Ravenous Dusk (77 page)

Aranda screamed. He laughed. "Where are you, motherfucker? I'll kill you—"

The intruder chuckled inside his head "Don't you get it, Major? You ain't alive, no more! You ain't even dead. Lucky wetback, you're
me
! You have been ever since I ate your fucking Swiss-cheese fly-shit of a brain! You even helped us beat the goddamned blood test! You stupid bitch-hog, don't tell me you forgot that, too…"

Aranda screamed as Dyson reminded him, feeding him twisted images from his own and Dyson's perspectives, eating and being eaten, digesting and being digested. Just enough of his brain kept alive inside Dyson to think he was still alive and well, to think he was himself. Imitating himself, he got them in.

The one who was not Branca jammed an improbably long, bony index finger into Labrador's right ear, stirred the contents of his skull. The drugged soldier dropped to the floor with a baby's gurgle.

Aranda's mouth stopped screaming for him, and his legs carried him to the airlock, but they weren't his, anymore. What was
him
would be shat out of the thing that ate him. What was
him
would be buried in this godforsaken place along with his medals and his holes.

Something knocked softly against the outer airlock hatch.

He watched his hand reach for the switch, and through his tears, he saw words rising up under his skin on his arm. It looked less and less like his arm every instant, the muscles swelling and knotting like breeding snakes under the skin, but he didn't notice for watching the letters, until he could read them. Just before the dream of Ruben Aranda stopped dreaming itself, he could make them out, and he remembered everything he ever wanted to forget.

DON'T MESS WITH TEXAS

Stella was hungry. She wouldn't eat in front of Dr. Barrow, and had just dismissed him when the siren sent him running for the airlock. "Stay here! The perimeter's been breached, maybe the base itself!"

"Then I don't want to be here." She easily outpaced him to the open hatch. He tried to use his phone as he ran, and tripped over roots. He waved her back. "Please, until I know what this is, stay here. It might just be a drill. Aranda's very keyed up, and the lines are down."

She came out of the shadows and loomed over him. "It's not a drill," she said. "He's here."

He looked sick, gulping as if to hold back vomit. "How do you know that? Are you—?"

She smiled bitterly and shook her head.

"He was only waiting for Storch to leave," she said.

She stayed behind him as he ran. The lower levels were deserted, but they both heard shooting from the upper galleries. Sirens blared from speakers at every corridor intersection. Monitor screens flashed a warning: "STAGE 4 ALERT: MIL. QUAR., A WING: TRIG. 02:42." A camera view showed only snow.

"No, shit, no," Barrow mumbled. "They're inside? Nobody even sounded the fucking alarm until they were inside—?"

She shoved him. He almost tipped right over, but she caught him and urged him toward the stairwell.

He attacked the six flights of stairs like a scarecrow with asthma, stopping twice to fumble out his inhaler. He stumbled up the last flight with one hand pumping the medicine into his tiny, flawed lungs, and the other flailing out in front of him, as if he ran through a fog. She resisted the urge to pick him up and carry him there, or just ditch him.

Finally, they got to the top level. A steel blast door stood between them and the barracks, and the alarm had locked it. The shooting was much, much louder, and they heard something else that the sirens had masked. Screams. Shooting.

"Oh God, oh God," Barrow wheezed. He clamped the inhaler in his teeth and dug in his many pockets for the key card to open the door. The brilliant fluorescents died. The darkness was deep purple and full of panicked hyperventilation, then black and quiet. She was startled to see Barrow swim up out of the darkness as if he hit a switch, but it was her eyes adjusting to the darkness. His form was a dull red blur. She realized she was seeing his heat.

He stood there staring blindly straight ahead, trying to keep his breathing under control as he felt for the card. She ripped his hands out of his pockets and dug through handfuls of keys, notebooks, tools and bits of trash before she found a blank red credit card with a magnetic stripe on one side. She ran it through the door and threw it wide open. The sound of the shooting knocked her back, like a monsoon rain drumming on steel and meat. And then the smell. And then she saw.

