Dave vs. the Monsters

by John Birmingham

  But that was all later.

  At 11:52 a.m., David John Hooper landed a killing blow with an edged weapon on the poorly protected nasal cleft of a Hunn ur Horde. The ax-shaped end of the maul’s twelve-pound head punched into the weaker, thinner mantle of bone just as Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn crouched and looked up toward the attacker.

  The Hunn’s last words were, “You dare not do this …”

  But Dave did, and with that one mighty blow he split the monster’s skull like a rotten watermelon, and everything that had changed forever that morning changed again.

  04

  When Dave was nine years old, he broke his arm. Totally worth it, he told his friends at school later, when he rolled up with his arm in plaster, supported by a sling. There is no bigger celebrity on the playground than the kid who turns up with a broken bone unless it’s the kid who turns up with a bone he broke in a moment of high adventure and epic stupidity. Dave Hooper was that kid.

  One day during the long, slow summer holidays that marked his ninth year, young Dave Hooper had become possessed of a plan. He would push his old trampoline, with which he was bored, up against the chain-link fence at the back of the yard. The Hooper family garden faced an empty lot, a couple of acres of grass that grew to knee length in summer, shaded by a few stands of scraggly old trees in which crows and ill-tempered magpies cawed at one another. He would find a spare length of wood from the tree house closer to the back porch, a handy piece of gear they’d used to make his brother Andy walk the plank from six feet up when they’d been playing pirates a month or so back.

  That cost him the month of June, grounded for the duration while Andy recovered from his sprained ankle. A royal ass whuppin’ courtesy of the old man’s leather belt, the one with the brass studs, had also been levied, in addition to the grounding. Dave had endured that without a whimper, as he had learned that whimpering led to more ass whuppin’. But it certainly didn’t dissuade him from his course of action with the trampoline.

  He planned to lay the plank against the edge of the trampoline, and then run up it, leaping at the last moment into the center of the stretchy canvas and launching himself into the air. Exactly like Spider-Man.

  After all, the grass on the other side of the fence was long and soft and surely would cushion any impact. Especially since Dave had done those judo lessons for three weeks a couple of years ago and knew exactly how to roll out of a fall. Like Spider-Man if Spider-Man knew judo. His cousin Darryl, who was not nearly as smart as Dave but was possessed of an admirable frontier spirit, agreed that this was an excellent plan. After ten minutes of huffing and puffing, the grunt work of moving the heavy trampoline all the way down the back garden and up against the fence was done. The plank was found, placed, and secured with a bungee strap from the back of Dave’s bicycle. As the genius behind this cunning plan, Dave insisted on the privilege of the first jump.

  It had been glorious.

  Dave flew into the air.

  He curled into a ball, fascinated by the kaleidoscopic green and blue smear of color the world became.

  It was all going according to …

  He woke up in the hospital six hours later with a concussion and a broken forearm. When he came to in his hospital bed in New Orleans, Dave enjoyed one sweet moment of being nine years old again. Sure he hurt, and he was in a world of trouble, but it was totally worth it. The stories he’d tell when he …

  Oh, shit.

  He plummeted forward in time from that long-ago summer, free-falling through two and a half decades to find himself, dizzy and disoriented, tucked in between cool white cotton sheets, surrounded by screens, punctured by needles from which ran tubes and wires. He was wrapped in bandages, and possibly insane.

  His first thought was that he’d had some kind of breakdown out on the rig, gone crazy, ripped the place up, and now he was in a psycho ward. Drug tests. This was gonna mean drug tests. His next thought was a memory. The face of the monster.

  The Hunn.

  The fucking what?

  The monster he had killed—he knew he had killed it—was …

  The Hunn.

  He knew that as clearly as he knew that he’d killed it. As clearly as he knew he was totally locked up in a psycho ward because he was a crazy man, thinking monster thoughts and pushing away memories of carnage and horror. For once in his mostly wasted adult life he thought maybe a little drug test wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Find out what crazy shit those hookers had doped him with.

  The Horde. The Hunn.

