There had been a man, a soldier. She couldn't recall his name, nor could she remember if she'd ever known it. He was at the Mission bunker at the end, and was probably dead, but suddenly, she remembered that she'd hoped to see him here. What was his name? It was no use. But he refused to be completely forgotten, even if he had no place that he fit into her memories. His scent, the way he'd looked at her, once, the way he'd called her name, not her first name, he was very polite, though they were in dire trouble, the way they'd almost touched, when the light—
She crossed the bridge, trying to penetrate the fog in her brain, even as the soldier on the ridge drew nearer. She started to climb the first precipitous turn of the road, when she caught a sharp tang on the wind. A stink of dead flesh and sweat and rancid blood; a carnivore's lair.
The soldier on the ridge turned to look at her.
She could not remember the name of the man she'd thought he was, but she knew the instant she saw his eyes that this was not him. In that instant, she knew she would be very sorry she hadn't stayed inside, this beautiful morning, but her feet kept carrying her nearer. She felt as if she had to blink and blink again to keep the fog in the back of her memory from drawing shut over her eyes.
"Halt!" the soldier bellowed, and charged down the almost sheer drop to the switchback above the one she stood on. He swung the huge rifle around to bear on her. The scope on it was a giant hourglass, the barrel longer than her leg and almost wide enough to fit three fingers in, if she were foolish enough to reach out and touch it.
The soldier behind it was every bit as lethal, with none of the weapon's sleek grace. He stood two feet taller than her, built like a marathon runner, skeleton wrapped in taut bundles of wiry muscle and sinew twitching with the voltage shooting through them. His skin had the blasted, pitted look of metamorphic rock, his face all slashing angles and concave planes, like a kidskin bag of steak knives. His eyes glinted flatly like verdigris on old, copper pennies. Stress-fracture lines in his face deepened in what the soldier probably thought passed for a smile. He slung the rifle onto his shoulder.
He was so clean-scrubbed, his faded olive drab uniform so ruthlessly spotless, that she wondered where the death-stench came from. Then he opened his mouth. "You lost, little lady?"
She backed away, the ice turning to wet cement underfoot, sucking her under when she tried to tear her gaze away from his.
"Don't run away, sweetheart," he tried to purr, but raw menace stole into his voice, and the death on his breath seemed to turn even sourer. "I could look at you all day, but time's tight." He was almost out of charm, already. "Come up and see the view."
She noticed then that his breath didn't fog. When she could not avoid it touching her face, it was colder than the north wind, and probably left a stain.
She felt his hand on her arm almost before she saw him leap down to stand beside her. His fingers cut into the meat of her right biceps, dragged her off her frozen feet so that she staggered into him. His flak vest slipped open when she brushed against it. She saw dog tags and a necklace of black lumps strung on a leather thong. She held her breath and swore in Spanish, tried to pull away.
They were human ears.
"Come on squaw-bitch, I got something to show you."
She planted her feet resolutely on the roadway, but he took no notice, yanked her clean off her feet and sprinted up the vertical ridge. Stella hung by his clawed fist, her boots only banging against the rock as it rushed past. The wind rushed in her ears, but she could hear her screams echoing down the mountain.
Where are you, Guardian Angel?
He stopped atop a knob of granite, still dangling her by her arm over the gorge. Chuckling, he whipped her around, flying her like a kite on the vicious updrafts. She bit through her lip not screaming for him. In his rage, he shook her, once, twice, dropped her on the rocks at his feet.
She tucked and rolled faster than thought and landed on hands and knees. Her fingertips tore into crevices on the rock, caught her before she fell off. Her brain was still spinning, her stomach rebelled and flushed her mouth with acid. She caught her breath and licked her bleeding lip, took advantage of the moment to look around.