A line of soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder across the corridor only ten feet to her right. They hid behind a makeshift barricade of bunk beds, lockers and bodies. They fired every weapon they had in constant, stuttering streams at something that was coming inexorably closer. The corridor beyond was ankle-deep in blood where it was not choked with corpses, or parts. There were about forty soldiers in the corridor, and Stella could see that they were all about to die.

To the left, another sealed blast door cut them off, with a steel mesh-reinforced window set into it. A face filled the window, pale and drawn. Wittrock, watching.

The red alert lights still winked on the walls, and the strobing gunfire provided enough light for Barrow to take his card back. "Go back to the forest!" he screamed.

"No! I'll fight!"

He turned and ran to the blast door, screaming over his shoulder, "Protect the forest!" The door opened up and swallowed him.

She ran to the barricade.

The human debris piled up like trash on Christmas morning, though many of the bodies were already melting away. The invaders came in waves out of two doors at the end of the corridor. They came in waves, each soaking up everything the Missionaries had before collapsing, and being trampled by the next wave.

A giant rose up among them and charged the barricade. He was made of blood and teeth. He carried an M60 machine gun in each enormous paw, shooting them like pistols, waving them and cutting the picket line into bite-size chunks.

The defenders' bullets either bounced off or fizzed impotently in the giant's hide. The lysing agent that reduced Keogh to a puddle had little or no effect on him. All the shooting didn't even drown out his laughter.

The surviving soldiers fled the barricade, but a die-hard few actually leapt over the wreckage and charged the giant, emptying clips of chemical ordnance into it. Another one charged out from behind the giant and engaged them hand to hand. Despite the new invader's totally alien appearance, she recognized him immediately.

It was the one who tried to rape her.

He had grown harder, faster, uglier. Every bone in his body was elongated and honed into wicked scythes, skewers, hooks and serrated blades. The ulna of each of his forearms flared out into a fanged battle-axe that clove through human bone like eggshells. The bodies jolted like his touch dealt out ten thousand volt bursts of electricity. His flesh squirmed and ran over his bones in constant flux, like molten wax, like cunning, hungry flames. He waded through the soldiers, hacking and slashing with every surface of his terrible body.

A few survivors ran for the door to the science wing, but they piled up against it and made a juicier target. None of them had a card, and whoever on the other side was supposed to let them through had abandoned his post.

Stella held very still and willed herself to become the wall, to disappear. Her skin went cold, and chromatophores in her skin and pelt mimicked the blood-splashed walls she clung to.

The giant tossed down his empty machine guns and walked right by her. She pressed herself into the wall and held her breath. Avery passed by, too, shaking like a doused dog, splatters of hot blood in her face.

The giant dove for a fleeing Missionary and grabbed him by the ankles. He snatched him up over his head and—make a wish—pulled him apart in the air. Stella let out an airless shriek as the soldier split down the middle up to the diaphragm, raining gore on the laughing giant's bear-trap face. Then he bludgeoned two wounded soldiers to death with the legs.

Avery froze, turned and looked her dead in the eyes. "Crazy fuckin' world," he snarled, "ain't it, squaw bitch?" and pounced on her.

Stella ducked and lunged at the stairwell door, propped open against a dead man's leg, and slipped through. She threw her weight against it until the lock clicked in its housing at her back.

Her heart thundered in her chest. She felt as helpless as she had that night when the old derelict had melted and turned into a replica of the mortally wounded Stephen, and the Mission had come to burn her—

Get a hold of yourself, chica.
She was not helpless, anymore. She wanted to live, and she had the means to defend herself, same as he did. And she knew this place. He didn't. He might have been hiding among them for days, but there was a place he did not know—

The door buckled. The LED above the card slot stopped blinking.

She vaulted over the railing and dropped three stories to the biosphere floor. She hit the ground in a crouch and sprang for the door.

It was locked. Above, she heard the blast door on the top floor explode out of its frame and crash down the stairs. Hollow, humorless laughter rolled down the well and sent her scrambling back up a flight to the next door.

