Ravenous Dusk (94 page)

The Committee applauded. One of the guardians reared up and snapped his warder's neck with one hand. He heaved the limp body across the room.

This is why Keogh has been allowed to go so far, Cundieffe realized. To fight such a global threat, America must band together with the other nations of the world and pool its resources under a more exacting authority. There would be sacrifices, but in the face of such an awful alternative as Keogh posed, humanity could not but decide to follow the Mules into a New World Order.

"Is this what you joined the FBI for, sir? To serve—these?"

Wyler blanched, then slapped him. "You worshipped law and order and the secrets and the power we gave you. Why didn't you complain, then? We told you all along we were working towards a perfect, orderly society. What the hell did you think such a thing would look like? Do you, of all people, honestly think for a moment that such a society could exist, with untreated, gendered
Homo sapiens
living in it?"

Cundieffe looked away, at the rows of balding or bewigged bureaucrats setting up to take over the world. They looked like the volunteers who manned the phone banks on a PBS fundraiser. They looked like every anonymous official in the background of every photograph of a President. They were the ones steering him through the crowds, handing him speeches. But beside them stood those creatures from the wettest dreams of Josef Mengele, and their brain-bag cousins, the Philosopher Kings.

"It seems like you already have the situation well in hand," Cundieffe said, trying to sound reasonable. "You already run everything. Why unleash Keogh to wreck everything, even if you really do think you can stop him, or find a cure for him?"

"It's not for any one of us to question. It's what's ordained. It's policy. We're all utopian idealists, here, but the world spits on and burns that kind of idealism, Martin. You know that. It made your life lonely long before you learned you were one of us. We're not talking about waging genocide on the gendered human race, Martin, if that's what you're thinking. Some will die, but no more than die in the Third World, anyway, and that's where it's all going to happen. After the Wilmington colony is sterilized, America will be clean. Iraq will be nuked, and the President will be strong-armed into explaining it to the world. The UN and every other nation in the world will be howling for our blood, but then Keogh will start to spread, abroad, and we will give them the cure. Then we'll begin implementing the new government plans—"

"Eugenic p-programs," Cundieffe stammered. "You're not going to wipe out the human race, you're just going to breed it out of existence."

"In Nature, on planet Earth, when has that ever been a crime?"

Cundieffe couldn't look at his mentor. Wyler came closer, mistaking his resolve for pouting.

"Listen, Martin, this is the real world, not the world of laws and ethics and justice. There are many others—outsiders like Keogh, only far more powerful—against whom we will be defenseless in the future, if we don't take decisive action now.

"You don't know what the world is really like, Martin. What's in it, what lies sleeping underneath, and what waits Outside. The future is going to be rife with pole shifts, climatic changes, explosive population growth, new religious wars and new fanatical faiths, and famines and plagues on an unprecedented scale: and things the world must never know about, like Keogh.

"And it'll only get harder. Things are about to get very, very rough, Martin, and no matter what's done, a lot of people are going to die.

America isn't going to suffer as much as the rest of the world, of course, but sweeping changes are going to have to be implemented to keep the nation from slipping into a new Dark Age. Hard decisions are going to need to be made, choices we can't expect from a whore of the polls."

Cundieffe nodded absently, then tried to make his face bright and convinced-looking. "How secure is this place?"

"Oh, don't let the quaint atmosphere fool you. This place will still be standing in an exchange that leaves Cheyenne Mountain as an ash heap. They're going to give the go-ahead to bomb Keogh's colony any minute, now, and that'll be the end of it, in our area of responsibility."

"No, I mean, inside. How secure are we, in here?"

"Even if there were an incident outside this room, the security system would render the room airtight. It's a strongbox, Martin, there's no safer place in the world."

"We're not doing bad things, are we, sir? We're just following our programming."

"Adaptive behavior is instinctual for us, Martin. Look into your heart, and you will see this is not just the right thing to do. It's the only thing to do."

