Dave vs. the Monsters

by John Birmingham

  “You all right, Vince?” Dave asked as he moved in front of his coworker.

  But Vince was a long way from being all right. He kept shaking his head and trying to force himself forward, but he just couldn’t do it. He appeared to be stranded at a point exactly midway between his need to help out and his fear of whatever was coming.

  “… eating them …” he mumbled, and then stared at Dave as if he couldn’t believe what he had just said.

  No sense wasting time with him, Hooper thought. Whatever he’d seen when he was last down here had put the zap on his head. Dave gathered up what he thought of as his considerable reserves of patience. It really was like talking to a kid.

  “Okay, then. Don’t worry, buddy, I got it. Go fetch me some stretcher bearers. We’re gonna need them. I think I can hear some of the guys up ahead. Injured. Go on. Can you at least do that for me?”

  When Martinelli did nothing, Dave Hooper frowned and shook his head. The guy was … what … paralyzed or something. Dave decided he had to abandon him and carry on alone.

  He edged cautiously down the hallway, careful not to step in the glistening trail of blood. He told himself he simply didn’t want to slip, but he also knew it was more visceral than that. Disgust and fear warding him off. Trying to make him stop, just like Martinelli. The heat grew no more intense, but he found it harder to breathe. The fire was consuming all the oxygen.

  He jumped as the steel-capped toe of his boot kicked a crowbar. It was matted with blood and hair. He bent to pick it up, some ancient, deeply buried instinct making him reach for a weapon. A club. Anything. He could hear noises just ahead, around the corner in the crew lounge. A wet, crunching sound. Shudders ran up his arms and around his neck as he recognized what it was. Chewing and grunting.

  Like Martinelli he suddenly found it difficult to move forward, but unlike the shift boss he found some reserve, somewhere, and forced himself to push one foot in front of the other, forgetting about the crowbar as he drew closer to the turn in the corridor that opened up onto the crew lounge. Light flickered from within, but it was a cold blue light, not the shifting orange-red glow of flames.

  His eyes were dark-adapted now, and in the gloom he began to pick out more details. Blood splatter. Torn clothes. A work boot with a foot sticking out of it, hacked off abruptly about halfway up the shin. The bone looked impossibly white to him, the jagged end of it sharp, like a broken branch. Hooper’s gorge rose in his throat, but he had nothing left to throw up. He gagged and then he spit, or tried to. His mouth was dry and sticky. An object leaning up against the wall drew his eye. He experienced a moment of recognition before understanding.

  A splitting maul.

  Marty Grbac’s splitting maul. It lay at an odd angle against the wall, just before the corner, as though dropped there and forgotten. An oversized, inappropriate piece of equipment for an oil rig but one that Marty carried with him everywhere. A souvenir of his first time in Alaska, he said. And a lucky charm. It had saved his ass once, and he wouldn’t give it up. The splitting maul looked like a cross between a sledgehammer and a woodcutter’s ax, because that was exactly what it was. A long straight shaft of polished hickory carrying a twelve-pound head with a blunt fist-size hammer on one side and a broad, slightly convex chopping wedge on the other. Sometimes called block busters, they are better suited than a conventional ax for splitting heavy logs and blocks of wood. The extra weight delivers a more powerful blow, and the greater width of the axlike head prevents the maul from getting stuck in the wood grain. Along with a giant novelty foam hand signed by Sammy Sosa, it was Grbac’s most prized possession.

  Hooper picked it up, surprised by how heavy the thing was. You’d need the shoulders of a bull, like Marty, to swing this thing, and on a rig you’d rarely have the space. It belonged in a forest, a cleared forest with a whole heap of logs lying around waiting to be split for the fire.

  He looked back over his shoulder at Martinelli, who was crying with the effort of forcing himself forward, his eyes pleading with Dave to forgive him. Tear tracks stood out on his filthy face. The man was such a perfect picture of misery that Dave found himself feeling more sorry for him than pissed off at him.

  “Be cool, Vince,” he said, hefting the heavy tool. It made him feel better for some reason. “Go get help.”

