Emergence (9 page)

‘I will feast on your loins,’ it said.

‘Wow, that’s not gay at all,’ Dave said, although mostly to himself.

Sliveen
, he thought. This thing is called a Sliveen. Or maybe
the
Sliveen, and the surprise of knowing what it was followed close on the heels of his surprise at realising it had not spoken in English but he’d still understood it.

Dave put aside any disorientation, pushed off the side of the wrecked automobile and took up a fighting stance with his fists bunched in front of him, feeling completely ridiculous. Like he was shaping up to some drunk in the back bar at an Irish funeral. He had not been in a for-real, no-bullshit fight since college and his football days. A few push and shove bar-room confrontations for sure. But Dave was much more of a sucker punch ’em and run type.

The Sliveen hefted a throwing axe, twirling it in his hand.

Uh oh.

Gunfire struck the creature from Dave’s left: a burst from a machine gun of some sort. Chief Allen, still in the Expedition, was hosing the ugly fucker down with a short, stubby-looking weapon and yelling at Dave to stay the hell out of the way. It wasn’t nearly as loud as Dave would have expected, and there wasn’t much of a muzzle flash. As he stood there, feeling like an idiot with his fists bunched in front of him, he had time to wonder if that fat black nozzle was some kind of attachment, a suppressor or silencer or whatever they called them. Whatever it was, it didn’t cut the
. . .
the Sliveen
. . .
in half, but it did have an effect of sorts. Thick blood spurted and bubbled from the creature’s flanks where the bullets chewed through leather armour and
. . .
what?

Was that chain mail? It sparked and flashed as the bullets hit, and Dave knew, he just
knew
, that yes, the Sliveen scout was outfitted in boiled leather and light chain mail.

It shrieked as though stung by a swarm of hornets, staggered backward, and turned toward Allen.

Heath appeared at the rear of the vehicle and opened fire with a pistol. A big fucking hand cannon, a .45 by the look and sound of it. The gun roared with every shot, and fire leaped from the muzzle. No suppressor there. The rounds hit the Sliveen in its centre mass as the soldier would have been trained to do. It dropped the tomahawk and staggered back under the impact.

‘Shoot it in the head,’ Dave cried. ‘It’s wearing armour. Shoot it in the fucking face.’

But Heath had already emptied a whole clip into the monster’s upper body.

‘Chief, get out of there,’ Heath yelled.

‘No good,’ Allen cried. ‘I’m pinned.’

The creature looked like it was in real trouble. It struggled to reach back over its shoulder, producing a bow and arrow. Dave spluttered at the incongruity of it all. The bizarre old-time weapons put the zap on his head even worse than the rabid monster wielding them.

The burning pyre of the Prius caught his eye. The boy stared sightlessly back at Dave, pinned under the wreckage, all life long gone.

The family members in the Prius were all dead.

Fuck this
, Dave thought.

Drawing on his linebacker days, he launched himself across the short distance separating the Sliveen from them. He dropped his shoulder and pitched into the creature, driving the thing to the ground.

It screeched in rage – and in pain, he hoped.

‘You dare touch me, calfling?’ the creature said, baring its teeth. ‘You dare –’

Dave had straddled the Sliveen, but it was strong even with a clip or two of lead inside it. Taking a pointer from all the Ultimate Fighting Championship vids he’d watched out on the rig, he kept its long arms pinned with his knees and drove his fists into its face, shattering nostrils, cracking the long, distended jaw, pulverising the eyes, the cheeks, the mouth, everything.

‘Fuck you,’
he shouted into the disintegrating face, and then he lost himself in a tightening, accelerating spiral of rage and bloodlust. This was for Blackbeard. This was for the Birkenstocks in the Prius. The little boy easily coulda been Toby or Jack. This was for Marty and Vince and everyone on the rig. But mostly it was for Dave, who was heartily pissed at how much trouble and grief these fucking things seemed set on causing him.

His blows rained down faster and faster, mechanically, methodically, but it seemed as though they landed at half speed, then quarter speed, then in the same super slo-mo he recalled from the car crash. He dismantled the skull of the Sliveen in much the same way a meth head might pull apart a rotisserie chicken, punching and tearing and ripping until all the skin and flesh and greasy meat and giblets and stuffing were just an oily slick on the road surface, and he suddenly had to stop because he was punching the asphalt and it was hurting his knuckles.

*

‘Towel,’ Chief Allen offered. His hand was shaking. Not so much the Midwestern surfer bro now, eh, Chief?

‘What?’ Dave asked, still disoriented. The scent of burning flesh from the Prius had his stomach churning and turning. Wasn’t Allen pinned in the car? How long ago was that?

‘You need a towel,’ Allen said unsteadily. ‘You’re covered in
. . .’

‘Chitlins, I believe,’ Captain Heath said. ‘In the local vernacular.’

Dave stared at him. Heath made a joke? Now?

He addressed the quartet of men from the second Ford Expedition. They stood around the Sliveen, weapons trained on the corpse, faces slack with shock or something like it. ‘Stay here to manage containment with local law enforcement,’ Heath said. ‘We need to get this thing out of here.’

‘Sir,’ Chief Allen said, ‘we can’t just mount that thing on the hood like a deer. People will stare.’

‘Gator,’ Dave said in a tired voice. ‘Wrap it up in something. Tell anyone who asks it’s a gator. Tell ’em the head got chewed up in the prop. Hide’s still worth hauling somewhere.’

He examined his hands. The knuckles he’d skinned raw had healed already. Bright pink skin had closed over the exposed bone he’d opened up pounding the bitumen. They itched like a bitch.

‘Casevac?’ one of the new arrivals asked, taking in the wrecked Expedition and the corpses in the totalled Prius. Allen walked over there. He knelt down on one knee in front of each body and closed the eyes. After he closed the last child’s eyes, he bowed his head for a moment.

No one said a word, bowing heads themselves, even Heath.

Prayers
, Dave thought. He bowed his head, but he wasn’t a praying man and he felt awkward doing it, like he was pretending and they would soon catch on to him. When Allen rose from his devotions, he returned with a pair of dog tags in his hands that he put deep in his pocket. The rain had matted his beach boy hair.

‘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 to push back at the useless feeling that had come over him.

Chief Allen came up alongside him. ‘He wasn’t really divorced.’

‘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 seemed to give up on the thought, 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 Prius. He felt guilty, as though all of this were somehow his fault. That, at least, was a sensation he knew. 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 bank 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.

*

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 his own guilt. 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 had cleaned himself up as best he could, but he still felt tacky with dried blood and gore. Allen was behind the wheel, keeping a close watch on the road. Dave and Heath were in the back. 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 know 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 marvelled 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. He’d learned that sort of shit 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,’ the captain 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 the captain’s shoulders tensed and he turned his head just a little toward the rear of the SUV. It was as though Dave had finally 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.