Dave vs. the Monsters 1: Emergence Read online

  He let his head fall into his hands. As usual, he hadn’t been thinking at all.

  *

  ‘Whoa! Dave. Wake up. We got a problem, man.’

  For one confusing moment, he was back in college and his roommate was trying to wake him up because the cops and campus security were banging on the door, looking for a missing KFC bucket.

  Not a cardboard bucket full of Southern-fried awesome.

  No. They wanted to ask him a few pointed questions about a giant fibreglass bucket missing from the tall pole in front of the Colonel’s nearest off-campus eatery. Someone had sawed it off and . . .

  Then the better part of twenty years fell away, and he came to in the cabin of the chopper hammering out toward the Longreach.

  ‘S’up?’ he asked.

  His voice cracked, and he coughed until he could speak again.

  ‘Sorry. What’s up, J2?’

  Her voice replied in his headset. Controlled, but only just.

  ‘Fire on the rig, Dave. A fire and . . . something else. I don’t know what.’

  He was instantly awake. His fatigue and the ragged edges of the hangover sluiced away in the adrenaline surge. Dave twisted left and right in his seat, disoriented, unsure of where he might find the rig. If Dave Hooper had trouble understanding people and social graces, mechanical objects were an entirely different matter. He had a natural knack for machines, engineering, and the rigs. When he was dealing with a mechanical problem, the universe felt right, as if solving such problems was why he’d been made.

  Dave knew what he had to do.

  ‘You gotta get me down there, J2, right now.’

  He waited for her to say no, to quote the company rules and federal law and common fucking sense, but after a second of silence she came back in a clipped voice.

  ‘Yep. Okay. Gonna be a fast one, though.’

  02

  The column of dark oily smoke was rising high above the absurdist metalwork cube of the Longreach as J2 brought the nose of the chopper around, giving Dave a clear view forward through the plexiglas windshield. His heart seemed to stop for a second. Everything, all his organs, seemed stunned into paralysis before spasming back into life at double speed. Malevolent blooms of bright orange fire fed a dark tower of smoke as it climbed away from the platform, but within a second or two of the initial shock Hooper frowned at the . . . wrongness of the scene. The seat of the blaze appeared to be down in the living quarters and hadn’t spread from there. The critical areas around the drill works were still clear for now. So was the helipad.

  ‘Two minutes, Dave. I’m wheels down and gone in thirty seconds. Jonty says they got wounded. Lotsa wounded. Gonna cross-deck ’em to Thunder Horse.’

  ‘Okay,’ Hooper replied, giving her only half his attention while he leaned forward and studied the fire. It was bad. It was always gonna be bad on a rig, but it wasn’t the hellstorm he’d been expecting.

  ‘There’s more, Dave,’ Juliette shouted as a secondary explosion blew out a cabin on the southern side of the platform. Dave watched as flaming debris fluttered down toward the deep blue water churning around the pylons. ‘I’ll patch ’em through,’ she shouted. ‘Put your damn cans back on, would you? And your harness.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, still distracted and not bothering with his safety belt. He wanted to get as far forward as he could to get a better look at the unfolding disaster. He fit the headphones back over his ears, however, even though the short cord kept him tethered in the rear of the cabin. The intercom crackled and popped just before he heard the guttural South African accent of the day shift supervisor, Jonty Ballieue, through the static. He sounded panicky, almost hysterical, and that frightened Hooper a lot more than the fire. Ballieue was one of the more unflappable yarpies he’d ever met.

  ‘. . . attack . . . fighting them . . . coming up from the pylo . . .’

  ‘Jonty. D’you read me? It’s Hoop. I’m less than a minute out. You’re breaking up, man. What the fuck is going on down there?’

  ‘. . . ooper? . . . acking us . . . We need . . .’

  But the interference washed any sense out of the few words that broke through.

  ‘Dave?’

  It was J2, jumping in on his channel, sounding even more worried than before.

  ‘I got the navy on my case now, man. They’re telling me we’re in restricted airspace. They’re warning us off, telling me not to land. Talking about terrorists or some garbage.’

