[Original Novella] The Resurrection War, Part 4

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A few were destroyed or disabled by mines. The rest cleared the beach, simply rolled onto and crushed the machinegun nests along the top ridge, then roamed about picking off stragglers. All to make way for the grave mites, who were next to emerge from the guts of the amphibious sub. As I studied it I noticed the hull of another sub behind it, attached as train cars would be to one another. Legged too, I assumed. Something like a tremendous steel centipede.

Had it crossed the ocean by crawling along the bottom? Or could it swim, undulating side to side like an eel? I wondered how long movement along the bottom could take before remembering that the occupants had no need of food or fresh air. Come to think of it I’d never seen any ventilation on tumbleweed tanks, nor any means of entry or egress.

The great gangly bugs, resembling something between a mole cricket and an earwig, combed the beach searching for bodies. Each was accompanied by the coldblood equivalent of a field medic. One of them came upon the camera and, with the butt of his rifle, smashed it. The feed abruptly turned to static.

I lowered my gaze when I heard the door to the little booth open. Betty stepped out, carrying herself better than my uncharitable imagination had given her credit for, and issued instructions to my escort from earlier. “Just switched over to the evening rotation, ‘Over There’ is playing now. Next up is the commercial for Blue Coal, after that improvise a little. Maybe some classical or something. Remember, no dead air! I’m gonna step out for a smoke.”

She brushed dangling blonde curls out of her face, scratched at a sizable mole under her eye, then smacked my behind on her way out of the room. I yelped but didn’t scold her. It’s not every day you meet Bombardier Betty, even in such a fleeting manner. Soon I was on my hands and knees in the little booth inspecting the radio internals via an open service panel.

Evidently there’d been issues with hissing, popping and whatnot. I protested that I was trained in the operation and maintenance of field radios but she deemed that close enough, and added that everybody specifically trained to service the equipment in question was either dead, or deadish.

“Well the first thing that jumps out at me is the burnt mercury arc rectifier. I can’t guarantee that’s your only problem but it’s the most obvious. Do you have any spares?” She set down a case next to me. “Just what’s in there.” I rummaged through it, finding only a single magnetron and a few different types of vacuum tube. I peered up at her and shook my head as she looked on with exasperation.

“Well can’t you jerry rig something? That’s what you’re good at, right?” I smirked. “Lady these things don’t run on wishes and dreams. Only the right elements put together in exactly the right way will do the trick. Either you’ve got another arc rectifier on base, or you haven’t got a working radio.” She fretted about for a minute before struck by an epiphany.

“Now I’m no radio whiz but I’d bet my last pack of smokes that if there’s another one of those things around here, you’ll find it in the lab. My husband Fritz does his pokin’ and tinkerin’ there, so I’ve got a pass that’ll get you inside. Tell anybody who gets in your way that you’re on an errand for Gertrude.” From within her blouse she produced a photo ID strung from a lanyard and handed it to me.

Good enough for me. Got me out of that stuffy little booth for a while, anyhow. On my way out I took a closer look at some of the comic art. Lil’ Abner in a Brodie helmet, fending off legions of the dead is just one of those things you never expect to see in your life. Near the end I passed Betty, thin trail of smoke from her cig sucked continuously up into a ventilation duct.

“Hey big fella. You look run ragged! But when you get a chance, clean yourself up and swing by my room. I might have some more work for ya.” Now, no doubt some of the men on base found her overtures enticing. But that crowd doesn’t include me so, face a slightly pinker shade than usual, I hurried past.

In the central chamber with the stacks of monitors, I noticed a new addition. A board bearing a map of the world with scattered, illuminated bulbs all over it. A group of officers stood before it, rubbing their chins, pointing to various bulbs and chatting nervously. I stood just behind them, studying the board for clues to its meaning. Just then one of the bulbs flickered and went out.

“That one just went dark.” It took another two repetitions before they noticed me. I pointed to the bulb I meant, and one of them gestured dismissively. “The bulb simply burnt out. Thats all, no concern of yours. I’ll have it replaced soon enough.” That explanation might’ve satisfied me too, had he not been visibly sweating.

