Kill Monster

by Sean Doolittle

  Cats scattered in all directions as he bolted across the porch and down the steps. Behind him, Wasserman’s creature made yet another crashing hole in his house. The creature broke through the porch and sank again, mired to the waist in more jagged lumber. This time the creature simply plowed forward, shredding its way through the old peeling floorboards as if wading against a low tide.

  Ben thought: Now what? The creature kicked through the poured-concrete porch steps with approximately as much visible effort as a bully wrecking a sandcastle at the beach. Unsure where else to turn, Ben sprinted toward the barn, no idea what he’d do if he managed to get there.

  Just then, in the distance, came an uplifting sound: vigorous honking. Ben veered toward the sound even as Gordon Frerking’s A-Team van came barreling into view, jouncing and bouncing down the old, overgrown machinery lane, sunlight flashing off the windshield like a rescue beacon.

  I love it when a plan comes together, he thought, just as he stepped in a low place in the ground, tripped over his own boots, and skidded belly-first down the sloping, dew-drenched lawn.

  The ground thundered behind him.

  Ben scrambled to his feet and poured on all the speed available to his banged-up, long-out-of-shape system, racing across the rocky lane and veering again, this time in the direction of the oncoming van. He strained to ramp himself up to speed.

  The van still passed him easily, slowing as it did, the side-panel door sliding open on its track. Jeremy leaned out, shouting, ‘Get in! Get in! Get in!’

  Ben stretched his legs and pumped his arms and willed himself faster, as the ground beneath his feet abruptly stopped rumbling. The sensation was alarmingly familiar. A cold stone of dread sank to the bottom of his stomach. It’s airborne again, he thought.

  Ben tried the same tactic himself, launching himself through the open door of the van, barking his shins painfully on the running boards, screaming:

  ‘Floor it, Gordon!’

  ELEVEN

  Reuben Wasserman regained consciousness in the dim back seat of a Lincoln Town Car at highway traveling speed. He calculated, based on the sunrise now in progress, that it was early morning. Travel direction: west, according to the angle of the shadows beginning to creep out from under the car and on to the blacktop ahead of them. The tinted window glass to Reuben’s left was smudged with face prints and smears of drying slobber. His head felt like a rotten melon filled with broken teacups.

  ‘Ah,’ said Malcom Frost, turning in the front passenger seat. ‘Welcome back. How are you feeling?’

  Reuben tried to look at him and winced. His neck was kinked and painfully stiff. He tried to speak but could not. His tongue felt swollen, mouth lined with wool. His throat was a dry leather tube.

  Frost nodded to the be-suited, sunglassed goon wedged into the back seat an arm’s reach from Reuben. The goon handed Reuben a juice box, like the kind soccer moms purchased for their grade-schoolers. The little plastic straw was already inserted and bent to sipping angle, ready for action.

  Apple.

  Glorious.

  Reuben sipped harder, squeezing the juice box in one hand, rubbing his neck with the other. In no time he’d sucked the juice down to a few gurgles in the bottom of the box. The goon extended his palm. Reuben handed over the empty.

  Frost smiled. ‘How about now?’

  ‘What’s happening?’ The words came out in a croak.

  ‘We’re preparing to breach the eastern limits of Des Moines, Iowa,’ Frost said. ‘Feel free to speak up if you need a restroom.’

  Reuben looked out his window at the autumn cornfields scrolling past on the far side of the interstate, brown and desiccated and waiting for harvest. Towering wind turbines dotted the landscape like bone-white alien artifacts, stretching rank and file to the horizon, their enormous blades turning lazily in the elevated breeze. A gauzy curtain of confusion hung between himself and the view beyond the window. Somewhere in the wings there lurked a sense of dark urgency he could not interpret.

  ‘How did I get here?’

  ‘Under the circumstances, I felt that it would be best to give you a little something to help you travel.’

  ‘What circumstances? Travel where?’ Reuben massaged his temples gingerly. He’d never had such a headache in his life. ‘You drugged me?’

  ‘Let’s call it a discretionary sedative. For your own protection, assuredly, but it does pack a bit of a wallop. I can’t say I envy you right now.’ Frost checked his wristwatch. ‘How much do you remember?’

