Dave vs. the Monsters

by John Birmingham

  Igor looked pained. So enticing, so close and yet so far away.

  Zach, however, did smile for a ghost of a second.

  “Dude, what would Sammy think?” Zach whispered.

  “You know that’s not me. And Sammy’s cool,” Igor said, trying to sound unrepentant.

  The married man, Dave thought. You could always tell them by the clinking of the ball and chain.

  Foxy finished her call to Armando the concierge, decelerating to drop back beside Dave but only to take hold of his arm and speed up again, dragging him along. It was early enough that most of the hotel guests were either still in bed or hanging on grimly at the gaming tables. The breakfast traffic hadn’t started yet, and they moved down the hallway toward the elevators without having to dodge around tourists or conventioneers.

  “You need to get up on what’s happened, Dave,” Foxy said. Dave was aware of the feel of her hip against his and rather more interested in getting up on Foxy than on the news. “Normally this first interview would be all about you, but after last night they’re going to want to ask you about the dragons and the demons, especially if they’re busting out all over like the one in New York, and they’re going to want to know what people can do to protect themselves.”

  Dave almost stopped in his tracks, and Igor had to swerve to avoid running into him.

  “There were Horde in New York?” he asked as they got moving again with a few excuse-mes and apologies.

  “Yes,” said Foxy. “What, they didn’t mention that on The Dukes of Hazzard?”

  “Shit,” he said. “I didn’t know. That sucks. Anyone hurt?”

  “It was only one of them as best anybody knows. And it jumped into the middle of some FBI thing. Totally unrelated. Got cut down pretty quick, but there were some people killed, some more injured.”

  He hadn’t seen or heard anything about New York, but then he had been distracted and there was more than enough monster news from New Orleans, and now with the dragons, that maybe a lone monster didn’t rate the front page anymore.

  “The feds locked down the scene,” she said as they weaved through a couple of housekeeping carts. “They blacked out all the surrounding phone calls going in and put all the witnesses into protective custody. Or quarantine or some shit. Hardly matters. There’s witnesses free to talk yet. No visuals, no witnesses, no story. And we got plenty of orcs and dragons to go around. So what’ve you got for us on that?”

  “But I don’t know shit about dar Drakon,” Dave said, dropping into the old language without thinking about it.

  “What’s that?” Foxy asked, turning to him but not stopping. “What did you call them?”

  Dave had to think about it for a second. “Dar Drakon,” he repeated, a little slower and more thoughtful this time. “That’s what the Hunn call them.”

  “Cool,” Foxy said. “Right there, you can talk about that, everyone’s calling these things dragons, except for the freaks who think they’re like mystical visitors or some shit. You tell us that the real name is that Dacron thing, and right away we got a news lead. What else can you tell me about them? No. Hold that thought. You need to get across your brief.”

  “My briefs?” Dave asked playfully as they pulled up in front of the elevator. She ignored him.

  “What a dick,” Igor sighed.

  “I know, right?” Foxy said, taking proper notice of Igor for the first time. “And yet … you know,” she sighed, and shrugged. “What a dick.”

  Igor nodded.

  “Come on, Dave,” Zach said, sounding peeved. “Some of us didn’t get to party in the Frank Sinatra suite. Which floor?”

  “Down on five,” Foxy said. “They’ve set aside a lounge for us.”

  Long before the doors of the elevator opened on a large party of drunken frat boys, Dave could hear them coming. Or at least Dave took them to be drunken frat boys. Maybe they were drunken software millionaires. Who knew these days? They were already pretty rowdy, but as soon as one of them laid eyes on Dave, they erupted.

  “Holy shit! You’re that guy. Super Dave. You kicked fuckin’ monster ass down in N’Orleans, dude.”

  “Don’t encourage the egomaniac, please, sir,” Zach said.

  “Why, yes, son. Yes I did.” Dave grinned.

  “DAVE!!!” they shouted at once, and it was much better than being blamed for an explosion and a fire that had nothing to do with him.

  Foxy cursed under her breath, Zach and Igor both broke out of character to roll their eyes, and the frat boys erupted in cheers and hoots. Mostly for Dave but in one confusing case somebody let go with a loud, lingering shout out for some guy called Leroy. They poured out of the elevator in a sweaty masculine wave, punching Dave on the shoulder, slapping him on the back, trying to do the same with the SEALs who had kicked a lot of monster ass, too. A couple of the fratboys finally paid some attention to Foxy, standing there in her little Bellagio signature waffle weave bathrobe looking fit to blow steam from her ears.

  “Autographs, man. We need autographs.”

  “No. Beers. We need breakfast beers with Super Dave.”

  “Sooooooper Dave!”

  “Woot woot woot.”

  “Later, boys, later,” Foxy cried out over the uproar. “You can have all the beers with Super Dave later. Right now he’s got some very important TV to do.”

  “Awesome,” one of the drunken frat boys said. “What TV?”

