Ravenous Dusk Read Free Page A

Chaos, or the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, or the Unbegotten Source? They sleep, and hear you not. I am the only god who will hear your prayers, Major."
    Hundayi sank to the ground before the Americans. Jagged black rock bit into his rubbery knees. He did not want to, but he feared if he didn't bow down, he'd stumble off the cliff-face, or be pushed. And the Major had come so far, fought so hard, just to stay alive in this shitty army, this shitty world. He was almost relieved to know that, now, nothing else mattered. What he had to do was sickening to him, but he had done it all his life, and needed no further prodding to do it now. "I pray to you, most excellent Sir," he hissed, "I beseech you spare my life, and let me serve you. But tell me, please: what are you?"
    "The first," Dr. Keogh said, "and the last," and showed him.
     

~1~
     
    There was dark.
    There were dreams so real she thought she'd died and been reborn. A cat in the lap of someone with eternally stroking, scratching hands. A protean sliver of almost-living matter on a cradle of languid tides, her boneless body little more than a higher iteration of the blood-warm water around her. Adrift on the dying gamma ray emissions of a supernova, a blackened speck of mind that not even the death of a sun could extinguish.
    The dreams exploded in black fireworks like she'd been socked in both eyes, and it was less like waking up than being reborn into a stone womb, to a mother who cannot feel her, and will never birth her out.
    There were burning worms of phosphene unlight in her eyes that might be the test pattern blind people see all their lives, or maybe just chemical vapors and radioactive isotopes eating them out of her head. Her mind darting a thousand directions at once and returning with no answers. Her body coming back with the same dumb responses, no, you cannot move, no, there's nothing to see. Legs? Haven't heard from them in ages.
    She screamed so loud that the ragged sound trailed off only when she had flattened her lungs, so loud she sent pebbles and dust tumbling in the dark. Not because of fear, which was growing like ice crystals in her brain with the realization of where she was. Not in hope of being found, because anyone looking for her would hardly have her rescue in mind. She screamed because she had no other way of telling herself she was alive. She was crushed between two slabs of steel-reinforced concrete deep in a collapsed warren of tunnels beneath a junkyard in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and nobody knew she was there.
    Her throat was parched and nearly stopped up with dust, and her sinuses were packed with a conglomerate of sand and snot that felt like crushed glass. She could feel fluid flowing past her on the slab, but she restrained herself from drinking. She burned all over, her skin raw and blistered from her scalp to her belly. The odds on her laying in anything like water in this godforsaken hole were next to nil.
    Like your chances of getting rescued.
    She forced herself to lie still, forced her breathing to level off, and let her gyroscopic mind whirl itself to an exhausted standstill.
    She could move her left hand before her face, but the right was pinned flat against her back in a devastating compound shoulder fracture. Still in shock, I must be, that should hurt like hell. She could feel something that might be either a tarantula or her right hand twitching uselessly against her left shoulder blade. Below there, she could feel nothing at all.
    That she had survived the previous week, only to end up here, buried alive in the mad prison she almost escaped with a cure for her cancer, made a perverse kind of sense that she might have laughed at, if it were somebody else's life she was reading about in the odd news from Reuters, over breakfast. When her captors had opted for suicide over capture by federal agents, she'd bolted, and gotten free. She could still see that fleeting glimpse of moonless sky, alive