Ravenous Dusk (51 page)

Instinctively, he believed this less than he believed the drone was from another planet. But even when he peeled it apart very logically, patiently, in his head, he still could not get any deeper than the gut revulsion and fear Dr. Keogh dredged up in him. Ditto his patients, who still came out to stretch and play in the snow in groups of ten between the tower and the minefields. The soldiers were invisible to them, and they did not look sick. They scared him, because they made him feel not just old, but obsolete.

He cracked open a black capsule on the console before him and snorted the powder heaped on the laminated maps of Hell's Canyon. The comm geeks froze, then got real busy.

Along about lunchtime, the troops started acting up, and Greenaway had Ade wake up Burl to tame them. Greenaway wanted nothing so much as a man's neck to wring. In the back of his mind, he might even have prayed for it. The heavens parted, the angels sang, and lo, Special Agent Martin Cundieffe was delivered unto his grateful hands.

That felt good, but it left him shaking, heart palpitating. He forced himself to eat a bowel-blocking LRP-ration of freeze-dried beef stroganoff and orange powdered ERGO drink. Around him, troopers good-naturedly bitched about eating the LRP rations and MRE's while the civilians in the bunkers ate fresh food from their own kitchens. They didn't lower their voices in his presence, but Greenaway found he was just too tired, already, to address the growing breakdown in discipline. He wouldn't deign to explain to the troops why he wanted nothing from the RD colonists, because he couldn't explain it to himself.

He didn't need Talley's prompting to lurch back to his trailer for a brief afternoon nap. He awoke feeling weaker, heavier, than when he sacked out. In his dreams, all his men—Burl, Teabag, Ade, Ruggy, Ensign Wifebeater, everyone—spoke in Keogh's voice, spoke his words. He'd been afraid to open his own mouth, afraid of who would speak out of it.

He woke up thinking it was the morning all over again. Gray sunlight leaked in through the blinds, and men ran hither and yon shouting at each other. He checked his watch. He'd only intended to sleep for an hour, but it was already 1600. He popped another herbal capsule and washed it down with more coffee, went to see what was blowing up this time.

The troops stood out beyond the minefield at the edge of the plateau, watching a distant plume of black and gray smoke curl up into the looming snowstorm down in the valley, about five miles due east. The artillery crews and the comm techs both concluded it was a barn off the road into White Bird, and observed that a tremendous explosion had preceded the fire. Greenaway wanted to send the Bell 406 down to recon the site, but Talley persuaded him to stay consolidated. In time, fire engines and Sheriff's deputies closed on the site, which had more or less burned itself out by then, anyway. Distractions and unhappy coincidences were the order of the day, and each one seemed to push the boundaries of Greenaway's world into a smaller and smaller portion of the mountain he'd come to rule. He fought the urge to go back to sleep, deciding that it would only be the quickest way to make something else go wrong.

At dusk, something else went wrong. The mines started going off. By themselves. At the outer perimeter, a string of mines detonated just like they were supposed to, the vibration of the first setting off its neighbors in a spreading domino-wave, except that in the purpling sunset light, it was clear no one was there. Snow geysered up into the sky and rained down no body parts, no blasted metal from Missionary drones, nothing. The men were spooked. Unlike other tactical explosive charges placed around the camp, the mines were simple mechanical devices, and could only be triggered the old-fashioned way—by stepping on them. The snow piling up on the pressure-plates was blamed, but the demo experts who placed them swore they could only have gone off if a man-sized object triggered them. Fearing the mines were defective, Greenaway ordered his men to stay away from the minefield and stop talking about it.

One could go insane trying to collate all of the bullshit that was happening, or one could focus on the one growing certainty that each event tried to obscure. They were coming.

The snowfall continued unabated, softening the night's approach, banishing the world beyond the edge of the plateau. Greenaway devoured satellite images and air traffic reports, feeling his inborn strength and anger coming to the fore as the dark closed in. No more mines exploded, no more tourists crowded the mountain, and nothing else burned down or blew up, but he could taste them on the air.

