Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  The phone rang.

  He tapped the brakes and fumbled for the phone on the passenger seat. Never taking his eyes off the road, he finally found and activated it, then tucked it between his ear and shoulder.

  "Agent Cundieffe here."

  "That was stupid," Hoecker snapped.

  "What was stupid?" He wondered which of the morning's misadventures he already knew about, and how much to tell him. He was fast coming to conclude that he probably shouldn't tell anyone anything.

  "This is a secure line, but talk fast. You're in Idaho?"

  "Oh, I'm in Idaho, alright. I've been busy, this morning, what with getting outmaneuvered by other Bureau agents, made a fool of by the local sheriff, and beaten up—"

  "Someone literally beat you up? Slow down, Martin, you're not making any sense."

  His eyes darted right. He saw it again, and could not look away. The snow was knee-to waist-deep here, and the trees were taller, thicker and more densely packed than before, broken up only by the occasional house-sized granite boulder, but he could almost swear he saw something like a man running down the mountain along with his car. He sped up, eyes locked on the road.

  "Brady, it is my conclusion that I have been brought up here on false pretenses, wasting Bureau resources to be tested on my ability to keep mum about something I can only assume is some kind of covert military action against the Mission. I don't care whether I've failed, or not, I just want to go back to Washington, and do my damned job."

  "It's all true, Martin," he said. "About Radiant Dawn and the Mission. It's worse than even most of the Cave Institute will accept. Three hundred and fifty people, all of them terminal cancer patients. It just went into full operation about a month ago."

  "Good lord! And there's some question about what the Mission's objective is? How many people actually know about this?"

  "Dr. Keogh has worked with the federal government to keep the new hospice village under guard for the time being, until the Mission can be neutralized."

  "But if he's to be protected, why do it in secret? And if he's doing something he shouldn't, why stand back and let him be bombed by terrorists, when he can be brought to justice?"

  "It's complicated. This isn't about right and wrong."

  "And what about Dr. Keogh? What do you know about Radiant Dawn, really? Not the official line, but the truth."

  "What do you believe the truth is?"

  Cundieffe looked to the left. The valley, still and wreathed in fog, looked like an uninspired postcard. Was anything he'd been told true? Events he'd never heard of, shaped by people who had no records, people who, for all intents and purposes, didn't exist in his world. Or at least, they hadn't until last summer. Very well then, he'd play along. "I believe that Radiant Dawn is a front for a gene therapy project involving cancer research. I believe that Dr. Keogh, about whom I still know next to nothing, is somehow connected to an old DARPA satellite weapons project called RADIANT, and that the satellite is still in existence, and operational, and that the technology, if not the weapon itself, is instrumental in the project. I believe that the Mission's ranks included several civilian and military personnel who also worked on RADIANT, and who are just as determined to destroy it, and Keogh's research. And I suspect that Keogh has somehow taken control over the Heilige Berg militia."

  "I don't think there's really a death ray up there, Martin, but you're not far wrong on the rest. The Committee is divided on which group presents a larger threat. Because of internal disputes over the nature of Radiant Dawn, we have only offered covert support, and resolved to stay away."

  He looked to the right, into the trees. There it was. The speedometer read forty, but there it was, pacing him like a harvest moon. It had to be an optical illusion. Eyes back on the road, which was crowning the wrong way going into a hairpin turn. He pumped the brakes and lay across the seats to try to throw his weight up-slope and keep the car from tumbling into the gorge. "Oh, stupid, stupid, stupid—"

  "Martin? I don't have much time—"

  The road veered back into a straight descent for the visible future, and Cundieffe found himself speeding up, glancing over at the shadow. Racing it. Stupid. For all he knew, it was a hallucination brought on by the pounding his head had taken. "Sorry. Agents Macy and Mentone—"

  "They're not with the Bureau. Stay away from them."

