Dave vs. the Monsters

by John Birmingham

  Their journey north proceeded in fits and starts as the SEALs paused whenever they came to an intersection, with Zach Allen or Igor holding up his fist to bring them to a halt. They would do a quick survey of the danger area, followed by the all clear and a resumption of the run. The pauses often allowed the SWAT team to catch up after dealing with its own unavoidable delays. Ostermann didn’t like stopping to defuse confrontations between gangs of young men or to get thick knots of dawdling civilians on the move again, but he had no choice. The gang brawls could quickly turn to shootings, and the slow shuffling mobs that stopped to watch them were forever threatening to block traffic or, Dave knew, attract a feeding frenzy.

  He motored along at a steady trot, feeling as though he could keep up this pace all night, and he didn’t doubt that Allen and the others could match his every step. It was Heath who impressed him the most, however. He could tell the man was favoring his good leg now, starting to drag the artificial limb a little, but he never slackened in his pace. Dave made a face at the idea of how uncomfortable it must be for him. That tender nub of flesh and bone pounding into whatever arrangement of steel, plastic, and padding marked the point where the body met the prosthesis.

  They came across their first body lying in a pool of blood at Loyola and Toledano. An African-American male. As Allen’s chalk established security around the intersection, guns out, backed up by SWAT, one of the SEALs approached the body cautiously, covering it with his weapon. He used a boot to roll the corpse over. There were three gunshot wounds to the chest.

  Ostermann arrived at a trot, sweating heavily. He shook his head and flicked off some of the perspiration with one hand. Around them civilians stood on porches, sporting an assortment of weapons ranging from baseball bats and kitchen knives to double-barreled shotguns and pistols. Dave took it all in, tasting the rain soon to come in the air, the fear and mistrust of the locals, and the waste of a life on the street. Nobody made a move to approach them, to explain what had happened. He wondered if one of them had cut the man down.

  “Not our problem,” said Heath as the sound of distant gunfire echoed across the cityscape. “Let’s keep moving north.”

  They resumed the long run, pushing on to Magnolia and turning east. Here the houses were even meaner and more dilapidated, often leaning over, surrounded by tall weeds. Small factories and warehouses, their functions often a mystery, took up double and sometimes triple allotments between the shotgun shacks. Dogs barked, sounding feral.

  The street was dark, illuminated by a burning car that had run into a power pole and the blue-white sparks of the fizzing, crackling power line that now snaked across the crumbling tarmac. Ostermann ordered one of his men to call it in to the power company. To get the grid shut down on this block.

  Chief Allen appeared beside Dave as they gave the downed line a wide berth.

  “How you doing, Dave? Hungry?”

  “Not yet, Zach.”

  “You’ll want to keep your nutrition up, dude,” Allen warned. “Metabolism will be running hot now. Keep it stoked.”

  The SEAL passed him a couple of gel packs that he sucked down gratefully even though they were unpleasantly warm.

  As Dave finished the second gel pack, he could hear the sounds of battle. Or slaughter. The screams of people being eaten alive. Animal cries as tooth and claw tore open flesh and shattered bone. He didn’t want to, but he concentrated, homing in on one particular channel the way you might try to follow a single instrument in a song. He teased out something like the slurping sounds you heard in an Asian food court.

  Noodles. Thick, wet noodles.

  “Better hurry,” he told Heath. “It sounds like a full war band.”

  “How many?”

  Dave concentrated his hearing, trying to filter out the arguments, the sirens, a hundred cable channels of chaos. He could hear distinct chewing, bone-cracking sounds.

  “Maybe a dozen, max,” he said. “Could be a scouting party. If they stick to form, there’ll be more of them soon.”

  “A dozen’s bad enough,” Heath said, pausing to talk into his mike.

  The Cobras passed over their position. Captain Heath signed off his comm net. “We’ve got eyes on targets north of Magnolia, but they’re already inside the residential blocks. Between that and the civilian aircraft overhead, the gunships can’t get a clean shot.”

  Overhead, a pair of louder Ospreys roared through the darkness on their way north. One of the aircraft veered suddenly to get out of the bright white cone thrown down by the searchlight of a news helicopter above it.