On top of that, the fellow he was talking to shook like a leaf, and all of them were smoking. A habit I’d noticed a sudden, widespread uptick in during my stay. No time to dwell on it just then. A bit of asking around and checking usefully placed wall mounted maps of the facility delivered me to the lab entrance.

I stood before a great metal hatch inset in a concrete wall. Something like the series of blast doors I’d come through on the way in. To one side there was a booth with a small porthole, glass that looked to be an inch or so thick and undoubtedly bulletproof. The bored, muscular looking woman within barked at me over an intercom as I approached. “Present your security pass, please.”

I held it up to the glass and she peered through with a penlight. I began to explain why I was not the slender freckled woman with frizzy red hair in the picture but she cut me short. “So you’re Gertrude’s errand boy today, huh? I keep tellin’ her that’s against protocol. What’s your business?” I explained that I needed a replacement mercury arc rectifier for the broadcast studio, and added that Gertrude must’ve sent me for fear that she wouldn’t remember which specific part was needed.

I stood there fiddling with my hands while she placed a phonecall. “Gertrude. This is Harriet. You send a scrawny rat faced lookin’ fella to pick up a part for you?” I thought to object to her description of me but decided against it. “Alright, you check out. Go on through, but you gotta decontaminate first. I suggest you hold your breath, no idea what’s in the stuff you get sprayed with.”

That didn’t sound promising. And indeed, once the outer hatch sealed behind me, I was blasted from all directions with some sort of foul smelling vapor. I covered my mouth and nose in time but didn’t think to shut my eyes, so I wound up rubbing away tears as they turned red and puffy on my way through the inner hatch. Once I reached the lab itself, I could not at first make sense of my surroundings.

It is to some degree common knowledge that the level of technology available to the military exceeds by a few decades what is available to the general public. That’s fairly academic. Quite a different thing to step, bodily, into something which seems straight out of a penny scifi rag. The room was vast but darkened, the only illumination coming from rows of internally lit glass chambers along the far wall.

I could faintly hear the same familiar whirring and clicking from the computer room the other day, as well as the all encompassing low frequency hum. However I tried to navigate the room, on account of the darkness I only wound up banging my hips and knees on every possible surface as I fumbled around. I heard a gurgle, and stood as still as I could to listen for more. When only the usual hum and clicks followed, I resumed trying to locate a light switch.

“Just stay where you are, you blasted simpleton.” I spun around trying to identify the direction it came from. Out of the black recesses of the room, a pair of dim red eyes approached. What I figured for eyes anyway until, my heart thumping more and more violently as they drew near, I realized were tiny bulbs of some sort. “I’m sure I gave you a start with this contraption on. But you’re quite lost. Who let you in here? Was it Harriet? My work is terribly delicate, I can’t have random people barging in at all-”

I cut him short and hastily explained who sent me and why. The mystery voice fell silent for a bit. “That makes sense of it. Bless her heart but Gerty doesn’t mind interrupting my work in the slightest. Never did. You wait here while I fetch the part. She was right to send you to me I suppose, I’d just have liked some advance warning.” The pair of faint lights bobbed and swayed off into the darkness in the direction from which they came.

I heard rummaging in an adjacent room. But after several minutes of it, I was no longer content to stay put. So, I gingerly made my way towards the only source of light I could see, the glass cases along the wall. I immediately regretted the decision once I got close enough to glimpse the contents.

It’d been alive at one time, I think. Certainly looked like living tissue, however abstract. The first one simply a cluster of organs in a paper thin sack, like a placenta. In various spots, what looked like partially formed insect wings jutted out from the piteous mass. The one in the next case over discernibly less malformed, but still impossible to identify as any creature familiar to me.

This one had most of a body, but every limb save for one simply terminated in a stump. The one fully formed limb looked to be the arm of a baby. Protruding from its shoulder blade was a single fully developed insect wing about the span of my elbow to my wrist.

When I got close enough to the glass, perhaps sensing it, the wing abruptly began beating. At such a rapid rate I could hardly see it, the vibration rattling the cases to either side. “And yet it moves”, I whispered to myself. “And yet it moves.”

