Dave vs. the Monsters 1: Emergence

by John Birmingham

  ‘There’s hundreds of those things out there,’ said Allen.

  ‘Yeah. Better to just take off and nuke them from orbit,’ Dave said.

  ‘Only way to be sure.’ Igor grinned.

  Allen measured Dave with a look that clearly implied that he thought it could be a live option.

  As much as his rational self knew not to be a damn fool, there was a damn fool part of Dave that wanted nothing more than to raise Lucille on high and charge into the Horde, swinging left and right. It was a hunger as needful as any he’d known since waking up in the hospital. Something inside Dave, deep in his blood, sang to him of the righteous urgency of closing with dar ienamic and destroying them. That was how part of him thought of the Horde now. Not as monsters but as an enemy. As ienamicae in the Olde Tongue. He shifted Lucille carefully from one shoulder to the other. The heavy maul had grown even more uncomfortable to hold while he watched the drama on the command van monitors. Dave felt like she was humming with a resonance below human perception and the only way to silence her was to give voice to that song. A hymn to murder.

  When he could stand it no longer, he turned to exit the van, needing to move, to do something, if only to get away, but he found Heath in the doorway blocking his path.

  ‘I need that air support, and I need it now,’ Heath said urgently, holding down the push-to-talk button of his headset. The navy man listened to a response that Dave could not hear, shook his head, and cursed softly.

  ‘Problemo?’ Dave asked.

  Heath stared mutely at Dave for a moment, perhaps wondering whether to let him in on the conversation. After a glance at the screens, where more and more of the Hunn appeared to be spewing up out of the earth, he made his decision.

  ‘We’re trying to get some A-10s up, but the nearest units are in Georgia,’ Heath said.

  ‘And what? They’re on vacation? Or just sitting at home watching Cake Boss?’ Dave asked.

  ‘No,’ Heath said, almost offended. ‘These are experienced combat aviators. But contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, we generally keep the munitions separate from the weapons systems themselves.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So they don’t blow up,’ Heath said flatly. ‘Anyway, this sort of thing takes a bit of time.’

  ‘What about your other choppers?’ Dave asked, shifting Lucille over to his other shoulder. The heavy maul started humming to him again. Nobody else could hear it, of that he was sure. ‘They’ve got those big-ass guns.’

  ‘If I need to, I’ll put them in, but I’d rather not risk the Cobras after what I’ve seen with the news chopper,’ Heath said. ‘All I need now is a couple of choppers getting shot down and dropping through the roof of a mall. We have blocking forces in place, we have the initiative, and we have the advantage. I’ll wager where these things come from they don’t do close air support.’

  ‘Not that I know of . . .’ Dave thought for a moment, but nothing came to him. Flying creatures were not unknown to the Hunn, especially dangerous ones like Drakonen. Urgon, for his part, didn’t have anything helpful to offer. ‘Pretty sure they don’t, anyway.’

  Heath’s eyes lost their focus as he pressed one finger to his earpiece and took in some new development.

  ‘Acknowledged. I’ll have my second platoon of marines attack from their position,’ he said. ‘They can still flank them.’

  Allen was at the door again. ‘Sir, we can get there faster. Second Platoon simply isn’t going to make it.’

  ‘Well, they’ll have to,’ Heath said calmly, as if he were a commentator for a golf match. ‘Or we will. Air support is taking too long.’

  ‘Too late,’ Dave said. On the two big screens beside him, the Hunn had finally turned themselves to face the downed helicopter and the marines of First Platoon. With a loud, ground-splitting bellow that he could hear inside the command vehicle, the Horde charged forward.

  Heath bounced out of the vehicle, grimacing as he landed badly on his artificial leg and hobbling to run in front of Dave. ‘You stay here. This is our job.’

  ‘I’m cool with that,’ he said.

  But something wasn’t cool.

  Outside on the street he found the SEALs ready to roll, but the SWAT team stood at the edge of things, arguing among themselves. Igor the giant jerked his thumb at the cops. ‘Sure glad we brought those guys along.’

  Heath waved a warning finger at Dave – stay put – and limped quickly over to Lieutenant Ostermann. ‘What is the problem?’

