A Protocol for Monsters: Dave vs the Monsters

by John Birmingham

  “You were down, man. I thought you were dead.” Martinelli shook his head, obviously having trouble believing his own memory. “But it was dead. The monster. And all its little monster friends, too. They got a few licks on you, but they were gone too. Like they died of shock or some shit.”

  The morning only grew more surreal after that.

  Hooper had some sort of seizure which Chief Allen successfully treated with chocolate bars. Then, having eaten enough breakfast to end every famine in Africa, ever, he strolled through a series of physical tests that would have passed muster as a training montage in a superhero movie. One of the bad ones. From the 80s or 90s.

  # # #

  Heath shut the tests down after the accident with the deadlift. Although it was more of a near-disaster than a simple accident.

  A weak storm front had come up out of the gulf, cloaking the base in cold, thin drifts of fog and the sort of light rain his granny had been apt to call “Scotch mist”. It was miserable weather that dampened everybody’s mood, except for Hooper.

  He was enjoying himself mightily, right up until the moment he threw a 200-pound weight bar clean through the heavy canvas tarpaulin the marines had stretched out over Sergeant Swindt’s makeshift weightlifting station. That was when Heath finally accepted they were dealing with something that wasn’t just out of the ordinary. It was off this whole goddamned plane of reality.

  He’d seen Hooper injure himself fighting that bug monster, and heal immediately. He’d watched Hooper attack the monster—the Sliveen, he had called it—moving like someone in a blur of special effects from the old Matrix movies. Finally, he watched the oil rigger pound the creature’s head to a soggy pulp. Even then, Heath could sit quietly, in the light of day, and posit some sort of explanation for what he’d seen. He knew from personal experience that time flowed differently in combat. You were in your head and out of it, the distance between subject and object collapsing and expanding all in the same moment. Your perceptions could not be trusted. Often they could not even be recalled once the adrenaline and terror washed out of your nervous system. He thought he had seen Hooper do those things, but that didn’t mean they’d actually happened.

  Nonetheless, he was not in combat this unseasonably bleak and chilly morning as he stood quietly and watched Dave perform a series of strong man stunts, culminating in a botched deadlift that launched a heavy iron bar and a dozen attached weight plates high into the air. And then he’d stood, watching as the guy launched himself after them, recalling for Heath the long ago Saturday mornings of his childhood spent watching cartoons in front of his family’s old RCA color television set. Spiderman, Top Cat, the Roadrunner and, of course, Superman.

  Dave Hooper, 37-year-old white male, and a champion asshole, had leapt hundreds of feet into the air and snatched a fully laden weight bar out of the sky, just like Superman. And Heath had seen it.

  So he cancelled the rest of the tests. There seemed to be no parameters to test against, and Heath decided he wanted this guy under the care and supervision of people better suited to dealing with bizarre anomalies than him. He’d have to report to JCS immediately. They weren’t just dealing with an outlier. There was a paradigm shift under way and Hooper seemed to be at the center of it. Heath ordered Chief Allen to get their guest fed and kitted up with some new clothes, and an hour later, as the autumnal afternoon dimmed towards evening, they rode a Humvee to the chopper that would carry them out to the oil platform where this had all begun.

  “The story is coming out,” Heath explained to Hooper as the Hummer powered around a long bend in the road. “Bill O’Reilly was mouthing off about Greenpeace a little earlier. Calling them whack jobs because one of their kids got on Facebook with a story about a military cover-up out on your rig. A bioweapon gone wrong. O’Reilly smacked them hard. He’s gonna look pretty foolish by the end of today.”

  He’d been trying to get Hooper ready for the storm of public attention that was surely coming his way. In what Heath was beginning to recognize as true Dave style, however, the guy managed to be a complete oaf about it.

  “Yeah, but Greenpeace doesn’t need Bill O’Reilly to help them look foolish,” he said.

  Heath bristled in silence at first, finally speaking up. With these assholes, if you didn’t speak up they took your silence for agreement.

