A Protocol for Monsters: Dave vs the Monsters

by John Birmingham

  “No,” he answered firmly. “Do not sterilize. I will tell you if that becomes necessary. I just need those choppers here.”

  “What about Captain Heath? He is supposed to be in tactical command. Has he been injured or killed?”

  “No. He remains in command. That’s why you’re not talking to him. He is engaged with the enemy. He doesn’t have time to chat.”

  “Are you seeking weapons release authority, Professor?”

  In spite of the horror and madness, Compton answered carefully.

  “No. I’m not seeking it. But if we need it, I will tell you. Just get me those gunships.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Compton, you have to see this. Hurry up.”

  Emmeline’s voice carried from the door of the command unit, cutting through the sound of battle a few blocks away. He pocketed his phone and hurried back into the truck, closing the door behind him and taking some measure of comfort from that even though he knew it would offer no protection if the creatures overran them. Something was going wrong, and it was probably as he feared: the marines’ firing line collapsing or something like that.

  A quick review of the last minute of video coverage and he understood that was exactly what had happened. The tension in the cramped confines of the command unit would have told him they were fucked even if he hadn’t been able to see it on-screen. Great, dark waves of monstrous attackers rolled over the thin line of defenders again and again as Emmeline replayed the video.

  “No, but look,” she said, pointing a finger at one screen in particular. Hooper lay there, entwined with the bodies of at least two marines. It was difficult to make an accurate casualty count because of the way the xenomorphs had literally torn apart their enemies—their prey, Compton told himself, watching with creeping horror as some of the beasts chowed down on their kills.

  “No, this one,” Emmeline said again when she could see that he was not paying attention to the footage she had selected.

  “Sorry,” said Compton, focusing in on the screen where she pointed at Hooper. As they watched, the oil rigger swung the axehead of his splitting maul in a high arc that impacted with the forehead of one of the larger creatures—the Hunn—standing in front of him. It split the beast in half, lengthwise, with an extravagant eruption of gore. Hooper quickly stepped up to one of the smaller Fangr and swung at its head with the blunt steel mass of the sledgehammer. The creature’s head exploded.

  “Well that was grotesque, but what was the relevance, Emmeline? We’ve always known he could hit things with a crude club.”

  “Raymond,” she said, emphasizing his name in that way she did when she was losing patience, “Look at the speed of the replay. It’s been slowed down a hundred times.”

  “What rubbish,” he scoffed, but as the words left his mouth he could see that she was right. Even with the replay dialed back to just one percent of its real-time speed, Hooper moved in a blur.

  “Good Lord,” said Professor Raymond Compton.

  The battle, which had seemed lost just moments earlier, now turned against the Horde, but not because of Hooper. As Compton tried to make sense of the video replaying on a loop in front of them, Emmeline drew his attention to another monitor on which pickups and SUVs arrived carrying heavily armed civilians. Criminals, to be blunt about it. The local gangsters which NOPD had warned them about. They had none of the fire discipline of the marines, but they had brought their heaviest weaponry and unloaded it on the xenomorph horde with an almost vicious glee. It broke the integrity of the monster forces, at least temporarily, and drove them off.

  Unfortunately it drove them deeper into the residential streets surrounding the open waste ground on which they had been fighting.

  “There is going to be a massacre,” Compton said in a low voice.

  “I need to get to Michael,” Emmeline insisted. She grabbed one of the tablets exclusively devoted to their tactical feed and started to head out.

  “Take an escort,” Compton insisted. “Anybody with a gun and a vehicle will do. I mean it Emmeline. Do not go on foot.”

  She produced a pistol with her free hand and said impatiently, “Yes, yes, yes. I know. Nobody wants to get eaten. But they need to know what’s happening. I don’t think they have any idea.”

  And then she was gone. Compton almost chased after her, but found himself watching a live feed that appeared to show Hooper talking to a couple of surviving military personnel. He recognized Heath on-screen after a moment, and the urge to follow Emmeline redoubled.

  His phone rang. It was Kirkpatrick.

  “You have assets online,” he confirmed. The gunships had arrived.

  Compton thanked the general and cut him off. He needed to think. They did not exactly have full spectrum coverage of the battlespace. Most of the monitors were still running news media feeds, but these were at least coming from enough sources that he could piece together a reasonably accurate picture of what was happening.

  The enemy force was still largely intact, even if the flow of its attack had been disrupted. Or rather, not disrupted, but redirected. Hundreds of the beasts were moving at speed into a dense residential district. Compton doubted that anything short of a concrete bunker would be secure against these things. Most of the residents, unfortunately, lived in small wooden bungalows. Shacks, really. He imagined that the thing he had seen lying on the slab back on the Longreach—a BattleMaster of the Hunn according to Hooper—would probably run straight through the walls of such a place, not even slowing down as it killed everyone about it.

  He was contemplating calling Kirkpatrick with a request for immediate interdiction by the gunships, when the sysop tasked with tracking Hooper’s movements cursed loudly, apologizing for losing him.

  “It’s okay,” said the female operator at the end of the row of workstations, “I think I’ve got him. He’s…He just jumped three and a half blocks…through the air.”

