Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  The only party who seemed to appreciate the gravity of the situation was the rental car agency, which would be sending an insurance claims investigator down this afternoon. The investigator called seconds later, introducing himself as Lou Duckworth in a flat, crushingly unimpressed voice, jowls flapping explosively with each syllable. Because Cundieffe was a government agent, the rental agency wanted to get to the bottom of this immediately, if not sooner.

  At seven, Cundieffe threw up his hands and walked out of the office in which he'd barricaded himself. Sheriff Manes was adamant about not going up the mountain, with or without state police escort, until the maneuver was over. He'd been on the phone with Major Ortman and Heilige Berg's landlord. All were in agreement that everything was perfectly normal. In not so many words, he informed Cundieffe that if he'd been shot at while up there, it should go to show him not to go gallivanting around on his own in the middle of nowhere while a military exercise was on.

  Lou Duckworth called then to report that the car was not in the field where Cundieffe had alleged that he left it. He really would like to sit down with Cundieffe and take a statement. Cundieffe gave it over the phone, omitting the parts that would beggar the agent's hard-nosed skepticism. Party or parties unknown had shot repeatedly at the vehicle as he was negotiating a particularly difficult mountain road, causing him to crash. The car was totaled, and unlikely to have gone anywhere on its own. He wanted to scream at the estimable Mr. Duckworth that he was an FBI agent, and that he had been attacked by a superhuman assassin and was lucky to have escaped with his life, that he'd nearly been killed again in an encounter with an unspeakable abomination which took more killing than a whole platoon before he destroyed it, but he refrained. Despite chronic seizures of panic that clogged his heart with ice, everything around him told him he was delusional, and he really had nothing better to do than dicker with the insurance investigator. Besides, something told him Duckworth would only care if his employer also insured Heilige Berg's slaughterhouse.

  He hung up and returned the blank stares of the deputies loitering around the office until they all, one by one, returned to shuffling makework and left him sitting alone.

  At eight, Sheriff Manes packed up and offered to drive him out to the Travelodge on the highway, and Cundieffe, sensing that nothing was going to happen where he was sitting, agreed.

  The ride was awkward, the Sheriff blotting out the threat of conversation by blasting a call-in show pundit who continually warned his listeners that bloody civil war with the "federal Gestapo" was both inevitable and imminent. Cundieffe winced at the tinny AM demagogue's elementary logic-twisting. Apparently having forecast the bloody advent of the NWO for the previous Thanksgiving and/or during the upheaval of Y2K, the glib doomsayer had his rabid audience trained to view the relatively quiet passing of the holidays as proof that his vigilance had carried the day and pushed the New World Order into cowardly retreat. Sheriff Manes nodded now and again and muttered assent under his breath, like a church deacon at a holy roller's revival.

  Cundieffe took his leave of the Sheriff graciously but gratefully, checked into a room and laid down on the bed. He washed down his dietary supplements and finished off the last of the fruit in his shot-up briefcase. Waiting for sleep, he drifted not to the events of the day, which surrounded him like a storm but had since become like a movie and divorced of emotion, but to the question of Dr. Keogh. Of all the people he might have expected to see there, the former Lt. Col. Greenaway was perhaps the very last. What did it mean?

  The heater came on, an endless, withering blast from a forest fire that made the room feel like a kiln, made him less warm than feverish, and he moved to turn it off. As he stood, he noticed a higher, almost insectoid, sound that seemed to come from outside. The brittle, subtly warped picture window vibrated in its frame behind the ghastly maroon and gold curtains, but he drew them and found the street was empty. It sounded like nothing else he'd ever heard in real life, but it had the surreal dreamlike quality of something else out of the movies. He went to the door and stuck his head out into the frigid night.

  The humming was exactly as it sounded in the movies, only deeper, subtler, but that was to be expected, with jet engines. It was the sound the Japanese Zeroes made when they attacked Pearl Harbor in Tora! Tora! Tora!

