Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  He didn't need Talley's prompting to lurch back to his trailer for a brief afternoon nap. He awoke feeling weaker, heavier, than when he sacked out. In his dreams, all his men—Burl, Teabag, Ade, Ruggy, Ensign Wifebeater, everyone—spoke in Keogh's voice, spoke his words. He'd been afraid to open his own mouth, afraid of who would speak out of it.

  He woke up thinking it was the morning all over again. Gray sunlight leaked in through the blinds, and men ran hither and yon shouting at each other. He checked his watch. He'd only intended to sleep for an hour, but it was already 1600. He popped another herbal capsule and washed it down with more coffee, went to see what was blowing up this time.

  The troops stood out beyond the minefield at the edge of the plateau, watching a distant plume of black and gray smoke curl up into the looming snowstorm down in the valley, about five miles due east. The artillery crews and the comm techs both concluded it was a barn off the road into White Bird, and observed that a tremendous explosion had preceded the fire. Greenaway wanted to send the Bell 406 down to recon the site, but Talley persuaded him to stay consolidated. In time, fire engines and Sheriff's deputies closed on the site, which had more or less burned itself out by then, anyway. Distractions and unhappy coincidences were the order of the day, and each one seemed to push the boundaries of Greenaway's world into a smaller and smaller portion of the mountain he'd come to rule. He fought the urge to go back to sleep, deciding that it would only be the quickest way to make something else go wrong.

  At dusk, something else went wrong. The mines started going off. By themselves. At the outer perimeter, a string of mines detonated just like they were supposed to, the vibration of the first setting off its neighbors in a spreading domino-wave, except that in the purpling sunset light, it was clear no one was there. Snow geysered up into the sky and rained down no body parts, no blasted metal from Missionary drones, nothing. The men were spooked. Unlike other tactical explosive charges placed around the camp, the mines were simple mechanical devices, and could only be triggered the old-fashioned way—by stepping on them. The snow piling up on the pressure-plates was blamed, but the demo experts who placed them swore they could only have gone off if a man-sized object triggered them. Fearing the mines were defective, Greenaway ordered his men to stay away from the minefield and stop talking about it.

  One could go insane trying to collate all of the bullshit that was happening, or one could focus on the one growing certainty that each event tried to obscure. They were coming.

  The snowfall continued unabated, softening the night's approach, banishing the world beyond the edge of the plateau. Greenaway devoured satellite images and air traffic reports, feeling his inborn strength and anger coming to the fore as the dark closed in. No more mines exploded, no more tourists crowded the mountain, and nothing else burned down or blew up, but he could taste them on the air.

  After dinner, he girded his loins and went to see Dr. Keogh. Crossing the camp to the tower's front entrance, he watched the group of residents taking in the brisk, brittle night air on the steps, and wondered again what brought them here, what made them so carefree, when the most ruthless, shifty motherfuckers in the history of warfare were coming to exterminate them.

  An old black man with what used to be called high yellow complexion waved and nodded to him as he approached.

  "Folks, it's not safe out here, you'll have to go back inside and hunker down. We're expecting incoming shit any time, now."

  They studied him with the placid indifference of sacred cows. A few of them looked at each other and stifled giggles.

  "Get inside, goddamit! I want Dr. Keogh out here, most fucking rickytick. Do you fuckheads speak English?"

  "We understand you, Mr. Greenaway," the high yellow one said in an amused, age-wizened voice. His eyes sparkled, silvery gray marksman's eyes, in the dying snow-light. Then they got up as one and made their way back inside. The high yellow slipped on the icy pavement and tore his knee open on the steps. The others helped him to his feet, laughing. He laughed, too, unmindful of the gaping hole in his black tracksuit, or the blood flowing freely from the lacerated skin.

  They were high on something, no doubt, drugged to the eyeballs, and feeling no pain. Maybe that was all this was, a place where the dying came to slip away on a tide of illegal drugs. And maybe No Such Company was really just a security consultant.

