Ravenous Dusk (23 page)

"Oh shit, is that right?" The guard chuckled.

"Yessir," Storch mumbled. "Wasn't hung over, or nothing. Just bad lunch—"

"Didn't ask for your life story, Wynorski. Get hosed down and hump it to 182a. Fucking suit-puking janitor."

Storch settled down, got his breathing under control. Everything was going to be okay. He was going to walk out of here without hurting anybody. Everything was going to be okay…

The elevator stopped as smoothly as it started. "Holy shit, what the fuck did you do to yourself?" a finger lanced at Storch's eye, plugged the hole in his face-plate. Storch stepped back and grabbed the guard's hand, but not-Dennison was already close in alongside him and had something pressed to his head.

"Settle down, Sergeant Korpela. Do you want to know what's in this?"

Not-Dennison held a syringe to Sgt. Korpela's head. The needle punctured his suit just above his mask, and he looked at it with his whole face screwed up and his eyes crossed, mutely screaming, oh yes, he knew this place well enough that he had a pretty good idea of what might be in it.

"I found it in a freezer downstairs. It's an airborne hemorrhagic fever bug. Start the elevator."

The guard only stared at the waggling needle.

"This little squirt I'm about to put in your eye? It's enough to kill about ninety-five percent of North America in a month. Of course, they'll cremate you before they let you out of here. Take us up, okay?"

"Are you—is he—infected…sir?" the guard pointed one finger at Storch.

"No, his suit was like that when he put it on. Put that fucking finger on the button and start this car up, now." He pushed the needle through the hood of the suit and pricked Private Korpela's forehead with it. The guard screamed like a girl, disarmed the emergency shut off, and resumed their ascent, never looking away from the needle.

"A crisis appears to have been averted," not-Dennison said. None were more surprised by what Storch did next than Storch himself. His hand rose up and paused in the air before Sergeant Korpela's rolled-up eyes. For a split second, Korpela's heart got very loud in his ears, the jackhammer lub-dub opening up to reveal the microacoustic zap of the electrical impulses firing his overtaxed heart. Storch flattened his hand into a blade, and brought it down lightning quick onto Korpela's solar plexus. The heart stopped dead. Storch could hear and feel exhausted blood backflushing into the vena cava, his valves snapping at vacuum at the mouth of his aorta, before clamping shut forever. Sergeant Korpela slumped in the corner, always the last to know. Not-Dennison pulled the syringe out and capped the needle before pocketing it. Storch's hand arced up again before not-Dennison, but he stopped it.

"That wasn't necessary, Corporal Wynorski," the Mission agent snapped.

"What's in the syringe, asshole?"

"Fucking knockout drops. When we get topside—"

The door slid open, and not-Dennison stepped out and marched double-time away from the elevator. Storch took Sgt. Korpela's rifle and followed. Gray daylight streamed in from a floor to ceiling window at the end of a long empty corridor. A sign opposite the elevators pointed the way to DECONTAMINATION.

"Are there cameras on the elevators?" Storch asked.

"Of course, but nobody's watching unless the alarm is sounded."

The alarm sounded.

They ran. Doors flashed by on both sides, Storch swinging the rifle to bear on them. A big window on the right looked into a lab where rows of robot arms worked over trays of virus cultures. A few overseers in suits watched them run by, their faces inscrutable behind the fluorescent light reflecting off their masks.

The exterior window was getting nearer, and they'd seen nobody else in the corridor, nothing between them and the outside. In less than twenty paces, he left not-Dennison behind, the rifle clamped under his arm. He hoped he didn't have to kill anyone else to get out of here, but down in his bones, he felt none of the revulsion for it that he'd felt before. He wasn't in their Army, anymore. He wasn't even in their fucking species. All he wanted was to go home, and if they weren't willing to let him do that…

He stopped at the window, had to wipe the glass with his sleeve to see through the condensation on it. It was early in the day, overcast, snow on the ground and on the conifers that screened the window off from whatever lay beyond. His body seemed to know what to do, so far. He hit the window with four shots. Wild ricochets, sparks and darkness rained down on the corridor. The bullets caromed off the glass and smashed into a light fixture overhead. There was a scratch, a little one. The "glass" was transparent plastic tank armor, like the walls of a killer whale tank at Sea World. Still, he had to kick it to be sure. He succeeded in ricocheting himself across the hall and into the concrete block wall opposite.

