Dave vs. the Monsters

by John Birmingham

  Unfortunately, they were no more able to move with the speed and agility of a freshly hatched carver daemon than the minion had been when it was full of tasty man meat. No sooner had the thresh determined to charge back into the strange, cold, harmless light to disable the large Man with the pleasingly dark hide than one of them tripped on the ruined masonry that lined the red-roofed building, falling face-first to the ground. This village seemed large for one that had fallen to ruin. There were snares and pitfalls all about, large holes filled with brackish water, and a veritable blizzard of fragile containers, skins, and pouches was strewn about.

  The blow all but rendered the stricken thresh unconscious, and its nest mate tumbled over as it attempted to arrest its own flight forward lest the quickthinking link between them be severed by distance. How fortunate that no other nest mates or minion were around to witness their embarrassment. The thresh that had not been knocked nearly insensible reached out with its thoughts to soothe and revive its mate and had only just regained a proper bond when the most awful, unthinkable thing happened.

  A flash of light.

  A thunderclap.

  As the grumbling, injured thresh put one claw to its head to rub at the spot where a large bump was already rising, its skull burst apart in a shower of gore. It dropped dead amid the rubble and detritus of the ruined village.

  The surviving daemon stood frozen in place, its jaw hanging open with long tendrils of man meat and minion innards still swinging from its fangs. And then it screamed. A long, hideous psychic scream that was completely inaudible to anything but a fellow dweller in the UnderRealms.

  20

  The SEALs were much twitchier on the flight back to the mainland. There was none of the lazy grace and relaxed camaraderie Dave recalled from the earlier ride out to the rig. Allen’s crew—his chalk, he called them—had known what they were flying into then: a secured landing, with ice cream. Nobody had any idea what awaited them now. The cabin of the Seahawk was crowded with the original SEALs plus another three or four spares they’d picked up, the two academics, and Dave. He was carrying something this time, too.

  Lucille.

  The navy commandos eyed him warily when Allen escorted him onto the helipad, but they had all heard about the weird “magic” hammer, and they seemed to regard it with even more suspicion than they did the oil rigger. None of them, except for Zach Allen, had seen him with Swindt at the base. But Professor Ashbury told him that half the men on the platform had tried to move the hammer at some point yesterday.

  “And Excalibur kicked all of their arses,” she said.

  He held the maul between his legs, which were closely pressed together in the crush, with the oversize steel head on the metal plating underfoot. Some of the SEALs muttered that they’d never take off with that thing on board, but they did, and now the Seahawk pounded north across the Gulf waters, clearing the outer islands of the barrier as Dave wondered what lay ahead.

  It was impossible. Urgon had nothing to tell him. As well as Dave could work it out, the Hunn had blundered into his world by accident. He’d been on a hunting trip that unexpectedly had turned into a much grander adventure. Try as he might, Dave found that he knew nothing about what was happening in New Orleans. All he knew of the city was whatever he’d known two days earlier. The Hunn was ignorant not just of that particular city but of all cities, even ancient ones. When last they had seen humans, they were draped in animal skins, shivering and starving in the clammy depths of caves or the meanest little clutches of mud daub huts.

  Lucille seemed to hum in his hands. Maybe it was just vibrations coming up through the deck, but it sent a wave of unease through Dave that grew with each passing minute. He was still getting used to the idea that Marty’s old hammer somehow had changed, just as he had. She felt … eager. And hungry in the same way he had been forever hungry since taking down the BattleMaster. But Dave also felt like he was forgetting something, and that bugged the hell out of him.

  The SEALs talked quietly among themselves on their private net, linked together by the headsets they wore. You could almost work out the command structure of the squad, or chalk or whatever, by the flow of information from Heath to Allen and out via two other SEALs, one of whom was that huge bastard with biceps like bowling balls. He seemed to be named Igor. Or maybe that was a nickname; Igor was a pretty stupid thing to call a kid. A shaved head taller than Dave, the man eyed the oil rigger with open suspicion and contempt from behind his thick, bushy beard.

