Emergence (8 page)

‘How many of these tattooed creatures do you recall seeing, Mr Hooper?’

Dave didn’t care to recall the scene at all. He knew it would be a long time before he didn’t close his eyes and see what was left of Marty Grbac.

‘One big fella and a couple of smaller ones. Different species maybe.’

He said nothing else as the vehicle descended down a long curving ramp before merging onto Louisiana 428. Taking a moment to sort his thoughts out, he watched the perfectly normal highway at night become a perfectly normal four-lane road split by an unremarkable green strip drinking up the rain. The scent of the rain was there, too. Powerful. Coming in through the air vents, cleansing the nasty scent of the hospital parking lot from his sinuses.

And then Dave knew that the smaller ones were called Fangr. He knew it the same way he knew that the vehicle they were riding in was a Ford Expedition. He’d never owned one. Never driven an Expedition or even caught a ride in one. It was just something he had learned at some time. From an ad, probably. This was a Ford Expedition. The scabby hairless gorilla that had bitten Marty’s head off was a Hunn ur Horde. The smaller, thinner creatures with claws like Wolverine were Fangr,
and they belonged to the Hunn. Like slaves or something. Captain Heath didn’t seem to suspect he was holding anything back. Not on purpose at least.

‘Different species, you think?’

Dave shrugged. ‘I dunno. I’m not a biologist. Are gorillas and chimps different species? Not that these
. . .
other things –’ He almost called them Fangr
.
‘– were like chimps. You couldn’t dress ’em up in butler clothes and make a movie with ’em or anything. Unless it was a fucking horror movie, I suppose.’

‘How’d you kill them, Dave?’ Chief Allen asked.

Dave shook his head as if denying what he had done.

‘I’m sorry, but I really have to eat,’ he said, becoming contrite again and hating the whiny tone in his voice. ‘I can’t think straight, I’m so fucking hungry, I’m dizzy with it. No joke, hombre.’

Heath tapped two fingers on the back of the driver’s seat.

‘Do we have any of the milk biscuits from the hospital left?’ he asked.

Blackbeard fussed about with one hand on the wheel before throwing Heath the paper bag and giving Dave the impression he’d been meaning to scoff them himself.

They had to detour through a local chain, Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, when Dave’s appetite came roaring back again soon after he’d finished the dry, crumbly hospital snacks. The navy guys had hustled him out of the hospital so quickly that he’d left without getting any of the canteen slop Pradesh had promised. The hunger wasn’t just a matter of discomfort or inconvenience. He wasn’t being a little bitch. The pain in his guts was a huge and terrifying thing that came on like a killing fever. He was worried the SEALs would laugh at him, but he had no choice, and he all but begged them to stop for some real food this time.

They didn’t laugh. Heath thought it serious enough to warrant immediate action, hauling out an iPhone, one of those new big-ass models Dave had been coveting, and searching up the nearest food source. He used Google, not Siri, and found a Cane’s drive-through on a tributary road that took them five minutes out of their way. It was tucked between a pool supply store and a shuttered business that had sold rubber stamps. Dave gagged again when Blackbeard rolled down his window to order and the pungent smells of grease and oil, rubber and rotting food scraps poured in. Nobody else seemed to notice, and with the smell of fried chicken being the strongest odour of all, Dave’s hunger won out over his nausea.

The dead-eyed teen working the window delivered their order in less than a minute, and Dave was ploughing through four Caniac Combos before they were out of the drive-through. Each combo consisted of a half-dozen chicken fingers, crinkle-cut fries, coleslaw, slabs of Texas toast, and sauce. For good measure the SEALs threw in two chicken sandwiches and four extra-large cups of chocolate milk. Before ordering, some consideration was given to getting a Tailgate Box of 100 chicken fingers, but Dave waved that away.

‘Been watching my waistline,’ he said.

‘Wow,’ Chief Allen said as he searched through the pile of junk food. ‘There’s nothing healthy at all here. Fat, fried salt, fried sugar. No lean protein. No clean carbs. It’s all garbage.’

‘Prayer and meditation will only get you so far,’ one of the pirates said.

‘But that is still some considerable distance on you infidels,’ Allen replied without discernible malice. He had settled for a plain chicken salad sandwich, had even asked for whole wheat and been disappointed. The captain went hungry. Assuming he ever got hungry. Heath looked like he took his daily fill from bad vibes and rainwater. Dave choked his food down as quickly as he could, and only the black-bearded SEAL took to the food with a level of gusto approaching his. Blackbeard chewed and swallowed methodically while Dave struggled to shove every spare calorie into the burning hole of his hunger as quickly as possible.

