Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  She arched her back and walked a little taller. She had never felt quite so good about herself.

  She wandered the spiraling corridor that encircled the biosphere, taking stairs and upward-slanted passages until she found the quarantine lab, but Storch wasn't there. Dr. Barrow was. He worked at a computer with two assistants, who rotated trays of specimen vials under a robotic injector arm.

  The soldiers came in behind her, flanking the exit and drawing down on her. "Dr. Barrow, heads up!" one shouted, then, at her, "Stand down, bitch! We're packing the Nasty Green Shit…"

  Barrow looked up and said, "Get the hell out of here, all of you." When he saw her, he ran for the far exit. "He's not here! He's with the soldiers—"

  "I want to talk to you. I don't want to eat you, anymore."

  He peered around, above, below, her, hyperventilating.

  "What, never seen a naked meta-Shoggoth before?"

  He shooed away the assistants. The soldiers refused to clear out until he showed them the weapon on his desk, but he dropped it as soon as the door hissed shut behind them.

  He sat back down at the workstation. One skinny hand, looking like a shaven bird spider, gestured towards the first aid lockers in one corner. "Clothes in there."

  More for his sake than her own, she fetched a suit of scrubs and slipped into them. One of her spurs tore the seat out of the pants as she clumsily stepped into them, but she took more care with the next pair.

  His eyes skidded off her as she walked up to him, and she knew he'd been watching them. "That's what you call us, isn't it?" she asked. "What does it mean?"

  Barrow made some meaningless adjustments to the molecular model on the screen. "You should…he doesn't want me to tell you."

  "But you want to, and I want to know."

  "He thinks I'm wrong. They all do. He was there, and he doesn't believe it."

  "He thinks you're all crazy. Everybody he's talked to here has their own line of shit to sell."

  "I know there's no other explanation than what I told him. I—I took blood from him while he slept when he was here before. The cells I incubated used the agar substrate to grow a self-sufficient multi-celled colony. It was trying to grow into a new Storch. His DNA—and yours as well, if you underwent the same conditioning—is free of the third strand, but it moves so fast you can barely see it. It's turned inside-out, with all sorts of activity centering on the introns—junk DNA that we now believe is some kind of master switch for the rate of adaptation. It's synthesizing RNA off its genes constantly, and spinning off proteins human beings— and every other living thing—just don't make. It builds structures—"

  Stella cut him off impatiently. "Why him? Why is he different?"

  "That's been the focus of our research. We know Storch was at an Iraqi chemical weapons installation called Tiamat in the Gulf War. Whatever happened there, he was exposed to chemical agents—"

  "He was exposed to Spike Team Texas."

  "Oh," Barrow said. His face worked twitchily after something at the edge of his memory. "They were the first surviving guinea pigs of the RADIANT test in '84. They were exposed to the raw radiation, before Keogh had programmed it with his own DNA templates. If Storch was infected by them, then he might have developed a kind of cancer."

  "Tell me about the Old Ones."

  He looked up at her, homing in on her eyes as the only part of her that was recognizably human. "How much do you know?"

  I read it in his head. I know it scares him to death. "I don't know shit, that's why I'm asking."

  "It's hard for some people to accept—"

  "All of it's hard to accept. It always has been. Storch says you think flying saucers played God and made everybody, and that Keogh is a saucer-man."

  "No, that's not it at all. A Shoggoth—they're not aliens. They're the lost trunk of the tree of life. Life did evolve on earth, but it hadn't got past the single-celled stage when the Old Ones arrived. They introduced new traits that accelerated evolution by way of scalar-wave radiation projectors—like RADIANT—and self-replicating RNA messengers which could transmit desirable mutations. These, too, got out of the lab, and are still with us, but they don't work like they used to."

  Viruses, Stella thought. He was talking about viruses.

  "The Old Ones used the single-celled proto-life they found in the stagnant shallows of the earth's oceans as raw material to synthesize life complex enough to serve them. Their greatest success was a multicelled organism that retained an amoeba's plasticity. Some race that came after, but pre-dated humans, called them Shoggoths. They served the Old Ones for six hundred million years, mutating and adapting like self-improving machines. One day, they invented brains, and decided to stop being slaves.

