skin. Then she started to speak, the words guttural and horse and almost indecipherable.
“That’s Arabic,” Waterman said.
“Is she from the Middle East?” someone else said.
“No,” Simmons said, clearing his throat. “This woman was an American soldier from Alabama. She had never been to the Middle East. At the time of her death she had no language proficiency other than that of her native tongue. The wound in her head was caused by a training explosion. It was instantly fatal.”
Waterman just shook his head. “Why is she speaking Arabic? How can she be speaking Arabic?”
“And fluently by the sound of it,” Pearle pointed out. “With a localized accent that you hear amongst Sunni populations in Beirut…if I’m not mistaken.”
“You’re not,” Simmons said. “We don’t know how she’s able to speak the language. But many of the…newly risen, have faculties they did not possess in life.”
The woman kept speaking, laughing now and then. If anything, she reminded Pearle of that little girl in the movie that puked up the green stuff.
Waterman, a West Point graduate who had studied Middle Eastern languages, said, “That’s not Arabic now… it’s…it sounds like a mishmash of Aramaic and Biblical Hebrew. If you slow it down a bit, I might be able to translate some of it…”
But Simmons looked uneasy at that. It was obvious he did not want Waterman translating it. And all there got the feeling that it had already been translated and Simmons didn’t care much for what she was saying. To prove this, he shot through the video to the next snippet.
This stream seemed to be taken outside.
Simmons said it was taken a few days after the explosion at Fort Providence. It showed a team in white protective suits walking down empty lanes in the rain or examining the carcasses of dead animals in the grass. They took samples and drew fluids. The same with the cadavers of men and women. They seemed to be dead. Then the team stood over the corpse of what might have been a man, but so badly damaged and decayed that he had no limbs, just a trunk rolling in the grass, his chest ripped open, ribs on display. The skin of his face was sheared right down to the muscle beneath. But his eyes were shocklingly alive and aware. And the most unpleasant part of that was that he was speaking in a very calm, though flat and dead voice:
“…lays there and waits, that’s how I do it. Lays there and waits until my time comes and then I open my eyes and have my bit of fun. I likes the little boys best, don’t I? Loves to get my hands on them, slits them open and plays with them slimy, coiling things that slip out. Likes to watch ‘em die like that. What good fun that is. Watch ‘em die and pulls on my cock the whole while. Naughty by name and naughty by nature, that’s what old Jim is. You there…Doctor Holmes? You haves a fat little boy at home, don’t you? Sweet bit, I’d get my teethes on him, cut his throat while I lays on top of him. Little David, lovely little David…does he likes them clowns? There’s a funny little clown coming to town, what a silly lark that one is…”
Simmons killed the audio then while that corpse continued to speak. Not agitated or violent, just chatting away as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Everyone was a little shaken by what they saw and more particularly by what they heard.
“Who the hell was that?” Waterman said. “Why was he saying those things? He had a British accent.”
Simmons licked his lips again. “That was the remains of Private Charles Ardansky from Youngstown, Ohio. He was not a British natural. Nor had he ever been out of this country. He died in the explosion…and then, woke up in that state, speaking that way. He was nineteen years old.”
“But that was the voice of a middle-aged British man,” Waterman said, still unable to wrap his brain around any of it. “That was no nineteen-year old boy from Ohio. And Holmes? He was one of the men in those suits? How could Ardansky know about his son?”
Simmon said, “The newly-risen know things they did not know in life. They often speak in voices other than their own.”
“But that’s…that’s like demonic poss?”
“Hold your tongue, Bob,” Pearle warned him. “It’s not our job to figure the hows and whys. So zip it up, by God.”
Even when the video was in good condition, it was sometimes scratchy-looking like an old movie. Next they saw a couple men dressed in desert camouflage fatigues that were very dirty and burned-looking. They were standing in the middle of the road outside a nondescript building in the rain. Simmons said they were both members of an Army Ranger battalion that had been KIA in Afghanistan.
And Pearle didn’t say it, but he was thinking, Sure, killed over in that hellhole serving God and country, so you boys shipped their bodies home and brought them back to life at Providence. He did not know the precise mechanism of resurrection and Simmons was avoiding the subject just as he was avoiding discussing the research program that had brought all this into being. But that was the Army. Simmons probably didn’t even know himself.
The two dead men were in pretty rough shape. The one on the left was very bloated and white and there were clearly maggots nesting in his face. The one on the right was missing his left arm…though when the camera zoomed, Pearle saw that was not the case at all. Something was growing from the stump like a vestigial limb, but thin and rawboned, fingers snaking around at the end of a spadelike hand. Not five of them, but seven.
The team moved in. They carried tanks on their backs connected to hoses in their hands. They sprayed the two dead men down with a yellowish mist and the effects were immediate: they melted. There was no other word for it. They began to steam and sizzle and went down. By the time they hit the ground, most of their flesh had slid right off the bones beneath like liquid plastic. They continued to flop about for a time, but soon enough they stopped moving.
“What was that stuff?” Waterman asked. “What was that? Acid?”
“An experimental toxin,” was all Simmons would say.
Waterman opened his mouth to ask more questions, but Pearle gave him a look and he shut up. Pearle figured he was going to have to have a talk with his adjutant. Man had trouble keeping his mouth shut. Wouldn’t bode well for his career in this man’s army. Pearle’s other men weren’t saying a thing. Seemed that you couldn’t make them speak. What they were seeing had permanently sealed their lips.
“Appeared that that trooper had seven fingers,” Pearle said.
“Yes, mutations are another problem,” Simmons said. “As you’ll soon see.”
The video cut away again and now the cameraman was descending down a flight of stone steps in what appeared to be a cellar. Cardboard boxes feathered with mildew, dusty beams, drooping cobwebs. A few members of the white-suited containment team were examining something in the corner…something incredible. It looked like a dog, a swollen hairless dog. Its jaws were wide, teeth barred. The canine anatomy was unmistakable…but it wasn’t a dog. Not anymore. It didn’t seem to have any limbs. Long, glistening white threads grew out of its hide. Some hung slack and others were taut, growing up out of the dog’s hide in nets where they were attached to the walls like spiderwebs.
It was bad. Plenty bad.
But what was worse was that the dog was not dead.
As the team members began poking it with metal probes, it began to move with a flabby motion, those white threads coiling and snapping like tentacles. They thrashed in the air like they were looking for something to grab. The team members gave them a wide berth. The dog’s body was just a fleshy, colorless protoplasmic mass that roiled and squirmed. Its head moved on its neck, jaws opening and closing, a tongue like a hollow tube slapping around. It was making a noise…a low, bestial screeching sound.
A few of Pearle’s men made noises like they wanted to be sick.
“It’s bad the first time you see these things,” Simmons said, the understatement of the year.
Back on the screen, the dog was sick or dying, barely moving now and Simmons explained that they’d shot it full of poison. It lay there, eyes unfocused, tongue lolling from its mouth. Its flesh was quilted with protrusions and rolls of fat. The threads coming out of its hide were hanging from it like dead worms. The team had rolled the beast over and were examining its underside. What at first looked to be a double row of teats were not teats at all…but eyes. There were no less than ten eyes that were moist and yellow staring up at the camera. It was like something from a sideshow this side of hell. And then one of those eyes blinked and Waterman nearly fell out of his seat.
“What the fuck is this?” he said, standing up now. “What the hell’s going on here?”
“It’s as Major Simmons said,” Pearle explained. “A mutation. Now sit down. I will not repeat myself and, Bob,
