Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  Wyler cast a harsh sidelong glance at him, like a father whose son has just cried through his first trip to the barber shop. Don't be such a candy-ass, Martin, said his eyes.

  "Today, as a few of you already know, is the crisis we've been waiting for. All great evolutionary leaps come out of an environmental catastrophe, and ours will be no different. Our hand has been forced, but we are ready for the massive undertaking we knew would be laid across our shoulders one day. For centuries, we have labored in secret to preserve the candle of human civilization against the storm of animal nature, and for the most part, we have been successful. But as the task became greater and more complex, we knew that it would one day overreach our abilities. The sheer size and power of those arrayed against us would overwhelm our scant numbers, while the safety of the whole would require harsher natures than ours. The author of the Republic professed that the philosopher-kings required to guide the ship of state over the uncertain rapids of the future would come from nature, but even before his time, we worked to direct nature, as man has always done, towards the desirable path. That path ends here, today, ladies and gentlemen. When we leave Mount Weather, we will go out into a new world, with new hope of an attainable, orderly tomorrow. Henceforth, though our task will be no less great, the stakes no less dire, yet our burden shall be lessened, and the ship of humanity will sail on into the future of our making."

  The doors opened and a squad of soldiers came in wearing uniforms so outlandish that Cundieffe had to stifle a laugh. Ballooned trousers and stockings, slashed sleeves blooming out of steel chest plates, and kettle helmets such as the Conquistadors wore. Each carried an assault rifle slung back on his shoulder, but in their hands they held pikes and halberds. It took Cundieffe a moment to place them, but he finally did. They were dead ringers for the Swiss Guard, the mercenary force who guarded the Pope at the Vatican. Still puzzling over Madame Chairperson's bewildering speech, he wondered for a moment if they weren't making every backwoods bigot's worst nightmare come true by turning control of the nation over to the Catholic Church.

  The guards stepped aside and they walked in. All in the war room rose to their feet in silent awe.

  The first ones stood head and shoulders above their guards. Absurdly broad in shoulders and deep in the chest, they looked like any Bible storybook picture of the Philistine giant Goliath. They had been selectively bred for aggression and charisma and raw physical power, but at a staggering cost. Their muscles rippled and creaked on brittle bones taxed to their limit to hold them upright. Their wide-open faces were so blank and unresponsive they might have been painted on, and betrayed a bloody-minded idiocy that Cundieffe had seen in the eyes of pit bulls. Drunk on their own physical might, weaned inside a secret realm to rule a world they could not comprehend, they looked around them and saw only meat to be beaten and eaten. They wobbled and drooled, drugged, but an attendant walked behind each of them with a doctor's bag and a cattle prod.

  This must be some kind of joke, Cundieffe told himself. These are Socrates' philosopher-kings?

  But they were only the first. Those that came next might be born leaders, but they were, if anything, far less human than their giant brethren. Cundieffe had been taught, of late, to see all biology as an economic process. They, the Mules, were deprived of reproductive capabilities, which biological windfall they shrewdly reinvested in intellect, immune-function, and empathy. From all he had been told, the Mules had been sports, happy accidents of genetics who had helped bootstrap humanity up from savagery into ordered civilization. How could they believe that it was other than destiny, that they came along when they did? And how could they not look at the slope-browed brutes all around them as raw material, to be refined into something more like themselves?

  The second batch could not walk on their own, and rode in wheelchairs with bubble domes around them. Their skins looked like the unfinished, shiny pink flesh under an unripe scab. Their limbs were stunted, vestigial affairs, flippers with a few crudely hewn digits, garbled, misfired wings folded into sunken, swaybacked torsos. In the womb, nature had given up early on their bodies and squandered all the saved biological capital on an orgy of cranial engineering the likes of which homo sapiens would never, in a million generations, have spawned on its own. Their wizened faces were squashed down underneath explosive blooms of cranium, which rested on cradles. The seams of their enormous skulls did not meet, but curled back like the lips of a tulip to make way for a crippling mass of brain tissue. It spilled out of their skulls in great, trembling sacs that would have hung down to their waists, if they could stand. Cundieffe counted eight chairs parked alongside the long table in the center of the war room.

