Emergence (12 page)

‘The what?’ Dave and J2 said at the same time.

‘Sensitive Site Exploitation,’ said Heath. ‘Collecting the data.’

‘The data?’ Vince said, still not getting it.

‘Bodies,’ Dave said, guessing.

‘And parts of bodies,’ Captain Heath added.

‘Oh, damn.’ J2 grimaced.

Heath said they could eat in a connected tent for the officers, away from curious stares and awkward silences. Dave supposed news of their arrival would be all over the ‘restricted facility’. All closed shops were the same. Gossip was a highly tradeable commodity, and half a dozen survivors of the Longreach fire – it now was being sold as some sort of conventional explosion, much to Dave’s chagrin – would shine like newly minted coins.

Two TV sets were on in the mess hall as Heath took them through. Both were tuned to news channels, but only one was showing visuals of the platform at that moment. Smoke and fire poured out of the crew quarters. It must have been a replay of yesterday’s video. Dave would have liked to have stopped and listened for a few minutes, even though he knew it was all going to be bullshit. If the talking heads had been fed a line that it was some sort of fuck-up that’d caused the explosion, he knew that his cock was on the chopping block for it.

But that story could never stand up, could it? Just as he’d told J2, way too many people had seen the Hunn and the Fangr. The truth, bugshit crazy as it was, was going to spill, and very soon. Maybe even today. The terrorist story already seemed to have collapsed if they were now running with this accident line. Again he bristled at the unfairness of it. There had been no goddamn accident on his rig. But how long would it be before somebody tipped a bucket of shit on him anyway? Hell, if he ran to the press with stories about demon hordes, he’d do the job for them.

‘Baron’s appoints lunatic as safety boss on rig. Rig blows up.’

End of story.

He was turning away from the screen when the hunger pangs took him again, stronger than last night. More painful. He folded up like a cheap Chinese umbrella, dropping to the floor and knocking over a couple of plastic chairs as he fell. He cried out in shock and pain as something like a cold iron fist closed around his intestines and squeezed.

‘Oh, God
. . .’
he gasped. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and within seconds his armpits were soaked. He shivered and drew his knees up to his chest. He was dimly aware of chaos breaking out around him, of raised voices calling for help. J2 was shrieking. He even heard the word ‘corpsman’, just like in a war movie. He felt himself lifted up and carried somewhere. Fluorescent tubes burned his eyes with harsh white light. He tried to speak, but the pain was too great.

Heath’s face was in his, shouting at him.

‘Can you hear me? Can you tell me what’s wrong?’

Dave’s teeth chattered as he tried to force them apart. His tongue seemed swollen.

‘Hnn
. . .
hunn
. . .’
he managed before another wave of racking gut cramps doubled him over.

‘Did you say something about the Hunn?’ someone asked.

‘No, here, let me through.’

It was a familiar voice, but in his distress and discomfort Dave could not recall why. He felt a new presence looming over him but was unable to open his eyes. It felt as though the Silveen’s chain-mail fist had ripped out his insides.

‘Here. Get this into him.’

‘Are you crazy?’

Dave was vaguely aware of an argument breaking out around him, and he wanted to scream in frustration. He managed to prise his jaw apart just wide enough to say something when somebody shoved something between his lips.

Chocolate.

Saliva jetted into his mouth so quickly that he felt himself gagging on it. He bit down on the chocolate, thankfully only chocolate. Whoever had saved him with a chunk of Hershey Bar got his or her fingers out from between his teeth pronto. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, gesturing frantically for more chocolate, anything anybody could give him. He recognised Allen at last as the navy SEAL handed him the rest of the Hershey’s Bar.

‘That’s three you owe me,’ he said.

Dave was too busy eating to reply. They’d thrown him onto a spare table. He saw his friends and co-workers from the Longreach looking on in a mixture of horror and concern.

‘You all right, Dave?’ J2 asked.

‘You may not believe me, Ms Juliette,’ he said through gritted teeth, ‘but I’m really fucking hungry.’

Heath barked out orders, and men and women disappeared, only to reappear a few moments later bearing trays of food. Dave’s hands were shaking as he snatched at the greasy breakfast offerings. Strips of bacon. Pork sausages. Hash browns. Scrambled eggs scooped up in his bare hands and half smeared over his unshaven face. He didn’t care. The more he ate, the faster the terrible pain in his stomach subsided. Heath’s marines cleared the anteroom of onlookers as Dave slowly recovered. Only the rig workers, Heath, and Allen remained.

