Asskickers of the Fantastic Read online

  Rex picked up a black marker and drew a line through THE ALDENTE CLAN. He smiled with considerable satisfaction. Tonight the world had three less monsters to worry about.

  He sat on the couch and picked up the TV remote, switching all the sets to the same channel. Searching through his list of DVR recordings, he selected the episode of “The Jerry Warmouth Show” that featured Rex’s appearance. He hadn’t seen the show yet and was curious what all the hubbub was about. He pressed the play button and settled back to watch.

  The show began with Jerry Warmouth, a middle-aged man with a ridiculous orange toupee, sitting in a chair against a black background. He introduced the night’s topic.

  “Good evening, and welcome to ‘The Jerry Warmouth Show.’ One of the hottest controversies making headlines these days concerns the Fantastic Rights Amendment, which, if passed, would grant vampires and zombies and frost giants and all kinds of super-abnormal phenomena the same rights and privileges accorded to human beings.

  “Our topic tonight is ‘Fantastics: Criminal Deviants or Legitimate Minority?’ We’ll be back in a minute with our guests.”

  Some light jazz music played as the opening credits rolled, designed to lend an air of sophistication to the long-running talk show, but everybody knew the show would devolve into a screaming match before the second break, and with luck some jaws would be broken and blood would be spilled.

  When Warmouth returned, six people wearing red velvet robes were sitting on or standing near a couch to his right. They were all in goth makeup and muttering to each other in a bad approximation of Latin, perhaps complaining about the hot lights and could somebody please get them a goddamn Fresca. In a chair on the other side of the host was Rex Havoc, sitting alone and scowling at the weird robed guests on the couch.

  Warmouth looked into camera and began.

  “Welcome back, everybody. I am joined tonight by a spokesman for the Fantastic Rights Initiative, Nocturnos, King of Witches, who is here with several members of his coven.”

  Applause erupted from the small studio audience, some of them holding up signs that exclaimed:

  FANTASTICS FOREVER!

  and

  WITCHES DEMAND EQUAL RITES!

  “Thank you for inviting us, Jerry,” said Nocturnos, giving the camera a big grin that revealed two rows of teeth sharpened into needle points. His black hair was slicked back and as shiny as a pair of patent leather shoes, and his goatee was curled upward to look as sinister as possible.

  Warmouth then turned to introduce Rex.

  “Also on our panel is Rex Havoc, leader of an unusual group called The Asskickers of the Fantastic, who has vowed to kill every monster on earth, or give them a good kick in the ass, anyway.”

  Rex did not respond, and continued to burn holes through Nocturnos with his angry stare. Jerry shrugged and turned back to the King of Witches.

  “Nocturnos, let’s begin with you. Suppose you tell us just what is a Fantastic, and why are you trying to move into our neighborhoods?”

  “Jerry, the term ‘Fantastic’ – or ‘Monster,’ for all the haters out there who still insist on using the ‘M word’ — merely identifies one as a member of a superior race of beings. Creatures that, because of extraordinary peculiarities in their physical makeup, are superior to wretched human scum, and are thus closer to the Creator.”

  “Hmph. Ask him who his creator is,” muttered Rex.

  There were angry protests from the other members of the coven, but Nocturnos motioned for calm and continued.

  “As for moving into human neighborhoods, Fantastics are not interested in this, as most of us are constantly on the move anyway and wouldn’t know a Tudor from a hole in the ground. In fact, that’s where most of us do live — in holes in the ground.”

  That got a good laugh from the studio audience. The host chuckled appreciatively and Nocturnos went on.

  “All we want from humans is a little understanding and perhaps keep some of the graveyards open late, as nearly all Fantastics operate at night and would like the opportunity to visit their relatives.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me,” said Warmouth. “I can’t understand wh—”

  Nocturnos cut him off mid-sentence.

  “Also, we want a trillion dollars in reparations and fifty Las Vegas showgirls annually for special ceremonies.”

  An audible gasp rose from the audience. The host’s jaw slacked open in disbelief.

  “That last point is not negotiable,” said Nocturnos.

