Radiant Dawn

by Cody Goodfellow

  Storch was roused out of his half-sleep by a flash-glimpse of a figure in the road directly before them: an adult doe, stiff and still as a plaster yard decoration, impaled on the van's hi-beams. What did his father call it, his father who served three tours in Vietnam but, in his saner days, had prayed only while deer hunting? Jacklighting, a mortal sin, a betrayal of the rapport between hunter and hunted.

  Buggs jogged right and grazed the deer's flank against the driver's side. Storch saw the top of its head whip around confusedly as the giant steel box hurtled past, the vacuum of its passage sucking it off its feet. It did what instinct told it must be done. It leapt into the air, straight up, its legs cocked at an angle as if to fend off the Buick Le Sabre following too closely behind them. The driver of the next car lacked Ely's reflexes and sailed into the deer at seventy-eight miles per hour. The deer plunged through the windshield as if diving into a pool covered in a sheet of frost. The Le Sabre nosed into the guardrail and whipped perpendicular to the fast lane and the Weber's bread truck behind it. Buggs's van turned a snaky S-bend in the road, and the hills enveloped the scene just as a second sun seemed to rise above it.

  "When are those dumb animals going to learn?" Buggs asked.

  The sign at the Colma city limit claimed the population was seven hundred fourteen, but Storch never saw one above ground. Rolling green hills girded the freeway on both sides, studded with row upon row of headstones, plaques, monuments and mausoleums. The graves to the east commanded a majestic view of the gray San Francisco Bay. Storch was hard pressed to decide what was weirder, the city itself, or the creeping feeling of relief and the sense that he could learn to live here.

  Buggs turned off the 280 at Route 82. They rolled past a deserted mall: florists, chapels, stonemasons, banquet halls and liquor stores. They turned south on El Camino Real, the main drag in California's grand necropolis. They passed more cemeteries than Storch had seen in his entire life. As expected, Buggs took upon himself the role of tour guide.

  "Like no other city in America," Buggs said. "Over half a million residents, the real silent majority. Look at all this fucking real estate. In the future, archaeologists digging this up will conclude one of two ways: either we worshipped our dead or we were heavily into worm farming.

  "About a hundred years ago, San Francisco took a good look at its zoning laws and realized all its cemeteries were illegal. Besides which, they needed the space. So they dug up every last one of them and carted them down here—except for the Presidio and the Old Mission. See that? That's Cypress Lawn, where the rich ones go. William Randolph Hearst, Spreckels, Coit, Gertrude Atherton…"

  Storch closed his eyes and pulled his ears into his skull, let himself squeeze in one last five-minute catnap. He felt himself slipping away just as the van came to a stop and the engine died. Buggs opened his door and hopped out, feet crunching on gravel as he came around and opened Storch's door. He fought not to stumble as he climbed out and surveyed Buggs's new job.

  "It sure as hell looks like a funeral home."

  "Used to be. The people I work for meditate a lot. They say they can't have the psychic vibrations of the living around, or something."

  The building was a two-story gambrel-roofed farmhouse in the New England style, impeccably maintained, with fresh pearl-gray paint and black trim. A gravel driveway wound up to a six-car garage. Towering weeping willows framed the converted funeral home on three sides, and iron fences separated it from the crowded, neglected Greek Orthodox cemetery that encircled the property.

  "Come on. Check it out."

  They crossed the lawn and ascended the portico steps. A porch glider swung silently in the evening breeze, and scores of wind chimes hung from the eaves. Storch could feel an electric tingling in the lobes of his ears, but couldn't quite hear them.

  Buggs slipped off his shoes and motioned for Storch to do the same.

  "You've got to be really, really quiet until we get back into my workroom, man." Storch nodded and stooped to unlace his boots. Buggs unlocked the door and peeked inside, scanning the place for something. Deciding the coast was clear, he slipped inside and waved Storch in.

  Candles and incense burned in sconces around the foyer, marking the walls rather than illuminating anything. The walls themselves were cushioned with the deep packing foam used in recording studios. The faint shuffling of their stockinged feet on the lush carpet sounded as if it was coming from down a tunnel. The pungent opiate smoke from the incense, the stifling stillness, made Storch feel sleepy.

