Dave vs. the Monsters

by John Birmingham

  “The marines do not normally get to eat this well,” Heath said by way of explaining the ice cream. He seemed almost embarrassed. “Not in the field. It would be MREs until they got the kitchen going.”

  “You don’t have to explain. Rig monkeys are animals. You got choir boys there.”

  “The food on your rig was going to waste,” Heath said, as if it was important. “And I don’t think MREs are going to do it for you in the long run. I want to see what the docs have to say about your metabolism.”

  That dampened Dave’s enthusiasm for the cookout.

  “Yeah. I been wondering about that. Whether it’s always gonna be like this. I might have to live in a fucking food court.”

  He was just about to pitch into his mop-bucket-size chocolate shake when he was interrupted.

  “Do you mind if I join you, gentlemen? I couldn’t sleep.”

  Heath stood up as Professor Ashbury approached their patch of deck, forcing Dave to remember his manners as well. Grunts of exertion surrounded them as the marines chose that moment to wind up their meal break and head out on patrol. Once upon a time he might have waddled off in a food coma after them, but Dave Hooper now bounced up onto his feet with no effort at all. Neither bloated nor heavy, he did at last feel as though he could stop shoveling food into his head hole. He was thirsty, however, and fetched himself a Coke from an ice-filled cooler.

  He could hear the marines joking about him as they left on their patrol.

  It was odd to think of armed soldiers heading out on patrol when all they were doing was walking around his platform. Heath picked up a folding chair newly vacated by one of the jarheads and twirled it around for the professor to sit on. She thanked him and carefully placed a mug of something hot on the fold-up mess table.

  “Doc.” Dave nodded.

  She fixed him with an unreadable expression. Freed of her biohazard suit, she was, he found, quite striking. Not a chick who’d be posing for Sports Illustrated anytime soon, but he could see how some men would find her easy on the eyes. Men like Dave, say.

  “You really should refer to me as Professor Ashbury,” she said. “Or Doctor Ashbury; either is applicable. My friends call me Emma, but I do not think we will be on a first-name basis.”

  “Wow,” Dave said, a bit put off. “Okay, Professor. Have it your way.”

  “Anything you can tell us?” Heath asked.

  “Not without lab work, which will have to wait until we get back to the mainland,” she said, stifling a yawn.

  “Coffee won’t help you sleep, Doc,” Dave informed her helpfully. “D’oh! Sorry. I meant Prof.”

  “Cocoa,” she explained. “With a nip of rum. Not enough alcohol to disturb my sleep patterns but enough to relax after a hell of a day.”

  “Hey, no need to explain. That’s my type of bedtime drink.”

  She sketched a smile but purely for the sake of form, rearranging her features because it was required. Like Heath, she must have been tired and, at a deeper level, unbalanced by the way the rational world had totally tipped off its axis. The three of them found themselves alone. It was a familiar but unsettling scene to Dave Hooper, who could feel the rig around him, the miles of pipes and tons of metal and concrete, floating, creaking, shifting here and there in ways it never had before. The feel of it was wrong. He could hear the dull clang of boots ringing on steel stairways as squads of marines stomped off on patrol. The usual hum and rumble of the drilling machinery was silent, but he could hear generators and even, if he strained, conversations to which both he and the Longreach were unaccustomed. For one disorienting second he managed to filter out a whole snatch of dialogue from an unfamiliar voice somewhere nearby.

  “… some shit right out of King Arthur, dude.”

  “… fuck you, you’re full of it …”

  “… not lovin’ this freak show …”

  “… like a fucking slaughterhouse, man. Worse than fucking Baghdad. Way Karsoe tells it …”

  He pulled away from it, slightly disturbed at the fidelity of the sound. It was as though he’d dialed in on the conversation the way he might focus on a line of text in a book. But there was nobody nearby to account for the dialogue.

  “Mr. Hooper?”

  It was Professor Ashbury.

  “Dave,” he said, coming back to them. “Call me Dave.”

  “All right, then; I will call you Dave. Are you okay, Dave? You looked somewhat woebegone.”

