Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  The trash trucks were gone before Lt. Durban was dragged out from his hiding place. The drivers backed out of the narrow street and returned the vehicles to the waste management company lot from whence they came.

  The two motorcyclists took off in the same way, one east, one west, the latter carrying the bag. He circled round the block once, then got onto the main avenue and shot up the southbound 295 onramp like a bullet from a suppressed rifle. Even if one were watching the motorcyclist intently, it would be hard to say for sure that one saw him toss a bag in the open front passenger-side window of a late model dark sedan parked on the corner at the last light before the overpass. One who had tailed Lt. Durban might have noticed that the sedan had also discreetly followed him into the capital from Ft. Meade, picking him up as he left the gas station.

  After about a minute, the sedan drove over the highway and got on the 295 headed north, but got off again at Pennsylvania Avenue and entered a four-story parking garage attached to the Old Post Office Mall. A scant forty-five seconds later, a maroon minivan checked out of the garage and got on Pennsylvania headed southeast. A trained observer might have recognized that the driver of the minivan bore a striking resemblance to the driver of the sedan, except for his hair color, a mustache and a change of clothes, but there was nobody watching.

  The minivan left Washington, DC and followed Pennsylvania Avenue after it became Expressway 4, getting off in the suburb of Suitland. Rush-hour traffic was thinning, but the van was still just one more oversized commuting module in a sea of same, and no one took notice of it as it pulled in to a corner mini-mall with a manicurist, a camera repair, an Atlantic gas station that was fenced off pending replacement of its underground tanks, and a donut shop which had been closed down for eighteen months. The windows and door of the donut shop were plastered over with layers of newsprint, and the marquee was a gutted plastic shell with one bare fluorescent light bulb still flickering inside, periodically lighting up the word TASTY.

  The driver climbed out and unlocked the front door of the donut shop, let himself in and locked it. He peered out through a viewing slit torn in the newsprint just above the pushbar. The lot was a cemetery. He heard the squelched rasp and chatter of police-and souped-up cellular signal scanners. A wooden chair groaned as the massive man sitting on it rose and crossed the shop to take the driver by the arms and spin him around so fast his wig only half-spun with him.

  "Got away clean, didn't I?" the driver asked in the flat, faint twang of the Oklahoma plains.

  "Not even a 911 phone-in on the geek's car yet," the big man answered, taking the bag off the driver. He touched the man's shoulder once by way of thanks and brought the bag back into the former kitchen. The deep fryers and other cooking fixtures had been ripped out and replaced with a pair of computers, several scanning beds and a row of laser printers, all tied into a huge switchbox wired to the power and phone lines of the defunct Atlantic station. A balding, dark-skinned man sat at the terminals, tinkering with the magnification on the scanners. He took the bag and dumped it out on a long tray atop a wheeled utility cart. A pile of Zip disks rattled under his rubber-gloved hands as he silently set to work feeding them in.

  The arrangement had eaten up a sizable portion of the man's savings, but a cursory examination of his financial records would reveal only that he'd recently purchased a beach-front condo in Costa Rica, hardly an inappropriate transaction for a recently retired military officer with no family. As far as anyone who'd care to investigate could tell, he was down there now, drinking and whoring and identifying himself to any who cared to know. The laundered nest egg had been more than enough to finance the computers and the Tasty shop lease, and to pay a man who matched his description to alibi him from one end of Central America to the other. The men hadn't cost him a dime. They were true believers, comrades in arms from one or another of the many units he'd led, and a few from the mercenary posses he'd run in Africa. They believed in Lt. Col. Mort Greenaway, and in the task at hand.

  He, in turn, believed that he had finally secured the evidence he needed to pursue the task to completion, namely, the exposure of the covert terrorist organization that called itself the Mission, and its ties to rogue elements within the federal government. All the lies, all the bullshit that had piled up behind his back could be exposed, now, all the things that had made him look like a raving maniac at the sub rosa review of the Radiant Dawn incident.

