The impromptu lecture wrapped up after two hours. Once Dave started talking, there seemed to be no obvious place to stop. Heath’s expression went from surprised to incredulous to angry before settling back into his usual blank mask. As much as Heath and the scientists were unbalanced by the performance, their surprise and incredulity were mild next to his own. In the end he kept talking because it was easier than stopping to consider the implications of what he’d already said.
“The Horde are like an army,” he explained as his voice grew hoarse. “No, scratch that. They are an army. But we’re not their enemy. We’re their food. Their rations. There are other armies. Real enemies. More like them.” He frowned.
“Noted,” said Heath. “But let’s stay on topic for now. The Hordes.”
There was so much more he could have told them. He’d barely started in on the Fangr, but it was getting very late and the researchers had been working all day. Dave felt himself getting hungry, too, and rather than run down his store of energy bars, Captain Heath, looking hollow-eyed and subdued, decided after consulting with Compton that they could reconvene at 0600. He suggested that the doctors and professors and their assistants might like to consider some questions to ask Dave rather than having him simply ramble on with whatever came to mind.
That would be better, Dave thought as they moved outside onto the deck of the platform. A fresh southerly breeze blew across the rig, giving him a chance to clear his mind a bit. He found that he didn’t know what he knew until he decided to think about it. It would be a whole hell of a lot easier to just answer whatever questions they fired at him, although he’d already disappointed Professor Ashbury with his inability to get into any physiological detail beyond the obvious. As he tried to explain, he didn’t much understand human anatomy beyond the basics, either, but he left the makeshift morgue with the impression that Compton thought he was some sort of bullshit artist.
He’d add it to the long list of things he didn’t give a fuck about.
Dave had flown out to the platform with Allen’s SEALs, but the other military personnel out here were mostly marines according to the young chief petty officer. Some of them had set up guard posts equipped with machine guns. When he gave some thought to it, he realized that these guys seemed to understand the rig nearly as well as he did. They’d put those meat grinders exactly where you would expect trouble to rear its ugly, snarling head if it came up from below looking for a snack. Other marines were at work patrolling the Longreach. Still more were busy clearing away the debris and damage and getting some basic systems running again. They were all armed and wearing vests that made them look like his boys’ Mutant Ninja Turtle figures. Heath had told him how many marines and SEALs and sailors were on the rig and how they were organized, but that military stuff about platoons and squads and whatnot went in one ear and out the other. More important than how many platoons went into a company and how many companies could sink a battleship, they were changing shift—or “watch,” Dave supposed—when he finished telling his monster stories and went looking for a feed.
Although the crew lounge where Marty had died was still sealed off, the Longreach’s kitchen was undamaged. A few sailors from a nearby ship had cross-decked to cook some chow, using the platform’s own stores. Heath said something about the corps eventually getting their own cooks in, which was neither here nor there to Dave. He was just looking to get fed. A temporary mess station sat up near the helipad in a windbreak created by two shipping containers converted to offices. A heavy tarpaulin offered some overhead protection, and four long folding tables provided a makeshift serving space. Marines and sailors lined up to get their trays filled with whatever came out of a series of heavy green plastic cases.
Dave stepped up and looked inside one, finding a stainless steel tray full of food.
“Dave?” Heath gestured him over to a spot, pointing to a stack of similar containers each marked with his name. “I have yours over here. And I got you this.”
Heath produced a large metal spoon from his pocket.
“And we need to talk,” said the navy man.
“You’re breaking up with me?” Dave asked as he sat down in front of the first food container and waited for Heath to do the same.
“That little tutorial you gave back there, Dave; you surprised me.”
“Me, too, man,” he said, distracted by the smell of hot food as he opened the first meal case. Ignoring Heath, he removed the lid and used the overlarge spoon to work his way through the warm fried chicken and rice inside, stripping the meat and sucking the juice out of each bone before opening a second case to attack the mashed potatoes. A quick glance into the third revealed mac and cheese, or whatever the navy used for cheese. It was agreeably thick and gooey. The navy officer frowned and contented himself with a hard-boiled egg.
