Ravenous Dusk (99 page)

The first thing she saw was a rotor blade, close enough to trim her eyelashes. It came out of the fog like a machete, flashed past her eyes and ripped away the curtain of green mist. She ducked, and a helicopter passed not ten feet above her, sideways, and nosed into the muddy slime-bed of the San Gabriel River.

The Shoggoth lumbered down the slope of the amphitheatre, trailing wisps of green aerosol, but no worse for wear. The lysing agent no longer worked. Nothing could kill it, now. It slid down into the orchestra pit, parting around the burning helicopter, and began to engulf the dead and dying, shitting out wheelchairs and crutches and clothing like an amoeba sweeping up lesser bacteria.

The last helicopter pulled way back, climbed to a thousand feet and launched Hellfire missiles into the Shoggoth. The bubbling black protoplasm swallowed them with vacuous plunk sounds. They never even detonated.

"IT IS ACCOMPLISHED, it said. "THE WORLD WILL BE ONE."

The air around the roiling mass shimmered with waves of something finer than smoke. The air suddenly smelled like Him, that smell that was her smell when He lived inside her. It was making itself into a virus. This was why it was here, why it became One, to be smart enough to create a virus that would directly infect any animal with His genetic code, His consciousness. The tainted sea breeze lifted the viral swarms off the lumbering Shoggoth and sent them spinning out over the city of Los Angeles. It was going on elsewhere, everywhere Keogh gathered His hostage minions, in the middle of cities all over the world. There were thousands of them today. Tomorrow, there wouldn't be anything else.

And there wasn't a goddamned thing she could do about it. She reached the top of the stairs, but her legs kept climbing air, and she fell down again. This time, she could not get up. Her head swam, her arms and legs were boneless, flopping, trembling. She drank in gulps of foul, smoke-choked, smoggy air. She felt her whole body contracting, clenching against a blow harder than anything she had ever suffered. She touched her womb, where a normal baby would have been, but she felt nothing there. Yet it was in her, and in that moment, it made its intentions lethally clear.

It wanted out.

It hurt. Her skin burned with sudden, crushing fever, and every muscle in her body leapt free of her control. She dropped and writhed against the pavement. All sound and vision dwindled down to a blunt, blurry, murky dot, and then the dot went away. She saw red. She heard something pushing against her brain from inside her head, struggling to touch her the way Keogh had, along synapses she had burned away so that nothing could ever get that close to her again. She cowered away from it now, but it would not be denied. It forced itself into her brain, and it spoke to her.

Out of every pore of her skin, all at once, Stella Orozco had her baby.

The offspring left her like a bullet from a gun, but the effort almost killed her. She suddenly lost ten pounds of mass to the winds, and capillaries everywhere just under her skin were atomized. Blood rose up on her skin in a rich foam, and she collapsed and clung to the spinning ground. She had never felt anything so wondrous in all her short, sour life as the moment it touched her. It hadn't the body or the brain yet to frame the words it had to say to her, but it made itself known, and then left.

When Storch freed her from Keogh, he imparted segments of his own wild, recombinant DNA to create proteins that cleansed her of her jailor and freed her to change. They were exactly alike for an instant, but then the world worked its little changes on them, and they grew apart, into freaks, as isolated in form as they'd been in their hearts, when they were human. They fought each other tooth and nail even as they mated, that one time, but warring against their own xenophobia was the life force that made them the exquisite mutants that they'd become. Exquisite and unique they were, but they weren't the end product, not any more than humans or dinosaurs or flatworms had been. It had used them to make this child, but her body acted on her insecurity and tried to murder it. It forced the child to hide in her blood, a nexus of independent cells, yet One, as Keyes was now One. It would not develop into a multicellular body, but not because she wouldn't let it, but because it wasn't supposed to. Invisible, it floated before her on the wind, so thick that she almost saw a sort of shape, but then the wind shifted and it was gone, blown across the amphitheatre to the Shoggoth.

Keogh screamed. The mountainous body seemed to split apart from within, becoming thousands of bodies again, then inert sludge. The Shoggoth faltered, retching up oil barrels of whatever it used for blood, and fell apart, even as it trembled and simmered with new life—her offspring, a sentient virus, replicating itself out of the shattered colossus and taking to the wind.

Around the world, Stella's viral child stormed Christian Keyes's neural network and downloaded itself into the colonies of the Shoggoth wherever they gathered. In Russia, in Africa, in India and Brazil, the Keyes-clones disintegrated into replicas of Stella's nameless child, and went to seek their fortune.

The amphitheatre fell silent. A few fires still burned down in the orchestra pit, which was now filled with a visibly evaporating pool of protoplasm. Her child was growing, and going out into the world.

"Be good," she told it, and let herself drop off to sleep on the sidewalk.

The sun had not yet risen over Tiamat, but the storm had been blown away, when Storch crawled out of the pit and rolled away from the edge. He lay on his back on the floor of the canyon and looked up into the cloud-wracked sky for a long while. His body needed sleep, but he was afraid the wave of divine jungle juice might flood the canyon, so he kept his eyes open.

The ground beneath him slowly subsided back to stillness, and only clouds of spores wafted up from the mouth of Eden, far below. He thought he heard something clamber up the wall of rock and skitter off across the canyon floor, but he saw nothing.

Then something bigger climbed over the lip, much bigger and wheezing curses on everything under, inside and outside of the sun.

Storch looked, but he was too tired to do much else, even though it was Dyson. The giant sauropod-man looked down at him with his one good eye. His other eye-socket was still stuffed with a bulging coil of Dr. Teeth, now as thick as a fat man's thigh. It wiggled and wormed through the unimaginable hollows of Dyson's head like a big apple.

In the purple predawn light, Dyson looked like a coral reef on two shaky legs that were little more than gnawed, leaking bone and chewed up thongs of tendon. Eden-born things too hideous to describe had made a cluster of burrows all through Dyson's gargantuan physique. The chittering, squirming brood of Spike Team Texas ate each other and drooled out eggs in sickening time-lapse. Dr. Teeth's rotary garbage disposal head patrolled the violent rookery, devouring some newborns and whole clutches of eggs, while passing over others which it, apparently, deemed fit to live in the walking ecosystem Brutus Dyson had become. Like a little dragon of Eden, it culled the weak and protected the strong from the new Garden's blood-simple demiurge.

"What're you lookin' at, sonny?" Dyson snarled. Storch just lay there, at a loss, once and for all, for words, and too tired to do anything about it.

Presently, Dyson saluted and lumbered off into the desert, barking orders to his raw recruits. He didn't see Storch salute him back, and probably wouldn't have cared.

This was no place to sleep. He was hollowed-out, but he wanted, bone-deep
needed
, to get home. His body swelled with hydrogen snatched out of the air and lifted him on the wind, and his arms grew and hands splayed out into the beginnings of bat wings. As the canyon shrank beneath his feet and became just another hole in the ground, he thought he heard a voice on the wind, or in the dusty, burnt-out corners of his mind.

But then it was gone, and there was only the wind carrying him west, home to Death Valley. He couldn't think of a better place to watch the world be reborn.