Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  "Yeah, most of the year, in—in Norwalk." Where they kept his father. "Listen, I haven't got any fruits or vegetables, so—"

  The inspector leaned in the cab window across Storch and took up a big deep sniff of the air in there. His nose seemed to swell and hairs waved out of the nostrils.

  Storch's hand itched, twitched, and he looked down at it, clasped it with the other one. Would they grow claws again, or something else? Would they just go for the gun? He fought the urge to scream at the inspector to get away before he got hurt.

  A car behind Storch honked, then another. The inspector backed away from the truck and waved Storch on into California.

  Relieved and exhausted, he rolled into Mojave at mid-morning. The sky was clear and brutally blue, the air so pure that the scent of food cooking or the sound of a shout could travel for miles, like blood in the ocean. The desert was green and fat with nearly all the rainfall it would get for the year, the endless fields of sage and creosote, yucca and Joshua trees like a rumpled, threadbare Army blanket. This was what Storch had craved: in the unbroken emptiness, the mountains, the telephone and power lines fell away, and he floated free of perspective. One minute he could be large enough to see over the horizon, the next so small that he would pass beneath even God's notice.

  The silence, the stillness, calmed him. It was what kept him here for nearly a decade, and healed his soul-sickness. He knew he couldn't stay, but he also knew that before he could decide where to go or what to do, he had to replenish himself, had to anchor himself to what he was, before the world changed him into something he could not live with.

  As a human, he stood up to fight to save the human race from its replacements. He had helped to murder more people than he'd ever helped in his lifetime for a cause he didn't understand, but that was the way of soldiers. When he learned more, he could not justify genocide, but neither could he say, this is just, this is the natural order, and let it come. What was coming was not simply a new and improved human being. It was only Keogh, His mind like a virus hiding in every indestructible host. The world would rush to be "awakened," and someday, there would be only Keogh.

  That was a fate worth fighting against, but the lines were tangled up, and he could not see that either side had a monopoly on truth, let alone moral high ground. The Mission meant to exterminate the mutants, including him. Science marches on, he thought grimly, but I run.

  And in the middle, only Storch alone, a mutant outsider among mutants. Cut off from the divine hive-mind and his own humanity, he could only go insane and become something worse than Spike Team Texas. Madness was in his blood, as surely as his name was Storch, and no recombinant DNA could tweak it away. He could fight, but for what?

  How many times would he kill to save a species to which he no longer belonged, a race which rejected him as a monster? How many times would he die?

  He stopped in Baker.

  The Liberty Salvage junkyard had been carted away and a new hurricane fence erected around it. Looking around and seeing no one, he scaled the fence and jumped over.

  He was surprised by how much they'd left here. The pit was half-filled with gravel and a few pools of translucent scum that would've evaporated a long time ago, if it was water. Except for a few protruding slabs of concrete and tortured rebar, the pit might've been your garden-variety toxic waste dump. He saw several rusty red barrels and some abandoned excavation equipment among the debris.

  He stood at the edge as the sun seemed to drop out of the sky and splatter on the merciless desert floor. Lenticular clouds bloomed like ghosts of UFO's in the west, then unraveled into strings of vapor. The ground turned purple and indigo as if ink were rising up out of the pit. When the sun went down out here, the earth cooled so fast you could hear it shrinking.

  This was where it happened, where everything changed. In a second, his mind and body were taken away from him. The last, most basic roots of his life were burned away. All of it hinged on a crazy, suicidal decision to come back here.

  Only he and Wittrock came back from the raid on the Radiant Dawn hospice village, and they were headed for an airfield. He could have gone with them, or he could have fled when they touched down in Nevada, but instead, he had forced the pilot to take him back here. He was trapped, irradiated, and imprisoned, in every possible sense of the word. Maybe he came back to turn himself in, to seek punishment for what he'd done, or maybe it was because of the nurse.

  The soil on the floor of the pit was cracked and warped by escaped moisture. The brittle sound of it under his boots reminded him of thin ice on a frozen lake. Profoundly mistrustful of the ground, he probed each step before he shifted his weight, avoiding the pools of scum in the hollows of the pit.

  Stella Orozco was her name.