  Motioning to the audience to settle down, Jerry turned his attention to Rex.

  “Now Rex, you are totally opposed to any rights for Fantastics, and indeed would like to rub them off the face of the earth. Have I got that right?”

  “The only good Fantastic is one with his ass kicked up around his ears,” said Rex.

  “You see, Jerry?” said Nocturnos. “That’s exactly the sort of Gestapo mentality Fantastics have to deal with every day. Not just from Rex Havoc and the Ass-Grabbers of the Fantastic, but from humans in general. This has gone on for centuries, and we simply won’t stand for it anymore.”

  “Burn in hell, witch!” said Rex, shaking his fist at him.

  “Your first born is mine, Havoc!” the King of Witches shrieked back.

  The studio audience, smelling blood in the water, became very excited.

  “Gentlemen, please. Let’s try to keep this civilized,” said the host. There were groans of disappointment from the audience.

  Rex continued: “These people do not comprehend the sinister forces they’re meddling with. They practice black magic. They have sex with multiple partners and wear lots of makeup.”

  “Satan will devour your soul, Havoc!” said Nocturnos.

  “Tell him to eat my shit while he’s at it!” said Rex, accidentally snapping off the arm of his chair.

  This was red meat to the audience, who had sensed things were about to get really violent.

  “Gentlemen, I beg you. Don’t make me call security,” said the host.

  There were more groans of disappointment from the audience. But Jerry gave them a conspiratorial wink, assuring the groundlings their bloodlust would soon be slaked, and they grew excited again.

  Rex, still fuming, settled back in his chair, keeping the broken chair arm handy in his lap.

  “It’s very simple, Jerry,” said Nocturnos. “The Asskickers are relics of the past, while Fantastics represent the future. Very soon, all mankind will bow before Lord Satan, the one true God of the Universe, and there isn’t a goddamn thing Rex Havoc can do about it.”

  Warmouth turned back to Rex.

  “Rex? Any response?”

  The veins in Rex’s head appeared close to bursting. His jaw was clenched tight enough to cut sheet metal.

  “I say, why the hell are we sittin’ here beatin’ our gums when there’s a slob Fantastic right here we can knock the shit outta.” He stood and ripped off his lapel mic. “Matter of fact, let’s rip this motherfucker’s head off right now!”

  Rex made a flying leap over the host and crashed on top of Nocturnos, breaking his chair and throwing the rest of the coven into a confused panic. He grabbed the King of Witches by the throat and punched him repeatedly in the face. Three of the coven members tried to pull Rex away, but he shook them off. Nocturnos shrieked as he was punched twice more in the head, and then Rex turned and started punching out the rest of the coven members. Warmouth leaped into the fray but was clotheslined by one of the female witches. Several big guys in black security T shirts piled on top of Rex, pushing him to the floor.

  Warmouth got to his feet and turned to the nearest camera to close the show.

  “We’re ending the show a little early tonight. Tune in tomorrow when we will have the first interview with Chucky the adorable homicidal doll since he was chopped to pieces, and the heroic woodcarver who saved his life.”

  Then somebody clobbered Warmouth with a chair. The credits began to roll as paramedics rushed to his aid.
Rex shook off the security goons and started punching out paramedics. The wild melee continued a few seconds more, and then Rex punched the camera and everything went black.

  All the TVs in Rex’s apartment abruptly went to commercial break, and he clicked them off with the remote.

  Rex was pleased with his performance. He had been afraid he would come off as too cerebral, and that the audience would think he was some kind of smarty farty brainiac. But it seemed clear he had avoided that comparison. He wondered how long it would take doctors to remove the broken chair arm from the King of Witches’ royal ass.

  Rex rose from the couch and headed into the bedroom. Tomorrow was another busy day and monsters weren’t going to kill themselves.

  Chapter 5

  The Asskickers of the Fantastic

  The Asskickers of the Fantastic began with one man, Prof. Lars Wurlitzer. Born in Munich, Germany in 1950, his parents were killed by vampires while on a family vacation in Transylvania. Only eight years old at the time, Lars miraculously escaped the slaughter, but the memory of it scarred the boy for life. He vowed on that awful day to avenge the murder of his parents and destroy every monster in the world, just as soon as he finished grade school.

