Radiant Dawn

by Cody Goodfellow

  "Sir? Lieutenant Colonel Greenaway just issued an order to all the military search parties and Delta Force squads onbase."

  That's news," he answered in as neutral a tone as he could muster. "Where is he?"

  "At a payphone at a gas station outside Big Pine. Apparently, he crashed. He scrambled them to a location near Baker. He then rattled off a bunch of code-phrases, and got confirmations back from ten choppers in the field and three squads onbase. They're on the move as we speak, sir."

  Baker was less than ten miles from the eastern perimeter fence of Ft. Irwin Military Reservation, China Lake's next door neighbor. Eight choppers in the air with FBI agents onboard were in the sortie, but the agents had not called in, and presumably were not allowed to. It was as if the lieutenant colonel knew where they were—or where they were going.

  Cundieffe clapped his hands excitedly. Something could still be snatched out of this debacle; the perpetrators of this act, their technology, or at the very least, a military scapegoat. He couldn't simply contact Greenaway again and let him know he was under scrutiny. "Put together every available agent with some tactical gear and let's get out there."

  "An excellent idea, but I'm afraid I'll be needing your talents right here, Special Agent Cundieffe."

  A long shadow fell across his desk. He looked up and saw Assistant Director Wyler himself standing in the doorway of his office. He waved Hanchett away and folded his arms across his chest, his head cocked at a tired angle. He sighed and seemed to shrink six inches. "This situation appears to have spiraled out of our collective control."

  On your watch. He almost fainted again.

  "What—I'm—Sir! This is a surprise. I was working to prepare a preliminary report, when—the—new developments—"

  "Put nothing down on record for the time being, Martin. This is going to get much worse before it gets any better." His face was grave and deeply lined. His toupee sat a few degrees off the beam. Had he ever noticed the Assistant Director wore a toupee? Did anyone else know?

  "Worse, sir?"

  "Oh, yes. What happened tonight was a declaration of war. A second civil war, the consequences of which could be far more devastating than the first." He turned and walked away, his hand absently gesturing for Cundieffe to follow. "But in every war, Martin, the most pivotal victories often pass beneath history's notice. Such a victory will soon fall to us, Martin."

  Cundieffe stood up and started to follow, but balked when he saw where the Assistant Director was going. Wyler stopped with his hand on the door of the Men's restroom, his brow furrowed.

  Cundieffe took another step, then froze again. What the devil was the Assistant Director playing at? President Johnson dragged many of his policy briefings with White House staffers into the lavatory in a crude but effective demonstration of alpha male dominance. According to a tale he'd overheard a retired Secret Service agent tell his father at a barbecue, when then Attorney General Ramsey Clark had encouraged Johnson to force the Director into retirement, the President had pronounced his fiat by "accideliberately micturating" on the AG's sensible black brogans. If that was the Assistant Director's strategy, what could he expect in compensation for allowing an atomic bomb to be dropped on American soil?

  Then again, there was that oily, uninvited sensation he'd gotten in the limousine at the airport. That fleeting twinge at the physical intimacy of the Assistant Director's presence. Surely it was his own insecurity projecting itself on his superior. AD Wyler wasn't the first bureaucrat to be tarred with that brush, first and foremost among them the Director himself, for choosing duty over family. Dear Lord, what if it was him?

  Get a hold of yourself, Martin! If you're going to panic, at least concentrate on the real situation, there's plenty to keep you wetting your pants, there, too.

  This is some sort of briefing, that's all it is. Damage control. Mustn't allow anything to embarrass the Bureau. He realized with relief that his feet were carrying him towards the Assistant Director. They were alone in the office, but Wyler waved impatiently. "God's sake, Cundieffe," he stage-whispered, "get inside. It's imperative that we speak privately, and immediately, but I desperately need to micturate."

  Cundieffe edged past the Assistant Director into the restroom, glancing around as he crossed the painfully white tiled room to stand beside the last sink, pointedly not looking into the mirror. Assistant Director fumbled out a set of jingling keys and locked the door.