  ‘Bullshit!’ he said in amazement. ‘Are they fucking crazy? Why is it restricted to us? We gotta get casualties off. I have to get down there and get to work. Where the fuck are terrorists gonna come from out here? What’d they hijack, a submarine? Look down there, J2. There’s nothing there. Fireboats haven’t even made it out yet.’

  ‘Dave . . .’

  ‘Get me down, Juliette,’ he said, talking over the top of her objections. ‘You put me down and get the wounded to Thunder Horse and you’ll be back at the depot before that navy asshole you’re talking to has even tied a slipknot in his little pecker to stop from wetting his pants.’

  She opened her mouth to try one more time, but Hooper cut her off with another harsh bark.

  ‘Do it.’

  The helicopter pilot tugged at the bill of her Era baseball cap, as though saluting him. She pushed forward on the stick and took them in.

  Juliette threw them into a tight corkscrew descent that crushed him into his seat, where the broken seat spring speared into his butt like the shrimp fork of an angry little vengeance demon. The pressure on his back and neck cranked up the misery of his hangover, turning the dial to 11 on the Spinal Tap amp. Dave Hooper ignored it, along with the urgent need to dry-retch again and the feeling of having his eyes gouged out by the pressure of high-speed deceleration. He gritted his teeth, which were still slimy from the night before, and tried to pick out as much detail from the hellish scene as he could.

  It was almost impossible. Rig monkeys and fire teams ran everywhere. Secondary explosions shook the lower levels of the structure as thick black clouds of smoke poured into the sky. He caught the briefest glimpse of a rainbow, formed in the mist drifting off a water jet, before the skids slammed down on the helipad, sending a painful jolt up his backbone.

  The chopper doors flew back as evac teams wrenched the handles and wrestled wounded men into the cabin. Dave was about to start shouting directions, imposing some sense of order on the scene, when he was struck dumb by the sight of a couple of Vince Martinelli’s second shift guys trying to scramble in over the top of the casualties. They looked terrified, with huge white eyes bugging out of oil-stained faces. But they didn’t appear to be injured in any way. Dave shouted at them to get the hell back, but the pounding of the chopper blades, the roar of explosions, and the hoarse shouts and screams of a dozen other men drowned him out.

  He tried to push the first of the interlopers out of his way and was surprised when the man suddenly flew sideways, the victim of a stiff arm jab by Martinelli himself, who followed up with a series of vicious rabbit punches to the neck of the second man. Vince wasn’t fucking around, either. He really hammered the guy, forcing Dave to jump down and grab his fist as it was cocked for another strike.

  ‘Jesus, Vince, knock it off. You’re gonna kill him.’

  ‘Sorry, boss,’ yelled the shift supervisor, who looked on the edge of panic himself, ‘but I figured this might happen when you showed up. Some of these fucking idiots even tried to throw themselves over the side to get away from the things. Got at least one life pod away as well.’

  ‘Away from what?’ Dave yelled as Martinelli threw the other man to the side of the helipad like a bag of dirty laundry. Dave waved his thanks at J2 as he left the helicopter behind, but she was too busy prepping to un-ass the area to pay him much heed. Martinelli grabbed his boss by the elbow and led him through the chaos on the pad. There w
ere bodies everywhere. Burned, mangled, horribly disfigured bodies. And at least a dozen walking wounded waiting for their turn to be evacuated. Everyone looked frightened, which was only to be expected, but what Dave didn’t expect was the crazed, almost animalistic terror that seemed to be driving some of them.

  They had trained for this. He had trained them for this. They shouldn’t be losing their shit.

  ‘You gotta come, Dave, this way, quickly.’ Martinelli all but dragged him along by the arm. ‘Fucking things are down this way.’

  Heat from the fires came at them in waves, tightening the exposed skin on Hooper’s hands and face, making him wonder how long any of them could hope to survive on this gigantic ticking time bomb. He saw three kitchen hands, still wearing their stained, greasy chef’s whites, fighting one another to get to the chopper.

  ‘What the hell,’ he muttered to himself as the men screamed and raged in frustration and something else, something more elemental, when the aircraft spooled up its engines and lifted off before they had a chance to board.

