"YEAH! DIE, MOTHERFUCKER!" The bold Missionary stood up out of cover, and he could have run right then and gotten away, or even reached the intake vents, but he stood rooted to the spot, fascinated beyond instinct by what he had wrought with his little gun. Oblivious even to his commander shouting at him to get back, he was still just standing there when Dyson rose up again.
Dyson's chest burst asunder, the massive left arm tore free and flopped to the snow along with gouts of bubbling, poisoned tissue. His head, likewise, tore itself apart, skull opening like a flower, jointed lobster limbs and tentacles flinging away the molten green toxin eating away at his brain. Dyson wobbled, off-balance, and from somewhere in the ruin of his head, gurgled, "OK, be like that. So much for all this 'bring 'em back alive' shit."
The Missionary shouldered his gun and fired too late, too wide, to hit him again. Out of the gutted torso shot a phalanx of barbed whips, wrapped around the Missionary and yanked him off his feet, ripped away his weapon, drew him in close.
The four Missionaries split and rushed around to try to outflank Dyson again. One of them ran right past Storch, stepped on his hand.
Dyson's facial tentacles wrapped around the Missionary's helmet and unscrewed it like the cap on a bottle of beer, but then stopped. They played over the captive's face as gently as a blind child's fingers. The soldier's arms and legs flailed, frantic but useless, bringing only more ragged screams as Dyson's barbs worked deeper into his body.
Storch didn't want to look at his face, but he recognized him as the Armenian Missionary with the skull tattoos up and down his arms. His eyes squinted shut and his head snapped back and forth like he was trying to break his own neck.
"I know you!" Dyson growled, jovial, like they were at a VFW mixer. "Little Augie Tokash, Jr.! I did a SOG hitch in the 'Nam with your daddy, son! I even met you once, but you were a little mite, then. I don't bet you remember me too well, do you?"
Tokash kept wriggling and screaming, but when Dyson shook him gently, he went limp. Either in shock or entranced by something he saw in that mess of feelers and claws, Tokash stared down at the monster that remembered his dad and shook his head. "No, sir, I—"
"You favor him quite a bit. He was one righteous, by-the-book CO, I'll tell you what. Wasn't he, son?"
"He was—he never—I didn't know him too good."
"Well, I did. He wouldn't abide no cowboys in his teams, and by God, if he wasn't going to put yours truly up on charges for doing my job in-country. So I hamstrung his righteous by-the-book ass with his own K-Bar knife and left him for Charlie. Then I rotated stateside and visited your house. Brought you a box of Army men and gave your Mamma the clap so goddamn bad she hanged herself rather than go to the doctor, the stupid hog-bitch. DO YOU REMEMBER ME NOW?"
Tokash screamed his soul out. Dyson lifted him high and bent him backwards until he snapped, and his head and heels touched. He turned Tokash inside out and gulped him down even as the other four Missionaries closed in and pummeled him with fire.
Storch backed away. There had to be another way in. He tried to narrow his senses down to the ground before him. Screen out the overwhelming stink of carbonized forest and cordite and coppery blood. So faint it would never have registered if he did not know it so well, a trail days old glowed before him. He smelled Keogh intermingled in the sweat of hundreds of others that had passed this way. Curled up in them like a virus, driving their wills, their immune systems, their emotions. Driving them out of this place, days ago.
He shivered. The Mission was attacking an empty nest. For all their technology, all their wiles, they were as stupid as he, because they were all gone. He knelt in the snow.
Always too late. Always—
In his mind's eye, he lay on that table in the sick bay of the Mission bunker. His last moment of true calm, true peace. She watched over him, her scent overpowering even through the mask she'd put over his face, imprinting on his nerves something even more powerful than the sickness, more undeniable than the Headache. It showed him now that he was not just repeating the cycle he'd been cast into by the body of Sidra Sperling and the fucked-up girl in the snuff mine. He was answering a call older than his species—older, perhaps, even than Keogh—and it was in this, he knew, that he would find himself.
