Radiant Dawn (27 page)

He came back around the block in a new suit of clothing; ugly and uncomfortable but decidedly less paramilitary looking. He stopped dead in his tracks on the edge of the motel parking lot, crippled by a rush of foreboding about going back in there. The parking lot still had most of the same cars he'd noticed when he left, and no new arrivals. The buttery yellow lights at the front desk were on, but he saw no sign of the clerk. He'd left nothing important inside, indeed, probably not enough for a police forensics team to tell he was even there.

He looked around again, trying to seem lost, and not as if he were casing the place. Infrequent cars flew past at freeway speeds. A police car went by without taking notice of him. He went back to the intersection and crossed the street, checked into a Motel 6 that could have been stamped from the same mold as the first, checked into the room under another fake ID, and went inside.

The picture window commanded a pretty good view of his old room, and had blinds instead of curtains. He left the lights off and opened the blinds just wide enough to see across the street through a slit. He sat down in a scuffed-up naugahyde lounge chair, unlaced his boots, fitted the silencer onto the gun, laid it on the table beside him, and watched.

A few guests came and went. After about an hour, the desk clerk came out for a cigarette, his nose in a paperback.

Storch rubbed his eyes, willing adrenaline into his nervous system. He fished a bottle of pineapple juice out of his coat pocket, sipped at the too-sweet, lukewarm nectar and felt his blood thicken up, his movements become less jittery, less desperate to stay awake. He checked the clip in the automatic. An argument in one of the upstairs rooms spilled out onto the balcony, two biker-looking guys with no shirts on pushing at each other and shouting. The desk clerk went up and told them to go back inside. Storch worried that they would bring the cops, willed them to shut up and cut it out. Miraculously, they did.

Storch watched. Nothing happened. And somewhere around two-thirty, he leaned forward to check the gun again, and just kept leaning until he collapsed on the floor.

There actually wasn't that much space in the underground base, but it was so twisted upon itself that Stella, when she was allowed out of Mrachek's sight, constantly found herself rounding a corner to come face to face with one or more soldiers standing duty outside a door she was clearly not meant to enter. The soldiers always stood, impassive and silent, not even batting an eye as she asked them questions, or lambasted them with insults. They would've done the Queen's Grenadier Guards proud, but Stella quickly discovered it was largely a show for her benefit, or intimidation. One morning, at least according to the digital chronometer on the climate control in the sickbay, she stopped just short of a corner around which she knew a soldier regularly stood all night, outside what she guessed was the motor pool, until his morning relief came. She listened.

Instantly, she recognized the voices. They regularly pulled this duty, and just as regularly bitched about it. The night-guard was a Latino named Medina, a very senior noncommissioned officer whose talk was peppered with Army jargon. The relief was named Betancourt, and he talked less, perhaps because of a mild stutter and a lazy Alabama drawl that made him sound like a halfwit, even when, as now, he was talking about things Stella couldn't begin to understand.

"News?" Medina offered.

"It's b-bad, Maceo," Betancourt muttered. "Going on worse. School Of Night's gone black."

"What the fuck? What do the eggheads know?"

"Can't be sure, but they f-fear the worst. It's like the ordnance cache raid all over again."

"So
now
we're gonna have to steal a telemetry lab," Medina's voice was acidic. Stella guessed whatever this mysterious new development meant, it was widening a rift between the soldiers and the eggheads. "They scrubbing?"

Silence. Betancourt must've shaken his head, because Medina hawked and spat and composed an impromptu haiku entirely out of Spanish and Army-coined obscenities.

Betancourt reminded Stella of Eeyore the depressive donkey when he added, "Wittrock's de-de-cided to d-do it himself…on-site."

"Fucking egghead queen-bee motherfucker," Medina hissed. "Just putting more weight on an op that's already grinding on the rims. He wants a complete saturation, and we're supposed to wait to pick his ass out of the fire while he's fucking with their computer."

"That part—th-th-that still doesn't sit well with me, man," Betancourt mumbled. "They ain't luh-like us, I know, buh-b-but they ain't soldiers, man. They're fuh-folks…"

"You didn't see what homeboy did to Gene in the sickbay, man. That raid in Lone Pine, when we picked up Mrachek's guinea pigs? I've never seen anyfuckingthing take that much killing and keep on going."