  Cundieffe turned and started to protest, but Assistant Director Wyler was climbing onto the first sink and, steadying himself against the fluorescent light fixture, he pried an adhesive air freshener off the wall, just inches below the assiduously scrubbed ceiling. Cundieffe helped him climb down and followed him as he went to a toilet stall and tossed the air freshener into the basin, flushed. To Cundieffe's blank stare, he asked, "You didn't know that was in here?"

  "We—was that a surveillance device?"

  "Yes, audio-video, installed by Naval Intelligence. Didn't your people sweep for bugs?"

  "We never thought we had anything to hide from the Navy, sir. I mean, really—"

  Wyler brushed past him and went to a urinal, unzipped his fly and looked over his shoulder at Cundieffe, who retreated again to the sink. "You have no idea what this is about, do you?"

  "What this would that be, sir? If you're referring to the terrorist situation—"

  "—Is only the beginning, Martin. We stand at the cusp of a watershed moment in human history. The future has never been closer, but we have never been closed to complete and utter chaos. Order is going to be tested, and the enemies, many of them, are already among us."

  Cundieffe looked around blearily, resumed scrubbing his hands. The soap was the good old abrasive powder variety, not that glutinous syrup most public restrooms offered. He ground the pumice-based soap into the meat of his palms, one after the other long after both were pink as boiled lab rats. "I don't know what to say, sir. I've always felt a calling to serve the Bureau."

  "That's right. It's in your blood, isn't it? Your father and your mother both, sixty-five years of service between them. You're trustworthy, utterly selfless, the model of a Bureau agent. It's hard, not being not like most other people, isn't it, Martin?"

  "I don't follow you, sir."

  "Your perceptive and cognitive faculties have always made you a keen observer of human behavior, but it only isolated you from your peers. You never excelled in physical, manly pursuits, and others resented you, treated you as if your intellect made you less of a man. The Bureau was your instinctual niche, it's where you could excel by using your natural talents, and serve the public good by preserving order. Am I right so far?"

  "Sir, are you—can I turn around now?" He stole a glance at the mirror before him. AD Wyler still stood before the urinal, one hand planted against the wall. His head turned, his eyes met Cundieffe's and glittered.

  "Have you ever wondered why you felt this way, Martin? Why you felt compelled to give over your life to protect a populace that never made a place for you? Have you ever felt a deeper cause for the—stirrings that drive you?"

  Cundieffe braced himself against the sink, focusing on a relatively fresh wad of chewing gum affixed to the spotless chrome neck of the faucet. Wrigley's Spearmint, he observed, noting its uncanny resemblance to brain matter after a thorough chewing. Probably left there by Special Agent Normand, he must remind Normand about careless hygiene—

  "You're not alone, Martin." He heard a hushed clink of metal on tile. It was the sound of a belt buckle.

  He sucked wind for a long, long moment before he let himself talk. "Sir, I'm not a judgmental person in the least, and my—I'm extremely discreet, but—I think you should know that I'm not a—"

  "Neither am I, Martin. Look at me."

  "What? Sir, are you—done?"

  "Turn around, Martin. There's no other way, son. I need you to see, before we can trust you."

  "What? Sir, with all due respect, what is this?"

  "Turn ar
ound, Goddammit!"

  Cundieffe whirled around now, his face flushing with anger. "There's no need to swear—Oh my God, sir!"

  From the moment he first met AD Wyler at a special dinner at the Academy, Cundieffe had felt a strange vibration from AD Wyler that he couldn't admit to himself was something sexual, and so he'd buried it as something unworthy of himself. It was a unique experience, never repeated, even when he came into contact with real homosexuals. Now he understood why.

  AD Wyler stood before Cundieffe with his pants around his ankles, and his spindly, hairless legs planted akimbo to afford Cundieffe an unobstructed view of the featureless join of flesh where every other member of the human species, it was fairly certain, had some sort of reproductive organs. At first he thought the Assistant Director was tucking, but there was nowhere to hide anything; nor was he wounded, for there were no scars, no pubic hair, no vestigial traces of either sex; only a tiny urethra on the forward edge of the pelvic bone, a purely neutral means of passing waste.

