Ravenous Dusk (90 page)

The line of buses had become a fleet in the fairground parking lot. By her best estimate, only about half of the people filing in through the turnstiles into the fairground were already Him. The rest were still sick, dying, hoping. RADIANT was gone. She'd been right. He didn't need it any more. Or, He wouldn't—when He was One.

And what are you going to do?

I didn't ask to come here, Guardian Angel. You figure it out.

But her Guardian Angel had no answers.

Stella got up and called for the check. Ida lumbered out and slapped it on the bar beside the wrecked flotilla of her meal. She peeled out cash she didn't remember stealing off the dead Asian man, tipped a knowingly contemptuous five percent. She went to the bathroom, holding her nose as she peed. As usual of late, her piss was the color and odor of scorched coffee, and so much of it the toilet flushed on its own from the pressure. Mercifully, this time she did not puke. She came back out without checking herself in the mirror, and cornered Ida behind the cash register.

"Incidentally, since you pissed in my orange juice, I thought you should know that the methedrine shit you spike your coffee with has eaten holes in your liver big enough to stick a pencil through, and your kidneys are starting to let blood slip into the mix. I wouldn't worry, though; with your blood cholesterol where it is, you'll be having a fatal stroke before you hit menopause, which is due for you in what, three months? Have a great Saturday, Ida."

Walking out the door past the stunned waitress, Stella had a moment to breathe in the oil-scummed air and bask in the sunshine before it hit her again, what she had to do, and that she had no idea how to do it, at all.

Red-gray clouds hung over Wilmington like clumps of brain matter floating in dirty dishwater. The buses had stopped coming when Stella crossed Industry Drive and stood at the edge of the lot. The smell of Him was overpowering, even over the glutinous reek of petroleum alchemy choking the feeble Pacific breeze from the west.

She ran across the four-lane road to the other side, though there was no traffic. On the parking lot, only a few tumbleweeds stirred. About fifty buses and twice that number of cars packed like spent salmon in the deep end of the lot, and Stella rushed to take cover among them, feeling watched by the sky. She ran down the narrow alleys between them, feeling pulled along though she wanted to stop and think, she had no idea what she was doing, and she didn't even know whether the impulse that brought her here wanted her to stop it or join it—

A security guard stepped into her path from behind the end of a bus. "This is a closed event, ma'am," he said, and he was going to say more, but she went right through him. She was vaguely aware of knocking him down, of slamming him into the grill of a bus so hard half his ribs caved in. But she was keenly aware that he smelled only of coffee-breath, Speed Stik and a cheap knock-off of Polo cologne liberally applied to cover up failure to bathe, and so she kept going.

There were more security guards at the gate, soft, dumpy rent-a-cops, though they carried sidearms. She detoured back a few hundred yards and climbed up the chainlink fence. She scanned the other side for only a split-second, then leapt.

It hit her the moment she hit the pavement on the other side. It was like being trapped in a washing machine, or getting knocked down and rolled by a really big wave, if the ocean knew your name, and everything about you, and wanted you to drown. Wanted you to want to stay under, never come up. And you almost wanted to, yourself—

They knew her. They all knew her, and they welcomed her back. They never turned their backs on her. It was her decision to forsake them. She lived in them still, that biochemical snapshot of her at her happiest, most fulfilled moment ran in their veins, and if she wanted to return to them, it would be so easy to forget everything that had happened since.

Her knees buckled under her, dumped her on the asphalt walkway between the fence and a Quonset hut. Her eyes mired in tears, she couldn't see past her outstretched arms. The light fractured into prisms, became hands reaching down out of the sky to lift her up, cold eyes peering down through rips in the clouds. The expanding bubble of their nurturing love swept out over the world, physically pinning her to the ground, crushing the breath out of her lungs with its longing ache to embrace, to be, everyone and everything. It was not even true consciousness, yet, but a swell of raw exultation, a newborn god reveling in its unspeakable new power. Yet it knew her, and roared around her like a river against a steadfast rock, wearing her down, digging at her anchorage, washing her away—

