Emergence (18 page)

Dave’s thoughts were shooting about like a pinball getting flipped hard.

‘Rendition. Like a terrorist?’

‘No,’ Heath said. ‘More like witness protection. And it was only one option. Quickly rejected.’

‘And what were the others?’ Dave demanded to know, fighting his temper again. ‘Snipers? Air strikes? Grabbing my family? My boys?’ He knew that nobody would think of trying to pressure him through Annie.

Heath looked pissed, mostly with the professor, who for her part was entirely unrepentant.

‘We’ve never dealt with something like this,’ she said in a calming tone, deflecting his last question by answering the original one. ‘But we have protocols. All of them untried. Untested. You came out of a violent first contact that no other subjects survived.’

‘Vince did.’

‘No. Mr Martinelli observed the contact from close quarters,’ Ashbury corrected him. ‘He did not take part in it directly. You survived a hostile contact, but the protocols defined you as compromised.’

‘Because I survived?’

‘Because you survived.’

‘Oh, bullshit.’
Dave’s anger finally broke out, but only in verbal form. He was careful to keep his hands, which had balled up into fists all by themselves, deep inside the pockets of his cargo pants. He squeezed his eyes shut so hard that stars and roses the colour of dark blood bloomed behind them. When he opened them again, with his fury contained and slowly abating, he spoke though gritted teeth.

‘I had a brother.
Had
one. My baby brother. Went off and joined the army after 9/11. Thought he was gonna chase bin Laden down himself. Instead he got blown up and shot to pieces in a fucking soft-ass Humvee in some Baghdad shithole because of fucking protocols and parameters and metrics and all of that shit you people go on with. I know the fucking ragheads who set off the bomb and pulled the triggers killed Andy. But your man Rumsfeld? And his fucking known unknowns?
His
protocols? He put him there to be killed. For no good reason.’

He blazed defiance at Heath.

His brother.

His fucking brother.

‘I am sorry, Dave,’ Emmeline Ashbury said in a very quiet voice.

A tightness had closed up Captain Heath’s face, but when he spoke, his voice was also quiet.

‘I am sorry about your brother,’ he said. ‘Your loss. I didn’t know. It wasn’t –’

‘It wasn’t in the file?’ Dave snapped, already feeling guilty but not willing to let Contrite Dave back in yet. Angry, Ugly, Asshole Dave would have his moment of glory. ‘There was no protocol?’

Heath looked embarrassed. Dave let go of the anger with one hot, ragged breath.

‘You wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘There were a lot of things people didn’t know about Andy. One thing, he signed up under Mom’s name. They changed their names when my old man ran out. I thought, fuck that old prick. It’s my name. He can’t have that, too. So I kept it.’

An awkward silence enveloped them. And with it came the embarrassment, the hot shame that rose up from his neck and burned his cheeks.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said in a small voice, feeling like a very small man. ‘I shouldn’t have said all that shit. I admit I got issues with the government, the military. But you’re just people. Not the thing itself.’

Dave could hear a rhythmic tapping and realised to his shame that it was Heath, nervously jiggling his artificial leg. The titanium limb knocked against the leg of his chair.

‘I apologise,’ Dave said roughly. ‘I run off at the mouth sometimes. Like a fucking idiot, and yeah, like a bigot sometimes. Like my old man. I didn’t mean any disrespect to you or your service, Heath. Andy, he was proud of serving.’

The tightness around Heath’s eyes remained, his jaws clenched, and when he spoke, he also obviously had to force himself to dial it back.

‘I accept your apology, Dave.’

For one mad and dangerous second Bad Dave almost flared up again,
because who was this asshole to judge him?
But he stamped down on that shit. Hard.

Heath appeared to force himself to speak quietly. ‘Everyone loses something in war. Even when you win, you lose something.’

‘Yeah,’ Dave agreed.

He’d lost something, too.

His Superman boner.

15

T
he minion had no name of its own. A lowly creature, it knew what it was and what it served: its hunger and its queen. It snarled at the wretched thresh circling its kill, perhaps looking to rush in while it was distracted by feeding. Oh, and it was so easy to be distracted by this fine meal. Exactly how long had it been since any had tasted the meat of the frail two-legged creatures that screamed so sweetly when you bit into them?