  The senior police officer looked pained as he pointed at his own headset.

  ‘I’ve got the mayor arguing with the chief, and I can’t get clear orders,’ Ostermann said. ‘Mayor wants us back at the hospital. Right now. Chief says we’ve been detached to you. Mayor says you’re not paying the bills. Chief –’

  To his eternal credit, Captain Heath did not shout or curse or grab the SWAT officer by his collar and beat him to death. Dave watched the man grit his teeth and take one step forward into Ostermann’s space. He spoke in a calm, quiet, reasonable tone, low enough that even with his newly enhanced hearing, Dave could not tell quite what he said.

  Ashbury stuck her head out of the command vehicle. ‘Second Platoon is jammed up with refugees and tourists. They can’t get to First Platoon.’

  ‘Ostermann?’ Heath said, with more volume.

  ‘Yes,’ the now-compliant SWAT officer said.

  ‘Please get your Second Tactical Platoon to assist our marines on Claiborne at McDonald’s. The ones who are dying for this city right now.’

  Ostermann reached up to his throat mike for his radio, presumably to call his fellow platoon commander. Dave ignored him, staring down the long road toward the waste ground where the Hunn had emerged. He could see nothing of them beyond a thickening crowd of refugees. Two cars had crashed at the intersection a block down, creating a dam in the flow of terrified civilians.

  ‘First Platoon is breaking cover and advancing toward the downed chopper,’ Ashbury said. ‘They say there are survivors. The hostiles are charging them.’

  Shit was getting out of hand. Dave didn’t need to waste four years in ROTC to know that. Didn’t even need his limited chops in Call of Duty. Heath had a team of disparate groups not used to working with one another dealing with something they’d never seen before. They weren’t in some shitty neighbourhood in Baghdad or the mountains of the Hindu fucking Kush. They couldn’t just switch to full auto and open fire, and hose down the problem. Even a dude like Heath could do only so much with limited resources and unlimited constraints. But he had to do something, and quickly. Dave could clearly hear the massed gunfire and the rumble of the Hunn stampede. It reminded him of being trackside at the Kentucky Derby.

  He thought about putting his head back into the van to check on what was happening, but as soon as the thought occurred to him, he staggered, almost dropping Lucille, stunned by a low-grade electrical charge that ran through the handle, into his arms, and up through his skull. Or something that felt like an electrical charge.

  ‘Prof, what’s happening over there?’ he asked, almost gagging. ‘With the marines.’

  She didn’t bother to look away from the displays, answering him by raising her voice.

  ‘The Hunn are charging them. Getting shot down. Charging again. It’s keeping them out of the residential streets for now. Shouldn’t you be leaping tall buildings or swinging your mighty tool or something?’

  Dave spun around, not really sure why but aware that he’d just heard something that sounded like a hissing whip crack.

  A strangled cry and the sound of a man falling to the hard road surface drew his eye to one of the SEALs. Impaled by a four-foot war shaft. The arrow of a Sliveen scout. Blood boiled up out of the victim’s mouth as his body spasmed in shock, and everyone dived for cover.

  ‘What the fuck?’ gasped Ashbury.


  Compton went rigid with fright, then launched into a tangle of uncoordinated action, diving for the command unit’s door and trying to slam it shut.

  ‘Sniper!’ Allen yelled.

  ‘Sliveen arrakh,’ Dave corrected him at high volume without thinking, without even knowing what he’d just said until he actually thought about it. ‘Arrows,’ he cried out then. ‘It’s arrows.’

  SWAT started shooting. The SEALs dashed for cover. Chief Allen, Igor the giant, and a cop grabbed the body of the man who’d been struck and dragged it out of the middle of the road. They hadn’t moved more than a few steps when another police officer screamed and fell, run through by a shaft that pierced the back of his body armour.

  Dave already was turning toward the source of the danger when he saw the second arrow fly, a dark blur in the night. Not waiting for permission, not bothering to ask or consult with Heath, he exploded from a standing start, moving in the direction of the Sliveen. Everything seemed to slow down around him.

