"We don't serve them by the bowl, Miss."
"You have fruit cups as an alternate side dish on the senior menu. Use that. Make something up, I don't care. Just give me a bowl of tomatoes and a pitcher of orange juice—"
"It comes in a carafe, Miss."
"A carafe'll be great, Ida. Just please hurry with it, won't you please, Ida?"
"Is that all, Miss?"
"For now, yes, now go get the damned juice…please."
Sounds like somebody got themselves knocked up, Ida told herself. Bet she doesn't even know who the father is. She put up the order and slouched out of sight to fill the carafe with her own special blend of juices.
Stella tried not to make a scene, but it was so hard. Even when she had been buried alive for six months, she had not known hunger or thirst like this. Not since she'd been a prisoner in her own head had she felt so intruded upon, or so out of control. She devoured everything in sight, and still she burned to eat more. When she looked at people, she saw them turn into hamburgers and hot dogs like in cartoons, or she could see their livers glowing through their bodies like holy relics, and it was an act of will not to eat them. Often she threw up, and this was the most unforgivable part of all. The moment it was out of her, she craved her own vomit, and cleaned up her own mess with lunatic gusto, sobbing, pounding her own head to make herself stop.
She reckoned that she had eaten her weight in food since she escaped the Missionary compound in Colorado, six days ago. Yet she had gained only about twenty pounds, and none of it fat, none of it baby. Pregnant women in the hospital always said they knew when it was starting to grow inside them, but Stella doubted any of them ever dreamed of symptoms like hers.
Her temperature climbed up into the low hundreds if she went more than an hour without drinking, and her blood sugar dropped critically low unless she fed it like a coal stove. She'd considered taping an IV to her arm, and feeding constant glucose solution, but her body craved food, in abundance, and variety. No, not her body. It was the little visitor her gentleman caller left behind. Another invader to repel. She had survived and beaten cancer, Keogh, and the shape-shifting rapist, but she was helpless before this new outrage. It was growing inside her, a stranger, yet it was just enough of her that her immune system would not terminate it. She still tried, synthesizing proteins by visualizing her rage and fear, and turning them loose in her uterus, but they found nothing to destroy. It was in there, there was no mistaking it. The changes in her blood, the food going nowhere, the dreams—a faceless, formless tumor coalescing out of her flesh and ripping itself free, crying, "What am I? WHAT AM I?" in a baby Keogh's voice. The presence, in moments of perfect stillness, the feeling of something clumsily probing her mind from underneath. She knew it was in there, alright, but damned if she could find it.
She was scared of it not for the power it had over her, nor even because its father was not human. He was no more or less human than she was. She was afraid of the thing because she knew that she was falling in love with it.
It was hers. It was of her, from an unimaginable union with a man, no, a creature, like her, who was, in all probability, dead. She could not blame him, but she couldn't resist blaming herself. They were both used, shaped, brought together and mated to yield—what?
She wolfed down the last rasher of bacon and washed it down with her third carafe of orange juice. Ida watched her through the kitchen pass-through window. Stella belched, ordered another. Ida disappeared from view, but a moment later she heard laughter. But she brought out a fresh, ice-crusted carafe, watched Stella drink off half of it in a single draught.
Once more, she struggled to put it out of her mind. She had to focus on today, on what she could change, and what might happen if she didn't.
She hadn't wanted to come. She was called here, though she had no idea who summoned her. Once she started running in Colorado, she'd wanted never to stop. She raced through the woods for three days, stopping only to melt snow and drink it. She killed a twelve-point buck with her bare hands. Twisted his head off by his antlers, before he smelled her coming on the wind, never mind heard her. It took the rest of the night to eat him, but she burned him off before she stumbled into a ski lodge and stole a truck, and had to stop for fast food twice before she got on the highway. Around then, it had begun to make itself known, and without thinking about it, without wanting to, she found herself driving west.
