A Protocol for Monsters: Dave vs the Monsters Read online

  A PROTOCOL FOR MONSTERS

  DAVE VS. THE MONSTERS

  by

  JOHN BIRMINGHAM

  Dave vs. the Monsters

  Novels

  Emergence

  Resistance

  Ascendance

  Novellas

  A Protocol for Monsters

  Soul Full of Guns

  A Protocol for Monsters is a companion volume to Emergence: Dave vs the Monsters.

  I don’t want to do myself out of a sale, but it won’t be nearly as much fun if you haven’t read Emergence first.

  You can find them in all flavours at jbsbookshelf.com

  PROLOGUE

  “Thick head!” Emmeline muttered as she leaned into the job. The bone saw blade whined as it chewed through the top of the xenomorph’s skull. A few of the others laughed nervously. It wasn’t a particularly funny joke and Emmeline was not an especially funny person, but they needed the relief. She had already burned through one large blade on the heavy-duty autopsy saw. This thing really did have a remarkably thick skull. Thick enough that she wondered how much room could be left inside for the brainpan, especially given how much of its head was taken up by an outsized mouth and hundreds of needle-like teeth. All of them clotted with human flesh.

  The noise of the bone saw came through the radio interface of her biohazard suit as an unpleasant whine, almost a hot scream.

  Professor Emmeline Ashbury set her features in stone as the last of the resistance gave way and the heavy bowl of bone came loose. She grunted in relief. Her arms were growing tired and shaky. She would have to get one of the others to break open the chest cavity.

  “Compton should be here,” said Metcalf.

  “Professor Compton is not here because Professor Compton gets a little wobbly spooning dog food out of a can,” said Emmeline as she pried off the top of the creature’s skull. “Face-planting into my post-mortem examination is not the best use of his time.”

  The heavy skull cap came away with a sticky pulling sound and revealed a bizarre cranial cluster that looked like an upside-down stew of brainstem and cerebellum. Or perhaps cerebella? Given the multiple nodules she could already see.

  “Jesus, that looks like spaghetti and meatballs,” said Wally Hicks.

  “No. You’re wrong, Wally,” Emmeline said. “More like tagliatelle con spinaci and meatballs. Or maybe cervelli agnelli.”

  There was a pause while the junior staff waited for her to translate the obscure reference. Probably wetting themselves in fear of being called on to explain.

  “Lambs brains,” Emmeline said. “See?” She snipped one of the structures free of the tubing that connected it to the other cerebella and popped the tiny lump of grey matter into a stainless steel tray.

  “It’s not really grey matter,” she added, for the benefit of the video recorder. “More greenish and purple I’d say. At any rate, first biopsy, Master Hicks.”

  The helmet of Wally’s biohazard suit dipped forward in acknowledgement and he carried the tray away to cold storage. They would take a small cut of the tissue to examine here on the Longreach with the equipment the military had flown out for them, but the real work would begin back on the mainland when the bodies of the xenomorphs arrived at Area 7.

  The rest of the team leaned in over the corpse to get a better look at the cerebral mass as Emmeline extracted it from the skull. The thing’s eyes stared lifeless and milky at the theatre lights. There were two large black orbs, but at least another eight smaller eyeballs between and around them, not unlike that of a spider. With so much visual data to process, Emmeline had expected to see enlarged occipital lobes, but there were no lobes of any kind. No single cerebrum at all.

  “Jesus, that’s grotesque,” said Metcalf. “It’s nothing like the Grey’s.”

  “No reason why it should be,” Emmeline said patiently. “We have no idea yet where these creatures originated or how they got here. But their technologies aren’t Grey.”

  “More like fucking Dark Ages,” came Metcalf’s reply inside her helmet. His breathing sounded harsh in the helmet speakers and she could see his features were shiny with sweat behind the faceplate. The CIA man was not new to this sort of operation. He was familiar with extremophile possibilities. But, like the rest of them, he’d been shocked at what they’d found on the oil rig. And, like all of them, he knew there’d be no sweeping this one under the rug. This wasn’t a lone spaceship, its crew cold and dead for thousands of years, crashing into the desert hundreds of miles from the nearest speck of civilization.

