“Two minutes.”
Allen kicked the toe of his boot and relayed the message from the pilot. The SEAL team, or whatever they called themselves, appeared to power up around him, with men checking their own load-outs before cross-checking one another’s. With nothing to check, Dave contented himself with scanning the ocean for familiar sights. He could make out Thunder Horse on the horizon. The red and white structure was the largest rig in the Gulf of Mexico. It had survived stormy weather and hurricanes. Would it survive an invasion from Dungeons & Dragons as well? A pair of ships from the navy sketched a lazy patrol around the massive facility. Destroyers he supposed. Bigger than coast guard cutters, smaller than an aircraft carrier. He’d seen other ships on the way out to the Longreach, including something that might have been an aircraft carrier.
Were any of his people still over at Thunder Horse? He hoped not. The casualties should have been evacuated to shore by now, and anyone who was good to go should be long gone.
What could the crew of that platform be thinking, though? Had Thunder Horse played host to a couple of survivors babbling gibberish about monsters and demons boiling up out of the water? Were they watching satellite news, scoffing at the ignorant crap the media always went on with about the industry, or talking quietly, fearfully, among themselves as the first hints of the truth leaked out in the wider world.
“Yeah, Ortiz, he said something like that when we got him in off the Longreach. Poor bastard was burned up pretty bad, but he was talking some crazy shit about monsters, not fire.”
Allen held up his index finger: “One minute!”
Dave expected the SEALs to start cocking weapons, but nobody did. Allen appeared to check the safety on his M4, but that was all. Then he could see the Longreach as the Seahawk swung around on the final approach, and he knew they weren’t going in guns blazing. All the way out he’d been calling the helicopter a Black Hawk because it looked like one, but Allen had put him straight on that, much to Dave’s embarrassment.
The rig was lit up from top to bottom, with unfamiliar emergency lighting strung up around the most heavily damaged sections. The helipad was brightly illuminated and busy with military personnel, including a guy with bright paddles who waved them in.
As the big bird flared, Dave suffered a few flashes of recall from the last time he’d set down here.
Vince stiff-arming guys out of the way as they scrambled to get on the evac flight.
The burns. The open wounds.
You dare not you dare not you dare not …
The chopper settled down with a dainty one-two step, and rather than rappelling down ropes or diving for cover, everyone exited as though climbing off a bus. The feel of the deck under his new boots was strange, familiar yet wrong. He stayed bent over for a little longer as he cleared the rotor blades. The Seahawk felt much bigger and more dangerous than the civilian models he was used to shuttling around on. He joined Allen and his guys off to the side of the helipad, waiting to be introduced, but Captain Heath had other plans.
“If you’ll follow me, Mr. Hooper,” he shouted over the noise of the chopper lifting off. Allen gave him a brief wave before leading his men off toward the far side of the pad, where the SEALs appeared to have set up some kind of temporary command post in one of the converted shipping containers given over to the platform’s admin section. Heath, who seemed to have no trouble finding his way around the unfamiliar structure, led Hooper down the same path he had taken when following Vince Martinelli. They passed marines geared up for Call of Duty, more guys who looked like carbon copies of the SEALs, and a lot of support folks, both men and women. He had no idea what any of them were doing. That was why this place felt wrong. Or one of the reasons. He had exactly zero clues about what was happening here now. But at least nobody was running around screaming and dying, so that was a good start.
Captain Heath turned left instead of right after passing the small flight operations shack and took the steps down to the main canteen rather than the smaller crew lounge where Dave had found Marty Grbac. A couple of marines stood guard outside the heavy plastic swinging doors. They wore rubber gloves and masks. Heath collected his own protective gear and passed some back to Hooper. Dave thought the paper mask wasn’t necessary, but he put it on anyway. The smell coming out of there was foul. It clashed with the odor of cooking food in the nearby kitchen. He could see marines moving in and out of the kitchen service doors with boxes of food from the freezers. Probably a good idea to get them away.
“Excuse me.” A young girl in a lab coat pirouetted past him carrying a tray full of what might have been liver. It looked and smelled wrong. The space where he’d eaten so many meals was unrecognizable. Heavy plastic sheeting covered all the walls and the floor. Temporary lighting burned harsh and white, throwing everything into hard relief. Seven or eight people in biohazard suits ghosted around four stainless steel trolley tables on which lay the remains of the Hunn and its acolyte Fangr. The science types had all pulled back the hoods of their white coveralls, and like Dave and Heath they wore only paper face masks.