  ‘This way, down this way,’ Martinelli repeated. ‘Come on, Dave. I don’t know how long Marty and the others can hold them back.’

  They cleared the area around the helipad just as the down blast of the rotors tried to push them off their feet. Dave followed Martinelli around the corner into a slightly sheltered corridor between two prefab huts. He put the brakes on, almost stumbling to his knees as Martinelli continued forward, dragging him along.

  ‘Vince,’ he shouted. ‘Would you slow the fuck up and tell me what’s happening? J2 said the navy was talking about terrorists. But I don’t see ISIS around, do you?’

  Martinelli didn’t look happy to be stopping, but he looked even more unhappy at the question, as though Dave were crazy for even asking it.

  ‘The fuck did anyone say anything about ragheads? This ain’t that. It’s worse. You gotta see for yourself, Dave. These things, these fucking animals, they just come out of the water. Up the fucking pylons or something.’

  The space between the prefabs was narrow, and someone slammed heavily into Hooper’s shoulder, pushing him into a pole as they ran past. It stunned him, and he felt an electric tingle of pins and needles run down from his shoulder to his fingertips. This seething crush of people sluicing back and forth didn’t feel like his crew. It felt like a mob.

  They were on a drill rig. In the middle of the gulf. Where the hell did people think they were going to escape to? Sure as shit weren’t going to their emergency stations, that was a goddamn given.

  Dave stood back against the wall of the small prefabricated building that housed the flight operations centre for the rig. He flicked the pins and needles out of his fingertips, or tried to, anyway.

  ‘What, Vince? What things came up the pylons? You’re not making any sense, man.’

  Martinelli’s face dropped.

  ‘They didn’t tell you? Jesus, I asked them to tell you. You’re going to think I’m fucking crazy.’

  ‘Try me,’ Dave said.

  ‘Monsters,’ Vince Martinelli said. ‘There are monsters on the rig, Dave.’

  *

  One heartbeat. Then two. Dave Hooper did not move, did not speak. It was possible he didn’t breathe, either. He looked into Vince Martinelli’s eyes and down into the soul of a man who was telling him the truth. Or at least the truth as he understood it. As men rushed and crowded past them, mostly headed for the helipad, Dave stared at Martinelli and saw the frightened father of four young children. In his eyes, bloodshot and gaping out from a face blackened by smoke and soot, he saw little fear of the very real danger of dying in a small supernova as the Longreach went up. Instead, he thought he saw a creeping horror of something worse.

  ‘Vince,’ he said as quietly and calmly as he could while still being heard above the crashing din and chaos. ‘Tell me as quickly and as simply as you can.’

  ‘We don’t have time, Dave. We need –’

  ‘I need to know, Vince,’ Dave said in a steady voice but with great force. ‘If I’m going to fight a fire, I need to know what sort of fire. If I’m going to fight . . . things –’ He had to force himself to say it. ‘– I need to know . . . fuck, what sort of things. Or at least what they’re doing.’

  ‘They’re eating people, Dave. For fuck’s sake, there’s no time for this.’

  Vince Martinelli seemed to be pulled in several directions. Like the kitchen hands Hooper had seen just a minute ago, Martinelli looked like part of him just wanted to get the hell away. As far away as quickly as possible. But his shifting shoulders, the way he kept bouncing on the balls of his feet, all spoke of the need to get moving again, the way they had been going, toward the problem.

  Toward the monsters, Dave thought, trying not to let incredulity run wild all over his face.

  It was possible, likely even, that Vince and the others thought they had seen ‘monsters’ when in fact the navy might be right. Might be there were attackers dressed in scuba gear and . . . what, fright masks or something? Hooper dismissed the idea as soon as he had it. That was bullshit. Worse than Vince’s monster story. He could imagine some crazy Greenpeace cocksuckers sneaking out here and scaling the rig to hang a banner or something, but a bunch of bearded fucking sand maggots like bin Laden and all of them? Forget that shit. Never gonna happen.

