Ravenous Dusk (14 page)

It was time to go.

She reached for the doorknob, turned it and started to open the door before it hit her that she had no idea who was on the other side, but that it was almost certainly whomever He had called with her hands and voice.

She backed away from the door, stumbled and fell to the ground over a pair of plastic kitchen bags, cinched tightly shut, but exuding the cloying perfumes of vanilla and her own necrotized flesh. She almost thought she could see the floating dust tumbling into the tiny mouths of the bags, all the magic Stella-Cancer-dust taking care of itself.

You're being insane. For all you know, it's the woman who lives here, or the sheriff. You've got to get out of here.

Where are we—I…Where am I going?

Like Radiant Dawn. Gather all the mutants out in the middle of nowhere so some lunatic fascists can barbecue them without getting on the news. What's Plan B, God?

Stella looked around the trailer, looked at the silhouette of the caller in the window. A tall, thin man in an overcoat, no hat. "Stella Orozco? We have to hurry, there's a plane waiting for us."

Stella opened the door and looked into the mercury-mirror eyes of Dr. Keogh. He smiled at her, a wide, patient smile of true affection and something deeper that she had only witnessed a few times in her life. It was a kind of quiet admiring pride that lights the face of a teacher when a pupil has completed the last lesson.

"Do you—remember me, Doctor?"

He nodded sagely, the brittle sunlight striking blinding highlights off his white hair. "I told you, there would be another Radiant Dawn."

Overwhelmed at last, she fell against him, sobbing. To see someone, anyone, from the other side of the nightmare she'd fallen into six months ago, and this man, who had first offered her hope and then cast her adrift…

"You have bags?" Dr. Keogh asked, looking past her into the trailer.

"No. nothing." But she turned around and stepped inside, grabbed the trash bags and hauled them out before shutting the front door. He offered to help, but she shouldered him aside as she carried them down the icy-slick lane to the dumpsters. As she rounded the corner, a sleek black shape appeared from behind the dumpster corral, snarled at her and snapped its fangs at the bag.

"Mannix! No!" An old fat man in a golf cart hove into view from behind the dumpster corral at the other end of the dog's absurdly long leash. Mannix tore the bottom out of the bag and immediately recoiled from the wave of noxious fetor that exploded into his hypersensitive nostrils. He backpedaled, gave a sharp, snorting bark and lunged at Stella. Her eyes widened in shock at the swiftness of the attack, but her own hand whipped out before her and slipped under the dog's muzzle, took firm hold of the tender pipes that fed the dog air and water and food and blood, and gave them a good squeeze. Though her arm was still little more than a jointed stick, she could rip the Doberman's life out with little or no effort, could pull his spine out through his fucking mouth, if it came to that. She was no less horrified than the dog by this realization, and let him go with a gentle shove. Mannix yelped and streaked across the lane and began retching and gobbling up weeds.

"Good Lord, what's that stink?" The old man levered himself up from the cart and shuffled towards the dumpster.

Stella swung the gate out to cover the ravaged bag and leaned against it, trying not to throw up on the man. "I'm sorry about the mess. I'll take care of it."

The old man shook his head, squinting at Stella, spooked by her as much as by the incident. "That's all right, ma'am, it's the damned dog's fault. He doesn't cotton to strangers poking around the trash. And you are a stranger…"

"I'm Marguerite Weintraub. My Aunt Naomi lives in #72? She's been ill, so she's come to stay with us for a while. The poor dear left some things in a mess, so my husband and I cleaned it up. I trust there's no problem?"

The old man rolled his eyes, smiling at Stella so awkwardly his upper plate slipped loose and made a break for it. He caught the denture in his hand and popped it back in. His mouth and eyes worked themselves into knots as her features slowly came into focus. He didn't seem to notice that she was dressed in her aunt's ill-fitting clothes. "No trouble at all, Mrs. Weintraub. Where is Mrs. Gordesky now, ma'am?"

"Oh, she's fine, but my husband took her to the hospital in Las Vegas for a check-up early this morning."