  “What’s he doing?” Compton demanded to know.

  “I just told you,” she said testily. “He jumped over three blocks. Landed on top of a car, right in front of the enemy column.”

  Compton hurried down the length of the command unit.

  “Show me,” he said as he arrived behind her station. She was monitoring four displays, but only one was dialed in on Hooper.

  “Is that one of ours?” Compton asked. “Can you get us in any closer? I need to see what’s happening.”

  She hesitated for a moment, but only a moment.

  “It’s a drone feed,” she said. “One of ours, so yes.”

  He didn’t know whether she meant NOPD or the military by “one of ours”, and he didn’t much care.

  “Pull in as tight as you can,” he said. The operator worked her console and Hooper suddenly filled the screen. Or rather the back of his head did. She muttered to herself, adjusted the controls, and zoomed back out a little ways.

  “That will do just fine,” Compton said. He had no audio feed, so that wasn’t entirely true, but he would make what he could of the video.

  Immediately, he could tell that Hooper wasn’t going to start laying all about him with that oversized block splitter he was carrying. He was talking to the largest of the hostiles, another Hunn by the look of it. A smaller creature, much smaller and different in form, attended it, reminding Compton of a puppy because of the way it capered around the massive legs of its leader. A puppy that looked like a giant toad with a forest of eyestalks.

  Was that big thing a leader? Another BattleMaster?

  It suddenly cuffed the little toad-shaped horror away, knocking it a good ten or twelve feet through the air, before returning to its confrontation with Hooper. This was very definitely a negotiation, an exchange between tribal chiefs or champions. Although Compton could not hear what was being said—what language were they even speaking?—he had seen this sort of thing, had participated in it himself enough times, to recognize the form.

  As the realization of what was happening, or what he assum
ed was happening, dawned on him, he shook his head in wonder. He could not be certain of course, unless he was down there himself, but he was almost certain that Hooper was offering some sort of challenge. A rite of trial by combat perhaps? It was both fascinating and infuriating at the same time, because he was sure they were playing out just such an exchange, but he couldn’t be one hundred percent sure.

  Other monitors up and down the unit carried vision and reports of a hastily organized evacuation of surrounding streets. With every passing moment the danger of unleashing the gunships on the enemy abated. The number of civilian casualties they could expect dropped away. In fact, so tightly packed was the scrum of unearthly warriors that a single pass with mini guns and rockets would probably destroy most of them right now.

  Compton resisted the urge to call Kirkpatrick. For the first time in two days he was finally seeing something he understood. A primitive cultural process. A ritual challenge. He did not need to know what Hooper was saying, to know what he was doing. He had to be calling out the leader of the enemy force. It felt like victory. He had fought hard to retain control of the response to the xenomorph incursion. He’d had to see off challengers from every branch of the military, and from some of the weirder, more obscure reaches of the national security state, but here was sweet vindication at last. He might not have been able to cut these creatures open and break them down into their component parts like Emmeline, but that didn’t mean he could not understand them.

  A slow smile crept across his face as he watched the formalized confrontation play out on the screen. He was not even surprised when Hooper launched himself at a number of creatures other than the BattleMaster. Compton had seen this time and again as well. He was proving himself a worthy challenger. The female sysop started in surprise when Hooper appeared to vanish, half a second before a couple of monsters violently disassembled themselves for no apparent reason. But Compton did not. He had no idea how the man was doing that, but he had already seen him do this once and thus it made sense he would do it again.

  He became aware that everyone in the command unit was now watching the contest between Hooper and the leader of the Horde. The nearest operators were watching his screen, and the others had dialed in on the feed.

  “What the hell is that?” one of them asked.

  From the tone of his voice he was obviously still processing the freakish speed with which Hooper seemed able to move. It looked less like acceleration, or even hyper acceleration than it did some sort of quantum effect, as though he was slipping in and out of normal time. Weird, thought Compton. They were going to have to get some physicists in on this. But not just yet. What was happening right now was something very old. Something pre-technological.

  “It’s a contest of champions,” Compton explained, answering a question he hadn’t been asked. “Mister Hooper appears to have challenged their leader to a duel.”

  General incredulity followed, but not at Compton’s reading of the situation. It was rather more that nobody imagined Hooper could survive it, not after seeing what happened to a whole platoon of marines armed with heavy weaponry.

  Compton scratched at his beard, pondering the confrontation.

  “We know these things are pre-industrial, possibly even preliterate,” he said, enjoying the opportunity for a little impromptu lecture. After all he had missed out on his TED Talk. “It makes sense that they would have been shocked, and possibly even awed,” he quipped, “by running into modern weaponry. But this,” he gestured at the screen, “this they would understand. I will give Hooper that much. He has a natural feel for barbarian manners.”

  The two champions had begun the death match. Compton was certain it would be a fight to the death. The monster was swinging at Hooper with a sword that looked as big as a telegraph pole, while his human opponent parried and blocked and hit back with his own weapon. Compton had come to think of it as the graviton hammer. They smashed at each other with insensate violence, and it did not seem as though Hooper would survive. The BattleMaster was just too big and too strong. It was absorbing a lot of damage, to be sure, but it could absorb the sort of kinetic energy that would destroy a human being. Or possibly even an Abrams tank.

