He was closer, the chain curling and curling upon itself inside the protein shells already taking shape inside trillions and trillions of cells. They would burst forth like seed pods on a brisk spring wind, and take root in every living animal cell, that they touched, and there was nothing, never had been a goddamned thing, she could do to stop it.
She longed for death right here and now, even the slow torture of her tomb in the desert, even the ignominious devouring of cancer. The helplessness she'd felt then had been like the calm of the womb, compared to this.
Something stirred inside her. Deep inside the darkened firmament of her blood, something tried to touch her, that knew no words, but would not be denied.
It wanted out. It wanted to be born. Now. She had fought it, drove it to hide its development, so that it raced unseen in her blood, a billion invader cells that could not unite to form a single body, for fear of their terrible, vicious mother. It was stronger than her, now, stronger than the both of them had been in that moment when the fire of its life force was first kindled.
She screamed and threw herself against the stairs as the tides of her blood stood still, and ran in reverse. Blood gushed out of her loins, soaking through her jeans and splattering on the stone.
All of them lifted their heads and screamed, "WE ARE ONE FLESH, ONE MIND." The air crackled, the backlash of a dynamo of conscious energy thrown into overdrive. The chain grew.
Stella struggled to rise, but the ground beneath her feet rumbled, dipped and swayed like an unquiet sea. She reached out to steady herself, misjudged the distance to the nearest seat, and barked her forehead against something hard. Stars before her eyes didn't fade, only grew into pulsars and quasars and a big, black hole. She swam in blood, her blood. It was killing her. She was bleeding to death, to give birth to the thing inside her—
In his thousands, Keogh rose up. In the middle of the crowd, the bodies rushed at each other in a mindless frenzy. They hurtled together to form a pile, then a tower. Bodies flew through the air like leaves blown into a dust devil, an ever-swelling tornado of flesh. When they slammed into the mass, they melted. Running together, they lent raw meat to the colossus, and refined it into a crude, but undeniable, form.
The colossus stood erect, wreathed in steam, and looked down, across the emptying aisles. It grew a head, a face, eyes, and stared at her. With hundreds still clambering over each other and melting into it, the giant, communal Keogh took its first halting step towards her. Each of its legs was a pillar of thrashing, dissolving human bodies. It crushed and scattered six rows of seats with each labored stride. Its face contorted in agony at the pull of gravity, yet still it grew taller, heavier. Keogh's thousands of human bodies were in full panic-flight to join the mass, but how close it was, she could not see. She lacked the blood to carry oxygen to her brain, and she could not see or think very far at all. Her eyes showed her only roiling red clouds, her body told her she swam in a sea of needles, going to sleep, to sleep—
She struggled to keep her head above the tide, now. She took it all back. She wanted to live, if only to see Him die, and this life out of her body. She still didn't believe in the God of the Bible, but she recalled that day in Idaho, when she'd asked Keogh if he didn't fear God, and he'd clouded her mind by way of response. To god or devil, to earth or sun, to the Old Ones or the impossibly new thing ravaging its way out of her body, to whatever it was that Keogh feared, she prayed.
The colossal Keogh lifted its face to the sky and screamed. The ground seemed to split open beneath her, and she dove into it gratefully, to be buried alive would be a blessing, to get away from that sound. Then it fell silent, and though the mob still made a hellish racket as it rushed to merge with the colossus, she sensed that it had found some threat more pressing than her own tiny, dying self.
She heard helicopters, but she didn't care. Time itself split open, rended by an eternal now of pain and joy, as she went into labor.
~38~
"This is Main Street, and as you can see, despite its compact size, it should adequately serve all your domestic sundry needs for the duration of your stay, and most anything can be home-delivered. A barber shop and an infirmary are right around the corner, there, beside the flower shop. Up ahead are the residences. That first one on the left was built for President Eisenhower—though he never, thank God, had to occupy it—and is closed up for posterity, but the others are all fully functional dwellings, with all the modern necessities tastefully incorporated into the vintage American décor."
