Ravenous Dusk (79 page)

The giant tilted back his head and swallowed Sixto in a gulp. He dropped the hind end and cracked his knuckles. "Say, you're that little brown number Tuck was sweet on," he said. "He was lookin' for you. Lucky for you I found you first. I just want to eat you—"

She took another step back, bumped into Wittrock. "Damn it, give me some room," he grumbled.

"There is no room. Open it."

Dyson lunged for her. She jumped straight up, lashed out with both taloned hands at his face. His jaws snapped at her. One claw popped an eye and severed a knotty bundle of tendons that anchored his outsized jaw to his shoulders. She ran up his back and hit the floor behind him. He spun and kicked her before she'd regained her footing. The wounded leg that Barrow had shot gave out under her, and she staggered. His spurred heel stabbed deep in the muscles of her lower back, scraped a kidney.

She whirled and sprayed spores in his face from ducts in her lymph glands, was surprised and pleased to hear him cry out, "Ow, you hog-bitch! Now, that's just dirty! No wonder he loves you!"

"He's dead,
puto
. I killed him."

He froze in his tracks, tasting the air, deciphering the mingled scents coming off her. "Well, I'll be damned," he said at last. "You did, didn't you?"

He just stood there. His muscles rippled and swelled. His arms grew to the floor and squirmed with new changes. His heat singed the hairs off her face. He reached for her—

She ducked and went between his legs. Wittrock was gone. The door was open, but it was closing fast. She felt gelid mountain wind on her face like a slap that would awaken her from this unending nightmare. She reached out for it. Another wind at her back, his hot, rotten breath, his molten whisper, "Not so fast, bitch—"

She went through the door and into dark and wind. The floor sloped steeply under her. She slipped on something, a sheaf of files Wittrock dropped. She heard his retreating footsteps ahead. She half-ran, half-flew down the narrow tunnel, claws raking rough-hewn stone. The wind roared in her ears as if she was in free-fall, but she still heard the giant gaining on her. He'd gotten through the door, or simply knocked it down. Nothing could stop him. Nothing, but—

Wittrock's heat-signature came up on her. He stopped and turned and heaved the last of his files in her face. "No! Not me—"

"It's me," she said.

He sighed, his breath hitching and bumping like a child recovering from a crying jag. "Is he—?"

"He's coming, don't you hear him?"

Wittrock turned and ran further down the tunnel. "You have to—do something! We can't—we—have to—can't outrun him—"

"I don't have to outrun him," she said, shouldering past him and kicking out at his pumping old man's legs. She tripped him up, sent him careening face-first to the floor. "I only have to outrun you."

"Wait, I'm too important!" he screamed. "Without me, there's no hope—"

She ran on. Dyson loomed over the fallen scientist, growling, "Well, lookee here," but in a moment, they were swallowed up in the dark, and she came out of the tunnel into a snow-draped slope on the side of the mountain. But she could still hear—

"Oh, Doc, have I got some medicine for you—"

"No, God, no! NOT ME! OH JESUS CHRIST, NOT ME—"

The full moon peered down at her through scudding silver clouds.

Good
, she thought. She'd had a bellyful of hope.

She ran.

Martin Cundieffe had learned his lesson. In the Bureau, there were what his old superior Lane Hunt called "door-busters," men of action who thought on their feet and handled situations in the field, and there were bookworms, who collated and quantified said situations, and made appropriate notes. Perhaps there existed a superhuman few who commanded equal mastery over both spheres of human endeavor, but the previous week, and the days of recovery since, had left no doubt in his mind which end of the bell curve he inhabited.

Since he'd come back from Los Angeles, he'd left his desk only to sleep or track down information too old or arcane to be accessed by his computer. Though his bandaged right hand was still good for little more than turkey-claw pecking, he was able to learn more than enough from his desk to add to the too-much he'd seen in Idaho and LA. He was able to build a composite picture richer in texture for his experiences, but it did nothing to lessen his fear, the too-solid boulder in his stomach that told him that he and the Institute still could not begin to comprehend what they were dealing with.