The minion knew not.

Just that it had been too long. So many turnings trapped in the UnderRealms, forced to hunt and feed on the creeping urmin
and inferior thresh such as the two that bumbled through darkness behind it, splashing and grunting in the brackish brown waters that flooded the ruined village. The minion kept one eye trained on them but knew itself to be safe from attack while it remained in the pool of light where it had dragged the carcasses to feed in peace. Thresh did not stray into the light. It would burn the hide from their backs.

The minion grunted in good humour as it tore off a limb and stripped the meat from the bone by pulling the tasty treat out through three layers of fangs. So sweet and soft, not at all like the meat all minion recalled from the ancestor memories of long ago, when their kind moved upon the upper world with freedom. Legend dimly recalled these creatures as being much tougher and stringier on the fang. They often tasted sour, it was said, and it wasn’t unknown to have to spend a good long time chewing on their gristle and bones.

It pulled off a leg and crunched happily through the thick upper thigh, almost giddy with pleasure at the warm juices that still squirted and the rich, heady marrow that lay inside the bones. The meat was well marbled with fat, lots of gorgeous yellow fat.

Oh, Her Majesty was going to be pleased when the minion reported back to her that the path to the upper realm was clear again.

As long as it could remember to save some of the feast for the offertory. It would not do to come before the throne with a full belly and empty claws. It had seen even daemonum superiorae go into the blood pot for less.

The minion snarled a warning into the dark as it sensed the thresh working up the nerve to charge, perhaps imagining that if they were quick enough, they might get in and out of the light without being too badly burned. It could understand that. The smell of fresh meat must be driving them to madness. The minion knew it was having trouble restraining itself as it drove a snout deep into the steaming, still quivering viscera of one of the prey.

It just tasted so gooooooood.

So good indeed that the minion, never really known for intelligence and restraint, did not pause to wonder from where the light in which it squatted and ate was shining. It had imagined at first that the great golden armoured beast on which the prey was riding would flee when the minion attacked. But no, it sat, seemingly uncaring of the fate of its masters, howling with a rhythmic thumping sound that reminded the minion of mating season. Perhaps the chariot beast was in season, and if that was the case, waiting to see what the male of the species was like might be foolhardy on the minion’s part. Its bright eyes shone forth, illuminating the remains of the meal. But no warmth shone from them. Not like the dangerous heat that pulsed off the fires this prey was known to carry through the night sometimes. Fire that could consume vampyri and Hunn and Fangr and even Grymm in a twinkling. Fire that could harm and even kill a whole rank of minion were they foolish enough to remain exposed to it for too long.

The meat, however, was
. . .
distracting. It melted in the mouth and sat warm and heavy and pleasing in all of the minion’s stomachs. If only the prey had not died so quickly, the minion might even have had the pleasure of a live meal and bloodwine, a delicacy so rare even in the older times that it was spoken of as myth. There were ancient minion that claimed to have eaten so and spoke of a special tincture that infused the prey meat when they were allowed to baste in the juices of their own terror during a meal.

The minion doubted those stories now.

How anything could contain the hunger long enough to bother, it did not know.

This meat was just so sweet.

16

I
t was the chocolate thickshake that did it for Dave in the end. He felt uncomfortably full for the first time in days. There was a peculiar pleasure to be had in sitting back and lightly drumming his greasy fingertips on that tight, distended belly. A pleasure that lasted for all of ten minutes, and then the tiny bulge above his belt buckle marking the final resting place of so many chickens and pigs and their friend the thickshake was gone, and he was back to his new, sleek swimwear model profile.

‘Damn. I’m getting a cover of
Sports Illustrated
out of this,’ he said.

Professor Ashbury marvelled as though he’d just shown her a particularly intriguing card trick.

‘I’ve seen some odd things today, very odd, but watching you consume a trailer park’s worth of garbage food and then do your miracle weight loss thing, I will concede that was a rather special moment, Dave.’

