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Huell Kendrick

Huell Kendrick is a divorced, chain-smoking, knife-carrying FBI agent from Louisiana and a founding member of the Paranatural Incident Task Force, played by Zack.
Type Player character
Aliases "Detective Hendricks" (Letterman's slip); "Toothbrush Man" (Jester); "Kendrick" (McManley); "sweetie" (Sheila)
Affiliation FBI; Paranatural Incident Task Force; formerly a narcotics unit and a sheriff's office
Status Alive, on crutches with a steel plate in his foot (as of Radford Horrors 04)
First appearance Radford Horror 01
Played by Zack

Description

Huell is in his fifties, a smoker with poor cardio who gets winded on an uphill path. He first appears in a gross detective coat with "cool-ass facial hair" and a taste for country music. The table has described his build several ways: Zack's "goblin-bellied," Andre's "built like an alcoholic," Dante's "Disco Elysium skinny fat," and later Rita's "kind of a beanpole," fairly tall and thin but still about 50 pounds heavier than Andrew Howard. (Radford Horror 01, Radford Horror 03, Summer Service 04, Appalachia 03, Radford Horrors 02)

His manner is laconic and deadpan, with dry cop humor, crude asides and a habit of odd questions ("Hey, Howard, you ever been shot?"). He is polite to witnesses with a bite ("Not to be rude, sir"), flips off people who annoy him, and likes a cool entrance: he cleans his fingernails with a knife during an interview and holds his flashlight under his gun. Zack plays him as a man who shrugs things off ("You know, I'm a cool tough guy") over a sad, solitary home life. (Radford Horror 02, Radford Horror 07, Appalachia 01, Summer Service 05, Roulet Estate 01, Roulet Estate 03)

He started the campaign as the team's skeptic beside the equally doubtful Biz, answering Andrew's alien theories with "swamp gas" and insisting a missing girl was a runaway. That position eroded after he was lifted into the air by the thing over Radford, and by the end of the first case he was sad and shaken that cryptids are real. He has remained the voice of procedure: warrants, probable cause, "it'll be in my report." (Radford Horror 01, Radford Horror 04, Radford Horror 06, Radford Horror 08, Appalachia 06, Walkers 09)

His tastes are fixed points of the show's period setting: Ecto Cooler, Crystal Pepsi, Sour Patch Kids, Corn Nuts, pogs, ALF, Ms. Pac-Man and, at his lowest, Roseanne. He prefers Nirvana to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. (Radford Horror 01, Radford Horror 04, Walkers 01, Walkers 07, Roulet Estate 01)

Background

Huell was raised in Louisiana and has decades of law-enforcement experience. Before the FBI he was a narcotics cop, worked for a sheriff's office (where the record for a missing person coming home was about 11 hours), did undercover work among "hillbillies," and says he once worked for a city. He went to college ("that's why I gotta be a detective") and did not serve in Vietnam ("I didn't go to no war"). He has first-aid training and carries a full kit. He also tells a goat-racing story from South Dakota, which nobody lets him finish. (Radford Horror 02, Radford Horror 08, Summer Service 03, Appalachia 01, Appalachia 04, Walkers 01, Walkers 07)

He is divorced; in the first episode his ex-wife, "the battle-axe," had just taken half his belongings. He has a daughter in college whom he sees around New Year, and Zack calls him "the silver medal parent." His father was Thomas Kendrick, remembered at a late-summer table with a big plate of bacon; his grandfather called odd backwoods communities "the water people." (Radford Horror 01, Radford Horror 08, Appalachia 01, Roulet Estate 01, Walkers 09)

Huell reached the task force as a punishment. After an incident that is never described, his boss told him he was not fired and charges would not be pressed, but that he was off his investigation and his team, "your name is mud," and he was being sent to "some kind of make-work task force the president's idiot brother wanted." (Radford Horror 01)