She ditched the truck in Grand Junction and jumped a Greyhound bus bound for Los Angeles. She hit a wall, sleeping through to Las Vegas, when she woke up to a familiar smell. Cutting through the dank, road dust and armpit stink of the bus was a smell that once came from her own pores. It was the briny musk of His sweat. Her eyes snapped open and she looked around, saw a pale, harassed-looking old Asian man leading two obviously sick-looking people, a middle-aged black man and a plump young white woman, down the aisle. The Asian man—in the set of his eyes, how they took everything in as if it had happened a million times before, though his mouth dribbled non-stop in some exotic tongue that sounded tailor-made for complaining. So He was still just in them, but when they came together—
She did not understand the thought, any more than she understood why she had to travel west. She turned her face to the window as He passed, but she felt His eyes on her, felt her scent being drank up, though she tried to mask it. They had all shared each other in Idaho. She remembered them all and she knew they would remember her. This body was strange to her, but they would commune and share the chemical imprints of all they'd seen and done, all He would need to know. Surely, they would all recognize her.
When she looked up, He had moved past her, leaving only the contrail of medication and necrosis from the terminal cancer patients he led. They took the back row of the bus and immediately went to sleep. She looked back at them every so often, sure He watched her through His eyelids.
At a rest stop in the middle of the desert, He got off to take a piss, and she followed Him. Another passenger, a Mexican field worker who carried his life in a cardboard box, berated her, but she showed him something that made him run out cursing to pee and pray in the desert until long after the bus left.
She tried to do Him like the buck, but the head wouldn't come off. Still, she broke His neck, opened Him up and learned all she needed to know from His blood. She was scared to do it, at first, scared He would take root in her and start running her again, and she wouldn't be able to get him out, ever—
But she did it. His blood was full of chemicals that came together to tell her where to go, and what would happen there.
The Asian man was pretty dead, but He wasn't. "Stella," the dead man whispered, "you make my life so interesting." She looked around and tried not to throw up. Only then did she notice she'd eaten His liver.
She left him there and got back on the bus. The cancer patients were still fast asleep. He'd probably drugged them. She wondered if they would find their way to the place without Him, if she shouldn't try to stop them. In the end, she left them, and for all she knew, they never woke up.
She bolted out of the Greyhound terminal in downtown Los Angeles just before sunrise. She walked past a charter bus at the curb outside the terminal and smelled him, broke into a run went down the street to Union Station and stole a Saturn sedan. She had to smash the window in, but this looked a lot less conspicuous in LA than it had in the Rockies. She got on the Santa Monica Freeway, headed west, seeing only the road and the signs, seeing what He was supposed to see. It led her here, and she felt as if she were wallowing out of a rushing river when she pulled out of its grasp at the last moment to go into Denny's.
The line of buses had become a fleet in the fairground parking lot. By her best estimate, only about half of the people filing in through the turnstiles into the fairground were already Him. The rest were still sick, dying, hoping. RADIANT was gone. She'd been right. He didn't need it any more. Or, He wouldn't—when He was One.
And what are you going to do?
I didn
't ask to come here, Guardian Angel. You figure it out.
But her Guardian Angel had no answers.
Stella got up and called for the check. Ida lumbered out and slapped it on the bar beside the wrecked flotilla of her meal. She peeled out cash she didn't remember stealing off the dead Asian man, tipped a knowingly contemptuous five percent. She went to the bathroom, holding her nose as she peed. As usual of late, her piss was the color and odor of scorched coffee, and so much of it the toilet flushed on its own from the pressure. Mercifully, this time she did not puke. She came back out without checking herself in the mirror, and cornered Ida behind the cash register.
"Incidentally, since you pissed in my orange juice, I thought you should know that the methedrine shit you spike your coffee with has eaten holes in your liver big enough to stick a pencil through, and your kidneys are starting to let blood slip into the mix. I wouldn't worry, though; with your blood cholesterol where it is, you'll be having a fatal stroke before you hit menopause, which is due for you in what, three months? Have a great Saturday, Ida."
Walking out the door past the stunned waitress, Stella had a moment to breathe in the oil-scummed air and bask in the sunshine before it hit her again, what she had to do, and that she had no idea how to do it, at all.