After dinner, he girded his loins and went to see Dr. Keogh. Crossing the camp to the tower's front entrance, he watched the group of residents taking in the brisk, brittle night air on the steps, and wondered again what brought them here, what made them so carefree, when the most ruthless, shifty motherfuckers in the history of warfare were coming to exterminate them.

An old black man with what used to be called high yellow complexion waved and nodded to him as he approached.

"Folks, it's not safe out here, you'll have to go back inside and hunker down. We're expecting incoming shit any time, now."

They studied him with the placid indifference of sacred cows. A few of them looked at each other and stifled giggles.

"Get inside, goddamit! I want Dr. Keogh out here, most fucking
rickytick
. Do you fuckheads speak English?"

"We understand you, Mr. Greenaway," the high yellow one said in an amused, age-wizened voice. His eyes sparkled, silvery gray marksman's eyes, in the dying snow-light. Then they got up as one and made their way back inside. The high yellow slipped on the icy pavement and tore his knee open on the steps. The others helped him to his feet, laughing. He laughed, too, unmindful of the gaping hole in his black tracksuit, or the blood flowing freely from the lacerated skin.

They were high on something, no doubt, drugged to the eyeballs, and feeling no pain. Maybe that was all this was, a place where the dying came to slip away on a tide of illegal drugs. And maybe No Such Company was really just a security consultant.

He waited on the steps for five minutes, honing his dread into anger and steeling himself to go in after them, when Dr. Keogh finally came out. The tall, gaunt old man wore a white lab smock over his tracksuit uniform. Greenaway looked hard at him, but Burl Talley's voice crackled on his headset, which he'd pushed up away from his ears, because the static and routine comm checks drove him batshit. He only half-noticed that Dr. Keogh's breath did not form visible plumes of vapor as he stepped out of the heated tower and into the plunging cold.

Greenaway raised a hand to acknowledge and stall Keogh, pulled the headset into place. "Burl, what now?"

"Mort, I can't raise Teabag."

"How long since his last report?"

"Ten minutes ago, he punched in. I told him to punch in every five."

"He's probably taking a shit. Call me in another ten."

"You know Teabag. He'd
broadcast
if he was pinching one. Send Wifebeater to head-check him."

"Negative, Burl, Wifebeater's on eastern point watch. Send Dogtown."

"Can't. They're down below the ridge line, on patrol."

"Well shit, send somebody from the bridge, but take care of it. I've got to talk to somebody, here. Out." He took off the headset and fixed Dr. Keogh with his steeliest gaze. "Dr. Keogh, we're expecting the enemy to engage any time now. Your people have to get down below and stay there. No more outside privileges."

Dr. Keogh smiled unconcernedly, came down the steps to Greenaway. "I wouldn't worry. The outcome is already determined. My people have felt the approach of certain death before, and learned that in every moment, one must live. I can't make them unlearn that lesson. It may be that very soon, your men will need to take shelter with us, but in the end, it will matter very little."

Greenaway looked away from the doctor. He felt as if he were rolling inside a wave in Keogh's gaze, unable to find which way was up, where there was air to breathe. "Your fatalism means fuck-all to me, Doctor. We're here to protect your people, and we're going to win. We have superior firepower, superior sensory technology, and superior soldiers. We're going to wipe them out, and if you cooperate, your three hundred cancer-freaks won't lose so much as a night's sleep."

Dr. Keogh chuckled. "Ah, if only it were so. You make me laugh, Mr. Greenaway. Your technology—their technology…you're not here to protect us. You think of us as bait. You are the one who doesn't understand."

Burl's voice squawked on the headset in his breast pocket. "Burl, I can't raise Wifebeater."

Angrily, he put the headset back on. "What about—"

"Or Dogtown. Lines are functioning, but all I get is dead air."

"Get the goddamned bridge detail up there. Call Major Ortman. Find those motherfuckers."

"It's so hard to keep good men under duress," Keogh said.

"My men didn't desert. Something's fucking going on here, and I want to know what."

"It's very simple, Mr. Greenaway. This
is
a trap, but
we
are not the bait."

Behind Dr. Keogh, the doors opened and ten residents came out. They were a different bunch, but he noticed now that there were four children and six adults, half male and half female, just as before. They flanked Keogh on the steps and smiled at Greenaway, as if he were an expected guest at some unknowable celebration.