  He only saw her twice. When she gave him aspirin in the sick bay, she'd tried to be a cast-iron bitch, but then she'd watched him sleep— watched him pretend, to see how long she'd hover over him. She was so angry—at everything and everyone, at men, white men in particular—yet so scared, that he felt more drawn to her than he had to anyone he'd known for…for forever, so long as he knew. She'd disarmed him, but in a way she couldn't have predicted, and which only seemed to make her angrier as it rendered him weaker. When he'd heard her voice on the radio, cutting in on the suicide plans of the Mission scientists, it was her that he'd been coming back to save, but there were deeper forces at work.

  The girl he left to die in the white slavers' mine, the one he came to save, but left to burn.

  You get used to it…

  Stella Orozco was one too many innocent people he could have saved, but didn't. And for what he'd done in the cave, his brain whipped into a rage soup by the abrupt destruction of his life and the discovery of the dead girl, he still owed the universe. That was why he went after her, and threw his humanity away. There was something else, too, a need he couldn't put a name to, because it still felt too much like weakness. The way her eyes flashed when she saw him and ran to him in the awful light. As if she saw through him, and despite herself could not look away. The way she almost touched him, in that moment before the ground opened up…

  Storch! Do you see it? It's beautiful!

  The wind changed. A coyote howled nearby, and a chorus of dogs took up the desert vespers from somewhere in the distance. The odors of men and trash and car exhaust assailed him from the direction of town, and the spiky smell of sage, and the eye-watering reek of the unholy poison in the ground.

  And her.

  Fainter than his faith, yet some trace of her was nailed to the place, a chemical ghost that flickered and wavered out of the dead ground like the last wisp of smoke from a doused match. He looked around as if he had fully awakened for the first time since he got behind the wheel in Colorado. He would wake up on the road, or in the plastic cage, now.

  When he didn't, he picked his way over the floor of the pit with greater urgency, studying the ground and drinking in the poisonous air for any trace.

  The rubble might have settled, exposing her remains to the air. Some desert scavenger might have burrowed down to her and gotten at her. He had no way of knowing how sensitive his nose was, now; for all he knew, he was smelling the indigestible bits of her in a cache of coyote shit.

  But he kept looking. The trace grew into a thread, and the thread a trail. He followed it deeper into the pit, into the blue shadow of a broken concrete wall that jutted out of the crumbled embankment like a smashed tombstone.

  He put his fingers on the pouting sheet-metal lips of the hole she climbed out of, ravaged and gouged by claws, from the inside. His heart leapt. He looked up at the sky, as if he could catch someone watching to see how their joke went over.

  He stuck his head into the hole and inhaled, gagged, retreated with his mouth and nose clamped shut. The air inside was sour and dry and deader than the first gust of air from an unsealed Egyptian tomb. But it was not a tomb. It was a chrysalis. A womb.

  He closed his eyes tight, drinking in the air to fi
nd where the trail led next. His brain tingled like he had altitude sickness, and he was sure now that he was dreaming. She was alive. She had escaped. She was His.

  Storch did not need his nose to follow her trail, once he settled down and began to look. Her footprints across the pit were preserved by the crusty sand, that must've been slush when she walked in it. Since the last snow. Less than a month ago. Meaning she'd been buried all this time. Like him.

  He climbed up the side of the pit and back over the fence. The trail disappeared on the pitted tarmac road that ran from the old drive-in junkyard back to Baker and the 15, but the only shelter in sight was the trailer park a little less than a mile down the road. A body freshly risen from the grave wouldn't be choosy.

  He forgot the truck, ran as fast as he could. His legs carried him in great, measured strides, pistoning muscles and lungs working in perfect syncopation. The distance eaten up beneath his feet faster than if he'd driven, his muscles unfazed by the effort, as if his blood had found something more efficient than iron with which to bind and deliver oxygen.

  He braked to a jog as he passed through the open gate of the Vista Del Nada trailer park. His heart raced not with effort, but with fear. He didn't dare to rationally hope that, out of this unspeakable runaway catalog of atrocities had come a miracle that would absolve him of even a scintilla of his guilt. The universe just didn't like Storch like that.

