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Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
On my way back to the broadcast studio, I noticed more bulbs on the world map had gone dark. Faulty batch, they’d tell me. So I didn’t bother asking. Instead, I approached the cluster of agitated officers animatedly discussing the matter and eavesdropped as inconspicuously as I could manage.
“What do you mean, it’s gone? I received an inventory report from depot 109 by radio this morning. It can’t simply be gone.” Another reached out as if to calm him down, but be recoiled. “Overrun, just in the past hour. Manufacturing complex 320 as well. We over-extended our defenses, if you’ll recall I advised against it when it was proposed.” The other fellow made some sarcastic remark about the clarity of hindsight.
“Then we’ll recall the remaining tanks to the factories two hundred miles south and shore up their naval defense by re-routing carriers from-” The other fellow somberly shook his head. “You don’t mean to tell me…” But in fact, he did. “They didn’t stop at depot 109 but pressed their advantage, I just came back from listening to gunfire and screaming by radio. Couldn’t raise anybody of ours. Have a look at the board.”
The first fellow did a double take. Indeed, the light in question was now dark. I too could have sworn it was lit just a second ago. Our own bunker complex was the lone red bulb on the board, but it was rapidly being encroached upon by unlit bulbs on all sides. Our territory shrinking by the minute, gobbled up by the ravenous ranks of the dead.
The repairs went mercifully quickly. The magnetron was also faulty as it turned out, but I already had a replacement on hand. After giving the whole mess a few minutes to warm up, I had Betty try it out and received glowing approval soon after. “It’s going out clear as a bell! Why, I could kiss you!” I allowed it so as not to sour the occasion, and soon after was showered and ready to hit the hay.
The day had taken more out of me than I realized, mentally as well as physically. I was out cold before I knew it, visions of six eyed babies swimming about under my eyelids. Perhaps because I needed the comfort, I again found myself having the birthday dream. Alone as before, except for my mother.
She stood at the stove in her floral print apron, back turned to me, stirring a steaming pot of something or other. I edged around to one side but couldn’t seem to glimpse her face, and pestering her provoked no response. So I gave up and headed for the window. Hoping, wishing, begging to see anything else. Feelings of foolishness blended seamlessly with despair as I surveyed the landscape.
It was so close now. Within a hundred feet. From there, extending in all directions to the horizon, having already engulfed everything else. Thrashing, boiling, folding over on itself continuously. The nearest patch of it extended a feeble pseudopod and groped around the edges of the window. “You can’t have this place!” I cried, striving to be heard through the thick weatherized glass. As if that would make it stop.
By this point, could I really object? I’d done nothing to save anybody elses home. Watching from a distance, emotionally detached, as the creeping black mass swallowed them up one by one. Now that it was my turn, I at last understood how they must’ve felt. The abstract nameless nothing which they’d ignored with such determination until then, finally arriving at their doorstep. At the one place they never believed it would reach.
Satisfied that it couldn’t penetrate the window, I turned to explore the rest of the house. Only to find it oozing in under the front door. Frantically I gathered towels from the bathroom and wedged them into that crack, for what little good it did. The sludge just kept coming. I rushed to the garage to fetch the mop and bucket. When I tried to fill the bucket from the spigot by the doorway, it wasn’t water that gushed forth.
I again bashed my head on the bunk above mine when I awoke. Swearing furiously, cradling my head in my hands as the new gash bled all over them. I wanted to scream, memories of the nightmare still fresh in my mind. To cry and writhe on the floor, but I’d already seen what becomes of those who seem unstable around here. It was the effort of nearly half an hour to put myself together enough that I felt I could talk to anybody cogently.
I emerged into chaos. The corridors and main chamber were lined everywhere with gurneys, most of them makeshift. On them lay bandaged, moaning soldiers. “Survivors of complex 320 and the farms” a nurse with deep, puffy bags under her eyes hastily explained as she dressed one of the soldiers’ wounds. I asked which farms she meant, and she stared at me like I was some sort of idiot.