  "Where's your room?" he asked, rubbing his eyes.

  Buggs shushed him, led him deeper into the house. They passed through what probably used to be the chapel. Storch could dimly make out posts hung with headphones and goggles and racks of electrical components set evenly around the room, and surrounded by piles of pillows. They turned down a narrow corridor lined with narrow doors. Some stood open, and Storch saw someone sleeping inside, goggled and headphoned. Hints of pulsating black static leaked out of them. Faint as it was, it resonated in all the cavities of Storch's skull and made the darkness come alive with impossible, predatory colors. A hand reached out of the wall and took him by the arm, pulled him into one of the rooms. The door closed behind him, and the hungry colors dissolved into black again. Silent lightning flashed, once twice, and became the cold glow of a fluorescent light. Buggs was staring into his eyes, pinning his arms at his sides.

  "Are you alright, man? You're not gonna freak out and have a Desert Storm flashback, or something, are you?"

  "I'm fucking fine," Storch growled, breaking loose and stepping back. "Don't touch my fucking body."

  Buggs shrugged and went to a bank of light switches. The room had once been used for embalming, and still had a checkerboard-pattern tile floor and a row of steel beds with gutters in them. Computer shit was stacked to the ceiling on all five of these, and spilled over onto the floor, crowded the counter that ran along the wall, and even hung suspended from the ceiling. The floor was a carpet of cables and trash: potato chip bags, Twinkie wrappers, empty Jolt Cola cans, Ephidrene packets, cigarette butts.

  "Alright, alright. Pretty weird, huh?"

  "What the hell are these people on, Buggs?"

  "A mystical mission," Buggs answered in a fruity, New Age voice. "They alone understand the true nature of the universe, and are destined to preserve it from destruction."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream of a god they call—" Buggs looked around melodramatically, then cupped his hand and whispered, "Mana Yood Sushai." He looked around again, then smiled and nodded knowingly at Storch, having confided the cult's innermost secret.

  "What do they do?"

  "Mostly, they just sleep, I guess, building up the energy to meditate, which is pretty much what they do the rest of the time. They use all that VR shit in the chapel to entrain their brainwaves to the same frequency, and they dream together. They think that as long as they keep dreaming and meditating and shit, Mana Yood Sushai will keep dreaming the universe. But if they stop—" again looking around for cult assassins, "He'll wake up."

  Buggs went over to a tower of CPUs and started flicking switches, Things started humming and clattering and Storch could feel ions proliferating in the air around him. He wanted to go back out, find an empty cell and go to sleep in the hungry dark. To keep himself awake, he kept talking.

  "How can they afford all this?"

  "They're all really brilliant programmers, actually. Every so often, one of them comes out and bats out some code or does some contract database design work, makes them a few hundred grand, and goes back to sleep. They've got some people who come in to clean up and do the landscaping, but they know better than to come in here."

  "What do they need you for?"

  "I do a lot of different things. Network administration—they've got a couple of nodes just for decryption, websites with all kinds of ciphers and encrypted messages floating around—" />
  "Anything about cancer?"

  "No. Why'd you ask?"

  "No reason."

  "But it's funny you should mention it, because what I think they really wanted me for was to screen their TV."

  "What?"

  "I tape all their favorite TV shows. Trekkie crap, mostly, and lots of airy-fairy New Age lectures on Public Access channels, but some CNN and Discovery Channel stuff, too, anything on genetics or paleontology— and anyway, what I do is, I edit out the commercials. It's kind of like being a poison-taster for a paranoid royal family."

  When he got tired of babbling, Buggs hacked Water & Power records for Sperling, Donald. "Nobody else keeps better track of where you've lived," Buggs boasted as he pried their firewall open and typed in bogus passwords. The screen blew up a catalogue of numbers and addresses, going back to Sperling's college days at UC Davis.

  "Look at this. Donald and Marie Sperling's power bill accounts, from the day they set up housekeeping in Davis in 1976 until the present. Notice anything weird?"

  "This isn't complete," Storch muttered. "There's two and a half years missing." Then he remembered how long the commune had lasted. "Shit. He was one of them. Him and his wife were members." After July of 1979, there was no service record. Then, in December of 1981, with service charges, switch-on fee and a fifty dollar deposit for the house in Sunnyvale.

