Dave vs. the Monsters

by John Birmingham

  Annie had stayed home for six months when Jack arrived, but it had not been a happy time. Later on, they both acknowledged that she’d probably been depressed. Fuck knows Dave had been.

  That was when Bad Dave showed up.

  Bad Dave looked a lot like his better-behaved twin, and if anything he was, at first, more charming, more helpful, more—what was the word?—ingratiating. Bad Dave was ever so supportive, offering to run down to the shops for Toby’s medicine or to work an extra shift to pay for the shrink Annie had started seeing. But Bad Dave had his ways. It was amazing how much time you could cut off a run to the grocery store or the pharmacy if you really pressed the gas on your vintage 1969 Chevy Camaro with that sweet-ass 468 big block. More than enough time for a side drink at Ringo’s bar and maybe even two if you took the back road on the way home to avoid the cops and explained you’d had to pull over to take a couple of work calls. It was dangerous to drive while using the phone, after all. And he was a safety guy. It said so on his name tag.

  Bad Dave could be awfully convincing when he was selling a story to his wife about needing—like really fucking needing—to fly up to Houston over the weekend for a bunch of bullshit meetings with the suits that he agreed was a total waste of time, but what the hell, they were paying him double time just to show up. And they could totally use a little bit more of the folding stuff.

  Bad Dave could even halfway convince himself that the time he spent in Hooters while he was on the company clock in Houston was actually necessary to keep things running smoothly at home, because God knows having him around the house didn’t seem to put his wife in a good mood, whereas inhaling buffalo wings and beer at America’s favorite titty bar did wonders for his.

  But in the end Bad Dave always had to make way for Contrite Dave, for Apology Dave, and for Dave of the Shameless Grovel and Seething Resentment. Contrite Dave had worn out the knees on more than one pair of jeans crawling back into the affections of his long-suffering wife, a painful necessity that Rational Dave, or rather the divorce lawyer Rational Dave secretly consulted once, characterized as unavoidable. Unless he wanted to spend the next decade or so in crippling poverty after Annie’s lawyer and the Internal Revenue Service were finished gouging him. Contrite Dave had more than once promised the IRS that he would get his shit together, another little secret of which Annie was unaware until her rat bastard lawyer, Vietch—an old college flame and pathetically, obviously desperate to rekindle the fire—somehow ferreted out the information and informed her.

  Sitting up in his hospital bed, allowing the doctor to prod and probe him, Contrite Dave was feeling very, very sorry indeed. If only for himself. He was more than a little worried. The officer he’d struck—and he hadn’t even tried to hurt him, not really; it was more what the old-timers called a love tap—well, he was in surgery right now, having part of a rib removed from his lung. The surgeons had also had to drill a hole into his head, according to the doctor, to relieve the pressure from all the bleeding in there.

  Contrite Dave nodded quietly. Occasionally he muttered “sorry” even though, yeah, he was mostly sorry for himself. And he let his arms hang limp while the doctor checked his dressings. Dr. Pradesh his name was. A very distinguished Indian guy—a curry Indian, not a Custer Indian—and an actual professor, Nurse Fletcher had whispered to him, with a neatly trimmed silvery beard and an honest-to-God turban on his head. A duck-egg-blue turban, Dave thought. Duckegg blue had been one of Annie’s favorite colors for dinner settings and throw cushions when she still cared about such things.

  Dr. Pradesh, the Turban, looked very concerned as he examined Dave’s chest and abdomen. The oilman wasn’t sure why, because apart from feeling very hungry, starving in fact, he was fine. None of the other people in the room gave him any clue about what might be wrong. The orderlies were still there and still glaring at him. Nurse Fletcher scurried about trying to anticipate the Turban’s every need. And a new navy guy stood in the corner with his arms folded, regarding Dave like some sort of unexploded bomb. Whenever he caught the eye of this new guy, which he tried to avoid doing as much as possible, Contrite Dave could not help himself.

  “Sorry,” he muttered.

  The new navy guy said nothing. He leaned against the door frame, his body a huge brick of compacted muscle that somehow gave the impression of fluidity. His face was a mask behind the Oakleys, neither hard and angry nor open to debate. For all Dave knew the man could have been meditating.

