Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  The next soldier stepped out and shot wildly down the corridor, but Storch was already behind the point man's pillar, shooting the second soldier in the forearm as he stepped back into cover. He shot him again in the thigh, and advanced at a full charge, putting down his targets as if the bullets came out of his eyes, as if his enemies were cardboard cutouts in a kill house, as if everyone else was shambling along at half-speed. Storch's body flowed through the motions so fast that he could barely keep track, let alone control himself.

  Someone shot him, two slugs punching him in the abdomen and one through his left breast. The initial pain was no worse than a needle from a careless nurse, but he felt his lung collapse, ribs shatter, and something caustic spilling into his vital organs. Storch staggered and almost fell down, air whuffing out of his chest-hole in bloody foam-flecked gusts, but pop his lung closed itself up and sucked in air good as new, better, even. Another bullet meant for his face creased the top of his skull as he faltered, but this time his skull was thicker, and it only made him faster, and less careful.

  He shot two more soldiers in the head, neck and chest and passed them before they hit the ground. He emptied the magazine to cover himself as he stooped and grabbed a dead soldier's rifle. Bullets hung in the air all around him, and more than a few found their marks. He felt his body rerouting fluids and nervous impulses and rebuilding even as it ran itself into more shooters and took them down. He'd lost count of how many when he came to the double doors. The corridor ended blindly, no windows on either wall, no doors. On the double doors, the instructions for decontamination procedure. A perfect bottleneck.

  "Give me my pistol," Lt. not-Dennison wheezed from close behind him. He looked over his shoulder. The Mission agent was trying to stand upright and having a hard time of it. He'd been shot twice, one in the right thigh and one in the shoulder just to the right of his throat, but something vital was wrecked, and blood splashed out and down the front of his suit on a steadily failing rhythm. He coughed out a laugh. His teeth were framed in fresh arterial blood. "I'm not gonna make it," he said, and tore off his helmet.

  Storch only looked at him.

  "I forgot to tell you," not-Dennison said, "about the orders." He sat down hard on the floor and laid back, clawing at the seals on his suit. "Come here, I have something I need to give you."

  Storch approached cautiously. Lt. not-Dennison had a hard time of it, since his right arm hung limp at his side, and he was shaking badly from shock. Ear cocked on the double doors behind him, Storch knelt and helped him get the suit open. Underneath, he wore the ordinary greens of a Second Lieutenant in the Chemical Corps. What did he have for him?

  A sick hunger rose in Storch's belly. Standing still, he was almost knocked flat by his fatigue, by the gnawing pains of all the places where lead had recently penetrated his newly resurrected flesh. He was not a god. He had to eat, and now. Lt. not-Dennison was dying, was not quite a man anymore, just meat, so what did it matter? He could stop the hunger, make himself strong again–

  No! You are Zane Ezekiel Storch, you don't eat people–

  "They're coming," Storch snapped. "Talk fast."

  "My real name is Lt. Raymond Saticoy, Third Army Special Operations Group. I am acting on orders of the Mission. My orders were that I was not allowed to get caught…" His hands tore open his uniform, and for a second Storch thought he had on some sort of flak vest. Saticoy seized both Storch's hands, the bare, bloody fingers dug into the pressure points on the insides of Storch's wrists so they went numb. His face came up into Storch's and smeared blood on his mask. Saticoy's face was muzzled in blood, but his eyes fixed on Storch's even as they began to glaze over. "…And I was not allowed to fail."

  Storch still didn't know what the hell Saticoy was wearing. A vest of canvas and nylon, it had two flat bags filled with fluid, and a third, empty pouch between them. The two filled bags began to mix in the third. "It's a binary chemical explosive. Wired to my heart rate, but there's a live switch, too. It's armed."

