Emergence (10 page)

‘Its name was Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn.’

He wasn’t sure how he even knew how to pronounce the name properly. He usually had trouble ordering Italian takeaway.

‘It was
. . .
He was a BattleMaster of the Fourth Legion,’ Dave said, feeling embarrassed as he did so and without really knowing what the hell he was talking about until he slowed down and really thought it through. It was like recognising every word in a book he did not recall reading.

‘That’s a bit like you, Captain,’ he said. ‘An officer. It sounds impressive, doesn’t it? BattleMaster of a whole legion, but there’s
. . .
let’s see
. . .
only about two and a half thousand Hunn to a legion, four or five legions to a regiment, ten regiments to a Horde, and hundreds of regiments to a Grande Horde. No. To
the
Grande Horde.’

Heath didn’t exactly lose his shit, but his expression was obviously shaken as he examined Dave’s face for signs that he was lying or had gone insane.

‘The creature told you this?’

‘Fuck no, as if. It just sort of sat there making a meal of Marty Grbac and snorting at me until I caved its fucking skull in.’

‘And that’s when you were able to understand it? To know what it was?’

Dave shook his head.

‘No. That’s when I took a little nap and woke up in the hospital. The next thing I know, I’m throwing guys through cupboard doors and I’ve picked up some sort of postgraduate degree in Monster Studies. Tell you the truth, Heath, I’m really hoping to wake up on the floor of my motel in an hour or so with a couple of hookers from Reno sitting on my face having a pillow fight while I vomit up whatever prohibited monkey gland extract they slipped me to bring on this bullshit hallucination.’

The Ford took a right turn past a Blue Angels jet raised on a pole for display. They’d arrived. Somewhere. Tall trees loomed over them, creating a dark tunnel through which they rolled at something just over a walking pace. Allen turned the wheel to steer the Expedition through a set of concrete barriers, pulling up at a guardhouse where a sailor in a black rain slicker asked for his ID. The sign above the gate informed Dave that they were at NAS JRB New Orleans.

‘This your secret base?’ Dave asked.

‘No,’ Heath said.

The sailor waved them through the gate. Heath pulled out his phone, punched in a number, and said, ‘This is Heath. Get the helo ready; we leave in ten,’ before expanding on his answer to Dave. ‘No, this is not the restricted area. We’re going somewhere more secure.’

Dave took in the perfectly manicured grass and the well-maintained lamplit streets. It all seemed so normal even if it was a military base late at night.

‘It’s not a hallucination, is it?’ Dave asked at last.

‘No, Mr Hooper,’ said Captain Heath. ‘I’m afraid not.’

08

T
hey flew for an hour or more. Midnight found them far beyond any stretch of country with which Dave was familiar. He peered out at the ground below them every now and then. Sometimes he saw the fat snaking lanes of a well-lit freeway cutting through the primordial dark. More often, they flew over poorly lit one- or two-lane blacktop roads. Once or twice he picked out small freestanding buildings, sometimes lit with neon. Gas stations or general stores. He’d grown tired after eating, tired to the point of slurring his words and struggling to keep his eyes open. Heath had decided that Hooper needed to be ‘properly debriefed’, and he didn’t want to ‘contaminate’ that process in the helicopter, so he let his man catch a little shut-eye.

Dave fought to stay awake, mostly because he dreaded falling asleep, fearful of what might chase him through his dreams, but he needn’t have worried. The food brought on a warm and heavy lassitude, and despite his best efforts and the roar of the engine and rotors, the motion of the helicopter periodically put him under. When he passed out, he slept heavily, without nightmares or waking terrors. It was just like flying out to the rig, sleeping off a party. He did experience a moment of profound disorientation upon being jolted awake as they touched down on the tarmac in the darkness. The hookers, the chopper flight out to the platform, everything – the memories all came at him too fast, and he had trouble placing himself in time and space. He rubbed the stubble on his face as the pilot shut down the engine. It felt like the only real thing in the world.

‘Where are we?’ he asked, feeling dizzy. He also was thirsty from the chocolate milk. Dairy did that to him, and he regretted not sticking to Coke.

‘A training area,’ Heath said. ‘Off the books. You can’t find it on Google if you try. At least not for now. If you come with me, Mr Hooper, I will get you bedded down for a few hours. You need some real rest. You have a busy day tomorrow, and I have reports to file. Many reports and a few letters to write, I’m afraid.’

Dave didn’t like the sound of that. He’d had to write a couple of those letters. They sucked.

‘Hey, good luck, man,’ Allen said, taking Dave’s hand in a firm grip. The chief’s eyes looked troubled by the earlier violent insanity, but it was the first genuine goodwill Dave had felt from anybody all day, and he appreciated the gesture.

‘Thanks for the chocolate bars,’ he said, yawning and feeling a little embarrassed by it. ‘I think you might have saved my life, Chief. Seriously.’

‘That was some nasty business tonight, man,’ Allen said. ‘That thing had us dead. You totally saved our hides.’

