Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  "Do you know where you are? No, of course you don't. You've been dead. You can't just walk out of here."

  "Where am I?" His hands wanted to get wet in this moron so badly, he had to back away, but the idiot, thinking he had the upper hand, only came closer. Are you doing that, God? he thought.

  "You are on the fourth subbasement level of the Special Projects Bioresearch Complex underneath Ft. Detrick, the Army's principal research facility for biological weapons. Above our heads are about a thousand USAMRIID scientists, and twice that many fighting soldiers of the 2nd Chemical Corps. You can't throw a rock in here without knocking over something that could kill every man, woman and child in America.

  Ebola, Marburg, Q, botulinum toxin, anthrax, bubonic plague, dengue, cholera, encephalitis, brucellosis, typhoid, the whole fucking hit parade is on tap in freezers upstairs. This base, and every other military base in the country, is on a state of high alert because of us, which means doubled guards, and beefed-up, full combat units."

  "Who? Because of me?"

  "No. The Mission." The man tapped his own chest with the gun, and pointed it right back at him.

  "You tried to burn me," he said, looking at the dead man against the far wall.

  "We thought you were—you were fucking dead. They brought you here to harvest genetic material from you. That's why you were shot full of NGS, there wasn't even supposed to be a cell left intact…and then, just to be sure, I was sent to reroute your body here." He tried to wipe his face against the helmet liner, then put the gun away. "Aw, fuck it. If you won't die, you won't die."

  "How are you getting out?"

  "I was just going to burn you and walk out of here."

  "What about him?"

  "Just a fucking corporal. Didn't even know who you were." The Mission agent walked around the gurney, sweeping the empty body bag into the incinerator, and bent to lift up the dead corporal by his arms. "Help me get him up on the gurney."

  "What for?"

  "What the hell do you think, what for? You're gonna put on his suit."

  Storch limped over to the body and took hold of the legs. There was a sick second where he looked at the body and a new kind of fire swept through him, like the agonizing fatigue of lactic acid buildup in muscles, like—hunger. His body was so weak it could barely hold onto his soul, and fixing itself apparently didn't come cheap. He had to eat something. He thought of Spike Team Texas feeding. He thought about the fire. The Mission agent started unsealing the suit's maze of Velcro seals and zippers. Storch noted the name and rank on his suit: Lt. Dennison. The dead man on the gurney was Corporal Wynorski. "Dennison," he breathed. "They cured me."

  "What?"

  "He's gone…God…Keogh, the…the voice in my head. Shit, I thought he was…" Dennison's eyes registered no understanding whatsoever. "When they shot me…"

  "We shot you, asshole. You went over, and got zapped. We were told you had to be iced before they got you here, or they were going to strip your ass down for parts. They didn't tell us what to do if you were still…" He'd gotten Wynorski's suit open and laid it out. Now, he tugged the helmet off the dead man's head, and rolled the body on its side to drag the suit out from under it.

  Corporal Wynorski was a young redheaded man with freckles splattered all over his face. His right eye was burst open, and the whole right side of the head bulged unnaturally. Excellent shooting, he thought, seeing the Mission agent with new respect. He must've been the one who plugged me. The hole in the face-plate was small enough it could be plugged with a thumbtack, but the interior was slick with blood. Dennison dropped the suit on the floor at Storch's feet. "Just put the goddamned thing on."

  "I don't want to. I just want to go home."

  "Then walk out of here, asshole. It'd probably be easier to get out by myself, if they were all shooting at you, anyway."

  "Dennison," he growled, "you don't understand." His hands were starting to get out of control again, roaming the air in front of him like very angry dogs.

  "That's not my damned name, but I do outrank your sorry noncom zombie ass, so do it."

