Ravenous Dusk (89 page)

"The crime of original sin was the neural mutation which led your species to sentience. Your race was ejected from the hothouse in several waves about two hundred thousand years ago. The region was crawling with other hominids at the time, but your self-aware brains drove you to exterminate all you came across, until only those with your particular neural disorder remained to dominate the earth."

"So what do you want out of there?" Dyson got closer. In his present form, he could bite the kraut's head off without swallowing his gum, but he didn't want to do anything he couldn't take back—not yet.

"Seraphim, Brutus. That's what your Bible called them, but the appellation is weak at best. Sad to say, there is no God, and never was, not like your race believes in. The ones who made you, who made me, and everything that lives or ever did live, are down there, and they may or may not be dead. And the Tree of Life. Do you remember that from the Bible?"

"It gives eternal life, or whatever, isn't that right?"

"It
is
eternal life, and much more, though your religions were never so specific. Race memory and mass hallucination formed the core of your sacred texts, then politics destroyed them utterly. If you stay with me that long, Dyson, I will give you to the Tree Of Life."

The kraut turned and vanished into the clouds of dust pouring out of the hole. Dyson felt himself quickening with anticipation again.

They started to arrive at seven, the chartered Grayline tour buses forming a convoy that backed up Industry Drive to the San Diego Freeway. A few vans and cars crowded in among them and filed into the vast, empty lot for the Wilmington Fairgrounds & Amphitheatre. No security manned the entrances to collect parking fees or direct traffic, which moved along like some civilian mock-up of a military maneuver, the lot smoothly filling in layer by layer. No signs announced what the event was, no press or police milled around the front of the amphitheatre, though the amount of traffic in a city like Wilmington on a Saturday morning was itself a newsworthy event.

The marquee on the oily dirt median in front of the entrance announced the ODDFELLOWS' LADIES AUXILIARY FLOWER & GARDEN SHOW for the last weekend in March and the SOUTH COAST'S BIGGEST & BEST GUN & MILITARIA EXPO!!! for the first week of April, but locals knew these events were two years old, and there would be probably be no scheduled events at the Wilmington Fairgrounds ever again.

As outdoor venues go, the four-thousand capacity Del Sol Amphitheatre was one of the largest in Los Angeles County, but it had not seen a show in four years, and would have been torn down long ago, if real estate values in Wilmington made it worthwhile. The overeager builders of the amphitheatre had hoped to revitalize the area with the big concert venue in the late Eighties, but had only too late realized what the Wilmington Chamber of Commerce had discovered in the late Seventies: that Wilmington had always been and always would be a dirty cluster of oil refineries and warehouses, but never a town, in any real, human sense.

Well over fifty percent of the total acreage of the city of Wilmington belonged to Exxon, Standard Oil, and a host of minor fuel companies, the rest to trucking and freight companies. No one with the bad sense and worse luck to actually live in Wilmington had any use for flower shows or the ratty-ass circus that used to come around, and their interest in guns and militaria was purely practical.

The fairgrounds were surrounded on three sides by oil refineries, unspeakably ugly termite cities of endless tanks, pipes and catwalks that made the fairgrounds look like a human internment camp in the last days of a particularly nasty alien invasion. The amphitheatre itself was set back a quarter mile from the road, behind a double row of Quonset hut exhibit halls, barns and chainlink fences. From the air, it looked like half an enormous satellite dish, an abandoned Arecibo overlooking the toxic moat of the San Gabriel River, an unfinished last-ditch plea for extraterrestrial salvation from a race drowning in its own filth.

Today, for perhaps the first and last time, the amphitheatre was going to be full.

Across Industry Drive from the fairgrounds, a Denny's served breakfast to a pair of sleep-starved Highway Patrolmen and a trio of wired truckers. Ida Pulaski, the only waitress on duty, seated a young Hispanic woman at the bar and poured her coffee, but her eyes were on the line of buses entering the fairgrounds.

"What're they doing over there, d'you suppose?" she asked out loud, but the Hispanic woman only said, "Can I just order, now?"

