Dave vs. the Monsters

by John Birmingham

  “Noted,” said Heath. “But let’s stay on topic for now. The Hordes.”

  There was so much more he could have told them. He’d barely started in on the Fangr, but it was getting very late and the researchers had been working all day. Dave felt himself getting hungry, too, and rather than run down his store of energy bars, Captain Heath, looking hollow-eyed and subdued, decided after consulting with Compton that they could reconvene at 0600. He suggested that the doctors and professors and their assistants might like to consider some questions to ask Dave rather than having him simply ramble on with whatever came to mind.

  That would be better, Dave thought as they moved outside onto the deck of the platform. A fresh southerly breeze blew across the rig, giving him a chance to clear his mind a bit. He found that he didn’t know what he knew until he decided to think about it. It would be a whole hell of a lot easier to just answer whatever questions they fired at him, although he’d already disappointed Professor Ashbury with his inability to get into any physiological detail beyond the obvious. As he tried to explain, he didn’t much understand human anatomy beyond the basics, either, but he left the makeshift morgue with the impression that Compton thought he was some sort of bullshit artist.

  He’d add it to the long list of things he didn’t give a fuck about.

  Dave had flown out to the platform with Allen’s SEALs, but the other military personnel out here were mostly marines according to the young chief petty officer. Some of them had set up guard posts equipped with machine guns. When he gave some thought to it, he realized that these guys seemed to understand the rig nearly as well as he did. They’d put those meat grinders exactly where you would expect trouble to rear its ugly, snarling head if it came up from below looking for a snack. Other marines were at work patrolling the Longreach. Still more were busy clearing away the debris and damage and getting some basic systems running again. They were all armed and wearing vests that made them look like his boys’ Mutant Ninja Turtle figures. Heath had told him how many marines and SEALs and sailors were on the rig and how they were organized, but that military stuff about platoons and squads and whatnot went in one ear and out the other. More important than how many platoons went into a company and how many companies could sink a battleship, they were changing shift—or “watch,” Dave supposed—when he finished telling his monster stories and went looking for a feed.

  Although the crew lounge where Marty had died was still sealed off, the Longreach’s kitchen was undamaged. A few sailors from a nearby ship had cross-decked to cook some chow, using the platform’s own stores. Heath said something about the corps eventually getting their own cooks in, which was neither here nor there to Dave. He was just looking to get fed. A temporary mess station sat up near the helipad in a windbreak created by two shipping containers converted to offices. A heavy tarpaulin offered some overhead protection, and four long folding tables provided a makeshift serving space. Marines and sailors lined up to get their trays filled with whatever came out of a series of heavy green plastic cases.

  Dave stepped up and looked inside one, finding a stainless steel tray full of food.

  “Dave?” Heath gestured him over to a spot, pointing to a stack of similar containers each marked with his name. “I have yours over here. And I got you this.”

  Heath produced a large metal spoon from his pocket.

  “And we need to talk,” said the navy man.

  “You’re breaking up with me?” Dave asked as he sat down in front of the first food container and waited for Heath to do the same.

  “That little tutorial you gave back there, Dave; you surprised me.”

  “Me, too, man,” he said, distracted by the smell of hot food as he opened the first meal case. Ignoring Heath, he removed the lid and used the overlarge spoon to work his way through the warm fried chicken and rice inside, stripping the meat and sucking the juice out of each bone before opening a second case to attack the mashed potatoes. A quick glance into the third revealed mac and cheese, or whatever the navy used for cheese. It was agreeably thick and gooey. The navy officer frowned and contented himself with a hard-boiled egg.

  “Living large there, Cap’n,” Dave said, happy to be eating again with no sign of the buffet running low.

  Heath peeled the egg and ate it, washing it down with a metal mug of black sugarless coffee.

  “I don’t eat a large meal in the evening,” he said. “I have to watch my calories very closely.”

  “No five-mile runs anymore, eh?” Dave said without thinking. “D’oh. Sorry,” he added quickly. “That was my inner asshole talking. It’s gotta be hard, your line of work with that injury.”

