“Casevac, Captain?” the SEAL from the second car asked again.
“They’re gone,” Heath said. “It’s too late for that. A gator carcass?” he said to Dave. “I can work with that. Let’s get rolling.”
They tied down the Sliveen while Heath checked the bodies of his men. Dave examined the shattered Expedition as Chief Allen came up alongside him. It was something to do to push back at the useless feeling that had come over him.
“He wasn’t really divorced,” Allen said.
“What?”
“Divorced,” Allen said. “It was just a joke. An old one. Fratelli. Dude with four kids. Linda, his wife, she’s strong but …”
Allen didn’t finish the thought. Instead he seemed to give up on it, turned his back to the scene of the ambush, and checked the tie-downs. Dave wandered over to join Captain Heath, who was now poking around in the wrecked vehicle. He felt guilty, as though all of this were somehow his fault. That, at least, was a familiar sensation. Almost reassuring in its familiarity. He imagined Annie’s voice in the back of his head. Happy now?
“I’m about done here,” Heath said, emerging from the wrecked vehicle. The four nameless operators from the second Expedition had sealed off the site with hazard tape and conjured up an old tarpaulin to wrap the Sliveen carcass. Traffic was starting to back up beyond the makeshift roadblock. The squad leader seemed to be on the radio with the local first responders. He looked grim.
“Our lift is about an hour away,” he said.
Heath nodded.
“Fine. Keep the lid on here. And be ready for any follow-up attacks. We’ll take your car to the station.”
“Aye, Captain.”
Without another word, Dave, Heath, and CPO Allen got back on the road.
They drove away in the second Expedition with the creature tied down to the roof. Nobody spoke until Allen had them back up to cruising speed. The silence weighed on Dave, a feeling as real as the extra weight they were carrying on the roof of the SUV.
“So, Mr. Hooper. What is that?” Heath finally asked, pointing one finger straight up.
“A scout,” Dave said, as though admitting to something wrong. There didn’t seem much point denying the weirdness of the situation anymore. “I think they’re called Sliveen. There’ll be more of them spooking around. Doing your job,” he said, tapping the back of Chief Allen’s headrest.
“How many?”
Dave shook his head. “I dunno.”
“And you called it a Sliveen. Why? How do you know that?” Heath went on.
Dave turned to him in the rear of the vehicle. He’d cleaned himself up as best he could, but he still felt tacky with dried blood and gore. Allen was behind the wheel, keeping a very close watch on the road. Heath wasn’t glaring at Dave or showing much in the way of emotion at all. His face was spotted with blood and badly scratched. He had bandages over the two worst cuts. The others he’d let scab over. It lent him a morbid aspect in the jaundiced glow of the highway sodium globes. This didn’t seem to be the moment to bug him about personal grooming.
“Captain, would you believe me if I said I got no idea how I know? Just like I don’t how I killed that thing back on the rig. Or the ugly cocksucker we got tied down on the roof. I just don’t know.”
Heath stared at him for a second, weighing the answer. “Let’s rewind,” he said at last, and Dave marveled at the guy’s capacity for absorbing madness and bullshit. You had to wonder where he’d been to find that level of Zen cool.
“You were telling us what you remembered about the attack on the rig.”
You dare not do this …
Dave nodded as he gathered his thoughts. The crash and the slaughter they’d just left behind already seemed distant and unreal.
“I picked up Marty Grbac’s splitting maul. It’s a woodcutting tool. Shouldn’t even be on a platform,” he said, relieved to be talking about something other than monster orcs with giant balls, leprosy, and a taste for ribs, or strange ninja demons with bows and arrows. “He picked it up in Alaska coupla years ago. Carried it with him everywhere. It was—”
“I know what a splitting maul is, Mr. Hooper,” Heath interrupted, but gently. “And that’s what you used to kill it?”
When Dave spoke, it was without conviction. He was worn down flat. “Guess so,” he said. “I sort of remember stepping up to this thing and swinging on it, but after that I got nothing. I woke up in the hospital, and your guy was there. No,” he corrected himself. “The nurse was there. Nurse Fletcher.”