  He gripped Vince by the bicep. Dave’s large calloused hands didn’t reach even halfway around the other man’s upper arm. But he gave him a little push toward the stairwell.

  ‘You can tell me on the way, then. Where are we headed?’

  ‘Down to the first crew quarters,’ Vince said, letting go of the tension that had been holding him unnaturally upright just before.

  ‘And what are they doing down there?’ Dave asked. ‘These things.’

  He couldn’t say the word ‘monster’ without feeling like an idiot.

  Martinelli seemed to pick up speed with every step, but he faltered momentarily, looking back over his shoulder to answer. He looked guilty.

  ‘They’re tearing shit up, Dave,’ he said. He came to a complete stop again. ‘And eating people.’

  Not Greenpeace, then, Hooper thought. Vegetarian softcocks, the lot of them.

  He had to bite down on a crazed snort of laughter. Eating people? If he hadn’t seen the madness and horror on the helipad, he’d have bet Vince was punking him. They were in a narrow walkway between a couple of the prefab huts and were being jostled on all sides. Rig workers shouted and cried out around them, a mob scene, heavy steel-capped boots pounding on the ironwork. Martinelli gave him that same look, a furtive sort of guilty glance, before moving off again, drawing Hooper along in his considerable wake.

  As they forced their way against the human tide rushing up from the lower levels, Dave tried to shake off his sense of disbelief. He was about to ask Vince if he had really said these things were eating people, but he shut his mouth as three men stumbled by. He recognised a couple of drill monkeys, Lam and Ibarra, holding up the third man, who looked like something had taken a huge chunk out of his left shoulder. Dave couldn’t place him for a second. The stranger’s face was ashen white, and his coveralls and high-visibility vest were painted in blood. With a start, he realised it was Pena, the new hydrologist. Last thing Dave had done before going on leave, he’d briefed Pena in, giving him the tour of the rig and all the emergency assembly points. The man looked very different now. It wasn’t the worst injury Hooper had seen on a rig, but he couldn’t help noticing that Pena had no burn marks on him. When people got hurt on oil rigs, in Dave’s experience anyway, they got crushed and they got burned. He threw a quick glance back over his shoulder as the men struggled past him.

  That poor bastard did look like something had taken a bite out of him, and his bright yellow vest was scored with bloodied slash marks.

  Acid and bile boiled away in Dave Hooper’s stomach, and his
head seemed to be gripped in a tightening iron band. They hurried down three flights of steel steps and flew around one corner and then another into the densely packed grid of prefabricated living capsules that constituted the crew quarters. The smell of burning synthetics reached him just before the first tendrils of oily smoke. The crowds had thinned out, but their progress was now slowed by smoke and flame. The power had failed completely down here, and at times the two men were forced to inch along through darkness. After a while Martinelli seemed to find it all but impossible to push himself forward.

  ‘Come on, Vince,’ Hooper said, laying a hand on his back. ‘I think I can hear the guys.’

  And he thought that, just maybe, he could. Faint voices, shouting and screaming somewhere up ahead, the words lost in the roar of sirens, explosions, and the mad metallic clangour of a gigantic man-made structure that was violently coming apart.

  Hooper found himself encouraging his friend to keep moving, to stay in contact in the darkened, increasingly claustrophobic passages. Here and there light leaked in from the outside world or small fires threw an eldritch glow on scenes of mayhem and slaughter. Dave swallowed hard as his throat locked up at the sight of a severed arm and a long, bloody smear leading away around a corner into the main lounge.

  Dave bumped into Martinelli, who had come to a complete stop. The man seemed to have put down roots. A small shove failed to move him, and he pushed back against another, harder push, even reversing a few steps. Dave was stunned. Vince was straight up one of the most courageous men he’d ever met. Over the years he’d seen him run headlong into enough lethally dangerous situations and pull some poor bastard to safety to know that Martinelli was swinging a heavy pair of cast-iron testicles. But it seemed there was no way he was getting any closer to what lay at the end of that blood trail. He’d started moaning and trembling like a kid at the door of the dentist waiting for a root canal. It was like, hell, that wasn’t even Vince standing there, just a tangle of fear and horror that had taken his shape.