The Dave and Threshy Christmas Special.

A free one from JB.

It’s been a helluva year. They all are, but this one seemed especially Hellish (especially late yesterday when my dog ate 1.7 kilograms of hand-made chocolate brownie, and then I got a flat tire taking him to the vet).

Anyway, apologies to anyone getting this email twice because I’m sending it out to both my Burger and ASB readers. And extra apologies to everyone at Patreon who already got this in draft form.

I’ve been meaning to write a Dave and Threshy Christmas bit for years. For those who have NFI what’s happening here, they’re two fan faves from my Dave vs the Monsters trilogy, published ten years ago.

That’s right, Bloomfield. Ten.

Thanks to everyone who’s been hanging around since then. You’re the only reason I still bother.

Best of the Season to you all.

A drunk tank in Hell is no place for a hangover. Or maybe it was just Arkansas. Dave Hooper wasn’t a hundred per cent certain. But he was sure he’d woken up somewhere between Hell and the Razorback State because there was a razorback daemon wearing a Fulton County sheriff’s hat and the better part of Fulton County’s former sheriff standing just outside the bars of the cell.

Hooper closed his eyes and breathed carefully. His bile rose on the toxic stink of daemonic body odour and day-old sheriff chitlins. He bit down hard on the gag reflex, refusing to heave up what little remained of his stomach contents, most of which he’d already left in a steaming pile in the corner of the cell, all of which Threshy had already scarfed down.

“Dude, just getting my macros,” Threshy said at the look Hooper gave him.

“Shut up,” the razorback snarled, smashing its cleaver into the steel bars with a sharp clang.

Dave shuddered as the great iron lever behind his eyeballs cranked up the pressure of his murderous headache. He squeezed his eyes closed for a second, hoping that when he opened them, this would all disappear.

But everything was the same.

He was still hungover. He was still a prisoner. And it was still Christmas Eve.

He looked around the sheriff’s office. The razorback daemon had settled down in front of the television to watch the Rockets and lick its fangs. Lucille was leaned up against a desk on the other side of the room. If only he could reach her, he knew she’d take care of business. The enchanted splitting maul had powers of her own, including a whole bunch of magical therapy shit that was like gobbling down all the power-ups in Pacman.

What she didn’t have, though, was the ability to fly across the room into his hand like he was Thor or something. So Lucille sat on her useless magical ass, taunting him with what he couldn’t have.

On the television in the corner of the office, the Rockettes danced in front of the Rockefeller Christmas Tree, the first time the tree had been lit up since the army retook the city from the Horde and the first time the Rockettes had performed since the Horde had eaten all of the previous dancers.

None of this was right. Starting with the hangover.

He didn’t get hangovers these days because he couldn’t get drunk. One of those careful-what-you-wish-for-you-might-just-get-it deals.

Dave groaned at the wet, disgusting sound of Threshy slurping up the last of his morning vomit.

He remembered now.

Not so much how they ended up in the tank, but for sure, how he got drunk and stuck with the hangover. It was the daemon’s fault, the psychotic little empath. They’d been getting after it in some abandoned biker bar outside of Pine Bluff, Threshy sharing the experience of necking whole jugs of Margaritas via a psychic link that required Dave to hold one of the fat, little monster’s dozen or so eyestalks.

Yeah, he remembered now. And he shuddered.

“Just the tip, Dave. That’s all.”

And that’s how it had started. With Dave Hooper, saviour of the human race, the legendary The Dave, twiddling the end of a pot-bellied empath daemon’s slimy eyestalk, desperate to get a buzz on after a year of enforced sobriety thanks to his stupid superpowers, one of which was fast-healing. Because a guy who can knit up his own broken bones and torn flesh in the blink of an eye is never, ever getting back together with the morning after an epic night before. His stupid superhero metabolism simply consumed all the booze before he could get a buzz on.

Threshy, on the other hand, was a fucking two-beer screamer.

“Oh fuck me,” Dave groaned softly.

The slurping sounds stopped as Threshy looked up and chuckled.

“Okay, but just the tip, Dave.”

Hooper might have killed the little fuck right there and then – if the hangover hadn’t been so crippling and if his rage hadn’t been shorted out by another voice. A strangely familiar baritone from the far end of the cell. Deep, resonant and sort of Austrian in accent.

