Extermination was a dirty business, Georges Loop knew, and the pay was always a little dicey—sometimes a trickle, sometimes a tsunami. But somebody had to do it, and he was a third-generation exterminator. In his office in the backroom of his brother Francois’ laundromat, he accepted calls from all over the tri-county area: his company motto was Best in the Business, but that didn’t necessarily mean much, since he was also the Only One in the Business. There were plenty of places out there where the military was conscripted to do what he did. Every passing year, fewer and fewer people got into the exterminator gig, making him something of a dying breed.

His own kids certainly had no interest in taking over the family tradition. Two sons and a daughter, and the only thing they were good for was going to college and getting cushy jobs in offices. He wondered if the moral quandaries they would have to deal with as they got older were easier or much, much harder than the ones he faced. He suspected the latter.

It was a Tuesday morning when he got the call—a woman named Holly Morgenthau, living on the south side, had an infestation in her bathroom. She said it was urgent, since she was in a one-bedroom apartment and couldn’t keep going down to the convenience store every time she had to take a leak. Georges said he understood, let Francois know he was heading out, and he hopped into his weathered ’95 Dodge panel van, cranked up the air conditioning as he hit the road.

The apartment complex was one of those three-storey walk-ups, the kind made out of OSB that burned to the ground in five minutes, one every few years, when some idiot fell asleep with a cigarette still in hand. He parked in the loading zone, strapped on his equipment, and headed inside, buzzing her apartment—303—to get past the cracked glass doors. A matter of seconds later he met Holly, a heavy-set young woman with short auburn hair and a pretty, but at the moment dour, face.

“I just can’t take it anymore,” She grumbled, “I mean, I’ve always been all for their rights and all that, you know…but I finally understand why people hire exterminators, I’ll tell you that much.”

“Hear it all the time,” Georges said in his French-Canadian drawl, “Everybody’s a humanitarian until they get some real-world experience. So where’s the infestation, exactly? I’ll need to get the drop on them.”

“In the toilet basin. Little bastards never shut up while I’m on the can.”

Nodding, Georges moved swiftly and quietly into the bathroom, flicking on the light and tearing off the basin lid in almost the same movement. Swimming around in the water within, four homunculi—repulsive, wrinkly humanoid things—gawked up at him with expressions of sheer terror. Georges Loop drew the tool of his trade, a semi-automatic pneumatic dart gun, and opened fire. Nails four inches long pierced each homunculus through the chest, killing three of them before the fourth scrambled out of his cold water bath and hopped into the tub, scrambling for the drain. Georges took careful aim just as it dunked its head in the aperture and took the final shot.

The whole ordeal was over in, at most, ten seconds. Three masses of pinkish flesh bobbed in the water, their arms splayed out and their gargantuan blue-grey eyes staring into the middle distance. The fourth was limp with his body hanging half-in, half-out of the drain, little tail drooping in death. Without savoring the victory, for he had had so many, Georges opened a trash bag and deposited each corpse in it, pulling out the nails as he did so—no use wasting perfectly good zinc, after all.

“Good lord, I didn’t realize it would be so easy,” Holly said.

“Oh, it’s only that easy when you’ve got years of experience, ma’am. When I first started out, one of those things just about slit my throat with a straight razor before I got a good shot. It’s a dangerous job for the professional, suicidal for the amateur. You did the right thing calling me.”

“Well. Thank you for your help, Mr. Loop.”

“Hey, it’s my pleasure. Here’s my card. Remember, we handle all kinds of household bogeymen—homunculi, gnomes, goblins, gremlins, even the occasional poltergeist.”

“Poltergeists? I imagine you need more than just a nail gun for those.”

“Yeah, those jobs can get a little messy. The trick is to get them inside of a television or radio, and then put a faraday cage around that. They solidify and then you can shoot them with a Colt .45.”

“Really? You can just shoot them with a gun?”

“Hey,” Georges said with a smile as he accepted his payment and went out the door, “No matter how much magic and supernatural mumbo-jumbo you’ve got going on, a gun’s a gun. You have a nice day now, y’hear?”

And so Georges Loop’s work was done, and he tossed the garbage bag of magical corpses into the dumpster, whistling tunelessly. It was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it.