Dyson dug in and watched, weighed which way to jump. If Dyson was anything, it was adaptability. Avery shrank into duty, a scarecrow made of nerves winding tighter, building to a critical mass that had to be aimed at somebody, soon. Holroyd got slack, got fat, fatter, planetary. Then gone, vanished up his own colossal ass. It was Holroyd's dereliction of duty that preoccupied Spike Team Texas this fine morning, at this critical juncture in the Plan.
Fat flakes of snow brushed against the nictitating membrane sheaths over Dyson's unblinking eyes. The mountain shook. Talons clattered on the trigger-guard of his sniper rifle. The artillery batteries were dry-firing their guns, the barrels madly swiveling at phantom targets the computer said were there, oddly muted crumping booms rolling down the valley like the tread of jackbooted gods.
The bristled gray skin of Dyson's forehead twitched. Something had brushed his face, a touch lighter than breath, and his inner ear confabulated with the hypersensitive nerves of his exposed skin to triangulate the touch's point of origin, while his forebrain pulled apart the active sonar ping for the content of its message. Across the gorge, a third of the way down the mountain.
There
.
Dyson slithered from cover and ran on all fours across the face of the sheer cliff wall. Exposed for only five seconds, he went unseen to the rim of the gorge and leapt across. Arms burning, leg muscles blowing out as he kicked away from the wall across fifty feet of open space. He soared almost half the gorge before he started to fall.
He arched his legs and threw his arms wide to hug the oncoming granite rock face. The glacier-carved gorge funneled icy updrafts that he skated on to his landing. The wall hit him everywhere at once. He slid, slashing stone, broke two talons on his left paw and four on his left foot. A grunting snarl echoed down the gorge. On the bridge thirty feet above, two soldiers stood duty, one of them gunning a snowmobile. Oblivious.
Dyson scaled the wall and faded into the trees. His pelt went white with spreading evergreen stains. His hand and foot burned as new talons grew in. He caught his breath and ate fistfuls of snow. This was not a time to let heat have its head. This was a time for wisdom, for restraint. The content of the message was simple, but complex in its implications. Avery had found Holroyd, and needed help getting him back.
He stopped at the edge of the tree-line and hid when he saw Avery. The wiry One-One might've passed for a fire-charred tree alone in the clearing at the north end of the Heilige Berg compound. A Barrett Light 50 across his wide, pick-axe shoulder blades. He watched Avery for longer than he realized before showing himself. A twinge of gut-pain that he doubted Avery, but before yesterday, he hadn't doubted 'Royd, either.
"This area's off-limits, Tuck."
"Figured that's why he'd be here, sir. Everything that fat fuck does has to be a poke in the eye." Avery shrugged his shoulders, and Dyson could hear them creak. He looked sucked in, as if he strained against imploding and pulling a big chunk of the world into the hole behind his eyes. He looked as if he'd been up on green hornets since '75. Dyson had changed so much over the years that he almost forgot what he really looked like, and Holroyd just kept getting bigger. But Avery was a sphinx, inscrutable, looking more like himself every year, just
tighter
. "Should've seen it coming, sir. Discipline's been pretty slack."
In all their years together, through all their trials, he had never breathed a dissenting word against Dyson's command, never bitched without a good reason. Dyson's body drew itself up for battle, talons raking the roiling cloud of fog he blasted out of his cavernous chest. He stopped just short of smashing his One-One's face in, because this was a time for delicacy, for discretion. They had had plenty of fights before, and had only given up because for all their unreasoning rage, they had not ever discovered if they could actually kill one another. "Maybe you'd like to sit a spell in officer's country," he growled. "Maybe you don't need my help."
"He wants to talk to you. I can't move him."
Dyson watched the empty quad of the Heilige Berg compound. "Can't, or won't?"
Stung, Avery breathed cold fire. Whatever he almost said floated up between them and was torn apart by the wind. "He's been at their stores. He's…bigger, Sir."
Food was how this shit started. On the mountain, they were on a severely restricted diet of the same shit the residents ate, which, in reconstituted, vitamin-enriched mush form, was Keogh by-product. They were forbidden to touch any of the animal or plant life in the area, most of which was already either dead or irradiated, anyway. They were forbidden to hunt or pillage for fear of jeopardizing the Plan, but Holroyd suspected a darker motive.