Twitching suspicion making his dentures click in his mouth, the manager said, "Your aunt said you lived in Bakersfield, is what I recall."

"We moved last year. My husband works at Caesar's Palace. My aunt's lease is paid up through the spring, I take it?"

"Oh, there's no problem with that. Just worried about the lady, is all. She's always been one of the nice ones. Left scraps out for my dogs."

Stella tightened her face in a dismissive smile and stooped to clean up the mess. The man clucked and doodled on his clipboard before heeling Mannix and rolling away in his golf cart.

Stella held her breath as she scooped putrid flesh and cracked bones back into the trash bag. The remains smelled different from the odor she'd grown accustomed to in the trailer; there was a sourer smell, though most of the bones were as clean as if they'd been bleached, with deep nicks and gouges in them, and the marrow all gone. She picked up a concave ellipsis of bone the size and shape of her palm and turned it over. There were strands of yellowed white hair hanging from it.

Was this her hair? She'd seen it falling out, but it hadn't turned white. Was this her skull? Her head had been badly beat up and decayed, but had she shed her old skull? Her old brain? She stroked the hairs on the shard. Her thoughts still ran riot in this new, improved head. Her memories still gave her the anger she needed to stay strong and go on living. Her soul was still in here, even if it was not alone. If this was not her head, God help the God who had to share it with her.

Unless the skull was someone else's, but…

This broken old thing must be part of her skull. There was no other logical explanation. She scoured her brain and could find no memory, no flicker of guilt over having harmed anyone, at least not lately. She bundled up the rest of the mess and tossed it into the dumpster.

Dr. Keogh pulled up beside the dumpsters and came around to open her door for her. She stopped short of climbing into the passenger seat, looking at him and at the trailer. He touched her shoulder, fixed his gaze on her and spoke to her in her ear and with her brain. "There's no time to lose, Stella. The life force awaits."

She watched herself climbing into the car, and the car pulling out of the trailer park, and she fell almost immediately into a deep, deep sleep.

January 3 Over the Gulf of Mexico; 120 Miles south of Corpus Christi, Texas

The mammoth C-130 cargo plane rode the storm like a sled hurtling across a glacier, pulling itself forwards by main strength of its four massive props, but dropping serious altitude whenever the furiously roiling cells of wind shifted. The cabin rose and fell as on a restless ocean, then, for variety, made like a washing machine.

In its infinite wisdom, the National Weather Service had not elected to christen this storm, which had sprung up out of a sudden low pressure fault line opening along the Texas Gulf coast, drawing together a very wet, warm weather system from the Yucatan Peninsula with freezing rain sucked down from the Plains states. Somewhere below them, the storm was punishing the Gulf with sheets of fat, tepid rain and fist-sized hail, but experts predicted the storm would come no closer to land, and so it was theirs to name. They'd come up with all kinds of names for it, until they'd exhausted all profanity.

The pilot was a learned hand at this kind of flying, and had made the route dozens of times, with and without the approval of the FAA and the DEA, but he had never carried passengers as illegal as these, nor a cargo anywhere near as dangerous as the one that groaned and rocked in the cavernous expanse directly behind the cockpit. Though they had worked with the Mission many, many times, on this flight, he elected to keep the door to the cabin locked until they landed.

The Mission unit commander, Major Ruben Aranda, truly dreaded flight. He was not, strictly speaking,
afraid
of it. Therapists had told him that he was uncomfortable with the surrender of control, that it was only natural for a very hands-on Army officer to mistrust someone else's defiance of gravity, and that his symptoms were purely psychosomatic reactions to stress. Still, Aranda was reasonably certain that his aversion was purely physical. The tiny bones of his inner ear seemed to grind together like coal in a diamond mine, and his eardrums made each correction of air pressure into an excruciating ordeal that could not be relieved with chewing gum, strong drink or hard drugs. Even under the best of circumstances, in an empty first-class section with a jacuzzi, he would be on edge and in pain, and this flight was not first-class anything.

