Become him, his body said, in spasms. Eat him.
It was hard not to. The private's vitality sizzled in the air like steak on a grill, his to devour. Sweat stank of drugs and worse, but the energy in those limbs, the secrets in the blood, would make him stronger. He bit back vomit as images surged forth in crimson Technicolor, waking dreams of doing it, loving it. It was not a moral repulsion that held him back. He was beyond good and evil, or beneath them—a force of nature, a beast in the jungle. Even as the blood-tide of hunger drew him closer to the unconscious private's beating heart, drew the claws out of his fists, he fought it, because it was not what he would do. I am not Spike Team Texas, he told his fists. I am Zane Ezekiel Storch, and I don't eat people.
In the end, a little blood had been enough to affect the change. It danced and tingled going down, a chemical song of ancestry and survival that reverberated changes through him until it came to the fundamental theme that bound them together. A common ancestor, lost on the savannah and torn with longing to return to the trees, uneasily learning to mimic its hunters. Then deeper, further back down the thread of a million, billion little lives, to that unspeakable vision—
Something vast and terrible and wise, watching him
—that haunted Storch throughout his long sleep at Ft. Avon. He closed his inner eye to it and rode it out. And when he looked at his hands, they were chocolate-brown and gnarly with muscle, broad palms and long, knobby fingers. His scalp burned where kinky black hair grew, and his face ached as fluid and cartilage flattened his nose, thickened his brow and lips and planed his cheekbones.
He dressed in the private's soaking wet uniform, the heat from the change steaming the urine-stinking water out of it before he had the boots laced. The name on the chest was HEELEY, D. Strange heat-haze vapors filmed his vision—faces, names, places, football games. The man's memories, chemical residue of a lifetime in a drop of blood, trying to get into his head. He pushed those back, too, and tried to get back to business in his new skin.
Miraculously, no one had come in during the entire transaction, and Storch feared the bus had left without him. He walked out into the blue-black pre-dawn gloom of the rest stop, suddenly feeling naked as the eyes of Guardsmen picked at him. Not knowing how the man walked or talked, or which of the other weekend warriors he knew and should acknowledge, he crossed to the row of olive drab school buses and milled around until a skinny white private yelled out a window to get on the fucking bus, already.
He got on and fell immediately into dreamless, grateful sleep. But even while he slept, he scented the others on the bus, fixed on the man across the aisle, whose aromatic signature was already very familiar to him. The Missionary officer who put a gun full of green death to Storch's head, but couldn't pull the trigger. And not because Storch held Wittrock by his pencil-neck—he could smell the officer's eagerness to see the wizened old egghead stop breathing—but because he was tired and scared and more than half-insane. Even more haunted than Major Bangs had been, tired of killing and losing men, tired of fighting things that would not die.
He snapped back into the present, heard a muted twang and an even fainter sound like the wind unzipping, then snapping shut behind a swiftly moving, aerodynamically perfect object. Not a bullet. An arrow. A wet chunky sound, and a few blobs of snow shook out of a sentinel white pine on a knoll overlooking the road about a hundred yards from his position. He couldn't place the shooter, but he knew the arrow came from the ridge, from Radiant Dawn. An errant breeze stirred the powder mounded before his face, and he smelled Tucker Avery, the blindingly fast one with mercury for blood and nitrous oxide injectors in his heart.
He smells like you.
Storch stayed put. Melted snow. Hugged the ground. Became the forest. Avery's spoor faded, and almost on cue, he heard soldiers moving up the hill, a travesty of stealth in spacesuits. Two three-man fire teams, leapfrogging from point to cover positions in classic insertion pattern. A moment later, he smelled their breath, filtered through the activated charcoal and robot-vomit polyvinyl and whatever else sealed them off from the outside world, smelled their sweat and strain and mortal terror as they lumbered up from cover to cover. They passed within fifty feet of his position and topped the ridge without tripping any alarms. Of course not, because Spike Team Texas snuffed the sentry in the tree. Meaning two things. The sentry was human. And Spike Team Texas—which meant Keogh, unless things had changed radically while he was sleeping— wanted the Missionaries inside. Meaning the whole thing was a trap. Which changed nothing for him. For Storch, nothing changed. He had to go into the hole again. It was always the same hole. He had to go into the hole again, because she was in there. It was always the same girl. He was always too late.