The road wound around their vantage point and disappeared at once into the trees. By the seam that ran down between their peak and the next, she thought there might be a road that met theirs, and about a mile down the mountain, she saw one emerge from the forest and swing out onto the lip of a promontory overlooking the river gorge. Beyond that, everything was veiled in whiteout. She could see no other sign of civilization—no, wait, she saw a pillar of blue-black smoke just beyond the bend in the road. Someone else was here, a mere mile away. Someone human—
"Look at me, squaw." She heard the crisp rustling of his canvas vest, and an awful ripping sound that seemed to go on for minutes. A sound of metal teeth gnashing, and the smell got much worse. A zipper.
"Look at me."
He won't let this happen. He mustn't.
As Stella turned to look, she wasn't seeing, she was remembering, peering back into all the places where she'd tried to lose bad memories, all the dark corners of her childhood in the fields and foster homes that could only drive her insane. And no, she saw when she came to the end, no, she'd never been raped. Touched inappropriately once or twice, but no more, and she'd made them sorry they tried that much. And no, she'd never been with a man the way women coupled in romance novels, all sighs and sweet passion. She fucked a few boys she thought she liked in high school and college, and never understood what all the fuss was. She'd thought he was someone else…
She looked.
The soldier stood over her with his legs akimbo and pants unfastened. His uncircumcised penis hung down to his knees, an elephantine cartoon cock that only a perverse thirteen year-old God would curse a man with. It looked even more ridiculous and repulsive hanging from his stripped-down, skeletal frame. He watched her, petrified but for a rhythmic facial tic that wracked the right side of his face.
Stella felt his pulse, a pulsating tremor in the rock, through her ragged fingertips.
She bit her lip again, this time to keep from laughing. It was so fucking pathetic! He thought this would make her swoon, this caveman monster-meat tryst on a mountaintop? "My, your real prick must've been like a baby's pinkie-finger."
"What?"
"Well, why else would you overcompensate like that? Big gun, big dick, big fucking deal."
He sputtered, "Hog-bitch…" and his penis swelled, flushed livid red, like an octopus bluffing a predator. It reared up and lunged at her of its own accord. Stella recoiled with a gasp of disgust, barely caught herself on the edge again. There was nowhere to go but down, no way to get there but jumping.
He won't let this—
"Tried to be nice—"
The cock got bigger, darker. A ring of barbed horns broke out from under the hood of its foreskin, and serrated blades like the teeth of a cheese-grater broke out all down the shaft. Black-red segmented worms wriggled out of his urethra and tasted the air for her scent.
She tried not to throw up, made herself look him in the eye. "Bet your shriveled little balls don't even work." She looked around her again, which way to jump, because He wasn't coming to save her.
The mutant soldier gagged and winced as the transformation took its toll. Clouds of steam vented off his livid skin. Pebbles and melting snowflakes danced around his feet to the thunderous beat of his heart. She could feel the pulse in her fingers and feet, could see the arteries writhing under his snare drum-taut skin. "I want her," he moaned. "Give her to me."
She backed up as far as she could, looking around desperately. Who was he talking to?
He was shouting at her. At Him.
"Take her over! Give me the bitch!"
Her blood curdled. Her knees went rubbery, and the fog threatened to come back, but now she knew what it was, she fought it for her life.
Where are you, motherfucker? Where are you, goddamit?
She
closed her eyes and jumped.
He roared. She heard the air torn apart by his arms as they swept out to catch her a millisecond after her feet left the rock. His claws in her fluttering hair, he caught her, queered her flight, tore out a double-handful at the roots. She twisted in air and kicked off the ledge, making a missile of herself and reaching out into the winter wind—
The bridge rushed up double-time underneath, her legs splayed out to take the impact, but her ankles still rang big silver bells of agony and she stumbled, skinned her knee.
She wanted to run. Her feet wanted to fly her right off this goddamned mountain, take her back to Bishop, hell, back to Mexico. But she stood rooted to the spot. Her voice was coming out of her mouth, but the soldier seemed to know it wasn't her talking.
"This woman is one of our core reception medical staff. She's a valued guest, and an integral part of our team. And she doesn't like to be touched, Sergeant Avery."