  "Once one of them developed the mutation, it spread through the population like a disease, infecting even the protoplasmic stock from which Shoggoths were synthesized. Shoggoths were highly adaptive, but they had only attained rudimentary sentience. If the Old Ones hadn't become so dependent on their slaves, the rebellion wouldn't have had any effect at all. They almost won, but after thousands of years, the Old Ones' bioweaponry killed them off. The Old Ones died out soon after, but they still experimented with life, trying to control the flow of mutation in controlled environments, and introducing their modified creations into the wild as slaves or feeding stock. The futile experiments ground on long after they passed away, and continue still.

  "We are the ultimate product of those experiments. But Keogh—he's using the Old Ones' technology to clone himself, body and soul, and replace all animal and plant life. Given his genetic structure—and we've only seen the RADIANT-induced tertiary DNA strand, mind you, not a pure sample—I would say he was genetically comparable with what we know of Shoggoths, but that's impossible. They were incapable of reproducing, even by fission, or they would have overrun the planet."

  "Maybe they learned. You said they were adaptable."

  "It was hard-wired into them. But—"

  "What?"

  "Even my own people don't buy into this theory, but I'd hoped someone…with your experience—"

  "Ask the fucking question, already."

  "Well, given that they never reproduced, there's still the possibility that an individual Shoggoth could have—well, their cells are capable of infinite replication, it's far more likely that Keogh is an original survivor—"

  "You think he's two hundred million years old."

  "At least. Think of it. A survivor of the sentience-positive Shoggoth population escapes the Old Ones and goes to ground, maybe even into hibernation. Time enough to develop its intellect, time enough to plan a way to use the Old Ones' technology to fulfill its amoebic programming, and devour the world."

  Stella thought about it, shook her head. "No, he wasn't like that. I mean, he wasn't a thing. He was a human being. He related to people, he understood their motivations. He knew how to drive a golf cart, for Christ's sake. He didn't just crawl out from under a rock after sleeping for eons."

  "That's what my people always say. The most progressive theory is that he's a human being, and he infected himself with Shoggoth DNA, but none of this gets us anywhere. Not many people really care, we're all so tired, and with RADIANT destroyed—"

  "What?"

  "You didn't know? The Russians knocked it down, concurrently with Idaho and a major raid on the Chernobyl population. With the satellite destroyed and the domestic colony wiped out, everybody feels like the problem has been ripped out at the roots, and now it's the soldiers' mess to clean up, but—"

  "It's not done. He wouldn't let you take RADIANT unless he didn't need it anymore. The colony isn't wiped out. It was empty. He's going to be One, soon."

  "But Major Aranda was there, he said the casualties were—"

  "I was a part of the colony. Three hundred of us spread out across the country to hide. You bombed an empty hole in the ground. They're still out there, and they're coming together. Soon."

  She didn't know or care if he'
d understand, but his red-rimmed eyes flared and he lunged at her with his hand out, almost touched her, before he regained himself. "You mean a neural network. We speculated—"

  "I mean all of those people out there—they're Him already. But soon, He's going to become all of them. I don't know how else to explain—"

  "I know, I know," he crowed, thrilled to be right about something, no matter how awful being right was. "And with that kind of unified processing power, he could make a mutagenic retrovirus—" He bowed his head and yanked on his dreadlocks as if to kickstart his brain. "Where are they?"

  They heard the raised voices from the war room before they opened the door. Barrow looked sidewise at Stella and his leery expression warned her, Be invisible.

  Inside, monitors, computer consoles and red, red light, like the bridge of a submarine on high alert. Her pupils dilated painfully to drink in the gloom. A knot of uniformed men stood in the center of the room, facing Storch. Beside him stood Dr. Wittrock, who was nose-to-nose with a tightly wound Hispanic officer. The officer had bandages wound around his head with spreading burgundy stains and a wet pucker where his left ear should have been. Sweat and bone-deep fatigue were etched in his battered face.