  He waited on the steps for five minutes, honing his dread into anger and steeling himself to go in after them, when Dr. Keogh finally came out. The tall, gaunt old man wore a white lab smock over his tracksuit uniform. Greenaway looked hard at him, but Burl Talley's voice crackled on his headset, which he'd pushed up away from his ears, because the static and routine comm checks drove him batshit. He only half-noticed that Dr. Keogh's breath did not form visible plumes of vapor as he stepped out of the heated tower and into the plunging cold.

  Greenaway raised a hand to acknowledge and stall Keogh, pulled the headset into place. "Burl, what now?"

  "Mort, I can't raise Teabag."

  "How long since his last report?"

  "Ten minutes ago, he punched in. I told him to punch in every five."

  "He's probably taking a shit. Call me in another ten."

  "You know Teabag. He'd broadcast if he was pinching one. Send Wifebeater to head-check him."

  "Negative, Burl, Wifebeater's on eastern point watch. Send Dogtown."

  "Can't. They're down below the ridge line, on patrol."

  "Well shit, send somebody from the bridge, but take care of it. I've got to talk to somebody, here. Out." He took off the headset and fixed Dr. Keogh with his steeliest gaze. "Dr. Keogh, we're expecting the enemy to engage any time now. Your people have to get down below and stay there. No more outside privileges."

  Dr. Keogh smiled unconcernedly, came down the steps to Greenaway. "I wouldn't worry. The outcome is already determined. My people have felt the approach of certain death before, and learned that in every moment, one must live. I can't make them unlearn that lesson. It may be that very soon, your men will need to take shelter with us, but in the end, it will matter very little."

  Greenaway looked away from the doctor. He felt as if he were rolling inside a wave in Keogh's gaze, unable to find which way was up, where there was air to breathe. "Your fatalism means fuck-all to me, Doctor. We're here to protect your people, and we're going to win. We have superior firepower, superior sensory technology, and superior soldiers. We're going to wipe them out, and if you cooperate, your three hundred cancer-freaks won't lose so much as a night's sleep."

  Dr. Keogh chuckled. "Ah, if only it were so. You make me laugh, Mr. Greenaway. Your technology—their technology…you're not here to protect us. You think of us as bait. You are the one who doesn't understand."

  Burl's voice squawked on the headset in his breast pocket. "Burl, I can't raise Wifebeater."

  Angrily, he put the headset back on. "What about—"

  "Or Dogtown. Lines are functioning, but all I get is dead air."

  "Get the goddamned bridge detail up there. Call Major Ortman. Find those motherfuckers."

  "It's so hard to keep good men under duress," Keogh said.

  "My men didn't desert. Something's fucking going on here, and I want to know what."

  "It's very simple, Mr. Greenaway. This is a trap, but we are not the bait."

  Behind Dr. Keogh, the doors opened and ten residents came out. They were a different bunch, but he noticed now that there were four children and six adults, half male and half female, just as before. They flanked Keogh on the steps and smiled at Greenaway, as if he were an expected guest at some unknowable celebration.

  "There are not three hundred of us any more, Mr. Greenaway. There are only forty. You never toured the entire bunker network. You assumed, because you never really cared."

  Greenaway looked around for something to tell him he was not still dreaming. He looked Keogh up and down, from his mantle of silver-white hair, unstirred by the whipping zephyrs blowing across the p
lateau, to his ice-crusted boots. His eyes traveled back up to Keogh's knee—to the torn black pants, the knee scabbed and bloody but already healing. Back up to his indulgent smile, his eyes, twinkling with the reflection of Greenaway's own, partial, but utterly damning realization of what was going on.

  Their eyes flashed gray-silver, all of them. Marksman's eyes, fossilized eyes, eyes of living stone. His eyes.

  Greenaway's hand unsnapped the flap on his holster, clasped the chill grip of his Walther 9mm, but he couldn't draw it.

  "Do you know what sets your kind apart from all the other races that have risen to dominance on this world, Mr. Greenaway? You are the first to achieve sentience who were not predators, but prey. Lowly, gleaning, groveling hominids, you only acquired a taste for meat—for killing—from scavenging the kills of true predators. You became smarter because you were too weak to defend yourselves by main strength. You've forgotten that you only protected yourselves from extinction by sacrifice, by throwing one of your own to the wolves, that the rest might escape and survive. You did it so many millions of times that the screams of the scapegoat being eaten alive still echo in your nightmares. Yet here your kind still plays out those programmed instincts. To achieve victory, there must be sacrifice. One of the herd, one too old and infirm to serve any other purpose, must be thrown to the wolves to draw them out."

