cannibals with breasts. No one believed it, of course. One midnight, Branch climbed from bed by himself. There were no mirrors. Next
morning they knew he'd been looking by the bloody footprints, knew what he'd seen through the mesh grille covering his window: virgin snow.
Cottonwoods came to green glory. School hit summer. Ten-year-old Army brats racing past the hospital on their way to fish and swim pointed at the razor wire surrounding Ward G. They had their horror tale exactly backward: in fact, the medical staff was trying to unmake a monster.
There was nothing to be done about Branch's disfigurement. The artificial skin had saved his life, not his looks. There was so much tissue damage that when it healed, even he could not find the shrapnel wounds for all the burn scars. Even his own body had trouble understanding the regeneration.
His bones healed so quickly the doctors did not have the chance to straighten them. Scar tissue colonized his burns with such speed that sutures and plastic tubing were integrated into his new flesh. Pieces of rocket metal fused into his organs and skeleton. His entire body was a shell of cicatrix.
Branch's survival, then his metamorphosis, confounded them. They openly talked about his changes in front of him, as if he were a lab experiment gone awry. His cellular 'bounce' resembled cancer in certain respects, though that did not explain the thickening of joints, the new muscle mass, the mottling in his skin pigment, the small, calcium-rich ridges ribbing his fingernails. Calcium growths knobbed his skull. His circadian rhythms had tripped out of synch. His heart was enlarged. He was carrying twice the normal number of red blood cells.
Sunlight – even moonbeams – were an agony to him. His eyes had developed tapetum, a reflective surface that magnified low light. Until now, science had known only one higher primate that was nocturnal, the aotus, or night monkey. His night vision neared triple the aotus norm.
His strength-to-weight ratio soared to twice an ordinary man's. He had double the endurance of recruits half his age, sensory skills that wouldn't quit, and the VO2 max of a cheetah. Something had turned him into their long-sought super soldier.
The med wonks tried blaming it all on a combination of steroids or adulterated drugs or congenital defects. Someone raised the possibility that his mutations might be the residual effect of nerve agents encountered during past wars. One even accused him of autosuggestion.
In a sense, because he was a witness to unholy evidence, he had become the enemy. Because he was inexplicable, he was the threat from within. It was not just their need for orthodoxy. Ever since that night in the Bosnian woods, Branch had become their chaos.
Psychiatrists went to work on him. They scoffed at his tale of terrible furies with women's breasts rising up among the Bosnian dead, explaining patiently that he had suffered gross psychic trauma from the rocketing. One termed his story a 'coalition fantasy' of childhood nuclear nightmares and sci-fi movies and all the killing he had directly seen or taken part in, a sort of all-American wet dream. Another pointed at similar stories of 'wild people' in the forest legends of medieval Europe, and suggested that Branch was plagiarizing myth.
At last he realized they simply wanted him to recant. Branch pleasantly conceded. Yes, he said, it was just a bad fantasy. A state of mind. Zulu Four never happened. But they didn't believe his retraction.
Not everyone was so dedicated to studying his aberrations. An unruly physician named Clifford insisted that healing came first. Against the researchers' wishes, he tried flushing Branch's system with oxygen, and irradiated him with ultraviolet light. At last Branch's metamorphosis eased. His metabolism and strength tapered to human levels. The calcium outgrowths on his head atrophied. His senses reverted to normal. He could see in sunshine. To be sure, Branch was still monstrous. There was little they could do about his burn scars and nightmares. But he was better.
One morning, eleven months after arriving, ill with daylight and the open air, Branch was told to pack up. He was leaving. They would have discharged him, but the Army didn't like freaks with combat medals bumming around the streets of America. Posting him back to Bosnia, they at least knew where to find him.
Bosnia was changed. Branch's unit was long gone. Camp Molly was a memory on a hilltop. Down at Eagle Base near Tuzla, they didn't know what to do with a helicopter pilot who couldn't fly anymore, so they gave Branch some foot soldiers and essentially told him to go find himself. Self-discovery in camouflage: there were worse fates. With the carte blanche of an exile, he headed back to Zulu Four with his platoon of happy-go-lucky gunners.
They were kids who'd given up shredding or grunge or the 'hood or Net surfing. Not one had seen combat. When word went out that Branch was going armed into the earth, these eight clamored to go. Action at last.
Zulu Four had returned to as much normalcy as a massacre site could. The gases had cleared. The mass grave had been bulldozed flat. A concrete marker with an Islamic crescent and star marked the site. You had to look hard to still find pieces of Branch's gunship.
The walls and gullies around the site were cored with coal mines. Branch picked one at random and they followed him in. In later histories, their spontaneous exploration would become known as the first probe by a national military. It marked the beginning of what came to be called the Descent.
They had come as prepared as one did in those early days, with handheld flashlights and a single coil of rope. Following a coal miner's footpath, they walked upright – safeties off – through neat tunnels trimmed with wood pillars and roof supports. In the third hour they came to a rupture in the walls. From the rock debris spilled onto the floor, it seemed someone had carved his way out from the rock.
Following a hunch, Branch led them into this secondary tunnel. Beyond all reckoning, the network went deeper. No miner had mined this. The passage was raw but ancient, a natural fissure winding down. Occasionally the way had been improved: narrow sections had been clawed wider, unstable ceilings had been buttressed with stacked rock. There was a Roman quality to some of the stonework, crude keystones in some of the arches. In other places the drip of mineral water had created limestone bars from top to bottom.
An hour deeper, the GIs began to find bones where body parts had been dragged in. Bits and pieces of cheap jewelry and cheaper Eastern European wristwatches lay on the trail. The grave robbers had been sloppy and hurried. The ghoulish litter reminded Branch of a kid's Halloween bag with a rip in it.
They went on, flashing their lights at side galleries, grumbling about the dangers. Branch told them to go back, but they stuck with him. In deeper tunnels they found still deeper tunnels. At the bottom of those, they found yet more tunnels.
They had no idea how deep it was before they quit descending. It felt like the belly of the whale.
They did not know the history of man's meanderings underground, the lore of his tentative exploration. They hadn't entered this Bosnian maw for love of caving. These were normal enough men in normal enough times, none obsessed with climbing the highest mountain or soloing an ocean. Not one saw himself as a Columbus or a Balboa or a Magellan or a Cook or a Galileo, discovering new lands, new pathways, a new planet. They didn't mean to go where they went. And yet they opened this hadal door. After two days in the strange winding corridor, Branch's platoon reached its limit. They grew afraid. For where the tunnels forked for the hundredth time and plunged still lower, they came upon a footprint. And it was not exactly human. Someone took a Polaroid photo and then they di-di maued it back to the surface.
The footprint in that GI's Polaroid photo entered the special state of paranoia
usually reserved for nuclear accidents and other military slips. It was designated a Black Op. The National Security Council convened. The next morning, NATO commanders met near Brussels. In top secrecy, the armed forces of ten countries poised to explore the rest of Branch's nightmare.
Branch stood before the council of generals. 'I don't know what they were,' he said, once more describing his night of the crash in Bosnia. 'But they were feeding on the dead, and they were not like us.'
The generals passed around the photo of that animal track. It showed a bare foot, wide and flat, with the big toe separate, like a thumb. 'Are those horns growing on your head, Major?' one asked.
'The doctors call them osteophytes.' Branch fingered his skull. He could have been the bastard child
