Emergence (14 page)

He waved his arms around, taking in the wet compound, the leaves blowing across the muddy ground, the forest closing in on them at the edge of the camp, the whole world. The two men fell silent for a while.

‘And it all changed after you killed the orc?’

‘The Hunn,’ Dave offered. ‘It was a Hunn. Some sort of soldier beast or demon or something. Orc’s close enough, I guess, if you really want to get sued by the Tolkien estate. I thought the same thing when I saw it. Humanoid, or maybe primate enough to make you think in those terms. Been a long time since high school Biology for me.’

‘So how do you know it’s one of these Hunn?’ Allen asked, pronouncing the word correctly.

Dave returned to his perch on the small wooden set of steps leading up the tented medical station.

‘Same way I knew exactly where that weight bar was gonna fall. I just knew
. . .
The thing was a Hunn, called itself Urgon Htoth.’

‘The hell is that? Old German or something?’

‘No idea. But my head is full of this crap now if I want to open Pandora’s box and look in there. I could tell you Grymm fairy tales about the Hunn and the Fangr and Sliveen and Gnarrl. About the Grande Horde and the Threshrend and the UnderRealms. The banishing. The long dark
. . .’

He stopped himself because Allen was staring at him with frank disbelief and not a little alarm.

‘Have you told Captain Heath about this?’

Dave shook his head.

‘Not all of it. Just a little about the Hunn. And the little butt buddies it had along. The Fangr. And the Sliveen scout last night. Didn’t want him thinking I was bugshit crazy. Like you do now.’

‘No, man, no
. . .
I
. . .’

Allen tried to sell his denial, but Dave had seen the look on his face when he’d revealed just a little of what was running through the back of his mind, just below the level of consciousness.

‘And these things you, er, you know? They came on after you killed the thing? The Hunn.’

‘Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn.’

‘Yeah, that guy. You got, what, his memories and your Avenger mojo at the same time? When you brained him?’

Dave said nothing, but the fear in his eyes confirmed everything.

‘Sounds like one of those Native American myths,’ said Allen. ‘You know, where you eat your enemy’s heart to consume his strength and courage. ’Cept in your case you just splashed his brains on the wall and put the zap on his groupies.’

‘The Fangr?’

‘The walkin’ dead with the stupid long talons, yeah. Both of your friends said that. When you dropped the Hunn, the others went down with it. Dude, we’re a long way through the lookin’ glass here. You have to tell Heath. He needs to know
all
this stuff.’

Dave raised a hand in front of his face, turned it around, and looked at the veins under his suntanned skin and the fine blond hairs on the back of the hand. It was recognisably him. Maybe a little thinner. But him. This was the hand that had scooped a million peanuts out of a thousand bowls in God only knew how many bars over the years. The hand that had smacked the fine tattooed ass of that top-shelf hooker he’d flown down from Nevada and ridden like a bouncy toy less than two days ago. The hand that had stroked his wife’s hair in long-ago and happier days. He placed the tips of his fingers gently on his eyelids and rubbed at them. He was tired and very worried.

‘I really don’t want that thing in my head,’ he said. ‘I don’t want any of it.’

Allen stood up at the sound of someone coming down the path.

‘Didn’t say it was in your head, Dave. I don’t believe in old Indian tales about eating a dude’s heart to harvest his mojo. I believe in Colt automatics and well-managed supply chains, planning, prep, and the application of measured force to defeat superstitious crap like that or bin Laden’s beardy nutters.’

‘And you believe in God, too, don’t you? You’re a Christian. Like a real one.’

‘I try,’ Allen said.

‘Yeah, my friend Marty, too,’ Dave said, but more to himself. Captain Heath appeared, striding around the corner of the big tented building, crunching up the muddy gravel path as though having only one leg to get through the day was no problem at all. Like Chief Allen he was dressed in fatigues and body armour, but he carried only a pistol on his thigh. The same one he’d shot at the Sliveen, Dave supposed. Had Heath lain awake last night replaying the crash and killings over and over again? Or had he just written up his reports and taken to his cot for a couple of hours of shut-eye?

‘Are you well rested, well fed, Mr Hooper?’

‘Sure,’ said Dave. ‘Why? We going on an adventure?’

‘We’re going back out to the Longreach, sir. I want you to take me through exactly what happened and have a look at the SSE data. It might shake free a few memories. Or some intelligence we can use.’

‘SSE? Back to the rig? Is Vince coming? Or any of the others?’

Heath held up his hands. ‘One question at a time. Yes, we’re going to review the sensitive site data. As for your friends, including Mr Martinelli, they’ll be released later today. They’ve signed non-disclosure agreements about their time on this base, and we’ll be returning them first to Baron’s for whatever debriefing your company deems necessary and then on to their families.’