Heath, who had seen it all before, checked his wristwatch and announced himself ready for the rack.

‘But there’s one last thing you could do for me,’ he said to Dave.

‘Sure, name it,’ Hooper replied, still feeling the need to atone for being a dickhead earlier.

‘Professor, would you like to come along?’ Heath asked. ‘It won’t take long, and this has been bugging me since I found out.’

Dave was more than just intrigued now. Heath was not the sort of guy to let anything bug him for very long. He was more the sort of guy to call in a strike from an orbital platform or perhaps file the problem to death. In triplicate. The more time Dave spent around him, the more he came to see Heath as an uptight but potentially violent bureaucrat.

‘We’re headed to the crew lounge,’ the captain explained. ‘Where you encountered the Hunn.’

Before Dave could object, Heath hurried to explain himself. ‘The site’s been cleaned out. Sensitive Site Exploitation was thorough and used a standard decon protocol.’

‘Go on,’ Dave told him.

‘But there was one thing left,’ Heath said. ‘We couldn’t move it.’

Professor Ashbury seemed to know what he was talking about. She regarded Dave with a carefully composed expression, giving nothing away.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘The hammer. Mr Grbac’s splitting maul. We can’t move it.’

Now Dave was confused rather than intrigued.

‘Why? I buried it in Urgon’s melon, not the steelwork.’

‘Probably better you just come along and see for yourself. You might “remember” something more.’

Whatever the problem was, Heath seemed at a loss. Contrite Dave had no objections. He had his atonement to be getting on with, and he wasn’t at all sleepy. Matter of fact, he had no idea how he was going to get his head down and was worried about being out of it tomorrow, with Professor Compton shooting him the stink eye and loading him up with questions he couldn’t hope to answer. Just to make him look like some sort of idiot rube in front of Emmeline.

Or Emma. He wondered if she liked to be called Emma in bed.

Then he stopped thinking about that because it was becoming obvious. Again.

He turned his thoughts back to Compton. That served to soften the rail spike. Dave Hooper had met plenty of guys like Compton before. They saw the dirt under his fingernails and the grime worked into his old shirt collar, and they thought
redneck
. Didn’t matter that he had a couple of bachelor’s degrees and a master’s in engineering and knew enough about academia to know that he could go play their reindeer games as a teacher if he wanted to. But then he remembered what his dad had always said.

Those that can’t do, teach.

These pricks, Dave had decided long ago, just couldn’t see past a bit of oil and grease.

‘Let’s go, then,’ he said. ‘And I’ll consult the ol’ monsterpedia for the splitting maul of the gods,’ he said, tapping the side of his head.

Turned out his Rolodex was possessed of a bottomless trove of lore concerning legendary weapons. That was how he thought of it, too: ‘lore’. Despite being pretty sure he’d never had reason to utter the word before. What was he, the Nerdlinger General? As they wound through the maze of flame-scored corridors, working their way around restricted and unsafe areas, up and down stairs that were sometimes internal, sometimes external, and sometimes a hybrid of both, he worried that the answer to that might be yes. Dave apparently now knew more about legendary swords and celebrated battleaxes than the world’s geekiest tabletop game geek. He’d known a couple of champions at college; engineering schools seemed to attract the type. But he doubted they could match his arcane expertise in edged weapons of storied and gore-splattered renown. All of them with names like BoneCleaver and DragonRend. All of them with their own ‘souls’.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ he muttered.

‘Is there an issue?’ Professor Ashbury asked.

‘Giant man-eating nerds. Really, you don’t want to know,’ Dave said, and went back to pondering Marty’s splitting maul. But apart from nearly falling into a dark, bottomless well of memory where hundreds of legendary war hammers lived – ‘
Tremble before Mighty Trhondor’s Hammer of Flattening
’ – he came up empty-handed.

As they weaved past a patrol just before the turn to the crew lounge, Heath stopped and asked the sergeant in charge if he could borrow one of his marines.

‘Sure, Captain. Take your pick.’