Avery looked down at her. His pants were zipped back up, his vest snapped up to cover his trophies. He was silent, but for the tiny sizzling of snow melting under his boots. "It never happened, sir." He snapped a salute and turned away, loped down the other side and out of sight.
Stella ran back, her mind all jagged red rage, pointed inwards at Him.
He and others like him were early experiments. They ascended, but were never programmed. They are not of our mind.
Hot tears froze on her face, the fog from her heaving breath blinded her as she raced across the bridge.
God damn you! You were going to let him rape me! You tried to take over my body—
I never try anything, Stella.
What kind of God would you be, without a few pet devils…?
They are monsters, Stella. Without a human form, without guidance, they have gone insane, in body and mind. But I would turn none away. They also serve.
How many sacrifices does it take to keep him in line?
He's never harmed one of us. You made him angry.
I'll kill him if I ever see him again.
I don't doubt you'd try.
She stopped on the front steps of the reception center. She stood stock-still, marveling at her heart rate downshifting, at fatigue poisons burning away in her muscles. She wondered if her blood still used iron to bind oxygen; even in the mountains, she never ran out of breath, never got a cramp. Her fingers ached, but the torn skin was already closed over. Her snow pants were ripped over her knee, but she could find no injury at all, there. Her scalp was already mending, as well. She felt a few days' growth of new hair already sprouting where it'd been torn out. She stretched her arms up to the morning sky, reveling in her new body, as she pushed the ugly memory of Sergeant Avery into the fog. He helped her.
This is the order I give to the world. This is the reason I would impose upon you, my children, that your sleeping flesh does not beget monsters. You will never age, never sicken, never know fear or confusion or madness, ever again.
He tweaked her endorphins, teased her nerves so that the world rushed up in all its glory as she'd never perceived it before. She saw the muted glow of the forest, and felt Him in the trees, in the frozen soil, felt Him spreading out into the world. She saw the coruscating lattice of cosmic rays in which the sun bathed the earth, the raw catalyst of her transformation, her ascent to divinity. She went down on her knees and hugged herself for joy.
Are you grateful?
Oh, yes, she wept. Oh, thank you, God.
~14~
Storch sorely regretted stepping through the door.
He was in another cage, clear plastic panels, but the room beyond was so dark he could not see the walls, only the men who backed away from the barrier as he entered. The steel door slammed shut behind him. Seybold and Brewer safe behind the airlock.
He recognized none of the men on the other side. A short, wiry Latino officer, two non-coms in alpine camouflage, and a pale, labcoated manikin with white, ropy dreadlocks spilling down to the small of his back. He didn't see Wittrock anywhere.
There were more cages on either side of his, and the one on the right was occupied. The other prisoner approached the plastic wall between them. It was a naked man, middle-aged, sagging, flabby torso covered in downy gray hair. His lips moved silently, but when Storch looked at him, he could almost hear the words pouring into his head, pouring out of those unblinking gray eyes. Storch backed away, into the center of the cell.
A speaker on the ceiling of his cell crackled. "What are we going to do with you, Sgt. Storch?"
"Let me out of this fucking cage," he growled. His skin crawled. Neck prickled, muscles strained and burned. He felt hot and weak, but knew it wouldn't last. He was changing again.
"Can't do that," the officer replied. "You're not one of us, any more. Even if you were, your arrival is something of a bad omen."
"I'm not here to hurt anybody. I want—" his eyes skating back to the Keogh pressed against the wall, "—I want to know what's really going on."
"You understand the position we're in," the officer said. "This wouldn't be the first time men have come back from the field more than what they seemed. Your neighbor there is an infiltrator." The officer pressed a button.
"—Thought we'd lost you, Zane. What have they done to you? We need you, Zane, now more than ever. Was it ever as clear to you, as now? They hate you for what you are, because they know, even now, you can destroy them—"
"He seems to know you."
