by Jeff Long
The interviewer shifts uncomfortably. “God?”
“Of course. This is a test. We are in a war. There will be only one winner.”
“You seem so certain.” The interviewer tries to hide it, but she is as frightened and unsure as the rest of us. “How can you be so certain?”
The light on Rebecca’s face brightens one degree. It is like watching her spirit show itself. She leans forward to touch the interviewer. This woman who has lost her entire world in a single night reaches out to comfort a stranger who has lost nothing but her courage.
“Believe me,” she says. “Don’t be afraid. We are God’s people.”
“So we will win?”
“I don’t know about that. But one thing I do know is that the children will return to us. They will.”
FOX NEWS
The Rob O’Ryan True News Hour
O’Ryan: “It was supposed to be over, General Lancing. The plague sterilized the Interior passages. That’s what we thought. We were told Haddie had gone the way of the carrier pigeon. Dead. Extinct. Following the subterranean plague ten years ago, the U.S. government gave our citizens a green light. Over 1.3 million American pioneers are now engaged in developing the Interior, everywhere from the Atlantic Recesses to the Pacific Bowl. We thought the inlands were safe. Not so. Now we learn these things were alive and well all along. How do you explain this?”
General: “It may be that a group of them survived the plague in some isolated branch of the tunnel system. It may be that individuals were residing on the surface at the time of the plague, and that they are just now organizing.”
O’Ryan: “Sleeper cells, is that what you’re saying? That these things infiltrated our towns and communities a long time ago and have just been waiting?”
General: “We don’t know yet. But I will say this. Americans have gotten complacent over the last ten years. The plague gave people a false sense of security.”
O’Ryan: “We can’t ever let our guard down, is that what you’re saying?”
General: “That is the soldier’s creed, Robert. Vigilance.”
O’Ryan: “What now, sir? Hot pursuit? Special ops? Military occupation?”
General: “It’s common knowledge that the previous administration signed off on the United Nations Subplanetary Treaty three years ago. Now the implications are finally becoming clear.”
O’Ryan: “Don’t blame me, General. I said at the time that the treaty was a mistake. But people see what they want to see. The treaty was sold to us as the blueprint for a new utopia. Peace forever. But the devil’s always in the details. It may sound grand and noble to forbid all nations from annexing or militarizing the subocean territories. But now we find ourselves chained—shackled hand and foot, us, the American giant—by a world body that has always been hostile to our interests.”
General: “My hands are tied, that much I know.”
O’Ryan: “Outrageous. Really. This is crazy, General. The United States of America suffers a bloodbath on her own soil. Thousands of her children are kidnapped from their homes. And we have to sit on the sidelines begging for permission to defend ourselves?”
General: “The treaty, Robert.”
O’Ryan: “This is giving me a stomachache, General. All right, enough of that for now. Let me introduce my next guest, Professor Alexandra Von Schade, an expert in hadal cultures and civilization. She joins us from our studio in San Francisco, where she is the director of the Institute of Human Studies. Welcome aboard.”
Von Schade: “Thank you.”
O’Ryan: “So they are alive after all, Dr. Von Schade. As someone who studies what we thought was a dead race, you must be awfully excited.”
Von Schade: “Excited? A terrible tragedy occurred last night.”
O’Ryan: “Committed by your hadals.”
Von Schade: “They don’t belong to me, Mr. O’Ryan. Until last night we had no idea that any had survived.”
O’Ryan: “It’s no secret that you are an advocate for them.”
Von Schade: “I’m a student of their remains, linguistic, archeological, and cultural.”
O’Ryan: “You’re an authority on these things. They held you captive for a time. Can you tell us what lies in store for the missing children?”
Von Schade: “I can only guess. The initial phase will be shock. The violence of capture, the forced march through tunnels, the abrupt shift to permanent night, the change in diet, the homesickness, all these and other factors will stress their systems. In the first days and weeks, they face tremendous challenges.”
O’Ryan: “Challenges? You make it sound like an Outward Bound course.”
Von Schade: “The children will be given every advantage to survive. They will receive the best food and care their captors can offer. If there is any danger along the way, the children will be guided around it. You have to remember, the hadals value our children.”
O’Ryan: “Especially the females, isn’t that right? The breeders.”
Von Schade: “For some reason it became difficult for Homo hadalis to reproduce among themselves. They had learned to reach across the species border, to create hybrids as a way of surviving. They had been doing it for so long, it became a cultural instinct.”
O’Ryan: “A cultural instinct? Again, you make it sound so neat and painless and reasonable, Professor.”