And it wasn't here.
The trail was imprinted with hundreds of bodies, hundreds of Keogh-ridden souls, but she was not among them. But she was. It strained his patience to pick at the morass of scent-signatures in his brain with the staccato screams of guns and cannons all around him, but it was what he'd come for, so everything else went away. She was with them, but not with them. In them. Storch understood. Keogh sacrificed generously, but wasted nothing. He had to leave decoys, but those who fled took with them the genes of those left behind.
She was still here. But time was almost out, it was almost too late again. He could hear Dyson screaming, and he could hear the approaching roar of more drones, and the cannons and the Stingers redoubled but hit less than ever.
A helicopter, a real live Cobra gunship, swooped over the plateau and flung strings of 70mm rockets and streams of rotary-barrel machine gun fire at the incoming, but the point drone dodged the Cobra's fire and slammed into its cockpit. The Cobra hung in place for a moment, seeming to skate along on the backs of the drone swarm, then it whirled and darted eight directions at once and dropped out of the sky directly above the tower. It went in through the central skylight like a knife into a cake, explosions blasting out vinyl windows on each floor down to the lobby. Clouds of malachite green mist frothed out of the building, spreading and gathering on the front steps. Storch saw a man dive out a window with green witch-fire feasting on his back. Screaming a scream in Keogh's voice, the body smacked the ground and vanished under the green fog.
It might have been her. Dyson or no, the tunnels would be flooded with mist in minutes. He struggled to narrow the world down to the ground before him, and followed the trail.
There was dark.
There were dreams so real she thought she'd died and been reborn. Fool me twice, she thought bitterly, shame on me, because she knew she was back in the pit.
Impaled and crushed, forgotten in an unmarked grave in the desert, she raged at dreams, and at herself for believing in them. Look where they got you. Every time she lost consciousness, she escaped and found a new life, and every time she awakened, she was still here. Still alive, still praying for death.
She must be dreaming, for this time, she didn't even have the dignity of dying alone. Others, so many others, were in here with her, this time. All the others who came here seeking a better life, in her dreams. She heard them stirring in their own cruel tombs, lost in their own nightmares.
She wrenched her body against the rebar spears and tried to drag herself free of the crushing concrete slabs, tried to hurt herself so bad she'd wake up for real.
Wait, said God. I would ask this one last thing of you.
"I want to die," Stella screamed, without air. She choked on dust, and felt her breath bubbling out of her collapsed lung. "I can't—die…"
The others whimpered the same sentiments, and she hated them for it. They made her want to curse them and keep on fighting, but what was the use? She always ended up here.
You are doomed, God said, but the ones who have condemned you are within your reach. This is where we make our defense. Our kind will survive this petty atrocity, and you will live on in them. But the enemy must be destroyed.
Stella seethed. They were here, the ones who promised to cure her, but tried to kill her, and did so much worse. The ones who put her here.
Her hands became claws, and suddenly her smashed left arm no longer flopped against her back, and the rebar no longer speared her chest. The concrete slabs crumbled and became vapor. Her despair coalesced into a pure black fury that grew over her charred remains like an exoskeleton, and sprouted from her fingers, her knees and elbows, her spine and her pelvis as jagged obsidian spurs and knurled talons.
>
They were here.
One of the others flew at the hatch in front of them and threw the bolts, shouldered it open. The others rushed the door and streamed out into the corridor. She was confused for a moment; the bunker was intact and looked like part of her dreams, of the other place where she'd thought she was finally safe. If this was another dream—
But then she smelled him.
The essence of him was unlike almost any other person she'd ever had to smell. He didn't stink of his vices or dietary weaknesses, or the crude masks of cologne or soap. He reeked of stress and terror and the road, but it was not this that had attracted her, but what lay within him. It spoke to a part of Stella that lived underneath her human exterior, to a primal machine in her that had been tamed and beaten back into the shadows of her subconscious in her species' infancy. Her little God lived there now, but she connected that moment to this and knew with marrow-deep certainty that Storch was here, but he was very different, and yet the same.