‘Private, you’ll do,’ he said, pointing to the largest man in the unit, a slab-shouldered brute whose assault rifle looked comically small in his hands.

‘Sir?’

Heath asked the giant marine to follow them into the lounge. He hadn’t been lying about the clean-up job. Dave’s mild apprehension about returning to the slaughterhouse was unfounded. The room was empty. It had been stripped and sanitised. The smell of bleach was strong enough to bring tears to the eyes. The tiles he’d knocked out of the ceiling had even been replaced from somewhere. No bloodstains marked the floor or walls. He could hear cooks and other personnel preparing the rig’s kitchen for breakfast. Swap the civilians for cooks in camouflage and it was possible to convince yourself that nothing had happened. No evidence of any kind remained of the terrible violence done here. Except for one thing.

Marty Grbac’s splitting maul.

It lay on the tiled floor. Still matted with dried blood, bone chips, shards of broken fang, and a few strands of coarse hair that looked like they’d come off the back of a feral hog. The straight hardwood stock still bore a bloodied imprint of his fingers. Or maybe Marty’s. Dave couldn’t say.

The sergeant, whose name tag identified him as McInerney, ordered his men to keep watch in the hallway outside while he took up station by the door, as curious as anyone about what Heath was up to. Private Everding stood at ease, waiting to be given another order but not looking much at ease to Dave’s eye.

Hooper made to reach for the splitting maul, but Heath held up a hand.

‘Just a moment. Everding? Could you try to pick up the hammer for me?’

‘But sir
. . .’
the marine started to protest.

‘Just indulge me, son. I said
try
.’

The marine threw a pleading look at his sergeant, who merely gestured at the splitting maul with his free hand. ‘You heard the captain. Give it your best.’

Private Everding didn’t look happy, but he did as he was told.

Handing his rifle to Sergeant McInerney, he approached the heavy tool reluctantly. Dave could understand that. It was filthy with blood and worse. Professor Ashbury circled the room for a better vantage point.

‘What’s going on here?’

Compton. Was he stalking them? It was the second time he’d walked in on a show-and-tell.

He waddled into the room, clad in khaki trousers and a rumpled dress shirt. Ashbury gave Compton a brusque nod of professional acknowledgement.

‘Captain Heath thought to bring Hooper in on this,’ she said, waving one hand at the splitting maul.

‘I see,’ Compton said. ‘You should have called me.’

‘My apologies, Professor,’ Heath said. ‘I am used to operating in the field without direct supervision.’

Dave, who had no idea what was up, just watched from where he stood on a light patch of tiles where the TV once had lived. Where had that gone? he wondered. After another fruitless appeal to his sergeant, Everding dropped into a squat over the long hickory shaft. He looked like a man about to attempt an Olympic lift. Rather than picking up the hammer, as Dave had expected, with his dominant hand, just under the heavy steel head, Everding placed both hands about equally distant from each end of the shaft. Then he tried to hoist the weight. He looked ridiculous, as if he were goofing around. And then
. . .

Everding tried to lift the hammer.

‘What the fuck?’

Dave’s eyes went a little wider, then narrowed as the enormous marine heaved and strained. Cords stood out on his neck, his face turned dark red, and he grunted with the effort.

The handle moved maybe an inch before he gave up and let go, stumbling back across the room, where Heath had some difficulty preventing him from crashing to the floor.

Everding had failed.

In Dave’s mind, a monologue on the event sank into the trove of lore.

‘Many from the village had tried their hand to shift Maul the Suresplitter. All who made the attempt failed, for the Suresplitter awaited
. . .’

Okay, enough. Dave willed himself out of that particular nerdspace in his brain.

‘Thank you, Marine,’ Heath said. ‘Care to try, Sergeant?’

McInerney’s grin widened.

‘I watched Joey Cuomo try the same thing this morning, Captain. He didn’t do much better. Reckon I’ll treat my hernia to the day off if you don’t mind.’

Heath grinned back at him. A small thing, but it was a warm, genuine smile, one of the few Dave had seen from him. In contrast, the captain’s glance at Compton revealed little but impatience.

