Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  And it'd take one to get through the blast door. The weight of the bunker's outer shell collapsing against it hadn't bent it more than twenty degrees or so, and the upper frame of the door was blocked by concrete. Her only hope lay in banging on the blast door and hoping someone from the rescue crew was still out there.

  No one is out there, Stella.

  Have you got a better idea?

  Tear the door open.

  That's stupid, what do you think I am? I was never strong, and I'm only barely alive now!

  You have changed.

  Stop telling me what to do! She clawed at her face in her anger, but stopped just short of putting out her own eye. Her left hand was someone else's. It belonged to something else—her fingers were gone, replaced by hard, broad, blade-edged claws, like a mole would have. They were growing out of her hands, out of the fused stubs of her fingers, that she'd torn off digging herself out of the slabs.

  God, what's happening to me?

  You're going to survive this.

  What am I?

  You're alive.

  Stella poked one claw into the hole and jabbed her hand at it like she was driving a saw through a knotty block of wood. The claw punched through the blast door down to her knuckle like she was cutting butter. She slashed frantically at the door until she'd hacked a hole wide enough to crawl through.

  She could see moonlight.

  Slowly, mindful of her crushed legs, she dragged herself out of the hole. The light was blinding, halos within halos like daggers in her eyes, but she couldn't blink for the joy of seeing again. When at last she hauled herself up, her eyes stopped tearing up and she could see her surroundings.

  She lay shivering in the open pit of the motor pool, but there was little that she recognized from her brief glimpse of it. Mounds of dirt and concrete debris lay everywhere, and the walls had collapsed inward to spill rusted-out barrels of god-knew-what on everything. It didn't glow green like in the movies, but the noxious, bleachy smell and the heat-haze effect of fumes that roiled over it advertised its true nature adequately. There was something else on the ground that struck more fear into her heart than the waste, though.

  Snow.

  A thin dusting of powder lay in the leeward shadows of the walls, and was only starting to melt and gather in pools in the recesses of the pit.

  My last day of work was the Fifth of July, she thought. I was held here for a week. Last night–the last night I was outside–was hot…

  In the desert, it snows maybe once or twice a year, between December and February.

  Stella fell on a puddle of clean meltwater far from the barrels and drank greedily. It soothed the burning on her skin, and carved a track through her insides that she now knew must have been sealed for the better part of a year.

  When she could drink no more, she stopped and leaned back from the puddle. As the ripples receded into mirror stillness, she leaned forward and looked at her silhouette by moonlight.

  She was dead. Past dead. She could lose a bodybuilding competition to Ramses II. A glaring patch of bare skull shone through the blood-matted rag of hair above her right ear. Her nose was a hole like a third eye. Her lips had withered and pulled away from her teeth, a leering rictus that gleamed in the moonlight.

  She washed in the puddle, but came away looking or smelling no better. She dragged herself to her feet, shuddering on legs that were more tumor than flesh. The silvery glow of the desert night was flattering, but she should never have lived to see this. Her skin was black where bone didn't break through, and her clothing had entirely ripped or rotted away. Still, it would take a forensic pathologist to identify her gender. Her breasts, never more than a modest handful, were gone, only one nipple remained, the other sheared off. Her abdominal muscles were withered and hanging away from her viscera, a miserable, leathery purse that gurgled now with new life as the melted snow rehydrated her guts. Her hips jutted out like antlers from a sunken pubic arch shaded by the dangling flaps of still-detached thigh-meat.

  I'm alive.

  She'd lain underground for six months. One hundred and seventy-seven days more than Jesus.

  You have earned the right to survive. You have earned your place in the light.

  She walked to the edge of the pit, circled it until she found a slope she could climb out.

  You must find shelter, and a telephone.

