Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  "No shit, Sherlock. Who are they?"

  "A crazy old soldier and his friends. He used you for the wrong reasons, but now some good can come of it."

  Durban shrugged out of his parka and went over to the stove, fed some logs into it. "You're investigating the Cave Institute? Why would they let you do that?"

  "I'm—" He tapped the screen. "He thinks I'm one of them. My investigation isn't sanctioned, but I've been looking for you, to try to find you before they do."

  "What do you want from me?"

  Gingerly, eyes nailed to Durban's, he fished the disk out of his coat, held it out between them. "Do you recognize this?"

  Durban flinched and looked away, his ruddy face paling with shame. "That's it. The disk…"

  "Did you read what was on it?"

  "I read enough. I didn't—"

  "I need you to decrypt it here and make me a copy I can read. Can you do that, here?"

  He shrugged. "I could put it on the goddamned AOL homepage from here, if I wanted to, but why should I? I've done all this to stay alive. That thing stays buried, or they'll come after me for real, and my family—"

  "It has to come to light, Lieutenant, or they will kill you, and no one will ever have known it existed. If you print it out for me, I'll make sure it comes before a Congressional Committee. Your name will be cleared, justice will be done—and," hating himself for this last part, "you can go home."

  Durban took the disk and went to a workstation set up in the especially cluttered space between the two pine trees. Cundieffe knelt before the stove and warmed himself at the fire, grateful for this moment of stillness, but struggling not to let his mind race in circles. What time was it? He'd left the office after midnight, so the sun would have to be coming up soon. What then?

  Presently, Durban came to him with a slim stack of freshly printed sheets. "You really, really want to know what they did?"

  "I need to," Cundieffe said. "The country needs to know—"

  "No it doesn't," he said. "I used to believe in this country. Shit, I would've died for it, if duty called. But now…. No, no one should have to know about this."

  He placed the papers in Cundieffe's hands. He started to read, and with the first sentence, all the blood drained out of his face.

  He read them all the way through, then started again at the beginning, stopping only when he began to feel sick to his stomach. So wrapped up in the documents was he that he did not notice exactly when it was that someone started shooting up the cabin.

  He heard a cough and looked up at Durban. The Naval officer was studying him, but the side of his neck gaped open in a hideous crater out of which freshets of arterial blood gushed as he sagged sideways and collapsed against the wood stove.

  "No! God damn it, Greenaway!" Cundieffe jumped up and scanned the walls of the cabin. Between the shuttered windows and the front door hung an upside-down Old Glory. One of the shutters had a crack in it through which light spilled out into the night, and bullets spilled in. One of the computer monitors exploded, the pressurized pop of its tube like a second gunshot from within the room.

  Cundieffe went to Durban. He was dead. The fur trim on the hood of his parka smoldered and ignited flames which Cundieffe saw spreading across the floor to the cardboard cartons of firewood, the racks of supplies, the jerry cans of gasoline for the generator—

  Cundieffe stuffed the papers in his coat and ran for the door.

  NO! Stop! The shooter waited for him to come out. He had to get out without getting shot, if at all possible. He lay down on the floor and turned the knob, threw the door wide. A volley of semi-auto lit up the cabin's interior through the open doorway, but he couldn't hear shots from outside, or see muzzle flashes. He crawled back into the cabin, relieved to see the fire wasn't spreading as fast as his imagination had told him it was. The place would undoubtedly burn down by morning—long before the sniper got tired of waiting for him to come out—but nothing would explode, for the moment. He checked the closed-circuit monitor.

  The Range Rover sat by the side of the road, still, but a human-shaped hump lay in the ditch almost under the vehicle, and another sat silhouetted in the back with its head against a star-shaped mess on the side window.

  He started to look for a back exit when a shadow filled the front door. "Agent Cundieffe?" It wasn't Greenaway's sniper. Cundieffe ducked behind a row of shelves with his hands wrapped tight around his legs.

  "Agent Cundieffe, it's safe to come out. We followed you out here…"

  He looked around for something he could use as a weapon. Boxes of foil-wrapped, freeze-dried food were closest. The gun rack was behind the door, and Durban lay on his Mossberg, burning himself out already, at the foot of the stove.