He was faster, this time. She was still alive, and suffering only he knew what kind of tortures. Perhaps he was much too late, like when he hit the wrong abandoned mine and saved the wrong girl, her name was Gina, but she'd become one of them, a predator, and he'd left her to die. Or she was like Sidra Sperling, used up and turned inside out by Keogh already, discarded in a ditch. Or he'd be only a second too late, like he'd been with Stella Orozco the last time. A second or a day or months, he was always too late, and the earth always opened up and swallowed up the girl. He owed the world for too many dead girls he couldn't save, so back in the hole he went, until he got it right. But this girl—
She was more. When he closed his eyes, he felt as if she hovered over him as she did in the Missionary bunker, watching him pretend to sleep, and she seemed to understand what a chance he was taking. He felt as if she recognized that he was vulnerable, and as she watched over him, she transmitted so much more than either of them could ever say in words. Her scent ran in his veins. It called to him. She was still here, and wanted out. Storch, who could not simply be human, anymore, had to do what he did to discover what he was. She had known what he was, and watched over him, anyway. Maybe now, she, alone among all the people in the world, could tell him what he was, now.
He lay still. Melting snow. The Missionaries laid up behind the trees silhouetted against the top of the ridge. Their breath plumed in the air above their helmeted heads, little fog-flags announcing their presence to anyone watching, but there was no one. Because they were expected, and the door was open.
And then it happened. The big 40mm guns on the mountaintop saw them first, and opened fire. It was as if the whole mountain were an active volcano blasting off its cap and spewing white-hot molten lead into the night. The guns fired west, strobing the sky white-gold and limning the craggy contours of the storm clouds above and the peak below, pinning the running soldiers milling around the tower on their own shadows.
The artillery screamed a steel-throated aria of autofire in solid, unbroken sweeps, as if they were writing their name on eastern Washington, as if the Japs were coming back for Pearl Harbor and got lost in time and space, and were coming here. Snow shook out of the trees, avalanches cascaded down from the peak. Rocks danced. The ground shimmied and shook, victory at sea. Only Storch didn't move. He melted snow.
Then they came.
Over the shriek of the cannons, the sound was like all the bees on earth in a single, livid swarm. It sounded like a million Enola Gays. The white light in the sky went red as the flaming debris from the first planes streaked across the low-hanging clouds and winked out like meteors. Nothing touched the ground.
The first planes swooped over the peak like a cloud of rabid bats, hugging the rock and passing through the artillery's arc of fire at just under the sound barrier. Stupendous crisscrossing flame trails lit their path, but too many of them to count passed over the guns and dropped on the tower. Even as they ate up the final yards to target, they dove and bucked and entangled with each other like a flying circus gone mad, but they weren't planes, not with men in them. They looked like winged seeds, with tapered delta wings, no more than sixty feet wide from tip to tip, swept back from a bulbous fuselage the nose of which was the yawning maw of a jet turbine. The
sides were studded with armaments and integral explosives. There was no room for a pilot and no need, because the planes did what no sane pilot, not even a fanatical Missionary agent, would do.
Two of the drone bombers snapped into view at an almost vertical angle, as if they'd hugged the Snake River valley on the other side of the mountain and come in under the guns. They rose up in an elegant mating dance, cavorting mechanized moths. One gun from the peak battery followed them up and painted their trail with 40mm shells, but it exposed the peak's northern flank, and a third plane pounced on the battery almost faster than Storch's eyes could take it in. The artillery nest went straight up through the clouds, all three cannons and the whole mountaintop blooming blinding plasma like a newborn star.
A few hundred feet below the ashes of the peak defenses, the eastward artillery batteries opened fire and diced up the planes as they circled the tower, more 40mm cannons and a brace of Vulcans, so much wreckage flying so fast the tower had a halo. The trailer park around the tower lit up the sortie with Stingers, a TOW missile battery and even rifle fire. The defense looked too disciplined to be Keogh's. Government protection. Obvious, because they had brought everything they'd need to win the previous battle.