  There were no TV crews, no rescue crews, not even a junkyard, anymore. Only a single, rustbound bulldozer that had become too contaminated to be worth retrieving during the half-hearted clean-up. She crossed the lot to the hurricane fence the state had put up around the pit and scaled it easily. The road led to the highway and Las Vegas on the left, to a trailer park on the right. Half-mad with cold and hunger and pain and joy, Stella headed to the right, starting to run on the frost-encrusted sand beside the road. The stars dilated, each twinkling beacon the rose window of a celestial cathedral, a pitiless eye of cold, sidereal fire. The dark spaces between hid a divine machine in which this world and everything in it were only dust, but the master of it all spoke to her.

  You must heal, and wait. We will come for you.

  ~2~

  Jan. 1, 2000

  Westwood, California

  The trees were sick.

  The undersides of all the leaves on his mother's Valencia orange tree and her hibiscus bush were flocked in furry clumps of the secretions of the silverleaf whitefly, and in any other backyard in West LA, they would've been cut down by the diligent Public Works Department. No outsider would ever touch anything in the Cundieffe yard.

  Martin Cundieffe sat on the porch glider beside the back door of his mother's house and sipped lukewarm hot chocolate. The day was chilly and arid, with bitter gusts of wind out of the northeast, blasting away the last traces of the rainstorm that had left an eighth of an inch of snow in Palm Springs the week before. Weather in southern California was like a service interruption of a public utility. It was seldom predicted, never accurately, and it transpired with such an apologetic half-heartedness that no one ever took it seriously. The first big autumn storm Cundieffe had seen in Washington a few months back had startled him with the notion that anyone would willingly live under such meteorological tyranny.

  He zipped up his windbreaker, hoping that nobody spotted him in it, since it said FBI across the back. He expected to be called back to the office any minute, so he had slipped the windbreaker and an old green coverall from the garage over his suit to see to the trees before his mother or the neighbors noticed that they were festering again. Over the past several months, he'd tried placing shoofly plants and Encarsia wasps in the yard, but the former had no effect, and his mother had accidentally killed the latter with overzealous chemical spraying, which caused a population explosion of the highly resistant parasites. Last month, he'd launched a last-ditch campaign to smoke out and burn the adult whiteflies with a newspaper torch, but the extent of scaly larvae and light beige eggs on the leaves this afternoon had driven home the hopelessness of the campaign.

  The Melnitzes next door, irritable fussbudgets and fetishistic lemon-growers, had filed complaints every week for the last two years, and addressed the LA City Council about the problem twice. The first time, Public Works sent out a crew of tree surgeons, who inspected and chopped down the Melnitzes' own prized lemon trees. Because of his new responsibilities at the office, he had let the trees go to ruin, knowing all the time that his mother trusted no one else to care for them. He might have let them get a lot worse if he hadn't found himself in need of this place that he knew more intimately than his own body, to reflect on everything that had changed outside its walls.

  Martin's father was transferred to Los Angeles when the listening post he administered in the old Post Office tower in Washington, DC, was closed in 1966. This was a reflection of the Director's warm personal feelings for the senior Cundieffe, as well as his wife, who had served as a trusted member of the executive secretarial pool on the fifth floor at FBI Headquarters fo
r twenty years. In his dotage, the Director had shut down nearly all of his domestic listening posts and COINTELPRO operations out of a sudden terror that his legacy would be tainted by what some would misperceive as abuses of the Constitution and his office. Many who knew less and sent more lavish birthday gifts each year had been sent further away, often to foreign legat posts in South America or the Middle East.

  The Cundieffes resettled to a nice two-bedroom house on an idyllic side street in Westwood, not two miles from the Federal Building on Wilshire. For Special Agent Frank Cundieffe, it was not a question, but Muriel felt uprooted, thrown away from the seat of power on a whim. Frank arranged for Muriel to join the Los Angeles SAC's secretarial pool, but she complained that it was a henhouse, and the SAC was far from "Director material." Frank bought Muriel the sapling orange tree and planted it in the backyard in a gesture he could not have explained himself, but which Martin knew was intended to root her to this new place. It didn't quite work, and Muriel sank deeper into depression. Frank sprang into action again, bringing his wife out to Hawaii for a month-long working vacation while he did some sub rosa consultation work with the Naval Security Group's listening posts at Honolulu. It was there that he bought her the hibiscus cuttings that became the massive thicket of trumpetshaped flowers that dominated the Cundieffe backyard. It was also in Hawaii that Frank and Muriel, forty-two and thirty-nine, had conceived Martin.