“We’ve tested for airborne contaminants,” the officer said, as if reading Dave’s mind. “Nothing. A bad smell, but that’s what rotting flesh smells like.”
Dave knew the stench, but this was not just the foul smell of dead meat gone bad. He could stick his head into his refrigerator back in Houston for that experience. No, he recognized the stink of decaying demon flesh. A rank odor as old as the sediment through which they’d been drilling these last months. He had always known it.
Just as he’d always known these creatures. That was why Heath had brought him out here. He’d been worried that the navy guys would think him mad when he let them know a little bit of what was happening inside his head.
It was worse than that. Now they thought he was useful.
His feet seemed to be stuck to the floor, making it impossible to move toward the trolleys. The medical staff, or researchers, or whatever they were, had ceased their endeavors one by one as they took in his arrival. They were all staring at him.
More fans.
He felt Heath’s hand on his arm, urging him forward, but gently.
“Come on. Tell me what you can.”
The human contact was enough to get him going again. He approached the largest trolley, on which lay the corpse of the Hunn. It was odd. He’d only had a few seconds when he’d first encountered the beast, and then he’d been in a hospital bed and everything had changed. So there hadn’t been time to note any details beyond the gross and obvious ones such as its size and inhuman features. Yet when he let his eyes travel up and down the corpse, from the massive horned feet to the crushed ruin of the face, he saw particulars that were entirely new to him, details he hadn’t had time to attend to before, such as the vivid artwork tattooed all over the Hunn’s putrefying hide.
He stared at the swirls and loops of black ink.
They told a story.
Yet in really seeing these things for the first time he also recalled them from a sink so deep and vast that it triggered an association from his own past, from some bullshit class in undergrad psych he’d crashed once because he was chasing some girl who was enrolled in it.
Race memory.
Dave shuddered and tried to step back, but Heath was there with his hand on Dave’s shoulder now. It wasn’t a physical barrier, not really, but it was enough to block his retreat.
“What’s up, Dave?” he asked with surprising care. “Tell me what’s happening.”
Hooper felt sick and dizzy with hot flushes.
“I need to sit down,” he said.
A woman in a biohazard suit dropped what she was doing to the creature. She bustled her assistants aside and pushed a stool underneath Dave.
Dave dropped onto the stool, letting his head fall between his knees and trying to control his breathing. He took long, slow breaths, ignoring the foul miasma of rotten meat. A few more of the researchers gathered around him, and one fanned his face with a manila folder.
“Get him some water,” the woman in the biohaz suit said, perhaps a bit more loudly than she needed to. Her accent was very British. “Maybe a bucket as well. We do not need any additional contamination in here.”
“English,” Dave said, trying to distract himself from the nausea.
“Once upon a time,” she said. “Don’t make a mess.”
“Are you hungry?” Heath asked, ignoring the interchange. “Do you need to eat?”
“No,” Dave said, managing a grim chuckle. “For once I am completely off my feed, but thank you. Ma’am, I won’t need that bucket. Thank you.”
“ ‘Doctor,’ ” she said without turning to face Dave. She was really into her autopsy or whatever she was doing. “Or ‘Professor,’ not ‘ma’am.’ Professor Emmeline Ashbury, Office of Science and Technology Policy. You may call me Professor Ashbury.”
“Okay,” Dave said, a bit taken aback. “Ah, sorry.”
“Apologies are unnecessary, and they do grow tiresome. That’s why I left England,” she said, poking at something deep within the creature’s chest. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Ooh, this looks interesting.”
And with that she lost interest in Dave.
“Don’t know how anyone could think of eating after seeing that thing,” one of the techs said as he laid an unidentifiable green organ on an exam tray.
They were probably going to be skipping meals until they got the stench of death out of their nostrils and clothes. And skin. Dave drew in a deeper breath and rubbed his forehead, gratefully accepting the proffered bottle of water. It was cool and possibly the most delicious drink he’d ever tasted. Pure, clean spring water.
“Sorry,” he said in a cracked voice. “I just … It just got to be a bit much, is all.”
“Take your time,” Heath said.
“Perhaps a medic,” Professor Ashbury said over her shoulder, briefly taking her eyes off the body cavity. “He looks rather wobbly, don’t you think?”
