A Protocol for Monsters: Dave vs the Monsters

by John Birmingham

  “Chief?” Heath said, knowing that Allen already had this minor detail in hand. The CPO fetched a sports bag full of clothes he’d estimated to be Hooper’s size.

  Heath could have sworn the man was drunk or even a little bit stoned given the fuzzy, distracted way he wasted the next few minutes, not getting dressed, not helping out, complaining that he’d lost his wallet and his phone and generally adding to the tension in the room. It was like trying to get a toddler to dress himself. Chief Allen helped to bustle the two civilians, Pradesh and a nurse who seemed to spend most of her time sniping at the doctor, out of the room. Just when Heath imagined they might be making some progress, a candy striper appeared at the door with a bag of cookies for the patient.

  Heath took them from her and sent her on her way with as much speed and good grace as possible.

  “Are we good to go?”

  # # #

  They drove west on US 90, in a matched pair of Ford Expeditions. The same operators who’d responded to the attack on the rig now protected the only man who offered any chance of explaining what had happened out there. They were not permanently assigned to ride shotgun for the Office, but Heath had worked with many of them before, when he was full-time at DEVGRU, naturally, and afterwards, on secondment to the Office. Chief Allen, in particular, had more than a passing acquaintance with the unusual demands of Heath’s new employer.

  Sitting in the back of the lead vehicle between Allen and Heath, Hooper borrowed a phone and spoke briefly to his ex-wife, the conversation recorded by the NSA. If she said something that Heath needed to know immediately the duty analyst would get in contact, otherwise he would just review the transcript when he had a chance. Probably sometime after midnight when he had delivered his charge into protective custody.

  It was not hard to get a read on Hooper, even listening to just one side of the conversation. He sounded like a deadbeat. In the space of just a few minutes talking to his ex he managed to pass through guilt, resentment, indignation, bargaining, sniping, wheedling and one outright lie. Although Heath could not entirely fault him for that last one, having insisted she did not need to know he was keeping company with the navy’s finest. Hooper instead told her he was with “some Coastguard guy” which served to deflect attention from any Special Forces involvement and to subtly undermine Heath’s authority and possibly even his dignity. Hooper seemed to be one of those guys.

  There was something very definitely wrong with him, and not just his personality. Lieutenant Dent would be in traction for months, nursing chest injuries you might expect to find in someone who’d been struck a blow by a sledgehammer. However, the testimony of the hospital staff, specifically the nurse who had been with Pradesh, seemed to indicate that Hooper had not intended to hurt the man. He had simply “brushed him off”, and this had led to him “accidentally” flinging Dent across the room into a cupboard door which had shattered under the impact. Heath would not have believed it for a moment, had Dent not confirmed the truth of it. Even more disturbing, although he had not seen it himself, was Chief Allen’s description of how Hooper had cut his hand, while casually destroying a bedside table, and how quickly the wound had healed. Quickly and completely.

  Captain Michael Heath, Joint Special Operation Command’s liaison to the Special Programs Division of OSTP, understood they were way off the reservation. It wasn’t only JSOC who were interested in Hooper and the xenomorphs. He was now liaising directly with the joint chiefs as well. As his daughter would say, the eye of Sauron was on this cracker.

  “What did you kill out on the Longreach, Mr Hooper? And how?” Heath asked as soon as Hooper was finished talking to his ex-wife.

  The oil man grimaced, his face looking sallow and sick in the yellow glow of the highway lighting. They had left the city behind some time ago, and the only sound in the car was the thump of the tires as they hit potholes and joins in the road surface.

  “What do you mean?” Hooper said at last. He sounded unsure of himself, nervous.

  “We’ve reviewed all of the CCTV coverage that we could recover,” Heath explained. “And we’ve conducted after-action interviews with survivors. Mr Martinelli was very helpful. He saw what you did, and the team we put in confirmed the details. It’s important that we know what happened. We need to know what you killed, Mr Hooper—and how. Because nobody else on that platform survived an encounter with these hostiles.”

