It began with a black bag over my head, six or seven men seizing
me off the street on my way home from work, Holding me at gunpoint
in the back of a van. They explained in detail what would happen to
my family if I didn't listen to them. Until that moment, torture was
just a word. I'd never given it much thought. I wasn't prepared to
hear some of the things they told me. By the time they were loading
me onto a helicopter, I would have done anything they asked. I arrived
at the Black site, kicked out of the chopper, where my feet hit
the hard packed, wet mud with a splash. Black hood torn off so
hard it hurt the skin on the tip of my nose, and then I
got my first look at the place. Can't say if it met my expectations
or not. I didn't have any idea where I was going or what it
was supposed to look like when I got there. Still it managed to leave
me feeling surprised. An abandoned village nestled in the jungle, mostly one room
hovels, lots of corrugated iron. Here and there lay burned allotments, dyeing
pepper plants left untended, their fruits stamped into the earth by the passage of
soldiers dressed in all black, rotten fences and troughs to feed. Long dead
pigs and goats lay smashed to pieces, and then lurking on a hill like
some architectural jump scare was a three story hospital made of glass and steel,
stated the art, built in a place where tarmac was just a rumor.
Officially, it had been put there by a charitable nonprofit wanting to research novel
diseases and potential cures deep in the jungle. Unofficially, it had always belonged
to the CIA, a useful place to test strange things with pots in the
name, and when the time came, a useful place to dissect the impossible.
Imagine my surprise when I was escorted by armed men to an office with
my name on the door and discovered that I was to be in charge of
its latest major project, head of Research. Printed on the glass, real
official looking big black letters like I'd always worked there. First thing, I
thought, how long do they intend to keep me here? But that didn't
last long. The hospital became my home and has been ever since. Less
than twenty four hours after my arrival and hid my feet up on the desk,
barking orders at technicians. I slipped into the role easier than I'd like
to admit. You see, where they got me was on scientific curiosity.
That how they ensured I was on board with the project. That's why they
never pointed a gun at me after day one. They didn't have to.
The second I saw that thing inside the Messiah's chest cavity, I was a
willing asset. No more me, only the project, the discovery, and
the revelations. Lying on that slab nestled in the flesh of an otherwise normal
looking man was a white hot piece of divinity, a pinprick in the fabric
of reality. I don't know how else to describe it. It was like
I'd spend my whole life seeing two dimensional shadows, and then I suddenly got
a glimpse of the three dimensional shapes them. I haven't seen my children since
they took me, couldn't tell you their names. I was never the same
after the first autopsy. No one in that place was sane. After the
scalpel first bit into his flesh, Attrition amongst the research staff was incredibly high.
Every day, another nurse seized by stigmata, or a once faithless lab
technician struck by the call to write the Third Testament. The guards dealt with
the unwilling members of the team. Traumatized scientists and clinicians lined up one by
one against an exposed brick wall in the jungle heat and shot. I remember
smoking in the cafeteria in between surgeries, nervously shaking as I tried to ignore
the pop pop pop of some of my more stubborn colleagues being executed. And
then back to work, where I suppressed the feeling that I was the worst
kind of traitor. Next day there'd be new faces scrubbing up and asking for
orders, another pair of hands shipped in from God knows where. Back to
cataloging divinity. At times I imagine joining the objectors, the people who found
religion in a sterile, black ops lab. But that thing we pulled out
of him, that baffling enigma that burned my eyes and consumed the project.
Everything we learned about it felt like a quantum leap in our understanding of microbiology.
We tested everything we could get our hands on, plants, animals,
humans. I tried not to look any of them in the eye, quiet
people taken from some quiet part of the earth where they wouldn't be missed,
All of them scared, did they know? I mean, really no,
the suffering they were in for definitely not. They expected to be shot,
I imagine, not to wake up with the roof of their mouth fined with
eyeballs. I'm ashamed to say, but those kinds of results invigorated me,
excited me, even when it all fell apart and I missed the evacuation.
