Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  "I'm hungry."

  "It won't kill you. They'll let us stay here, but you can't kill and eat people."

  "Wasn't a person, just a fucking scientist."

  "There are new rules, and you have to learn them if you're going to stay alive."

  She laughed. "That's what it's all about, right? Staying alive?"

  He chewed his words a moment. "That's all I ever learned in school."

  "Why?"

  "Why what?"

  "Why stay alive? Idiot."

  He didn't have any snappy comebacks to that. He sat down beside her. The trees whispered dendriform dreams above their heads. Questing, thirsty roots siphoned water out of the soil beneath them. Camera starlight twinkled. There was something so intense about silence, now, an imminent threshold beyond which one could forget how to break it with words, could forget words, forget time and death and become truly alive. She sensed that he felt it too, but he fought against it, struggling upstream to anchor himself, and her, with words.

  "Well, I guess you're safe, now…"

  "I guess I should thank you, I guess—for saving me, I mean, back there. I thought I was finally going to die—"

  "I had reasons."

  "Like what?"

  "There are worse things than being dead," he said. "You can lose more than your life, now."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You saw it. It almost happened to you, just now. You can lose yourself, lose what it means to be human."

  "You say it like that's a bad thing." She tried to smile at him, but his frown made her bite her lip.

  "You think you're free now, but you're not. Your body owns you, now. It wants to survive, and it'll do anything—it can do anything—to survive. Keogh kept it in check, but you're still just along for the ride. You've got to fight it every instant to keep from becoming something you can't even imagine."

  "And what are you now, Storch? You're not human, any more than I am. What are you holding out for?"

  "I'm the man who's going make Keogh extinct. I'll do or become whatever I have to, to get Him."

  "Then you don't want to stay alive all that much either. What then, Sergeant Storch? You saved me, thanks a lot, but what then?"

  Storch wiped his face clean of whatever trace of expression was growing on it. "Then I'll just live."

  She bit back a smart retort, held herself silent until she felt a knot inside. She untied it. "I used to fight so hard for everything—losing anything meant death, and nobody was going to take it away from me. Then I found out I was going to die. After everything I'd been through, stupid fucking cancer. And then—after it happened and you—after I fell into the hole, I had plenty of time to wonder what the hell I'd wanted to live so bad for, anyway."

  "I'm sorry about that," he mumbled.

  She nodded. "Wasn't anybody's fault," she added, when watching him squirm got old. "I'm getting over it."

  "Life is just something you have to get through, is what my daddy used to say. It's a test, and you just have to endure it. Be true to yourself, and you'll get by."

  "My mother believed the same thing, more or less. My father told me that, anyway, before he left me. But isn't there—I mean, shouldn't there be a moment, in between the fights and the bullshit and the knowing you're going to die, and none of it means shit, isn't there ever a moment when life is its own reward? When you're just glad, and proud of yourself for just being? Have you ever had one of those, Storch?"

  He shrugged and looked away, as if hoping something would jump out of the trees and attack them. "I can't say as this one leaves me much to complain about."

  She laughed again, caught herself when she noticed he was smiling. The bunched-up muscles around his jaw subsided and his chewed-up lips peeled away from his teeth.

  "Oh, so you do know how to smile, sort of" she said.

  "I've seen folks do it on TV, now and again." Then it was gone as fast as it appeared. He scratched his neck too hard, and she saw a spreading stain of blood under his skin.

  "What the hell—"

  He looked at her and held up his corded, scab-laced arms. The skin peeled and blistered as if he'd stuck them into hot coals. Deep crimson patches covered his exposed skin, growing into each other and raising white vesicles on his face, the backs of his hands, his neck.

  "What's happening to you?"

  He held his hands out to her. "I think you are," he said in a deadly earnest whisper. "Are you doing this to me on purpose, Ms. Orozco?"

  "I didn't do anything—" But in the same breath, she knew it was true. Her heat burned him, and now it burned her. She felt her pores opening up like mouths and screaming chemicals at him. She saw her own crimson, blistering skin and knew he was doing the same to her. When she looked at him, she gasped, and forgot what she'd been saying, or how to say it.

