Ravenous Dusk (47 page)

He dealt with voices like that all the time in his work, but when he heard such bile from people with property, with means of self-support, with all the benefits of living in a well-ordered democracy, it made him sick to his stomach. Who else, if not the decent, taxpaying citizens, was he out here trying to protect?

He thought of the Cave Institute. He had examined their claims long and hard, and come to believe, to know, that without them, mankind would have destroyed itself before civilization ever became worthy of the name. They were the invisible hand on the tiller of the otherwise hell-bound ship of state, but even their benevolent stewardship could be construed by paranoid fantasists as a kind of tyranny, and make their lies and fever-dreams a little more real. He wondered, himself, who they were really trying to protect, and how many sides there really were.

He saw something else, just then, that he hadn't noticed on the way up, which surprised him, because Karl Schweinfurter had told him about it. At the time, it hadn't seemed to matter enough, but now, it could tell him something when he had less than nothing.

The Heilige Berg slaughterhouse adjoined their acreage in the valley. It was a two story wood and cinderblock structure like an elongated barn, with a maze of corrals and chutes enfolding it on two sides, and a loading dock with a row of parked trucks on the third. The corrals held only untrampled snow. It was probably customary to butcher most of the herd before winter, but there would still be plenty of dairy cattle, and he'd seen herds toughing out the cold in other fields in the area. Schweinfurter had said he'd seen the trucks going day and night when he was there last, so they might've slaughtered the whole herd, but he'd also said the meat was all kept in coolers in the slaughterhouse until it went to a wholesaler in Grangeville. Why were the trucks going up to Heilige Berg, then?

He stood in the shelter of a wood shed at the edge of the property for a long time, looking at the weather-scarred slaughterhouse. A search of the building should be conducted by a SWAT team, and perhaps a bomb squad, with dogs and body armor and at least a gun or two between them. An unarmed Bureau agent without so much as a telephone or a car, who had already been beaten and shot at—wounded, he remembered, seeing and feeling his hand again—would do well to walk directly to the sheriff's station.

But there was Hoecker's order.
Bear witness—

He crossed the snow to the nearest human-sized entrance to the stockhouse. A Master lock hung open from the latch. He removed it, pocketed it and peeked inside.

The interior was dark, the air warm and close and ripe with the coppery scent of blood and the funk of animals, but Cundieffe wrinkled his nose in puzzlement. It didn't smell like cattle. It was strong enough, but there was no musky, not-unpleasant aroma of manure. There was also no sound.

Now would be the time to announce himself as an FBI agent and demand that any parties within declare themselves and come out with their hands up. Now would be the time to have a gun and some back-up. The two arguments neatly nullified each other.

Cundieffe gingerly walked into the dark with his hands out, and gave a meep of pain when his right hand hit a post. Fumbling down it, he found a light switch and flipped it.

Rows of bare-bulb lights fluttered and came aglow in sour yellow patches of a vast, cavernous space, the juice traveling like a rumor to the back of the room, which must be half the length of the slaughterhouse. Ramps led up to a hayloft, and several doors and chutes on the far wall led deeper into the building. There were no cattle, but the killing floor was furnished from wall to wall in cots.

Cundieffe walked around and then through the ranked Army-surplus cots, so like the orderly human corral of a disaster relief center. He counted three hundred cots, each with a scratchy wool blanket neatly folded on the foot. Hoses and less self-explanatory slaughtering machinery dangled from the rafters and lay in neat stacks on shelves along the north wall. Polished steel glistened, hoses dripped.

He wandered from one row of cots to the next, peering under cots. The floor was scabbed with recent blood almost everywhere, but there was nothing else, which struck him as stranger than people not minding sleeping in a slaughterhouse. There was nothing else on the floor. Even in a military barracks, a person left traces of his occupancy—a comb, a discarded magazine or a paper cup, graffiti. Heilige Berg was mostly young boys, but also included many whole families, regular people, despite their hateful religion and crash-course survivalism. People left trash, forgot things, made messes, carved their initials, left an unpleasant odor. He found hairs on the cots when he peered very closely, and a few scuff-marks and traces of dirt and damp where boots had left their marks.