Not everyone’s
, Dave thought before stumbling as he increased his pace to catch up with Heath, who had forged ahead. He left Chief Allen looking a little bereft and lonesome in the deep gloom of the night. For some sort of secret military base – that was what a restricted facility was, wasn’t it? – his surroundings looked like any number of mining camps or depots he’d been through over the years: prefab huts, shipping containers, warehouses, vehicle parking lots, and security fencing. A light drizzle fell from low clouds, probably the far edge of the storm that had been closing in on New Orleans when they’d left.

There didn’t appear to be much activity in this part of the base, but then, it was late at night and Dave had no idea how big the place was. Captain Heath led him up a muddy path to a demountable hut in which Dave could see lights burning. The guy moved well for a cripple. You wouldn’t have known from the way he carried himself that he was part cyborg down there. Heath had said something about an airfield, but aside from the helicopter pad there was no sign of a runway anywhere nearby. By then, however, Dave was too tired and out of it to care. The exhaustion that had nailed him in the car had rolled back in like a very high tide. The lunacy of the day felt long distant, unreal. He wanted a hot shower and a soft bed. Or even an army cot. And what would be best of all would be crawling into that cot and waking up in the morning to discover he really was in some motel somewhere, fucked off his skull on drugs.

He knew that wasn’t going to happen, though. As much as he felt like he was sleepwalking, this was real. He’d seen two men die a few hours ago. Then he’d killed whatever had killed them. The Longreach – that was real, too. As distant and abstract as it felt. All of it. He stifled a yawn and nearly tripped himself dragging his feet up the stairs. His head was reeling.

Heath pulled back a screen door and thumbed a combination into the keypad of the sturdier metal door behind it. The lock disengaged, and light spilled out as he pushed on the handle.

‘Through here,’ he said.

Dave wasn’t expecting what he found inside. A nurse was sitting at a desk doing paperwork under a hooded lamp; behind her half a dozen or so beds were occupied by men and women Dave recognised as his co-workers from the Longreach. Well, one woman, anyway: Charlene Disch from the flight ops centre. She was asleep, probably sedated given the way her face was twitching and small moans were escaping from between her lips. Every once in a while she’d start kicking and shivering before settling back down again to a low-level snore.

In the cot next to hers lay Vince Martinelli, so big that he spilled over the sides and his feet dangled in space off the end. And in the cot after Vince, Dave thought he recognised J2. His spirits lifted a little.

‘Try not to wake them,’ said the nurse. ‘They’ve had a tough time of it. The last of the debriefs wrapped up only two hours ago. I had to fill them full of Ambien to get them all down.’

‘Who you got here?’ Dave asked, keeping his voice low, fighting back exhaustion but needing to know. He’d been trying to get a line on his guys all day, and this was the first real proof he had that any of them had made it out in one piece. It was also the first evidence he had of him not being an A-Class fuck-up. His people got out alive. These ones anyway.

Nurse Hubbard wore the same digital jungle camouflage fatigues as Allen. A cup of coffee steamed under her desk lamp, illuminating a blizzard of forms, records, and notes. She searched around in the confusion of papers for a moment, the bags under her eyes showing the weight of her day at Camp Mysteryland. She found what she was looking for, a clipboard, and with a glance to Captain Heath for the okay, she handed it to Dave.

There was a list of names on it, all of them people Dave knew.

‘What? So these are the ones you said were missing?’ Dave asked as he read the names, blinking once or twice to clear his vision, which was still blurred with weariness.

‘They’re not missing anymore,’ Captain Heath said. ‘I apologise for the confusion. We’ve had our own troubles trying to sort things out in the chaos. In any case, here they are.’

Dave’s temper flared at the obvious attempt to wave away the deception.

Heath put his hand on Dave’s shoulder, almost a fatherly gesture, which was odd, since Dave was sure he had a couple of years on the captain, but it was the most human thing he had seen the guy do since they’d met.

‘I need you to know that we are trying to be forthright and completely up front with you. I am pathologically honest by nature,’ Heath said. ‘It’s a weakness of mine.’

‘It doesn’t seem to have hurt your career.’

‘It has, more than you would know.’ Heath let that sit between them for a moment, without elaborating. ‘When we have information we can share with you, we will do so. I hope you will do the same with us.’

He means it
, Dave thought. But meaning something and making it happen? Two different things. Especially with the fucking warheads. His brother had taught him that. In a way, Heath reminded him of Marty Grbac. Just as Allen had. Or maybe he was looking for reminders of his friend when there were none to be found. Physically Marty and Heath couldn’t have been more different: a huge Polack meat locker and an African-American whipcord pulled tight enough to snap if you plucked him the wrong way. But Marty had been a perpetually earnest born-again boy scout, and Dave suspected that Heath might be a member of that happy-clapping congregation, too.

He tried to call up a memory of Marty offering a prayer before every meal. Marty making the sign of the cross every time he climbed into a helicopter. Marty boring everyone senseless with exciting new engine parts for his motorcycle that he’d scored on eBay. Anything to drive away the image of the Hunn sucking on him as if he were an oversized frozen tequila popsicle. The image, the fatigue, and the stress of the day finally pulled Dave’s plug. He staggered forward, crashing into Hubbard’s desk, nearly knocking over her mug of coffee. The room swirled and swam around him, and he felt Captain Heath grab him by the elbow, half carrying and half pushing him toward one of the cots. The scuffed linoleum floor pitched and yawed underfoot as though they were at sea. He felt himself falling down the face of a great black wave. Crying out. But the wave closed over him before he knew what he was trying to say.

