Ravenous Dusk

by Cody Goodfellow

  The giant dove for a fleeing Missionary and grabbed him by the ankles. He snatched him up over his head and—make a wish—pulled him apart in the air. Stella let out an airless shriek as the soldier split down the middle up to the diaphragm, raining gore on the laughing giant's bear-trap face. Then he bludgeoned two wounded soldiers to death with the legs.

  Avery froze, turned and looked her dead in the eyes. "Crazy fuckin' world," he snarled, "ain't it, squaw bitch?" and pounced on her.

  Stella ducked and lunged at the stairwell door, propped open against a dead man's leg, and slipped through. She threw her weight against it until the lock clicked in its housing at her back.

  Her heart thundered in her chest. She felt as helpless as she had that night when the old derelict had melted and turned into a replica of the mortally wounded Stephen, and the Mission had come to burn her—

  Get a hold of yourself, chica. She was not helpless, anymore. She wanted to live, and she had the means to defend herself, same as he did. And she knew this place. He didn't. He might have been hiding among them for days, but there was a place he did not know—

  The door buckled. The LED above the card slot stopped blinking.

  She vaulted over the railing and dropped three stories to the biosphere floor. She hit the ground in a crouch and sprang for the door.

  It was locked. Above, she heard the blast door on the top floor explode out of its frame and crash down the stairs. Hollow, humorless laughter rolled down the well and sent her scrambling back up a flight to the next door.

  It was locked, too. She threw her shoulder into it. The metal absorbed her attack without so much as denting.

  She heard something like a tornado coming down the stairs. She knew she'd never make it up to the next floor, which would be locked, before it found her. She was an ant trapped at the bottom of a bottle. She whirled around, eyes snapping from one feature to another. Gilled vents snapped shut to prevent the dispersal of gas, but even if she could get one open, they were no wider then her leg. She couldn't fit, not in time.

  Something flashed past her, screaming down the open stairwell. She jumped back from the railing. It hit the concrete floor with a dull crackling smash and was silent.

  Turn and face him. You are so much more than you were—

  Not here.

  No choice.

  She pounded on the door until her fists went numb, bones creaking and snapping in her delicate clawed hands. Scratches in the metal caught the red blinking lights. In a day or two, she might tear a hole in it. She had seconds.

  Something heavy and hard hit the landing above her. The stair landing shook beneath her feet, seemed to lurch and tear itself partially out of the wall. She hit the door one last time, shrieking for all she was worth, as if the raw articulation of her terror and desperation could shatter what her fists could not.

  The door opened. She fell through and knocked heads with a wiry, hatchet-faced Mestizo man with shattered, gold-plated teeth and a flamethrower. It was one of Wittrock's pet FARC guerrillas. The weapon he cradled drooled electric blue fire from the nozzle aimed at her eyes.

  "Puta del Diablo!" he screamed, trying to jump away from her to bring the seething barrel of the flamethrower into play. She pivoted and thrust him through the open doorway into the stairwell. He gave two steps and saw something over her shoulder worse than her. She ducked as he opened up on Avery.

  Stella ran. At the far end of the corridor, she saw the convex wall of the canopy, and the black shelter of the forest. All the doors she passed were sealed.

  Behind her, she heard Avery roar. She risked a glance back. The guerilla backed up the corridor, spraying Avery, who raced right up the wall, across the ceiling, and sprang at the source of the harmless stream. The guerrilla shouted the Rosary as he turned and ran after Stella. He made three steps before Avery dropped on him, axe-arms chopping him down in mid-stride.

  Stella leapt over the railing and hit the plastic biosphere dome. She raked it with her claws and was almost blown back by the blast of pressurized air that escaped. A hexagonal section of the dome went slack beneath her, and she plunged through the hole into the darksome forest.

  The trees bowed and shook with the wind soughing out through the punctured dome. It was still dark inside, the dome tinted smoky black to preserve the forest's natural cycle. The sirens had gone dead, in here, but she heard a new alarm coming from the airlock. She'd violated this place, opening it up to the outside world. She was about to violate it a whole lot more.

