Ravenous Dusk (50 page)

He felt unzipped down to his soul, as if all the misplaced hate that'd been holding him at attention for so long simply bled away. He loved everyone. He waved feebly to the deputies behind the counter, to the Sheriff sitting in his office, to the two FBI agents who flanked him out the doors and across the parking lot to a big van.

He noticed it wasn't an ambulance, but a plain black van, and this made him feel important. He would travel in secret to the hospital, out of the eye of the media and the bad people who were making all the bad things happen on the mountain.

With all the fear and guilt and uncertainty pressing down on him, it felt so good to just let go and surrender, to let go of the old fears for a while and just feel safe. He was out of jail. His troubles were over. They would fix him. The FBI agent had leveled with him. There were bad feds, but there were good feds, too, and they were OK. They weren't at all the monsters Grossvater Egil said they were. Amazing how wrong about everything he could be. If he could be wrong about that, then he could be wrong about the Rapture, too, and the feds could fix them all.

Even one of the paramedics, who was black, smiled at him reassuringly as he lifted his end of Karl's gurney into the maw of the van. Dimly, he saw light reflecting off a myriad of shiny things inside. The walls were bright white and corrugated steel, with safety glass-faced cabinets full of life-saving equipment. A big lamp with multiple bright lights and cameras and microphones set into it hung from the ceiling. They parked him under it, so even when he closed his eyes, he saw pink and gold jellyfish forms chasing each other across his inner eyelids. Whispering voices clustered around him, but he couldn't hear them, because the van fired up, and they were moving. He could feel the engine vibrating somewhere underneath him, but he felt only the slightest swaying motion, like the cargo area of the van was on big springs.

"Mr. Schweinfurter, can you hear me?" the nice black paramedic asked. The man's voice sounded black, all deep and bassy, but gentle and comforting. He saw faces hovering over him, but they were blurry and shiny behind face-shields and surgical masks.

"I—" Karl started, but fell off the edge of the word and into a mushy preverbal swamp. He felt good. He felt grateful. He wanted to thank them for saving them, and to assure the black paramedic that he had nothing personal against niggers, whatsoever.

The engine stopped. Were they at the hospital already? Grangeville was an hour from White Bird on a good day, and the snow was coming down in dumptruck loads, outside. He could see no windows or sunlight, could see nothing beyond the great golden eye of the lamp.

"Better give him more gas," the black paramedic said. "Are you sure he's negative for irradiation?"

"He's circling the drain, Doctor," said another person, whom Karl recognized by his shiny bald head, like the bookworms, but it was one of the other ones, the guy and girl agents who looked like brother and sister, and whose parents probably were, too. The cool bookworm told him something important about those two, but he couldn't remember—

Big black hands in translucent rubber gloves poked and prodded his chest. "Jesus, what a mess. Does this hurt, Karl?"

Karl tried to shake his head, but he couldn't move it. He could feel some kind of padded clamp holding it in place, like on a really extreme roller coaster, or when they thought your neck might be broken. They were just being careful.

"I just want to be sure, Agent." They waved a wand over him, and one wall of the van lit up with a grainy image of his insides. They whistled.

"We'd better harvest now, before he arrests. We can't learn any more from cold tissue."

"But you can fix me, right?" Karl rasped. "I'll get better?"

"He's definitely malignant, but not irradiated," the agent whispered. "Poor redneck bastard."

"We're going to fix you right here, Karl." The nice black man said. "Jim, give me the seven, the Teflon serrated one. Yeah…you can help us, Karl. Do you want to help us?"

"Sure I want to help…but what about me?"

"We've learned just about all you can tell us, Karl," the agent said, "but we need to know more."

The paramedic held up something that blinded him right through his squinted lids. The white light imprinted his retinas with the image of a fanged circular saw blade.

"We need you to show us, Karl. Just relax, and show us what you got."

"Why?"

"You're pretty important, Karl. You're a member of a very special group."

"A…a master race?"

"Sure, a master race…battery power's not gonna get through the sternum. Plug it in—"

Even though it hurt, Karl was happy to be of service to his new friends. It was the duty of a member of the master race, to help his inferiors.