He caught himself before he added “the fat black chick.” Then he silently cursed himself for even needing to. That sort of shit, he’d learned from his old man, and it was a lifetime’s work unlearning it.
“Your lieutenant came later. I’m sorry about that, by the way,” he said.
Heath inclined his head, reminding Dave of a priest accepting a confession. Another childhood moment. “Lieutenant Dent will recover,” he said. “He’s had worse injuries.”
“Like you?” Dave asked, looking at the man’s leg again. He could see now that the limb he had thought was injured was in fact missing. Heath was rocking a bionic leg.
“Roadside bomb,” he said in a way that ended the discussion. “Are you sure you don’t remember anything after hitting the largest of the creatures? Do you remember what you just did to the … gator?”
“The Sliveen? Yeah. I remember,” Dave said, shifting in his seat. “Mostly. I guess I might have gone a little elsewhere at the end.”
Heath made a noncommittal noise.
“Yes, we noticed.”
There wasn’t much to look at outside the car, just blurring scrubland. He trusted Chief Allen to keep his eyes peeled for another ambush. Dude had to have more practice at that than Dave did, after all.
“But the hostile back on the Longreach?”
“The Hunn,” Dave said, feeling as though he were jumping off the end of a pier into ice-cold water. “I’m pretty sure it calls itself a Hunn.”
That got Heath’s attention and Allen’s, too, Dave could tell from the way his shoulders tensed and he turned his head just a little toward the rear of the SUV. It was as though he finally had told Heath something he didn’t know.
“A Hun, you say. Like a German?”
He shook his head.
“No, a Hunn,” he said, pronouncing the “u” at the back of his throat and drawing it out just a little. Once he had said the word, it was as though the spell was broken. He didn’t care what these guys thought. If he was nuts, he needed treatment. “A Hunn,” he continued. “A BattleMaster of the Legion.”
“A what?” Allen asked.
Dave Hooper released a long, stale breath tainted with cheap chicken and old cooking fat. He tried to lean back and close his eyes, but the headrest got in the way.
“I could tell you,” he said, “but then you’d have to lock me up for a crazy man.”
“We are very accepting of eccentricity, Mr. Hooper,” Heath said. “Try us.”
Well, that seemed true enough, so he tried. As they passed through a light industrial area, Dave searched memories that until today he had not known he possessed. Perhaps because until today he had not. He tried his best to explain as they passed a U-Store-It.
“I don’t know why I know this, or think I know it, and you’re not going to believe me, but you asked. So I’ll tell you what I know,” he said, “without having one fucking clue why I know it.”
Remembering what happened on the platform, recalling what he had seen, was like thinking about the years of his life he had long ago left behind. His marriage, college, his childhood. It was all there. He just needed to focus and recall.
“Its name was Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn.”
He wasn’t sure how he even knew how to pronounce the name properly. He usually had trouble ordering Italian takeaway.
“It was … He was a BattleMaster of the Fourth Legion,” Dave said, feeling embarrassed as he did so and without really knowing what
the hell he was talking about until he slowed down and really thought it through. It was like recognizing every word in a book he did not recall reading.
“That’s a bit like you, Captain,” he said. “An officer. It sounds impressive, doesn’t it? BattleMaster of a whole legion, but there’s … let’s see … only about two and a half thousand Hunn to a legion, four or five legions to a regiment, ten regiments to a Horde, and hundreds of them to a Grande Horde. No. To the Grande Horde.”
Heath didn’t exactly lose his shit, but his expression was obviously shaken as he examined Dave’s face for signs that he was lying or had gone insane.
“The creature told you this?”
“Fuck no, as if. It just sort of sat there making a Happy Meal of Marty Grbac and snorting at me until I caved its fucking skull in.”
“And that’s when you were able to understand it? To know what it was?”
Dave shook his head.
“No. That’s when I took a little nap and woke up in the hospital. The next thing I know, I’m throwing guys through cupboard doors and I’ve picked up some sort of postgraduate degree in monster studies. Tell you the truth, Heath, I’m really hoping to wake up on the floor of my motel in an hour or so with a couple of hookers from Reno sitting on my face having a pillow fight while I vomit up whatever prohibited monkey gland extract they slipped me to bring on this bullshit hallucination.”