‘Dave,’ Allen said. ‘We’re not in boot camp, dude. You can slow down. Nobody’s gonna steal your feed bag.’

‘No.’ Dave shovelled another handful of chicken fingers into his mouth. ‘Can’t.’

The pirate grunted beneath his Amish-thick beard in a way that might be thought of as laughter. He settled in to drive one-handed while clutching a sandwich. A steady rain beat against the Expedition’s windows and windshield, forcing him to slow down a little, but never once did his other hand put the sandwich aside to grip the wheel.

‘You see this Prius in your blind spot, right?’ Chief Allen asked.

‘Don’t care much for backseat driving when my wife does it, Chief,’ the pirate said. ‘And yeah. They’ve been back there since we left the chicken shack.’

‘Chief, let him drive the vehicle,’ the captain said.

‘I’m just trying to get us there in one piece,’ Allen said.

Dave leaned forward to spy a Prius keeping a steady pace right alongside the rear door. A thin, sallow-skinned driver was having an animated conversation with someone in the front passenger seat. Behind them a trio of children screamed, bounced, and threw things at one another. Pandemonium in the land of the Birkenstocks while the Prius driver remained oblivious to the second Ford Expedition closing on the rear.

‘Lead, this is Tail,’ a radio crackled. ‘Sure those aren’t your kids?’

The pirate shook his head. ‘Negative. Last I heard, my old lady was bangin’ some biker dude.’

Dave recognised the look on Allen’s face right then. It was the same expression Marty wore at times: tolerant disapproval. Dave couldn’t help liking this guy. Maybe it was just that he reminded him of Marty, who could be a censorious, judgmental asshole, too.

‘Decorum, gentlemen,’ the captain said. ‘We have a guest. Let’s not trash the reputation of the United States Navy in one outing.’

‘Right,’ the pirate said. ‘Tail, this is Lead. Gonna brake and drop in behind the Prius.’

‘Tail copies.’

The Expedition slowed down only to find the Prius stubbornly maintaining its position. Blackbeard slowed down to thirty-five, hit the blinker, and began to merge toward the Prius. Then and only then did the driver notice, get the hint, and get out of the way.

‘The stubborn was strong with that one,’ said the beard in the shotgun seat.

‘You got kids?’ Dave asked him.

He nodded. ‘Four. I like to keep busy between deployments.’

‘And those are only the ones he knows about,’ Allen said.

*

Dave pushed another fistful of chicken strips into his mouth and swallowed them after a few bites for the sake of form, all the time wondering if it was possible for him to detach his jaws now. Didn’t seem to matter how much he ate; he remained ravenous. Through the window he saw the oldest boy in the civilian car, maybe five or six years old, dark brown curly hair with skin that didn’t match the driver’s. Maybe they were a mixed couple, then. He couldn’t see the woman in the dark.

The boy didn’t smile or wave at Dave. In fact, the boy didn’t take any notice of Dave at all. Instead, he was pointing at something off the side of the road.

‘Yeah, four kids,’ the beard repeated.

The Expedition’s windshield shattered, the view of the hood suddenly obscured by a dense latticework of fine white cracks.

‘
Whatthefuck
. . .’

The safety glass exploded inward with a hollow boom, showering them with thousands of tiny jagged chips. Everything slowed down just as it had when Dave had broken his arm as a kid. No, in fact, it was even slower than that, time’s arrow suddenly arrested in flight by some weird super slo-mo effect that the special effects guys at ESPN would have paid good folding money for. Dave had plenty of time to watch the small galaxy of safety glass stars rushing toward him. Rushing slowly.

Slowly.

S-l-o-w-l-y.

He dodged smoothly to one side, taking cover behind the headrest of the front seat as the silvery storm swept into the rear of the SUV’s cabin. He distinctly saw four separate pieces rake long bloody furrows in Captain Heath’s face, one of them just below his left eye. The skin there bunched up as the shrapnel ploughed a rough trench through his flesh. Dave looked on, horrified, unable to turn away, as the man’s cheeks seemed to dimple under the impact.

Another dull, heavy thud. A second impact, followed by a tearing sound and Blackbeard’s strangled cry.

