Emergence Read Online Free PDF

the chuckle of a psychopathic angel. With an enormous boner.
    ‘Fuck no,’ said Dave. He tightened his grip on the splitting maul, turning left and right. The smaller creatures were definitely moving now, trying to circle around to come at him from both sides. He felt his bladder let go, and a warm rush of urine ran down his legs, the last of his big night out with the hookers from Reno. No drug tests for him, then.
    He laughed.
    Just one short gust of laughter teetering on the edge of psychosis. It didn’t matter much now whether he’d got drunk and jumped onto Facebook last night, did it? Nothing much mattered now. Not his ex-wife. Not her carnivorous lawyer –
    He snorted with laughter again. Carnivorous. Ha. Not even close .
    Not the bosses back in Houston. Not the credit card assholes who were always chasing him. Or the IRS, which wanted to know where the hell his last two tax years might be at. Not even his own conscience about what a shitpot, worthless father he’d turned out to be. None of it mattered, because he was going to die. Eaten by monsters and quite possibly ass-fucked by their gigantic monster cocks into the bargain.
    Eight or nine years of compressed frustration and rage boiled up inside Dave Hooper as he realised he was never going to get a chance to make good on any of it.
    He would never see his boys again, and they would never know what happened to him. The rig would burn, and then it would blow, and all of this insanity would be incinerated, atomised. All Toby and Jack would ever know was that their dad had failed again. This time at the last thing he genuinely could have claimed to be any good at: his job. He had failed, and everyone who had relied on him had died.
    The shout that welled up from deep within Dave Hooper’s loneliest, most empty places was unlike anything he or these monsters had heard. It was neither fearful nor despairing. It was less a scream than a roar, a full-throated bellow of fury and outrage and a final bitter retort to every shitty deal that life had handed one poor angry man.
    The biggest beast seemed startled, then amused, and finally outraged as Hooper charged across the tacky, blood-drenched carpet of the crew lounge. The thing let rip with its own war shout as it tore the remaining arm from Marty’s savaged torso and waved it about like a baton, howling gibberish at the three smaller creatures. They moved quickly but clumsily, two of them crashing into each other and the third leaping for Dave but becoming entangled in a long strand of yellow-green intestines on which it had been sucking. The creature yelped like a kicked cur as it crashed to the ground.
    The splitting maul described a great circular arc in Dave’s hands, punching through the ceiling tiles with a burst of powder and a terrible screech of metal strips and one smashed light fitting. It was, however, unusually heavy, and driving it through the air in a short, vicious descending blur was all the strength of a man who stood two inches over six feet and had worked his whole life at hard manual labour. A man whose resentment at the world and everyone who had conspired against him was fuelled by a silent, shameful understanding that his problems were mostly his own damn fault.
    *
    The creature, which Dave would later come to understand was no ordinary monster but a BattleMaster of the Hunn, was indeed drunk on the heady nectar of fresh blood and meat. If Dave Hooper had stumbled into the lounge twenty minutes earlier, if he had been there with his friends and colleagues when the Hunn and its attendant Fangr warriors had emerged from the waters and scaled the rig like rabid monkeys, he, too, would have died. But for once in his life Dave Hooper caught a lucky break.
    *
    Urgon Htoth Ur Hunn, BattleMaster of the Fourth Legion, did not stir when the calfling appeared holding the war hammer the Hunn had so easily taken from another of the weakling foe. Indeed, from the one he was gorging himself on now. A poor