Dave frowned.

‘But not me?’

‘No, Mr Hooper, not after this morning. I’m afraid you still have much you can help us with. Plus your family is some distance away and you are estranged from them as I understand.’

Dave frowned, ‘Well, not estranged
. . .’

Captain Heath continued. ‘The rig is still classified as a high-risk area, Mr Hooper. Nobody from Baron’s has been allowed inside the exclusion zone. It’s too dangerous. But I don’t imagine the same is true for you.’

Dave didn’t know what to say to that.

‘No,’ he admitted at last. ‘Probably not.’ He stood up at the same time as Allen, who made remarkably little noise for a man so loaded down with equipment. ‘Any other reason?’

‘As I expected, the real story is beginning to form up in the real world. The mainstream press isn’t touching it yet, but some of your colleagues are leaking to the blogs and the gossip sites. Some went straight to Facebook. A couple have been tweeting their versions of events.’

‘Versions?’ Dave asked. ‘Leaking? Heath, they’re just people. Talking about what happened. Not like that supernerd who pissed off to Russia after he ratted out the fucking NSA.’

‘Mr Snowden,’ said Heath, saying the name as though it hurt him to pronounce it.

‘Whatever the case, I give it another day before the president has to start answering questions about an attack from Middle Earth. So you’ll appreciate that he would like as much information as quickly as he can get it.’

‘Fair enough,’ Dave said. ‘If I’d been sober on election day, I’d have voted for him. First time, anyway. Suppose it’s the least I can do.’

‘Nah,’ Allen said, giving Dave a nudge with one padded elbow. ‘There’s plenty more.’

12

T
here was no long, fraught car ride back to New Orleans. They boarded a grey chopper at the base in a clearing that looked to have been hacked out of the wilderness in the last week. It was obvious that the trunks of the saplings at the edge of the clearing were freshly sheared off. A driver shuttled them by Hummer from the compound over to the helipad, a ten-minute drive on an unpaved road through thick forest. Rain fell heavily enough to obscure the track here and there, but the driver didn’t slow down. He seemed to know the way, and Heath ordered him to go as quickly as he thought was safe and then some.

‘The story is coming out,’ he said as the Humvee slid around a long bend in the road. Allen, meanwhile, kept nudging Dave to spill the crazy beans. ‘Bill O’Reilly was mouthing off about Greenpeace a little earlier. Calling them whack jobs because one of their kids got on Facebook with a story about a military cover-up out on your rig. A bioweapon gone wrong. O’Reilly smacked them hard. He’s gonna look pretty foolish by the end of today.’

‘Yeah, but Greenpeace doesn’t need Bill O’Reilly to help them look foolish,’ Dave said.

‘My daughter’s in Greenpeace,’ Heath said without elaborating, and that shut the conversation down for a while.

Dave could hear the engine and the rotor thump well before they entered the clearing. Another half-dozen or more SEALs were already embarked, seated in the rear cabin. Allen greeted them all with his middle finger and a boyish grin. He didn’t bother introducing Dave over the roar of the engines, directing him to a berth at the back of the cabin. Heath took a seat up front with the pilot. Maybe he was even qualified to fly this thing. That tin leg didn’t seem to hold him back otherwise.

When they were securely buckled in, Dave asked Allen how he had gotten into the SEAL business. It was a thin effort at diverting the chief from the course he seemed set on of getting Dave to come clean to Heath about the full extent of his craziness. Surprisingly, it worked, giving Dave time to think about how he was going to explain to the navy officer what a fucking nut bag he’d thrown his lot in with. Well, it worked for now, at least. Even Allen didn’t expect him to shout over the roar of the chopper.

‘Dude,’ Allen said, looking almost wistful even as he raised his voice. ‘I was a lifeguard in high school. Surf patrol, you know. I volunteered for that – it was an awesome way to meet babes – but I picked up some paid work at a community centre pool, too. Some old dude there talked me into competing in the Lifeguard Olympics. Our company did that every year, you know, for morale and so on. Anyway, my senior year we won. I wasn’t doing much else with myself. Steve, the same dude, talked me into going to see a recruiter. The army guys treated me like dirt but the navy was cool, showed me some videos, and I was hooked. Went on to SEAL training, and here I am.’

‘Lifeguard Olympics?’ Dave asked, nearly shouting now. ‘You mean like
Baywatch
?’

‘Sorta.’ Allen grinned, the first time he’d done so all day. ‘It was cake compared to SEAL training.’

