A Protocol for Monsters: Dave vs the Monsters

by John Birmingham

  They were still sorting out the witnesses—or the one conscious witness in this specific instance, a shift supervisor named Martinelli. He claimed to have seen a co-worker, the rig’s OH&S boss no less, brain the thing with some sort of sledgehammer.

  It was still lodged in the ugly bastard’s shattered skull and no amount of heavy lifting could budge it.

  The safety guy, a Mr David Hooper, was no help. He’d been Casevaced onshore, comatose, suffering from burns and a broken arm. But according to Martinelli…

  “…when Emmeline finally gets here.”

  Heath shook his head, annoyed at himself for losing focus.

  “I’m sorry, Professor. You cut out. What were you saying?”

  Compton’s voice was clipped. A little pissed.

  “I said, I suppose we can make the arrangements for the Field Exploit when Emmeline finally gets here. There’s no sign of her yet.”

  Heath moved away from the dead creature. The crew lounge was a mess. A charnel house, really. But at least the human remains had been removed. The dead xenomorphs lay where they had fallen, or been struck down.

  “No, there wouldn’t be,” he said, part of him wondering what had killed the three smaller creatures. They carried no visible injuries he could see. “She’ll be en route to Andrews by now. As will you and the Exploit team, as soon as you hang up.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  As soon as the aircraft leveled off, a woman in Marine Corp fatigues handed out the briefing packs, buff-colored envelopes fat with pictures, maps and Sensitive Site Exploitation data. The plane was a civilian business jet, leased when no suitable military flights had been available. Washington had turned on the money tap. That told Emmeline all she needed to know about the importance and urgency of their unscheduled trip to the gulf. That, and the chief petty officer that Heath had dispatched to look after Elana’s cats when Emmeline protested she couldn’t possibly leave home unless they were sorted.

  Heath, who knew her well enough by now, didn’t even hesitate. The car that came to pick her up from C Street also brought the chief petty house-sitter turned cat wrangler. As an added bonus, the refrigerator-shaped female CPO blocked a final attempt by Roger of House Penrose to have at Emmeline’s maidenhead, placing her considerable bulk between them while Em escaped into the chauffeured navy car.

  “So, this looks nasty,” she said, leafing through the first couple of photographic images. They looked like stills from some wretched horror movie. One of those bloody awful ones where photogenic young travelers are dismembered in hostels and such like.

  Compton, sitting next to her, scratched at his neckbeard in a way that made her itch and squirm all at once.

  “This must be some sort of… I don’t know…some sort of…”

  “Xenomorph incursion,” she said, cutting straight to the point.

  “Ha,” he grunted. “You wish.”

  “No, really, I don’t,” she shot back, returning to the briefing notes and muttering. “Nobody wants a xenomorph incursion.”

  Compton grunted by way of reply.

  He was in a foul mood, which wasn’t unusual, but he’d turned that animus inwards, which was. The man was seething. Emmeline was not always able to read the unspoken cues of body language. But she was a ferocious learner, and she’d had three years to study Compton’s tantrums. The incessant scratching at the flaming red neckbeard, the blotches of color high on his round cheeks, the hunching of his shoulders, the working of his jaw, they were as good as a cartoon thought-bubble.

  I am pissed off.

  She ignored him, just as she ignored the startled cries and curses of her Exploit team as they read through their briefing packs.

  At 09.34 hours, Central Standard Time, BP’s Longreach Platform had been breached by hostile forces. Initial reports, later discounted, suggested a terrorist strike. A DEVGRU Special Mission Unit, training in the gulf, was re-tasked to the platform, securing it without resistance and coordinating the evacuation of civilian casualties. Eleven confirmed deaths. Nine missing personnel. Dozens of injuries. And those numbers would only get worse.

  Four confirmed xenomorphs.

  Once upon a time, before her diagnosis, Emmeline would not have reacted to this as her colleagues were currently reacting. With shock, denial, confusion.