  Hooper almost seemed to fold in on himself as he considered the answer. Heath felt a shudder run through the man’s body. It was likely he was suffering from PTSD, but they did not have the time to indulge him in a long recuperation.

  “What are you? From The X-Files or something?” Hooper asked in a weak attempt at a joke to fend off the original question.

  “I work for JSOC, Mr Hooper,” Heath said. It was only half a lie. “Joint Special Operations Command, just like I told the doctor back at the hospital. We responded to the emergency on the Longreach because local emergency services called it in as a potential terrorist strike. That’s a scenario we have prepared for, but it was not a terrorist strike, Mr Hooper. We need you to tell us what it was.”

  The man’s hands were shaking as he rubbed at his eyes and swore quietly. Dave Hooper was a mess. Somewhere deep in the lower reaches of the Pentagon, great iron wheels were already turning, as the machinery of state powered up to deal with new threats, and possibly a new weapon with which to meet them. But the man sitting next to Heath in the back of the speeding Ford looked a hell of a lot less like a weapon and more like a casualty.

  “I’m sorry, Captain, but I got no fucking idea what happened out there. I thought it was a nightmare. Just a bad dream or some drug fuck-up at the hospital.”

  He fell quiet for a second, before adding, “I was really hoping you’d tell me something.”

  With a little encouragement from Chief Allen—“Dude, why don’t you start by telling us what you remember? …We hear crazy stuff all the time. Seriously. We don’t judge”—Hooper confessed that he first thought the attackers were animals. Like giant hairless apes or something. It didn’t sound that accurate to Heath, from the reports he had, but then he wasn’t the traumatized survivor. As the tiny convoy rolled through the night, dropping down a long curving off-ramp before merging onto Louisiana 428, Hooper appeared to make an effort at recalling what he could. Heath recorded the details on his iPhone. He didn’t tell Hooper he was doing this, having long ago found out that most people are better storytellers when they don’t have a blank page or a live mic in front of them.

  Hooper shied away from describing how he’d killed the things, saying he was hungry when Heath pressed the question.

  “I’m sorry, but I really have to eat,” he whined, a strangely contrary tone coming out of such a large-framed, rough-headed man. He looked to Heath like the sort of dumb ass-cracker whose life had been on a steep downslope from the day he’d stopped playing high school football. And yet Hooper was a qualified engineer, so obviously not stupid. He was only about halfway gone to seed, and he had the sort of looks Heath could imagine might play well with cocktail waitresses of low repute.

  “I can’t think straight,” Hooper complained now. “I’m so fucking hungry, I’m dizzy with it. No joke, hombre.’

  Heath tapped the back of the driver’s seat.

  “Do we have any of the milk biscuits from the hospital left?”

  They did, as it happened, but Hooper still asked them to detour through a chicken joint where he ordered up a frankly unbelievable orgy of grease and dead meat. Heath suspected it wasn’t just because he was hungry. The guy was probably trying to claim back some of his taxes via Uncle Sam’s credit card. Assuming he filed taxes, of course.

  Hooper was pushing fistfuls of chicken strips into his face when the windscreen exploded.

  # # #

  “Contact, contact, contact.”

  Heath did not remember hauling out the radio, but it was there in his hands as the Ford Expedition veered crazily out of co
ntrol. The left side of his face was on fire and the world was a maddening gyre of violence and noise. Screeching tires, a man screaming, the grinding crash of metal and broken glass, the big SUV tilting on its wheels, threatening to roll, and then righting itself at the last moment. Chaos and horror.

  A metal bar—a guardrail, something from the median strip?—had speared right through the engine block and the passenger’s seat. It glistened darkly with blood and he stared at it for an eternity, wondering at the strange arrowhead shape that had just missed his knee.

  “Contact, contact, contact.”

  The radio crackled back at him. “Copy. Contact at eleven, engaging.”

  Another crash, this one louder than the bang which had shattered the windscreen. Heath was thrown forward in his seat, mashing his face against the headrest in front of him. Airbags deployed like explosive revelations.

  Why hadn’t that happened before?

  “Cut him out,” someone yelled as the bags deflated, just before Heath realized it was his own voice he could hear barking orders.

