Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  Eyes flicked around above his head. No response.

  "I realize also that you have been specially trained to resist interrogation and seek any opportunity to escape when held captive in wartime, and that you believe that some sort of state of war presently exists. And who could fault you for that assumption? You have been held without legal due process, and, in the course of your imprisonment, you have been tortured in an attempt to extract the information I am about to ask you for. I know, it strikes me as ridiculous, as well: when all else fails, try diplomacy. But, if I may make so bold, you of all people should be aware of the military's shortcomings with regard to unique situations like this one."

  No response.

  "Regrettably, I have no power to delay your execution and any cooperation you will offer will have to be for posterity, as nothing, I am given to understand, will result in the commutation or even temporary stay of your sentence. You're a man the United States government wants very badly to kill, Sgt. Storch, though you're already dying of cancer. And they want to do it in secrecy, in silence. Not that they'd have to—if the events of July Tenth, 1999, were made public, they would have little or no difficulty sentencing you to die in the gas chamber in California. There are more than enough rock-solid cases against you to move for the death penalty, so one could make the perverse argument that by executing you in secret, the government is only sparing the citizenry a lengthy and expensive show trial and years of panic and unrest.

  "But I don't think anyone I've spoken to knows what really happened that night. I think that you know more than even you realize and are in a position at least to deny the military its precious silence."

  He couldn't even tell if Storch was looking at the picture on top of the pile. The photo had been digitally enhanced, so it looked like a Pointillist painter's rendition of a security camera still. In it, a man whom Cundieffe and everyone else had positively identified as Sgt. Storch stood at the counter of the Furnace Creek Sheriff's office, pointing a gun at two men in uniform, one dead, one quite explosively dying. Though his gun hand was a hundred-fingered blur, his head was held as still as if he was posing for the picture.

  Cundieffe opened up the first file and held up another picture. It showed Storch's pickup truck. "This truck was found on July Sixth along Highway 190. It was identified as your vehicle and impounded as evidence in the murder of Sheriff James Twombley and Deputy Kenny Landis on the Fifth, though there were several discrepancies observed between the vehicle's condition and the statements of Deputy Danny Asaro and the Death Valley Junction Sheriff's deputies who pursued the alleged murderer. Is this your vehicle, Sgt. Storch?"

  No response.

  Another photo. The same truck, down to the license plates, but shot through with bullet-holes and shotgun spray. Tipped over in an arroyo, half-buried in dried mud. "This vehicle was discovered by myself and another agent on July Tenth, less than two hours before the Mission dropped napalm on Radiant Dawn Hospice Village. Note that the condition of the vehicle matched the aforementioned statement. There were two trucks with your license plates. One was used to murder two peace officers, the other was found abandoned by the side of the road in the middle of Death Valley. Which vehicle was yours, Sgt. Storch?"

  No response.

  He closed the file and picked another. He held up a full-color crime scene photo of a male corpse propped up in a chair. An astounding variety of sharp instruments buried in the skull. "This unfortunate gentleman was named Charles Walter Angell, leader of the School Of Night sect in Colma. While the group's twenty-six members were all found dead by some sort of apparent biofeedback mass suicide, Mr. Angell was brutally murdered and suffered considerable postmortem desecration. They are content to believe that you did this."

  He laid this photo down before Storch and picked up another. It showed a residential interior, the walls draped in tie-dyed tapestries and beaded curtains. Two bodies lay splayed out side by side in the center of the room. Every sharp object in the house and many not found in any healthy home were jammed into the skulls of the victims. They looked as if they were wearing steel war-bonnets.

