He fed. Half an hour of relentless two-fisted piggery that accounted for all of the leftover bacon and biscuits in the camp kitchen. Allen shooed away most of the onlookers who had no reason to be looking on, but there was no getting rid of the personnel detailed to KP for the morning. They watched in awe as Dave did his trick, making enough food for three grown men disappear inside one. Chief Allen excused himself for a few minutes while Dave was fueling up and then returned with an armful of new clothes, fatigues similar to those the SEALs wore, which looked a shade different from the jarheads’ preferred patterns. Although, Dave corrected himself as he sucked up another strip of bacon, preference probably had nothing to do with it. He’d never understood the way the uniforms kept changing on Stargate, which he used to enjoy watching with his boys, and to his civilian eye there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to people’s fashion choices on this base, either. Some were tricked out in what looked like quite formal attire. Some went around in gym gear. Others wore what he assumed were combat fatigues like the ones he climbed into after his second breakfast. He’d never asked his brother about it and never would now, of course. A terrible sadness washed over him, as bad as any of the animal grief he’d felt when they told him Andy was dead. It was so unexpected, and so fucking bad, that he had to hold his breath lest it come out in a sob. And then, just as abruptly, it was gone and he was delighted to find that the cargo pockets of his pants were filled with CLIF protein bars and energy gels.
What the fuck?
His emotions were everywhere and for a second he was struck by the image of himself as a spinning top just about to wobble out of control.
Enough of this teen girl bullshit. Get a grip, idiot.
He checked his new wardrobe again. It was something to do. Something to distract his thoughts. He got a pair of tan combat boots and a black T-shirt. Good. Allen also set body armor down in front of him with ammo pouches filled with yet more food.
“You can change back at your tent,” Allen said. “When you’re done here.”
“I’m not enlisting, you know,” Dave said, forcing himself into the moment. Into this moment.
“We wouldn’t have you,” Allen shot back. He attempted a lopsided grin, but to Hooper the stress lines around his eyes looked every bit as deep as they had after the ambush last night. “We still have some standards,” said the chief petty officer. “But everyone wears a plate carrier to the site. It’s just the rules. Also, I got you a CamelBak. Filled it with Gatorade. Might help.”
“Plate carrier?” Dave asked.
Allen held up the body armor, which looked like a pair of bib overalls with the bottoms cut off. “A lot of guys leave the plates behind, don’t like the weight. I’d prefer you left yours in. The captain will have my ass if you get killed and you aren’t wearing this.”
“Okay.”
His hunger abated after another half a loaf of white bread smeared with grape jelly, and he followed Allen back to the medical tent where the rig survivors had bunked down last night. There was no sign of his crew.
“They’re doing psych evals about now,” Allen said. “See if they’re crazy enough to let loose in the real world again.”
“So they’re going home today?”
“Or tomorrow.”
“After the story breaks for real?”
Allen rewarded him with a half smile.
“Now you’re learning.”
Once dressed, Dave looked like a street person who’d lucked out in the garbage cans behind a surplus warehouse. The T-shirt was a size too big, at least across the stomach, although the sleeves and shoulders were a little tight. He adjusted the straps and Velcro on the body armor, which felt like a life jacket to him, familiar from drills out on the platforms, light and not particularly burdensome.
“Thanks for these,” he said, holding up a peanut butter and caramel-flavored OhYeah! bar.
“Thank the long-suffering taxpayers of these United States,” Allen said, reminding Dave of the unopened letter from Uncle Sam’s shakedown man back on the kitchen table in his apartment. He dreaded to think what might be waiting for him in such a fat, heavy-looking envelope. The thought occurred to him as he laced up his new boots that he might be able to cut a deal with the IRS, some sort of contribution in kind where they gave him a tax credit for killing those things out on the Longreach and last night on the way here. After all, you could totally look at that as a community service in a way. It was a selfish thought, he knew, unworthy of the current circumstances and disrespectful of the losses and suffering others had endured yadda yadda yadda.
