Kill Monster

by Sean Doolittle

  ‘Just trying to look like a hero,’ Ben lied. Or maybe it was the truth. ‘My kid’s a fan, he’s got a little thing going with some buddies, his birthday’s coming up, I just thought …’

  ‘Hell, man. If they can take it back from the spiders, they can have it whenever they want. Seriously. I’ll text you the combo as soon as we hang up.’

  Which happened approximately three minutes later, Ben trying to hurry off the phone gracefully without seeming like a grasping jerk. When he was finished, the car was silent for a moment.

  Then Charley said, ‘Tell me you weren’t talking to Caleb Warren just now.’

  Francesca immediately locked on to him. ‘You were not either.’

  ‘Frankie. The road.’

  ‘I’m watching, I’m watching. Caleb Warren from Crane, Caleb Warren?’

  ‘He’s an old pal. No big deal, guys.’

  ‘No big deal? Are you kidding me right now?’

  Abe said, ‘Whoever he is, he certainly sounds amazing. What’s this Grotto, Ben?’

  Ben steeled himself, took a deep breath, and tried the ice bag again. ‘It’s practically right on our way.’

  Malcom Frost awoke to the distant rumble of mastodons thundering over the plains. His half-dreaming mind imagined a great, majestic herd of them, somewhere just over the horizon, stamping up clouds of prehistoric dust. Running straight through a plate glass window.

  His eyes snapped open, and the room came into focus. One by one, a few things became clear.

  First, he couldn’t move properly. Next, there was a hot, fumey breeze coming in through the fluttering curtains. Which helped to explain why Malcom was covered in bits of glass.

  These things, in turn, explained the sound that had woken him. It had been the sudden combustion of modern petroleum, and not the tramping of shaggy prehistoric beasts. Had his suspended brain attempted to draw a connection between the former and the latter? Either way, the Lincoln was on fire outside.

  And Anabeth Glass had dosed him with his own vapodermic, the interminable Gypsy cow.

  Calm yourself, Malcom thought, as a secondary explosion buffeted him with waves of heat and the heady stench of burning petrochemicals. Evaluate.

  He looked around at his predicament, tuning out the distant pop and hiss of rupturing tires in the background. All things considered, it could have been worse.

  The injection he’d absorbed, for example. He’d loaded the jet gun with a simple cloudwater distillation: shrikeweed milk from Melanesia, condensed winter fog from Lake Pleshcheyevo in the Yaroslavl Oblast, a hint of lavender. Useful for hijacking the central nervous system of an American suburbanite, yes … but to a person of Frost’s hard-earned tolerances, approximately as potent as half a Sominex.

  Less tolerable by far was the discovery that he’d been zip-cuffed to an unconscious Lucius Weatherbee.

  Frost’s disappointment in his longtime operative was immediate and profound. Honestly, what had gotten into the man today? Lucius had seen colleagues perish in the line of duty before. He’d sustained all manner of prior injuries himself. Why choose today to become an uneven, lackadaisical, pill-popping grouchbox? Had he become unhappy in his work? Gotten crankier with age? Was it the country air?

  Frost supposed it didn’t matter. Bottom line: he couldn’t work like this.

  So he ignored the crackling heat radiating through the vacant window. He contorted himself on the floor, extending his leg as far as he could. He reached until the tip of his left shoe touched a long, scimitar-shaped shard of window glass. He pulled the glass toward him and used it to slice himself free of his restraints.

  As the wail of police sirens grew louder, hurrying across the highway from one fool’s errand to the next, Frost dug the bothersome Khorkhoi Cube from his pocket. The daffy thing was buzzing and blinking crazily in Lucius’s general direction, two feet away.

  Useless.

  Frost oriented the cube in his fingers, then depressed each micro-LED in order – a nineteen-step combination pattern that caused the top panel to pop free. Almost immediately, the hatchling appeared: pale, wrinkled, glistening with secretions, burrowing its way mindlessly up through its bed of sand.

  Frost tipped Lucius Weatherbee’s head back, positioned the cube just so, and watched the little squirmer wriggle its way over the edge, up his lip, and into his nasal canal.

  ‘Bon appétit,’ he sighed to the otherwise empty room.