  For once, Greenaway understood what Keogh was getting at. "I'm not bait," he growled, bitterly, weakly.

  "Oh, but you are," one of them, Greenaway didn't see which, added in Keogh's voice. "Only with a gaudy show of military might around us could we draw the Mission in sufficient strength to weaken them, and reveal their primary base of operations."

  Another added, "Take satisfaction in this, if nothing else. Your enemies will be exterminated, so your sacrifice will not be in vain. This is all you have lived for, is it not?"

  The one he still thought of as the original Dr. Keogh reached out to touch him. "We hoped to make you one with us, but you would not share our food, and now there is no time left. They are indeed coming, and they are going to kill every living thing on this mountain, because that is what must happen. We are committed to this, Mr. Greenaway. Our individual deaths will bring a new race to life, and we will live to see its birth and ascendance through their eyes, for we are One."

  Greenaway drew his pistol, leveled the sight on Keogh's unlined brow. "Get the fuck away from me. We'll stop them—and then we'll kill all of you."

  They crowded closer, their faces and hair draining of color. Their faces became his face, their voices his voice. "Protect us, Mr. Greenaway."

  He shot Dr. Keogh in the face. The 9mm parabellum bullet seemed to punch the doctor's whole head in at point-blank range, the bridge of the nose and both eyes blasting out the back of his skull. He kept coming. "You'll have to do better," another Keogh said.

  Greenaway turned and ran, almost slipped and fell on his face. He ran all the way to the comm trailer, tore the door open and leaned against it.

  Talley stood up and braced him. He looked drunk, but his breath was unfermented, though still shitty. "Mort, shit's flying apart. It's on."

  Greenaway caught his breath, bit his lip as he tried to frame what he'd just seen into words that wouldn't just prove him unfit for duty. He had other things, sane things— "What about Teabag?"

  "Wishniak's dead, Mort. I tried to raise you. The bridge detail found him, up in his tree, where he was supposed to be—with an arrow through his head."

  "A what?" The hits just keep coming. Teabag—an ex-Marine sniper named Joshua Wishniak, who did tours with Greenaway's first Delta unit in Lebanon—hated to be called Teabag, but his friends always swore they'd get it carved on his tombstone.

  "Someone did him with a fucking compound bow. Pinned his head to the goddamned pine tree. We have to assume the perimeter's breached. Bridge guys are beating the bushes, but have nothing yet. They still can't find Wifebeater, his post is deserted. Dogtown's missing, too. But fuck all that, look at this."

  He dragged Greenaway to a radar console. The display showed two arrow-shaped clouds of flickering dots converging on the mountain from the east and west. They were so dense, Greenaway thought they were storm fronts. "More bad weather?" he asked numbly.

  "Shit, it's the fucking attack!" Talley screamed. "Two full wings of fighter-bombers. They're running stealth, but the cellular array we put together picked them up. They wink on and off, making ghost-planes to fuck up their pattern, but there's at least fifty planes, Mort. Fifty."

  Greenaway shrugged. "Shoot them down."

  "They'll be in range in about four minutes, but we're going to get shithammered, best-case scenario. We've got to get into those bunkers—"

  Talley kept babbling, but Greenaway couldn't hear him. The bunkers reminded him of something that happened to him, just now. He was so fucking tired. Like poor old Barbarossa, he felt as if he were going to freeze to death on the eve of the battle he'd waited for his entire life. He had something to tell Talley, something he ought to know…

  "Mort, goddammit, are you listening to me?"

  Greenaway rubbed his eyes. Enemy air attack in overwhelming numbers in minutes, get the men into the bunkers, right, south perimeter wide open and men missing, Teabag's head pinned to a tree by a fucking arrow—

  Do something!

