Dave vs. the Monsters

by John Birmingham

  And so he sailed on, not quite sure what the fuck he was doing but carried forward as much by Lucille’s sweet song, which now sounded undeniably real and human inside his head, as he was by the power of his leap. That power was even more unexpected and frightening to him than it had been when he had intercepted the flying barbell back at Camp Mysteryland.

  It felt as though there were no limits to what he might do. Jump hard enough and perhaps he’d find himself in the vacuum of space after a few minutes. A ridiculous thought, but how much more ridiculous than whatever he was doing right at that moment?

  What am I doing? he thought.

  So did the pilot of the Cobra gunship as Dave flew past him, winking and cocking a thumb and finger play gun at the guy, whose mouth hung open in abject confusion.

  “Yeah. Be cool. Super Dave’s got this,” he said.

  Ahead and below, the double horn formation of the Horde swept around the downed helicopter. For a moment the flames and the coordinated fire of the marines held them back. Dave could easily imagine/remember the stinging sensation as the heat and light tightened their hides. It might have been enough to protect and shield the survivors and the handful of uniformed men and women—yes, that was definitely a woman in full battle kit down there—if a couple of Grymm had not targeted them with … what was that?

  As Dave dropped down closer and closer to the encounter, he strained to make out what sort of weapon the elite Hunn warriors used, but even his augmented vision was not keen enough. Whatever it was, it worked. He saw a couple of blurred streaks shoot out from their hands before two of the marines spun into the dirt, their own weapons spraying ribbons of tracer fire into the sky. The Grymm worked furiously at the tiny handheld weapons, loading and cocking them, but to no purpose this time.

  A Sliveen warrior loped up out of the half-light and put three war bolts into the remaining survivors before the Grymm could fire again.

  Gravity steadily took hold, and Dave Hooper began to descend again, dropping below the nearest news chopper, descending toward the marines of First Platoon, who were precisely thirty-six strong. They had been forty-one before the squad was cut down around the flaming wreckage of the WVUE helicopter.

  “Oh, hell, no,” he barely breathed when he realized that the better part of the platoon had broken from cover and the relative safety of the McDonald’s and was advancing in stages, fire and movement, toward the main body of the thrall. He dropped rapidly through the night, preparing to land. The thunder of the charge was loud under the sharp-dull thudding of the helicopters, the industrial jackhammer of heavy weapons, and the percussive thump and crunch of grenades. A last quick glance back over his shoulder showed the SEALs and New Orleans SWAT racing toward the thrall on foot. He could see Heath falling behind the more able-bodied men but struggling to stay in contact with them.

  Hundreds of civilians, maybe a thousand of them, in front of the strip mall across the main stem had scattered like ants scalded by hot water when the Horde had bellowed its battle roar. Some were so freaked, they had run toward the engagement, and the others were spreading out through the nearby streets, making the job of herding them to safety all but impossible.

  Then he was almost down, but with the perfect comic book hero landing this time. Dave had trouble focusing. A fast-growing headache tried to drill through the bone between his eyes.

  Lucille chose that moment to become impossibly heavy.

  If the splitting maul could speak, Dave, who felt a powerful wave of nausea sweep over him, imagined she would be telling him the same thing his wife frequently told him all the way down the broken road that was their marriage.

  I tried to warn you.

  The ground rushed up with impossible speed. Tucking in his shoulder, Dave plowed into the dirt as he attempted to roll off some of the momentum and energy he had built up. Lucille fell from his grip and landed next to a startled marine who looked all of nineteen. Dave probably had ass pimples older than this kid, who was sporting an impressive spray of his own acne. He looked only slightly more freaked out by the man who’d fallen from the heavens than he did by the rapidly approaching wave of slavering monster flesh.

  All this Dave took in as a strobing, washed out color wheel of imagery while he rolled over and over, not stopping until he hit the remnants of a chain link fence, bending a thick steel pole.

  “Ouch,” he said.

  “Corpsman!”

  Dave stood up and shook himself off.

  The world responded by suddenly tilting, spinning, and dropping him back on his ass again. A giant iron vise snapped around his head and squeezed like a bastard.

