Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  The soldiers ran out into the courtyard and spread out to the far corners, turned and faced Storch, but in that instant, they were blinded, and probably would have been shot to pieces by the courtyard guards, had Storch tried anything. He walked out into the center of the courtyard, stopped and fell to his knees. His eyes closed, his mouth open, he simply basked as soldiers paced around him with weapons drawn, as if he were not already chained and beaten within an inch of his life. What had he done down in Florida, what had he shown them, that had them so frightened? He doubted anyone else even noticed that Storch now had a thumb he had lost in the Gulf War, so what had they seen? His medical records probably held the answer, but there was so much more he could learn from Storch himself, if he only had the time to reach him…

  Col. Nye screamed. Storch was turning purple. His face and neck seemed to swell as his skin changed. It looked as if he was holding his breath, but the entire courtyard reverberated with the echoes of his cavernous lungs, as if he was trying to suck all the air out of the world. Nye shocked him, but Storch didn't seem to notice. He raced across the courtyard and hoisted one bandy leg to kick Storch squarely in the chest, but Cundieffe caught the leg under the knee and easily tipped the Colonel back on his ass. His hand went for—oh, nuts, Col. Nye still had his gun.

  "Stay the—hell—away from this man, Colonel! Get your men back! He's having an allergic reaction to the sunlight! Help me get him into the shade—"

  Cundieffe bent to lift Storch up by the arms, but the sergeant shook him off and stood on his own. "Get your hands off my fucking body," Storch said. He was not shaking or hyperventilating, anymore, but his skin was still a livid violet. He looked long and hard at Cundieffe, as if he'd just awakened from a dream to find the FBI agent lurking at his bedside. "They haven't fed me in a week," he said.

  "Your cancer isn't killing you, is it?"

  Storch, still looking up at the silvery blue square of sky, shook his head. "When I—when it needs to adapt, then He goes away," he mumbled. "For a while. Talk fast."

  "Who controls RADIANT?"

  Storch trembled. "Ask another question."

  "Where is the Mission?"

  "I really don't know."

  "Why did you do it?"

  "To stop Him…" Storch spat out the big H the same way rape victims speak of their attackers, the way pathologically God-fearing people talk about their deity, the One who gives them orders when they forget to take their meds.

  "Stop whom? Stop him from doing what?"

  "Stop Him from changing us. Being us…"

  "Why weren't you killed by RADIANT?"

  "It kills you, but—it speaks to cancer, and the cancer grows and it— becomes you."

  He was raving so Cundieffe switched topics, firing his questions double-time. "Who controls the Mission? How many cells are there?"

  "Probably Wittrock, now. Everyone else I know is dead." He seemed to strain for a moment—to remember, or simply to talk? "Wittrock said there were other units, but I don't know where they are."

  "Whoever controls RADIANT turned it on the Mission in retribution for the attack, correct?"

  "Well, shit, I guess you got all your answers."

  "Does Keogh control RADIANT?"

  Storch only looked at him for a second, then looked back up at the sky. The tendons stood out in his neck, muscles bunched up in his jaw. "His name's not Keogh. Not Keitel or Quesada, either."

  "Then what is his name?"

  Storch looked away from the sky as if it had suddenly become filled with something he couldn't bear to see. When he turned to look at Cundieffe, his whole body trembled with effort, yet remained totally contained. He stared very hard at Cundieffe, who began to believe that the prisoner was suffering a stroke. "He…has no name. He steals names, faces…H—he—his name was K-k-k…" A capillary in his right eye burst. "Tell my daddy to stop writing that book…"

  "What else does Keogh control, Sergeant?"

  "Agent Cundieffe, we'll have no more questions." Storch thawed and became molten, flowed up into Cundieffe's space so fast he was sure trigger-happy Col. Nye would fry him, but if he did, it had no effect anymore. Which shouldn't surprise, he thought.

  When it needs to adapt—

  Cundieffe felt himself suddenly dealt deeply into a game he did not know how to play. Either Storch was a masterful con man, or a certifiable split personality, or something else that no one in the world could understand. In any case, he would be dead in a matter of hours, so Cundieffe decided to play along.