  More shouting.

  “He’s pinned to the seat. No time for that.”

  That was Chief Allen. Heath cursed, his words lost inside a huge arrhythmic booming, a noise that seemed to fill the whole world. It was Hooper kicking the door on Allen’s side of the SUV. Heath would have told him to stop, to calm down, but the door suddenly flew away with a wrenching crash and Hooper was gone in the blink of an eye. That was no mere cliché. Heath blinked blood and sweat out of his eyes and suddenly Hooper was no longer in the car, he was outside on the road, slamming into something with his shoulder.

  Heath’s heart, already racing, stopped. He was sure of it. His fucking heart actually stopped pumping blood while his brain devoted every neuron to untangling the insanity he now beheld. It was a creature, another hostile. But nothing like the ones Hooper had described. The xenomorph before them recalled a giant mantis. It towered over the rigger, its long insectile limbs moving with animal swiftness.

  Hooper was…

  …talking to it.

  Heath was sure. They were snarling at each other in some guttural, unfamiliar language. The weird, suspended moment gave him just enough time to catalogue the creature’s appearance. It appeared to be wearing light armor of vaguely medieval design, chain mail and boiled leather, that sort of thing. It carried a giant bow and wore a quiver full of equally over-sized arrows across its back. A number of hatchets and strings of something like shuriken hung from a studded belt at the monster’s waist. Heath’s rational mind seized up trying to process the bizarre imagery.

  And then the moment was lost, swept away in a loud and oddly reassuring roar of gunfire. Chief Allen had reappeared to unload a full clip from one of the MP7s he’d taken from the weapons locker. The rounds flashed and flared as they struck the thing, throwing hot bright sparks off its chain mail.

  Seriously? Chain mail?

  The gunfire had some effect. The xenomorph let rip with a terrible, high-pitched shriek that jolted Heath from his reverie. He fumbled for his sidearm with numb fingers, hauling the heavy .45 free of its holster, but nearly dropping it. He calmed himself and took a second to steady his grip, drop into a shooter’s stance and take aim on the creature’s center mass. The hammer fell and the loud report of the pistol settled his nerves. It was familiar when so much was not.

  He squeezed off shot after shot and then his clip was empty, but it didn’t matter because Hooper—the deadbeat, the redneck—was on top of the thing, pinning it to the ground with his knees and raining down blow after blow on its head. The carapace cracked. The insect shivered violently and fell still.

  But Hooper kept pounding away.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  They were still finding bodies and parts of bodies all over the rig, especially on the lower levels where the xenomorphs had presumably forced entry. Not that Compton was walking around, picking up half-chewed bits and pieces of people, of course. That’s what they had the Exploit kids for. Let Ashbury and her eager young postgrads cover themselves in glory and sticky stuff. The Deputy Director of OSTP (Special Programs Division) was no micro-manager.

  He sat on a cheap plastic chair in the crew lounge where some redneck engineer had reportedly caved in the skull of the largest creature. Compton ignored the marines who worked around him, clearing out the last of the blood-soaked furniture.

  “You think it’s from Asgard?” Metcalf joked, and true to form, Ashbury missed the joke.

  “Asgard is made-up, Jack.”

  “You sure about that,” the CIA man asked, grinning. “Thor’s Hammer there says otherwise.”

  Compton sighed.

  “It’s not from Asgard. It’s from Home Depot. It’s a perfectly conventional splitting maul, if a little heavy at twelve pounds. Steel head. Hickory shaft. Retails for 61.99.”

  “And nobody can pick it up?” Emmeline said.

  “Well, it’s got a lot of, you know, gunk on it,” Metcalf deadpanned, and again Ashbury missed it.

  “Yes, it is very nasty, but I don’t think they bleed superglue,” she said, leaning over the heavy tool and frowning. She poked at the crust of gore which coated the upper half of the hammer. They’d had to borrow a couple of marines to pull the remains of the largest xenomorph away from the thing when none of the Exploit team had proved strong enough.