Secondary explosions from burning ordnance on the peak were just starting to rock the mountain when the Missionary fire teams broke cover and stormed the bridge. The defenders' squad-sized deployment took cover behind a panel truck and blasted up the road with M16A2's and a tripod-mounted grenade launcher. The Missionaries had rotary-barrel Vulcan machine guns on sling harnesses and modified Pancor Jackhammers, belt-fed automatic shotguns, like line-of-sight chainsaws, and they cut right through the truck and wiped out the squad in seconds. He saw one of the Missionaries take a direct center-of-mass hit and go to one knee as if he had a cramp. Another one helped him to his feet and they took off at a dead run across the bridge and around the burning truck, vanished into the stand of pines that bordered the near edge of the plateau.
The bridge and a naked white sheet of open snow one hundred yards across lay between Storch and the tower, and the trailer park was alive with highly motivated soldiers shooting at everything but each other. Follow the trees to flank the complex. That's what he would do.
Storch moved.
He slithered out of his bed and out through the bushes, down the tumble of rocks that sloped ever more sharply to the gorge. His uniform was sodden, snow-caked, but he didn't shiver, and still his limbs were supple and responsive, pouring heat from some untouchable reservoir that the creeping chill never reached in all those buried hours. Glacier-slow he crept down, feeling a bull's-eye of cold fire blossoming on his back. The soldiers had rushed the bridge like Normandy and no one at the trailer park took notice, but the Missionaries were expected, invited, and he couldn't expect the invitation to extend to him.
Wind-sharpened granite gouged his hands and flayed his belly as he picked up speed. His crawl became a fall, hands snatching at the rock to put some shade of spin on his descent. The bridge grew larger, veered to the right as he slipped and dropped twenty feet, the wind screaming in his ears, hit flat on his back on the narrow concrete buttress thrusting out of the gorge wall. He scuttled under it and touched the cobwebbed understructure. Another owl hooted, spooked from its nest under the bridge, and flapped away.
The steel and concrete struts arched out of the gorge walls and held up the span like the canopy of a petrified rainforest. The girders were festooned with vines of det cord and blocks of Semtex. Flexing his fists, the Gor-Tex gloves he found in D. Heeley's coat pockets tore out at the knuckles. His hands were roughened up by the rocks, tougher than Gor-Tex, tougher than Kevlar. He seized a support strut and swung out over the gorge, black and pregnant with crystalline mist except for guttering fires from burning wreckage. His hands burned as the cold metal bonded with skin, bit into the meat of his palms. He swung from strut to strut, not looking down at the bottom or up at the explosives, a snarled, sloppy spider's web with lumps of plastique trapped in it. He almost ripped out the det cords. Pausing in mid-span, swinging in the wind, the bridge jouncing and warping with the stuttering seismic havoc of the explosions. Maybe it would be better if no one got out. He left them.
On the other side, war. Black and red and white, roiling chaos and noise eating up the world, and it made Storch laugh, because it was a scene right out of the crazy dreams. His proto-human ancestors burning out the last of the ophidian Others who thought the world would always be theirs. The sticks and stones now hurtle with laser-guided, supersonic accuracy, and they fight each other while their soft-fleshed masters cower in bunkers, but it's the same war, the only war, for which all the others have been pale dress rehearsals. And he was walking into it.
He hauled himself up onto the abutment on the far side of the bridge and froze. Headlights washed over the bridge and speared him as he tried to lie flat and be one of the dead. A heavy armored half-track rolled out of the trailer park and banked so hard it lifted up on its left-side wheels and treads, heading in his direction. Too late, coming to secure the perimeter. A curtain of fire rained down on the snowfield between them, drone planes pinned on the artillery fire turned to incandescent gas and punishing explosive force, hit the snow and raised geysers of white. Mines responded, a chain-reaction, sending rubble bouncing into forever.
