Ravenous Dusk (3 page)

Her fucking brain, again, whirling away on imponderables while her body slipped away. Lie still and conserve your energy, your air supply. When you feel stronger, start tapping on metal, if you can reach any. They have trained rescue dogs, they have scent detectors, they have ground-penetrating sonar, for Christ's sake.

Save your strength, and stay positive. You will be rescued.

Who the fuck are you? She asked herself, but she knew. It was the voice she'd always heard when life or death hinged on choices. It was the voice that had guided her through orphanhood and foster homes and a solitary life of hard-fought serenity. The voice that had abruptly cut off when she discovered she had terminal cancer of the liver. Her Guardian Angel, come back too late to do more than poke and prod her in her failure.

Tell me another, Guardian Angel.

Her hand scuttled across the papier-mâché nightmare of her face, stretched taut over the bones except where knots of deep tissue trauma formed new features. Her fingers faltered in the alluvial ruts carved into her cheeks by tears. Incredible, that halfway to death, already mummified and entombed, her body had decided to splurge and let her have a good cry. Her breath fluttered and a whole rack of steak knives pressed against her lungs. That'd be her broken ribs, unless she was impaled on a bunch of iron rebar, too. "Thank you, God, for this precious gift," she whispered. "When I get out of here, I've got a present for you, too."

Fuck you too, Guardian Angel. I want to die.

"With what?" she screamed aloud, coughing up a tempest that only got worse as her blood-flecked breath stirred up the dust coating her tomb. "I have no legs! I have one arm, and I'd have to chew my goddamned legs off to get free—" she paused for breath, coughed up sand "—but the pressure…from the concrete…is the only thing keeping me from bleeding to death."

"What, goddamit? What?"

She had no retort, for it was true. She would not, could not die down here. Her new body would not allow it. Death for her would not be the sad little thing that came to claim other hapless accident victims, usually before they regained consciousness. Like Prometheus on the rock, or a vampire, she would linger forever down here. Powerless to save her, her new, improved body could only infinitely prolong her suffering, unless her old mind got her out. Even as the brittle bundle of sticks that apparently was her hand pawed the matted hair from her brow and set to probing the shattered stone floor of her tomb, she knew she would get out. If she emerged a smashed and peeled skull, propelling its miserable self only by the flapping of her jaw and the flailing of her severed spine, she would escape this.

Her fingers scrabbled over the unbroken slab she lay upon, creeping ever outwards almost to full extension before finding a crack. The sensation was unspeakably strange; she felt none of the textures or temperatures of that which her hand touched. It was like trying to work a telephone with a glove on a broomstick. Had the nerves in her fingers been cut, or had her whole nervous system given up the ghost and signed off? Shock, she told herself. At least you can still move it. Die trying.

She forced her hand to claw at the edges of the nearest small rock underneath her slab, to wedge her numb fingers into the fissure and pry the rock loose. It might have taken hours, but at last she held a shard of concrete in her fist, as more dirt and rocks clattered into the hole she'd made. Her hand seized up and the rock tumbled out of her grasp, and she realized with a start that she could still feel pain, for her hand felt as if it had caught fire. Maybe it was burning, and she was blind. But there was no warmth from the flames that ate her nerves. She shrieked and tried to blow on her hand, but only sand and spit came out.

Stella froze. A sound, not of her own making.

The rock she'd dropped had struck something. The sound was muffled and faint, but so familiar to her that it made all the difference in the world between going through the motions of trying to survive, and actually getting out. The rock had struck sheet metal. The only sheet metal surfaces she'd encountered in the Mission bunker had been the blast doors that sealed off the motor pool/hangar. Last night, she'd gone to those doors first when running from Delores Mrachek, she'd banged on them for help from the federal agents who surrounded the bunker, and they'd shot at her. She knew those doors with her fists. If they were below her, then she was closer to the surface than she'd had any reason to hope.

She clenched her hand into a fist. Her nails gouged the meat of her palms and clicked on bone. A short bark of a scream escaped her lips, but the pain brought her back wholly into herself. There was very little blood, but her hand felt as if she'd torn every tendon and ligament in it.

She pried loose more rocks, working herself into a fever that painted the dark with brilliant hallucinations, before she felt the slab beneath her shift. It was only a few millimeters, but she felt it in her legs, saw the wheeling phosphene mandalas tilt on their axes before her, and heard the grit of something harder than her own head as the concrete blocks settled into the tiny tunnel she'd begun to make. The flooring she'd been picking at was nearly pulverized by the weight of the bunker's outer shell collapsing onto it, but she had no idea how thick that floor was, or how many floors lay beneath it.
I see where you're going with this, God
, she thought.
In digging my way to freedom, I only dig myself a deeper grave.

Fuck you, Guardian Angel.

What do you want me to do, then? This?

Stella reached up behind her and clawed at the slab pinning her down, Its edges were cleaner, a neat break along a stress line, and she dislodged only crumbs, and broke off her nail and most of the flesh left on her pinky finger. She might've been trying to crush herself rather than try to escape. When her hand grasped the protruding length of rebar, she didn't even realize what it was. She seized upon it and yanked down on it with all the strength she had left in her ravaged arm. She even heard the muscles of her deltoid separating from her humerus, and the snapping of her wrist, before they were drowned out by the growl of the concrete slab unzipping itself into shards and crumbling over her.

Then the darkness came alive again and took her away.

When she awakened, she could move.

Moving was pain.

Her right arm was dead meat at her side, completely popped out of its socket and held on only by the twisted wreck of her shoulder muscles. The elbow was blown out, too. Her left was little better, shaking like a dying dog as she put weight on it.

She rolled over.