  Immigrating to America in 1969, Lars joined the army and was stationed in Vietnam during the height of the conflict. There he earned the rank of major, and created a special ops team called the Asskickers, a squad that specialized in perilous rescue missions. Lars and the Asskickers saved many lives during his two tours in Nam, and he and his team were awarded the Secret Medal of Heroism by President Nixon.

  After the war, Lars attended Quatermass University in England, where he became a highly respected engineer, scientist and professor. But Lars never forgot the brutal murders of his parents by monsters, and he began writing obsessively on the subject, most famously penning the definitive guide on surviving every kind of monster attack, the 1500 page, hernia-inducing “The Super-Abnormal Phenomena Survival Guide.”

  (For a short time, this book came with an actual survival kit, which included all the weapons you would need to destroy every monster known. This was discontinued after some hunters chasing the Jersey Devil in the Pine Barrens got drunk and wound up using their SAPS Kits on each other, ultimately burning down most of the forest, which is now called simply The Barrens.)

  One of Lars’s most promising students at Quat U was a serious young man named Rex Havoc.

  Born in 1972 in Tarzana, California, he was orphaned when his mother had been dragged to hell by demons at his fifth birthday party. Years later, he discovered that his father, who had abandoned Rex’s mother before he was born, had sold her soul to the Devil for immortality and a bag of weed.

  Despite his traumatic childhood, the lad excelled in every subject he chose to study, and Lars took him under his wing. After graduation, Lars told Rex of his idea to create a team of monster hunters called the Asskickers of the Fantastic, and he enthusiastically signed on.

  Weeks later, with little money but a giant reservoir of rage, the two men began to hunt monsters across the globe — killing werewolves in Tibet, chasing ghosts in China, tracking the chupacabra in Puerto Rico, and taking sledgehammers to the living Moai statues of Easter Island.

  Eventually, the workload became too much for Rex and Lars to handle alone, and they recruited two more members, Brunhilda Beluga Zagwides – fondly known as “Bruno” – and Scott William Sundae — called “Springer” for reasons no one could quite fathom.

  Bruno was born in 1980, and her parents had neither been killed nor molested by monsters, but she was nearly killed herself in a small town in Louisiana that had been taken over by vampires. She was originally hired to be the Asskickers’ receptionist, but soon became a full-fledged member of the team, bringing a feminine touch to the job of slaughtering monsters.

  Springer, born in 1983, was the youngest member of the team, and joined up because he had nothing better to do. Rex found the boy at a local pool hall and knew immediately the lad was headed for trouble with a capital T. He brought Springer into the fold to drive the van, and he too quickly became a full-time Asskicker, as well as the designated heartthrob of the team.

  Of the 152 cases the Asskickers worked on over the years, very few of them made the nightly news, and that was just the way Lars and Rex liked it. The Asskickers preferred to work in the shadows, out of the public eye (unlike the Ghostbusters, who Rex considered to be a bunch of showboating assholes.)

  Yet, despite their best efforts to fly under the radar, some of their adventures became the stuff of legend. One of these cases was called “The Day the Earth Sat Down.”

  In 2001, exactly fifty years after the historic flying saucer landing on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the Space Man and his giant robot made a return visit to Earth. This time around, not satisfied with just demanding the world’s nuclear stockpiles be dismantled, the Space Man unveiled a new, much longer set of demands — 1,154 of them in fact.

  These new edicts included: stopping global warming; mandatory recycling; prohibiting alcoholic drinks and spicy food; modest skirt lengths; rules of courtship; manscaping guidelines; the proper way to tell a joke; and most outrageously, a total ban on all violent movies, especially those starring Jason Statham.

  To demonstrate the seriousness of his demands, the Space Man gave the entire human race explosive diarrhea for 24 hours, a thoroughly unpleasant spectacle that debilitated six billion people and clogged up every sewer on earth.