I got to finally rifle through all those classified documents where I discovered I hadn't
been selected because I was some genius of microbiology, but rather because my psychological
profile made it clear I'd do anything if you dangled a big enough mystery in
front of me. That and the fact that I was actually quite good at
managing projects. Geniuses usually aren't grat at sending out memos or keeping track of
performance numbers. Thankfully, I'm no genius who was humbling at times working with
some of the guys down below, being senior to them. Even I mean,
doctor Coates was probably the smartest man I'd ever met, no real academic
career, because he had a habit of hyper fixating on things that either couldn't
be solved or which no one gave a damn about. But it was pretty
clear this was a guy who could have turned his brain to just about anything
and made a name for himself if he was just a little more on the
ball. He was a NodD and basically gave lectures. Barefoot would respond the
last minute, marking deadlines by giving every student to be through a stabler at
the head of his department. That kind of thing. Intelligent but not particularly
sensible. The project broke him, broke his world view, broke his mind,
and, towards the end, even his body. You might think the
problem was asking a hyper rational man to process the divine, but if anything,
he processed it a little too well. He was the first person to
read the Third Testament without going insane immediately insane, i should say, or
maybe he was always nuts to begin with. Either way, he managed to
take all the random scribbles in bits of verse that we'd collected from the personal
effects of the deceased and actually put it together into a single document. Then
he read it and came out looking like nothing special had happened. The next
guy after him, not so lucky, but doctor Coates. He carried on
working for a few days after took measurements of this made records of that slipped
into the background, out of my notice while I focused on trying to figure
out some way of getting the Third Testament scanned into a computer without it causing
havoc A lot like the people who read it, machines liked to give out
halfway through reading the Third Testament. Not Coats, though he seemed just fine.
I should have known better. The first clue that something wasn't quite right
was when I went to his office, a cramped space with metal walls and
floors, no windows given it was below ground, and a countertop full of
equipment. It was always a mess in there, and usually a bit smelly
too, but it was usually just that unwashed scientists smell. But one day
when I went to call on him, he opened the door and I got
the whiff of something that was just wrong. Smelled a little like death,
only not quite just different, moldy almost. Course, he was entitled to
do some experimentations on his own time, and that's what I figured it was.
At the time I wrote it off, had other things on my mind.
Only the smell got worse with time turned up day after day, and
each time it stung my nose a little more, hung around my sinuses a
little longer than coats. He looked a little worse for wear each time too.
Again, nothing serious, the kind of thing that's actually quite normal for
a man like him. I'm used to seeing scientists fixate on a problem,
something quiet they won't share with anyone else until they know for sure what they've
got. That's what he was like, and I figured when he was ready,
he'd either show me something that would blow my socks off, or it'll
be something stupid, like a Goddiss microwave to evenly heat up his lunch by
taking it apart and rewiring its inside. Sometimes I wonder, if I caught
it earlier, could I have done something about it? Someone smarter might have
picked up the odd chemical mixtures on his shelf, or recognized the peculiar smells.
Not me, though, all I can say in hindsight is thank god
my office was above ground. By the time his little project had finished working
its way through the floor he was on, he'd killed thirty six people with
his home made nerve gas. Thankfully, the facility was prepared for that kind
of attack, and the automated security systems had the entire level locked down very
quickly, so that the damage wasn't that bad. Could have been a lot
worse. But what was weird was the venting system wasn't working. Should have
cleared it out and under a day, but four hours later and the gas
levels were the same. The investigation, at least at first, had to
happen remotely. CCTV from his lab was spotty. Something was corroding the cameras,
but based on some of his material requests, we guessed he'd been culturing
some unusual fungus to create the bioweapon. Whatever it was, it was potent,
and we were helpless to do anything about it. We had to wait
and hope to God whatever awful thing he'd concocted would wear out on its own.
What little the CCTV could capture made for a grueling sight. Eight scientists
dead at their desks, slumped over, blood pouring out of their mouths.
The fluid looked black on the grainy black and white monitor. But what upset
me more were the assistants, dozens of young men and women who didn't really
belong in that place too much to live for, and all of them so
scared of what was going to happen to them, And they were just lying
there in the middle of whatever it was they were doing in the labs themselves,
smashed beakers and machines in disarray. In their rooms. Some of them
lay peacefully sleeping, others held each other in secret, little trysts they thought
no one knew about. All over the level, body lay in the floor
in strange positions, and again, the black fluid leaking from every orifice,
staining the floor, their faces and their clothes, soaking their chests and groins.
