8. ROUGHNECK

PRECURSOR VIRUS + 1 YEAR

A handheld digital device was used to record the following audio diary. Apparently, it was meant to be sent home to Dwight Bowie’s wife. Tragically, the diary never made it. If this information had come to light sooner, it could have saved billions of human lives.

—CORMAC WALLACE, MIL#GHA217

Lucy. This is Dwight. As of right now I’ve officially started my job as tool pusher—you know, head honcho—for the North Star frontier drilling company, and I’m taking you along for the ride. Comm isn’t set up yet, but soon as I get the chance, I’ll send this to you. Might be a while, but I hope you enjoy this anyway, honey.

Today is November first. I’m in western Alaska, at an exploratory drill site. Arrived this morning. We were hired by the Novus company just about two weeks ago. A fella named Mr. Black contacted me. So, what the heck are we doing out here, you say?

Well, since you ask so nice, Lucy … our goal is to drop a groundwater monitoring sonde at the bottom of a five-thousand-foot borehole, three feet in diameter. About the size of a manhole cover. It’s a good-sized hole, but this rig can go to ten thousand. Should be a routine operation, except for the ice, the wind, and the isolation. I’m telling you, Lucy, we’re putting one heck of a deep, dark hole out here in the middle of the big, frozen nothing. Some job I got, hey?

It was not a fun ride to get here. Came in on an old Sikorsky heavy transport chopper, big as a house. Some Norwegian company in charge. None of ’em spoke a lick of English. You know, I may be a Texas boy, but even I can carry on with the Filipinos in Spanish and spout some Russian and German. I can even understand those boys from Alberta, eh? (LAUGHTER) But these Norwegians? It’s sad, Lucy.

Chopper carried me and seventeen others from our base in Deadhorse. Barely. Wind levels were higher than I’ve ever seen. ISA plus ten, storm-gale level. One minute, I’m looking out the window at the blue-tinted wasteland below and wondering if the place we’re going to really exists, and the next we’re dropping straight down, like on a roller coaster, toward this wind-blasted little flat spot.

Now, I’m not trying to brag, but this site really is extremely remote, even for an exploratory drill site. There’s nothing, and I mean nothing, out here. Professionally, I know that the remoteness is just another factor that makes the operation more complex and, heck, more profitable. But I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t put me on my toes. It’s just such an odd site for a monitoring well like this.

But, hey, I’m just an old roughneck—I go where the money is, right?

Hi, Lucy, this is Dwight. November third. Been a busy few days getting the surface operation up and running. Clearing the area and setting up the facilities: dorms, mess hall, med station, communications, and so on. But the work has paid off. I’m out of my tent shelter and bunked up solid in a dorm, plus I just hit the mess hall. Food is good on this rig. North Star does it right on that score. Keeps the help coming back. (LAUGHTER) Generators are going strong here, keeping the dorm real toasty. Good thing, too. It’s about minus thirty degrees Fahrenheit outside right now. My shift starts early tomorrow. So, I’ll need to get some shut-eye pretty soon. Just sayin’.

We should be here a month or so. I’ll be working swing shift, from six a.m. to six p.m., and spending the nights on call in this dorm prefab. It’s just an old retrofitted shipping container, faded orange when it’s not covered in snow. We’ve hauled this hunk of junk all over the North Slope and beyond. My guys call it our “hell away from home.” (LAUGHTER)

Had a chance to review the drill site this morning. The GPS leads to a conical sinkhole about, uh, sixty feet across. Sort of a dimple in the snow, just a short walk from the prefabs. I think it’s kinda creepy how this man-made pit has been waiting out here in the wilderness, looking like it’s ready to suck down a caribou or something. My guess is that another borehole was dug here before now and that it’s collapsed. I don’t understand why nobody told me this already. It definitely bugs me.

I’d ask the company man on this job, Mr. Black, but the kid was delayed by the storm. (NERVOUS LAUGHTER) Well, he sounds like a kid over the phone. In the meantime, Black says he’ll direct our progress remotely by the radio. That leaves me in charge with my lead driller, Mr. William Ray, taking night shifts for me. You met Willy down in Houston once, at the training rig. He was the one with the big old belly and those twinkling blue eyes.