  “My daughter’s in Greenpeace,” he said without elaborating, and thankfully that shut the conversation down for a while. He was having real difficulties knowing how to play this situation, how to manage this guy. But there could be no doubt he needed to be managed, and carefully.

  The muted roar of the helicopter reached them well before they entered the clearing. Six of Chief Allen’s SEALs were already embarked, seated in the rear cabin. Heath took a seat up front with the pilot, quietly thankful for the engineering marvel of his new leg. There was no way he’d have been able to make this ride with an older, conventional prosthetic. He would never serve in combat again, of course, but the screw-on titanium limb had let him stay in the navy, and in a way it was something of a gift.

  Without it he wouldn’t have been attached full-time as the military liaison to OSTP. He wouldn’t have been in the cockpit for this adventure.

  Perhaps though, he might have been able to spend more time with his daughter.

  # # #

  They finished breaking down the smaller creature late in the afternoon of the second day and Emmeline dismissed everyone for a tea and coffee break before starting in on the much larger corpse. She’d been frustrated in her search for a cause of death for the first hostile. That wasn’t an issue with the second creature. Its skull was an open bowl of crushed bone and rotting gore, courtesy of Mister Hooper’s unusual sledgehammer. The one mysteriously stuck to the floor of the former crew lounge.

  “We’ll dispense with the cranial exam,” she announced when the Exploit team had reassembled. Once upon a time, pre-diagnosis, she would have delivered that information as a bald statement of fact. Now she even managed to shade it with some ironic distance, quirking her lips before doing up her paper mask.

  I should be getting the bloody Asperger’s Nobel Comedy Prize for this stuff, she thought.

  “Given the extensive damage to the subject’s skull I’d prefer to remove the head and have it sent back for an MRI,” she said more seriously. “Wally, if you would be so kind as to see to that later.”

  Wally Hicks pulled the cord on a small, specially designed chainsaw and it snarled into life. Everyone stepped away from the corpse to avoid the spray of dead tissue that was coming.

  “Later, Wally. Later!”

  “Oh, sorry.” He powered down the saw. “It’s just I’ve been waiting to use this baby all day.”

  “It’s all right,” Emmeline said. “Enthusiasm is never to be discouraged. But let’s deal with first things first, shall we?”

  She looked around the team, almost asking, “Where’s Jack?”

  But of course they were missing Jack Metcalf today. He had flown back to the mainland, banished by Compton’s allies in Washington. Jack had bid his farewell to Emmeline with good grace, promising to catch up with her in Mordor. She smiled at the joke, because she understood it was necessary to acknowledge the effort of making it. Not that they were ever going to Mordor, of course. That was just a place in a book. For Compton, Jack had only a wry smile and a promise that, “Your turn will come.”

  “Okay,” she said, clapping her gloved hands together. “The marines weighed him in at 217 kilograms, correct?”

  “217.3,” said Cadence Ramsay.

  “Got it,” Em said, before turning on the recording system. “Subject is an unidentified male xenomorph…”

  “No shit,” somebody snorted. Emmeline ignored them. They were obviously referring to the creature’s grotesquely oversized genitalia. So, yes, there was no doubt it was male and thus it was redundant to offer commentary on the subject beyond noting the fact of it. But Emmeline had learned to let such things pass her by. In
the end, the neurotypical were very strange.

  “He is 2.44 meters in height. The dermis is a tough hide covered in coarse patchy hair and the same lesions and hardened warts as the previous subject. It is likewise inked with intricate rune-like tattoos, imagery of which has been captured for later study.”

  With the experience of yesterday’s autopsy to guide them they could have performed this one a little quicker, were it not for all the extra mass they had to cut through, and saw off and extract. Also, it was obvious that this larger creature, while sharing some anatomical characteristics with its smaller companions—multiple hearts and stomachs for instance—was nevertheless a quite separate and, so far, unique specimen.

  Emmeline took her time, missing the contributions of Jack Metcalf who was a handy fellow with a knife. Unlike a human autopsy, she peeled back the hide covering the creature’s limbs, taking photographs and samples as before, estimating from its musculature how strong it might be, how fast. Very, in both cases.