“Ho-ho-holy shidt.”

Dave turned around and instantly regretted it as white-hot spikes of pain jagged up through his neck and into his eyeballs. He thought for one made second he’d been locked up with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s morbidly obese cousin.

“What the fuck,” he grunted. “Who’s this asshole?”

He was human, for a start. Or at least he looked it. A bearded, big-bellied man in a torn, heavily stained wife-beater and filthy red pants held up with old-fashioned braces.

“That guy?” Threshy said. “That’s Santa Claus.”

Dave blinked. He was having trouble focusing.

He rubbed at his eyes and dragged his hands down over stubble that felt as if it had a three-day head start on him.

Dave struggled to sit up straight and then to stand. His head spun, and the spinning went all the way down into his churning stomach, but he had nothing left to throw up.

“Hey, Fat Gandalf,” he said. It came out as a harsh croak. “They grab you up from a Walmart or something?”

Dave was thinking that if it was safe enough for department store Santas to wander around getting their drink on, he couldn’t have strayed too far from the realms of Man.

“Was ist los?” The other man said. He sounded even more German.

Dave flinched away when he felt one of Threshy’s scaly tentacles on his arm. He hadn’t even noticed him sneak up.

“Dude,” the tiny daemon hissed. “That’s the real Santa. Don’t you remember? From the bar? That’s how we ended up here.”

“What?”

“No lie, big guy. Remember?” Threshy knocked a claw upside his head. You got your motherfucking mind-reading g.o.a.t here. That dude’s legit. That’s Christopher fucking Cringle, man.”

Dave looked at the man again.

Santa shrugged. When he spoke, it was eerily like talking to three hundred pounds of walnuts crammed into a big, brown Austrian condom.

“Dat’s my name. Don’t vear idt oudt.”

Dave squeezed his eyes shut and blinked them open again.

“Wait. What? Aren’t you from the North Pole or something? You sound like a failed mall Santa from Skogie. And you look like the kinda asshole I’d expect to find in the can from getting grabby with the shopping moms or the Walmart elves.”

“Ho-ho-hope you don’ kiss your mom vid dat mouth, Hooper. But den, whores don’t kiss. Har-har-har.”

Hooper moved so quickly that the world stopped turning. The television screen froze, and the razorback watching it. Threshy stood grinning that stupid, drooling meat-dripping grin of his, all of his eyeballs glistening wide, unblinking. Dave flashed across the jail cell, a red wave of rage carrying him towards the piss-stained bag of trash-talking man boobs and… directly into the balled-up, hammer-hard fist of a roly-poly primordial deity.

It felt like colliding with a force of nature, a thunderbolt exploding through Dave’s head, picking him up and ragdolling him back across the cell to crash into the bars on the other side. They flexed with a shriek of tortured steel, bending under the impact before snapping back like thick rubber bands. He hit the concrete floor as shockwaves rolled through him.

The eerie bubble of suspended time, which had inflated outwards from Dave when he flew at the guy, suddenly popped, and the world stuttered back into movement.

Threshy’s eyestalks swivelled to follow Dave’s flight path and landing.

The razor daemon roared in menacing outrage and charged over to the cell, smashing its giant cleaver on the bars to raise a savage, metal storm of noise.

Dave shook his head.

His hangover was gone.

Santa leaned down and offered Dave a dinosaur hammock of an arm to pull himself up.

“It’s gut für vat ails you,” he said in a low voice, giving the razor daemon a quick side-eye.

Dave, still groggy from the blow but fully recovered from his night of drinking with Threshy, looked at the steel bars of their cage.

“Warded,” Santa said under his breath. “Dat’s why you can’t just pull dem apart.”

Dave didn’t mention that he’d been so addled with drink that it hadn’t occurred to him to try.

The razorback’s cleaver crashed and clattered on the bars as it yelled at them to shut up unless they wanted to go into the bloodpots right now.

“Ho-ho-hold dat thought, azzhole,” Santa muttered. Then he cried out, “Now T’reshy!”

A tentacle shot through the gap in the bars and wrapped itself around the razorback’s thickly muscled legs. All of the smaller daemon’s eyestalks went rigid, and its wet green lips pulled back from its fang tracks.