He was here to save her. Again.
He was seconds too late last time, and he let her go down into a hell of undeath in which, for all she knew, she still rotted, and this only another fantasy.
He is here, God said, It is no dream. He has something we need. Secrets in his flesh that may save our race.
He let her go down, and he left her there. But for him, she might have stayed put and not been buried alive at all.
She followed the others around a bend in the corridor. The new one was lit by glowing silver-blue walls, and by their dim phosphorescence, she saw that she was in a hall of mirrors, or another dream, because all the others were her. They tossed their wild black hair and smiled her smile at her, and brandished their vicious talons.
He failed you, God said. He turned his back on all of us. Now he has come to kill you for what you have become. Make him serve us.
She shoved the other Stellas aside and rushed at the scent of her betrayer. If this was a dream, there were worse ways to pass the time.
The trail led to the exhaust fan tunnels, about a quarter mile around the peak. Storch followed it through piles of smoking rubble and over the severed cables of comm lines running up to the peak. He tuned it all out— the guns going off over his head, the drones smashing into the smoking ruin of the tower again and again with a blacksmith's rhythm, the screams of the mercenaries ripping up their camp with rifles as if the enemy were among them. The acrid, submarine scent of Keogh led him across the battlefield to their back door.
It was another shattered blockhouse, and though quieter than the intake bunker, it was no less clotted with death. A squad of eight Missionaries lay scattered across the debris-strewn snow, the soft chinks in their armor pin-cushioned with arrows. It looked as if they'd been ambushed by the whole fucking Sioux nation as they set up explosive charges in the gaping mouths of the exhaust vents. When he looked closer at the arrows, he saw they were all whittled from the whitebark pines that stood around them, and though all the arrowheads were too deeply buried in flesh to be examined, he knew they'd be chiseled from the granite that formed the mountain. All their helmets had been ripped off, and trophies had been taken. One killer had done this.
Storch climbed into one of the vents, leaning against the buffeting cushion of chill air rushing up out of the depths like Keogh's breath. His ears rang, but there was nothing else alive out there. The guns had fallen silent. An ominous chorus of drones rose on the wind and circled the naked mountain.
Storch threw himself over the piled charges and fell down the shaft, hit something hard in the dark, stopped.
Hands out in front of him, he grasped an aluminum screen and wrenched it out of its frame, tumbled out into a lesser, silvery-gray darkness. As his eyes adjusted, the outlines of the cavernous space glowed with bioluminescent moss on the walls and ceiling. It glowed the color of His eyes.
Branching corridors like the tunnels of a rabbit-warren burrowed off in all directions. The whole place was steeped in Keogh's scent, His sweat and blood etched into every inch of hand-carved tunnel, His breath and excrement tinged the air as if Storch were a microbe lost in His bowels. He heard no sounds of battle from above, but he felt the mountain jouncing and shaking through the soles of his feet, and motes of firefly moss drifted on the fan-recycled air.
Time was short. This was an empty tomb, or almost empty. Keogh would let the Missionaries take the bait and fill the bunker with gas. Perhaps if his sacrificial victims died from the gas, he hoped to learn how to adapt to it and survive, and pass the adaptation in some form to His others, who had flown. Storch had learned to adapt to it because Spike Team Texas ran in his blood, and only the Keogh in him had died. The gas was made to kill Keogh at a molecular level, but he had no illusions about the fucker's adaptability.
Maybe this trap is not for them, but for you, he thought. Maybe you better move faster.
There was no trail to follow through the caves, so he wandered, through tunnels and galleries and workshops and nests of plastic honeycomb cells. His brain burned with the chemical ghosts of strangers, all sublimated, all enslaved to the antediluvian stink of Him. Hundreds had passed through here, perhaps thousands, but they were gone.