  He turned away from Vince Martinelli, breathed in a draft of the thin, scorched air, and stepped around the corner into the crew lounge.

  03

  “Mother. Fucker.”

  Dave nearly dropped the splitting maul on his toes. He stood fixed to the floor, as incapable of moving as Vince Martinelli had been. The … thing that was eating Marty Grbac looked up from its jumbo-size Happy Meal and snarled, making a sound like a big cat in a zoo. It didn’t look anywhere near as cuddly as a hungry lion, however. Hooper didn’t react immediately because the shock was so great that his body didn’t know how to react. Instinctually, intellectually, he was a void.

  The thing … the monster turned its eyes on him after taking one more bite out of the ruined meat Popsicle that had been one of Dave’s best friends. Marty G. He knew it was Marty, or what was left of him, because of the tattoo just visible under the runnels of blood covering most of his one remaining arm.

  … rd is my shepherd. I am his lamb.

  The beast snarled slowly at him again. Dave’s conscious mind suddenly lurched into action again, now racing in a fever to catch up, seeking to impose some sort of meaning, however poor, on the scene before him. The first rational conclusion it reached was … big. This fucking thing was big. Marty Grbac had stood six-five in the shower, and his upper arms were the size of Dave’s thighs. This thing probably stood a head taller than that.

  It was just an impression. The animal, whatever it was—it looked like some sort of hairless gorilla with a shocking case of full-body herpes—was sitting back on its haunches taking bites out of Grbac’s upper body like a hungry drunk tearing chunks out of a footlong at Subway. So yeah, it was big.

  His mind, still frantically cycling through possibilities, latched on to shreds of recognition or analogy. The creature’s eyes were black limpid pools, something like a shark’s. It had no snout or nose, just two breathing slits above the open maw of a mouth filled with fangs. Not the neat, dangerous canines of a wild dog but a junkyard pile of broken tusks, jagged scythes, and barbs strung with half-chewed flesh.

  An image came to him, just a flash, of sitting in a movie theater with his two boys when they were much younger and he was a better father, with his arms wrapped around them as they burrowed their faces into his chest, terrified by the snarling creatures pouring out of the ground in one of those Lord of the Rings movies. The thing eating Marty Grbac reminded him of one of them. An orc.

  An orc with nuts the size of softballs and a cock like Satan’s own spitting cobra. The nasty fucking thing was fully rigid, too. Like it was getting off on eating his friend.

  “Fuck,” breathed the rig boss. “That’s nasty.”

  It snarled again, casually, regarding him with apparent indifference. A terrible sound erupted from the fetid hole of its mouth: a wet, guttural eruption, long and low, like a hippo farting in a mud bath. Dave’s jaw dropped, and his face hung slack with horror as the creature … laughed at him. He was certain it was laughing. A snorting, sucking series of barks as it slurped up ribbons of skin like noodle strands. Dave Hooper’s balls crawled up into his body. His much smaller, less scabrous balls. He shuddered with revulsion and the first stuttering paroxysm of fury.

  This fucking thing was drunk on blood and bloated with hot meat. It was eating his friend, laughing at him, and waving its johnson in his face like it fully expected a free blowjob. Whatever it was, wherever it had come from, nobody or nothing came onto his rig and got up in his face with that kind of shit. He shook his head almost imperceptibly, a snarl beginning to disfigure his features, answering the creature’s ferocity. For the first time he took in the scene all around them. Carnage illuminated by
the loading screen of a game on the Xbox. It looked like Halo. Body parts were scattered about the lounge. Entrails and bloodied chunks of unidentifiable meat festooned the furniture, a faded brown three-piece lounge of dubious origin. Blood lapped at his boots. As Dave shook his head, muttering “No, no, no,” through gritted teeth, he noticed movement to his left and then his right.

  More of them.

  No, that wasn’t right. There were more creatures, but they were smaller than the brutish-looking thing squatting in the middle of the room. There were two, no, three of them. Demonic-looking, but lesser versions of the animal snacking on Marty’s rib cage. They were monstrous baboons whereas it was a gorilla. Its jaw appeared to distend horribly wide as it crunched through bone and sinew, tearing and ripping and shaking free its meal with more snorts and grunts. And that sound, like the chuckle of a psychopathic angel. With an enormous boner.