Someone shot at him, a whole lot of bullets passing by just as he hit the wall after his second attempt to go through the window. He spun and rolled onto his belly on the rifle, looking down the corridor with Lieutenant not-Dennison still unaccounted for at his back.

The corridor angled off to the right, suggesting that they were on the first or second floor of a cylindrical building. Pillars set into the inside wall provided good shooting cover every twenty feet. He could see a boot and a rifle barrel protruding from behind each of the first three pillars.

He took careful aim on the rear-mounted sight, clamped down the stock between his chest and the slick tile floor, and squeezed off two shots. The toe of the boot exploded and the soldier stumbled shrieking out into the open hall, his weight on the shot foot and he went down, a blind, clumsy noncombatant in his heavy MOPP gear, his gun forgotten on the floor.

The next soldier stepped out and shot wildly down the corridor, but Storch was already behind the point man's pillar, shooting the second soldier in the forearm as he stepped back into cover. He shot him again in the thigh, and advanced at a full charge, putting down his targets as if the bullets came out of his eyes, as if his enemies were cardboard cutouts in a kill house, as if everyone else was shambling along at half-speed. Storch's body flowed through the motions so fast that he could barely keep track, let alone control himself.

Someone shot him, two slugs punching him in the abdomen and one through his left breast. The initial pain was no worse than a needle from a careless nurse, but he felt his lung collapse, ribs shatter, and something caustic spilling into his vital organs. Storch staggered and almost fell down, air whuffing out of his chest-hole in bloody foam-flecked gusts, but
pop
his lung closed itself up and sucked in air good as new, better, even. Another bullet meant for his face creased the top of his skull as he faltered, but this time his skull was thicker, and it only made him faster, and less careful.

He shot two more soldiers in the head, neck and chest and passed them before they hit the ground. He emptied the magazine to cover himself as he stooped and grabbed a dead soldier's rifle. Bullets hung in the air all around him, and more than a few found their marks. He felt his body rerouting fluids and nervous impulses and rebuilding even as it ran itself into more shooters and took them down. He'd lost count of how many when he came to the double doors. The corridor ended blindly, no windows on either wall, no doors. On the double doors, the instructions for decontamination procedure. A perfect bottleneck.

"Give me my pistol," Lt. not-Dennison wheezed from close behind him. He looked over his shoulder. The Mission agent was trying to stand upright and having a hard time of it. He'd been shot twice, one in the right thigh and one in the shoulder just to the right of his throat, but something vital was wrecked, and blood splashed out and down the front of his suit on a steadily failing rhythm. He coughed out a laugh. His teeth were framed in fresh arterial blood. "I'm not gonna make it," he said, and tore off his helmet.

Storch only looked at him.

"I forgot to tell you," not-Dennison said, "about the orders." He sat down hard on the floor and laid back, clawing at the seals on his suit. "Come here, I have something I need to give you."

Storch approached cautiously. Lt. not-Dennison had a hard time of it, since his right arm hung limp at his side, and he was shaking badly from shock. Ear cocked on the double doors behind him, Storch knelt and helped him get the suit open. Underneath, he wore the ordinary greens of a Second Lieutenant in the Chemical Corps. What did he have for him?

A sick hunger rose in Storch's belly. Standing still, he was almost knocked flat by his fatigue, by the gnawing pains of all the places where lead had recently penetrated his newly resurrected flesh. He was not a god. He had to eat, and now. Lt. not-Dennison was dying, was not quite a man anymore, just meat, so what did it matter? He could stop the hunger, make himself strong again–

"They're coming," Storch snapped. "Talk fast."