“The last ones. We’re down to what’s stored here, on base. That goes for medicine too. There’s just not enough beds! There never were enough beds. Really, the merciful thing to do would be to burn ‘em so they can’t be brought back. But we don’t have the facilities for that. Now either make yourself useful, or get out from underfoot.”
I did the latter. As I entered the main chamber, I felt a series of tremors. A sort of rapid “whump whump whump whump.” Then again. The teletank operators were nearly buried in wadded up data tape and cigarette butts, nonetheless continuing to smoke like a couple of chimneys. It hung thick in the air and I contemplated searching for a gas mask before deciding it wasn’t worth the trouble.
Save for a few which now showed only static, the monitors displayed what I slowly worked out was the same battlefield as seen from different angles. There, in fuzzy monochrome, I witnessed a pair of approaching zeppelins. The gas bags needlessly ornate for a vessel of war, printed to resemble decorative lace. Shiny black flying machines swarmed about the carriages slung from the underside. Only as they grew closer, it became clear that the flying machines were in fact winged grave mites.
Of course. Why did I expect anything different? It’s just one thing after another. They never stop. Never have before this, not sure why I thought they would now except that I couldn’t make myself contemplate the alternative. Worse still, as I watched a feed of teleoperated anti-aircraft guns blasting away at the incoming swarm, I noticed the series of shots matched up perfectly with the tremors I felt.
“Whump whump whump whump.” I’d assumed this was some distant battlefield. Hoped. Wishful thinking, as ever. Instead it was taking place right on top of us. I recognized two officers from the other day, still arguing with each other before the board with the map and lightbulbs. “Fuck the refugees. Fuck ‘em. They’re slowing us down. We should be making preparations to retreat to colony 431.”
The other took him by the shoulders and shook him. “You’re not listening, Danny. They took colony 431 half an hour ago.” It was no help. He looked beyond reason, fidgety and drenched with sweat. “Then we’ll retreat to the shipyard southeast of here, from there we can-” The other fellow lost his patience. “I told you Danny. I told you. They took the shipyard yesterday. It’s all gone, Danny. All of it. There’s just nowhere left to go.”
I gazed up at the map and sure enough, all lights except for the red one were now unlit. The poor wretched fellow collapsed to the floor in a mania. “How can that be? There’s gotta be something left. How can there be nothing?” The other officer initially knelt as if to help him. But then he looked around, sighed, and wandered off. A single, much more intense tremor shook the room.
I looked to the monitors, about half of which now showed only static. The first impactor had landed. The cloudy grey sky in the background was full of ‘em, like shooting stars. A second impact set the lights overhead to flickering, and showered the teletank operators with dust and debris. Not long now, I thought. Not long at all. I headed for the lab, rehearsing in my head on the way what I should say to get past Harriet.
No need. Inexplicably, both hatches hung open and the little windowed booth to one side was empty. Even the entrance to the lab was packed with gurneys. Most of the patients lay motionless, but one on the right wall writhed about, whimpering and muttering to himself. Night terrors? No, he was like the poor wretch from the trenches. Hard to imagine that wherever he was right now could be worse than this.
I called out for Dr. Fritz, but received no reply. I knew him to be an irritable man, and had expected the approaching front to have compounded his stress. But instead I was met only with eerie silence as I stepped through the doorway into his darkened lab. No hum, no clicks. They must’ve redirected power to keep the strict necessities online.
“Fritz? Are you in here? I’m just looking for a headset.” Still no response. The reason became clear soon enough. I spotted the pair of dim red lights at the far end of the room, carefully navigated through the incubators to reach it, then pulled it free from the stand it was on. Once strapped tightly to my face, all was revealed.
The stand I’d pulled the goggles from was in fact Fritz’ stiff, lifeless body. Slumped over his desk, surrounded by empty morphine syringes. All told, a fairly pleasant way to go. Probably the best of a lot of bad options. If he’d left enough for me, that might’ve been the end of it. Selfish bastard. Instead, figuring he had no more need of this chamber of horrors, I fished a hammer out of the first toolbox I found and began correcting his little mistakes.
