"Wait. Hold him there until I get there. I'll be on the next plane out of Washington."
"Sir? I don't understand what this is about, but I sure as hell would appreciate a heads-up as to what we're dealing with, here."
"You and me both, Agent Waters," Cundieffe said, and hung up. Crushingly grateful for whatever perverse impulse forced him to drive to work this morning, he shrugged into his overcoat and speed-dialed the airport.
~16~
Storch drove as hard as the icy roads would allow, racing down the mountain the way they'd come up the night before, stumbling onto the freshly plowed two-lane State Road 50 and heading west.
He was startled to find that it was night again: he must've slept a lot longer in the cell than he'd guessed. He felt better than he had any right to, and his hands had returned more or less to normal, though they itched like mad and were still peeling. He felt hunger and heat so bad he thought he'd faint. He kept the windows rolled all the way down, but he'd have to stop soon and eat something, or his body would start eating itself. He would hold out as long as he could to get out of the Mission's domain of influence. As if they couldn't figure out where he was going. Even if there wasn't some kind of tracking device in the truck, they were brainy outlaw officers and scientists, and he was only a beaten, stupid sergeant. Going south and out of the country would be the smart play, but instinct drew him back to the west, to his lost home in Death Valley. Instinct had shown itself to be so much smarter than the rest of him of late that he'd stopped trying to fight it.
He didn't look in the mirrors.
In the glove compartment, there was a roll of new-minted twenties, a stack of gas and prepaid phone cards and registration papers on the truck in the name of something called the Black Canyon Ecology Project. The truck had two gas tanks, both full, and he found a parka under the seat to cover his bullet-riddled torso.
Sharing the road only with day-trip skiers returning from Crested Butte and the occasional semi, he sped down and out of Black Canyon, crossing the frozen lake of the Curecanti National Recreation Area. Feeling like he was running with his back turned to a free-fire zone, like they were right behind him, and there was something he could do about it, if he was only nervous enough.
The 50 merged with the 550 and veered north between the Uncompahgre Plateau and Grand Mesa National Forest. He stopped in Grand Junction and bought a three-pound loaf of turkey from a convenience store deli. The protein soothed his aching muscles, but made the itching worse as he began to heal again.
His mind was his own, and he could think more clearly than at any time since the Gulf War. No more sickness. No more Headache, which had always lurked in the back of things, always within striking distance of shutting off his brain. Yet still he was sucked along, like a bicyclist swept up in the warm vacuum behind a speeding semi, floundering in the inexorable gravity of a state of being he could not comprehend.
Once the exhilaration of being out again wore off and his reflexes took over the driving, he started to think. At first, he tried to switch his mind off, micromanaging the road, twiddling the dial on the radio, which included a police and emergency scanner. All was quiet in western Colorado, and why shouldn't it be, on a late January weeknight, when all the world thought Zane Ezekiel Storch was dead?
And who was he, to say they weren't right?
What the hell are you?
He couldn't answer the question without Keogh's words, without Wittrock's condemnations or Barrow's lunatic lectures.
Your flesh is the mirror of your soul
, Keogh told him.
A monster
, Wittrock said.
You are an atavistic return to the original product of the grand experiment
, Barrow raved.
Yeah, whatever…
The accusations and insanities chased each other around in his head as the 50 met the larger 70 Interstate and turned westbound again, crossing the Utah state line. The alpine terrain subsided into high desert plains and broken badlands, but the hours and miles only quickened Storch's turmoil.
As a soldier, Storch was a specialist in survival. Now, everything he knew about his trade had become irrelevant, and the rules of the new game seemed to be known by everyone but him. He wore the faces of others, stole their DNA and spliced it into his own. He grew new parts to do things he couldn't imagine or accept, then shed them. His own form was only another mask.
Maybe Spike Team Texas weren't such bad guys before they changed. Twisted up inside by the war, the changes RADIANT wreaked upon them were too much for their minds to take. Their flesh became the mirrors of their souls, alright. What would his flesh become, when he lost it? Because by the minute, by the mile, he was losing it.