‘Fair enough. I don’t imagine the professor or I would even move it the inch Private Everding achieved.’

They all looked at Dave.

‘So, what?’ Dave said. ‘You just sort of pulled Urgon’s head away from it?’

‘After a fashion,’ Ashbury said. ‘It made the most awful mess.’

Dave bent forward to pick the maul up or at least to try. Heath warned him to be careful.

‘Remember what happened to the weight bar. Take it easy, Dave.’

Good point
, he thought without saying anything.

‘This will be interesting,’ said Compton, as though Dave were a labrador trying to play the piano.

Dave stood over the end of the shaft and looked at Emmeline Ashbury.

‘See what happens,’ she said. ‘Please, however, do exercise some care.’

He stood up straight again, examined the problem, and cautiously toed the handle with his boot. The end of the shaft moved about six inches when he pushed it. It felt no heavier than it had the last time he’d touched it, which was to say heavy but manageable. He gave it another small nudge with the same result.

‘Oh good grief,’ Professor Compton said.

‘You want to try again?’ Dave asked Everding, who was staring at him as if he’d grown another head. ‘Might’ve just been gummed up with monster blood. That stuff’s like superglue.’

‘No, sir,’ said Everding.

‘Alrighty, then.’

Dave leaned down and picked up the hammer, grimacing a little at the sticky filth encrusting the handle. Unlike the weight bar, which had felt as though it was made of foam, this felt pretty much as he remembered it. In fact,
exactly
as he remembered it. Heavy but usable. He hefted the piece and gave it an experimental twirl. It swung around in a tight figure eight at such speed that the air whooshed.

‘Holy shit,’ Everding exclaimed. Then, ‘Er, excuse me, ma’am.’

But Ashbury wasn’t interested in his apologies. She was staring at Dave as he twirled the heavy maul like a conductor’s baton. It blurred with the speed of the movement, and Heath finally called out, ‘Dave! That’s probably enough.’

‘Oh, sorry,’ said Dave, who’d forgotten himself, lost in the strange simple joy of playing with Maul the Hunnsplitter. Or maybe Sledge the Melon Smasher. Or
. . .

He was gonna need a name for this thing. He knew that the way he knew burgers needed beer.

The stiff breeze coming off the improvised fan blade was ruffling Emmeline Ashbury’s dark hair, and the sound of the hammer’s passage was a deep thrumming hum. A little like a chopper blade without the percussive note. He had to remind himself that a day ago he’d used it to put down a monster that was sitting right here, snacking on his friend like a piece of beef jerky.

He swung the top of the handle into his palm with a meaty crack. The steel head glistened dully where it wasn’t covered in dried gore.

‘Thank you,’ Heath said, obviously relieved. ‘I could see that thing flying through a wall and taking out half the rig.’

‘I think she could probably do that,’ Dave said with a trace of awe. ‘Would you mind if I cleaned her up? She’s kind of gross.’

‘I got it,’ said Sergeant McInerney before ducking out the door.

‘You’re assigning this object a gender role?’ Professor Compton asked. ‘It is just an artifact.’

‘No, she’s more than that,’ Dave said, looking anew at the splitting maul. ‘She has
. . .
I dunno, something. Why not give her a name? You never named a car, Doc?’

Compton said nothing.

The remaining marine nodded with apparent understanding.

‘Maybe I should name her Annie. A steel tornado of unholy destruction? Or not. We’ll see.’

‘There has to be a rational explanation,’ Professor Ashbury said. ‘For all of this.’

‘I agree with my subordinate,’ Professor Compton said, ignoring the death glare his subordinate sent his way. ‘Extraordinary as events may seem, I doubt we are dealing with magic here. Some arcane technological event, perhaps.’

In spite of the caked-on bloody gruel, Dave found that he wanted to hold on to the splitting maul. It felt natural, the way a really beautifully crafted baseball bat did. Or a pool cue. Or a fine piece of ass
. . .
or anything, really. Any tool that had been carefully crafted by a skilled maker with one purpose in mind. The wood grain meshed and melded with his calloused hands, generating a soothing warmth of reassurance.