  He waved his new spoon at the artificial leg.

  Heath shrugged.

  “There’s many with worse. Much worse. I’m lucky.” Heath fixed him with a level stare, like a butterfly chaser pinning a new catch to a board. “You weren’t exactly square with me, were you, Dave? About how much you knew, or know, about these creatures.”

  A dozen marines gathered nearby with their trays. A few of them pointed and gawked as Dave put away thousands of calories without stopping to draw breath. Some looked envious, some horrified. Heath finished his egg and sipped at the coffee.

  Dave shoveled the food into his mouth partly to fuel up but also to give himself time to think.

  “Look, I’m sorry about that,” he said at last after cleaning out another meal case of mac and cheese. “But you gotta cut me some slack, man. I’m just getting used to all this. Between you and me, I wasn’t in the best of shape when I choppered back out here. You know, before it all went down. I woke up in that hospital thinking I was having some kind of bad acid flashback.”

  “You took acid?”

  Heath sounded as horrified as a man with his emotional distance could be. Dave laughed out loud and almost lost a mouthful of macaroni.

  “Nah, not for years.”

  And thanks for not asking about all the lines of blow I vacuumed up back in that motel.

  “But yeah, when I get off the platform, I like to play hard. I’m not gonna apologize for that. I spent most of my marriage apologizing for shit I really shouldn’ta had to. At least, not at first. But I got to admit there was a part of me thought I was fucked up on something or having some kind of breakdown. You know, like having bugs coming out from under your skin, ’cept these critters were seven foot high.”

  He stopped talking to shotgun a bottle of water down, then opened another foil-covered food tray. Pineapple and pork with some sort of thick yellow noodles.

  “I thought I was going nuts,” he said as he looked around for a fork to wind up the noodles. His spoon wasn’t going to be much use. Heath produced a plastic fork from the discarded food packages. “And if you heard some of the shit running through my head when we first met,” he said, “you’d have thought the same thing.”

  “What shit, Dave?”

  Heath was remarkably patient.

  The rigger shrugged.

  “All that stuff I was telling the eggheads. I didn’t even know it was there until I started looking for it. I mean, what sort of things do you know, Heath?”

  He waved his cheap plastic fork at the man’s head. A strand of noodle flew off and landed on Heath’s arm.

  “Shit. My bad.”

  Heath flicked the sticky yellow strand onto the metal grillwork of the deck.

  He didn’t seem inclined to make anything of it, so Dave carried on.

  “You think about it. You got a lifetime worth of learning up there in your head. But a lot of it, most of it, is filed away. You couldn’t get through the day if it wasn’t.”

  “True,” Heath said. “But you could have told me. Command is going to want to debrief you properly. They’ll want to know everything.”

  He emphasized the last word.

  “And they’re going to blame you for not letting them in on it earlier?” Dave asked.

  Heath frowned.

  “I don’t care about tha
t. I care about knowing as much as possible about any potential hostile. That knowledge could save lives. Like the ones we lost on the road,” he added pointedly.

  Hooper stopped eating and put down his meal case of pork and noodles.

  “Dude, you gotta believe me: that was as big a surprise to me as it was to you. There’s nothing I could have done to warn you about that. I didn’t know the Sliveen was out there.”

  “But you knew the Sliveen existed. And that they’re scouts. You even said as much to Chief Allen. You said they do his job.”

  Dave stopped for a moment to ponder that. He resented the implication that the ambush was somehow his fault. But he resented even more the idea that Heath might be right.

  “But I didn’t know,” he protested, not liking the whiny tone creeping into his voice.

  Heath didn’t escalate the issue. He merely fixed Dave with the same level stare.

  “But if I knew that you had much greater knowledge of these things, I could have asked you the questions that needed to be asked. There’s no avoiding it, Dave. The ambush wasn’t your fault, but you had a responsibility to tell me what you knew, or at least to tell me that you possibly knew something about this enemy that I could have used.”

