Ravenous Dusk (65 page)

They were both doing it now, repelling each other subconsciously, while something still deeper forced them to become one. The body wasn't just a blind engine of survival, but its changes hinged on animal levers in the brain that humans had buried beneath miles of conscious bullshit. She dug into the root-cellars of her brain as she tried to tell him to stop fighting her.

They wounded each other deeply, and each new wound became a new erogenous zone, a new site of penetration and infection. They rolled across the glade and blackened the grass with their heat.

Do you want this?
She asked herself. The instinctual core of her that lived beneath words howled YES, and she could not did not want to would not stop it. She ground herself against him. Her quilled cunt ravaged his abdomen and stung him with acid nectar. Threadlike strands of skin shot out of his neck and abdomen, like the pili with which the first bacteria exchanged genetic codes, and pricked her. They burned her wherever they touched, but they grew together with her skin, so that it hurt more to tear them out.

His arms enfolded her and lifted her up as if to throw her away, but she felt a third hand touch her between her splayed legs, pry them apart and explore her.

It felt like the head of a giant snail, a prehensile thrusting against her vagina, but she also felt delicate, boneless fingers teasing the tender petals of her labia and clit. The touch reverberated up through her to her brain and out the top of her head in golden waves. She moaned. She lowered her defenses.

Something squirmed inside her and the velvet tendrils retracted into his penis as she snapped at them. "Sorry," she managed. He hissed at her and dropped her on it.

She fought. With both hands holding her arms at her sides, he teased open her nether lips and entered her. It wasn't so terribly big as she'd feared, but inside her, it grew like kudzu, bifurcating and surrounding the head of her cervix. A nest of baby snakes writhed in her uterus. Lightning jolted through her in a delirious orgasm that stopped her heart and all brain activity as she bucked and ground against him in a clutch of
petit mal
seizures.

He grew into her, and through him, she grew into the roots of the forest and out into the net of life that covered the mountains and spread out in all directions to the sea and the bottom of the sea and into the most rarified strata of the sky and out into the deepest reaches of space, where the seed of races yet unborn slept in the eons-old ice of comets, endlessly roving cosmic sperm.

And in her blood, in her brain, she knew him chemically, tasting his memories as they flooded her bloodstream. She was born with him into a Spartan home with the Army chain of command for a family. His childhood was a blur of training, all warm memories clipped out to make room for soldiering. She saw his mother desert and his father go insane. She followed him into the Army, to his niche in the elite Rangers. She loved it with him as the home, the habitat, he had been seeking all his life. She killed three men in Panama City with him in Operation Just Cause, and threw up, but did not cry. Some people, he simply believed, just needed to be killed.

She suffered and struggled with him through the Special Forces Q Course, and listened to craggy Green Berets telling him to quit, he didn't have the brains to be anything more than a grunt. Soldier Ant, they called him. Cannon-fodder. She exulted with him when he shamed them into passing him. She followed him into the most overworked, danger-close unit in Special Forces. She went with him into Desert Storm, and the awful night-fight he only half-remembered for so many years. She was saved

and changed with him by 1st Lieutenant Brutus Dyson of Spike Team Texas, just as he would save and change her.

She retreated into the desert with him and was almost happy for a while, until soldiers fighting a secret war crashed into his life and burned it down. She ran with him from one trap to the next and got drafted into an army to fight against sick people. Strangest of all, she saw herself through his eyes—saw herself watching over him, saw him fear for her, saw him try to save her—

She became Keogh with him, the black ink of His echo choking her, as if He would come alive again inside her. Mercifully, he had blocked almost all of it out, so that it passed in a squall of needles and electrodes and rolling tape.

She was changed again with him, this time by a bullet. She died with him and came back in a new body made of cancer. She hated Keogh with him, a hate that answered all his questions, soothed all his doubts. But most of all, she hated the lies he was being told about God and the world and the human race. She hated the egghead scientists who had planted the ideas in his head, the crowning blasphemy that, of all the atrocities heaped upon him, he could not accept. They told him that aliens spilled a test tube and made all life on earth as an accident or joke, and Keogh was something from Outside, pulling the strings of the Universe, usurping evolution to become God. If they were right, they more than killed God: they rationalized Keogh as the logical next step in a runaway experiment set into motion by a dead race.