  In their recommendation for early retirement, the panel had explicitly noted that he suffered from paranoid delusions, that he was "probably unfit for society at large, let alone for active duty in any capacity." In their judgment, his sociopathic ego and bitterness over a stalled career drove him to withhold vital tactical information from the FBI arm of the operation, to violate the rules of engagement by pursuing the helicopter observed fleeing the burning Radiant Dawn hospice village, and to "fabricate a bizarre counteraccusation regarding possible government collusion with the perpetrators." Fabricate. They didn't even have the balls to call it lying when they accused him of it. But he could stuff their lies down their throats with these documents, and go to his grave a vindicated man. Or he could use them to get what he wanted all along: to hunt the egghead terrorist organization himself, on his own terms.

  He knew there would be files. The government could do nothing without leaving a paper trail. Even at the star chamber level of black budgets and blacker ops, everyone wanted their ass covered, though they stood ready to shred the lot at the merest hint of Congressional oversight. Official documents would be outside the military's, and, thus, his reach.

  But there was another assumption about government that had yet to steer him wrong. There was always someone listening.

  It had been pathetically easy to play Lt. Durban; after reviewing his nonclassified military record, he had the punk's number and dialed it. He was a geek, but he dreamed of being regular Navy, a war hero. He needed somebody to pin balls to his chest, because he wasn't born with any.

  What would he tell his geek bosses at No Such Agency? That he'd been carjacked by the Russian Mafia, probably. At least, that was what they hoped. About a week before he first called Lt. Durban, he'd begun placing ads in every website linked to the Soldier Of Fortune set, soliciting "Stateside wetwork" for a bunch of "hungry former Spz. Commandos," knowing full well that the FBI and/or the CIA would ferret out the Spz. as the common abbreviation for Spetznaz, the Soviet Special Forces. He had a host of responses placed through dummy e-mail accounts at Internet cafes in twelve states. They got eight more offers that they hadn't doped up themselves, which gave Greenaway hope for the future as a free agent.

  The INS and customs were even now looking up the asshole of every Ivan who came into the country with forceps and a flashlight. The FBI was surely watching the criminals and white separatists across the nation whose credit card numbers he'd bought from a guy who hacked the IRS for a living.

  Once before in his career, he'd turned away from the Army in disgust, and printed his own ticket back in when the time was right and Delta Force was looking for a few bad men. Now, in the teeth of disgrace, he would buy an even sweeter posting, and prove the truth to the only person whose opinion he, in the final analysis, gave a shit about.

  The computer tech brought up the first page of a document.

  ABOVE TOP SECRET-ROYAL CHANNELS ONLY

  MAUVE Intercept 0121010-07-99

  FW: MACHETE

  07-10-99; 19:48:15 PDT

  (No Match/ID for either Voice)

  VOICE 1: Colonel, you've been less than cooperative in the course of this investigation.

  VOICE 2: You've been less than baggage, Cundieffe.

  VOICE 1: I expect it was under such an opinion that your goon squad left us in Titus Canyon a little while ago. Your conduct has been criminal if they were under your orders, and incompetent if it was not. All of this is being recorded and transmitted to my superior's offices in Washington, by

  the by.

  VOICE 2: Then I
have nothing to say.

  VOICE 1: I do. I thought you'd like to know where they are.

  He didn't need to read the rest. He was Voice 2. And Voice 1, that junior G-man bookworm the FBI had scapegoated with the whole mess, was probably chasing stolen snowmobiles in Alaska, if he worked at all. "Print all of it," he said, "except that one."

  ~4~

  Heilige Berg, Idaho

  A snowy, moonless midnight in the mountains of the Snake River Valley is a scary time to be out in the woods alone with only a rifle you don't know how to use and a world of bloodthirsty subhumans lurking just over the perimeter. Time seems to stumble on the edge of the promised new day, and slip backwards out of thousands of years into the first dark age. Society could collapse and make not so much as a puff of smoke that one could see from here. Karl Schweinfurter would be eighteen in two months, and had never successfully shot a target with his rifle, let alone another human being. But he was sworn to duty, to the protection of his family, his hearth and his faith. They were one day into the new millennium, treading on the thin ice of borrowed time before the Last Days, Gotterdammerung, Ragnarok.

