Chapter 31

Thirty-One

Baku had mapped out every part of the army base weeks ago. It was important he told Theo to know where everything and everyone was and he'd spent some time creating little rips here and there, looking through, recording it all, and then had eventually found Theo.

He wasn't looking for him, he was looking for any human who could help him, and though Baku was clearly not the type to boast about his accomplishments it had been his idea to try the serum on a human.

"Our biology is so similar," he said. "But just different enough…"

Had he told the rest of his people what he was up to? Yes and no. The monsters didn't have a system of government in the same way the countries on Theo's Earth did, but the success of their mission had been reported along with their plans to continue on to the other infestations.

"Don't you have to get someone's permission?" Theo asked.

"No," the monster said. "But we let one another know if we disagree with a course of action and often that is enough to sway a person in another direction. We all work towards the good of the whole though, Theo." He paused. "Rarely is there a problem." Another pause. "You also have not requested permission either."

"Because they won't give it!" Theo said. "They'll lock me in a lab and extract the serum and then do fuck knows what with it!"

The monster nodded at that, and Theo sighed. They had discussed the serum in detail in the days leading up to their incursion into the army barracks. Baku had taken Theo through all the data on the experiments and the outcomes. Their computers worked almost the same way as Theo's did, though theirs had some quantum components which Theo knew his government would pant to get their hands on. The upshot was that the serum could mimic almost anything if you aligned it to its dimensional vibrations. The munching monsters just happened to be their target.

"We must be cautious though," the monster had said. "It is still experimental. We must monitor ourselves very carefully in between doses."

Theo had thought long and hard about the possibility of growing an extra couple of eyes or his skin starting to glisten, or at least that being his perception of the whole thing, and he remained resolved.

They were making a difference here.

Him and the monster.

They were saving lives.

Theo was thinking about that as they readied themselves to slip through the freshly created rip into the army base. Of the improbability of it all. Of him, Theo Anderson, data scientist, running club champion, sometimes board game champion too, being a bit of a hero. It made him smile. It made him laugh. The fact that he also had a monstrous lover as well was just the icing on the impossible cake.

The rip led them into the bathroom of one of the female barracks, Julia and Gill's in fact. They came out of it straight into a toilet cubicle. It was almost poetic. After all, Theo had ended up in the other universe the same way!

"Carefully," the monster said as they stepped out.

He was a little concerned, he had said earlier, that the walls between the dimensions here were weak from how many times he had ripped and ripped but he'd closed every rip after himself, so Theo was choosing to believe the army base was fine.

They opened the door of the bathroom slowly and looked out into the room proper. It was quiet at this time of morning and not least Theo knew because there would be a massive clean up operation on the beach. There were thousands and thousands of munching monster bodies to remove, not to mention all of the egg sacs.

Julia was not on deployment though. She was on a six-hour break before being shipped off to her next posting. They had peeked through into her barracks just an hour ago to discover that. She had been sat on her bed, frowning at her tablet and whoever she was talking to on it. She was sat there now, flicking through a book, and Theo took a very deep breath before he pushed the door open and stepped into the room. The monster stayed behind, as they had agreed, waiting in the bathroom.

Julia jumped up the moment she saw him and grabbed her gun.

"Julia, no!" Theo shouted.

She pointed the gun at him. Baku growled. Theo gestured for him to stay where he was.

"Julia, no," Theo said again. "It's me. It's Theo."

She gasped and took a tiny step forward. "What…"

"Look at me," Theo added. "Not the purple. I know the purple is weird. But at me, at my features, you recognise them, right?"

Julia did look at him. Eyes roving over his face, but she did not lower her gun.

"What are you?" she eventually demanded.

"I'm Theo," he said. "Just Theo. The man who saved your ass in the village shop."

"Theo…" she breathed. "Is that actually you?"

He nodded. "Hi, Julia."

She lowered her gun slightly. "You're purple."

"Yeah, I know."

"Why are you purple?" she demanded.

"It's complicated."

"Is it something to do with your capture by the munching monsters?"

Theo started. "Why would you think that?"

She did lower her gun then and took a few steps towards him. "Gill and Dimitri saw you being pulled into the other dimension. Gill had gone to find another of those watermelon-flavoured isotonics. She saw you in the forest only you were in the toilet?"

"Yes, I was taken there, but not by a munching monster," Theo said, and then quickly, he told Julia everything that had happened, from the very beginning to the very end, though he left out the sex, as she didn't need to know all of that.

"So you stopped the infestation?" she asked when he was done and her gun was back on the bed now and quickly she went and locked the door to the barracks.

"Yes."

"Theo…that is amazing. The number of lives you will have saved." She shook her head. "It was madness down there, like nothing I imagined. Every time we shot one, they just bred more and replaced it. We couldn't keep up."

Theo described the egg sacs to her, and she gagged slightly. "That's disgusting."

