Dave vs. the Monsters

by John Birmingham

  “Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said again and again. “And I grew up in Baltimore.”

  The last survivor was Terry Higgins, an Englishman, an instrument and control engineer of about fifty years of age who looked like he’d put on another decade overnight. He had been hiding in the showers across the hall from the crew lounge and had emerged in his underpants and a towel just as Dave swung the hammer. He confirmed Vince Martinelli’s story about what had happened next.

  “It was like cutting the strings to a bunch of puppets when you hit that big bastard,” he said. “They all went down.”

  “What’s up with you, Dave?” J2 asked. “You looked mighty sick just then.”

  He knew she was probably paying a little more heed to Heath’s stories about infections and transmission vectors now.

  “It’s like I told you, J2,” he said. “Shit’s been weird all over. Not just on the rig. I ain’t been myself. Not bad. But not myself.”

  “Honey, bad is yourself,” she said, and a few weak chuckles eased the tension.

  Surrounded by people he knew and felt he could trust for the first time in a while, Dave almost threw his hands up in defeat and told them everything. About the strange things he just seemed to know about the creatures that had attacked them. About his weird superhero strength that seemed to cost him terribly if these recurring spasms of violent hunger were somehow connected to it. But he needed no warning look from Captain Heath to shut the hell up. He knew it as a righteous certainty that if he told them everything, they’d think him crazy or cursed. They would back right off of him. And the last thing he wanted at the moment was to be left alone.

  “I don’t know, J2,” he said. “I guess we all had a bad day yesterday. And I didn’t eat. It catches up with you. I just got dizzy. Sorry for freaking you out. Been more ’n enough of that to go around. What about you guys? How you all doing? You being looked after?”

  They were subdued in their responses. Higgins complained about not being able to get a decent cup of tea, and Toltz worried that he hadn’t been able to reach his daughter on the phone.

  “Is that going to be a problem?” Dave asked Heath. “This man needs his kid to know he’s all right.”

  Heath showed them his open hands. “If you need to reach out to your families or your employer, that’s fine. We’d ask …” He paused. “The president would ask that you don’t go talking to anybody about the details of what you saw yesterday. We don’t know if this was a one-time event or if you guys cracked open some sort of chamber with your drill and let these things out. We just don’t know enough to be able to tell people anything yet without scaring the hell out of them. And that includes your families. So no, you didn’t wake up in North Korea. You can call your daughter, Mr. Toltz. But please, let’s not make things worse.”

  It was hard to imagine how they could be worse for Dave, but J2 was babbling by then, asking Heath about whether the president really had asked after them.

  “He may even want to talk to you later,” said the officer, eliciting great excitement, except from Higgins, who muttered something about celebrity politicians jacking up his tax rate.

  “When can we go home?” asked Clayton Toltz, damping down the buzz of conversation. They all wanted to know the answer to that.

  “You’ll appreciate that we need to interview you, examine you, make sure we know as much about what happened as possible. As soon as that’s done, you’re out of here. We don’t really have the facilities on this base to cater to houseguests. And as soon as we know what we’re dealing with, we can get on with doing our jobs. And hopefully you can go back to yours.”

  “Is the government gonna stop us from telling our stories?” Blucas asked. “Because we could get some good money for these stories. From the real news, too. Not just cable.”

  Dave was alarmed by the idea and surprised when Heath brushed off the rig monkey’s concerns. “We can’t stop you saying or doing anything, Mr. Blucas. It’s not like in the movies. We’re not going to disappear you. There were 143 people on the Longreach yesterday. Our latest figures list thirty-seven of them as dead. Twenty-four are in the hospital with very serious injuries. And the remainder are scattered around the Gulf on a variety of ships and onshore facilities. Not all of them know what happened. As I keep saying, we don’t know what happened. That’s why we need your help. The initial reports yesterday, that terrorists had attacked the platform, came from your own people. Some of them are still insisting on that today. But eventually the truth will out. And probably pretty quickly. We need to get in front of that. Do you think you can help us?”