“Living large there, Cap’n,” Dave said, happy to be eating again with no sign of the buffet running low.
Heath peeled the egg and ate it, washing it down with a metal mug of black sugarless coffee.
“I don’t eat a large meal in the evening,” he said. “I have to watch my calories very closely.”
“No five-mile runs anymore, eh?” Dave said without thinking. “D’oh. Sorry,” he added quickly. “That was my inner asshole talking. It’s gotta be hard, your line of work with that injury.”
He waved his new spoon at the artificial leg.
Heath shrugged.
“There’s many with worse. Much worse. I’m lucky.” Heath fixed him with a level stare, like a butterfly chaser pinning a new catch to a board. “You weren’t exactly square with me, were you, Dave? About how much you knew, or know, about these creatures.”
A dozen marines gathered nearby with their trays. A few of them pointed and gawked as Dave put away thousands of calories without stopping to draw breath. Some looked envious, some horrified. Heath finished his egg and sipped at the coffee.
Dave shoveled the food into his mouth partly to fuel up but also to give himself time to think.
“Look, I’m sorry about that,” he said at last after cleaning out another meal case of mac and cheese. “But you gotta cut me some slack, man. I’m just getting used to all this. Between you and me, I wasn’t in the best of shape when I choppered back out here. You know, before it all went down. I woke up in that hospital thinking I was having some kind of bad acid flashback.”
Heath sounded as horrified as a man with his emotional distance could be. Dave laughed out loud and almost lost a mouthful of macaroni.
“Nah, not for years.”
And thanks for not asking about all the lines of blow I vacuumed up back in that motel.
“But yeah, when I get off the platform, I like to play hard. I’m not gonna apologize for that. I spent most of my marriage apologizing for shit I really shouldn’ta had to. At least, not at first. But I got to admit there was a part of me thought I was fucked up on something or having some kind of breakdown. You know, like having bugs coming out from under your skin, ’cept these critters were seven foot high.”
He stopped talking to shotgun a bottle of water down, then opened another foil-covered food tray. Pineapple and pork with some sort of thick yellow noodles.
“I thought I was going nuts,” he said as he looked around for a fork to wind up the noodles. His spoon wasn’t going to be much use. Heath produced a plastic fork from the discarded food packages. “And if you heard some of the shit running through my head when we first met,” he said, “you’d have thought the same thing.”
“What shit, Dave?”
Heath was remarkably patient.
The rigger shrugged.
“All that stuff I was telling the eggheads. I didn’t even know it was there until I started looking for it. I mean, what sort of things do you know, Heath?”
He waved his cheap plastic fork at the man’s head. A strand of noodle flew off and landed on Heath’s arm.
Heath flicked the sticky yellow strand onto the metal grillwork of the deck.
He didn’t seem inclined to make anything of it, so Dave carried on.
“You think about it. You got a lifetime worth of learning up there in your head. But a lot of it, most of it, is filed away. You couldn’t get through the day if it wasn’t.”
“True,” Heath said. “But you could have told me. Command is going to want to debrief you properly. They’ll want to know everything.”
He emphasized the last word.
“And they’re going to blame you for not letting them in on it earlier?” Dave asked.
Heath frowned.
“I don’t care about that. I care about knowing as much as possible about any potential hostile. That knowledge could save lives. Like the ones we lost on the road,” he added pointedly.
Hooper stopped eating and put down his meal case of pork and noodles.
“Dude, you gotta believe me: that was as big a surprise to me as it was to you. There’s nothing I could have done to warn you about that. I didn’t know the Sliveen was out there.”
“But you knew the Sliveen existed. And that they’re scouts. You even said as much to Chief Allen. You said they do his job.”
Dave stopped for a moment to ponder that. He resented the implication that the ambush was somehow his fault. But he resented even more the idea that Heath might be right.
“But I didn’t know,” he protested, not liking the whiny tone creeping into his voice.