Why was she so sure that she did not deserve happiness? When had she gotten so fucked up inside, that she thought life was pain and loneliness, and rejected every offer of help, of love, of communion? She'd let herself be swayed by the Mission's awful lies about Him and what He was going to do. He had come only to stop the pain and the tyranny of the strong against the weak that had run the human race, indeed, the whole sphere of life, to the brink of extinction. Some part of her understood, and wanted to help, or she would not have come back—

"FUCK YOU!" she screamed. Her body shook with warring impulses, none of which she trusted. God damn Him! God damn her body, and God damn what she'd become. For hadn't she made a horrible mess of everything, on her own? Immortal, invincible, she'd only killed and destroyed friend and foe and innocent bystander alike, rutted like a beast with a creature more twisted than herself, and tried to strangle her offspring in its womb. She'd become an avatar of the world she hated, but still she could be forgiven. Still, she could give herself over to the whole of Him, and be healed.

"Sure, I hate myself. Always have. But it's the only fucking me I ever got, the only thing nobody's ever been able to take away, and YOU CAN'T HAVE IT!"

She stood and willed herself to perfect stillness. Changes stirred in her blood. She flushed red-hot. Steam, then smoke, arose in pale streams from her clothing. She became the goddess of the forest, a glossy black hole in the sun-sick morning. She ran down the fairway. Security guards might have shot at her, but in the instant between seeing and shooting, she was simply gone.

Faster than thought, she streaked through the loose cordon of dumbstruck rent-a-cops and down the length of the fairgrounds to the wall of turnstiles at the edge of the amphitheatre. She could hear them. No one shouted or stirred, but their breath tamed the wind into a soughing, rhythmic tide. Their synchronized heartbeat stirred the ground. She felt the redoubled psychic push of Him against her, the many becoming One like a crystal aligning its molecules in a blind chain-reaction. For that was all that was happening, when you got past the mystical bullshit Keogh dressed it up in. All their brains were wired and charged exactly like His: the harmonic resonance of so many of them in one place crystallized their collective identity, burning away the individual minds and fusing the thousands of burning brains into One.

Stella vaulted over the turnstiles and crossed the walkway to the nearest stairs. A few more guards were scattered about just inside the entrance, but they lay on the asphalt in fetal knots, their brains squashed flat by the force of a message they could not comprehend.

She stopped at the top step and looked down into the amphitheatre. She had felt it and fought it off, but to see it, in front of her…

The stage was empty, except for a single microphone stand. The sick, uninitiated ones were all down in front, and they all looked dead. Sprawling bodies, wasted and sunken, clogged the aisles. A junkyard of upended wheelchairs filled the orchestra pit. She would have thought them all truly dead, if she didn't know Keogh so well. Nothing was wasted. They would serve, would be devoured, like everyone else.

The back half of the amphitheatre was packed with Him. They all stood shoulder to shoulder with their hands linked in an unbroken chain that ran across the stairways. As one, they turned to regard her from two thousand pairs of eyes, all of them the chill gray of hoar-frost and billion-year old stone. And two thousand smiles broke out. She knew then, that there was only Him, in all that vast space, only Him and her.

She could still run away. She could do what she'd always done, and look out for Stella Orozco, and fuck the world, let Him have it.

She felt the wave of Him crest and break and draw back into itself, and all those eyes closed, all those brows furrowed in deepest concentration. Their linked hands shook as if lightning passed through them, back and forth, up and down the chain, subsiding like waves in a pool. She came closer to one and looked into his open, untenanted face.

The great thought that bound them all together was an almost visible aura over the crowd, an oil-slick kaleidoscope deformation of the light that grew clearer by the instant. She saw in it what he had shown her before, in Idaho, when they shared themselves.