“No,” Dave answered. “Seriously, I’ll be all right. I just need a minute.”
“Really?” Ashbury said. “That long? I heard you killed it a lot quicker than that.”
He closed his eyes and concentrated on his heartbeat, slowing it down. It had been pounding away like a trip-hammer in his chest. He imagined himself on a beach in Bali, a nice spliff in one hand, a disgracefully cheap cocktail in the other. A day of fishing leaving a nice patina of relaxed exhaustion over him after a fine meal. Perhaps a couple of adventurous Swedish backpackers with giant Nordic breasts and …
No, that was enough. He could feel the rebar coming back. He opened his eyes.
“I’m good. Let’s do it.”
And he was ready this time as he approached the remains of Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn.
You dare not do this!
“Slavaattun mal shastarr,” he said to the corpse with a sneering leer.
“What?” Heath frowned at him.
Whoa. Where the fuck did that come from?
Dave repeated the phrase to himself, but slowly.
“Roughly translated?” he said to Heath. “ ‘I guess I do dare, bitch.’ ”
The captain kept his expression neutral.
“Yeah, sometimes I surprise myself, too,” Dave said. He took his time circling the stainless steel trolley, and the researchers all moved aside for him. Apart from the killing stroke he had delivered to the Hunn, Heath’s people had been nickel-and-diming it to pieces as well. An incision sliced here. A plug taken there. And in the center of its massive chest an equally massive Y-cut scar where they’d opened old Urgon up, all the better to empty him out. Dave had no interest in what they found in there. Three stomachs, two hearts—a primary and a secondary—some really nasty digestive juices, and a long intestinal tract that pooped tiny little rock-hard marbles of demon guano when the monster was done digesting his meal.
A cloud passed over his face. The Hunn’s last meal had been a friend of his. He pushed the thought away. He was becoming practiced at that.
“This ugly-ass motherfucker,” Dave said, “is a Hunn.”
The simple declaration seemed to cast a spell over the room, suspending everything. He gathered his thoughts from wherever they came and pressed on.
“One of the six clans of the Horde. The Hunn are the largest, most savage of them. They are the shock troops of the Horde,” he said, looking directly at Heath. “The heavy infantry, I guess you’d call them. And this one here, he was a BattleMaster of Hunn. They’re born, not made. Your average vanilla-flavored Hunn will run to about seven foot tall and weigh in at maybe three hundred, three hundred fifty pounds. Most of it, as you’ve probably seen, is pretty densely packed muscle. They probably have the strength of about a dozen men. Or maybe half a dozen Sergeant Swindts,” he conceded. “I guess you’ve run your tape measure over this bad boy, so you already know that a Master of Hunn can top out at over eight foot and weigh another sixty or seventy pounds. Without armor.”
One of the researchers raised a hand and opened his mouth to speak, but Dave waved him off. “I’ll get back to the armor,” he promised.
“So. The really big, dumb bastards like to call themselves BattleMasters. They’re like you, Heath. Officers.” Dave tapped the side of his head. “Sorry. Can’t Google up a direct comparison, but if you want to imagine them being about eighteen, maybe nineteen times stronger than a grown man, you wouldn’t be far off. They’re pretty fast and nimble—given they’ve got all that mass to move around—and when they take a swing at you, holy shit, they do throw out the hurt bombs. Their bones are dense …”
He looked around at the white suits for confirmation. A couple of them nodded, including Ashbury, who had abandoned her autopsy to take in his lecture.
“That rhino hide they’re covered in is thick but strangely sensitive to UV damage. It picks up a lot of infections. The infections suppurate and rupture. It can make them vulnerable. Their hide is normally as tough as boiled leather, but when it ruptures … not so much. That’s why they wear armor. It’s also why they have tattoos in a dumb-ass sort of way. The ink our boy here got himself would have hurt like a bastard when it went on.”
He paused for a second, closing his eyes and searching for the knowledge.
“They use bone needles and the ink of this sort of squid. Urmin. Rhymes with vermin. But lives on land. And the suckers on its arms all have little razor teeth around them.”
He checked to see if everyone was still following him. They were with rapt, horrified attention.
