Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  "You're still down there, aren't you?"

  "Affirmative. Do it. Blow it up. We'll get clear if we can, but consider us KIA, unless you hear otherwise. Copy?"

  Already hovering above the jagged peak, Count Chocula dipped and came in for its first run. "Affirmative, boss. Do what you gotta…"

  The Keoghs all just stood there as if this was exactly what they expected to happen. The one he'd shot up grew most of a new head. The Bell 406 fired a volley of Hellfire anti-tank missiles into the tree-line from five hundred feet above their heads, then juked and jived to dodge a salvo of unguided rockets. The last of the tall whitebark pines went down amid football field-sized fireballs, and the chopper pivoted and turned back.

  "Now the trailer park, Terry," Greenaway said.

  "But sir, I can see you down there, I can take the motherfuckers out from here with the pods—"

  "Bomb us, goddamit!" Greenaway screamed, and then he choked. Something erupted out of the rocks at the foot of the cliff face and raced down towards them, just paces ahead of a tumbling wall of satanic green vapor that ate its way up out of a hole in the ground where the vent bunkers used to be. Greenaway staggered back, away from the Keoghs, shouldered his M16A2 and took aim at the running thing.

  He looked down the sights of the assault rifle, but he could not shoot. It was a man, or something like a man, except it had only raw, knotted muscle and glinting bones instead of skin. Tatters of green uniform flapped in the wind on its oversized form. His head was ducked down low over a body he cradled in his arms. His legs pounded the snow like bombs, eating up twelve feet at a stride, but he barely gained ground on the avalanche of gaseous death that raced at his heels. When the cloud hit dead bodies, they screamed and exploded. Greenaway head-checked the Keoghs and saw by the stricken look on their collective face that whoever the fuck he was, he was not one of them.

  But he was hardly human, either. Greenaway aimed again, amazed all over again by his blinding quickness. The runner passed within a hundred yards of Rhino, who seemed not to even see him. He triggered mines, but was gone before they detonated.

  Greenaway squeezed off a shot, leading the runner a good twenty feet. The runner seemed to bow before the bullet left the barrel, and kept right on running.

  He was heading for the bridge. Greenaway smiled. This, at least, he could control. He reached into his parka through his ripped NBC suit and found the remote detonator, unfastened the safety cover, and took a shallow breath.

  The runner hit the bridge and was halfway across it in three strides when Greenaway pressed the button. A skirt of fire and force lifted the bridge and split it into four sections, illuminating the silhouetted runner as he stopped and turned back the way he'd come. He leapt clear of the bridge's doomed launch trajectory, vaulting over the temporarily airborne troop truck and hitting the snow without dropping the girl, without breaking stride. Greenaway sighted him down the rifle. Two hundred yards. Impossible at this distance, but getting easier every second.

  "Boss, what are your orders?" Count Chocula's voice chirped in his ear.

  The runner turned and ran along the edge of the tree-line. Mortars lit his way, kicking up fountains of earth, but the runner threaded an untouchable path through them and emerged unscathed. Then he stopped.

  Greenaway drew a bead on him, sixty yards out and stock-still. A steady hand could barely pick him off with an M16, and his hands shook like he had DT's. He watched the runner jolt and rock as bullets from somebody down-slope lit him up, but he threw something down the slope and dropped prone on the snow.

  Greenaway looked at the Keoghs, back at the runner, then back to Rhino. No one moved. The Count squawked at him, but it might've been the wind.

  The edge of the plateau went white with a blast half the size of the one that destroyed the bridge, but it rained body parts and burning, screaming trees. When the light died away, the runner was already gone.

  Greenaway crouched and turned, shot the nearest Keogh's eyes out. He raked the mob of them at knee-height, felling ten or fifteen of them like saplings before the clip ran dry. The others silently charged him.

  "Run for the Cadillac!" he shouted. "Terry, give us sixty klicks to get clear! Then take a shit on this place, and cut a trail down the mountain, copy?"

  "I hear that," the Count hollered, and laid down curtains of 20mm cannon fire that made confetti of the assembled Keoghs.