  He paced the rows of double-wides and mobile homes in a frenzy, looking for he knew not what. He rounded the office and ducked back when he saw a pair of Dobermans sitting on the porch. They watched him with heads cocked at an angle as if they didn't know what the hell to make of him. Dogs didn't do that. They barked at what they didn't understand, at anything that intruded. But these just watched him go by. An old fat man in an easy chair sat beside the window, watching TV.

  Storch didn't see anyone outside, and could almost believe the place was abandoned, if not for the blare of televisions and radios and the hospital smells of medicines, ointments, cigarettes and microwaved food. Underneath it all, there was still a trail, but he stumbled across it several times without it leading him anywhere. He wandered until full night had set before he found the double-wide green Sojourner trailer tucked away at the back of the park, off the gravel lane and facing the desert. It was wrapped up in CAUTION-POLICE LINE-DO NOT CROSS tape. It reeked of her.

  He listened at the door and looked around before forcing the lock and slipping inside. He came back out twice as fast and collapsed in the sand with the door flapping in the wind, a bright crash like a sword on a shield that could probably be heard in Laughlin. Her. And death. And rot. And blood. And Him.

  The place was lived in hard, the sinks overflowing with dirty plates and empty cans, bottles, all licked clean. Sloughed skin like rotten willow bark scattered all over the bed and the living room floor. Blood on the stripped mattress, so much blood it must've been a whole other person.

  She'd come here to feed and to heal. In her hunger, she'd done terrible things.

  He'd made her do them. She was probably a prisoner in her own head, like he'd been. Mad from months buried alive, whipped and warped by a parasitic mind raping her own, down in the hard, cold dark, and turned loose on an unsuspecting world.

  Had they caught her?

  He sifted the bloody undertow of sensation roaring through his brain, discarded some, enhanced others, rebuilding the room in his head so he wouldn't have to go in. Cigarette smells, and mud from boot-prints: the police touched little, waiting for an expert who may not have come yet. The scene was cold, but there was no cordite stink, no gunpowder and terror-sweat that imprinted scenes of bloodshed. And she would not be taken without a fight.

  No. He scented Keogh in the mess, but with a different flavor than the one she sweated out of her pores as she healed. He came for her. He was in this room, in a body that ate healthy, showered regularly, and used soaps and aftershaves to smell like a proper middle-aged, middle-class white human male. He came and took her away, to wherever they were gathering now, in preparation for—what?

  A bloodless evolution—

  He was more than human, now, but still only a stupid Green Beret Sergeant. He knelt on the sand and clawed great fistfuls of the abrasive earth up and rubbed it in his eyes. His hands tried to scour his face off. He tried to think, tried to remember, what it was to be a soldier, to be a man—

  Is his critical center of biomass in White Bird?

  Major Aranda's question spun at him out of nowhere. They thought he was their guinea pig, they wanted answers. They had given him his answer. They had shown him who he was fighting, and maybe where. He owed them a debt of gratitude.

  He ran back to the truck to get a road atlas.

  ~17~

  Winter in the Snake River Valley, Idaho–Greenaway fucking loved it.

  Sitting alone in the cabin of a Bell Model 406 scout/attack helicopter, he saw the wicked fangs of the Seven Devils Mountains and the Snake River, a blue-black buzzsaw blade sheathed in the aptly-named Hell's Canyon, and he was fueled by an exultant awe for nature, when it got its ducks in a row. If there was one thing he could respect, it was terrain that had no respect for men. The plunging gorges and swift-flowing rivers made a thrilling scenario for a wargame. Greenaway couldn't imagine a better place to formally begin his retirement.

  His ground units radioed in five by five, all linked up outside of White Bird and ready to move up the hill. The support chopper team, likewise, had only good news from their position. Good men, trustworthy soldiers hand-picked from throughout his career, and not one invited didn't come over. He had no officers higher than Sergeants, no fawning yes-men lieutenants or career-conscious captains gumming up the lines of communication. Greenaway had been planning his army for years before retirement even became a realistic threat. He hadn't been looking forward to leaving the Army, but when they forced him out, he rediscovered his dream army and found the means to make it come true.