  There were witnesses, over a hundred of whom had not been eaten by…whatever this thing was. They would already be out there telling their stories. Selling their phone cam images and videos.

  The Office would have to move quickly. Not to contain this, or even to control it, but rather to control the fear and confusion that would spread from it like a contagion. Emmeline knew all about containing fear and confusion.

  “Abdomen next,” she announced.

  “Scalpel?” said Cadence Ramsay, the microbiologist who’d joined the Office from the European Space Agency just three months ago.

  “I don’t think so, Cady,” said Emmeline. “Not if its scalp is any guide. I think we might need a bayonet from one of those marines out by the door. A sharp one.”

  “Way ahead of you, Professor,” Jack Metcalf said, turning around to the second stainless steel trolley and producing a long, evil-looking autopsy knife—large, heavy, single-edged—a descendant of the amputation or “capital” knives used by surgeons in the old days.

  “I see you were a boy scout before you became a licensed killer, Mr Metcalf. Think you’re up to doing the Y-incision?” she asked. “I’m afraid I need a few minutes to get my strength back after sawing through its thick skull.”

  “Not a problem, Prof.”

  Metcalf set to the task of cutting a deep Y into the upper torso, so that they might peel away the skin, but like Emmeline he found the going tough.

  “It’s like leather,” he said, and the sound of his voice in her helmet speakers told Emmeline he was gritting his teeth. “Really. Shitty. Leather.”

  “Osteoderms,” Emmeline explained.

  The hard little nuggets of bone were embedded in the thousands of scales which seemed to lie just under the leathery carapace of the xenomorph’s outer hide.

  “It’s like it has armor under its armor,” said Wally.

  The creature’s hide seemed to be inked with some form of display. Tattoos, she thought. It was also covered in weeping sores and pustules, which gave way easily before the blade, erupting with a greenish yellow discharge. Other blemishes, which looked like giant warts, proved so tough that Metcalf was eventually forced to cut around them. It took him a good few minutes to make the whole incision and when they carefully peeled back the skin she could see why. The dermis was up to an inch thick in places and as tough as old boot leather, save for those areas weakened by lesions and suppurating ulcers. There were enough of these that the creature’s hide presented more as a patchwork than a wholly intact dermis.

  Metcalf and Hicks carefully pulled back the skin to reveal a bone cage. It came apart twice as patches tore off along the edge of larger ulcerated lesions.

  Beneath that, it was not like a human rib cage, with individual ribs held together by muscle and fiber. Instead, the creature’s torso, and presumably its vital innards, were protected by a solid fibrous mass of something like cartilage.

  “I think we’re going to need a very large pair of bone shears,” Emmeline mused.

  “Or a chainsaw,” said Metcalf. His voice was flat. She did not think he was
joking, but she could never really trust her own judgment in such things.

  Emmeline checked the large clock on the opposite wall: 19.43 hours.

  “Let’s just try the big shears first.”

  “Okay, I’ll grab them,” Wally offered.

  They had two more corpses of this type to examine. And the enormous one on the gurney in the hallway outside. It was obviously a different species. Possibly even from another genus or family. She would come at it last, learning what she could from the smaller creatures first. This was going to be a very long day. It had not turned out at all as she had expected.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Twelve hours earlier Emmeline Ashbury had been worried about the cats. They weren’t even her cats, but that did not stop her from worrying. Her roommate, Elana, was a borderline crazy cat lady who insisted that the internationally recognized criterion for cat craziness was the keeping of at least seven cats at one time. Elana had three, giving her a four cat buffer, but the oldest of her moggies were a pair of aged siblings who were very obviously nearing the end of their nine lives. They could no longer jump up onto her bed by themselves. Their legs trembled when they climbed the stairs of the apartment, the top two floors of a lovely four-story rowhouse on C Street.