  He reconnoitered the knob-shaped hill that overlooked the road on three sides before he sat down on his rock, waited ten minutes more before he knelt and began to dig in the snow and soft earth underneath. He wasn't worried about being caught unawares by intruders—in the thirteen months he'd been here, there'd been none. The Jägers were another matter. Most reserve sentries suspected they were only detailed out in the woods for the elite warriors' stalking practice. Guard duty sucked, but it beat graveyard shifts in the slaughterhouse, and it was the only time one could be alone for longer than a toilet trip.

  Karl found the bottle and dug it out, pocketed the cap, rubbed the mouth of the bottle vigorously so it wouldn't stick to his lips, and took a good stiff belt. Jägermeister, the cough syrup of kings. His friends in school had sworn by its economical buzz value and ferocious, loopy potency, but Karl had never enjoyed it before, preferring beer, pot or even Nyquil over Jäger shots. But beer was impractical and even if it were possible to score weed, the Jägers would scent it on his clothes and come down on him.

  Karl believed fervently in God and was pretty sure about the divine selection of the white man, but he was beginning to have his doubts about Heilige Berg. His parents, good God-fearing working people who owned a corner market in Nampa, had the best of intentions when they sent him here to, as Papa put it, "wake up the righteous man in you," after he and some school-friends were caught drunk and disorderly in a Circle K parking lot on a school day. Papa had switched the family to the Teutonic Heritage Church the year before because only they had answers for what the world was coming to, and they had a ready answer for Karl's problems, too.

  Karl's first impression of the church's mountain retreat was little better than the one he made upon the community at large. Climbing down from the shaky second-hand school bus in a parka and two layers of bluejeans, he'd goggled at the ranks of hearty teenaged commandos in white arctic camouflage standing at attention at the far end of the parking lot. He'd come expecting a lame tough love church camp with the same white separatist leanings as the church in town. He unzipped his parka to the brutal predawn cold to show his abundant, upbeat piety in the form of a T-shirt he'd got on a family vacation pilgrimage to the Creation Research Museum in Santee, California. Faded and worn through in the left armpit, the shirt still clearly depicted a stylized Darwin fish flat on its back, with its ridiculous, abominable legs pointed skyward. A circle and slash negated the mythical beast, under which a caption proclaimed, NO WAY…. Beneath it, the original, legless Jesus fish floated on a field of heavenly light, the Greek name of Jesus in its flank slightly misspelled, but no less holy. The caption read, YAHWEH!!! Mama still chuckled every time she saw it, but Grossvater Egil Reuss, the pastor of Heilige Berg, had failed to see the humor. The huge, shield-bearded cleric had seized Karl by the hood of his parka and jerked him off his feet so that he lay supine in the slush with an enraged frost giant who might have been the second coming of Beowulf looming over him.

  "Was ist los?" Grossvater Egil roared in his face. "Was machst du dabei, mit den Judische Hemd?"

  When Karl only stammered out an apology in English, his rage only multiplied. "You have no mother tongue? God, boy, what is your name?"

  "Karl Frederick Schweinfurter, sir."

  "You're a race-traitor scrap of shit come to spy, aren't you, Karl?"

  "No, sir, my—my parents sent me here."

  "You're wearing a blasphemous rag on your body, Schweinhund," the man growled, to the gruff amusement of the assembled platoon of Jägers. "That is not the name of God."

  Before Karl could offer further apologies, let alone explain that the shirt was a clever denunciation of evolution, Reuss tore the T-shirt clean off his body, leaving only the collar. "Strip, spy," he ordered, and urged all due haste by slapping him across the back of the neck with a hand as broad and hard as the blade of an oar. Karl staggered under the blows as he stripped down, sloughing his parka and his boots, his layered jeans and thermal underwear, and finally his boxer shorts, which were mercifully, and against all odds, still unsoiled. Shivering uncontrollably, he was struck again when he hugged himself for warmth. The only sound was the laughter of the Jägers and the crunch of the other new arrivals filing past him with eyes averted, until Grossvater Egil seized one by the hair and twisted him face to face with Karl. "Look at him, boy. He's not one of us. Er hat keinen Blut im Gesicht, keine Schade."