  The Turban finished his examination and straightened up, looking at Dave, or rather at his injuries, with obvious disdain.

  “Somebody has made a very stupid mistake,” he said. Dave figured he had studied and worked most of his life in England, because his accent was pure Oxford. Or what Dave assumed to be Oxford on the basis of some old movies on the TV he’d fallen asleep in front of. He resolved immediately to stop thinking of him as the Turban. He was not a guy to be crossed, and Dave didn’t trust himself not to say something stupid and offensive. He had history against him. “This man has not been injured at all,” the Turb–Pradesh, said. “I don’t know how he ended up here, but he is taking up a bed that could be used for one of the other casualties. We are overwhelmed by them.”

  That finally caught Dave’s attention and pulled him out of his one-man pity party.

  “Casualties, Doc? Or, you know, Professor, whatever. How many casualties, how bad?”

  Pradesh dismissed him with a sniff.

  “A lot worse off than you, young man,” he said. It had been a long time since anybody had called Dave Hooper “young man.” One of the reasons he’d hired two whores from Nevada was so that one could spray a big whipped cream “37” on her chest for the other one to lick off. Man had to have something to look forward to on his birthday, after all.

  “But Doctor,” the nurse protested, “I saw and dressed his wounds myself. He had second-degree burns to forty percent of his torso. A greenstick fracture to his right ulna. And a deep laceration running from his right armpit most of the way down to his navel. The sutures will still be in him.”

  Pradesh looked at her with an expression hovering somewhere between pity and contempt.

  “Then show me the stitches, nurse,” he said. “They won’t have dissolved yet. Or the burns. Either would be satisfactory. This man is fit and healthy. And from evidence of the trauma done to the naval officer, his little nap in our much-needed bed has returned to him whatever strength he lacked when carried in here. From the smell of his breath, I would imagine he was passed out drunk.”

  Hooper observed the exchange between doctor and nurse as though watching a tennis match, his head turning to and fro. Nurse Fletcher was not backing down. Whatever deference she had paid to the doctor’s exalted position before had been withdrawn in the face of his lack of respect for her professional judgment. If she said Hooper was burned and lacerated …

  But he wasn’t, was he? Dent had said he was fine, too. He shifted about, turning his shoulders this way and that, trying to feel the tug of fresh sutures in his skin. Or the familiar and deeply unpleasant sensation of burned meat on his own body. Second-degree burns, the nurse had said. That was gonna hurt.

  But nothing. How could that be?

  The last thing he remembered was … No, best not to go there. He was still trying to sort out his memory of landing on the platform from the drug-addled dream of the orcs. He didn’t know what his last memory was.

  (You dare not do this.)

  He remembered swinging the hammer. No, he remembered a bad dream about swinging on something—

  Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn, BattleMaster of the Fourth Legion.

  What the fuck? Dave tried to shake the thought from his head. He remembered something about a TV being on in the crew quarters. A game, stalled on the Xbox. Maybe some sort of acid flashback? Man, it’d been years, but they said it could still come back at you years later.

  “So he’s good to go, Professor?”

  It was the soldier. No, it was the new
navy guy, Dave reminded himself. His voice was a strange train wreck of a Midwestern accent buried under a surfer’s drawl. A voice like that, this guy got around. A replacement for the navy guy he’d broken, he was dressed in the same digital jungle camouflage, but with a pistol strapped to his thigh. Dent hadn’t been wearing no pistol. Pradesh turned away from his confrontation with Nurse Fletcher, letting the new guy feel the full force of his disapproval.

  “Well, he is good to get out of bed, if that’s what you mean. But I don’t want him leaving the hospital or even the ward until we find out who was responsible for putting him in here when he should have been sleeping off his drunk in a cell at the police station. You might not think it important, but I am trying to run a medical facility here, and I cannot have it descend into some sort of half-arsed pantomime of a Persian bazaar. Mr. Cooper—”

  “Hooper,” Contrite Dave said, getting less contrite by the minute. “Dave Hooper.”

  Pradesh carried on without missing a beat: “—will not be leaving until we find out how he made his way in here.”