"My real name is Lt. Raymond Saticoy, Third Army Special Operations Group. I am acting on orders of the Mission. My orders were that I was not allowed to get caught…" His hands tore open his uniform, and for a second Storch thought he had on some sort of flak vest. Saticoy seized both Storch's hands, the bare, bloody fingers dug into the pressure points on the insides of Storch's wrists so they went numb. His face came up into Storch's and smeared blood on his mask. Saticoy's face was muzzled in blood, but his eyes fixed on Storch's even as they began to glaze over. "…And I was not allowed to fail."

Storch still didn't know what the hell Saticoy was wearing. A vest of canvas and nylon, it had two flat bags filled with fluid, and a third, empty pouch between them. The two filled bags began to mix in the third. "It's a binary chemical explosive. Wired to my heart rate, but there's a live switch, too. It's armed."

Storch's arms wouldn't come free. He yanked back, only tugged Saticoy up after him. With devilish strength, Saticoy drove his good knee hard into Storch's groin, pointing out a fatal flaw in his body modification, so far. Storch howled and threw himself backwards, pivoting at the last instant to slam the dying man into the heavy steel doors. They shivered under a hail of bullets slamming into the other side. The third pouch on Saticoy's chest was full. "You can't live, Storch, Keogh, whatever you are. Has to be this way—"

Storch stumbled back and kicked the oversized red emergency entry button on the wall beside the doors and when they swung open, he brought Saticoy up high and hurled his limp body into the showers. Storch threw himself back out of the doorway, but the doors only half closed when Saticoy, pinned in midair on a hurricane of bullets, exploded.

The doors whipped over his head like the blades of a broken scissors, and a white hole opened up in the atrium of the decontamination chamber, and it reached out to the walls and ceiling and floor and pushed them back, infinite in all directions, and when it closed over him, Storch was actually trying to fight his way up the concussive stream to get
into
the light, but then the building was coming down on his head, and the shitty old world shut him up in darkness once again.

"Coy?"

Ringing like a cathedral in free-fall, pealing bells burning up on reentry and becoming sine-wave vapor. Scent of a hospital luau, charred pork and medicine…

"Coy! You in there, man?"

Roaming the devastated channels of capillaries in his caramelized skin, new uneasy treaties with molten plastic invaders. A debate raging in his cells: repel the interlopers, or co-opt them, and grow a skin of polyvinyl armor? Storch sat back in awe, wondering how and when his body became so much smarter than he was.

"Coy, we're moving you…"

Moving…he was rising, now, but he could only see the light, still pushing him away, back into the shitty old world filled with dying soldiers and shouting doctors, and all of this was, somehow, his fault, but they were taking him away, too weak to stop them. He could not die, but if he was going to heal, if he was going to get stronger, he had to eat someone…no, something…

Burned now by wind, but the stench blew away, and the dark went pale red with sunlight on his eyelids. Floating down a river of hands, voices raised against the wind,
overflow routed to civilian hospital burn unit, transfer papers pending, have to check with my CO, so many dead
—

Wind gone now, close, cold air and noises behind the gaseous chimes, voices very close, but they couldn't be speaking to him, because his name was not—

"Saticoy! You in there? We gotta move you, man, but hang in there…"

"His term demo pack went off in there, LT."

"Do we know that?"

"S'not here, is it? Middle of the goddamned decon wing. Beaucoup casualties. He should've died."

"He almost did. Coy! Stay with us, man. We're getting you out. But we need to know. Can you talk? Coy, I know you're there, douchebag, what happened in there? Did you dispose of the package?"

His hand came up before his eyes, and it was no surprise, this time, to see that where his flesh was not charcoal black or raw red muscle, or brown with melted suit, it was olive, like not-Dennison's. They thought he was the Mission agent who'd bled all over him, when he tried to blow him up. Even without the guidance of God, his body never missed a trick.

He sat up, restraints and IV tubes ripping away like smoke. "I…am…the package."

The man leaning over him recoiled and tried to stand in the moving ambulance, cracked his skull on the underside of a locker that dumped blankets and splints on him. Someone behind him smashed the back of his head with a rifle butt. He saw stars but wouldn't go out. He swiveled and took the rifle away and pointed it. Hands went up from the two still-conscious Mission agents. Eyes wide, looking at him, seeing not even he knew what.

"Take me to the Mission," Storch said.