He dragged Greenaway to a radar console. The display showed two arrow-shaped clouds of flickering dots converging on the mountain from the east and west. They were so dense, Greenaway thought they were storm fronts. "More bad weather?" he asked numbly.
"Shit, it's the fucking attack!" Talley screamed. "Two full wings of fighter-bombers. They're running stealth, but the cellular array we put together picked them up. They wink on and off, making ghost-planes to fuck up their pattern, but there's at least
fifty
planes, Mort. Fifty."
Greenaway shrugged. "Shoot them down."
"They'll be in range in about four minutes, but we're going to get shithammered, best-case scenario. We've got to get into those bunkers—"
Talley kept babbling, but Greenaway couldn't hear him. The bunkers reminded him of something that happened to him, just now. He was so fucking tired. Like poor old Barbarossa, he felt as if he were going to freeze to death on the eve of the battle he'd waited for his entire life. He had something to tell Talley, something he ought to know…
"Mort, goddammit, are you listening to me?"
Greenaway rubbed his eyes. Enemy air attack in overwhelming numbers in minutes, get the men into the bunkers, right, south perimeter wide open and men missing, Teabag's head pinned to a tree by a fucking arrow—
Do something!
Greenaway chopped up air and said, "Call Ortman, find out if he has any real guns. Get him to hold the south perimeter."
"He doesn't have any real guns. And he's leaving."
"What?"
"Says the maneuver's been called off. They're driving down the mountain, now. Said one unit stayed behind—"
"One unit? How many?"
"How the hell should I know? They're not accounted for, which means they're probably the ones inside our perimeter, the ones who shot Wishniak. We're overrun, Mort, goddammit, now what do we do?"
Then it hit him. As if he'd only forgotten what just happened with Dr. Keogh, as if he hadn't noticed that he still had his gun out, the frosty grip welded to his sweaty palm. He shivered. "Burl, we've got to get the fuck off this mountain."
Talley looked at him and said something, but his words were drowned out by the deafening speech of antiaircraft guns.
~24~
It all happened so fast.
The first wave swept over the mountain in less than five seconds, and the second came before the flares had faded from their vision, before the ringing had even begun to block their ears.
But for Storch, who lay motionless in the snow at the edge of the gorge overlooking the bridge to Radiant Dawn, it unfolded like a series of pictures at a gallery, images of a place he had visited too many times, a place that came looking for him when he failed to find it. A place he would have to go into one more time, and do what he had failed to do so many times before.
Storch melted snow. In the hours he'd lain there, radiating waste heat as he changed back, he'd melted so much snow he'd made a stream that some lucky cartographer would get to name, someday, but he weighed the risk as less than that of moving. Banks of powder settled and tumbled over him, digging him a deeper grave until only his eyes peered out through a sage-scented stand of brush at the matrix of lights around the tower. He lay so still, riveted to the earth, that he could almost feel his nerves growing into the soil, becoming the forest. The trees becoming his new fingers, transmitting every disturbance, every intruder in his woods, his new body.
In the stillness behind his eyes, nothing moved, and so no time passed. He felt no fatigue and no boredom, only the quickening intensity of the Now, this endless instant which would not pass until something happened. This was the utter patience that all predators know, that the Special Forces had tried to teach him, but which no thinking animal could truly master. Now, his thoughts came in colors and images, not words, endlessly cycling around his quarry, somewhere down below.
An owl hooted, knifed down to the ground and taloned some kind of rodent out of the brush within inches of him. Soldiers in the trees watched the road, snowmobiles surfed the ridge overlooking the gorge, and once or twice he caught a scent on the wind so sour, so pregnant with memories of terror that he almost broke cover. Spike Team Texas. But they all seemed too preoccupied with other business to notice the rills of meltwater that trickled down the slope among the pine trunks before freezing again. The cold seeped into Storch and fused his joints, but it gave him cover. Sucking out his heat, it rendered him invisible to infra-red sight and kept his breath from fogging.
