They discussed nothing of great import as they walked around the structure under the unblinking gaze of the IR and LLAMPS surveillance systems the marines had installed. Hooper seemed intrigued by her work, which was always pleasant, but she resisted being carried away by the conversation. She had to maintain her focus. As dizzying as it was being near him, she knew intellectually that it was nothing more than a very intense proximity effect, probably based on some neurochemical process they did not yet understand. If she could only cut him open and take a few biopsies…
One last test, then. She shivered and moved in close to him. Allowing their elbows and hips to touch, Emmeline almost fainted with desire.
Enough.
She had proved her point. They were going to have to treat this man as being very dangerous in more ways than one. She could already anticipate the difficult briefing she would have to give to all of the female staff in the morning. But first, she would allow him to walk her back to her cabin. Just one last test; of her own ability to stay focused, as much as it was a test of Hooper’s ability to distract and bedazzle her.
Careful, Emmeline…
“I’m cold,” she said. “And tired now. And a little scared. Walk me back to my cabin, would you? That’s not a come-on, by the way,” she quickly clarified. “I’m genuinely scared. And cold. And if I wanted to fuck you, I would tell you. I have Asperger’s Syndrome.”
Hooper nearly tripped over his own feet.
“Shit? Really? I thought—”
“What? That I wanted to fuck you?” Her head swam saying the word. “Or that I’m retarded now?”
Hooper shrugged inside his hoodie. “No,” he said. “I just thought…I thought. Okay. Yeah, I thought Asperger’s meant retarded. You sort of threw me with that.”
Her temper flared, but it did nothing to reduce the wretched physical desire she felt.
“Well, it doesn’t,” she snapped. Angry at herself, rather than him. What was she doing? She needed to get away from this man. “So fuck off with that idea. But walk me home anyway.”
She stuck her arm through his and pulled him forward. Or rather, somebody who looked like her, who had her name, but could not possibly be her, did that. She wouldn’t do that. She couldn’t be so bloody stupid.
What the hell was she doing? Why was she touching him? Allowing him to touch her? She didn’t like being touched at the best of times.
“It’s dark,” Emmeline’s imposter added. “I don’t want to fall off this fucking oil rig. You’re the safety chap. It’s your job.”
“So, since I’m doing you a favor here, you can do me one,” Dave said, and her head swam with the imagery of all the favors she could do for him.
She fought to regain control of her body and mind, cursing herself for failing.
“Not like that,” Hooper hurried to add. “Just what the fuck is wrong with your friend Compton?”
She almost laughed out loud, but she feared hysteria might overtake her. Shaking her head to try and clear it, she said with quiet vehemence, “He is not my friend. He is my boss at OSTP.”
Ashbury explained a little of Compton’s academic background, and his consultancy work for the military which had seen him black-balled on progressive campuses around the country. She almost gasped with relief as they turned a corner into a more exposed section of the Longreach and a blast of cold air seemed to blow away Hooper’s mysterious sexual power. It was there, and then it was gone.
Perhaps the cold wind had done something to him. Shriveled his mojo?
But no, it quickly cycled back up. She would make a note of it and try to figure out what it meant later. For now all she wanted was to get away from him before her rational mind was completely undone.
“Found you!”
Emmeline jumped, startled.
She turned to the new voice, recognizing Michael’s CPO, young Zach Allen.
“Hope you weren’t planning on going to bed,” he said, and she blushed furiously, but recovered when he added, “We have to get back on shore now. Orders from JSOC.”
“What’s happened?” Emmeline asked.
Zach Allen was shaking his head, as though he couldn’t believe his own words. “More of Dave’s monsters. A heap of them, coming up out of the sewers in New Orleans.”
Relief flooded through her.
And a deep and terrible frustration.
CHAPTER NINE
The flight from the oil rig to New Orleans was hell. Spending ten minutes alone with Hooper on the Longreach had been bad enough, but Emmeline had clutched at her get-out-of-jail-free card. Any time she needed to sever the connection to him, to break the hold he seemed to have over her, all she had to do was move away about twenty paces. Before they were ordered back onshore, she had even quietly switched cabins for all the female staff, moving them far enough away from his that it would not be a problem. Crammed into the back of the chopper however, jammed right up next to him for hours, she suffered quiet agonies. Emmeline was desperately grateful to Compton who did what he could to distract Hooper, even though that mostly meant sniping at him and keeping his attention off her.
She could see there was trouble in the city as they flew in. No large city ever truly slept, but New Orleans seemed to be up well past its bedtime. There was an unusual number of emergency service vehicles about. The road network was thick with lights, and as their chopper banked around to land she caught a quick glimpse of swarming helicopters and the flash of gunfire. In a way, she was almost grateful. It gave her something to think about besides Hooper. As soon as they hit the landing pad, and she could get some distance on him, that problem vanished. The pilot set them down on the helipad atop a hospital about ten or fifteen blocks to the southwest of the incursion, and the SEALs all poured out to secure a perimeter. Hooper, familiar with the routine of getting on and off choppers, unclipped his safety harness and hurried away, bent over until he was safely beyond the reach of the rotor blades. Emmeline stuck with Compton, watching closely the growing distance to their unusual subject.