The 70 picked its painful way across Utah and through Fishlake National Forest, and the first rays of dawn pricked the Wasatch Plateau as Storch stopped in Aurora to refill and buy more meat, then turned south on the 15.
Towns flashed past without meaning or remark, overgrown, shitstinking deposits of bipedal mammals. If he let his eyes see as they wanted to, even the writing on the thousands of brightly lit signs on the road had no more meaning than the pheromone trails of ants, the piss-musk messages of dogs. He watched for eyes watching him, for obstacles that might rise in his path, but there was only the open road and the numberless company of trucks, blind herd animals following the same game trail south and west.
As he passed through Cedar City and into the monumental alien landscape of Zion National Park, he shut it all up. His was not a strategically trained mind. He could not expect to get a handle on the rhythm of conflict in a normal war, let alone one between humans and their unnatural successors. He needed a battle plan, and he had to trust in this body, because it was the only one he had. He was still Zane Ezekiel Storch, even if it was only his say-so against the rest of the world. He was still a soldier. But he didn't want to be in anyone's army ever again.
He could not run any longer. He would fight. Whom he would fight, and how, he had no fucking idea whatsoever.
He crossed a corner of Arizona, saw a sign beside the road: Mt. Bangs, elev. 8,012.
I'll be damned
, he cracked a smile, enjoying a plain coincidence.
There's your monument, sir, you crazy motherfucker.
The road carried him across Nevada and the Pacific time zone line. Storch spent his bonus hour in the restroom of a Shell gas station. He blocked two toilets and bought another turkey and three hams for breakfast.
He passed the Valley Of Fire State Park and the Moapa reservation, then Las Vegas: a riotous garden of neon pitcher-plants, the tar pit of the space age. In the absence of natural predators, humans make their own diseases, their own predators, their own extinction. He caught his reflection studying him in the mirror. Why not their own successors?
He passed through a nameless casino resort blooming like Russian thistle hard against the California border, LAST CHANCE TO GAMBLE! on a spangled billboard overshadowing the California sign. So engrossed was he in driving, brooding and radiating copious amounts of heat that he nearly blew through the INS inspection station straddling the state line.
The olive-drab customs agent stepped out into the road hesitantly, one hand outstretched to wave him to stop, the other gripping a walkie-talkie like he wished it was a gun. Storch's foot started to stand on the gas, but he held it back and forced it onto the brake, feeling odd clouds of relief blotting out his fear. Shit, he told his body, guess you don't know everything.
He drew up just before the inspector, who came around to the window a little sharply, pissed at almost being run over. "Where you coming from?"
No smart answers, now, he thought, but no answers leapt to mind at all. He must have just stared at the inspector for a moment while the nasal tones began to make themselves into words. The man was just an agricultural cop, looking for pest-infested fruits and vegetables, and maybe the illegals who pick them. He would have no beef with Storch, no idea what he was letting in to the state.
"Colorado," Storch said. "Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Rec."
The man cocked his head in a way Storch didn't like. "Skiing?" His hooded eyes were on the empty bed of the truck.
"Nope. Visiting."
"You live in California?"
What the hell was going on? He thought about the Mission. They were small, but they were smart. They could have put out a stolen report on the truck. They could have filed an anonymous tip on him and juggled the NCIC and state police files eight ways from Sunday to make the law try to stop him. He hoped they weren't that careless with strangers' lives, but he knew too much about that to hope.
He should have switched to another vehicle in Utah. He should have tried to change his looks. He was slipping, forgetting his training. Becoming an animal, just running. He could see it in the inspector's face as he loudly and slowly repeated his question. "Do…you…hail from…?"
"Yeah, most of the year, in—in Norwalk." Where they kept his father. "Listen, I haven't got any fruits or vegetables, so—"
The inspector leaned in the cab window across Storch and took up a big deep sniff of the air in there. His nose seemed to swell and hairs waved out of the nostrils.
