Ravenous Dusk (56 page)

If there was a way off this mountain, or payback to be extracted, he had to come alive and do something.

"Talley, get these commo faggots some guns and let's get the fuck out of here." He jumped down into snow and marched out to the edge of the devastated trailer park, where he saw two of his men, Manny Aleppo and Rhino, hunched down behind an overturned trailer, exchanging fire with someone in the trees at the edge of the plateau. He just stood there and took center-of-mass shots like blown kisses, and pot-shot their position as if he had all night to get them, which he did. Behind him, someone else lobbed mortars with aimless randomness all over the snowfield. A few got as far as the trailer park, making the rubble dance to assure Greenaway that if he tried to call in the 406 to exfil them, it would be shot to shit the moment it touched down.

"Goddammit, boss," Aleppo hollered, "we want to go home!"

He knew he should say something stirring, something that would steel the troops—both of them—for the final assault. "Me too," he mumbled.

Talley stormed up behind him, spun him around and punched him in the mouth. He sat down hard on something jagged and metallic that sheared his ridiculous rubber NBC suit from hip to ankle. He fought for breath, tasting blood and chipped teeth. He dug for anger to fling at his most trusted noncom, but he found only bone-deep fatigue and nausea, and the chilling certainty that he had simply lived way too goddamned long.

"I suppose you're relieving me, Burl, and I won't get into it with you here and now. If you think you got a better plan, lead on. I'm all motherfucking ears."

"You goddamned psycho sonofabitch, this is YOUR WAR, remember? We're just the hired help, Mort. We knew not a goddamned thing about what we were getting into! And we sure as shit resign, as of this instant. But since this is your war, I think you oughta stay to talk the terms for your surrender, don't you?"

Greenaway went for his sidearm and only then saw it in Burl's stubby booger-hook. "You're—what are you doing, Burl?"

Talley's face crumpled up like an old paper bag. Tears sprang out and froze in the corners of his bloodshot eyes. "You took every goddamned soldier above ground who ever trusted you, and you fed them all into a meat grinder, and what the hell for? For
them
?" He waved his arm at the ruined tower. "They ain't even human, and then they ain't even here no more, are they? And what about the enemy, Mort? Where were they? Here and gone, and somebody cut up our men from the inside, I'll tell you what. What the hell happened here, Mortimer Greenaway? What the hell were we fighting? What killed us?"

Greenaway looked at the ashes in the snow at Talley's feet. He did not flinch when one of those boots kicked him in the stomach. He just rolled over and wrapped his arms over his head.

"Tell me, by God, or I'll beat it out of you!" Talley shouted, and stomped him just above his kidneys.

Greenaway just kept looking through freezing tears, at a terminal loss for words, but now the snow at Talley's feet was suddenly the thing to be looking at. It shifted and sank into itself like the mouth of an ant lion's den, and the bowl became a hole, and the hole widened between Talley's boots until he slipped and fell into it. A bayonet lunged up out of the hole and sank to the hilt into the hollow of Talley's crotch and his femoral artery. Hot red blood sluiced the snow and raised a merciful curtain of steam as Talley was dragged screaming out of sight, shooting wildly into the air and the ground, screaming Greenaway's name.

Greenaway gathered himself into a crouch and looked around. The three comm geeks stood transfixed before the widening, hungry hole that swallowed the master sergeant. Manny and Rhino shot up the hole, and he almost thought Manny was going to shoot him, when a double-tap to the back of the soldier's neck poleaxed him. Rhino shrieked and returned his attention to the ghost in the trees. No one had the presence of mind to even shoot at the man who climbed up out of the hole.

He was caked in snow and frozen earth and blue with cold, but he didn't shiver. He moved in slow-motion, like some steam driven contraption in need of oil, but he could have run circles around them. Greenaway understood now why the mines had been going off. The Heilige Berg militia burrowed under them all day, perhaps for several days, with their bare hands, to get here. Which sounded insane, but of course it wasn't, because they weren't human. They were Keogh.

He unwound his frosty balaclava hood and smiled at Greenaway. More holes opened up in the crusty snow, and the comm geeks stampeded back to the dubious safety of the trailer. Rhino emptied his rifle and picked up Manny's.