Sometimes, the experience of being Mort Greenaway was so thrilling, so fraught with challenge, that he would gladly turn it over to someone else. This was shaping up to be one of those days

Waking at 0500, he found the camp already up and flying off the handle at a situation. Ice fog pushed visibility down to arm's length. Its shifting tides smothered sounds or amplified them out of all regard for distance, so it sounded like the camp was tearing its own asshole out for no reason when Greenaway stumbled out of his trailer. Snowmobiles prowled the steep, ice-crusted forest below the plateau, men shouted and discharged rifles somewhere halfway down the mountain, and then a small fireball rose up out of the mist. He took a huge mug of black coffee from an Afrikaner mercenary whom he knew only as Ade and washed down a big black capsule of herbal speed. Ade didn't know what the fuck was going on, so he stomped over to the comm center, a big armored box on a flatbed trailer festooned with aerials and antennae, and shouted for Master Sergeant Talley.

"Burl, what the fuck is going on?" The glycerine capsule was stuck in his throat, slowly melting and trickling hot packets of herbal nervous amperage into his uneasy gut. An irresistible urge to hit something or someone—anyone, really—had taken over his left arm and began to creep into his heart.

Talley sat in a folding chair before a console much like an air traffic controller's, with a black circular display flecked with green dots and ghostly clouds. His nose only inches from the screen, he cycled through satellite overlays from various orbital eyes, oblivious to the boss's arrival until one of the comm technicians tapped him on the shoulder.

He stood and regarded Greenaway like the CO was only one more tit-clutcher he'd have to wet-nurse today. He looked as if he'd slept at the console, if he'd slept at all. He'd stripped down to his battle dress underclothes and rolled the sleeves up to reveal knurled forearms blue with blurred, indecipherable tattoos. Though the undershirt was black, deeper shadows of sweat-stains ran from his armpits and Adam's apple to his gut-strained belt. "Not much of a situation, after all, Mort," he growled. "We got it under control, you want to bunk out for a few more hours—"

"Why the hell would I want to do that? What are my men doing?"

Burl stifled a yawn. "We had some kind of an encounter on the north face. Third-party shooting, none of our men were involved."

"What do you mean, a third party shooting?"

"Near as we can tell, somebody was up here, and somebody else flushed them, then chased them down the mountain. We got Dogtown's team tracking them on snowmobiles, but with the snow and the fog, I don't expect them to find much."

One of the comm techs turned in his seat. "Dogtown team leader's on channel one," he told Talley.

"Speaker," Greenaway growled. "Dogtown, sitrep."

Ruggy DeSantis, the Dogtown leader, hawked, spat and shouted over the wind lashing his position. "Sir, we're on the north face, and we just shot down a fucking UFO, over."

The morning went downhill from there.

Snowmobiles dragged the downed aircraft back to base, where the unit mechanic and the comm techs—two ex-Army Signals operators, a Naval radar expert and a former Air Force MX missile jockey—gathered around the smoking ruins and scratched their heads.

There wasn't much to examine, since, as the Dogtown team leader explained, the men had unleashed all their collective anxiety on the first moving object that presented itself out of the fog. Under their enthusiastic fire, the saucer-shaped aircraft had crashed and exploded. They put it out with snow and chained the wreck, which was only ten feet in diameter, to their snowmobiles. The Dogtown team had found nothing else, all traces of the skirmishers obliterated by an avalanche caused by the noise.

They swiftly concluded that it was terrestrial in origin, but were stumped beyond that rather obvious assumption. It was actually doughnut shaped, a thin aluminum and fiberglass shell with enough of a rotor assembly left suspended over the hollow center to suggest that it was a drone helicopter, and stabilizers, cameras, microphones and other spy paraphernalia sticking out of the outer hull. The drone's insides were blackened slag, but Greenaway didn't need to read the owner's manual to know who built it. He stepped up perimeter security and sent Talley to his trailer to sack out with Ade at his door. By oh-eight-hundred, the fog had more or less lifted, but the snow fell harder than ever, and visibility got so bad he posted a sniper team in a hide overlooking the gorge, halfway down the mountain. They were ordered to shoot anyone–
anyone–
who tried to come up the road.