  She removed the organs in a single block, to be broken down and examined by her assistants, one of whom reported while gagging that they had retrieved human remains from both stomachs.

  They had found human bones and flesh during yesterday’s autopsy and Emmeline would have thought her assistants’ surprise curious, had she not seen the like of it before. For her, confirmation that the first hostile had eaten its fill of oil rig workers was the end of the matter. She’d have been surprised if their new best friend on the slab here had turned out to be vegan. But young Jennifer Kwan had been just as upset today as she was yesterday. There was no accounting for some people.

  The flow of work swept her up again and it was some hours before she realized everyone had stopped around her.

  She knew she was feeling odd before she looked up. Her heart was beating unnaturally fast. A heavy warmth in her stomach was seeping down into her groin and upper thighs. Her breath came in hitches.

  She would have called a halt to the procedure and stepped outside for a few minutes. She obviously needed some fresh air.

  But when she looked up she found Heath and a stranger standing at the entrance to their makeshift morgue.

  It was Hooper. She knew it.

  Just as she knew she had never wanted to fuck a man more in her life.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It was inexplicable. Impossible.

  She understood the idea of instant attraction. One of the great misconceptions about those living on the spectrum was the widely held belief that they could not love. That they could not feel desire. It was ignorant bullshit. She had loved her parents and her sister. She had once loved a young man and had suffered the agonies of love lost when that relationship had failed.

  But this…this feeling was every bit as alien and wrong as the grotesque menagerie of dead monsters they had been cutting apart for two days.

  Heath led the man, Dave Hooper, into the room by his arm. They both held paper masks over their mouths but dropped them when they grew used to the smell. Cady twirled past them carrying a specimen tray with an organ that might have been functionally analogous to a liver. It looked a bit like one, but they just didn’t know yet. Emmeline saw how the young woman stopped and nearly tripped over her own feet. She got moving again but her attention was focused mostly on their visitors, not her job.

  A quick check of the room revealed the same story over and over again. All of the female members of Emmeline’s Exploit team were flushed and flustered and staring at Hooper, but he was oblivious. Instead he stared gape-mouthed and distressed at the largest of the xenomorph corpses. The one he had killed.

  PTSD explained his reaction, she thought. But not hers.

  Heath gently pushed the man further into the room, seemingly no more alert to the effect Hooper was having on the women there than the man himself.

  It must be a result of whatever organic changes had been wrought upon Hooper by his initial exposure to the creatures.

  A working hypothesis, full of holes, and liable to fall over at the first puff of contrary wind, but it was all she had. That and her work. Emmeline redoubled her attention on the autopsy, trying to find her focus again, to ignore the hot flushes that wanted to undo her.

  That wanted her to undo his belt and…

  Oh good grief.

  She bit her cheeks, not hard enough to draw blood, but hard enough that it hurt. A lot. And surprisingly the distraction actually helped. Her heart slowed down, and the hot rush of blood to her loins seemed to ease off a little. But before she did her best to ignore him, Hooper staggered and nearly fell.

  “I need to sit down,” he said.

  She hurried over and pushed a stool under his butt, sparing him an undignified fall to the floor.

  Instead he dropped onto the stool. His head fell between his knees and he tried to control his labored breathing. He took long, slow breaths as the other members of Exploit, especially the women, gathered around him. Cady fanned his face with a manila folder.

  “Get him some water,” Emmeline said. “Maybe a bucket as well…”

  He looked like he was about to vomit and she couldn’t help it. She still wanted him.

  “English,” he croaked and she realized he was talking about her. Her accent.

  “Once upon a time,” she replied, completely flustered now. She retreated into officiousness, “Don’t make a mess.”

  “Are you hungry?” Heath asked, somewhat bizarrely. “Do you need to eat?”