  Storch's arms wouldn't come free. He yanked back, only tugged Saticoy up after him. With devilish strength, Saticoy drove his good knee hard into Storch's groin, pointing out a fatal flaw in his body modification, so far. Storch howled and threw himself backwards, pivoting at the last instant to slam the dying man into the heavy steel doors. They shivered under a hail of bullets slamming into the other side. The third pouch on Saticoy's chest was full. "You can't live, Storch, Keogh, whatever you are. Has to be this way—"

  Storch stumbled back and kicked the oversized red emergency entry button on the wall beside the doors and when they swung open, he brought Saticoy up high and hurled his limp body into the showers. Storch threw himself back out of the doorway, but the doors only half closed when Saticoy, pinned in midair on a hurricane of bullets, exploded.

  The doors whipped over his head like the blades of a broken scissors, and a white hole opened up in the atrium of the decontamination chamber, and it reached out to the walls and ceiling and floor and pushed them back, infinite in all directions, and when it closed over him, Storch was actually trying to fight his way up the concussive stream to get into the light, but then the building was coming down on his head, and the shitty old world shut him up in darkness once again.

  "Coy?"

  Ringing like a cathedral in free-fall, pealing bells burning up on reentry and becoming sine-wave vapor. Scent of a hospital luau, charred pork and medicine…

  "Coy! You in there, man?"

  Roaming the devastated channels of capillaries in his caramelized skin, new uneasy treaties with molten plastic invaders. A debate raging in his cells: repel the interlopers, or co-opt them, and grow a skin of polyvinyl armor? Storch sat back in awe, wondering how and when his body became so much smarter than he was.

  "Coy, we're moving you…"

  Moving…he was rising, now, but he could only see the light, still pushing him away, back into the shitty old world filled with dying soldiers and shouting doctors, and all of this was, somehow, his fault, but they were taking him away, too weak to stop them. He could not die, but if he was going to heal, if he was going to get stronger, he had to eat someone…no, something…

  Burned now by wind, but the stench blew away, and the dark went pale red with sunlight on his eyelids. Floating down a river of hands, voices raised against the wind, overflow routed to civilian hospital burn unit, transfer papers pending, have to check with my CO, so many dead—

  Wind gone now, close, cold air and noises behind the gaseous chimes, voices very close, but they couldn't be speaking to him, because his name was not—

  "Saticoy! You in there? We gotta move you, man, but hang in there…"

  "His term demo pack went off in there, LT."

  "Do we know that?"

  "S'not here, is it? Middle of the goddamned decon wing. Beaucoup casualties. He should've died."

  "He almost did. Coy! Stay with us, man. We're getting you out. But we need to know. Can you talk? Coy, I know you're there, douchebag, what happened in there? Did you dispose of the package?"

  His hand came up before his eyes, and it was no surprise, this time, to see that where his flesh was not charcoal black or raw red muscle, or brown with melted suit, it was olive, like not-Dennison's. They thought he was the Mission agent who'd bled all over him, when he tried to blow him up. Even without the guidance of God, his body never missed a trick.

  He sat up, restraints and IV tubes ripping away like smoke. "I…am…the package."

  The man leaning over him recoiled and tried to stand in the moving ambulance, cracked his skull on the underside of a locker that dumped blankets and splints on him. Someone behind him smashed the back of his head with a rifle butt. He saw stars but wouldn't go out. He swiveled and took the rifle away and pointed it. Hands went up from the two still-conscious Mission agents. Eyes wide, looking at him, seeing not even he knew what.

  "Take me to the Mission," Storch said.

  "You'll never make it," one of them said, sizing
him up, fear redoubling, bravado breaking down. "You might as well kill us now."

  "Then I'll kill you and find out where it is by eating your brain." Bluff on bluff. He raised the rifle. Through the windshield, he could see a gray ribbon of car-choked highway. They were already off the base, probably headed for a safe house, or more likely a private airstrip.

  "You better be a light sleeper, motherfucker," the agent said.

  "I'm well-rested," Storch rasped. "Been sleeping for months. Just take me to the goddamned man in charge, and get me something to eat."

  ~10~

  In the Bible, Karl Schweinfurter knew, the trials and troubles of others were told as object lessons to steer the faithful away from the pitfalls of sin. He figured his own troubles would make a fitting addendum to the Book of Job, but damned if he could tell what lesson one could take from it.

