Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  Who they were officially coming for remained an open-ended question that no one had deigned to answer for him. Neither had anyone in real power dignified his RADIANT theory with a response. Quite by accident, he'd come across a news spot on the radio, three days before, about a fire that razed a Radiant Dawn Hospice Outreach Center in San Diego. The local newspaper's site carried a short article about the fire, which was believed to be accidental, and which occurred after hours, when the building was unoccupied. A picture of the center's senior counselor, a bald, middle-aged woman who gripped a flowery hat in her hands as she surveyed the charred ruins. In the picture, standing off a good thirty feet down the sidewalk, two men in dark suits and shades looking on. Cundieffe studied them until his eyes refused to see straight. Were they government investigators, or Missionaries, revisiting their handiwork, or were they just arson detectives with nothing better to do on a Sunday morning?

  He had to believe that this made sense to somebody in the invisible hierarchy. RADIANT was the connection and the key, and he had to hope that whoever was putting the puzzle together and looking over the complete picture could see what was happening. They were One, And Not Many. They had to know the best path. He had to believe in them, as he believed in himself.

  Everyone else in the office had gone two hours ago by the time he put down the files and laid his head on his desk to rest his eyes. Somewhere, very, very far away, he heard a vacuum.

  He might have dozed off for a few minutes, because he jolted and said something to the effect of, "Yes, sir, it's on its way, sir," when his computer beeped at him and his phone rang at the same time. Picking up the phone, he recoiled from a blast of keening static like a dental drill in his ear, slammed it back in its cradle. It was too much like the crank-call dream he'd had this morning, if it was a dream.

  A window on the monitor advised him that he'd received an e-mail with an attachment. There was no return address, no subject line, and nothing on the screen, just the attached, unlabeled file.

  He moved his hand to delete it, suspecting a virus. A second window popped up on top of the unopened e-mail: a progress bar creeping towards 100%. "Printer #3403 Working…"

  Cundieffe hit all the cut-off buttons to no avail, then turned off his computer. He stood up and looked down the ranks of darkened cubicles to the main corridor. There was no one else here. He no longer heard a vacuum.

  Slowly, as if there were a tiger somewhere in the office, he crept out of his cubicle and half-ran, half-skipped to the printing station. The big workhorse inkjets sat silently in rows like washing machines, but the HP laser printer at the end of the row whispered as it pushed a fresh photographic image out onto its drying tray.

  He looked over his shoulder at the vast, empty office again. Surely, this was some kind of network breakdown. He hadn't asked for anything to be printed, he hadn't even opened the damned thing, but who'd believe that it wasn't his fault. Less than a month at Headquarters, and—

  Cundieffe looked now at the photograph, and his raving stopped dead in its tracks. He took off his glasses and held them up close to the image, blinking spastically to bring his damnably feeble eyes into focus.

  It was a grainy black and white snapshot of three rows of tweedy, bespectacled men standing in a desert. Across the scrubby plain behind them loomed a skeletal metal tower with a bulbous pendulum hanging from the apex. They were talking to someone off-camera, looking at the ground, smoking cigarettes or pipes; not posing, and the blurred edges of the photo and the grittiness of the exposure told him that it was taken with a vintage Minox spy camera. The men looked like college professors and engineers, rumpled tweed trousers and shirtsleeves, thick glasses, bemused, put-upon expressions and grievous sunburns. They were scientists, and the pendulum was an atom bomb. This photograph was taken at the height of the Manhattan Project, at the core of the most secret enterprise in human history.

