Dave vs. the Monsters 1: Emergence

by John Birmingham

  – You have tribute.

  The queen’s voice rumbled in the thresh’s mind like the grinding of tectonic plates. The thresh abased itself, sliding even closer to the hard rock floor of the chamber.

  – Attend me, thresh, and allow me to sup of this tribute that I might judge its worth and your fate.

  The thresh cautiously inched forward, a little too cautiously, earning it a kick in the rear from one of the warrior attendants. That was enough to send it scuttling forward until a thought from the queen brought it to a halt. The thresh concentrated and heaved, regurgitating the better part of the meal it was carrying in both of its stomachs. It retched and retched, emptying its guts lest there be any question that it had not rendered full tribute. So fulsomely did it vomit up the fermenting remains that its vision blurred and the room began to spin.

  It felt the presence of the queen in its mind, stroking it and calming its fears as only a mother could.

  – You have done well, nestling. I can smell the rotting hide of the minion you defeated. Praise be to you for your victory. And praise, too, for this gift of sweetmeat. It has been an age since we last fed on this delicacy.

  The thresh was aware of movement in the dim red-lit cavern as something immense and powerful shifted in the gloom and dragged itself forward. It felt vibrations in the bedrock as the queen pulled herself toward the steaming pile of human offal. It could sense fear leaking out of the closely guarded minds of the Grymm on either side of it and wondered how much of its own abject awe and terror they sensed by mere observation. Possibly none. The Grymm remained kneeling with heads bowed down. The queen alone knew its thinking now. Jaws distended with a wet creaking sound, and one of her tongues shot out with a rasp, scooping up the pile of remains in one motion. The thresh felt her satisfaction, indeed her pleasure, at the meal as its own. It sensed regret at the meagre provisions but excitement at the prospect that she might feast properly soon.

  – There were others, you said.

  The thresh was almost paralysed by the majesty of her presence, but she insinuated soothing feelings into its mind and the small daemon was seized by a new and unexpected confidence.

  – Yes, Majesty. Another of the Men. Larger and darker of flesh. We attempted to take it, but my nest mate was destroyed by strange magicks.

  It felt the queen’s scepticism at its thinking but knew that she could not deny the clarity of its memories. She knew its thinkings and feelings as though they were her own, and she could see in her own mind how the other thresh had been destroyed as they moved forward to seize the prey. The thresh had the unprecedented and wholly unsettling experience of examining the memory with the queen, pondering it with some of her reflected intelligence and her vast accumulated store of knowledge and lore. It learned more of men in that brief moment than it would have learned in a lifetime of listening to stories around the blood pot.

  Men, it learned, had pleaded with their gods to spare them. From all the sects daemonum. And most especially from the blood pots of the Horde, the mighty Hunn and leashed Fang and the heavy claw of the Grymm. For whatever reasons the gods had seen fit to separate the realms, turning daemon on daemon for millennia. Of men’s world now, the queen knew nothing. But she well remembered them as feeble creatures. Not enemies, just food. They had no magicks. They cowered in caves and behind trees waiting to be eaten. They lashed together thin branches to shelter them from the sky and beat useless implements out of soft metals. Iron was unknown to them. Pushed to extremes, they might fight to preserve their young. But nowhere in her memory, which stretched back across oceans of time, had any men ever conjured up magick enough to reach out and slay a daemon in such fashion.

  The thresh had the merest idea that the Sky Lords may have separated the realms for that very reason: lest men and their beasts be hunted out. It also knew the contempt of Her Majesty for such thinkings. Who were the Sky Lords to banish them? But just as important, where were these gods now that the barrier between the realms had been breached? The thresh was just beginning to get an inkling of its monarch’s thinkings on the matter when she withdrew from its mind and it found itself prostrated on the stone floor with only its thin and meagre thinkings and the silence of the Grymm guardians for company.

  As it lay exhausted and sickened, it retained but one clear memory of the privileged violation.

  It had not been her only servant to pass through the barrier. Her Majesty knew of others. Some great change was upon the world.