  No, the poor man looked like he needed to evacuate both his stomach and his bowels all at once. What was Michael thinking? Emmeline exchanged meaningless chitchat with Hooper for a moment, trying to gather her wits and tamp down her libido. She understood that everything was somehow related. The creatures on the slab. The Excalibur sledgehammer. This man and the ungovernable desire she felt towards him. Xenomorph technologies or…something was at work. OSTP was not unfamiliar with such problems. A generation of researchers had been lost to early and rapid onset Alzheimer’s by exposure to alien Grey technology, which was why nobody studied it any more. Some mysterious action-at-a-distance had made that impossible. Just as Hooper—or rather, something which had changed him—was making it impossible to concentrate on her job right now.

  “Ooh, this looks interesting,” she said, feigning mild surprise at some aspect of the autopsy.

  Emmeline managed to return her attention to the carcass, and after a few minutes the hot flushes cooled and the ache in her groin subsided. Indeed it was as though they had never happened. She was able to regard Hooper as she would any man. Heath was trying to get him to talk them through what he knew of the creature. Like her, he seemed to come to his wits after a while, pushing away whatever was bothering him so terribly. Probably not rampant sexual attraction to every woman in the room.

  She suspected he was probably used to dealing with that.

  “This ugly-ass motherfucker,” Hooper said, indicating the largest of the hostiles, “is a Hunn.”

  Emmeline looked up at him.

  Nomenclature. That really was interesting. He had her attention. He had everyone’s attention.

  “One of the six clans of the Horde,” Hooper continued. “The Hunn are the largest, most savage of them. They are the shock troops of the Horde,” he said, looking at Heath. “The heavy infantry, I guess you’d call them. And this one here, he was a BattleMaster of Hunn. They’re born, not made. Your average vanilla-flavored ‘Hunn Dominant, which is just a gay monster way of saying ‘warrior’, will run to about seven feet tall and weigh in at maybe 300, 350 pounds. Most of it, as you’ve probably seen, is pretty densely packed muscle. They have the strength of about a dozen men. Or maybe half-a-dozen Sergeant Swindts,” he said, perhaps referring to one of Michael’s men. Emmeline had never heard of him, but apart from Michael and his nice young chief petty officer, she rarely had much to do with the hired muscle.

  Mister Hooper pressed on, walking slowly around the corpse. Seemingly unperturbed by the gross injuries he had d
one it, or even the noxious smell. “I guess you’ve run your tape measure over this bad boy, so you already know that a Master of Hunn can top out at over eight feet and weigh another sixty or seventy pounds. Without armor.’

  Wally raised a hand to speak, probably to tell Hooper that this specimen actually came in even heavier than that. But it may have been unusually large, she supposed. He was still speaking in general terms.

  “The really big, dumb bastards like to call themselves BattleMasters. They’re like you, Heath. Officers.” He tapped the side of his head. “Sorry. Can’t Google up a direct comparison, but if you want to imagine them being about eighteen, maybe nineteen times stronger than a grown man, you wouldn’t be far off. They’re pretty fast and nimble—given they got all that mass to move around—and when they take a swing at you, holy shit, they do throw out the hurt bombs. Their bones are dense…”

  Well he had that right.

  Emmeline nodded at him, to confirm this.

  “That rhino hide they’re covered in is thick but strangely sensitive to UV damage. It picks up a lot of infections. The infections suppurate and rupture. It can make them vulnerable. Their hide is normally as tough as boiled leather, but when it ruptures…not so much. That’s why they wear armor. It’s also why they have tattoos in a dumbass sort of way. The ink our boy here got himself would have hurt like a bastard when it went on.”

  He paused for a second, closing his eyes as though trying to recall something.

  “They use bone needles and the ink of this sort of squid. Urmin. Rhymes with vermin. But lives on land. And the suckers on its arms all have little razor teeth around them.”

  He checked to see if everyone was still following him. Emmeline certainly was. This was both horrifying and fascinating. She would have thought the man insane were it not for her own experiences of the last two days.

  “Anyway, a dude with a lot of tats, he has sucked up some real pain to get them. The design tells a story, but you know, blah blah blah. I’m a badass from a line of badasses. We’re all considered very macho.” He grinned. “Anyway. Game stats. The fastest of them can run at about…” He closed his eyes again and did a quick calculation.