  Allen and a couple of the cops swore loudly.

  “Ostermann?” Heath said, calm if somewhat exasperated. “Seriously?”

  The SWAT boss scrunched his flushed, sweating face into a furious mask before snarling into his headset.

  “I don’t care if you have to shoot them down; get those news choppers out of the AO. Now!”

  As Dave tried to ignore screams and worse, he looked up into the cloudy night sky, where civilian helicopters dueled with the military and the police for airspace. A soft rain began to fall. He thought about saying something to Heath about loitering on open ground. About having so few men with him. The Hunn and Fangr would charge them if they encountered the group. They’d leap right over the snarl of cars blocking the intersection of Magnolia and Washington, picking up speed across open ground.

  But it was the searchlights that brought him up short.

  “Captain?”

  “Yes, Dave?” Heath said, exasperated. “Let’s move out,” he ordered everyone.

  “They don’t dig the light,” Dave said. “Those spotlights will be freaking them out.”

  “Noted.”

  Another body lay in the street ahead, this one undoubtedly a victim of the daemonum. They stepped around entrails crawling with ants and flies. A black man’s unseeing face looked up at Dave, the throat ripped open. The sickly sweet stench of drying blood, shit, and urine filled his sinuses. He swore, blew his nose, and cleared his throat loudly.

  The SEALs stopped and looked back at him. Again he was sure he felt Lucille trying to speak to him, to admonish him in some ultra-low-frequency hum that he felt in his hands as an unpleasant, almost electric sensation. It was nuts, but this stupid fucking sledgehammer was nagging him somehow. His body ached from the effort of carrying it. The discomfort reminded him of how his back used to hurt from carrying his boys around as toddlers. They got heavy quick. He realized he’d been cursing loudly only when Heath hissed at him.

  “Dave!”

  “I know, sorry, my bad,” Contrite Dave stage-whispered back. “Be vewy quiet. Hunting wabbits. I know. I’m on it.”

  “You okay?” Allen asked, concerned.

  Dave shook his head. “I’m not sure. Let’s just get on with this.”

  Moving down both sides of the street, the shooters kept their weapons at the ready, searching the rooflines, the alleyways, and the deserted lots. The SEALs, he noted, kept their weapons trained on the few civilians who passed by now. The SWAT guys lifted their barrels up, allowing them safe passage. Different strokes. Dave carried Lucille in both hands, ready to swing it. Trash, discarded clothes, and occasional bodies slowed their movement, but only slightly, as they picked a path around the obstacles in the dark.

  “You boys headed to the lot?”

  The SEALs turned as one, muzzles zeroing in on a graying African-American man who stood in the doorway of Jazz’s Po-Boys. He held a shotgun much the same way a hunter might, pointed toward the street, not quite away from them but not quite toward them, either.

  “What have you seen, sir?” Allen asked quietly.

  “The End of Days,” the old man said. “You boys army?”

  “Navy,” Allen said.

  “Huh, go figure. Long ways from the beach here, Popeye. Name’s Ferguson,” the man said. “If you head down on that street toward the builders’ lot, you’ll find all the trouble you’re lookin’ for.”

  Allen m
oved quietly toward the shop keep. “The builders’ lot?”

  Ferguson pondered the team for a moment as a Cobra flew low over the building, toward the lot, Dave assumed. “Over on Washington,” the old man said when the roar died down. “Big new development. For folks with money. Or was. Have to drop the asking price now, I reckon.”

  Heath introduced himself. He was sheened with sweat, and his face was tight. “Sir, we could use a secure place to base from. Your establishment is definitely better than the location I had in mind.”

  “And what location was that?”

  “There’s a mosque—”

  “Oh, hell, no.” Ferguson laughed, a rattling wheeze, as he pointed at a careworn shack behind them. It looked like a tumbledown garage to Dave, but Ferguson assured them this was the local mosque. “That ain’t one of them Ay-rab mosques with gun turrets and shit. That’s an American mosque, Navy. Bigfoots’ll run right through that.”

  “Bigfoots?” Allen asked.