  They were subdued, but nobody pushed back.

  “Can you tell us one thing?” Vince asked.

  “If I can,” Heath answered.

  “Are there more of these things?”

  “And can you kill them?” Santini tossed in from over in the corner.

  “There could well be more,” Heath told them. Not exactly lying, but not being pathologically honest about things, either, Dave thought. “And yes,” he added to Santini, but in such a way that he addressed all of them. “We can kill them. Just ask Dave.”

  For the first time in days, Dave grinned and nodded.

  “Oh, shit, yeah,” Dave said. “We can kill ’em good.”

  What he didn’t say was, And there’ll be lots to kill. Armies of them. Legions.

  10

  The navy split them up after breakfast, sending each of the survivors off to be examined by teams of doctors, psychologists, and otherwise anonymous personnel with no specific job description who interviewed them about the events of the previous day until they had all talked themselves out. As they rotated from one folding table to the next in a couple of large tin sheds, it was pretty boring for the most part, featuring plenty of “hurry up and wait” according to one army guy in Dave’s entourage. They all had an entourage, just like that TV show. But his was the largest and included Heath and Allen, who remained with him throughout the morning. They seemed to have no function other than to be there as familiar faces. Maybe to stop him going all snarly Hulk and smashing the place up, he thought with a wry grin that he quickly hid. It still didn’t spare him from hours of tedium, though, while laptop keyboards got hammered and tablets were stroked. Mystery guys in white coats checked and signed printouts and transcripts while more mystery guys with no specific job description consulted one another in low voices as all the information they gathered was sucked off to Christ knew where. Dave wasn’t actively separated from his coworkers, but the military kept them tumbling through the morning like lotto balls, and he had no real chance to check up on any of them.

  He supposed it wasn’t much different from what he would be doing if he were back in Houston trying to get to the bottom of what had happened out on the rig. Lots of interviews. Lots of cross-checking.

  There’d be less of this secret squirrel bullshit, though.

  The procedure was the same for everyone until about eleven in the morning, when Dave was herded away from the others. His little entourage, grown to seven strong, trudged through rain that was pouring hard now, turning the compound into a muddy quagmire. After a few miserable minutes in which the rain eased off a little, they arrived at what looked like an exercise station, where a marine sergeant with a name tag that read SWINDT waited for Dave with a face nearly as foreboding as the tattoos on his oversize biceps. Until yesterday he would have been an intimidating sight, but Marty Grbac had been possessed of a set of guns every bit as impressive as Sergeant Swindt’s, and the last Dave recalled of them, some blood-drunk superorc was using the bones of those big ol’ ham hocks to pick his teeth. Swindt stood next to a chinning bar, and standing next to him, looking less impressive as he tried to keep the rain from his glasses, was a navy officer who introduced himself as Lieutenant Johnson. He had to juggle a clipboard and an iPad in a heavy LifeProof case to shake hands.

  “We’re going to do a physical fitness test,” Johnson said.

 
; “A what?” Dave asked. “Seriously? I’m back in gym class? Do we have time for this?”

  “Yes,” Captain Heath said. “We do. Sergeant Swindt will explain what you need to do.”

  Sergeant Swindt explained the marine version of pull-ups in granular detail, taking care to point out all the thou-shalt and shalt-nots of what would and would not constitute “a proper pull-up for the purpose of this test.” Apparently the marines had very particular ideas about that sort of thing. Swindt certainly did.

  “The chin-up has a variety of different forms, all of them wrong, except for the form I shall now demonstrate,” he barked.

  He leaped a few inches into the air, grasping a bar that was beaded with rain. The giant marine used a closed grip with his thumbs tucked in on the opposite side of the thick iron bar from his fingers, but he did not use the momentum of the jump to complete the first pull-up, instead fully extending his arms while tucking his feet up behind his knees.