Like I said, this should take about a straight month. But, as always, we’ll be here until the job is done. (INAUDIBLE)

Thing is—I know it’s dumb—but I can’t kick this worried feeling. There’s extra complications to drilling in a hole that’s already there. Could be equipment abandoned in there, leftover from the old days. Man, nothing jams up a drill like blasting into old pipe casing or, god forbid, a whole abandoned drill string. You know, somebody went to a lot of trouble to put a big hole out here. I just can’t understand why. (SHUFFLING NOISE)

Damn, I guess I’m gonna have to let it go. But I can already tell that figuring out why this hole is here is gonna be like a puzzle my mind won’t let go of. Hope I can sleep.

It doesn’t matter, anyway. We’ll stay safe and steady like we always do. No accidents, no worries, Lucy. We’re gonna earn that safety pay.

Hey, baby, it’s Dwight. November fifth. The last of the major drilling equipment modules were choppered in yesterday. My team is still spraying down the well site. The water comes from a lake about a quarter mile away from here. The layer of permafrost up here traps water on the soil surface, which is why Alaska is covered in lakes. The lake was frozen over, but we were able to cut a hole in the ice so we could do a direct pump.

After about a week of freezing, we’ll have an ice pad that measures a solid four feet deep. Then, we’ll set the whole drilling rig right on top, steady as concrete. Next springtime, we’ll be long gone and the pad’ll melt away and there won’t be any trace we were ever here. Pretty slick, eh? You tell those environmentalists about that for me, okay? (LAUGHTER)

Okay. Here’s the roster. We got me and Willy Ray running the drill. Our medic, Jean Felix, is also in charge of camp operations. He’ll make sure everybody gets watered and fed and keeps their little fingys attached to their hands. Me and Willy each got five guys on our drill crews: three roughnecks and a couple Filipino roustabouts. Our crew is rounded out with five specialists: an electric man, a drill motor man, a pipe casing man, and a couple welders. Finally, we got a cook and a janitor wandering around here somewheres.

We brought a bare-bones crew of eighteen, company man’s orders. I’m comfortable with it, though. I guess. We’ve all made money together before and we’ll all make money together again.

Next week, when the drill is online, we’ll keep going nonstop in two five-man crews for twelve-hour shifts until the hole is drilled. Should be four or five days of drilling. The weather is a little bit foggy and a whole heck of a lot of windy, but, hey, any weather is good drilling weather.

That’s it, Lucy. Hope all is well in Texas and that you’re staying out of trouble. Good night.

It’s Dwight. November eighth. Company man still isn’t here. Says he won’t be coming, either. Says we’ve got it under control. He just told me to make sure the communications antenna was steady and out of the wind and to bolt it down extra tight. Said if comms get knocked out between us he’s gonna be real unhappy. I gave him the regular roughneck response: “Whatever you say, boss. Just make sure your checks keep cashing.”

Other than that, uneventful day. Ice pad is coming along faster than expected, what with the wind blasting through here hard enough to push a grown man down. All our buildings are huddled up next to the well site, close enough to eyeball. Still, I told the men not to go wandering off. Through this nonstop howler you couldn’t hear an atom bomb detonate from a hundred yards away. (LAUGHTER)

Uh, one more thing. I had a chance to check out that groundwater monitoring package this morning. The thing we’re supposed to install? It’s out back, on pallets and wrapped tight in a black tarp. Honest to god, Lucy, I never seen anything like it before. It’s this big pile of curved wires, yellow and blue and green. Then, there’s these spiral pieces of polished mirror. Each one is light as carbon fiber, but razor sharp around the edges. Cut my sleeve on one. The thing is like one of your grandmam’s crazy jigsaw puzzles.

Weirdest thing though … the monitoring equipment is already partially hooked up. A line is runnin’ from a black box that looks like a computer all the way back to the communications antenna. Can’t tell for the life of me who could have set it up. Heck, I don’t know how I’m gonna put it together. It’s gotta be experimental. But then how come no scientists got sent with us on this project?

