Meriwa, a genetically engineered monster hunter with a penchant for cheap whiskey and cracking terrible jokes, lands a job working for a vampire-led corporation where she discovers true love with an eccentric billionaire vampire CEO, a once in a lif...
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Sighing, I snapped my little notebook closed and returned it to my inside coat pocket then took a sip of my bourbon and cast my eyes about the sleazy bar. The place was packed to the gills with local types, the kinds of guys who wore flannel and work boots and worked hard in the day and spent their nights getting drunk and regaling each other with tales of their adventures and sexual conquests. I ignored the sounds of the jukebox and smell of alcohol and unwashed drunks as I took in my surroundings with a practiced eye.
When I was a child, they taught us that everyone was a potential enemy. When we would go into the field for the first time, they said we would be overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of the ignorant human masses who had no clue that there were evils in this world waiting to prey on them. And we were training so that we could kill those evils before they killed the innocents. If we wouldn't fulfill that purpose, then we were useless. That was what they'd often tell us when one child at Imhullu died in combat or was taken for 'reeducation' never to be seen or heard from again.
I shuddered at the memory before taking another sip of my beer. I wasn't at Imhullu anymore. I'd left it eleven years ago when my brother had saved me from that horror, giving his life so that I could escape the Arctic facility. Then the kindly old man had taken me in and sheltered me from the people training to hunt me down. Pop taught me right from wrong. He taught me that what they'd done to me was brainwashing, that no kid should ever have witnessed the horrors that I had. Pop had even given me my name, my actual name, not the name 30B that the Imhullu Project had assigned to me. He'd given me the name Meriwa.
But sometimes I had those dark moments when I thought none of that good stuff mattered.
Because Pop was still dead, and so was my brother.
And I was alone, flitting from bar to bar and hoping to find some sort of purpose. But what reason was there for me to even try to find meaning in this world. Me... a genetically engineered monster hunter with no monsters to hunt.
The sound of someone breaking a triangle of pool balls with the cue ball helped distract me from these thoughts, and that's when my attention was drawn to a woman speaking loudly into a cell phone from a table in the corner. She didn't fit in here, her smart but sensible suit standing out like a sore thumb against the sea of flannel and Carhart jackets.
She also stood out because she was angry, raising her voice into the phone. "The guy refused to do the work on the car until tomorrow. I'm stuck spending the night in some shitty motel in the middle of nowhere. Anyway, I'll at least make it back to New Orleans by 3:00 tomorrow."
As she spoke, two local men clad in work boots and dark flannel shirts walked up to her table, and I observed the interaction curiously. The two figures had lust in their eyes, but I was convinced the woman didn't know that as she put one manicured hand over the phone's microphone and addressed them. "Can I help you?"