  “The body is pulled up until the bar touches the upper chest,” he said without any apparent difficulty or discomfort. He might as well have been leaning against a bar as hanging from one. “One repetition will consist of raising the individual’s body with the arms until the chin is above the bar before lowering it until the arms are fully extended again. The individual will repeat this as many times as possible. Kicking motions are permitted as long as the chin-up remains a vertical movement and the feet and/or knees do not rise above the waist level. I will prevent the individual’s body from swinging by extending my arm across the front of his knees while the individual remains on the bar. The individual may change hand position during the exercise providing he does not dismount the bar or receive assistance. The individual may rest in the up or down position, but resting with the chin supported by the bar is prohibited. Are you ready?” Sergeant Swindt asked.

  “Fuck,” Dave sighed. “Did the individual mention that he fucking hates pull-ups?”

  Swindt genuinely seemed not to care about that information.

  Dave shook his head at the waste of time and effort and in his frustration leaped up a notch too hard. His eyes bulged as he suddenly found the bar below him at waist level before he dropped effortlessly back down to the ground with a splash.

  The military observers all took a step back from the spray of mud while Lieutenant Johnson began scribbling notes into an iPad with a stylus.

  “Well, that was weird,” said the rigger.

  “Please complete the exercise as instructed,” Swindt said as though he hadn’t just witnessed a middle-aged man break the surly bonds of gravity as if they were made of rainbow ribbons. Not feeling entirely sure about what might happen next, Dave looked to Allen, who shrugged and smiled at the bar.

  “Remember, it’s a pull-up, not the high jump, dude.”

  He adjusted his takeoff for a little less spring and found the bar height easily this time.

  “Begin,” Swindt said.

  Dave could feel his weight hanging from the bar, but it was merely an awareness of the mass rather than any sort of difficulty. It no more strained his arms than picking up a magazine would.

  “Hmph.”

  He adjusted and held on to the bar with just one hand. It was no more of an inconvenience. Not really.

  “Both hands on the bar, please, sir,” Swindt growled.

  But Dave didn’t need both hands on the bar. He ripped off ten or eleven chin-ups using only one arm, a wide grin cracking his face. Raising a beer to his lips might have taxed his strength more than this.

  “You want me to start over? Do it the marine way?” he asked, hanging from one hand, dropping in a couple more chin-ups just to show off. He was almost laughing.

  Allen rubbed the bridge of his nose and groaned. “This is going to be a long day.”

  But it wasn’t. Not at the base, anyway. Swindt gave up trying to instruct him in the correct form for a sit-up somewhere around the hundred mark. The Marine Corps noncom would refuse to count any rep without the proper form, which confused Dave at first when he was happily grinding out what he estimated to be his thirtieth or fortieth sit-up while Swindt leaned over him grunting, “Six, six, six … seven, seven …”

  Dave ignored him, fascinated by the change in his body. He tried to get into the small, basic gym on the platform a couple of times a week, and the physical demands of rig work were a good way to keep up a constant calorie burn. But the food out there was all high-fat and high-carb stuff, energy-dense eating, a bit like the navy mess, and although he liked to think of himself as being in pretty good shape for a guy his age, there was no denying the baby blubber eel that had taken up residence around his midriff the last few years.

  Or there had been no denying it.

  The blubber eel was gone now. In spite of Swindt’s annoying inability to count past a number bigger than all of his fingers and toes combined, Dave kept on at the sit-ups, poor form or not.

  “Thirteen, thirteen, thirteen … fourteen … fourteen …”

  He couldn’t help looking at where his stomach normally would roll over the top of his jeans. You couldn’t always see it when he was standing up straight. Sucking things in a bit. Wearing a loose shirt. But here he was laid down on a muddy rubber mat, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, folding himself in half as he rolled through a hundred-plus sit-ups without breaking a sweat or even losing his wind. And the eel was definitely gone.

  “I think that’s probably enough, sir,” Lieutenant Johnson said. “Sir?”