"There are not three hundred of us any more, Mr. Greenaway. There are only forty. You never toured the entire bunker network. You assumed, because you never really cared."

Greenaway looked around for something to tell him he was not still dreaming. He looked Keogh up and down, from his mantle of silver-white hair, unstirred by the whipping zephyrs blowing across the plateau, to his ice-crusted boots. His eyes traveled back up to Keogh's knee—to the torn black pants, the knee scabbed and bloody but already healing. Back up to his indulgent smile, his eyes, twinkling with the reflection of Greenaway's own, partial, but utterly damning realization of what was going on.

Their eyes flashed gray-silver, all of them. Marksman's eyes, fossilized eyes, eyes of living stone. His eyes.

Greenaway's hand unsnapped the flap on his holster, clasped the chill grip of his Walther 9mm, but he couldn't draw it.

"Do you know what sets your kind apart from all the other races that have risen to dominance on this world, Mr. Greenaway? You are the first to achieve sentience who were not predators, but prey. Lowly, gleaning, groveling hominids, you only acquired a taste for meat—for killing—from scavenging the kills of true predators. You became smarter because you were too weak to defend yourselves by main strength. You've forgotten that you only protected yourselves from extinction by sacrifice, by throwing one of your own to the wolves, that the rest might escape and survive. You did it so many millions of times that the screams of the scapegoat being eaten alive still echo in your nightmares. Yet here your kind still plays out those programmed instincts. To achieve victory, there must be sacrifice. One of the herd, one too old and infirm to serve any other purpose, must be thrown to the wolves to draw them out."

For once, Greenaway understood what Keogh was getting at. "I'm not bait," he growled, bitterly, weakly.

"Oh, but you are," one of them, Greenaway didn't see which, added in Keogh's voice. "Only with a gaudy show of military might around us could we draw the Mission in sufficient strength to weaken them, and reveal their primary base of operations."

Another added, "Take satisfaction in this, if nothing else. Your enemies will be exterminated, so your sacrifice will not be in vain. This is all you have lived for, is it not?"

The one he still thought of as the original Dr. Keogh reached out to touch him. "We hoped to make you one with us, but you would not share our food, and now there is no time left. They are indeed coming, and they are going to kill every living thing on this mountain, because that is what must happen. We are committed to this, Mr. Greenaway. Our individual deaths will bring a new race to life, and we will live to see its birth and ascendance through their eyes, for we are One."

Greenaway drew his pistol, leveled the sight on Keogh's unlined brow. "Get the fuck away from me. We'll stop them—and then we'll kill all of you."

They crowded closer, their faces and hair draining of color. Their faces became his face, their voices his voice. "Protect us, Mr. Greenaway."

He shot Dr. Keogh in the face. The 9mm parabellum bullet seemed to punch the doctor's whole head in at point-blank range, the bridge of the nose and both eyes blasting out the back of his skull. He kept coming. "You'll have to do better," another Keogh said.

Greenaway turned and ran, almost slipped and fell on his face. He ran all the way to the comm trailer, tore the door open and leaned against it.

Talley stood up and braced him. He looked drunk, but his breath was unfermented, though still shitty. "Mort, shit's flying apart. It's on."

Greenaway caught his breath, bit his lip as he tried to frame what he'd just seen into words that wouldn't just prove him unfit for duty. He had other things, sane things— "What about Teabag?"

"Wishniak's dead, Mort. I tried to raise you. The bridge detail found him, up in his tree, where he was supposed to be—with an arrow through his head."

"A what?" The hits just keep coming. Teabag—an ex-Marine sniper named Joshua Wishniak, who did tours with Greenaway's first Delta unit in Lebanon—hated to be called Teabag, but his friends always swore they'd get it carved on his tombstone.

"Someone did him with a fucking compound bow. Pinned his head to the goddamned pine tree. We have to assume the perimeter's breached. Bridge guys are beating the bushes, but have nothing yet. They still can't find Wifebeater, his post is deserted. Dogtown's missing, too. But fuck all that, look at this."