Anthony DeCosmo - Fusion

The creature in Large Specimen Containment Area Number Three roared and slammed its large body into the walls of its cell, almost continuously. Even the thick safety glass and soundproofing could not muffle its raucous hollers.

It no longer resembled that combination of insect and humanoid. The once slender but tall animal had become wide and lined with blood-red muscles, as if it were a body that had shred its skin. The face had morphed into a devil’s skull complete with a trio of bony horns and eyes seemingly changed from organic to mechanical. Deadly talons sprouted like daggers from paws at the end of its arms and legs. Sharp metal spines — metal! — protruded along its back.

It had not been fed in a long time; the last keeper who tried lost an arm, tranquilizers had no effect, and security refused to enter the cage with anything less than lethal intentions.

As far as she could tell, this metamorphosis occurred instantaneously early last July to all Stick Ogres. In fact, her research teams tracked instant transformations in nearly three dozen different types of invading entities. Some of those had been docile prior, a few predators. All had changed into deadly beasts with a rabid disposition.

Both type A and type B Giant Sloths had morphed into iron-plated beasties capable of spitting fire with a kind of flame thrower protruding from their mouths. Two of those were in containment up on Sub-Level 6.

Reports suggested that a similar fate had befallen all of the alien invaders known as “The Tribe of the Red Hand,” or Feranites, resulting in a new race of robotic soldiers joining Voggoth’s legions.

As in the case of the Stick Ogre, security cameras captured the instant evolution of the Sloths on tape. The original animals had grown completely still, then vibrated, and then their new selves grew out of their flesh as if each living cell changed, one by one, into the new entity.

This was no natural evolution like a caterpillar changing into a butterfly, but some kind of biological alchemy. Eyes replaced by artificial lenses, blood, bones, and hair into grease, metal, and wires.

The creature below stopped its rage for a moment; something it rarely did.

Anita leaned against the glass. The surface felt cool. Her sleep-deprived mind worked the pieces of the equation over and over.

According to radiation levels found inside the stem cells of the Stick Ogres and the Sloths, those creatures came to Earth from the same point of origin as the Feranites. But not anymore. They no longer had stem cells. They no longer had any living matter within their frames. Like statues or rock formations, the creatures were made of molecules but not of living tissue. They could be destroyed, but not killed; not exactly.

So how can they thrash about? How can they roar? Why can they walk and attack?

Her thoughts fell away as she realized that the demonic thing in the cell below stared up at her, as if studying her.

She backed away from the glass and stumbled. Her arms and hands fidgeted-as they almost always did anymore-in a sign of nerves.

The creature roared and ran headlong into a wall. She felt the impact as a distant tremor.

Anita closed her eyes tight and let the blackness provide some measure of peace. But it was an illusion. Peace would not come to Anita Nehru; not as long as these mysteries gripped her in obsession. Not as long as she felt an answer lay within her grasp if only she pressed a little harder.

Trevor had assigned her to Red Rock despite her lack of formal scientific training. Her gift did not come from hard core research, but from an ability to take raw data and turn it into usable information. Indeed, her initial contribution to the small band of survivors had been to create sketches of hostiles from fragmented information.

She had demonstrated patience and commitment and resilience. Now those traits conspired to trap her in Red Rock. Her patience kept her searching for answers when others would give up. Her commitment would not allow her to run from this chamber of horrors as long as her dungeons might reveal something that could change the war; her resilience kept her brave in the face of the horrors in that place.

Anita forced herself along the enclosed catwalk until she reached the exit door. A swipe of her keycard opened the heavy portal and she moved into a sterile hallway. When the door slid shut behind she leaned against it and inhaled a deep breath.

She regained her composure as best as could be expected from a person who had not slept in two days. Off she staggered, avoiding the elevators and choosing one of the many stairwells as if extra exercise might return a bounce to her step.

It did not. By the time she reached Sub-Level 2 her legs felt ready to collapse. That resilient part of her psyche that kept her going finally admitted that a nap-even if only an hour-was required…

Anita fell asleep slumped against a hard desktop. A solitary lamp cast a fuzzy white light over papers, books, photographs, and piles of notes.

The dream came again. In it she drifted through a charred battlefield. Dead human soldiers lay strewn across a blackened Earth. Trees stripped bare stood on the horizon like zombie claws reaching from the grave. Tiny fires flickered giving the landscape a Hellish glow.

One of the bodies belonged to her son. His empty eyes stared at nothing; his jaw lay wide open suggesting he died screaming.

As bad as the sight of seeing her child dead, the true terror of the dream came from Anita feeling a sense of responsibility. A sense of failure for not finding the answers.

She knew the questions well enough. She knew that the invaders had come from eight different points of origin. She knew that organized armies of various technological abilities as well as aliens ranging from prey animals to predators had also come to her Earth, where initially they had wreaked havoc upon the population but now lived-the animals at least-as part of Earth’s ecosystem.

She also knew that seven of those invaders shared a basic DNA structure with humanity. They were, she rationalized, built with the same building blocks even if their outward appearance varied greatly.

One race, however, stood apart from the rest. They did not share the same building blocks as the other creatures. Voggoth’s warriors-the ‘grown’ entities that served as his war machines-exhibit the traits of simple, archaea organisms, not unlike bacteria. Furthermore, the minions of his race-the ones many had come to think of as the ‘soulless ones’ — had no DNA. No biology at all. They existed as things, different from rocks, concrete, and iron only in their behavior.

Those war machines of simple design and those soulless creatures that appeared to live but, in reality, did not all came from the same point of origin. From wherever it was this Voggoth lived.

And now those creatures marched across her country in a seemingly unstoppable tide. As she walked through her dream she saw the results of that march; results that had played out across California, the Pacific Northwest, the deserts of Nevada and New Mexico, the Rocky Mountains, and now the Great Plains. For the moment, the dead body of her son existed only as a phantom harbinger of what might be. If only she could unlock the answers.

In her dream, Anita began to cry. She held her faced in her hands. In the past, this is where she would wake up, the burden of responsibility too great to allow sleep. On this occasion, the dream played differently.

When she removed her hands from atop crying eyes, she saw the bodies of the dead soldiers again. This time, however, they were not human despite still wearing the body armor and battle dress uniforms of The Empire’s fighters. This time she saw the oval heads and oversized maws of Mutants lying on the battlefield in human garb, including her son.