  “Fuck no,” said Dave. He tightened his grip on the splitting maul, turning left and right to scan for movement. The smaller creatures were definitely moving now, trying to circle around to come at him from both sides. He felt his bladder let go, and a warm rush of urine ran down his legs, the last of his big night out with the hookers from Reno. No drug tests for him, then.

  He laughed.

  Just one short gust of laughter teetering on the edge of psychosis. It didn’t matter much now whether he’d got drunk and jumped onto Facebook last night, did it? Nothing much mattered now. Not his ex-wife. Not her carnivorous lawyer—

  He snorted with laughter again. Carnivorous. Ha. Not even close.

  Not the bosses back in Houston. Not the credit card assholes who were always chasing him. Or the IRS, which wanted to know where the hell his last two years’ taxes might be at. Not even his own conscience about what a shitpot worthless father he’d turned out to be. None of it mattered, because he was going to die. Eaten by monsters and quite possibly ass fucked by their gigantic monster cocks in the bargain.

  Eight or nine years of compressed frustration and rage boiled up inside Dave Hooper as he realized he was never going to get a chance to make good on any of it. He would never be able to get in front of the debts. He would never convince Annie that he wasn’t as bad a husband and father as she always made out.

  He would never see his boys again, and they would never know what happened to him. The rig would burn, and then it would blow, and all of this insanity would be incinerated, atomized. All Toby and Jack would ever know was that their dad had failed again. This time at the last thing he genuinely could have claimed to be any good at: his job. He had failed, and everyone who had relied on him had died.

  The shout that welled up from deep within Dave Hooper’s loneliest, most empty places was unlike anything he or these monsters had heard today. It was neither fearful nor despairing. It was less a scream than a roar, a full-throated bellow of fury and outrage and a final bitter retort to every shitty deal that life had handed one poor angry man.

  The beast seemed startled, then amused, and finally outraged as Hooper charged across the tacky, blood-drenched carpet of the crew lounge. The thing let rip with its own war shout as it tore the remaining arm from Marty’s savaged torso and waved it about like a baton, howling gibberish at the three smaller creatures. They moved quickly but clumsily, two of them crashing into each other and the third leaping for Dave but becoming entangled in a long strand of yellow-green intestines on which it had been sucking. The creature yelped like a kicked cur as it crashed to the ground.

  The splitting maul described a great circular arc in Dave’s hands, punching through the ceiling tiles with a burst of powder and a terrible screech of metal strips and one smashed light fitting. It was, however, unusually heavy, and driving it through the air in a short, vicious descending blur was all the strength of a man who stood two inches over six feet and had worked his whole life at hard manual labor. A man whose resentment at the world and everyone who had conspired against him getting ahead in it was fueled by a silent, shameful understanding that his problems were mostly his own damn fault.

  The creature, which Dave would later come to understand was no ordinary monster but a BattleMaster of the Hunn, was indeed drunk on the heady nectar of fresh blood and meat. If Dave Hooper had stumbled into the lounge twenty minutes earlier, if he had been there with his friends and colleagues when the Hunn and its attendant Fangr warriors had emerged from the waters and scaled the rig like rabid monkeys, he, too, would have died. But for once in his shitty life Dave Hooper caught a lucky break.

  Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn, BattleMaster of the Fourth Legion, did not stir when the man appeared holding the warhammer the Hunn had so easily taken from another of the weakling foe. Indeed, from the one he was gorging himself on now. A poor adversary but a magnificent repast. Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn had never dined on man meat, although like any warrior of the Horde he had been raised on the legends of the older time when Hunn and Grymm and even Fangr had roamed at will across the surface of the world, hunting men for their flesh and for the pure wild joy of it.

  As this new calfling stumbled upon the Hunn and his attendant Fangr, Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn lazily tore away a fresh nut of shoulder meat and chewed it slowly, enjoying the heady pleasure of the bloodwine and the satisfying crunch of bones between his teeth. It was a stirring feast. Truly. The bloodwine had engorged his loins. He was so pleased with how this adventure had gone that he had even been considering tearing off a few pieces of the kill for his Fangr leash. A rare honor to eat from their master’s portion. But in the end he was enjoying the meal too much to share it. And the Fangr were already sated on calfling guts and slow with the scraps of good meat and pooled bloodwine they had scavenged from the fight, anyway.