  No, her reaction would have been even more pronounced. Possibly extreme. She might well have shut down, unable to process the inputs.

  But her diagnosis was half a lifetime ago, and while it might define her, and often constrain her, it could not take from her those achievements she had wrested from the world. She had won her position with the Office on merit. Unlike Compton, a political appointment. She was meant to be here in this plane, flying towards…what?

  Four confirmed xenomorphs.

  Four corpses that could not be.

  She would not speculate on what she could not know. Not yet. She would review the available data—the briefing pack. Upon arrival she would inspect the site. Their military liaison would establish the laboratory facilities as requested. She would assemble the Exploit team. They would get to work on those impossible corpses. There was something very soothing about knowing her place within this scheme. While the situation might be confused, opaque, even dangerous, her role within it was not.

  Looking at a photograph of a fierce, animalistic hominid, she knew exactly what she should do next.

  Crack that ugly skull wide open and have a jolly good poke around inside.

  # # #

  Early in Professor Ashbury’s time with the Special Programs Division of OSTP, Professor Compton had made the mistake of asking her out on a date. Or at least, he had imagined it as a date. He had read somewhere that dating autistic women was great because they flat out could not cope with nuance and ambiguity. They didn’t play games. If you wanted a blowjob, ask for a blowjob. If they felt like it, you were assured of one hassle-free hummer.

  He hadn’t straight up asked her for a blowjob of course. He wasn’t a fucking idiot. But it hadn’t gone well, for the very reason he thought it might. She really was a literalist. When he asked her at the end of her first week whether she would like to go out for a drink, she had said yes.

  But what she had meant was, “Yes, I do like the idea of leaving the building after work for an alcoholic beverage.”

  Not, “Yes, I will consider a casual sexual encounter with my supervisor.”

  He could have sworn that’s what was very obviously implied by his invite and her acceptance. But Ashbury had publicly corrected his misconception with the direct and brutal honesty for which she would soon become well known at work. It was mortifying, but there was nothing he could do. As much as he would have liked to fire her for embarrassing him, Compton knew terminating her employment for turning him down would lead to a difficult lawsuit and probably to another jihad from the likes of Carole fucking Ferriade. And luckily, Ashbury’s soon to be legendary bluntness rescued him.

  “You behaved like an idiot,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean you are an idiot.”

  And that had seemed to put an end to it for her. He had even come to appreciate her odd personality. She was not a gossip, or a time waster. She did not feel the need to make small talk or pretend to like someone or something which annoyed her. Her field of study, exobiology, was pointless bullshit, of course. But then, the Special Programs Division was something of a warehouse for pointless bullshit, wasn’t it?

  Or so he had thought until this morning.

  Ashbury sat in the wide, comfortable plush leather seat next to him, silently leafing through her briefing papers, occasionally scratching notes into a small black Moleskine pad.

  Unlike him, she seemed perfectly content to read her file and make her neat little notes and pretend as though this was just another day at Warehouse 13. Her Exploit team were no better. Just glorified postgraduate interns, most of them, all yammering away at each other back in the cheap seats. None of them with half a fucking clue what a dead end their ca
reers had come to the moment they’d signed on with Special Programs.

  It simply did not matter how bizarre or paradigm-shifting the data they’d collect in the gulf might be. Nobody would ever see it. They would never publish a word in a peer-reviewed journal. Whatever reports they wrote, whatever findings they made, might, just might find their way into a three- or four-minute briefing to the national security advisor. But more likely they’d never get past some gatekeeper many pay grades below her.

  Compton shuffled through the first few pages of briefing notes on the freak show in the gulf. Ashbury had told him they’d have to prepare a public response for once, because of the number of witnesses. Dozens of them had been evacuated to other platforms, to nearby vessels and onshore before the navy could seal the information breach. But he could only snort at that. If she didn’t believe the national security state was capable of whipping up a cover story for an isolated incident hundreds of miles offshore and discrediting any alternate explanations, she didn’t know her employers very well.