More Keoghs climbed out of the holes, ice-mummies with those same silver-gray eyes. "You see, now," they said to him, "how obsolete you are."

"Fuck you all," he growled. He snatched an M16A2 out of a comm geek's nerveless hands and sprayed Keoghs full-auto.

With only one lung inflated and most of its face shot away, the nearest Keogh spoke only in a sibilant whisper, but the others, emerging from the holes by the dozen, now, took up its speech and amplified it into the voice of the God of the Hive. Even the trees seemed to turn the wind into his voice. "We tried to save you. We tried to take you in, but you were too stupid, and stupidity is the only sin in the real world, Greenaway. Stupidity is extinction. The Old Ones who began this game were stupid."

"Who the fuck are the Old Ones?"

Keogh smiled wider. "Exactly," he said.

Greenaway tugged on his headset. "Terry, do you copy?" Please God, let me have this, at least. "Terry, come in, goddamn you."

"Say my call-sign, beeyotch."

"Terry, this isn't—"

"Say my name—"

Regretting the decision to let the pilots pick their own call-signs, he mouthed the words so Keogh wouldn't hear them. "Count Chocula…"

"Boss, we copy, what the fuck? There's a whole fucking army massed under your nose, come back. You can't want me to come in there—"

"I know. Do not come in to exfil. Repeat, stay back, and put this fucking place into orbit."

"You're still down there, aren't you?"

"Affirmative. Do it. Blow it up. We'll get clear if we can, but consider us KIA, unless you hear otherwise. Copy?"

Already hovering above the jagged peak, Count Chocula dipped and came in for its first run. "Affirmative, boss. Do what you gotta…"

The Keoghs all just stood there as if this was exactly what they expected to happen. The one he'd shot up grew most of a new head. The Bell 406 fired a volley of Hellfire anti-tank missiles into the tree-line from five hundred feet above their heads, then juked and jived to dodge a salvo of unguided rockets. The last of the tall whitebark pines went down amid football field-sized fireballs, and the chopper pivoted and turned back.

"Now the trailer park, Terry," Greenaway said.

"But sir, I can see you down there, I can take the motherfuckers out from here with the pods—"

"Bomb us, goddamit!" Greenaway screamed, and then he choked. Something erupted out of the rocks at the foot of the cliff face and raced down towards them, just paces ahead of a tumbling wall of satanic green vapor that ate its way up out of a hole in the ground where the vent bunkers used to be. Greenaway staggered back, away from the Keoghs, shouldered his M16A2 and took aim at the running thing.

He looked down the sights of the assault rifle, but he could not shoot. It was a man, or something like a man, except it had only raw, knotted muscle and glinting bones instead of skin. Tatters of green uniform flapped in the wind on its oversized form. His head was ducked down low over a body he cradled in his arms. His legs pounded the snow like bombs, eating up twelve feet at a stride, but he barely gained ground on the avalanche of gaseous death that raced at his heels. When the cloud hit dead bodies, they screamed and exploded. Greenaway head-checked the Keoghs and saw by the stricken look on their collective face that whoever the fuck he was, he was not one of them.

But he was hardly human, either. Greenaway aimed again, amazed all over again by his blinding quickness. The runner passed within a hundred yards of Rhino, who seemed not to even see him. He triggered mines, but was gone before they detonated.

Greenaway squeezed off a shot, leading the runner a good twenty feet. The runner seemed to bow before the bullet left the barrel, and kept right on running.

He was heading for the bridge. Greenaway smiled. This, at least, he could control. He reached into his parka through his ripped NBC suit and found the remote detonator, unfastened the safety cover, and took a shallow breath.

The runner hit the bridge and was halfway across it in three strides when Greenaway pressed the button. A skirt of fire and force lifted the bridge and split it into four sections, illuminating the silhouetted runner as he stopped and turned back the way he'd come. He leapt clear of the bridge's doomed launch trajectory, vaulting over the temporarily airborne troop truck and hitting the snow without dropping the girl, without breaking stride. Greenaway sighted him down the rifle. Two hundred yards. Impossible at this distance, but getting easier every second.

"Boss, what are your orders?" Count Chocula's voice chirped in his ear.

