Enjoy the Silence

I knew we were close. My partner and I, we were so, so close.

No, I mean we were about to accomplish our goal, not that we were – you know.

Anyway.

The room was pitch dark, and infrared goggles would do no good here. We lit up like two nuclear suns, sure, but what else was in there with us? Did they emit like us? Could they see us?

Our mics had long been cut off. Too far underground, too many battles between here and the way out. Sunlight was a distant memory. Topside was a dream.

We knew the chances of us getting out of here alive were in the slim-to-none category. We'd volunteered for this “festive swaree,” as my partner would say. We knew all too well. We'd seen the victims. Taking out this motherplucking scumsucker would be payment enough. Our kids would have one less monster stalking their nightmares.

The swearing? Our boss really doesn't like potty mouths. What we do for a living, the danger we're always in, and this is the hill he chooses to die on? Whatever.

But, maybe the goggles would help anyway? We went broadband, just in case. Monster hunting was such a new science, and it's not like we had any captured to experiment on. We had air filters in our helmets for a reason – lost a few good researchers the hard way. Never wanna see that again!

Our guns are integrated with the armor. Easier to carry the heavy hardware, and it forms its own protection. Of a sort. Keeps the hands free, which is, um, handy sometimes.

One last room. Silent as a tomb. Irony.

He goes left, I go right. It's what we always do. It'll get us killed one day, the others say.

Nothing rose up to to fight, which was suspicious. I gestured, he nodded, and we started sweeping to clear the room. See, the nice part about guns that we don't have to swing around to point, is that a quick movement can line it up on a target. In our job, everything in front of us is a target. Every. Thing.

So, that baby-looking thing? Cap it – yep, see, babies don't have tentacles in their insides. Starving little girl? Black ooze when we take it out, and avoid the puddle it leaves as much as possible. Get new shoes after the job's over, too. Victim-looking thing being held by big nastiness? Shoot through the “victim,” and watch both writhe and shrivel like flesh-and-blood humans don't. If it looks human this far in, it's just meant to distract you. And our stuff's blessed by every priest and prophet and mystic we can find. Blessed bullets, blessed materials, holy oil and gunpowder and the purest crystals for the lasers on the big cannons. The things still don't like light, so we concentrate it and get 'em where it hurts. Random digital flashes have been known to slow some of them down. I've been prayed over so many times I should glow twice as much as I do from heat signature or random LED lights.

Speaking of, I saw my partner's head jerk, and got one trying to sneak up on my blind side. Hard to do that, when our visors show wraparound. And I could see something slithering towards his flank, and my hand gun nailed it. He got the skittering things that tried to follow their leader. I toasted something behind both of us.

I suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to be closer to him. The urge was strong – safety in numbers, right? Literally back-to-back to protect each other? Or was it a trap? I twisted my wrist, and got a wave-off, so I eased away to get a bit more distance instead. We must be very close, to get that reaction.

The room was dull in our sensor-laden vision. Boxes and piles of stuff or whatever left enough of a differential signature that we could avoid them. The moving things gave off dark “blues” and “purples” in false color, and we utilized near-invisible lasers and hollow-point bullets filled with holy oil and hand guns with silver-coated bullets alternating with anointed lead. Because we usually never know what we'll be up against, so we bring it all. There was even canvas over our armor, dipped in holy water right before we put it on and went in.

And it was a dance. We were following a pattern, a deadly samba of lethal beauty, where we each knew where the other would be at all times. Any other movement, at any other temperature, was eliminated. Disruptive patterns had no place in our dance.

Even through the partial filters, I could smell my fear. And his. Under it, was mustiness, and death, and decay. The fear was strongest. Being close to winning, for us, was losing. And the desire to live was a reek neither could escape. The scent is quite close to sex, the basic will to live and procreate. The fact that we'd both whelped our puppies long ago and left them behind when we entered training, for their own safety... It meant nothing, down here. Future and life were as far away as love, light, warmth. But despair? Nah. Our kids would sleep better in a world with less things in it that would kill them in nasty fashions, and feed on their emotions before feeding on their corpses. We knew this job didn't come with retirement benefits.

And still we followed each others' signals, each others' body movements, popping off the nasties with efficient dispatch. Occasional glances towards the ceiling got those creepers too.

Until the coffin-size box in front of me exploded outward.

I didn't hesitate, I just poured firepower into that space. None of the flinders got through my armor, of course, and we'd been conditioned since early training - never flinch.

It was awful, of course. I think it used to be human, though the flesh had long since atrophied. Un-dead? Vampire? Something in between? Some kind of revenant. And powerful, to draw so many other monsters to itself to protect it. That's a lot of killing they'd done, to “survive” for so long.

My partner was also dropping everything he had into this thing, and pieces were separating, and though they tried to re-form, you could see the process slowing down. We even have flamethrowers in this getup, and I waved and shook my fist and made flicking motions. Mine was damaged; he'd have to do it, if he could.

His was okay, and he sprayed that sucker down and lit some kind of incendiary.

