Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  He crossed the snow to the nearest human-sized entrance to the stockhouse. A Master lock hung open from the latch. He removed it, pocketed it and peeked inside.

  The interior was dark, the air warm and close and ripe with the coppery scent of blood and the funk of animals, but Cundieffe wrinkled his nose in puzzlement. It didn't smell like cattle. It was strong enough, but there was no musky, not-unpleasant aroma of manure. There was also no sound.

  Now would be the time to announce himself as an FBI agent and demand that any parties within declare themselves and come out with their hands up. Now would be the time to have a gun and some back-up. The two arguments neatly nullified each other.

  Cundieffe gingerly walked into the dark with his hands out, and gave a meep of pain when his right hand hit a post. Fumbling down it, he found a light switch and flipped it.

  Rows of bare-bulb lights fluttered and came aglow in sour yellow patches of a vast, cavernous space, the juice traveling like a rumor to the back of the room, which must be half the length of the slaughterhouse. Ramps led up to a hayloft, and several doors and chutes on the far wall led deeper into the building. There were no cattle, but the killing floor was furnished from wall to wall in cots.

  Cundieffe walked around and then through the ranked Army-surplus cots, so like the orderly human corral of a disaster relief center. He counted three hundred cots, each with a scratchy wool blanket neatly folded on the foot. Hoses and less self-explanatory slaughtering machinery dangled from the rafters and lay in neat stacks on shelves along the north wall. Polished steel glistened, hoses dripped.

  He wandered from one row of cots to the next, peering under cots. The floor was scabbed with recent blood almost everywhere, but there was nothing else, which struck him as stranger than people not minding sleeping in a slaughterhouse. There was nothing else on the floor. Even in a military barracks, a person left traces of his occupancy—a comb, a discarded magazine or a paper cup, graffiti. Heilige Berg was mostly young boys, but also included many whole families, regular people, despite their hateful religion and crash-course survivalism. People left trash, forgot things, made messes, carved their initials, left an unpleasant odor. He found hairs on the cots when he peered very closely, and a few scuff-marks and traces of dirt and damp where boots had left their marks.

  Who didn't take their boots off when they went to sleep? Bodies slept here, but not people.

  In the last thirty-six hours, they evacuated the compound and took shelter here. They took nothing, left nothing, forgot nothing. As tight as Delta Force commandos, as disciplined as Benedictine monks, they butchered the herd while the rest slept in the same room. In their boots. Then, just before dawn, they boarded charter buses and vanished. As incredible as Schweinfurter's story had been, he had refused to accept that his people would voluntarily leave the compound. They were different, now, he'd insisted, but nothing could make Grossvater Egil lead the community off the mountain. He had a prophecy to wait with them until Gotterdammerung, and the Ragnarok of the Races—

  They left nothing behind, and no one. They left the door unlocked. Abandoned their faith, and left in the most orderly evacuation imaginable. It was a puzzle.

  Crossing to the far wall, he found the door nearest the northeast corner of the room standing ajar, and a darksome flight of stone steps descending into a basement. Feeling for a light switch, he found none until he reached the bottom. His shin barked something and he tripped over a wooden crate and fell into more of them, scraping and bruising the few patches of tissue on his limbs that were not already contused. His hands came up to soften his fall, but skin snagged on nails, arms sank into jagged gaps between boxes and a morass of packing foam.

  He fought his way back to his feet and, biting his lip in a vain attempt to keep from cursing again today, found the switch. It was an old-fashioned button, like a doorbell, and he heard a crack and smelled ozone when the circuit closed. He had a moment to swallow the certainty that the Heilige Bergers had left the door unlocked in a lame attempt to lure a few stupid baby-killer fed thugs into an explosive trap. The light was weaker and scummier than upstairs, and it took Cundieffe a few minutes for his eyes to adjust.

  The crates filled the basement waist-high to the dim suggestion of a far wall, making the chambers beyond inaccessible. Stenciled on the sides: Idaho Army National Guard Armory on some, Cyrillic characters and VORSICHT! EXPLOSIV on others. All the crates appeared to be empty.

  They did not leave empty-handed, after all. They didn't take their cache intact, but broke it out and left in haste, as if going off to war.