  The figure entered the cabin, stepped over Durban, and looked behind the intruding tree trunks. Cundieffe heard him doing something to the computer, peeked out, and saw him hunched over the hard drives under the trestle table between the trunks. His back to Cundieffe. Out of sight of the door. Not particularly concerned.

  Cundieffe stood and rushed the stooped figure. His foot snagged on something. He stumbled and fell into the firewood, a honking bark of surprise and pain yanked out of his mouth.

  The figure turned on him, pistol in one hand, ROYAL PICA disk in the other. It was Agent Macy or Mentone, he forgot which—anyway, the one who was supposed to be male. It smiled at him as if he'd been expected but late, but with such a person as him, how could you stay mad?

  "Find anything back there?" he asked dryly. "We're almost ready to go, here."

  Cundieffe took a step closer, it almost became a dead run at the Mule agent, gun or no gun. Get a hold of yourself.

  Someone with a big rifle filled the doorway. Cundieffe stiffened and started to duck again, this was going to be messy, but then he saw it wasn't Greenaway's man—Wiley, that'd been his name. This one wore a camo poncho over a full suit of black body armor, and had a portable telescope strapped to his head, pushed back above his eyes, which were flat brown buttons on his blank face.

  "What happened here?" Cundieffe asked.

  "You were kidnapped. Mr. Greenaway and his gang of rogue soldiers were conspiring to commit treasonous acts with their associate, Lieutenant Durban."

  "I don't suppose any of it will make CNN, though, will it, Agent Mentone?"

  "Macy," the Mule corrected, then shook his head. "Situation's changing fast, Cundieffe. A state of emergency exists. Maybe even a state of war. Sacrifices will have to be made." Agent Macy shut down the computers at a power strip and started unplugging them. Cundieffe stood there numbly. He could think of nothing to say, no reason why they should not shoot him. The air was choked with the smoke from Durban burning.

  From behind the computers, Agent Macy said, "Walk Agent Cundieffe down to the car, Mr. Loeb. I'll be along, momentarily. Agent Mentone will know what to do with him."

  Cundieffe walked out into the forest, not noticing as Loeb fell in behind him. He started across the darkened yard, let himself be steered around it and all the way down the hillside. Loeb pushed him in an erratic path back down to the road with the cyclopean night-vision telescope on. He never made a sound. Cundieffe couldn't even hear him breathing over the runaway train of his own heartbeat. His hand gripped Cundieffe's shoulder when he saw something, and jerked him. It was only by blind luck, apparently, that Cundieffe had blundered up to the cabin without getting himself killed.

  They came out onto the road. The Range Rover was parked twenty feet away, and close in behind it stood another SUV with someone behind the wheel.

  He saw the dead man in the ditch was Greenaway's driver, Mizell, a red pillow of slush under his ventilated skull. The work was unmistakably good, the men who must have done this surely the elite of the elite, to have gotten the drop on Greenaway's commandos at all. Only the Bureau's own HRT snipers were that good.

  Cundieffe shivered as he looked at the spray coating the inside of the Range Rover's rear window. The window opposite was smashed
out. He'd hoped that Greenaway might see reason and do the right thing, but now he was dead, like everyone else who knew the truth. All those thoughts, all that rage, reduced to so much heat and mess, and the night, so cold, it sucked it right up—

  "ROYAL PICA," he mumbled. Pica was Latin for magpie. A mental disturbance that caused people—usually children—to crave and devour the indigestible—chalk, clay, stones. The file names of top secret operations were supposed to have no literal significance, but he bet this one did. It stuck in someone's gut, chilled someone's soul, from its very conception. And it had not ended. It had evolved.

  Loeb walked past him, up to the SUV—a Suburban, Cundieffe noticed now, just like the one that Wyler picked him up in, that morning— and tapped on the passenger-side window.