  Not a new best friend, then, Dave decided.

  Both Ashbury and Compton, too, were plugged into that net, but not Dave, of course. He sat nursing Lucille and watching the reflection of the moon on the surface of the waters below, a mad diffracted shower of silver on the choppy water. Another helicopter, this one a big twin-bladed model, carried marines from the platform. Dave could see it to his left, trailing below and behind the Seahawk; other marine helicopters followed out of sight, part of an aerial armada.

  There should have been some sense of reassurance with so many tooled-up, well-trained killers around him. But the electric itch of the splitting maul’s wood handle against Dave’s palms continued to bug him as they approached New Orleans. It was becoming uncomfortable. The sensation mingled with his annoyance at being excluded. It wasn’t because they didn’t trust him. Not exactly. He was pretty sure Heath and probably Allen had his back, but he remembered the chief petty officer telling him there was no way they could plug him into their combat net because he wasn’t trained for it. He’d just get in everyone’s shit and mess with it. But Compton and Emmeline Ashbury, he could see, seemed very comfortably nestled within the group’s command structure.

  Heath or Allen would ask some question of the professors, who would consult each other before answering. The information then propagated quickly through the unit. It was hard to hear over the uproar of the engine and the rotors, but they seemed to be talking mostly about anatomy. They could have asked him, of course. He knew more about Hunn and Fangr anatomy than any of them. But he wasn’t a professor, and so he wasn’t qualified to wear the headset, apparently.

  Dave was so lost in his resentment at the perceived slight that he missed the first time Ashbury asked him a question. He felt her kicking his leg. She had changed out of the Skechers she’d been wearing and into heavy work boots.

  “What?” he called over the noise.

  “The crossbow orcs,” she shouted, covering her mike. “What did you call them?”

  “Could be Grymm,” he shouted back. “Or Sliveen. And they’re not orcs. But they do use war bows. The Sliveen, that is …”

  He trailed off when he saw Compton rolling his eyes.

  “And they’re akin to scouts or skirmishers?” Ashbury asked.

  He was aware that everyone in the rear cabin was watching him now.

  “Think of the Sliveen as stealth fighters,” he replied. “Like special forces. They’re a smaller clan than the Hunn, but they reckon they’re way more bad-ass in war craft than all the rest of the Horde. Didn’t you dissect the one we killed on the way to the base?”

  Ashbury threw a glance over at Heath, who answered for her.

  “We didn’t retain control of that specimen,” he said loudly enough to be heard over the rotors. “Another agency has it.”

  Dave frowned.

  “The CIA stole your monster? Dude, that’s not cool.”

  Some of the SEALs shifted in their seats, turning toward the exchange.

  “Another agency,” Heath repeated.

  “Not our office,” Compton barked at him over the roar. “Not the only people qualified to do this work.”

  The professor seemed to blame Dave for this.

  “What did you just say about the Grim?” Heath asked. “You mentioned them earlier, too. Do they use crossbows?”

  “The Grymm,” Dave said, unconsciously rolling the “r” and drawing out the “m,” which he punctuated with a slight, guttural “ugh.”

  “
They got a lot of religious hang-ups,” he added for no reason he particularly understood.

  “The Grim? Dave?”

  He admonished himself silently. He was concentrating so fiercely on trying to extract something useful from his monsterpedia that he didn’t notice how intently everybody was looking at him, including the academics and Allen.

  “Sorry,” he said aloud. “I forget. Yeah, the Grymm. Another smaller clan, much smaller than the Hunn and Fangr in numbers but much better trained. Well, okay, they train, which sets them apart. Makes them unique, actually. They might use crossbows; I’m not sure. I didn’t exactly get the Einstein of the UnderRealms here.”