  “Or whatever,” Ferguson conceded. “Figured them for indigenous monsters. Saw a show on the History Channel about them once. The Bigfoots. Figured they’d come back to take what we took off of them.”

  Lieutenant Ostermann, delayed by dealing with the helicopter issue, at last caught up with the SEALs.

  “Those boys with you?” Ferguson jerked his thumb at the approaching SWAT contingent.

  Heath nodded. “They are. I need every gun. Will that be a problem, sir?”

  “I ain’t broke no laws since I got an Article 15 in Oakdale after I got back from the Nam,” Ferguson said. “I got me no business with the po-lice. And they got them none with me. Go on, Navy; get yourself set the fuck up. But you break something, you bought it.”

  A news chopper, one Dave hadn’t seen before, swooped low over the roof. Heath and the rest of the party looked up in annoyance that soon translated into incomprehension. Dave followed their gaze. It was his new eagle eyes that caught the problem.

  A long arrow—a Sliveen war shot, arrakh-du for sure—had punched through the pilot’s window, pinning the dead man to his seat. The news chopper spun around and around in a tightening gyre, losing altitude fast. The nose dipped lower, and as the cabin tilted over crazily, a body dropped from the rear compartment. Dave grimaced as he watched the man plummet flailing through the night air. He recalled how much he’d wanted to toss Compton out of the chopper on the way in.

  Not my finest moment, he thought. But I didn’t actually do it. So there’s that.

  The Bell helicopter dropped just beyond the roofline, hitting the earth with a crunching explosion that shook the ground and threw a great gout of fire into the air. Dave reckoned it had crashed somewhere between the marines and the Horde.

  Igor had come up, hefting a long-barreled weapon with a scope, which he handled with ease. He nodded at Ferguson and then turned to Chief Allen. “Anyone started a tab yet? I could murder a po’boy.”

  25

  Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn found his vanguard, or at least part of it.

  One of the Hunn dominants had lost the leash of control over his Fangr acolyte. They were busy ripping a pile of calflings apart as Scaroth emerged at the head of the Queen’s Vengeance, thresh a few quick strides behind him. In the village to the east the growls of another Fangr acolyte could be heard along with the screams of its victims being eaten alive. This realm smelled wrong. As it had before. Thresh had wondered last time what it was, and now, upon returning, the answer came to it in a burst of quickthinkings.

  This world smelled like a giant foundry.

  An entire realm of forged metal and bellows fire.

  “Hold!” Scaroth roared, ignoring the hammering wings above him. Thresh cringed as it looked up toward the creatures in the air, wondering what they were, even as Urspite ignored them. The gaze of a great single eye blazing with a terrible fire traversed the field, passing over them, but without burning anyone. Urspite’s anger with his Hunn dominant kept him in place as the others cowered away.

  The blood madness was on the Hunn dominant and his leash. A terrible second of disbelief followed for all who beheld the scene. It had been many eons since the Hunn had established their domination of the Fangr, and in all that time none of the inferior daemonum had ever disobeyed a direct command. It was not in their meat to do so. But so, too, in all that time, thresh knew, none of the inferior daemonum had ever tasted the scent of the old prey in its nostrils, either. Thresh had just enough time to wonder what Scaroth might do before the BattleMaster had already done it. Reached into the long quiver slung over his enormous shoulders, he withdrew a pilum with deliberate slowness, and not even bothering to line up the throw, he unleashed the shaft in one fluid movement. It streaked through the night and impaled one of the Hunn’s Fangr with a dull, wet crunch, affixing it to the ground, where it squealed once before shivering and going limp.

  “Attend me, Hunn!” Scaroth barked to the errant daemon’s master.

  The Fangr may have been lost to the killing frenzy, but the guilty Hunn had presence of mind enough to pull away from the bestial scene. It helped that one of the strange flying creatures turned its burning eye on the warrior and its leash, driving them away from the slaughtered prey. The daemon shrieked and snarled and leaped out of the circle of light. It stood dumbly for a moment, long ropy strands of skin and meat hanging from its jaws, and seemed caught between horror, humiliation, and giving in to the siren song of the bloodwine.