  He sat on a bare wooden bench in Grossvater Egil's lodge. Snow-filtered moonlight cut blue runnels in the smoky gloom, which was only accented by the mellow red glow of the embers in the wood stove. The mounted heads of all the deer and elk in Idaho watched from the shadowy rafters. Even here in his private sanctum, Grossvater Egil did not display his other hunting trophies, but Karl knew they were here somewhere, because every young Heilige Berger got to see them once.

  A Nazi SS stormtrooper in full parade regalia stood at attention beside the door. Karl knew it was only a mannequin, had pored over the medals and ribbons to while away the hours when the light was better, but now, as he drifted in and out of fevered sleep, the sentry seemed to shift its posture as if taking sly looks at him. The light came back as a sterling gleam off the silver gorget around the mannequin's neck, the ceremonial SS dagger in one gloved fist, the bayonet affixed to the Mauser Model 98 carbine rifle slung across its hollow chest. He did not know whether there was even a lock on the door, but he didn't want to try, because maybe it wasn't a mannequin, anymore, but a Jäger. It was just the sort of trap that Grossvater Egil would lay for him. It bothered him that he was scared of an empty uniform, but he was so absolutely terrified of every living man, woman and child in Heilige Berg that he far preferred its company to anything outside. The only thing that kept him thinking about trying to leave was that Grossvater Egil was coming back any minute, with a "surprise."

  In the last week, life at the Heilige Berg compound had gone from bad to worse, and not just for him. About two days after he'd discovered their new neighbors, people at home started to get sick. First the Jägers, then the younger children and the old, then everyone had it. The sickness spread so fast that there was no time for hysteria, let alone careful quarantine measures. Those who could get out of bed at all moved like arthritic drunkards, and their foggy breath left beads of flash-frozen blood in their trails. He had been in the stockade for deserting his post since New Year's, and it was probably this that caused him to be spared.

  Grossvater Egil retreated into his lodge and doubled the guard, though all other work in the compound ground to a halt. He issued only one statement: their enemies had stooped to biochemical warfare. Those who were still fit, if there were any, were to don gas masks and heavy protective gear and carry on the defense of the group; the rest should confine themselves to their quarters and pray. No medical treatment could save them from the cowardly weapons of the satanic armies of Z.O.G., but if they prayed, if they meditated on their greater reward in the next world, they would surely pass into grace, or be delivered back to fight on in this one.

  Three days later, the combined prayers of the congregation had dwindled by half. The Jägers were nearly all gone, either bedridden or dead in the woods. The sounds of them screaming and coughing and shooting at nothing, or at each other, had gradually tapered off to silence.

  In Karl's own house, there was only his wife left alive. Heidi had actually succumbed first, breaking down in coughing fits when she went to see him in the stockade. His parents had caught up with and surpassed her symptoms in a matter of days. He was let out and put to work caring for the sick, which meant cleaning up after them, since there was no medicine, and nobody knew what was wrong with them. Heilige Berg Church preached of the Living Power of God's Healing Word, and reviled all hospitals as temples of false pride.

  Karl felt pretty bad when his parents died, it was all so sudden and so not like how people died in the movies, it was so ugly. They reminded him of the wasted human shells he'd seen on the buses that night, of the mythical matchstick-people of Auschwitz. Wherever he went in the compound, he heard the same gasping, gargling struggle for breath, as if the whole congregation were transforming into fish. His father, emaciated, palsied, died eating a moldy sandwich, face going purple, then black. His mother shrieked at him in German all night long until something tore inside her, and Heidi kept trying to tell him that the baby she carried was his, and that he owed her a decent Christian burial before she fell into a sleep like death herself. What bothered him most was that when they finally died, the bodies didn't go away. In movies and on TV, somebody always knew when somebody died, and they came to collect the body lickety-split. It took him until several hours after they started to stink before he realized he was the only somebody left.