  And with that he turned the full force of both turban and beard on Contrite Dave.

  “And rest assured your employer’s health insurance will be paying for every minute you lie there wasting our precious time and resources.”

  “Hey, that’s cool,” said Contrite Dave, who didn’t want any trouble.

  The navy guy spoke up again, not at all intimidated by the superior attitude of this high-talking asshole with his head in a towel. “Doc, if he’s good to go, I have orders and authorization to take him, right now.”

  Uh oh, thought Dave, his heart sinking. He’d really fucked up that other navy guy, and now he was in the shit. Not just with the government or the fucking IRS but this time with the navy. Fuck. That was probably worse than the IRS.

  “Hey, I’m a civilian,” Dave said.

  The navy surfer bro’ rotated his head a notch to the left, still leaning on the doorjamb as if they were at the bar playing pool. “Dude, seriously? You can pretend to have a choice about this, but you will be coming with me. On foot or on your ass.”

  He spoke calmly and steadily with a laid-back California vibe that sounded as if it had been tacked on to the Midwest inflection like a jerry-built porch. But there was no mistaking the intent behind it, as though putting a couple of rounds in some dude was no big deal. Dave didn’t doubt this new guy would shoot him without a second thought. He wasn’t making threats; he was just explaining how it was gonna be in his weird soft-but-hard voice.

  All Dave wanted to do was get out of bed, get out of this hospital gown that left his ass hanging in the breeze, find Vince Martinelli or somebody, anybody from the platform, and sort out exactly what had happened. But nobody was interested in what he wanted. Pradesh left off his argument with Nurse Fletcher to take up this new one with … Allen. The navy guy’s name tag read ALLEN, and he had stripes on his collar. Dave frowned. He knew that without having to look. But he didn’t remember having seen it and noted it before.

  Nurse Fletcher, meanwhile, unimpressed with being abandoned in the defense of her professional judgment about whether a guy was burned to a damned cinder or not, increased the volume of her objections to Professor Pradesh, or rather to the back of his duck-egg-blue turban. The navy guy, Allen, glanced at the cupboard Dave had destroyed by—what? Jedi Knight Force-punching it? He stood with arms folded, refusing to be drawn into an argument with Pradesh. He just kept shaking his head, appearing to grow calmer the more the doctor lost it. Mr. Hooper would be coming with him. End of story. The orderlies who were supposed to be watching him had been distracted by the three-way argument.

  Dave leaned forward and glanced across the hallway into the room opposite, hoping to see someone he knew in there, possibly even Martinelli. But Nurse Fletcher’s considerable bulk intervened, blocking his view. She raised her voice, trying to talk over Pradesh, who was trying to convince Allen that he was in charge here. Dave was suddenly aware of just how hungry he was, ravenously so. His stomach growled and saliva jetted into his mouth as he sniffed the chemical-scented hospital air and thought he discerned a faraway hint of boiled potatoes and some sort of meat.

  The thought of meat brought up memories of the nightmare he’d rather forget, and he forced them away. The argument around him grew a touch louder and a lot more irrational. It was like listening to his two boys go at each other over some stupid and pointless playground bullshit. Nobody had answered any of his questions about the rig and what had happened. Nobody had told him who made it off and who didn’t. They didn’t seem to understand that he was responsible for what happened out there. He was the guy who was supposed to keep everyone safe, and he hadn’t.

  He had failed.

  Epically.

  Again.

  The same way he had failed in his marriage, failed as a parent, failed as a brother and a son and a friend too many times to remember. Dave Hooper had failed at pretty much everything he had turned his hand to in life except his work. And now he had failed at that, too.

  He just wanted them to stop for a moment, to listen to him. To answer his goddamn questions. He wanted them to shut the fuck up. He wanted to know why he was in a hospital, apparently unharmed, when so many others were not. He wanted to know why he was having psychotic visions even if the answer was obvious. Especially if the answer was obvious. One of those hookers had to have slipped him something last night, and he was about to fail a drug test. Probably about to be charged and prosecuted. And that wasn’t even close to the worst of the shit coming down on him.

