Monster Hunter Vendetta by Larry Correia Page A

much. The Dread Overlord had declared jihad. This thing was terrifying. It was huge. "An alien god has a vendetta against me? Oh, that's just awesome."
    "Yeah," Franks said. "Awesome." I swear the bastard almost smiled. Almost.
    "So now we wait for the Condition to come to us," Myers said proudly. "It turns out the Old Ones never bother to communicate with their followers here, so this message was a big deal. Capturing Pitt is now the cultists' primary goal. They'll do anything to get him. Any attack they launch gives us one more lead that we don't currently have."
    I turned back to the picture of the MCB agent. She was in five pieces and still alive. I did not want to end up as a crime-scene photo. "Your plan sucks."
    "This file contains everything we know about the Condition, their assets, their methods. We'll be ready for them to make their move. In the meantime, you just go about your business and pretend we're not here."
    "Okay, so why the secrecy?" Earl asked sharply. "Or was your little tantrum out in the hallway just to prove a point?"
    The senior Fed shook his head. "Marty was my friend."
    "Mine too..."
    "Then maybe you should have thought of that before you murdered him," Myers snapped.
    Earl flashed with anger, shoved his chair away from the table and stood, glaring down at Myers. His fist hit the table hard enough to crack the wood. "It was an accident!"
    I've got to hand it to him, Myers didn't so much as flinch, and since I knew he also knew what Earl was capable of when he was angry, that was especially impressive. "What, are you going to accidentally kill me too?" Franks' hand inched toward his holstered Glock, surely loaded with silver bullets, ready to plug Earl if he should so much as twitch, and for a moment the little conference room teetered on the edge of violence. "Do it. And it'll be the end of MHI once and for all." The college professor was locked in a staring contest with the werewolf and the killing machine got ready to shoot everybody.
    "Enough." Julie was calm as she spoke. "Earl, sit, please. Agent Myers, we're cooperating fully. You two can murder each other over personal business later. We've got work to do." Harbinger pulled his chair back to the table. He was really ticked. Franks put his big hands back on the table. Since I was sitting next to her, I was the only one who saw Julie discreetly return her compact .45 to her lap. She had been prepared to shoot Franks under the table, Han Solo style. My God, I love this woman.
    It took a moment for everyone to calm down. I don't know what had transpired between the two men, but Earl was still flushed as Myers pulled out a final piece of paper. "As for the secrecy, we've been eavesdropping on the Condition's communications—wire taps, reading their mail, the usual."
    "Shocking," I muttered.
    Myers dropped the bomb. "The Condition has a spy inside of MHI."
    The three of us glanced at each other. The idea was absurd. "Horse shit," Earl snapped. "I know my men."
    "We have several messages in here that reference a mole. You've been infiltrated. How many people have you hired since the battle with Lord Machado?"
    We looked to Julie. She was the one who kept track of logistics. "Two training classes, twenty-six Newbies in total, made it through to hiring, with another fifty currently going through." And the three of us knew that of those fifty, we would be lucky if half of them made it through training and this current class had been the biggest that we had ever had. MHI had been drastically short-handed since we had been allowed to reopen. We had been cranking through classes as quickly as possible. "You honestly think one of our new employees is working for the Condition?"
    "In their mind, your company is what stopped the second coming. What do you think? You can't trust your senior people either. Keep in mind what kind of things you're dealing with. The Old Ones are powerful, and it wouldn't take much to flip someone you've known for a long