Tim Curran - Resurrection

The building was cut from brick, whitewashed and windowless, boxy in shape. There were cameras set out, listening devices, motion detectors…not that any of them were much good any longer being that there was no one to monitor them. Generally, there was a smell of dankness and rot, but now and again they smelled that acrid odor of the yellow rain. Something that was very frightening, because if it came down suddenly, they were done for. There was no cover to be had anywhere.

“Pick it up,” Mitch told them.

But it was not easy. Their clothes were so heavy and wet they seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. They trudged along behind Mitch until the scene of that burned wreckage came into view. Whatever had exploded, it had destroyed not only that jutting wing, but a good section of the main building. What they were seeing were crisscrossed blackened beams, rubble, and twisted metal scattered in some great heap. They found a few bodies in there cremated right down to the skeletons. Lots of mangled conduits and pipes, the shattered remains of what might have been machinery.

“Look at that,” Harry said.

Above, on the roof, there were a dozen crows sitting up there, stretching their wings and clacking their beaks. In the rain, you couldn’t see much of them. They were just perched up there like they were looking for something to descend upon.

“Something alive, anyway,” Tommy said.

But Mitch didn’t think so. “Look over there.”

Another body just around the side of some metal drum, boiled to slop like the others. There were three of those crows on it, pulling out strands of pulpy meat with their beaks. That was bad enough, but as they looked closer they could see that those birds were not right. Their hides were threadbare and you could see the bones through them. One of them had very little flesh on its head and you could plainly see the skull beneath, one eye socket with a black eyeball, the other empty. They flapped their wings and kept pecking and picking.

“Lead on,” Tommy said. “I’ve had enough.”

Mitch ducked under a burnt arch of wood, climbed over a pile of bricks and slid down the other side, leapfrogging iron beams and a spiderwebbing of pipes and melted hoses. And as he did so he was thinking that whatever had gone up here, whatever had exploded, it had let loose an incredible amount of energy and an incredible amount of heat. He was seeing that wrecked machinery and a lot of the metal was actually fused, lots of glass melted in to unrecognizable shapes. There were times as they picked through those ruins that he thought the whole thing would come down on top of them. But finally they made it, climbing over a collapsed wall and sliding beneath jagged sheets of cracked plasterboard.

And then they were in.

Great sheets of plastic were hung from ceiling to floor to keep the wind and rain out of the rest of the complex. There were a couple more bodies here, soldiers apparently, reduced to a sort of mush that had absolutely nothing to do with the fire. Their skeletons looked like they were trying to climb out of the doughy paste their flesh had been reduced to. Carpets of moss were growing out of their mouths.

“What the hell did this?” Harry asked, wrinkling his nose at the smell which was not so much organic decay but something hot and moist like plaster rot, the stink of old houses threaded with wood blight. “That rain? It turned their skins to goddamn gruel? Looks like fucking Malt-O-Meal.”

“Ground zero,” was all Mitch could say about it, a blanket explanation that explained absolutely nothing.

“Here’s another one,” Tommy said.

This one might have been a woman judging from the long brown hair hanging from its scalp. And although her hair was only mildly singed, her flesh had gone liquid and mushy like the others. She was like some morbid wax effigy that had been lit up and then put out just as it began to melt, her flesh sinking into the skeleton below, her fleshless jaws locked in a scream. One hand was reaching out to them, a laminated plastic ID card in it that looked like a credit card.

“C’mon,” Mitch said.

They pushed aside the plastic sheeting and found themselves in a long corridor studded with offices, the walls black from the heat and smoke damage. The base had its own power supply and it was still running. A few lights were on overhead, but most were not. It was gloomy in there, their footsteps echoing out. At the end, they passed through a door and came into some sort of lobby. There were a bank of elevators, but you needed an ID card to operate them. But there was a directory on the wall. And although the complex was only single story, there had to be four or five levels below ground. The lowest, no doubt, being the most secure and contained.

Tommy read from the directory. “Let’s see…do we want biochemistry or embryology? That’s downstairs. Then we got developmental biology and cell biology, bioengineering and nanoscience…what are we looking for?”

“Nanoscience?” Harry said. “I saw that shit on the Discovery Channel. They let little mechanical bugs loose in you to repair things, repair your cells.”

“I’m betting what these eggheads have been doing here won’t make the Discovery Channel…except maybe on Halloween night,” Tommy said.

They found the stairs leading below, but the doors were locked and again you needed an ID card to get down there. The doors were three-inch steel and there was no way in hell a four-ten or twenty-gauge shotgun would do more than scratch them.

“What now?” Tommy said.

Harry had that one covered, though. “That woman out there…she had an ID card in her hand.”

“You wanna get it?” Mitch asked him. “I don’t think I want to touch her.”

“Shit, I worked the prison mortuary, that stuff don’t shake me.”

“Use a rag or something to grab it, Harry,” Mitch warned him. “She might be contaminated with something.”

“Got ya.”

Harry raced off. Despite his soaking wet clothes, he moved off very fast. But unlike Tommy and Mitch, here was a guy who worked the weights every day and did a hundred-and-fifty pushups before breakfast. He was in peak condition. Fighting condition, as you had to be to survive in his world.

Tommy and Mitch lit cigarettes, avoiding looking at each other.

“If I was Harry,” Tommy said, “I’d run and keep running. Steal the truck and get the hell out of here. That’s what I’d do.”

“He won’t.”

“No…I don’t think he will.” Tommy pulled off his cigarette. “What about Chrissy, Mitch? I mean, yeah, I want some answers, but what about the kid? This isn’t helping us find the kid.”

Mitch didn’t say anything to that.

What was there to say? Should he try and make Tommy realize that this was important in ways he couldn’t adequately put into words? That like Wanda Sepperly had told him this was very necessary, them coming here? She had said it was all circular. That all roads would connect in the end. That to get to Chrissy he would have to follow roads that seemed to lead nowhere, but they would link him to her in the end. There was no point trying to explain things he didn’t even understand himself. He trusted in what Wanda said. He had to; he simply didn’t have any other choice.

None of it made sense and yet, in his guts, it all did. Somehow.

Just as Harry Teal was part of it, so was this.

“We’ll find my girl, Tommy. I know we will.”

Tommy exhaled smoke. “You know this is going to be bad, don’t you? What we see below?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You can feel it like I can?”

“Yes.”

And he could. It was thick in his mouth, that taste of fear, like sucking on copper pennies…metallic and sharp and unpleasant. There was a smell here that had little to do with putrescence or death, this was bigger than that, older than that. The smell of blackness and pain, insanity and spiritual evil.