History

The Radford Horror

Huell reported to the task force's D.C. barbershop office, opened a ream of fax paper with a needlessly large knife angled so everyone could see, and found a hidden cabinet of old "stakeout candy" while clearing the bathroom. He decorated his desk with postcards of the World Trade Center and the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. In Radford he separated and interviewed Liam Lucky, privately questioned young Tyler about the spaceman, photographed the Lucky house, and concluded Amanda Lucky was a runaway. He ended the first night at the Pay n' Stay with a rash. (Radford Horror 01)

He led the questioning of Yobiah Whateley about the spacesuit and the dogs, and plotted the missing dogs on a motel tourist map, showing that every house bordered the woods. At Dr. Lori's office he read the psychiatrist as buttoned-down but capable of violence if cornered, and his help let the Biz plant a bug that promptly rolled into a vent. His attempts to get the bug back (a lost-jacket story, then feigned interest in the window) failed, and the experience from the failed roll levelled him up. That night he scouted a clearing on foot, heard tense Spanish, snapped a twig, slipped away from an armed group with flashlights, and later gave a wounded Kurt first aid. (Radford Horror 02, Radford Horror 03)

Having taken no precautions, Huell caught the motel's bedbugs. The welts across his stomach became a running subplot: a diner waitress threatened arson, the hospital steam-sterilized his clothes, and he spent the day in scrubs and then in the Biz's thrift-store slacks and a "Radford, Virginia, UFO USA" flying-saucer T-shirt. He ordered a pancake stack taller than his head, asked the blunt questions at the autopsy, and still refused to believe in the UFO: "I wasn't in the car that saw it personally." (Radford Horror 04, Radford Horror 05)

Cruising the suburbs with Kurt, Huell spotted a figure in an astronaut suit at the tree line, ran it down and tackled it. Under the helmet was one of the Whateley twins. Huell put his knife to the boy's face; the boy said, "It's okay. You don't have to fight this," and something overhead lifted them both. Huell hung on above the tree line, smelling rotting wood and black mold, then fell: 4 harm, a broken right ulna, and unconsciousness. Kurt splinted the arm with a stilt. The same ER doctor who had treated his bedbugs that morning told him, "Huell—twice in a day, you are not having a good life, my friend." The cover story was that he fell off the water tower. Afterwards he was wistful and undecided about what he had met. (Radford Horror 06)

Still concussed and one-armed, he packed weapons, cigarettes, water, Everclear and dog treats for the raid on the old-town church. He eased the door open, recognized the smell from when he "got picked up," tackled Wilbur Whateley, and shot the Radford Moth. The creature then took his mind and made him shoot Andrew in the chest; the bullet slowed before it struck Andrew's breastbone. Huell cut off one of its legs with bolt cutters, threw Wilbur clear of the burning building, and freed the Biz from under it, at which point its proboscis went into his stomach and filled all seven of his harm boxes. Kurt dragged him out. (Radford Horror 07)

In hospital he welcomed Andrew to the "shot" club, admitted "I confess I didn't shoot you on purpose, Howard," and collected his medical records as proof he was not in hell. He searched the burned church and found no trace of the moth's body. Back in Washington a courier delivered a 25-pound stuffed alien from his old narcotics colleagues with the note "Ha ha, fuck you, Huell." He gave it to Andrew, and it became the team mascot, OJ. (Radford Horror 08)

The Summer Service

In Marblehead Huell bought the trash bag for the severed arm, started a feud with the desk clerk Jester by asking for a toothbrush (the inn, he was told, was "not a bed-and-toothbrush"), and heckled the service at the colonial church. When Amos Shaw offered communion wine, Kurt only sipped. Huell drank all of it. (Summer Service 01)

Unrecorded session

Summer Service 02 was never recorded. Later recaps establish that Huell, Kurt and Andrew were exposed to the nerve agent in the water during it. (Summer Service 03)

The wine carried the worms. Awake for about 48 hours, full of nervous energy and hungry, Huell walked to McDonald's for fries and passed a house whose door had stood open for days. Inside Amos Shaw's house he found signs of a struggle, a burner left on, clerical garments and about ten pounds of crystal marbles, and called the FBI switchboard from a payphone. The call brought forensic examiner Donald McManley and his RV to the scene. Andrew then noticed that Huell was visibly more muscular, that his hairline had advanced, and that he had the same youthful glow as the priest and Jester. Huell was torn about taking ivermectin: "I need more information about worms." (Summer Service 03)