There were no seats or other human amenities, only the huge cargo cabin, which was filled with plastic shipping crates with forged Mexican labels and customs forms on them. The cabin was poorly pressurized and not heated at all; he couldn't feel his hands or feet, and his ears were making the most of the free bandwidth. He was actually grateful for his chattering teeth, because they seemed to help with depressurizing his eardrums. The omnipotent roar of the engines made conversation all but impossible, and nobody had anything to say but to bitch about the cold. Lt. Grostick had trumped them all with his tale of sneaking out of the USSR in the landing gear well of an Aeroflot airliner in '88, and the subject was laid to rest.

Major Aranda sat near the cockpit with his group of eight trusted subordinates, while the other group sat around and atop the tower of crates. He despised the other group of passengers, and instinctively knew they held him in even lower regard.

He loathed the cargo, but he was even more afraid of it. He knew very little about their final destination, but everything he'd learned so far only made him hate it, and the people around him, and the huge palettes of high explosive stuffed into the smugglers' holes beneath their feet, even more. It almost made him begin to hate the Mission.

They were on the edge of U.S. territorial waters, carrying twenty-five metric tons of an experimental chemical weapon, and the last remaining field command element of the central cell of the Mission. The great man who had recruited him into this chickenshit outfit had joked that they were a counter-evolutionary army. He thought at the time that it was a joke.

The command element consisted of himself and the old man at the far end of the cabin. He did not know Dr. Calvin Wittrock very well, but he was beginning to realize that, in describing him, Major Bangs had exercised rare understatement.

They were flying an old CIA-run drug smuggling route up a seam of minimum vigilance to an abandoned naval airstrip outside Kingsville in Texas. Aranda knew that drugs and less pleasant contraband came in via this conduit on SOD's Seaspray freedom flights in the eighties, and that it was maintained for other purposes, today. If they gave the proper electronic response burst when passing into US airspace, they'd be tacitly invisible on all other radar systems. By the time word of the corridor's use reached someone high enough to know about the Mission, they would be on the road, totally untraceable, and eight hundred miles away. If the state line wasn't closed and overrun with Army National Guard troops, they hoped to get back to HQ by tomorrow, this time. Medication time, give or take an hour if they had to shoot it out. He wished they still had the infrasonic generator technology Armitage designed. He wished Armitage was still alive.

He had not asked to be the ranking military officer in the Mission, would gladly have passed on the reins to anyone else, but he was the senior, and far and away the most qualified for this kind of warfare, even if most of his qualifications were only half-remembered nightmares that had been scrubbed from his brain by the same well-meaning therapists who tried to tell him why he was afraid of flying.

His watch beeped. He looked at its face, turned around to the inside of his wrist, an old habit from jobs where the glow off a watch face could get your hand blown off. Time for his meds. He palmed them out of his pocket pill caddy, dry-swallowed them with a blink and a momentary grimace. A high orange count in the mix today: he must be near the peak of his cycle. Shit, he'd sure hate to kill somebody and forget about it. His men were too good not to notice, but too good to make him feel noticed. Gripping his knees with his hands to hide their shaking, he waited to start feeling normal.

Enlisting in 1968, only a month before the Tet Offensive rendered the war a hopeless hamburger mill, Major Aranda passed through the Army's layered sifting box in freefall—Airborne straight out of basic training, then OCS. Blooded in Vietnam as a second lieutenant, then a captain, with

101st Airborne, he came back to the U.S. in '72 with a jacket of medals, top-flight fitness reports and a will unblunted by the bitter defeat.
His
war had been a thing of beauty. He slashed and burned through Special Forces training and had to fight to get sent back to the war. The brass loved his brains and nerve, and wanted to rub against it in the Pentagon. The politicians loved his squeaky-clean ethnicity, and wanted their pictures taken with him, wanted him to introduce them on campaign stops. But most important, his troops loved
him
. He never got scared, but unlike every other suicide-case the war had hatched, Aranda never got angry, either. He never wasted men, he never let adversity throw him off-task, and he always came home with the job done.