  He closed his hands over the end of Lucille’s shaft and rested his chin on them, allowing his mind to wander to where it might tell him something about this new class of horrors he hadn’t thought much about before.

  “They’re the palace guard. Of the Queen.”

  Ashbury stared at him.

  “There’s a queen?”

  He nodded.

  Professor Compton spoke up. Unsurprisingly, he seemed even more pissed with Dave.

  “And you didn’t think to provide us with this information earlier?” Compton snapped. “Do you have any idea what the existence of that sort of hierarchical authority implies, of the societal complexity needed to evolve such a structure? Quite likely this entity is broken into factions that can be exploited if we can properly understand them, much in the same way we’re able to understand different tribes in Iraq. You should have told us this information sooner.”

  “You didn’t ask!” Dave shouted back. “Listen, I’m not a fucking soldier or a professor; I work on the rigs. I got the Encyclopaedia Satanica jammed into my fucking head. How am I supposed to know what you think you need out of it? Do you shout at your textbooks when they don’t volunteer information for you?”

  “Secondary source material yields answers with ease to those who are functionally literate,” Compton shot back.

  “With that charm I’ll bet you were able to get all sorts of firsthand information from folks in Iraq,” Dave shouted back, using the uproar of engines and rotors as an excuse to yell into Compton’s face. “I know I sure want to tell you everything I know.”

  “This isn’t helping, Professor Compton,” Ashbury said.

  Compton was sitting against the rear bulkhead, like Dave, but Ashbury had placed herself between them. The anthropologist leaned forward to eyeball Dave, who didn’t bother moving his unfocused gaze from where it had settled in the middle distance.

  “Hooper. Listen to me. This is important. We’re flying into a hostile contact with these things, and you’re holding back information.”

  “I’m not holding back anything,” he said. “If you want to know, you have to ask the right question. Engineers understand that basic concept, but apparently they don’t teach that in remedial anthropology. It isn’t like quoting game day stats for the Dallas Cowboys.”

  Dave could feel the tension rising in the cabin.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked finally. “I answered all the questions you asked today. You didn’t ask about any queens or social complexes or anything. You asked about the Fangr’s toilet habits, Professor, not their royal fucking family.”

  A couple of the SEALs turned their hard eyes on Compton but then divided their hostility to include Dave as well. They looked unimpressed with all the civilians on their helicopter.

  Compton continued, undeterred by Dave’s anger or the SEALs’ disapproval.

  “Because that sort of information can tell us how they organize themselves, you idiot. About whether they need to organize themselves. Do they live in cities? Do they self-organize like a hive, or have they evolved more complicated systems of consent and control? What about logistics—how do they feed and supply themselves? What about their political structures? Their economy? It’s important if we have to fight them, and we almost certainly will, in a very short time. We need a deep understanding of them or we’re going to have an Iraqi quagmire in our own backyard.”

  “Oh, really? I thought you solved Iraq.”

  It was assholes like this who had gotten his brother killed. Before he could stop himself, Dave made to reach for Compton with half a mind to fling him out the open door of the Seahawk, but Ashbury’s hand reached his and short-circuited the thought process. He shook off the impulse, but it left him feeling sick and hollow. And weird. It felt as though Lucille seemed to want Dave to snatch the man out of his harness and throw him out into clear space.

  Twelve or thirteen magic pounds of hardwood and cold steel with a personality. A psychopathic personality.

  Awesome.

  Although he could hardly blame her in this case. Compton was a dick.

  He shook his head again, rejecting the crazy idea of Lucille the splitting maul as someone real.

  “Jesus, just stop it, would you,” Ashbury said in a tight voice. “You’re behaving like a couple of jerks, which I totally understand is because you are a couple of fucking jerks, but—”

  “I think, Emmeline, that this fellow is leading us into more trouble than you can imagine,” Compton shouted back at her.

  “I’m not leading you anywhere,” Dave said. “I haven’t even got one of your stupid Xbox headsets.”

