Gregory Norris - Down with the Fallen - A Post-Apocalyptic Horror Anthology

I keep wondering if there were warning signs we missed.

There was always this aura of blandness about him. He was charming, handsome, almost too perfect I guess. The fact that he dressed up in tights and wore a cape does, in retrospect, seem like a huge red flag, but like many of us, he’d grown up on a midwestern diet of comic books and cartoons—his costume was a tribute to the very culture and people he had sworn to protect.

He wore that same costume the night those confused news reports first started rolling in. Natural disaster. Terrorist attack. There was panic and chaos and then that infamous footage of him floating above the Eiffel Tower, the city on fire beneath him, that smile on his face.

I’d met him twice before.

Once was at the base in Cornado, just across the bay from San Diego. I was out the back of the barracks, having a quiet smoke, when I felt a sudden shift in the wind. There was a strange charge of electricity in the air and there he was, standing in front of me.

I’d seen photos and videos of him, of course, but in the flesh he was even more impressive, the colors seemed brighter and sharper, exactly how a legend should be. Larger than life. I had an odd feeling, like déjà vu and vertigo at the same time. I think I actually steadied myself against the wall. He nodded a greeting at me, asked me my name. It took me a moment to compose myself and reply.

“Tom. Tom Hooper.”

He leant forward and took the cigarette from my hand, studying it. “How long have you been a smoker, Tom?”

“Uh… a few years now.”

“There’s a shadow.” He snuffed out the cigarette with his fingers and then took his hand away. The crushed cigarette remained floating in the air. “On your left lung. It’s very faint but it’s there.”

He waved his hand over the cigarette and it separated into fragments, a constellation of burnt and broken tobacco. His gaze fixed upon the pieces and they started glowing, burning up, disintegrating. The small galaxy on fire. Then he fixed those blues eyes upon me.

“This will only hurt for a moment,” he said. He pulled me in close and slammed the palm of his hand against the center of my chest. The air went out of me. I felt a rush of fire rolling through my lungs, with a sharp arctic wind chasing behind it and then he removed his hand and smiled, releasing me.

“Stay off the cigarettes, Tom. Life is for living.” And with that he was gone, a shimmering blur disappearing off into the cloudless sky, leaving behind a Private First Class who returned to his bunk with shaking hands and a broad smile as he tossed his cigarettes into the trash.

That was the kind of man he was. He saw little difference between extinguishing a forest fire or returning an errant balloon to a crying toddler. He was here to help. To make the world a better place.

Then you think of what happened later. Bodies twisted and mangled. Cities scorched and burned. Continents shaken and torn apart. I was in the ops room when we got news that Europe was gone. My brother was over there, serving on the battleship Anna Maria. I remember my CO staring at the comms officer, saying over and over again, “What do you mean gone?” his voice rising to a panic.

In Rio de Janeiro they dropped a B83 nuclear bomb on him. 1.2 megatons—seventy-five times stronger than the Little Boy that was dropped on Hiroshima all those years ago. He walked out of the mushroom cloud like it was just smoke on the breeze.

I can’t view that day at the barracks in isolation anymore. Some nights I’ve lain there, placed my hand over my chest, just like he did, as if by copying his movements I could find some insight into why he changed. But no insights ever come. All I know is that there was a shadow on my left lung, and then there wasn’t, and that was his choice, his will.

The second time I met him was two years later, in Syria, the aftermath of the Mhardeh refugee camp massacre. The killings were some sort of insurgent statement; this is what would happen to those who accepted aid from the West. Families. Women. Children. Two hundred fifty people were slaughtered that day. I thought I’d never see anything that bad again. It only took a few hours for me to be proved hopelessly wrong.

Our squad was first on the ground. We had forced them back to their strongholds on the edge of town, blocking off the roads to Hamas, settling in for a lengthy war of attrition—or a shorter one if the requests for air support went through. Then the order came over the comms of support of a different nature—he’d joined the fight. The CO told us to drop back and secure the perimeter. To this day I’m not sure what made me disobey that order. Maybe I just wanted to see what retribution looked like. Maybe I was hoping for some myself. I walked through that camp. I’d seen what those insurgent forces had done.

It was an old paint factory, three stories tall. Broken windows like jagged tombstones. The metal doors of the main entrance had been blown in, a dark, gaping mouth. I later discovered that my helmet cam started malfunctioning at that point, some kind of static interference. Maybe that was his doing. Maybe he didn’t want anyone to see what he’d done.

It was near pitch black inside the factory. I clicked on my flashlight to see where I was going. It swept over the husks of rusting machinery, and then onto shapes that I couldn’t understand at first, in the center of the room. It was like some giant sculpture, except it was still alive, mostly alive, impossibly so.

There were bodies but they weren’t bodies anymore. It’s like he had rearranged their atoms, blended and melted them together. It was around seven or eight feet tall. Flesh, melted and fused, arms and legs and screaming mouths and wide open eyes, all as one. Skin stretched and distorted, veins and intestines interwoven across the surface like twine over a ball. It was the enemy. It was a horror of meat and tissue.

And then one of the eyes blinked and all I remember was rushing for the exit, falling to my knees outside, retching into the dirt, gasping for air.

“They were bad people, Tom.”

He was standing there, looking off, and even though his body language suggested a level of agitation, his hair was perfect and his eyes were dolphin blue, and for the first time I wondered if it was all some mask, and if so, what the true face below looked like.

“You saw what they had done at the camp. To those children.” His voice had that strange timbre of justification to it. He shook his head, and there was a hint of anger and frustration in there. “Sometimes I don’t understand you people.” He looked at me, as if I could explain it. I didn’t know what to say. I’d seen the refugee camp. I didn’t understand either.

He stared at me for a long beat and then nodded, his voice soft. “Best you report back to base, Tom. Tell them the targets have been dealt with. Tell them I’ll handle the clean-up.”

He offered his hand and I took it, and as he helped me up I found myself nodding back, trying to ignore that rising panic, that urge to get as far away from him as possible. I moved out, glancing back once. He was still standing there, his back to me, the cape fluttering in the gentle breeze, staring into the darkness of that paint factory.

I didn’t tell a single person about what I’d seen. He was right. They were bad people. They deserved to die. But most of all I remember thinking that I was glad he was on our side, one of us.

And then three months later Paris happened.

Strike Team Alpha has entered the ice fortress. In doing so I feel like we’ve stepped from our reality into his. He took on the costume of a comic book character, and it’s like we’re walking through the pulpy pages of a two-fisted adventure. I want to start laughing at the absurdity of it all, but I’m scared I wouldn’t be able to stop.