  Humiliation won out. And fear of the inexplicable Drakon-like creature that hovered above them. Thresh could feel the Fangr’s distress as a hot empathic prickling under its own hide. Most compelling of all, though, was the force of displeasure emanating from Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn in malignant waves. The BattleMaster’s dark rage and disapproval was so intense that it caused thresh to moan softly. Thresh tried to shield its smaller, weaker mind from the fearful thinkings of Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn, but it was as pointless an effort as a grosswyrm trying to outrun a magma flow.

  The massive shoulders of the disgraced warrior slumped, and it hung its great gnarled head in shame, approaching the Master slowly, with its surviving Fangr acolytes attending it in a series of small looping circles, as though torn between the need to approach and the desire to avoid the will of Scaroth.

  The BattleMaster did not even deign to speak to the failed Hunn. To lose the leash over one’s charges was unforgivable. The Hunn dropped to its knees before him. Turning to the remaining members of its leash, it demanded that they bare their throats to the blade, which they duly did, becoming mostly still but keening a wretched death song. Three quick slashes and hot ichor spilled onto cold mud. The Hunn turned back and presented the blade to Scaroth, but even that mercy was not due him because of his failure.

  When the BattleMaster refused to release him from dishonor, the Hunn plunged the tip of the long curved blade into his abdomen and ripped out his own innards.

  He died hissing. In shame.

  Thresh sniffed at the stink of it. Around the lesser daemon, its superiors did the same.

  The scent of prey was much stronger this time with fresh blood in the air. There were many of them nearby. Some even crawling away from the bloodied pile of prey that had tempted the pathfinder and its leash into ruin. Their screams and high keening wails were a delight to the senses, but there was no time to indulge. The rest of the vanguard came pouring up out of the tunnels and into the night Above, fiercely scarred Hunn and their leashed Fangr claiming the clawhold in the realm of dar ienamic.

  They were ienamic now?

  Thresh had been taught to think of Men only as meat for the blood pot, and that only as a legend. When had it formed the idea that the calflings were anything as notable as ienamicae? Thresh worried that some mad apostasy had claimed its mind to dignify the creatures with the ancient and noble crown of dar ienamic. But then, the powerful magicks it had encountered on its last visit here were … powerful.

  It recognized the field into which it had emerged, an open wast
eland on the edge of the village in which small fires and candle lamps burned. There was no sign of the minion in the ruins to the left, but the source of the heady aroma of man meat was immediately obvious. A small clutch of the creatures stood around their strange beastless chariots where thresh had fallen upon the filthy minion just before its nest mate had been slain by some trickster’s wizardry. Thresh stuck close to Urspite Scaroth as much for protection as anything. The Revengers crawled up out of the tunnels behind it, cloaked in sweet darkness, arraying themselves in a loose scythe formation. Fangr acolytes leashed to their Hunn dominants growled and snarled, eager to get to the kill. The Hunn growled in turn, quieting their inferiors but eyeing the cyclopean Drakon suspiciously, sniffing the air, and detecting the scent of sweet, sweet meat.

  Thresh could not long gaze in the direction of the foe.

  So they are foe now? Not food?

  All of its eyestalks cringed away. There burned a great many lights in that direction, as though the men had established a large war camp in the red-roofed building with all the fires. As eager as Fangr and Hunn were to have at them, all shied away from the light and the promise of fire and pain that came with it. Lieutenants Grymm stomped and stalked, exchanging quiet thinkings on how best to put out the lights. Reaching a talon up, thresh attempted to gain the attention of the BattleMaster by tugging at its armor.

  “What?” growled Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn, busy attempting to brute his forces into a formation resembling something from the war scrolls.

  “The light, sir. The eyestalks water and squint from it, but it does not burn. Not if it is as it was before.”

  Urspite Scaroth Ur Hunn reached down and picked the tiny daemon up by its throat, all but choking it.

  “Shall I throw you into the fire light and test that thinking, thresh?”

  Struggling to choke out an apology for bothering the BattleMaster, thresh begged not to be sacrificed so. It had much to offer in the way of thinkings. Urspite Scaroth opened his massive claws and dropped thresh into the mud. It was thankful for the mud. The soft ooze broke its fall from such a prodigious height.