Mr. Bird and Lord Mignola Part 1

An old spy on his last leg trying to live in peace before the super soldier serum kills him and he gets roped into helping a vampire hunter find her boyfriend before it is too late.

The pain tabbed into Mr. Bird had like a nail being driven into rotten wood. He winced from the sudden shock of agony pouring up from his bones almost dropping his cup of coffee. He growled at the pain pushing it away from and setting the cup back on the table. His large hands, hands that told the story he grew up working on a farm, and the love for that work hadn’t faded from his life yet. Even if the hard work of ruling over land, keeping the crops growing, and the livestock feed was a break from his true job.

                He started to rub his hand when the waitress came over to him. Sweet, old Mary narrow her eyes in the way only a grandmother could at the sight of suffering and asked, “You alright?”

                “Just getting old,” Mr. Bird said, and she laughed.

                “Tell me about it,” Mary said. She was pushing six-five and Mr. Bird although he might look to be in his late thirty was five years older than Marry, but the super serum given to him in Nam slowed his aging. It gave him super strength which was nice when you had to break skulls for a living. And it gave him super speed which made long morning runs a bit quicker, but it was killing him now. The serum was killing him slowly and painfully.

                “Anything I can get for you?” Mary asked, and Mr. Bird’s dark brown eyes smiled up at him. His face was hard with a strong jawline and a black goatee pointing at the end his chin. A goatee one or two children had told him it reminded them of a cartoon villain, and he would laugh it off. His hands were still covered in the tiny scars from his childhood growing up on a cotton farm in the Deep South.

                It’s why he joined up before the war broke out. He couldn’t die on the farm the place he was born and rise. He would rather die in some far-off place, even if it were a jungle on the other side of the world.

                He didn’t smile, Mr. Bird wasn’t a man who knew the facial expression, but he brightened his eyes and said, “No, ma’am, thank you.”

                “Sure thing, honey,” Mary said moving off to the next table in the roadside rest. Mr. Bird along with a few other souls, mostly truck drivers, were the only people in the whole place this time of the morning. The sun hadn’t started to come up yet, but the hints of the heat were lingering on the edge of the world. Soon the rays would break overhead and tried their best to warm the day in late October, but the sun rays would fail, and the world would be chilled by late afternoon.

                It was Wednesday, the day Mr. Bird went into town to gather some supplies, mostly beer. It was the upside to living alone. He only had to care for himself and could buy whatever junk he wanted too, but there was a heavy downside to this life.

                He paid his bill leaving a heavy tip as he always did and headed for his Ford truck. He glanced back at Mary thinking back to the one he let get away named Merrie as well. Merrie Kingmen was the love of Mr. Bird life back before he became a super soldier for a secret arm of the government called the Paladin Division and one of their best spies. He truly did love her, but he had seen what Nam had done to some of his friend’s love life coming home, and he couldn’t imagine what working with Paladin as one of Merlin’s Shadows was doing to do her … and him. He kissed her on the cheek one fall day and left never coming back.

                He never forgot her, even tried to love a few others but Merrie Kingmen’s always had his heart in the end. He thought about looking her up, seeing how great her life turned out, but he couldn’t find the strength to do so. He had enough demons plaguing his mind didn’t need to give them a helping hand.

                The October winds were bitter this morning as he tightened his jean jacket and held down his leather cowboy hat dashing out the door. He hated the cold and yet, he had brought land in northern Wyoming. He was a damn idiot for buying land in a place so cold, but he couldn’t go back south. He couldn’t live there again. He didn’t have a problem with the south, but he didn’t want to die there either.

                He kept his head low until he saw the boots standing beside his driver door. He followed them up to an athletic body of a twenty-three-year-old woman with black hair. One side of the woman’s head was shaved like she normally wore a Mohawk up, but Mr. Bird doubted the other side was shaved and notice the tip of her black hair were snow white.

                “Go away,” he growled, not caring at all about how lovely this girl was when it came down to it. He saw before anything else the golden choker around her long pale neck. He didn’t want anything to do with the Twelve. He hated dealing with those holier than thou monster hunters and all their missions ended up with fighting something which shouldn’t be real, making his more painfully than it needed to be.

                The girl, he wouldn’t dare call her a woman yet, she was still a child to him, stepped out of the way as he pulled his door open.

                “I need your help,” She said grabbing the door.

                Mr. Bird hissed pulling it from her hand and snapped, “I said go away. I’m on leave for the next month, now get out of my face.”

                “You don’t understand, sir,” the girl tried to say. She sounded like someone from Boston trying to beat back where they were born, but the past always came out. Mostly bled out in someone’s speech no matter how much they tried to hide it.

                “No,” he said slamming the door and pulling out of the gravel parking lot leaving this mystery girl in the dust.

Author's Note

Writer’s Note:
I have had Mr. Bird hanging near the edges of the Paladin Division for almost a year now. I was watching some DC comics cartoon about the Question and the name Mr. Bird dropped into my lap. I thought the name would be something found in a dime novel or on the radio beside Lamont Cranston and I couldn't toss it away. I had to do something with the name and the person who came with it. I knew I wanted Mr. Bird to be an old man, something like Eli McCullough and equally as rough, but I didn't have a story to place Mr. Bird in. And I still don't, but this short story (maybe, novella) will give me some ideas as what to do with Mr. Bird. I hope so anyway and this story is simply me hanging out with the grumpy old Bird to see what he is like for a while. I hope you enjoy this story as much as I enjoy writing it.

I’ll try to make this short for the both of us, but I feel, I need to add a little context to my stories on here. All the stories I post on this website are what I call “break stories.” They are either stories I go to when I get stuck in long from novels or I write them to explore a world. So, what does this mean? It means I enjoy these stories, but I don’t put everything into them. So, why am I posting them? A fair question and the reason I’m posting my stories on this website is to have fun, to show you my growth but most of all to give you a little taste of the worlds I work in are like. What does this mean for you? It means you can judge the work as you wish and by all means help me with plot, characters, and building the world, but I ask you to ignore grammar problems as best as you can and the style in which these stories are written. My page on here is my sketchbook and you guys get to see all the rough, nasty parts of my writing.