  But Compton was working himself into a state and wasn’t interested in being talked down.

  “And we don’t know what’s inside your head, Hooper. Or how or why it got in there. We don’t know whether we can trust you. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing to say you haven’t been assimilated or co-opted by these things. You say yourself they’re in your head. If so, why are we even listening to you?” he asked.

  Dave’s anger might have returned, but the guy was so obviously shitting himself under all the bluster that it was hard not to feel some pity for him. Hard but not impossible.

  “This is not what I signed on for,” Compton protested loudly into his headset. Dave had no idea who he was talking to, or yelling at, really.

  Igor the giant extended his forefinger at the end of a very long, meaty arm straight into Compton’s face, forcing the smaller man back and leaning forward as the academic gave ground.

  “Compton, this is exactly what you signed on for. You tucked Uncle Sam’s greasy dollar into your G-string, and now you’re gonna do a little pole dance for him. So unless you got something useful to add, I’d suggest you close your pie hole and let us get into character. We’ve had no chance to prep beyond a five-minute brief that sounded like an elevator pitch for the fucking Evil Dead. Nobody needs your hysterical pregame bullshit. So I will ask you: Do you have anything useful to add to our brief, Professor?”

  “How dare you? I’m in charge here!”

  “Of nothing,” Igor replied. “Captain Heath is in operational command, so sit your candy ass back and shut the fuck up before I shut you up.”

  The professor leaned back against the bulkhead, folded his arms across his chest, and went quiet, staring out the open hatch into the night sky.

  Zach Allen shook his head at Igor. “Little harsh, dude.”

  “Don’t tell me you weren’t thinking the same thing,” Igor, unrepentant, said.

  Zach turned to Professor Ashbury. “Do you have anything for us?”

  To Dave it looked just like the better half of a good-cop, bad-cop routine. And he’d been on the business end of a couple.

  “Dave is your best source of ready information,” Ashbury said. “I can give you better answers if we have enough time, but it appears we do not.”

  “You mind if I ask if you have a plan?” Dave said.

  “We’re going to deploy about a mile out from the incident. At Touro Infirmary,” Allen said, making eye contact with Compton while he explained things to Dave. “We’ll patrol in. Aggressively. State police and NOPD SWAT will guide us there.”

  Igor spoke up again. “Hey, Compton, you won’t be coming with us. So feel free not to piss your pants now.”

&nb
sp; Allen’s intervention restored some calm to the cabin. Not that the SEALs had been in open rebellion. Nobody besides Igor had even spoken during the set-to between Dave and the academic, which he found amazing. If he’d been flying into a shit fight with a dozen or so of his guys from the rig, they’d have landed the chopper surrounded by a little cartoon storm cloud with lightning bolts and fists and the occasional comic BIFF! coming out of it.

  The SEALs checked their gear, pointedly ignoring the fracas. For his part, Compton folded back in on himself, muttering something of no consequence.

  “Ten minutes.”

  Dave could see the coastline. New Orleans was a smear of light through the bubble canopy at the front of the chopper. The Mississippi River curled around the city, bringing to mind the childish notion of a castle protected by a moat. Barges and other vessels made their way up and down the river, oblivious to any peril that might befall them. Water was no barrier at all to the creatures of the UnderRealms.

  The city of Mardi Gras and spring break hotties seemed remarkably tame and quiet from the open door of the Seahawk. No explosions lit up the night. No jets flew in low to attack swarms of Sliveen or Grymm, Fangr or Hunn. No flaming pyres were in evidence, no blood pots overflowing with tribute for the Low Queen.

  Blood.

  Tribute.

  Dave was positive he was forgetting something important. Or worse, as Emmeline had said earlier, he needed to know something but didn’t know what to ask himself. Lucille was definitely humming now. Singing to him. The vibrations thrumming up his arms and into his neck were starting to give him a low-grade headache, a bit like a six-beer hangover.