Ravenous Dusk (28 page)

They went berserk, pointing their guns at him and screaming at him to sit down and
stop it
. His window was a black mirror. He didn't look like Saticoy, anymore. The olive pigment fled his skin, which became an ugly, marbled purple and bluish white where shattered capillaries and deep tissue trauma were dissolving. He still didn't recognize the face that glared at him. It was a mask of wet clay, streaming and twitching and becoming someone else.

Ignoring their panic, their guns, Storch bolted to the restroom, where he suffered and savored his first bowel movement in two weeks. His mind ran in circles, saying his name, telling him his life to keep hold of himself. He heard the distinctly alien clink of metal at one point, and, rising to take a peek, observed no less than five 7.62 millimeter rifle slugs embedded in his stools.

He avoided the stainless steel mirror on the door until he had to look at it to get out. He froze, his fist raised up at the strange reflection.

"Is that you?" his reflection asked him. His face still looked like a mask made of roadkill, but it was his face. His eyes were not gray or brown, but gold-flecked green. His scalp was already blue with a new crop of his own black hair pushing up through burn scabs like filthy snow. His nose was cocked a few degrees off center where he'd broken it when he was fourteen. His body remembered.
His body lied…

Thoughts, crazy, unworthy thoughts, flooded him. He was dreaming, he was the reflection trapped in the mirror. His eyes turning gray, his hair going white, his teeth long and crooked, smiling Keogh, and he was falling back—

"Where the hell've you been?" he asked his reflection, flinching at the sound of his own voice. The harrowed face in the mirror looked even worse than he felt.

Storch went back to his seat, the agents backing up the aisle from where they'd been camping out beside the lavatory. He touched his face—
his
face—and then looked at his hands. His left thumb had been gone for nine years, he'd gotten used to having a reptilian paw, but now it was whole. His resurrected thumb traced the crooked contours of his nose. That had not healed, or rather, it had grown back the way he remembered it. Why not? He'd become Corporal Wynorski and Lieutenant Saticoy completely enough to fool their comrades, without even trying, without even
knowing
. His own face was only one more mask, now, and he could trust it no more than he could anyone else.

He'd thought he'd hit bottom when they took away his life and his home. Again, when they coerced him to do horrible things, and showed him still more horrible things. And again, when he lost control over his mind and his body, yet still could not die. Now, he was free. No more voices in his head, no more blackouts. But now his own body had become a survival machine he couldn't control, a species of one, like the monsters in Spike Team Texas. There was no one at the controls that he could see, and he was afraid to look any deeper.

He knew that he was letting it happen. He was going insane. Like his father, and that was the next step to becoming just like Dyson, Avery and Holroyd. He knew it, but he couldn't stop it, indeed he almost couldn't wait for it to happen, because when he lost the power to reason, to remember, he would be truly free. Whoever picked him for this fate just should've known better.

The plane touched down on a plowed private airstrip surrounded by pine trees and snow-streaked blackness. Watching one of them reset his watch, he confirmed that they were on Mountain time. Biting subzero wind blasted in the open doorway. His ears pop pop popped, his jaw clamped. He felt light-headed, tingly, starved for air. Colorado, maybe Utah.

The area had been cleared of all but a few perimeter guards in civilian winter gear. With two agents before and two behind, Storch climbed down from the plane and crossed the runway to a van, while the pilot met with the ground crew to secure the plane.

The driver was one of them, much older, but not officer material. He climbed out of the van when he saw Storch coming with them, backed away with his hands up. When one of the agents from the plane approached him, he turned and ran. The masked Marine drove.

The airstrip was far from any signs of habitation, and they skirted any as they drove out. Storch saw a road sign indicating that they were on the 127, and that the town of Gunnison was three miles away. Another sign marked the boundary of the Blue Mesa Indian reservation. They turned onto another highway, the 135, headed north, towards Crested Butte and a long list of ski resorts.