Ida looked at her now, because she'd figured the woman was here for a job. Her long, inky black hair and severe, lupine features made her look more like an Indian, and she was dressed like a truck driver. "Sure, go ahead, I'm listening."

"Full order of onion rings with three side cruets of French dressing, two Farmer's Slams with extra bacon, hash browns, eggs raw with an extra water glass—"

"Eggs what?"

"Raw, Ida," the Mexican girl said, eyes flicking at her nametag. Ida hated it when people used her name like that, loathed the nametag that invited such improper familiarity from customers. And the little Mexican bitch
knew
it. "As in uncooked. Still in the shell, Ida. Can your cook do that? Can he
not
cook six eggs?"

Ida's brain raced, chasing the carrot of a polite, policy-correct fuckyou. Aha! "Health code, Miss. We can't serve raw, unpackaged food."

"What a crock of shit! What manmade packaging is more perfect than an egg, Ida?"

Tupperware, for one, you ignorant, taco-bending wetback
, she thought as she ripped the order sheet off and clipped it on the cook's order wheel. She had not become lead waitress in twenty-eight years by not knowing when to choose her battles, so she just said, "It's your health. You're expecting to meet someone?"

"No, it's all for me, Ida. And I'm not done ordering, so get that paper back."

Ida took a long time to retrieve the order, because she was sure her anger was spelling nasty four-letter words in burst blood vessels on her forehead. But she got it down and, without turning to look at the hatchet-faced beaner skank, managed to say, "Go ahead."

"I need a turkey sandwich, but I want the meat from three turkey sandwiches on it, so if you want to charge me for three, that's fine. And I'd like a pitcher of orange juice, and a bowl of tomatoes instead of French fries."

"We don't serve them by the bowl, Miss."

"You have fruit cups as an alternate side dish on the senior menu. Use that. Make something up, I don't care. Just give me a bowl of tomatoes and a pitcher of orange juice—"

"It comes in a carafe, Miss."

"A carafe'll be great, Ida. Just please hurry with it, won't you please, Ida?"

"Is that all, Miss?"

"For now, yes, now go get the damned juice…please."

Sounds like somebody got themselves knocked up
, Ida told herself.
Bet she doesn't even know who the father is
. She put up the order and slouched out of sight to fill the carafe with her own special blend of juices.

Stella tried not to make a scene, but it was so hard. Even when she had been buried alive for six months, she had not known hunger or thirst like this. Not since she'd been a prisoner in her own head had she felt so intruded upon, or so out of control. She devoured everything in sight, and still she burned to eat more. When she looked at people, she saw them turn into hamburgers and hot dogs like in cartoons, or she could see their livers glowing through their bodies like holy relics, and it was an act of will not to eat them. Often she threw up, and this was the most unforgivable part of all. The moment it was out of her, she craved her own vomit, and cleaned up her own mess with lunatic gusto, sobbing, pounding her own head to make herself stop.

She reckoned that she had eaten her weight in food since she escaped the Missionary compound in Colorado, six days ago. Yet she had gained only about twenty pounds, and none of it fat, none of it baby. Pregnant women in the hospital always said they knew when it was starting to grow inside them, but Stella doubted any of them ever dreamed of symptoms like hers.

Her temperature climbed up into the low hundreds if she went more than an hour without drinking, and her blood sugar dropped critically low unless she fed it like a coal stove. She'd considered taping an IV to her arm, and feeding constant glucose solution, but her body craved food, in abundance, and variety. No, not her body. It was the little visitor her gentleman caller left behind. Another invader to repel. She had survived and beaten cancer, Keogh, and the shape-shifting rapist, but she was helpless before this new outrage. It was growing inside her, a stranger, yet it was just enough of her that her immune system would not terminate it. She still tried, synthesizing proteins by visualizing her rage and fear, and turning them loose in her uterus, but they found nothing to destroy. It was in there, there was no mistaking it. The changes in her blood, the food going nowhere, the dreams—a faceless, formless tumor coalescing out of her flesh and ripping itself free, crying, "What am I? WHAT AM I?" in a baby Keogh's voice. The presence, in moments of perfect stillness, the feeling of something clumsily probing her mind from underneath. She knew it was in there, alright, but damned if she could find it.