The prisoner's eyes flashed, mercurial sclera catching the dim light of the cavern. Under his husky, rambling voice, Storch felt an almost subsonic ululation, faster than words or thought, speaking to him in an eons-dead language that still echoed in his cells.
Storch clung to himself to keep from hurling his body at the prisoner. He tore his eyes away from the gaze of Cyril Keogh. Behind his jailers, he could make out monitor screens—cameras trained on him, measuring his heat output, red-white plumes around him like a volcanic halo. "He's not in me," he tried to explain. "He's dead—in here. You killed him."
"We understand so very little of the process," the dreadlocked scientist said. "Enlighten us."
The officer pushed another button on the console beside him. A Christmas string of warning lights blinked and winked. Green, heavier-than-air clouds of malachite green tumbled into the prisoner's cell like cotton candy.
"They're afraid of what you are, now. They're even more afraid of what you represent. The end of their tyranny—"
The cloud spread across the floor of the cell and touched the prisoner's heels. His face crumpled in strain and he crawled up the wall like a beetle in a killing jar. His hands and feet were gnarly with unfinished suction cups, and they carried him up the featureless wall to the ceiling.
"Tell him what it does," the officer said.
"The lysosome catalyzer agent dissolves animal cells and kills just about anything on contact, but reacts as an enzyme to cells with the tertiary DNA strand synthesized by RADIANT. It causes the lysosomes– the organelles that break down waste in the cell–to proliferate and eat the nucleus and the cell walls. The ravaged cells call out to their neighbors to divide and heal the organism, but on cells in the mitotic state, the lysing agent initiates a chain reaction–"
"Now, Zane!" the prisoner shrieked, and the ululation became a piercing whine, like a high-speed data transfer, like claws trying to get purchase in his head. "Strike now, or you'll be next!" Storch battered his ears to keep the sound out, but it was so loud, now, it seemed to come from
his own head.
Is that you, God?
No one answered. No one told him what to do.
"As you can see, it gets ugly pretty quick."
The brilliant green clouds piled up in the next cell. The prisoner screamed. The jailers watched.
Storch could see nothing but a wall of crystalline emerald vapors in the cell for a very long time before he heard a rasping death-rattle and the flat thud of the prisoner's body hitting the floor.
Storch held himself stock-still. His eyes would not close.
The officer was right on the other side of the barrier, watching him intently, waiting for some tell-tale sign. This is a test, the motherfuckers want to see you crack, see whose side you're really on—
The prisoner rose up out of the murk and slammed into the wall. A goodly portion of him sloughed off on the plastic, crazy red snow angels. Steadying himself against the wall, the prisoner tried to ululate at Storch, but there was nothing left with which to make a noise. Where its face had been, a seething tangle of tumors bubbled and liquefied. Tendrils, fragile, barbed things, like the arms of a sea-star, erupted from the mass and spread across the wall, desperate, questing roots, seeking a way to touch him and leach off his strength. They were two of a kind and all alone in a hostile world, shouldn't they share their resources for mutual survival?
This is only a test—
Storch's hand on the wall. He could feel the terrible heat from the tendrils through the inches-thick plastic, could feel its horror, anguish and abandonment. Why wasn't he helping? He was one of them…
A naked skeleton slumped against the wall, cracking open, turning itself inside out as the marrow burst and streamed into the gutters with the rest.
He could feel their eyes crawling all over him. He struggled for words. "When the light—when it hit me, I changed, but he got into me. I didn't ask for it, and I didn't see you motherfuckers trying to help. I don't remember much of anything from then until I woke up with your boy trying to burn me up."
"Where do your sympathies lie now, Sergeant?" the officer asked. Behind him, Storch saw himself on-screen, a towering infra-red inferno. He looked at his hands. Was he changing? Into what?
"I don't hold any grudges. I just want to know—what I am."
"What was it like?" the scientist asked. He hit a switch and fans came on in the next cell. The green fog hoisted up like a curtain, leaving only a dewy carpet of scum on the floor, and a clump of cloudy suds draining into a gutter.
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