Cundieffe sat down at a console and, after ferreting around to get the feel for the system, checked his e-mail.

A report from his old colleague in LA, Eugenie Hanchett, on the Storch kidnapping. The senior Sgt. Storch was abducted from the Norwalk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane yesterday, by a man posing as a psychiatrist, Dr. Hiram Hansen. While the duty nurse checked the Doctor's ID, the abductor somehow managed to get out of the hospital with the patient, who was severely delusional and under restraints and heavily medicated. Their present whereabouts were unknown.

Cundieffe deleted the message without replying. In LA, Agent Hanchett would have a lot more to worry about than tracking down an old lunatic war veteran, if she survived. Besides, the only person who might care was dead.

A junk mail hawking Lemurian Blessing Bracelets, forged of a unique silver alloy which attuned the wearer's aura to the cosmic emanations of the lost civilization of Lemuria, whose mystic science had, continental sinking aside, conferred upon them near-divine powers and good luck. Cundieffe ordered one for himself, and on a quick head-count, decided to order seventy-five more.

A message from someone he'd never heard of,
wyrmboy3202
. Figuring it was more junk mail, he almost deleted it, but the subject line stopped his hand over the button.
He Won
, it said. The message was sent two days before, but had only just arrived.

He opened it.

No one looked at Martin as he rose and took his briefcase out from under the desk. "I'll be back in a moment, sir. Fresh air—"

Wyler nodded absently and watched as a helicopter's eye-view of Los Alamitos came up on most of the screens. The racetrack hove into view for a second, where Mother liked to spend Easter Sundays with her friends after church.

Cundieffe went up the stairs and looked around. All eyes were on the screens. No one had picked up the body of the slain warder. A short, stocky form in a black lab coat and coveralls, the body had landed so that the broken neck bent back on itself, and the head lay under it. Cundieffe looked around one more time.

The helicopter passed over the 605 and Coyote Creek, crossing the county line into Long Beach. Another helicopter flanked the camera on either side—both old surplus Hueys with big green tanks on the sides, like crop dusters.

Cundieffe opened his briefcase and took out his Thermos. They ran it through an X-ray along with his other belongings before they let him in here, but they'd seen nothing. He unscrewed the lid and peered inside.

It moved.

The X-ray had made it testy. It swarmed up the glass sides of the Thermos and stretched out a gray pseudopod toward his face.

He'd almost forgotten about Spec Four Gibson Holroyd, US Army 1st Div., MACV/SOG. He'd kept it because what he saw in Idaho made him loath to turn it over. As it turned out, they'd gotten plenty from there without it.

He supposed that was when the therapists would say he'd started to snap. He stifled a laugh as one of the Philosopher Kings drifted by, the respirator pump mounted on his wheelchair wheezing and dripping coolant and drool on the most secret floor in America.

—
the more ready you are to work for Satan.

He clamped the lid down and reached around on the table beside him. His hand brushed a plastic cup, and he took it. It was half-full of tepid cocoa, the edges scummed with marshmallows that refused to melt completely. Darn near perfect. Cundieffe shook the Thermos, opened it and poured the cocoa in through a narrow opening. He shook it again. Soak up that sugar, you sick little son of a gun. Do what you're supposed to do.
Raise an army—

He lifted the corpse up and propped its shoulder against one knee. He twisted the head around until it lay face-up in his lap.

Around him, they still watched the screens. The helicopters turned north at the Long Beach Marina and followed the muddy San Gabriel River into the oil refinery grids of Wilmington.

He just sat there, looking at the screens. In the end, it was the words of Keogh that made him move.
Never stop trying to change the world.