“Anyway, a dude with a lot of tats, he has sucked up some real pain to get them. The design tells a story, but you know, blah blah blah. I’m a bad ass from a line of bad asses. We’re all considered very macho.” He grinned. “Anyway. Game stats. The fastest of them can run at about …” He closed his eyes again and did a quick calculation. “About forty miles an hour for short distances. But they get puffed quickly. Like I said, that’s a lot of weight to go hauling around at high speed. Mostly they like to jog around at a slow lope, accelerating when they close with an enemy, or prey. Which to a Hunn is pretty much the same thing anyway.”
He had circled around the top of the dissection table until he stood next to the half-crushed head of the corpse. He wrinkled his nose in distaste.
“He’s no oil painting, is he? Anyway, more fascinating factoids: they have very poor eyesight, especially in bright sunshine, but their sense of smell is about as good as a hunting dog’s. They can sleep standing up. They can hold their breath for a loooong time. Can go four or five days without water. Ten if they can get some blood to drink. Yeah, I know. Gross. The hide can be up to two inches thick in places.”
He looked up at Heath again. Unlike the brainiacs who seemed happy to defer to his superior knowledge, Heath looked as if Dave had just dropped his pants and mooned the lot of them. Allen was right. He should have found the time to give Old Navy a heads-up about this.
“But the hide’s not impenetrable,” he said, pressing on regardless. “These things fight with edged weapons, up close and very personal. When they want to reach out and touch someone at a distance, they’ll throw a spear, or if you’re dealing with the Sliveen, they’ll notch an arrow.”
“The Sliveen?” Heath asked. “The scout?” His face was a mask of deep concern, but Dave didn’t care anymore. They had asked him here to do his party trick, and he was going to do it. It felt good to let go of this stuff. A blessed fucking relief. As though giving it up made it somebody else’s problem.
“One of the six clans,” he explained. “You ever watch those Lord of the Rings movies?”
“Fuck yeah!” said one of the younger male researchers before blushing with embarrassment.
“Well, just imagine that movie with orcs pretending to be ninjas.”
“Awesome,” the same guy said in a quiet voice.
“Yeah, the Sliveen think they are. The Hunn disagree. A Sliveen is what hit us on the road last night.”
“These things have already made it to the mainland?” someone asked.
“Not now,” Heath said. “Continue, please, Mr. Hooper.”
“The Sliveen also like to think of themselves as being very sophisticated,” Dave said, then stopped. “Hey. Did this asshole come packing a sword? A really big sucker?”
“It did,” a bald man said. He’d just come into the room with the air of someone who liked to make a big entrance. “I’ve done some preliminary investigations, but we lack the facilities for metallurgical or linguistic analysis. Aside from the basic facts we could ascertain here—it was made by a tool-using, tool-making culture, designed primarily for combat, with some symbology indicating that it may also demonstrate rank and achievement—we have not been able to learn much about the material culture of this or the other creatures.”
No one said a word. The bald man who sported a shocking red neck beard was a bit short and a bit wide. He looked less of a pirate than he did a pirate’s fat cook. He seemed to waddle when he shuffled about in his biohazard suit. The arms and legs had been taped up to take up some of the slack. A pair of wire-framed glasses sat over the paper mask; behind them lurked a pair of sharp small brown eyes. He could just as easily have been an accountant at BP rattling off numbers concerning dividend payments. Except for the beard, of course. The bean counters always looked about twelve years old to Dave.
“I think I understood some of that,” he said to the new guy.
“Dr. Raymond Compton,” Heath said. “Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy. Also, academic resources and special projects chief.”
“Or to put it another way,” Dr. Compton said, “I’m in charge.”
Dave didn’t buy it. The little man didn’t look like he could manage a classroom of frat boys, let alone the military types answering to Heath.
“No, I take it back,” Dave said, biting down on a number of possible retorts. “I’m confused again. Anyway, it’s a pity the sword was sent away. The swords have stories on them, too.” He looked directly at Heath. “Good intel.”
“I believe I told you that, did I not, Captain?” Dr. Compton said with a look on his face that Dave recognized. The look of a man whom no one ever listened to and who resented the hell out of it. Of course, Dave had his own experience in that area. Without a Ph.D. he’d made do with boyish charm and bullshitting. Compton, having a Ph.D. and that big important title, looked as if he hadn’t learned the trick. Oh, yeah. Dave knew this sort. He had to be right, and he had to have the last word.
Always.
The less I have to deal with this asshole, Dave thought, the better.