“I distinctly remember instructing you to stay put, yes?” I felt a firm grip on the base of my neck. “What have you done” I muttered, unable to take my eyes off the biological atrocities before me. “You give me too much credit. I’d have no idea where to start creating something like this. They were found this way when this compound was first seized. The enemy hadn’t any chance to set fire to it, as they did the labs of every other colony we’d claimed until then.”

My stomach turned. I put one hand on my stomach and struggled to keep my breakfast down. “What are they?” The voice took on a thoughtful tone, plainly much more accustomed to such sights than myself. “Well they didn’t do this surgically. No sign of stitches, no scars or anything of that nature. Each possesses different features of both Homo Sapiens Sapiens, and Acarina Sepulchrum. The common grave mite.

What’s known of evolutionary history precludes the birth of successful offspring between the two, nor anything even so developed as what you see. Mammals and insects are simply too distantly related for any possibility to exist of hybridizing the two by...ahem...conventional means. Figuring out how they managed this is the primary goal of my research.”

I winced, continually trying to look away. But every little twitch of its nubs captivated me. Witness to a crime against the divine author of life, supreme trespass against the animal kingdom and natural world it arose from. No natural circumstances could birth this. For what possible reason had the coldbloods debased themselves in this way?

“All’s fair in love and war, they say. These creatures are certainly not the product of love, but of the desperate ingenuity of an enemy which, at the time, we had on the ropes. The fact that we’ve not yet seen any hybrids on the battlefield suggests they regarded this line of research as a dead end, or ill advised. Perhaps there are depths to which even the dead will not sink.

I, on the other hand, do not limit myself in such a way. Least of all when uncovering the secrets of this project could hold the key to turning the tide of the war, even in the eleventh hour. That’s what drives me, anyway. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Even if they felt there was no need to continue down this path when existing weapons and tactics were proving successful, I hope I may yet find some diamond in this dungheap that will vindicate my persistence. That will justify everything I’ve so far done, and still have left to do.”

He handed me some bulky headgear which, when he audibly flipped a switch on the rear of it, revealed itself by a pair of dim red lights to be the same manner of goggles he himself had on. “Put these on. I’ve removed all the bulbs in the room, the others are terribly sensitive to light.” Others? I slipped the goggles over my eyes and, as I adjusted to the new light level, nearly wet myself.

Row after row after row of incubators, like a nursery. But inside of each, what I now realized the atrocities I’d seen before were merely aborted versions of. Infants, only possible to mistake for human from a distance, with various insectoid features. Some with three sets of beady black eyes and long, delicate antennae protruding from beneath them. Others with the bulbous compound eyes familiar to me from male grave mites I’d encountered in the trenches.

The one nearest me suckled on its segmented, chitinous thumb with glistening mouth parts as little vestigial wing nubs on its back periodically vibrated. Instinctively I tried to back away, but the door was on the other side of the mess before me. The great, unforgivable offense. I’d not come ready for this and still couldn’t accept it, even as it surrounded me. I began to whimper.

“Oh stiffen up. You’ve seen worse in the trenches, I’d wager. And if in the end we are swallowed up by the dead, what difference will any of this have made? If instead we can somehow snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, who will judge us? Do the victors not write the history? Will anyone still alive by then truly condemn me for doing what was necessary to ensure the future of our kind?”

I had nothing to say. Instead, as I noticed he held a pristine mercury arc rectifier in his extended hand, I took it and followed the outer wall to the exit. On the way I switched off my goggles as soon as I felt sure I could make it to the door without them. I simply didn’t want to see any more if I could help it. As I set the goggles down just outside, I heard him quietly chuckling to himself. As if I was childish to react as I did.

Perhaps it really seemed that way to him, endless months slaving away in that darkened room of inexcusable errors warping his notion of human decency. I felt ashamed to realize that I could see his side of it, even if I didn’t ultimately agree. That, should he discover some miracle weapon, future generations would likely venerate him as a visionary and hero of the war. Textbooks would simply omit the ‘unnecessary details’ of exactly how he’d done it.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 5!}