Ravenous Dusk (88 page)

The changes came faster and more fiercely than ever before, but he didn't fight it, and so it didn't hurt. The changes came not from the library of his ancestors' genes, but from wholly new proteins, working to fulfill a design unimaginable to Nature, let alone Storch himself. He had only to demand, and his body shaped itself.

While he'd been floating in the ocean, his broken body had grown an enormous mantle of hollow skin from his back and arms, a giant membranous net with which to gather plankton and sunlight and schools of tiny browsing fish. Mercifully, he had never attracted any sharks.

Now the net's gaping open mouth sealed, and his cells went to work on the water, pulling apart the molecules and absorbing or venting the oxygen and brine, so that over hours, the net became a bulbous, buoyant hump that tugged him to the surface as it grew ever larger. The hump became a hydrogen balloon. Slowly, gracefully, it lifted him out of the water and onto the wind.

He rose fitfully on the choppy surface breezes, further purifying and gently exciting the hydrogen mix so that the air currents buffeted him ever higher, ever faster. The
Hindenburg
was full of hydrogen, he thought, but it happened anyway.

Even as he rose, his body burned with further changes. His skin hardened against the chilling altitude. The membranes anchoring his arms to the underside of the balloon sac lengthened to reach to his feet and stiffened into elongated, trailing wings like those of a flying squirrel. The nose of the balloon hardened into a prow of skeletal muscle around intake ports, and valves closed the interior into discrete chambers like the nacelles of a dirigible.

He wondered if some part of his brain, some neglected agent in the floor of his animal self, was not directing his transformation, perhaps even using one of Buggs' more perverse fantasies as a blueprint, or whether it was only the blind force of the idiot god that spawned them all, scrambling his genes. There was in the design some trace of squid and octopi, of jellyfish and manta rays, but their marine structures had been brilliantly subverted to make him fly. Best not to dwell on such questions, he decided. The barrier between body and mind had been murky enough before he woke up this morning.

He rose higher, up to the rarified ceiling of the troposphere, where the jet stream roared west towards Indonesia and Asia at upwards of three hundred miles per hour. At about thirty thousand feet, the balloon flattened and expelled all the hydrogen in a single, convulsive burst that left him sitting on the rushing wind for a moment, and then, again, he began to fall into the Pacific Ocean.

When he reached terminal velocity, the wind trying its level best to skin him alive, the intake ports on his back gasped and the balloon filled with the roaring air. The complex mechanism of bone and muscle fed the air into a nacelle where his body heat cooked it, then expelled it violently out of a ventral cloaca. The balloon became a giant organic jet, a soaring manta ray of the upper atmosphere, with a tiny human body clinging, remora-like, to its underbelly. He fell faster than terminal velocity, faster than sound. He threw his arms out, the membranous wings belling against the pummeling wind. It felt like belly-flopping on concrete, but he leveled off and, greedily sucking in the jet stream, steered west.

You know now where you must go, and what you must do
, Armitage's fading mental voice brushed his brain.

"I know where to go," Storch roared. Though the wind forced his words back down his throat, he felt the unghost shrink away from the heat of his reply. "Now, get the fuck out of my head."

He greeted the sunrise with the oath, as he had every day of his life since the Change. Funny how the words tasted exactly like shit in his mouth, now he was the only one left.

An anvil-shaped island of bruise-colored clouds hovered overhead, but five miles out in any direction, the sky was empty but for dust the muddy, bloody red of pomegranate guts. The clouds above never gave rain, never quite dispersed, and they never, ever moved. It was the one place on the earth God could not, from the look of things, abide the sight of.

The place had changed very little since the last time Dyson had been here, nine years ago. Sand, rocks, rag-heads, and the hole in the ground, the cunt of the world, which they had come to rape.