  Storch's joints still lacked a lot of their old flexibility, so it took a long time for him to get into the suit, even with not-Dennison fussing over the Byzantine arrangement of the zippers. The suit was almost as heavy as the armored one he'd worn at the Radiant Dawn raid, with two air tanks in the back and a hose for plugging into the canned air tubes running through the ceilings in the labs. Wynorski's Army boots were too tight for his feet, so he left them and slipped his bare feet into the suit. The Corporal's inner jumpsuit could have been a few inches longer, as well. Moving with exaggerated slowness, feeling his muscles chafe at each other like bundles of jute rope, he zipped into it and hauled the suit up over his shoulders as not-Dennison did up all the seals. He did the helmet last. Not-Dennison wiped out the worst of the mess on one of Wynorski's socks, tossed it on the gurney with the boots, and pushed the Corporal's body feet-first into the maw of the incinerator.

  Storch pulled the helmet down over his head and let not-Dennison clamp down the seals. Staring straight ahead, his eye was a few inches above the circular hole, which had been made so clean and fast it left no spiderweb cracks in the Plexiglas. He began, almost immediately, to sweat. Copious ribbons of perspiration beaded on his forehead and streamed down into his eyes. His hand came up reflexively to wipe it away, thumped against the helmet. He could almost taste himself in here, the curdled reek of rotten, reborn Storch a suffocating miasma that, in his old life—

  What you perceived as sickness was really the highest blessing…

  —would have put him in a coma. Beneath it, he could smell the distinct funk of the suit's previous occupant, a soup of sweat and menthol cigarettes, starchy cafeteria food and rhinovirus. If he didn't shut it out, he feared it would carry him away, flood the tenuous ramparts he'd built around his own identity, and make him an animal with no name. He shivered as he fought for self-control. Not-Dennison seemed not to notice as he went back to the door and waved the back of his hand in front of it. Storch looked at his own sleeve and saw a bar-coded ID card in a clear plastic slipcover sewn into the vinyl, just above the glove. He looked around the inside of the helmet, scenting something new. His fight-orflight instincts kicked into high gear; someone was in here with him. He looked up just as it dripped in his eye, and the world went red.

  Keogh had told Storch that his cells held libraries of data, of all the genetic ancestors of Storch going back to the first day of Creation. Now, he discovered that he was not unique in this respect. Wynorski's blood had tales to tell, too, and they came rushing at him all at once. With a sense that was not sight or sound or smell, but a common root of them all, he fell down through the ancestry of the dead corporal, reeling as the strange flesh-memories converged with his own in the geological yesterday of primeval Europe, then down the wormhole of their shared ancestry, down into that unspeakable origin where he was—

  all things

  —a raging, amoebic god. Unmarked graves and devouring beasts vomited him out, wombs yawned and swallowed him, and in between, the stylus of the world scripted his form and scratched it out, again and again. It might have been bearable, if not for the absence of the voice of God in his ear to make sense of it all, but there was no voice but his own, crying out at a billion lessons learned too late, at a million forms of flesh forgotten, yet struggling still to live again in the mind of a man who could not remember his own name.

  Someone was shaking him. In a dream paler than all the others, he was a man in a plastic shell, and another man was trying to stir him to act. He lashed out, clawing at the dream and trying to climb onto it as a man in a flood grabs at a floating scrap of debris, but the man thought it was an attack, and leapt out of his reach. He fought with his whole body to stay in this dream where he had a name and somewhere to go, where he was not yet dead again. There was a gun in his face, the man was thinking of shooting him. He couldn't be killed like that, he knew, but he could be
incapacitated long enough for the man to put him in the fire.

  Quicker than the man could react, quicker even than he could follow with his eye, Storch's hand swept the gun away and took it from the man with a simple twist of his wrist that stopped scant millimeters away from breaking it.

  "Let's go," Storch said, but the man wasn't moving. He just stood there with his eyes glued on Storch's, and his mouth hanging open. "What?"

  "Look," the Mission agent said, "at yourself."

  Storch looked around the room, saw only the stainless steel surface of the gurney for a mirror, and went to it. It was like looking through a doorway into hell. The man had shoved Wynorski's redheaded, freckled body into the fire, yet there he was looking up at Storch from the polished steel bed.

  Storch wore the dead corporal's face. His hair coiling like snakes and bronzing itself, his pigment gathering into pools and oozing out of his pores in brown splatters, his eyes changing to golden-green, looking directly through the pinhole in the mask that now lined up with his eye. He looked again at the ID card on his sleeve. The dead man again. Him.