  It seemed like a waste, but perhaps Lucius had been right: maybe it was time, once again, to adapt. What good was an old-fashioned Khorkhoi Cubist in a world full of science fiction made real?

  And a triple shot of blotting serum all in one go wasn’t about to do the man’s cerebral cortex any favors, anyway. Lucius would be extraordinarily lucky if he ever recovered his own name, worm or no worm. Meanwhile, Malcom Frost had more pressing issues.

  So he climbed to his feet. Steadied himself. As he brushed aside the curtains and peeked out through the shimmering heat waves, the scar-thickened skin of his face and scalp seemed to shrink and pull taut, as if triggered by sense memory, an imprinted recollection of flame.

  Well played, he thought, surveying his old mentor’s handiwork. Old being the operative word in more ways than one. And here came the authorities, now.

  Until later, then.

  Frost boosted himself through the bathroom window just as the sirens arrived, fleeing on foot down a gentle slope into the sprawling brown cornfield behind the motel, a living scarecrow disappearing from view.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  As a child of the 1980s, Ben Middleton had celebrated his own fourteenth year during the wild and wooly days of the late Cold War. Like many southeastern Nebraska children his age, he’d grown up vaguely terrified that, instead of a new BMX bike with padded bars and handbrakes for his birthday, a nuclear warhead might land on his house.

  This fear, cultivated in part by vaguely terrified adults, owed much to the proximity of Offut Air Force Base in Bellevue, tucked just under Omaha’s wing. At the time, Offut still served as headquarters to Strategic Air Command – a fortified underground complex installed by the US Department of Defense to control a full two-thirds of the nation’s nuclear strike force from the relative middle of nowhere.

  This installation had always gone a long way toward reassuring area residents that they would, in all likelihood, be among the first to be vaporized if the Soviets ever decided to push the button. It also explained a lesser-known feature of the region: namely, the dozens of 1950s-, 60s-, 70s-, and even 80s-era bomb and fallout shelters scattered about the Missouri and Platte River valleys.

  Most of these shelters had been built by private citizens, on private land, to wildly varying specifications. Ben had no idea how many were left intact these days, but he’d known of a fair few during his high school and college years. The Wall had come down in Berlin, and the USSR had scattered to the winds, and Reagan and Gorbachev had wandered off into the sunset. But if you had the hook-up, a quality subterranean doomsday bunker still made a great place for country keg parties and garage-band rehearsals.

  ‘I’m not sure I like this,’ Abe said, looking skeptically down at the fortified steel hatch nestled amidst the pasture grass at their feet. ‘At all.’

  The door was roughly the size of a shipping pallet and had squalled like a dying banshee when Gordon, Charley, and Abe helped Ben haul it open. The air coming up from the opening in the ground was cool and musty. Rusty, corrugated iron steps led down to the birthplace of Crane’s original line-up, still intact and ready for action on Caleb Warren’s parents’ farmland.

  ‘Yeah, me either,’ Devon scoffed. ‘That band is so overrated.’

  Jeremy shook his head. ‘You’re overrated.’

  ‘I’d be a 2 if McLaren didn’t know you kept his browser history on a thumb drive.’

  ‘He only knows that because you told him, idiot. You accidentally blackmailed him for me.’

  ‘Look, I said my plan might be stupid,’ Ben remind
ed them. ‘But I’m a little short on better ideas. Anyone else?’

  ‘Maybe we ought to stick together,’ Jeremy suggested. ‘I mean, it’s sort of Monster Movie 101, right? Never split up.’

  ‘We have to find that rock,’ Ben said. ‘How long will that take? If Charley or I are there, we could lead the creature right to us.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Abe said. ‘The more hands on deck, the faster we find it.’

  ‘And what if the creature gets there before we do?’

  ‘You’d rather be trapped like rats in a hole if that happens?’

  Ben kicked the hatch lid with his foot. The Grotto responded with a hollow gong that seemed to echo back to them from somewhere near the center of the Earth. ‘This thing’s built for brutality. The walls are a foot thick – plate steel and reinforced concrete. It’ll hold a hell of a lot longer than a house.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Gordon said. ‘This plan is stupid. Take Riya’s car, go park on a back road somewhere. If you hear the creature coming, drive ten miles and wait. Stay away from populated areas and just run the thing in circles until we call you.’