Heath didn’t escalate the issue. He merely fixed Dave with the same level stare.
“But if I knew that you had much greater knowledge of these things, I could have asked you the questions that needed to be asked. There’s no avoiding it, Dave. The ambush wasn’t your fault, but you had a responsibility to tell me what you knew, or at least to tell me that you possibly knew something about this enemy that I could have used.”
“But I didn’t know about the ambush, or about the Sliveen …”
“You didn’t know about the ambush or about that particular scout. But what can you tell me about the Sliveen now?”
Dave tamped down his frustration and mounting anger and took a moment to focus on the question. What did he know about the Sliveen?
A lot, as it happened.
He sighed and started to talk.
“The Sliveen are like, I dunno, the ninjas of the Horde. Or the SEALs, or whatever. They’re a small clan, and they consider themselves superior in skills to even the Grymm.”
“The Grim?” Heath frowned.
Dave sighed.
“See. This is a fucking rabbit hole, man. Or you know, what do they call those things, those patterns? A fractal. Does that sound right? It just goes on and on, deeper and more fucking complicated the more I look into it.”
Heath shook his head, “It’s not exactly right, but go on. Skip the Grim. We can come back to them later. We’ll come back to all of this later. Just tell me what you know about the Sliveen, off the top of your head. Right now, without thinking too much about it.”
Dave swapped his small plastic fork for the spoon he’d been using and chased the last pieces of pork and pineapple.
“The Sliveen are the scouts,” he said. “They cover long distances, alone or in small groups. They’re not brawlers like the Hunn, but they’re savage in a stand-up fight. Prefer to snipe at you from a distance with a … a war bow. Like our boy last night. Or a sort of crossbow thing. Smaller, but easier to carry.”
“Do you think there’ll be more of them spooking about back on the mainland?”
“No idea. Honest Injun.”
Dave held up one hand.
“Please don’t be needlessly offensive,” Heath said before putting his coffee mug down, empty. “Nobody asked you the obvious question,” he added before Dave could be offended by the implied criticism.
“Which is?”
“What are they doing here?”
Alternating between multiple trays, Dave shoveled another spoonful of mac and cheese into his mouth and thought about it for a moment or two as he chewed. He couldn’t remember enjoying the taste of a meal so much as he did this one. “They had no fucking idea what they were doing here,” he said at last, staring into the distance, out across the darkened sea. “Besides feeding.”
Another spoonful of mashed potatoes. He closed his eyes and thought about it some more as he swallowed the creamy, buttery spuds. They were surprisingly good. Much better than the lumpy, watery mess he was used to here on the rig. It reminded him of some of the epic pig-outs he’d indulged in at college many years ago after a couple of bongs brought on the munchies.
“They’ve been down there, in the UnderRealms they call it, for a long time. Long enough that they remember us as nothing more than cattle, wandering the fields, you know, grazing, waiting to be eaten. They call us … calflings, I guess would be closest. Like veal. Extra tender ’n’ tasty,” he said, scraping the last bits of mac and cheese out of the tray.
Dave focused again, following what he now thought of as the Hunn’s race memory back through the millennia.
“I don’t know that they even think of us as being civilized. It’s possible they disappeared before civilization got going.”
“Disappeared?”
“You seen any around before yesterday?” He paused to follow the thought wherever it might go.
“They were driven into the UnderRealms,” he said. “Or their myths tell them so.”
He carefully set the first three cases aside and dragged over the second round. Inspecting the contents, he placed the pulled pork in front of him, more mashed potatoes to his right, and the green beans to his left. The lack of a fresh crusty bread roll for the pork was a bummer, but he pitched in anyway, grinning in spite of it all. It was a hell of a thing, being able to eat whatever the hell he felt like without guilt or consequence.
“A bit like us being driven from the Garden of Eden,” he said around a mouthful of pork. “Everything’s hookers and blow, and then you’ve been kicked out on your bleeding ass in the dark and the rain.”
“By whom?”
Another pause.
“The Sky Lords.”