  "This is Sky and Chrysanthemum Angulo, of Santa Cruz, California. Both were convicted manufacturers of hallucinogens, and they were found murdered in their home, in January of 1988. There were signs of missing property, particularly electronics and narcotics, but their seventeen-year old son, Baron Angulo, was never found. Local authorities proceeded on the assumption that gang drug dealers had killed the Angulos and that their son had either fled or been abducted by the gang. The FBI's San Jose field office concluded that the sole perpetrator was the son, but there has never been an indictment handed down for want of evidence and what records they do have keep disappearing from the NCIC database. He's never been arrested or even sighted. This is the last known photo of Angulo. Do you recognize this boy?"

  Storch's eyes might've flicked around in their bottomless sockets. Cundieffe took another look at the photo himself. Bright, mischievous eyes, and the crooked smile of one who has never been punished.

  "Several of your former neighbors in Thermopylae positively identified the young man in this photograph as one Ely Buggs, a former employee of yours. Is that correct?"

  Nothing.

  "In 1996, a hacker penetrated the databases of the Human Genome Project at UC Berkeley, and copied all data in a section of classified research and proprietary DNA-parsing compounds. The FBI's computer crime specialists tracked the source of the incursion to a computer tied into a server network in Mountain View, California. The property owners were a small computer security firm and had no idea about the computer's presence, let alone its purpose. Upon accessing the server, they unleashed a virus which temporarily crashed the FBI's San Jose field office network and contaminated all outgoing e-mail with a Tourette virus, which randomly spikes all messages with obscenities and sundry blasphemous phrases."

  Storch might have nodded once.

  "Sounds like your employee, doesn't it?"

  No response.

  "Well, in other news, I went to see your father recently. He's still in solitary confinement, too, at Norwalk. You know that he's been writing a history of the universe, or something of that sort? Well, five months ago, he put it to the torch. No one knows how he started the fire, but he managed to destroy it and half of the ward. The chronicle numbered over seventy thousand pages, nearly five hundred pounds of paper, seven years of uninterrupted work. Since then, he's been locked up and heavily medicated, because he can't break out of the manic compulsion to begin another chronicle. In his more lucid moments, he's been writing it on the walls of his cell, and he explained it to me in excruciating detail before he was put back under sedation. He promises it will be twice as long as the other, which he now believes was erroneous. It begins with your birth, Sgt. Storch. I didn't tell him that you were in any kind of trouble. The doctors say a shock that great could trigger another breakdown."

  Cundieffe might've been telling him about his own father, in Japanese. He had expected to have dug out some emotional reaction by now, some sign that a light was still on behind those flat, unblinking eyes. He probed every ghost of a motion for signs of contempt, anguish, rage, menace, fatigue or despair, but the face of the prisoner was mummified, painted on.

  "Sgt. Storch, I'm getting a little tired of the sound of my own voice, here. None of this information will exonerate you in the eyes of the United States government because of your participation in the Radiant Dawn massacre and your fatal attack on FBI Agent Robert Niles on the night of your arrest. You are going to die today, while the people who brought you into this, against your will, I suspect, are safely ensconced somewhere in South America, plotting another attack on American soil. Those men out there are hoping you'll make some pitiful deathbed mea culpa and give up the Mission's foreign headquarters and in-country operatives and maybe tell them why you did it. And I don't even know why I'm the one talking to you, because just before I got here, I think I figured it out."

/>   Storch's ears might have twitched, his brow might've contracted a millimeter or two.

  "Shortly after you jumped—or were pushed—out of that helicopter over Liberty Salvage in Baker on the night of the Tenth, you and seven Delta Force commandos were irradiated by a light from the sky, which several accounts dismissed as an astronomical phenomenon or the spotlight of a previously unaccounted-for helicopter on the scene. Then the bomb went off in the Mission HQ."

  Storch definitely shivered once, as if his skin had just shrunk a size.

  "Within ten days, all seven soldiers were dead. Autopsies revealed a particularly rare variety of cancer tumor spread throughout their bodies. They're called teratomas, Sgt. Storch. They differ from garden-variety tumors in that they normally only manifest in germline cells, and the malignant mass attempts to differentiate into the distinct features of an independent organism. The features are only vestigial, certainly not viable, but more like an incomplete Siamese twin, if I may use a phrase out of political fashion. Or, in this particular case, several twins."