Assistant Director Wyler had not summoned or contacted him since his return. If he came into Headquarters at all, he had successfully eluded Cundieffe, and Ms. McNulty was a sphinx, betraying only a slight disgusted wince that suggested she knew where he'd been.

Through the window of his office cubicle, he watched the sea of secretaries flowing out like ebb tide to the elevators. A few eager junior agents' clung barnacle-like to their desks in the cubicle maze, tabulating a million workaday crimes, statistical abstractions he once delighted in pursuing, himself. He felt like Pearl Harbor happened yesterday, and nobody knew except him, and he was

stricken mute.
Last week, Hell opened a branch office in Idaho, and it wasn't the first, and it's going to happen again. Why can't any of you see it?

The reason why was plain to see, if only by its outline. It was clearly there before him, silhouetted by all the intersecting dead ends. Where had all the Radiant Dawn people come from? Where had they gone? Who was Dr. Keogh, or Keyes, or Lux, or whatever he called himself? Where were the Missionaries? Who put Lt. Col. Greenaway in charge of an army on Radiant Dawn's doorstep? These and a thousand other questions went unanswered because someone in the government didn't want them answered. He could think of only one group that wielded that kind of power, whose fetish for secrecy was so absolute, that it could hide a war on domestic soil.

Dr. Keogh was a ghost, a revenant from the dark days of the Cold War. Whatever he had been, he was something more—or less—than human, and the Cave Institute used the government to protect his research from the Missionaries, his own onetime disciples.

The Cave Institute was the kind of benevolent dictatorship of naturally superior philosopher-kings Plato described in his
Republic
. He did not doubt their sincere dedication to the security and prosperity of the nation, for the same values ran in his own blood. To serve humankind, to protect it from its own stupid animal impulses, had always been his instinctual drive, and he had seen the same principles in everything else the Cave Institute did. They were so reasonable, he found himself wishing only that Wyler would come back and explain it to him. If he only knew what they were about, he still believed, he could accept it and serve. But the Institute was not of one mind about this situation, and he was in the most dangerous possible position. In the middle, taken into nobody's confidence but used by both sides, he could only ruin himself, and the Institute's higher, no doubt desirable, goals, by further uninformed action.

Brady Hoecker had not been available, either. His line was disconnected, and nobody seemed to be familiar with his name. He had driven past the Cave Institute several times, but never dared to go onto the property without his sponsor.

Worst of all, he'd heard nothing from Storch. He'd really thought that in Sgt. Storch, he'd found, if not an ally, at least a fellow traveler in the quagmire. He hoped that feeding him the information he'd learned about Keogh would lead to some sort of decisive outcome, force some cracks in the maddening dome of silence that covered the whole mess. But nothing had happened, nothing had changed, and Cundieffe was afraid he'd gotten the poor bastard killed, assuming Storch even believed him.

After all, there were no islands on any map at those coordinates. For the first couple days, he downloaded hourly satellite shots of the Central Pacific Basin and stared into the blank gray void between the Marshall Islands and Christmas Ridge. Only a fanatical idiot would go to such a place on his say-so alone. Just as only an idiot would go to Idaho and stick his head into a private war on the say-so of a renegade Mule.

The make-work he'd been assigned for the new Counter-terrorism Division's database was completed in two overnight shifts, leaving him little else to do but pick at the frayed threads of his private investigations. Without a full list of Radiant Dawn clients, he had plodded for days at the end of last year through the national population of diagnosed terminal cancer patients, hoping for some lead he could pursue: a loved one or a relative willing to come forward and implicate the group. The government could help isolate them, but it could not completely stifle the media, which flocked to stories of dying people exploited by alternative belief systems like flies to fecal matter. So the clients selected for Keogh's treatments would be without relatives or other attachments.

Even with this sizable reduction of the field, the group he had to comb through was disturbingly large. Looked at from above, the incidence of cancer in America was alarming, an epidemic, but somehow, it had silenced the cries of the herd, and wandered among them like the finger of God, striking down one here and there, sometimes with no visible cause, for reasons that only a darkly malicious deity could comprehend.