"Yeah…the smell…" Theo sighed. "I'm going to stop them all, Julia."

"And close the rips?"

"As many as we can but you know it is a cascade effect now. We can close them, but more will appear."

She nodded, almost sadly. "I know."

"We're going to do our best though," Theo added. "Any we find, we'll close."

Julia shook her head, but she wasn't denying what Theo was up to, she was just impressed by it. That made Theo feel good. He had wanted Julia's approval from the start. Perhaps it was because she had volunteered, and he had been conscripted. Or maybe it was just that even then, subconsciously, he had known this was what he was supposed to be doing and Julia had seemed to sense that too.

"The monster who took you..." she began.

"He's close by," Theo said quickly.

"He's a person?"

"Yes."

"So there are people in the other world." Julia shook her head again. "I knew it. They kept saying there wasn't, that it was just a world of monsters, but of course there would be people."

Theo paused. "Do you want me to call him over?"

Julia took a slight step back towards her gun, but Theo chose to ignore that. "Okay…"

Baku stepped out from the bathroom. Perhaps it was just that he was in human surroundings, but it struck Theo all over again just how big his monster really was. Theo had gotten used to it in the past weeks, but Baku really was massive, so heavily muscled, and so angry looking, though he was anything but. That, along with his purpleness, his pointed ears, and his silver hair, it all made him look like a monster.

"Oh my god," Julia gasped when she saw him. "You're purple as well. Is everyone in your world purple?"

"No."

She gaped at the very human word leaving his very not-human mouth.

"You're also a human."

Baku growled.

Julia grinned. "Listen to that! He growled!"

"He's not a human," Theo said quickly.

"He looks it. He sounds it. He's speaking our language!"

"Life on our worlds is closely aligned," Theo said, and he felt almost like some kind of inter-dimensional ambassador when he said that. It was like he was living in an episode of Stargate, Theo realised, and he was pleased by the thought.

Julia stepped forwards, circling round Baku, considering every detail of him. "Not human? Uh huh."

She started asking questions.

How many of them were there?

Where did they live?

How long did they live for?

What was their tech like?

Were there aliens in their world, like actual aliens from other planets?

Did they know if there was an afterlife?

Question after question and many similar to what Theo himself had asked over the past few days. Baku answered them all in quick, clipped answers. He explained their society, their lifespans—similar to a human's—that they had never met aliens, and that they believed in an afterlife but that it was not like what humans imagined.

Theo didn't need to imagine it. He remembered the space between worlds. The familiarity of it. The feeling that he had been there before and would return there again.

"Julia," he eventually said as she started to ask about their breeding practices. "I wanted to make sure everyone is okay. The squad, I mean."

"They're fine," Julia replied, waving a hand as she continued to run her gaze up and down Baku. "We all got through the battle okay. Though Joel…"

"What?"

"He left not long after the clean up on the beach. Just…left."

"Where did he go?" Theo asked.

She shrugged. "I don't know."

"He's army proper. He wouldn't dessert."

"No. He probably wouldn't."

They were both silent as they considered that. Had Joel met a monster of his own? Something that had slipped through one of the rips? Theo hoped it was not the rip to the new world. After all, they had no idea what or who that might hold.

"Where are they posting you next?" Theo asked after a moment.

"I think down to Cornwall," Julia replied.

"Then I might see you there?"

"I hope so, Theo," she replied. "Maybe I could help."

Theo remembered Baku saying that Julia's vibrations would also work with the serum and for a moment he was tempted to ask her to come with them, but they didn't know the long-term side effects yet, and their upcoming missions were going to be horribly dangerous, and there were still rages in the other dimension... So instead, Theo reached out and he pulled Julia into his purple arms.

"Take care, Julia," he said softly.

She hugged him back. "You too, Theo."

One more hug and then they broke apart. Theo gestured to the bathroom where she followed them in. She spotted the rip immediately and gasped at it.

"You really can open and close them?" she said, and it was not a question as they had all known that cubicle three did not have an inter-dimensional rip before now. Julia clapped her hands together. "You know, Theo," she said. "I had a good feeling about you from the very start. I'm happy to be proved right."

"This isn't the last time we'll see each other," he said.

"No, it's not."

She looked over at Baku who was hovering protectively behind Theo next to the rip. Though Theo was not aware of it, Julia could count the number of lovers she'd had on both hands and then need a few more hands to get to the very end, so she was very familiar with the sort of look stamped on Theo's monster's face. That they were fucking was not in question. That Theo was happy wasn't either.

And was it weird? Yes.

Did it make any sense? No.

But Julia just shrugged because that was what happened when rips started appearing between dimensions and monsters came out of nowhere and fell for humans. And besides, she hoped that there might be an adventure like Theo's in her future!

"Take care of him," she said.

And the monster nodded, and Julia was in no doubt at all that he would, and she watched them as they entered the rip into the other world, and carried on watching as it closed, and her friend began his new life in his new world with his monster.