Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  The chute was snatched up again, and jerked Storch off his feet. Rock hit his head. Through pinwheels of demented sunlight, he saw that the wind didn't have his chute. Tentacles rose up out of the lagoon and rended the chute to shreds, dragging him toward the madly churning water.

  Storch scrabbled madly for a handhold with one hand and tore at the thick belt of nylon around his right thigh. His legs spasmed and kicked like a hanged man's death throes, and suddenly, his right leg flexed and grew, thickened so fast the blood drained out of Storch's head and he almost fainted. The pain was enormous, but in an instant, it was over. The leg strap popped and he fell out of the harness. The thrashing kelp-tentacles drew the empty parachute into the lagoon.

  He lay on his back, chest heaving, each breath like a month in traction. His skin tingled. A billion microscopic plutonium beestings pricked him. A million subatomic bullets exploding through the busy little microcosms of his skin cells: hundreds of thousands of particles smashing the delicate superstructures of his DNA helices into strands of deranged acid debris. If he were a normal human being, he'd be dead in hours, disintegrating on this beach where only kudzu grew and the seaweed ate sharks, while Keogh laughed, somewhere else in the world and deep inside his head.

  But he could feel his cells going to work, rebuilding, refining defenses against the onslaught. His skin thickened into scales and bony shell-plates under his jumpsuit. The half-formed hair-feathers sprouting down his arms burst through the sleeves as thick thorns of keratin. He felt the burn of the radiation damping down, as it changed him. He was becoming less human every moment he spent on this island.

  He got up and patted himself down. He still carried thirty pounds of weapons, explosives and ordnance in bellows pockets all over the suit, and more inside. He drew an M9 Beretta 9mm from a hip pocket, and slid in a fifteen-round clip of green-tipped bullets. His finger was covered in thickening scales, and barely fit through the trigger-guard. Looking over his shoulder at the hungry lagoon, he walked towards the bunkers.

  Kudzu stirred, though the wind had stopped. He circled around a bunker until he found a recess in the wall of vines that might be a door. He probed the vines over the door, recoiled. Under their shield-leaves, the vines must be hairy with thorns, which shredded his sleeve, though they couldn't break his skin. He took out his K-Bar knife and slashed at the vines. They wept green sap and parted to reveal a blind wall of lead bricks.

  He knew only a little about the old island A-bomb tests, but he knew that they buried all the radioactive trash in the bunkers and sealed them up. In all likelihood, there was only more of the same inside. But there were satellite dishes on the roof, and this was the place where it all started. He had to be here. There had to be something inside—

  He took out a brick of C4, sliced open the shrink-wrap and tore it into strips. He mashed these into the join where the bricks met the concrete, using the entire one-pound block, and jabbed a detonator into it. The detonator looked like the face of a cheap digital watch with wire leads snaking out of it, which, essentially, it was. You could shoot at plastique, or pour gasoline on it and burn it without making anything but smoke. It took an electrical charge to make it explode.

  He walked away fifty feet and took shelter behind a projecting buttress. The wind shifted, bringing the bloody, voiceless battle in the surf to his ears. He took out the remote, checked the channel, and pressed the button.

  Nothing happened.

  He went back over to the doorway. The detonator was gone. He eyed the rustling vines suspiciously. How oddly easy it was, now, to just accept that the fucking vines stole it. They were too green to burn, and he only had four more detonators. He couldn't waste one.

  He hacked the vines back with the knife and plugged in another detonator, backed away without blinking or looking away. Sure enough, the fuckers came creeping around the wall towards the detonator. He shot at them once, twice, tearing off a stalk so that the leaves fell away and he saw what else lay beneath. It was not kudzu. It bore only an incidental resemblance to any species of the plant kingdom, but it was not truly an animal, either.

  Under their leaves, the vines were covered in silver-gray eyes like coins, and black, questing thorn-tongues, and other things that neither an animal nor a plant had any business with.

  He pressed the detonator. It worked.

  He threw himself prone on the coral ground. The concussion rolled over him and filled the air with ingots of lead. Over the supersonic crack of the explosion, the vines screamed. Smoke rolled in the cavity he'd made.

  He got up and approached with the gun extended before him, disturbed but a little comforted to see how his hand was growing over it. He walked up to the hole, picked up a chunk of lead and tossed it through. It vanished through the smoke, but the dull clang of metal stopped it somewhere inside. Fanning the smoke out of his eyes, he stalked over the low mound of lead and into the hole.

  His eyes adjusted to the gloom and the dust, but there was nothing to see. Stacked floor to ceiling, wall to wall, rusting barrels leaked on the lead-lined floor. The black and yellow radiation symbols on them were barely legible through the layers of corrosion. The radiation here was almost a visible exhalation from the barrels. It cut through him, playing havoc with his cells, turning them against each other.

  He backed away, stumbling outside and running away down the beach. He stopped at the surf when the black kelp sensed his approach and reared up out of the waves to embrace him. He shot into the surf on reflex. He backed away from the water, standing midway between the two threats and looking up into the hurtfully blue sky, but now he saw only Keogh's eye, staring down on him.

  A hammerhead shark hurled itself out of the sea and flopped across the coral beach before the black tentacles took it back. Its gasping jaws snapped silently at the air. Its dull black eyes glinted dumb malice as it was eaten alive.

  "I know you're here!" he roared at the island. "I know you, motherfucker, and I know you know me! I found you, didn't I? Found your home! This is where you live, isn't it? Where you came from?"

  He walked up the beach to the lagoon. He pulled a grenade from his breast pocket and bit off the pin, chucked it into the thickest clump of Keogh-kudzu. It exploded, tossing whipping salad and shrill vegetable screams into the air.

  "You were just a man once, and I bet you're still just a man! You're not a god, and if you can't come out and face me, you ain't even much of a man!"

  He threw another grenade into the lagoon. The kelp made a whirlpool around where it hit the water. It blew a Volkswagen-sized bubble of ocean into the air, black kelp and red blood spraying the setting sun. The lagoon went insane. The kelp-tentacles thrashed and rose up, and clusters of eyes bloomed on their tips. Wise silver-gray eyes. Storch almost understood.

  "Why don't you come out and face me, man to man, motherfucker? You talked a big line of shit in my head, but now that I'm here, I don't see much to back it up. What are you hiding from, Keogh?"

  The ground stirred beneath his feet. The vines rattled their shield leaves and grew taller. The black kelp stood on end in the air like statically charged hair. Suckered tentacles and massive jointed crustacean claws knitted together into a single, towering form above the water.

  Storch froze with his foot in mid-air before one of the shallow pits in the coral. The bottom disappeared, or rather, it opened, because the pit was really an eye socket. A great gray compound eye regarded him from the pit. All around him, eyes opened in the ground—eyes and mouths brimming with gnashing shark teeth and eager, darting tongues.

  "I'm not hiding from you, Zane," said the island. "I've been waiting for you."

  Storch pointed at the eye between his feet and shot it. The enormous lens puckered and sank like a soufflé, a spray of plasma turning to green suds as the bullet dissolved and went to work.

  The island screamed. The kudzu grew furiously at him. The writhing tower in the lagoon flew apart and became a cyclone of black snakes. Storch fired at it, too, but the s
hots went wild. He was ducking whiplash tendrils and armored flails, but there was no single body to put a bullet into. He fired at the coral between his feet, at the field of eyes and fang-rimmed maws yawning and leering at him, at the formless, endless face stretching to the horizon.

  There was nowhere to run. The island was Keogh.

  The island laughed, and the sound ate away at him like the radiation, and the sun was low on the horizon, it would be full dark, soon—

  He ran out of bullets. Tendrils like cobras made of iron rebar snared his right hand as it went for another clip. Thorns dug into his arm, grew through shell and skin and muscles and into his bones. They caught the other arm as he tried to free the right, and stretched him out prone on the coral. He looked up into the indigo sky and prayed, let the plane come now, let Don not give a shit about me, let him come and blow this all away—

  "I am somewhat larger than you expected, yes?" Keogh's voice came from every pore in the rock. "But you didn't come to destroy me, did you, Zane? You always come to take from me. Take my cures, my lessons, my bodies, and this time, you want the whole truth. You want to know what you're fighting."