  Frank died of a heart attack in 1977, and Muriel retired early to care for her son. Martin made the backyard his laboratory, digging up anthills, launching rockets and tuning in his first handmade radio. As he looked around him today, he saw the marks of his education. The chipped corner on the mantle of the brick barbecue in the far corner, beside the garage, had carved the crescent-shaped scar on his right knee when he was eight, eavesdropping on the Melnitzes' predecessors. His first bust—he'd overheard them talking about a drug smuggling operation with a Mexican gangster posing as a gardener, and reported them anonymously to the local police. He saw the wall of staghorns that had made him uneasy as a child, clinging to the shaded kitchen wall at his back, their primitive, shell-like bodies suggesting some early attempt by the vegetable kingdom to leap into the domain of animals. None of them seemed to have grown or lost a leaf since he was a small boy, afraid to go out into the backyard at night. The modest expanse of the yard itself was paved over and painted a green brighter than Astroturf by Frank Cundieffe, who always had better things to do than slave over a lawn. The trees that had taught Martin everything he knew about horticulture and marriage: only a few leathery brown sacs hung from the branches of the orange tree, and the hibiscus was completely denuded of the trumpet-blossoms that his mother had worn in her hair around the house when no visitors were likely to call her to the door.

  The whitefly was devouring her plants, the downy parasitic floss dangling from the undersides of all the remaining leaves. When they finally succumbed, or some idiot with the City Public Works stole into the yard and chopped them down, the unparalleled deductive skills of Special Agent Martin Cundieffe told him, his mother would surely die.

  All these things kept recycling in his mind, all the things and people he couldn't keep alive, for all his cleverness. All these things brought him back to Sgt. Zane Ezekiel Storch.

  One week after the Radiant Dawn massacre, Cundieffe was officially promoted to Supervisory Special Agent of the Los Angeles field office's counterterrorism section. Most of the work lay in monitoring suspicious groups and reviewing local police work for militia group involvement. The bulk of his time was spent detailing surveillance and consulting with local police on crimes, mostly robberies. What little waking hours he could spare he spent nursing and updating his watch-list files and integrating it with the NCIC database in Washington. Big changes were afoot at Headquarters; Counter-terrorism had been spun off as its own Division, and Deputy AD Wendell Wyler was promoted to Assistant Director to head it. Wyler had assured him there would be a place for him at Headquarters when the dust settled. He'd already been to visit the new AD four times in the last five months, to sit in on meetings on the new Division, and on the recently approved Domestic Preparedness Center, which would centrally coordinate responses to terrorist threats. The Attorney General woodenly saluted the current Director for the Bureau's proactive posture in preparing for potential threats to safety and national security, and the media was predictably upbeat and supportive. If they only knew, he thought, what really happened.

  The federal government found itself in a morass over the Radiant Dawn terrorist attack—to admit that a radical group had stolen from the Navy, then bombed a village full of civilians, then nuked it, would cause a panic, even if it hadn't happened in California. Reluctantly, the Pentagon and the Justice Department assembled a comprehensive cover-up, which had so far held up, in no small part due to the Mules' backstage management.

  The investigators who first surveyed the site announced that the Radiant Dawn village was destroyed by a freak propane tank explosion, which triggered a chain reaction, igniting pockets of methane in the community's sewage system. State and local investigators were kept at arm's length while a Nuclear Emergency Survey Team sanitized the crater. The media quickly picked up the official line and conflated it into a deflective terror-campaign. The cover of Time the following week showed a chilling computer graphic of a rural household in cross-section, with a death's head-adorned bomb embedded in its foundation. The headline: Wired For Death? The Ticking Time Bomb Underneath American Homes. Less restrained periodicals carried the message even further, and a nationwide inspection of propane and septic tanks swept away concerns over the true nature of the tragedy that started it all.