  He turned over yet another photograph. A man's body on a steel examination table in a Naval hospital morgue. The body lay skewed at an awkward angle because there was no stretching it out. A tumor the size of a bowling ball warped the arc of the spine just above the hips and several more of greater or lesser size bloomed up and down the torso, great cables of protoplasm stretching from one tumor to the next under the skin. Two of them had been incised and the skin pinned back to expose the contents of the masses. One which had broken through the left temporal wall of the skull was in particularly clear focus. The granular folds of the tumor were studded with spikes of bone and glassy, blue-gray polyps; the tumor was trying to grow teeth and eyes.

  "The odds of this kind of cancer forming in even one person are one in several million, and the odds of survival are painfully self-evident. You alone, of all those exposed, showed no sign of cancer immediately after exposure. Your suit was examined, and millions of microscopic pinholes were found burned into the vinyl, so there was no doubt that what hit them, hit you as well. But you survived.

  "It was RADIANT, wasn't it? The military built an orbital antipersonnel device which caused cancer, but there was more to it, wasn't there? Radiant Dawn was a form of laboratory, where they were testing the effects of the weapon on those who already had cancer. The effect on them was very different from what happened to previously healthy bodies, wasn't it, Sgt. Storch?"

  No response.

  "There was a very different kind of Radiant Dawn community on the very same spot in the seventies, did you know that? Records are extremely sparse, and there's not so much as a picture of the leader, a man named Quesada, but there were rumors that it was some sort of a radiation cult. This has been going on for a very long time, hasn't it, Sergeant? This thing that you and your friends were trying to protect the world from, I mean. You might be of the opinion that such an undertaking could never come so far without sponsorship from within the government, and after all I've seen and heard myself, I couldn't say you were wrong. But you know what? Despite all the blood you and our friends spilled, it's still going on."

  Storch staring through the pictures. Cundieffe turning over another. A field shot from a helicopter, a tiny toy church with a sheet-metal roof, and an ashtray beside it in the dirt. No, the ashtray was a pit, and the crumpled butts were human bodies. "There've been reports over the last six months of messianic movements in Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya, where cancer incidence is high and treatment nearly non-existent. World Health Organization relief workers reported finding this body pit in Uganda with well over two hundred corpses, completely incinerated with gasoline. They turned out to be victims of AIDS. Their families said they left their homes to go to be healed out in the country. Flyers were found which instructed cancer sufferers to gather at predetermined places in the middle of the countryside to be healed. The AIDS patients just came along hoping for a miracle, and those who already had cancer and survived cremated the dead. Well over four hundred cancer patients in those three countries alone have vanished, and we have no idea how many more of these pits there are."

  He turned over a satellite image, this one of a city. There were no cars on the roads, no smoke coming from the factories, and the giant broken eggshell in the center told the story. To not recognize it, one would have to have avoided all news coverage throughout the late eighties and early nineties. "There are at least three colonies in the former Soviet Union. The largest is a squatter colony in the quarantined zone surrounding Chernobyl. We still have no idea how large it is, but it's estimated that cancer victims in the Ukraine alone number in the tens of thousands."

  He leaned across the table, so close that Storch could have bitten him, if it was worth getting shocked. "If it was your aim to exterminate RADIANT, you failed utterly. The program is still going on, and it's spreading."

  Storch might've been an oil painting. Cundieffe sat back, then launched himself out of his chair and walked around behind Storch. Through a gap in the soldiers' cordon, he saw Nye and Hoecker stand up and approach the bars. He signaled them to back off and leaned in behind Storch's head.