  Across the street, a Circle K and a feed store stood half-hidden behind palisades of muddy snow. Rows of houses and apartments, lights out, televisions on. Fat, soapy flakes of snow cascaded to the street and turned to ice. The sky was bricked up behind a roof of inscrutable black clouds, but he thought he saw a flash of sulfurous yellow cut through them and heard, an instant later, a boom. Something flat and hot and as long as Cundieffe's leg whistled down out of the clouds and sliced into a snowbank directly in front of the motel parking lot. Snow melted and turned to steam, closed over it.

  Cundieffe dove for the phone and called Sheriff Manes's pager. "I wanted to tell you your friend on the radio was right," he said on the message line.

  He hung up and paced, stealing glances out the window at the empty street. The humming had passed, but now he heard thunder pulsating as if the earth itself were having a heart attack. A few lights came on, but no one else looked out.

  The phone rang. He snatched it up and barked, "Sheriff, it's happening. Come get me—"

  "Lou Duckworth from State Farm here, Agent Cundieffe, I'm back up in Grangeville for the night, but I'm coming back down first thing in the morning. It may not seem very important to you, but we need to find out what happened to that car—"

  It took the Sheriff fifteen minutes to get back to the Travelodge and pick up Cundieffe, ten minutes more for both off-duty deputies to meet them at the sheriff's station. The Sheriff looked pissed to be out of bed, but not disturbed enough by half for what they could all see plainly happening around them.

  Ten miles to the west, the black barricade of Heilige Berg was a curtain of blooming explosions. The night desk deputy had fielded a few dozen phone calls in the last half hour, complaining about the noise, reporting debris falling out of the sky. One caller claimed that a small aircraft had crashed in the Nez Perce National Forest, eight miles due east of White Bird.

  They set out in two Broncos, the Sheriff and Cundieffe in one, the deputies following in the other. Only a few cars passed them on the two-lane road out of town. As they passed the black mound where the slaughterhouse had been, Sheriff Manes looked across at Cundieffe. "None of this shit started happening until you feds got here, young fella."

  "You just didn't see it," Cundieffe said. "The Heilige Berg militia weren't the only people up there, and the soldiers up there aren't all weekend warriors on maneuvers. There's a war on, Sheriff. It's not on CNN or in the papers, but people are getting killed up there, just the same."

  "Shit, out here, there's always a war on, between the government and sovereign citizens. When you poke around in the way people live their private lives, it's like stirring up a fire ant hill. You gotta be prepared to get bit."

  Cundieffe looked out at the fields of snow, glistening in a stray wash of moonlight through a tear in the clouds. Sweltering in the recycled engine heat, he rolled down the window and stuck his head out into the chill wind. "Sheriff, stop!" he shouted.

  "What?" Manes barked, but Cundieffe insisted, and he braked in the middle of the road. The deputies pulled up behind them and Cundieffe got out.

  Ahead of them, the road crept up into the first galloping foothills that skirted Heilige Berg. On their left, he saw the broken fence where he'd crashed only this afternoon, and the hateful billboard. To the right, the wall of hills subsided to make way for the snow-choked creek bed that merged, a mile back, with the Salmon River. He could hear the snow falling on the field.

  "It's stopped," he said.

  Manes looked visibly relieved. "There's gonna be hell to pay in the morning, I'll tell you what. Folks halfway to Elk City had shit come down in their yards—"

  One of the deputies pointed up the cre
ekbed. "Sheriff, lookit that–"

  At first, Cundieffe couldn't see it. The falling snow and the gloom were a curtain that muffled sound and sight, but something plowed up a great fan of snow as it came toward them down the white furrow of the creek bed. They heard no sound of a motor, but it moved too fast through the deep, soft snow to be anything but a snowmobile. The other deputy shone a spotlight across the creekbed and caught it in the glare for only a moment before it turned ninety degrees and flicked back into the darkness.

  The snow where it had passed smoked. The form was sheathed in steam and hunched over, but Cundieffe's knees went rubbery when he saw that it was a man, running.

  "It's him!" he screamed. He climbed back into the Bronco and hunkered down behind the dubious protection of the door.

  The sheriff and his men still stood in the road, the deputy trying to find the runner in the stands of skeletal brush on the far side of the creekbed.

  "What the fuck was that?" Sheriff Manes shouted.