  The deep indigo light made a lustrous mane of shadows around his face. He rolled his massive shoulders and stretched, blisters all over him ruptured, and fresh waves of him enveloped her. His chest swelled, bones straining into new architectures, muscles rippling like blood-mad anacondas. His eyes rolled in panic, terrified of the power that wielded him.

  The forest blurred and vanished in the warring walls of pheromone fog they made. The raw, roaring vitality of him spoke through his flesh, leaving him as helpless and confused as she. "What's happening to us?"

  "It's not all bad," she said, and kissed him.

  Sparks danced between their lips before they touched. When they did, she felt as if her mouth were melting into his, and his fearsome wanting forced itself into her and fired her own lust to devour and be consumed.

  She pulled back from him, heart in her throat. What was this, some kind of endogenous date-rape drug? What was he doing to her? What was her body doing to her? She was in heat, like a bitch. Was it loneliness, was it shock, driving her instinctively to drag another one inside her to fill the void?

  Sex never meant much to Stella, even less than love. She'd let it happen once or twice to satisfy her curiosity, and dismissed it as one more trap that would mean death, if she let it get her.

  It had her now. Her breasts ached. She felt herself growing wet, her pelvis churned and her faced burned with shame. Her insides felt as if they were liquefied, spinning, boiling under her skin. Nerves she never knew she had swam to the surface and tasted the air. The electrical surge of NOW melted memory, annihilated the future. Surely, this was what he meant by losing what it meant to be human. And he didn't seem to be coping with it any better than she was.

  She had only been perverse for the sake of trying to upset him before, but now she wondered if she hadn't meant it. Was it such a bad thing, to stop being human?

  He shuddered, holding himself in check and desperately avoiding her eyes. His face contorted, setting up tsunami waves that rippled through his torso, leaving the muscles in strange new configurations. He terrified her, and she almost ran, but then his gaze locked hers, his pupils so dilated his eyes were black mirrors in which she saw herself.

  She flew to him. Her lips were blistered, the new skin growing in shingled and coarse, like a cat's tongue. Her mouth touched and tore at the tender flesh under his jaw, where a ruff of crimson-dripping feathers grew, and felt his teeth at her own pulse. She tasted the labyrinthine essence of his alkaline sweat, felt his stampeding pulse quickening in vulnerable arteries just millimeters beneath her teeth and barbed tongue. They could kill each other instantly, if they gave in to instinct, tearing out each other's throats like rabid wolves.

  His hands on her described fiery trails and raised chills that drove her flesh mad with changes. He caressed her back, tracing her new and improved spine down to her flank, traversed and darted down the front of her pants to cup the engorged orchid of her sex.

  It was furry with thousands of quills, stiffened hair-needles that raised a shower of dancing blood droplets from his fingers and palm. "What's with the mixed signals?"

  "Hurry, before it grows teeth," she said. She tore his shirt of
f. Underneath, his skin had gone purple and black and crazed with sharp shark-skin radulae. He changed colors. The sores on his back glowed violet, then emerald and gold and rose crept in, and the pigments mingled and strobed hypnotic counterpoint to their entrained heartbeats in a breathtaking mating display.

  She stroked his chest down to his groin. Her fingers turned back and rubbed his new skin the wrong way. Two of her fingertips sheared off to the bone. It felt good. Her skin burned. Bubbles streamed up the interior walls of her skull. Her lymph nodes swelled.

  "I'm trying not to hurt you," she purred, touching him. His skin sizzled and went silvery-white where her blood flowed.

  "Stop trying—" he groaned, and pulled her to him. He hoisted her up to his mouth. His exoskeleton shredded off her shirt and cut into her breasts. Her blood melted the brittle edges, cooked his skin and burned its way into him.

  Their immune systems were at war. They were reacting to each other's formidable arrays of pheromonal triggers as hostile antigens, and their bodies were making ever more formidable defenses against each other. But their bodies had also driven them together, in spite of their fear, their loneliness, and their mistrust.