  Cundieffe pressed his face against Greenaway's window, trying to see through the gore and the dark. Pegs of safety glass glittered on the seat, the floor, the corpse's lap. If he could get to a weapon while Loeb's back was turned, he would probably make as big a mess of things as he had when he was carjacked by the bogus DC Metro cop, but if he didn't—

  He blinked, closing his eyes tight to purge imagination, but when he looked again, it was still there. The body leaning against the window was still there, but it wasn't Greenaway.

  He turned just as Mr. Loeb made a similar discovery in the Suburban. Something coughed in his face, entering his head through the massive single lens of the scope over his eyes and coming out at the base of his skull. He stumbled back and flopped on his backside in the ditch, dead as Dillinger, though his legs kicked on the edge of the tarmac for a long while.

  "Come here," the man in the Suburban said. Cundieffe turned and looked around. He thought about running, but to where?

  He walked around to the driver's side window, which rolled down so Greenaway could lean out and ask, "So, did you get it?"

  The papers. It hit him again like a fist between the eyes, what he'd read, what he knew. It changed everything. "Are you insane?" he screamed. "Channing Durban is dead. Your men are dead. You can't keep doing this. You're only going to get more people killed. You can't use this against them. It's too—it would—"

  "Well, what are you going to do with it?"

  Burn it. Bake the ashes in bread and feed it to birds. Blow my own brains out. It's that bad. "What are you going to do?"

  "Burn them down. I want to make it public. That's what you want, isn't it? Justice, real justice? That's why you're fucked with them, right?"

  "I didn't know how bad—how deep it—" He deflated, out of words. The air still stank of burning Durban. He supposed the stink must be soaked into him, now. He took the pages out of his coat and stuffed them through the window. "Take them, but don't release them. Nobody needs to know this, do you understand?"

  Greenaway glanced at the pages, then back at him, his eyes flashing mistrust. "Then why are you giving them tome?"

  "Do what you've always done. Buy yourself a clean slate. Get the hell out of America, and don't come back."

  Greenaway folded the pages into his overcoat, under his broken arm. He started up the Suburban. "What's in it for you?"

  "Knowing that somebody else knows, who isn't dead." Cundieffe started to get in the back, but Green away waved him back with his suppressed 9mm automatic.

  "Take the Range Rover, or wait for them to come back down, I don't care, but you can't come with."

  "What? You've got to get me out of here—"

  "You can't come." Reaching awkwardly across the steering wheel, Greenaway notched the shifter into reverse and backed away from the Range Rover. "Best you don't know how I get out, or if. It'll make your surprised look more convincing when I do come back and kill the whole unholy fucking lot of you."

  "Damn it, Greenaway, at least tell me where I am!"

  "A couple hours' hike south of Lost City, West Virginia. Thanks for all your help, Special Agent, and good fucking morning to you." He jerked the Suburban into drive and squealed out onto the road, and out of sight.

  Cundieffe turned to size up his prospects with the Range Rover when Agent Macy came bounding out of the trees with his gun drawn. He carried a suitcase under one arm, but it flipped free and hit the snow hard when he leapt out into the open. "What happened?"

  Cundieffe raised his hands over his head, but he felt an insane urge to start laughing. "You're too late. He got away."

  Macy peered into the Range Rover at the body of Agent Mentone and shook his head. Then he seemed to forget about it, and went around to the driver's seat of the Range Rover, and climbed in. "Get in."

  "What, are we going after him?"

  "He's not our problem. I've got to get you back to DC, where you're packing a bag, then we're going to Mount Weather."

  Cundieffe shivered with the cold, wiped away frozen beads of sweat on his forehead. He had nowhere else to go. He got in.

  ~35~

  Blue light.

  Blue dark.

  Alive.

  So fucking alive.

  When he awoke, he wondered, Am I in the ocean?

  Stupid question to ask. There was no outside that Storch could feel. Hewenton and on, teeming with life, glutted with death, rancid with poisons and indomitable in his regenerative purity. Better to ask—

  Am I the ocean?

  For lack of a better explanation, until a more coherent update from his stir-fried brain was aired, he was the ocean.

  There are worse things to be when you're a know-nothing mutant in a stolen, dead human body. The world is insane, and it just keeps getting crazier until you go insane trying to fix it. You deserve this, Zane. Just be the ocean.