“Oh, come on, no.”
Dave threw his hands up, sending a dollop of potatoes at Heath. Thankfully it missed the captain’s ear by a few inches and plopped harmlessly onto the deck.
“Shit, sorry. But yeah. See, that’s what I mean about you taking me for a crazy man. The Sky Lords. Sounds kind of faggy, but that’s what the Hunn call them. I dunno who or what the fuck they were. But they ruined the party for everyone. Well, for everyone whose idea of a party was biting the heads off screaming village folk.”
“Village …?”
Dave took a bottle of water from a pack of twelve, drained it in one shot, and shook his head.
“Don’t suppose you got beer? No, forget it. Anyway, long story short, these things gotta predate what we think of as civilization. You know, ancient cities, Roman roads, microwave mac and cheese. I can’t tell you by how much.”
He gave it another few moments of thought.
“They don’t think about time like we do. There’s no calendars or alarm clocks down there.”
He stopped talking with a spoonful of macaroni halfway to his open mouth. When Heath made as if to ask him a question, he held up one hand. Dave concentrated, and Heath let him be, waiting him out.
“They don’t have any technology as we’d understand it,” Dave said after a pause. “No … machinery as such. Some forging and smithing, you know; Dark Ages stuff. But even Roman engineering would have been beyond them.”
“You studied history?” Heath asked.
Dave shrugged, scooping up some pulled pork from the bottom of the can. He chewed, swallowed, and slid the empty case aside. He was inhaling this stuff. He really ought to slow down and just enjoy it. “The history of engineering. For my undergrad, the usual requirements. I think Western Civ was one of the few bullshit courses I enjoyed. Anyway, you asked about them disappearing. I reckon they were gone, banished, before human civilization really got going.”
“Maybe it couldn’t get going while they were around,” Heath thought out aloud. “Professor Compton might have an opinion on that.”
Dave couldn’t give two shits about Compton’s opinion on anything. He leaned forward to check another case that held greenish scrambled eggs, ham slices, and hash. He pitched into the eggs, not really caring about the color. It was probably an herb, and he was still peckish. When he was done searching “his” memory and ready for some hash, he answered Heath.
“Urgon doesn’t have an opinion on that,” he said.
“Urgon? He’s your man now?”
“My bitch.” The rigger smiled. “I made Urgon my monster bitch. Now he has to step and fetch it for me.”
“So what do they want?”
He didn’t even have to think about that one. It was a question that answered itself. Dave was famous in the crew lounge for his Schwarzenegger, and he drew on it now. “Vat is der greatest pleasure? To vanquish your enemies and chase dem before you, to eat der horses and ride der vimmin.”
Heath observed him for a full second.
“Was that a joke?”
“No, that was Conan. But it’s not a thousand miles removed from the way our boy Urgon does business. Or did. It’s been a long time since they’ve walked the OverRealms. The Above.”
“The over …?”
“This,” said Dave, waving his spoon around a little more carefully this time. “Our turf. And no, I don’t know how they got here. Neither did he. He was just out hunting.” Dave turned his head to one side as he pulled out the memory. “Hunting minion. A lesser demon. Tough meat but good for smoking. If you’re a Hunn. Anyway, he was tracking a nest of them; next thing he knows, he’s swimming up toward the light, which he’s never seen, he’s only ever heard about it. And then he’s climbing the rig, and …”
Dave put his spoon aside for a moment and shut down the recall.
“And then it was feeding time,” he said quietly.
“I’m sorry,” Heath said. “You can … remember that? As he did?”
“Yeah,” Dave said. “But I’d prefer to not have the replay running behind my eyeballs if that’s cool with you.”
Heath agreed. He looked about five years older than when Dave first had seen him.
“This is what the instructors used to call an out-of-context problem,” said the naval officer, sounding very tired. Dave started in on the ham slices and hash browns. His appetite remained unaffected.