  He snorted in between gulps of the chocolate thick shake.

  “Woebegone? My grandma used to say that.”

  “Mr. Hooper … Dave … is having a few adjustment issues,” Heath explained. “We all are.”

  Ashbury raised an eyebrow. “Indeed.”

  She wrapped both hands around the chipped enamel mug and took a pull on her cocoa. When the mug came away, it left a small frothy mustache that she licked at like a child. Dave found himself smiling at the sight. And then he found himself having to adjust his posture because of the erection that started to strain at his pants.

  Oh, for fuck’s sake.

  There had been a bad time a year back when he’d seriously thought about seeing his doctor about getting a scrip for some Viagra. Then he’d thought about just ordering some on the net. Then that crisis had passed thanks to a Waffle House waitress. She’d smothered, covered, and chunked him all the way to recovery. But this … He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. This fucking rail spike in the pants was new and not entirely welcome. He tried to hide it behind the ice cream bucket in his lap.

  The prof was a good-looking lady but not his type, and he knew for a certainty that he wasn’t hers. She was too smart.

  Annie had taught him the dangers of smart women. Annie and her goddamned college crush lawyer, Vietch.

  “Thirsty,” he said, draining the bottom half of the Coke he’d fetched. It was icy cold, and he was hoping it might put out the fire or at least give him a cold spike headache to chill things down a little.

  It didn’t do that. He was uncomfortably aware of Ashbury’s scent and the bow of her lips and …

  “Dave?”

  Annoyed, he slammed the galvanized tin mop bucket down with a sound like a gunshot. Everyone jumped, including him, and the big can tipped over, spilling the last of its contents. It was crushed in the middle, just the way he’d crush an empty can of Bud during the Super Bowl.

  “Oh, man … sorry …”

  Heath mopped up the spill with a napkin, which made Dave feel bad because he had to get down on his robot leg to do it, and Ashbury offered rote assurance that he had nothing for which to apologize, which was demonstrably fucking untrue given the one-legged man swabbing the deck in front of him. Heath finished and dropped the sodden napkin into the ruined bucket.

  “You’ve been through an extraordinary ordeal, Dave,” Ashbury said. “Quite literally. People use ‘literally’ nowadays as an inappropriate modifier. But in your case it is apt. Your experience was outside the ordinary realm. You’re still going through it. It’s natural that it would unsettle you.”

  He thanked her and shifted his position again, finding that by throwing one leg over the other, ankle on his knee, he could open up a little wiggle room for the old persuader. He sighed audibly with the relief.

  “Thanks, Prof,” he said. “I shouldn’t complain. This is just …” He threw a look across at Captain Heath. “What was that you called it all? Out of context?”

  Heath nodded, and Dave waved one hand around to take in the rig. Then he gently picked up the crushed bucket. “There is no context for any of this. Not outside of the SyFy Channel. I mean, you guys? Maybe you’ve dealt with this sort of thing before?”

  His look was hopeful, but Heath gave him nothing.

  “I was the available JSOC asset in theater, Mr. Hooper. I was down here supervising a completely routine training exercise.”

  Professor Ashbury looked like she was searching for something encouraging to say. In the end all she could come up with was va
gue conversational filler.

  “I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised, by which I mean we, not you, Dave. We spend our professional lives imaging the extreme. Trying to quantify it. Establish parameters. We—”

  “So you haven’t been to Area 51? Either of you?”

  No, they hadn’t.

  “Captain Heath has been very good about all this, you know,” she said, throwing the officer an encouraging glance. “He’s been very good about you.”

  “Professor,” Heath said in a warning tone.

  “Oh, come on. The man has been to hell and back. And he obviously doesn’t have the emotional or intellectual skills with which to cope.”

  “Hey!”

  “Captain Heath,” she continued, favoring Dave with a significant glance, “has probably saved you from extraordinary rendition …”

  “Professor!”