  She raced through the maze of trees with Avery's gobbling screams of lusty triumph ringing in her ears. He'd come, already. He couldn't help himself. Underneath all his monstrous adaptations, he was still only a man.

  Pheromones boiled out of her like music in her sweat, weaving a mélange of desire and panic that even the trees seemed to respond to. She reached the glade and lay down on the soft, springy soil. She spread her arms wide and closed her eyes.

  Something followed her through the hole in the dome. It tried to be stealthy, but she could feel its approach through the forest, because the trees screamed chemical warnings to each other as he tore through them. Silent and swift as the wind itself, yet he wounded everything he passed, so he came as no surprise to her when he burst out into the open. Plumes of heat and toxic excreta announced his arrival. Branches curled and blackened at his touch. He stalked the glade, his head swiveling to take in the trap he knew had to be here. But there was only her, splayed out on the ground like an offering.

  He came closer, bones grinding and squealing as his movements became jerky, uncontrollable spasms. His mercurial flesh softened, hardened, shifted to create the necessary equipment. His heat increased, but his rage dissipated like a mountain thunderstorm. "You—want this?"

  "You do…don't you?" she purred. She arched her back and presented herself to him. Downy black fur rippled and threw off female starshine and musky rut-hunger. "He didn't want you to have me—but now, I'm ready."

  He took another step closer, and she could smell his desire rising, sapping his bloodlust. It was a sour, ammoniac emotion, the naked inner core of a thing that had never, ever known the tender side of the physical act of love. Pleasure was to be taken in another's pain. Pleasure was the power of life and death, the despoiling of innocence. The act of love was revenge for the sin of birth. He wanted to ravage every womb for want of the one that had spat him out.

  She mastered her fear, bottled it up and buried it inside herself. Its absence baffled him, but her other secretions drew him nearer, despite himself.

  The dome had sealed itself, but the trees still writhed as if to tear themselves out of the ground. The whisper of their needles was like the aroused breath of the earth itself, the night the sky raped the earth and begat the gods.

  "Come on," she whispered huskily, "before I change my mind again."

  "Crazy squaw bitch," he growled, and lay down on top of her.

  His penetrations were legion. Bone-daggers gored her everywhere, deflowering bloody vaginas wherever he touched her. His talons caressed her, ripped her open and dripped vitriol, scalding anti-semen. Something like a snake, scaly and dry and cold, lapped at her exposed throat. The head of his penis, a throbbing moray eel ringed with collars of gnarled drill-teeth, ground itself against her groin.

  She lay bare and shivering beneath him, fighting her body's mounting reflexive overdrive. Back, back inside her mind she went, and built a place for herself where the grunting and pain and violation were only a rumor of war from a distant land, and when the walls came crashing down around her, she burrowed into the floor of her consciousness and pulled the hole in after her. She could wound him badly, she might even kill him, but not yet…

  "I ain't never—" he whispered, losing himself in bliss. Eyes opened and closed all over his face like bubbles in boiling oil, the better to see her with. "Bitch, you ain't laughin' now, are ya? Gonna give it to you good, I tell you what. Gonna fuck you inside out—eat you up—"

&nb
sp; She enfolded him. Her flesh reached out to his and softened its edges, drugging it with endorphins and serotonin to spike his ecstasy to unbearable new heights. Bone and muscle flowed like melting ice into structures the forest had taught her, flowed around him and into him, even as she reached down into the perfumed soil, into the labyrinth of questing roots that formed their bed.

  His movements against her became frenzied. His cock forced itself into her. She gasped and yowled with mingled agony and delight as the ugly club battered her cervix and gouged bloody divots in the walls of her uterus. He let loose a red, wordless howl that shook the forest. He bored deeper into her, heedless of how deeply she was inside him. He paused for a moment, then thrust against her in the beginnings of a mechanical cadence. Bellowing in Comanche and Vietnamese, he scourged the softest, hottest parts of her like a jackhammer. Her walls secreted acid that burned him, but only seemed to quicken his arousal.

