Dave vs. the Monsters

by John Birmingham

  “What d’ you think’s up with me?” Dave asked him as they emerged into waning afternoon light and waited, presumably, for Heath to return. “You must have seen some shit out in the tropics and such. Weird diseases and stuff. Anything like this?”

  Dave plucked at his fatigues, indicating that he meant the radically transformed body within them.

  “Superhero syndrome?” Allen asked. “Sorry. Nope. I’ve seen dudes stoned off their gourds on khat and bennies and weird cocktails of third world hooch. Seen them do stuff, running around full of bullet holes when they should rightly be lying down and dying quietly. But no, Dave,” he said quietly. “I haven’t seen anything like whatever aids or ails you.”

  Allen, who’d struck him initially as a laid-back surfer archetype, at least once upon a time, in his pre-SEAL days perhaps, had come over kind of gloomy and reserved since the ambush. He didn’t mention the men who died or the family in the Prius, and Dave wasn’t inclined to bring it up. He figured a guy would talk about that stuff when he wanted to, and probably not with the asshole who might be responsible for it in some way.

  “You scared?” Allen asked.

  “Guess I might have reason,” Hooper admitted. “The whole circus act this morning with your man Swindt. That was cool, but no way was it right. Kinda freaks me even more than what happened on the Longreach.”

  Allen was surprised. “Why?”

  Dave shrugged, stood up, and walked a small circle on the gravel path in front of the medical tent. They were tucked away in a quiet corner of the base. He could see personnel moving about here and there but still no sign of his fellow civilians.

  “We were drilling down deep, chief. Really deep. A record, in fact. Did they tell you that? We’d just drilled the deepest hole any motherfucker drilled anywhere on this planet. Ever.”

  Allen nodded.

  “Yeah. I read that in the briefing note. So?”

  “You ever seen photos of the things that live down at those depths?” Dave asked. “It’s a horror movie down there, man. Pressure means they stay down deep, but we see things sometimes. Shadows on the edge of the cams and stuff. Not just giant squids and sea snakes with teeth like fucking kris daggers. Worse than that.”

  Allen smiled, a weak effort but genuinely made.

  “Yeah, I got Discovery Channel, man. I’ve seen that stuff, too. Monster fish. About this big.”

  He held up one hand with the thumb and forefinger extended, their tips an inch or so apart. “And if they come up off the sea floor, they explode, though, don’t they? Can’t handle the lower pressure, like you said.”

  “Yeah,” Dave said. “But the fact stuff lives down there, it just proves stuff lives down there, and it’s like nothing we’re used to seeing up on the surface. So those things yesterday …”

  Urgon Htoth ur Hunn …

  You dare not do this!

  “… I guess we could have broken into a cave system or something, like a sealed ecosphere, something old and, I dunno, different. Some place evolution went bad. Like the jungle that Ebola virus came out of.”

  “Maybe,” said Allen, but he didn’t sound as though he was buying it. Dave didn’t really believe it, either, because part of him knew different.

  “Anyway,” he went on, staring into the gray drizzle with his back turned to the SEAL, “I’m just saying, as bad as that was yesterday, shit happens in my world. Just like yours. I knew a guy got eaten by a tiger once. A fucking tiger, seriously. Another drill site, over on one of the Indonesian islands, we had to bring these guys in to catch a whole bunch of gators, or crocs I suppose, after they ate some of the locals we’d hired.”

  “So dudes get eaten all the time in your line of work?” Allen asked, sounding amused in an abstract, distant way.

  “Not all the time, no. And not on the rigs. But stuff happens. You know …”

  He tried to blow it off.

  “But that deal with the weights and the chin-ups this morning? That’s not some insane Twilight Zone bullshit. That was me, Allen. I threw two hundred pounds of heavy metal through the tent and way up into low orbit. And then I jumped up there like Keanu fucking Reeves doing his Matrix thing and I plucked it out of the sky before it fell on Lieutenant Johnson.”

  “Johnson? Really?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t tell you that. I could see it happening before it happened. Not looking into the future like down a time tunnel or anything. Just looking at what was happening and knowing how it was going to turn out. Like when you see some guy walking through the park and a kid hits a fly ball, and you just know it’s gonna brain this dude. And it does.”

  “Yeah,” Allen said, nodding his head. “Been there more times than I can count.”

  “Well, that ain’t right, is it? None of it. Not my physical this morning. Not the way I’ve turned into a human garbage disposal. Not the twenty or thirty pounds of gut flab I’ve dropped doing it. None of this shit.”

  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 to 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 Grimm 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.

  “Just the name of 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 recognizably 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 s
macked 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 hallway.

  “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 armor, but he carried only a pistol on his thigh. The same one he 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.”

  His pulse rate slowed, but each heartbeat seemed … bigger, which was weird. “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 nondisclosure agreements about their time on this base, and we’ll be returning them first to BP 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 BP 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

  There was no long, fraught car ride back to New Orleans. They boarded a gray chopper at the base in a clearing that looked to have been hacked out of the wilderness at some point 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 where Dave and CPO Allen had been waiting 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 him 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 center 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 BUD/S.”

  The takeoff 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 realized 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. Old Navy 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 skeptical. Also, there was the media. Without a phone—his old iPhone had gone astray—or ready access to a 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 BP 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 the 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.