*

Someone was shaking his shoulder. It wasn’t the first time Dave had experienced that sensation of rocking back and forth in his flesh while dope and booze sloshed around in his head. So deep was his slumber that the sounds that reached him were akin to someone shouting at him from above the water. It sort of reminded him of someone’s wife screaming at the top of her lungs while he went down on her in a hot tub. That had been in a company compound in Saudi Arabia. She wasn’t
his
wife, of course.

The rocking continued, back and forth. For once, blessedly, there was no tightening band of iron wrapped around his poor skull, no asshole pounding away to a bass beat with a sledge inside his brain. He felt remarkably clean, disgustingly healthy, and even a little blissed out.

‘Dave!’

It must be important. The rig is on fire, or is it the roof? We don’t need no water, Mom; let the motherfucker burn.

‘What?’ the muffled man’s voice said. ‘Wake up, Dave.’

He recognised the voice as Vince Martinelli’s, and he came awake as abruptly as light flooding a darkened bedroom when you flicked the switch. There was no grogginess or confused dislocation. The transition from deep sleep to wakefulness was instant. He remembered all but falling into the hut some time ago – he had no idea how many hours, or minutes, had passed – and then Vince was shaking him and saying his name. There was nothing in between. Just a void.

He opened his eyes and blinked the crust of sleep from them. It was morning. He could tell by the quality of the light in the room. It was different, natural. He was still dressed in the Eddie Bauer gear Allen had given him back at the hospital, but somebody had undone his belt and taken off his shoes. The ever-thoughtful Heath, perhaps, or maybe that nurse. She’d been a little bit into him, he thought.

‘Vince, hey, you okay?’

Vince was leaning right over Dave’s cot. He looked terrible, with raccoon eyes and pouchy, sagging flesh hanging from his face. Juliette Jamieson hovered behind him, regarding Dave with a deeply anxious expression. He knew that look. That was the look people gave him when they expected him to Sort This Shit Out.

Dave was tempted to run for the door.

‘Oh, thank God,’ Vince said in a voice that seemed to have lost most of its power. ‘I thought you were gone, man. I’ve been trying to wake you, but you wouldn’t wake up. Like you was in some sorta coma or something.’

‘I’m fine,’ Dave assured him, sitting up and swinging his feet over the side of the camp bed. In fact, he felt better than fine. He felt as though he’d just smashed out the most awesome gym session of his life, as though he could walk out into the street and bench-press a few cars. And then he remembered Lieutenant Dent flying across the room yesterday. He stood up, carefully, making sure not to lay even a finger on his friend.

His pants were loose. He took the belt in one, two more notches, gently. A quick glance around the room told him they were alone.

J2 edged around Vince. She looked as though she didn’t want to be overheard.

‘Dave,’ she said in a stage whisper. ‘I think we’re prisoners here. They’re not letting us go. My ma will be havin’ kittens by now.’

‘Be cool, J2,’ he said in as reassuring a voice as he could. ‘I came in last night under my own steam. Guy brought me in, Captain Heath, he was kind of a puckered ass, but he was okay. They got their reasons for all the security, I guess. Where are the others?’ Dave asked when he noticed that the rest of the cots were empty. ‘I thought I saw Charlene in here last night. And a couple of other guys from the Longreach. But I crashed out.’

Vince looked over his shoulder as though he feared he, too, was being watched. ‘I know. I’ve been trying to wake you for half an hour. I coulda lit a fire under your ass, Dave, and you’da slept through it.’

‘So where are they? Did Heath take them?’

Vince Martinelli nodded gravely. ‘The scary black dude? Him and some other guys. They were all armed, Dave. Not rough with it or anything but acting like they’d shoot us if we gave them any trouble.’

J2 nodded in agreement, her eyes wide and fearful. She hadn’t been out on the rig long enough to see what was happening down on the lower decks, but she’d probably heard plenty about it while she shuttled the casualties to the other platforms and back to shore. After last night Dave wasn’t surprised that they’d put a bag on her and any other firsthand witnesses. Made denying the truth and the madness of it a little easier, he supposed. Funny. On TV when the secret government conspiracy spooled up, you were always rooting for the rogue agent or the investigative reporter or whoever to bust the thing wide open. But having seen what he’d seen in the last twenty-four hours, Dave wasn’t convinced he was with Mulder and Scully on this. Annie, he knew, would freak the fuck out. Multiply her reaction about 350-million-fold and you’d have the likely response of the American populace.

‘Yeah,’ he said slowly. ‘Look. There’s some weird shit going down. Out on the platform
. . .’
He paused, looking at his knuckles, which had healed so perfectly that you never would have imagined he’d taken all the skin off them pounding a monster’s skull into street pizza late last night. ‘Here as well.’