  "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, what the fuck are you?" the Mission Agent hissed.

  In a voice a full octave higher than his own, Storch groaned, "Get me out of here."

  They left the incinerator chamber pushing the gurney, Storch in front, not-Dennison bringing up the rear. Not-Dennison didn't ask for his gun back.

  The corridor was like any hospital basement; white tiled walls festooned with steel pipes and plastic tubing, many heavy steel doors with card readers or the kind of center-crank that hatches on subs had. The air was recycled, scoured and scrubbed of all particles, a dead kiss streaming into his eye from the hole.

  Not-Dennison parked the gurney against the wall and took the lead, shuffling all the way down the long straight corridor to an elevator at the end. He said nothing, gave Storch no reason to suspect a trap, but Storch could smell fear in the glut of stale chemicals in the waste air venting out of his suit. The Mission agent was scared shitless of him, but he was equally terrified of the walk out of here.

  Storch knew that ninety percent of going where you didn't belong on an Army base lay in looking like you knew what you were doing. He'd never been inside a bioweapons research facility, but not-Dennison had everything doped out, and should have been able to walk out, and now he was Corporal Wynorski, no one was looking for Storch, because he was dead, he was brought here in a bag…. Not that anyone would be looking for him, because he was dead, he was brought here in a bag.

  You are Zane Ezekiel Storch, Sergeant, ODA 591, Fifth Special Forces, retired, you live in a trailer in Death Valley, your father is George Gorman Storch, Master Sgt., retired, you like—

  The elevator was closing. Not-Dennison looking at him, doing nothing. A guard in a full suit like theirs stood beside the control panel with one arm across his chest, gripping the strap of the unwieldy M16A2 rifle on his back. Storch caught the door, dodged in and herded not-Dennison between himself and the guard. He kept his head twisted away as he presented his sleeve-card for scanning. The guard ran a red penlight over it.

  The doors shut. The elevator car rose so smoothly it might be riding on air. Not-Dennison watched the guard.

  "You said you were both going topside, sir?" the guard asked. SGT. KORPELA, Storch read on the breast of his isolation suit. He sounded way too impressed with himself. It had probably never occurred to him that riding an elevator in a germ warfare lab was a shit detail.

  "Yeah, we just took out the trash," not-Dennison said. "I'm off-duty starting five minutes ago."

  "Corporal Wynorski, you're supposed to be on 2, Lab 182a, sanitation detail. Ten minutes ago." Sgt. Korpela pointed at Storch, reading the wall display readout from his card. In a confined space like the elevator, Storch thought, the twenty-inch barrel and fixed stock on the M16A2 were all but useless.

  "Yessir," Storch piped. He stopped, the weird, reedy sound still buzzing in his ears. Strange that he could consume a man's genetic memory, steal his likeness and his voice, but no idea how to use them. It shouldn't take much to get this guy off his back, he was only needling Corporal Wynorski because a janitor was a little below elevator guard, pecking order-wise. But he couldn't get his brain to focus on what to say, because his body was planning something else again.

  "Wynorski puked his suit," not-Dennison said.

  "Oh shit, is that right?" The guard chuckled.

  "Yessir," Storch mumbled. "Wasn't hung over, or nothing. Just bad lunch—"

  "Didn't ask for your life story, Wynorski. Get hosed down and hump it to 182a. Fucking suit-puking janitor."

  Storch settled down, got his breathing under control. Everything was going to be okay. He was going to walk out of here without hurting anybody. Everything was going to be okay…

  The elevator stopped as smoothly as it started. "Holy shit, what the fuck did you do to yourself?" a finger lanced at Storch's eye, plugged the hole in his face-plate. Storch stepped back and grabbed the guard's hand, but not-Dennison was already close in alongside him and had something pressed to his head.

  "Settle down, Sergeant Korpela. Do you want to know what's in this?"

  Not-Dennison held a syringe to Sgt. Korpela's head. The needle punctured his suit just above his mask, and he looked at it with his whole face screwed up and his eyes crossed, mutely screaming, oh yes, he knew this place well enough that he had a pretty good idea of what might be in it.