Who didn't take their boots off when they went to sleep? Bodies slept here, but not people.

In the last thirty-six hours, they evacuated the compound and took shelter here. They took nothing, left nothing, forgot nothing. As tight as Delta Force commandos, as disciplined as Benedictine monks, they butchered the herd while the rest slept in the same room. In their boots. Then, just before dawn, they boarded charter buses and vanished. As incredible as Schweinfurter's story had been, he had refused to accept that his people would voluntarily leave the compound. They were different, now, he'd insisted, but nothing could make Grossvater Egil lead the community off the mountain. He had a prophecy to wait with them until Gotterdammerung, and the Ragnarok of the Races—

They left nothing behind, and no one. They left the door unlocked. Abandoned their faith, and left in the most orderly evacuation imaginable. It was a puzzle.

Crossing to the far wall, he found the door nearest the northeast corner of the room standing ajar, and a darksome flight of stone steps descending into a basement. Feeling for a light switch, he found none until he reached the bottom. His shin barked something and he tripped over a wooden crate and fell into more of them, scraping and bruising the few patches of tissue on his limbs that were not already contused. His hands came up to soften his fall, but skin snagged on nails, arms sank into jagged gaps between boxes and a morass of packing foam.

He fought his way back to his feet and, biting his lip in a vain attempt to keep from cursing again today, found the switch. It was an old-fashioned button, like a doorbell, and he heard a crack and smelled ozone when the circuit closed. He had a moment to swallow the certainty that the Heilige Bergers had left the door unlocked in a lame attempt to lure a few stupid baby-killer fed thugs into an explosive trap. The light was weaker and scummier than upstairs, and it took Cundieffe a few minutes for his eyes to adjust.

The crates filled the basement waist-high to the dim suggestion of a far wall, making the chambers beyond inaccessible. Stenciled on the sides:
Idaho Army National Guard Armory
on some, Cyrillic characters and VORSICHT! EXPLOSIV on others. All the crates appeared to be empty.

They did not leave empty-handed, after all. They didn't take their cache intact, but broke it out and left in haste, as if going off to war.

He felt dizzy, sat down hard on a crate. Nobody in White Bird said anything about the Heilige Bergers leaving heavily laden with rifles, explosives and mortars. Even Sheriff Manes' trio of dullard deputies could not have missed such a detail.

He should hurry to alert the Bureau and the state police about this new development. If the Heilige Berg community had been somehow biologically co-opted by Radiant Dawn, they were armed and on the loose somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, and the agents who followed them might be caught unawares and killed.

He shuddered. It made no sense for them to leave. What he saw here was baffling and mildly unnatural, but it told him that Heilige Berg was taking up arms, whether to defend Radiant Dawn or their own homes he couldn't guess, but they were here, he knew it.

Then who left in all those buses?

He stood up so fast he didn't notice a nail tearing the seat out of his slacks.

Dr. Keogh gathered his patients out in the remotest possible locations to expose them to RADIANT, which killed healthy tissue, but stimulated some new and improved version to grow out of malignant cells.

But to absorb the white separatists, they would have to have had cancer, all of them. Schweinfurter verified Hoecker's original tip that Heilige Berg fell prey to an epidemic, and that when he was brought back from his Dairy Queen ordeal, they were mysteriously cured. The boy himself was undoubtedly sick, perhaps dying, if he didn't get to a hospital and into immediate cancer treatment. Because he missed his chance to be cured, missed RADIANT.

He hoped that Macy and Mentone could at least be counted on to take care of the boy. When all this was over, whatever this was, he knew that the boy would be the only willing witness, the only evidence that strung this web of impossibilities together.

There were still so many questions, though, that he couldn't bring himself to tell a soul what he believed. How did Dr. Keogh make Heilige Berg sick enough fast enough for them to survive the change? And what was the change? He thought again of Sgt. Storch, sitting there impassively, while deep in his glassy eyes, something flailed at chains that kept it down inside. He saw Storch walking dumb as his ruptured head melted. He saw a man running down the mountain alongside his racing car, shooting his phone out of the space his head had been in only a split-second earlier.