  "It's the…man…the one who shot at me," Cundieffe said. He reached for the shotguns on the rack above the seat, tugged on them and found them locked.

  "Now, don't touch those," Manes said, and climbed into the back with his keys out. "You don't know your way around these guns."

  "Hey! We see you!" the deputies yelled. One of them swept the trees with the spotlight, while the other tracked the light down the barrel of his service pistol. "Come out of there with your hands up!"

  It came, and though they thought they were ready, they weren't. Cundieffe saw something made of smoke shoot out of the trees and fly across the creek like a dust devil. The spotlight jerked and bounced off it as the other deputy drew his gun and both of them shot at it over and over. But whether they hit it or not, it was between them in an eyeblink, and their guns were empty. "Get him, Rory! Get him, get him, get—"

  Manes had dropped his keys, and bent to find them. "Jesus Christ, you idiots—" He looked up and saw it.

  It picked up one of the deputies by an arm and leg and smashed the other one to the ground with him, then dropped him. It stopped and looked up, and Cundieffe gasped, because it was something that bore only a structural resemblance to a human body. Through the clouds of steam and vision-warping waste heat, he saw a thing made of raw muscle and charred spurs of bone, taloned paws, and huge, snowshoe feet. Its back and chest were riddled with holes, which oozed fluid and smoke. He stood there, shivering in agony, as plugs of lead spat out of the holes and sank, sizzling, into the snow.

  Sheriff Manes cursed a blue streak, trying to find his keys under the Bronco's seat. Cundieffe laid flat across the seat and reached for the radio handset in its cradle under the dashboard.

  "Don't fuck with me," the thing said, "I just want the truck." Though the voice was a husky rasp, the words distorted because the speaker had no lips, Cundieffe instantly recognized it. He sat up and turned to look, but it was gone.

  Sheriff Manes knelt beside the Bronco with his head between his knees, praying, gagging and dry-heaving all over the toes of his boots. A pervasive barbecue stench hung in the air, but of the thing with a dead man's voice, there was no other sign.

  Cundieffe climbed out of the truck. The deputies lay in a pile beside the second Bronco. A few isolated pops of rifle fire rolled down the face of the mountain, but otherwise, the stillness was a solid thing.

  No. This was too much of an outrage. He was rattled, as anyone would be by the events of the day, and his mind was coming unhinged. Storch was dead, shot through the skull close enough to spray him, only two weeks ago. He was dead. He was not out there—

  It stepped out of the trees where it had gone to ground before, and crossed the creek again. In its monstrous, mangled arms, it cradled a woman's body. "Don't fuck with me," it said again, and clambered up onto the road.

  "Sergeant Storch?" Cundieffe asked, and shrank back behind the truck door. Peeking over the sill at the silhouette as it turned to regard him, he smelled the wash of burned flesh off it and looked into its deep-sunk eyes, and his last reserve of incredulity was blasted clean out of his mind.

  This impossible, obscene thing, it was Storch. Racing, he put it together. Storch was shot, but he wasn't what he appeared. His thumb had grown back. He survived months of torture and interrogation, marked only by the wounds he inflicted on himself. His corpse was moved to Ft. Detrick, where something happened, something that killed a lot of people and blew up a good portion of the underground bioweapons research complex there, that the government covered up and buried. He knew now what it was, what they'd covered up even from the Mules, if they knew it themselves. It was Storch getting out.

  "It's you, isn't it, Storch? Do you remember me?"

  The burned thing studied him for a moment. "Mr. Know-It-All," he said at last. "You're too late for the fight, but you're just in time to help cover it up."

  "Whose side are you on?"

  "My side," Storch said. "Stay the fuck off it."

  "What's happening, Storch? What the devil is all this about?"

  "Like the man already told you, it's evolution." The thing opened the passenger door of the deputies' Bronco and laid the unconscious woman into the seat, strapped her in. Cundieffe saw she wore the rags of a black tracksuit with a white corona on the breast. She was from Radiant Dawn. She was nearly as messed up as he was.

  Storch slammed the door and went around to the driver's side. Cundieffe approached him, choking back bile at the odor. "That wasn't you, that I spoke to before, was it?"