He marveled at his hands. They had only changed back to his native pigmentation in stripes and marbled blotches, forming natural camouflage far more effective than the crappy alpine pattern on his stolen National Guard fatigues. His face and neck were marbled the same way, milk white and coffee brown patterns that made him invisible in the snow-tufted woods, even to himself.
Stoned and cramped as he was from the long bus ride, the black Guardsman had put up a hell of a fight when Storch took him. When he saw the National Guard convoy on the highway, he had immediately known where they were headed, and snuck into the restroom to lie in wait. He passed up several that were too slight of build, lurking in a stall directly across from the front door. Not knowing, not wanting to know what the fuck was going to happen next, but trusting to his body's superior survival skills, he struck the big black private as he leaned over the sink. Swept his legs out from under him and slammed his head into the sink so hard porcelain chips and formica and blood sprayed the tile floor. The private should have gone out, but he fought, kneed Storch in the groin, which would have hurt if his testicles hadn't retracted into his pelvis at the prospect of a fight. Storch had to hit him again and again, harder, too hard. He watched with sick wonder as his fists resculpted the black private's face into a puddle, sent him reeling into the stall to crack the toilet basin in half and collapse beside it. His feet still pumped at the spreading pool of sewage as if he attacked a tackling dummy in his sleep. Storch checked the front door, then shut himself up with the body.
Become him
, his body said, in spasms.
Eat him.
It was hard not to. The private's vitality sizzled in the air like steak on a grill, his to devour. Sweat stank of drugs and worse, but the energy in those limbs, the secrets in the blood, would make him stronger. He bit back vomit as images surged forth in crimson Technicolor, waking dreams of doing it, loving it. It was not a moral repulsion that held him back. He was beyond good and evil, or beneath them—a force of nature, a beast in the jungle. Even as the blood-tide of hunger drew him closer to the unconscious private's beating heart, drew the claws out of his fists, he fought it, because it was not what he would do.
I am not Spike Team Texas,
he told his fists.
I am Zane Ezekiel Storch, and I don't eat people.
In the end, a little blood had been enough to affect the change. It danced and tingled going down, a chemical song of ancestry and survival that reverberated changes through him until it came to the fundamental theme that bound them together. A common ancestor, lost on the savannah and torn with longing to return to the trees, uneasily learning to mimic its hunters. Then deeper, further back down the thread of a million, billion little lives, to that unspeakable vision—
Something vast and terrible and wise, watching him
—that haunted Storch throughout his long sleep at Ft. Avon. He closed his inner eye to it and rode it out. And when he looked at his hands, they were chocolate-brown and gnarly with muscle, broad palms and long, knobby fingers. His scalp burned where kinky black hair grew, and his face ached as fluid and cartilage flattened his nose, thickened his brow and lips and planed his cheekbones.
He dressed in the private's soaking wet uniform, the heat from the change steaming the urine-stinking water out of it before he had the boots laced. The name on the chest was HEELEY, D. Strange heat-haze vapors filmed his vision—faces, names, places, football games. The man's memories, chemical residue of a lifetime in a drop of blood, trying to get into his head. He pushed those back, too, and tried to get back to business in his new skin.
Miraculously, no one had come in during the entire transaction, and Storch feared the bus had left without him. He walked out into the blue-black pre-dawn gloom of the rest stop, suddenly feeling naked as the eyes of Guardsmen picked at him. Not knowing how the man walked or talked, or which of the other weekend warriors he knew and should acknowledge, he crossed to the row of olive drab school buses and milled around until a skinny white private yelled out a window to get on the fucking bus, already.
He got on and fell immediately into dreamless, grateful sleep. But even while he slept, he scented the others on the bus, fixed on the man across the aisle, whose aromatic signature was already very familiar to him. The Missionary officer who put a gun full of green death to Storch's head, but couldn't pull the trigger. And not because Storch held Wittrock by his pencil-neck—he could smell the officer's eagerness to see the wizened old egghead stop breathing—but because he was tired and scared and more than half-insane. Even more haunted than Major Bangs had been, tired of killing and losing men, tired of fighting things that would not die.
