Radiant Dawn (32 page)

"I'm kind of disappointed," Storch called out. "Last time was sort of original, but this…"

"You got a lot of nerve coming back here, homes," the Hispanic man said, leaning across his table to close the blinds, the gun leveled at a businesslike relationship with Storch's head. "You were lucky the first time, and we were stupid. We paid for that."

Storch blinked, looked round for the bikers. He could feel their breath on the back of his neck. "What are you talking about?"

"Where'd you go, homes?"

"I don't see where that concerns you, Sergeant."

"You're always ending up in the wrong place, that's why. I don't buy your Gulf War sickness bullshit, and I don't buy you. We came here to kill you, homes." He waited too long to see some glint of fear well up in Storch's eyes. Storch's bland stare gave him one of his own.

One of the bikers hauled the big man back. "Leave it, man. He's for the Major." The sergeant tucked his gun in an armpit holster, turned and stormed off. The bikers waved Storch out of the booth with the guns. Storch followed the sergeant out of the diner and into the convenience store. None of the handful of sleepy tourists or sped-up clerks took notice of them as they passed through, so Storch assumed the guns had been concealed again. The sergeant strolled over to the truckers' refuge and had a word with the stoned, pregnant girl watching the door. He held the door open for Storch and the bikers. Storch rubbed his eyes at the dimness inside.

A meeting hall-sized room with a snack bar along one side and cafeteria tables taking up one-half. The rest was taken up with heavy floor-mounted recliners with TVs built into the arms. The tables were empty, but a few truckers dozed or tweaked out in the blue glow of the screens. Through an open double door on the far side of the room, Storch heard the clack of billiard balls and the spastic burble of video games. The sergeant led the way down an adjoining corridor into the lodging area. Sizing up the accommodations, Storch fondly remembered the cargo container as more comfortable and easier on the eyes. The sergeant stopped before a door and slid a chewed-up plastic card through a slot beside an equally chewed-up door. He popped the door open and seized Storch's lame arm. Storch dug in his heels, but the sergeant yanked outwards on the arm, and Storch wobbled with the searing pain, and before the bones had stopped grinding together, he was plunged into complete darkness.

The cell couldn't be much deeper than Storch could reach from the door. He was more impressed than surprised to find someone'd lifted his gun. He stood stock-still, willing his eyes to adjust to the imperceptible glow of the thread of light from beneath the door. The stink of sweat, cleanser and stale cigarette smoke almost gave the darkness a color, then a face, No, it was a man, in here with him, no, two. Storch had been in the room at least three minutes before he could see them, and never heard them breathing. Despite himself, Storch stepped back to the door and reached behind him for the knob. There wasn't one.

"Why did you come back, Sergeant Storch?" a voice asked, ringing bells in Storch's head. The officer type in the cargo container, the major.

"I'm getting pretty sick of people asking me questions in the dark, sir," Storch said. "I don't know what I did to piss you folks off, but I—"

A brilliant white light stabbed Storch's eyes. He recoiled and clamped his eyes shut. The other soldier asked, "That better?"

"Tell us what you did in San Jose, Sergeant," the Major asked.

Storch scrubbed his face. He was beyond exhausted and his painkillers were starting to wear off, it was so hard to focus, to try to play their game. Maybe if he played along, they would help him get out of the country, or at least help him understand what the hell had happened. But how much to tell? How much did they already know? He told them where he went and what happened in San Jose, leaving out only his visit with Buggs. This thing had already burned away nearly all the meager store of friends and acquaintances he'd managed to gather. He wasn't going to sacrifice the only person who'd helped him.

The Major steepled his fingers in front of his face. Storch could see well enough now to tell that the Major was a black man in his middle fifties, close to two hundred pounds and in excellent shape. Even sitting on a bunk bed in dungarees and a plaid flannel shirt, he looked like the men who'd run Storch's life from the moment of his conception—moving his family hither and thither, committing his father, sending him into the desert. The other man, holding the flashlight in one hand and an exotic sawed-off shotgun in the other. He was younger, white, a grunt with close-set, Appalachian features and a huge jaw that didn't quite set right, a nose like a smashed ax blade, broken so many times the bridge was almost concave. A Marine, Storch would bet his broken arm on it.

He was impressed by these men, though he hadn't tested them. They were former military, and flint-hard with battle-training—the sergeant probably a Ranger, the bikers were probably SEALS or Green Berets.

Once Storch had found Special Forces, he'd discovered his allegiance was not to the Army or to his country so much as to the ideals of his caste. If the right catalysts had been introduced at the right time in his career, if he hadn't gone on the mission in the war, who knows? He might've been among these men long ago.

"You're skipping something. That makes you look like a liar, Sergeant." The Major's voice was calm, cool, anything but condemning. Storch flashed on the first time he'd heard this voice. It'd been scrambled, but the combination of a mild, upper Southern accent—Kentucky, maybe Maryland—and carefully enunciated r's, told him the Major had been the man on the phone in his trailer. The man whose wake-up call had first set him running.