  In rubbing his neck, Reuben had discovered a bruised area the size of a silver dollar beneath his fingertips. The sensation put him in mind of the flu shots he and Claire had gone in for last month, and he thought: injection site? He couldn’t remember the jab itself.

  ‘She told me to come home,’ he said, trailing off. ‘I …’

  ‘Don’t try to force it. You’ll only feel worse.’

  ‘Claire cooked dinner. You were …’ Reuben could not, for the life of him, seem to collect his thoughts. It was as if the lobes of his brain had separated and floated apart from one another, like helium balloons trapped in opposite corners of his skull. ‘Did Claire invite you?’

  Frost nodded in a way that seemed meant to convey sympathy more than affirmation. ‘The serum has that effect.’ He tugged his sleeve, covering his watch and, thankfully, the pale, blue-veined, vaguely obscene-looking knobs of his skeletal wrist. ‘But you appear to be assembling phonemes into words, so I’d say we’re officially in best-case-scenario territory.’

  ‘But I …’ Reuben tried and gave up. But he what? What did he want to say? He looked to the goon beside him for help.

  The goon abandoned him, turning his gaze out the opposite window.

  To the living cadaver in the passenger seat, Reuben said, ‘Your name is Martin.’

  ‘Malcom.’

  ‘Malcom Snow.’

  ‘Frost,’ the man corrected, ‘but you’re within the general weather pattern. Another good sign! I think you’re going to be fine.’

  ‘You came to ask me something about the creature.’

  Frost touched his finger to the tip of his nose: bingo. ‘Excellent. I was hoping we wouldn’t be starting entirely from scratch.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘A thorny existential question for all of us, but let me attempt to summarize.’ Frost arranged himself in the seat to speak toward the back more comfortably. ‘Until somewhat recently, I served as a consulting operative to the Order of Dingir. Ever heard of us?’ When Reuben only stared at him, Frost nodded. ‘You’re right. Silly question.’

  ‘The Order of who now?’

  ‘How to put this simply.’ Frost adopted the tone of a middle school history teacher in lecture mode. ‘The Order is an interfaith consortium. Founded in secret by clerics and scholars half a millennium ago. Under the auspices – you’ll find this quaint – of the Sumerian name for God. All for the purpose of keeping the mortal realm safe from … well. Let’s just say supernatural dangers.’

  ‘Supernatural dangers?’

  ‘That more or less covers the bases.’ Frost shrugged. ‘Most major governments have a branch for this now. If you want my opinion – and I realize you’re not asking – the Order these days is approximately as relevant as a stone tablet. But you’ve got to hand it to the dusty old fossils: they take a licking and keep on ticking.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Routine exorcisms, mostly, at least during my tenure. Your occasional rogue imp, minor daemon, what have you.’

  ‘Golem assassins.’

  Frost chuckled. ‘Actually, this one’s a first for me. In fact, I very nearly missed out on the fun entirely.’

  I’d like to go home now, please, Reuben thought.

  ‘I can tell you that Ba’al Zəbûb gave us a run for our money in ’68, but we managed to keep a lid on things in the end. Arguably.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘2016 was almost another story. Althoug
h, personally, I believe the jury may still be out on that one as well. Lucius? Aberdeen?’

  ‘Still out on that one, sir,’ the driving goon agreed.

  Lucius?

  Aberdeen?

  At hearing those names, a faint bell seemed to ring somewhere deep in the fogbound moors of Reuben’s mind. Almost too faintly to hear. He sat up in his seat, rode out an agonizing cramp behind his right knee, and said, ‘What about now?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘This club of yours. The Order of Whatever. You said “until recently.”’

  ‘Now I’m in business for myself.’ Frost nodded serenely. ‘We can leave it at that.’

  ‘What do you want with me?’ An invisible ice pick pierced his brain just then. Reuben closed his eyes involuntarily. ‘Where’s Claire?’

  ‘You should rest. We’ll be arriving at our destination in just a couple more hours, and there’s much work to be done. Assuming we’re not already too late.’

  Reuben realized that the faintly sour odor he’d noticed seemed to be coming from him. Specifically: from his pants. The distant bell in his mind chimed louder.