  “Dude, are you all right?” a soldier asked. Or maybe a marine. Or even something else. Possibly just some helpful asshole wandered out of a Cheaper Than Dirt gun barn loaded for orc. Dave couldn’t make him out through the migraine aura blooming across his visual field. Not that he could really tell any of these characters apart except for the SWAT guys in their natty black outfits. “Mr. Hooper? You jump out of a chopper or something? Did you break anything?”

  This guy knew him?

  He tried squinting through the distortion that lay over everything now.

  “Feel …” Dave grunted, “… sick.” He rolled over onto his side, curled into a fetal position, and vomited.

  “I got Hooper here. He says he’s sick,” the man shouted into a helmet mike.

  Dave rolled over. “The Hunn …”

  “We got them,” the marine said without sounding for a moment like he believed it. Hooper struggled up onto one elbow and tried not to retch again. His vision cleared slightly, and he realized he knew the marine. It was …

  Everly? Enderson?

  Everding!

  His name tag read EVERDING. The guy from the Longreach. The big private who hadn’t been able to lift Lucille more than an inch or so off the deck.

  “Hey. I know you. Do you know a guy called Swindt?” Dave asked groggily, feeling as if he’d just had a hit off a nitrous tank. “Likes to work out?”

  “Who?”

  He squinted at their surroundings. He was at the edge of the worst of the fighting now, stuck out on the end of the marine line, as best he could tell. The platoon had moved forward, taking what cover it could, denying it to the enemy, which was caught on open ground. A great tactic against a human foe, but against a daemon thrall intent on overrunning you no matter the cost? Not so much.

  They had forced the Hunn, their leashes of Fangr, and a few sundry daemonum back from the downed chopper, where four marines frantically worked on one of their comrades who was showing signs of life. He squinted and turned his head over on its side, lining up an unaffected area of his eyesight on the scene. It was the woman Dave had spied a few moments earlier. The long shaft of a Sliveen arrow had entered her body at the hip and emerged from the opposite shoulder, but she was screaming, which meant there was breath in her body. Muzzle flashes from her comrades lit up the night. Gunfire raged in a storm of superheated steel. Tracers whipped from dozens of glowing, smoking muzzles, lashing at the thrall, cutting some down and knocking others back. Every now and then a bright yellow strand of tracer fire as thick as a fire hose and as bright as Vegas would light up a daemon. Like, for real. Causing it to burst into flames and scattering the monsters around it. In this way they broke three charges that Dave witnessed up close through the shifting veil of pain and distortion that had fallen over him. The Horde shivered under the firepower of the marines. Fangr and Hunn alike went to ground, diving into shallow holes and behind whatever meager cover offered itself, only to be thrashed, kicked, and manhandled back up onto their haunches by the tallest and largest of their number, a creature that made Urgon look small.

  The BattleMaster, Dave thought, without being able to do a damn thing about it.

  He had a bad hurting on him, way more serious than the worst hangover or fever he’d ever known. This felt like a sickness of the fucking soul as much as the body. A medic dashed over to them, yelling que
stions at Everding and then yelling more at Dave. But he had trouble understanding the corpsman.

  That was what Everding called him: “Corpsman.”

  The marines threw grenades like confetti and swapped out magazines constantly as they tried to wear down their foe. Bursts of pepper-black explosions bit into the front ranks of the Horde. Fire teams darted from cover, pushing forward through the spotlights of police and news choppers. He could smell the alkaline tang of their fear and something more. Something seemingly at odds with the terror. Their killing joy. They reeked of it, the madness and glory of it.

  The thrall leader pointed his cleaver at the marines, who had formed a firing line to the left and right of the downed news chopper. As bullets sparked and flashed off his chain mail and plated armor and dug bloody chunks where they struck thick hide, the giant Hunn opened his broken-fanged mouth and a deep-throated heavy bass growl reverberated through the ground, bouncing off brick and wood, asphalt and concrete. It rattled the back of Dave’s wisdom teeth, drowning out every other sound except his own weak, thready heartbeat. Which sounded like a tom-tom inside his head. The BattleMaster’s war shout—his shkriia—made the previous call to slaughter sound like a feeble cough.