  He knew this because the Limited Atomic Test Ban Treaty ruled out above-ground testing of nuclear weapons in 1963. He also knew this because he recognized one of the men in the front row: J. Robert Oppenheimer, godfather of the atomic weapons program at Los Alamos in the 1940s. His security clearance was revoked in 1954 after scathing HUAC hearings unearthed some Red unpleasantness in his family background. Apropos of nothing, he remembered a recording of Oppenheimer he'd heard somewhere. The outcast atomic visionary read from the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita, seeking an ancient precedent to his apocalyptic invention. In the telephone call, he heard again the haunting hollowness of Oppenheimer's voice as he read the words of Vishnu: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

  Looking deeper, straining harder, he recognized another man, in the back row, on the far end. The high forehead, the chiseled features and penetrating eyes that looked like coins in the desert sun. Looking not a day younger than the pictures of him on the Radiant Dawn website. It was Dr. Cyril Keogh.

  He walked back to his desk with the picture clasped in one hand behind his back. Still scanning the office, listening for distant, muffled laughter. Someone was fooling around with him, someone who knew what he believed and how passionate he was about his work. If this paste-up job was as sophisticated as the telephone call about Mother was crude, it only

  pointed more vehemently at a single source.

  More tests.

  It was enough to make a man want to use profanity aloud.

  His phone rang.

  He picked up the phone, but he held it away from his ear at first. There was no static on the line, though, only a voice he recognized asking, "Cundieffe? Agent Martin Cundieffe?"

  "Brady?"

  "Why aren't you in Idaho?"

  Cundieffe's anger sprang out of the knotted muscles of his neck and jaw and seared down the line like hot wax breaking through the wall of an unevenly burnt candle. "I met with you the other day at great risk to my job, most of which these days seems to be researching…crap that I don't understand and which nobody else either knows or cares about, but which consumes all my time, leaving me no leisure whatever to play games with a fraternity of…of asshole mutant bureaucrats. I work diligently and without cease for justice every day and night of my life, and I hold myself to a higher standard than either the Bureau or any other agency of the government of this great nation. In short, I do not test well when I feel I am…when I'm being f-fuh-f-fucked with, Mr. Hoecker. Do I make myself clear?"

  Had he just sworn? He didn't even hear breathing on the line. Well, damn him, if he expected an apology. "Brady, are you there? Did I make myself clear? Why in the world would I want to be in Idaho?"

  "It's not about stolen cars, Martin. It's about everything."

  He started to make good with a retort, but the dial tone cut him off. He laid the phone to rest on the cradle and sat down hard in the chair.

  The phone rang again.

  He began to walk away from it, but the anger and the paranoia were too much for him.

  "Agent Cundieffe?"

  "Who is this?"

  "I'm sorry, sir. It's Agent Pete Waters, from the Moscow, Idaho, resident agency. I did the surveillance on Heilige Berg, the other night?"

  "Right, right, I remember. You didn't find anything. Listen, I appreciate your diligence, but this is not a terrorism case. You said yourself that they didn't appear to be doing anything, and car theft is not a counterterrorism issue, in any case. Until there's some new development—"

  "A boy from the compound ran away from the place in a stolen car last night. He hot-rodded into White Bird and crashed into the Dairy Queen. He's in sheriff's custody, right now."

  "Is the Dairy Queen in an adjoining state, Agent Waters?"

  "No, sir, it's the one right there in White Bird."

  "Don't call me again."

  "Sir, I was told you'd want to know about this." The Moscow agent sounded exasperated beyond measure, as if he were going to hang up, himself. "The boy's not too badly banged up, but he's real sick, throwing up, can't walk straight. He demanded police protection, bu
t he won't go to the hospital. Says he needs to be locked up and a doctor needs to come to see him."

  "Get to the point, Agent Waters, please. What is he so afraid of?"

  "He said his church group was taken over by aliens. He says they poisoned the water and the food."

  "The boy watches too much bad television."

  "He said the aliens came from a place or a thing called Radiant Dawn."

  His teeth gritted so hard he tasted a chip on his tongue as he shouted at the idiot agent from Moscow. "I don't know who put you up to this, Waters, but there's going to be hell to pay to OPR, come morning, if I don't get a straight explanation from you about this…this shit!"

