[Original Novella] The Resurrection War, Part 6 (the finale!)

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The displaced blood simply blasted out the back of the rifle’s stock, spraying uselessly against the wall behind the medic. Dripping down it and pooling at the floor, steaming, still warm. When at last the blood was exhausted and some amount of the black stuff sprayed out the back instead, the pump was shut off.

Then the same bayonet was plunged instead into the corpse’s heart. One needle positively charged, the other negatively, fed current by red and black cables from a set of cylindrical lead acid voltaic cells dangling from his belt. Loud crackling commenced, and as I looked on, the body spasmed violently. Even for some time after the crackling stopped.

The medic, shiny black goggles catching residual light from the still-lit red bulb on the map board, continued around the room. One by one, reviving the dead refugees. The ones not yet dead were exsanguinated anyway, allowed to perish, then revived after that. In a staggered fashion, the bodies he’d processed some minutes ago began sitting up.

So it went, gurney by gurney, each of the medics leaving behind them a trail of freshly risen corpses. For their part, some weeped. Others stood up and began to wander. Soon enough, one of the medics arrived at the gurney I was hiding under. From this distance I could clearly hear the whirr of the pump. The slurping, churning sound of blood being suctioned from the body. The raucous splatter of it against the cold concrete floor.

Then the loud crackling. The whole gurney shook, even as I held tightly to the frame, struggling to make no sound. It took what seemed like an eternity for the medics to finish their work and leave the chamber. Above me, I heard and felt a body stirring. Two pale legs swung over the side, feet flattening as they met the floor, then the gurney lurched somewhat as the corpse’s weight shifted from it.

It took some time to re-learn how to walk. Like a newborn deer. Dead brain sending signals down a dead spine, cold clammy limbs responding like so much puppetry. Stumbling along, movements growing more precise as the creature who’d once been a man adjusted to its new existence. Raised from the dead, recruited to fight. Converted to the new flesh.

Next through were the grave mites. Feeding on bodies deliberately left untreated for them, attendant handlers loading the excess remains onto their flattened carapaces and strapping them down for transport. Where to? The farms, perhaps. Or wherever the grave mites came from to begin with.

The one nearest me made such sickening noises as it feasted. Slurping, ripping and crunching its way through the midsection of some poor wasted soul. It was a meager consolation that he’d died hours earlier. Others were not so lucky, wailing in agony and flailing about in a feeble attempt to fight off the spindly-legged nightmare creatures which eagerly tore off bleeding chunks of their flesh.

It pained me to cower there doing nothing. But without a weapon, there simply wasn’t anything to be done. I’d only wind up adding myself to their feast. So I continued to wait and watch, my breathing now as shallow as I could make it. Sounds of distant screaming and gunfire echoing down the corridors gradually grew less and less frequent. Mankind’s final redoubt falling to pieces around me, given over at last to the dead.

Twice, the grave mites seemed to smell me. Came distressingly close to my fragile little shelter, sucking in the air around it in moist sounding huffs. Each time I held my breath and remained as still as I could until they lost interest. The last scrap of freedom available to me was to choose the manner of my death, and being eaten alive ranked pretty low.

If only I could get ahold of a rifle. I might then take a few with me, saving the last bullet for myself. I could’ve also beaten Dr. Fritz to the morphine, had I known then that it really would come to this. Worse than useless, at this late stage, to obsess over the what ifs. Just then, something new entered the room. I do mean new. After all these years I thought they could no longer surprise me. That I’d seen every possible expression of their sickness.

It stood roughly seven feet tall, black pulsating veins easily visible through its bone white skin. Bulging black compound eyes leaking traces of the oily fluid as if it were weeping. Hair slicked back, slim colorless lips pressed stoically together. Clad neck to feet in a full body garment which I am at a loss to fully describe.

The texture of the material somewhat resembled the decorative flourishes atop wrought iron fences. Or something like a black tangled mass of thorns. As I studied it, I realized the constituent tendrils were subtly moving. Sliding, wriggling, the garment itself some sort of unliving organism. I couldn’t see how it was possible to move about in such a covering without injury, but he did so effortlessly.

The air seemed to vibrate around him. Distorting the outlines of the room, pulsing, throbbing. His very presence disturbing the fabric of reality. The pale creature closely examined the partially eaten bodies on the gurneys across the room. Then surveyed the chamber as though searching for something in particular...until his eyes came to rest on me.

I held my breath. Silently praying it would again allow me to escape notice. That it was something, anything else on this side of the room which had caught his attention even as he headed directly for my hiding place. No. No, no, no. The possibilities were rapidly reduced to one as he grabbed the edge of the gurney and flipped it. In a flash, I was on my feet and making a break for the nearest corridor.