He looked on as a couple of marines who had located the supply room and found a batch of brand-new galvanized tin mop buckets scooped ice cream and cookies into them. They churned up the mix with a beater fitted to a scavenged power drill. There were excited grins all around as they doled the results into Styrofoam cups. Dave thought maybe a bucket full of that might not be a bad idea. The dairy would make him sleepy.
“The marines do not normally get to eat this well,” Heath said by way of explaining the ice cream. He seemed almost embarrassed. “Not in the field. It would be MREs until they got the kitchen going.”
“You don’t have to explain. Rig monkeys are animals. You got choir boys there.”
“The food on your rig was going to waste,” Heath said, as if it was important. “And I don’t think MREs are going to do it for you in the long run. I want to see what the docs have to say about your metabolism.”
That dampened Dave’s enthusiasm for the cookout.
“Yeah. I been wondering about that. Whether it’s always gonna be like this. I might have to live in a fucking food court.”
He was just about to pitch into his mop-bucket-size chocolate shake when he was interrupted.
“Do you mind if I join you, gentlemen? I couldn’t sleep.”
Heath stood up as Professor Ashbury approached their patch of deck, forcing Dave to remember his manners as well. Grunts of exertion surrounded them as the marines chose that moment to wind up their meal break and head out on patrol. Once upon a time he might have waddled off in a food coma after them, but Dave Hooper now bounced up onto his feet with no effort at all. Neither bloated nor heavy, he did at last feel as though he could stop shoveling food into his head hole. He was thirsty, however, and fetched himself a Coke from an ice-filled cooler.
He could hear the marines joking about him as they left on their patrol.
It was odd to think of armed soldiers heading out on patrol when all they were doing was walking around his platform. Heath picked up a folding chair newly vacated by one of the jarheads and twirled it around for the professor to sit on. She thanked him and carefully placed a mug of something hot on the fold-up mess table.
“Doc.” Dave nodded.
She fixed him with an unreadable expression. Freed of her biohazard suit, she was, he found, quite striking. Not a chick who’d be posing for Sports Illustrated anytime soon, but he could see how some men would find her easy on the eyes. Men like Dave, say.
“You really should refer to me as Professor Ashbury,” she said. “Or Doctor Ashbury; either is applicable. My friends call me Emma, but I do not think we will be on a first-name basis.”
“Wow,” Dave said, a bit put off. “Okay, Professor. Have it your way.”
“Anything you can tell us?” Heath asked.
“Not without lab work, which will have to wait until we get back to the mainland,” she said, stifling a yawn.
“Coffee won’t help you sleep, Doc,” Dave informed her helpfully. “D’oh! Sorry. I meant Prof.”
“Cocoa,” she explained. “With a nip of rum. Not enough alcohol to disturb my sleep patterns but enough to relax after a hell of a day.”
“Hey, no need to explain. That’s my type of bedtime drink.”
She sketched a smile but purely for the sake of form, rearranging her features because it was required. Like Heath, she must have been tired and, at a deeper level, unbalanced by the way the rational world had totally tipped off its axis. The three of them found themselves alone. It was a familiar but unsettling scene to Dave Hooper, who could feel the rig around him, the miles of pipes and tons of metal and concrete, floating, creaking, shifting here and there in ways it never had before. The feel of it was wrong. He could hear the dull clang of boots ringing on steel stairways as squads of marines stomped off on patrol. The usual hum and rumble of the drilling machinery was silent, but he could hear generators and even, if he strained, conversations to which both he and the Longreach were unaccustomed. For one disorienting second he managed to filter out a whole snatch of dialogue from an unfamiliar voice somewhere nearby.
“… some shit right out of King Arthur, dude.”
“… fuck you, you’re full of it …”
“… not lovin’ this freak show …”
“… like a fucking slaughterhouse, man. Worse than fucking Baghdad. Way Karsoe tells it …”
He pulled away from it, slightly disturbed at the fidelity of the sound. It was as though he’d dialed in on the conversation the way he might focus on a line of text in a book. But there was nobody nearby to account for the dialogue.
“Mr. Hooper?”
It was Professor Ashbury.