It’s not ordinary and I don’t like it. In my experience, weird is dangerous. And this place isn’t very forgiving. Anyways, I’ll let you know how it turns out, darlin’.

Lucy, baby, this is guess who? Dwight. It’s November twelfth. Ice pad is complete and my boys have assembled the dozen or so pieces of the drilling rig. You wouldn’t believe it, Lucy, how far the industry has come. Those hunks of metal are futuristic. (LAUGHTER) Small enough to chopper in, and then you just get ’em close and in the right configuration. The pipes and wires reach out to each other and the pieces self-assemble, just like that. Before you know it, you got yourself a fully functional frontier drilling rig. Not like the old days.

We should be drilling by tomorrow noon, first shift. We’re ahead of schedule, but that hasn’t stopped the boss man from chewing me out over the phone. Mr. Black thinks we have to be finished and out by Thanksgiving, no matter what. That’s what he said, “No matter what happens.”

I told Mr. Black, “Safety, my friend, is number one.”

And then I told him about the hole already being here. I still haven’t figured out why that is. And not knowing poses a serious risk to my crew. Mr. Black says he can’t find anything on it, just that the Department of Energy put out a call for proposals to get it monitored and that Novus won the contract. Typical. There’s about a half dozen partners on this project, from the cooks to the chopper pilots. The right hand is ignorant of the left.

I checked Black’s state drilling permits again, and the story adds up. Even so, the question still teases me: Why is there already a hole here?

We’ll find out tomorrow, I guess.

Dwight here. November sixteenth. Uh, oh boy, this is hard to say. Real hard. I can’t hardly believe it’s true.

We lost a man last night.

I noticed something was the matter when that steady hum of the drill started kinking up. It woke me from a sound sleep. That drill sounds like money falling into my bank account to me, and if it stops, I take notice. While I sat there blinking in the dark, the sound went from a deep grumble you could feel in the pit of your belly to a squeal like fingernails across a chalkboard.

I threw on my PPE gear and got upstairs to the rig floor, pronto.

Geez. What happened was, the drill string plowed into a layer of solid glass and pieces of old casing. I don’t know what the casing was doing down there, but it bucked the drill string. The drill came unjammed okay, but the boys had to change it out quick. And my senior roughneck, Ricky Booth, went after it with a lot of speed but not a lot of brains.

You gotta grab them horns and push, see? The guy missed his grab at the drill shaft and it went swinging, spraying mud and shards of glass all over the rig floor. So he tried to toss a chain around it to get hold. Shoulda used a Kelly bar to ease the drill shaft into the bore instead of slapping it with a chain like a hillbilly. But you can’t tell a roughneck his job. He was an expert and he took a chance. I wish he wouldn’t have.

Problem was, the shaft still had some spin to it. When the chain went round, the shaft took hold quick. And Booth had the chains crossed over his gosh-darned wrists. Willy couldn’t stop the spin in time and, well, Booth got both his hands tore off him. The poor kid staggered back a few steps, trying to holler. Before anybody could grab him, Booth fainted and ate it right off the platform. Banged his head on the way down and landed limp on the ice pad.

It’s terrible, Lucy, really terrible. It breaks my heart. But, even so, this kind of situation happens. I had to deal with it before, you remember, out in the Alberta oil sands. Thing is to jump on it fast and get it under control. You can’t be left prying bits of your man out of the permafrost with a crowbar the next morning.

I’m sorry, that’s just awful. My mind isn’t right just now, Lucy. Hope you’ll forgive me.

Anyways, I just had to keep moving. So, I roused the second shift. Me and Jean Felix dragged Booth’s body to the storage shed and wrapped him in plastic. Had to, uh, had to put his hands in there, too. On his chest.

In a situation like this, out of sight, out of mind is crucial. Otherwise my boys’ll get spooked and the job will suffer. Plan for the worst and recover fast is my motto. I promoted a roustabout named Juan to roughneck, relieved the shift with four hours left on the clock, and stopped the drill.