"Jacked" on worms, he helped Kurt mount the Davy Crockett on the Biz's Buick Regal, borrowed Andrew's spare suit for the Board of Selectmen, and advised Esteban to "Take the biggest knife in your kitchen." (Summer Service 04)

At Arnold Weathers' house he shot Puddles through the forehead to no effect and was bitten and dragged; later he helped Andrew destroy Arnold Weathers himself, taking worms through his sock. He found the two sets of financial books and a shoebox of marbles, gave Madeline Weathers his favorite knife, and insulted McManley's pajamas. Overnight he no longer slept and healed completely within an hour. Curious, he cut his own arm open: the worms in his flesh burrowed away from the air and his blood was darker than normal. When armed church members surrounded the Ram and Arms Inn, he phoned the FBI to report a police posse and demand a helicopter, then fired at the sidewalk as a diversion so the others could reach McManley's RV. (Summer Service 05)

Unrecorded session

A session known as "05.5" was played between episodes 05 and 06 and never recorded. In Radford Horrors 04 Andre and Dante recall that the team hit Huell with their own car "when you were all wormed up," which Zack had forgotten. No recorded episode shows it, so it belongs to one of the arc's two lost sessions. (Summer Service 06, Radford Horrors 04)

In the finale the deworming agent took hold: he lost the worm "luster," got a pounding headache, and Zack removed the bonus from his sheet. He missed Jester with the flashlight weapon; Jester screamed "It's you, Toothbrush Man!" and bit his neck through the car window before being scraped off. Huell then beat the Biz at rock-paper-scissors for the right to fire the Davy Crockett at the angel thing. The roll was a mixed 7, and Zack burned a Luck point to make it a success, narrated at his request as a sudden sneeze that jerked the weapon onto target. He passed out in the back seat, visibly losing muscle and hair and regaining wrinkles, and ended the arc feverish in a National Guard medical tent, vomiting dying worms. (Summer Service 06)

The Things in Appalachia

Weeks of passing dead worms left Huell gray and haggard. He admitted, "You know, I kinda miss them, to be honest." Big Bill sent him on his day off to check on McManley, who was on leave and close to being fired. McManley hated him, and the persuasion roll was a 3, but Huell burned a Luck point and the two bonded over Roseanne; McManley agreed to come back to work, and Huell left with the pizza. He also had a new, embarrassingly large knife with a dragon on the hilt, "Nippon Steel." (Appalachia 01)

In Dahlonega he climbed a tree twice, ruining his suit and bruising himself, to retrieve a child's shoe with pale hair caught in the laces, and concluded Gene Cartwright was dead: "Listen, buddy, he was dead 45 minutes after the last person saw him." He slept through Andrew's sleepwalk, squeezed into the Death Cave, studied the folded face and stored it in the hotel mini fridge, and glimpsed a strangely familiar man in a cowboy hat entering the room next door. At Auraria he greeted the Covenant with a cheeky salute and needled a member about cheeseburgers until he stormed off. (Appalachia 02, Appalachia 03, Appalachia 04)

He argued for a warrant before searching Frotter Comstock's buildings, tested the Spud Hut savant with a coin flip, and bought dinner for the Circle Chasers: "Sure, we found ten grand in a garbage can. Fuck it, it's on me, boys." At the freeway crash site he was the one who connected the SHA logo on the Spud Hut truck to the tracking device. (Appalachia 06, Appalachia 07)

Disguised as press with a tape recorder and lanyard, he entered the distribution center. In the break room ambush he shot an ape-man through the neck; it slammed his head into a cinder-block wall, and Kurt's Claymore left him with a ruptured eardrum. Andrew and the Biz then pulled most of an ape-man jawbone out of his left buttock, and Kurt numbed the wound with cocaine. High, limping and worried about becoming a were-ape, Huell loaded up on an unreasonable amount of gold bars, was lifted and crushed by Big Bob until Andrew severed the creature's arm, and climbed the exit ladder only to find he could no longer walk. (Appalachia 08, Appalachia 09)