  He couldn't parse that one. If they were protecting Keogh, why were they covering it up in advance? It was like some kind of surreal military exercise—or a trap. "But if they're here by the Committee's orders, then why am I here?"

  "We can't allow Radiant Dawn to keep operating in the dark. We can't legitimately investigate them ourselves, but a tangential avenue opened up which uniquely concerned you. We hope you'll see, as we do, that the cause is urgent."

  "But how in the heck am I supposed to stop it—"

  "You're not supposed to stop it. You are not to call in more agents, or state police, or notify or cooperate in any way with the local law or the media. This is going to happen. You're there to bear witness. We—myself and a plurality of powerful Committee members—have reason to suspect that the outbreak at Heilige Berg, whatever its true nature, was caused by the Radiant Dawn colony. The Committee as a whole has—arrangements with Keogh that will suffer if the Mission destroys his work at this critical juncture. They've contracted with Lt. Col. Greenaway to defend the colony against the Mission. You're there in case they're wrong."

  "I know he's here. He's the one who beat me up!"

  "Don't try to make anything out of it."

  "But he hit me," Cundieffe said, hating the whine in his voice.

  "He's critical to operations right now, and you aren't, but that could change very soon."

  "What is the Committee thinking? He's shown a consistent pattern of overaggressive insubordination."

  "True, he's a bloody-minded caveman, but Greenaway can be trusted to play his role. He believes he has the government by the short hairs. He wanted this."

  Cundieffe understood. Greenaway had blackmailed them with Mission evidence, just as he'd used his Operation White Star Work to get in on the ground floor of Delta Force. He wouldn't have just come in if they just asked him. What did he have on you?

  "Officially, he has resigned his commission, and is now a private security consultant, funded by black cash from an offshore account paid into, ultimately, by the Pentagon budget. He's better-armed and supported than he was in Delta Force, and he thinks he has carte blanche to go after the Mission, but we've placed him where he can only act in one direction, so he is contained. Better to have him inside, than trying to get in and dragging the circus in after him. The Mission's leadership is composed of ex-DARPA scientists and Army Special Operations Division and Intelligence Support Activities officers—the most brilliant, duplicitous men this country has ever produced. No one else could even begin to guess what they'd try. Greenaway can be counted on to get the Mission, and do it quietly."

  He felt numb, dead from the neck up. He looked right. The terrain was rockier, with fewer trees, and the runner was closer. For a concussion-induced hallucination, it sure looked clear. It looked like a man in jungle camouflage running down the mountain at fifty miles per hour, motionless from the waist up, pointing something at him. It had to be a vision. "And then what?" he asked.

  "Then we'll try to make the Committee see what it is they're dealing with. You and I, Martin. We'll show them. I can't guarantee this line any longer—"

  "Hundreds of dead people too late—" Cundieffe shouted into the phone, but the phone squealed and he jerked it away from his ear. Then there was a coughing sound and there was no phone, only black plastic slivers in his burning hand.

  His jaw dropped and he was looking stupidly at where the phone had been, wondering, How did Brady do that?

  Glass cut his face, and he noticed that the passenger's side window had exploded, and now the driver's side window blew out. Cundieffe put all the empirical data together and concluded t
hat someone was shooting at him. He lay down on the seat and tried to remember if he was pointed at the gorge, tried to visualize the swirling, treacherous road he'd been looking at a second ago, and in the end he said, screw it, and stepped on the accelerator.

  He yanked the wheel right a notch with his left hand, then held it straight, the fading image of the road jumping and melting like an old hygiene education film under the two terawatt bulb of his panic. His rear window shattered. His headrest burst, a galaxy of glass and flaming foam rubber floating above Cundieffe's head as another volley atomized the front windshield and the rear doorposts. He wished he had studied harder to become proficient with firearms. He wished he had brought one with him.