  "To whom am I speaking, please?"

  "We are all one flesh, touching, loving, hating, killing itself, Agent. We are all one flesh, becoming one mind…"

  "What is the purpose of Radiant Dawn?"

  "We are teaching the world to adapt, Agent. In what they see as death, there lies eternal life. What they really fear is transformation, not death."

  "You're going to die. Very shortly. Don't you think it's time to speak more clearly?"

  "They can't kill me," Storch said. "This body is only the messenger. They cannot kill the message."

  Col. Nye and his soldiers drew around Storch in a crushing knot, shoving Cundieffe out of the way. "And what is your message?" he yelled through the press.

  "A bloodless evolution, Agent Cundieffe. The seeds of change in the old flesh are about to bear new fruit."

  "This interview is over," Col. Nye snarled. With Cundieffe racing after them, the soldiers carried Storch bodily out of the courtyard and back into the dark maze of service corridors.

  Twice soldiers peeled off to try to hold Cundieffe back, but he slipped out of their grasp, leaving one holding his overcoat by the collar after he ducked out of it. "You've got to postpone the transfer, Col. Nye! He's trying to tell us something that we have to know! Damn it, listen to me!"

  The escort spilled out onto a loading dock opening out on a parking lot. An armored car waited in the middle of the loading area. The street outside was cleared, and soldiers stood behind the cars parked across the street. Beyond them lay a park, barren, ash-colored trees and frost-seared lawn. The nearest building visible was over two thousand yards away.

  "Fuck off, pencil-neck," Nye wheeled on Cundieffe. "He goes. So says the Army in its infinite wisdom, and so say I." He jabbed Cundieffe's belly with something. Cundieffe looked down. Oh crud, there's my gun.

  The soldiers lowered Storch off the dock and hustled him across the lot to the open loading door of the armored car. Cundieffe was looking from his gun to Nye's nosehole and the red-rimmed, murderous eyes above it. He was not looking when the silent shot slammed its target.

  They both spun round in time to see Storch's head split open as a bullet and a great corona of explosive gas bored through it. The escort formation fell apart as most of the soldiers blindly returned fire out into the street, and the rest dropped to the ground and rolled away in a panic.

  Col. Nye, cursing a supersonic blue streak, leapt down from the dock and charged over to the armored car, where the driver was already shouting for help into the radio. In the midst of it all, Storch took a halting step out into the sunlight, then another, then another. Foam and smoke streamed out of his skull, and his blood on the ground danced and sizzled like grease on a griddle. Cundieffe stepped off the dock and fell hard on one foot, so awestruck was he by the sight. Until now, it suddenly dawned on him, he'd only seen people die on television. Sgt. Storch was escaping, though Cundieffe could see light streaming through the hole in his skull.

  "Knock him down!" Col. Nye screamed, and Cundieffe was trying to get up, but his ankle was sprained, and wouldn't bear his weight. He threw himself in Storch's direction to bring him down and out of the line of fire, wherever that was, but two more shots stitched the sergeant's chest and blew a lot of fluid and tissue out his back. Storch seemed to freeze and weigh the pros and cons of being dead, and, after a while, reluctantly accepted. He fell face-down on the pavement. His skin was starting to turn purple again in the sun.

  Col.
Nye was pointing at the office building in the distance, just over a mile away, and shrieking hysterically into a phone and at his guards, who piled into the armored car and peeled out of the garage. In an instant, there was just Cundieffe and Col. Nye standing over the body of Sgt. Storch. Only the sizzling sound of Storch's burning blood broke the silence. The awful, abundantly lethal wounds in his head and chest seemed, incredibly, to grow, spreading like stains, causing the flesh to subside and run like melting wax. Nye was still holding Cundieffe's gun, and Cundieffe knew by looking at him that it was not a question of whether he would get it back, but how.

  "Never, in all my years, have I lost a prisoner," Nye started, "not one whatsoever—" Cundieffe sucked in air and blew him away.

