The Exterminator
Prologue & Chapter One
Prologue
There are people who fix roofs and stitch wounds and argue about the price of milk. Then there’s the other kind—the ones who carry salt in their pockets and iron in their cuffs, who answer phones that don’t ring for anybody else. We call them Exterminators. The job is not clean. The job is not famous. The job is simple in shape: find what doesn’t belong in this world, send it home—or bury it so deep it forgets the way back.
They’re scattered across the country like buckshot: a parish priest who keeps a shovel by the confessional; a night-shift vet who knows which blood clots wrong; an old woman who can taste a lie in the wind. They don’t wear uniforms. They don’t compare scars. Most of them will die in places with bad lighting and worse smells. But when something moves in the dark that isn’t supposed to move, someone like us shows up with a duffel full of last resorts.
There are rules. Not holy writ—more like habits that kept somebody alive long enough to pass them on.
Salt buys you seconds. Iron buys you inches.
Clockwise closes; counterclockwise opens.
Never trust a locked door in an empty house.
If you hear your name spoken behind you, don’t turn—throw.
Always bring the body back, or the story will follow you home.
And when in doubt, leave bread for the living and coins for the dead.
Hudson Dubois grew up on those rules. He comes from a line of men who stitched wards into boot leather and hid rosaries in glove boxes—grandfathers who laid fence posts in circles, fathers who bled into sigils because sometimes that’s the price for a lock that holds. He learned to pack a kit before he learned to drive: river salt, silver-washed soft points, a Saint Expedit medallion on a chain that clinks when the road turns mean. He learned the difference between killing a thing and keeping the door closed behind it. One is loud. The other is work.
New Orleans taught him the rest. The city hums with old stories; some have teeth. If you listen, the air will tell you when it goes wrong—smelling like pennies, tasting like a storm. Hudson listens. He keeps an engine running and a rotary on the wall, the kind of phone that only rings when the night has run out of polite ways to ask for help. He keeps a hearse in the lot because sometimes you need a vehicle that knows how to carry what most folks won’t look at. He keeps a desk covered in maps, pins, and string that tie the living to the dead in a language only the desperate read.
The work isn’t about courage. Courage is a candle; the job needs a pilot light. It needs hands that don’t shake when the bells start chiming for no reason, and feet that know how to walk through a room without waking what’s sleeping in the corners. It needs someone who understands that monsters aren’t always the teeth-and-claw kind; sometimes they are the promises you make to yourself in the middle of the night and the debts that come due at dawn.
Hudson learned young that a good day is when nothing gets worse. He learned that victory is a fancy word for “nobody else dies tonight.” He learned that some names are better left under stone and salt. He learned all of it the hard way, because that’s how these things are taught.
This is not a story about glory. It’s a ledger of small balances—one field left unburned, one mother who sleeps through till morning, one voice that stops whispering under the bed. It’s about a man who keeps showing up with a bag of bad ideas and a habit of survival, because somebody has to.
If you need a saint, light a candle.
If you need a miracle, call your mother.
If you need the thing in the crawlspace to stop breathing your name—call an Exterminator.
And if you call this one, understand: Hudson Dubois will come. He will bring salt and iron, a coin for the gate, and a knife that knows his blood. He will not promise you an ending you’ll like. He will promise you an ending.
The phone is ringing.
Moss, Moonlight, and Teeth
The engine coughs like an old smoker as the airboat skitters across the glassy swamp—a slick mirror of moss and mist stretching endlessly in every direction. Cypress knees jut from the water like broken fingers, and Spanish moss sways in the moonlight like its whispering old ghost stories.
Hudson Dubois grips the wheel with one hand, the other resting lazily near the throttle. His white T-shirt clings to his chest, already damp with humidity, and a trucker cap casts a shadow across eyes that have seen too much for twenty-five. A faint scar runs from the bottom of his right eye to the edge of his scruff, and a devil skull pendant swings slightly from a chain around his neck, catching occasional flashes of moonlight. He looks like a man born of bourbon and bayou—weathered, dangerous, and steady as stone. Sitting beside him, bouncing like a marionette in the uneven drift, is Clark Woodall—nineteen, anxious, and as far from home as he’s ever been—dressed like a college brochure in a polo shirt, sweater vest, and tan khakis that look wildly out of place in the swamp.