  The giants were herded into a corner by their warders, and had to be prodded into submission when the room broke out in thunderous applause.

  Stapleton called for order. "For some of you, this may come as a shock, but we have known all along that we were not the last word on the species, but only the vanguard of a new human genetic diaspora, which must be shielded and nurtured until it can take its rightful place."

  Cundieffe goggled at the new leaders. Many of the outer circle of the Committee demanded answers, some openly incensed and repulsed, others ecstatic. Madame Chairperson explained that they were the products of the best-known human husbandry project in recorded history, the ruling families of Western Europe. The giant guardians were selectively inbred in Europe for centuries within the so-called Black Families of the European aristocracy. The philosopher-kings were of the same blue bloodline, but were hybridized with another ancestral line preserved in France and Germany in the Merovingian dynasty of the Holy Roman Empire. After their betrayal in the ninth century, the heirs retreated into nameless secrecy under the care of the Prieure De Sion in the south of France, where only a few outsiders became privy to the secret of their origins. Few outside this room today knew that these mutants were directly descended from the bloodline of Mary Magdalene and her sometime paramour, an exceptional mutant specimen known as Jesus Christ of Nazareth. By law of nature and holy fiat, they were humankind's naturally ordained rulers.

  "They are, of course, severely handicapped and physically infirm from centuries of recessive traits piling up in their germline, so until very recently, we seemed to be further than ever from our ultimate goal. Then Keogh opened doors for us. From the prisoner Storch and the captives taken at White Bird, we harvested mitochondrial DNA unlike anything ever discovered in living animal tissue. The Shoggoth mitochondria in Keogh's genotype powers the drastic somatic alterations observed in the Radiant Dawn specimens, but now we have harnessed that dangerous power for society's benefit.

  "With Keogh's gene therapy technology, we have grasped the power to accelerate nature's plan for the human race a thousandfold. The new leadership is responding to treatment, and will soon be ready to assume its place."

  And there were to be more. Video screens lit up showing animated computer graphics of the forms into which they would cast the citizens of tomorrow. Spidery human skeletons and fish-faced changelings, shaped to live in orbit, and under the sea. Hulking, monolithic monsters with only mouths and black eyespots on their minimal heads, burrowing troglodytes with the outsized spade-claws of a mole. Women who looked like Holroyd, the shapeless human monster in the slaughterhouse, all dewlaps and rolling haunches of blubber, breeding cows for a better humanity.

  Cundieffe didn't know how long Wyler had been looking at him, but the crumple of Mosaic scorn his face had become told him his own face betrayed his inner turmoil. "It's—sir, this is monstrous."

  Wyler bristled, whispered scalding tones in Cundieffe's ear. "You had no problem with the notion that you were a genetically superior administrator, and should rightfully trample due process to keep human affairs running smoothly. By the same argument, these are superior rulers, and will see humanity through the coming instability to greater levels of specialization, into a smoothly run hive, instead of the self-destructive cesspool of contradictory impulses it is
now. With judicious application of the genetically enhanced mitochondrial DNA, the human race will be shaped into something fit for the future."

  The Committee applauded. One of the guardians reared up and snapped his warder's neck with one hand. He heaved the limp body across the room.

  This is why Keogh has been allowed to go so far, Cundieffe realized. To fight such a global threat, America must band together with the other nations of the world and pool its resources under a more exacting authority. There would be sacrifices, but in the face of such an awful alternative as Keogh posed, humanity could not but decide to follow the Mules into a New World Order.

  "Is this what you joined the FBI for, sir? To serve—these?"

  Wyler blanched, then slapped him. "You worshipped law and order and the secrets and the power we gave you. Why didn't you complain, then? We told you all along we were working towards a perfect, orderly society. What the hell did you think such a thing would look like? Do you, of all people, honestly think for a moment that such a society could exist, with untreated, gendered Homo sapiens living in it?"