  "I don't presume to know everything about you, Sgt. Storch. I'm not even cleared to know what happened to you in the Gulf War. But I think I know a lot more about you than the people who are going to execute you today, because I'm the only one who's been looking in the right direction. I've read medical reports, for instance. VA hospital records that were sealed and buried. They knew there was something wrong with you, Sergeant. You and the other survivors of the Tiamat engagement. They found elevated white blood cell counts, but they didn't match the other blood in your system. They did DNA tests, and they couldn't accept what they saw, so they did them again, and then they forgot about you. Because they couldn't explain what the DNA of another organism was doing in your body, in rogue cells that were stimulating your autoimmune responses. They couldn't explain how the cells continued to split off in culture, and became independent single-cell organisms, with no genetic similarity to you or the parent cells. You didn't die in Baker because you already had cancer, but they couldn't understand it, so they never told you. You see what they do with unacceptable truths.

  "I already have all the answers they want, but they don't really want to hear them, so your silence is the greatest service you could possibly render them. I don't need to know anything else from you, except this: when did your thumb grow back?"

  Storch leapt away the table and sprang at Cundieffe. The agent's feet slipped out from under him on the plastic sheeting. The flagstone floor banged his knee silly and it gave way under him. He whirled around and went for his gun, but Nye had it. He froze then, when he saw Storch's eyes. For a second, he could have sworn they were the same steely gray as the blisters on the tumor in the picture.

  Storch jolted straight up and his legs kicked out spastically in mid-air. Then he collapsed and beat the floor like an epileptic. Cundieffe smelled ozone and burning hair. Storch's eyes were green wheels with gold spokes flashing rage and terror, but his voice was steady and low as he said, "I will talk to you…outside."

  Col. Nye fought with Cundieffe for five minutes, but after a replay of the argument with someone on a secure telephone line, he relented, and they brought Storch to the surface.

  He walked in the center of the eight-man escort, with Cundieffe and Nye just behind them. Nye explained the conditions of the field trip in an almost hysterical rasp, relaying instructions from someone at the other end of his phone. Storch was not to be unshackled. He was not to move more than fifty feet in any direction, because the shock-collar around his neck contained two grams of C4. If he wandered out of range of the microtransmitter Col. Nye carried, it would detonate.

  "Do you really think that's necessary?" Cundieffe asked.

  "Not even sure it'd slow him down, but if he runs, he's your problem."

  The eleven of them crammed into the elevator and two guards reached to press the button. O
ne looked at the other one second longer than he should've, both their hands off their weapons, and Cundieffe looked at Storch, whose head was inclined on the pair. Cundieffe looked down at Storch's feet, shifting weight and turning as if to spring into a pivot motion that would allow him to grab one of the weapons behind his back. Nye leaned on the shock button, and Storch trembled while Nye chewed them out. One of them finally pressed the button, and the doors slid closed.

  As they rose, Col. Nye shouldered his way through the cordon and stood nosehole to chin with Storch. "Bet you love all this attention, don't you, asshole?" he growled. "All this commotion over Baby's first fucking words, you think we're gonna blink and away you'll go with a song in your motherfucking heart."

  Storch looked back blandly at Nye's Halloween-mask face, but made no move. In the close quarters of the elevator, Cundieffe could make out the distinctive tang of each man's perspiration. All but Storch's. He smelled like lightning.

  The car rose six stories before humming to a stop and disgorging the passengers into a service corridor. Col. Nye seemed to see something in Storch's eyes that made him bite back the main course of his ration of wrath, and led the way out. Soldiers stood at attention every ten feet and doubled up outside each door. Somewhere in the building, very faint, Cundieffe could hear sirens.

  Col. Nye went to a double door at the blind end of the corridor and threw them wide open. The pallid, weak winter sun was a revelation to Cundieffe, who threw his arm up across his face as he stepped out into it. They were in the open central courtyard of an office building, seven stories high. All the curtains were drawn, and there were another dozen soldiers spread around the perimeter and before the three glass doors leading back into the building. Some quick-thinking superior of Col. Nye's had pulled the fire alarm to clear the building.