"Well, wh-whatever they are, I hope the d-d-docs find a cure for 'em, so we duh-don't have to b-burn 'em out again, I tuh-t-tuh-tell you what."

Stella's ears burned as she backed away.
Guinea pigs?
Stella walked back to sick bay, and only got lost once.

On her way, as if her anger had cauterized blocked synapses in her brain, she found herself thinking clearly again. Perhaps she'd been drugged all this time, not to have wondered before.

Mrachek said they were fighting a war, and after the whirlwind of events that'd showed her what became of Seth Napier, she'd been bludgeoned into accepting Radiant Dawn as the enemy. But what had they done, besides try to survive? Whatever Stephen had become, he'd survived cancer and multiple dismemberment. What happened to Napier was an accident, a freak byproduct of whatever kept him alive. The Radiant Dawn community hadn't tried to spread beyond its own enclave. They wanted what all people want, but they had enemies. These people.

And me. When I wanted them dead, was it because I was afraid of them, or because they turned me away?

Mrachek sat with her big back to the door, hunched over a binocular microscope. Her arms were poised akimbo, her hands manipulating a syringe and an eyedropper over the petri dish under the scope. "Where've you been?" she asked, but didn't turn around. Stella crossed the sickbay a little faster than she intended. If any part of her intended harm, it wasn't keeping her forebrain informed, but it slammed on the brakes when Mrachek turned around. Her curare dartgun was in her rosy pink fist, like an extra finger. "I think it'd be best if you stuck around closer to sickbay. I can't vouch for your safety elsewhere."

"What're you going to do to Radiant Dawn?" Stella asked.

"I thought I made myself clear before. We're at war, dear heart."

"You called them a disease. I thought that meant you were trying to cure them."

"They are a disease. But there's no cure. They have to be destroyed."

"They're human beings!"

"Oh no," Mrachek clucked her tongue at Stella as if she were a potty-mouthed child. "They were human beings once; poor, dying souls who came to Radiant Dawn as their last hope for survival. Like you did. But they've been reengineered into something else, and they're an unstable population. It's either them, or us."

After the Indians, the slaves and the Jews, you'd think white people would back off that argument.
For once, don't let race cloud your thinking, don't let this become a fight, because there's nowhere to storm off to when you lose.
"They seem to want to keep to themselves. Why can't they be contained?"

"Could the first egg-stealing mammals be contained? Could primates be kept in the trees? Could we be kept from using tools to make the world we've made? Whether it's in their nature or not, they're going to spread, and they're going to replace us. Unless it's finished here." Mrachek rubbed the bridge of her nose wearily.

"But if they're what's next, who are we to stop them? Who are you to kill them off?"

"Come look at this," she said, and beckoned Stella closer to the microscope. She approached, eyes on the dartgun resting in Mrachek's palm on the countertop. She peered through the lenses, adjusting the focus until she could make out an undifferentiated sea of particulates. She dialed up the magnification by a hundred and the sea became a wall of cells, amorphous sacs, mortared together by neoplasmic streamers. Stella recognized the formless blobs immediately. Cancer cells. Organic anarchy incarnate, they had no function other than to proliferate and murder their host. Stella saw these cells in her dreams.

"They're not yours. They've been cultured from Mr. Napier, although cultured isn't the right word, because they don't even require a growth medium. They keep multiplying until they've expended all available resources, weeks after separation from the parent organism. These aren't taken from Napier's cancer. They are Napier. A small enough sample breaks down into this, the dormant state." Feeling Mrachek hovering over her, Stella backed away from the scope, stepping on the medic's toes.

She didn't seem to notice. More to herself than for Stella's benefit, she began to lecture. "Did you know, there's a theory, I didn't used to have any use for it, but some homeopathic researchers point to the origin of cancer as the result of the dead end of evolution. We've made everything for ourselves, so we can't genetically improve, and our genes are striking back the only way they know how; cancer as frustrated evolutionary force expressing itself as death. If it can't change us, it'll kill us all off and start again. But someone signed a peace treaty, and sold us out."