The Ford took a right turn past a Blue Angels jet raised on a pole for display. They’d arrived. Somewhere. Tall trees loomed over them, creating a dark tunnel through which they rolled at something just over a walking pace. Allen turned the wheel to steer the Expedition through a set of concrete barriers, pulling up at a guardhouse where a sailor in a black rain slicker asked for his ID. The sign above the gate informed Dave that they were at NAS JRB New Orleans.
“This your secret base?” Dave asked.
“No,” Heath said.
The sailor waved them through the gate. Heath pulled out his phone, punched in a number, and said, “This is Heath. Get the helo ready; we leave in ten,” before expanding on his answer to Dave. “No, this is not the restricted area. We’re going somewhere more secure.”
Dave took in the perfectly manicured grass and the well-maintained lamplit streets. It all seemed so normal even if it was a military base late at night.
“It’s not a hallucination, is it?” Dave asked at last.
“No, Mr. Hooper,” said Captain Heath. “I’m afraid not.”
08
They flew for an hour or more. Midnight found them far beyond any stretch of country with which Dave was familiar. He peered out at the ground below them every now and then. Sometimes he saw the fat snaking lanes of a well-lit freeway cutting through the primordial dark. More often, when they crossed the road net, they flew over poorly lit one- or two-lane blacktop. Once or twice he picked out small freestanding buildings, sometimes lit with neon. Gas stations or general stores, something like that, Dave thought. He’d grown tired after eating, tired to the point of slurring his words and struggling to keep his eyes open at times. Heath hadn’t lost interest in anything he had to say, but he decided that Hooper needed to be “properly debriefed,” and he didn’t want to “contaminate” that process in the helicopter, and so he let his man catch a little shut-eye.
Dave fought to stay awake mostly because he dreaded falling asleep, fearful of what might chase him through his dreams, but he needn’t have worried. The food brought on a warm and heavy lassitude, and despite his best efforts and the roar of the engine and rotors, the motion of the helicopter periodically put him under. When he passed out, he slept heavily, without nightmares or waking terrors. It was just like flying out to the rig, sleeping off a party. He did experience a moment of profound disorientation upon being jolted awake as they touched down on the tarmac in the darkness. The hookers, the chopper flight out to the platform, everything—the memories all came at him too fast, and he had trouble placing himself in time and space. He rubbed the stubble on his face as the pilot shut down the engine. It felt like the only real thing in the world.
“Where are we?” he asked, feeling dizzy. He also was thirsty from the chocolate milk. Dairy did that to him, and he regretted not sticking to Coke.
“A training area,” Heath said. “Off the books. You can’t find it on Google if you try. At least not for now. If you come with me, Mr. Hooper, I will get you bedded down for a few hours. You need some real rest. You have a busy day tomorrow, and I have reports to file. Many reports and a few letters to write, I’m afraid.”
Dave didn’t like the sound of that. He’d had to write a couple of those letters. They sucked.
“Hey, good luck, man,” Allen said, taking his hand in a firm grip. The chief’s eyes looked troubled by the earlier violent insanity, but it was the first genuine goodwill Dave had felt from anybody all day, and he appreciated the gesture.
“Thanks for the chocolate bars,” he said, yawning and feeling a little embarrassed by it. “I think you might have saved my life, chief. Seriously.”
“Meh,” Allen said. “That was some nasty business tonight, man. You totally saved our hides. That thing had us dead.”
Not everyone’s, Dave thought before stumbling as he increased his pace to catch up with Heath, who had forged ahead. He left Chief Allen looking a little bereft and lonesome in the deep gloom of the night. For some sort of secret military base—that was what a restricted facility was, wasn’t it?—his surroundings looked like any number of mining camps or depots he’d been through over the years: prefab huts, shipping containers, warehouses, vehicle parks, and security fencing. A light drizzle fell from low clouds, probably the far edge of the storm that had been closing in on New Orleans as they left.