  ‘I thought about that. Then I thought about what might happen if we had engine trouble. Or ran out of gas. Or hit a deer. Or blew a tire at exactly the wrong moment.’

  ‘Yeah, but—’

  ‘Anyway,’ Ben went on. ‘I wasn’t thinking of getting us trapped down there. What if …’ He paused, already hearing how it sounded. ‘What if I could make it go the other way around?’

  First Floor IT raised its collective eyebrows at this idea.

  Abe still wasn’t sold. ‘I don’t know, Ben. It sounds awfully risky.’

  ‘I got away from it once before,’ Ben said. ‘The thing is scary as hell, but I wouldn’t call it graceful.’

  ‘That’s a long way to press your luck. And Charley’s.’

  ‘Charley won’t be here,’ Ben said. ‘You either, Francesca. You two are going to get back on the road and drive south. Only stop for gas. Just keep on heading south until you hear it’s safe to turn around and come back.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Charley said. ‘You need me. No way am I leaving.’

  ‘First of all, watch your mouth. Second of all, it’s not up for discu—’

  ‘Yeah, I’m not doing that, either,’ Francesca said. ‘All hands on deck, right?’

  ‘Wrong.’

  ‘We don’t have time to debate this, people.’ Anabeth seemed visibly frustrated for the first time since Ben had known her. He realized they’d reached the end of her expertise on this situation, at least for the moment. Something about knowing that made him feel better and worse at the same time. ‘I don’t know the right answer. But Charley, honestly, I think your dad might be right-ish. This may be the best thing we can come up with on short—’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Charley said. ‘I don’t even care if this thing kills me. I’m still staying.’

  ‘Knock that shit off,’ Ben snapped before he could stop himself. ‘And don’t let me hear it again. Ever.’

  ‘That goes for me, too,’ Francesca said. She hooked an arm around Charley’s neck. ‘Loser.’

  Charley’s face turned scarlet. He looked at the ground. ‘I’m staying.’

  Ben looked at Abe. ‘Help me.’

  Abe looked back at him – How? – then at Gordon. ‘This morning. You tracked the creature’s speed, right? Do you remember anything?’

  ‘Logged the stats in my phone.’

  Devon seemed to be catching a signal between them that Ben, so far had missed. ‘And we know it followed us at least to Ashland.’

  Jeremy: ‘But we don’t know where it went from there.’

  Abe nodded, clapping her hands together. ‘OK, Halo Team. We’ve got five minutes to crunch some numbers. Let’s make it count.’

  ‘Sheriff, we’re getting pretty deep into theoreticals at this point,’ Field Agent West said, ‘but we may be up against some kind of cloaking capability.’

  ‘Like a … what. Like a stealth mode, you’re saying?’

  ‘Stealth mode.’ She pointed in agreement. ‘That’s it exactly. Something that enables the creature to remain invisible while traveling. Obviously, that could help explain the unusual shortage of reported sightings so far. As well as the challenges your search teams seem to be encountering.’

  And why nobody in the bleachers can remember seeing the thing until it was halfway across the damn field, Tom Curnow thought. If the boss sensed his glance, Tom received no indication. So he sat quietly.

  ‘But that’s just a theory,’ said Agent Battis.

  ‘Uh huh.’ Sheriff Prescott nodded. ‘So she said. I take it you two have run across one of these gomer things before?’

  ‘Golem,’ Agent West said. ‘And, no. Not in my career. Or in FDAB’s case history, either – which, admittedly, only goes back to the mid-1950s.’

  ‘Mind if I ask how we’re arriving at these theories, then?’ Prescott raised a friendly palm. ‘Don’t get me wrong – if anything explains why half the cops this side of Wahoo can’t seem to locate a giant mutant freak with superhuman strength in open country, I’m all for it. But you can understand my …’

  ‘Skepticism?’

  ‘I was going to say puzzlement, but your word works, too.’

  ‘There’s precedent in the literature,’ Agent Battis said. ‘There have been examples of a charm or totem being used to endow such a creature with selected characteristics. Powers, you might say.’

  ‘Uh huh. What literature are we talking about?’

  ‘Perhaps an alternative word,’ Agent West said, ‘would be folklore. We know how that sounds, but bear with us, Sheriff.’

