Джозеф Нассис - SNAFU - Heroes [An Anthology of Military Horror]

And how long could I dance at the edge of the abyss?

Bad questions to ask yourself in the dark.

Bad questions.

As we descended, though, the darkness changed, becoming cloudy and finally yielding to the glow of a security light in a metal cage mounted on the wall beside a big metal door.

It was a massive door as solid and ponderous as a bank-vault. There were several high-tech scanners beside it and even though I had plenty of gadgets for bypassing all kinds of security systems, I could see that I wasn’t going to need any of them.

The door stood ajar.

It was held open by a corpse.

I think it had once been a man.

But it was impossible to tell.

The body was swollen and black, the tissues distended by expanding gasses as putrefaction ran rampant.

And… it had no face.

The flesh had all been torn away to reveal the striated remnants of muscle and the white of naked bone.

This hadn’t been done by a knife or any kind of weapon. The flesh was torn in very distinctive ways.

By teeth.

Not small rat teeth, either. And it didn’t look like dog or cat teeth. The flesh was savaged by very large and very sharp teeth. Not fangs, but rows of teeth. There was enough left of the throat to see that much.

“Christ,” I said. “What did that?”

Her voice was very small.

“Dear God,” she whispered. “They’re out…”

“What’s out?” I demanded, but she shook her head.

“I… don’t know exactly. We’ve only had rumors. But…” Felicity shook her head and set her jaw. Tiny jewels of sweat glistened on her forehead. “Cover me.”

“Hey, wait, dammit…”

But she was already in motion, stepping over the corpse, squeezing through the opening, disappearing inside. With a growl I gripped the edge of the massive door and hauled on it, swinging it wider to give me room to follow.

There was light inside and I ran forward, gun up and ready, into a lab that looked like it was born in the fevered mind of Dr Moreau. The chamber was vast and it must have stretched hundreds of yards under the streets of Cape May and outward under the waters of the bay. The ceiling was twenty feet high and supported by massive steel pillars. The floor was pale concrete that was stained by dried seawater, rust-red old blood, and a dozen chemicals of various sickly hues. There were ranks of computers – the high-end super-computers used for gene sequencing – tables of arcane scientific equipment, and a dozen stainless steel dissecting tables. There were also bodies in the room.

Many bodies.

Most of them were human and none of those were whole. Legs and arms, ragged torsos, bodiless heads, were scattered across the floor.

I knew without counting that the bodies down here and the corpse blocking the door upstairs would add up to an even dozen. The missing scientists.

Not working at a separate site or in another country.

All of them here.

Forever here.

Each missing scientist… but not all of any of them.

Felicity and I stood nearly shoulder to shoulder, gaping at the slaughter.

But then, even with all of that carnage around us, our eyes were drawn to the far wall. How could we not look? How could anyone not stare at what was there?

Row upon row upon row of glass cylinders, each ten feet high and as big around as elm trees. Each filled with murky water that smelled of brine and decay.

And in nearly all of the tanks a body floated.

They were all naked.

Men and women.

Tall. Powerfully built, with corded muscles under layers of gray-green skin.

They floated in the water, tethered by cables and wires attached to electrodes buried in their chests and skulls. Pale hair floated around their faces. Pale eyelids dusted their cheeks.

There were at least fifty tanks.

Three of them were empty, the glass shattered, the wires hanging limp and unattached. Every other tank was full.

Each of them was naked.

None of them were human.

“Holy Mother of God,” murmured Felicity.

I felt myself moving forward, taking numb steps like a sleepwalker. My eyes were wide, burning from not blinking. The sight before me was hideous, appalling in its implications, but I couldn’t look away. I stopped in front of one of the tanks and reached out with one hand to touch the glass. The body inside floated on the other side of the thick glass, inches away from me, but worlds apart in so many ways,

The people – the things inside the tank – did not have hands.

Not as such.

They had long flat panels of flesh in which were segmented bony structures that had once been fingers, and each was connected by rough webbing. The feet were the same. And all along the waterlogged limbs the flesh glistened with scales.

In movies, in Disney pictures, creatures like this are beautiful.

In these tanks, here in the real world, they were hideous.

I looked up into the face of the body that floated inches from me. The mouth was little more than a slash with rubbery lips, between which I could see row upon row of serrated teeth.

The eyes of this creature were half open. There was a trace of white around the irises that were large and black.

On the side of the creature’s face, below where stunted and useless ears hung, were gills.

The sound of a footfall in water startled me and I suddenly whirled, bringing my gun up, but it was Felicity.

She was standing ankle deep at the edge of what I’d first thought was a large puddle, but as I hurried over I could now see was a pool. It ended at a wall and when I shone my flashlight at the water, we could see that the wall ended a few feet below the surface of the pool. Tendrils of seaweed wafted back and forth and there were small fish in the water, darting here and there.

“It must lead out to the bay,” said Felicity.

We looked from it to the three broken cylinders and then at the decaying bodies.

“Three of them must have escaped somehow,” she said. “They killed the staff and escaped through the pool.”

I nodded. And though I was almost too sick to speak, I asked, “Do you know what this is?”

She gave me a quizzical look. “I should think it’s effing well obvious.”

“No… I can see what they’re doing. Transformative genetics… theriomorphy… they’ve turned test subjects—”

“—or volunteers,” she cut in.

“—or volunteers… into monsters. Into water-breathing…” I fished in my mind for the word.

“Into mermen,” said Felicity Hope. “And mermaids.”

“I thought mermaids were supposed to be beautiful.”

She gave a short, ugly laugh. “You don’t read your folklore. The mermaids of legend were monsters who lured men to terrible deaths. They drowned them and fed on them.”

“So these madmen created genetically-engineered… what’s the word? Mer- people ?”

“Close enough.”

“But... for Christ’s sake why ?”

She cocked her head appraisingly. “What is your nation’s primary weapon of response to deliberate aggression from either China or North Korea?”

“Generally-speaking, lots of missiles.”

She shook her head. “Which are launched from…?”

“Ah,” I said, “our fleet.”

“Top marks. The US fleet in the Taiwan Strait is the most powerful weapon of war in existence. Aircraft carriers ready to launch the world’s most sophisticated and lethal fighters and helicopters, battleships and cruisers, and nuclear submarines capable of launching nuclear and non-nuclear missiles. China is working on building a blue-water fleet, but beyond hype, they are many years away from anything comparable, and it’s doubtful they ever will build anything comparable. That’s why they’ve worked so hard on their missiles and on a submarine fleet capable of slipping past your surface ships. It’s why North Korea is developing its nuclear capabilities and building long-range weapons of mass destruction.”