  Everding cursed, eyes going as big and round as dinner plates.

  “Uh oh,” the corpsman muttered. “This can’t be no good.”

  Hundreds of surviving Hunn and leashed Fangr suddenly rose up from where they had cowered and burrowed into whatever cover they could find in the rubbish-strewn lot. They stood into the incredible volume of fire, ignoring the loss of an acolyte next to them, a warrior in front.

  And then they surged forward, looking like nothing so much as a landslide of bristling muscle and tusk and hard armored, tattooed flesh.

  “HUNN UR HORDE!”

  Slowly at first but soon gathering speed, the Horde moved en masse toward the marines, the front ranks absorbing the bullet storm, warriors falling, Fangr shrieking and tumbling in broken tangles.

  “HUNN UR HORDE!”

  But never stopping, never faltering, just coming on with the mindless fury of beasts and all the concern of the rising tide about the fate of anyone it might drown. Dave struggled to raise himself, but his limbs were weighed down by some impossible burden. He was not paralyzed. He could feel and move his fingers, but he could no more push himself up off the ground than Everding had been able to lift Lucille off the deck back on the Longreach.

  “HUNN!”

  “HUNN!”

  “HUNN UR HORDE!”

  The first marine fell, cleaved asunder by one great swing of a blade that looked half ax and half machete. His dying shriek as the top of his body separated from the lower limbs cut through Dave’s miasma as cleanly as the edged weapon had passed through the man. His vision cleared, but not the crippling inability to move. He saw the firing line overrun. Hunn and Fangr and one lone, loping Sliveen vaulted over their own dead and wounded, knocking aside guns, ignoring ineffectual bayonet thrusts. Fangr fell on marines in threes and fours, pulling them apart with fiendish and violent glee. The awful sound of limbs torn from sockets with a sucking, popping sound would stay in Dave’s memory for the remainder of his days.

  In less than a minute, the firing line disintegrated and the vanguard of the rampaging thrall broke out into clear ground, running straight toward the hundreds of civilians who had not fled quickly enough. The great mass of the devils was heedless of Dave and his two companions hunkered down in the shadows on the far left flank. But not all of them.

  “Behind you,” Dave grunted.

  The corpsman stood up with his weapon held low at the hip. Some sort of assault rifle. Normally it would have intimidated the hell out of someone like Dave, who had never had a thing for guns, a distaste that was only confirmed by his brother’s death. But in the hands of the corpsman, spraying fire at a charging rhino-size Hunn warrior, it looked utterly ridiculous. A toy. The corpsman emptied the full magazine into the Hunn, ignoring the smaller, more agile Fangr that bounded along beside it. Tracer rounds flashed and flared off the creature’s armor. Armor-piercing ammunition punched through boiled leather and dull gray metal plate, but to no avail. The killing frenzy had come over this one, too. Raked by deep gouges and bloody welts, the Hunn roared in pain and outrage, swatted the rifle away with the point of its cleaver, and kicked the corpsman in the chest. The giant horned claws impaled the screaming man, and the Hunn shook off the carcass the way Dave might try to shake off a piece of paper stuck to his boot by dog shit.

  Still Dave could not move. Still he lay helpless in the dirt as Everding shouted useless obscenities and unloaded a full mag of tracer and penetrator rounds at the Fangr leash. The 5.56-mm ammo scythed into the three daemon slaves, cutting two of them down with extravagant sprays of blood and gore. The third beast jagged to the left and sustained only a few grazing shots.

  “Run, Hooper! GO!” the marine yelled at him. But he could not. He couldn’t run. He couldn’t even crawl to where Lucille lay a few feet away. All he could do was lie there and wait to die.

  Some fucking big league superhero he’d turned out to be.

  Coughing dust and pink foam, Everding tried to draw his knife before the Fangr reached him, but it was moving with animal swiftness, and then it was airborne, jaws clamping shut around his neck before he could even raise the tiny-looking blade. Man and daemon tumbled over together, fetching up in a writhing, caterwauling tangle on top of Dave, who could not even squirm out from underneath them. Everding lashed out weakly with his bayonet before the Fangr tore out his throat.

