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 been 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.
“I’m not really dressed for this,” Dave said, who was still in the clothes Allen had provided him.
“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 two hundred pounds of metal came flying 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 favorite armchair in his apartment back in Houston, watching a replay on ESPN.
But that was out in the world. Inside, everything speeded up. He found he was able to calculate the exact trajectory the lethally tumbling deadweight would take. Equations he hadn’t thought of since his undergrad engineering days spilled across his conscious mind, providing vectors and angles of escape and acceleration. He was able to imagine the flight of the slowly spinning weight bar as it reached its apogee high above the camp and began a long, chaotic tumble back to earth. He could see from the paths they all had taken in their escape that Johnson had chosen poorly, and long before the weight crashed down on the lieutenant’s right shoulder, Dave was able to “see” the outcome in all its unpleasant detail. Shattered bones, rendered flesh, a skull crushed and split open, spilling its gray, steaming contents into the mud.
He pushed away the images of yesterday’s slaughter on the rig that wanted to come flooding back in behind his eyeballs. They were replaced by even more upsetting images of that little boy in the Prius. An unpleasant electric tingle ran over his skin, and he snarled in a strangely animalistic fashion. That kid wasn’t much younger than his own youngest, Jack. And then he couldn’t help imagining the Hunn and Fangr fighting over Toby and Jack, tearing them apart …
But even as he saw all those things in slow motion, he already was moving at such speed that the others would later say that it was as though he winked out of existence for a second until they picked him up again as a blur of fluid motion threading through their stationary forms.
He cleared the tent just before it collapsed in on itself, and using the edge of the rubber mat, the last firm foothold he knew he would enjoy, Dave Hooper launched himself skyward. Whereas he had surprised himself before by nearly jumping over the chinning bar, there was no surprise this time. He knew that he was about to leap sixty-three feet and four inches into the air, where he would intercept the weight bar at the zenith of its flight, grasping it firmly with both hands, his left hand nine inches from the weight plates at one end and his right hand a little closer, at seven.
Dave made the intercept exactly as envisioned, pulling the weight bar out of its flight path and down onto a new and safer course.
He landed in the clear, between two sheds, holding the bar as though it were no heavier than a pool cue. The sound of impact as his feet punched into the sodden earth rolled away from the explosion of mud like the fart of an elephant god.
Dave tossed the weighted bar to one side. He was standing in a crater at least a foot deep.
Captain Heath canceled the rest of his physical, including a three-mile run in the rain that Dave was more than happy to miss. He hated running even though he felt as though he could cover three miles in a couple of minutes. Thinking about that only led him to thoughts of the Hunn, however, and he shied away.
The entourage broke up, and Dave found himself herded into an aid station by Allen and Heath. He looked around for his crewmates from the rig but saw no sign of them.
“Debriefing,” said Heath.
“Please roll up your sleeve, sir,” a nurse said. Concentrating fiercely, she took samples of his blood, filling seven tubes from each arm. When she whisked the needle away and swabbed the puncture wound, a cloud crossed over her face.
“There’s no …”
“Don’t worry about it,” Allen said. “Dude here’s like a self-sealing tire.”
“Next station,” Heath said. “Let’s go. We’re on the clock now.”
And so it went for the next half hour as they fairly ran from one station to the next.
“Turn your head and cough, please.”
“Childhood disabilities?”
“Any broken bones?”
“Allergies?”
“Do you feel abnormal in any way? If so, could you please describe it?”
Dave answered that one with a snort. “You’re shitting me, right?”
“Do you have a history of mental disturbances?” a navy shrink asked.
“Where did you say you broke your arm when you were a kid?” the X-ray tech asked.
Standing before one of the navy doctors, he pointed at his right arm.
The X-ray showed no evidence of the fracture.
“Could you fill this cup, please?” a nurse from earlier in the morning asked. She was a smokin’-hot blonde with lips that were all lurid promise. Best thing he’d seen on this miserable base so far.
Bad Dave came roaring back in the worst way.
“I could fill more than that if you like, honey,” he said.
“Just the cup, sir,” she said, blushing.
Don’t blow hot, he thought, filling the cup in a bathroom while Allen looked vaguely in his direction. Just don’t blow hot.
It was a legit concern. His cock had stiffened like a length of rebar when he started to imagine the sorts of things he could get up to, or down to, with a woman like that, and his balls were humming like a coal miners’ choir. Dave feared that once he let the old persuader out of its cage, there’d be no getting it back in without some sort of action.
He also no longer imagined that whatever bizarre monkey gland extract those hookers had slipped him was responsible for what was happening. But neither did he want these navy guys ratting him out to BP. If he’d taken his usual drug test out on the rig, he would have had a small bottle of baby piss he could swap for his own sample, all courtesy of Vince Martinelli’s youngest. Here, however, he probably was going to start alarms ringing in about three seconds. He forced his mind to settle down, forced it away from thoughts of the nurse and onto the thick pile of unopened letters he knew was sitting on his kitchen table back in Houston. Correspondence from the IRS, and almost certainly not love letters. It had been a couple of years since he’d filed his returns. Things just got away from him, was all. Things with Annie, the separation, the divorce prep. Things with work. You know, things.
His dick deflated like an old inner tube, and within a minute he’d managed to fill the specimen jar with a full measure of Dave’s Golden Ale. He finished up, washed his hands as his mother had taught him, and returned to the nurse’s station, where she waited with Allen, her face unreadably neutral except for the high color in her cheeks, which had not faded.
Ha, still got it, Dave thought.
Blondie took the cup, gloves in place, and pulled a tab on the side that showed her the results.
Here we go, Dave thought.
“Good to go,” she said.
No. Fucking. Way.
He couldn’t believe it. No way had he just passed a drug test. Most of the bonus he hadn’t spent on pussy he’d blown on top-shelf coke a week earlier. There had to be snowdrifts of the stuff still blowing around in his system.
“You are my new best friend,” he told her, almost sighing with relief.
“I already have enough friends,” she said.
Whoa. Dave was certain that was a come-on. No way he could have misinterpreted that, and he was about to reply in kind when he felt the first familiar pang in his stomach again. This time he knew what was coming.
“Hey, Allen,” he called out.
“Yeah?”
“You think there’ll be any waffles left at the mess tent?”