  Lt. Col. Greenaway was not the first retired Army officer to turn mercenary; he had himself delved in wetwork-for-hire in Africa after Vietnam, before drifting back into the fold. But he knew of no other merc whose army was financed by the United States government to hunt American citizens within her borders.

  When he came to them with the NSA intercepts, they looked at him like he'd shit on their desks. So vulgar to actually bring copies, their eyes said, while their mouths spewed mealy-mouthed bureaucratese. In '78, when he'd bought his way back into the Army with White Star smut, they'd made out like he was Judas and swore to get him, someday. This time, they hardly kicked as they cut him a check. They thought they'd bought him off cheap with Army surplus goods, a fat payroll for men, and a license to hunt eggheads. He wondered just how common the practice of government blackmail had become in the intervening years. He didn't have much time to consider whether or not he was doing exactly what they'd hoped he would.

  Not even the NSA would admit to knowing where the Mission was dug in in-country, and Greenaway thought long and hard before passing on hunting them in South America. He got fresh intercept traffic like the morning paper every day for a month, but no joy. Then, the late-night call from a Deep Throat-copycat who tipped him off to Idaho.

  That was two weeks ago. After a tight training cycle, he notified the appropriate parties and mustered his men from their impromptu winter quarters at the ass-end of Camp Perry, the CIA's training ground in Virginia. Eight hours ago, they stood at attention on an abandoned airstrip in the middle of the Yakima Firing Center in central Washington, heard the orders of the day, loaded up their toys into six trucks and two helicopters, and set out for the new Radiant Dawn hospice village.

  He was about to break a cardinal principle of special ops, in running a pitched defense. His troops were hunters of men, not goalkeepers, and every other force that had tried to defend a hill like this had come to grief, though none were quite like his. Still, after the first fly-by, Greenaway was mighty impressed, his mind abuzz with po
ssibilities.

  Situated on a ledge perched near the top of a narrow, almost-impassable valley, the new village reminded Greenaway of the ancient Jewish fortress, Masada. Connection to the road was by one two-lane bridge over a frozen waterfall. Most of the civilians must be underground; there were only thirty or so single-wide trailers and a few sheds clustered around the tower, and he spotted ventilation shafts and a chimney in the snow-girded granite cliffs above the village.

  The nearest town was almost ten miles away, population one hundred. A militia compound was only a mile downhill, but they were reclusive white supremacists who spent all their time teaching children to shoot pictures of black and Jewish feds. Like a bear trap in your front yard, liable to spring with deadly force on anything that stumbles in. I like the way this Dr. Keogh thinks. His advance recon scouts had advised him that the Nazis had staged a mass exodus only the night before, grouping up in a meat packing plant they owned down in the valley, then leaving in chartered buses. He wondered idly how they knew what was coming, wondered less idly who else knew.

  The three-thousand foot summit of Heilige Berg swept by underneath them, and Greenaway motioned the pilot to go lower. In the brilliant midmorning sun, the field of snow around the tower was a blinding lens, with brightly colored ants frolicking on it. Kids, lots of them, and a few adults, building snowmen and throwing snowballs at each other, a regular Norman Rockwell scene, Winter Hijinx At The Top Secret Freak Colony. The people down below looked happy, healthy, and, he was sure, were simply a bunch of honest-to-goodness decent people who'd been through hell. He was equally sure that the Mission was coming to destroy them, though he had no idea, or interest in, why.

  They set down in the middle of the field. He war-faced his reflection briefly in a stainless steel panel beside the loading door. He looked old and hard, but more of the latter, today. An all-consuming PT regimen had carved much of the creeping flab off him, while he'd answered the problem of his receding hairline with a scorched earth policy. He wore an unmarked black beret and an alpine winter camo suit with an MP5 strapped to his back, a Beretta 9mm at his hip, a K-Bar survival knife on his belt, and another concealed in his boot. He'd let the beard grow wild to cover the deep scar that clove his face from above his right eye to his jawline. He'd slashed it open coming out of his chopper, at the bottom of the Owens River, last summer. The beard was almost entirely silver, with only a hint of the original-issue copper-red whiskers, which made him look like a paramilitary Santa. He nodded at his reflection's steely glare. Yes, old man, you still got it.