Tim Curran - Resurrection

Harry came back with the card which looked shiny and new. “I wiped it off with a rag,” he said. There was a barcode on the back. He inserted it into the slot and the door clicked. “There we go.”

Mitch led the way through and down the iron steps to the next lower level. Again, Harry had to insert his card. The door opened and they passed into a corridor that was completely dark. They lit the lanterns right away, hoping they’d see some light switches ahead. The air was decidedly foul and corrupt, moist and hard to breathe. Something had gotten out of control here and this was its smell.

Holding the lanterns, they moved down the corridor. There were no doors on either wall, just a set of heavy steel doors at the end. Again, the ID card opened them and out came a nauseating, hot wave of decomposition that made them turn away, swallow their guts back down.

“Oh, Jesus,” Harry said. “That stink.”

They moved in there, each wondering what sort of awful vapors they might be breathing, but none of them wanted to turn back. There was discovery ahead, the sort of things no man…or precious few…had ever been allowed to see. The room they were in was large with white walls, three doors set into it. They used the card again and went off through the one on the right that said PATHOLOGY over the doorway. The room was circular and tiled in green, set out with trays of surgical instruments, stainless steel slabs with drains set into them, cabinets of chemicals. Scales and specimen jars.

“Looks like an autopsy room,” Tommy said.

There were no bodies or anything in there, but lots of tell-tale stains on the floor and on those slabs. The air smelled of alcohol and preservatives. You could just image the sort of nasty things that went on there, but there was nothing much to see. They went through a set of double doors at the back like the kind that lead into restaurant kitchens. This room was even bigger. Set along one wall were the mouths of brick ovens and along the other were huge circular iron doors set into steel faces that gleamed. The smell in there was old, but unsettling. The stink of burned things and ashes.

“This is a crematorium,” Tommy said. “I don’t know about those brick ovens, but those steel hatches are for sliding bodies into…to cremate them.”

Nobody doubted what he said.

They moved around with their lanterns held aloft, shadows jumping around them. There was a coating of fine gray ash on the floor. They didn’t open the circular iron doors, but inside those brick ovens there were great heaps of cinders and blackened remains. You got the feeling that somebody had been burning a lot of something and very quickly, hadn’t cared much about the mess they were making. Which made Mitch think of those concentration camps in Europe, how the Nazis has been incinerating bodies as fast as they could before the Allies moved in. The air was dusty and gritty, left a dry film on your tongue.

“Can we get out of here?” Tommy said.

Mitch led them through another door and this room was narrow with shelving running from floor to ceiling along both walls. There were leaden, rubberized coffins heaped all over the place. But the shelves themselves were crowded with zippered body bags. Harry went right over to a few of them, took hold of the straps.

“There’s remains in these,” he announced.

Many were full and many were not. But nobody had to tell them that these were the remains of soldiers shipped back from Iraq and other terrible places where American sons and daughters were dropping like flies. This is what the government was doing with them. Not all of them, of course. Many were shipped to their families, but many were not. They ended up here to be used as raw materials for whatever line of research the Army Medical Command was pursuing. The nature of which must have been shocking beyond belief.

“This is sick,” Tommy said. “I mean, this is really fucking sick. You die for your country and this is the respect they show you in the end.”

“Are you surprised?” Harry said. “Are you really surprised?”

But he wasn’t, none of them were. You tried to be a good American, you tried even to be patriotic at times. You hung your flag out on Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day, the Fourth of July. You tried not to be too hard on your leaders even though you knew, down deep, that they were dirty and manipulative, spinmasters and bureaucrats and out-and-out liars. But you tried to trust them, you tried to believe in them, you tried to tell yourself that there were not dirty backroom politics going on. You did your best to support wars that were unnecessary and bloody and costly, had no true purpose that you could see. And this is what it got you. This is how the puppetmasters pulled your strings and wasted your sons and daughters, pissed on the flag and the constitution they were supposed to uphold. And when the mask was stripped away at midnight, regardless of party affiliations, what you saw was ugly and brutal and squirming. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, as they said.

Mitch led them out of there.

Yes, they were still frightened and disturbed, but it was more than that now. Those emotions had been displaced by anger and slow simmering rage. They went back out the pathology door and chose another. This led to another steel door which announced:

“Well, let’s see what those sweethearts were up to in here,” Mitch said.

Harry used the card and the door popped open. They passed through a series of doors, each warning them off and they found themselves in a wide corridor. To one side there were glass doors running from floor to ceiling. A very dark, smoky glass you could not see through. They put the lanterns right up to them, but the light would not penetrate very far. But there were things in there, forms, figures, something that they just could not see and that was probably a good thing. They turned to the other wall which was set with black iron doors with observation windows set into them.

“Look like solitary confinement cells,” Harry said.

“They are,” Mitch said. “This is…this some kind of fucking zoo.”

Holding the lanterns up to one of the observation windows, they saw a naked man in there. A dead man with that same pulpy, corpse-white flesh that the dead of Witcham possessed. Like them, he was wormy and rotting, bloated-up. He seemed not to notice them, was too busy chewing the meat off his own forearm. In the next cell they weren’t sure what they were looking at…something like a mass of gray-white slime that was trying to pretend it was a man, ropes of it webbing it to the walls and ceiling. It was the same in nearly all the cells…inhuman things, unformed things, unfinished things, things that maybe had started as carrion and kept growing, maybe not entire bodies, but parts thereof that were growing and multiplying like tissue in Petri dishes, an organic miasma of limbs and heads and staring eyes. They saw something like a jellyfish with a hundred coiling limbs, except the upper half of it was clearly a woman with a face that was fetal and indistinct. In another cell, it looked like there were two women sitting side by side, only they were not separate, but grown together like Siamese twins, rows of pendulous teats growing from chest to crotch. They found a cell with three or four corpse-like things in there, white and blubbery and slimy, that seemed to be dividing from a single mass.

These were the things they saw.

Nameless experiments gone terribly wrong.

Most cells had nothing even recognizably human in them…just scraps and cast-offs that were assimilating one another, mutating into things you could not even guess at. Evolution had started in the grave in this place and where it would lead, you just didn’t want to know.