His sense of direction faltered, and he might have passed through the same caves several times before he stopped himself. How much time had passed? Pvt. Heeley's cheap Casio watch told him he'd only been down there for about five minutes, but he was starting to feel like he lived here. The miasma of scent-trails forced their meaning on him, so that he felt as if he were walking a track, a soldier ant patrolling a circuit through the labyrinth without really searching. When he fought it, he only grew more disoriented, so he let go. OK, I live here, I'm a part of the hive, and the hive is threatened. Where do I go to hide?
The scent leaped out at him then, the residue of terror and Keogh's calming pheromone wash marked a corridor that sloped steeply down into the granite guts of the mountain. He followed it greedily, for in it he detected a trace of the one he'd come looking for.
The corridor went down and down, met another junction that led to unused dwelling galleries, and deeper tunnels, where the moss grew only in stingy patches, or not at all. His vision bored down into infra-red, and he lit the way before him by his own roiling body heat. Ten minutes he'd been down here. The Nasty Green Shit would come, if it hadn't already. He wondered if he would survive it, this time. It had damaged Dyson pretty badly, and he hadn't been carrying a hostile woman out over his shoulder.
He hadn't let himself think too much about that part. Keogh had made his body do things, see things, forget things. She was deeper into Him than Storch had ever been, and might not want to come out. He might have to leave her here—
"You like it here, don't you?"
"It grows on you—No, like, don't get me wrong, it's, like—but—you get used to it."
"Then stay here."
He owed the universe for one dead girl. He owed her—
And there she was. She came racing around a hairpin bend in the tunnel and stopped just twenty feet away from him. Her eyes, black holes in her mask of heat, flashed recognition. "Sergeant Storch!" she cried, and came running.
In the dark, he saw her features come clearer with every step she took, but she came so fast he didn't notice how her gait was all wrong, and she was too big, and her scent was off, and her outstretched hands were a wall of claws. But his body saw it all and he stepped back and pivoted. She leapt into the air and became a missile, a wordless cry shivering the air between them as he crouched and braced himself.
She came within a hair's breadth of tearing out his throat. Her claws slashed down his scalp and glanced off his brow. Her body tore up the empty space where he'd been only a split-second before. His arm shot out and caught her by the neck, whipped her sideways and hurled her at the wall head-first. Her legs whipped up and hit the wall on the balls of her feet, sprang right back at him, and he had no time to step aside this time, because out of the corner of his eye, he saw her come a
round the bend, saw more of her, dozens of her, crying his name and coming so fast—
She landed on his shoulders and sank her claws into the cords of his neck. "Our mercy is infinite, Zane," she hissed in his left ear. "You left us to die in a hole. You turned your back on us and became an abomination, but we forgive you. You can save us—" Her teeth, so sharp, sank into his ear and ripped it off.
The others surrounded him. Looking like her, smelling like her, they cried his name in her voice and in his own even as they ate him alive. Their claws gouged him, tore him away bit by bit and consumed him. "You have secrets to share, Zane. Save us—"
Screaming, but they reached in and tore out his tongue. Fighting, but they flayed off his uniform and his skin and severed the tendons that held up his right arm. Kicking, but they hamstrung him, and he went down under their weight. They swarmed over him like ants dismantling a beetle carcass, and his strength bled out as his body tried to change to beat them back, and failed.
One of them, a child with her face, sank its fangs into the meat of his left forearm, and he lashed out, flexing his muscles and screaming as they trapped the barbed fangs like a mosquito. He flailed his arm and the child-sized doppelganger thrashed in the air, ripping chunks out of its brood-mates. They scattered and he staggered to his feet, slouching against a wall. The one sunk into his arm went limp from the waist down, its spine torqued at an awful angle, its claws ripping at the tendons of his wrist. He dashed its brains out against the wall and ripped it off his arm, threw it at the ranks of her closing in on him again.
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