  "You lost one today. What you've cost us by delivering him to his execution, we won't even begin to understand until it's too late. Your security was a farce, Colonel, and my report will reflect that. In fact, if I may make so bold, I intend to pursue an investigation of this entire transfer, which stinks of a staged execution."

  Nye's eyes opened twice as wide as his nosehole and got twice as dark. "My fault? Staged?"

  "He had something to tell me, and your people wanted him dead. When I stated my intent to postpone the execution, you acted accordingly. Don't worry, I'm sure your punishment will be minimal. After all, you were only following orders."

  Col. Nye's hand was shaking as he flipped Cundieffe's gun around in his leathery hand and stuffed it back into Cundieffe's holster. "Go home, G-boy. I've got a mess to clean up."

  Col. Nye went over to oversee the removal of Storch's body as Cundieffe called in to AD Wyler. As the Assistant Director's secretary put him on hold, he watched a team of Army medics in biohazard suits load Storch into a pressure-sealed stretcher. One of them dumped a clear solution all over the blood and tissue Storch left on the concrete.

  "This is Wyler. Speak."

  "He's dead, sir. Killed in transit."

  Wyler was silent for a long time. A medic mopped up the last of the mess, and they left in a civilian ambulance. Cundieffe was alone in the garage, and cars were moving down the street again. "Get here immediately. Were you able to learn anything useful?"

  "I don't know, sir. He spoke to me, but I think he'd lost his mind. He didn't make much sense. I think we need to change the focus of the investigation. I think we need to take a much closer look at Cyril Keogh."

  "Get here, now. Dr. Keogh is not our concern, but weathering the shitstorm that's about to slop over our decks is."

  Cundieffe winced. He still couldn't bring himself to accept his superior's sometimes vulgar hyperbole. He took one last look at the garage where Storch was killed. The only trace of his passing looked like just another oil stain on the asphalt.

  "There are procedures, Martin," Wyler was saying into his ear. "Even for situations like this, there is policy. That's why we're here."

  As he walked out of the garage and into the midwinter sunlight, he looked up at the sun that had given Storch his last meal.

  They can kill this body, but they can't kill the message.

  Cundieffe hailed a cab and ordered the driver to take him to FBI Headquarters. In his pocket, he held a plastic bag in which he'd had, until this morning, the last of his mother's egg salad sandwiches. In it, his white linen handkerchief, which he'd managed to dab in the bubbling halo of blood and brain around Storch's head. The military believed they would learn more from Storch dead than alive.

  Then so would he.

  Somewhere under his many layers of clothing, his cellular phone trilled. It took him three rings to get to it, in the breast pocket of his blazer.

  "You're still at your mother's house?"

  "Yes sir, I was finishing up some overdue yardwork. The report—"

  "We need you here. Get to LAX immediately."

  "Sir?"

  The Assistant Director was already gone.

  You have a lot to learn about America.

  Cundieffe set aside the unfinished Storch report and took up another, slimmer, but older, manila outer shell brittle and sepia-stained. He laid it open and began to pore over the contents, looking up as he did every so often and squinting, then trying on his mother's spare pair of bifocals and squinting even harder.

  The oldest photo in the file was of Frank Cundieffe kneeling beside the planted orange tree. Never much of a kidder himself, he had a pair of handcuffs out and was uncuffing the trunk of the four-foot sapling as he looked off-camera with naked distaste.

  The second photo was of Frank and Muriel Cundieffe coming out of the lounge at the Hawaiian Village resort. His father, tight, tired and sizing up the cameraman, the bolts of silver in his hair lit up like tinsel by the flash. His mother startled but already starting to laugh at the hotel portraitist's charming ambush. The flower in her hair was three shades off from the mauve hue of the flowers on the tree his father had brought home. Cundieffe had the photo digitally enhanced to bring the colors out through the slow decay, as the cheap colors had oxidized and turned green. He took a flower from the seat beside him and held it up to the picture, then up to the blow-up he'd made of the flower. Nestled behind her ear, it gave a strikingly lush asymmetry to his mother's plain but handsome face, her chestnut brown hair became something like gold. The flower in his hand could have melted into the photograph. He set the file down and crossed the yard. There were dozens more photos in the file, taken by himself on two occasions in the last year, when it had become clear that the trees would not survive the infestation.