  Storch shook his awful head. "Wasn't me. Was Him. I got to get gone, they'll be coming."

  "Where are you going?"

  Storch made a sound like a laugh, or a cough. A bullet popped out of his neck. He got into the Bronco.

  Cundieffe got as close as he could stand. "Sergeant Storch, I'm all alone. I want to stop this, but I know nothing. Everybody who knows is part of it, I think. Even my superiors. They're letting this happen because they stand to gain something from it, but what? What is he doing?"

  "Ask Him," Storch said. His taloned paws fumbled with the keys, turned them in the ignition and put the Bronco in gear. "Ask any of them, they're all Him. He knows everything. He's everywhere."

  Cundieffe heard a helicopter. He turned and looked up the riverbed, where a heavily armed military chopper leapt up out of the woods, speared the forest around it with rockets and took off to the east, passing directly overhead. Cundieffe heard snowmobiles coming out of the hills, trucks coming down the mountain.

  "Storch, wait!" He hurled himself at the open window. The Bronco backed up, dragging his feet out from under him. He levered himself up over the sill and into the blackened gristle of Storch's face. Glowing green eyes stabbed him with blind rage. A huge red paw came up and engulfed his face. The stench made Cundieffe's head swim. His grip loosened and he felt himself falling down under the wheels as the Bronco sped up in reverse, swerved sideways on the road and headed back towards White Bird. "Please, we want the same thing—I can find him for you—"

  Storch slammed the brakes. Cundieffe fell and rolled in the road. He struggled dizzily to get back up. "You want to find him."

  "Where is he?"

  "I don't know, but I'm looking. You want to know where, I want to know who. We can help each other."

  "Then I guess you're not so useful, now are you?"

  Cundieffe propped himself up against the Bronco, reached into his coat. Storch's hand came up again, but Cundieffe pulled out a card and a pen, wrote a number on it. "This is a voice mail account I set up under a false name. Nobody else in the Bureau knows about it. Call me when you get wherever you're going—don't tell me where you are, but just let me know you're still alive. I'll leave a message if I learn anything. I think someone's trying to help me, but I don't understand yet what they're trying to tell me."

  "If you don't know what He is, forget about it. This isn't your fight."

  "He's a disease, isn't he? Infecting people via satellite, invading them, replacing t
hem. I saw what he did to Heilige Berg. If he could do that here–"

  "He's coming. Get out of my way." Storch snapped the card out of Cundieffe's hand and floored the accelerator. Cundieffe jumped back and shielded his face as the Bronco sped away with its headlights off. He heard a truck coming down the road, and leapt out of the way just as it passed. It was a Heilige Berg panel truck, loaded with soldiers with carbine rifles and grenade launchers.

  This is America, he thought. This is the nation you swore to protect.

  Cundieffe hugged himself to keep from fainting. Nausea climbed up in him and shot out the top of his head. He vomited all over the road and collapsed on a snowbank. Once, he craved secrets, to know what was really going on. All the secrets he knew were making him sick. He feared the ones he didn't know yet would kill him.

  The road was empty again, the night silent.

  Cundieffe got back into the Bronco and waited while Sheriff Manes triaged the deputies. One had a concussion, the other was pretty certain his arm was broken, and they wanted to go home. Manes shouldered them into the back and leaned against the doorpost with his hand over his eyes for a long moment. His shaky hand went for the handset on the radio.

  "Dispatch, this is the Sheriff, come back. Jimmy—"

  He saw then that the curly black cord dangled limp from the handset, ripped out of the console. He glared at Cundieffe, who shrugged and said, "He did it."

  "Give me your—"

  "My cellular phone was destroyed in the accidental shooting, remember? We have to go up there, Sheriff. There's worse up ahead, and—well, you saw it… "

  "I didn't see anything." Sheriff Manes' face twitched, like a bulk eraser had just wiped his brain clean. "Didn't see nothing at all."

  In another place and time, it would make headlines and history books. Cundieffe stood on the ridge overlooking the plateau, where he had stood only twelve hours before, when Greenaway had greeted him. He recognized almost nothing.