  An atomic bomb was a horrible event to be sure, but it was as of yet an abstract notion, and a real one, with precedent. This was Cundieffe's atomic bomb. "What happened to—What—What are you?"

  "I'm a human being, Martin, just like you. Just like six and a half billion human beings on this planet. We're no different from them, except for the niggling detail that we do not reproduce."

  "'We?' How many of you are there?"

  Wyler stooped and hoisted his pants, fastidiously tucking in his shirt. "Only a few thousand accounted for, but we expect that's going to change. There's been a lot of speculation among us about how we came to be— viruses, radiation, even controlled experiments—but most of us believe we're a natural product of evolution. We're the answer to the world's overpopulation problem, Martin, and it's wars, and famines, and depleted environment.

  "Look at ants, Martin. One of nature's oldest living creations, and largely unchanged. Because they have mastered specialization. Workers and soldiers give up their reproductive duties to their queen, and specialize in their respective talents for the survival of the nest. In the last few hundred years, homo sapiens has forced an evolutionary crisis and become its own agent of extinction. We are born without the costly investment in reproduction which burdens other human beings, and instead have those energies expressed themselves in higher intellects, greater stamina, and an instinctual public ethic. All of us hold positions of some influence in government, academia and business, and all of us work for the continued survival of the species, and to keep our secret. We are nature's plan for keeping the human race alive." Wyler washed his hands, watching Cundieffe. "So, now you know whose side you're on."

  Cundieffe backed away from Wyler in the general direction of the toilet stalls. "Sir, I don't think you understand—"

  "Martin, there's nothing to be upset about. It's what you are, it's what we are."

  Cundieffe turned and raced for the first stall, slammed the door and bolted it. His face was hot and slick with sweat and tears. Why was AD Wyler doing this to him? All he'd ever wanted was to serve the Bureau, to be accepted, and now these head games, this mutant bullshit.

  By God, Martin, you are a BOY! And you will ACT LIKE ONE!

  He was a man. Compared to AD Wyler, he was a man.

  His mother explained to him when he was nine, and going off to summer camp. How other boys had different parts from his, and might tease him, but not to take it personally, it wasn't his fault, it was just the way God had made him, and God had His reasons.

  "Martin, come out of there at once."

  Cundieffe undid his belt and tore open his slacks, yanked down his shorts and there it was.

  He was a man.

  Martin had indeed taken some ribbing at summer camp that year, and at high school, he'd refused to bathe with the other boys. No one but his mother had laid eyes on it since that summer camp, excepting his regular physician, who was a very kind man and an old friend of the family, and so had never stared or made him feel uncomfortable.

  Martin's penis was less than half the length of his pinky, and incapable of becoming erect. His mother had told him that due to a birth defect affecting his glands—not her words, oh no, she called it a "heavenly test"—his male organ had simply stopped growing in infancy. Despite the painful hormone shots that'd made him sick and furious by turns throughout his later childhood, puberty had simply never arrived. He had no testicles whatsoever, and no hair had ever grown to hide the minuscule thing he micturated with, but would never entertain the quixotic notion of showing it to a human being.

  Until now.

  "Assistant Director Wyler? I don't understand the full implications of this incident, but I want to state in the clearest, yet most respectful terms, that a grave error has been made. I—I need you to see this, I guess—"

  Before he could think better of it, he shoved open the stall door and shambled out with his slacks down. For a moment he dreaded that Wyler would be gone, or worse, that someone else would be here. At least no one in the Navy knew, because he always used the stalls, for fear that someone would peek at him. It didn't make him any less of a man, if his mother had told him once, she'd told him a thousand times.

  Wyler was there, and he didn't laugh. Instead, he only shook his head sadly and clucked his tongue. "My God, what did they do to you?"