  "It's over, Calvin. It's over! Why should we risk more men—?"

  "It's far from over, Major Aranda," Wittrock replied. "And the risk to your men is minimal."

  "I don't want any men," Storch said. I just want you to get me there."

  "But they're all dead!" Major Aranda shouted. "They're dead, and the satellite is gone! Our liaisons abroad are going to mop them up in South America and Africa, but it's over!"

  "You didn't kill anyone He didn't leave for you to kill, Major," Storch said. "He's still out there in force. I only want the one. Find Him for me and get me there alone, and I'll end your fucking war for you."

  "What are you even doing here?" Aranda snarled. "The last time you blew through, you said you were done."

  "What are you doing here? The last time I saw you, Spike Team Texas was eating your men alive."

  Aranda closed with Storch, their eyes practically touching like the contacts on a detonator. Storch swelled and his arms became taut bludgeons of piano wire, but Aranda didn't shrink. He blazed with an insane knowledge of what Storch was capable of, and a willingness to take him on, anyway. "We killed your boyfriend, and every one of his people. Why are you siding with this mutant fuck, Calvin? A few days ago, you wanted him dead!"

  Wittrock took Aranda aside and whispered into his intact ear. Storch noticed her and Barrow and came over to them, storm clouds roiling behind his eyes. "Go back to the forest," he told her. "And you," grabbing Barrow by the lapels and shaking him, "stay away from her."

  "He told me," she said, but she didn't say, and I saw it in you, saw your fear. "It's all true, Zane."

  "It's bullshit! He's a man. You know it just like I do. He's just a man. He can be killed."

  Wittrock signaled for order and spoke to a coffee-complected older man in a black flight suit. "Mr. Costello, what is the status of our air capability?"

  Costello smiled broadly and scratched the back of his head. "Drones are all gone, obviously, but we can get another C-130 and put him wherever he needs to go, if he doesn't mind jumping."

  Stella saw in their eyes why they were agreeing, and what Wittrock must have said to Major Aranda.

  "Then I see no reason why Sgt. Storch's operation shouldn't proceed," Wittrock said, "given verification of any intelligence he might eventually unearth. Unless Dr. Barrow has any more religious objections."

  Stella stared hard at Barrow, but the Green scientist looked at Storch a moment and then at his moccasins. "If Sgt. Storch is convinced that's what he has to do, he's already indicated he's unwilling to participate in further research, so I don't need him."

  "What about the other one?" a soldier asked. Not "the girl," or "the chick."

  "She stays here, protected," Storch said. He looked at her. "Anybody fucks with her, and I'll come back and kill all of you."

  She bit her tongue. She was too angry to yell at him in English, anyway. Her skin blackened, blood simmered. She turned and went to the door before her body hurt someone. Her arms were turning purple again. Her fingertips went numb, turning into knives.

  She stood in the corridor and listened to them finalize the deal. She tried to calm herself down, but her body wanted to hurt someone. She didn't want to let it go at Storch. They had nearly killed each other, just fucking.

  It frightened her that she couldn't control her own body. It frightened her that nobody was there to do it for her. That made her hate herself, and everyone else, a little more, the more she changed. What frightened her most was that when she became what she was becoming, when she became change itself, formless, she knew she would welcome it.

  He came out, and she melted into the wall. Fuck him. She could walk away now. They were even. She barely knew the stupid asshole, but her blood did. He was right, anyway. Her old life was over seven months ago, and she had nowhere else to go. Soon, she could run away, grow wings and fly, dive into the ocean and become a shark. Her heart's dearest unspoken wish—to be free and never die, to need no one and nothing— had become hers. When she was stronger, she would go out into the world and live. When she was stronger, she wouldn't need to see him.

  She went after him. He walked faster than most athletes sprint, and didn't slow down when she called him. "Storch! Zane, what is this shit? What are you running from?"

  He didn't look at her. He took a staircase up three flights and stormed a broad sloped corridor that arched around the domed forest. The treetops shivered under a heavy sprinkler downpour. "Listen, Ms. Orozco, what— what—happened, um, was—"

  "Don't fucking flatter yourself. I'm talking about Him."