  He felt dizzy, sat down hard on a crate. Nobody in White Bird said anything about the Heilige Bergers leaving heavily laden with rifles, explosives and mortars. Even Sheriff Manes' trio of dullard deputies could not have missed such a detail.

  He should hurry to alert the Bureau and the state police about this new development. If the Heilige Berg community had been somehow biologically co-opted by Radiant Dawn, they were armed and on the loose somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, and the agents who followed them might be caught unawares and killed.

  If they were really off the mountain at all.

  He shuddered. It made no sense for them to leave. What he saw here was baffling and mildly unnatural, but it told him that Heilige Berg was taking up arms, whether to defend Radiant Dawn or their own homes he couldn't guess, but they were here, he knew it.

  Then who left in all those buses?

  He stood up so fast he didn't notice a nail tearing the seat out of his slacks.

  Three hundred and fifty people, all of them terminal cancer patients.

  Dr. Keogh gathered his patients out in the remotest possible locations to expose them to RADIANT, which killed healthy tissue, but stimulated some new and improved version to grow out of malignant cells.

  But to absorb the white separatists, they would have to have had cancer, all of them. Schweinfurter verified Hoecker's original tip that Heilige Berg fell prey to an epidemic, and that when he was brought back from his Dairy Queen ordeal, they were mysteriously cured. The boy himself was undoubtedly sick, perhaps dying, if he didn't get to a hospital and into immediate cancer treatment. Because he missed his chance to be cured, missed RADIANT.

  He hoped that Macy and Mentone could at least be counted on to take care of the boy. When all this was over, whatever this was, he knew that the boy would be the only willing witness, the only evidence that strung this web of impossibilities together.

  There were still so many questions, though, that he couldn't bring himself to tell a soul what he believed. How did Dr. Keogh make Heilige Berg sick enough fast enough for them to survive the change? And what was the change? He thought again of Sgt. Storch, sitting there impassively, while deep in his glassy eyes, something flailed at chains that kept it down inside. He saw Storch walking dumb as his ruptured head melted. He saw a man running down the mountain alongside his racing car, shooting his phone out of the space his head had been in only a split-second earlier.

  The more he thought he knew, the more afraid he was of believing in it. No sane man could hope to fold such things into his vision of the world, but he was not a man. He was a Mule. Nature's own new and improved human, selected for the ability to face the unacceptable so that the species as a whole would not perish. If he and his kind could not restore order and protect the populace from the truth, then perhaps the human race deserved to step aside and make way for its successors.

  Trembling, he climbed the stairs and was crossing the killing floor when he heard a noise like plumbing backing up throughout the slaughterhouse. He felt the gurgling groan in the soles of his feet, saw the cots vibrate as the sound grew and became a thrumming, throbbing pulse, as if the slaughterhouse was a living thing revitalized with its abandonment, and its heart had begun to beat.

  He shook his head as if to shoo away a fly. Such lurid thoughts were grotesque, unworthy and unproductive. He was under a little stress, but it was no excuse for letting his imaginat
ion run away with him. But what in heaven's name was that sound?

  The vibrations subsided, but a growling subharmonic rose and shook the walls. It came from deep in the slaughterhouse. It grew louder exponentially as Cundieffe approached it. He opened a heavy, double-wide refrigerator door, and the sound, and the smell, knocked him back ten feet.

  It was as if the refrigerator had broken down, and later flooded with raw sewage from a burst pipe. The sound was a voice.

  Cundieffe wrapped his scarf tightly around his mouth and nose, but he could still taste it like a film congealing on his tongue, and his eyes began to burn as he stepped inside.

  A wide corridor surfaced in quilted aluminum panels led into a huge bank of walk-in fridges and freezers. The corridor itself was not refrigerated, but Cundieffe shivered.

  He saw daylight. Around a corner, a train-wreck, minus the train, the corridor wall and the exterior wall beyond that breached by elliptical holes ten feet across. Dishwater-colored daylight filtered into the dark, painting harsher shadows outside their feeble corona. Outside, the corrals. Fences trampled by the same herd of rogue elephants. Snow and shreds of debris tracked across fractured, filth-smeared concrete in a vast swath back of the end of the corridor, where a refrigerator door hung open at an askew angle.