The bigger, stronger monster screamed in defiance and violation, but Threshy held on.

The earsplitting uproar of edged metal on steel bars cut into Dave’s head with almost physical pain, but the little threshrend daemon would not let go. The razorback screamed and stabbed the length of its cleaver through the bars, trying to impale its tiny tormentor.

Dave, who had some experience with jailhouse brawling, didn’t need an invite to join this one.

He launched himself at the weapon as Santa von Terminator closed the gap with their jailer and fixed onto its polearm. Santa heaved with all his might, which was considerable, him being a mighty chieftain of the elder Skylords and everything. The razorback slammed into the bars with a teeth-rattling crash and Dave pulled at its weapon hand with force enough to snap the wrist.

Threshy withdrew his tentacle as Dave grabbed the giant cleaver and swung it double-handed in a vertical cut that passed through steel bars and razorback flesh like soft butter and even softer, warmer butter, but with more hair and suppurating boils.

The monster peeled apart, the two halves dropping to the jailhouse floor close enough for Santa to reach through and retrieve the keys.

“Merry Christmas to all und to all a gut night,” he said.

“Haha, except for that guy,” Threshy giggled hysterically. “Fuck him in the neck.”

Dave stared at the ruin he had made of the drunk tank cage and the eight-foot-tall monster.

“I thought you said this was warded with, like, magic wards and spells and shit.”

“Duh,” Santa said, rolling his eyes and pointing at Threshy and the dead monster. “Against us and our veapons, not theirs.” He unlocked the cage door. “Anyway, if you vant to live, kom vit me.”

“Hey, I wanna live. I fuckin’ love living!” Threshy cried out, rushing the door before it was properly open.

Dave started to follow, then paused.

“Are you really Santa Claus?” he asked.

“Dat is one of my names, yes. Others know me as Langbarðr. But I prefer Odin.”

“So, where’s your reindeer, Odin?”

He shook his head sadly.

“A dragon ate them while I was stuck in a fucking chimney. I’m going to haff some explaining to do ven I get home. And she’s going to put me on the Ozempic I just know it.”

“Is that why you were in the bar?” Dave asked. “Working out your story before you got home?”

Santa looked at him. Finally, he said, “I thought der yappy little horror gonad vas supposed to be der mind reader.”

“Greatest of all time, Santa!” Threshy grinned. It was a disturbing sight on a daemon who was eighty per cent mouth and chainsaw fangs.

Dave waved him to be quiet and walked over to fetch Lucille. He needed to think, and she helped him with that, too.

“Listen Santa, or whatever you wanna call yourself. We could do each other a favour here.”

Santa narrowed his eyes.

“Go on.”

“Those fucking dragons are a menace, but they get real sleepy after a big feed. How many reindeer did it chow down on?”

“All of dem,” Santa sighed. “Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Dunder und Blixem. Dunder vas my wife’s favourite, too. Oh boy.”

“Yeah, yeah, we’ve all been there, pal. But you’ve never been there with Super Dave. Yo, Threshy, you ever mind-jacked an honest-to-goddamned dragon before?”

“Er, no,” Threshy said, losing some of his bluster.

“But you could totally do it, right? Because you’re not some kind of soft cock, are you.”

A dozen eyestalks bristled.

“Hey, if Threshy wants to make a dragon his bitch, that bitch is gonna be smokin!”

“There you go, that’s the spirit.”

He turned back to Santa.

“I can’t get you those reindeer back, but we’re gonna get you a ride. And we can come up with a story for Mrs Claus to explain all the venison.”

Santa nodded carefully.

“You said ve could do each other a favour, no?”

Dave smiled.

“Yeah, ve could. I ah… I hear you got this list?”

“Ja. I do, every year I am to be making der List.”

“And checking it twice?”

“Dis is the process, yes.”

“The thing is,” Dave said. “I feel like, you know, every year…”

“You only make the Naughty List.”

“Every fucking year, man. I can’t get a break.”

Santa nodded.

“You save Christmas; this year, you get the break.”

Dave thought it over.

“Just this year?”

“Don’t push it,” Santa warned.

“Okay,” Dave said. “Deal.”

They shook hands. And a tentacle.