  Dave started to curse. His voice was dry and rasped in his throat like gravel. He cursed anyway and pulled at the tubes running into his arms and the backs of his hands, pulling them free, becoming entangled, and freeing himself again. He kicked off the sheets and the light cotton blanket and swung his legs down off the bed, still muttering curses. His head swam, and the edges of his vision blurred a little. He felt nauseous, but then, a 2 a.m. breakfast of corn chips and vodka hadn’t promised anything more.

  A nurse appeared at his door. A big-ass black lady. He noticed then that the door was open, as was the door of the hospital room across from him. That wasn’t right. He was pretty sure they locked up the psychos when they put them in the nut hatch. And that was sure as hell where he belonged. Or the drunk tank. That brought him up short and sharp. Shit. Maybe he was starting to go the way of his old man on the booze. Seeing things. Falling apart in his head.

  No.

  The Hunn, he knew, was called Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn, and he knew that the same way he knew his cousin’s name from all those summers so long ago: Darryl Hooper. He knew these things because he had learned them a long time ago. Darryl once had nearly blown his little toe off with a firecracker. He worked for a logistics company in Norway now. Dave had fucked his first girlfriend and never told him.

  That had been some sweet forbidden pussy.

  And Dave had killed Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn, a BattleMaster of the Horde, in the game lounge on the Longreach platform.

  Damn. He was losing his fucking mind. Just as his old man had.

  “Mr. Hooper, please. Mr. Hooper, you need to get back into bed right now. You’ve been very badly hurt.”

  The words were caring, but the big-ass black lady nurse who said them didn’t look the sort to take any guff from the likes of him, and she didn’t so much suggest he get back into bed as growl a direct order to do so. That was too bad, because Dave didn’t think he’d been badly hurt, not physically, anyway. He didn’t feel like he’d been hurt at all. As far as that went, in fact, he felt fine in spite of all the bandages and the holes they’d been poking in him. Better than fine, even. As his eyesight cleared and the head spins stopped, he stretched and rolled his shoulders.

  Took a deep breath and …

  “Nurse,” he said with some difficulty. He felt dizzy again and had to sit down on the bed, which at least mollified her. “Where am I?” he asked.

  “You’re safe now, Mr. Hooper, but you need to stay in bed. You’ve been burned, and your arm is broken.”

  “My arm?”

  That echo of his distant past served only to confuse him. Yes, he had broken his arm a long time ago playing Spider-Man with his cousin. But he was fine now. Possibly insane but fine. The arm didn’t hurt at all, and he well remembered what a broken bone felt like. It hurt for days. He lifted his arm with the molded plastic sheath, a black arm guard of sorts perforated with hundreds of tiny holes, perhaps to let the bandages breathe. He clenched his fist experimentally, waiting for the pain he remembered from that summer of his childhood, a feeling like someone had dug in under the flesh with a heavy set of pliers, latched on to the bones, and given them a vicious turn. Nothing. Not numbness. Just an absence of pain.

  “Mr. Hooper, sir, get back in bed. The doctor is coming. He’ll be very angry to see you up like this. And I’ll get in trouble; now come on, please.”

  Her voice took on an almost motherly note, and it finally reached him. The nurse didn’t seem to think he was cra
zy, just hurt. Of course that made her crazy, because he was fine. Felt like he could toss a pigskin to his boys with this damned broken arm.

  Not that he got to play with them much these days. Or had before Annie had taken them and left.

  “The Longreach …” Dave croaked again. A bottle of spring water stood on the little table by the head of his bed. He used his good hand and his teeth to open it. Took a sip. It was lukewarm but beautiful. He didn’t think he’d tasted water this clean and sweet before. Before he could stop himself, he had emptied most of the bottle, although he did spill a bit down his chin. “The Longreach,” he repeated, “the drilling rig I was on. What’s happened?”

  The nurse shook her head, but in pity rather than denial. “Oh, it’s terrible. I’m sorry, Mr. Hooper. So many dead and injured. I’m afraid I don’t have the details, but …”

  Dave picked up a TV remote from the bedside table and pointed it at the small flat-screen Samsung hanging from the ceiling at the end of the bed. He powered up the television, flicking through the channels looking for a news show.