  In fact, to be truthful, the BattleMaster himself was so full of hot flesh and the just spilled blood of his prey that he might not even finish this feast in one sitting. A great pity, because the legends had proved true and the freshest kill was the sweetest. This fine feed put to shame even the offerings of the palace blood pots, which was only to be expected, he supposed. It had been millennia since any had tasted fresh meat from the bones of men or their herds.

  Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn was somewhat surprised that this last man had come to him rather than attempting to flee. The calflings he and his Fangr had come upon here in this strange tower on stilts had made some attempt to resist him. But it was a poor and wretched showing they made, and he knew that what little courage they showed came only from one another. When he found men on their own or in twos and threes, they invariably fell prey to fear before the first touch of tooth or claw.

  Why, he had not even deigned to draw his blade yet.

  It had not been necessary when the largest of their so-called warriors, the one on whom he was dining at this moment, had come at him with the warhammer. A valiant effort, he supposed, snorting through bubbles of blood and drool, but utterly hopeless. Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn had closed quickly with the human and simply pulled the weapon from his hands before tossing it away and tearing off his head.

  The man standing before him, reeking of fear, did not look like he would put up nearly as much of a fight. He clutched the warhammer to himself almost as a talisman. Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn doubted he could lift the weapon, and almost as though the same thought had occurred to him, the puny creature nearly crushed its own hoof by fumbling the thing and all but dropping it.

  The BattleMaster indulged himself in a rich, generous chuckle. He might not even kill this one. He might return with it to the UnderRealms as an offering for the palace. He had seen chain aplenty lying around this ocean keep for a proper leash. Her Majesty would surely raise him high for the prize, even higher than she would raise him in the Horde for the achievement of having breached the capstone into the Above for the first time in …

  Well …

  He had no idea.

  The legends spoke only of the older time when the Horde was free to roam the Above, defending its subject lands against rival Sects, taking what cattle and territory it co
uld from them. Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn grunted instructions to his Fangr around a mouthful of meat and bone. He told them to take the man, but carefully. Slowly. To restrain him and not to harm him too badly. He would make more than a useful prize. There would be many who would not believe that Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn had breached the capstone and walked upon the world of men, raiding one of their fortresses and feasting mightily on the occupants.

  He would have just a few more bites and perhaps another draft of the bloodwine before it cooled and lost its intoxicating power. He shivered with the iron stench and thick heat pouring down his throat again. His eye membranes drooped, and he chuckled at the fierce war face the calfling was trying to make at him. As if flaring its ugly snout and baring such dull, small teeth might undo a BattleMaster of the Hunn.

  Yes, this one would make a fine gift to the palace. Her Majesty might even keep it as a pet.

  It came as quite a surprise, then, to Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn, BattleMaster of the Fourth Legion, when the calfling made a sound he would have sworn was a war shout and … charged!

  But that was not as great a surprise as finding out just how drunk on bloodwine he was when he tried to climb to his feet to meet the challenge.

  The splitting maul crashed through plaster roof tiles, severed the thin aluminum strips separating them, and shattered a long fluorescent light tube. Shards of glass and showers of sparks sprayed the room, and the heavy steel smashed down without slowing much or diverting from its deadly path in the slightest.

  Dave had not thought to use the edged metal of the maul’s ax head. Dave had not thought of much at all. The vicious heavy steel wedge was simply at the business end of the swing. He often wondered later what would have happened if the maul had been reversed in his hands and he had tried to split the creature’s head open with the simple clubbing tool of the sledgehammer. Perhaps the result would have been exactly the same, if a little messier. Marty’s splitting maul was an unusually heavy model, hand tooled as Dave recalled him saying more than once. It might have delivered enough mass with enough speed to splinter and crush the sheath of bone protecting the BattleMaster’s gelatinous, chimp-size brains. Or not. And he might have died there.