  Compton had seen enough. He absented himself from the workstation, allowing one of the systems operators to take his place while he moved back to his original screen which still ran commercial newsfeeds. Most of these had pulled in tight on the contest as well, but a couple still carried wider angle imagery. He could see the monsters were closely grouped now as they attended to the match.

  He took out his phone and called Kirkpatrick. The air force general answered on the first ring.

  “It’s me, Compton.”

  “I know. You’re watching this too, right?”

  “I imagine the whole world is watching it,” Compton said. “But we need to move as soon as it’s done.”

  He could sense Kirkpatrick dragging his attention away from whatever screen he was watching. His voice changed, became more focused.

  “The enemy have ceased their attack.”

  “For now,” Compton conceded. “And I suspect that if Hooper won they might disengage completely. He’s probably negotiated a withdrawal. But that’s not relevant.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’ll be back. And he won’t always be there to provide gladiatorial services.”

  “You have a recommendation?”

  “I do. No matter what the outcome of this singular contest, I would recommend engaging the hostiles with all available force. Destroy them. A few will probably escape, but that serves our purposes too. They can carry the message back with them.”

  Kirkpatrick did not reply immediately, and when he did his voice sounded less than certain.

  “Professor, I’m not an expert like you. But somebody in New Orleans appears to have negotiated a ceasefire. I understand and acknowledge that it hasn’t completely ended the fighting. This man Hooper and that ugly junkyard dog he’s pounding on are still at it. But a ceasefire is a ceasefire.”

  Compton almost laughed.

  “Ceasefires are an acknowledgement of weakness. You know that, General. We negotiate a ceasefire because we need to. We negotiated one here because we needed to. Without it we could not employ your tactical assets. They would have killed more people than they saved. That’s no longer the case. We don’t need the ceasefire. We need to make these things understand that they cannot fuck with us. That we are not their complimentary snack.”

  “Professor Compton, I don’t necessarily disagree with your analysis, but it’s not the only analysis. OSTP is the coordinating agency for our response…”

  For now, was the implied threat.

  “…But yours is not the only agency responding and advising.”

  Compton narrowed his eyes. He was certain that Kirkpatrick was talking to him on a speakerphone. His voice sounded slightly hollow and removed. He was probably sitting in a room with half-a-dozen power players so far up the org-chart you couldn’t see them. Compton speculated feverishly about who else was whispering sweet nothings into the ears of the president and the joint chiefs of staff. CIA? Echelon? Some private contractors? He couldn’t know for sure, but he didn’t doubt that they were all scratching at Kirkpatrick’s door.

  “We don’t know much of anything about this new threat,” the general continued. “We don’t know their order of battle, their production base, what sort of resources they could mobilize against us. Sending a message is important and it might even preclude further hostilities. But if there are to be negotiations with these things, we will need a base level of trust, will we not?”

  Compton nodded, but not because he agreed with the man. He had simply been anticipating this line of argument.

  “Trust is important, General,” he said. “I’ll give you that. But as you would know, in dealing with some cultures, trust is a lot less important than fear. With enough fear, you don’t need trust.”

  Kirkpatrick did not repl
y for at least two seconds. Long enough that Compton checked his phone to see if he still had the connection. He did. The general’s voice crackled out of the tiny speaker.

  “Okay,” he said, as Compton returned the phone to his ear. “National command authority concurs. The gunships are weapons-hot and will engage on your command.”

  “Thank you,” Compton replied, not bothered to mask his relief. He hung up and returned to the small cluster of operators watching the fight between Hooper and the Hunn.

  The gunships opened up four minutes later.

  EPILOGUE

  In deference to Emmeline, they didn’t gather at Hooper’s bedside in the naval hospital. He was asleep anyway, and she decreed that until they knew more about his radically altered physiology, it would be best to let his body repair itself. That seemed to involve lots of eating and sleeping. She occasionally looked at the computer screen in the meeting room that had been set aside for them, not quite believing what had happened these last few days. Hooper did not stir, but sometimes he did snore. They heard it through the speakers.

  “I don’t know how we can expect to control him,” said Compton. The Special Programs director was still flush with satisfaction from his victory in New Orleans. Not a minor tactical win over a foe which had already surrendered, mind you. No, Compton was celebrating the major bureaucratic struggle he had won to maintain Special Programs as the coordinating agency for the whole-of-government response to the Horde. He’d even had a phone call from the president to thank him and to confirm the role.

  “We can’t control him,” Michael answered. “That would be like trying to control a twister or a solar flare. I think he’s a natural, or I guess an unnatural phenomenon of some sort.”

  “And an asshole,” Compton added.

  “Pretty much so,” Heath sighed.

  “But it looks like he’s our asshole now,” Compton joked. Or Emmeline assumed it was a joke. He was smiling, and he rarely did that unless he was very pleased with himself or making a joke.