At oh-nine-thirty, the first challenge came, and Team Teabag failed to meet it. "Sir, there're trucks, Army trucks, and buses, coming up the road."

"You have your orders, Teabag."

"It's a company-sized convoy, sir. I don't have that many
bullets
."

Greenaway raged, massed his whole infantry complement to the south gate and waited. When Teabag called back in to report that they had a motor home and phony guns, Greenaway saw red. He had words with Army National Guard Major Ortman, who seemed to think that the Governor of Idaho had decided to send them to Greenaway's doorstep to play wargames in the snow. Even better, he seemed to think No Such Company was there to play, too. Disabusing him of these misconceptions proved fruitless, since Ortman's slavish respect for the secrecy of unconventional warfare only made him take Greenaway's abuse as part of the game.

Only because there really were too many of them to shoot, and because they really did seem to be ineffectual weekend warriors, did Greenaway agree to leave them the road. He had his people monitor their communications, which were limited to boombox wars, Clinton and fag jokes, and complaints about the cold.

He saw them clearly for what they were, too—another feint, another distraction from a threat he could feel coming, as if it were germinating in his tired old bones. He tuned them out, but pulled Teabag up inside the fence and had him sit in a pine tree overlooking the ANG's tailgate party.

Less than an hour later, a bloodcurdling racket from the direction of the Heilige Berg compound, with gunfire, screams and a subsonic rumbling, as of a cattle stampede, threw the camp back into high alert. Before he could scramble the Cobra to fly over it, Major Ortman called him to report that his men had reconned the compound and discovered that it was seemingly abandoned, and that some kind of a firefight might have occurred, but it could just as likely be an explosion of improperly stored ordnance, triggering an avalanche. Greenaway sent Dogtown over to review the site, but they could add very little light to the murky account. A storage cabin had been blown up, or maybe someone drove a tractor of some kind out through the front wall and, under small weapons fire from parties unknown, took off down the mountain.

Greenaway popped another black capsule, took his pulse, lost count. He was all over this fucking mountain! This was his battle! So why were skirmishes breaking out all around him, as combatants he hadn't even known were up here maneuvered around him? That one or more of the parties were Missionary spies, he had no doubt, but who was hunting
them
? His own men were still too busy setting up proactive defenses to cover the whole mountain, but someone else was up there with them, ghosting them, alerting their enemy who must be coming soon, it had to be soon, before it all—

Heilige Berg was deserted. His advance recon teams had watched the buses go down the mountain, had known they were gone, but now it seemed the most likely possibility that at least a unit of fighters had stayed behind. He hadn't had much faith in their acumen before, but who knew what a determined guerilla force defending its own territory could be capable of, if not Greenaway? This was, after all, their mountain…

It occurred to him several times throughout the day that he ought to see Keogh and order him to evacuate. He knew too little about what was going on to guarantee his own men's safety, let alone theirs. If they could be moved under cover of night or fog, the complex could still serve his purposes, and no civilian casualties would sour his revenge. He knew it would be stupid to move them now, that was exactly what the eggheads probably wanted him to do, with all their diversionary tactics. They were safer now in their bunkers, than they would be on the road in buses.

It was a moot point, though. Greenaway would not see Dr. Keogh. Fuck him. Just thinking about him made Greenaway age and grow tired, as if he was a kind of virus that sapped his strength. He wasn't afraid, per se, or he could have sent a messenger, but he didn't want to know any more than he did.

Up until now, he honestly didn't care what Radiant Dawn did, that the Mission had to destroy them. When the egghead FBI agent Cundieffe leaked to him the truth about the Mission, he had seen only them on the horizon. They, all along, were the real enemy he had been born to fight. He believed this with all of his scarred old heart, and he had raised a small army of men who believed it also, for most of their wounds from far-flung hellholes the world over, had really been inflicted by
them
, with their bad intel, their lies, their bullshit bag jobs to prop up dictators. Radiant Dawn was a means to an end, bait in a trap that would deliver them. Radiant Dawn was sick people who came here to die, or be experimented on, perhaps to find a cure for cancer.