  He flowed out through the faint electrical current of the brine and touched his new body. Sharks roved in packs through the warm currents of his equatorial abdomen like leukocytes, gobbling up everything unfit to serve the ocean. Pods of whales roved their ancestral routes up and down the coasts, just under his skin, their mournful songs telling the world, and him, who he was. He pored over the richness of his reefs, the miraculous explosions of forms that danced the eons' old battle-dance of selection, vying for the right to serve him and bear young more fit than themselves. The eaters and the eaten fed him and made him stronger, but there were despoilers from outside him, who only multiplied and grew bolder in their assaults, so much so that he feared they might one day kill him.

  He smarted at the multitudes of parasites sucking his life's blood, these rapacious foreign invaders from the paltry scabs of land that defined his only borders, who sapped his strength like clouds of mosquitoes and tapeworms and viruses, and gave back only their shit, oil, trash and toxic waste for him to absorb.

  But he knew he would survive this. He was the Ocean, from which they all crawled, and to which, when the stars were right, they would all return.

  How he came to be the ocean, he did not really remember, just now, nor did he particularly want to. He'd made mistakes. He believed the world he grew up in was the real one. He believed his father was crazy for seeing things that weren't there, and so when things started to happen to him, he'd told himself he was not crazy, and he went to fix them. He was a soldier adrift in a war nobody else could see, between sides equally insane and dangerous. He told himself there was a bottom to it all, a sane explanation, and that he would find it. He sided with the less-crazy, less-evil Missionaries and went to war again, and it was even worse than before. He saw then that it was not him. Daddy was right. The world is insane, and there aren't enough bombs or bullets to fix it. When he found that all the insanity in the world seemed to be coming from one little atoll in the South Pacific, it was only natural that he go there and slay it. Then he could go home and know that he'd done his duty as a soldier.

  Keogh was waiting for him. He was always here, waiting for us to come to him, when it all got to be too hard, when we were all too hurt and sick to go on. So patient, so calculating, the Missionary were like flies trying to kill a man with a swatter, but they, too, were his creation. This had all b
een so long coming. All the struggles of Nature, all the triumphs of humankind, led to Keogh.

  Why had he tried to stop it? Everything he lost—his home, his freedom, his humanity, his sanity, his goddamned body—was stripped away by a force of Nature as decisive as the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs, or the Flood that swept away the evil descendents of Cain in Genesis. It had not been a challenge: there was nothing to avenge, for his grievances were so small against the panorama of evolution, the grand story of life that began and ended with the thing that called itself Keogh.

  And who was he to try to stop it? He hadn't even known what he was trying to save. Dr. Barrow had tried to explain, but he was a tree-hugging loon, so he'd been easy to dismiss. When Keogh showed him, something that had held him up all through it just broke, never to repair itself. The world had been seeded with life by the obscenely vain Old Ones, who wanted only slaves. Everything that lived on earth, all that had ever lived, was only the remains of an insane experiment grinding blindly on, the creators long since dead and gone. His own will to adapt and survive at all costs, which had brought him back so many times, was just a shred of faulty programming that once drove monstrosities like the Shoggoths to rebel against their creators. The world had come from insanity, so who gave a shit where it was going?

  The fabled end of the world was about to happen, but only in that humans were about to be replaced by new and improved versions of themselves. Most would gladly accept Keogh's control over every aspect of their lives for the chance to be remade as a superhuman. He was not defending the earth or even the human race, but the status quo. Though he knew that Keogh's mind would spread and blot out every other like a disease, this, too, would be an advance. No more war, famine, plague or lawyers, forever and ever, amen, unless he fucked up as bad as the human race had, and something else came along.

  In the absence of any divine authority like the one that ruled his father's universe, evolution itself was an evil god, sweeping whole species off the planet at a stroke. It was a mighty god, working unappreciated miracles all the livelong day, but it sure as hell wasn't much on answering prayers. It made what is, and could not be held back forever from making what will be. Keogh was only a tool Nature had chosen as its righteous agent to save the world from homosaps in the only way it could.