“Hey, Hud!” Clark shouts over the howling engine, his voice cracking with nerves.
Hudson doesn’t answer. His eyes stay locked on the narrow corridor of water ahead, carving a path through the ghost-lit marsh with the instinctual precision of someone who’s done this in worse weather, with worse odds. The fan behind him howls, but his focus cuts through it like a blade. He doesn’t blink much—hasn’t since he was a kid, since the night his father taught him how to track something that doesn’t leave footprints. This isn’t just navigating the swamp. It’s reading it. Every twitch of moss, every ripple on the surface, tells a story. And right now, the story whispers danger. Hudson doesn’t flinch.
Clark leans in closer. “Hudson!”
Still nothing. The wind whips through the boat, drowning him out. He tries again, this time at a full scream. “HUDSON!”
Finally, Hudson blinks like he’s returned from another dimension. “Oh—shoot, man. What’s up?”
“How much farther?” Clark asks, eyes darting between the water and the encroaching trees.
“Bout ten minutes,” Hudson replies, his eyes lingering on Clark’s clothes.
Clark frowns, tugging at his sweater vest. “You gonna keep staring at my outfit?”
“Hard not to,” Hudson says, grinning. “You look like you’re about to teach AP Algebra, not banish spirits.”
“They’re moisture-wicking,” Clark mutters. “And the vest is vintage.”
“Vintage what—substitute teacher chic?” Hudson smirks.
Clark rolls his eyes. “Glad one of us dressed for the occasion.”
Hudson chuckles, eyes still on the water ahead. “Fashion crimes aside, we’re almost there.”
“Remind me what the situation is again?“ Clark asks, rubbing his temples. “I was in the middle of writing my term paper and wasn’t altogether... here.“
Hudson snorts. “What were you doing, analyzing the emotional arc of naked flute solos? Or were you finally attending that guest lecture on werewolf scat patterns?”
Clark sighs. “Listen, if I don’t at least take a couple classes, my dad’s gonna lose his shit.”
Hudson leans back, eyeing him. “So you’re still doing this to keep Daddy calm? I get wanting to make your parents proud—hell, that’s half the reason I’m sitting here instead of six feet under—but at some point, you gotta stop living for their approval. Stand up for yourself, Clarkie. Tell Daddy: I am an Exterminator, and I am proud!”
Clark’s jaw tightens, eyes flicking away. “Yeah... I’ll think about that next time he’s screaming at me over dinner.”
There’s a beat. Hudson doesn’t push it further. “Anyway,” he says, shifting gears, “there’s a sweet old lady who owns the place. Family friend. Best I can tell, it’s got a poltergeist squatting in it now.”
Clark stares. “A… poltergeist?”
“Yup,” Hudson says with a shrug. “Last time, it was the ghost of her great-great-grandad. Loved him in life, not so much in death. Paid me twenty-three hundred to send him packin’.”
“That’s insane,” Clark huffs.
“Should have heard his feelings about the Civil War. Crazy stuff” Hudson remarks
Hudson chuckles and reaches under the dash, pulling out a dented flask. He takes a swig—the liquid catching the moonlight on its way down—then wordlessly extends it toward Clark. For a moment, Clark hesitates, staring at the flask like it might bite him. His hands are already clammy, and his heartbeat thuds loud enough in his ears to drown out the engine. But something in Hudson’s calm—reckless maybe, but steady—makes him reach for it. He grabs the flask with both hands, almost reverently, and takes a long, uncalculated sip. The burn hits hard. His eyes water. He coughs, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his hoodie.
“Jesus,” Clark mutters, voice raw from the burn.
“Yeah, and he didn’t even fight in it,” Hudson says with a chuckle, nodding toward the rearview like the ghost’s politics were still riding shotgun.
