[Original Novella] The Resurrection War, Part 2

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Part 1}

Behind them, a raucous procession of tanks and various other machines of war, grinding along on all shapes and manner of treads. Chaplains perched atop some of them, before podiums mounted to the upper deck of each rusty behemoth, recited melodic invocations to battle over a loudspeaker system. Behind the podiums hung the banner of the coldbloods, tattered from gunfire but fluttering defiantly in the breeze. Even their symbols are not so easily destroyed. Nor their faith, whatever it is.

One after the next, after the next. Unholy men bellowing their musical recitations, throngs of cold blooded soldiers mobbing about to either side and dancing with renewed morale. Like an unstoppable parade of remorseless depravity. Occasional lightning strikes, drawn to their extended collectors, turbo charge their advance.

Even a single risen corpse turns the stomach. Why has God allowed such a flagrant violation of natural law? The dead finally spilled out onto the surface of the Earth as foretold, but so far there’s been no sign that anybody will come to save us. By this point, there’s precious little left to save.

Unthinkable, that a just and merciful God should sit idly by as we’re consumed by our own fallen comrades. But then, I’d seen a great many unthinkable things in recent years and their frequency was only increasing. Drowning us all in a rising tide of cold, pale flesh as God either sleeps or turns a blind eye.

Some take it as reason to abandon their faith. Others cling to it more strongly than ever, insisting that Christ will soon appear in the clouds with angels blaring their trumpets just as our darkest hour arrives. Still others believe we’re being punished. That the mountain of moral debt we’ve accrued over thousands of years of bloodshed is finally being collected.

I don’t know what I believe anymore. I’ve heard it all and none of it resonates. If you’d told me six years ago that a dead man can be restored to some semblance of life, that he could again walk, talk and operate a rifle, I’d have thought you mad. I’m not even sure I believed when I saw the first row of them approaching over the horizon. Stiff, ambling silhouettes I’d been told were in fact the recently departed.

Nor am I sure that I truly believed even as they began shooting at me. Even as I pinned one to the Earth with my bayonet, thick black sludge trickling from the wound as it writhed about, more frustrated than hurt. “Asinine. Demented. Obscene” I remember thinking as I aerated it with my bayonet, black goo splattering my boots. And yet it moves.

And yet it moves! Words mistakenly thought to have been uttered by Galileo, post-trial. Defiantly affirming that regardless of what we believe, it’s what we observe that’s real. “And yet it moves” I muttered, beginning to chuckle softly to myself. “And yet it moves. And yet it moves.” No, that’s no good. Keep it together.

An idling truck awaited us across an open field. Some of the men whooped. Only the Captain seemed troubled. It wasn’t clear why until, when we’d reached roughly the middle, filthy pale hands began erupting from the soil all around us. One shrieked. The others swore, and started shooting.

Must’ve buried themselves under a thin layer of dirt. No need to breathe of course, the coldblood version of a minefield. “Shoot for the eyes!” the Captain shouted. I nearly asked him why not the joints until the first of them fully emerged from the Earth, wearing armor designed especially to shield the knees, shoulders and elbows.

We could still blind them. Headshots were made difficult by unusually thick helmets designed to prevent it, but they remained open faced for ease of communication. I’d once seen a shot enter through the mouth, ricochet off the back and exit through the eye, bursting it like an overripe grape in the process.

Gunfire deafened me, for once louder than the shells and mortars. Bullet casings filled the air like a sort of glittering mist, the escorts circling their wagons around us, Lewis guns blazing in all directions. In the distance, the truck began rumbling towards us. Salvation! So close I could taste it. Until I noticed it was avoiding the dead.

Once close enough that I could see the pale fellows driving it, they started shooting. I hollered to the others, but there was no competing with the relentless report of their guns. They only noticed once it was nearly on top of us. I don’t remember clearly but it must’ve clipped me, as the next thing I recall after that was the dream.

Surprising that it should return after all this time. I had it on and off for the first two years of the war. I suppose because it’s my earliest happy memory. The one everybody retreats to when forced to bear the unbearable. For some, the colored lights and festive music of their first Christmas. For others, their first awkward experiments with love. For me, a birthday party.