The runner turned and ran along the edge of the tree-line. Mortars lit his way, kicking up fountains of earth, but the runner threaded an untouchable path through them and emerged unscathed. Then he stopped.

Greenaway drew a bead on him, sixty yards out and stock-still. A steady hand could barely pick him off with an M16, and his hands shook like he had DT's. He watched the runner jolt and rock as bullets from somebody down-slope lit him up, but he threw something down the slope and dropped prone on the snow.

Greenaway looked at the Keoghs, back at the runner, then back to Rhino. No one moved. The Count squawked at him, but it might've been the wind.

The edge of the plateau went white with a blast half the size of the one that destroyed the bridge, but it rained body parts and burning, screaming trees. When the light died away, the runner was already gone.

Greenaway crouched and turned, shot the nearest Keogh's eyes out. He raked the mob of them at knee-height, felling ten or fifteen of them like saplings before the clip ran dry. The others silently charged him.

"Run for the Cadillac!" he shouted. "Terry, give us sixty klicks to get clear! Then take a shit on this place, and cut a trail down the mountain, copy?"

"I hear that," the Count hollered, and laid down curtains of 20mm cannon fire that made confetti of the assembled Keoghs.

Greenaway had to kickstart Rhino out of his trance, but the comm geeks ran so fast they waded right into the green pool around the back wheels of the surviving APC. Two of them ran right into it up to the waist. One of them shrieked and sank out of sight, but the other waded out and collapsed at Greenaway's feet. His NBC suit dripped off his legs, which sloughed meat like over-cooked chicken drumsticks. He reached out to Greenaway and tried to ask for help getting up when his eyes glazed over with shock. His buddy, Greenaway never had caught his name, wanted to lift him up and take him along, but then Rhino raced past them, shooting blind over his shoulder, scaled the blunt nose of the APC, dropped in through the open side hatch, got the engine turned over, and started to roll away without them. They ran after and jumped inside.

A pair of Keoghs came around the comm trailer and rushed them, but the helicopter's machine guns scythed them down. Scattered rifle and RPG fire drove the 406 back up through the roof of smoke, but it showed that the force surrounding them was smashed wide open for the moment. They flattened five more Keoghs crossing the snowfield. Greenaway saw them getting back up in their wake, shaking off the tire-tracks and racing after them, shooting. He cradled his head in his arms. What the fuck? What the fuck were they fighting?
I wish I knew, Burl.

Rhino hit the brakes. The comm geek split his scalp on the bulkhead behind the driver's seat. Greenaway half-jumped, half-fell into the cab. "I'm not going down there," Rhino mumbled. In the dark and the smoke, there was mercifully little to see, but what he did see made him also want to turn back, and chance the lances of rocket fire pounding the last vestiges of the Radiant Dawn settlement into smoke. It looked like Tet and the Somme and Agincourt and all the goddamned places where God set up his wood-chipper and stuffed it with human fertilizer. The pitted, bare earth was black and red and painted in body parts, blasted trees and charred bodies. But nothing here could die. Every infinitesimal fragment of His flesh writhed and suffered for as far as he could see through the smoke, but the runner had gotten through.

Greenaway dragged Rhino out of the driver's seat and ordered him to man the turret. "Kill everything again, Rhino," Greenaway called out, and drove them over the edge.

The ground tried to grab them. The wheels sank into muck and severed hands clawed at the wheels. The invincible dead choked the wheel-wells and clambered up onto the windshield. Every pothole yawned to greet them and swallow them up. Every seemingly safe high point crumbled under them and sent them, wheels scrabbling on bloody mud, into fresh waves of mutilated Keoghs. Rhino screamed and sobbed and spun round and round, shooting everything. Only the blind force of their own momentum sent them smashing through the final cordon and down the uneven slope of the mountain.

Trees introduced themselves in impassable hedgehog formations, and fucking snowmobiles slashed this way and that like henchmen in a goddamned James Bond movie, but the runner was long gone.

Greenaway hobbled over open ground, braking in stops and stutters until he stumbled across a fire road. A convoy of burning trucks from Heilige Berg lay on and around the road. This must've been the primary for the Hellfire attack the Count laid down. The APC lurched onto the road and picked up speed, clinging only to the roughest outline of the balls-out slalom course.