  Hot blood poured out of the terrible wound, blinding Dave, getting into his nostrils, flooding his mouth with the coppery sweet taste of violation and death. The great dead weight of the marine who’d sacrificed himself in vain suddenly lifted clear of his chest.

  The Fangr loomed over him, a snarling, stooping vision of horror painted in human blood, jaws festooned with man meat. Dave’s heart was beating like a hammer just inside his rib cage

  Beside the leashed killer the Hunn stood bleeding and panting and regarded him with slow deliberation. Dave could feel the will of the dominant creature, the physical force of it restraining the leashed inferior. The battle or its aftermath raged on elsewhere, but the world, which he was about to depart, contracted down to the small dark circle in which the three of them eyed one another.

  “You have shortened my leash,” the Hunn said in clear English.

  Then Dave realized it hadn’t done that at all. It had spoken in the Olde Tongue, but he had understood it as clearly as he would understand Brian Williams reading a headline.

  “Go fuck yourself,” the rigger spit back at him, but it came out as a choking gargle, and he swallowed half a mouthful of Everding’s lifeblood before gagging and vomiting again.

  The Hunn understood well enough what he meant, though, and roared like a wounded bear. It stomped on Everding’s head, crushing helmet and bone alike with a sick crunching pop. The Fangr snarled and strained at its invisible leash, which Dave could actually feel, the same way you feel inside you the vibrations of a church bell if you stand close enough when it strikes the hour.

  The dead and the dying were all around. Screams and groans mingled with cries of fear as some of the laggard daemons stopped and feasted on the fallen men. Sporadic gunfire cracked through the humid air, adding the slightest tincture of more hot copper and spent powder to the night scent of blood and iron. Tires squealed and sirens wailed. Above them somewhere gunships pounded away, their rotors counting a drumbeat cadence to measure the pace of the massacre he, David Hooper, had spectacularly failed to prevent. In the distance, almost drowned out by the uproar, he could pick out the bass thump from someone’s overpriced car audio system. Pink. Telling Dave to keep his drink and just give her the money.

  He felt tired beyond endurance, wanting to just lay his head down and wait for the end. The zoo sounds of the Hunn and Fangr seemed to fade away. Everything faded away.

  He
thought at first he was losing consciousness. The nausea, the deep body aches and burning pain, so many aches and pains that it was impossible to distinguish one hurt from another, the sense of futility and sorrow—they all faded as dark flowers bloomed in front of his eyes. He blinked, the eyelids sticking together with Everding’s blood. And then he blinked again at the statue of the Hunn and its evil butt monkey.

  They roared no longer. They moved not at all.

  Nothing moved, and no sound came to him except for one sweet high note of song. An old battle hymn. Old before men had the language to sing hymns.

  Lucille.

  The pain vanished, washed away on her song. His strength and all his energy came surging back, carried in on the same channel. When he moved to stand up, the world did not spin around to plant his ass in the dirt again. His arms and legs were no longer immobile and leaden. He was able to spring up onto the balls of his feet and perform a playful roll to gather up the splitting maul, which honest to God sighed as his hands closed around her.

  “Marty Grbac says hi,” he snarled, and with one overhead blow collapsed the Hunn from head to foot into a shower of broken bone, torn flesh, and blood. Still nothing moved. Not any speed that a hyperaccelerated Dave Hooper could perceive as movement, anyway. He stepped toward the frozen Fangr and swung Lucille at its head like Barry Bonds aiming for the cheap seats. He imagined knocking the thing’s skull into orbit, but it merely disintegrated in a disgusting explosion of gore. A slow, strange geyser of thick daemonic ichor erupted from the creature’s neck, the physics all wrong, and time slowed down again.

  Until a sudden jump cut fast-forwarded the world back into sync with him.

  He spun around with the force of the blow to find a few dozen members of the thrall stopped in their tracks, distracted by their appetites. They hunkered down over human remains, tearing into the corpses and occasionally one another as they fought over the choice pieces. Many of the Hunn staggered about, snorting in a way that Dave recognized as laughter. Urgon had snorted at him in just the same fashion. They were drunk on the freshly decanted bloodwine of the First Platoon.