Clark grips the bench seat, knuckles whitening. “I can’t believe how calm you are.”
Hudson raises an eyebrow, but says nothing.
“I came down here—what, six months ago? For school,” Clark goes on, his voice climbing with each word. “Then my dad cuts me off, I answer some insane Craigslist ad to make rent, and now I’m ghost-hunting with a man who looks like he wrestles alligators for fun.”
“Clark, honey,” Hudson says with a grin, “I wouldn’t be piloting this rusted bathtub through gator country at night for a case of warm Bud Light and three hundred bucks if I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Clark lets out a nervous, hollow laugh. “Alright...”
“And for the record,” Hudson adds, “I may hunt ghosts, but I’d never wrestle an alligator for fun… maybe for a paycheck though.”
“Nut job. I know we’ve been working together a while, but I don’t think we’ve ever caught a poltergeist job,” Clark says.
“Yeah, haven’t had one in a while,” Hudson replies. “Think the last one was a month or two before you showed up.”
Clark shifts uneasily. “I think it’s fair to ask—what am I walking into here?”
Hudson leans back slightly, eyes still scanning the dark ahead. “Forget what you’ve seen in the movies. No sparkly vampires or kung-fu werewolves. Poltergeists are old-school—loud, messy, pissed off. They’ll toss your pots across the room, hide your keys, maybe write ‘I’m watching you’ on the bathroom mirror in red lipstick just for kicks.”
Clark blinks. “Wait—like, actual lipstick?”
Hudson shrugs. “Happened once. Smelled like Chanel.”
Clark stares, dumbfounded. “So… a ghost?”
Hudson barks a laugh. “Naw—well, kinda. Probably just a ghost with cabin fever. Low-level stuff. Pissed off, but not too dangerous—usually.”
A chill creeps down Clark’s spine. “Who taught you all this?”
Hudson goes quiet. The engine hum fills the space like a buffer. Then he says, “My daddy. And his daddy before him. And a few of his poker buddies who’d seen things no one should walk away from.”
Clark raises an eyebrow. “Like a family business?”
“Something like that,” Hudson says. “My dad called us Exterminators—hunters of what shouldn’t exist. Just not the bug-killing kind.”
Clark waits, sensing there’s more—something buried just beneath the surface, like one of those sunken cypress stumps you don’t see until it wrecks your motor. But Hudson doesn’t take the bait. His eyes stay fixed on the water, unblinking, scanning the rippling dark like it owes him answers. His jaw tightens just enough to make the muscles twitch beneath the stubble. The silence that follows isn’t casual—it’s weighted. The whole conversation might sink to the bottom and never come back up. A flicker of pain crosses Hudson’s face, gone almost as fast as it comes. Whatever he’s thinking, he’s not planning to share it. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
“My dad… he wasn’t big on hugs or bedtime stories,” Hudson finally says, voice low. “Taught me how to draw salt lines before I learned long division. First time I shot a gun, I was nine. First time I saw a spirit break someone’s ribs without touching ’em, I was ten. He said fear was fine—hesitation wasn’t.”
Clark exhales, slow and shaky, the kind of breath you let go when you’re not sure if the room—or in this case, the airboat—is supposed to stay quiet or if you’re meant to fill it. Words hover on the edge of his tongue—half-formed apologies, or questions he isn’t sure he has the right to ask. He glances at Hudson, hoping for some kind of cue, a flicker of invitation.
But Hudson’s expression is carved from stone—stoic, unreadable, the kind of face people wear when they’ve carried too many ghosts for too long. The silence between them isn’t just awkward—it’s dense, packed with things neither of them can name.
Clark shifts in his seat, fingers tapping an anxious rhythm on his thigh. He thinks about saying something—Sorry about your dad, maybe, or That’s heavy—but everything sounds wrong in his head. So he does the only thing that feels safe. He says nothing.
Hudson takes another swig from the flask and tightens his grip on the throttle. “He’s gone now. Left me the tools… and a world full of things that want people dead and screaming. So here I am.”
If you’re ready to see how deep this goes, grab your copy of The Exterminator here.