Thomas and Harry were there. Also Gwyn, my first crush. Though I’d invited two other girls to disguise that fact. At the time, it made sense. Such laughter! All eyes expectantly trained on me as Mom pulled the cake from her trusty Sunbeam oven, twisting a gleaming chrome knob on its face as she did so. All for me, to make my special day as perfect as she knew how.

But then the dead man showed up. He looked perhaps thirty, though age no longer means much after your heart stops. Pale, disheveled and clothed in a tattered suit, banging on the window. We all tensed up but didn’t look. We weren’t meant to, and knew we’d be punished if we did. Mom closed the drapes, and soon the banging stopped. Everyone appeared relieved, so I took my first shot at blowing out the candles.

Trick candles! Still a novelty then. Everyone laughed, I blushed, but then redoubled my efforts to extinguish them. The dead man began banging on the door next. Thomas was sweating, fighting the urge to look. The urge to scream. But we’re meant to keep quiet. I blew the candles out, and again they re-lit. The fun had faded, and instead become mild frustration.

A second one joined him. We forced out stilted laughter, Mom handed out additional party favors as a distraction. Always the competent hostess. I blew as hard as I could. Some went out, but the rest re-lit so I simply snuffed the remainder one by one with my thumb and forefinger.

The two outside became four. Then six. Then ten. Don’t look. Don’t ever fucking look. So long as we don’t react, it isn’t really happening. Soon enough there were hundreds. Mobbing my little home on all sides, pounding and clawing at the siding. And the door, and the windows. Harry began losing it, giggling out of control until Mom calmed him down.

The kitchen door burst inward. One of them lurched towards us, but Mom threw herself into its path, seizing it by the wrists. Even from across the room, the stench of decomposition was overpowering. I motioned as if to get up but despite everything Mom cried “Don’t! It’s fine! Everything’s fine, cut the cake!” Step by step, she forced it back out through the door, then kicked it flat on its ass.

The door’s hinges were busted such that it wouldn’t just go back on. So I had to get the knife myself while Mom, sweat making her mascara run, held the door in place as what was behind it struggled to get back in. It wedged its head between the door and the frame, jaw snapping.

Hair in her face, makeup streaked down her cheeks, Mom shouted at me to “cut the cake already! Everything’s fine! Always has been, always will be! Cut the cake, it’s your special day!” I sank the knife into the soft, pliant cake. It bled the familiar black sludge.

I awoke with a start, hitting my head on the bunk above me. Surprised to find I wasn’t on the battlefield, but also to be alive. I could feel my own heartbeat of course, but placed a hand over my chest, then checked my pulse just to be certain. Waking up after a bash like that means one of two things, and I was in a hurry to rule one of them out.

“Oh I saw him alright. Prancing about like an excitable little twit. Just had no clue what his problem was until the truck was on us. I wouldn’t put this on him, he did what he could. Still, he’s dead weight. I don’t see what’s so important about this one fuckin’ radio man that we can’t just-”

Their eyes locked with mine and widened. As if about to ask how long I’d been awake, although what came out instead was “Welcome back to the land of the living.” Less so with every passing minute. The room around me was plainly some sort of bunker, corrugated steel sheeting forming a hemicylinder with flat concrete walls at either end.

After bickering with the nurse for a bit over whether I was in a condition to stand, I was finally permitted to leave the bunk room. Just to use the bathroom initially. But then I’d added that I’d like to shave. Then that I could use a shower, and so on until she grew tired of waiting outside for me and left me to my own devices.

It was nice to be fussed over, and in truth I did still feel somewhat shaky. But although I suspected there was only one way it could turn out, I wasn’t about to lay back and watch it happen while somebody periodically changed my bedpan and gave me sponge baths. There is some part of men, a nagging voice in their head which grows louder and more insistent the closer death is.

Get up, it whispers. There’s still so much left to do. The longer you lay there, contemplating final submission, the louder the voice grows. Until it’s shouting at you. Berating, demanding, imploring you not to accept your end.