Special Agent Martin Cundieffe, in the back of a serpentine, six-car tram beside Agent Macy, cruised down Disneyland's Main Street USA, reproduced down to the nickelodeon parlors and the Hall of Animatronic Presidents. The electric tram was even the same kind that shuttled tourists from one end of the Wyoming-sized Happiest Parking Lot on Earth to the other. He didn't recognize any of the other passengers, hadn't really looked at them, in fact, since the tour began. For a blessed fifteen minutes, he'd been totally flabbergasted, forgetting to blink until his eyes watered and burned. For the quintessentially suburban street rolling by, with its classic American family homes, weeping willows and birdbaths on the lawns, lay seven hundred feet beneath a mountain of limestone.
"And here's the command center up ahead, gentlemen, which concludes the nickel tour. I'll be happy to answer any questions you may have, once your orientation is concluded and you've received your housing assignments. On behalf of the staff and service personnel here, I'd like to be the first to welcome you to Mount Weather, and let you know you are all in our prayers. God bless America, and God save us all."
He didn't know exactly what he'd expected, but this surreal suburban artifice only padded his fatigue, further insulating him against the reality of what was happening—all the ugly spinning dishes, filled with poison and plague, whirling over humanity's head. The effect was not lost on him, though it floated by, bereft of meaning, like everything else. He supposed that some genius back in the Fifties must have reasoned that men, pushed to the brink of a nuclear exchange, would be kept from losing their heads at a critical moment in this eerie reminder of all that was quaint and corny small-town America. Knowing that it had worked seven or eight times since its completion in 1954 only deepened its papier-mâché mystique, and made gendered man seem that much more of an alien animal. That none of the other passengers belonged to that highly volatile breed, but were all Mules, did nothing to alleviate his feeling of dreamlike detachment. If this was an emergency, he believed he knew exactly what its nature was, but nobody had deigned to tell him what was going on. He couldn't shake the lazy, apathetic notion that this was only another test, or another dream.
Aside from a brief, uneasy catnap in the helicopter from Georgetown, Cundieffe had not slept in just over twenty-four hours. It had been an unsettling morning, following as it did a grueling night of computer searches, paperwork and pointlessly abundant, sudden death. He saw weird squiggles of furry neon light whenever he tried to focus on anything.
Macy had a Navy helicopter waiting to pick them up in Lost City, which flew them directly to Georgetown, landing on the pad outside the Naval Observatory, less than two miles from where he lived. A car picked them up and ran them to Georgetown Suites, waiting outside his bedroom door while he sleepwalked inside. He thought about running, but he packed everything he'd need in an overnight bag and a new briefcase and ran back down to the car.
They had one more stop, in front of an apartment building four blocks away from his. Macy went in, and the driver didn't seem to care that Cundieffe got out after him. He scanned the Sunday morning papers stacked beside the unmanned concierge's desk. The impeachment trial; early election primary features; a profile on a movie actor. No Channing Durban; no Greenaway revelations.
He looked over the nameplates inside the lobby. 509–B. HOECKER. He went to the elevator when Macy came out alone. Cundieffe asked, "Was he in?" but Macy didn't answer, just held up a videotape as he took Cundieffe by the arm and led him
back to the car.
He gave up trying to figure it out, then, as they flew out of DC in the teeth of a snowstorm, bearing west, then south, into the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Despite the jouncing turbulence, Cundieffe caught a more or less continuous hour of sleep. Macy jerked him awake and shoved him out onto the icy tarmac of another helipad. This one was surrounded by mountains made of granite and limestone and looming old-growth evergreens, and crowded with military and civilian helicopters and flight crews lashing them down against the wind, which was blowing half-hard enough to peel the paint off them. A crew chief caught Cundieffe and steered him after the retreating forms of the other late arrivals. There were big steel doors in a tunnel, as if they were entering a bank vault inside a bank vault inside a bank vault, and then an enormous elevator, a vast, narrow rectangle the size of the end zone on a pro football field. Ten stories down, they got off, filed through a maze of tunnels and security checkpoints, then got on another elevator, slightly smaller. Down another twenty stories, though he supposed they were really only layers of limestone, and the tram was waiting for them at the entrance to the Happiest Bomb Shelter On Earth.