  He stopped. "WHORE!" His face split in a grimace, all eyes and teeth and twitching sinews. "You're already knocked up!"

  She blinked. Her eyes turned inward. Her body was in upheaval, messages of pain and grievous damage bouncing off each other and piling up like rejected mail at the door to her brain. She braved it, fought shock at the enormity of what he'd already done to her, through it all and down into the root cellar of her womanhood, where she saw—

  Oh God, he was right.

  She sprang the trap.

  Avery came awake to what was happening around him. Everywhere they touched, everywhere his bony armor dug into her, she also had penetrated him with millions of whiplike roots. The tough, flexible cellulose grew into him through the joints of his exoskeleton, splitting into billions of monofilial taps and boring into his very bones through their microscopic pores. Inside him, they proliferated and swelled into knots, feasting on his supercharged marrow and blood cell factories. She drained him. His penis retracted out of her, noisily tearing free as he attempted to extricate himself. She let him go, but the roots of the forest had him now, thousands of them rearing up out of the ground and digging into his back and winding round his ribs, greedily extending into the softer meats within.

  "YOU FUCKING CUNT!"

  The roots in his back lifted him off her. She lay still before him, just out of his reach, as the roots bored deeper, drank and ate him and pulled him apart.

  Her roots grew out of her back and down into the soil, merged with the network of tree roots for anchorage, then reached back up out of the soil to rape him as he had raped her.

  Boring roots erupted out of his legs and back and dug ever deeper into his body, up through his legs and torso, out his mouth and eye-sockets. Avery tried to rip himself free, but only shook the roots out of the dirt. He couldn't rip free without bringing down the forest.

  Avery tried every trick his body knew to get free. He grew claws, but the roots were too pliable and armored to be easily cut, and her sap so acidic it seared holes in his bones. They injected spores into his wounds, which exploded in fungi and molds and lichens, all the parasites the forest had ever faced and defeated, running riot in his body.

  Biting the roots burned his lips off and broke his teeth. He tried to climb off them, flapping madly in an insane attempt to fly, but the impaling root clusters shot up through him to the roof and wrapped around the dome's support girders. Infinitely bifurcating roots shredded his bowels and made his heart race so hard he squirted blood from his eyes and ears even after he lost the capacity to scream. His body tore itself apart trying to transform into something that could survive this.

  The roots tore themselves free, now, taking most of Tucker Avery with them. What was left was little more than a skeleton, luxuriant puffball fungi and shelves of mushrooms blooming in place of meat. Yet still, incredibly, he stood. Shuddering and quaking with the last beats of his root-shot heart, the mutant took a step towards her. Another.

  She ripped herself out of her web of roots and leapt out of his reach. The ground beneath her squirmed, severed Stella-roots still seeking nourishment. She was weak, starved, burning up with fever. She had sapped huge volumes of Avery's vitality, of his very body, out of him, but it went back into him in the form of roots. Not a single erg of energy, not a molecule of him had she taken into herself, for fear of tainting herself, of turning into him. Livid, foaming welts rose up wherever he'd touched her and sluiced out the dregs of his presence. Her vagina drizzled sizzling acid discharge on the ground between her quivering legs. She threw up, coughing up brittle shards and slivers and specks of him that had broken off inside her.

  But there was something else inside her that she could not dislodge. It wasn't of Avery, but neither was it of her, and what frightened her most was that she hadn't noticed it growing down there until now. He brought her here and left her. He forced himself on her, then left, and now—

  Avery tried to speak. His jaw was horribly distended, his mouth choked with a blooming brain coral fungus, his eye-sockets home to thrusting phallic toadstools that wriggled and swelled like a snail's eye stalks. He wriggled and danced so hard that compound fractures shattered his arms and legs. Lichens and greedy molds took root in his spine, burrowing through his hollow exoskeleton, reducing it, micron by micron, into nutrients to grow, to spread.

  Clouds of spores burst from his face, touched her skin and set off a million microscopic wars. She ran for the trees, then turned back to look at Avery.

  A man in a baggy, ill-fitting rubber space suit entered the glade with a lysing agent flamethrower. He turned it on Avery.

