Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  Aranda looked to Barrow, whom he'd expected to shut up once and for all. But the Green zealot recoiled as if a tiger had leapt out of Blount's mouth and savaged his face. Pumping his inhaler, he rasped, "Just as likely, you'll only provoke him into turning RADIANT on a major city. Maybe he'll kill millions, but a few thousand or so with cancer will still rise up. Even if your technology works, for a change, you'll only trigger a more violent reaction." He turned and braced Aranda. His pupils were so dilated that Aranda could see his whole face reflected in them. "You can't lead us into this, Major, not now, not like this. You still don't know enough. Even he doesn't know enough," pointing at Wittrock, "and what he does know, he hides until it suits him."

  Aranda shook the scientist's hands off him and turned away. "We're committed. White Bird is the largest concentration of infected mass, and it's growing. We've collected samples of soil and water from the valley, and the pine trees are producing lethal carcinogens in their pollen, in the dead of winter. The Heilige Berg separatists abandoned the place, and split up. We're almost certain that most are infected, and probably irradiated. We can't wait to see what spring'll be like."

  Barrow leaned into him again. He whispered, "Why are they leaving now, Major? Who tipped them off? If you take RADIANT away, you better get every last one of them around the world before they come together. Because you're only going to force Him to adapt, find a new way to reproduce—"

  "Get away from me," Aranda said, then turned on Wittrock. "If I learn that you've been holding anything that could help back, I'll feed you to the fucking Greens, do you understand?"

  The glade boiled over with competing shouting matches as Aranda stormed out, shouldering past Dr. Hanley to enter airlock. "We wouldn't eat him," she said, "but you say the word, and we'll gladly compost him for you." She showed him a tranquilizer gun.

  He raced to his room and collapsed on his bunk. His head felt like an egg in a bear trap. When he closed his eyes, he could almost visualize his pain, like a glowing steel (tumor) ball bearing rolling around on the floor of his brain. He went for his pills and ate today's and tomorrow's without looking at the mix of colors, then lay down. He had briefings in an hour, then they would go downrange to a mountain valley in Idaho to incinerate three hundred and fifty innocent people who happened to be infected with a sentient disease. Until the meds began to kick in and his headache went away, he prayed that he would forget this day as soon as it was over.

  ~19~

  We are Spike Team Texas. Our war is forever.

  He pledged the oath to the sun as its first rays struck his face, as he had every day of his life since the Change. It was what got them through it, and the words made him strong.

  Before and below him, the battlefield unfolded like a table-top model, the camouflaged cogs of a machine awaiting a critical infusion of heat and invading elements to set it into motion.

  The mercenaries had built the trailer-park around the tower into a fortress, with walls of razor-wire, twelve troop trucks, two Bradley fighting vehicles, a half-track and a swarm of snowmobiles jammed into the field between the tower and the foot of the peaks. A reflecting radar station on a trailer swept the eastern skies from just in front of the main entrance. Another just like it was parked on the other side of the Snake River, in a little forward ops base where the helicopters roosted. APC's patrolled the perimeter, which was marked out with barbed wire, claymores and infra-red sensors. The field where children had played only yesterday was pregnant with mines so densely packed that a stone dropped on one would bounce from one explosion to the next in a chain-reaction. In the midst of it all, groups of Radiant Dawn guests watched from the front steps, like prisoners in a concentration camp. Like bait.

  Helicopters, a Bell Model 406 and, he observed with a warm tug of nostalgia, a Huey Cobra, patrolled the valley down to the foot of the mountain, Gatling guns swiveling like eager mandibles. On the jagged peak above and behind the tower, they had three antiaircraft batteries: two Bofors systems on the summit, each running a quartet of 40mm cannons, and a Helicon system about fifty yards above the roof, with three 20mm Vulcan autocannons. Loaders and sighters watched FLIR and radar displays on their computers that cut through the fog and showed them circling hawks and a flock of Canadian snow geese. They were well-sheltered with gray canopies covered in snow and gravel, and might escape the notice of a casual flying observer, but for the jungle-spaghetti of arm-thick power and comm cables spilling down the cliffs to the trailer park.

