Matthew Silver and the Monster Hunters, Book One: The Darkest Waters

Chapter Eight

SilverCHAPTER EIGHT

Morning found me, once again, drop-dead tired. I wouldn’t even have woken up on time, if it hadn’t have been for the girls.

Scott and I had both accidentally slept in too late, but Scott blamed it on me. The more I protested it wasn’t my fault, the funnier the others thought it was. It took me a while to realize that they knew it was Scott’s fault, but they just enjoyed watching me get all worked up over sleeping-in too late, twice in a row.

All I have to say is that I’m never letting Scott set the alarm from now on. YOU’D THINK HE’D KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A.M. AND P.M., BUT I GUESS—Man, I really am obsessing over this…

I had said all of my goodbyes the night before, like any other mission, but it had felt a little different. None of us were allowed to say the nature of our mission, so whenever I said goodbye to someone, I looked them in the face and wondered if I’d ever see them again. I was almost bursting to blurt out what I was doing, and where I was going. I just buried my anxieties and told my friends that I’d see them later.

We all went into the Weapons Department to pick out our individual gear. Scott didn’t have to do a thing, because he had already gotten enough firepower to storm the Capitol.

The Hunters used to use things like crossbows, wooden stakes, and knives to hunt monsters, but we evolved with the rest of the world into firearms. Some of our guns weren’t that different from conventional weapons, besides being altered to fire silver rounds, while others were CCU originals; never before seen by civilian or military eyes. The Weapons Department had plenty of these specially modified weapons, but they were rather picky about loaning them out.

The CCU Battle Rifle (BR) (also dubbed “the Predator”, as in The Hunter’s Predator) was the standard issue weapon for every Hunter. Weapon designers modeled it after the M16A4, standard issue assault rifle for the United States Marine Corps, but it was adapted for basic silver ammunition, silver grenade rounds, and they really packed a punch against monsters, compared to conventional weapons. In the old days, Hunters would just pack silver slugs into their six-shooters and go to work. Crude and slow to reload, but effective.

Sandy picked out a semi automatic 12-guage shotgun (obviously customized to fire silver buckshot), her favorite hunting knife in a deerskin sheath (short and thick, compared to my long sleek fighting knives), and she donned a green beret that matched her surplus army jacket. She looked like the world’s deadliest Girl Scout.

Scott had two BRs, both with grenade launchers, strapped onto his back, twin .45 pistols holstered to his sides, gunslinger style, an LMG (light machine gun, modified for powerful silver shells) in his arms, and a backpack full of surprises. This would weigh anyone else down, but Scott was used to carrying around heavy weaponry. He was still as agile as usual, which wasn’t much.

Jay settled for a BR and a small sidearm. She didn’t need much weaponry. She was a weapon. Her martial arts were scary. I fight monsters for a living. I know what scary is.

I opted for another sniper rifle, but it seems that after losing two of them on the last mission, I was banned for a while. So I ended up just grabbing a BR off a rack with an advanced combat optical gunsight. My two favorite long silver daggers went by my sides, and I put a dozen throwing knives into the long, padded, skintight sheaths underneath my sleeves—specially tailored right from the Weapons Department by my request. With those sheaths, whenever I needed a knife, I could just shift my arm, and a blade would fall into my hand. It took a lot of practice to get this to perfection, but I was pretty good at it.