  He rolled onto his back, and she fell on him, nipping his neck again and again until he bit her back. Her hands went down to his undefended crotch and ripped away his flimsy cotton pants. Flashing unpleasant memories of Sergeant Avery, the mutant rapist with his monster-cock. She recoiled. Avery's body reflected his fucked-up mind. He needed to destroy everything he touched, so he made his genitalia into a weapon. What was inside Storch commanded her body to react with desire, but to the changes, he was only another invader.

  They were both doing it now, repelling each other subconsciously, while something still deeper forced them to become one. The body wasn't just a blind engine of survival, but its changes hinged on animal levers in the brain that humans had buried beneath miles of conscious bullshit. She dug into the root-cellars of her brain as she tried to tell him to stop fighting her.

  They wounded each other deeply, and each new wound became a new erogenous zone, a new site of penetration and infection. They rolled across the glade and blackened the grass with their heat.

  Do you want this? She asked herself. The instinctual core of her that lived beneath words howled YES, and she could not did not want to would not stop it. She ground herself against him. Her quilled cunt ravaged his abdomen and stung him with acid nectar. Threadlike strands of skin shot out of his neck and abdomen, like the pili with which the first bacteria exchanged genetic codes, and pricked her. They burned her wherever they touched, but they grew together with her skin, so that it hurt more to tear them out.

  His arms enfolded her and lifted her up as if to throw her away, but she felt a third hand touch her between her splayed legs, pry them apart and explore her.

  It felt like the head of a giant snail, a prehensile thrusting against her vagina, but she also felt delicate, boneless fingers teasing the tender petals of her labia and clit. The touch reverberated up through her to her brain and out the top of her head in golden waves. She moaned. She lowered her defenses.

  Something squirmed inside her and the velvet tendrils retracted into his penis as she snapped at them. "Sorry," she managed. He hissed at her and dropped her on it.

  She fought. With both hands holding her arms at her sides, he teased open her nether lips and entered her. It wasn't so terribly big as she'd feared, but inside her, it grew like kudzu, bifurcating and surrounding the head of her cervix. A nest of baby snakes writhed in her uterus. Lightning jolted through her in a delirious orgasm that stopped her heart and all brain activity as she bucked and ground against him in a clutch of petit mal seizures.

  He grew into her, and through him, she grew into the roots of the forest and out into the net of life that covered the mountains and spread out in all directions to the sea and the bottom of the sea and into the most rarified strata of the sky and out into the deepest reaches of space, where the seed of races yet unborn slept in the eons-old ice of comets, endlessly roving cosmic sperm.

  And in her blood, in her brain, she knew him chemically, tasting his memories as they flooded her bloodstream. She was born with him into a Spartan home with the Army chain of command for a family. His childhood was a blur of training, all warm memories clipped out to make room for soldiering. She saw his mother desert and his father go insane. She followed him into the Army, to his niche in the elite Rangers. She loved it with him as the home, the habitat, he had been seeking all his life. She killed three men in Panama City with him in Operation Just Cause, and threw up, but did not cry. Some people, he simply believed, just needed to be killed.

  She suffered and struggled with him through the Special Forces Q Course, and listened to craggy Green Berets telling him to quit, he didn't have the brains to be anything more than a grunt. Soldier Ant, they called him. Cannon-fodder. She exulted with him when he shamed them into passing him. She followed him into the most overworked, danger-close unit in Special Forces. She went with him into Desert Storm, and the awful night-fight he only half-remembered for so many years. She was saved

  and changed with him by 1st Lieutenant Brutus Dyson of Spike Team Texas, just as he would save and change her.

  She retreated into the desert with him and was almost happy for a while, until soldiers fighting a secret war crashed into his life and burned it down. She ran with him from one trap to the next and got drafted into an army to fight against sick people. Strangest of all, she saw herself through his eyes—saw herself watching over him, saw him fear for her, saw him try to save her—

  She became Keogh with him, the black ink of His echo choking her, as if He would come alive again inside her. Mercifully, he had blocked almost all of it out, so that it passed in a squall of needles and electrodes and rolling tape.