A few steps carried him down the table to where the Hunn’s massive arm lay. He picked it up. It had three … fingers, he guessed you could call them. And a thumb. He remembered opposable thumbs from school. They were important. “What do you call those animals with these kind of fingers and toes, like horns?” he asked nobody in particular, assuming that a roomful of pointy heads would be able to provide the answer.
“Ungulates,” Ashbury said. She looked to be in her late thirties with a look that used to be described as handsome on the ladies of a bygone age. She was pretty, he supposed, but strong-featured. Dave could see two spots of high color on her cheeks over the top of the paper mask.
“So what are you guys, the monster squad or something?”
“I’m an MD with supplementary degrees in anthropology and forensics,” Professor Ashbury said. “I have also published several papers on exobiology. Dr. Compton’s speciality is—”
“Anthropology,” he said, as if that trumped exobiology with maximum prejudice. “During the war I did a lot of work on the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System. Before that I had some passing contact with the exobiologist community and their love of imaginary xenomorphs.”
He said that as if it should mean something to Dave.
“Xenu the alien? Like Tom Cruise worships?” Dave said, genuinely confused.
“No,” Ashbury said, not amused. “Exobiologists study extreme habitats and the life-forms that occupy them here on earth, and we make educated guesses about the way xenomorphs—aliens—might evolve on other planets.”
“These things aren’t aliens,” Dave said, flicking Urgon on the side of the skull. “Well, I guess they’re not from this world, strictly speaking. But they’re definitely not from Klingon, either. Although, looking at him …”
Heath stepped in to bring him back on topic.
“Professor Ashbury and her staff are all security cleared for government work at the highest level,” he said. “Nobody thinks these things arrived here from outer space.”
“But unless you want to bring in Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a consultant,” Ashbury said, “then exobiology is your go-to reference group.”
Compton had traded his poker face for a much more dissatisfied expression. He was a barrel-shaped man who didn’t seem to have much actual strength to him. Dave wondered what his hands were like, probably smooth, soft, without a day’s worth of honest work on them. All his achievements came through teaching instead of doing.
“How is it you came into possession of this knowledge, Mr.… Cooper?” he asked, stumbling slightly over Dave’s last name.
“That’s Hooper to you, Grizzly Adams.”
“How, Mr. Hooper, did you come to know all this?” Compton repeated. “It seems a preposterous suggestion that you have taken it in by osmosis.”
“I’d like to know that, too, Dave,” Heath said quietly. “You said you knew a bit about these things, but nothing like that.”
“Better explain yourself, Hooper,” Ashbury said with a twinkle in her eye. “These guys are such uptight arses at the best of times that I don’t even notice it. But I’m sensing a lot of extra pucker in the room right now.”
Some of the scientists tensed. The Lord of the Rings kid, who looked to be in his early twenties and way too young to be doing secret government experiments on alien life-forms, looked like he might wet himself.
Dave folded his arms and fought the old familiar urge to lie and distract.
“Look. I’ll be fucked if I know,” he said to Heath. “A couple of days ago I couldn’t have told you any of this stuff. But a couple of days ago this ugly motherfucker—” He smacked the Hunn with the back of his hand. “—hadn’t crawled onto my rig and bitten the head off one of my best friends. There’s a fuckin’ preposterous suggestion for you right there, Doc. I hadn’t discovered my previously unknown ability to juggle refrigerators and small cars at the same time. Another preposterous suggestion. And I hadn’t put a hammer through old Urgon’s skull here and apparently downloaded all of his nasty fucking hopes and dreams.”
His voice grew louder as his temper got the better of him, and he finished by slapping an open palm down on the chest of the dead demon. It sounded like a rifle shot and brought the two marine guards running in from outside with their weapons up. It also collapsed the monster’s chest cavity like an old paper light shade.
Ashbury jumped back a little in fright. Somebody swore.
“Easy, Marine,” Heath said, calm and cool, without raising his voice. He put his hand on the top of the marine’s rifle and lowered it back to the floor. “We’re fine. Stand down.”
Everyone was looking at the body and at Dave.
“Sorry,” he said at last. “Still don’t know my own strength.”
“Okay,” Heath said in a soothing tone. “Let’s get back on track, shall we? And, you remind me, Mr. Hooper, I want to talk to you about that hammer later.”
He sounded like Dave’s old man right then, making an appointment to take him out to the woodshed.