It was locked, too. She threw her shoulder into it. The metal absorbed her attack without so much as denting.

She heard something like a tornado coming down the stairs. She knew she'd never make it up to the next floor, which would be locked, before it found her. She was an ant trapped at the bottom of a bottle. She whirled around, eyes snapping from one feature to another. Gilled vents snapped shut to prevent the dispersal of gas, but even if she could get one open, they were no wider then her leg. She couldn't fit, not in time.

Something flashed past her, screaming down the open stairwell. She jumped back from the railing. It hit the concrete floor with a dull crackling smash and was silent.

Turn and face him.
You are so much more than you were—

Not here.

No choice.

She pounded on the door until her fists went numb, bones creaking and snapping in her delicate clawed hands. Scratches in the metal caught the red blinking lights. In a day or two, she might tear a hole in it. She had seconds.

Something heavy and hard hit the landing above her. The stair landing shook beneath her feet, seemed to lurch and tear itself partially out of the wall. She hit the door one last time, shrieking for all she was worth, as if the raw articulation of her terror and desperation could shatter what her fists could not.

The door opened. She fell through and knocked heads with a wiry, hatchet-faced Mestizo man with shattered, gold-plated teeth and a flamethrower. It was one of Wittrock's pet FARC guerrillas. The weapon he cradled drooled electric blue fire from the nozzle aimed at her eyes.

"
Puta del Diablo
!" he screamed, trying to jump away from her to bring the seething barrel of the flamethrower into play. She pivoted and thrust him through the open doorway into the stairwell. He gave two steps and saw something over her shoulder worse than her. She ducked as he opened up on Avery.

Stella ran. At the far end of the corridor, she saw the convex wall of the canopy, and the black shelter of the forest. All the doors she passed were sealed.

Behind her, she heard Avery roar. She risked a glance back. The guerilla backed up the corridor, spraying Avery, who raced right up the wall, across the ceiling, and sprang at the source of the harmless stream. The guerrilla shouted the Rosary as he turned and ran after Stella. He made three steps before Avery dropped on him, axe-arms chopping him down in mid-stride.

Stella leapt over the railing and hit the plastic biosphere dome. She raked it with her claws and was almost blown back by the blast of pressurized air that escaped. A hexagonal section of the dome went slack beneath her, and she plunged through the hole into the darksome forest.

The trees bowed and shook with the wind soughing out through the punctured dome. It was still dark inside, the dome tinted smoky black to preserve the forest's natural cycle. The sirens had gone dead, in here, but she heard a new alarm coming from the airlock. She'd violated this place, opening it up to the outside world. She was about to violate it a whole lot more.

She raced through the maze of trees with Avery's gobbling screams of lusty triumph ringing in her ears. He'd come, already. He couldn't help himself. Underneath all his monstrous adaptations, he was still only a man.

Pheromones boiled out of her like music in her sweat, weaving a mélange of desire and panic that even the trees seemed to respond to. She reached the glade and lay down on the soft, springy soil. She spread her arms wide and closed her eyes.

Something followed her through the hole in the dome. It tried to be stealthy, but she could feel its approach through the forest, because the trees screamed chemical warnings to each other as he tore through them. Silent and swift as the wind itself, yet he wounded everything he passed, so he came as no surprise to her when he burst out into the open. Plumes of heat and toxic excreta announced his arrival. Branches curled and blackened at his touch. He stalked the glade, his head swiveling to take in the trap he knew had to be here. But there was only her, splayed out on the ground like an offering.

He came closer, bones grinding and squealing as his movements became jerky, uncontrollable spasms. His mercurial flesh softened, hardened, shifted to create the necessary equipment. His heat increased, but his rage dissipated like a mountain thunderstorm. "You—want this?"

"You do…don't you?" she purred. She arched her back and presented herself to him. Downy black fur rippled and threw off female starshine and musky rut-hunger. "He didn't want you to have me—but now, I'm ready."