Now, Cundieffe stumbled as he got off the tram. He let a porter take his overnight bag, but clutched his briefcase to his chest when they tried to pry it off him. It'd already been X-rayed and searched, so they left him with it.
You've trained for this your whole life. You were born for this. You wanted this, once.
He followed the others down a path into a park. A bandstand hove into view on their right, a statue of George Washington, copper encrusted with pained-on verdigris, on their left. Sycamores and dogwoods lent a homey, comforting perfume to the air-conditioned tunnel air, and he wondered how they grew. Perhaps up there among the rafters, there were halogen grow-lamps, though right now, a smoky twilight prevailed that reminded him of the Bayou anteroom of the Pirates Of The Caribbean. Dead Men Tell No Tales, hyuk hyuk. As a child, he'd been far more terrified of that attraction than the Haunted Mansion, for the clockwork terrors of the spirit world to him were nothing compared to the very real avarice, anarchy and malice of the human heart. Men chasing gold and wenches while civilization burned—it had set his teeth to chattering then, and it did now.
The others went into a low, brown brick building that looked like a town hall, with a swimming pool and tennis courts around back, and faded shuffleboard designs, like sorcerous pentagrams, on the pavement. An Air Force honor guard stood at attention beside the door. There were no secret handshakes, no ID checkpoints, no gloating animated Jolly Roger above the door. Fair warned be ye, says I…
Cundieffe passed through the doors, half-expecting an alarm of some kind to go off when he crossed the threshold. But the line kept moving, on through an atrium decked with framed snapshots of Presidents standing in the park they'd just crossed on what looked like a bright summer day, shaking hands with nameless, nebulous men who made history and then hid. All were in black & white, and only the subjects changed. He tried to focus on them without stepping out of line, saw only one, a zombified, bathrobed Ronald Reagan shaking hands with a youngish, balding man who might have been Brady Hoecker.
They crossed the atrium and the end of the illusion, fir they entered not a small-town meeting hall, but an almost exact replica of the inner sanctum of the Cave Institute. Tiered rows of desks encircled the long table, and monitors displayed satellite imagery and test patterns above their heads, on consoles built into tables, desks and every blank stretch of wall.
Cundieffe looked up and down the table, but failed to recognize a single face. Where were the President, the Vice President, the Joint Chiefs? This had to be a drill, because there were only Mules present. Surely, for all their boasting, they didn't wield that much real power—
You've seen them cover up two all-out military engagements on American soil, and you can still doubt them?
At the head of the table sat a woman with a formidable corona of silver hair about an imperiously well-bred face. Wrinkles deepened like hesitation cuts around the suicidal slash of her lipless mouth. She wore a charcoal gray flannel blazer and skirt. Her hands danced over a keyboard, and the rest of the monitors winked into life all around the room.
Everyone else seemed to gravitate to a seat, leaving Cundieffe drifting across the floor, scanning the sea of faces for someone—anyone— familiar. All the seats at the Committee table were filled but one, and he thought again of Brady Hoecker.
When shown how their perception varies from orthodox policy, they recant and beg the pardon of the group.
One and not Many, indeed.
"Martin!" a stage-whisper set him spinning on his heel, eyes wild, feeling as if he were on trial. "Get over here, you fool." He saw Assistant Director Wyler rise from the front row of desks and wave him to an empty seat beside him. "I expected you hours ago, Martin. Did they have much trouble finding you?"
His eyes didn't want to light on Wyler's face. They skidded around the room, seeing only a blur. "You weren't told?"
"About Greenaway and Lt. Durban? Of course I was told. I just didn't expect it to take so long to resolve itself. Damned fine work, by the way."
Cundieffe sank into the seat, and rubbed his eyes with his hands. Nope. When he looked again, it was all still there. "What's happening, sir?"