Nobody seemed to care that he was watching their route. He knew they'd argued about it, but in the end none of them was dumb enough to try to blindfold him. They seemed evenly split between being more confident and more nervous as they got closer to home. He wondered how much headquarters knew about what they were bringing back. He watched the terrain roll by, touching his face every so often. Scratching his scalp, tracing the crook in his nose, over and over.

The van turned off the state road and meandered down a narrow valley with a plaque welcoming them to the Gunnison National Forest. They stopped twice to take down heavy chain barricades across the unpaved fire road. The snow outside was waist-deep. He saw them signal someone in the woods each time they got out, but it was still too dark to make anything out.

They could be hiding an army here. How big could the Mission be?

"We need to talk," Storch finally said. Nobody responded. He stood up and before anyone had reacted, he was right behind the masked Marine with his arm around the thick, stubby neck, and he said, "Stop."

The van bucked and lurched into the first stages of a front wheel stand, and everyone but Storch tumbled forward. A gun went off once, a back window exploded, but everyone checked out okay.

"What's up ahead?"

The obvious officer in the group bit his lip and looked thoughtful, while the others just stared. "You're expected," he said, in a soothing hostage negotiator's voice. "You know as much as we do, beyond that. Nobody wants trouble, but if you've come to start some, friend, you won't go away disappointed."

"My name is Sergeant Zane Ezekiel Storch, Fifth Special Forces Group. I served in the Gulf War."

"We know," another one put in. "We were detailed to kill you."

He looked hard at them, let go of the masked Marine. "I don't want trouble. I just want to know some things. You got a cellular phone?"

The brains shook his head. "They don't work here. We've got a CB."

"Use it. Tell your friends to behave. If I'm fucked with, you don't want to know what I'm capable of."
And neither do I.

The van crept higher and deeper into the forest, taking more forks than Storch could keep track of, within a few miles of the first turnoff. As dawn peaked over the Divide, they pulled up at a dead end abutting a huge palisade of snow.

Even with the thick winter coat, Storch could recognize the signs of a mining operation. The face of the mountainside before them was dynamited away to a sheer wall, and the shape of the palisade suggested it was made of the earthen tailings from a shaft. The agents backed away from the van to give themselves room as Storch stepped out. Fresh powder squeaked underfoot, and he sank in up to his knees. The agents waved him forward, but he stood his ground, and they finally started crab-walking sideways over the palisade. He followed them, eyes going in all directions until he thought he might be growing new ones.

He stopped at the top, looking back over his shoulder at the first rays of dawn through the warring clouds smeared across the horizon. How long had it been since he'd seen a sunrise? Not since RADIANT, at least.

The leader and the masked Marine stood on a concrete plug just inside the mouth of a condemned mine shaft. The vertical shaft had been filled in, he remembered they did this with some dangerous mines in Death Valley. The other two agents passed him, headed back to the truck.

Storch stopped. "We're all going down," he said.

"Somebody's got to move the truck," one of them answered, clambering back up the crumbling palisade. "We're exposed up here."

He didn't like having them at his back, but the leader beckoned to him, and he cautiously approached, looking around, taking in the crackle of melting ice in the trees, the rustle and reek of the agents' bodies in their stale clothes, the piercing purity of the frozen mountain air. He breathed in the gelid cold, exhaled clouds, let his fear wash out as the first faint tracers of daylight began to warm and feed him.
If I'm about to get killed for real this time
, he thought, feeling stupid but thinking it anyway,
thank you for this.

Storch stepped onto the concrete, and almost immediately, it began to sink into the shaft. The officer blandly played tour guide. "This was a silver mine, until it was condemned around 1930. It was renovated by the National Forestry Service in the sixties as part of a special project. But they abandoned it, too."

"What kind of project?"

"You'll see."

Storch guessed they'd descended about forty feet when the elevator jolted to a stop. Before them, a massive steel door was set a foot deep in the concrete, a placard at eye-level: NATIONAL FORESTRY SERVICE RESEARCH STATION NO.7. Looking up, Storch felt as if he were standing at the bottom of a missile silo. A hatch had closed over their heads when they went down the shaft, so there was only a cone of shadow, where he'd hoped to see some fleeting trace of the dawn.