From his burrow on a ledge overlooking the pit from the south, he could see Keogh's entire operation—Saddam's operation, really, but only in name, which was all the goat-fucking clown really cared about, anyway. In return for his vast technological largesse, Keogh had received two skeletal companies of Republican Guards, barely a hundred fifty men, known as the Marduk Division. Most Iraqi soldiers were scared of their commander, the enemy, their comrades, and their own shadows, but these were blooded vets, most of whom had at least been around to run like cowards out of Kuwait. They occupied a compact tent city fringed with antiaircraft emplacements and tank hides, across a no-man's-land from Keogh's encampment and the motor pool. They were not scared of much, but even from this distance, he could tell how scared they were of the civilians, how scared they were of this place. Their whole perimeter was wrapped in razor wire, and some of the soldiers snuck out at night to bury mines around their barracks, but the dumb motherfuckers never briefed each other on the placement, and they were forever blowing each other up.

A night shift of Keoghs came up the dirt ramp that encircled the wall of the pit, silently passing the incoming day shift, which was everyone else in camp, about a hundred of Him. He ran them all the time, and he ran them into the ground. All of them were stained violet to soak up the sun because there was no more food, their eyes rolling around as if this were all a nightmare.

Sunlight would not touch the floor of the pit until eleven-hundred hours, but even though the rocks around the rim were etched with frost, convection currents of hot, dusty air rolled up out of the pit, like the breath of a sleeping volcano. They blew charges all night in a mad-ass rush to push through the plug by today. Back in '96, after some unpleasantness involving an UNSCOM inspection team, the UN had plugged up the hole but good, and forced Saddam to stand watch over it. They'd been digging since mid-October, boring and blasting through three hundred feet of concrete, cutting through steel plugs ten feet thick, defusing bombs spiked with reactor waste secreted throughout the mix like goddamned chocolate chips.

They worked like ants digging a nest, methodical and ruthless, indifferent to fatalities. Recently, as the dig accelerated to meet the deadline, their true nature had become impossible to hide. There were cave-ins aplenty, and a whole team of diggers got buried last week, only to emerge yesterday, zonking Geiger counters with lethal levels of radiation from the bomb they'd triggered. The soldiers had freaked out and tried to call out to Baghdad, and that was when they discovered their land-line had been severed. Any minute now, they would realize their drinking water was poisoned, and half their number were not rising for reveille. They were all supposed to be sleeping in today, but one of the commanders must have cut off water rations, or something. Maybe the son of a bitch saw it coming, since it was ripped clean out of Saddam's playbook. Things were likely to get ugly. Hell, things were bound to go Idaho all over again, but this was not Dyson's ration of shit to eat.

Today, the diggers were going to break through. Dyson had been inside before, but only inside the bombed-out bunker above the Holy of Holies, and he was very excited to be going down all the way to the heart of it. He only wished the others were here.

That part had yet to sink in. When they were human pissants, their creed was survival of the team, and fuck all else. They had lived like gods in the jungle, and when they got old and tired and lost their head, good old Uncle Sam took them and made them new. RADIANT made them into gods, into one god, with a new head—Keogh. They'd done him good service for sixteen years, and never a dust-up, never a twitch of doubt. Keogh respected them, did not try to absorb them, though he had to have known all along how it would end. Spike Team Texas was not a sword, it was a snake, and those who tried to wield it always got bit, in the end.

Nobody expected it to end like this, though. None of them were ever supposed to die, not ever again, not after Captain Quantrill. Long before Keogh came along, Spike Team Texas had been One, but they had fallen apart. He could not mourn his slain brothers without a bitter sting of reproach for them. They had been One, but each of them had succumbed to their old human weaknesses, and gone the way of all flesh. Still, it was a bitter pill.

Keogh would become One today, but he had made none of their mistakes. The individual human identities of each of his little pawns was going to blow away on the wind of a single thought—all their weakness, all their lusts, all their sin and pride and ego. They were going to become something the world had never seen before. Spike Team Texas had looked forward to this day, because it was the day their service would be at an end, and they would turn on their master in the REAL Mother of All Battles. Now, Spike Team Texas was not One, but only one. He did not mourn, for he had this at least, to look forward to. He was going to walk into Eden tonight.