I remember sitting there and just watching them twitch and foam of their mouths,
waiting for death to finally come. Even then the hours ticked on as
we waited for the systems to purge the gas twelve twenty four forty eight,
nothing happened. It was like everything in there was frozen in time. And
then somehow the lights on that level went out. Emergency lighting came on,
bathing everything in red, but combined with the low quality cameras, it was
like gazing at an old video game, grainy, fuzzy resolution. We figured
that Coates must have rigged up a remote timer on the electronics, which wasn't
a good guess since his speciality was biochemistry and the security systems were of the
highest tier. But what else could it be. Wasn't like someone could have
hit the circuit breaker. We knew eventually we'd have to go in there sixty
hours, have to shut down. We just had to. There was too
much high value material to leave behind. And there are reports of strange noises
down there. Guards posted to the door heard faint sounds on the other side,
footsteps They reckoned. Course, I wrote that off. Not a nonsense,
I told myself and them, And yet we still went in armed,
because well, if coats were smart enough to rig this whole nightmare, who's
this He didn't make a little gas mask to keep himself safe. You'd think
I'd be used to working in hazmat suits and I sort of vam, but
going into that sileder floor was something else. The visor felt restrictive, the
squeak of the rubber suit was deafening, My breath was too loud, and
every time the insuit radio came to life with one of the soldier's barks,
I damn near jumped out of my skin. And then the door actually opened.
Nothing could have prepared me for that. The air was thick with mist,
which lit up harshly with the emergency lighting's red hue. Old metal grates,
vents, open doorways, all of it either blood red or completely dark.
There are far too many shadows for it to feel safe. It didn't
help some of the bulbs with strobe lighting, rotating sirens that lit the place
up in periodic flashes of crimson light. God. Even the four soldiers next
to me look nervous. We passed more than a few bodies on our way
to Coats's lab. All of them lay where they'd been on the CCTV,
at least as far as I could tell. Sounds stupid, but I stared
at a few of them closely, just to make sure. All those reports
of footsteps had started to worm their way into my brain. Couldn't shake the
idea we weren't alone down there. When we finally opened the door to Coats,
what I saw left me frozen to the spot. The soldiers focused on
the strange growth after the corner of the room, which registered to me only
as a dim sort of collection of thick fungal petals crawling up the wall.
Veins pulsing like capillaries in the eye. But to me what really hit home
was the empty desk. Last time they had reliable footage of that room,
Coats had been lying there dead as a dodo, blood leaking from his still
open eyes, pulling on the desk and dripping onto the floor. And that
stain was still very much there. There was even the faint outline of where
his head had been laying, but the man himself was gone. This,
even more than the grotesque thing that took up one wall, terrified me.
That quivering mass of fungus was pomping out enough toxic gas to kill half the
base, but it was stationary. At least in another circumstance, I might
have even found it fascinating. But Coats, he had clearly gone off the
deep end. Had he lain perfectly still for days and end to trick us,
that didn't seem right again, I thought the bodies we passed the way,
they looked so still, but not lifeless, like a porcelain doll.
There was that slight suggestion of something working behind the eyes. What do we
do with this? One of the men asked, take samples, burn the
rest. I replied, if gas levels don't go down in a week,
we'll have to purge the whole floor with phosphor us. The whole time,
I had my eyes and the space around us under the desk on top of
the cupboards. If Coats wasn't at his desk, where was he? Where
the hell did this thing come from? The same soldier muttered as he laid
a series of thermal charges on the fleshiest parts of the mold. It seemed
to flinch in response to his touch, but otherwise benign. Ah. He
probably took some of the subjects tissue samples. We know it propagates unusual levels
of growth in plants and animal tissue. Explains why the cast levels don't go
down. What'sn't metabolizing? I gave the soldier an odd luck. What he
said, you are the only ones within education. Fair enough, I replied,
with a quick shake of the head. It isn't metabolizing anything except his
tissue. It's a well, bluntly, I mean, I think of the
fish and the bread, right. It's something we've known about his tissue samples
for a while now, spontaneous creation of matter and energy out of nothing.
But to give Coats credit this is a pretty novel application. He's created an
infinite bioweapon. Why, I was about to reply, I haven't the slightest
clue. When a loud bang drew attention to the doorway. Outside lay a
darkness, broken only by the strobing of a red light flashing on and off.
It revealed, for just this single instant, the outline of a man
standing in the hallway. The soldiers swore nervously as they raised the rifles.