  ‘Did you …’ Reuben paused. He tried to make himself remember. It hurt too much, and the chipped shards of thought he did manage to excavate from the sand clogging his synapses didn’t seem to fit together properly. ‘I had a dream you ate my bird.’

  A pair of sunglasses appeared in the rearview mirror. The driving goon was watching him.

  Reuben glanced at the goon keeping him company in the back. He was watching, too.

  Reuben checked his pockets. His phone wasn’t in any of them. The chiming bell in his head began to sound like an alarm. He could feel his heart rate speeding up. Face flushing. For some reason he began to tremble like a wet kitten. ‘Where’s Claire?’

  ‘Oh my.’ Frost sighed. He looked to the goon in the back seat. ‘Perhaps not yet, then.’

  Reuben followed Frost’s glance. The goon had discarded the crumpled juice box. In its place was a gun. The gun was pointed at Reuben.

  ‘Hey, no,’ Reuben said weakly. ‘Wait.’

  The goon pulled the trigger.

  Reuben felt a sudden sharp bite near his breastbone. The sensation seemed confusingly anticlimactic. He looked down and saw a feathery orange puff sticking out of him. Again the thought flashed in his mind – injection – this time followed dimly by another:

  Did that guy in the sunglasses just shoot me with a tranquilizer dart?

  Because that was sure what it looked like to Reuben. Just like what those khaki-wearing TV zookeepers used on the Discovery Chann …

  Each and every quarter, Ajeet Mallipudi occupied the number one slot on Corby McLaren’s stack chart. He was a toothy, bird-boned force of good cheer who smiled through everything, overpowered workaday drudgery with gratitude, and conveyed bright-eyed optimism in the face of dystopian corporate indifference. Jeeter could take a support call from one user while repairing account permissions for another while analyzing network traffic on a separate monitor, all without committing suicide. He also happened to be Ben’s favorite colleague in First Floor IT.

  So of course he’d be the first to suffer in Ben’s place.

  ‘Hang in there, sweetie,’ Abe said, stroking Jeeter’s brow as Gordon careened along the county gravel toward Highway 6, his eyes flicking back and forth between the rearview mirror and the road ahead.

  The interior of his prized restoration was – predictably – a rolling nerd cave, complete with leather captain’s chairs, Marvel Comics-branded carpet tiles, low-level strip lighting, and an in-vehicle WiFi transceiver. Ben saw various gaming consoles in padded retaining brackets, all connected to a flat-screen television, which was itself attached to the windowless side wall panel on rubber shock mounts.

  They’d gotten Ajeet loaded into the rear of the van, laying him out on a leather-upholstered bench seat that folded out into a small cot. The elastic strap of his goggles was the only thing keeping the halves of his ruptured helmet on his head. He was breathing, but he’d been unconscious nearly a quarter of an hour by now.

  Abe crouched beside him, doing her best to hold his head steady as the van shimmied and swayed. She looked toward Ben. ‘Where’s the nearest hospital?’

  ‘There’s a fire and rescue station in Ashland. Somebody call 911 and tell them that’s where we’re headed.’ Eyes fixed on the view behind them, Ben saw that Wasserman’s creature had lost significant ground. The thing had not given up its loping, lumbering pursuit, but it had fallen back at least a quarter-mile now, still receding amidst the swirling rock dust, a dun-colored smudge against the horizon line.

  Jeremy crowded in beside him. ‘What the hell is that thing?’

  ‘It’s a golem.’ He glanced at Jeremy. ‘I know how it sounds.’

  ‘You mean, like, from Dungeons & Dragons?’

  ‘As opposed to Lord of the Rings, that’s what I’m told.’

  ‘This isn’t happening,’ Devon said, raising his phone to his ear. ‘This can’t be happening.’

  Ben crouched down next to Anabeth. ‘How is he?’

  ‘If you’re asking for my medical opinion, not swell,’ Abe said. ‘But all I really know is that he needs a doctor. The only thing I’ve ever nursed is a hangover.’

  ‘So,’ Jeremy went on, tapping Ben repeatedly on the shoulder as Devon chattered to the emergency operator in the background. ‘About this golem.’

  ‘Please don’t ask me to explain right now.’