“Dave,” he said, coming back to them. “Call me Dave.”
“All right, then; I will call you Dave. Are you okay, Dave? You looked somewhat woebegone.”
He snorted in between gulps of the chocolate thick shake.
“Woebegone? My grandma used to say that.”
“Mr. Hooper … Dave … is having a few adjustment issues,” Heath explained. “We all are.”
Ashbury raised an eyebrow. “Indeed.”
She wrapped both hands around the chipped enamel mug and took a pull on her cocoa. When the mug came away, it left a small frothy mustache that she licked at like a child. Dave found himself smiling at the sight. And then he found himself having to adjust his posture because of the erection that started to strain at his pants.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
There had been a bad time a year back when he’d seriously thought about seeing his doctor about getting a scrip for some Viagra. Then he’d thought about just ordering some on the net. Then that crisis had passed thanks to a Waffle House waitress. She’d smothered, covered, and chunked him all the way to recovery. But this … He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. This fucking rail spike in the pants was new and not entirely welcome. He tried to hide it behind the ice cream bucket in his lap.
The prof was a good-looking lady but not his type, and he knew for a certainty that he wasn’t hers. She was too smart.
Annie had taught him the dangers of smart women. Annie and her goddamned college crush lawyer, Vietch.
“Thirsty,” he said, draining the bottom half of the Coke he’d fetched. It was icy cold, and he was hoping it might put out the fire or at least give him a cold spike headache to chill things down a little.
It didn’t do that. He was uncomfortably aware of Ashbury’s scent and the bow of her lips and …
“Dave?”
Annoyed, he slammed the galvanized tin mop bucket down with a sound like a gunshot. Everyone jumped, including him, and the big can tipped over, spilling the last of its contents. It was crushed in the middle, just the way he’d crush an empty can of Bud during the Super Bowl.
“Oh, man … sorry …”
Heath mopped up the spill with a napkin, which made Dave feel bad because he had to get down on his robot leg to do it, and Ashbury offered rote assurance that he had nothing for which to apologize, which was demonstrably fucking untrue given the one-legged man swabbing the deck in front of him. Heath finished and dropped the sodden napkin into the ruined bucket.
“You’ve been through an extraordinary ordeal, Dave,” Ashbury said. “Quite literally. People use ‘literally’ nowadays as an inappropriate modifier. But in your case it is apt. Your experience was outside the ordinary realm. You’re still going through it. It’s natural that it would unsettle you.”
He thanked her and shifted his position again, finding that by throwing one leg over the other, ankle on his knee, he could open up a little wiggle room for the old persuader. He sighed audibly with the relief.
“Thanks, Prof,” he said. “I shouldn’t complain. This is just …” He threw a look across at Captain Heath. “What was that you called it all? Out of context?”
Heath nodded, and Dave waved one hand around to take in the rig. Then he gently picked up the crushed bucket. “There is no context for any of this. Not outside of the SyFy Channel. I mean, you guys? Maybe you’ve dealt with this sort of thing before?”
His look was hopeful, but Heath gave him nothing.
“I was the available JSOC asset in theater, Mr. Hooper. I was down here supervising a completely routine training exercise.”
Professor Ashbury looked like she was searching for something encouraging to say. In the end all she could come up with was vague conversational filler.
“I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised, by which I mean we, not you, Dave. We spend our professional lives imaging the extreme. Trying to quantify it. Establish parameters. We—”
“So you haven’t been to Area 51? Either of you?”
“Captain Heath has been very good about all this, you know,” she said, throwing the officer an encouraging glance. “He’s been very good about you.”
“Professor,” Heath said in a warning tone.
“Oh, come on. The man has been to hell and back. And he obviously doesn’t have the emotional or intellectual skills with which to cope.”
“Hey!”
“Captain Heath,” she continued, favoring Dave with a significant glance, “has probably saved you from extraordinary rendition …”
“Professor!”
