Dave vs. the Monsters 1: Emergence

by John Birmingham

  He tried to call up a memory of Marty offering a prayer before every meal. Marty making the sign of the cross every time he climbed into a helicopter. Marty boring everyone senseless with exciting new engine parts for his motorcycle that he’d scored on eBay. Anything to drive away the image of the Hunn sucking on him as if he were an oversized frozen tequila popsicle. The image, the fatigue, and the stress of the day finally pulled Dave’s plug. He staggered forward, crashing into Hubbard’s desk, nearly knocking over her mug of coffee. The room swirled and swam around him, and he felt Captain Heath grab him by the elbow, half carrying and half pushing him toward one of the cots. The scuffed linoleum floor pitched and yawed underfoot as though they were at sea. He felt himself falling down the face of a great black wave. Crying out. But the wave closed over him before he knew what he was trying to say.

  *

  Someone was shaking his shoulder. It wasn’t the first time Dave had experienced that sensation of rocking back and forth in his flesh while dope and booze sloshed around in his head. So deep was his slumber that the sounds that reached him were akin to someone shouting at him from above the water. It sort of reminded him of someone’s wife screaming at the top of her lungs while he went down on her in a hot tub. That had been in a company compound in Saudi Arabia. She wasn’t his wife, of course.

  The rocking continued, back and forth. For once, blessedly, there was no tightening band of iron wrapped around his poor skull, no asshole pounding away to a bass beat with a sledge inside his brain. He felt remarkably clean, disgustingly healthy, and even a little blissed out.

  ‘Dave!’

  It must be important. The rig is on fire, or is it the roof? We don’t need no water, Mom; let the motherfucker burn.

  ‘What?’ the muffled man’s voice said. ‘Wake up, Dave.’

  He recognised the voice as Vince Martinelli’s, and he came awake as abruptly as light flooding a darkened bedroom when you flicked the switch. There was no grogginess or confused dislocation. The transition from deep sleep to wakefulness was instant. He remembered all but falling into the hut some time ago – he had no idea how many hours, or minutes, had passed – and then Vince was shaking him and saying his name. There was nothing in between. Just a void.

  He opened his eyes and blinked the crust of sleep from them. It was morning. He could tell by the quality of the light in the room. It was different, natural. He was still dressed in the Eddie Bauer gear Allen had given him back at the hospital, but somebody had undone his belt and taken off his shoes. The ever-thoughtful Heath, perhaps, or maybe that nurse. She’d been a little bit into him, he thought.

  ‘Vince, hey, you okay?’

  Vince was leaning right over Dave’s cot. He looked terrible, with raccoon eyes and pouchy, sagging flesh hanging from his face. Juliette Jamieson hovered behind him, regarding Dave with a deeply anxious expression. He knew that look. That was the look people gave him when they expected him to Sort This Shit Out.

  Dave was tempted to run for the door.

  ‘Oh, thank God,’ Vince said in a voice that seemed to have lost most of its power. ‘I thought you were gone, man. I’ve been trying to wake you, but you wouldn’t wake up. Like you was in some sorta coma or something.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Dave assured him, sitting up and swinging his feet over the side of the camp bed. In fact, he felt better than fine. He felt as though he’d just smashed out the most awesome gym session of his life, as though he could walk out into the street and bench-press a few cars. And then he remembered Lieutenant Dent flying across the room yesterday. He stood up, carefully, making sure not to lay even a finger on his friend.

  His pants were loose. He took the belt in one, two more notches, gently. A quick glance around the room told him they were alone.

  J2 edged around Vince. She looked as though she didn’t want to be overheard.

  ‘Dave,’ she said in a stage whisper. ‘I think we’re prisoners here. They’re not letting us go. My ma will be havin’ kittens by now.’

  ‘Be cool, J2,’ he said in as reassuring a voice as he could. ‘I came in last night under my own steam. Guy brought me in, Captain Heath, he was kind of a puckered ass, but he was okay. They got their reasons for all the security, I guess. Where are the others?’ Dave asked when he noticed that the rest of the cots were empty. ‘I thought I saw Charlene in here last night. And a couple of other guys from the Longreach. But I crashed out.’