‘Oh, my God, Dave,’ J2 said in awe when he was finished. ‘You could go pro with an appetite like that.’ He had consumed enough food for five men. Maybe more. The pain was gone, and he patted his stomach gingerly, expecting to find his belly grossly swollen. But he felt neither heavy nor bloated. It was as though he had already digested the food, as though he’d burned it up while he was eating it.

‘Got to eat a good breakfast, J2,’ he said, finally realising that most of his rig crew was in the officers’ mess with him. They looked down on him with a mixture of concern, fear, and awe. ‘Most important meal of the day. Hi, everybody, by the way.’

A few of them laughed, but nervously. The other workers from the rig crowded in around him, eager for news from the outside world and wanting to know how he had survived. Alberto Santini, a geologist, had seen the creatures coming up the drill bit and run to raise the alarm. Henry Blucas, one of Vince’s second shift rig monkeys, had been in the crew lounge when they broke in and had seen Marty try to fight them off. He’d taken an ineffectual swing at one of the ‘little fuckers’ – the Fangr – before abandoning the idea as hopeless and running, screaming, for the flight deck. Clay Toltz, a large-bellied African-American who was new to the rig and had been supervising the drill crew far away from the action, had been one of the first down into the lounge after Dave had killed the Hunn. He was still making the sign of the cross every time he spoke of it.

‘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 and do 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

T
he 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 Surface 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 co-workers, 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 oversized 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 super-orc 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,’ Dave said.

‘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.’

Dave adjusted his take-off 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 Dave in the correct form for a sit-up somewhere around the hundred mark. The Marine Corps non-com refused 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 had tried to get into the small, basic gym on the Longreach 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 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, 180-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 220 in the winter months.

‘My guess, 205,’ said Swindt.

‘I got ten bucks on 210,’ Allen chipped in.

‘You’ll lose your dough, Chief,’ said the marine. ‘Lieutenant?’

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
. . .
207 pounds
. . .
which would
. . .
er
. . .
give Mr Hooper a BMI of twenty-six for his height, which is overweight
. . .
and
. . .’

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

Two-oh-five, though? That was a lot better than he’d been expecting.

‘I say 205,’ 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-zero-five,’ 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 in his industry; it was one of the basic strength builders, and at his age he needed to at least make a token effort – 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-sized 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.

‘I’m not really dressed for this,’ said Dave, who was still in the clothes Allen had provided him with yesterday.

‘Just do one,’ Captain Heath said. ‘See what happens.’

He took up his position at the bar, allowing Swindt to adjust his foot placement and grip.

‘Bend your knees, not your back,’ said the marine, and Dave lowered himself to make the first lift. He squeezed the bar, as someone had told him to or he’d read in some fitness magazine or seen on
Biggest Loser
or something years ago, took a deep breath, exhaled, and lifted.

At the last moment he checked himself. Memories of the last day, of Lieutenant Dent flying through the air, of the bedside unit splintering under his fist, of the chin-ups, caused him to dial it back just a little.

It was a good thing he did.

The 200-plus pounds of metal flew up off the rubber mat, slipped out of his fists at the top of the lift, and tore through the canvas tarpaulin with a dull, wet roar.

‘Move!’ Swindt roared, charging at the assembled officers, his arms wide as if to gather them up. Allen swore and dived out the side of the makeshift tent. Dave was aware of everything slowing down. Everything but his thoughts. The physical world, the world of real things, seemed to move in super slo-mo, and when he focused, he could pull in tight on all the little details: the individual threads of the tarpaulin stretching and snapping and coming asunder; the first drops of rain tumbling in through the rent in the cover; the muddy fantails thrown up by the shoes of the officers as they ran; the way Allen turned his body in midair when he dived, tucking in his chin and making a circle of his arms as he dropped one shoulder and transitioned from a horizontal dive into a falling shoulder roll. But most of all he could see the giant weight set climb into the leaden sky like a bottle rocket. The tarp, torn free of its moorings and shredded by the passage of the weight bar, flapped gamely after it, but rain and aerodynamics conspired to drag it back. All this Dave observed as if sitting in his favourite armchair in his apartment back in Houston, watching a replay on ESPN.