Whatever they ate, their bodies used down to a molecular level. All flesh gave up its deepest secrets to them when they ate it—all flesh but Keogh's. 'Royd took to eating soil like a steam shovel, tunneling millions of years into the icy earth to get at the dormant seeds, prions, insect remains, and tiny fragments of DNA from the would-be's and never-were's of the big game. It tided him over for a while, but yesterday, he blew a gasket and went AWOL.
At sunrise, Dyson, on watch duty, saw him stalk and flush the only unspoken-for game in the valley—the Missionary spotter on the next ridge. The spooked commando gave as good as he could with a baffled rifle, then split on skis, with Gibby Holroyd in hot pursuit and about as tactful as a runaway tanker truck. He ran down the sorry shithead at the base of the mountain, and was tearing into him when Avery caught up and drove him off. According to Avery, Gibby just picked up the rest of the spotter and ran across the road. Avery gave chase, but stopped short as a goddamned Army National Guard convoy blundered up the road and gave 'Royd cover back up the mountain without noticing his ghosting them.
Avery had to sneak around the weekend warriors as they set up their roadblocks and fired up their barbecues, which was why it had taken all morning to run 'Royd to ground.
They crossed the field and circled around a long, low log cabin that Dyson figured for a storage pantry, since it was across a small yard from the rear kitchen door of the dining hall. A low parapet ran along the steep, snow-caked roof. This made Dyson laugh. The fucking idiots probably never realized the shed had a sniper hole built onto it, to protect the food from them. But they weren't idiots, anymore. They were Him.
He closed his eyes and summoned focus. He had to be in command of himself, to face this.
The double doors hung open. The snow in front of the doors was trampled and scraped down to the cobblestone path underneath, as if somebody had driven a tank into the shed. The air that wafted out was ten degrees warmer, and smelled like the inside of a decomposed elephant. He stepped into it and walked into the dark with his talons outstretched to show he had no weapons. The gesture made as much sense for them as the medieval tradition of the salute, but he hoped Holroyd was clearheaded enough to see his intent.
"It's alright, boy, you can come out, nothing's been done that can't be undone, yet."
The floor was ankle-deep in trash—cardboard and smashed wooden pallets, flattened cans and jugs, and galaxies of shattered glass. There was no food left.
"Somebody's got to do something, Brute." Holroyd's voice was a hoarse, gargling whisper, but Dyson couldn't tell where he was in the room. He
was
the room. "He's the lyingest motherless lick of devil-shit ever to walk, but He's right about it."
Dyson reined in his rage. Though his eyes adjusted quickly to the dark of the shed, he couldn't see 'Royd, just an amorphous red fog of rising body heat. "This is dereliction of duty, Gibson. Just shut up and come out. You used to be a fine soldier. I used to be proud to serve with you. What have you turned into, man?"
Holroyd's laugh made the walls flex. Dust pattered to the floor. "Said the motherfuckin' yeti! Answer me that, LT. What are we? Because we sure ain't men."
"We're Spike Team Texas, shit-for-brains," Avery snapped, stepping into the doorway with rifle raised. "We survive. We adapt. Our war is forever."
Holroyd's laugh was forever. "And what are we doing here, Brute? Can you or your Okie parrot say they know what's going through the prime gonzola's brain, right now?"
"I can tell you that better than most," Dyson replied coolly, "because this team had one head, and since he's gone, I have that sorry duty. You have some doubt about who's in charge here?"
"You could have fooled me, LT. Here, I thought all along that Keogh was in command, and we were his fucking lackeys."
"You're talking treason, fat boy," Avery growled.
"Fuck you, Okie monkey-chow. I shit bigger than you!"
"Shut up! You know damned well why we hitched up with the Doctor. He taught us how to live like this, and he still has shit to teach you. Like self-control. You've got to get your shit together. You're going to fuck up the program."
"The program! The Plan! The all-fuckin'-important Plan! And where do we fit into the big plan, LT? When Keogh gets what he wants, what do we get?"
"I thought we'd go back to the jungle," Dyson said. "Shit, there's probably a whole tribe of Holroyds running around, eatin' their own shit, because they ain't got chewing tobacco. I thought we'd make an attempt to just fucking live, with all our enemies dead."