  She was changed again with him, this time by a bullet. She died with him and came back in a new body made of cancer. She hated Keogh with him, a hate that answered all his questions, soothed all his doubts. But most of all, she hated the lies he was being told about God and the world and the human race. She hated the egghead scientists who had planted the ideas in his head, the crowning blasphemy that, of all the atrocities heaped upon him, he could not accept. They told him that aliens spilled a test tube and made all life on earth as an accident or joke, and Keogh was something from Outside, pulling the strings of the Universe, usurping evolution to become God. If they were right, they more than killed God: they rationalized Keogh as the logical next step in a runaway experiment set into motion by a dead race.

  Then it was as if every atom in her body suddenly reversed polarity, and she shorted out.

  When she came to, she was on her back, and he held himself above her. He was still inside her, but poised in perfect stillness. He grimaced, fought for speech. "You're burning me—"

  Acid dripped from her, raising ugly white welts on his inner thighs and belly. His cock was in her to the hilt, burning him, but he didn't move.

  "I haven't moved yet," he said. "Do you want this?"

  She thought a moment. She still tingled from the initial thrust, but she craved him so much she changed her acidity, withdrew the teeth, and made herself deeper for him.

  "Maybe this is what life is for," she said.

  "What–" He struggled to say more, but words came out in quavering, hushed breaths, as he battled to hold himself still inside her.

  "A chicken is an egg's scheme for making more eggs," she said. He moved.

  Gone again when she woke up. The trees leaned in over her like bystanders at a hit and run accident. She burned, she glowed, she still felt him inside her, moving.

  A pile of olive drab plastic pouches lay beside her. MEAL-READY TO EAT, it said on the front of each, and included an unflattering clinical checklist of the contents.

  A flash of anger blew out before it got going when she saw it for the empty reflex it was. What more did he owe her? She had seen deep enough inside him to know that he k
new no more than she did, and believed even less of what Keogh had shown him.

  She ate four of the MRE's without reading them, but on the fifth, beef stroganoff with creamed corn and raspberry compote, she shook with a sudden wave of nausea that told her to stop. She chewed pine needles, savoring the trees' ancestral forms behind the bitter tang and stinging sharpness, so much more edifying than the processed machine-shit in the pouches. Sap ran in her veins. She knew, now, how to grow roots, and to make her own food in the sun with chlorophyll.

  She squatted at the base of the largest tree and watered it, wondering idly if she was killing it, or if it would start to look like her.

  She shook the branches of a dripping pine and showered in the chill dew. The livid blotches from where he touched her washed away, but there were too many bruises, lacerations shaped like his teeth, for her to count. You should see the other guy, she thought, and laughed.

  Their clothes were shredded, scattered across the glade and crushed into the muddy soil, and she saw no fresh ones laid out anywhere. He must've walked out of here naked, expecting her to wait here for him. Since the cameras overhead in the lightening canopy could see her anyway, she decided she had little left to lose.

  She went out looking for him, dressed only in her skin. Outside the biosphere, the air was stale and sterile, dry and recycled, like the interior of an airliner at the end of a transatlantic flight. The outer airlock opened and soldiers in gasmasks backed away from her with their rifles up, but they let her pass.

  It was a remarkable discovery for her that her nakedness was somebody else's problem. They wouldn't look directly at her so long as she just kept walking with her head high. She had never thought of herself as worthy of ogling, but neither was there anything in her anatomy or the way she carried it that would cause men to avert their eyes. Then she caught a glimpse of herself in a reflective pane of the canopy. Knots of scar tissue ran down her back, a jigsaw puzzle of skin and scales and feathers. One of her breasts was missing, and ruddy, ragged planes of muscle peered through the gaping crater. Black iridescent bubbles of protoplasm congealed around the edges of the wound, growing her a new one. Stiletto spurs of bone grew from her ankles like dewclaws, clicking on the white tiled floor.