Across the pit, the soldiers were starting to wake up. Screams and shouted orders, seizures of panic fire, and then he could see them running around. By now, they would be finding out their trucks and helicopters were all disabled, the mechanics all dead. It was a sloppy mess, but it would provide some diversion while they waited.

Dyson slipped out of his burrow and peered over the ledge at the hole in the floor of the pit. The interior was obscured by clouds of dust, but he could make out the tracks the ore cars ran on. A crew of diggers shouldered one of these out to the end, where a mound of debris marked the terminus.

The tailings formed a mountain chain that snaked around the walls of the pit, winding in on itself towards the gaping hole where the bunker had been, before. Among the boulders and dust-hills of pulverized concrete were girders, blocks of machined steel, wrecked drilling rigs and other gear, burnt-out generators, bits of diggers. Machines broke down here faster than in the jungle, faster than even the dust and the ionized atmosphere could explain. Accidents ran amok and ate people up like popcorn. Dr. Keogh called it entropy, and said it ran the universe. Dyson did not give a shit if entropy was a fairy fucking godmother; he cared only that it was what they were here to kill.

The old soldiers' barracks in the pit was now an equipment warehouse and dynamite shack. The day shift gathered its gear and reviewed progress on computers before setting off down the track into the hole.

Dyson scaled down the wall, spider-like, to the bottom. Even in the clustered night shadows of the sheer wall of green-black basalt, it was warm, and not the warmth of the diggers' explosions, either. There was about the air the kind of electricity that one feels in front of the Washington Monument, or the Taj Mahal, any place that has become an icon in the universal mind. This place was more famous than all of them combined, it ran in all the blood in human veins, yet few had laid eyes on it, and fewer still would know what they were looking at. Dyson, who knew, had left all his guns behind. He had made himself ready in the night. As he slept, he dreamed a new form for himself that would withstand whatever lay before it, down in the hole. When he'd awakened and seen his flesh, he'd almost scared himself.

One of the diggers beckoned and showed him a computer printout. It was the inner pit in cross-section. The last layer had been pricked. "The excavation will be complete," Keogh said with obvious relish, "before the rest of us arrive."

This one was a piggy kraut mining engineer, colon cancer at thirty-five, oink oink. Defiantly chubby and red-headed, his thick German accent made Dyson's mind wander. Only a kraut could stay fat on a diet of sunlight. But it was His voice coming out of the tubby kraut's mouth, His hard gray eyes glinting out of that soft purple face. So Dyson listened, or tried to.

"There were countermeasures in the fundamental layer," he went on. "The debris is being cleared, and only the original barrier remains."

Original barrier.
Dyson, God bless his sweet mother, remembered his Bible, at least the good parts.
And a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the tree of life.

"When do we go in?" Dyson growled, for in his present form, everything came out in cavernous, rasping tones.

"We are not yet prepared. Tonight, when it is accomplished."

When all the little lights in all those sick, cancerous fucks in southern California turned into one great big light, Spike Team Texas would be free. Everybody gets what they want.

"When I am One, Lieutenant, you're going to try to kill me." The tubby kraut's jowls drew up in an empty smile.

"No, boss," Dyson said.

"That was your plan all along, wasn't it? I'm not condemning you, it's your nature, to always bite the hand that feeds you."

Dyson looked around, at the legion of Keoghs buzzing like ants off to work in the nest. "I'm a good soldier, boss."

"I know that to you, the odds look insuperably long, but you and I both know what drives you. When the time comes, give yourself over to the moment totally, as if you really could destroy me. I look forward to it," Keogh said, and turned away.

"Boss!" Dyson barked. The kraut turned and blinked at him. "You never told me what was down there, that you want."

"You never asked."

"I want to know, now." Was that spineless whiner voice coming out of him?

"You've read your Bible?"

"I remember we ain't welcome there."

"And do you know why?"

These little Socratic riddle-games got longer in the tooth every time he dared to ask a question. "Adam and Eve ate the apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, stupid. But it was all the bitch's fault."