  "There's where he was. Now let's find out where he is," Buggs said.

  Buggs fiddled for five minutes, opening windows within windows of security, slipping through each layer with a different skeleton key. Storch tuned out his rambling explanations of the significance of each. Computers bothered him. More than anything else since he'd gone into the desert eight years before, computers had changed the world, and not for the better. It was as if a crazy new religion had burned new tongues, new prayers, new commandments, into the rest of the world. It baffled him, the way they talked about Y2K, and poured money into businesses that existed nowhere and made nothing. Everyone worshipped false gods of pure data, and trembled before an Apocalypse when the world might threaten to become real again.

  "Here you go. Credit card purchases for Donald NMI Sperling for July, 1999. Hmmm, eats out a lot—alone. Not much else…Monthly Metrotram pass…oh, look at this. You came at a bad time, boss." Buggs tapped the entry at the bottom of the screen: $695 / AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 997 / SAN JOSE TO MEXICO CITY VIA LAX / ONE-WAY / 7-8-99. "He's gone on vacation."

  He was gone. How many people have to disappear before you get wise and vanish yourself? If there really was a secret war, let it be fought by people with their heads screwed on right. Mexico—and not to find Donald Sperling, either.

  "I can get into airline booking, see if his seat was filled."

  "No, Buggs. Let it go."

  "Well, shit, I'm real sorry I couldn't be of more help. You want me to call some of your righteous militia friends to come pick you up?"

  "I don't have any righteous friends. Take me back."

  Buggs dropped Storch off at a Target around the block from his motel just before ten. As he climbed out, Buggs said, "Hey, boss. Take this."

  Storch turned around and saw a roll of bills held under his nose, the two on the outside were twenties. "I can't take your money, Buggs. Thanks, anyway."

  "Dude, you need money to get out of here, and you need a new look. Right now you look like a freaked-out commando in a bad disguise. You won't even stay out long enough to make it on America's Most Wanted." Buggs grinned sheepishly. "Besides, you paid me way too much. I would've done it for free. Go on, man. Take it and get the hell out of here."

  Feeling like a proud farmer accepting his first welfare check, Storch took the money. "Thanks. I'll send you a postcard."

  "Adios, dude," Buggs said and pulled out of the parking lot. Storch watched his last friend go until his van disappeared onto the freeway onramp. Suddenly feeling naked, he turned and walked into the Target.

  He came back around the block in a new suit of clothing; ugly and uncomfortable but decidedly less paramilitary looking. He stopped dead in his tracks on the edge of the motel parking lot, crippled by a rush of foreboding about going back in there. The parking lot still had most of the same cars he'd noticed when he left, and no new arrivals. The buttery yellow lights at the front desk were on, but he saw no sign of the clerk. He'd left nothing important inside, indeed, probably not enough for a police forensics team to tell he was even there.

  He looked around again, trying to seem lost, and not as if he were casing the place. Infrequent cars flew past at freeway speeds. A police car went by without taking notice of him. He went back to the intersection and crossed the street, checked into a Motel 6 that could have been stamped from the same mold as the first, checked into the room under another fake ID, and went inside.

  The picture window commanded a pretty good view of his old room, and had blinds instead of curtains. He left the lights off and opened the blinds just wide enough to see across the street through a slit. He sat down in a scuffed-up naugahyde lounge chair, unlaced his boots, fitted the silencer onto the gun, laid it on the table beside him, and watched.

  A few guests came and went. After about an hour, the desk clerk came out for a cigarette, his nose in a paperback.

  Storch rubbed his eyes, willing adrenaline into his nervous system. He fished a bottle of pineapple juice out of his coat pocket, sipped at the too-sweet, lukewarm nectar and felt his blood thicken up, his movements become less jittery, less desperate to stay awake. He checked the clip in the automatic. An argument in one of the upstairs rooms spilled out onto the balcony, two biker-looking guys with no shirts on pushing at each other and shouting. The desk clerk went up and told them to go back inside. Storch worried that they would bring the cops, willed them to shut up and cut it out. Miraculously, they did.