  Cundieffe looked away, at the rows of balding or bewigged bureaucrats setting up to take over the world. They looked like the volunteers who manned the phone banks on a PBS fundraiser. They looked like every anonymous official in the background of every photograph of a President. They were the ones steering him through the crowds, handing him speeches. But beside them stood those creatures from the wettest dreams of Josef Mengele, and their brain-bag cousins, the Philosopher Kings.

  "It seems like you already have the situation well in hand," Cundieffe said, trying to sound reasonable. "You already run everything. Why unleash Keogh to wreck everything, even if you really do think you can stop him, or find a cure for him?"

  "It's not for any one of us to question. It's what's ordained. It's policy. We're all utopian idealists, here, but the world spits on and burns that kind of idealism, Martin. You know that. It made your life lonely long before you learned you were one of us. We're not talking about waging genocide on the gendered human race, Martin, if that's what you're thinking. Some will die, but no more than die in the Third World, anyway, and that's where it's all going to happen. After the Wilmington colony is sterilized, America will be clean. Iraq will be nuked, and the President will be strong-armed into explaining it to the world. The UN and every other nation in the world will be howling for our blood, but then Keogh will start to spread, abroad, and we will give them the cure. Then we'll begin implementing the new government plans—"

  "Eugenic p-programs," Cundieffe stammered. "You're not going to wipe out the human race, you're just going to breed it out of existence."

  "In Nature, on planet Earth, when has that ever been a crime?"

  Cundieffe couldn't look at his mentor. Wyler came closer, mistaking his resolve for pouting.

  "Listen, Martin, this is the real world, not the world of laws and ethics and justice. There are many others—outsiders like Keogh, only far more powerful—against whom we will be defenseless in the future, if we don't take decisive action now.

  "You don't know what the world is really like, Martin. What's in it, what lies sleeping underneath, and what waits Outside. The future is going to be rife with pole shifts, climatic changes, explosive population growth, new religious wars and new fanatical faiths, and famines and plagues on an unprecedented scale: and things the world must never know about, like Keogh.

  "And it'll only get harder. Things are about to get very, very rough, Martin, and no matter what's done, a lot of people are going to die.

  America isn't going to suffer as much as the rest of the world, of course, but sweeping changes are going to have to be implemented to keep the nation from slipping into a new Dark Age. Hard decisions are going to need to be made, choices we can't expect from a whore of the polls."

  Cundieffe nodded absently, then tried to make his face bright and convinced-looking. "How secure is this place?"

  "Oh, don't let the quaint atmosphere fool you. This place will still be standing in an exchange that leaves Cheyenne Mountain as an ash heap. They're going to give the go-ahead to bomb Keogh's colony any minute, now, and that'll be the end of it, in our area of responsibility."

  "No, I mean, inside. How secure are we, in here?"

  "Even if there were an incident outside this room, the security system would render the room airtight. It's a strongbox, Martin, there's no safer place in the world."

  "We're not doing bad things, are we, sir? We're just following our programming."

  "Adaptive behavior is instinctual for us, Martin. Look into your heart, and you will see this is not just the right thing to do. It's the only thing to do."

  Cundieffe sat down at a console and, after ferreting around to get the feel for the system, checked his e-mail.

  A report from his old colleague in LA, Eugenie Hanchett, on the Storch kidnapping. The senior Sgt. Storch was abducted from the Norwalk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane yesterday, by a man posing as a psychiatrist, Dr. Hiram Hansen. While the duty nurse checked the Doctor's ID, the abductor somehow managed to get out of the hospital with the patient, who was severely delusional and under restraints and heavily medicated. Their present whereabouts were unknown.

  Cundieffe deleted the message without replying. In LA, Agent Hanchett would have a lot more to worry about than tracking down an old lunatic war veteran, if she survived. Besides, the only person who might care was dead.