Von Schade: “Reasonable, yes. Not painless. Not neat. Not for the captives. Not for their families.”
O’Ryan: “Is that what’s going on then? Are they trying to repopulate their decimated ranks?”
Von Schade: “I don’t know. It’s possible.”
O’Ryan: “Then why not take children from other countries? Why America alone?”
Von Schade: “That puzzles me, too. It has the appearance of a political act. An act of terrorism.”
O’Ryan: “But these are apes. Or demons.”
Von Schade: “In hindsight, we never should have gone down there. Once we discovered hell was a real place, an inhabited place, we should have roped it off and taken one giant step back and thought things through before attempting contact. Instead we rushed in. We destroyed their habitat. We wiped them out with some sort of biological weapon…”
O’Ryan: “You persist in your conspiracy theory. There is no evidence to suggest the plague was anything but natural.”
Von Schade: “I’ve seen the cylinders.”
O’Ryan: “Which have been proved fakes.”
Von Schade: “We upset a delicate balance. That is my point. Until then, we were in a sort of truce with them. Our monsters largely stayed down there. Except for the occasional literary hero, the Oedipus or Aeneas or Dante, we largely stayed up here. Then, suddenly, the hadal tribes had nowhere left to go. It may be they’re trying to restore the earlier balance, us up here, them down there.”
O’Ryan: “By going on a bloody rampage across America?”
Von Schade: “We exterminated them, including their children. We wiped out the future of an entire people. Here’s what it feels like.”
O’Ryan: “An eye for an eye then? You’re saying America had it coming?”
Von Schade: “Of course not.”
O’Ryan: “But what goes around comes around?”
Von Schade: “There are always consequences to one’s actions.”
O’Ryan: “But again, why America? Why not China or France or the Arab Emirates?”
Von Schade: “It may be they figured out that America was responsible for the genocide and this is payback. Basically, I think they just want to be left alone.”
The screen splits, showing General Lancing, to O’Ryan’s side. He is a picture of rage. The muscles are flexing in his head. He can barely restrain himself.
O’Ryan: “You claim that the hadals civilized mankind, Ms. Von Schade. That they planted in us the notion of pyramids, agriculture, and poetry, again your words. That without them, we would still be apes in the marshes.”
Von Schade: “The facts a
re increasingly clear. We were mentored. We inherited civilization.”
O’Ryan: “Civilization? We’re talking about creatures that ate us. They used us as slaves and livestock. They stole our children. And yet you continue to humanize them.”
Von Schade: “They humanized us. That is my point.”
O’Ryan: “Let’s look at some footage now from one of last night’s kill sites. Please help walk us through the humanity of these things. A word of warning to all you parents out there, the following is not for younger eyes.”
The screen fills with yet another image of last night’s havoc. “Hell House,” reads a roadside billboard, “Redemption Through Terror.” The “house” is in fact an old circus tent pitched against a hillside. Portions have collapsed at the rear, revealing a mine entrance with a rusted metal door dangling by one hinge.
O’Ryan: “We obtained this from one of our correspondents in Colorado Springs. This was a sort of haunted house aimed at high school teens. Unfortunately it was placed next to an abandoned gold mine.”
The scene shifts from outside to inside. The Colorado sunshine, so cheery in the early part, filters through blood-splashed canvas walls. Pieces of scaremongering exhibits litter the floor: a Bible, a plastic baby doll painted red, a car body gently rocking in midair.
O’Ryan: “Over the course of two terrible hours, twenty-three young people were kidnapped and taken down the mine shaft. But not before the raiding party killed all the adults and anyone else who resisted.”
The first of the bodies appears on camera, tagged but not yet bagged or moved. The dead man seems astonished to find himself in this state. Naked as a hog, flat on his back, his body has been mutilated. Each thigh bears an identical wound, long and deep, exposing the red muscle. The camera returns to his face. His eyes are gone, replaced with pebbles. That explains the astonished look.
O’Ryan: “The bodies were butchered. Some were scalped and castrated. Five were decapitated. Meat was taken.”
Most of the dead are men, thighs slashed open, pebbles for eyes. Several are buff younger hunks, athletes obviously. These are the ones who were beheaded and castrated. Their chest cavities yawn ajar, with ribs snapped. The camera moves on.
Near the back of the tent, we reach a woman. After killing her, they propped her sitting upright. She was a large woman. Her obesity is somehow more pornographic than her nakedness. She sits there in a great mound of her own flesh. The camera pauses at her enormous breasts. Each breast has been embellished with a vermilion stripe running around and around in a barbershop swirl to the nipple.