  Emmeline’s flatmate owned the whole property, living in the apartment upstairs, and separately subleasing the lower floors to pay the mortgage, which was not large. She had inherited a pile from a Greek aunt who had divorced well. Twice. Em did not especially like the cats. She thought all of their kind a faithless, self-centered lot. Like the worst sort of bad boyfriend. Either spraying their scent everywhere or lying around, expecting to be fed and complaining when they weren’t. But Elana was an excellent roommate and in Emmeline’s hard-won experience good roommates were even more difficult to source than good boyfriends, who were all but impossible. Listing Elana Mitchell’s many advantages, she was ridiculously well-educated. Tick. She traveled a lot for her work, leaving Emmeline to enjoy the flat in luxurious, glorious solitude. Another tick. She had recently taken up baking as a hobby. Tick! Tick! Tick! And she had written a Master’s thesis—two degrees ago—evaluating programs to teach social skills, including the interpretation and use of romantic cues, to young adults on the autism spectrum.

  As a slightly older adult on the spectrum—only slightly older, mind you—Emmeline both approved of this, and reveled in finally having someone around who understood her, a very successful, relatively happy Englishwoman with Asperger’s Syndrome. Or relatively content. Yes, perhaps relatively content best described her at the moment. At any rate, she was a woman who liked to make lists. A woman who liked to alphabetize the bookshelves. And a woman who very definitely liked to avoid noisy entanglements.

  Hence her worry about the cats. Tobias, the ginger one, did not look at all well. His shaky front legs were even shakier than usual, as though he had developed late-stage Parkinson’s overnight. With Elana away for another two days, it would fall to Emmeline to put Tobias into the cat cage—not a serious challenge given he could not outrun her on those tiny trembling legs. It would, however, be a noisy affair, and there was the chance of entanglement as Tobias fought to stay out of the hated cage. But that was not the entanglement she was hoping to avoid.

  No, that lay in wait on the ground floor, where one of the downstairs tenants, Roger Penrose, some sort of terrible right-wing policy wonk at one of those terrible right-wing wonk houses, was lurking, ready to pounce. Three times this last week he had accosted her, asking Emmeline if she might accompany him to some terribly noisy and awful ball. She had lowered her eyes and muttered something about needing time to think about it, to sort out her calendar and wash her tights, before immediately running upstairs to die a thousand deaths. Penrose was one of those odious thrusting fellows who simply would not take no for an answer. For whatever reason, he had latched onto her. Probably because she was a little bit pretty and oh so very smart, which was as good as old money in wonk world. She knew he would not take no for an answer because in her blunt and Aspie way she had said, “Oh good heavens no,” when he had next asked her to tarry along with him.

  It was almost as though the blasted man took her refusal as a challenge. He was undoubtedly some sort of Ayn Rand loving mental case. He had actually seemed amused by the prospect of being knocked back the third time he asked. As he duly was. And yet, did this dissuade him? No, no it did not. He merely smirked that he would have her agreement or he was no man of House Penrose.

  Yes, that’s exactly how he put it.

  Emmeline could just imagine what a horror a ballroom full of flouncing muppets like Roger of House Penrose would be. She might well have hidden inside her apartment for a month to avoid it. But Tobias, meowing weakly and rubbing his head against her ankle, closed off that avenue of escape.

  She was wondering how to juggle it all when her phone rang.

  # # #

  Professor Raymond Compton was excited. Very excited. He had not been allowed to speak in an open forum for nearly five years. That had not seemed a dire imposition when he signed on as a Deputy Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. His previous outings as a public speaker had been dogged by anti-war idiots protesting his role in developing the Human Terrain System for the US military. Their idiot status was confirmed by any refusal to acknowledge that he, Compton, deserved more credit for putting an end to violence in Iraq and Afghanistan than a bunch of stupid, unwashed street mimes. But, even though his life had improved immeasurably when he no longer had to run the gauntlet of peace-mongering fools, he did miss lecturing, the sound of his own voice booming out across an adoring audience.