  NSA would be all over the electronic trail already.

  No, this was just another day. Another investigation. Another secret report. Another cover-up.

  And all on the day when he should have been getting ready to fly out to the west coast and enjoy his triumphant return to the public realm and his first victory for many years over his enemies in the academy.

  Professor Raymond Compton sighed.

  Now he was never going to get a chance to give it to Carole Ferriade in his TED Talk.

  He closed the file on his lap and tried to sleep. Might as well let Ashbury apply the full wattage of her unbalanced personality to this mess. The prospect of all the meaningless blood and horror seemed to make her happy, or as close to happy as the crazy bitch ever got.

  # # #

  Heath strode through the hospital, and for him striding anywhere was an act of calculated will these days. He ground his teeth together in discomfort and frustration. There was no way they’d be able to cover this one up, he knew.

  The information had surely leaked too far and wide for containment. This wasn’t like that AI going sentient last year, taking over the robot dog and killing all those Boston Dynamics eggheads. There were no witnesses to watch them pound that thing to scrap metal. The four-legged Terminator had killed them all.

  It took Heath’s leg too, before they destroyed it.

  But this xenomorph incursion—wherever the hell it was from—had hundreds of live witnesses, dozens who’d seen the damned things with their own eyes and, almost certainly, captured images with their phones.

  How long could it be before the first of those started turning up online, or even worse, in the mainstream media?

  He resisted the urge to stop and stare every time he passed a television set carrying news coverage of the incident. It seemed somebody was watching the Longreach story in every second or third room. For all Heath knew, some of the patients might even have come off the platform. The survivors were spread around emergency facilities all along the Gulf Coast—at least five here at New Orleans East.

  Only one of them was his problem. But he sounded like he’d be more than enough of a problem to be getting on with.

  David Hooper. A thirty-seven-year-old white male. Asshole, by all accounts.

  And when he wasn’t being an asshole, he was the engineer in charge of plant safety on the Longreach exploration rig. The fall guy, presumably, if this went the way a few folks higher up the food chain wanted it to. In their scheme, if Hooper was the guy supposed to stop the rig blowing up, and the rig blew up, then Hooper was the guy gonna get his ass burned. No matter what the real reason.

  Problem with that wasn’t that Hooper had supposedly killed a bunch of the things that had attacked his rig. The moment he stood up on his own and tried to tell that story he was bugshit on toast. Completely discredited. No, the problem with that was all the credible witnesses who’d back him up. With their phone cams.

  Heath turned the corner onto the ward where Hooper was recuperating. His face twitched into something that might have looked like a smile on somebody with a less severe visage. His new titanium leg was working better than they’d promised him. Osseointegration, they called it. A new tech developed from the study of antlers, or something. The limb screwed directly onto the stub of bone; he had much better control over this limb than the old-style stump-socket model. He could even feel the floor, in a fashion. Tell whether he was walking on carpet or concrete. The stump didn’t rub. It didn’t sweat as much, nor swell or break out in skin rashes and blistering. You could literally turn on a dime in this thing, reason enough to smile, were it not for the argument he could hear coming from Hooper’s room.

  Great.

  This asshole had already put one of Heath’s men into traction, and according to Chief Allen, who was now watching over him, he was prone to irrational outbursts and physical violence.

  No shit, Heath thought. Dude killed one monster with a sledgehammer, and three others God only knew how. Mister Hooper probably wasn’t a debating club medalist in high school. If he was anything like a lot of men Heath had found working hard, dangerous jobs at the ass end of the world, he’d be much better suited to life out there than he was to polite company.

  He could hear Hooper as he drew closer to the room, refusing to go anywhere, refusing to submit to any tests until somebody gave him some answers. Heath felt a twinge of discomfort in his stump as he listened to the belligerent voice.