There didn’t appear to be much activity in this part of the base, but then, it was late at night and Dave had no idea how big the place was. The one-legged special-ops guy led him up a muddy path to a demountable hut in which Dave could see lights burning. Dude moved well for a cripple. You wouldn’t have known from the way he carried himself that he was part cyborg down there. Heath had said something about an airfield, but aside from the helicopter pad there was no sign of a runway anywhere nearby. By then, however, he was too tired and out of it to care. The exhaustion that had nailed him in the car had rolled back in like a very high tide. The lunacy of the day felt long distant, unreal. He wanted a hot shower and a soft bed. Or even an army cot. And what would be best of all would be crawling into that cot and waking up in the morning to discover he really was in some motel somewhere, fucked off his skull on drugs.
He knew that wasn’t going to happen, though. As much as he felt like he was sleepwalking, this was real. He’d seen two men die a few hours ago. Then he’d killed whatever had killed them. The Longreach—that was real, too. As distant and abstract as it felt. All of it. He stifled a yawn and nearly tripped himself dragging his feet up the stairs. His head was reeling.
Heath pulled back a screen door and thumbed a combination into the keypad of the sturdier metal door behind it. The lock disengaged, and light spilled out as he pushed on the handle.
“Through here,” he said. Dave wasn’t expecting what he found inside. A nurse was sitting at a desk doing paperwork under a hooded lamp; behind her half a dozen or so beds were occupied by men and women Dave recognized as his coworkers from the Longreach. Well, one woman, anyway: Charlene Disch from the flight ops center. She was asleep, probably sedated given the way her face was twitching and small moans were escaping from between her lips. Every once in a while she’d start kicking and shivering before settling back down again to a low-level snore.
In the cot next to hers lay Vince Martinelli, so big that he spilled over the sides and his feet dangled in space off the end. And in the cot after Vince he thought he recognized J2. His spirits lifted a little.
“Try not to wake them,” said the nurse. “They’ve had a tough time of it. The last of the debriefs wrapped up only two hours ago. I had to fill the
m full of Ambien to get them all down.”
“Who you got here?” Dave asked, keeping his voice low, fighting back exhaustion but needing to know. He’d been trying to get a line on his guys all day, and this was the first real proof he had that any of them had made it out in one piece. It was also the first evidence he had of his not being an A-Class fuckup. His people got out alive. These ones anyway.
Nurse Hubbard wore the same digital jungle camouflage fatigues as Allen. A cup of coffee steamed under her desk lamp, illuminating a blizzard of forms, records, and notes. She searched around in the confusion of papers for a moment, the bags under her eyes showing the weight of her day at Camp Mysteryland. She found what she was looking for, a clipboard, and with a glance to Captain Heath for the okay, she handed it to Dave.
There was a list of names on it, all of them people Dave knew.
“These are the people you said were missing,” Dave said as he read the names, blinking once or twice to clear his vision, which was still blurred with weariness.
“They’re not missing anymore,” Captain Heath said. “I apologize for the confusion. We’ve had our own troubles trying to sort things out in the chaos. In any case, here they are.”
Dave’s temper flared at the obvious attempt to wave away the deception.
Heath put his hand on Dave’s shoulder, almost a fatherly gesture, which was odd, since he was sure he had a couple of years on the captain, but it was the most human thing he had seen the guy do since they’d met.
“I need you to know that we are trying to be forthright and completely up front with you. I am pathologically honest by nature,” Heath said. “It’s a weakness of mine.”
“It doesn’t seem to have hurt your career,” Dave said.
“It has, more than you would know,” Heath said. “When we have information we can share with you, we will do so. I hope you will do the same with us.”
He means it, Dave thought. But meaning something and making it happen? Two different things. Especially with the fucking warheads. His brother had taught him that. In a way, Heath reminded him of Marty Grbac. Just as Allen had. Or maybe he was just looking for reminders of his friend when there were none to be found. Physically they couldn’t have been more different: a huge Polack meat locker and an African-American whipcord pulled tight enough to snap if you plucked him the wrong way. But Marty had been a perpetually earnest born-again Boy Scout, and Dave suspected that Heath might be a member of that happy-clapping congregation, too.
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