Army ants of sweat bit into his skin. Move! Charge them, they can't hurt you, they're only human—
He stayed put, stayed dead. The lights roved on to his right. The half-track veered onto a path around the edge of the plateau. He saw a soldier in full body armor standing tall in the bubble turret behind the cab, running a pair of Mk.19 40mm grenade launchers. The half-track slowed to a crawl at the out-thrust end of the plateau, and the grenadier swiveled the weapons out and down the slope, began popping one hundred and twenty high-explosive grenades a minute into the thick stand of trees blanketing the slope. Almost immediately, they began to detonate, and trees went down like narcoleptic giants, trunks reduced to sawdust and shrapnel. The sound, the sustained tocsin of timed bombs, was almost loud enough to be heard over the aerial attack. Whatever was down there, the half-track kept firing into it as the empty snowfield of the plateau erupted behind and on their left. Storch thought mines again, so much shit still fell out of the sky, but black shapes boiled up out of the snow and swarmed over the half-track. Out of tunnels or foxholes that put them inside the minefield, they came so fast Storch could see only that they wore camo and were colder than the snow they'd been hiding in, but he knew in an instant who they were. They were Keogh.
The grenadier turned and fired into the minefield, probably clued in by the screams of the driver. They tore the door off the cab and pulled him out, engulfed him. They climbed into the cab, and the half-track started to roll again, but the grenadier was still firing at the holes they came out of, and the grenades must have rolled down the tunnel and, at the end of their one-second fuses, exploded beneath the half-track. Snow and earth and bits of black human shapes lofted the huge armored truck up on its nose, and it might have tipped over on its roof, but the snowbank gave way, and the half-track slid off the plateau and out of sight.
Storch got up and ran, stooped and feeling naked in the rushing, hot fire-wind. All the trees on the plateau burned merrily, so the grove he ran through was like a cathedral in Hell. He passed bodies here and there, mostly soldiers in black body armor, but he saw one broken Missionary in his spacesuit, wrapped around a tree branch ten feet above Storch's head, looking as if he'd been thrown from a crashing 747. He kept running, wishing he had a gun, though it would make no difference.
He heard them long before he caught up with them. Shooting, screams, and above it all, a voice he still heard in his nightmares.
"Shit, izzat the best you little girls can do?"
He noticed then that the explosive symphony overhead had died down. Though his night-sight was ruined by the fires, he could see only darkness and smoke over the trailer park. The tower still stood,
but there was no cheering on the foul, scorched wind. The eastward guns reoriented themselves, and commenced firing into the empty sky to the east, and more Stingers lanced out and locked onto something only radar could see. Even Storch couldn't believe it. Another sortie incoming. Time was running out, if it wasn't too late, already.
Empty hands flexing and growing, he turned and ran towards the firefight.
A ruined cinder-block bunker jutted out of the foot of the cliff-face, the walls blasted out and scattered by a crashing drone. Three circular holes bored into the granite cliff, with huge fans in them, though none turned now, and one of them was choked with debris. Intake vents for the tunnels under the complex. If the Missionaries could get into them, they could gas the whole population without ever setting foot within, but they were never going to make it, because in their way stood Brutus Dyson.
"Don't any of you faggots know how to fight?" Dyson roared. He stood ten feet tall, and nearly half as wide, a shaggy white Grendel with battering rams for arms. His back had sprouted a heavy bone carapace off which bullets and grenades ricocheted, but he turned and faced them with arms outstretched, a ludicrous invitation to come out and grapple. A pile of mangled, bullet-riddled bodies, all of them in black body armor, lay strewn around his feet, like so many spent condoms. "Come out and fight like a man!" he bellowed, and his laughter shook embers from the burning trees.
The five surviving Missionaries flanked him, pouring fire on him from fifty feet away, but the converging streams scattered off Dyson's hide. His head was mantled in a thick sheath of overgrown shoulder muscle, and twitched under the few lucky shots that chipped away at it.
One of the Missionaries charged out of formation, ducked under the unbroken river of cover fire and ran to the edge of the cinder-block foundation. Taking cover behind a waist-high section of wall, he popped up in the giant's shadow and strafed Dyson with his Jackhammer. The shells stitched up Dyson's torso, from his solar plexus to the left shoulder, blowing right through the monster's hide, then swerved back and punched a line across his forehead. Dyson reeled back several steps and stumbled against a pile of rubble. Incredibly, impossibly, hurt. The wounds burst red-black blood and green foam, and Dyson screamed. Despite himself, Storch shivered in empathy as the Nasty Green Shit went to work on Dyson.
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