  When next it heard Her Majesty’s thoughts, they came at a remove, not arising within the thresh’s own mind as before but arriving within it as she spoke to all of them.

  – This shall not stand. We shall not be mocked thus. Not by the likes of men. My captains ur Hunn and ur Grymm, you shall gather the necessary forces and return to the Above with this thresh if the path lies open still. You shall secure our passage there. You shall learn the nature of these magicks that destroyed our nestling, and you shall lay our vengeance on those responsible. Come hence to me when these things are done and I shall make due preparations for my return to the world of men.

  22

  The Seahawk put down on the hospital helipad, and the SEALs poured out of the cabin to ring the aircraft. Christ knew what they were expecting to fight off, but they were all ready for it. Down on one knee, lying prone on the concrete, scanning left and right, the sky, the small structure where the local police officers waited. Compton, Ashbury, and Dave followed them.

  As the big bird took off, Dave watched four more aircraft, weird airplane-helicopter-looking hybrids, orbiting the hospital. ‘Ospreys,’ Ashbury said when he asked what the double-bladed machines were. A couple of faster-looking helicopters had joined the transports, bedecked with an assortment of weapons.

  Gunships, Dave thought. For sure.

  Captain Heath keyed his mike and ordered the marines to await further instructions. The noise from so many aircraft was enormous. Louder than anything Dave had ever heard on a rig.

  Dave felt as anxious and unsettled as he had when each of his sons was born. He’d known the world was changing then, too, the world of Dave at least. And it was one of those things he’d never told anyone, certainly not Annie, but he didn’t expect the change to be all for the better.

  He felt the same worry gnawing at him now. He wanted to call it free-floating anxiety because a hot psych major he’d balled in college had said that once and he’d liked the sound of it. It seemed to explain a lot of shit, especially about the hot psych major. But when he examined the feeling, there was nothing free-floating about it at all. Nor was it a sensible reaction to the circumstances.

  He looked at Marty’s splitting maul, which he held with both hands.

  Lucille.

  It was this fucking thing; he was sure of it. Lucille ached to be buried deep in the broken bone and flesh of the Horde.

  ‘Not going to land them?’ Dave asked, nodding at the choppers, as much to distract himself as anything.

  ‘Can’t land them on this.’ Captain Heath gestured at the pad. It was way too small. ‘No sense putting them here when they’re faster in the air. I’ll keep them as a reserve until I know what’s going on. I’ve got so many conflicting reports, it’s hard to know what we’re dealing with.’

  Bent over, with the ferocious downdraught trying to knock them off their feet, the odd, disparate group shuffled over to meet the locals. The police captain gave Dave and Lucille a doubtful once-over but said nothing.

  ‘You Captain Heath?’ the man shouted. He looked to be in his fifties, with a small potbelly and thinning silver hair. He’d taken off his NOPD baseball cap to avoid losing it to the rotor wash.

  Heath introduced himself and the two professors but not Dave. Or Lucille.

  ‘Captain Eichel,’ the cop yelled over the roar of the choppers. ‘Len Eichel, Sixth District, NOPD. We’re glad to have you boys with us, sir.’ Eichel co
uldn’t help taking another glance at Dave. Though Dave was dressed in camouflage trousers and body armour, his grey hoodie and the growing tufts of decidedly unmilitary hair on his head marked him out as different even among the SEALs, who took a relaxed approach to their appearance. The splitting maul didn’t help matters, either. The two eggheads didn’t draw the police officer’s attention in the same way.

  ‘What is the situation, Captain?’ Heath shouted. ‘My briefing was pretty spare about details on the ground.’

  ‘On the ground, under it. All over,’ said Eichel. ‘911 is jammed with calls, and my people are having trouble sorting them all out. I’m getting reports of these things between Toledano and Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard. So far, aside from prank calls, there’s nothing outside of Sixth District that I know of.’

  ‘Describe them,’ Heath said.