  Allen’s voice cut through the dull patter of rain. “Hey, Dave. That’s enough, man. You’re just showing off now.”

  He came out of his private thoughts, shaking his head to throw off the raindrops that wanted to run down into his eyes. “Sorry,” he said, abandoning the exercise and climbing to his feet, noticing that his knees gave him no trouble when he did so. They’d started to stiffen up in the last couple of years, making him less enthusiastic about jogging up and down the multiple flights of steel steps on the rigs and probably opening another door for the eel to slither in and take up residence, too. He patted his stomach now. It was flat and hard. It didn’t feel like his body anymore. Or maybe … no … it did feel like his body, but back when he was young and still playing football.

  “Got something else?” he asked Swindt, who regarded him with a neutral expression.

  “You deadlift?” the marine asked.

  Dave shrugged. “Not much. Half my body weight usually. It’s my back and knees …” He trailed off. “I guess I should give it a try, though.”

  Swindt nodded once. Lieutenant Johnson, who was trying to get a final count for the sit-ups from Swindt, followed them over to a bench and a rack of free weights and plates that Dave was thankful to see was partly covered by a canvas tarpaulin.

  “You want to start with your body weight?” asked Swindt, who now seemed more curious than threatening. “What are you, two-hundred-something?”

  Dave sucked air in through his teeth, admitting he hadn’t hopped on the scales for a while. “Wasn’t sure I’d like what I found,” he said, and thought he might have topped out at over two hundred twenty in the winter months.

  “Two-oh-five, my guess,” said Swindt.

  “I got ten bucks on two-ten,” Allen chipped in.

  “You’ll lose your dough, chief,” said the marine. “Sir?”

  Lieutenant Johnson seemed surprised to be consulted. He’d been busy wiping mud splatter from the case of his iPad.

  “How much did Mr. Hooper weigh in at this morning, sir?” Swindt asked with exaggerated patience.

  “Oh,” said Johnson, checking both his iPad and the papers on his clipboard. “That was … er … two hundred and seven pounds … which would … er … give Mr. Hooper a BMI of 26 for his height, which is overweight … and …”

  “Hey,” Dave said. “I had that big breakfast, you know. You gotta spot me a couple pounds for all the good navy grub.”

  One-eighty-seven, though? That was a lot better than he’d bee
n expecting.

  “I say two-oh-five,” Swindt insisted, ignoring the evidence of Johnson’s iPad. “We’ll start with that.”

  Allen and Swindt loaded up a long bar with more weight plates than Dave had ever imagined lifting in his life. Even with all the freaky shit that was going down, he was nervous.

  “Did I mention my bad back?” he asked without much confidence.

  “The effective range of an excuse is zero, Mr. Hooper,” Heath said. Dave couldn’t tell if he was joking.

  “This is just for your warm-up set,” Swindt said without looking at him. The plates kept clanging together on the bar, sinking lower and lower into the rubber matting under the tarp. The observers in his entourage crowded in under the canvas to get out of the rain, which had thickened again.

  “Two hundred,” Swindt announced. “We’ll call it there.”

  And then the instructions began again.

  “The individual will stand with his toes just under the bar, feet slightly wider than his shoulders …”

  Dave listened this time, because although he had done some deadlifting—you had to; it was one of the basic strength builders, and at his age in his industry he needed to at least make a token effort—but even with a little deadlifting in his past, he knew his form wasn’t good. He tended to bend his back and his knees when they should have been straight, which he could get away with at low weights, but at this level …

  He balefully examined the Olympic-size bar with a heavy mass of dead iron clamped on to each end. That was his body weight there, or as close enough as made no difference. And as more than one woman had complained over the years, having one whole Dave Hooper land on top of you wasn’t the most comfortable experience.

  “You will pull back your shoulders and push out your chest …” Swindt continued.

  Dave wondered how much the marine could deadlift. Or bench. Or twirl around over his head. At least one soaking wet Dave Hooper, he’d bet.