  ‘I was just wondering if anybody could tell me why we haven’t run over it with a four-ton conversion van yet.’

  ‘I can tell you that I shot it four times in the chest and once in the head with a twelve-gauge pump gun.’

  ‘And?’

  Ben referred him to the portal windows.

  ‘Ow!’ Devon said, lowering his phone and rubbing his arm. ‘What the hell?’

  ‘Just making sure I’m not dreaming,’ Jeremy said.

  ‘You’re supposed to pinch yourself, dickburger.’

  Ben ignored them, touching Ajeet’s cheek with the backs of his fingers. The kid’s skin felt like warm cheese. He couldn’t help thinking of Corby McLaren’s words: Life hasn’t kicked any of them in the balls, yet. Not really. Poor Jeeter.

  ‘Am I misreading the situation,’ Abe asked him quietly, ‘or did that thing seem to come after you specifically?’

  ‘To the best of my understanding, it seems to be functioning as designed, yeah.’

  Jeremy said, ‘Please don’t tell me you’ve been sleeping with Mrs Golem.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Devon said. ‘Are you saying you knew about that thing? And you let us sleep out there?’

  ‘Look, somebody told me this might happen, but I didn’t believe it.’ Ben looked up. ‘Would you have believed it?’

  ‘I don’t believe it now,’ Jeremy said.

  Ben checked Jeeter’s pulse again. Devon’s censure may have been misplaced, he thought miserably, but the guy still had a point. If Ben had an ounce of decency to spare, he’d tell the others to dump him here on the road to fend for himself and get Ajeet to the rescue station as fast as the Vandura could carry them.

  But he also needed to get to Charley, and he had no wheels. No phone. He didn’t even have his wallet. Nothing but the clothes on his bleeding back.

  ‘What’s it doing now?’ Devon asked.

  ‘Around fifteen miles per hour, top foot speed,’ Gordon called from the driver’s seat. ‘Jump range: call it one hundred feet at … hang on … approximately twenty-four feet per second. Ballpark.’

  Ben said, ‘Are you high right now?’

  ‘I wish.’ Gordon reached through the steering wheel to tap the dashboard gauge window with his index finger. ‘Been clocking on the speedo since the tree line. Me being you, I’d want data.’

  It was, Ben conceded, an extraordinarily even-minded outlook under the circumstances. Let’s get some numbers on this thing. He made his way up to the front of the van and climbe
d into the shotgun seat. ‘Gordon, what did McLaren rank you this quarter?’

  ‘A four, right above you. But only because I threw you under the bus on that voicemail outage last month.’ Gordon glanced over. ‘Sorry. Dick move.’

  Ben nodded. ‘Figure out how fast you need to make this van go, and we’ll call it square.’

  RATTLED BONES AND RUBBER BANDS

  TWELVE

  They were received just after seven forty that Saturday morning at the volunteer fire station in small-town Ashland. Awaiting their arrival was a middle-aged couple – Tiff and Tom – holding lidded foam coffee cups from the nearby filling station. Tiff appeared to be dressed for a morning of autumn yard work; her husband, a uniformed county sheriff’s deputy bearing the name ‘Curnow’ on his pocket plate, was dressed for patrol. Tiff handed Deputy Tom her coffee, grabbed her med pack, and climbed into the Vandura to check Ajeet’s vitals, asking over her shoulder, ‘Dispatch said he fell out of a tree?’

  ‘We were camping,’ Devon explained.

  Deputy Curnow asked, ‘What was he doing up a tree?’

  ‘That’s what we’d all like to know,’ Jeremy said.

  Curnow looked to Ben, as if experience dictated that he was most likely to find coherent elaboration in the eldest member of the group. But Ben could only shrug. ‘I was in the house.’

  ‘The house?’

  ‘I’d just gotten up.’

  ‘I thought you said you were camping?’

  ‘They were camping,’ Ben said. ‘I’m only the landowner.’

  ‘I see.’ The deputy narrowed his eyes at Ben’s abraded face and neck, his shredded coat sleeve. ‘Did you fall out of a tree, too?’

  Tiff poked her head out of the van just then. ‘Hon, I need a hand. Right now.’