Red-gray clouds hung over Wilmington like clumps of brain matter floating in dirty dishwater. The buses had stopped coming when Stella crossed Industry Drive and stood at the edge of the lot. The smell of Him was overpowering, even over the glutinous reek of petroleum alchemy choking the feeble Pacific breeze from the west.
She ran across the four-lane road to the other side, though there was no traffic. On the parking lot, only a few tumbleweeds stirred. About fifty buses and twice that number of cars packed like spent salmon in the deep end of the lot, and Stella rushed to take cover among them, feeling watched by the sky. She ran down the narrow alleys between them, feeling pulled along though she wanted to stop and think, she had no idea what she was doing, and she didn't even know whether the impulse that brought her here wanted her to stop it or join it—
A security guard stepped into her path from behind the end of a bus. "This is a closed event, ma'am," he said, and he was going to say more, but she went right through him. She was vaguely aware of knocking him down, of slamming him into the grill of a bus so hard half his ribs caved in. But she was keenly aware that he smelled only of coffee-breath, Speed Stik and a cheap knock-off of Polo cologne liberally applied to cover up failure to bathe, and so she kept going.
There were more security guards at the gate, soft, dumpy rent-a-cops, though they carried sidearms. She detoured back a few hundred yards and climbed up the chainlink fence. She scanned the other side for only a split-second, then leapt.
It hit her the moment she hit the pavement on the other side. It was like being trapped in a washing machine, or getting knocked down and rolled by a really big wave, if the ocean knew your name, and everything about you, and wanted you to drown. Wanted you to want to stay under, never come up. And you almost wanted to, yourself—
They knew her. They all knew her, and they welcomed her back. They never turned their backs on her. It was her decision to forsake them. She lived in them still, that biochemical snapshot of her at her happiest, most fulfilled moment ran in their veins, and if she wanted to return to them, it would be so easy to forget everything that had happened since.
Her knees buckled under her, dumped her on the asphalt walkway between the fence and a Quonset hut. Her eyes mired in tears, she couldn't see past her outstretched arms. The light fractured into prisms, became hands reaching down out of the sky to lift her up, cold eyes peering down through rips in the clouds. The expanding bubble of their nurturing love swept out over the world, physically pinning her to the ground, crushing the breath out of her lungs with its longing ache to embrace, to be, everyone and everything. It was not even true consciousness, yet, but a swell of raw exultation, a newborn god reveling in its unspeakable new power. Yet it knew her, and roared around her like a river against a steadfast rock, wearing her down, digging at her anchorage, washing her away—
Why was she so sure that she did not deserve happiness? When had she gotten so fucked up inside, that she thought life was pain and loneliness, and rejected every offer of help, of love, of communion? She'd let herself be swayed by the Mission's awful lies about Him and what He was going to do. He had come only to stop the pain and the tyranny of the strong against the weak that had run the human race, indeed, the whole sphere of life, to the brink of extinction. Some part of her understood, and wanted to help, or she would not have come back—
"FUCK YOU!" she screamed. Her body shook with warring impulses, none of which she trusted. God damn Him! God damn her body, and God damn what she'd become. For hadn't she made a horrible mess of everything, on her own? Immortal, invincible, she'd only killed and destroyed friend and foe and innocent bystander alike, rutted like a beast with a creature more twisted than herself, and tried to strangle her offspring in its womb. She'd become an avatar of the world she hated, but still she could be forgiven. Still, she could give herself over to the whole of Him, and be healed.
"Sure, I hate myself. Always have. But it's the only fucking me I ever got, the only thing nobody's ever been able to take away, and YOU CAN'T HAVE IT!"
She stood and willed herself to perfect stillness. Changes stirred in her blood. She flushed red-hot. Steam, then smoke, arose in pale streams from her clothing. She became the goddess of the forest, a glossy black hole in the sun-sick morning. She ran down the fairway. Security guards might have shot at her, but in the instant between seeing and shooting, she was simply gone.