I heard a furious screech behind me. Vaguely familiar, mostly human but with a hint of something else. I cared not where I ran to, so long as I put as much distance as possible between myself and that cold, white thing in the chamber behind me. But in every sense, there was simply no place left to go. At every turn I encountered either the dead, or packs of grave mites. Not another living soul to be found.

Why, then, did I run? Like treading water after a flood has submerged all land. Burning through my last few minutes of life, driven purely by the animal instinct to survive. But the more I thought about it, the weaker that instinct became. “There’s nothing left”, I thought. Nothing left of humanity to save. Nothing of myself worth hanging onto. Even if I escaped, then what? A few decades, at best, of wandering a corrupted Earth. Only to eventually succumb anyway.

My sprint slowed to a jog. Which then slowed to a shuffle. Finally, I simply stood and waited to be taken. Better that I should go peacefully, if I could still choose. Ahead of me, I saw him approaching. Calm expression, casual gait. As if he knew from the start that I’d surrender. A medic accompanied him and, as the two reached me, prepared his rifle.

I cried softly, anxiety overflowing as my final moments arrived. Surreal, yet also hyper real, my mind racing on final approach to its end. Could things have gone differently? Might I have done this, or that? Useless navel gazing, the Captain called it.

Yet because we are wired for survival above all else, it is a herculean effort to wrestle your own mind into accepting the uncompromising reality that it will die. That for me it was not years, days or even minutes away, but already here. I tensed up and sucked air in through my teeth as the needles penetrated my thigh.

I’m down to just one thing. Only one door is still open to me. All roads lead to Rome. As I watched my own blood leaving my body through the coiled transparent tubing, despite the headset, the room grew dark. Increasingly light headed, I soon felt too weak to prop myself up and instead collapsed onto my back. The shiny black goggles of the medic were the last thing I remember seeing before I blacked out.

Silence. Darkness. I drifted through the abyss for some time before realizing I could still think. That I’d not been annihilated. Death, where is thy sting? It really wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. Hyped myself up for something which, in the end, was really rather anticlimactic. As if to soften my landing, soon I found myself back in the birthday dream.

The afterlife? Or the brain’s own act of mercy to itself as the body shuts down. I didn’t care. It was just what I needed right then. I found myself beside Mom, standing before her Sunbeam oven. Shiny chrome knobs, spotless cooktop, an appetizing scent wafting down from the pot perched over the burner.

Then, slowly, the pictured widened. I could see more and more of the room at once, discovering that there was nothing more to it than the stove and a bit of the wall and floor. I stood next to Mom on that meager patch of coherent reality, as everything around it was already given over to the writhing sludge. Tendrils grasping blindly at our ankles. Seeping down the wall, into the seams between the stove panels.

“No, please” I weakly protested. For all the good it had ever done me. “I’m not asking for a lot. Just let me keep this much. Just this much” It only continued spreading. Subsuming the last precious morsel, sparing absolutely nothing. “Don’t cry”, Mom admonished. “It was always going to turn out this way.” She looked down at me, eyes jet black, veins visible through translucent white skin. As the crawling mass finally consumed us, she ladled some of the contents of the pot into a bowl and offered it to me. I didn’t have to look to know what it was.

Darkness again enveloped me, but only briefly. A great glowing horizon rapidly approached. Splitting apart as it drew near, light and colors pouring through it. Blurry at first, but as I fully opened my eyes, details of the room around me quickly resolved themselves. White walls. White ceiling. White floor too, I assumed, if I could’ve seen it from the operating table.

Everything was so refreshingly clean. An irritatingly bright cluster of bulbs backlit the surgeon peering down at me through his safety glasses. Lower half of his face concealed by a porous surgical mask, the upper half covered by something like a hairnet. All around him stood nurses and various other assistants with relevant specialties. “You really had us worried, buddy. It was hectic for a while, that infected wound was among the worst I've ever worked on. But you pulled through.”

What was he on about? How had I escaped the bunker? The bugs. The medics, the giant. The entire war. All of it began to fade away. As the details of fever dreams tend to, soon after one awakens. I wept tears of relief. There was no fighting it. I’d actually found a way out. Against all odds, a way which never occurred to me throughout the ordeal. One of the nurses dabbed away my tears with a spare bit of gauze, but they just kept coming.

“I want to go home” I managed, though my voice was so feeble I had to repeat myself to be understood. “I bet you do”, the surgeon said. “but that shrapnel was lodged deep. You’ll need at least six weeks to heal up before I can release you. Then it’s back to the front lines. Orders are orders, and you’ve got a war to win.”

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^{The End.}