The take-off put Dave back in the moment just a day earlier, an eternity ago, when J2 had tormented him about his hangover. No trace of the headache or nausea remained, and he realised for the first time that it, too, had vanished when he’d clubbed the Hunn to death. There was a chance he’d slept it off at the hospital and woken up groggy with sedatives. But probably not. He’d probably burned every molecule of alcohol in his body the same way he’d torched an inhuman amount of cooked meat and chocolate bars since. Be interesting to get his hands on a bottle and see whether he could neck it without any ill effect. Or a doobie.

Or even a line.

Oh, yeah. The chance would be a fine thing.

The grim faces of the men around him, all of them hidden behind combat goggles, did not inspire any confidence that he had fallen in among wayward party animals. Not when they were on the government’s clock, anyway. Some of them hadn’t shaved in weeks, a stark contrast to the marines and regular sailors he’d seen on the base. In fact, Dave thought they were a pretty rank-looking bunch, but in the way that you might expect an Old Testament prophet to be all rank and stringy and totally uptight about his very particular brand of shit.

Then he looked at his own camouflage trousers and oddly fitting T-shirt and figured he’d keep his fashion tips to himself. A few of these characters looked like they wouldn’t be opposed to the idea of shooting old Dave in the head and tossing him out of the chopper. How many of them knew what had happened to their pirate buddies? How many blamed him? Probably all of them from the vibe he was getting.

Really not feeling the love for our man Dave from this crowd.

The roar of the engines and the thump of the rotors made any prolonged conversation pointless, and he got to wondering what these guys had been told about the situation they were flying into. The captain had surprised him so far with his no-bullshit policy. Most likely Heath had given them
all
the information he could gather, including the results of the morning’s ‘tests’ on Dave. A couple of the SEALs were checking him out, obviously unimpressed and deeply sceptical. Also, there was the media. Without a phone – his old iPhone had gone astray – or ready access to a working screen of any kind, Dave hadn’t caught up with the outside world since catching a glimpse of the cable news at the start of the day. Apart from the Greenpeace kid Heath had mentioned, maybe, and some public relations douche bag at Baron’s hinting human error might be to blame for the disaster – Dave’s error, let’s be clear – there had been no indication of the Longreach story taking any weird detours away from agreed realities. How long could it be, though? Not soon enough for Dave. He really didn’t want to be the one standing next to Heath or Obama or whoever when they did their ‘Orcs Attack!’ press conference.

It was too loud in the helicopter to ask Allen about any of it or to tell Heath anything about his earlier discussion with the chief and the uncharted depths of knowledge about the Horde that he seemed to possess now. The SEALs were plugged into some sort of tactical network through complicated headsets. Allen would occasionally push a button on his earpiece and talk into the tiny boom mike just off to the side of his mouth. But nobody had offered Dave anything like that, and when he’d asked, Allen had shouted back that there was no point.

‘You’re not trained for it, man. We got troop net and command net on this. We can’t have anyone getting on yapping away. Bad enough when you get the wrong brass on the net. It’ll mess everything up; trust me.’

Okay. That was cool. Dave wouldn’t allow an outsider to come onto his rig and start dicking around, either. But it meant that for the moment he was cut off, cocooned within the early evening darkness and the roar of the helicopter. There was little room to spare in the cabin because of the SEALs’ equipment and in one or two cases the sheer size of the men. Two door gunners manned a couple of Gatling guns. Dave was totally sure they were Gatling guns, like right out of the movies. He kept himself tucked up tightly on his little fold-down seat, looking out of the open door as the forest slipped under their wheels.

The stormy weather had cleared as the sun set, and only a few thin strands of cloud obscured the first gleaming stars and a bright three-quarter moon that glistened on the rivers and streams and the bayou below. Lights stood out here and there, singly and clustered in small settlements. The towns grew larger as they flew south, and New Orleans loomed on the horizon as a dome of light. The chopper swung around to the southeast, just perceptibly, to avoid overflying the city. Dave could see flashes of sheet lightning out over the water, and then he realised that some of the flashes were on the ground inside the city. As they drew closer, he was certain he could see fires within the greater metro area.

‘What’s that?’ he shouted to Allen, pointing at the flickering light source.

The SEAL consulted his comm gear and called back, ‘Nothing. Just a little riot. Gang fight or something. There’s been some gunfire, so we’re jagging east to avoid it. Be embarrassing getting shot in the tush over our own turf.’

‘Yo,’ said one of the SEALs, pointing at the tiny light show. ‘Murder city nights.’

It was an in-joke or reference worth a few appreciative nods and fist bumps from his friends but lost on Dave.