Mr. Black musta been watching the log file, because he called right away. Told me to get that drill going again when the day shift started in a few hours. I said hell no, but the kid sounded panicked. Threatened to pull the whole project out from under us. It’s not just myself I’m thinking of, Lucy. I got a lot of people depending on me.

So, I guess we’ll get her going again when the next shift starts in a few hours. Until then, I’ll be on the horn reporting the accident to the company and calling for a chopper to come get the body of my senior roughneck and carry him on home.

Lucy, it’s Dwight. November seventeenth. What a night, last night.

Well, drilling is over. We penetrated that solid glass sediment layer last night at forty-two hundred feet and it opened up into a cavern. Strangest thing. But this is where we’re supposed to place the monitoring equipment. I’ll be more than happy to get that jinxed package safely underground. Then I can forget all about it.

I still haven’t figured out who plugged the monitoring equipment into the antenna, but Mr. Black says the thing is self-assembling, like the drilling rig modules. So, hey, who knows, maybe it plugged itself in? (NERVOUS LAUGHTER)

Another issue. Something is hinky about our communications. I’ve noticed that all the folks I speak to have a similar twang. It could be some kind of atmospheric thing or maybe the equipment is funky, but all the voices are starting to sound the same. It doesn’t matter whether I’m doing my progress reports with the ladies at the company call-in counter or checking weather from the boys in Deadhorse.

It’s an odd comm setup, provided by the company. My electrician says he’s never seen this model before. Kind of threw his hands in the air, so I let him get back to work watching over the rig. Looks like I’ll just have to hope the bastard doesn’t break, seeing as how it’s our lifeline to the outside world.

In more serious business … The medic held a little memorial service for Booth at the shift change today. Just said a few words about god and safety and the company. Still, it doesn’t matter how fast I dealt with it, the crew is feeling a bad mojo. Fatal accidents like this are rare, Lucy. Worse, that recovery chopper didn’t arrive today for Booth’s body. And now I’m finding I can’t raise anybody on this damned comm equipment.

I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

It’s okay. We’ll keep up our work, keep the routine, and wait. We can drop in the monitoring station and link it to the comm array tomorrow. Then we’ll be ready to break it down and get the heck out. Once the chopper comes back and we talk to the outside world, everything will be better. Just as soon as the chopper comes back for Booth.

I miss you, Lucy. I’ll see you soon, god willing.

Oh my god, Lucy. Oh my sweet god. We’re in trouble. Oh my. We’re up shit’s creek here. It’s November twentieth.

There’s no chopper coming, baby. There’s no nothing coming. This place is a goddamn curse and I knew it from the beginning and I didn’t—(BREATHING)

Let me explain it. Let me slow down and explain it in case somebody finds this tape. Oh, I hope you get this tape, baby. Mr. Black, I don’t know who he is. This morning, after three days, the chopper still didn’t come. We were all ready to go. I mean, the monitoring equipment is down there at the bottom of that hole. The shaft is filled up with wires hooked to the permanent antenna installation. It’s beautiful. Even scared out of their wits, my guys stayed professional.

The day we finished, the crew started falling sick. Lots of puking and diarrhea. The ones who’d been on the rig floor were affected most, but we all felt it. Honestly, we felt it the minute we broke into that damned cave. Just this creeping nausea. I didn’t mention it to you because, well, I just didn’t want you worrying over nothing.

Besides, everybody started feeling better. For about half a day we thought maybe it was just a bug. But with no chopper coming and no comm, we started arguing. There were some fistfights. My guys were nervous. Confused and angry. We all stopped sleeping.

Then, the sickness hit twice as hard. A roustabout went down in convulsions in the mess hall. Jean Felix did everything he could. Kid went into a coma. A coma, Lucy. He’s twenty-three and strong as an ox. But here he is with his hair falling out. And … and sores all over his skin. My god.

Jean Felix finally told me what was going on. He thinks it’s radiation poisoning. The boy in a coma was on the rig floor when Booth bought the farm. The kid got that glass mud all over him, even swallowed some of it.

That goddamn hole is radioactive, Lucy.