  Forced to capitulate, the world seemed doomed to a future of stupefying boredom, until Rex and the Asskickers, with the help of SEAL Team Six and Bill Nye the Science Guy, defeated the Space Man and his robot, and kicked their asses all the way back to their home planet of Treehuggeron, or whatever the hell it was called.

  Another famous case concerned the angriest woman in the world, Prof. Furietta Bitchstorm, who became the radioactive monster known as “Atomic Bitch” when her lab at the newly relocated Very Dangerous Research Laboratory-America blew up. Possessing the power of a nuclear reactor in a body hardly bigger than an anorexic prom queen, Atomic Bitch vowed revenge on all the men who had ever treated her badly, which apparently numbered quite a few because she had already leveled half the city before the Asskickers arrived on the scene.

  After getting their butts kicked for most of the adventure, the Asskickers realized that the angrier Atomic Bitch got, the more powerful she became. Lars determined the only way to defeat her was to make her even angrier, which seemed counterintuitive, not to mention extremely dangerous. But in the end, Atomic Bitch’s uncontrolled rage led to a meltdown – literally – and she sank to the center of the earth, defiantly giving the finger to the whole world as she vanished forever.

  Perhaps the Asskickers’ greatest adventure took them to Mars, where the team was recruited to save the planet from, ironically, an invasion from Earth. In the case called “Earth Attacks,” a Las Vegas billionaire, bent on seizing the Red Planet and turning it into a giant interplanetary resort casino, launched a fleet of spaceships to lay waste to the great underground Martian cities. Just in time, Rex and the Asskickers arrived to help the Martian army, beating back the brutal invasion and sending Earth packing.

  In gratitude, the King of Mars gave medals to the Asskickers and made Bruno his queen. This created a whole new set of problems since Mars needed women badly and the king did not want to let her go. In the end, Rex killed several hundred Martians in order to rescue Bruno, so this mission actually ended up being more of a wash. (Bruno, however, did get to keep the lovely tiara.)

  All this brutal combat had taken quite a toll on the team, particularly on Rex Havoc himself, who over the years had broken nearly all of his bones battling the creatures of darkness. Of the 206 bones in the human body, only the tiny bones of his left middle ear managed to escape injury. He had also broken some of his titanium bone replacements, but even his doctors couldn’t figure out how he managed to do that.

  One devastating incid
ent occurred in 2005 at a charity miniature golf tournament, when Rex was ambushed and nearly beaten to death with golf clubs by a gang of teenage monsters posing as traveling pros. His skull was crushed and most of his intelligence leaked away, leaving Rex with the IQ of a Cheez Doodle.

  A steel plate was installed in Rex’s head to stop his brain from sloshing around too much, followed by many months of therapy. In time, the majority of his mental faculties were restored, but gone forever was that part of the brain that governed his sense of humor. Not even a knock-knock joke remained.

  Over the years the Asskickers had moved their operations many times – from Tarzana, California, to New Orleans, to New York, to the Arctic Circle, and then back to New York again – wherever monsters needed their asses kicked. By 2008, the Asskickers had destroyed more monsters than all of the world’s police and military forces combined, and by themselves were responsible for a twelve percent drop in the monster population worldwide.

  These were the best of times for the Asskickers – a time of great success, close friendships and many fond memories.

  All that changed – catastrophically — when the Asskickers went to Romania in 2009.

  Chapter 6

  Danny and Naomi

  The next morning, Rex fixed his usual breakfast of tap water without ice and walked to the window in his front room. It was raining very hard, and lightning flashed on the horizon. The forecast said it was going to be an all-day soaker, which would keep fire demons trapped in their caves and terrify vampires, who had no buoyancy and could easily drown inside their coffins. It also meant Rex would have the whole day to himself, and he was anxious to get back to work on his new book.

  Wearing a cardigan sweater, corduroy pants, comfortable slippers, and reading glasses — his preferred garb around the house — Rex sat at the typewriter, an old Smith Corona manual. Close at hand was a stack of his self-published books, all with titles urging the Devil to engage in a variety of loveless sex acts: