The heat in her voice made him flush deep, cardiac-failure red, but he sat rooted. "He was dropped on an uncharted atoll in the South Pacific where he believed the original Keogh was, or the nerve center of Radiant Dawn, or something. It's a hellish place—they dropped a neutron bomb on it in the Fifties, and kept it a secret—"
"And you people took him there. And left him." When Barrow tried to explain something, his speech got jackhammer-fast, and his hands flapped in your face like birds beating themselves silly against a window. It was best to stand by with a knife to cut the bullshit before it flowed out of control.
"They flew him out there to get rid of him," he finished, hands at the defensive. "He scares them, and they don't trust him, and, to tell you the truth, neither do I."
She made him cringe away from her smile. "But you trust me?"
"No—well, yes, because you passed the blood-tests. Nobody comes in without one, even from guard duty. You're not one of us, but you're not one of Him, either, anymore. That makes you an unknown quantity, but you're not like Storch."
"Oh, really?" He smelled all the subsequent jabs in her remark, but she let him have them anyway. "Because I'm a woman, because I was a nurse, because I'm not a soldier?"
"I didn't—"
"Not even you know what I am, or what I'm becoming, so don't bullshit yourself you know what I'll do."
"Okay, I'm so— I won't."
"Better. Now, what happened?"
"He gave us a location and a wish list for gear. Then, three days ago, he left with our flight team. They put him on the kind of cargo plane that shuttles military payloads all over that part of the Pacific, mostly ABM testing, nowadays—"
"I know all that. Get to the fucking point."
"Wha—Okay. He parachuted to the atoll successfully, and that's the last we saw of him. The plane refueled on a little US outpost on Howland Island and came back twelve hours later, but there was no sign—"
"Did you land and look for him?"
He rolled his eyes, wanting to correct her, tell her that he hadn't done any of this, or known about it much before she did. "It's a radioactive rock, the beach-sand is dusted with plutonium, the water's crazy with sharks, and there was no airstrip to land a C-130 on, Ms. Orozco. He refused to take a radio, or the extraction rig Costello offered him. He took some infra-red beacons, but they weren't activated where the pilot could see them. We saw no sign that he'd ever been there."
"So what? You just left? Or did you—?"
He guarded his throat and his nuts again as he said, "If it was a strategic target, like he said, we had to be sure. This isn't Geneva Convention-approved warfare, Ms. Orozco. We're fighting for our lives. Up in space, a Russian team took out the RADIANT satellite last week, while you were in Idaho. They all died, as did the Mir crew, but one of them didn't just die. It was Keogh, up there, Ms. Orozco. He had control of the station."
In her old, human life, Stella had watched the news regularly, and had followed Mir. "But there's nobody up there, now."
"No, not anymore. The governments of both countries sent up a team to watch RADIANT, but they all died up there. And that's the closest to a victory we've had in this fucking war."
Stella closed her eyes.
"We have to hit Keogh when and where we can, because time is running out. You know that, better than anyone."
Stella's skin bristled, chromatophores in her skin radiating angry, poisonous tree frog red. Her pheromones soured to drive him back, but he was too thick with mushy empathy to get the message. He came closer, trying to comfort her.
"I'm sorry, Ms. Orozco, I didn't know how—"
"How what, Dr. Barrow? How close? I've only met him a few times. I don't know him, and I sure as fucking hell don't love him."
He squirmed. "But he—"
"He came back and got me. That's why you idiots are dead wrong, with your trying to outthink him. He'll kill Keogh and he'll come back for the same reason he got me, because that's all the cabron knows how to do."
Major Aranda snapped awake to a screaming headache and the sense that he was not alone. He rolled out of bed and across the floor to his holstered pistol hanging from a chair, pointed it at the dark. His brain throbbed like weevils were eating it, and the wounds under the sweat-soaked bandages around his head and neck stung so bad they blurred his vision, but he could hear quite clearly.
Sounds outside his quarters. Slowly, silently, he crept to the door and peered out into the corridor. Animal noises, snarling, claws raking stone, a gurgling yowl—furtive, but clear as a bell. All the other doors were shut. The ponds of dim amber light captured no motion. In defiance of what he saw, the sounds grew louder, wilder, like great cats in heat running amok in the ventilation ducts.
He ran down the corridor, skin prickling into goosebumps, clad only in skivvies and undershirt and clammy night-terror sweat. Did no one else hear it? Was he hallucinating? Was he even awake?
He stopped at an intersection. To his left, the corridor ended in a gallery overlooking the dew-misted canopy of the forest biosphere, where the mutant bitch had holed up. Was it her? He clutched his gun tighter. She was a cancer in their midst, the very thing they were sworn to destroy. Storch called her a refugee. Barrow wanted her for a pet. Aranda believed she was more, a threat to the Mission every bit as great as Keogh, if she wasn't still a part of him. Perhaps the noises were coming from her, and the time had come to do something about her. He listened, stilling his racing mind and shivering body. The sounds came from another direction, from higher up in the complex.
He passed a sentry who blankly stared at him when he shouted, "Don't you hear it?" The sentry shook his head at his wild-eyed and shouting CO waving a gun in his underwear in the middle of the night. Aranda knew how it looked, but he went on, anyway. Alone. The noises were getting louder.
A chill, creeping fear clutched him by the balls, but there was also a rising kid-on-Christmas-Eve kind of exhilaration. He was the only one up and out of bed, and he was going to surprise the hell out of Santa—or somebody.
He used to know how to react to situations like these, but they always ended so horribly that he took drugs and radical shock therapy to forget.
Now it was the first time again, and he'd never shot a gun at anyone before, and his mind was so shot full of holes, losing it would be an empty formality.
He went on, up through the sleeping base to the quarantine lab, and the airlock. Remarkably, none of the Greens were here, and the maze of workstations and equipment were silent, except for a few computers rendering to themselves in the dark.
The sound was so goddamned loud he couldn't believe nobody had already raised the alarm, but there were Mark Branca and Jeremy Labrador, the only other survivors of the Idaho operation, standing at attention beside the airlock. Branca was still in his skivvies, but he wore a flak vest and a helmet, and carried a rifle. Labrador had a gun too, but he still looked half-asleep.
"We heard it too, sir," Branca said, saluting crisply.
He almost kissed them, he loved these fucking guys so fucking much.
They loved him, too, for how he got them out of Idaho. They spread the word that he was solid in the face of shit out of Dante's Inferno, that he sacrificed no one without anguish or strategic gain. He let the monster take a swipe at him while they fetched the charges and detonated them down the air shaft. He lost his ear and what remained of his never-remarkable good looks. He got them out. The two survivors had made him a de facto Purple Heart out of bullet fragments taken from their body armor. It sat in a case in his quarters, more prominently displayed than the real ones.
He usually never listened to the praise or the curses of enlisted men, but he had to this time, because he had no recollection of having done any of it. He had stopped taking the drugs to try to get it back, but there were no night terrors, no hideous flashbacks, to tell him what the fuck happened up there. He only knew that they got the motherfuckers, no matter what that mutant bitch or that hippie egghead coc
ksucker Barrow said. The war was almost won, and he had almost won the right to forget it all, for good.
"It's coming from the airlock, sir," Branca prompted him. Labrador looked around blearily, eyes glassy, registering nothing. Labrador sustained only a few flesh wounds, and wasn't on any painkillers that Aranda knew about. Jesus, the shit never stopped. The things he had left to remember about Army life—the procedure, the drilling, the stupidity of soldiers who slipped or just fell—
Branca was up against the airlock, peering into the black vacuum inside through the armored porthole. "Think I see it," Branca said. Labrador yawned, scratched his balls with his rifle barrel.
At least one of you is on top of this shit, he thought. He checked the magazine in his pistol. NGS shells. He'd seen them turn Keoghs to slush in minutes, and he had the other guys' say-so that they worked in the field, so…
"I can't open the lock, sir," Branca reminded him. "It retina-scans, remember?"
"Yeah, I—" Aranda went to the scope and pressed the cold rim of the lens against his eye socket. It felt like it was cupping his eye in preparation for scooping it out. It scanned and approved him. He threw the switch beside the airlock and the hatch swung open with a rush of bottled air.
"Told you it'd work, Brute," Branca said, with a weird hillbilly accent, which was strange, because Branca had no sense of humor, and hailed from Chicago.
"Thanks, Major, thanks a whole lot," said a voice from within the airlock. Aranda stepped back and raised his gun to shoot. He could see nothing inside, but now the voice seemed to be coming from behind him.
"Awful sorry about that scrape back in Potatoland, but we had to make it look good, you understand."
"You're not getting past me, motherfucker," Aranda said and fired into the airlock.
In the flash of the muzzle, he saw nothing but his bullet bouncing around the chamber. He hit the emergency lights, the switch right next to the alarm, but he must have forgot to hit the alarm. He forgot so many things, but they were so awful—
In the yellow strobing light, he saw only an empty airlock. He could still hear the phantom noises, but he could no longer deny where they were coming from. They, like the voice of the intruder, were coming from between his ears.
"Aw shit, Major, don't tell me you forgot…"
"We kicked your fucking asses," Aranda snarled, "and you came to the wrong place for payback."
"Oh payback's here, Major. We already got more than a piece of you."
Branca smiled at him and unzipped his flak vest. On his chest hung a string of human ears. Most were rotted and shriveled to nubs of yellow, peeling cartilage, but one, a left ear, was only a few days off the bone. Branca chuckled and stopped being Branca.
Aranda screamed. He laughed. "Where are you, motherfucker? I'll kill you—"
The intruder chuckled inside his head "Don't you get it, Major? You ain't alive, no more! You ain't even dead. Lucky wetback, you're me! You have been ever since I ate your fucking Swiss-cheese fly-shit of a brain! You even helped us beat the goddamned blood test! You stupid bitch-hog, don't tell me you forgot that, too…"
Aranda screamed as Dyson reminded him, feeding him twisted images from his own and Dyson's perspectives, eating and being eaten, digesting and being digested. Just enough of his brain kept alive inside Dyson to think he was still alive and well, to think he was himself. Imitating himself, he got them in.
The one who was not Branca jammed an improbably long, bony index finger into Labrador's right ear, stirred the contents of his skull. The drugged soldier dropped to the floor with a baby's gurgle.
Aranda's mouth stopped screaming for him, and his legs carried him to the airlock, but they weren't his, anymore. What was him would be shat out of the thing that ate him. What was him would be buried in this godforsaken place along with his medals and his holes.
Something knocked softly against the outer airlock hatch.
He watched his hand reach for the switch, and through his tears, he saw words rising up under his skin on his arm. It looked less and less like his arm every instant, the muscles swelling and knotting like breeding snakes under the skin, but he didn't notice for watching the letters, until he could read them. Just before the dream of Ruben Aranda stopped dreaming itself, he could make them out, and he remembered everything he ever wanted to forget.
DON'T MESS WITH TEXAS
Stella was hungry. She wouldn't eat in front of Dr. Barrow, and had just dismissed him when the siren sent him running for the airlock. "Stay here! The perimeter's been breached, maybe the base itself!"
"Then I don't want to be here." She easily outpaced him to the open hatch. He tried to use his phone as he ran, and tripped over roots. He waved her back. "Please, until I know what this is, stay here. It might just be a drill. Aranda's very keyed up, and the lines are down."
She came out of the shadows and loomed over him. "It's not a drill," she said. "He's here."
He looked sick, gulping as if to hold back vomit. "How do you know that? Are you—?"
She smiled bitterly and shook her head.
"He was only waiting for Storch to leave," she said.
She stayed behind him as he ran. The lower levels were deserted, but they both heard shooting from the upper galleries. Sirens blared from speakers at every corridor intersection. Monitor screens flashed a warning: "STAGE 4 ALERT: MIL. QUAR., A WING: TRIG. 02:42." A camera view showed only snow.
"No, shit, no," Barrow mumbled. "They're inside? Nobody even sounded the fucking alarm until they were inside—?"
She shoved him. He almost tipped right over, but she caught him and urged him toward the stairwell.
He attacked the six flights of stairs like a scarecrow with asthma, stopping twice to fumble out his inhaler. He stumbled up the last flight with one hand pumping the medicine into his tiny, flawed lungs, and the other flailing out in front of him, as if he ran through a fog. She resisted the urge to pick him up and carry him there, or just ditch him.
Finally, they got to the top level. A steel blast door stood between them and the barracks, and the alarm had locked it. The shooting was much, much louder, and they heard something else that the sirens had masked. Screams. Shooting.
"Oh God, oh God," Barrow wheezed. He clamped the inhaler in his teeth and dug in his many pockets for the key card to open the door. The brilliant fluorescents died. The darkness was deep purple and full of panicked hyperventilation, then black and quiet. She was startled to see Barrow swim up out of the darkness as if he hit a switch, but it was her eyes adjusting to the darkness. His form was a dull red blur. She realized she was seeing his heat.
He stood there staring blindly straight ahead, trying to keep his breathing under control as he felt for the card. She ripped his hands out of his pockets and dug through handfuls of keys, notebooks, tools and bits of trash before she found a blank red credit card with a magnetic stripe on one side. She ran it through the door and threw it wide open. The sound of the shooting knocked her back, like a monsoon rain drumming on steel and meat. And then the smell. And then she saw.
A line of soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder across the corridor only ten feet to her right. They hid behind a makeshift barricade of bunk beds, lockers and bodies. They fired every weapon they had in constant, stuttering streams at something that was coming inexorably closer. The corridor beyond was ankle-deep in blood where it was not choked with corpses, or parts. There were about forty soldiers in the corridor, and Stella could see that they were all about to die.
To the left, another sealed blast door cut them off, with a steel mesh-reinforced window set into it. A face filled the window, pale and drawn. Wittrock, watching.
The red alert lights still winked on the walls, and the strobing gunfire provided enough light for Barrow to take his card back. "Go back to the forest!" he screamed.
"No! I'll fight!"
He turned and ran to the blast door, screaming over his shoulder, "Protect the forest!" The door opened up and swallowed him.
She ran to the barricade.
The human debris piled up like trash on Christmas morning, though many of the bodies were already melting away. The invaders came in waves out of two doors at the end of the corridor. They came in waves, each soaking up everything the Missionaries had before collapsing, and being trampled by the next wave.
A giant rose up among them and charged the barricade. He was made of blood and teeth. He carried an M60 machine gun in each enormous paw, shooting them like pistols, waving them and cutting the picket line into bite-size chunks.
The defenders' bullets either bounced off or fizzed impotently in the giant's hide. The lysing agent that reduced Keogh to a puddle had little or no effect on him. All the shooting didn't even drown out his laughter.
The surviving soldiers fled the barricade, but a die-hard few actually leapt over the wreckage and charged the giant, emptying clips of chemical ordnance into it. Another one charged out from behind the giant and engaged them hand to hand. Despite the new invader's totally alien appearance, she recognized him immediately.
It was the one who tried to rape her.
He had grown harder, faster, uglier. Every bone in his body was elongated and honed into wicked scythes, skewers, hooks and serrated blades. The ulna of each of his forearms flared out into a fanged battle-axe that clove through human bone like eggshells. The bodies jolted like his touch dealt out ten thousand volt bursts of electricity. His flesh squirmed and ran over his bones in constant flux, like molten wax, like cunning, hungry flames. He waded through the soldiers, hacking and slashing with every surface of his terrible body.
A few survivors ran for the door to the science wing, but they piled up against it and made a juicier target. None of them had a card, and whoever on the other side was supposed to let them through had abandoned his post.
Stella held very still and willed herself to become the wall, to disappear. Her skin went cold, and chromatophores in her skin and pelt mimicked the blood-splashed walls she clung to.
The giant tossed down his empty machine guns and walked right by her. She pressed herself into the wall and held her breath. Avery passed by, too, shaking like a doused dog, splatters of hot blood in her face.
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