  So stunned was he by the baffling destruction, that he was painfully slow in turning to look at the source of it, as well as the sounds and the smell. He turned with his eyes closed, and only opened them when he felt something wet and massive sweep the air before his face, and heard the voice again, bubbling up as if from the bowels of a tar pit choked with decaying carcasses.

  "Say, buddy," said the unspeakable voice, "Can you help out a Vietnam veteran?"

  Against all common sense, against the screaming gravity of his primal nervous system, Cundieffe moved closer. Slitting his eyes, he walked into the warm, wet wind that streamed past him out of the occupied fridge. He stopped ten feet away from the doorway and peered more avidly than he intended into the dark until his eyes began to readjust.

  Something filled the refrigerator from wall to wall, from the floor to the rows of hooks on tracks from which meat once hung. How far back the compartment went, he had no idea, but it was full of quivering, wheezing life.

  Light glinted on mounds of excrement on the floor that reminded Cundieffe of owl droppings—tightly compacted, desiccated nuggets of bone and hair and sinew, the only indigestible elements of an entire mouse or mole, reduced to an almost mineral state by an exquisitely efficient digestive system. By the size and rough composition of the excreta before him, Cundieffe could not but conclude that each of the mounds had once been a whole beef cow. The Heilige Berg militia, or whoever they were now, had not butchered the cattle, but merely slaughtered and placed them in cold storage, so this thing had come through the wall and eaten them whole.

  With a ghastly plosive noise and a monstrous gust of gaseous by-product, a fresh one was ejected by a mammoth sphincter and slid across the slime-slick floor to stop at Cundieffe's unsteady feet. He felt the floor, and the earth's crust beneath it, groan at the unbearable burden of the glutton. The thing almost exerted its own gravitational field, for it drew Cundieffe still nearer, though he felt as if any moment, it would sink into the molten mantle at the earth's core, and drag him, and the rest of Idaho, in after it.

  A wall of smooth flesh like a colossal bowel blocked the doorway, its only discernible feature the many, many, busy sphincters, but as he watched, new features began to percolate and reach out of the mass.

  Cundieffe trembled before the enormity, the obscenity, the impossibility of what he saw. In a day, he had seen a man that he had concluded must have been many men, for what man could have done what he did? Now, he shook as he had not then, for he had no choice but to accept it, for this thing, too, was some kind of a man.

  Out of the sea of fat and assholes came a knurled knob of boneless tissue, dwarfed by the awesome size of its body, but growing larger all the time and wrinkling with contours of a fetal human face. Eyes, beady and black and twinkling with avid, greedy joy, popped open like time-lapse blisters all over the overripe flesh, and a mouth brimming with boneridged tongues and syringes and teeth teeth TEETH yawned and smiled at him. "I seem to be stuck," the mouth moaned.

  "What—who—who are you?" Cundieffe choked. He started to take a step backwards, but his foot got no traction, and he braced himself against the wall to keep from falling down in the mess.

  "Specialist Four Gibson Holroyd, One-Two, Operational Detachment Alpha-Texas, MACV/SOG, at your service, scrawny morsel."

  "D-d-did you eat the whole herd?" He honestly didn't know what else to say.

  "You fucking kidding me? They got something like two hundred head in these lockers. Only about forty of 'em in here, but like I said, I seem to be inextricably incarcerated by my own gustative excess. So if you wouldn't mind lending a hand—"

  Still afraid to take a step, paralyzed by those black eyes, Cundieffe found himself reaching out to the insatiable blob, when a tongue of sorts slithered up out of the mouth and reached out to him. He dove backwards, pivoting and trying to run, but his feet only splashed in the filth and betrayed him. He heard the air snap above his head as the tongue whipped past like the deadly adhesive flycatcher of a gargantuan toad.

  He screamed, flailing his legs and windmilling his arms as he went down on the floor, sailed out of the blob's reach on a carpet of effluvium. His stomach revolted then, hot vomit hitting his palate and fouling the scarf over his mouth. He swam in shit trying to get to his feet. He heard more tongues coming for him. The blob hollered after him, but with so many writhing tongues, its words were gibberish.

  Cundieffe scrambled to the edge of the puddle on his hands and knees, but when he hit firm floor, he raced out through the holes in the wall and rolled in the snow. Hot tears stung his eyes and his nose ran freely, but it flushed the vile residue of the thing that called itself a man. He shed his filthy topcoat, tore off the scarf and used the unsoiled portions of it to wipe the filth off his skin. It burned.