By the time the light came back, the figure was gone. Who the
hell was that, one barked, must be coats. Another replied, CHOP's
done, I cried, ware, gesturing to the charges. Let's get the
hell out of There are no miracles left for you. You have made your
own miracles. The words were growled, so loud and deep they seemed to
vibrate my very bones. The soldiers snapped to attention, but me, I
took a little longer to turn back to the corner of the room. I
knew what I was going to see, but God I didn't want to see
it. There are other gardens, but not for you. Do not spoil
the other readings goat to emerge from the thing in the wall calling himself free
with a wet squelch. He stood not naked, but clearly naked. As
his skin began to absorb his clothes, he looked like a burned victim coated
in algae. He loves you in spite of everything. He loves you,
and there is a place in Heaven for you all. But it is time
to I can't blame the soldier who pulled the trigger. It wasn't just the
fact that Coach was speaking with a mouth that a grown grotesquely across his abdomen,
but rather that the words were drilling straight into our heads like some prushing
off. It made my eyes cross, my ears ache, and my nose
bleed. Two other men had vomited, splattering the inside of their visors with
thick fluid. They were the first to go. They didn't see what hit
them, and I'm somewhat glad. Coats angered by the gunshot, moved with
the elegance of a dancer. I stumbled out into the corridor as he tore
them apart, his arms seemingly flowing right through their biohazard suit. The remaining
soldier, the trigger happy one, was beside me as I fled. It
wasn't far to the exit. I hoped would make it the rest of the
way without incident, and in just a few short hours I might be able
to put the few images I had of coats pulling flesh and fabric apart like
it was tissue deep, into some recess of my mind and just move on.
But it was only a few short steps into the dark before the remaining
soldier began to fire blindly at the corridor behind us. It was a mistake
for him to turn around in the fraction of a second where his eyes had
been turned away, he missed one of the bodies lying on the ground.
I jumped, He didn't. I was dimly aware of there being no one
beside me, only when the gunshots grew fainter and fainter. As I left
him behind, one of the shots dinged off a panel by my head,
and to this day I suspect it was not a ricochet, but a deliberate
attempt to get revenge from me abandoning him. Still, I didn't look back
down until I reached the secure door. I thumb the keypad frantically, terrify
as my ears registered the sound of approaching footsteps, muffled by the bio hazard
suit. God, I couldn't stop myself. I looked. I had nothing
else to do except wait for the security to clear me and open the door,
and there was no guarantee they'd even do that. I might be waiting
forever, staring at nothing as Coats came closer and closer. Without even realizing
what I was doing, I turned and saw the soldier with a gun.
Jeez. Coat's office was out of sight, so I had no idea if
he repeated this with the other two. With the man, I saw he
was in pieces yellow and red in ragged strips, the coat of the ceiling
as much as the floor, and barreling towards me on all fours, legs
and arms too long for a normal man. Came Coats, eyes wide,
jaw distended, chunks out of his head still missing, but his mouth it
silently spoke the same few words, almost in time with his loping gallop,
over and over and over. It would take days for me to even realize
what it was he was saying. Thankfully, before he'd managed to reach me,
the doors opened and a hail of gunfire filled the corridor ahead Coats,
fast as lightning disappeared into some dark crevice, and I was dragged to safety
before the worst might happen. As soon as I was on the other side,
I told security to flood the place with phosphorus, and everything was purged
white, hot, fire and demand. By the time it was over,
only metal remained, and even then a lot of it had melted and cooled
in strange shapes on the floor. I also went out of my way to
kill any attempts at reclaiming the lost workplace. Higher ups were mad all that
square footage lost, but I said the risk of contamination was too great.
Of course, I left out the part where I returned one quiet night a
few days later and placed my ear against the thick steel wall that I knew
ran close to one of the vents on that level. It was faint,
but I heard Coats whispering. Only then did I get the final clue to
what Coats had been saying as he came towards me in the flashing red of
that darkened corridor. We love you, We love you, We love you,
we love you, we love you. Even now, the cameras showed
that level to be a sterile, hollow space, but I cannot escape the
feeling that if I were to open it, I would see Coats come slithering
out of some long forgotten vent, perhaps worse for wear given all the time
that has since passed, But Coats, none the less terrifying and misshapen,
were desperate to spread the very Testament that twisted his mind and body, that
caused him to try and breed something that might well have ended the entire world.