  “Fox & Friends, guys. He’s going to be on Fox & Friends in just a few minutes. Get on Twitter or Facebook or whatever and tell everyone you met him and where he’s gonna be. Then go back to your rooms, turn on your TV. Fox & Friends,” she repeated slowly. “He’ll do his bit on camera, and then I’m sure he’d love to have breakfast beers with all of you, isn’t that right, Dave?” In truth, all Dave wanted was to get Foxy back to his hotel suite so he could do this take-charge piece of ass like her old man owed him money.

  All of his appetites were running hot. Had been since he had recovered in New Orleans.

  Foxy prevailed upon Zach and Igor to gently remove the drunks from the elevator door, which was madly pinging in protest at being held open so long. They tried to maneuver Dave inside, suffering a slight delay while he posed for a few selfies with the bros, which they promised to hashtag as #SuperDave.

  “Breakfast beers later, fellas, for sure,” he promised, waving them off. They cheered and hooted him some more as the doors closed on them, calling out a few final questions.

  “Dave, you eating downstairs? Don’t go there, man. They ran out of waffles.”

  “Dave, are you wearing that chick’s nightie?”

  “Dave, is that like a superboner?”

  The doors of the elevator whispered shut on peals of laughter, and the four grown-ups all pretended not to notice the massive erection testing the structural integrity of Dave’s Y-fronts.

  Igor punched the button for the fifth floor, and they rode down in awkward silence before Dave could stand it no more. “So, I’ve never been on television before.”

  “Don’t worry,” Foxy said. “The camera won’t show anything below the waist.”

  “Give me strength, Lord,” Zach muttered.

  “We can totally shoot him,” Igor offered again. “He’ll probably get better.”

  “No one is shooting anyone until I’ve had my cross,” Foxy said, powering up the screen of her phone again and flipping through some sort of list.

  “Right. Dave. We’ll cover New Orleans after the first break, but there were six dragon attacks last night. And that’s leading everything today. Two of these things were killed. The one that ate Joe Biden’s plane was shot down, I guess, by the escort. The other one seems to have ridden an American Airlines passenger jet all the way into the ground. As best we can tell, the other four knocked their targets out of the sky and then disappeared. Where the fuck you hide a dragon these days, I have no idea. But they’ve gone to ground somewhere.”

  Dave thought about this for a moment.

&n
bsp; “Prey,” he said at last. “They weren’t targets. They were prey. You know, like an eagle or a hawk taking a big fat pigeon.”

  They all stared at him as the elevator dropped through another six or seven floors.

  “They were trying to eat Joe Biden’s plane?” Igor asked.

  “Probably hungry,” Dave said. “Been a long time between feeds.”

  “Okay, we can go with that,” Foxy said. “But let’s not get carried away with the Biden angle. We don’t want to turn him into some kind of victim, or a hero for fuck’s sake, not for just … not getting eaten. We got lots of good innocent dead people on those other planes. Lots of dead dragon chunks, too. We might push that. Anything you can tell us about that, Dave?”

  “Tell you what? I don’t even know where this happened. I was preoccupied.” He smiled to no good effect. Foxy just stone-faced him. Damn, but this chick knew how to maintain focus. He was certain she still wanted him. And it wasn’t just Bad Dave being bad. He could smell it coming off her. Same way he’d smelled it on Mulan and half the chicks in the casino last night. It was a musky, salty, meaty animal scent he could taste at the back of his throat.

  He had to admit, he was sort of impressed she wasn’t blowing him right now. But she stayed on mission.

  “I’ll be feeding them the questions, and they’ll be asking you the questions. Don’t worry; it won’t be anything you can’t answer. There’s a seven-second delay, so if you get nervous and say a swear word, it’ll just get beeped. Oh, and the American flight went down over Montana, by the way. If that makes any difference.”

  “Not really.”

  “Okay,” said Foxy. “So, news of the day. We’ve got six aircraft down. Two … dragons down with them.” She shook her head, obviously tripping on the insanity of what she was saying, before gathering her wits and pushing on. “So all commercial and noncombat military flights are currently grounded throughout the continental United States. Canadian airspace has also shut down. The Europeans will be closing their airports as soon as those flights currently in transit have made their destination. You got all that?”

  Dave nodded.

  “Sure. That’s why I’m stuck here. Fair enough, too, unless you want more planes getting bit in the ass.”

  “Yeah, whatever. Don’t bother yourself with the policy questions,” Foxy told him. “We’ll have our own experts to do that. You just need to answer some basic questions about dragons. How dangerous are they? How do we kill them?”

  “But you already know the answer to that,” Dave said. “Really fucking dangerous, and you kill them by shooting, I dunno, missiles or something at them. Whatever those air force guys did last night.”

  “AIM-9X Sidewinder,” Igor said. “And 20-mm cannon fire. Though I think an A-10 might be better.”

  “What are you? An air force groupie now?” Zach asked.

  His colleague gave him a surprised look, to which he replied with a shrug.

  “It’s all over the war blogs.”

  “Thank you, soldier,” Foxy said, favoring him with the sort of grin Dave hadn’t had out of her since she had woken up. “That’s great detail. Our audience will love that sort of stuff.” Igor nodded and coughed to cover the blush that crept up from his neck as the elevator stopped and the doors whooshed open.

  A small crowd was waiting for Dave.