  The shooter was behind him, and probably standing still, unless the fire had come from a helicopter. Certainly not a running man—

  Then it occurred to him that he was still driving rather fast on an icy mountain road while lying prone across the seats of his car. No more bullets passed through the cabin that he could discern, but the wind that roared through the exposed interior was nearly as powerful an incentive as bullets to remain where he was. He peered over the dash, screamed, "holy gosh—" and flailed at the wheel.

  The runner stood in the middle of the road in front of him. A very, very tall, thin man, he stood stock-still, seemingly unperturbed by the oncoming car, though it must appear very large indeed to him, looking at it down the enormous starlight scope on the sniper rifle he held. The balding dome of Cundieffe's head through such a device must look like a Rose Parade float, and for a man who could shoot so well at a moving car while running through snow—

  Cundieffe threw himself back down across the seats and kicked at the gas as the air above his head came alive with lead. His hip must have disengaged the safety belt, or perhaps the sniper simply shot it away. The car bucked so hard he rolled onto the floor, and he figured he hit the wrong pedal, and kicked the other one as hard and as fast as he could.

  His right hand flared in pain and curled up like a burning leaf as he tried to grip the wheel with it. A shard of plastic from his phone jutted from the heel of his limp fist, and a raw, red groove seared the path of the bullet across his palm. He groped for his briefcase on the floor beside him, propped it up against his chest and tucked his head behind it. He hoped the steel sides, the laptop and thick sheaves of files inside, would do a better job of stopping a bullet than the front of the car had.

  The dashboard flew apart, and Cundieffe's ears popped and rang. The sniper's bullets, mangled by traveling through the auto body, the firewall and the instrument panel, punched flaming holes in the upholstery. His briefcase bucked in his arms with a distinct p-tang and a squelchy sizzle of pulverized circuitry. The passenger-side airbag deployed with a blast of stinging gas, and just as quickly burst as bullets punctured it. The driver's side airbag went to tatters a moment later, and then nothing but the wind.

  Cundieffe jerked upright on the seat and whipped his head around. There was good news and bad news. The runner was nowhere. The road was likewise. He had run out of mountain, and had only a gentle foothill between himself and the nearest ranch, but he was off the road, and headed for a fence.

  He seized the wheel with his good left hand and the elbow of the right, and attempted to turn the car back to the left, which he presumed was the direction the road had wandered off. The car slewed sideways as it hit the barbed-wire fence, taking out two posts and sliding out of control on two wheels into the open field beyond. Cundieffe gripped the wheel and pressed his face against the ruined airbag.

  When the car stalled and came to rest, he got out and looked around with his hand in his breast pocket, unconvincingly fondling a pretend gun for the benefit of the runner, should he still be around. There was only the wind and the snow falling, and a vast apron of pure white silence spreading out from him in all directions. His ears rang. His head snapped around involuntarily at what sounded like the clanging bells of a dozen distant freight trains converging on him. The wake of his bobsled-run down the hill was the only feature on the land, and the snow was already covering it over.

  It hit him then, when he was sure that whoever was shooting at him was gone. He had never been shot at, before. He had never even realistically expected that such a thing might ever happen to him. An inexcusable lapse in duty, but for an agent who had sought only a niche behind a desk, and who had been rewarded for his diligent bookworming with a post at the head office, the experience was impossible to square with waking life. It was as if he'd watched a movie. He'd been too emotionally worked-over to even panic, and now it was over.

  The Oldsmobile bore ample witness to the improbability of his survival. The shooters—for surely, there must have been several, along the road—had every reason to believe he was dead. They riddled the car along the line of his center of mass with at least twenty rounds of .50-caliber ammunition, not counting the ones that must have passed through the windows. Two sizable bullet fragments had penetrated his briefcase, killing his laptop and mixing the fragments with the shredded files and the oranges he'd saved for lunch. Counting the holes made it easier to reason what happened, and forget what he'd thought he saw.