Dave saw Chief Allen lean forward, still gaping at the driver, who slumped forward in the seat with what appeared to be a one-inch-thick dowel rod pinning him to the seat. A dark arrowhead the size of Dave’s clenched fist protruded from the back of the driver’s seat just a fraction of an inch away from Captain Heath’s kneecap. Scraps of meat and leather swayed from the vicious-looking stone triangle. In a weirdly detached moment, Dave seemed to have all the time in the world to ponder the oversized arrowhead. It was barbed and fashioned from some sort of glassy, volcanic stone, he thought, something like Apache Glass or Pele’s Tears.

‘Shit,’ Allen said and time sped up again. The SEAL in the front passenger seat reached across, put the vehicle in neutral, and grabbed the wheel, leaning over the gearshift column when another arrow punched through the windshield. Although he was curled up around his pile of food, the arrow passed close enough for Dave to feel its passage over the back of his head. It speared into the seat behind him, preventing him from sitting up straight again.

Heath had a radio out. Dave had no idea where he’d been hiding it.

‘Contact, contact, contact.’

The radio responded. ‘Copy. Contact at eleven, engaging.’

The Expedition rammed into the back of the slowly rolling white Prius, spinning it 180 degrees. Dave caught sight of the oldest boy’s horrified face as the vehicle flipped and rolled. Safety glass disintegrated and a little body flew out through a broken window in time for physics to bring the metal Prius frame back into contact with the asphalt, crushing the child in the process.

‘No,’ Dave mouthed helplessly, feeling paralysed by horror in a way he hadn’t been back on the rig.

Metal crumpled around him and crunched, more glass shattered, and Dave felt the world slip sideways. Air bags exploded into the cabin, knocking Allen back. He cried out in surprise. They should have stunned Dave, but everything had slowed down again. Physics and consequence moved so impossibly slowly in his world that he was able to watch each of the safety bags fill up the interior of the vehicle as if they were party balloons being blown up by children. A fine white dust drifted off them with a dry, acrid chemical smell. He watched, fascinated, as the faces of the other men flinched involuntarily. The implacable Heath scrunched up his eyes and gritted his bright, perfectly straight teeth as his head turned away from the billowing white walls that came at him from all sides. It was as though he were watching it all happen on a small screen somewhere. The SUV started to tilt, and for half a second, stretching out over a small eternity, he was certain they were going over. Then the vehicle shuddered and bounced back to earth and stopped moving in any direction. As though hitting the play button on his phone or TV, the natural second-by-second progression of time resumed.

‘Cut him out,’ Heath yelled as the air bags deflated.

‘He’s pinned to the seat,’ Allen said. ‘No time for that.’

Dave heard another sick wet thud, and the other SEAL up front screamed before slumping forward, his skull split by a huge, ugly-looking throwing star.

Still bent over by the arrow shaft, Dave reached across Allen and tried the door, but it wouldn’t open. In a fit of frustration, he lashed out with a cramped side kick. The door buckled and boomed. ‘Watch your legs,’ he said, and Allen tucked them as far out of the way as he could. Another kick, harder this time, and the whole door flew off with a sound like a shotgun discharge, flying across the street, skimming the tarmac, and sending up a brief shower of sparks. He heard someone curse behind him. Heath. Dave stumbled out into the rain, climbing over Allen, disoriented and unbalanced. Tried to get his bearings when a fast, black blur slammed him back into the side of the Expedition.

He grunted as the impact drove the air out of him but he shook it off with surprising ease. It felt no worse than a heavy hit on the training bag back in his college football days.

A radio crackled somewhere, but Dave heard it as though the speaker were standing next to him.

‘Can’t get a clear line of fire.’

It was an unsettling auditory illusion.

Dave took in the dent he’d left in the side of the Expedition. The car looked as if it had come off a lot worse than he had. The side panel at the rear had buckled like a crushed beer can. But that might have been the original crash.

And then he saw it.

Another monster, similar in basic form to the Hunn and its leashed Fangr, but even taller, with an almost insectile appearance, recalling a giant mantis. It had a quiver full of javelin-sized arrows slung across its back, worn over a leather scale shirt that hung down to its knees. Presumably protecting its junk. A brace of axes and strings of iron throwing stars hung from the monster’s hips, held in place by a belt of leather discs embossed with metal studs. With its long-limbed gait, Dave could imagine it leaping at him like a demonic grasshopper.