The more he thought he knew, the more afraid he was of believing in it. No sane man could hope to fold such things into his vision of the world, but he was not a man. He was a Mule. Nature's own new and improved human, selected for the ability to face the unacceptable so that the species as a whole would not perish. If he and his kind could not restore order and protect the populace from the truth, then perhaps the human race deserved to step aside and make way for its successors.

Trembling, he climbed the stairs and was crossing the killing floor when he heard a noise like plumbing backing up throughout the slaughterhouse. He felt the gurgling groan in the soles of his feet, saw the cots vibrate as the sound grew and became a thrumming, throbbing pulse, as if the slaughterhouse was a living thing revitalized with its abandonment, and its heart had begun to beat.

He shook his head as if to shoo away a fly. Such lurid thoughts were grotesque, unworthy and unproductive. He was under a little stress, but it was no excuse for letting his imagination run away with him. But what in heaven's name was that sound?

The vibrations subsided, but a growling subharmonic rose and shook the walls. It came from deep in the slaughterhouse. It grew louder exponentially as Cundieffe approached it. He opened a heavy, double-wide refrigerator door, and the sound, and the smell, knocked him back ten feet.

It was as if the refrigerator had broken down, and later flooded with raw sewage from a burst pipe. The sound was a voice.

Cundieffe wrapped his scarf tightly around his mouth and nose, but he could still taste it like a film congealing on his tongue, and his eyes began to burn as he stepped inside.

A wide corridor surfaced in quilted aluminum panels led into a huge bank of walk-in fridges and freezers. The corridor itself was not refrigerated, but Cundieffe shivered.

He saw daylight. Around a corner, a train-wreck, minus the train, the corridor wall and the exterior wall beyond that breached by elliptical holes ten feet across. Dishwater-colored daylight filtered into the dark, painting harsher shadows outside their feeble corona. Outside, the corrals. Fences trampled by the same herd of rogue elephants. Snow and shreds of debris tracked across fractured, filth-smeared concrete in a vast swath back of the end of the corridor, where a refrigerator door hung open at an askew angle.

So stunned was he by the baffling destruction, that he was painfully slow in turning to look at the source of it, as well as the sounds and the smell. He turned with his eyes closed, and only opened them when he felt something wet and massive sweep the air before his face, and heard the voice again, bubbling up as if from the bowels of a tar pit choked with decaying carcasses.

"Say, buddy," said the unspeakable voice, "Can you help out a Vietnam veteran?"

Against all common sense, against the screaming gravity of his primal nervous system, Cundieffe moved closer. Slitting his eyes, he walked into the warm, wet wind that streamed past him out of the occupied fridge. He stopped ten feet away from the doorway and peered more avidly than he intended into the dark until his eyes began to readjust.

Something filled the refrigerator from wall to wall, from the floor to the rows of hooks on tracks from which meat once hung. How far back the compartment went, he had no idea, but it was full of quivering, wheezing life.

Light glinted on mounds of excrement on the floor that reminded Cundieffe of owl droppings—tightly compacted, desiccated nuggets of bone and hair and sinew, the only indigestible elements of an entire mouse or mole, reduced to an almost mineral state by an exquisitely efficient digestive system. By the size and rough composition of the excreta before him, Cundieffe could not but conclude that each of the mounds had once been a whole beef cow. The Heilige Berg militia, or whoever they were now, had not butchered the cattle, but merely slaughtered and placed them in cold storage, so this thing had come through the wall and eaten them whole.

With a ghastly plosive noise and a monstrous gust of gaseous by-product, a fresh one was ejected by a mammoth sphincter and slid across the slime-slick floor to stop at Cundieffe's unsteady feet. He felt the floor, and the earth's crust beneath it, groan at the unbearable burden of the glutton. The thing almost exerted its own gravitational field, for it drew Cundieffe still nearer, though he felt as if any moment, it would sink into the molten mantle at the earth's core, and drag him, and the rest of Idaho, in after it.