  Needless to say, the car wouldn't start. At a guess, it might be the holes in the radiator and the engine block, but the battery had a hole in it, too. The gauges dangled from their sockets, or rolled around between his feet. The cheap stock stereo gave a flatulent spasm of AM static that faded and died before he could change the station. The door beeped once when he opened it to warn him he'd left his keys in the car.

  Alero is a sorry name for a domestic mid-sized sedan, he reflected. Devoid of any of the evocative imagery or consonant sounds that made a distinctive American automobile, it sounded like the name of some new prescription medicine they advertised on television, but were too embarrassed to reveal what malady it cured. I'm glad I didn't die in an Alero.

  He looked to the road, a hundred yards or so to the north. The barbed wire followed it, and a small billboard he hadn't noticed before stood out against the horizon. It was hand-painted, obviously the work of the landowner. SMASH THE NEW WORLD ORDER! STOP Y-JEW-K! DEATH TO FED BABYKILLER THUGS! WE REMEMBER WACO! screamed red block letters, while beneath it, a sub-legend gave a web address and one-eight-hundred number for pamphlets.

  The back of his neck burned as if someone were tickling it with an infrared sight. He collected his ruined briefcase and ran across the field, over the flattened stretch of fence, and up onto the road.

  On foot, he thought he could make it back to White Bird in about an hour, but he felt wary of staying on the road. Though he might hitch a ride, he might also run into the owner of the pasture where he'd left the car, or the men who were trying to kill him. He walked a little faster along the palisade of muddy snow piled on the shoulder. His legs ached as lactic acid accumulated in his exhausted muscles, but he forged on, and eventually, they went blessedly numb.

  Twice, he heard trucks coming and threw himself into the ditch until they passed. His slacks and shoes were thoroughly soaked through by the time he got far enough down the road that the ranches became large residential spreads with visible houses, but he kept trudging. Any of these good civilians could be rabid anti-federalists, or, for all he knew, all of them could.

  He dealt with voices like that all the time in his work, but when he heard such bile from people with property, with means of self-support, with all the benefits of living in a well-ordered democracy, it made him sick to his stomach. Who else, if not the decent, taxpaying citizens, was he out here trying to protect?

  He thought of the Cave Institute. He had examined their claims long and hard, and come to believe, to know, that without them, mankind would have destroyed itself before civilization ever became worthy of the name. They were the invisible hand on the tiller of the otherwise hell-bound ship of state, but even their benevolent stewardship could be construed by paranoid fantasists as a kind of tyranny, and make their lies and fever-dreams a little more r
eal. He wondered, himself, who they were really trying to protect, and how many sides there really were.

  This is going to happen—

  He saw something else, just then, that he hadn't noticed on the way up, which surprised him, because Karl Schweinfurter had told him about it. At the time, it hadn't seemed to matter enough, but now, it could tell him something when he had less than nothing.

  The Heilige Berg slaughterhouse adjoined their acreage in the valley. It was a two story wood and cinderblock structure like an elongated barn, with a maze of corrals and chutes enfolding it on two sides, and a loading dock with a row of parked trucks on the third. The corrals held only untrampled snow. It was probably customary to butcher most of the herd before winter, but there would still be plenty of dairy cattle, and he'd seen herds toughing out the cold in other fields in the area. Schweinfurter had said he'd seen the trucks going day and night when he was there last, so they might've slaughtered the whole herd, but he'd also said the meat was all kept in coolers in the slaughterhouse until it went to a wholesaler in Grangeville. Why were the trucks going up to Heilige Berg, then?

  He stood in the shelter of a wood shed at the edge of the property for a long time, looking at the weather-scarred slaughterhouse. A search of the building should be conducted by a SWAT team, and perhaps a bomb squad, with dogs and body armor and at least a gun or two between them. An unarmed Bureau agent without so much as a telephone or a car, who had already been beaten and shot at—wounded, he remembered, seeing and feeling his hand again—would do well to walk directly to the sheriff's station.

  But there was Hoecker's order. Bear witness—