  He steered Karl's pitiful nakedness to the edge of the lot, where brown, scabby snow had been bulldozed into a bank that came up to his waist. "Los, Kinder! All of you, look at this! Only the white man can blush, only the white man has shame, and can make blood in the face." He slapped Karl full force across his right cheek, sending him almost flying into the bank of snow. He crept slowly back to his feet, hesitating at every syllable spat from Grossvater's lips for another slap. "This—thing knows no shame! He brings blasphemy with the false Jewish name of God on a shirt, he backtalks in the face of right, and even in his nakedness and abasement, he cannot blush!"

  Karl was sure that he was not only blushing, but probably openly bleeding, but said nothing. This was only the most extreme version of a situation with which he was very familiar, being made an example of. Perhaps it was because he always seemed to smirk from the deep, elliptical scar on his chin and lower lip where a pony at a petting zoo had bit him once when he'd tried to feed it a carrot mouth-to-mouth. Perhaps it was his hair, which hung in a shaggy, shoulder-length mullet that reminded older men how much of their own hair they'd left in the shower drain that morning. Or perhaps it was simply because he was forever destined to be the only one still screwing off when the teacher decided to crack the whip. For whatever reason, it was always Karl, so he stood as straight as he could in the freezing predawn cold, as the elder slapped him again and again until he'd proven to his own and the camp's satisfaction that Karl could, indeed, produce blood in the face.

  "I will teach you shame, boy," the cleric roared in his ear. "From this day on, I am your Grossvater, and I will save you from the filth of the world and even from the filth that is within you, but you must cleanse yourself before God and this holy place."

  And Karl had obeyed, scrubbing himself with snow until he had raised a glorious blush on every square inch of skin, as the population of Heilige Berg had watched and taken a lesson from his ablutions.

  Heilige Berg was a religious retreat, and enjoyed the tax-free status and lack of federal oversight which the United States generally extended to all faith-based groups. In fact, it was a permanent settlement of two hundred trained fighting men and women, mostly kids whose almost exclusively Germanic or Scandinavian parents hoped to prepare them for the imminent racial holocaust they believed would herald the Last Days. But there were many whole families there, too, and after Karl had been at Heilige Berg for as long as he thought he could stand it—a month—his parents
had come: not to take him home, but to stay.

  His mother was attacked by black thugs one night as she went to put in the night deposit. They beat her face so badly she looked like a circus freak, Mama Schweinfurter the Mule-Faced Woman. Both her eyes were still closed up, and Papa had to lead her around. They'd told her they would rape her and give her a litter of black babies, but she was too old and ugly. This had been the worst of it for her, and she had begged Papa to take her to safety. Papa went to see Pastor Bochner, who made arrangements for Church people to manage the store, and held the deed in trust to the family house while they holed up on Heilige Berg. Mama had cried as she told him all of it again and again, her hands trying to cover the words they'd cut into her face: HO HO HO. Karl could guess what it meant, but he couldn't bring himself to tell Mama.

  After that, things had taken a turn for the better at Heilige Berg; Karl was transferred from the slaughterhouse to guard duty, and was even allowed to go on supply trips into town. He would never make Jäger, but he was matched to Heidi, and they were assigned a joint room. He loved her and protected her, according to his duty, and she did the same, until the lights went off.

  "Lord, is this how it's supposed to be? Heidi's pregnant, and I guess you like that alright, we're supposed to 'be fruitful and multiply,' and all. I love her, and I want to do right by her, that's a husband's job, right? But I can't help but wonder what you're planning, Lord. She's like four months along, and everybody's proud as punch of her, but I ain't never been with her, Lord. I believe in your power, and in the Virgin Mary and the fruit of her womb, Jesus, but I'm not a blind man, Lord, I see how she cavorts with the Jägers. I don't figure you had a hand in any of this—I mean, not the Heidi part of it, but…"