  Shocked gasp on the other end, a hand over the receiver, Waters laughing at him? "This kid is a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi fruitcake, sir, but he's telling the truth about one thing. He's got big tumors all over him like you wouldn't believe. He's real, real sick. They want to fly him out to the University Medical Center at Boise, in the morning—"

  "Wait. Hold him there until I get there. I'll be on the next plane out of Washington."

  "Sir? I don't understand what this is about, but I sure as hell would appreciate a heads-up as to what we're dealing with, here."

  "You and me both, Agent Waters," Cundieffe said, and hung up. Crushingly grateful for whatever perverse impulse forced him to drive to work this morning, he shrugged into his overcoat and speed-dialed the airport.

  ~16~

  Storch drove as hard as the icy roads would allow, racing down the mountain the way they'd come up the night before, stumbling onto the freshly plowed two-lane State Road 50 and heading west.

  He was startled to find that it was night again: he must've slept a lot longer in the cell than he'd guessed. He felt better than he had any right to, and his hands had returned more or less to normal, though they itched like mad and were still peeling. He felt hunger and heat so bad he thought he'd faint. He kept the windows rolled all the way down, but he'd have to stop soon and eat something, or his body would start eating itself. He would hold out as long as he could to get out of the Mission's domain of influence. As if they couldn't figure out where he was going. Even if there wasn't some kind of tracking device in the truck, they were brainy outlaw officers and scientists, and he was only a beaten, stupid sergeant. Going south and out of the country would be the smart play, but instinct drew him back to the west, to his lost home in Death Valley. Instinct had shown itself to be so much smarter than the rest of him of late that he'd stopped trying to fight it.

  He didn't look in the mirrors.

  In the glove compartment, there was a roll of new-minted twenties, a stack of gas and prepaid phone cards and registration papers on the truck in the name of something called the Black Canyon Ecology Project. The truck had two gas tanks, both full, and he found a parka under the seat to cover his bullet-riddled torso.

  Sharing the road only with day-trip skiers returning from Crested Butte and the occasional semi, he sped down and out of Black Canyon, crossing the frozen lake of the Curecanti National Recreation Area. Feeling like he was running with his back turned to a free-fire zone, like they were right behind him, and there was something he could do about it, if he was only nervous enough.

  The 50 merged with the 550 and veered north between the Uncompahgre Plateau and Grand Mesa National Forest. He stopped in Grand Junction and bought a three-pound loaf of turkey from a convenience store deli. The protein soothed his aching muscles, but made the itching worse as he began to heal again.

  His mind was his own, and he could think more clearly than at any time since the Gulf War. No more sickness. No more Headache, which had always lurked in the back of things, always within striking distance of shutting off his brain. Yet still he was sucked along, like a bicyclist swept up in the warm vacuum behind a speeding semi, floundering in the inexorable gravity of a state of being he could not comprehend.

  Once the exhilaration of being out again wore off and his reflexes took over the driving, he started to think. At first, he tried to switch his mind off, micromanaging the road, twiddling the dial on the radio, which included a police and emergency scanner. All was quiet in western Colorado, and why shouldn't it be, on a late January weeknight, when all the world thought Zane Ezekiel Storch was dead?

  And who was he, to say they weren't right?

  What the hell are you? He couldn't answer the question without Keogh's words, without Wittrock's condemnations or Barrow's lunatic lectures.

  Your flesh is the mirror of your soul, Keogh told him.

  A monster, Wittrock said.

  You are an atavistic return to the original product of the grand experiment, Barrow raved. Yeah, whatever…

  The accusations and insanities chased each other around in his head as the 50 met the larger 70 Interstate and turned westbound again, crossing the Utah state line. The alpine terrain subsided into high desert plains and broken badlands, but the hours and miles only quickened Storch's turmoil.

  As a soldier, Storch was a specialist in survival. Now, everything he knew about his trade had become irrelevant, and the rules of the new game seemed to be known by everyone but him. He wore the faces of others, stole their DNA and spliced it into his own. He grew new parts to do things he couldn't imagine or accept, then shed them. His own form was only another mask.