How they screamed as I crushed them. Halfway human, but with a chittering screech mixed in. Even after I reduced the first one to quivering mush, the remains continued to twitch and writhe about. I was afraid of that. “And yet it moves” I muttered. “And yet it moves”. One by one I moved among the incubators, raising my tool of correction and bringing it down over and over.
“AND YET IT MOVES!” I shouted in a murderous fit, sticky black blood splattering my face and arms as I went about my vital work, no longer concerned with appearances. Far too late for that. Surely, far too late. “AND YET IT MOVES!” I brought the hammer down again and again. “And yet...it moves.”
I don’t know what I hoped to accomplish. The sticky black remains only continued to bubble and twitch. I suppose I was after absolution. For the doctor. For myself. For the rapidly dwindling remainder of living, breathing humanity packed together in our final, now-crumbling bastion. Reasoning that if nothing else, we might reclaim some small shred of dignity before the end.
I wiped the noxious crud from my face as best I could, then set off in search of a gun. That’d be a trick. Everybody in any condition to shoot would’ve already claimed one from the armory, and would now be cleaning, loading and otherwise preparing it for use. The impacts were now so regular that there were no intervening periods of silence. Just constant pounding from above, light fixtures swaying about violently, many having already gone dark.
On my way to the central chamber, I stopped by the broadcast studio. Gertrude was nowhere to be seen, but there was Betty, having locked herself into the recording booth from the inside. When she noticed me, she weakly smiled and cracked the door. I told her I was searching for weapons and asked if she wanted to accompany me. I was rebuffed.
“No darlin’, this is where I’m staying. The boys gotta keep hearin’ my voice to the very end. I’ve been with ‘em for so long, how could I abandon ‘em now? I can still hardly believe it. How can they get Betty? That’s what the boys must be thinkin’ still.
That the voice on their radios could never die. That whatever else gets swallowed up, they’ll never lose good ‘ol Bombardier Betty. How could they? That’s the magic of radio. Your voice goin’ out loud and clear to the hopeful multitudes, you seem to them like something more’n human. Somethin’ that’ll still be floatin’ around even when everything else burns away.
I’m no less naive. This whole time...I dunno. I couldn’t take it seriously. That it would really turn out like this. I kept thinking it would stop just short. That God, or nature, or history somehow wouldn’t allow this outcome. That someone, or something, would arrive just in time to save us. But it never did.”
A single tear snaked down her cherubic face, forming a wet spot on her blouse where it fell. Her voice drained of all life, such that I could be certain she’d resigned herself to what would happen. I asked what had become of Gertrude. All Betty would tell me is that she’d gone to be with Fritz. On the off chance that she’d used a gun to do it, I doubled back towards the lab.
As I passed through the control center, I noticed every monitor now displayed only static. The chairs, occupied until recently by teletank pilots, sat empty. The lone red bulb on the map board flickering with each successive tremor, final candle in the darkness on the verge of being forever extinguished. Most of the refugees lining the edge of the room were no longer breathing now, perished for lack of manpower and facilities to treat them.
A sudden earth-shattering explosion threw me to the ground. All of the remaining lights finally gave out, plunging the facility into darkness. The impacts slowed to a halt. For the first time in as many days, there was total silence. I pulled the headgear on, toggled the switch in the back and waited.
There were a few initial crowds of panicked nurses, engineers and so on flocking across the room from one corridor to the next. The first time I nearly joined them until I saw them gunned down. It proved to be a pattern. The invaders clearly expected us to run and were laying in wait, so instead I hunkered down among the gurneys and continued to watch.
Dust now filled the air. Still swirling about from those last few impacts, and from the blast. Clinging to every surface. To every fallen body. Into the hazy stillness emerged a team of three coldblood medics carrying queer rifles. They paused at each body, checking for a pulse. Then locating a major artery in the thigh and jabbing the rifle’s bayonet into it.
The bayonet consisted of two large diameter needles. From one trailed a long coiled transparent hose carrying the black stuff. From the other, a hose which was empty at first, but then filled with red as the rifle’s integrated pump went about exsanguinating the body. Replacing the vacuumed out blood with the foul, oily syrup I’d become uncomfortably familiar with the scent, texture and flavor of in the past hour.
Stay Tuned for Part 6!