  “Right now,” said the voice that had to belong to Hooper, “you can start by telling me what the hell happened out on the Longreach this morning. It was this morning, wasn’t it? I haven’t been out of it overnight.”

  Heath reached the door and wasted no time inserting himself into what was obviously a tense stand-off.

  “No, sir,” he said. “You have not.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Michael Heath, Captain, United States Navy. Joint Special Operations Command,” he said, introducing himself, mostly to Hooper, a beaten-down looking white guy propped up against a couple of pillows in bed. For somebody who had supposedly killed a hostile xenomorph, and had definitely punched Lieutenant Dent clean through a door, Hooper was an unimpressive specimen. You could see right away he was a drinker. The high color in his cheeks, the broken capillaries in his nose, the watery eyes, Heath could almost feel the man’s thirst from across the room. His briefing notes said Hooper had been returning to the rig from a two-week debauch a day before he had to. A drinker’s gambit, removing himself from the source of temptation because he knew he wasn’t strong enough to resist it. It would be interesting to get a look at his tox screen as well. Chief Petty Officer Allen, who’d been assigned to watch over Hooper after the incident with Dent, had that look on his face that said he was offering up his suffering to baby Jesus.

  Hooper’s face twitched as he took in Heath’s arrival and the captain was pretty sure he knew what he was thinking. He wasn’t thinking “officer” or “Navy SEAL”. He was thinking “black man”. Possibly worse.

  “Okay,” Hooper said, his voice gravelly, as though his throat was dry, “more navy guys. Awesome.”

  Heath allowed one of his less foreboding frowns to play across his features as he considered the man. Perhaps he had been wrong. Perhaps Hooper had seen the uniform before he’d seen the color of his skin. That would be a marvel, would it not. Addressing himself to the attending physician, a doctor by the name of Pradesh, Heath hurried to get them out of this hospital as quickly as possible.

  “Doctor, you will find papers have been served on your administrators releasing Mr Hooper into our care. We require his consultation on a matter of national security.”

  “I’m afraid that will not do, sir,” the doctor protested, waving his hand dismissively and loading the word “Sir” with just the right amount of reserve to let Heath know that he was addressing his status as a guest in the hospital, not his rank as an officer of the US Navy. Pradesh was a good fo
ur inches shorter than Heath, even with his bright blue turban, and he had the short man’s habit of bouncing up on the balls of his feet when arguing.

  “Well I’m afraid this will not stand, Captain Heath. It will not stand at all. This patient is under my care and will remain under my care.”

  And with that, Pradesh launched himself into a vigorous defense of his rights and responsibilities, and an even more willing assault on the presumptions of minor government functionaries with ideas above their station. Heath allowed it all to flow over him, becoming the rock on the riverbed. When Pradesh finally paused to take a breath, Heath strode into the room and took control.

  “If you’ll get dressed, please, Mr Hooper. I have transport waiting for us downstairs. Time is short.”

  “I must protest this…” Pradesh began.

  “Of course you must,” said Heath.

  “Doc,” said CPO Allen, “from what I’ve seen we’re doing you a favor. You’ll thank us some day.”

  “Thank you, Chief Allen,” Heath said in a tone that warned Allen he was not at all thankful for the chief’s contribution.

  “Sir.” Allen braced himself, almost to parade ground attention, acknowledging the unspoken rebuke.

  Heath fetched an official complaint form from within his pocket and gave it to Pradesh—“We’ll need it in triplicate,”—before turning to the patient. “Mr Hooper, sir. I note you are still not dressed.”

  Hooper’s face crumpled, as though he were a dim child who’d been summoned to the front of the class to explain a difficult math problem.

  “I got no clothes,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to mine, and this hospital gown—”

  Heath felt the needle on his frustration edging up ever so slightly towards the red. He did not try to block or ignore the feeling. Rather he let it come on, examining it from a distance, acknowledging the shape and the strength of the emotion and allowing it to leave him. After all, his frustration wanted to be out in the world. So he released it, leaving him calm and centered.