  Storch watched. Nothing happened. And somewhere around two-thirty, he leaned forward to check the gun again, and just kept leaning until he collapsed on the floor.

  22

  There actually wasn't that much space in the underground base, but it was so twisted upon itself that Stella, when she was allowed out of Mrachek's sight, constantly found herself rounding a corner to come face to face with one or more soldiers standing duty outside a door she was clearly not meant to enter. The soldiers always stood, impassive and silent, not even batting an eye as she asked them questions, or lambasted them with insults. They would've done the Queen's Grenadier Guards proud, but Stella quickly discovered it was largely a show for her benefit, or intimidation. One morning, at least according to the digital chronometer on the climate control in the sickbay, she stopped just short of a corner around which she knew a soldier regularly stood all night, outside what she guessed was the motor pool, until his morning relief came. She listened.

  Instantly, she recognized the voices. They regularly pulled this duty, and just as regularly bitched about it. The night-guard was a Latino named Medina, a very senior noncommissioned officer whose talk was peppered with Army jargon. The relief was named Betancourt, and he talked less, perhaps because of a mild stutter and a lazy Alabama drawl that made him sound like a halfwit, even when, as now, he was talking about things Stella couldn't begin to understand.

  "News?" Medina offered.

  "It's b-bad, Maceo," Betancourt muttered. "Going on worse. School Of Night's gone black."

  "What the fuck? What do the eggheads know?"

  "Can't be sure, but they f-fear the worst. It's like the ordnance cache raid all over again."

  "So now we're gonna have to steal a telemetry lab," Medina's voice was acidic. Stella guessed whatever this mysterious new development meant, it was widening a rift between the soldiers and the eggheads. "They scrubbing?"

  Silence. Betancourt must've shaken his head, because Medina hawked and spat and composed an impromptu haiku entirely out of Spanish and Army-coined obscenities.

  Betancourt reminded Stella of Eeyore the depressive donkey when he added, "Wittrock's de-de-cided to d-do it hims
elf…on-site."

  "Fucking egghead queen-bee motherfucker," Medina hissed. "Just putting more weight on an op that's already grinding on the rims. He wants a complete saturation, and we're supposed to wait to pick his ass out of the fire while he's fucking with their computer."

  "That part—th-th-that still doesn't sit well with me, man," Betancourt mumbled. "They ain't luh-like us, I know, buh-b-but they ain't soldiers, man. They're fuh-folks…"

  "You didn't see what homeboy did to Gene in the sickbay, man. That raid in Lone Pine, when we picked up Mrachek's guinea pigs? I've never seen anyfuckingthing take that much killing and keep on going."

  "Well, wh-whatever they are, I hope the d-d-docs find a cure for 'em, so we duh-don't have to b-burn 'em out again, I tuh-t-tuh-tell you what."

  Stella's ears burned as she backed away. Guinea pigs? Stella walked back to sick bay, and only got lost once.

  On her way, as if her anger had cauterized blocked synapses in her brain, she found herself thinking clearly again. Perhaps she'd been drugged all this time, not to have wondered before.

  Mrachek said they were fighting a war, and after the whirlwind of events that'd showed her what became of Seth Napier, she'd been bludgeoned into accepting Radiant Dawn as the enemy. But what had they done, besides try to survive? Whatever Stephen had become, he'd survived cancer and multiple dismemberment. What happened to Napier was an accident, a freak byproduct of whatever kept him alive. The Radiant Dawn community hadn't tried to spread beyond its own enclave. They wanted what all people want, but they had enemies. These people.

  And me. When I wanted them dead, was it because I was afraid of them, or because they turned me away?

  Mrachek sat with her big back to the door, hunched over a binocular microscope. Her arms were poised akimbo, her hands manipulating a syringe and an eyedropper over the petri dish under the scope. "Where've you been?" she asked, but didn't turn around. Stella crossed the sickbay a little faster than she intended. If any part of her intended harm, it wasn't keeping her forebrain informed, but it slammed on the brakes when Mrachek turned around. Her curare dartgun was in her rosy pink fist, like an extra finger. "I think it'd be best if you stuck around closer to sickbay. I can't vouch for your safety elsewhere."