“No. It’s important he understands. There was a chance, Dave, that you could have ended up in a cell somewhere, sedated and chained down. I know Captain Heath argued very strongly against that, and to be honest, I think he saved a few lives doing so. I’ve only skimmed the briefing on the changes you’ve undergone since first contact, but it’s enough to know that containment would have been the wrong option. Practically and morally.”
Dave’s thoughts were shooting about like a pinball getting flipped hard.
“Rendition. Like a terrorist?”
“No,” Heath said. “More like witness protection. And it was only one option. Quickly rejected.”
“And what were the others?” he demanded to know, fighting his temper again. “Snipers? Air strikes? Grabbing my family? My boys?” he added, knowing that nobody would think of trying to pressure him through Annie.
Heath looked pissed, mostly with the professor, who for her part was entirely unrepentant.
“We’ve never dealt with something like this,” she said in a calming tone, deflecting his last question by answering the original one. “But we have protocols. All of them untried. Untested. You came out of a violent first contact that no other subjects survived.”
“Vince did.”
“No. Mr. Martinelli observed the contact from close quarters,” Ashbury corrected him. “He did not take part in it directly. You survived a hostile contact, but the protocols defined you as compromised.”
“Because I survived?”
“Because you survived.”
“Oh, bullshit.” Dave’s anger finally broke out, but only in verbal form. He was very careful to keep his hands, which had balled up into fists all by themselves, deep inside the pockets of his cargo pants. He squeezed his eyes shut so hard that stars and roses the color of dark blood bloomed behind them. When he opened them again with his fury contained and slowly abating, he spoke through gritted teeth.
“I had a brother. Had one. My baby brother. Went off and joined the army after 9/11. Thought he was gonna chase bin Laden down himself. Instead he got blown up and shot to pieces in a fucking soft-ass Humvee in some Baghdad shithole because of fucking protocols and parameters and metrics and all of that shit you people go on with. I know the fucking ragheads who set off the bomb and pulled the triggers killed Andy. But your man Rumsfeld? And his fucking known unknowns? His protocols? He put him there to be killed. For no good reason.”
He blazed defiance at Heath.
His brother.
His fucking brother.
“I am sorry, Dave,” Emmeline Ashbury said in a very quiet voice.
A tightness had closed up Captain Heath’s face, but when he spoke, his voice was also quiet.
“I am sorry about your brother,” he said. “Your loss. I didn’t know. It wasn’t—”
“It wasn’t in the file?” Dave snapped, already feeling guilty but not willing to let Contrite Dave back in yet. Angry, ugly Asshole Dave would have his moment of glory. “There was no protocol?”
Heath looked embarrassed. Dave let go of the anger with one hot, ragged breath.
“You wouldn’t,” he said. “There were a lot of things people didn’t know about Andy. One thing, he signed up under Mom’s name. They changed their names when my old man ran out. I thought, fuck that old prick. It’s my name. He can’t have that, too. So I kept it.”
An awkward silence enveloped them. And with it came the embarrassment, the hot shame that rose up from his neck and burned his cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a small voice, feeling like a very small man. “I shouldn’t have said all that shit. I admit I got issues with the government, the military. But you’re just people. Not the thing itself.”
Dave could hear a rhythmic tapping and realized to his shame that it was Heath, nervously jiggling his artificial leg. The titanium limb knocked against the leg of his chair.
“I apologize,” Dave said roughly. “I run off at the mouth sometimes. Like a fucking idiot, and yeah, like a bigot sometimes. Like my old man. I didn’t mean any disrespect to you or your service, Heath. Andy, he was proud of serving.”
The tightness around Heath’s eyes remained, his jaws clenched, and when he spoke, he also obviously had to force himself to dial it back.
“I accept your apology, Dave.”
For one mad and very dangerous second Bad Dave almost flared up again, because who was this asshole to judge him? But he stamped down on that shit. Hard.
Heath appeared to force himself to speak quietly. “Everyone loses something in war. Even when you win, you lose something.”
“Yeah,” Dave agreed.
He’d lost something, too.
His Superman boner.