  Greenaway had to kickstart Rhino out of his trance, but the comm geeks ran so fast they waded right into the green pool around the back wheels of the surviving APC. Two of them ran right into it up to the waist. One of them shrieked and sank out of sight, but the other waded out and collapsed at Greenaway's feet. His NBC suit dripped off his legs, which sloughed meat like over-cooked chicken drumsticks. He reached out to Greenaway and tried to ask for help getting up when his eyes glazed over with shock. His buddy, Greenaway never had caught his name, wanted to lift him up and take him along, but then Rhino raced past them, shooting blind over his shoulder, scaled the blunt nose of the APC, dropped in through the open side hatch, got the engine turned over, and started to roll away without them. They ran after and jumped inside.

  A pair of Keoghs came around the comm trailer and rushed them, but the helicopter's machine guns scythed them down. Scattered rifle and RPG fire drove the 406 back up through the roof of smoke, but it showed that the force surrounding them was smashed wide open for the moment. They flattened five more Keoghs crossing the snowfield. Greenaway saw them getting back up in their wake, shaking off the tire-tracks and racing after them, shooting. He cradled his head in his arms. What the fuck? What the fuck were they fighting? I wish I knew, Burl.

  Rhino hit the brakes. The comm geek split his scalp on the bulkhead behind the driver's seat. Greenaway half-jumped, half-fell into the cab. "I'm not going down there," Rhino mumbled. In the dark and the smoke, there was mercifully little to see, but what he did see made him also want to turn back, and chance the lances of rocket fire pounding the last vestiges of the Radiant Dawn settlement into smoke. It looked like Tet and the Somme and Agincourt and all the goddamned places where God set up his wood-chipper and stuffed it with human fertilizer. The pitted, bare earth was black and red and painted in body parts, blasted trees and charred bodies. But nothing here could die. Every infinitesimal fragment of His flesh writhed and suffered for as far as he could see through the smoke, but the runner had gotten through.

  Greenaway dragged Rhino out of the driver's seat and ordered him to man the turret. "Kill everything again, Rhino," Greenaway called out, and drove them over the edge.

  The ground tried to grab them. The wheels sank into muck and severed hands clawed at the wheels. The invincible dead choked the wheel-wells and clambered up onto the windshield. Every pothole yawned to greet them and swallow them up. Every seemingly safe high point crumbled under them and sent them, wheels scrabbling on bloody mud, into fresh waves of mutilated Keoghs. Rhino screamed and sobbed and spun round and round, shooting everything. Only the blind force of their own momentum sent them smashing through the final cordon and down the uneven slope of the mountain.

  Trees introduced themselves in impassable hedgehog formations, and fucking snowmobiles slashed this way and that like henchmen in a goddamned James Bond movie, but the runner was long gone.

  Greenaway hobbled over open ground, braking in stops and stutters until he stumbled across a fire road. A convoy of burning trucks from Heilige Berg lay on and around the road. This must've been the primary for the Hellfire attack the Count laid down. The APC lurched onto the road and picked up speed, clinging only to the roughest outline of the balls-out slalom course.

  Greenaway saw a riderless snowmobile go airborne not ten feet ahead of him and smash into a tree, saw the runner cut across the road lit by the halogen spots above the windshield, and then he was gone well ahead of Rhino's spray of panic-fire.

  The 406 blazed them a trail with Hellfire missiles and Hydra 70 rockets, but the woods were still alive with Keog
hs, darting between trees and pacing the runner on snowmobiles or on foot, black shapes he could see by the glint of their eyes. They were after the runner, and seemed not even to notice him.

  Greenaway glimpsed the runner again across a gentle, treeless slope midway down the mountain. The gorge yawned on their right, and the runner made for it, shooting targets cleanly in the head at a dead run with a converted Kalashnikov.

  Count Chocula hovered over them as Greenaway slowed down inside the trees. He spotted something coming up behind them faster than the runner, gaining on the APC though he sped up to a reckless fifty on the winding, icy road. The pursuer closed the distance in seconds and came clear in a fleeting bar of moonlight. It was another running man, taller and rangier and longer of leg, and he carried no one. He held a Barrett Light 50 sniper rifle spot-welded to his shoulder as he ran so fast he was in free-fall. His rifle barked as he passed, and Rhino disappeared from the shoulders up. The cabin of the APC popped and shook with armor-piercing rounds as long as Greenaway's middle finger. The sole surviving comm geek danced around singing ricocheting bullet shards, screaming, "I've got blood in my eyes! What's happening? What the fuck is happening out there, sir?"