Storch's hand itched, twitched, and he looked down at it, clasped it with the other one. Would they grow claws again, or something else? Would they just go for the gun? He fought the urge to scream at the inspector to get away before he got hurt.
A car behind Storch honked, then another. The inspector backed away from the truck and waved Storch on into California.
Relieved and exhausted, he rolled into Mojave at mid-morning. The sky was clear and brutally blue, the air so pure that the scent of food cooking or the sound of a shout could travel for miles, like blood in the ocean. The desert was green and fat with nearly all the rainfall it would get for the year, the endless fields of sage and creosote, yucca and Joshua trees like a rumpled, threadbare Army blanket. This was what Storch had craved: in the unbroken emptiness, the mountains, the telephone and power lines fell away, and he floated free of perspective. One minute he could be large enough to see over the horizon, the next so small that he would pass beneath even God's notice.
The silence, the stillness, calmed him. It was what kept him here for nearly a decade, and healed his soul-sickness. He knew he couldn't stay, but he also knew that before he could decide where to go or what to do, he had to replenish himself, had to anchor himself to what he was, before the world changed him into something he could not live with.
As a human, he stood up to fight to save the human race from its replacements. He had helped to murder more people than he'd ever helped in his lifetime for a cause he didn't understand, but that was the way of soldiers. When he learned more, he could not justify genocide, but neither could he say,
this is just
,
this is the natural order,
and let it come. What was coming was not simply a new and improved human being. It was only Keogh, His mind like a virus hiding in every indestructible host. The world would rush to be "awakened," and someday, there would be only Keogh.
That was a fate worth fighting against, but the lines were tangled up, and he could not see that either side had a monopoly on truth, let alone moral high ground. The Mission meant to exterminate the mutants, including him.
Science marches on
, he thought grimly,
but I run.
And in the middle, only Storch alone, a mutant outsider among mutants. Cut off from the divine hive-mind and his own humanity, he could only go insane and become something worse than Spike Team Texas. Madness was in his blood, as surely as his name was Storch, and no recombinant DNA could tweak it away. He could fight, but for what?
How many times would he kill to save a species to which he no longer belonged, a race which rejected him as a monster? How many times would he die?
He stopped in Baker.
The Liberty Salvage junkyard had been carted away and a new hurricane fence erected around it. Looking around and seeing no one, he scaled the fence and jumped over.
He was surprised by how much they'd left here. The pit was half-filled with gravel and a few pools of translucent scum that would've evaporated a long time ago, if it was water. Except for a few protruding slabs of concrete and tortured rebar, the pit might've been your garden-variety toxic waste dump. He saw several rusty red barrels and some abandoned excavation equipment among the debris.
He stood at the edge as the sun seemed to drop out of the sky and splatter on the merciless desert floor. Lenticular clouds bloomed like ghosts of UFO's in the west, then unraveled into strings of vapor. The ground turned purple and indigo as if ink were rising up out of the pit. When the sun went down out here, the earth cooled so fast you could hear it shrinking.
This was where it happened, where everything changed. In a second, his mind and body were taken away from him. The last, most basic roots of his life were burned away. All of it hinged on a crazy, suicidal decision to come back here.
Only he and Wittrock came back from the raid on the Radiant Dawn hospice village, and they were headed for an airfield. He could have gone with them, or he could have fled when they touched down in Nevada, but instead, he had forced the pilot to take him back here. He was trapped, irradiated, and imprisoned, in every possible sense of the word. Maybe he came back to turn himself in, to seek punishment for what he'd done, or maybe it was because of the nurse.
The soil on the floor of the pit was cracked and warped by escaped moisture. The brittle sound of it under his boots reminded him of thin ice on a frozen lake. Profoundly mistrustful of the ground, he probed each step before he shifted his weight, avoiding the pools of scum in the hollows of the pit.