  “No. It’s important he understands. There was a chance, Dave, that you could have ended up in a cell somewhere, sedated and chained down. I know Captain Heath argued very strongly against that, and to be honest, I think he saved a few lives doing so. I’ve only skimmed the briefing on the changes you’ve undergone since first contact, but it’s enough to know that containment would have been the wrong option. Practically and morally.”

  Dave’s thoughts were shooting about like a pinball getting flipped hard.

  “Rendition. Like a terrorist?”

  “No,” Heath said. “More like witness protection. And it was only one option. Quickly rejected.”

  “And what were the others?” he demanded to know, fighting his temper again. “Snipers? Air strikes? Grabbing my family? My boys?” he added, knowing that nobody would think of trying to pressure him through Annie.

  Heath looked pissed, mostly with the professor, who for her part was entirely unrepentant.

  “We’ve never dealt with something like this,” she said in a calming tone, deflecting his last question by answering the original one. “But we have protocols. All of them untried. Untested. You came out of a violent first contact that no other subjects survived.”

  “Vince did.”

  “No. Mr. Martinelli observed the contact from close quarters,” Ashbury corrected him. “He did not take part in it directly. You survived a hostile contact, but the protocols defined you as compromised.”

  “Because I survived?”

  “Because you survived.”

  “Oh, bullshit.” Dave’s anger finally broke out, but only in verbal form. He was very careful to keep his hands, which had balled up into fists all by themselves, deep inside the pockets of his cargo pants. He squeezed his eyes shut so hard that stars and roses the color of dark blood bloomed behind them. When he opened them again with his fury contained and slowly abating, he spoke through gritted teeth.

  “I had a brother. Had one. My baby brother. Went off and joined the army after 9/11. Thought he was gonna chase bin Laden down himself. Instead he got blown up and shot to pieces in a fucking soft-ass Humvee in some Baghdad shithole because of fucking protocols and parameters and metrics and all of that shit you people go on with. I know the fucking ragheads who set off the bomb and pulled the triggers killed Andy. But your man Rumsfeld? And his fucking known unknowns? His protocols? He put him there to be killed. For no good reason.”

  He blazed defiance at Heath.

  His brother.

  His fucking brother.

  “I am sorry, Dave,” Emmeline Ashbury said in a very quiet voice.

  A tightness had closed up Captain Heath’s face, but when he spoke, his voice was also quiet.

  “I am sorry about your brother,” he said. “Your loss. I didn’t know. It wasn’t—”

  “It wasn’t in the file?” Dave snapped, already feeling guilty but not willing to let Contrite Dave back in yet. Angry, ugly Asshole Dave would have his moment of glory. “There was no protocol?”

  Heath looked embarrassed. Dave let go of the anger with one hot, ragged breath.

  “You wouldn’t,” he said. “There were a lot of things people didn’t know about Andy. One thing, he signed up under Mom’s name. They changed their names when my old man ran out. I thought, fuck that old prick. It’s my name. He can’t have that, too. So I kept it.”

  An awkward silence enveloped them. And with it came the embarrassment, the hot shame that rose up from his neck and burned his cheeks.

  “I’m sorry,” he said in a small voice, feeling like a very small man. “I shouldn’t have said all that shit. I admit I got issues with the government, the military. But you’re just people. Not the thing itself.”

  Dave could hear a rhythmic tapping and realized to his shame that it was Heath, nervously jiggling his artificial leg. The titanium limb knocked against the leg of his chair.

  “I apologize,” Dave said roughly. “I run off at the mouth sometimes. Like a fucking idiot, and yeah, like a bigot sometimes. Like my old man. I didn’t mean any disrespect to you or your service, Heath. Andy, he was proud of serving.”

  The tightness around Heath’s eyes remained, his jaws clenched, and when he spoke, he also obviously had to force himself to dial it back.

  “I accept your apology, Dave.”

  For one mad and very dangerous second Bad Dave almost flared up again, because who was this asshole to judge him? But he stamped down on that shit. Hard.

  Heath appeared to force himself to speak quietly. “Everyone loses something in war. Even when you win, you lose something.”

