Ravenous Dusk (48 page)

A wall of smooth flesh like a colossal bowel blocked the doorway, its only discernible feature the many, many, busy sphincters, but as he watched, new features began to percolate and reach out of the mass.

Cundieffe trembled before the enormity, the obscenity, the impossibility of what he saw. In a day, he had seen a man that he had concluded must have been many men, for what man could have done what he did? Now, he shook as he had not then, for he had no choice but to accept it, for this thing, too, was some kind of a man.

Out of the sea of fat and assholes came a knurled knob of boneless tissue, dwarfed by the awesome size of its body, but growing larger all the time and wrinkling with contours of a fetal human face. Eyes, beady and black and twinkling with avid, greedy joy, popped open like time-lapse blisters all over the overripe flesh, and a mouth brimming with boneridged tongues and syringes and teeth teeth TEETH yawned and smiled at him. "I seem to be stuck," the mouth moaned.

"What—who—who are you?" Cundieffe choked. He started to take a step backwards, but his foot got no traction, and he braced himself against the wall to keep from falling down in the mess.

"Specialist Four Gibson Holroyd, One-Two, Operational Detachment Alpha-Texas, MACV/SOG, at your service, scrawny morsel."

"D-d-did you eat the whole herd?" He honestly didn't know what else to say.

"You fucking kidding me? They got something like two hundred head in these lockers. Only about forty of 'em in here, but like I said, I seem to be inextricably incarcerated by my own gustative excess. So if you wouldn't mind lending a hand—"

Still afraid to take a step, paralyzed by those black eyes, Cundieffe found himself reaching out to the insatiable blob, when a tongue of sorts slithered up out of the mouth and reached out to him. He dove backwards, pivoting and trying to run, but his feet only splashed in the filth and betrayed him. He heard the air snap above his head as the tongue whipped past like the deadly adhesive flycatcher of a gargantuan toad.

He screamed, flailing his legs and windmilling his arms as he went down on the floor, sailed out of the blob's reach on a carpet of effluvium. His stomach revolted then, hot vomit hitting his palate and fouling the scarf over his mouth. He swam in shit trying to get to his feet. He heard more tongues coming for him. The blob hollered after him, but with so many writhing tongues, its words were gibberish.

Cundieffe scrambled to the edge of the puddle on his hands and knees, but when he hit firm floor, he raced out through the holes in the wall and rolled in the snow. Hot tears stung his eyes and his nose ran freely, but it flushed the vile residue of the thing that called itself a man. He shed his filthy topcoat, tore off the scarf and used the unsoiled portions of it to wipe the filth off his skin. It burned.

Slowly, breath by freezing breath, he regained his composure. Never mind that it is impossible. It
is
. And if he got help, the thing would be gone, tearing the whole slaughterhouse off its foundations, and running amok across the Idaho countryside. The abomination had to be destroyed. Now.

He went back to the cellar to find a weapon.

He rummaged among the empty crates for an unguessable time, tearing up his crabbed, cramped hands on nails and splintered pine before he found something he thought he could use at the back of the pile. It was a Fabrique Nationale belt-fed M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, with two hundred rounds of 5.56mm ammunition coiled in a handy, though heavy, plastic box. After puzzling over the instructions, which were in French, he lugged the bullets and the "light" machine gun up the stairs separately and set them up outside the outer door to the refrigerated compartments.

His fingers shook as he tried to set the end of the belt into the feeder mechanism in the breech, like the unhurried Belgian stick figure in the diagrams. Inside, he could hear the blob's unholy plumbing wringing out more beef by-products, and the tongue-tied bellowing of the mouth, which had now become a caterwauling chorus.

He set the SAW up on its bipod on a steel utility cart from the killing floor, checked the ammunition and, after almost tipping the whole works over on the raised threshold, wheeled it into the corridor.

"Where you been, college boy?" The blob roared. The sphincters took up the cry, and the blob shifted. Cundieffe heard the reinforced walls of the meat locker straining, saw dust sprinkle down from the ceiling.

"Do you work for Dr. Keogh, or are you a member of the Heilige Berg separatist settlement?" Cundieffe asked in a flat monotone. It helped if he just looked down at the big black machine gun before him, taking comfort in its death-dealing power, and tried to persuade himself that he was just interrogating a prisoner.

"I'm all alone," the mouth managed. The tongues kept a low profile, slinking across the floor, snaking among the hills of digested cattle towards the machine gun. "I'm a species unto myself, an army of one."

Cundieffe watched them uneasily. He looked back at the gun. "I order you to…to remain still, or I shall be forced to resort to deadly force. Now, what happened here?"

"Big fuckin' surprise–for everybody. That old motherfucker's no dick-swingin' white man, I tell you what, he's an ink-drinkin' stink-beetle, he's… full of surprises."

"Is he–is Keogh–still up on the mountain?"

"What'd I tell you? They're all gone. Empty house, just bait… But I'm full of surprises, too."

"Are you, now?"

"Oh yeah, morsel. Gonna be an army! Army of 'Royds! C'mere, morsel…"

The tongues reared up and Cundieffe recoiled away from the gun, because he hadn't seen them coming, never saw so many get so close. They grabbed for the cart just as Cundieffe regained himself and lunged for the trigger. He gripped the stock with his left hand and slipped his finger into the guard. A lashing tongue blurred up and wrapped around his arm. Pain opened up his arm and made it spasm, and jerking it back, he squeezed the trigger in a death-grip. The gun bucked and barked. Sparks flew and lead sang in the corridor, the path of fire arcing crazily around the doorway, ricocheting bullets describing Catherine wheels of light on his bulging eyeballs.

It screamed, like a stadium filled with dying damned souls. The tongues recoiled. Bony radulae along the slimy tip of the one holding his arm sheared away the skin of his forearm with his shirtsleeve. The pain drove Cundieffe forward. He leaned over the gun and played it back and forth on the avalanche of noisome offal as it curled in on itself and tried in vain to present a smaller target.

Tentacles and bulging, muscle-ripped arms burst out of the mass, wrapping around the doorway and the unhinged door, trying to draw it shut. Clubs studded with bony baling hooks shot out and scythed the air. Rivets popped and walls buckled. A rafter beam splintered and fell.

Cundieffe bore down on the blob, grouping the stream of fire into the roaring mouth. Tentacles severed and danced like blind, pain-mad cobras. The huge jaw gobbled and gaped until the bullets obliterated it and punched deeper. The cart jostled and jumped to the relentless cadence of the machine gun and Cundieffe, confident at last that he was making a difference, rolled it forward, pushing aside excreta to drill the target more mercilessly, to separate every atom of it from every other atom until it was just so much inert slush, because such things should simply not be.

When the SAW ran out of bullets, he was within arm's reach of the thing. It seemed to notice the shift in events before he did, and tattered but intact tentacles swept the gun and the cart out of the way and reached for him as if he'd been hurling nothing but harsh language at it all along.

"Ain't you just supposed to arrest me?" it bawled.

"Aren't you supposed to die?" he shot back, and giggled, because it was a pretty clever comeback, given the dire circumstances. He giggled some more, because now he was even shakier, and bells were ringing again, and the choking cordite odor of the gunfire was already giving way to the stench, now redoubled, with its more intimate chambers opened to the air.

He staggered back the way he'd come, out across the killing floor, back to the cellar.

Impossible? Surely not. He just needed something bigger.

He found it at the bottom of the pile, among similar boxes with, of all things, Israeli stamps and customs decals on them. The instructions were entirely in diagrams and numbers, which could show a kindergartener how to load and deploy the weapon. Very clearly it showed that one must be at least five hundred feet from the target for the missile to arm, and that one must be extremely careful about the back-blast which erupts from the rear of the weapon. He looked askance at the ordnance, which had a series of colorful but unfamiliar warning symbols on them, along with some comforting words in English: ARMOR-PIERCING SABOT RPG ROUND, 1. WARNING! DO NOT MANUALLY DISARM. CONTAINS DEPLETED URANIUM. Then he fitted it into the launch tube and went back to the meat locker.

"Hey, what you got there, college boy?" the blob gobbled, and when it saw the RPG on Cundieffe's shoulder, it flapped its million jowls approvingly. "That ought to do the trick. Fire away."

Cundieffe ran out through the hole again, paced out two hundred steps from the outer wall, keeping the stygian darkness of the occupied meat locker in view as he crossed the field and braced himself against a fence post.

"Shoot straight, college boy! Ah'm comin' for you!"

He clenched the trigger. The RPG round took off with a blinding cloud of flame and gas. The opposing forces drove him back and forth at the same time, and he swooned and collapsed in the snow, one eye on the rocket as it lanced the space he'd paced in a blink and disappeared into the dark interior.

"AAAAAAHHHHWOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

He thought he heard a devastating whump, like a punch in God's breadbasket, or a ball the size of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs hitting the sweet spot of a cosmic baseball glove. Then the shadows and stench and unholy howling burned up in a miniature nova.

The outer wall bubbled and blew away, the second story floor and roof tumbling into the gap. The whole slaughterhouse seemed to flex out, then fold in around the explosion, even as the shockwave leveled the walls of the fridge compartments and whirled them away in a split-second cyclone of uranium-impregnated shrapnel. A string of powerful secondary explosions, like the burning of an ammo dump, rocked the ruins as vast pockets of flammable methane trapped in Holroyd's intestinal tract ignited.

The bells would never, ever, ever stop ringing.

Cundieffe got to his feet and dropped the RPG. He shuffled back across the field, jaw on his chest, overwhelmed by what he had wrought. The entire building was gutted, timbers raining down and spilling bales of hay and drifts of roof-bound snow continuously. Here and there, little fires sprang up and began to gorge themselves on the dry hay bales. Where the meat locker had been, there was only a crater lined with unrecognizable gobbets of meat and dinosaur-sized bone. Cundieffe marveled. He'd done it. Now, no one would have to suffer the sanity-shaking obscenity of this unspeakable aberration. He understood, then, for a moment, the joy and pride that the Mules took in even dirty, convoluted operations like this. That the world would never have to know, and could go on living its billions of sane little lives, was the highest reward for duty well done.

He shivered. His clothes were soaked through with sweat and less familiar fluids, and he was injured in more places than he could count. Best to go to the road and hope for someone better disposed towards the federal government than the man whose fence he'd crashed through to pick him up and take him back to town. This place would have to be closed off and investigated thoroughly, and the mercenaries on the mountain would have to be stood down, even if it came to an armed confrontation. The mountain was a trap that Radiant Dawn, and God knew who else, if not the Mules themselves, had laid for the Mission.

Something stirred in the crater.

Cundieffe tumbled over debris, hauled himself to his feet and took a good look.

Inside, the crater stirred like a cauldron as the charred, liquefied mess began to congeal and make itself into a body again. A shattered wall tumbled, and a large chunk of the blob lumbered out into the light. It was more or less humanoid from the waist down, though there were too many legs by far. From the trunk sprouted a mad garden of organs and limbs, human and bovine and worse–rolling eyes, lactating udders, horns, hands, claws, flapping dewlaps, Brobdingnagian penises and cavernous vaginas, decentralized colonies of brain and nerves, fanged anuses and every conceivable variety of mouth dripping septic saliva. Smoking and sizzling, the burned, bomb-flayed thing rose and came at Cundieffe. More wreckage stirred, and more smashed jigsaw abortions stumbled from cover and approached.

"College-boy," hissed the army of 'Royds.

Cundieffe ran around the collapsing slaughterhouse to the shed where he left his briefcase. He got his Thermos and rinsed out the dregs of clam chowder. In the shed, he found a road flare and a full gas can, then ran back to the meat locker.

The army was growing, the pieces growing more useful limbs and eyes and mouths. No one looked like another, but it was harder to tell that they were pieces of a whole. Holroyd had achieved his goal. He had become a small army.

Cundieffe crept as near as he dared to the crater and lit the road flare. Brandishing it against the circling things, he dipped the open mouth of the Thermos in the molten flesh in the crater. He fastened the lid and backed away, waving the road flare ineffectually at them. At the edge of the foundation, he knelt and screwed the flare into the snow, unscrewed the cap of the gas can, and skulked back to the crater. He baptized the abortions with gas, lavished it on the flattened walls and the still-standing façade, ran screaming and giggling around the whole building until the can was empty, and he came back around to the flare. One of the things shuffled out of the building and into the light, a wriggling mass of brain and intestines teetering on bandy, road-runner legs. Cundieffe touched the flare to it, and it went up like a scarecrow. He threw the flare into the crater and ran.