He gave Allen a thumbs-up to signal that he understood before fetching another protein bar from one of the cargo pockets of his pants. He could sense himself getting peckish again and wanted to eat something, anything, before the racking gut cramps doubled him over.
Ha! Scored
, he thought as he recognised an Eat Smart Choc Peanut Caramel Crunch. He knew this one from the vending machines at the depot. As far as tasteless protein slabs went, it wasn’t too shabby. Not as gooey and sticky on the teeth as some other bars and sporting just the right amount of crunch. Like a chocolate Rice Krispie, he thought as he reduced it to a memory in a couple of bites, following up with a gel tube that he found he could easily read in the dark. A PowerBar Gel Double Latte, it tasted no worse than the instant coffee at work, and with the Eat Smart bar it eased his emerging hunger pangs, tamping them down nicely.

The SEALs were all packing four-eyed night vision goggles, which again he had not been given, but again he didn’t much care. As Dave took the time to look around the cabin, he found that deepening nightfall didn’t really handicap him. The colour was washed out of his surroundings, but he was able to make out even fine details in a clear monochrome grey. Something new, he thought. He’d been putting off seeing an eye doctor about his worsening eyesight, an inability to refocus from long to short distances. Hadn’t even been able to admit to himself his eyes were going after he bought a magnifying glass to keep at his apartment. It wasn’t for reading small print, of course. No. It was for burning bugs and toy soldiers when the boys came for an access visit. Which, of course, they never did. Now he could read the small print on the gel tube in the dark of the chopper cabin.

In normal circumstances Dave would have been bringing the awesome since the rig attack. He’d kicked some ass, dodged a hangover, destroyed the buffet, dropped a little weight, and gotten in an epic gym session. He was by any measure fucking crushing it. But his stomach fluttered with nerves as he read the label on the gel packet:

110 calories

total carb 27 g

sugars 10 g

sodium 200 mg

All in tiny little letters he’d have been unable to read not long ago even at high noon in direct sunlight. The hammering thud of the rotors fed vibrations up through the soles of his boots into his butt and guts. He absentmindedly ate another bar, mostly for something to occupy him.

He’d had a couple of skin cancers off last year. Side of his neck and just behind one ear. More occupational hazards given how much time he spent in the sun. His barber spotted the small lesions on the back of his head. Dave had been watching the sore on his neck that never went away, just under his left ear, watching it the way you would watch a strange dog standing astride your path with its hackles up. He knew it was probably bad, but if he didn’t go to the doctor and the doctor didn’t confirm that
. . .
well, he was sweet.

The basal cell carcinoma had been diagnosed during his annual physical, and the doctor at Baron’s had cut it out in the surgery that day, all the while cursing him for an idiot for letting it go so long.

The sense of creeping dread that he’d swallowed hard every time he woke up and looked at that small red sore that never healed? Yeah. That. Right now. Raised to the power of
what the fuck was happening to him
?

‘Damn.’

The unfamiliar voice of one of Allen’s comrades shook him out of the reverie. One of the SEALs was pointing off toward where a genuine light and magic show flared and sputtered in a blacked-out section of the outer burbs.

‘What’s that?’ someone asked.

‘Looks like the Central City projects,’ replied a voice with a distinct Cajun lilt. ‘Mebbe Calliope or Magnolia. Same old same old.’

‘Looks like fucking Helmand at that time of the month,’ said a monster of a man called Igor. Sporting an Amish-style beard on steroids, the man had biceps the size of bowling balls. Of all the men on the chopper, Dave figured this guy was the one who could give him a run for his money on the weight bench.

‘Damn. That’s tracer fire,’ he heard Allen call out.

A couple of voices chorused together:

‘For illuminating targets. And destroying personnel.’

Another in-joke, he gathered.

Before he could crane around far enough to see, the chopper’s flight path took them beyond the point where he could get a good angle. He sat back, cupped his hands over his mouth, and called out to Allen, ‘What was all that? Sounded serious.’

The SEAL didn’t seem to think so.

‘Drugs, for sure. Seen worse in Florida. Flown over honest to God street wars in Mexico that’d put that side show out of business,’ he said, jerking his thumb back in the direction of the city.

The cabin settled down again, and soon enough they’d crossed the coast and were flying out over the barrier islands, heading south for the Longreach.

*

Some of the SEALs dozed on the flight out, but unlike his last trip to the platform, Dave stayed awake the whole way. He topped up the tank with another protein bar and sipped some Gatorade from his CamelBak, but otherwise he was alone with his thoughts.

They weren’t pleasant.

He thought that if all that had happened had been a garden-variety fire and explosion on the rig, he’d have been better off. He’d have dealt. He told himself that if there had been some extreme but rational explanation for the things that had crawled up the pylons or the drill, something like his theory about cracking open an ancient ecosphere, he could have dealt with that, too. In good time.

But there was nothing on God’s green earth that explained what had happened to him personally. Not the sudden
Super Friends
status update or the utterly alien memories that seemed to come with them. Memories of long eons lived
. . .