He pried the corpse's mouth open. The jaws were clamped shut on a bloody snippet of tongue, and it took both hands prying on it to get it open wide enough. He tipped the Thermos to the corpse's cyanotic lips and opened it.
Do what you're supposed to do, you little impossible bastard. Raise an army—

Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He jumped, almost dropping the Thermos, but clamped the lid shut before it got out. He hunched low over the body, brain percolating explanations, all of them utter bullshit—

Hands grabbed him roughly, throwing him back on his behind. He rolled over and curled up around the Thermos. What the hell had he been trying to do?

It was the guardian who'd broken the warder's neck. He stooped over Cundieffe and fixed him with a glare of such pure command and contempt that Cundieffe found himself offering up the Thermos before he realized what he was doing. If he'd had anything else, he would have offered that, too.

The guardian opened the Thermos, tilted it back, and dumped the contents down its yawning gullet.

Cundieffe jumped to his feet and backed away. The guardian rested on his knuckles, prodding the warder's corpse as if it might only be pretending to be dead. Absently, the guardian of tomorrow began to rock back and forth and foam at the mouth.

Cundieffe ran up the stairs to the exit. He looked back over his shoulder at the room. The screens showed only clouds of incandescent green. The room erupted in applause.

Cundieffe shoved through the retinue of Swiss Guards around the exit, fumbled out his card on the lanyard around his neck for the Air Force sentry outside. "I'm sorry, sir, but nobody leaves—" the guard tried to tell him.

Behind them, the guardian's booming voice drowned out the buzz of the war room. "FIGHTING SOLDIERS FROM THE SKY—"

"I think your assistance is needed, in there," Cundieffe said.

"FEARLESS MEN WHO JUMP AND DIE—"

Inside, someone screamed. The sound was cut off by a single, brutal smash of meat against metal, and the room went berserk. "What the fuck was that?" the sentry shouted, and pushed past Cundieffe with his pistol drawn. A Swiss Guard skewered the Air Force guard on his halberd before he got both feet in the room.

Against his better judgment, Cundieffe looked back. The mutant who'd shared his cocoa rampaged through the war room. He seized one of the Philosopher Kings by the handles of its wheelchair, hefted it up, and waded into the crowd with it like Samson with the jawbone of an ass.

"MEN WHO MEAN JUST WHAT THEY SAY—"

Cundieffe picked up the dead guard's pistol and slipped out through the spring-loaded door as it guillotined shut.

"THE BRAVE MEN OF THE GREEN—"

Guards rushed into formation in the park, but it was clear they still had no idea what was going on inside.

Outside the town hall, he lit a match under a fire alarm. Sprinklers and sirens went off everywhere. He heard bolts slamming home in the walls of the command center, felt engines stirring to life beneath his feet.

Out on Main Street USA, it started to rain.

Cundieffe turned up his collar and walked at a brisk pace, following the signs that pointed the way to the exit. A guard shouldered his rifle at him and ordered him to halt, but he just stood there as Cundieffe wheeled on him and shot him through the forehead.

He hoped they didn't give him a hard time about flying him directly to Headquarters. There would be a lot of paperwork to fill out when he got back to the office.

For two days, Storch rode the wind. An aircraft too small and soft to reflect radar, he crossed the burning blue eye of the South Pacific, over New Guinea's northern coast, high above the riotous green peaks of Kalimantan and Sumatra.

He swooped out over the Bay of Bengal, riding a winter zephyr around the skirts of a monsoon, among whose lightning-lit temples of cloud he was only one more fleeting atmospheric oddity. He passed over the narrowing wedge of southern India in a tropical storm, roiling dynamos of supercharged atmosphere the size of stadiums that collapsed in minutes, squeezing out seas of balmy rain on the unseen subcontinent thirty thousand feet below.

The winds carried him out over the Arabian Sea and he banked north, passed over the Gulf of Oman and the needle-eye of the Strait of Hormuz, upstream against the garbled warpage rippling out from Tiamat, distortions of the omnipresent snore of the Unbegotten Source. Contracting the intake valves on his back and spreading his wings, he dropped out of the jet stream and into clear skies teeming with F-18's and Harrier fighter-bombers.