And the worst thing of all, what had been saying to me in
that corridor? What if it was true? What if he hadn't done it
out of hate but love? And the time I assumed the force we were
dealing with was hostile, But what if it wasn't Everyone who goes near the
Third Testament kills themselves. And until Coates, I thought it some kind of
twisted revenge. But what if that wasn't the case. What if he wasn't
doing it out of spite or hostility? What would that mean for me?
Forgiveness? If so? That terrified me, because after everything I'd been through,
I doubted I'd have the strength to resist that kind of offer. For
weeks, I lay awake at night wondering just what the hell might be in
those words that could compel people like coats to do what they did. And
yet despite everything, I still haven't read the Third Testament. Coates was a
genius and he still gave in. I know that I did some pretty messed
up stuff in the name of scientific curiosity, but well, I guess I'm
not ashamed to say I'm also a coward. I'm afraid of dying. Curiosity
can only get you so far, and after seeing everything that happened to the
people who read that thing, I couldn't bring myself to risk it. Whatever
the Third Testament is, hearing it seems pretty bad for your health. I
don't think I even deserve to be forgiven if that is what he's offering.
It was poetic justice that out of all the people who managed to make the
evacuation, I wasn't one of them. Leaving on foot is hardly an option
for me. I mean, even if I had the strength to hike through
hundreds of miles of rainforest, I need to reach the outer fence first.
And strange things have festered in the chemical pits, where they disposed of the
body's soft mounds of ash and bone that sing from time to time, exciting
the birds in the canopy to take off and make strange patterns in the sky.
If they can sing, they must have mouths, right, And if
they have mouths, what else? I think about coats? About what kind
of hands would reach out to drag me into those rotten pits of long dead
flesh and drown me in filth? And I shudder. I could try and
sneak past, but it really isn't safe outside the hospital. It isn't safe
inside, to be fair, But what choice do I have? At least
there's still power, internet, food to last me over a century, and
security doors. I keep everything below sub level one firmly locked away. While
out there well, I see things sometimes moving quickly between the old bildings.
The trees shake and stir, and wed jungle now grows thick and heavy against
one of the glass walls of the hospital. The vines twist and turn and
spell out odd messages. I shut my eyes firmly whenever I have to pass
them. And yet even blind I can hear the tidening fibrous coils as the
clawing flora scratches against the glass. They want me hungering all those corpses we
buried out there, rotting, breaking down, contaminated, with divinity. What
strange waters flow through the soil in this place. Nothing could make me risk
opening the doors and try walking through that vegetation. He might forgive, but
I don't think my former test subjects have. And as for down below,
you know, I never met him while I was alive. Don't know where
they got him from, or even why. My bet he ticked off the
wrong people, got shot and got back up. Maybe they shot him again
and he got up again. Maybe they did it five times, ten times.
I don't know. Somewhere along the lines someone worked out they had an
anomaly on their hands. Maybe I wasn't the first person to even try cutting
him open. It's just weird. No one ever told us who he was.
We just knew It'd be years before I wondered who mothered him, loved
him, raised him. I often wonder if this was the way it was
meant to go, or was it just an accident that he bumped into the
wrong people at the wrong time. The Messiah came and the first thing we
did was cut him off. No wonder we failed. Things in the projects
started to go really bad. About six months after the first incision, I
turnover amongst researchers was one thing, but well, it turns out a lot
of the soldiers had religious inclination. Wasn't just us dealing with visions and voices.
At some point they worked out what they were part of. The agency
likes compartmentalization, but it can only go so far. After the religious element
became clear to the guys on the ground, things started to break down.
It was one thing to control the scientists. The guards were armed. When
they broke, they broke hard. Most of his remains are stored in the
lowest level. Wrote its easiest to keep things cool. Outside. There's this
long corridor leading to the central chamber, huge, wide enough to dry four
or five cards side by side. And that was where the first card hanged
himself. Simple enough, they dragged him away and cleaned it up. It
wasn't long after coats. In fact, it was one of the men who
saved me at the door. Were pretty soon another two guys went down there
and hanged themselves, and then five, and then eight, and then top
side. Some people started blowing their brains out in their barracks in the canteens,
standing watch at the doors, looking out on the jungle. Cigarette hanging
loose on one lip. Seemed almost random, except there was a clear pattern
of escalation when those guys started killing their friends. That when it reached the
point where they couldn't ship new guys in fast enough to replace losses. Once
that happened, orders started getting lost, jobs started being left and done.