  “But I didn’t know about the ambush, or about the Sliveen …”

  “You didn’t know about the ambush or about that particular scout. But what can you tell me about the Sliveen now?”

  Dave tamped down his frustration and mounting anger and took a moment to focus on the question. What did he know about the Sliveen?

  A lot, as it happened.

  He sighed and started to talk.

  “The Sliveen are like, I dunno, the ninjas of the Horde. Or the SEALs, or whatever. They’re a small clan, and they consider themselves superior in skills to even the Grymm.”

  “The Grim?” Heath frowned.

  Dave sighed.

  “See. This is a fucking rabbit hole, man. Or you know, what do they call those things, those patterns? A fractal. Does that sound right? It just goes on and on, deeper and more fucking complicated the more I look into it.”

  Heath shook his head, “It’s not exactly right, but go on. Skip the Grim. We can come back to them later. We’ll come back to all of this later. Just tell me what you know about the Sliveen, off the top of your head. Right now, without thinking too much about it.”

  Dave swapped his small plastic fork for the spoon he’d been using and chased the last pieces of pork and pineapple.

  “The Sliveen are the scouts,” he said. “They cover long distances, alone or in small groups. They’re not brawlers like the Hunn, but they’re savage in a stand-up fight. Prefer to snipe at you from a distance with a … a war bow. Like our boy last night. Or a sort of crossbow thing. Smaller, but easier to carry.”

  “Do you think there’ll be more of them spooking about back on the mainland?”

  “No idea. Honest Injun.”

  Dave held up one hand.

  “Please don’t be needlessly offensive,” Heath said before putting his coffee mug down, empty. “Nobody asked you the obvious question,” he added before Dave could be offended by the implied criticism.

  “Which is?”

  “What are they doing here?”

  Alternating between multiple trays, Dave shoveled another spoonful of mac and cheese into his mouth and thought about it for a moment or two as he chewed. He couldn’t remember enjoying the taste of a meal so much as he did this one. “They had no fucking idea what they were doing here,” he said at last, staring into the distance, out across the darkened sea. “Besides feeding.”

  Another spoonful of mashed potatoes. He closed his eyes and thought about it some more as he swallowed the creamy, buttery spuds. They were surprisingly good. Much better than the lumpy, watery mess he was used to here on the rig. It reminded him of some of the epic pig-outs he’d indulged in at college many years ago after a couple of bongs brought on the munchies.

  “They’ve been down there, in the UnderRealms they call it, for a long time. Long enough that they remember us as nothing more than cattle, wandering the fields, you know, grazing, waiting to be eaten. They call us … calflings, I guess would be closest. Like veal. Extra tender ’n’ tasty,” he said, scraping the last bits of mac and cheese out of the tray.

  Dave focused again, following what he now thought of as the Hunn’s race memory back through the millennia.

  “I don’t know that they even think of us as being civilized. It’s possible they disappeared before civilization got going.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “You seen any around before yesterday?” He paused to follow the thought wherever it might go.

  “They were driven into the UnderRealms,” he said. “Or their myths tell them so.”

  He carefully set the first three cases aside and dragged over the second round. Inspecting the contents, he placed the pulled pork in front of him, more mashed potatoes to his right, and the green beans to his left. The lack of a fresh crusty bread roll for the pork was a bummer, but he pitched in anyway, grinning in spite of it all. It was a hell of a thing, being able to eat whatever the hell he felt like without guilt or consequence.

  “A bit like us being driven from the Garden of Eden,” he said around a mouthful of pork. “Everything’s hookers and blow, and then you’ve been kicked out on your bleeding ass in the dark and the rain.”

  “By whom?”

  Another pause.

  “The Sky Lords.”

  “Oh, come on, no.”

  Dave threw his hands up, sending a dollop of potatoes at Heath. Thankfully it missed the captain’s ear by a few inches and plopped harmlessly onto the deck.