  He saw, too, what they, with all their fancy toys, could not. The Missionary observation post set on the next ridge, two klicks to the north, had been vacated in a hell of a hurry just before dawn, with the all-seeing mercs none the wiser. He sensed the people in the woods, who were invisible to the chopper pilots with their FLIR goggles, because they were buried in snow and radiated no heat, just yet. He saw the road winding down the broken back of Heilige Berg, past the abandoned Nazi compound, and, through the ever-present mountain mist, he saw the fields and ranches of the valley below.

  From his perch, 1st Lieutenant Brutus Dyson saw all, yet was seen by none. He had not moved in over eighteen hours, and his skin temperature was only a degree or two warmer than the snowy ledge he lay on, thirty feet above the east-facing Bofors battery. For the duty, Dyson had grown himself a gilley suit—a shaggy, head-to-toe camouflage rig favored by snipers—thick enough to stop a bullet, liberally interwoven with local vegetation. His pelt was made of the fiber-optic spiculate hair of a polar bear, which soaked up ambient color and insulated heat. Right now, he could barely tell where his own arms ended and the rocks began. The talons made it difficult to hold his rifle—an M24 lifted from the mercs' weapons store by one of Keogh's slaves—but he had long since forgotten the weapon, and his eyes glazed over until some movement on the plateau below pricked his prowling nerves. He was coming to hate the mercs, which was good, because in all likelihood, he'd end up killing them all, but he was hating them because they made him wait and watch, and waiting and watching gave him time to think. Think about Spike Team Texas, and why it was beginning to fall apart.

  "Doom on you, little campers," growled the Abominable Snowman.

  Even before the change that had made him not human, he possessed an uncanny knack for adaptation. It was this native talent—what Special Forces called being "good in the woods"—that got him into the Green Berets when his Ranger CO was trying to get him Section Eight'ed and committed stateside. He left calling cards. Gouged out Charlie's eyes with a notched spoon. His doomed chickenshit comrades trashed him for it, but damned if he didn't hear stories from the interrogators for months after about the Eye-Stealer who haunted their nightmares.

  He was tapped for SOG in 1965. The Studies & Observation Group trained Nungs and Montagnards, yellow hillbillies, to fight smarter and dirtier than the Cong, and led them in recon runs and raids in the denied territory of those neutral countries where the Ho Chi Minh Trail fed the red heart of the war. The casualty rate for SOG A-teams was well above one hundred fifty percent, but their kill ratio was the highest in the theater, and for every American commando, Charlie deployed over four hundred to hunt him. They were also among the most highly decorated units, for the few missions that were ever cleared for citation boards to review.

  Three man SOG recon teams led squads of indig killers into NVA positions in eastern Laos and VC resupply depots northern Cambodia in 1965; spying on and harassing the gooks so they bunched up, making them fatter targets for company-sized Hatchet Force raids. Early success and stifling political bullshit made the brass hunger for smaller, harder teams of secret soldiers who could roam deep into hostile, gook-infested jungle for days at a time. In their blind zeal, the gods of war created Spike Team Texas.

  Almost before they were a unit, they became a single body. The other teams were thrown together and carved to fit on the lathe of unconventional war, but ST Texas was a new animal altogether. It was invisible, except to the dead. It ate only fruit and rice drenched in nuc
mam, the pungent VC fish oil staple. It used Kalashnikov rifles and wore canvas gook sneakers. It walked, talked, fucked, ate, and shit the jungle. It was not just that they were—almost—all Texans, or that they were all crazy in love with the war. It was simply that the Army had built them into a god, and turned them loose in Eden.

  Their head, Captain Virgil Quantrill, was one of the Quantrills, great-great-grandson of William Clarke Quantrill, the legendary scalp-taking Confederate guerilla warlord. Forbidden to go into the bush with his men, he snuck out. He doctored their mission reports, juggled atrocities and made them as invisible to MACV/SOG brass as they were to Charlie. Just as his bloody-minded ancestor taught the James gang all they knew about raiding, so Virgil taught them.