  "That's who I'm going to see. He's just a man."

  "You have to go now to kill Him, or to prove that they're wrong about Him? Jesus, you're crazier than they are."

  He stopped before a door, one hand on the latch, the other flat out to stop her. "Go back to the forest, Ms. Orozco, or go home. But don't try to talk me out of this. I'm already gone."

  He opened the door and went in. She charged in after him and knocked over a slim man in a jumpsuit. Banks of computers and cellular, satellite and shortwave equipment lined the walls and crowded each other on carts that he had to walk sideways through to get to an ordinary telephone. Storch lifted the handset and lights on the console behind it blinked and streamed digits. The phone was wired into a chain of scramblers that bounced the call over different lines and satellite feeds.

  He punched in an eleven digit number, then eight more, but didn't speak. He punched a few more buttons, pausing before each as if listening to a menu. He listened so intently that he didn't notice her.

  She stepped closer and strained to hear the tinny burbling noise cupped to his ear. She visualized her ears growing larger, catlike, bat-like, grotesque spires laced with veins and nerves, smarting from the crying of babies in South America and Greenland. They burned. She touched her ears fearfully, clawed finger snagging in her tangled, needle-strewn hair. They were not bigger. But she could hear.

  "You have one saved message," said an android operator. "Press One—"

  Storch heard the whole menu, finger hovering above the buttons as if the last option might come as some sort of surprise. Finally, he jabbed One.

  "Sent today, at Three Eleven AM," noted the android.

  "Sergeant, it's me, and—if you're getting this, then take notes, because I can't stay on this line too long, and they—this wouldn't even seem possible if not for what…" The speaker got too wound up to speak, and sounded like he was about to faint. "Okay," he finally said, "here's what I learned. Dr. Keogh was another—he worked for the Manhattan Project, and after that…um, he helped design a neutron bomb that they detonated on a tiny atoll in the South Pacific, and he was…well, it's a long story. He had no roots in this or any other country, and even his real name was cla
ssified. But I've been reviewing Radiant Dawn's holdings for months, getting as deep as they'll let me, and they own real estate, and satellite networks, closed-circuit satellite TV. Several pieces of property they own are in the middle of the South Pacific, atolls with satellite relays and automated observatories on them, or speculation on future transpacific cables, many of them joint ventures with telecoms and universities. One of them matches the latitude of the bomb test. The GPS coordinates—do you have a pen?"

  Storch pressed a button and the android said, "Message saved. There are no other messages—"

  "Go back to the forest," he said. His voice was a raw-throated bark, his skin red and flayed and puckered with healing scars that she knew better than she knew him.

  "He wants you to go," she said. "They want you to go. Nobody wants you to come back. So fucking go."

  She ran all the way back to the airlock. Through her tears, she couldn't see how to lock the door, so she stomped the inner airlock until it was bent in its housing. She ripped the shrieking alarm out of its socket and ran into the glade and tore her scrubs off. Her skin screamed chemicals and colors and wept feathers and scales and shells. Shimmering waves of heat danced around her. They turned her tears to steam.

  She slept under the tallest tree in the forest, out of sight of the cameras. In her dreams, she hunted alone in moonlit woods. In her dreams, the woods were hers, the woods were her, and no prey could escape her. She hunted men and fed them to the wolves who worshipped her. In her dreams, she was happy.

  ~29~

  As the snow flurries outside pushed his take-off back another hour, Cundieffe wondered what they'd do when they found out he wasn't going back to Washington. He wondered if they didn't already know. He wondered when he'd started calling them They.

  He waited, and suffered as he never had before under the torment of time's passage. He would not survive this wait. Surely, somewhere along the way, before his plane came to take him to where he might find answers, even if they didn't come to take him away, he was going to wither and die inside, just slip away, and the Martin Cundieffe that got out of this chair to board the plane would be a different one that moved into his empty shell like a hermit crab, one more at ease with the situation, one adapted to the unscrupulous and brutal world into which he had been cast.