  It had been easy to replace the orange tree. A farm in Encinitas had taken cuttings and seeds from the original and matched it to a sort of hybrid with enhanced resistance to pests. After planting it, Cundieffe had groomed it to match the photos taken the previous August, just before his first trip to Washington. The hibiscus was the one he was most concerned about. It was not cloned, and it was not a perfect match, though he had pruned it as best he could. If his mother studied them with the same critical eye with which she'd scrutinized the Director's memos, she would not fail to observe the difference in shade. But if she remembered the one she wore in her hair on the night she and her Frank made Martin Cundieffe, she would see a tiny piece of the world that would reflect her memories.

  Mother would be back from her New Year's card game any time now. Cundieffe rinsed out his mug and deposited it in the dishwasher, collected his files and locked them in his car, then came back for the trashbags. There were eight of them, all that remained of the old trees. He lifted the last of the bags up and swept away any remaining traces of sawdust or whitefly floss before stowing them in his trunk. He left a note on Mother's countertop before he packed his bags and left.

  Dear Mother,

  Called back to HQ.

  Tell the Melnitzes to make in their hats. The trees are clean.

  Love Always, Martin

  ~3~

  Ft. Meade, Maryland

  Lieutenant Channing Durban presented his ID at the gate, but the guard only glanced at the monitor that printed out the reader's scan of the barcode. The guard was a civilian, standard issue Government Services Administration doorstop, equally qualified as bailiff or rock concert event staff. Lt. Durban drummed on the steering wheel and tried to make out the guard's badge number through the frosted glass of his booth. The guards were routinely soft on the military personnel, a weakness that had been exploited more than once with devastating results for the Agency. In years past, it had rankled him, but tonight, with the new year only an hour old, it made him breathe a bit easier. He snapped a salute at the guard, who rubbed his stubbled chins and nodded blankly in response.

  Lt. Durban stopped at a gas station on I-95, five miles south of Ft. Meade, ran to a stall and locked it, dropped his pants, and stooped to remove a cache of documents from his colon.

  The whole thing was a little larger than a tightly rolled dollar bill; inside a bullet-shaped plastic capsule, he'd compacted 512 pages of text on microfilm. He almost washed it off in the toi
let basin, but balked when he thought of having to replace it, wiped it thoroughly with a paper towel, and dropped it into his breast pocket. He threw up the ham sandwich and dill pickle spears he'd had for lunch, changed out of his uniform into corduroy slacks and a sweater, went back to his car, and drove on south, to Washington.

  Chan Durban didn't join the Navy to become a spy any more than he wanted to shoot guns or ride in boats. He liked to play with electronics and wanted to go to college, so he enlisted and performed so exceptionally at communications school that he was swept into the Naval Security Group and stationed at its western processing center at CINCPACFLT, Hawaii.

  Along the way, he discovered he loved the Navy and didn't ever want to leave. He rushed through college and marriage and right back into the Naval Security Group and after short stints at its satellite processing centers, he went to work at Fort Meade in the Naval liaison office of Operations at the National Security Agency. So enamored was he of the service that he didn't mind being promoted above the gear which had been his first love. He had learned in his four years at the Puzzle Palace that the same love of tinkering and detail could be lavished on policy and documentation, that blocs of personnel and computers, indeed the entire colossal apparatus, could be viewed as a machine, and benefit from being so handled. It was a comfort to be absorbed into such a machine, to make it work at optimum efficiency for the American people.

  He really believed shit like that up until October of last year, when he'd started getting calls from an anonymous guy who claimed to speak for the Pentagon, ordering him to spy on the NSA for the Navy.

  The caller only rung him up when he was off-duty and alone in the house: usually late at night, never more than ten minutes after his wife, Mitsy, and their dogs had dropped off to sleep. He swept the house for bugs with a surprisingly effective portable device his older brother had bought him as a gag gift three Christmases back. Nothing. No unfamiliar cars or service vans parked outside. Still, they knew exactly when to call, and what to say. The tone was anything but official.