Unrecorded session

The finale, Appalachia 10, was never recorded. Its only trace on Huell's side is a phone call in the next episode, in which Andrew asks him, "When I did the weird shit, you weren't dying, were you?" Huell supposes he "must not have been." What Andrew did is not explained. (Walkers 01)

The Walkers in Skin

Huell waited backstage, armed, while the Biz was sent onto David Letterman's show; the FBI had told the producers he had an anxiety disorder. Brought out for support, he defended the Biz with a Rodney King joke and flashed his gun. Letterman forgot his surname and called him "Officer Hendricks," then "Detective," and a bartender in Utah later remarked, "I guess if you're gonna be a hostage, you might as well be an armed hostage." Back at the office he collected pogs from Diane. (Walkers 01, Walkers 03)

In Utah he offended a local agent with "So— Mormons, am I right?", came out "con" on the Ballard community center, and tried to flirt with the Ponytail Lady using the Clinton scandal. He distracted Nancy the goose with lunch meat and was bitten on the nose so hard it swelled shut. In the Ballard bar he won at darts on a Luck point and drunkenly told Maggie about the town water. He was also McManley's designated contact, and put off calling him until 3 a.m. on the night the team's car vanished: "Yeah, I think there's aliens and shit. You should be over here." (Walkers 02, Walkers 03, Walkers 04)

When the Plymouth Voyager vanished, Huell worked out that it had gone straight up and that the ground beneath it had been very hot. It turned up in Roosevelt flattened into the road, and he lifted the wreck free with his back on a roll of double sixes. The same session established that he cannot ride a bicycle. During the night event his world tipped like the inside of a tumble dryer and he crashed through a card table while drawing on the refrigerator. (Walkers 04, Walkers 05)

He repaired the ground-penetrating radar with gum-wrapper foil, found the key to the sugar-filled refrigerator at Ballard City Hall, and spent the day with a dread he could not place. An anonymous page promised information about "your colleague" if he came alone to the general store. Nobody met him. Instead a "homeless" man in the alley bit his wrist, shouted "Pig!" and ran, in a town the clerk said had no homeless. (Walkers 06)

The bite was a tissue sample. The next episode's cold open showed Huell's face rising from a tank of dark liquid, and Andre confirmed in the same episode that the skinwalker faction was growing a copy of him from it. Unaware, Huell helped subdue a naked intruder in the guest double-wide, then chauffeured Andrew to a 1 a.m. meeting at Ballard High School, straightened his tie and waited in the car. After an explosion he stabilized the bloodied "Andrew" who staggered out, not knowing it was a duplicate. Inside he faced ten or twelve coyotes that rose onto their hind legs and unrolled one of the plastic-wrapped bodies falling from the gym ceiling. (Walkers 07)

He threw a brick through the glass door of the Roosevelt police station ("I don't give a shit about these cops. I'm the FB-fucking-I"), patched up Yusuf Ansari, and asked the locals whether the coyotes seemed like "regular coyotes." (Walkers 08)

Unrecorded session

Walkers 08.5 was never recorded. Huell began the finale unstable and one harm from death from earlier injuries, and with the battery missing from his police walkie-talkie. (Walkers 09)

The finale's cold open panned down to a wet, sullen, naked Huell eating Twizzlers at the community center. The real one was on horseback with the National Guard. He spotted a naked, blood-covered figure sprinting toward them: the real Andrew. His own double then dragged him from the saddle and got a tendril into his mouth for an instant, which made him smell his childhood bedroom; his horse trampled it and crushed its head. When the duplicate Andrew shot Kurt and fled, Huell rode it down, bandaged the wounds he had just inflicted, and put his fingers in its mouth. Its tendrils lunged for him and pulled up a memory of his father eating bacon. Winged in the arm by a stray bullet, he rode back to the others and fell off his horse from blood loss. He recovered enough to hold Andrew at gunpoint for an identity test ("Tell me something about a cigar-shaped craft"). In the cavern Zack made the roll for the team's grenade assault, which destroyed the machinery behind the portal and stranded 50 to 60 skinwalkers, and then rolled a 14 to get everyone up the collapsing stairs. (Walkers 09)