He didn't need to watch the agents. He could feel them filling up the space around him. They vibrated with nervous tension, but didn't move. The officer said, "Before you go getting any stupid ideas, we're all expendable. You won't get a damned thing for us."

"We know how to fix your kind, now," the masked Marine added. "Fucking mutant."

"Shut up, Brewer," the officer said. To Storch, he said, without a trace of irony, "My name's Seybold, Roger Seybold. I used to—"

"I don't give a shit who you used to be," Storch growled, profoundly tired of head games, and
hungry
. He was starting to get hot again, starting to itch all over, and if he didn't eat something soon…

The steel door slid back into the wall and they shuffled into a cramped white-tiled airlock. Showerheads all over the ceiling, firehoses plugged into the walls. At knee-height, the walls swelled inward to form narrow benches, and the floor was ribbed with drain-grates. Another airlock door faced them, and through a window set into it, a wizened face peeked at them. The eyebrows, so thick and tangled, the eyes like brass buttons. The hair so unnaturally black it looked like vinyl, or licorice ropes, but Storch was perversely glad to see he had a lot less of it than the last time they'd met.

"Well I'll be damned," Dr. Wittrock said. "The missing link."

Storch planted his feet on the ribbed tile floor, locked his arms at his sides.

The outer door closed behind them, and Storch's ears popped again. Brewer's eyes got huge above his mask, his big arms wrapped tightly around himself. Seybold backed up into a corner, looking up warily at the showerheads.

Wittrock, watching them, licked his thin lips, seeing specimens. "You've caused us trouble, Sgt. Storch. I wonder if you've come to make amends, or wreak more havoc?"

Brewer was praying. Spittle soaked through his mask. Seybold sat on a bench and cradled his head in his hands.

"And I wonder if your operation could possibly have failed more decisively than it did, Roger. You're almost certainly infected, all of you. Why did you risk it? Whose side are you on?"

"Just do it, asshole!" Brewer roared. He charged the window and smashed it with his fist. Wittrock didn't flinch. Brewer's hand crackled, he let out a pain-maddened howl and kicked the door. "Burn us now! He's
one of them!
He fucking
ate
Coy, and stole his fucking face!"

Seybold ordered him to stand down, shoved him back into a bench. "I don't think we're infected with anything, Calvin."

The showerheads hissed and spat mist the color of Windex. Brewer roared, "Motherfucker!" and rolled up into a fetal ball on the bench. Seybold cringed, but seemed to accept his fate.

Storch stood tall under the chemical rain. It burned, cut runnels of searing agony where his skin was still scabbed over, which was damn near everywhere, but he refused to move a muscle. If it melted them all, so be it.

Wittrock watched.

After a long minute, Seybold stood up and made a bowl of his hands, splashed his face with the blue-green fluid. Brewer ripped his mask off and gasped for air. "It's just a fucking shower…"

The spray cut off. The drains gurgled and glubbed. Storch looked at his hands. The flesh, cracked and roughened, stained a mild blue where the cuts were deepest. Only a shower.

"Open the door," Storch said. "I just want some answers."

"And we have so many questions for you," Wittrock said, backing out of sight. A heartbeat later, the door opened.

There was nothing quite like the sound of snow falling in the mountains. To hear it, you had to stand utterly still, within and without, until every last molecule froze in its orbit, but the exercise instilled a tranquility so profound that Stella Orozco began to believe she'd reached escape velocity and left behind the dreadful tug of her old life forever. Standing alone out in the center of the open field in front of the medical center, Stella learned to hold her breath and her heart so still that she could eavesdrop on the uneasy sleep of the tectonic plates beneath her feet, and hear the stealthy turning of the earth itself.

In the winter morning, the rarified light of the sun struck the ice-bound air like a god's-hair bow on great, hydrogen strings. She heard music, a celestial whale-song that contained the roots of all the great symphonies, of all the songs that human beings had plucked out of the aether for their mysterious capacity to make the listener weep. Stella wept, herself, when all these sounds brought home to her how blind she'd been to life, and how blessed she was, now.