  Greenaway's feet and hands propelled the APC down the mountain, but his eyes were glued to the running sniper, who darted across the road behind them and disappeared in his right-side blind spot. Greenaway whipped his head around as if to find the sniper inside the cab with him. He reached for his M16 on the shotgun seat, but the comm geek, the last man alive under his command, stumbled into the space between him and the window. "What the fuck—"

  The right side "bulletproof" window-slit shattered and too many fifty-caliber bullets punched into the comm geek. Greenaway was trying to look through him, reach around him for his gun and steer around a particularly dense stand of trees when the insanely terrified young man's face bulged and split open and light shone through his brains into Greenaway's face.

  The shot caromed off Greenaway's helmet and smashed into the side window, starring, but not breaking through it. He saw the shell, suspended there like a dino-mosquito in amber, and had time to think, that was made for me, when the road went out from under them.

  His right arm went limp. His mouth flooded with bile. His chest caved in. God damn you, God! he screamed without breath. A heart attack, now?

  A smooth path of open snow lay before him. The APC's knobby all-terrain tires gripped the hard-packed, iced-over snow so long as he maintained a more or less straight course, which would add speed to his already suicidal rate until it swept him over the lip of the gorge. He fought it with his functional arm, howling silently as his lungs seemed to go flat. His eyes strayed down to the lip of the gorge, where he saw the runner with the girl in his arms.

  He stood there, contemplating something below, when into Greenaway's vision swam the other runner, the sniper, who skidded to a stop on a promontory overlooking the gorge. Bracing against a tree, he fused with it and drew a perfect arc down to the runner, who backed away from the edge now and then began running at it so fast he looked as if he would fly away.

  The sniper and the tree got larger, and Greenaway saw a lot about the motherfucker very quickly as he grew. Black spots bubbled up in his vision, but he stared through them and time seemed to slow down to let him take it in. He saw a bow and quiver slung on his back, and he saw the motherfucker wore old jungle camo and a flak vest, circa 1968. He knew without seeing the face that it was not Keogh, this time. It was somebody he saw only yesterday, but dismissed as a bad fucking speed daydream, and maybe he was dreaming him now, because what sane God would let something like that still walk the earth, when so many good men died over there? What were these mutants, that something like this walked among them?

  Not invincible, I hope, Greenaway thought, and steered the APC into him.

  The sniper got very large indeed in the windshield, filled it for an instant before the APC introduced him to a deeper relationship with the sturdy piñon pine tree he braced against. Greenaway was too engrossed in his own experience with arrested inertia to take notice. An airbag(!) bloomed and smacked him silly, then deflated as the APC glanced off the shattered pine tree and skated down the open slope on its passenger side.

  Greenaway fought to hold onto consciousness, unsnapped the safety harness and toppled out of his seat. He took a moment to reorient himself and noticed with relief that he hadn't had a heart attack at all. Bullet fragments from the shots that killed the comm geek studded his right arm and chest. One of his lungs felt sore, and his arm didn't really work, but his ticker was sound. That, at least, had not failed him.

  He dragged himself out through the shattered forward window-slit and lay very flat in the snow. The stillness reasserted itself, sprinkling snow on the scant evidence that anything had happened here at all. The windshield and grill of the APC were sprayed with blood and puckered from the impact with the tree, but of the sniper, there was no sign. Likewise the runner, whose trail vanished at the rim of the gorge.

  He heard the 406 setting down on the other side of the APC, and he reached for his sidearm. It was time to go. There was nothing here he wanted to live through. But of course, Burl had taken his gun when he—

  Greenaway pressed his face down in the snow and wept. Once, he had been strong and smart. Once, his enemies had feared him. Once, being human had been enough.