  Vince looked over his shoulder as though he feared he, too, was being watched. ‘I know. I’ve been trying to wake you for half an hour. I coulda lit a fire under your ass, Dave, and you’da slept through it.’

  ‘So where are they? Did Heath take them?’

  Vince Martinelli nodded gravely. ‘The scary black dude? Him and some other guys. They were all armed, Dave. Not rough with it or anything but acting like they’d shoot us if we gave them any trouble.’

  J2 nodded in agreement, her eyes wide and fearful. She hadn’t been out on the rig long enough to see what was happening down on the lower decks, but she’d probably heard plenty about it while she shuttled the casualties to the other platforms and back to shore. After last night Dave wasn’t surprised that they’d put a bag on her and any other firsthand witnesses. Made denying the truth and the madness of it a little easier, he supposed. Funny. On TV when the secret government conspiracy spooled up, you were always rooting for the rogue agent or the investigative reporter or whoever to bust the thing wide open. But having seen what he’d seen in the last twenty-four hours, Dave wasn’t convinced he was with Mulder and Scully on this. Annie, he knew, would freak the fuck out. Multiply her reaction about 350-million-fold and you’d have the likely response of the American populace.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said slowly. ‘Look. There’s some weird shit going down. Out on the platform . . .’ He paused, looking at his knuckles, which had healed so perfectly that you never would have imagined he’d taken all the skin off them pounding a monster’s skull into street pizza late last night. ‘Here as well.’

  Dave struggled to push down the feeling of vertigo that wanted to seize him.

  Vince Martinelli heaved himself up slowly from where he was crouched at the edge of the bed. He stood a few inches taller than Dave and had to lean forward to speak to him when he lowered his voice. ‘You’re fuckin’ telling me, Dave? I was there. I saw it all. I was there before you got to the platform. I saw what happened to Marty and the others. And then you . . . I mean, what the fuck, man? What was that thing? And those other things? With the claws? And you? Everyone else who went up against those things is dead or busy dying right now. But you . . .’

  ‘Vince told me, Dave. He told me what you did out there,’ said J2. ‘You’re a hero.’

  No. Dave was a freak and an accident and maybe contaminated with some sort of toxic monster goo that was fucking his shit right up; that was what Dave was. He wanted to wave her away, but Vince had taken hold of his arms and dug his fingers in, shaking him a little, as if the truth might fall out.

  Recalling what had happened at the hospital, Dave gently placed a hand on one of Vince’s thick forearms and eased it away.

  ‘I don’t know, guys,’ he said. ‘I remember everything pretty well, up until the moment I hit that thing with Marty’s splitting maul. After that, it’s all a blank till I woke in the hospital.’

  He didn’t share with J2 and Vince his strange, newly acquired knowledge of the Hunn and its Fangr attendants. The navy guys had let him tell his insane story. And they’d dealt with one of those things up close and nasty personal. It had killed two of them, and they’d driven through the night with the corpse of the splatter-headed fucker roped down to the roof of their SUV. That was the sort of thing that had to make a guy receptive to a little weirder than usual storytelling. But he didn’t think Vince was ready to roll with that level of crazy. Because truth to tell and sure as hell, Dave Hooper wasn’t.

 
; ‘You saw what happened, Vince,’ he said, leaning forward and joining their conspiratorial circle. ‘You tell me what the fuck that was about. Last thing I remember from the Longreach is swinging on that . . . animal, whatever. And then I wake up in the hospital. A couple of hours later I’m here. I haven’t even checked in with the office yet. They probably think I’m still out on the rig.’

  Martinelli eased himself down onto the cot, which creaked under his heavy frame. He moved like an old man with ground glass in his joints. J2 took up a perch on the cot across from them.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dave, I’m really sorry, man,’ Vince said, shaking his head in distress. ‘I tried to follow you in there. I really tried . . . But . . .’