And yet …
The same way he’d been meaning to sit his ass down and do his taxes, he’d also been meaning to get an accountant. Someone he could just give those unfiled returns to. Somebody who could get him out of the hole he’d dug himself the last couple of years. As he fitted and straightened the government-issued clothes and pondered just how much the military at least seemed to want and need his help, Dave Hooper had to ask himself if maybe an accountant wasn’t the right call to make here. Maybe a lawyer would be better. Or an agent who could find the right sorts of lawyers and accountants. He was gonna be a celebrity after all, one way or another, and celebrities all had agents to take care of their business, didn’t they?
He stomped the boots into place and stood up, noticing the huge old Sony TV in the corner of the room. It looked like one of the last WEGA models, as big as the moving van that delivered it, thought Dave, who’d paid cash for the latest Samsung flat-screen with his bonus before this last one. The one he’d spent on hookers and blow. The cash transaction brought down the price—the TV was probably, no, almost certainly, stolen—and left no trail for Annie’s douche bag lawyer to follow.
He wondered when, or if, he might ever get home to enjoy firing up Ol’ Sammy again.
“We good to go?” the chief asked.
Allen had changed his outfit, too, and it didn’t look like a change for the better. He wore digital jungle fatigues and boots, with pads on his elbows and knees. His helmet, which rested on a table on a stack of auto mags and old copies of Sports Illustrated, bristled with all sorts of attachments on a complicated rail system. He seemed to be carrying half his body weight in weapons and ammo. Dave wasn’t a gun nut. Never had been, and he took a powerful dislike to them after his brother was killed, but he knew enough to be able to recognize a shotgun, some sort of assault rifle, two pistols, a bunch of grenades, and a long, wicked-looking fighting knife. He wasn’t sure he’d want to go up against any of the—
Dar Hunn. Dur Fangr.
—the creatures he’d encountered on the rig with a little bitty pigsticker like that, but a snout full of buckshot or a burst of armor-piercing ammo probably would do the job.
“Go where?” Dave asked.
Allen answered with one word: “Longreach.”
His heart sank, but he had known it was coming. They were always going to take him back out there, make him walk through everything again.
“Sure, let’s rock,” he said without enthusiasm as he stripped the wrapper from an OhYeah! bar. He chewed mechanically, eating for fuel, as he recalled the feeling of the splitting maul smashing through the thick mantle of the Hunn’s facial bone and gristle. He could remember a lot more of the encounter the farther he was from it, and that was a problem. Because he’d like to get as far away as possible from that day as well as forgetting all about it. At first it had seemed like a barely remembered dream. Now the moment of impact was a muscle memory as tactile as if he had swung the heavy sledge just a second ago.
“What happened to the one we killed last night?” he asked as Allen gathered up his kit and they headed toward the exit. He didn’t feel comfortable calling the Sliveen by its name. It sounded like madness in his head when he formed the words.
Allen shrugged.
“No idea. That’s way above my pay grade, Dave. It could be a thousand miles from here by now on a slab at the Smithsonian or Area 51.”
“Really?” Dave asked, his interest piqued. “There’s an Area 51 for real?”
“No. But maybe there should be.”
“Oh, okay.”
He finished the peanut and caramel snack, no longer hungry. He was learning to recognize the signs of the weird, almost instant starvation now and thought perhaps he could keep the pain at bay with smaller but regular deposits of energy-dense food. The Turban had been right, he thought. His metabolism was running at white heat. It had burned off his love handles and blubber eel, given him a stripped down, almost Spartan look that he thought of as gaunt rather than healthy. It had been so long since Dave Hooper had gone without a cushioning layer of fat under his skin that he’d forgotten what being fit looked like.
Like CPO Zach Allen, for instance. The SEAL was all hard lines and angles not because he worked for it but because he worked hard at his job, and the physique just came as part of that deal. He looked like a clenched fist.
“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 smacked 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.”