He felt as if he were running on new batteries tonight, however, because a rare lucky break had turned up on his desk today. A week ago, he contacted one of the field agents in San Diego, where a Radiant Dawn outpatient clinic was bombed by the Mission in October. The agent was extremely cooperative because he'd been badly spooked by the whole affair, and had been told to soften the outcome as much as possible in the public eye. He'd been glad to send Cundieffe a client list from one of the computers they'd recovered, but Cundieffe had heard nothing else from San Diego, and had forgotten about it, in light of recent events. Among the stacks of files waiting for him on his desk was a printout of two hundred and thirty eight names, cross-referenced by their level of involvement with the clinic. One hundred and thirty four were contactees who had not participated in center activities. Against his master population list, he saw that most of these were not terminal as of last October, while many others were children or married parents. Not sick enough yet, or too likely to be missed.

Another eighty received counseling and some in-home care from the clinic's staff of registered nurses. Some paid in donations, but many more were pro bono cases—most of them poor, retired or illegal immigrants. Forgotten, invisible people. A few had e-mail addresses, which he copied down.

Twenty-four were receiving "full treatment." All of them were among the invisible classes. A check on their credit records showed that only five of them actually had credit cards, while only half of them had a bank account. Many had been on welfare for much of their lives, or were on Social Security. Of those five whose purchases he could track, all had stopped buying things in October of last year, though they continued to pay their balances. All had elected last October to have their bills paid by computer transfer. Odd, since he doubted any of them had a computer.

He looked at the list of names for a long, long time, until he saw through them to the burning ruins of the Radiant Dawn retreat in the Seven Devils Mountains. These people were in Idaho, but he doubted very much that they were there when the raid occurred. Where were they now? Another dead end.

Next, he studied the lab report for the plant samples the Idaho Bureau agents took from the Heilige Berg compound. The pine needles and the pollen, so subtly wrong that he'd missed it, but shocking in the context of everything else he'd seen. The lab report only made him feel sick.

The pollen contained a carcinogen similar to aflatoxin, a by-product of spoilage in peanuts, and the most toxic natural carcinogen known. He read this several times, trying to resculpt the words. He'd
been
there, breathing the pollinated air. His lungs ached, a nodule of malignant protoplasm swelling inside him to block breath and sow cellular madness through his defenseless body. He tried to reason his body back to sanity, but it was having none of it.

Heilige Berg was poisoned by the trees. The militia and their families were infected with cancer—and then given the RADIANT treatment. Coopted, they faked a mass exodus from the mountain, helped the Radiant Dawn members escape, and vanished into the woods until the Mission attacked. The military executed maneuvers in the area, so they obligingly vacated the premises for the duration. They refused medical examination, insisting they were in perfect health. Another dead end, at least until the pollen samples could be gene-sequenced, which could take weeks.

He got on the Internet and glossed over stories from Idaho newspapers he'd bookmarked. Nothing about White Bird or Heilige Berg, nothing about Karl Schweinfurter. He'd almost given up when a small back-page piece caught his eye.

CATTLE MUTILATIONS BAFFLE LOCAL

RANCHERS, INSPIRE FOLKLORE

The reporter took pains to show off his witty contempt for the White Bird-area rancher who claimed that something had stolen into his barn and slaughtered and devoured six of his cattle two nights ago. The account didn't fit the profile for UFO mutilation stories—the carcasses were not neatly dissected, but rended to bits and partially consumed. The rancher in question, Christopher Wilkes, 53, had driven off the attacker with a shotgun blast, but never saw it. He himself allowed that it might have been wolves, but claimed to have heard "something like speaking and/or yodeling" coming from the barn as he approached. When pressed about the yodeling angle, Mr. Wilkes, whose steadfast veracity came through even in the few skewed quotes, said it was "yodeling like a cowboy does, when he's drunk. It kind of sounded like that old Sgt. Sadler song, 'Ballad Of The Green Berets.'" The reporter cheekily speculated that a Bigfoot sensation could punch up tourism, but suggested that the cow-eating monster might learn something a little more current before his next attack.