  Greenaway chopped up air and said, "Call Ortman, find out if he has any real guns. Get him to hold the south perimeter."

  "He doesn't have any real guns. And he's leaving."

  "What?"

  "Says the maneuver's been called off. They're driving down the mountain, now. Said one unit stayed behind—"

  "One unit? How many?"

  "How the hell should I know? They're not accounted for, which means they're probably the ones inside our perimeter, the ones who shot Wishniak. We're overrun, Mort, goddammit, now what do we do?"

  Then it hit him. As if he'd only forgotten what just happened with Dr. Keogh, as if he hadn't noticed that he still had his gun out, the frosty grip welded to his sweaty palm. He shivered. "Burl, we've got to get the fuck off this mountain."

  Talley looked at him and said something, but his words were drowned out by the deafening speech of antiaircraft guns.

  ~24~

  It all happened so fast.

  The first wave swept over the mountain in less than five seconds, and the second came before the flares had faded from their vision, before the ringing had even begun to block their ears.

  But for Storch, who lay motionless in the snow at the edge of the gorge overlooking the bridge to Radiant Dawn, it unfolded like a series of pictures at a gallery, images of a place he had visited too many times, a place that came looking for him when he failed to find it. A place he would have to go into one more time, and do what he had failed to do so many times before.

  Storch melted snow. In the hours he'd lain there, radiating waste heat as he changed back, he'd melted so much snow he'd made a stream that some lucky cartographer would get to name, someday, but he weighed the risk as less than that of moving. Banks of powder settled and tumbled over him, digging him a deeper grave until only his eyes peered out through a sage-scented stand of brush at the matrix of lights around the tower. He lay so still, riveted to the earth, that he could almost feel his nerves growing into the soil, becoming the forest. The trees becoming his new fingers, transmitting every disturbance, every intruder in his woods, his new body.

  In the stillness behind his eyes, nothing moved, and so no time passed. He felt no fatigue and no boredom, only the quickening intensity of the Now, this endless instant which would not pass until something happened. This was the utter patience that all predators know, that the Special Forces had tried to teach him, but which no thinking animal could truly master. Now, his thoughts came in colors and images, not words, endlessly cycling around his quarry, somewhere down below.

  An owl hooted, knifed down to the ground and taloned some kind of rodent out of the brush within inches of him. Soldi
ers in the trees watched the road, snowmobiles surfed the ridge overlooking the gorge, and once or twice he caught a scent on the wind so sour, so pregnant with memories of terror that he almost broke cover. Spike Team Texas. But they all seemed too preoccupied with other business to notice the rills of meltwater that trickled down the slope among the pine trunks before freezing again. The cold seeped into Storch and fused his joints, but it gave him cover. Sucking out his heat, it rendered him invisible to infra-red sight and kept his breath from fogging.

  He marveled at his hands. They had only changed back to his native pigmentation in stripes and marbled blotches, forming natural camouflage far more effective than the crappy alpine pattern on his stolen National Guard fatigues. His face and neck were marbled the same way, milk white and coffee brown patterns that made him invisible in the snow-tufted woods, even to himself.

  Stoned and cramped as he was from the long bus ride, the black Guardsman had put up a hell of a fight when Storch took him. When he saw the National Guard convoy on the highway, he had immediately known where they were headed, and snuck into the restroom to lie in wait. He passed up several that were too slight of build, lurking in a stall directly across from the front door. Not knowing, not wanting to know what the fuck was going to happen next, but trusting to his body's superior survival skills, he struck the big black private as he leaned over the sink. Swept his legs out from under him and slammed his head into the sink so hard porcelain chips and formica and blood sprayed the tile floor. The private should have gone out, but he fought, kneed Storch in the groin, which would have hurt if his testicles hadn't retracted into his pelvis at the prospect of a fight. Storch had to hit him again and again, harder, too hard. He watched with sick wonder as his fists resculpted the black private's face into a puddle, sent him reeling into the stall to crack the toilet basin in half and collapse beside it. His feet still pumped at the spreading pool of sewage as if he attacked a tackling dummy in his sleep. Storch checked the front door, then shut himself up with the body.