"And you think Keogh'll stand for it? Listen, Brute. He taught us a few things I don't think you caught on to. He ain't just gonna take the people with cancer. He wants it all. Every man and woman and animal and plant. He wants it all. Not just to own it, but to be it. He won't rest until he's us, too."
"Gibby, I ain't gonna tell you again. Get your double-wide hillbilly ass out front and center, before I have to spill your breakfast." His claws grew. The pain made it harder than ever to concentrate, but this was beyond insubordination.
"I had the dream again, LT. About the bad time, after the Captain got topped. I couldn't stop eating, remember? I ate all my rations, and a monkey that I caught, and that gook officer's face, and the leaves on the trees…I even tried to eat my own hand, I got so worked up, remember? I think even then that I understood it. You can't just murder everything to possess it. You're still not safe. You have to
be
everything. And we helped him get that power, LT. And what is he going to give us?"
"What do you propose we do, One-Two, besides eat everything?"
"Shit, we got to raise an army ourselves, and take a stand. You want to wait for him to come for us in the jungle, when he's the whole goddamned world?"
Eyes blazing, Dyson answered, "Shit, yes, I do."
"And that's another thing. That sonofabitch I ran down this morning? He was only thirty-five and he was a goddamned captain! And as I was eating him, it occurred to me that I've been in this chickenshit outfit for his whole fuckin' lifetime and I AIN'T NEVER BEEN PROMOTED!"
"Spec Four Gibby Holroyd, it is with heavy heart that I relieve you of duty and commence to feeding you your own ass, effective immediately." He went into the dark claws-first just as Holroyd came charging out into the light. His black eyes rolled and his tongue lolled as he looked down on Dyson, and for an eye blink, Dyson feared.
They had fought before, tried to kill each other more than a few times even before the change, but when they looked into each other's eyes and saw the same fire burning there, the same light that set them apart from and above the entire human maggot race, all quarrels were forgotten. Now, Dyson locked his gaze on Holroyd's and saw only hunger to eat him and all the world and digest it and shit it out.
The earth shook.
If he had been big before, Holroyd was now a one-man re-enactment of the glacier that gouged the gorge out of the mountain. He had indeed eaten every edible thing in the shed, and wasted none of it. His torso sprawled from wall to wall, a turgid, blubbery manscape bristling with unblinking muddy green eyes and less familiar organs. His bulk snaked back into the dark like an obscene giant maggot, borne forward at a blindingly fast speed by a forest of stumpy, hoofed legs. Bulldozer arms unfurled and reached for Dyson as he dug his talons into the floor planks. And somewhere in the midst of it all, almost swallowed up by the rising tide of fleshy rolls between the great arms, Gibby Holroyd looked down with his ear-to-ear mouth slack and raining slobber. His tongue dangled out one corner, lashing from side like he was eating a snake. His rolling mad-cow eyes, sunk deep into beetling beds of flab, took in the tiny form of his CO and glittered, blood-simple hunger and wily redneck cunning and something else that almost made Dyson step out of the way at the last possible instant. There was no flicker of recognition whatsoever. 'Royd saw only food.
Dyson threw his arms out and crouched, closed his eyes. His talons met 'Royd's onrushing bulk and sank right up to the elbows into his belly as if into a tub of soft bread dough. Then 'Royd's main bulk slammed into him and drove him back up on his heels. It felt as if he were trying to stop a train. Muscles strained and popped in his legs and back. The floor planks splintered and gave way under him, and 'Royd bulled a few feet closer to the door.
"Stand clear, sir! Let me take this shot!" Avery's voice sounded as if he were in Mexico.
One of 'Royd's fists connected with the side of Dyson's head. Stars and planets split open and half the world went red. His cheekbone caved in, shards of the temporal plate of his skull introduced themselves to his brain, and his right eye popped out of its socket.
Deep inside 'Royd, Dyson's talons kept growing. Layer upon layer of fat and connective tissue gave way. 'Royd shrieked in his face, a high-pitched wail like dry ice on steel. Claws grated on massive ribs and curled around them. Another fist came down on Dyson's left shoulder. Bones pulverized, and blood geysered up into Dyson's ear. His left arm stopped working.