Then it was as if every atom in her body suddenly reversed polarity, and she shorted out.

When she came to, she was on her back, and he held himself above her. He was still inside her, but poised in perfect stillness. He grimaced, fought for speech. "You're burning me—"

Acid dripped from her, raising ugly white welts on his inner thighs and belly. His cock was in her to the hilt, burning him, but he didn't move.

"I haven't moved yet," he said. "Do you want this?"

She thought a moment. She still tingled from the initial thrust, but she craved him so much she changed her acidity, withdrew the teeth, and made herself deeper for him.

"Maybe this is what life is for," she said.

"What–" He struggled to say more, but words came out in quavering, hushed breaths, as he battled to hold himself still inside her.

"A chicken is an egg's scheme for making more eggs," she said. He moved.

Gone again when she woke up. The trees leaned in over her like bystanders at a hit and run accident. She burned, she glowed, she still felt him inside her, moving.

A pile of olive drab plastic pouches lay beside her. MEAL-READY TO EAT, it said on the front of each, and included an unflattering clinical checklist of the contents.

A flash of anger blew out before it got going when she saw it for the empty reflex it was. What more did he owe her? She had seen deep enough inside him to know that he knew no more than she did, and believed even less of what Keogh had shown him.

She ate four of the MRE's without reading them, but on the fifth, beef stroganoff with creamed corn and raspberry compote, she shook with a sudden wave of nausea that told her to stop. She chewed pine needles, savoring the trees' ancestral forms behind the bitter tang and stinging sharpness, so much more
edifying
than the processed machine-shit in the pouches. Sap ran in her veins. She knew, now, how to grow roots, and to make her own food in the sun with chlorophyll.

She squatted at the base of the largest tree and watered it, wondering idly if she was killing it, or if it would start to look like her.

She shook the branches of a dripping pine and showered in the chill dew. The livid blotches from where he touched her washed away, but there were too many bruises, lacerations shaped like his teeth, for her to count.
You should see the other guy,
she thought, and laughed.

Their clothes were shredded, scattered across the glade and crushed into the muddy soil, and she saw no fresh ones laid out anywhere. He must've walked out of here naked, expecting her to wait here for him. Since the cameras overhead in the lightening canopy could see her anyway, she decided she had little left to lose.

She went out looking for him, dressed only in her skin. Outside the biosphere, the air was stale and sterile, dry and recycled, like the interior of an airliner at the end of a transatlantic flight. The outer airlock opened and soldiers in gasmasks backed away from her with their rifles up, but they let her pass.

It was a remarkable discovery for her that her nakedness was somebody else's problem. They wouldn't look directly at her so long as she just kept walking with her head high. She had never thought of herself as worthy of ogling, but neither was there anything in her anatomy or the way she carried it that would cause men to avert their eyes. Then she caught a glimpse of herself in a reflective pane of the canopy. Knots of scar tissue ran down her back, a jigsaw puzzle of skin and scales and feathers. One of her breasts was missing, and ruddy, ragged planes of muscle peered through the gaping crater. Black iridescent bubbles of protoplasm congealed around the edges of the wound, growing her a new one. Stiletto spurs of bone grew from her ankles like dewclaws, clicking on the white tiled floor.

She arched her back and walked a little taller. She had never felt quite so good about herself.

She wandered the spiraling corridor that encircled the biosphere, taking stairs and upward-slanted passages until she found the quarantine lab, but Storch wasn't there. Dr. Barrow was. He worked at a computer with two assistants, who rotated trays of specimen vials under a robotic injector arm.

The soldiers came in behind her, flanking the exit and drawing down on her. "Dr. Barrow, heads up!" one shouted, then, at her, "Stand down, bitch! We're packing the Nasty Green Shit…"

Barrow looked up and said, "Get the hell out of here, all of you." When he saw her, he ran for the far exit. "He's not here! He's with the soldiers—"

"I want to talk to you. I don't want to eat you, anymore."