  “Shit, sorry. But yeah. See, that’s what I mean about you taking me for a crazy man. The Sky Lords. Sounds kind of faggy, but that’s what the Hunn call them. I dunno who or what the fuck they were. But they ruined the party for everyone. Well, for everyone whose idea of a party was biting the heads off screaming village folk.”

  “Village …?”

  Dave took a bottle of water from a pack of twelve, drained it in one shot, and shook his head.

  “Don’t suppose you got beer? No, forget it. Anyway, long story short, these things gotta predate what we think of as civilization. You know, ancient cities, Roman roads, microwave mac and cheese. I can’t tell you by how much.”

  He gave it another few moments of thought.

  “They don’t think about time like we do. There’s no calendars or alarm clocks down there.”

  He stopped talking with a spoonful of macaroni halfway to his open mouth. When Heath made as if to ask him a question, he held up one hand. Dave concentrated, and Heath let him be, waiting him out.

  “They don’t have any technology as we’d understand it,” Dave said after a pause. “No … machinery as such. Some forging and smithing, you know; Dark Ages stuff. But even Roman engineering would have been beyond them.”

  “You studied history?” Heath asked.

  Dave shrugged, scooping up some pulled pork from the bottom of the can. He chewed, swallowed, and slid the empty case aside. He was inhaling this stuff. He really ought to slow down and just enjoy it. “The history of engineering. For my undergrad, the usual requirements. I think Western Civ was one of the few bullshit courses I enjoyed. Anyway, you asked about them disappearing. I reckon they were gone, banished, before human civilization really got going.”

  “Maybe it couldn’t get going while they were around,” Heath thought out aloud. “Professor Compton might have an opinion on that.”

  Dave couldn’t give two shits about Compton’s opinion on anything. He leaned forward to check another case that held greenish scrambled eggs, ham slices, and hash. He pitched into the eggs, not really caring about the color. It was probably an herb, and he was still peckish. When he was done searching “his” memory and ready for some hash, he answered Heath.

  “Urgon doesn’t have an opinion on that,” he said.

  �
��Urgon? He’s your man now?”

  “My bitch.” The rigger smiled. “I made Urgon my monster bitch. Now he has to step and fetch it for me.”

  “So what do they want?”

  He didn’t even have to think about that one. It was a question that answered itself. Dave was famous in the crew lounge for his Schwarzenegger, and he drew on it now. “Vat is der greatest pleasure? To vanquish your enemies and chase dem before you, to eat der horses and ride der vimmin.”

  Heath observed him for a full second.

  “Was that a joke?”

  “No, that was Conan. But it’s not a thousand miles removed from the way our boy Urgon does business. Or did. It’s been a long time since they’ve walked the OverRealms. The Above.”

  “The over …?”

  “This,” said Dave, waving his spoon around a little more carefully this time. “Our turf. And no, I don’t know how they got here. Neither did he. He was just out hunting.” Dave turned his head to one side as he pulled out the memory. “Hunting minion. A lesser demon. Tough meat but good for smoking. If you’re a Hunn. Anyway, he was tracking a nest of them; next thing he knows, he’s swimming up toward the light, which he’s never seen, he’s only ever heard about it. And then he’s climbing the rig, and …”

  Dave put his spoon aside for a moment and shut down the recall.

  “And then it was feeding time,” he said quietly.

  “I’m sorry,” Heath said. “You can … remember that? As he did?”

  “Yeah,” Dave said. “But I’d prefer to not have the replay running behind my eyeballs if that’s cool with you.”

  Heath agreed. He looked about five years older than when Dave first had seen him.

  “This is what the instructors used to call an out-of-context problem,” said the naval officer, sounding very tired. Dave started in on the ham slices and hash browns. His appetite remained unaffected.

  He looked on as a couple of marines who had located the supply room and found a batch of brand-new galvanized tin mop buckets scooped ice cream and cookies into them. They churned up the mix with a beater fitted to a scavenged power drill. There were excited grins all around as they doled the results into Styrofoam cups. Dave thought maybe a bucket full of that might not be a bad idea. The dairy would make him sleepy.