One lab got written off because a test subject's body was left to fester over
a weekend, and by the time they got the door open there was flesh
growing up the walls. Not enough manpowered to deal with it, so they
left it for another day and moved on. Only they forgot to tell the
researcher who worked there, So come Monday, he went in and had a
hell of a surprise. Must have been like stepping into a wall of sour
dough. I can only hope he suffocated and it was quick, but who
knows. Not like their stuff as hard and fast rules. For all I
know, he's still in there screaming for air. Meanwhile, that tunnel people
just kept going down there and hanging themselves. I mean, every day I'd
wake up and I'd be down a few researchers and a couple more guards would
be missing. Took a shockingly short amount of time for most of the six
hundred people on site to just disappear. God knows when security stopped taking the
bodies down, just another job that got lost in the grown panic. By
the time evacuation orders came we were down to one hundred people. I estimate
that around four hundred ended themselves in that tunnel. I've only visited him once
since the project shut down, only had the guts that go look once barely
made it out alive. I felt compelled to try and face up to him,
acknowledged the role I played. Only that meant actually getting to the door
at the end of the tunnel, which was by this point pitch black except
for my torch, and blocked almost entirely with hanging bodies, so many pressed
together, so close that I had no hope of making my way through without
bumping into one. Reminded me of the jungle, funnily enough, of a
thick claustrophobic forest made of dried skin and brittle ligaments, different colors and shapes,
and of course different levels of decomb Some had lost their noses, lips,
and eyes. Others were a little bloated but still recognizable. Not friends,
really, I don't think I actually made one solitary friend on that project.
But colleagues, people who were under my charge, they looked sad.
All of them looked sad. They should have been buried at home with their
families, but instead they were locked all the way in the ass end of
nowhere. Of course, you can bet your ass the agency will make sure
no one ever knows the truth. You know, I still love contact with
them. Anything I post gets screened, arrogant ass ls. No that no
one's going to take me seriously in a record of this project anywhere. All
those people just ghosts in a system too big for any one person to keep
track of it all. You know how many people go missing in the United
States in a year? What about Europe or the whole damn world. God,
this project was just a drop in the ocean. I wanted to put
it to bed to see if I could get some kind of answer from him.
It was that idea, trying to get some resolution to this nightmare.
I gave me the strength to push past the first dead body and go deeper
into that tunnel. He reminded me of trying to make your way to the
front of a gig, only deathly silent, and the people you barged past
one gently back and forth, the sound of makeshift nooses tightening in the dark.
I think the worst part was the limited vision. My light was just
a lone disk, and God, it was pitch black in that place,
like caving, only the floor is slick and you don't have to worry about
a ravine. Made me think about being in the bottom of the ocean with
all the corps's visibility was never more than a few foot ahead. I remember
panicking at the realization I could easily get turned around, and well, if
all those lost souls didn't let me go, what if I wound up going
in circles for hours, days, even on end, just round and round.
The nearest wall could be right there and I wouldn't know it. Just
bones and teeth and ribs and hanging in trails, all of them called to
the touch, freezing. Obviously, that's why we'd put him down there.
The place was called my own breath, visible in the air, but the
bodies were like the meat you grab out of the fridge in a supermarket.
It was just awful. I found the fresh ones the hardest, the stomach,
a really rotten body, looks almost like a prop. It isn't.
Don't get me wrong. You look at it and your brain tells you,
damn well, it ain't a prop. But it's a hell of a lot
easier to convince yourself. It's just the thing when it hasn't got eyes or
skin. For the fresh ones, sometimes they still had expressions like anger or
sadness on their faces. They made me feel watched. And the fact they
were cold and slick with condensation. Every time I bumped into one, it
took everything I had not to let out a whimper. And they moved.
They didn't move, not like that. But there were no drafts down there.
It was perfectly still. They'd been perfectly still for months after the project
shut down, and then I came along and disturbed them, and it was
like a giant Newton's cradle, the static system that I put energy into.
They began to sway and twist and bomp. I'd knock one, and a
fraction of a second later it would knock me back, jostling against my cheek,
culed my arm as inertia rocked it back and forth. Ten minutes in
too far to turn back. That was when the nightmare began started small.