  He walked outside, then, bareheaded and without his heavy parka, walked into the brilliantly lit, crystal clear night, and he saw the strange golden dust blowing through the common field at the center of the compound. He looked up at the moon and saw the dust was streaming down from the pine trees: pollen from the cones, coming down like it was the high equinox. He could hear a few people crying in their cabins, but there were no lights on anywhere, no Jäger patrols between him and the gate. He looked up into the sky and felt as if he could leap up into it and come down anywhere in the world, anywhere it was warm and people didn't get all bent out of shape about Jesus and the Jews, anywhere that didn't have a Grossvater Egil.

  He started to walk out, but then turned and went to the motorpool, for once having a good idea in time to benefit from it. Here, too, he found nobody, and noisily stole one of the stockyard trucks parked in the mechanic's garage. On the way out the gate, he turned up the radio on a Christian rock station out of Grangeville, and gave the compound the finger as he turned out onto the road. He never expected to come back again.

  Of course, he'd expected to get more than eight miles away, too.

  When the truck's engine seized up less than two miles out of White Bird, he screamed and cursed and prayed and pounded his fists on the steering wheel until they went numb, but to no avail. God was still intent on keeping his life interesting. Nobody in the Bible got to drive out of Sodom or Egypt in a truck, but nobody in the Bible ever froze to death, either. He slept in the cab, shivering in the thin jacket he'd thrown on and dreaming about those big furry hats that the Russians wore, with ear-flaps. He'd embrace Communism and all its evil ways for a furry hat, if God couldn't be bothered to bring him one.

  In the morning, he searched the truck and came up with a brittle stick of Juicy Fruit gum, a half-used tube of Chap Stik, and about a dollar in small change from beneath the seats. The gum cut up the roof of his mouth, but he merrily chewed his breakfast and jingled his fortune in his pocket as he set off into the magnificent winter morning.

  The sun beamed down through a rift in the rolling clouds, and before long he was warm enough to tie his jacket around his waist and apologize to God for the whole hat thing. He was at the foot of Heilige Berg valley, where the ragged terrain subsided as it merged with the broad prairie of the Salmon River valley and the I-95. With luck and God's admittedly stingy grace, he could get something to eat in White Bird and hitchhike out of here, maybe back home to Nampa. He'd go right to the press or the cops and make a big stink about what happened up here, and get help to those who could still be helped.

  It was about then that he began to discover that he was pretty sick, himself. He felt a tightness in his chest, not from exhaustion, but as if his lungs were being squeezed. His stomach roared its protest over the trickle of teasing gum-juice, an
d his head started to hurt. His vision was shot through with ghostly rainbows, like the death-throes of a failing TV picture tube. He ate the Chap Stik and several fistfuls of snow to get his strength up, but his headache got worse, and he only felt weaker.

  It was starting to snow again by the time he limped into White Bird. His jeans had frozen stiff on his legs, and only his waterproofed thermal underwear kept him from succumbing to hypothermia. He gave a ragged cheer and tried to offer up a hymn in German, but all he could remember was the Löwenbrau jingle. He tried to make it right, hoping God understood: "Heute abend, Heute abend, gibst nur Jesus Christ…"

  The town proper was less than six blocks long and two wide, built between the junction of I-95 and State Road 117 and the frozen Salmon River, and consisted of a feed store, two gas stations, a sad strip mall and a Dairy Queen. Residential properties dribbled into the countryside in all directions, low, rambling ranch houses like forts dug into the snow, surrounded by monster pickup trucks and snowmobiles, and puffing hearty columns of wood smoke into the silver sky. Karl burned to go to one of them to ask for help, but he knew from the wisdom of the Jägers and his few experiences in town that the Heilige Bergers were not well liked in White Bird. Conservative redneck ranchers and poor townie trash that they were, yet they thought of Karl's people as a hostile survivalist cult, and not just purer followers of the same way of life they themselves held sacred. That they were a tax-free church which ran a thriving beef concern didn't warm their hearts, either.

  Another thought occurred to him—he could walk to the Heilige Berg slaughterhouse, which was on the edge of town. As sick as everyone was, it was probably abandoned. He might find something to eat there, or steal another truck. But the idea of going anywhere near Heilige Berg property scared him more than freezing to death. They would take him back up there to die, they thought it was a mortal sin to see a doctor, and he was sick.