  The tentacles grew thicker around him, bit deeper. He tried to tear himself free, but it was beyond pain. His bonds sank tiny rhizoid teeth into his bones. Tearing free meant tearing himself apart. He would do it now and die content, but for the truth of what the island said. He had come to know.

  "I want to tell you, Zane. I've been waiting for someone to come here, so that I can make them understand. Even though you turned your back on us when we needed you most, I'm so glad it was you."

  Storch was lifted off his feet and borne closer to the lagoon. His vision fogged with pain, but he could hear water rushing. Was He going to throw him into the surf? Storch strained to see.

  The lagoon was below him. The forest of tentacles and armored limbs grew out of the inner walls of the lagoon, which was a ribbed orifice with no visible bottom, a titanic alimentary canal extending down to the ocean floor, almost a mile below. Colossal engines of valves and striated muscle, like a Panama Canal of dinosaur hearts, stirred the water into a roiling whirlpool. The smell of it engulfed him, choking him and invading his palate, a sickening submarine stench that was so familiar to him because he'd tasted it in his own sweat. Inexorably, unmoved by his frantic resistance, the tentacles dragged him into the water, giving him only a moment to suck in a breath and hold it. The briny seawater was warm as blood when it closed over his head.

  Inside, it was like a city, a thriving megalopolis in the abdominal cavity of God. The walls, nearly a quarter mile away on all sides, bristled with fleshy edifices camouflaged as sponges and anemones, an entire ecosphere of false lures designed to attract and devour prey. Perversely, this gave him a crumb of comfort amid the rampaging dread eating into his gut. It needs to eat, he thought, which means it's not a god.

  The tentacles bore him down below the rim of the lagoon, the waning purple sunlight flashing before his eyes, then disappearing. Organs among the obscene clusters on the walls of the pit made their own light, a pallid, bluish glow that reminded him of the tunnels in Idaho, and the light behind Keogh's eyes in his nightmares. Looming structures of bony coral and sails of corrugated flesh jutted out from the walls—stomachs like industrial kilns in a foundry, their mouths fringed with restlessly waving cilia; pulsing sacs like kidneys the size of houses, trailing sewer-pipe veins; endless, gnarled coils of what might have been intestine or fields of brain tissue; great, glowing eyes that goggled at him on stalks and from billboard-sized sockets all over the walls. Lips and beaks and sphincters of skyscraper anemones and shark-mouthed worms purred in his ear as he descended deeper, ever deeper, into Keogh.

  Going limp in the rising pressure-grip of the ocean depths, he let himself be passed from tentacle to tentacle. The mammoth limbs grew in narrow groves like kelp farms that extended down the walls into inky infinity. The terrain of the interior only got stranger, the organs so alien in their structure that he was grateful for the creeping darkness that swallowed them, and him, up.

  Then there was a dim, butterscotch-colored light in the deep before him. It swelled to fill his vision, and then he was being pressed against a wall, soft, pliant, splitting before him like a womb in reverse. Scarcely a drop of water spilled through with him as he passed through the other side and fell through hot, damp air.

  "I told you once that education is a series of ever more complicated lies, preparing one, by stages, for the truth. This is what I am, Zane, behind the last mask. I've been waiting here for so long, waiting for a species like yours to evolve and develop the technology I needed. When he came— when we became I—he showed me the way, even as he showed me how desperately my return was needed."

  "You—should have stayed here," Storch hissed. "Nobody needed you. You never should have been."

  "But I was, Zane. I am, and I will be. And I am needed. There were many among you so decadent they thought they could gain by assisting me. The spiral of decay and extinction flows faster in your race than it did in my masters' time."

  Storch was just conscious enough to be confused. "Your masters?"

  "I myself have climbed the evolutionary ladder in my lifetime, but I arose from the humblest beginnings, humbler than your own. I was once the lowest form of life that has ever toiled on this earth. I was a slave."

  The tentacles set him down on a ledge of naked bone beneath a cloacal opening in the wall. The space was enclosed in some sort of membrane, a translucent bubble that projected out into the central well about twenty feet. Just beneath the ledge, the water lapped at still more colossal appendages far below.