  Master Sergeant Dyson was the One-Zero. The absolute authority in the woods, even Quantrill deferred to him.

  Sergeant First Class Tucker Avery was the One-One, or just the Okie. Half-Cherokee Tulsa-trash, wound tight long before Nam, he lived solely on Green Hornets, the giant horse-pills of speed Uncle Sam packed in their lunches. A master sniper and demolition expert, he once destroyed a platoon of NVA and their lieutenant with a can of nails, some gunpowder, and a crying baby. He still believed he was going to get the Medal Of Honor for it, when the papers finally went through.

  Spec Four Gibby Holroyd was the radio operator. Skinny then as Avery was now, still 'Royd was a man of large appetites. He lived to knock up every Asian he didn't kill, and starve out the rest. Somewhere in Laos and Cambodia, there were whole tribes of very ugly Amerasian hillbillies. Still and all, he was a dependable radio-man. He could be counted on to call airstrikes on his own head while NVA encircled their position, then just step to one side as the bombs came down.

  Other SOG recon units scouted for or poked around after air raids, spied on enemy supply routes and tried to snatch prisoners and wounded or dead soldiers. Spike Team Texas raised hell. They lived in the jungle. They set traps. They poisoned wells and rice. They tapped phone lines and lured NVA troops into minefields. They outkilled cancer. They took trophies. Their Nungs filed their teeth and bit into dying hearts for strength.

  Surviving ten SOG missions made you a legend. After fifteen, you spooked people, and after twenty, you were already dead. Spike Team Texas ran thirty-five missions in '66 and '67. They went through Nungs like bullets, but not one of the core four sustained a single serious injury.

  The longest insertion lasted five weeks. They were only ambushed at the LZ, getting in and getting out. It became clear to the Captain that a mole in the South Vietnamese army was giving them up, but nobody believed him. When Khe Sanh was overrun by gook tanks and twenty thousand NVA in February of '68, the Marines and MACV refused to help the besieged Special Forces camp at Lang Vei, and every SOG recon team that went out got ambushed on its LZ. Two were completely swallowed up and never heard from again. Spike Team Texas wrote and signed its own orders, pillaged the armory and hiked out of the SOG Forward Operating Base at Phu Bai, into the broken limestone hinterland of eastern Laos.

  Spike Team Texas lived off the land, and off the war. It fought the war on all fronts. Spike Team Texas declared war on the United States of America and all other armed parties in Southeast Asia. For seven years, it roamed from the Twentieth Parallel to Thailand, killing anyone who had what it wanted, and vanishing. It became the bogeyman that SF trainers scared their Yards, and each other, with. While Nixon "Vietnamized" the war, Spike Team Texas victimized the Khmer Rouge. It collected redder-than-red scarves. It saluted the last helicopters out of Saigon in '75, and faded back into its jungle.

  For Spike Team Texas, the war only went more covert when the Americans went home. They lived off the defiant hill-tribes of Laos and Cambodia, many of whom went nomad or dug into the deepest mountain wilderness, and still hated all Vietnamese scum and loved their killers.

  Where necessary, the Captain convinced them the war was still on, that America was still shoulder-to shoulder with them. They trained and armed them and moved on to the next village, sometimes laying in for a year or two, until all the babies started looking like Holroyd. They raped and pillaged opium warlords in Thailand, and amassed enough wealth to buy Presidential pardons.

  In 1981, as they were crossing the Mekong back into Laos, a fucking

  sniper shot Captain Quantrill from half a mile away. With the top of his head gone, he field-promoted Dyson to 1st Lieutenant, and ordered them to eat his body.

  Headless, Spike Team Texas went a little crazy. Slashing a bloody swath of indiscriminate slaughter across Laos, they got as far as the Bra, the old VC HQ, in the shadow of Leghorn, a ruined mountaintop Special Forces forward fire control center. The gooks never even put troops on the ground. They bombed them with yellow rain until they went blood simple and tried to kill each other. They took Spike Team Texas alive, yet headless. Like blind, gelded Samson, they chained Spike Team Texas up for two long years, torturing them even as they sickened and wasted away from their exposure to yellow rain. They refused to die, though, and the new Vietnam was too craven to outright execute them. In 1983, they did the sensible, and in the end, the most diabolical thing: they quietly turned Spike Team Texas over to the US Embassy in Thailand.