She was scared of it not for the power it had over her, nor even because its father was not human. He was no more or less human than she was. She was afraid of the thing because she knew that she was falling in love with it.

It was hers. It was of her, from an unimaginable union with a man, no, a creature, like her, who was, in all probability, dead. She could not blame him, but she couldn't resist blaming herself. They were both used, shaped, brought together and mated to yield—what?

She wolfed down the last rasher of bacon and washed it down with her third carafe of orange juice. Ida watched her through the kitchen pass-through window. Stella belched, ordered another. Ida disappeared from view, but a moment later she heard laughter. But she brought out a fresh, ice-crusted carafe, watched Stella drink off half of it in a single draught.

Once more, she struggled to put it out of her mind. She had to focus on today, on what she could change, and what might happen if she didn't.

She hadn't wanted to come. She was called here, though she had no idea who summoned her. Once she started running in Colorado, she'd wanted never to stop. She raced through the woods for three days, stopping only to melt snow and drink it. She killed a twelve-point buck with her bare hands. Twisted his head off by his antlers, before he smelled her coming on the wind, never mind heard her. It took the rest of the night to eat him, but she burned him off before she stumbled into a ski lodge and stole a truck, and had to stop for fast food twice before she got on the highway. Around then, it had begun to make itself known, and without thinking about it, without wanting to, she found herself driving west.

She ditched the truck in Grand Junction and jumped a Greyhound bus bound for Los Angeles. She hit a wall, sleeping through to Las Vegas, when she woke up to a familiar smell. Cutting through the dank, road dust and armpit stink of the bus was a smell that once came from her own pores. It was the briny musk of His sweat. Her eyes snapped open and she looked around, saw a pale, harassed-looking old Asian man leading two obviously sick-looking people, a middle-aged black man and a plump young white woman, down the aisle. The Asian man—in the set of his eyes, how they took everything in as if it had happened a million times before, though his mouth dribbled non-stop in some exotic tongue that sounded tailor-made for complaining. So He was still just in them, but when they came together—

She did not understand the thought, any more than she understood why she had to travel west. She turned her face to the window as He passed, but she felt His eyes on her, felt her scent being drank up, though she tried to mask it. They had all shared each other in Idaho. She remembered them all and she knew they would remember her. This body was strange to her, but they would commune and share the chemical imprints of all they'd seen and done, all He would need to know. Surely, they would all recognize her.

When she looked up, He had moved past her, leaving only the contrail of medication and necrosis from the terminal cancer patients he led. They took the back row of the bus and immediately went to sleep. She looked back at them every so often, sure He watched her through His eyelids.

At a rest stop in the middle of the desert, He got off to take a piss, and she followed Him. Another passenger, a Mexican field worker who carried his life in a cardboard box, berated her, but she showed him something that made him run out cursing to pee and pray in the desert until long after the bus left.

She tried to do Him like the buck, but the head wouldn't come off. Still, she broke His neck, opened Him up and learned all she needed to know from His blood. She was scared to do it, at first, scared He would take root in her and start running her again, and she wouldn't be able to get him out, ever—

But she did it. His blood was full of chemicals that came together to tell her where to go, and what would happen there.

The Asian man was pretty dead, but He wasn't. "Stella," the dead man whispered, "you make my life so interesting." She looked around and tried not to throw up. Only then did she notice she'd eaten His liver.

She left him there and got back on the bus. The cancer patients were still fast asleep. He'd probably drugged them. She wondered if they would find their way to the place without Him, if she shouldn't try to stop them. In the end, she left them, and for all she knew, they never woke up.

She bolted out of the Greyhound terminal in downtown Los Angeles just before sunrise. She walked past a charter bus at the curb outside the terminal and smelled him, broke into a run went down the street to Union Station and stole a Saturn sedan. She had to smash the window in, but this looked a lot less conspicuous in LA than it had in the Rockies. She got on the Santa Monica Freeway, headed west, seeing only the road and the signs, seeing what He was supposed to see. It led her here, and she felt as if she were wallowing out of a rushing river when she pulled out of its grasp at the last moment to go into Denny's.