  Shopping Network. Some asshole televangelist. The Golden Girls.

  “I don’t think that’s a very good idea, Mr. Hooper,” the nurse protested, but he ignored her and kept flipping. He went from ancient Jerry Springer reruns, to some show about fat people, to MSNBC. Not his choice of news normally, but right now he didn’t care. It was running nonstop coverage of the disaster.

  Some talking head was narrating video taken from a helicopter circling a long way back from the drill rig. There wasn’t much to see, just a column of smoke on the horizon. The news anchor confirmed that the chopper was being held outside a twenty-mile exclusion zone on the orders of the coast guard. Dave waited impatiently for news of casualties, but neither the anchor nor the ticker running across the bottom of the screen provided that information. After filling up minutes of airtime with speculation about a “daring terrorist strike,” the anchor threw it over to a correspondent in Washington. Dave cursed quietly again.

  “You should turn that off now. It’s not helping.”

  The voice was male and stern. Dave looked around, expecting to see the nurse flanked by some old fart of a doctor packing the usual God complex, but was surprised to see a lean, hard-looking man in military uniform. He looked a few years younger than Dave but much fitter and somehow older in the eyes. Dave looked for stripes on his arms, which was about the only military insignia he could recognize. Three meant a sergeant and two a corporal if the movies had not lied to him. But the man’s green and black spackled digicam uniform carried no stripes. Probably some sort of officer, then.

  “An army guy? Son, you got the wrong oil field,” Dave said incredulously. “Get lost on your way to Fort Polk?”

  The man shook his head.

  “Lieutenant Dent,” he said, introducing himself. “United States Navy.”

  That confused Dave even more. Why would a navy guy dress for the jungle? He had other issues to take up with this guy, though. Issues that had nothing to do with his possibly delicate state of mind, which he didn’t plan on mentioning at all.

  “What the fuck is this exclusion zone and terrorist crap you guys are going on about?”

  He jerked a thumb at the TV screen. His broken hand, which didn’t even give him a twinge.

  “The exclusion zone was declared for a reason,” Dent said. “Maybe you should have paid attention to it.”

  “Well, I didn’t see you anywhere out there lending a hand, SpongeBob, so I figured I’d just do my fucking job,” Hooper said. “I am the safety boss for that rig. It’s what BP pays me for, and it’s my cock on the block if anything goes down. So if anyone is gonna be getting excluded from the Longreach, it’s not me. Got a smart-ass answer for that, Navy?”

  Dent didn’t respond to the challenge beyond staring impassively back at him, and Dave decided he didn’t like this navy asshole very much. Then he decided he was leaving. After all, he had a job to do and he couldn’t do it in bed. He had to see to his people.

  “Are any of my guys here in this hospital?” Dave asked the nurse, ignoring the army guy … sorry, navy guy. He looked around the room probably for the first time, trying to figure out where they’d put him. It was a standard private hospital room, well appointed and clean. BP’s health insurance would cover that. And there were no …

  (Hunn ur Horde)

  … monsters. There were no monsters squatting in the middle of the room, snacking down on human femurs or sporting truly terrifying boners. Dave pushed the images away. Definitely some sort of bad drug flashback, he thought, mixing poorly with shock and trauma. Those whores; they must have slipped him something sketchy.

  “I was with a guy called Vince Martinelli before I, er, fell over, or passed out, or whatever. Is Vince here? Is anybody from the Longreach here?”

  The nurse looked to Dent, who answered, “That’s not your concern right now, sir. All of the casualties have been evacuated, and all of the wounded are being cared for. But we need to talk to you, Mr. Hooper, if you are well enough.”

  He looked himself up and down, taking in the bandages and the hospital gown and concluding that he wasn’t too badly hurt. He rolled his shoulders, patted himself down, flexed his arms. No burns, no breaks as best he could tell. The nurse had the wrong guy. Not surprising given the chaos that would have blown through this place. There were a lot of casualties off that rig. Dave started to stand up again.