Catfish moved more gracefully on the bottom of a rowboat after you smashed their brains in with an oar. She flopped about in the relative stadium of open space beyond the slab, reveling in the backlogged messages of agony now flowing freely to her brain. She was free. Still some twenty feet under concrete and hard-packed desert sand, but
free
. She should be dead, now. No doubt about it, if the burial hadn't killed her and she hadn't asphyxiated, then she never should have awakened from her faint after she freed herself from the slab. She'd lost a lot of blood, her vision writhed with faces she'd never seen and places she'd never been but all that was almost behind her. She was still alive. She was changed. The cancer couldn't kill her, now. Nothing would ever threaten to take her life again. She could make noise now, the dead would rise to dig her out.

She knew the voice was right, even as the words became shapeless blobs in her mind. She had to move, to get out. She had to put the pain aside and move.

The crawlspace she followed was only a little roomier than the pincers between the slabs, but it inclined downwards, down a jagged slide of shattered concrete shot through with spears of rebar, and slick with fluid that burned her skin off as she wormed through it. Her arms flailed at the ground like broken fins, every motion a fiery seizure, but she knew they were growing back. It was a good pain, and brought her back to herself. The cancer in her—
was
her, now. The blooming black and pink tumors she'd seen in Stephen, the man who'd been hit by the train—what, a week ago? Stanching the flow of blood, growing to replace tissue and bone, even lost limbs. It must have burned like this, she thought.

"We can rebuild her,"
she wheezed.
"Stronger, faster—"
She tried to hum the
Bionic Woman
theme song, but had to stop when she coughed up something solid.

She humped over a slab of concrete and slid the last few feet into the sheet metal door. Exhaustion burned her from the inside out. Lactic acid in her muscles must be past lethal levels. She shivered all over, and tried to catch her breath. She lay head-down against the sheet metal of the blast doors. The razor-puckered mouth of a bullet hole cut into her cheek.

When she woke this time, she could feel cool air on her cheek. It came from the bullet hole. She could smell the desert, through the ashes and oil and toxic waste and the dead—
oh that's me
.

There was no pain. She felt tired and sore, and her right arm still flopped, but the head of the humerus had popped into the rotator cuff while she slept.

She pressed her lips to the hole and sucked in fresh air. She gagged and coughed as her lungs inflated as if for the first time. The thought occurred to her. If she was so close to fresh air, why hadn't she been found already? Surely a dog would have sniffed her out. Scared of a little toxic waste, maybe more explosives. If they came looking for anything in here, it'd be with bulldozers.

And it'd take one to get through the blast door. The weight of the bunker's outer shell collapsing against it hadn't bent it more than twenty degrees or so, and the upper frame of the door was blocked by concrete. Her only hope lay in banging on the blast door and hoping someone from the rescue crew was still out there.

Have you got a better idea?

That's stupid, what do you think I am? I was never strong, and I'm only barely alive now!

Stop telling me what to do! She clawed at her face in her anger, but stopped just short of putting out her own eye. Her left hand was someone else's. It belonged to something else—her fingers were gone, replaced by hard, broad, blade-edged claws, like a mole would have. They were growing out of her hands, out of the fused stubs of her fingers, that she'd torn off digging herself out of the slabs.

God, what's happening to me?

What am I?

Stella poked one claw into the hole and jabbed her hand at it like she was driving a saw through a knotty block of wood. The claw punched through the blast door down to her knuckle like she was cutting butter. She slashed frantically at the door until she'd hacked a hole wide enough to crawl through.

She could see moonlight.

Slowly, mindful of her crushed legs, she dragged herself out of the hole. The light was blinding, halos within halos like daggers in her eyes, but she couldn't blink for the joy of seeing again. When at last she hauled herself up, her eyes stopped tearing up and she could see her surroundings.

She lay shivering in the open pit of the motor pool, but there was little that she recognized from her brief glimpse of it. Mounds of dirt and concrete debris lay everywhere, and the walls had collapsed inward to spill rusted-out barrels of god-knew-what on everything. It didn't glow green like in the movies, but the noxious, bleachy smell and the heat-haze effect of fumes that roiled over it advertised its true nature adequately. There was something else on the ground that struck more fear into her heart than the waste, though.

Snow.

A thin dusting of powder lay in the leeward shadows of the walls, and was only starting to melt and gather in pools in the recesses of the pit.

My last day of work was the Fifth of July, she thought. I was held here for a week. Last night–the last night I was outside–was hot…

In the desert, it snows maybe once or twice a year, between December and February.

Stella fell on a puddle of clean meltwater far from the barrels and drank greedily. It soothed the burning on her skin, and carved a track through her insides that she now knew must have been sealed for the better part of a year.

When she could drink no more, she stopped and leaned back from the puddle. As the ripples receded into mirror stillness, she leaned forward and looked at her silhouette by moonlight.

She was dead. Past dead. She could lose a bodybuilding competition to Ramses II. A glaring patch of bare skull shone through the blood-matted rag of hair above her right ear. Her nose was a hole like a third eye. Her lips had withered and pulled away from her teeth, a leering rictus that gleamed in the moonlight.

She washed in the puddle, but came away looking or smelling no better. She dragged herself to her feet, shuddering on legs that were more tumor than flesh. The silvery glow of the desert night was flattering, but she should never have lived to see this. Her skin was black where bone didn't break through, and her clothing had entirely ripped or rotted away. Still, it would take a forensic pathologist to identify her gender. Her breasts, never more than a modest handful, were gone, only one nipple remained, the other sheared off. Her abdominal muscles were withered and hanging away from her viscera, a miserable, leathery purse that gurgled now with new life as the melted snow rehydrated her guts. Her hips jutted out like antlers from a sunken pubic arch shaded by the dangling flaps of still-detached thigh-meat.