Ravenous Dusk

Author:Goodfellow, Cody [Goodfellow, Cody]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Perilous Press
Published: 2010-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

~23~

Sometimes, the experience of being Mort Greenaway was so thrilling, so fraught with challenge, that he would gladly turn it over to someone else. This was shaping up to be one of those days

Waking at 0500, he found the camp already up and flying off the handle at a situation. Ice fog pushed visibility down to arm's length. Its shifting tides smothered sounds or amplified them out of all regard for distance, so it sounded like the camp was tearing its own asshole out for no reason when Greenaway stumbled out of his trailer. Snowmobiles prowled the steep, ice-crusted forest below the plateau, men shouted and discharged rifles somewhere halfway down the mountain, and then a small fireball rose up out of the mist. He took a huge mug of black coffee from an Afrikaner mercenary whom he knew only as Ade and washed down a big black capsule of herbal speed. Ade didn't know what the fuck was going on, so he stomped over to the comm center, a big armored box on a flatbed trailer festooned with aerials and antennae, and shouted for Master Sergeant Talley.

"Burl, what the fuck is going on?" The glycerine capsule was stuck in his throat, slowly melting and trickling hot packets of herbal nervous amperage into his uneasy gut. An irresistible urge to hit something or someone—anyone, really—had taken over his left arm and began to creep into his heart.

Talley sat in a folding chair before a console much like an air traffic controller's, with a black circular display flecked with green dots and ghostly clouds. His nose only inches from the screen, he cycled through satellite overlays from various orbital eyes, oblivious to the boss's arrival until one of the comm technicians tapped him on the shoulder.

He stood and regarded Greenaway like the CO was only one more tit-clutcher he'd have to wet-nurse today. He looked as if he'd slept at the console, if he'd slept at all. He'd stripped down to his battle dress underclothes and rolled the sleeves up to reveal knurled forearms blue with blurred, indecipherable tattoos. Though the undershirt was black, deeper shadows of sweat-stains ran from his armpits and Adam's apple to his gut-strained belt. "Not much of a situation, after all, Mort," he growled. "We got it under control, you want to bunk out for a few more hours—"

"Why the hell would I want to do that? What are my men doing?"

Burl stifled a yawn. "We had some kind of an encounter on the north face. Third-party shooting, none of our men were involved."

"What do you mean, a third party shooting?"

"Near as we can tell, somebody was up here, and somebody else flushed them, then chased them down the mountain. We got Dogtown's team tracking them on snowmobiles, but with the snow and the fog, I don't expect them to find much."

One of the comm techs turned in his seat. "Dogtown team leader's on channel one," he told Talley.

"Speaker," Greenaway growled. "Dogtown, sitrep."

Ruggy DeSantis, the Dogtown leader, hawked, spat and shouted over the wind lashing his position.

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