They were working to make a virus, like that fateful one that had infected the Shoggoths with sentience, to share Him with the world. With all those minds linked and gnawing at the problem, He was close, so close, to synthesizing the RADIANT code in a flu virus. Nucleotide by nucleotide, He coded himself into a string of recombinant RNA. The bodies would manufacture the virus and infect the test cases, the sick who had come here hoping for a cure for cancer. He would cure them of themselves, and send them out into the world. The initial carriers would use their bodies as kindling to ignite the initial outbreak. The buses would take the rest to the train stations, to the airports, to their hometowns. He would spread on the winds, in the water, in food, and before the human race could begin to understand what He'd done, they would all have become One, and would, at last, understand everything.

He was so close—

Stella lashed out, ripped the plumbing out of the nearest Keogh, a proud old Mexican woman who could have been her grandmother. Blood sluiced out of the mortal wound for only a few seconds before it closed up. Her face knitted in distress, as if she'd dreamed something mildly unpleasant, but nothing to merit waking up.

Stella seized the woman by one arm and tore her out of the chain. The old woman's scream was like dry ice in a grease fire, a keening, endlessly rising shriek that only got louder as she tumbled ass over teakettle down the steep stairs. The old woman's body bumped into rank upon rank of joined hands, but the chain did not break. Where she had been, the others linked hands immediately to close the gap.

Stella attacked them. She ripped arms out of their sockets, gouged eyes out of heads, hurled bodies like limp sacks of fertilizer. The chain closed against her, passive, undeterred. It was like trying to break a wave by scooping handfuls of water out of it. Could she kill two thousand people with her bare hands? She could barely breathe. She collapsed on the stairs, so exhausted she could burst into flames, or melt into the asphalt.

He was closer, the chain curling and curling upon itself inside the protein shells already taking shape inside trillions and trillions of cells. They would burst forth like seed pods on a brisk spring wind, and take root in every living animal cell, that they touched, and there was nothing, never had been a goddamned thing, she could do to stop it.

She longed for death right here and now, even the slow torture of her tomb in the desert, even the ignominious devouring of cancer. The helplessness she'd felt then had been like the calm of the womb, compared to this.

Something stirred inside her. Deep inside the darkened firmament of her blood, something tried to touch her, that knew no words, but would not be denied.

It wanted out. It wanted to be born. Now. She had fought it, drove it to hide its development, so that it raced unseen in her blood, a billion invader cells that could not unite to form a single body, for fear of their terrible, vicious mother. It was stronger than her, now, stronger than the both of them had been in that moment when the fire of its life force was first kindled.

She screamed and threw herself against the stairs as the tides of her blood stood still, and ran in reverse. Blood gushed out of her loins, soaking through her jeans and splattering on the stone.

All of them lifted their heads and screamed, "WE ARE ONE FLESH, ONE MIND." The air crackled, the backlash of a dynamo of conscious energy thrown into overdrive. The chain grew.

Stella struggled to rise, but the ground beneath her feet rumbled, dipped and swayed like an unquiet sea. She reached out to steady herself, misjudged the distance to the nearest seat, and barked her forehead against something hard. Stars before her eyes didn't fade, only grew into pulsars and quasars and a big, black hole. She swam in blood, her blood. It was killing her. She was bleeding to death, to give birth to the thing inside her—

In his thousands, Keogh rose up. In the middle of the crowd, the bodies rushed at each other in a mindless frenzy. They hurtled together to form a pile, then a tower. Bodies flew through the air like leaves blown into a dust devil, an ever-swelling tornado of flesh. When they slammed into the mass, they melted. Running together, they lent raw meat to the colossus, and refined it into a crude, but undeniable, form.

The colossus stood erect, wreathed in steam, and looked down, across the emptying aisles. It grew a head, a face, eyes, and stared at her. With hundreds still clambering over each other and melting into it, the giant, communal Keogh took its first halting step towards her. Each of its legs was a pillar of thrashing, dissolving human bodies. It crushed and scattered six rows of seats with each labored stride. Its face contorted in agony at the pull of gravity, yet still it grew taller, heavier. Keogh's thousands of human bodies were in full panic-flight to join the mass, but how close it was, she could not see. She lacked the blood to carry oxygen to her brain, and she could not see or think very far at all. Her eyes showed her only roiling red clouds, her body told her she swam in a sea of needles, going to sleep, to sleep—