He peered around, above, below, her, hyperventilating.

"What, never seen a naked meta-Shoggoth before?"

He shooed away the assistants. The soldiers refused to clear out until he showed them the weapon on his desk, but he dropped it as soon as the door hissed shut behind them.

He sat back down at the workstation. One skinny hand, looking like a shaven bird spider, gestured towards the first aid lockers in one corner. "Clothes in there."

More for his sake than her own, she fetched a suit of scrubs and slipped into them. One of her spurs tore the seat out of the pants as she clumsily stepped into them, but she took more care with the next pair.

His eyes skidded off her as she walked up to him, and she knew he'd been watching them. "That's what you call us, isn't it?" she asked. "What does it mean?"

Barrow made some meaningless adjustments to the molecular model on the screen. "You should…he doesn't want me to tell you."

"But you want to, and I want to know."

"He thinks I'm wrong. They all do. He was there, and he doesn't believe it."

"He thinks you're all crazy. Everybody he's talked to here has their own line of shit to sell."

"I know there's no other explanation than what I told him. I—I took blood from him while he slept when he was here before. The cells I incubated used the agar substrate to grow a self-sufficient multi-celled colony. It was trying to grow into a new Storch. His DNA—and yours as well, if you underwent the same conditioning—is free of the third strand, but it moves so fast you can barely see it. It's turned inside-out, with all sorts of activity centering on the introns—junk DNA that we now believe is some kind of master switch for the rate of adaptation. It's synthesizing RNA off its genes constantly, and spinning off proteins human beings— and every other living thing—just don't make. It builds structures—"

Stella cut him off impatiently. "Why him? Why is he different?"

"That's been the focus of our research. We know Storch was at an Iraqi chemical weapons installation called Tiamat in the Gulf War. Whatever happened there, he was exposed to chemical agents—"

"He was exposed to Spike Team Texas."

"Oh," Barrow said. His face worked twitchily after something at the edge of his memory. "They were the first surviving guinea pigs of the RADIANT test in '84. They were exposed to the raw radiation, before Keogh had programmed it with his own DNA templates. If Storch was infected by them, then he might have developed a kind of cancer."

"Tell me about the Old Ones."

He looked up at her, homing in on her eyes as the only part of her that was recognizably human. "How much do you know?"

I read it in his head. I know it scares him to death.
"I don't know shit, that's why I'm asking."

"It's hard for some people to accept—"

"All of it's hard to accept. It always has been. Storch says you think flying saucers played God and made everybody, and that Keogh is a saucer-man."

"No, that's not it at all. A Shoggoth—they're not aliens. They're the lost trunk of the tree of life. Life did evolve on earth, but it hadn't got past the single-celled stage when the Old Ones arrived. They introduced new traits that accelerated evolution by way of scalar-wave radiation projectors—like RADIANT—and self-replicating RNA messengers which could transmit desirable mutations. These, too, got out of the lab, and are still with us, but they don't work like they used to."

Viruses, Stella thought. He was talking about viruses.

"The Old Ones used the single-celled proto-life they found in the stagnant shallows of the earth's oceans as raw material to synthesize life complex enough to serve them. Their greatest success was a multicelled organism that retained an amoeba's plasticity. Some race that came after, but pre-dated humans, called them Shoggoths. They served the Old Ones for six hundred million years, mutating and adapting like self-improving machines. One day, they invented brains, and decided to stop being slaves.

"Once one of them developed the mutation, it spread through the population like a disease, infecting even the protoplasmic stock from which Shoggoths were synthesized. Shoggoths were highly adaptive, but they had only attained rudimentary sentience. If the Old Ones hadn't become so dependent on their slaves, the rebellion wouldn't have had any effect at all. They almost won, but after thousands of years, the Old Ones' bioweaponry killed them off. The Old Ones died out soon after, but they still experimented with life, trying to control the flow of mutation in controlled environments, and introducing their modified creations into the wild as slaves or feeding stock. The futile experiments ground on long after they passed away, and continue still.