  No, that was wrong. Time didn’t seem to slow down; some monstrous force actually did apply the brakes to the flow of reality as he suddenly accelerated into motion. Part of his mind, detached and curious, noted how slowly Heath was dropping through the air as he leaped toward the command truck for cover. Ashbury cried out, but not in fear. She raged at Compton, wrestling for the door handle with him. Her infuriated screams reached him as a weird, elongated sound effect, as though he was watching the scene in super slo-mo. His own mind was unaffected. Dave was able to calculate the flight path of the second arrow as he found himself again calling on equations and math solutions. The deadly path of the war shaft led from the slowly crumpling body of the SWAT officer back into the night air at an angle of thirty-two degrees between the point of release and impact. In his mind’s eye he saw the passage of the arrakh-du as a dark red trace image, a slight parabolic curve accounting for gravity’s downward pull on the shaft. He could, if he chose to, examine gently floating clouds of calculations that would lead him to understand the speed of the projectile, the pounds per square inch of pressure it had delivered to the spinal column upon impact, the draw strength needed to use a conventional Sliveen war bow, the time to . . .

  But he chose none of these things, ignoring them in favour of calculating a path to the place where the daemon scout stood atop the bell tower of a red-brick church one and a half blocks up Fourth Street. It looked like about . . . No, it was a distance of 169 yards. Or 169 yards and nineteen inches from where Dave was launching himself toward the ancient ienamic to where the Sliveen, which looked like a much thinner, darker, more insectile version of a warrior Hunn, was slowly, slowly, slowly reaching back over its shoulder into a giant quiver for another war shaft. The Sliveen, he was pleased to note, moved no more quickly than Heath or Ashbury or any of its targets. So pleased was he to note this interesting fact that a wolfish grin spread over his face, giving him a fierce canine aspect.

  Lucille was singing to him again, but a soft and soothing love song this time. A gentle melody that paradoxically urged him toward violence at even greater speed.

  The path to the daemon opened up before them, an imagined trail that ran straight and true for half the distance to the monster, jagging left around a pick-up that was slowly, slowly, slowly rounding the next corner, up on two wheels, impossibly balanced between tipping over and making the radical turn. Then it veered to the right to avoid a clutch of a dozen or so fleeing residents, all of them bunched tightly together, none moving at anything faster than a fraction of a fraction of half speed, with one in mid-turn, pointing back and upward, quite possibly at the dark shadow of the UnderRealm scout. A leap onto a Ford F-150 emerging from the parking lot of the church would help launch Dave onto the steeply sloped roof of the nave.

  He remembered the term ‘nave’ from a long-ago lesson in a compulsory first-year civil engineering class. EGR 151: ‘A History of the Built Environment’. He knew, without bothering to test the knowledge, that he could recall every detail of that class now if he so chose. A wonder, given how close he’d come to failing it the first time around. He’d bothered turning up only because there was a particular hottie who was enrolled that semester and . . .

  The leap onto the nave would present him with an interesting physics problem, he realised, consciously putting aside his memories of the hottie, which was a non-trivial effort. She’d banged like an outhouse door in a high wind when he’d finally nailed her, and he could remember every tactile detail of that encounter, too, now. But he would, if not careful, punch right through the tiles and into the attic or even the main body of the church where the congregation would be seated of a Sunday on the pews.

  Where some worshippers undoubtedly were seated or kneeling right now, he thought, praying by candlelight for deliverance.

  Better to just get the fucking job done, Dave. Monster first. Hotties later.

  He saw that he would have to hit the steep tiled roof at a shallow angle, bleeding off the energy of his touchdown by running away from the Sliveen for . . . eight and a half yards . . . before performing a tight, looping turn and coming back at his foe from what would then be his right flank. What the Hunn called shield-wise when they deigned to pay their enemies the honour of carrying a shield into battle.

  The Sliveen bore no such protection.