The Roulet Estate

At the office Christmas party Huell gave the carolers his leftover cigarettes, traded scotch with Diane, gave the Biz the ID of a recently dead lookalike, and received a gold Dunhill lighter and cigar cutter from Andrew. He was not told about Andrew's changed physiology. He woke hungover under a couch in the Roulet house, face to face with a mummified cat, put on a pink fluffy bathrobe, and handed the Finnish Hare Krishna monk his unloaded gun to see whether he would shoot. Chasing the Roulet Intruder through the woods, he was shot in the shin with a VSS rifle and went down. Zack: "That's the end of Huell's career." (Roulet Estate 01)

Too big for the chimney, he stayed below while Kurt and Andrew found the hidden attic lair, and searched the Clown Mansion crawl space in the name of probable cause. He was also the one who asked, "Do we have any particular reason to assume the gray alien is the serial killer?" (Roulet Estate 02)

At the Brooks Pharmacy siege he answered the young cop's "So, aliens, huh?" with a raised finger, knocked out and handcuffed the biting old woman in the VW Beetle, and stormed the front with Andrew. He tackled the gunman and pinned him, taking a Mosin-Nagant round through the foot for three harm. He kept, in Andre's words, "most of" the foot. (Roulet Estate 03)

By March 1993 the task force had been disbanded and Huell was on workers' compensation in a wheelchair, nearly broke, living in a filthy apartment where an unfriendly neighbor hauled him up the steps. He rated his mood 3 to 4 "on a scale of one to suicide." A child in the elevator asked about his foot: "Got shot by an alien." He spent his days drinking and watching Roseanne, and talked Diane's ear off about it on the phone. (Roulet Estate 03)

The Radford Horrors

Andrew found him there months later, skipping physical therapy among Doritos and cinnamon Pop-Tarts. Huell claimed "I got so much going on," held out through fifteen minutes of Roseanne, and agreed to help look for the missing Biz. At the Biz's apartment he checked the medicine cabinet (no psychiatric medication, a great deal of aspirin). Asked whether the Biz could be a double agent, he replied: "Of course, I didn't notice when you got replaced with an alien, so—" (Radford Horrors 01)

He returned to Radford under Daniel Webster on crutches, with a steel plate in his foot, DEET, and a police-dog training glove he wore because "the last homeless guy I talked to bit me." He set off the smoke alarm in an airliner lavatory. At the Lonely Mountain Diner he asked to taste Andrew's rehydrated blood ("Tastes like blood"), failed to finish a huge breakfast and vomited across the bathroom, leaving with "Sorry about the mess." At the Sportsman RV Campground he searched the missing task force's tents and kept their map, then insisted on hiking to the fenced site and jolted his foot going over the wire. (Radford Horrors 02)

He stayed in the background of the next session, then waited in the car "out of shame" while Kurt apologized to Sheila for the bathroom. He phoned McManley ("Get down here, we've got goo"), mimed threatening Harold the Blockbuster clerk, and pitched a tent that leaned 20 degrees. (Radford Horrors 03, Radford Horrors 04)

Relationships

Abilities and equipment

Huell's playbook is never named in the episodes. For how the rules are used at this table, see Game mechanics.

Ratings. Cool +3 is his defining stat ("I'm plus three on Cool, so I'm so fucking cool") and the highest on the team. He has Sharp +1 and Charm -1. Tough is +1 in the first arc and +2 by The Radford Horrors. (Radford Horror 01, Radford Horror 02, Radford Horrors 02)

Moves.

Harm, Luck and dread. He has seven harm boxes and has filled all of them once. His Luck began at seven and does not come back; three points are known to have been spent, on the Davy Crockett shot, on McManley and on a darts game. Andre's borrowed "dread" track stood at 11 marks for Huell in Utah and, per Zack, had not risen "since we nuked a kaiju." (Radford Horror 07, Summer Service 06, Appalachia 01, Walkers 03, Walkers 07)

Worm strength. While infected in Marblehead he had a separate bonus to Tough, needed no sleep and healed fully in an hour. All of it ended with the cure. (Summer Service 03, Summer Service 05, Summer Service 06)

Gear.