  Or even just a captive audience. Captivity would do fine if the audience couldn’t stretch themselves to adoration.

  He clicked through the BuzzFeed listicle, “Twenty Worst TED Talks Ever”, fighting to suppress a smirk that was in equal measure droll amusement and smug satisfaction. It wasn’t enough, as Somerset Maugham originally remarked (before Gore Vidal stole it), that he should triumph. Others must fail. And there, at number two on the list of “Twenty Worst TED Talks Ever”, was the very personification of Vidal’s apt bon mots. Professor Carole Ferriade, of the English Faculty of UC Davis, Harridan-in-Chief to the peace-monger faction which had effectively run Professor Raymond Compton out of academia.

  Her seven-minute presentation, “Whither the Dead White Male—Shriveling the Penile in Post Modern Letters”—was beaten into first place for Worst TED Talk Ever by some dress designer who packed only seven pairs of underpants for her bit on saving the planet and indentured workers in Bangladeshi garment factories by “wearing nothing new”.

  Compton did allow himself a bemused sneer at that. He had to admit the idiot fashionista was a worthy winner, even if she had done him out of the enjoyment of seeing Ferriade take the gold medal. After all, how did she imagine GAP and Benetton’s indentured Bangladeshi serfs were going to feed their enormous third world families once idiot campaigners in the West had stolen away even the meager livelihood to be had as a factory slave.

  “It is not enough that I should triumph,” he muttered to himself, smiling, “Carole fucking Ferriade must fail.”

  He would enjoy just one more play-through of her mortifying presentation before returning to the latest draft of his own sure-to-be successful talk: “Why the West Has Always Won and Always Will”.

  The Bee Gees “Stayin’ Alive” suddenly played on his phone, signaling an incoming call.

  Compton frowned at the HTC One buzzing across his desk. The screen displayed an image of a severe-looking African-American man in the tan shirt of a navy service uniform.

  Heath.

  Compton sighed and rolled his eyes.

  What does he want?

  Whatever it was, he’d better not be ringing to tell Compton his TED Talk was cancelled by reason of bullshit.

  # # #

  “I’m sorry, Professor,” Heath said. “You’re just going to have to cancel that TED T
alk.”

  “But this is bullshit!” Compton protested.

  Captain Michael Heath resisted the urge to fire an obscenity back at the civilian. It was an urge which often took him when dealing with Compton. But venting would serve no useful purpose and Professor Compton was, in the end, his boss. A pompous ass. A self-serving oxygen thief. And the deputy director of the organization for which Heath was a mere liaison officer.

  He controlled his breathing and with it his temper.

  “It is not bullshit, Professor. I am at the site and it is a genuine incursion. There are casualties. Both friendly and hostile. I have two SEAL teams searching for further hostiles, and a marine company en route to properly secure the site. I have already briefed the national security advisor and she has informed the president and invoked Protocol Blue.”

  “Oh my God,” said Compton, but not in shock or even surprise. He sounded exasperated. “Are we really going on another of Emmeline’s snipe hunts?”

  Heath breathed in and out, carefully. He didn’t have time for his usual exercise—four seconds deep and rapid inhalation; seven seconds to hold the breath; eight seconds to slowly release it—but he took a moment to inhale deeply, and sigh loudly.

  “Professor Ashbury will lead the Exploit team, yes. She is the designated hitter for Protocol Blue. We both know that. But the national security advisor wants you there too. It’s not a snipe hunt. I’m standing next to one of the damn things. It’s big, dead and all kinds of ugly.”

  Heath stood over the creature in the ruined rec-room of the oil rig, waiting for Compton to respond. A few seconds silence told him that he’d at least given the man something to mull over. Although, knowing Compton, he was probably pondering the involvement of the White House rather than the news that they had recovered an intact xenomorph specimen. More than that. That they had four whole carcasses, mostly intact.

  Except for the head of this one, Heath thought as he gently kicked the enormous corpse with the boot at the end of his artificial leg. His bionic leg, as his daughter Maddie called it.