  But nobody was paying the slightest bit of attention to Dave Hooper anymore. Nobody cared. Certainly not about him and probably not about any of the men and women he had failed out on the Longreach. Before he even knew what he was doing, Dave let his temper off the leash. He balled his right hand into a fist and slammed it down on the little bedside unit on which rested his empty water glass and the TV remote.

  “Enough!” he shouted, but not loudly enough to be heard over the enormous crash of the bedside table exploding under the force of his blow. He had not meant to destroy another piece of furniture. Jeez, would the insurance even cover that? All he’d wanted was to stop them from bickering and get them to pay him some attention.

  Mission accomplished. Nurse Fletcher shrieked. Pradesh spun around in alarm and almost tripped over his own feet. Allen came up off the wall as if roused from a nap, his hand on his weapon, ready to use it. The two orderlies didn’t know what to do. Dave just stared at his fist where it hung in midair over the shattered sticks of furniture. He hadn’t been looking when he’d lashed out, and his fist had come down on top of a drinking glass. It exploded as if dropped from a great height, and jagged shards of glass laid open the side of his hand. One long, bloodied fang of glass had penetrated the heel of his palm and emerged on the other side.

  It was uncomfortable but not as painful as it should have been, Dave thought. He must be in shock. Reaching across, feeling a little queasy but fascinated at the same time, he pinched the shard between the thumb and forefinger of his uninjured hand and pulled it out. It was an unusual sensation, having something hard slide through his body like that. But, again, it didn’t really hurt. Not like his arm had hurt all those years ago when he broke it playing on the trampoline with his cousin.

  “I’m sorry,” he said in an almost childish voice. “I hurt myself. And I broke your table.”

  He held his hand up to Nurse Fletcher, who backed away from him, and then to Pradesh, whose eyes betrayed his shock as he stared at the wound. Allen also gaped at the ugly gash, but not because of any squeamishness about the blood. Presumably he’d seen plenty in his line of work. As had Fletcher and Pradesh.

  What none of them had seen, however, was the way Dave Hooper’s wound sealed itself and stopped bleeding within a few seconds. His hand itched terribly where he had opened it up, and he examined it with a sort of fearful curiosity, half expecting to pass out. But instead of some lipless
, pulsing violation, all he saw was the blood he had spilled. He ran his fingers gently over the site of the gash.

  The skin was sticky with blood but otherwise unmarked.

  “Holy fuck,” Dave said.

  “I told you so,” Nurse Fletcher hissed at the Turban.

  06

  Nurse Fletcher hurried back, wearing rubber gloves and carrying a cleanup tray. She dipped cotton balls into a bowl of warm water that was cloudy with antiseptic. After what had happened to Dent, Dave was careful not to make any sudden movements as she wiped away the blood. He was feeling dizzy again, but not because of the gore. He was certain now that he was starving. It had been a long time since he’d eaten any solid food, and that had been a bag of Doritos, and he’d tossed them up on the grass back at the depot. The hunger was becoming more than just uncomfortable. The pain in his stomach was much worse than the glass going into his hand. Or coming out.

  Pradesh shooed away the orderlies when Dave agreed to behave himself on the promise of something to eat and somebody finally answering his questions. Allen, who introduced himself as a chief petty officer, some sort of navy sergeant, assured Dave he would “brief him in” on the situation out at the Longreach, including an updated casualty list. Vince Martinelli, he said, had been taken to a military hospital with minor injuries but otherwise suffering only from shock. He would be fine.

  “This is most unusual,” Pradesh muttered as the blood came off Dave’s arm and hands. “Most unsatisfactory.”

  It was a freak show, was what it was, thought Dave. But “unsatisfactory” wasn’t the word he’d have chosen. “Bugshit crazy” would have been his choice. Nobody had asked him about monsters or nightmares or told him to piss into a cup yet, for which he was grateful. He’d been doing pretty well convincing himself he was having some kind of acid flashback or crystal meth moment until he’d destroyed the bedside table and sliced open his hand, only to see it heal in less than a minute. That was madness enough to put a man over the edge, but at least he wasn’t alone in having witnessed it. Five other responsible adults had seen it, too. And none of them had been snorting lines off some hooker’s tits the previous night as far as he knew.