  But the marines had no more luck shifting the improvised weapon than had Ashbury’s nerd squad. Professor Compton rubbed at his beard and glowered at the minor mystery. There were larger questions awaiting them of course, but Emmeline would provide most of the immediate answers with her post-mortem examination. Compton had no role to play in that, and would busy himself examining the creature’s oddly medieval weapons and armor. The corpses were also covered in tattoos which he had ordered photographed before the autopsies began. Clean copies of the runes could be sent to outside consultants to check if they had any analogies or antecedents in mythology. He’d probably start with the cuneiform geeks. They had boners for this sort of shit.

  As fruitful as that might prove, however, Compton could not help but be fascinated by the wrongness of the scene before them. The splitting maul lay flat to the floor tiles of the small crew lounge. It had fallen over when the marines dragged away the body of the xenomorph so that its ruined skull no longer supported the weight of the shaft.

  So it could move. But nobody could pick it up.

  Maybe it was emitting gravitons?

  “I’ll have to suit up in a couple of minutes,” said Ashbury. “Are you joining me, Jack, or staying here with Professor Compton?”

  Metcalf made some weak joke about following the pretty professor with the rubber gloves, rather than staying with the grumpy professor scratching at his beard lice, but Compton only half heard him. He wasn’t paying Metcalf much heed. He’d been neither surprised nor pleased to find the CIA man on the rig before them. There was no warning him off, of course. The Agency would be the first of many rivals trying to get a piece of this action, especially if it went public, as Ashbury insisted it must.

  “Yeah, you kids go and enjoy your autopsy,” Compton said. “I want to think on this a little longer.”

  He nodded at the splitting maul.

  What he actually wanted to do was call the national security advisor as soon as they were out of the room.

  He asked the marines to give him a few minutes, a request they were happy to go with since it gave them a chance for a cigarette break, or some simple mooching time, or whatever. Compton thanked them and shooed them out before using a sat-phone to call Washington.

  He almost made it all the way up to Rice, before being intercepted by her chief of staff, a pudding-head called Dunleavy. But that was okay. He could feel he was getting closer and closer to jacking into the mainline.

  “Professor,” said Dunleavy. “I hope you have a report for us.”

  “A full report soon,” he said, “once the post-mortem exams are done, but there’s something else besid
es bodies here. We’ve retrieved an artifact. With a possible power source we don’t understand yet.”

  He could almost feel the tug of the fish hook he’d just sunk into Dunleavy.

  “Oh yeah,” the man said. “What sort of power?”

  “Possibly graviton based,” he improvised, guessing that Rice’s advisor wouldn’t know what he was talking about. But the promise of any new energy source was always enough to grab anybody’s attention in Washington.

  “Gravitons?”

  Dunleavy sounded curious, rather than sceptical.

  “Yeah, they’re mostly theory until now,” Compton said. “But this…weapon,” he added in an inspired flash, “seems to be emitting them.”

  “How so?”

  “Gravitons are a theoretical particle,” said Compton, “like the Higgs Boson until recently. They’re thought to be the carrier particle for gravity, the thing that transmits the force of gravitational attraction.”

  “Okay, that sounds interesting and baffling all at once. Is it useful? Could we drive a car or a plane or a ship with it?”

  “A starship maybe.”

  There was a slight pause and then Dunleavy said, “Oh, I see. So, are there more aliens down there? I thought the aliens were all dead.”

  “I don’t think they’re aliens,” Compton said. “They’re nothing like the Roswell Greys. For one thing, they were alive just a few hours ago. But this graviton thing, I think we need to lock that down as soon as possible.”

  “When you say ‘we’, you mean ‘you’, right? Special Programs?”

  So, Dunleavy wasn’t such a pudding-head after all.

  “Yes,” Compton replied. “I’ve already got Metcalf down here sticking his nose in where it’s not needed.”

  “But maybe it is needed,” said Dunleavy.

  “No, it’s not. Captain Heath is the point man for Nat Sec and the Joint Chiefs. He can handle anything on that track. Just let him do his job and let me do mine. We don’t need half-a-dozen agencies on this. Especially not if it’s going to break and go public. You want one story, one source, one true consensus.”