Was she talking about Keogh? Even before she came to Radiant Dawn, he knew what was wrong with her, had offered her words of comfort that she'd foolishly interpreted as an invitation.

"Stella dear, we're not meant to be replaced by cancer. This isn't the natural order, it's the work of a—" she faltered, busied herself with the syringe, drizzling a minuscule amount of a bluish fluid into the dish. "Look at it now," she said.

Stella had watched crystals grow as a child. It was fascinating, and she'd badgered those of her foster parents who responded at all to her desires to buy her the kits, and she'd stay up all night, watching the lowly, particolored rocks remake themselves into delicate spires and fairy-palaces before her eyes. All that wonder rushed back into her heart and turned to ashes as she realized what she was seeing.

The blue fluid coursed through the intercellular crevices and elicited an almost electrical response from the cancer cells. They bloomed. The walls of each tiny cell erupted in questing vines that sped out and intertwined with their neighbors' shoots, tangling and twisting and reaching out of the tissue sample, reaching greedy boring shoots towards the lens. Stella jerked back and her hands went to her eyes. It'd been like watching fire.

"What do you see?"

"They're becoming…nerve cells?"

"Not nerve cells. They're still cancer cells, but they take on all the traits of functional nerve cells when they're introduced to liquefied dendrite cells, or any neurotransmitters. In the last hour, this particular sample has been adipose tissue, skeletal muscle fiber, and glial brain tissue. Is that nature?"

Stella clenched her fists at her temples. A cure for what was killing her. But was it worse than death, or better than mortal life? She couldn't stand much more of this argument, unless she could drive it into personal territory. "How would you know what's natural?"

"Stella dear, I was a Major in the US Army Medical Research of Infectious Diseases—USAMRID. I treated emerging viruses in seventeen countries, and I was never afraid. I'm afraid now. Come on."

She stood and led Stella back down the back corridor, where the quarantine cells were. To the last cell, behind two doors. Where they kept Napier.

She stopped just short of the double-paned viewing slot. Seeing him—it—would be too much. When she'd seen it the last time, it'd been burned, and shot full of more bullets than she could've carried in a duffel bag, and yet it walked, and regarded her with those gray eyes that weren't Seth Napier's, or Stephen's, but something wiser than a disease. Mrachek's chubby little hand pressed at the small of her back, gently shoving her towards it. She planted her feet, but the medic's lower center of gravity and deceptive strength rocked her off her heels and she stumbled against the door.

It wasn't what she'd call a disappointment, but it wasn't anything she'd have expected, either. The thing that mauled Mrachek and the soldier was gone. Faced with inescapable containment, Napier lay in a fetal curl, naked, on his cot. In the dim reddish light, he appeared to be shivering, and Stella turned to give Mrachek hell for letting him freeze, when Mrachek switched on a bright white light in the cell.

It was like turning sunlight on a tub of nightcrawlers. Napier wasn't moving, but his skin wriggled and shifted as the vital tissues underneath waged war over the proper way to build a human body. Its head rolled back and eyes opened and fixed on Stella. Those eyes. The face around them twitched in and out of Napier's and Stephen's features, but the eyes knew her. The thing that'd been Seth Napier grinned at her and splayed out his arms, to display its new body, or to offer her a hug.

"Look at him, dear heart. Is this the next dominant species? Is this what you'd give the world to?"

Right away, she noticed that Napier's new body was younger and more powerfully muscled than either he or Stephen had been. Then she noticed the buboes. She'd never seen the symptoms of bubonic plague outside of textbooks, but that was the word that came to mind. Pendulous, purple-black sacs sprouted from his armpits and groin, a collar of them round his neck; even, she noticed, in a sort of turkey crest on his scalp.

"What's wrong with him?" Stella whispered.

"Absolutely nothing, dear. He started swelling up like that about twenty-four hours after we brought him in. They're sort of like plague buboes, but they're also like testes. They contain a virus, similar to Rouss' sarcoma virus, only much more aggressive, and infinitely more precise."