Keeping Watch

Tremors: the Subtext #18

by Setcheti

 

Rating: FRT:MV,MP,SLC

Disclaimer:  I don’t own Tremors, because if I did the series would STILL BE ON THE AIR.

 

Malcolm Reed reached the top of the rickety-looking ladder fastened to the side of the garage and pulled himself up onto the roof.  The flat wooden platform he settled himself on had once been home to a wind turbine; he’d found the warped and flattened remains of the turbine, long since unseated by the same winds it had been placed to harness, in a rusting scrap-metal heap behind the garage.

 

Mindful of the turbine’s silent, rusty warning, Malcolm had affixed a handhold to the platform and bolted two hooks through the corrugated tin roof into the ceiling beams below.  The idea of being blown off his lookout perch didn’t appeal to him, so the instant he sat down he fastened his safety line to one of the hooks and clipped a tether attached to the AK-47 he had with him onto the other.  It wouldn’t do to have his gun blown off the roof by a sudden gust of wind either, especially if he were to need it.

 

Needing it was always a possibility, in Perfection.  Malcolm’s gray eyes scanned the valley from behind dark glasses as the hot breeze ruffled his dark hair and plucked at the loose shirt he was wearing.  The valley was hot and still, and empty as far as his eyes could see.  He unclipped a pair of binoculars from his belt and used them to look even farther than that.  Still nothing, which was both good and bad.  Good because nothing to see meant no monsters in the area, and bad because no monsters in the area meant the monsters were in some other area and therefore were not immediately killable.

 

Malcolm had decided he liked killing monsters.  The valley’s mutations weren’t sentient, and the scientists at the little research station were just as happy to study them dead as they were alive.  In fact, they seemed to prefer them dead, and in an effort to show their appreciation for that attitude Malcom and Burt tried to take the monsters down as neatly as possible.  Now that Tyler was more mobile, they’d all been putting in regular practice time on the small shooting range they’d situated near to Burt’s compound.

 

Larry had been practicing with them as well, and he was steadily improving.  Malcolm had to smile at the thought of his self-appointed protégé.  The younger man approached every new situation as a grand adventure, sometimes reminding him strikingly of…

 

He slammed down on that thought, his smile disappearing.  He didn’t want to think about where he’d come from, or the people he’d lost.  That way lay madness.  He’d think about guns, and explosives, and killing monsters.  Perhaps about the tea H…Jodi had ordered especially for him, or the tours he had booked for the next few days.  The smile made a faint reappearance.  It impressed the tourists to have Tyler riding shotgun with a high-powered rifle when they went looking for El Blanco – not to mention what it did for Tyler’s morale.  And the tourists spread the story about the ex-NASCAR driver’s near-fatal encounter with one of the Cyobactyls, which had the effect of turning public sentiment against the mutations and against the lunatic-fringe environmentalists who were still hanging about causing trouble.  Malcolm’s sensor net had caught the last caltrop-dropper in the act, though, and Homeland Security had made such an example out of him that it would probably be a while before any more of them ventured into the valley.

 

Not that Malcolm liked Homeland Security; neither did anyone else in Perfection, and neither did Twitchell.  “No oversight,” was the way their ‘assigned government overseer’ had described his feelings.  “There’s no one watching them, they just run around doing whatever the hell they want, and if you try to call them on it they’re a bunch of vindictive bastards.  The farther they stay away from this valley the happier I am.”

 

Malcolm could agree with that.  He respected Twitchell; the agent was serious about his job, about protecting the residents of the valley.  And he seemed to have found the appropriate mix of familiarity and professionalism, a balance Malcolm knew was difficult to maintain.  He had certainly served under someone who hadn’t been able to maintain it.

 

But he wasn’t thinking about where he’d come from.  He was thinking about monsters.  He was thinking about killing monsters, because if he didn’t kill them they would eat somebody and that was unacceptable.  He specifically wanted to kill more Cyobactyls, since one of those had tried to eat his ‘cousin’ and another had come quite close to eating his cousin’s partner.

 

And that was something else Malcolm could think about while he was waiting for monsters to show up.  He could think about how much he should tell Tyler and Burt about himself, and how he was going to go about telling it once he’d decided.  If he decided to tell them any more than he already had, that was.  It wasn’t like anyone would be coming from his past – or perhaps one might say, his future – to reveal any of Malcolm’s secrets to anyone.  It would, in fact, probably be possible for Malcolm to take his secrets to his grave with him, if that was the way he wanted it.  He just wasn’t sure what he wanted right now.

 

Or rather, he was sure…but what he wanted most was his life back, and that was one thing he couldn’t have.  He wanted his own partner back, but Trip was lost to him.

 

Something out across the desert fluttered, and Malcolm immediately raised his gun and peered hopefully through the sight.  He also wanted to kill monsters.  That one, he could have.