  ~26~

  Throughout his career in the FBI, Cundieffe had always assumed that the open contempt for local law enforcement espoused by many, if not most, Bureau agents—his father included—was the kind of ignorant animal tribalism and territoriality that hindered the pursuit of a truly just and ordered society. After today, he had learned that, in the case of the town of White Bird, Idaho, at least, the ignorance was his.

  He hid for nearly half an hour at the Heilige Berg slaughterhouse, nervously peering around the corner of the shed at the civilians who gathered in their pickup trucks to watch the blaze. Proper procedure raced around in his mind, but the sniper who shot up his car and the billboard in the field made him think better of it. No one seemed to spot him, and he did nothing to call attention to himself. This was hostile territory, a war zone, and he had no idea who the enemy was, or who might just shoot him out of spite.

  By the time Sheriff Manes and two deputies arrived on the scene, the fire had engulfed the entire structure, the last of the exterior walls tumbling into the conflagration with great spires of sparks and gray smoke. Two Idaho County Volunteer Firefighters' trucks followed close behind and sprayed the blaze, while the Sheriff organized the crowd of spectators into a shovel brigade, dumping snow on the leeward flank of the flames. Cundieffe broke cover and ran to the Sheriff, but he could think of nothing to explain himself that did not sound patently insane. "I've been shot at," he told the Sheriff, "and my car and phone are disabled. This situation is going to require a much larger federal presence."

  "It's just a barn fire, Special Agent," Manes replied. "Get them all the time." The jaundiced look in his eyes made it plain who the prime suspect in setting it was.

  "Sheriff, perhaps you arrived too late to hear the secondary explosions, but this barn was an ammunition dump. The soldiers on the mountain are in grave danger, and I demand that you return me to town immediately."

  The Sheriff complied, not immediately, but soon enough, and Cundieffe found himself back at the station house in White Bird, but no closer to getting through to the powers that be. AD Wyler was still in conference and unavailable, likewise Brady Hoecker. The Boise field office pledged to send two agents and a forensics team to look at the fire the next morning. A bank robbery with hostage fatalities had taken place in Nampa only the day before, and all available agents were on-task there.

  He was left with little room for doubt that he was being defecated upon in recompense for circumventing Bureau procedure. He should have paid a visit to the Boise office, or at least have had AD Wyler contact the SAC there to brief him on the outsider's business in their ar
ea. Not doing so made him look like a rogue agent from headquarters, trampling on their area of responsibility, making messes they'd have to answer for to the state authorities. Which was exactly what he was, and they smelled it through the phone.

  The local sheriff's deputies and state police could handle sealing the area to look for the shooter. The barn fire was just a barn fire, and the Heilige Berg militia had evacuated the area, as per the Boise agents' surveillance report. The Bureau had been notified of a routine Army National Guard maneuver taking place in the area, but knew nothing about a private mercenary force participating, or about a Radiant Dawn hospice community in the area. They knew nothing of any agents Macy and Mentone, or any others except himself operating in the area. The shooting he was involved in, they told him, was an accident, and when Cundieffe tried to correct them on this, they were suspiciously adamant that he was mistaken. "Have you ever been shot at before, Agent Cundieffe?" If anyone was trying to kill him out there, he was told, he'd be dead, and by whose authority was he out here, again?

  Manes hadn't heard from Macy or Mentone since they left for Grangeville with Karl Schweinfurter. Grangeville General didn't show Schweinfurter as having been admitted to the hospital, and calls to every other hospital in the county turned up nothing.

  Manes told Cundieffe that he'd called the local doctor, who may or may not be out of town for the weekend, and left him a first aid kit, with which he cleaned and applied adhesive bandages to his hand and face.

  He began to see what he was coming to, but kept making calls and sending faxes and e-mails back to headquarters and the Boise office for hours before he gave up. He hogged the NCIC database, accessing what he could of Pentagon records to learn something about Specialist Four Gibson Holroyd, but he got nowhere. As far as his limited official clearance allowed him to check, no such person had ever served in the Army. Calls to the world's largest bureaucratic edifice yielded only ineffectual excuses from night file clerks and grudging promises to have somebody poke around in the paper file annexes in Arlington for him in the morning.