  Juliette patted him on the arm. ‘You did fine, Vince. You got us off the rig. That was better than most of them. You helped get Dave out.’

  Dave gave him a very light fist bump on the shoulder.

  ‘My man! There you go.’

  But Vince wasn’t about to shake off his blue funk.

  ‘I fucking wimped it, man. You . . . you rocked those fucking freaks. I just –’

  Dave cut him off as gently as he could.

  ‘Hey, be cool, Vince. I was there, remember? You don’t have to apologise to me. Most of the guys on that rig were clawing each other’s eyes out to get away from those things. I saw you stiff-arm a couple of them off J2’s chopper, remember? But you manned up and did the job, buddy.’

  Vince had his head in his hands and looked as though he was trying to fold himself into a small ball of grief. An impossible task, given his size. Dave laid a hand on his shoulder again and squeezed, but very, very gently. J2 patted his arm and cooed meaningless nothings like a mother soothing the many hurts of a small boy. When Vince Martinelli looked up, his eyes were red-rimmed and watery.

  Dave paid him off with a level stare.

  ‘Tell me what happened, Vince. I need to know. Come on.’

  Vince took in a deep breath and gathered himself. He tried to speak, but instead he choked up a little, coughing to cover it. Another breath, and he sat up straight. J2 patted him on the back. It really did remind Dave of dealing with a child.

  ‘I could hear that thing in there with you. In the lounge. I could hear it . . . eating and, I dunno . . . laughing?’

  Hooper confirmed that with a sombre nod.

  ‘Yeah, I thought so too. Go on.’

  ‘I knew . . . I knew what was around that corner, Dave. And I let you go, ’cause I just, I couldn’t.’

  He appeared to slump forward a little again and lifted his head only when J2 patted his enormous suntanned neck and said quietly, ‘Come on, Vince.’

  ‘It’s all right, man,’ Dave added. ‘We’re out of it now. Keep going. The navy guy, Heath, he told me you saw it all.’

  Vince shook his head. Emphatically.

  ‘No. Not all of it. It took me a while to get my shit together. But I did. When I heard you cussing the thing out. You called it a motherfucker. Do you remember?’

  Dave didn’t and shook his head.

  ‘I’d seen you pick up Marty’s splitting maul. Not that I thought it’d do much good against those fucking devil things. But I knew you had it. And I could hear you cursing out that thing. And it was sort of laughing or chuckling, and anyway, I got moving again. I picked up some crowbar that was lying there. Thought maybe if I got a lucky hit in, you know? Or maybe I could just swing it and drag you back out.’

  Dave encouraged him to keep going. The Hunn would have killed Vince just as surely as it had killed Marty. He knew that but kept it to himself. Let Vince keep a shred of dignity to himself. Probably wouldn’t do to let him know just how close he’d come to being devil food, too.

  ‘Anyways, I come around the corner just as you charged at the big one. It was sitting there. Honest to fucking God, Dave, I’d swear that thing was laughing at you. Like when Marty laughed at that college boy who called him out in Houston that time. You remember that. Fucking Marty.’

  Dave remembered. Bible thumper or not, it wasn’t a good idea to upset Marty Grbac. ‘Sure. Go on.’

  ‘So you started swinging that thing, and there’s not much headroom in there, so you took out some roof tiles and an aluminium strut. Fucking plaster dust and shit everywhere. But that big ape’s not laughing no more. It’s looking sorta shocked and then really fuckin’ pissed at you and . . .’

  A spasm passed across Vince’s face. Like he needed to throw up.

  ‘It took off Marty’s arm then. You remember that?’

  J2 was looking a little the worse for the telling of it, too.

  Dave remembered the moment. An unpleasant memory he’d be a long time leaving behind.

  ‘And it’s waving Marty’s arm around like one of them conductors at the opera.’

  Vince was caught up in the telling of it now. And the more he spoke, the more came back to Dave.

  ‘Those nasty little scissor-hand fuckers that come up the rig first; they were starting to move then, but they were too late.’

  He smiled, but without any joy.

