Page 8 of A Very Monstrous Desire

“In the shop.” Theo shrugged and looked around the woods. “Or nearby. I don’t know. I didn’t see it. It was…a flash maybe, in my peripheral vision, but there was definitely something there.”

“The queen?”

“Not unless the muncher queens are like seven foot?”

“They’re not,” Dimitri said just as Joel demanded, “You didn’t want to mention this before, mate?”

“And when was I supposed to do that?” Theo asked. “When we were running for our lives from munching monsters who shouldn’t have been there? Should I have mentioned it then?”

Joel scowled. “Could it have been one of us? A human, I mean? Someone who avoided the evacuation order?”

“No,” Theo said. “I think…I think there was a shimmer.”

“A shimmer…” Did Joel actually growl? “That means something from the other dimension which means we’ve no choice but to go and find out what!”

“What’s the plan?” Gill asked.

“Plan?” He looked at her as if she’d asked something ridiculous. “Simple. We go back to the shop, we kill those fuckers, and whatever the hell it was that Theo saw.”

“But…”

“That is why we’re here.”

“Yeah…I guess…” Gill said.

“We were taken by surprise is all, such a close space, and they weren’t meant to be there,” Joel continued.

“They were also very aggressive,” Dimitri said, interrupting Joel’s speech which was either supposed to motivate or reassure them given that their first engagement had gone, well…badly Theo supposed. “More so than I expected.”

“No, they’re always like that,” Joel said with a shrug. “Sometimes worse to be honest.”

“So this is their usual approach?” Theo asked. He had wanted to say M.O. but he didn’t yet feel that he had the army gravitas to pull it off. “Attack, attack, and attack again?”

“Yeah,” Joel said. “It is.” He paused for a moment. “And maybe it’s a good thing that you’ve had a small taste of it in advance. You know what you’re up against now!” He pulled a phone from one of the many pockets on his cargo pants. “I need to update the other team leaders. I mean, if there’s a group like this here, who’s to say there isn’t one somewhere else? I tell you what, it’s a bloody good job they’ve insisted on dropping us so far out! No risk of them escaping through the barrier!”

He wandered over to a large oak tree and opened his phone. It was a flip phone, nineties style, mainly because proper smart phones didn’t work inside the infestation zones as the vibrations of the containment field affected them.

“There was definitely something else there, Julia,” Theo said as she joined him to look out onto the surrounding fields. She had divested herself of her army jumper before they’d even entered the shop and was stood now in a t-shirt and tight-fitting Barbour gilet that was blatantly not army issue. Her arms were covered in goose bumps. She must have been freezing. Theo had maintained a steady pace on the run to the woods and remained in his jumper, though admittedly he was sweating a bit. He wondered if there was purple goo on him anywhere and decided he would rather not know. He only had one change of clothes in his backpack, and he was saving them for when things got really disgusting.

“What do you think it was?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I barely saw it?—”

“Then—”

“But I did see something.” He paused. “And it had a shimmer. What else can it be but another monster? Maybe that’s why there are munchers here? Maybe they came through with another monster from their dimension? I mean, think about it, Julia, they must interact with other monsters there in some way?”

“They don’t come through without a queen though,” Julia said.

“Not that we know of.”

Theo looked over at Joel who was speaking rapidly into the phone, gesturing as he did so but smiling at the same time. He had been shaping up to be a good team lead and had this been a regular mission Theo would be absolutely confident in his abilities, but suddenly this wasn’t looking like a normal assignment at all, and smile or not Joel was obviously concerned.

“You’d think they’d know more about this stuff,” he said after a moment.

“How do you know they don’t?”

“Why haven’t they told us?”

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