We knew we'd have breathing problems. His oxygen mask had been damaged near the beginning, and both of us were now effectively blind with the fire consuming the whatever-it-was. Neither of us wanted to take off our helmets, and I wasn't sure my face shield would work after I took a head shot some time – a lifetime – ago. Some almost-forgotten rooms ago. I grabbed an arm and tugged, and we made our way away from the roar. Great, our audio worked just perfectly, thanks irony gods. You know that noise, those hiss-pop-sizzles, a bonfire makes? Now put a slab of rotting meat in it. Just joyous, let me tell you. If the dead could scream, this was what it would sound like.

We tried to make our way to the door. I thought I knew where it was, but things were burning, and my head felt fuzzy. My partner shook my arm, pointed, and oh yeah, there was the door. We needed to get somewhere where we could breathe without making us vulnerable.

Things were burning. Things were falling.

Some hit him, some hit me. And we were crawling, crawling, and we just wanted to live. We wanted away from monsters, and away from awful stenches, and towards sunlight. And rest. So dratted tired, darn our boss drilling these stupid rules against swearing into our heads...

My arm wasn't working right. His leg wasn't doing much better, I could see that.

But we made it to the door, slid outside. It was dark, and I could see better.

Which way was out?

I got my partner to his feet, and he leaned on my bad shoulder as we stumbled away.

Three rooms later, we took a small breather. I was about to open my mouth to ask if we were clear, when I saw movement behind him. I pushed him to the side, hit the trigger-

Arm wasn't working. A short burst of bullets, then nothing. Gun was damaged.

Craaaaaap.

A second boss monster? Well, that explained a lot. It was hiding, likely to get away while we were busy with the other one. And we'd be thinking the job was done, not realizing it was still out there.

Partner rolled and came up, guns blazing, but I felt my arm separate where the thing ripped it off. It didn't hurt, so I didn't scream. But I was falling, falling, and hit the floor.

I saw my partner's reaction, and he yanked his secret weapon off its chest mount. I nodded. It was okay, everything would be okay.

And he pulled the pin on that badass land mine, and threw it at the whatever-it-was, standing there still holding my arm.

The explosion was glorious. And deafening, even through the helmet, since we were basically on top of it.

I felt the silent push of air. How fast does it move, something like eight hundred miles an hour? Yeah, I knew I was dying, and instead of thinking of my loved ones and colleagues, I'm trying to pull obscure science facts out of my butt.

We were slammed against a wall.

I floated.

My partner floated.

We were beyond pain.

But we were still there.

This thing didn't scream either, not that we could have heard it, since I'm sure our eardrums were busted with the rest of us. I couldn't see, really, but I could “feel” its presence fade.

Everything was burning.

Eventually, the fire died, faded.

We didn't. Why?

Color and light faded. It got quiet.

And under the ash, I could see a tiny thread of black something creeping towards me.

Dangit!

What weapons? Those were for bodies, which we didn't have anymore! I could feel my partner still aside of me, still ready to do – what?

The thread struck, where I thought my chest might have been.

It pierced.

I pushed back somehow, maybe pure willpower? It recoiled, and the thread dissolved into air.

But I felt changed, all the same.

I could feel myself trying to create a new body. Is this how the monsters procreated? I tried getting away from my partner, to keep him from getting caught too, but he grabbed ahold anyway. I could feel him wanting to stay with me, fight this whatever-it-was with me. Partners to the end, right? But didn't the end already happen?

There was all this ash lying around. I found myself assembling it, somehow, into something that could move.

Oh, it was wrapping both of us. My partner wasn't letting go, so he got wrapped in it, too. One body for two persons; that could get a bit crowded.

But making this shell out of carbon without all the hydrocarbon chains still attached made for some interesting chemistry. We didn't have stomach, lungs, heart. No organs. Tentacles were much easier to make than hands and arms, and forget muscles, that needed an internal structure we didn't have and didn't want anymore. Complicated and fiddly and high maintenance. But along with ditching the organs, we ditched the incessant hunger that went with it.

Not a monster, then. More like a robot. I wanted to maintain a body, sure, but I could do so out of dust and other debris. The less life involved, the better.

No eyes, no ears, no mouth. But we could perceive, all the same. Somehow.

We were one. We were still us.

We could move, gliding over surfaces, moving away from the destruction we created. I was looking for a way out of this gray-on-dark world. I wanted to perceive light again, feel it on my nonexistent skin. Occasionally we'd find something that had survived our incursion, and we eliminated it. Encasing, smothering, breaking the organic bonds and leaving inorganics that couldn't recombine.

We realized we'd become the ultimate monster killers.

We could “see” a final doorway.

We could drop the carbon and be completely invisible, and we did so. We'd left people behind, guarding the door to the underground building we'd fought and died in. We didn't want them targeting us instead. We “saw” them milling around, mourning, deciding what to do. Trying to figure out if there was anything to recover, or just seal it all off for safety. Making the decision to take the whole thing apart piecemeal and make sure nothing would ever come out ever again.

We were already out, so we didn't mind.

We drifted away. We were untraceable.

We thought we'd hitch a ride back to our former headquarters. It would be fun to go out with our colleagues, be an extra weapon to cover their backs.

We wondered what it would be like to bond to their armor.

We were each other. We had no need to talk things out. We were us, and we knew what we wanted.

We enjoyed the silence.

We're really close, my partner and I. We are.