“That must have been unpleasant,” Compton shouted under the roar of the helicopter.
“More than somewhat,” she yelled back.
But whatever sexual power, or pheromones, or satanic monkey juice Hooper possessed, it simply faded away at about twenty yards. Things moved quickly then. Local law enforcement greeted Michael on the other side of the pad and he soon led the SEALs off at a brisk trot. Compton took out his phone as soon as he could and did what he did best, scaring up resources, bullying minor officials, setting up a local chain of command to control the operation. They argued about whether they should accompany the special forces guys, with Compton wanting to establish a command post at the hospital, and Emmeline insisting that they would be better employed closer to the hostiles. He had the protocols on his side and Heath ended the matter anyway by insisting they establish the CP as a fallback position.
It was chaos on the ground. Thousands thronged the hospital, some seeking emergency treatment, but most simply drawn to the reassuring presence of security forces. Fighting flared among the crowds and she wondered what it must be like closer to the site of the incursion.
Compton asked her to secure transport, mollifying her a little after their disagreement over the command post. He wasn’t trying to avoid contact with the hostiles. He was simply following procedure as he understood it, and also doing as Heath wanted. With military action in the offing, tactical command now shifted to Michael.
Emmeline searched for transport, finding a New Orleans Police Department command unit—a truck kitted out as a mobile command center—with nothing to do. It was a spare. The NOPD’s main unit was closer to the developing firefight on Clairborne Avenue. Nonetheless, the operators were unwilling to turn it over to some pushy Englishwoman who insisted she had every right to requisition both vehicle and occupants. It took Compton one phone call to settle that. Another call assigned eight state troopers to secure the command post he had thrown together in the admin
offices of the hospital.
“We’re done here,” he announced as soon as he was happy with the arrangements. “Do we have an escort forward?”
Compton seemed a little worried about pushing on through the chaos between the hospital and Clairborne. The command unit was set up in a specially adapted commercial truck, not an armored vehicle.
“I’m afraid not,” Emmeline told him. “They’re rather cross with us for taking their truck. I don’t think they’ll spare us an armored car. And I don’t think they can spare one, anyway.”
The deputy director of Special Programs took in the chaos engulfing the Touro Community Care Hospital and conceded defeat. “You’re right. They need all the cops they can get right here, simply keeping a lid on the pot. Let’s do the best we can then.”
The best they could manage was a slow crawl through heavy traffic and thousands of pedestrians jamming up the roads between Touro and the diner where Heath had set up his forward OP. The command unit offered a bewildering array of options for monitoring the situation outside, but Emmeline ignored most of them, concentrating on not throwing up as they stopped and started their way through the crowds. She could hear gunfire outside the truck, and on the speakers of a dozen different displays inside. It was overwhelming and making her nauseous.
“I don’t imagine we’ll be able to keep word of this from getting out for much longer,” said Compton as he bounced around in the seat next to her. She knew he was being sardonic. Half of the monitors in the command unit carried live video coverage from the news media. A couple were still calling it a “terror attack”. Most had gone straight to “monsters”. There was nothing like live, high definition video of giant demons eating people to encourage a paradigm shift.
“Do you think Michael will have enough resources to contain this?” Emmeline asked, grabbing onto her safety harness as they bumped over an obstruction. Hopefully not a pedestrian.
“Tactical operations and resourcing are his responsibility, not mine,” said Compton, and for a second he sounded like the perfect bureaucrat. But he went on in a more thoughtful tone, “I think, however, we might take out some insurance against things going wrong.”
He took out his own phone rather than using one of the secure channels in the command unit.
“Who are you going to call?” Emmeline asked.
“Probably not the Ghostbusters,” he said.
# # #
Compton thought he was going through to the national security advisor and was momentarily pissed to find he had been re-routed. Then he realized he was talking to an air force general with direct access to the joint chiefs of staff and all they wanted to know from Compton was how much ordnance he wanted dropped on New Orleans. That was better, if a little precipitate.
“I don’t think we’ve quite reached the scorched earth moment, yet,” he said. “But if you can task enough assets to interdict the equivalent of, say, a Russian infantry brigade, that should be enough for now.”
The enemy—the Horde, cue eye-rolling—looked to be about three companies strong on all of the overhead imagery. Most of it from news choppers. He could already see their force was composed of different elements, comprised mostly of the sort of creatures Emmeline had been busily slicing and dicing back on the oil rig. There were maybe two platoons of the larger, rather orc-like creatures which Hooper referred to as the Hunn, about two to three times that number of the smaller ones he called the Fangr, and sundry other demons they had not yet had the pleasure of meeting in the tattooed, putrescent flesh.