  There were no parades, no press conferences, no medals, no recognition of their heroism, their sacrifice. The prisons were cleaner, their torturers more of the brain-jockey type, and the food had less maggots and rat shit in it, but they were in fucking Florida. At least in Hanoi, they were that much closer to the shit, and they pined for it. In each of them, the voice of Captain Quantrill ordered them to stand tall in the voice of their growling, yellow rain-ruined stomachs. They were destined for something more.

  After a year in Florida, their destiny came calling. Along with twenty or so other prisoners, they shipped out on a C-130 to Hawaii, then Guam, where they boarded a boat along with a barnyard full of livestock and an equal complement of interservice brass, spooks and scientists. They were given physicals—Holroyd was so nervous, he tried to rape his doctor— and kept in cargo containers until they reached the atoll. The containers were loaded onto amphibious landers and rolled onto the shore, and the sailors off-loaded them with honest-to-god cattle prods. The treatment was hardly unwarranted. Avery, shackled hand and foot, had head-butted a mouthy communist to death in-transit. They brought the corpse out and used it anyway.

  The atoll was a big sandbar in the middle of the Pacific, but the engineers had built a little town on it, complete with houses of wood and tin and concrete (little pigs, little pigs, let me in), and barns and bunkers and a steeple in the center of the island. The steeple was all grown-over with machines and recorders and cables and shit, and the cables snaked out to each of the houses and shelters where the sailors and scientists chained down the animals and the convicts.

  They were put in separate houses. Holroyd, in the wooden house, shrieked and thrashed and bit two doctors while they tried to attach sensors to him. He sang and cried and pissed his pants for two solid hours. Avery, in a tin shack, slipped his chains, killing one and maiming four and getting as far as the boats before they trank-darted him. Dyson sat calmly in the brick house. He hadn't felt much of anything but sick since the Captain died and they got gassed. But today he felt a queer sort of exhilaration that made escape or violence irrelevant. If this was the end of Spike Team Texas, they were going out in style, for he believed that this was surely a nuke test. What better acknowledgement of their invincible badassedness, than to be nuked? But something about the way the doctors regarded him, the way they argued about having medical staff on-hand, made him begin to suspect this was something more.

  They called it RADIANT.

  One doctor, a sickly fossil who looked like he'd been yellow-rained on a few times, himself, asked him if he believed he had a soul. He laughed and answered that if he had one, it was bought and paid for, so what difference did it make?

  The other one took an interest in him then. He didn't know it at the time, but the other doctor was Hi
m, the brains behind RADIANT, and the author of their rebirth. He looked deep into Dyson's eyes, and Dyson looked back, pure spite melting into a kind of awe as he saw how old those eyes were. How old and wise and penetrating. They took his measure and gave him his due, no more, no less. "I would speak with you later," he said. "This doesn't have to be the end. This can be the beginning."

  "Whatever, fucker," Dyson grinned back. "Just get it over with."

  And when they threw the switch, there was no big bomb-blast, no stroke of lightning, no Godzilla rising out of the sea to eat them. The sun went crazy, and everything on the island screamed like it was burning up, but Dyson heard angels singing, and even as his flesh began to rot and fall apart, he felt new life blooming in the strands and blobs of malignant neoplasm shot far and wide like shrapnel through his dying body. He went to sleep with everything else on the atoll, but Spike Team Texas awakened. They opened their new eyes and took in the new world of cancer exploding out of every man and beast, everything dead and still growing in all directions, and in the center of it all stood the one that had made this, had made them, the one they'd mistaken for a mere human egghead. And in that moment, without a word spoken, they knew they would follow Him anywhere.

  Thus did Spike Team Texas get a head transplant.