  "I found it in a freezer downstairs. It's an airborne hemorrhagic fever bug. Start the elevator."

  The guard only stared at the waggling needle.

  "This little squirt I'm about to put in your eye? It's enough to kill about ninety-five percent of North America in a month. Of course, they'll cremate you before they let you out of here. Take us up, okay?"

  "Are you—is he—infected…sir?" the guard pointed one finger at Storch.

  "No, his suit was like that when he put it on. Put that fucking finger on the button and start this car up, now." He pushed the needle through the hood of the suit and pricked Private Korpela's forehead with it. The guard screamed like a girl, disarmed the emergency shut off, and resumed their ascent, never looking away from the needle.

  "A crisis appears to have been averted," not-Dennison said. None were more surprised by what Storch did next than Storch himself. His hand rose up and paused in the air before Sergeant Korpela's rolled-up eyes. For a split second, Korpela's heart got very loud in his ears, the jackhammer lub-dub opening up to reveal the microacoustic zap of the electrical impulses firing his overtaxed heart. Storch flattened his hand into a blade, and brought it down lightning quick onto Korpela's solar plexus. The heart stopped dead. Storch could hear and feel exhausted blood backflushing into the vena cava, his valves snapping at vacuum at the mouth of his aorta, before clamping shut forever. Sergeant Korpela slumped in the corner, always the last to know. Not-Dennison pulled the syringe out and capped the needle before pocketing it. Storch's hand arced up again before not-Dennison, but he stopped it.

  "That wasn't necessary, Corporal Wynorski," the Mission agent snapped.

  "What's in the syringe, asshole?"

  "Fucking knockout drops. When we get topside—"

  The door slid open, and not-Dennison stepped out and marched double-time away from the elevator. Storch took Sgt. Korpela's rifle and followed. Gray daylight streamed in from a floor to ceiling window at the end of a long empty corridor. A sign opposite the elevators pointed the way to DECONTAMINATION.

  "Are there cameras on the elevators?" Storch asked.

  "Of course, but nobody's watching unless the alarm is sounded."

  The alarm sounded.

  They ran. Doors flashed by on both sides, Storch swinging the rifle to bear on them. A big window on the right looked into a lab where rows of robot arms worked over trays of virus cultures. A few overseers in suits watched them run by, their faces inscrutable behind the fluorescent light reflecting off their masks.

  The ex
terior window was getting nearer, and they'd seen nobody else in the corridor, nothing between them and the outside. In less than twenty paces, he left not-Dennison behind, the rifle clamped under his arm. He hoped he didn't have to kill anyone else to get out of here, but down in his bones, he felt none of the revulsion for it that he'd felt before. He wasn't in their Army, anymore. He wasn't even in their fucking species. All he wanted was to go home, and if they weren't willing to let him do that…

  He stopped at the window, had to wipe the glass with his sleeve to see through the condensation on it. It was early in the day, overcast, snow on the ground and on the conifers that screened the window off from whatever lay beyond. His body seemed to know what to do, so far. He hit the window with four shots. Wild ricochets, sparks and darkness rained down on the corridor. The bullets caromed off the glass and smashed into a light fixture overhead. There was a scratch, a little one. The "glass" was transparent plastic tank armor, like the walls of a killer whale tank at Sea World. Still, he had to kick it to be sure. He succeeded in ricocheting himself across the hall and into the concrete block wall opposite.

  Someone shot at him, a whole lot of bullets passing by just as he hit the wall after his second attempt to go through the window. He spun and rolled onto his belly on the rifle, looking down the corridor with Lieutenant not-Dennison still unaccounted for at his back.

  The corridor angled off to the right, suggesting that they were on the first or second floor of a cylindrical building. Pillars set into the inside wall provided good shooting cover every twenty feet. He could see a boot and a rifle barrel protruding from behind each of the first three pillars.

  He took careful aim on the rear-mounted sight, clamped down the stock between his chest and the slick tile floor, and squeezed off two shots. The toe of the boot exploded and the soldier stumbled shrieking out into the open hall, his weight on the shot foot and he went down, a blind, clumsy noncombatant in his heavy MOPP gear, his gun forgotten on the floor.