Memorable quotes

Quote

"That O.J. Simpson, huh? Hell of a running back there. Hell of a running back. That young man's got a hell of a career ahead of him, I tell you what."

Zack (as Huell). (Radford Horror 01)

Quote

"Yeah, unusual in that there weren't aliens involved. Thank you for that, Howard."

Zack (as Huell). (Radford Horror 04)

Quote

"It's just an airplane. What the fuck are you talking about?"

Zack (as Huell), with the craft overhead. (Radford Horror 06)

Quote

"Hey Howard, you've been shot, buddy. Welcome to the team."

Zack (as Huell), in hospital, having done the shooting. (Radford Horror 08)

Quote

"I think the local police are trying to form a posse to murder us."

Zack (as Huell), on the phone to the FBI. (Summer Service 05)

Quote

"You motherfucker, you had toothbrushes."

Zack (as Huell), to Jester. (Summer Service 06)

Quote

"Sir, sir, I am an officer. Do not touch me. I am listening to the menu."

Zack (as Huell). (Appalachia 02)

Quote

"I've seen dogs on their hind legs before, and also I've nuked a monster before."

Zack (as Huell). (Walkers 04)

Quote

"Fucker. We're the cops for aliens."

Zack (as Huell). (Walkers 08)

Quote

"Of course, I didn't notice when you got replaced with an alien, so—"

Zack (as Huell), asked whether the Biz could be a double agent. (Radford Horrors 01)

Trivia

  • His ex-wife's name was never fixed. Asked to name his favorite knife in Summer Service 05, Zack could remember only that her name began with an M and settled on "I think it was Muriel," so the knife is Muriel. In Walkers 07 Huell, shaken awake, says "God damn it, Margaret." In Roulet Estate 01 Zack admits, "I don't remember what I named either my ex-wife or college-age daughter," and Andre does not remember either; the daughter has no name in any recorded episode. (Summer Service 05, Walkers 07, Roulet Estate 01)
  • His sidearm is a .38 revolver, as Andre confirms in Radford Horror 03. Kurt's hospital remark that "9mm doesn't look too impressive" about the wound Huell gave Andrew is the only suggestion otherwise. (Radford Horror 03, Radford Horror 08)
  • He was shot twice in The Roulet Estate: in the shin by the intruder's rifle in the woods, and through the foot at the pharmacy. The foot wound is the one that put him in a wheelchair, and Andre's recap in Radford Horrors 02 credits it to "the guy who was pretending to be an alien in those people's attic." (Roulet Estate 01, Roulet Estate 03, Radford Horrors 02)
  • Huell has been bitten by a worm-ridden Doberman, a desk clerk, a goose, a stranger in an alley, a coyote and an old woman. His dog-training glove is the result. (Summer Service 05, Summer Service 06, Walkers 03, Walkers 06, Walkers 07, Roulet Estate 03)
  • The non-canon one-shot Philosopher's Fist 3.J/2: Unchainable was retconned into the show as an OVA Huell watched on hotel cable while falling asleep. (Appalachia 02)
  • His postcards and his O.J. Simpson line are deliberate period irony. He also believes John Travolta is a Mormon rather than a Scientologist. (Radford Horror 01, Radford Horrors 02)
  • Zack was "kinda hoping" Huell would be hit by the moth's mind control, "'cause it's more interesting," and had him sleep through a team meeting "because I think it's in character. To be shitty about it." (Radford Horror 05, Radford Horror 07)
  • He had told McManley that watching Roseanne was rock bottom, then took it up himself; Zack had forgotten the earlier conversation until Andre reminded him. (Roulet Estate 03)

Appearances

Huell appears in all 37 recorded canon sessions.

What is known of his part in the unrecorded sessions is given in the History section above; see also Lost episodes.