  The tactical nuclear weapon was remarkably small and clean—less than a two kiloton yield, which was partially minimized by its placement on the ground, while the shape of the valley and the network of tunnels underneath absorbed the brunt of the blast. Federal money funneled into the insurance company paid the manufacturer's liabilities, and claims against Radiant Dawn itself were surprisingly low. Almost none of the residents had any immediate family, and few extended family or friends came forth to file suits. Only a handful of eyewitnesses from the Bishop County Fire Department gave contradictory testimony, but they were quickly marginalized. The military helicopters they saw over the village were National Guard choppers detailed to fire control over the hot summer, and they were dumping chemical retardant, not napalm, onto the fire. Sierra Club claims that detectable levels of radiation were present in the neighboring Inyo National Forest went largely unheard.

  Dr. Keogh, the founder and chief administrator of Radiant Dawn, reluctantly agreed to cooperate with the federal cover-up, but had since been frustratingly aloof from the Bureau's attempts to question him. In private, the government collectively asserted that the Radiant Dawn village represented a symbolic target for the Mission to demonstrate their force against those doomed to die, anyway. Too cowed to speak up at the time, yet Cundieffe believed that Radiant Dawn, the mysterious RADIANT project and what happened at the Mission's abandoned base in Baker were too entangled for coincidence. The only reason Cundieffe hadn't proceeded to investigate Radiant Dawn on his own was his sinking fear that somebody else in government already knew, and was working to remove any link to itself. Before Cundieffe had even returned to the field office from his shattering encounter at China Lake, all the RADIANT material—heavily expurgated though it was—had been pulled out of reach. Even declassified material relating to SDI and other defense projects from the fifties onward were temporarily reclassified Top Secret, DoD Channels Only, pending a "major administrative oversight."

  The Baker raid was yet another disaster only narrowly covered up, and in its way, even more perplexing than the other. The mysterious event which occurred just before the Mission's bunker imploded left seven Delta Force commandos with terminal cancer which ate them alive in less than a week. Their families were told they were killed in a helicopter crash during a joint maneuver with the
SEALS in the desert. AD Wyler told Cundieffe that they were exposed to a highly toxic substance in the Mission bunker which caused their deaths. Cundieffe probed no further, but he knew in his bones that it was RADIANT, knew also that there were cover stories within cover stories. Though he worked in a different dimension of truth from the nation as a whole, he still knew nothing that he could prove, even to himself.

  No evidence of any value and no remains were successfully excavated from the bunker. None of the vaunted non-lethal weapons technology that Wyler had dangled before him as that first taste of secrets that led to the Mules. Attempts to dig it out only disclosed high explosives and barrels of toxic waste sealed up within the walls. The Navy gave up, and a National Security Directive was quickly and quietly drawn up placing the property under DoD ownership, and fencing it off for the next ten thousand years.

  Since the events at the Radiant Dawn hospice in the Owens Valley, there was no intelligence indicating that the Mission even continued to exist, let alone that they still posed a threat, but the Mules believed otherwise. The Mission was being hunted both in North and South America, but that search had only yielded more dead ends. The Mission chopper which dropped one soldier off at their Baker HQ was never seen again, and presumably went to ground in Mexico. The oblique slant to the many, many briefings Cundieffe had attended with Wyler in Washington, however, suggested that they were not so concerned with concluding the investigation into what had happened there, but with preventing a worse outbreak of violence in the future. Cundieffe was consulted often and in depth on his limited knowledge of the man they seemed to feel was the key to the Mission. That he had been framed by parties unknown carried little weight in their discussions.