  ‘They’re like rabid people-eating dinosaur apes or something,’ Eichel said. He consulted a notebook for a moment. ‘Hairless gorillas. The pig monsters from Star Wars. The bad guy from Galaxy Quest –’

  Heath cut Eichel off. ‘Okay. Do you have firm numbers?’

  ‘No, I haven’t been able to get that yet,’ Eichel said. ‘What the fuck are they? Some sort of experiment gone wrong? Is that why you’re here? ’Cause those Greenpeace guys been saying on the news that this –’

  ‘They’re dangerous. But we can take them,’ Heath said, cutting him off. ‘Is that good enough for you?’

  ‘It’ll have to do for now, won’t it?’ Eichel said with a sour expression that sort of impressed Dave. This guy was pissed, but he wasn’t going to dick around. He just wanted to deal with the problem. Understanding what the problem was could wait.

  ‘I can brief you on the way down,’ Eichel said. ‘We’ve got armoured transport can take you right into Central. Roads are lousy with traffic coming out. Vehicles. People on foot. It’s a damned mess. There’s a lot of armed civilians down there, too. Most of the fire you can hear is from them, not my teams.’

  As the choppers departed, Dave was able to hear the crackle of gunfire that had been masked by their presence. A lot of gunfire.

  Heath pushed a button on his headset and issued orders to get off the roof. A moment later Allen and the monster SEAL called Igor began moving among the SEALs, not shouting, just quietly directing them away from the roofline and toward the little concrete structure housing the stairwell that would take them down.

  ‘Captain Eichel, we will need a firm estimate of how many hostiles we’re dealing with. Not an exact number. Just a good estimate.’ It was Ashbury, with her finger poised over a small, glowing iPad in a ruggedised case.

  ‘Hostiles? Is that what we’re calling them?’

  ‘Well, they’re pretty bloody hostile, I think you’d agree.’

  Eichel nearly stumbled on his feet as they rushed down the stairs. ‘That they are, Ms. And no, as I told your captain, we have no idea. It’s an unholy bedlam down Central. I got four officers down already. Hospital here’s overwhelmed with civilian casualties, mostly gunshot wounds. But there are some bad ones, too, people with animal bites on them. And there’s thousands more on the streets, heading out across the rest of the city.’

  ‘Dave?’ Professor Ashbury said. ‘You got anything?’

  ‘Nada,’ he answered quickly before thinking of something. ‘Captain . . . er, Eichel. How long since your first calls came in? How long these things been running around, you think?’

  The SEALs’ boots hammered on the concrete below.

  ‘Who are you?’ the cop asked, eyeing the big maul Dave carried over his shoulder.

  ‘Consultant engineer,’ Heath said before Dave could say anything.

  Eichel wasn’t convinced, but he had to take Heath’s word for it.

  ‘We had initial reports of a vehicular accident on Toledano, possible driver under the influence. That became a report of a rabid animal eating the driver and an escaped ape killing a bystander.’

  Eichel shook his head. He’d obviously seen a lot in his years, but this . . .

  ‘And it’s not even a full moon. When our officers arrived, they found two of these . . . things eating someone in front of a McDonald’s. Shots fired, which bagged one of the bastards. The other ran off,’ Eichel said, half out of breath, sweating with stress and exertion.

  They stopped on a landing for just a moment lest the overweight policeman had a heart attack. He caught his breath and motioned for them to move on. Dave recognised Eichel’s distress. It had been all too familiar to him until a day or so back. He was a big man, once powerful and still strong, but too many hours behind a desk sucking down bad coffee and free doughnuts had done its worst. The wheezing pant as Eichel sucked in breath, the high colour on his cheeks – yeah, Dave Hooper recognised all that. One hand went down to his own stomach. Flat and hard.

  As they started moving again, though, Dave felt just a touch weaker. Maybe a little light in the head and shaky on his feet. He pulled out an energy bar and chewed without joy or even much relief.

  Eichel continued between breaths: ‘That was hours ago. Everything was starting to calm down. We had someone from the university coming out to look at the thing we shot down. Then a bunch of these medievalist-type bow and arrow bastards come boiling up out of the ground.’