  “Yeah,” Dave agreed.

  He’d lost something, too.

  His Superman boner.

  15

  The minion had no name of its own. A lowly creature, it knew what it was and what it served: its hunger and its queen. It snarled at the wretched thresh circling its kill, perhaps looking to rush in while it was distracted by feeding. Oh, and it was so easy to be distracted by this fine meal. Exactly how long had it been since any had tasted the meat of the frail two-legged creatures that screamed so sweetly when you bit into them?

  The minion knew not.

  Just that it had been too long. So many ages trapped in the UnderRealms, forced to hunt and feed on the creeping urmin and inferior thresh such as the two that bumbled through darkness behind him, splashing and grunting in the brackish brown waters that flooded the ruined village. Minion kept one eye trained on them but knew itself to be safe from attack while it remained in the pool of light where it had dragged the carcasses to feed in peace. Thresh did not stray into the light. It would burn the hide from their backs.

  Minion grunted in good humor as it tore off a limb and stripped the meat from the bone by pulling the tasty treat out through three layers of fangs. So sweet and soft, not at all like the meat all minion recalled from the ancestor memories of long ago, when their kind moved upon the upper world with freedom. Legend dimly recalled these creatures as being much tougher and stringier on the fang. They often tasted sour, it was said, and it wasn’t unknown to have to spend a good long time chewing on their gristle and bones.

  It pulled off a leg and crunched happily through the thick upper thigh, almost giddy with pleasure at the warm juices that still squirted and the rich, heady marrow that lay inside the bones. The meat was well marbled with fat, lots of gorgeous yellow fat.

  Oh, Her Majesty was going to be pleased when minion reported back to her that the path to the upper realm was clear again.

  As long as it could remember to save some of the feast for the offertory. It would not do to come before the throne with a full belly and empty claws. It had seen even daemonum superiorae go into the blood pot for less.

  Minion snarled a warning into the dark as it sensed the thresh working up the nerve to charge, perhaps imagining that if they were quick enough, they might get in and out of the light without being too badly burned. It could understand that. The smell of fresh meat must be driving them to madness. Minion knew it was having trouble restraining itself as it drove a snout deep into the steaming, still-quivering viscera of one of the
prey.

  It just tasted so gooooooood.

  So good indeed that minion, never really known for intelligence and restraint, did not pause to think about from where the light in which it squatted and ate was shining. It had imagined at first that the great golden armored beast on which the prey was riding would flee when it attacked. But no, it sat, seemingly uncaring of the fate of its masters, howling with a rhythmic thumping sound that reminded minion of mating season. Perhaps the chariot beast was in season, and if that was the case, waiting to see what the male of the species was like might be foolhardy on minion’s part. Its bright eyes shone forth, illuminating the remains of the meal. But no warmth shone from them. Not like the dangerous heat that pulsed off the fires this prey was known to carry through the night sometimes. Fire that could consume vampyri and Hunn and Fangr in a twinkling and that could harm and even kill a whole rank of minion were they foolish enough to remain exposed to it for too long.

  The meat, however, was … distracting. It melted in the mouth and sat warm and heavy and pleasing in all of its stomachs. If only the prey had not died so quickly, minion might even have had the pleasure of a live meal and bloodwine, a delicacy so rare even in the older times that it was spoken of as myth. There were ancient minion it had known that claimed to have eaten so and spoke of a special tincture that infused the prey meat when they were allowed to baste in the juices of their own terror during a meal.

  Minion doubted those stories now.

  How anything could contain the hunger long enough to bother with such refinement, it did not know.

  This meat was just so sweet.

  16

  It was the chocolate thick shake that did it for him in the end. He felt uncomfortably full for the first time in days. There was a peculiar pleasure to be had in sitting back and lightly drumming his greasy fingertips on that tight, distended belly. A pleasure that lasted for all of ten minutes, and then the tiny bulge above his belt buckle marking the final resting place of so many chickens and pigs and their friend the thick shake was gone, and he was back to his new, sleek swimwear model profile.