  ‘You mean storybooks?’ Tom blurted. ‘How it sounds is like you’re talking about storybooks. Fairy tales.’

  ‘All right, then, Tom,’ Prescott said.

  Meanwhile, Battis had developed a smirk Tom didn’t much care for. ‘In our experience, Deputy, if you look hard enough, there’s generally a certain amount of truth in storybooks. Maybe you should read one sometime.’

  ‘And maybe now would be a good time for us to take a brief step to one side,’ Agent West said. She produced an iPad from her satchel, opened the cover, tapped the screen a few times. Then she leaned forward and handed the tablet to Prescott. ‘Can either of you remember seeing this man at any point today? Or any day recently? The photograph you’re looking at is a few years old, but—’

  ‘But he hasn’t gotten any prettier,’ Battis said.

  Prescott fished his cheaters from his shirt pocket, put them on, grunted once, and said, ‘I’d remember if I had, pretty sure.’

  He tilted the screen so Tom could see. Tom thought, What barrel of toxic waste did this one fall into? He said, ‘Also negative.’

  ‘Sheriff, swipe to the next … that’s it. What about her?’

  ‘Nope. Tom?’

  Bingo. ‘That one, yep. She was with the paintballers this morning. Glass. It’s in my notes.’

  ‘Anabeth,’ Agent West said.

  ‘Yep. That was it.’

  West and Battis exchanged looks.

  ‘Sheriff, we’d like to have a look at that campsite,’ Agent Battis said. ‘If you wouldn’t mind showing us the way.’

  ‘Wouldn’t mind at all,’ Sheriff Prescott told him, nodding in Tom’s direction as he handed back their tablet. ‘That’s why we hire deputies.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  The Grotto was a concrete and steel box about twenty-five feet square, lined on two sides with storage shelves, equipped with tank-based plumbing, AC power, and solar back-up. A narrow doorway opened into a smaller box housing a stainless-steel toilet (dry), a utility sink (calcified), and a pull-chain shower over a rusty drain grate (crawling with centipedes).

  The main room had been converted into a rehearsal and hangout space, clad in cast-off carpet for acoustics. A ’90s-era drum kit with pitted hardware and a hole in the kick drum sat spiderwebbed into one corner. Abandoned mic stands stood
around as if waiting for a party to start. Miscellaneous reclaimed furniture sat long undisturbed, yet surprisingly light on dust. The place must be holding, Ben thought. He wished he felt more encouraged.

  Charley flopped into a loveseat, while Ben eased himself on to the sprung, threadbare couch. They stayed there for approximately forty-five seconds before Charley said, ‘It smells down here.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s hang out up top for a while. We’ve got some time.’

  According to First Floor IT’s worst-case projections – using Ben’s house as ground zero, Ashland as a last-known location, and what little they knew of the creature, its capabilities, and its current whereabouts – they had a bare minimum of two hours before the thing could conceivably reach them at the shelter, even if it came full-bore, unobstructed, in a straight line. Which was about the same amount of light they had left in the day, leaving Ben and Charley with the following two-part plan:

  Part One: hang out here as a safety precaution while the others searched for the Shepherd Stone.

  Part Two: If the others weren’t back by sundown, leave.

  But as much as it calmed his pounding head to be out of the sunlight, Ben still felt nervous down here, where he couldn’t see anything. They’d need to come up with a lookout strategy. He wished they had binoculars. And a better plan.

  ‘The signal’s better up there anyway,’ he said, tossing Charley the new burner. ‘We need to call Mom again. You do it this time. They’ll probably be able to track it somehow, but she needs to hear your voice. I can’t keep …’

  He trailed off as he realized that the phone had hit Charley in the leg and bounced away, on to the cushion beside him.

  Charley was asleep.

  Just like that. Dead to the world, his chest rising and falling in a clockwork rhythm. Ben could hardly blame the kid. He released a long, slow breath of his own.

  Jesus, what a day. He touched his nose gingerly. It was like hitting himself in the face with a croquet mallet. He felt the swollen gash nestled down amidst the blood-crusted hair at the back of his head. That hurt, too. His bandaged neck and shoulder felt like salted road rash. All his joints ached. Even his throat hurt. Maybe he was coming down with something.