  A junk mail hawking Lemurian Blessing Bracelets, forged of a unique silver alloy which attuned the wearer's aura to the cosmic emanations of the lost civilization of Lemuria, whose mystic science had, continental sinking aside, conferred upon them near-divine powers and good luck. Cundieffe ordered one for himself, and on a quick head-count, decided to order seventy-five more.

  A message from someone he'd never heard of, wyrmboy3202. Figuring it was more junk mail, he almost deleted it, but the subject line stopped his hand over the button. He Won, it said. The message was sent two days before, but had only just arrived.

  He opened it.

  Please excuse tardiness. Got killed, eaten. 1000% SNAFU. No time to explain. This body is not mine. Mission dead. Keogh going to Iraq. Going to be One, and eat his Masters. Lysing agent won't work. He's got my immunity. I fucked up. I'll fix it.

  Storch

  The only thing to do—

  No one looked at Martin as he rose and took his briefcase out from under the desk. "I'll be back in a moment, sir. Fresh air—"

  Wyler nodded absently and watched as a helicopter's eye-view of Los Alamitos came up on most of the screens. The racetrack hove into view for a second, where Mother liked to spend Easter Sundays with her friends after church.

  Cundieffe went up the stairs and looked around. All eyes were on the screens. No one had picked up the body of the slain warder. A short, stocky form in a black lab coat and coveralls, the body had landed so that the broken neck bent back on itself, and the head lay under it. Cundieffe looked around one more time.

  The helicopter passed over the 605 and Coyote Creek, crossing the county line into Long Beach. Another helicopter flanked the camera on either side—both old surplus Hueys with big green tanks on the sides, like crop dusters.

  Cundieffe opened his briefcase and took out his Thermos. They ran it through an X-ray along with his other belongings before they let him in here, but they'd seen nothing. He unscrewed the lid and peered inside.

  It moved.

  The X-ray had made it testy. It swarmed up the glass sides of the Thermos and stretched out a gray pseudopod toward his face.

  He'd almost forgotten about Spec Four Gibson Holroyd, US Army 1st Div., MACV/SOG. He'd kept it because what he saw in Idaho made him loath to turn it over. As it turned out, they'd gotten plenty from there without it.

  The more cultured and intelligent you are—

  He supposed that was when the therapists would say he'd started to snap. He stifled a laugh as one of the Philosopher Kings drifted b
y, the respirator pump mounted on his wheelchair wheezing and dripping coolant and drool on the most secret floor in America.

  —the more ready you are to work for Satan.

  He clamped the lid down and reached around on the table beside him. His hand brushed a plastic cup, and he took it. It was half-full of tepid cocoa, the edges scummed with marshmallows that refused to melt completely. Darn near perfect. Cundieffe shook the Thermos, opened it and poured the cocoa in through a narrow opening. He shook it again. Soak up that sugar, you sick little son of a gun. Do what you're supposed to do. Raise an army—

  He lifted the corpse up and propped its shoulder against one knee. He twisted the head around until it lay face-up in his lap.

  Around him, they still watched the screens. The helicopters turned north at the Long Beach Marina and followed the muddy San Gabriel River into the oil refinery grids of Wilmington.

  He just sat there, looking at the screens. In the end, it was the words of Keogh that made him move. Never stop trying to change the world.

  He pried the corpse's mouth open. The jaws were clamped shut on a bloody snippet of tongue, and it took both hands prying on it to get it open wide enough. He tipped the Thermos to the corpse's cyanotic lips and opened it. Do what you're supposed to do, you little impossible bastard. Raise an army—

  Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He jumped, almost dropping the Thermos, but clamped the lid shut before it got out. He hunched low over the body, brain percolating explanations, all of them utter bullshit—

  Hands grabbed him roughly, throwing him back on his behind. He rolled over and curled up around the Thermos. What the hell had he been trying to do?

  It was the guardian who'd broken the warder's neck. He stooped over Cundieffe and fixed him with a glare of such pure command and contempt that Cundieffe found himself offering up the Thermos before he realized what he was doing. If he'd had anything else, he would have offered that, too.

  The guardian opened the Thermos, tilted it back, and dumped the contents down its yawning gullet.