  Slowly, breath by freezing breath, he regained his composure. Never mind that it is impossible. It is. And if he got help, the thing would be gone, tearing the whole slaughterhouse off its foundations, and running amok across the Idaho countryside. The abomination had to be destroyed. Now.

  He went back to the cellar to find a weapon.

  He rummaged among the empty crates for an unguessable time, tearing up his crabbed, cramped hands on nails and splintered pine before he found something he thought he could use at the back of the pile. It was a Fabrique Nationale belt-fed M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, with two hundred rounds of 5.56mm ammunition coiled in a handy, though heavy, plastic box. After puzzling over the instructions, which were in French, he lugged the bullets and the "light" machine gun up the stairs separately and set them up outside the outer door to the refrigerated compartments.

  His fingers shook as he tried to set the end of the belt into the feeder mechanism in the breech, like the unhurried Belgian stick figure in the diagrams. Inside, he could hear the blob's unholy plumbing wringing out more beef by-products, and the tongue-tied bellowing of the mouth, which had now become a caterwauling chorus.

  He set the SAW up on its bipod on a steel utility cart from the killing floor, checked the ammunition and, after almost tipping the whole works over on the raised threshold, wheeled it into the corridor.

  "Where you been, college boy?" The blob roared. The sphincters took up the cry, and the blob shifted. Cundieffe heard the reinforced walls of the meat locker straining, saw dust sprinkle down from the ceiling.

  "Do you work for Dr. Keogh, or are you a member of the Heilige Berg separatist settlement?" Cundieffe asked in a flat monotone. It helped if he just looked down at the big black machine gun before him, taking comfort in its death-dealing power, and tried to persuade himself that he was just interrogating a prisoner.

  "I'm all alone," the mouth managed. The tongues kept a low pr
ofile, slinking across the floor, snaking among the hills of digested cattle towards the machine gun. "I'm a species unto myself, an army of one."

  Cundieffe watched them uneasily. He looked back at the gun. "I order you to…to remain still, or I shall be forced to resort to deadly force. Now, what happened here?"

  "Big fuckin' surprise–for everybody. That old motherfucker's no dick-swingin' white man, I tell you what, he's an ink-drinkin' stink-beetle, he's… full of surprises."

  "Is he–is Keogh–still up on the mountain?"

  "What'd I tell you? They're all gone. Empty house, just bait… But I'm full of surprises, too."

  "Are you, now?"

  "Oh yeah, morsel. Gonna be an army! Army of 'Royds! C'mere, morsel…"

  The tongues reared up and Cundieffe recoiled away from the gun, because he hadn't seen them coming, never saw so many get so close. They grabbed for the cart just as Cundieffe regained himself and lunged for the trigger. He gripped the stock with his left hand and slipped his finger into the guard. A lashing tongue blurred up and wrapped around his arm. Pain opened up his arm and made it spasm, and jerking it back, he squeezed the trigger in a death-grip. The gun bucked and barked. Sparks flew and lead sang in the corridor, the path of fire arcing crazily around the doorway, ricocheting bullets describing Catherine wheels of light on his bulging eyeballs.

  It screamed, like a stadium filled with dying damned souls. The tongues recoiled. Bony radulae along the slimy tip of the one holding his arm sheared away the skin of his forearm with his shirtsleeve. The pain drove Cundieffe forward. He leaned over the gun and played it back and forth on the avalanche of noisome offal as it curled in on itself and tried in vain to present a smaller target.

  Tentacles and bulging, muscle-ripped arms burst out of the mass, wrapping around the doorway and the unhinged door, trying to draw it shut. Clubs studded with bony baling hooks shot out and scythed the air. Rivets popped and walls buckled. A rafter beam splintered and fell.

  Cundieffe bore down on the blob, grouping the stream of fire into the roaring mouth. Tentacles severed and danced like blind, pain-mad cobras. The huge jaw gobbled and gaped until the bullets obliterated it and punched deeper. The cart jostled and jumped to the relentless cadence of the machine gun and Cundieffe, confident at last that he was making a difference, rolled it forward, pushing aside excreta to drill the target more mercilessly, to separate every atom of it from every other atom until it was just so much inert slush, because such things should simply not be.