"Fucker's fucked us twice, Major. We're here to grease him, so let's." The Marine switched off the flashlight. Storch heard the shotgun pump ratchet. He tried to picture the space between him and the gun and wondered if he could fill it with fists before the Marine blew him in half. Slowly, silently, he went into a crouch, preparing to dodge at the slightest sound, opting instead to lunge for the Major and hope the jarhead liked the Major more than he hated Storch.

"Unfuck yourself, Draper. Those were civilian orders. Now, Sergeant. What else can you tell us about your visit to San Jose? It's very important."

Storch racked his brains so hard the truth came spilling out, even as he tried to bite it back. He wanted to be a truth-teller in front of these soldiers, he wasn't going to try to lie, not now. "A friend of mine from Thermopylae came down to see me."

"Did you contact this friend?"

"No, he tracked me down. He knows computers. Anyway, he took me up to his new work and tried to help me run down Sperling, and then he took me home."

"What is your friend's name?"

"I don't see where that figures in," Storch said. "He's just a guy who used to work for me, up until last week—"

"So you don't know anything about this," the Major cut him off again, and the flashlight flared again, pointed at the floor between them. The morning Los Angeles Times, still crisp and white, with its too-bright color spread showing a nighttime view of an old gambrel-roofed house on a bright green lawn, surrounded by ambulances, coroners' wagons and police cars. A bucket brigade of medical examiners passed bagged bodies out the front door and down to the ambulances on the crushed gravel drive. Storch sucked in a long, deep breath and blinked several times before he felt ready to read the headline.

SAN FRANCISCO AREA RELIGIOUS SECT WIPED OUT IN MASS SUICIDE; 28 DEAD

Death followed him. They followed him, and Buggs—

"You were there?"

Dumbfounded, Storch just nodded. "But everything was fine. They were all just asleep."

The light went out again.

"The School Of Night was our eyes and ears, Sergeant. Without them, our task is next to impossible. I had orders to kill you as a traitor, but I believed what Harley Pettigrew told me about you. He said you were unbelievably stupid and probably insane, but trustworthy. Who was this friend of yours?"

Storch started to say his name when it hit him.

Fucker's fucked us twice—

—always ending up in the wrong place, that's why.

I would've done it for free.

"Oh shit," Storch groaned, and sank to his knees. "Ely Buggs," he muttered. "He came to work for me about three months ago. He was just a clerk—"

"There were armaments under your store for four months," the Major replied. "I can't believe they used the same fucking guy twice."

"I can't believe it worked twice," Draper said. "But this fucker's still trash."

"Sir," Storch swallowed and started off, "I don't understand what the fuck's going on these last few days, but I want to get out of it. And I'm starting to see the only way out is down to the bottom and through. If you're fighting these motherfuckers that burned down my store and killed Harley and that girl and I don't know what else…I'm in."

"Sergeant, you're stupider than Pettigrew let on, and definitely insane. But now, more than ever, I need stupid, crazy grunts to fulfill my task. You can't leave here if you say no, but don't think for a minute that saying yes is going to save your life. We've all killed for this cause, and we're all going to die for it."

"I think I'd be a liar to pledge that kind of loyalty, sir. With all due respect." He drank a long drink of the close, stale trucker's-coffin air, and closed his eyes. What else could they expect him to say?

"Did Sperling tell you what Radiant Dawn did with his daughter?" the Major asked, and Storch cocked his head and thought for a moment about this tangential question.

Storch blinked, it was darker with his eyes open. "He told me some, but I don't see what—"

"We want to show you something, Sergeant."

A break in the blackness, a black box he recognized must be a TV just as it exploded into blinding snow, staring into it until tears came to adjust his eyes. A picture swam up out of the snow, squiggled as the tracking settled itself.

"—and this striving to transform is so powerful within us, that it takes a lifetime of programming to overcome it. That frustrated energy has to go somewhere—"

The image froze in crystal clarity, not skipping like his cheap VCR. "This is Cyril Keogh," the Major said. "He transmits this program via satellite each week. It is called Radiant Dawn. It is not a popular program, but it is accessible to several hundred million people all over the world. As you can see, little effort is expended on the program itself, but stego decryption reveals that the program itself is only a Trojan Horse for a private transmission."

The pixels began to flicker, every atom of the New Age lecturer's freaky visage strobing, becoming snow again, until another image came out of the Technicolor blizzard.

This was not the same program.

Still, he recognized her. It was Sidra Sperling.

Look how efficient he can afford to be, Storch realized, when he never intends to close her back up.

Storch couldn't properly call it a baby, because it was the size of a kindergartner. A caul covered its facial features, if it had any.

"Geneticists routinely use fruit flies to study mutations, because they have a new generation every week or so," said the Major. "Our enemy has achieved similar results with…higher animals."

"Oh my God…" Storch whispered. Unborn, a prisoner of the womb, it was pregnant, too.