Muzzle flashes spat from the darkness around the xenomorphs—even now he couldn’t really bring himself to think of them as “monsters” without conscious effort—but the fire was not coordinated or well directed. Local gangsters and maybe a couple of cops pecking at targets. He could see the disposition of Heath’s forces on a pair of linked Surface Pros Emmeline had rigged up. Heath’s personal fire team, a small unit consisting of a handful of navy commandos and NOPD SWAT (and Hooper, for what that was worth), had temporarily bunkered down in a brick building half a mile from the main incursion. More SWAT teams and two platoons of marines were converging on the enemy force, but much too slowly. Thousands of civilians were trying to flee the area, but hundreds more remained close to the threat, probably dawdling while they updated their Facebook and Instagram feeds.
“It’s all looking rather wobbly, isn’t it?” Emmeline said.
“It’s looking like a mass casualty event in the making,” he replied. The truck jerked to a halt with a hiss of brakes and didn’t move again. Compton was disoriented for a moment until he realized they had reached their destination, the small corner store where Captain Heath had holed up. Probably wisely. From what Compton could tell, this part of New Orleans was little better than a shanty town. The diner offering po’boys was one of the few solid, defensible structures between them and the enemy.
That was good, because they were under direct attack just a few minutes later.
###
The arrival of the command unit occasioned a few moments delay while Heath and his men bustled in to check the overhead coverage. Not that Compton needed newsfeeds or military satellites to tell him things were turning to guano out there. You could hear the screams and the gunfire and, beneath them, something like animal noises and shrieks during a disturbance at the zoo.
It grew crowded in the command unit as Heath, his senior non-coms, Hooper and seemingly every passerby and his dog crowded in to see what was happening. To Compton it was obvious what was happening was collapse and rout. A small force of marines had made it to the abandoned Pizza Hut on Clairborne Avenue, but they were getting badly chewed over by repeated assaults—he almost said human wave attacks. It did not seem to him, or even to Heath, that they would have enough forces in place to repel the attacks. Hundreds of civilians were trapped in such close proximity to the fighting, however, that they could not call in airstrikes for fear of killing all the people they were trying to save.
“What’s happening over there,” Hooper asked, pointing at a screen. “With the marines.”
Emmeline raised her voice over the general confusion, “The Hunn are charging them. Getting shot down. Charging again. It’s keeping them out of the residential streets for now. Shouldn’t you be leaping tall buildings or swinging your mighty tool or something?”
Compton admired the way she hid from Hooper the bizarre and unsettling effect he had on her. On all women, truth be known. Compton had to admit he had been on the lookout for evidence of the problem since Ashbury had told him about it. And when you were looking for it, you saw it all the time. Even now, he observed, a female systems operator working a keyboard at the far end of the command unit kept glancing over at their guest, or consultant, or whatever the hell Hooper was.
A whip cracking sound, coinciding with a wet crunching thud, quickly followed by a gurgling scream, pulled everyone’s attention to the door of the truck. Hooper moved with surprising speed and almost balletic grace to exit the unit, and one of the SEALs shouted “Sniper!”
The next few moments were a blur. A literal blur. Hooper disappeared. He didn’t sneak away when nobody was looking. Indeed, Compton was staring right at him when he appeared to wink out of existence. Two or three seconds later one of the systems operators cursed and declared, “He’s there! How the hell did he get there?”
“What? What?”
That was Emmeline, squawking like a bird. More swearing, even greater confusion, and then the sysop jerked back from the screen he was watching as though it had delivered an electric shock.
“Not even!”
“He’s fucking flying,” someone else cried.
“No way! Not even.”
Compton scowled as he frantically searched the bank of monitors for usable data. What did that even mean, “not even”? It was probably one of those stupid Internet things. He pushed the thought away, annoyed with himself, and angry with Heath for not containing and controlling the situation. By which h
e meant Hooper.
“What is going on?” Emmeline asked nobody in particular. She seemed especially distressed by the fast-changing circumstances. Compton could hear the cops and commandos yelling at each other outside the truck, and then the crunch of boots as they left in a group, presumably running towards the worst of the fighting. He dragged his own eyes back to the nearest monitor, which was relaying a feed from a news chopper. Spotlights played crazily over open ground south of Clairborne and he could tell by the intense flickering lights—and the crashing reports he could hear with his own ears—that the main battle was playing out there. And they were losing.
“Oh my god that’s Hooper. How did he get over there?”
Emmeline’s voice at least two octaves higher than normal.
Compton pushed himself up out of his seat, grabbed his phone and stalked out of the command unit. His hands were shaking and he made two failed attempts to key in the number for the national security advisor. Then he remembered to simply hit redial. He went straight through to the Pentagon, his calls now permanently forwarded there. Kirkpatrick, the same air force general he had spoken to earlier picked up on the first ring.
“What the fuck is happening down there, Professor?”
“Nothing good,” said Compton. “Are your gunships on station yet?”
“Not yet. They’re still twelve minutes out. Can you contain the situation? Do we need to sterilize the field?”
Cruise missiles. He was asking if Compton wanted to call down a cruise missile on New Orleans?
A Protocol for Monsters: Dave vs the Monsters Page 8