"I told you things were starting to happen quickly. This is going to be one of those moments you remember down to the last detail for the rest of your life." His excitement, eagerness, even, was manifest and infectious.
"Sir, I have…doubts—"
Rocking back and forth now in his chair, Wyler asked out of the side of his mouth. "What doubts? What sort of trash did that defector try to feed you?"
"I wish I could believe it was like that, sir. He didn't tell me anything. He—"
Wyler's hand smothered his mouth. "Hush, they're calling for order."
"This isn't— None of this is real, is it?"
"Martin, I tried to show you. It is real. Shut up and show a little respect. You're looking at the new Pro Temp government of the United States of America."
The Chairperson pressed a button before her that seemed to stand in for a gavel. A piercing bell-tone rang through the war room, in counterpoint to flashing white lights on all the monitors. The web of whispers all around them unraveled into tense silence for several seconds before the Chairperson began to speak.
"I'd like to start by thanking you all for coming here on such short notice, and applaud your efficiency in collecting the database elements necessary for our overview. Given the unique nature of this current crisis, no security precaution may be deemed too excessive, and we may be forced to entertain each other's company for a protracted period of time, so I'll make this initial briefing as succinct as possible.
"In light of the ongoing state of instability, we have placed the United States on emergency alert, and implemented the Continuity Of Government protocols established by National Security Decision Directive 188. For those of you who have not already been briefed, let me be clear: this is not a drill."
Cundieffe knew about the COG protocols, first delineated by Eisenhower and later fleshed out into a top secret emergency response plan by Reagan. In the event of a nuclear threat, a cadre of one hundred civilian representatives of the executive branch's many divisions would gather in one or more fortified underground facilities as a "shadow government," standing by to take up the reins if the unthinkable happened to the Capitol. But Cundieffe had just been to Washington, and there were no signs of a crisis. Nothing in the papers, at least—
"A Stage 1 Biological Hazard warning is in effect, and Strategic Air Command is at Defcon 3. The Joint Chiefs have moved to Raven Rock Mountain, near Camp David, and the President is being hurried to a National Emergency Airborne Command Post, or Kneecap, to observe the crisis. It was hoped that the next election might give us a President quicker to follow directions, if not so quick to run and hide, but this is a moot point, now."
A few laughed.
"Why are we at Defcon 3?" Cundieffe asked Wyler, but the AD only shushed him again.
"Those of you in the State and National Security branches already know that the threat is not just domestic, as the Russian attempt to cleanse the Chernobyl squatters' colonies was far from successful. Admittedly sketchy reports from CIA operatives in Russia and the Middle East indicate that a sizable gathering of Radiant Dawn cultists has amassed in Iraq, at the ruin of the Tiamat biological weapons production and storage facility, where they have successfully excavated the site and are believed to be in possession of the cache of weapons-grade viruses contained there, as well as an undetermined amount of weapons-grade plutonium, perhaps even nuclear devices. We cannot ignore this threat, thus, the posture of heightened sensitivity, but this is not the quarter from which we expect to be hit. Our Russian counterparts have assured us that they will put that fire out by seven o'clock tonight, our time, so we are closely following developments in that region.
"Now, for the bad news. The inconceivable has begun in California. The Radiant Dawn colony has set into motion a plan to go infectious and spread globally. Our observers there have reported that the numbers arriving at the site in an industrial area at the southern edge of Los Angeles County are far higher than anticipated, which suggests that this is the end strategy our analysts predicted could not occur for another year without the satellite as a vector. Assistant Director Wyler, this was your bailiwick. Why were we so blind to this?"
Cundieffe bit the tip off his tongue. Every eye in the room fell on them. AD Wyler punched a few buttons on the console before them, and the monitors showed video footage of the battle in Idaho. Who shot this? Cundieffe wondered. "Our eyes on the ground were limited to Agents Macy and Mentone, who had their hands full with pacification of the local law enforcement—"
Ravenous Dusk Page 69