Because while that voice reviles death, another competing voice welcomes it. Death is comfortable, and comfort is death. It’s too easy. You’ll stagnate, weaken. Until after relaxing for too long you find you can no longer stand.

Life is a struggle, so to struggle is to live. A cliche familiar to anybody who’s listened to the non-stop propaganda broadcasts, but with a basis in truth. I surveyed the adjacent room and found it bustling with activity. With life that had not yet surrendered. Which would not yet contemplate it, holding out hope until the end that some scrap of our civilization can still be saved.

A great array of round glass picture tubes hung from the ceiling in a semicircle around a central control console. Men in wheeled chairs wearing radio headsets scooted from panel to panel, twisting knobs, toggling switches, reading aloud sequences of numbers from tape being printed out into an ever growing pile around their feet.

“Depot 118 is overrun. Withdrawing remaining teletanks to reinforce forward defenses at foundry 326. ETA seven hours, forty five minutes assuming they don’t encounter opposition en route.” The man next to him operated a set of joysticks. The monitor before him displayed the view out of what, when I noticed the cannon looming overhead, I realized was a tank.

Remote control by radio! With video transmission no less. Only the second time I’d seen such technology in person, the first being a world’s fair before the war broke out. Really state of the art stuff. Other monitors told the same story, with the men peering at them controlling all manner of fighting machines from aeroplanes and tanks to zeppelins and battleships.

“Triage. That’s what you’re looking at, son.” I turned to see the Captain standing behind me, brown trenchcoat speckled with black stains. “Saving whatever can still be saved. Judiciously sacrificing what can’t. Don’t think it doesn’t pain them to leave men behind. So few of us left now. But with this technology, every drop of red blood equals a gallon of the black stuff. Those dozen men you’re looking at are doing the fighting of a thousand.”

Before I could inquire how, he herded me through a doorway in the opposite wall. Row after row of glass tubes I recognized as the sort found in any home radio covered every wall. A low pitched hum enveloped me, and I could faintly hear a continuous series of mechanical clicks. “We call it Monstermind. It’s a thinking machine of sorts. Maybe too grand to call it that. But it’s enough to continually carry out the last set of orders any given tank, plane or other machine received until it’s issued new ones.”

Absolutely astonishing. I felt alarmed at the brief rekindling of hope within me. Not that I opposed it, but because it’d been burnt out for so long. What other technological wonders were being kept hidden from the men on the ground? But then, would we rush so readily to our deaths if we knew our orders came from an unfeeling machine, not so different in certain ways from the enemy?

“Is there truly hope?” I inquired. “That we might somehow pull through, I mean.” He looked at me with undisguised disdain. “What the hell sort of question is that, boy? Irrelevant navel gazing. If we didn’t believe there was hope, why do any of this? Why fight? Why carry on, why breathe, why live? If you’re in such a hurry to join the dead, there’s a shortcut I can avail you of.” He fingered a sleek black pistol hanging from his belt. I elected not to test his sincerity.

The next room he took me to looked unexpectedly familiar. Row after row of caskets lined the floor, with disused channels to the surface above them. “Gravestation 907” was stenciled in letters ten feet high across the far wall. “This whole complex was converted from a captured coldblood settlement. That’s how we got our hands on much of the technology you’ve seen so far. But there wouldn’t be nearly enough electricity to power all of it if not for the POWs.”

His meaning was unclear until I noticed the casket nearest me shaking. Like there was somebody inside trying to get out. Closer inspection revealed that it was nailed shut, locked, and wired in series with the rest of the caskets via thick red and black cables. A little bulb on the lid flickered with each blow, but stayed lit.

“The tech boys tell me they’ve still got no fuckin’ clue how to extract electricity directly from the black stuff, the way coldblood tanks do. But it’s easy enough to just pull current from their bodies.” A trio of technicians wrestled a gagged coldblood into an open casket, restrained him, then attached alligator clips to a pair of bolts drilled into either side of his neck. Finally the lid was shut, and soon the bulb on it illuminated.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 3!}