  "What? Sir, I didn't judge you—You were born—as you were, and I—well, I'm a man."

  "No, Martin, no, you're not."

  "Look at me! I have a penis! I'm a man!"

  "That is a surgical construct, and not a very good one. Your parents, like many who have borne one of us, couldn't face up to the ambiguity. They had your sex assigned with a knife, Martin. A penis was built for you while you were still a baby, but by the looks of it, they abandoned the procedure midway through. You had hormone shots, but they didn't help. Because the receptors for those hormones simply didn't exist in you."

  Cundieffe sat back down on the restroom floor, the chill tile leaching the warmth out of his bony, naked ass. He stared blankly ahead while Wyler circled around him and stooped to speak into his ear. "You've lived all your life trying to play a role that doesn't suit you, Martin. You're one of us, Martin. You can help us, and we can help you."

  When Cundieffe fainted, he swooned into the Assistant Director's waiting arms.

  37

  There were snapshots from the moments after the irradiation, unstuck in time and shuffling themselves into view only when there was nothing else to see or hear. Like now.

  Soldiers clawing at their bowels and eyes, tearing themselves open to let something out; screaming their vocal cords to shreds as their healthier comrades restrain them.

  A fountain of sand and pulverized concrete where Stella Orozco was standing, the greedy hole pulling the whole junkyard in after it.

  His feet hanging in space, his fingers snarled in a toppled stand of chainlink fence.

  A young, homely woman in a smart blazer and skirt shouting nose to nose with a hulking officer in unmarked black fatigues. His hand shoves at her shoulder one too many times, and she jabs him with a taser. Everyone pointing guns, they're fighting over him.

  Guns and medics surrounding him, shuddering with the vibrations of the truck beneath them. One of the medics sedates him, then carefully pries open his left eye, then his right, clears his throat and spits into them.

  He felt crippling nausea sloshing through him in slowly subsiding waves. His skin felt two sizes smaller, and his insides felt as if they'd been stirred with a stick and mixed with a generous portion of army ants. His ears still rang from the explosion. He snapped his fingers beside each ear, and could barely hear clicking, as on a dead long distance line.

  He was not restrained, but he lay still. If he moved, he knew, his skin would break open wherever he put weight on it and blood like clotted ketchup would dribble out of him, and his hair and teeth would fall away, but he wouldn't have to look, because his eyes would have scabbed over. He'd been cooked by
that fucking light, and he would die soon, and die horribly. It was something to hope for, given the alternative. Maybe he was in a lighted room now, with officers and feds and the press watching him in eager anticipation of the months of interrogation, the years of trials, and the inevitable execution. Because that was what the United States government did with terrorists.

  And a terrorist he was. He'd participated in a monumental act of butchery, an insane campaign of genocide he could never hope to explain.

  Your Honor, they weren't human, they were—things.

  I didn't know the full extent of the plan.

  I was only following orders.

  He hoped to God they would catch Wittrock, but knew they wouldn't. Men like that never got caught or killed, not when they could persuade others to do it for them.

  Presently, because he could suddenly feel them burning, he knew his eyes were open. He blinked furiously, sloughing off crust and dust until planes of gray lesser darkness took shape around him and resolved into the cinderblock walls of his cell. Letting his head droop to one side, he peered through slitted lids at the faint nimbus of fluorescent light visible through the bars. A tiny square of window in a door let it into the cell block—or brig, wasn't that what squids called their jails, even on land? The meager stream of light haloed a minimalist steel head beside his bunk and a steel washbasin and scuffed steel mirror set into the wall above it. The floor was ever so slightly concave, with a drain in the center of the poured concrete floor, and a horizontal slot at waist level was set into the door. A man could live and die in this cell with no excuse to leave, Storch thought, but he doubted he'd be here for long. This was probably the brig at China Lake, or possibly Twenty-Nine Palms. In the morning, he'd be transferred with much fanfare to a federal holding facility, where the interrogations would begin. He wondered how well his counterinterrogation training would hold up against the people who thought it up.