I finally figured it out. That tickle in the back of my brain. The worry I had. I know why this hole is here. I know what that cave is. Why didn’t I realize? It’s a blast cavity. This place was a nuke testing ground. That big-diameter borehole was drilled so they could place a nuclear device down there. When it was detonated, the bomb vaporized a spherical cavern. The heat fused the sandstone walls into a six-foot layer of glass. The borehole itself became a chimney, with radioactive gas pushed out of it. Then, a slug of flash-melted rock formed into solid glass and plugged the chimney. It preserved this hole in the ground for all this time.

That radioactive cave down there is as close to hell as you can get here on earth. And we got sent here to drill straight into it. God knows why Black wanted us to drill it. I don’t even know what we put in there.

One thing I do know is that son of a bitch Black sent us here to die. And I’m going to find out why.

I’ve got to get that radio gear online.

Lucy. Dwight. November, uh, I don’t know. I’m not sure what we’ve done. My guys are all dying now. I did everything I could to get the comm gear going. Now I don’t know what’s going to happen. How you’re going to ever hear this …

(SNIFFING)

I got my electric specialist to help me. We mapped out every inch of that piece of comm equipment. Hour after hour.

And when it was over, we couldn’t raise anybody but Black. That bastard came in loud and clear, giving us nonstop excuses about how the comms would come online real soon and we should just wait. Kept telling us a chopper was coming in, but nothing. Nobody coming. Damned murderer.

On my last-ditch try, I called Mr. Black and kept him on the line. I could barely stand his slick voice leaking out of the headset. All his lies. I stayed on with him, though.

And we tracked Black down. We did it. Me and the specialist followed the signal to see how come it wasn’t getting transmitted. What’s more, we traced the logs on everything I ever said to Mr. Black. We had to see why we could reach just him and nobody else.

It’s terrible what we found, Lucy. Hurts me to think about it. Why did this happen to me? I’m a good man. I’m—(BREATHING)

It’s coming from the hole, Lucy. All the communications. Mr. Black, all my calls to the chopper company, my weather checks, the status updates to company HQ—everything. It’s all been going into that godforsaken black box, those yellow wires and curved pieces of mirror. How could it have been talking to me? Have I lost my mind, Lucy?

Self-assembling is what Mr. Black said it would do. Self-assembling down there in the radioactive dark. The pieces moving around, blind, forming connections to each other by feel alone. Some kind of computerized monster.

It don’t make sense. (COUGHING)

I’m feeling tired now. My specialist went to his bunk and didn’t come back. I snapped off the radio. There’s no point to it, anymore. Now, it’s real quiet in here. Just that infernal wind howling outside. But it’s warm inside. Real warm. Nice, even.

Think I’m just going to lay down, Lucy. Take a little nap. Forget about this whole thing for a little bit. Hope that’s okay with you, beautiful. I wish I could talk to you right now. I wish I could hear your voice.

Wish you could talk me to sleep. (BREATHING)

I just can’t help wondering about it, baby. My mind won’t let it go. There’s a room the size of a damned European cathedral five thousand feet below us. Think of that radiation pouring from those smooth glass walls. And all the wires snaking into the blackness to feed the monster that we put down there.

I’m afraid we did a bad thing, you know? We didn’t know what we were doing. It tricked us, Lucy. I mean, what’s down in that hole? What could survive?

(SHUFFLING)

Well, to hell with it. I’m dog tired and I’m going to take me a rest. Whatever’s down there, I hope I don’t dream about it.

G’night, Lucy. I love you, honey. And, uh, if it matters … I’m sorry. I’m sorry for putting that evil down there. I hope that someday, somebody will come out here and fix my mistake.

This audiotape is the only evidence related to the existence of the North Star frontier drilling crew. News reports from the time indicate that on November 1, an entire drilling crew was lost in a helicopter crash in a remote part of Alaska and presumed dead. Searchers stopped looking for the wreckage two weeks later. The location in the reports was Prudhoe Bay, hundreds of miles from where this tape was found.

—CORMAC WALLACE, MIL#GHA217