  Maybe Spike Team Texas weren't such bad guys before they changed. Twisted up inside by the war, the changes RADIANT wreaked upon them were too much for their minds to take. Their flesh became the mirrors of their souls, alright. What would his flesh become, when he lost it? Because by the minute, by the mile, he was losing it.

  The 70 picked its painful way across Utah and through Fishlake National Forest, and the first rays of dawn pricked the Wasatch Plateau as Storch stopped in Aurora to refill and buy more meat, then turned south on the 15.

  Towns flashed past without meaning or remark, overgrown, shitstinking deposits of bipedal mammals. If he let his eyes see as they wanted to, even the writing on the thousands of brightly lit signs on the road had no more meaning than the pheromone trails of ants, the piss-musk messages of dogs. He watched for eyes watching him, for obstacles that might rise in his path, but there was only the open road and the numberless company of trucks, blind herd animals following the same game trail south and west.

  As he passed through Cedar City and into the monumental alien landscape of Zion National Park, he shut it all up. His was not a strategically trained mind. He could not expect to get a handle on the rhythm of conflict in a normal war, let alone one between humans and their unnatural successors. He needed a battle plan, and he had to trust in this body, because it was the only one he had. He was still Zane Ezekiel Storch, even if it was only his say-so against the rest of the world. He was still a soldier. But he didn't want to be in anyone's army ever again.

  He could not run any longer. He would fight. Whom he would fight, and how, he had no fucking idea whatsoever.

  He crossed a corner of Arizona, saw a sign beside the road: Mt. Bangs, elev. 8,012. I'll be damned, he cracked a smile, enjoying a plain coincidence. There's your monument, sir, you crazy motherfucker.

  The road carried him across Nevada and the Pacific time zone line. Storch spent his bonus hour in the restroom of a Shell gas station. He blocked two toilets and bought another turkey and three hams for breakfast.

  He passed the Valley Of Fire State Park and the Moapa reservation, then Las Vegas: a riotous garden of neon pitcher-plants, the tar pit of the space age. In the absence of natural predators, humans make their own diseases, their own predators, their own extinction. He caught his reflection studying him in the mirror. Why not their own successors?

  He passed through a nameless casino resort blooming like Russian thistle hard against the California border, LAST CHANCE TO GAMBLE! on a spangled billboard overshadowing the California sign. So engrossed was he in driving, brooding and radiating copious amounts of heat that he nearly blew through the INS inspection station straddling the st
ate line.

  The olive-drab customs agent stepped out into the road hesitantly, one hand outstretched to wave him to stop, the other gripping a walkie-talkie like he wished it was a gun. Storch's foot started to stand on the gas, but he held it back and forced it onto the brake, feeling odd clouds of relief blotting out his fear. Shit, he told his body, guess you don't know everything.

  He drew up just before the inspector, who came around to the window a little sharply, pissed at almost being run over. "Where you coming from?"

  No smart answers, now, he thought, but no answers leapt to mind at all. He must have just stared at the inspector for a moment while the nasal tones began to make themselves into words. The man was just an agricultural cop, looking for pest-infested fruits and vegetables, and maybe the illegals who pick them. He would have no beef with Storch, no idea what he was letting in to the state.

  "Colorado," Storch said. "Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Rec."

  The man cocked his head in a way Storch didn't like. "Skiing?" His hooded eyes were on the empty bed of the truck.

  "Nope. Visiting."

  "You live in California?"

  What the hell was going on? He thought about the Mission. They were small, but they were smart. They could have put out a stolen report on the truck. They could have filed an anonymous tip on him and juggled the NCIC and state police files eight ways from Sunday to make the law try to stop him. He hoped they weren't that careless with strangers' lives, but he knew too much about that to hope.

  He should have switched to another vehicle in Utah. He should have tried to change his looks. He was slipping, forgetting his training. Becoming an animal, just running. He could see it in the inspector's face as he loudly and slowly repeated his question. "Do…you…hail from…?"