He snapped back into the present, heard a muted twang and an even fainter sound like the wind unzipping, then snapping shut behind a swiftly moving, aerodynamically perfect object. Not a bullet. An arrow. A wet chunky sound, and a few blobs of snow shook out of a sentinel white pine on a knoll overlooking the road about a hundred yards from his position. He couldn't place the shooter, but he knew the arrow came from the ridge, from Radiant Dawn. An errant breeze stirred the powder mounded before his face, and he smelled Tucker Avery, the blindingly fast one with mercury for blood and nitrous oxide injectors in his heart.
He smells like you.
Storch stayed put. Melted snow. Hugged the ground. Became the forest. Avery's spoor faded, and almost on cue, he heard soldiers moving up the hill, a travesty of stealth in spacesuits. Two three-man fire teams, leapfrogging from point to cover positions in classic insertion pattern. A moment later, he smelled their breath, filtered through the activated charcoal and robot-vomit polyvinyl and whatever else sealed them off from the outside world, smelled their sweat and strain and mortal terror as they lumbered up from cover to cover. They passed within fifty feet of his position and topped the ridge without tripping any alarms. Of course not, because Spike Team Texas snuffed the sentry in the tree. Meaning two things. The sentry was human. And Spike Team Texas—which meant Keogh, unless things had changed radically while he was sleeping— wanted the Missionaries inside. Meaning the whole thing was a trap. Which changed nothing for him. For Storch, nothing changed. He had to go into the hole again. It was always the same hole. He had to go into the hole again, because she was in there. It was always the same girl. He was always too late.
He was faster, this time. She was still alive, and suffering only he knew what kind of tortures. Perhaps he was much too late, like when he hit the wrong abandoned mine and saved the wrong girl, her name was Gina, but she'd become one of them, a predator, and he'd left her to die. Or she was like Sidra Sperling, used up and turned inside out by Keogh already, discarded in a ditch. Or he'd be only a second too late, like he'd been with Stella Orozco the last time. A second or a day or months, he was always too late, and the earth always opened up and swallowed up the girl. He owed the world for too many dead girls he couldn't save, so back in the hole he went, until he got it right. But this girl—
She was more. When he closed his eyes, he felt as if she hovered over him as she did in the Missionary bunker, watching him pretend to sleep, and she seemed to understand what a chance he was taking. He felt as if she recognized that he was vulnerable, and as she watched over him, she transmitted so much more than either of them could ever say in words. Her scent ran in his veins. It called to him. She was still here, and wanted out. Storch, who could not simply be human, anymore, had to do what he did to discover what he was. She had known what he was, and watched over him, anyway. Maybe now, she, alone among all the people in the world, could tell him what he was, now.
He lay still. Melting snow. The Missionaries laid up behind the trees silhouetted against the top of the ridge. Their breath plumed in the air above their helmeted heads, little fog-flags announcing their presence to anyone watching, but there was no one. Because they were expected, and the door was open.
And then it happened. The big 40mm guns on the mountaintop saw them first, and opened fire. It was as if the whole mountain were an active volcano blasting off its cap and spewing white-hot molten lead into the night. The guns fired west, strobing the sky white-gold and limning the craggy contours of the storm clouds above and the peak below, pinning the running soldiers milling around the tower on their own shadows.
The artillery screamed a steel-throated aria of autofire in solid, unbroken sweeps, as if they were writing their name on eastern Washington, as if the Japs were coming back for Pearl Harbor and got lost in time and space, and were coming here. Snow shook out of the trees, avalanches cascaded down from the peak. Rocks danced. The ground shimmied and shook, victory at sea. Only Storch didn't move. He melted snow.
Then they came.
Over the shriek of the cannons, the sound was like all the bees on earth in a single, livid swarm. It sounded like a million Enola Gays. The white light in the sky went red as the flaming debris from the first planes streaked across the low-hanging clouds and winked out like meteors. Nothing touched the ground.