  ‘You got that thing right in the snout. Or that hole where it shoulda had a snout. It was looking up at you, fucking fangs everywhere, but it was too slow. Like you get late on Thanksgiving, you know . . . when you’ve eaten and drunk too much.’

  ‘Yeah. I know that one,’ Dave said, and as he said it he knew it to be true in this case, too.

  Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn had feasted well. Too well. The Hunn had found himself bloated and blood drunk just when he encountered a calfling with the horns to glory itself in . . .

  Dave shook his head, trying to throw off the . . . memory . . . someone or something else’s memory, like a spider that had crawled into his hair.

  He was convinced now that he was not just recalling the encounter as he remembered but as . . .

  Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn . . .

  . . . as this fucking Urgon thing did.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked, not really wanting to know but needing to.

  ‘You killed it, Dave. Smashed its fucking coconut. And there was this . . . I dunno . . . like a flash or something. And I went down. Man, I was vomiting and spinning out, and . . . and it was like the worst fucking hangover I ever had, back in the day. But it passed quick. I got up.’

  Vince looked him in the eye as though seeing Dave for the first time. J2 was staring at him in the same way. Perhaps she was scratching him off her long list of totally un-wedding-worthy assholes.

  ‘You were down, man. I thought you were dead.’ Vince shook his head slowly. ‘But it was dead. The monster. And all its little monster friends, too. They got a few licks on you, but they were gone too. Like they died of shock or some shit.’

  09

  Heath came into the room so soon after Vince Martinelli finished telling his story that Dave wondered if he’d been eavesdropping. He looked for a one-way mirror or something like it but found nothing. The barracks hut was as spare and utilitarian as he remembered it, with tube lighting running through the rafters. The roof, he realised, was just heavy canvas. There were eight camp beds, six of them rumpled and vacant at this point. A series of cabinets and shelves ran along the back tent wall, probably stocked with medical supplies. A pair of oxygen tanks plus a quartet of what looked like military trauma bags also were stowed back there.

  Captain Heath looked fresh and crisp, the same as Dave, which wasn’t natural for Hooper at all. Two men in a different type of camouflage, with name tags that clearly marked them as marines, flanked Heath left and right. Dave would have guessed they were jarheads even without the USMC tags. They were both huge and intimidatingly fit, with shaved skulls that for some reason made him think of monks from the Middle Ages. Or kung-fu movies. Yeah, definitely kung-fu movies with fighting monks. It unsettled him a little that their eyes seemed lit with the same type of crazy as the Hunn b
ack on the rig. They were also armed, with pistols strapped to their thighs. Captain Heath apparently felt no need for a weapon.

  Both Juliette and Vince appeared wary, even anxious, as the military men approached. Dave just wished he were wearing shoes. Standing there in his socks seemed to put him at a disadvantage.

  ‘Good morning, Ms Jamieson, gentlemen,’ Heath said. ‘You still have forty minutes to eat if you wish.’ He seemed to measure Dave’s reaction to that announcement, but the maddening hunger of the previous evening had passed.

  ‘You hungry, you guys? You want to eat?’ Dave asked.

  ‘What about the others?’ Vince asked in a subdued mutter that wasn’t like him at all.

  ‘Fair question,’ Dave said directly to Heath a little too loudly, overcompensating for his friend and maybe for himself. ‘Where are my other guys?’

  The soldiers, or troops . . . was that what you called marines? He wondered about that and discovered he didn’t give a fuck. Whatever they were, Dave put them on edge. Heath had come the length of the barracks with the two guards – they were definitely guards – keeping a few feet back. The captain bent over and retrieved Martinelli’s shoes from under a camp bed. He passed them to the larger man without comment.

  ‘Mess hall,’ he said simply. ‘You should join them now. We have a busy day. More debriefs, tests to run. You need to get going.’

  ‘Tests?’ Dave asked. He hated tests.

  ‘Mr Hooper, you’ve all been exposed to some sort of hostile organism. You may be contaminated or infected with bacteria or viruses or some form of non-obvious toxin. We cannot safely release you back into the community, to your families, until we are sure you’re clean.’