  On the TV screen hanging over the end of his bed, a spokesman from BP was reading a statement, declaring that it was more important to deal with the immediate crisis than to speculate about what might have caused it.

  “I need to find my guys,” Dave said by way of dismissing Dent’s request. “I need to know who made it out. Whether anyone was left behind. I don’t mean no offense, but you weren’t there, you don’t—”

  “I was there,” Dent said. “My team got you out. And we need to debrief you, right now. You’re not badly hurt.”

  “And I’m not hanging around to play twenty questions with you. You need to know if some jihadi nutjob swam out there and blew up my rig? No, he didn’t. I don’t know what the fuck happened, but this terrorism bullshit …” He waved one hand at the television. “It’s a crock. Briefing ended. We’re done.”

  As he stepped forward, aware that his tough guy routine was somewhat undercut by the sight of his ass hanging out the back of the hospital gown, Lieutenant Dent stepped in across his path and put one hand lightly on his shoulder to bar his way. “I’m sorry, sir, but …”

  Dave was angry, and if he cared to examine his deeper feelings, he was also frightened and confused. But he didn’t care to do anything like that. He rarely did. Matter of fact, he was trying very hard not to think about the nightmare he’d had lying in the hospital bed. He decided that was a reasonable explanation for his memories. A nightmare while he was fucked off his nuts on whatever drugs those hookers had slipped him and whatever drugs the hospital had then poured in on top to mix up a little chaos cocktail inside his head. He didn’t mean to strike Dent and certainly not to hurt him. He merely wanted to brush the man’s hand from his shoulder and push past him. Instead, when he attempted to palm off the sailor, his hand moved with much greater speed than he had planned, making contact with the man’s forearm, which Dave distinctly heard break. A sound like the snapping of a twig in the forest, muffled by distance. And before he could stop himself, before he had time to wonder at what he’d just done and how much trouble it was about to cause, he’d already hit Dent in the center of his chest with an open hand, again a much quicker move than he had intended, but not hard. Or at least it didn’t feel hard to Dave Hooper.

  Lieutenant Dent cried out and flew back across the room, crashing into a freestanding closet, which splintered under the impact.

  “What the …”

  Dave sat down on the bed, or, more accurately, he collapsed onto it butt first. In a moment that convinced him he was going insane he heard the
shrill, disapproving tone of his wife berating him for setting his dirty ass down on their clean sheets. But that was just another memory. Something that had happened a long while ago. Like his cousin Darryl and the trampoline.

  Stunned. And starting to feel more than a little sickened again—hello nausea, my old friend—he knew, he just knew that he’d hurt the lieutenant badly. Fucked him up, even. Broken his arm at least and possibly fractured a couple of ribs. The dizzy spell he’d experienced when he awoke came swirling back up from nowhere, and he muttered an apology as he leaned back on the pillows. Blossoms of dark light blotted out half the room, and he thought he might be sick all over the floor.

  The nurse—Nurse Fletcher; he had a clear memory of the name badge she was wearing without ever really attending to it—cried out in alarm. Dave lost consciousness for a moment but not for too long, because when he came to, Dent was still on the floor, moaning and clutching at his chest with his one good arm, and two hospital orderlies were standing over the bed glowering fiercely at their difficult patient.

  “Fuck, I’m sorry, all right,” Dave said weakly. His head was spinning, and wracking gut cramps doubled him over. The darkness reached up to him again, and this time he stayed down there for a while.

  05

  Over the years, Dave Hooper had come to understand something about himself. He had come to know himself, or rather his various selves. There was Good Dave, who’d tried his honest best when he was first married to Annie and the boys were young and there wasn’t much money left over when they’d divided up his paycheck to cover all the basics. Annie had gone back to her job as an editor of technical books shortly after Toby was born, but only part time. Her paychecks were smaller, which was a mystery to his conservative friends such as Grbac because Dubya’s tax cuts should have put more money in their pockets. None of it was any sort of mystery to Dave. Politics be damned. He was just getting fucked by the infamous luck o’ the Hoopers.