  Unbearably green tongues of crystalline vapor swept over the dying mutant. He didn't foam up and melt the way Keoghs did, but he still collapsed under the onslaught. Drained by the roots, feasted on by the fungi, he was too weak to resist the chemicals eating the walls of his cells. Still, he was a long time dying.

  The man in the suit stood over him for several minutes, spraying until the canister on his back gave only spurts of air. He shrugged out of the pack and dropped the flamethrower on the ground, turned and approached her.

  He tore off his hood. It was Dr. Barrow.

  His eyes were red, his face streaked with tears. Inside the suit, his whole body trembled. His arms lifted and waved at the glade. "Look what you did."

  "Fuck you," she snapped. "I killed him. I protected your fucking forest."

  But then she looked. The roots in the ground ripped free of the soil, thrashed and battled, retreating from the spreading pool of lysing agent. The trees around the edge of the grove were changing color. They were moving. And speaking.

  "The trees are absorbing him. He's like Keogh, only wilder. They're alive in every strand of DNA, maybe in every atom. In a few hours, this forest will be him."

  "You burned him up. Nothing can survive that shit, isn't that what you eggheads were saying?"

  "It's too late." He took a gun out of a Velcro-sealed pouch on his thigh. He pointed it at her.

  She didn't move. His hand shook. "Get out of here," he finally said.

  "What happened upstairs?" she asked.

  "All dead. He's mopping up. Get out of here!"

  "How do I—?"

  He shot at her. Incredibly, he hit her. The bullet entered her thigh and fragmented into powder. It burned so bad her body tried to cut the leg off at her hip, but she held on. The wound back-flushed itself, spitting out the fragments as it sealed them in momentarily impermeable lipid vesicles. Still, the leg shook and spasmed to its own garbled impulses, barely holding her up.

  "Or stay," he said. "But it's going to rain—"

  The sprinklers in the ceiling hissed, gurgled and spat emerald mist. The trees shrieked. Her skin boiled. Her pelt melted and sloughed away under the lysing rain. Barrow looked up to the deluge with his arms outstretched. His face ran like a watercolor.

  She ran for the airlock. She ran so fast she went between the raindrops, every one a burning acid dagger that sliced away whatever it touched.

  The airlock stood open. She dove through it and
hit the emergency shower button inside. The airlock sprinklers doused her with blessedly pure distilled water. Washing away the last of the lysing agent, she wondered why her immunity was greater even than Avery's. The nasty green shit was derived from something Spike Team Texas had exposed Storch to back in the Gulf War. They gave him his immunity, an immunity not even Keogh had. The Mission had augmented the chemical weapon with Keogh's DNA signature, but it had put paid to Avery, if only to melt him into the forest.

  No, you did that.

  She looked out through the porthole in the sealed inner hatch. The forest was a swamp of green, towering pines sinking into the churning green mire even as they struggled to become something else—tentacles, arms, fanged, obscenity-screaming cocks. This was the worst. Somehow worse than even the massacre upstairs, because the trees were the innocents she'd perverted, raped as Avery had raped her. Used, turned into something abominable, like she was. She deserved to die with the forest, with Barrow. But she was not alone inside her skin. Yet again, she was driven by an invader that commanded her, against her will, to live.

  She came out of the airlock and approached the bottom stairwell door. It was still sealed, but she could hear the sounds from the upper galleries. Sporadic gunfire, a dull whomp of a grenade or something every so often. There was still resistance, but Barrow was right. Going up meant going through them. There had to be a way down and out.

  Someone came around a bend in the corridor. It was another FARC guerilla, taller and, if that was possible, uglier than the other one. He fired at something behind him, then did a double-take when he saw Stella standing there naked and burned halfway to the bone. He pointed his AK47 at her and shouted, "Jefe Doctor, es una puta malo!"

  Another man came around the bend, stooped under an arm-load of files. Wittrock. His eyes got big when he saw her, but he looked relieved. "Ms. Orozco, have you seen anyone else? Dr. Barrow?"