  Dave performed the calculations required to map out his route between his first step and his second. Those two steps carried him more than twenty feet, so great was the explosive power of each stride. He passed through the floating world like a thought through a line of dead text and experienced a moment of cognitive dissonance that was rooted in the realisation of just how quickly he was moving. The air itself cleaved apart at his progress, roaring in his ears as a gale force wind. Some part of him felt as though everything should have blurred around him, becoming an indecipherable smear of colour and movement. But the world was slow and everything within it impossibly unhurried and deliberate. Suspended.

  He was the blur, flashing past the fleeing terrified residents at such a speed that he was long gone before the most alert of them had turned even partway in his direction. He slapped his palm lightly into the side of the pick-up, imparting just enough of a hit to tip it back toward safety as it curved ever so slowly around the corner.

  As he leaped onto the hood and then the cabin roof of the F-150, he felt the metal crumple under the enormous pressure of his lift-off. But his calculations were good, and as the windshield exploded outward, Dave launched himself toward the roofline. As he sailed up and up, his boyhood self called him back toward memories of that summer when he and his cousin Darryl had imagined something just like this and pushed the trampoline up against the back fence and . . . But he closed off that remembrance, too, for it served no purpose now as he touched down on the grey roof tiles lightly enough that only a couple cracked under the soles of his boots. More shattered as he decelerated, channelling the enormous velocities he’d generated into the structure of the building. One foot slipped as he reached the apogee of his own particular flight path and turned toward the Sliveen.

  It had sensed the shocking swiftness of his approach and was turning much more rapidly now as Dave lost his footing on the disintegrating tile. The long, sinewy arm had drawn out the length of the arrakh-du war shot and in a heartbeat would have it notched and aimed. But Dave Hooper, the defender of this realm, moved within the space between heartbeats. Feeling his feet lose traction, he allowed the stumble to become a controlled drop, dipping his shoulder toward the peak and allowing the muscle memory of a judo roll he had performed only a few times as a child in a free class, and with no real grace or skill, to well up from within.

  He hadn’t even wanted to go to judo. It was a stupid martial art. Not like fucking karate, which kicked ass. But his mother said judo was good for his brother’s asthma. So they went to a few classes, decades ago. Dave executed the roll over the handle of Lucille and up the incli
ne of the steeply pitched church roof perfectly, as though he’d never stepped off the tatami.

  The Sliveen had the arrow notched and half drawn as Dave powered toward the creature. It almost certainly knew in its cold reptilian way that it could not afford to indulge in a full draw of the bowstring, which would deliver enough energy to punch the shaft through the human’s torso with momentum enough to fly on for hundreds of yards beyond it. Dave Hooper doubted he’d recover from a wound like that as easily as he’d healed from the cut in the hospital.

  Knowing it had to act quickly, the Sliveen scout loosed the shot as Dave closed the gap between them to talon range.

  Too slow. Too late. Too poorly aimed.

  Dave saw the long, spidery fingers of the scout let go of their grip on the taut wulfin-hide bowstring. He had time enough to watch the arrowhead of sharpened Drakon-glass begin its short journey away from the recurve bow. Time enough to shift his weight and bring Lucille up, one hand gripping her base and the other wrapped around the throat of the splitting maul just below the heavy steel head. He was certain she was singing. A light, skipping child song, almost laughing the melody.

  He pivoted and swept the air in front of him, tilting his head, watching curiously as the dark hickory knocked the arrow off course, sending it flying high, soaring at a greater angle of elevation, to land safely, he hoped, in the waste ground of the new housing development or even, should he be exceptionally lucky, in among the ranks of the raiding party. That, he thought, would be sweet. A Master of Hunn shot in the ass by one of his own thrall’s arrows.

  They’d be yucking it up about that one around the ol’ blood pots for a dark age.

  Momentum carried him on toward the scout, whose savage features were only now beginning to contort in rage and dawning confusion. Dave’s thoughts were running at such an accelerated pace that his head felt warm, even fevered. He turned his next step into a driving kick that caught the shocked Sliveen amidships. Although smaller than even a simple warrior Hunn, the stealth fighter still enjoyed a considerable advantage in height and weight over any but the largest human opponents. Even Sergeant Swindt would have to give away a few pounds and a good half foot in height to this bad boy. The kick landed square and true. Dave felt some of the force of the blow travel back up his leg and into his hips.