  ‘I need firm numbers on how many we’re dealing with. What you thinking, Dave?’ Heath asked.

  Hooper answered that by asking Eichel another question.

  ‘Central City? Is it crowded? I don’t know New Orleans that well. Central City sounds like an office park. Did it flood in Katrina? Is it, you know, abandoned?’

  Another flight of steps.

  ‘Oh, hell, no,’ Eichel told him. ‘No offices there. It’s residential. Must be 20,000-plus live down there. A busy part of town for us most nights. Although a lot of the locals seem to be getting the hell out now. Why?’

  Dave shifted Lucille from one shoulder to the other as he rounded another landing. She was starting to get heavier, and even though it was bullshit crazy, he’d have sworn she felt sullen or even despondent. Not that he’d be saying anything like that right now. Not to this police captain. He directed his answer at Heath and Ashbury.

  ‘It’s just a guess,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think they’ll have spread out too far yet. With that much prey packed in so tightly, the Hunn will feed. They won’t be able to help themselves. It’ll be like sharks in a frenzy. If there’s any Sliveen, they’ll be more disciplined, spread out individually in a loose circle around the raiding party. You’ll have to watch for them.’

  Captain Eichel regarded him with frank disbelief.

  ‘Son, what flavour of crazy are you?’

  ‘Minty fresh,’ Dave said as he rummaged through his memories again. ‘Of course, it could be a small hunting party, like back at Longreach. There might only be a few of them.’

  ‘A suggestion,’ Professor Ashbury spoke up. ‘Dave, you said they last recalled us as being pre-technological, correct?’

  ‘Yeah, they were the ones with the technology,’ Dave said. ‘Such as it was. They haven’t changed much.’

  Ashbury nodded. ‘They’ll be experiencing their own culture shock at the changes that have occurred since their last encounters with humanity. That may give us an edge.’

  ‘They could be off balance.’ Heath nodded, then raised his voice just a notch without yelling. ‘We have an opportunity here. Let’s expedite, gentlemen!’

  The tightly packed pod of military personnel increased its speed down the steps, all but carrying Eichel along with them. Dave had to marvel at Heath’s agility on that robot leg. It must have been hell where the metal joined the flesh. Compton, he noted as he turned on a landing, had drifted to the rear of the pack, where he didn’t have to move as quickly.

  ‘Captain Eichel, can you get your patrol officers to disengage from any contact with t
he hostiles?’ Heath asked. ‘Get them to work clearing civilians from the area. You got a SWAT team out there?’

  Eichel nodded and puffed. ‘I’ve got two tactical platoons. One is at Sixth District station waiting for instructions. Other platoon’s with me, here. Also got Louisiana state police SWAT in by helicopter.’

  ‘If you would, detach them to us,’ Heath said. ‘I don’t have formal authority, but it would be best if we worked together.’

  ‘Done,’ Eichel said. ‘We can argue about the posse comitatus and invoicing later.’

  That sounded like a joke, but it probably wasn’t, thought Dave, who was a veteran of many small but vicious bureaucratic wars with both the feds and his own head office.

  They arrived at a ground floor parking garage. Hundreds of people were crammed into the space, which had been transformed into a triage centre. Two armoured vehicles waited on the street outside. A quartet of Crown Victoria police cruisers were parked at odd angles to the stairwell with their doors open, officers standing outside or opening trunks to gather up body armour and weapons. Dave smelled blood and fear and a rich stink of human waste thick on the air. It was chaos. There was no order to the mob scene. Men and women with terrible wounds bled out, screaming on the tiles. Children in hysterics ran around or simply rolled themselves into tiny balls and hid wherever they might. Medical personnel in bloody scrubs, and in some cases street clothes, moved around, trying to bring order to the mess.

  Dave almost barrelled into Emmeline Ashbury, who was brought up short by the spectacle.

  ‘Watch where you’re going, Thor,’ she said.