I lost my ability to track what body was where and which ones were sent
swinging by my own clumsy movements, and then fingers combed my hair. I
cried out, and another said touched my beard, my face. I forced
myself onwards and started making eye contact with one too many dead men for it
to simply be an accident. Their expressions changed from sullen and listless to angry
and cool, leering smiles and curled lips. Then came the unmistakable sensation of
someone deliberately grabbing for my arm. I had to shake it loose, too
afraid to look back can face the possibility that I'd see one of them moving
and scowling. I pushed on, constantly, having to shake cold fingers off
my elbow or my collar. They groped incessantly, looking for anything to hold
on to. Firm grips pinched my belly, fat, my shoulders, my
chest, and then they started reaching for my eyes. At one point I
made the mistake of crying out, and a freezing cold finger with a slightly
furried texture slid into my mouth. The only relief came when I dropped to
my hands and knees and crawled the entire time. My mind raised with a
terrible possibility that I really was just being sent in circles over and over and
over, and they were never going to let me leave. I would die
down there in the dark, smothered by their rotting hands. God damn,
I came close to giving up. When my torch finally alighted upon an open
space. I cried out a heaving, wet sob made of relief and joy,
and my muscles, given new life, worked over time to get me
out of that horrible nightmare and into freedom. I didn't stop until I bumped
my head against the steel wall with a dull clang, and looked up to
see the vault's door, at last, the place we'd frozen him. I
got up, with what little dignity I had left, brushed down my clothes,
and risked only the briefest of glances back. The bodies looked inert now,
just like they had before I entered. I could have tricked myself into
thinking it was my imagination. Only half my shirt was now into hatters on
the floor, and I could still see strips of it still clenched in a
few of their hands. I did my best to compose myself and I entered
the vault. We hadn't left him in a very nice state. The plan
was the catalog everything. Yeah, we excited the most striking biological anomalies,
but the remaining flesh. I mean, we wanted to know everything, every
last capillary, every last cell. We wanted it recorded. So we had
this special machine flown in. It works by taking a piece of flesh and
slicing into a layer that's barely a micrometer thick, and depositing it into a
slide. That slide is digested and then stored in specialized cold refrigeration units.
It's usually used on a sample not much bigger than a potato, But for
him we had something specially made, frozen stood vertigal. We put him on
the machine where it worked, creating about one slice every three hours. Only
at the end. Well, first, no one came to take the slides
away, so they gathered on the floor below in a terrible mess. And
second, no one had bothered to check if he was still dead. Stupid
of us, really, of course he came back to life, only this
time he didn't get to leave the cave. I often wonder if he had
anything left to say, but by then the machine had reached his nose,
just his eyes at the top of his head looking right at me. Fall
me. God, we made a mess of things, didn't We made the
Romans look gentle in comparison. I fell to my knees and begged for forgiveness.
And the worst part he gave it. Obviously not verbally, but he
shouldn't surprise you to know he had other ways of putting thought to my head.
I was so angry at myself. I was positive I'd find some kind
of punishment waiting for me. When I didn't, he forgave me, told
me I was loved after everything I'd done. I mean, God, that
hurt the most. I didn't deserve it, still don't. And then he
gave me the Third Testament, or rather the cliff notes. Not enough to
drive me nuts, but the gist of it, so to speak, did
a number on me. Anyway. By the time I was done sobbing on
the floor, I lugged up and he was gone. Nothing remained, just
broken glass in a machine cutting empty air. Going back through the tunnel was
no easier than going in, but I hardly remember it. I lost a
couple of weeks after that little trip down below, but eventually I came to
in my office. Now I stay above ground. I've asked for rescue,
but the agency feels I best serve my country by staying where I am,
making sure nothing else leagues out. It's messed up, but I think,
for once they might be right. I've considered sharing what he gave me,
considered even putting it in bits of writing here. Might even go get the
full Testament and upload it, but that would involve reading it, and like
I said, I'm a coward and I don't want to die. Everyone who
reads it dies by their own hand. I guess all I can say is
the Third Testament. It's something of a warning, an outline of what's coming
our way, so bad that he came just to offer us a way out,
a promise that this somewhere else, and an acknowledgment that we're going to
need It makes me think of Coats, smartest man I ever met, whose
first reaction to knowing what was on the way was to try and engineer something
to wipe youmanity all out. Given to what we did to him, I
wonder if we don't deserve it