Faster than thought, she streaked through the loose cordon of dumbstruck rent-a-cops and down the length of the fairgrounds to the wall of turnstiles at the edge of the amphitheatre. She could hear them. No one shouted or stirred, but their breath tamed the wind into a soughing, rhythmic tide. Their synchronized heartbeat stirred the ground. She felt the redoubled psychic push of Him against her, the many becoming One like a crystal aligning its molecules in a blind chain-reaction. For that was all that was happening, when you got past the mystical bullshit Keogh dressed it up in. All their brains were wired and charged exactly like His: the harmonic resonance of so many of them in one place crystallized their collective identity, burning away the individual minds and fusing the thousands of burning brains into One.
Stella vaulted over the turnstiles and crossed the walkway to the nearest stairs. A few more guards were scattered about just inside the entrance, but they lay on the asphalt in fetal knots, their brains squashed flat by the force of a message they could not comprehend.
She stopped at the top step and looked down into the amphitheatre. She had felt it and fought it off, but to see it, in front of her…
The stage was empty, except for a single microphone stand. The sick, uninitiated ones were all down in front, and they all looked dead. Sprawling bodies, wasted and sunken, clogged the aisles. A junkyard of upended wheelchairs filled the orchestra pit. She would have thought them all truly dead, if she didn't know Keogh so well. Nothing was wasted. They would serve, would be devoured, like everyone else.
The back half of the amphitheatre was packed with Him. They all stood shoulder to shoulder with their hands linked in an unbroken chain that ran across the stairways. As one, they turned to regard her from two thousand pairs of eyes, all of them the chill gray of hoar-frost and billion-year old stone. And two thousand smiles broke out. She knew then, that there was only Him, in all that vast space, only Him and her.
She could still run away. She could do what she'd always done, and look out for Stella Orozco, and fuck the world, let Him have it.
She felt the wave of Him crest and break and draw back into itself, and all those eyes closed, all those brows furrowed in deepest concentration. Their linked hands shook as if lightning passed through them, back and forth, up and down the chain, subsiding like waves in a pool. She came closer to one an
d looked into his open, untenanted face.
The great thought that bound them all together was an almost visible aura over the crowd, an oil-slick kaleidoscope deformation of the light that grew clearer by the instant. She saw in it what he had shown her before, in Idaho, when they shared themselves.
They were working to make a virus, like that fateful one that had infected the Shoggoths with sentience, to share Him with the world. With all those minds linked and gnawing at the problem, He was close, so close, to synthesizing the RADIANT code in a flu virus. Nucleotide by nucleotide, He coded himself into a string of recombinant RNA. The bodies would manufacture the virus and infect the test cases, the sick who had come here hoping for a cure for cancer. He would cure them of themselves, and send them out into the world. The initial carriers would use their bodies as kindling to ignite the initial outbreak. The buses would take the rest to the train stations, to the airports, to their hometowns. He would spread on the winds, in the water, in food, and before the human race could begin to understand what He'd done, they would all have become One, and would, at last, understand everything.
He was so close—
Stella lashed out, ripped the plumbing out of the nearest Keogh, a proud old Mexican woman who could have been her grandmother. Blood sluiced out of the mortal wound for only a few seconds before it closed up. Her face knitted in distress, as if she'd dreamed something mildly unpleasant, but nothing to merit waking up.
Stella seized the woman by one arm and tore her out of the chain. The old woman's scream was like dry ice in a grease fire, a keening, endlessly rising shriek that only got louder as she tumbled ass over teakettle down the steep stairs. The old woman's body bumped into rank upon rank of joined hands, but the chain did not break. Where she had been, the others linked hands immediately to close the gap.
Stella attacked them. She ripped arms out of their sockets, gouged eyes out of heads, hurled bodies like limp sacks of fertilizer. The chain closed against her, passive, undeterred. It was like trying to break a wave by scooping handfuls of water out of it. Could she kill two thousand people with her bare hands? She could barely breathe. She collapsed on the stairs, so exhausted she could burst into flames, or melt into the asphalt.
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