  Storch gagged on waves of white-hot pain as the tendrils disengaged from him and retreated into the murky labyrinth of flesh beyond the membrane. He collapsed and choked back hot bile. His legs would not obey. His arms would not lift him up. Shivers rolled him into a tight fetal ball, the barrel of his empty pistol digging into his armpit.

  "Oh, but I've damaged you," the island murmured, heavy with remorse. Something hissed and blew a chill breeze across Storch's back. "See to yourself in there."

  Storch looked up. Deep inside the rigid muscular sphincter set in the wall, an open door led to an airlock very much like the one in Colorado. It reminded him of the rooms they put dogs in to "euthanize" them, by which they meant suck the breath out of them in a box. It was dead metal and steel-reinforced glass. He crawled into it gratefully.

  Already, his pain was blunted and turning to tingling hints of reduced function. His body rerouted resources to close the thousands of bone-deep wounds all over his body, but he was already so strained from the jump and the radiation, that the changes crawled. When the door closed behind him and sealed with a mechanized gasp, he was too weak to turn and block it. The inner door hissed open, and air-conditioned chill washed over him. He crawled into the next chamber and rolled onto his back.

  The low ceiling was layered concrete, the floor the same with a Persian rug. Across the chamber from where he lay, there was a functional low-budget hotel room, with a queen sized bed and a television, a refrigerator and cabinets, a microwave oven, and a bathroom with shower stall. The only thing missing was a picture window overlooking a pool. This had been replaced with tiers of computers chained together by a spider's web of cables. Four monitors slept on a long console set into the wall, but a single keyboard stood out of the trash and junk food wrappers covering the desk.

  Storch's nerves pricked. He searched the one-room bunker. A closet, filled with t-shirts, boxer shorts, pajama bottoms and sandals, and two radiation suits. Another closet that was really an elevator, which meant there was another exit, probably inside another of the bunkers. The cupboards full of blank CD's, Doritos, Twinkies, vitamins, non-alcoholic beer. Ashtray half-filled with marijuana roaches and pistachio shells. All the things that made up the distinctly sour and artificially preserved sweat of Ely Buggs.

  So the fucker lived. He was the reason for the regular planes
out here. Shuttling him to and from this bunker, where he ran the information systems that kept RADIANT online, and God knew what else. He sure as shit wasn't here now, but his mess was. Storch picked his way through it to the shower and painfully, painstakingly, washed Keogh out of his wounds.

  Examining his own body was little better than looking at one of Spike Team Texas. The chitinous shell that had grown over most of his body sloughed off and wouldn't stop bleeding where Keogh had torn it. He looked like a blasphemous freak from a sideshow. Still and all, his body had barely managed to keep him alive.

  He wasn't getting out of here. If Keogh didn't get him, the bombs would, or the sharks would, or the hundreds of miles of ocean would, or the Mission would. The realization was strangely liberating. You are not insane. It's the world that's crazier than a shithouse rat. He could still do it, he realized. He's not a man, but he's not a god. Die knowing, he said to himself. Die killing him.

  He walked out of the bunker and through the airlock into the yawning central cavity of the island. Outside the bubble, stars twinkled in a tiny circle of lesser darkness a few hundred feet above his head. Eyes opened all around him.

  Storch sucked in a deep breath, held it down in the floor of his lungs for a long moment, and called out. "I want to see your face. You say you're a man. Show me."

  "Very well, if it will make you more comfortable."

  The membrane sagged, bulged and split open. The wall became a womb, and something spilled out into the bubble. A nodule of pulsating fetal tissue dangled from a tangle of umbilical cables. They danced like copulating snakes as they pumped life into the quivering fetus, which grew before Storch's eyes into a tall gaunt human form. At last it trembled with animation and opened its ageless gray eyes to take in Storch from this novel new angle, and when it rose and climbed onto the ledge beside him, he took a shocked step back. The umbilical cables went slack, but did not disengage. Where they joined Keogh's head and neck and back and groin, they still seemed to exchange fluids, and Storch could see sparks of electricity shooting up and down the hideous translucent cords.