They did not cut her thighs. Instead, her plump white legs sprawl open, and a caramel apple, a Halloween fruit, rests on the ground in between. To her left and right sit the missing heads, five of them. With pebbles for eyes, they look ferocious, like bloody lapdogs. Some kind of meat spills from each of her hands.
O’Ryan: “As you can see, they vandalized this woman, arranging her like a mannequin or plaything.”
The video ends. Cut to O’Ryan sitting at a table with the general.
O’Ryan: “And yet, Professor, you continue to call these things human.”
Von Schade: “Because that’s what they are. They are offspring of Homo erectus. Two different branches on the same family tree, or bush. They were far more advanced than what we narrowly define as human today. It’s a mistake to call them monkeys or demons. In fact, at his peak, Homo erectus had a larger cranial cavity than modern Homo sapiens. Most likely it was erectus who discovered fire, and then went on to build empires predating ours by tens of thousands of years.”
O’Ryan: “I must be missing something then. You saw evidence of human behavior in the footage we just showed?”
General Lancing: “Wild animals. Devils.”
Von Schade: “They took time and put themselves at risk to prepare the bodies we just saw. They could simply and more safely have fled with their prisoners. Instead they took the time to honor the dead.”
O’Ryan: “Slashed them. Ripped them open. Tore out their hearts. Cut off their heads. How is that honoring them?”
Von Schade: “Take the wounds in their thighs. Those are a form of signature. They designate the particular clan or tribe a warrior comes from. A different clan would have cut the biceps or abdomen. They were marking their enemy for others to know. But the wounds serve another purpose, too. They open the body to rebirth.”
O’Ryan: “Rebirth? That’s a bit unorthodox. Maybe you can explain that to those of us who don’t live in San Francisco, Professor.”
Von Schade: “Through these wounds, the spirit is able to escape and continue its journey and be reborn. That’s what they believe. Also the wounds allow the body to start its own journey. By opening the closed flesh, the wounds allow in the insects and animals who will help render these people back to the sacred earth.”
O’Ryan: “What about the eyes? Scooped out, all of them. You have an explanation for that?”
Von Schade: “The eyes were replaced with stones to give them eternal sight. The hearts were removed to be eaten. They were taken from the bravest fighters so that their courage can be recycled.”
O’Ryan: “And that poor woman?”
Von Schade: “They probably mistook her for a minor deity. A fertility goddess. To them, the whole procession of people through the haunted house would have appeared to be a form of adoration. My guess is, they tried to take her along. When she refused, they killed her.”
O’Ryan: “And then mutilated her.”
Von Schade: “I didn’t see a single mark on her.”
O’Ryan: “Come on. They violated her body. They abused her flesh. Who knows what else?”
Von Schade: “Her body awed them. They would have worshipped her, if she’d gone with them.”
O’Ryan: “Give me video.” (The dead woman appears on screen again.) “This is worship? They drew obscenities on her. They turned her into a mockery.”
Von Schade: “They turned her into a goddess. Look at her, the large breasts, the large stomach, the huge hips and rump. Anthropologists call her condition ‘steatopygia.’ Well into the twentieth century, tribes in Africa prized a woman like this. We’ve all seen artifacts from the Stone Age. She’s the shape of their Venus. Abundance and fertility and nourishment, all in one package. This woman would have had a high status among them.”
O’Ryan: “We’re talking about slaughter, kidnapping, and a lifetime of rape.”
Von Schade: “From our perspective, yes.”
O’Ryan: “So now these creatures have a perspective?”
Von Schade: “For them this is all about survival. A competition for resources, if you will. They don’t distinguish between us and them. From their perspective, we’re all in this together, part of one great circle.”
General: “For God’s sake, woman, whose side are you on?”
Von Schade: “But they don’t think in terms of sides, General. You need to understand that. They’re not fiends punishing us for our sins. Although they do see us as very sinful, very unclean.”
General: “Now it’s our fault?”
Von Schade: “I didn’t say that. I’m simply pointing out that they don’t hate us any more than a predator hates its prey.”
General: “So you admit that they’re animals.”
Von Schade: “Aren’t we all?”
General: “You know what I mean.”
Von Schade: “They have committed terrible atrocities. But over the eons so have we. The story fragments that we’ve been able to translate speak of us—the surface people—as the devils and beasts and barbarians. At least they never attempted to exterminate us. They culled the herd, as Mr. O’Ryan labeled us. But they never tried to kill us off wholesale. It’s we who are guilty of genocide. The so-called plague was a man-made mass murder. It was planted by an American agent, or agents, on an American expedition.”
General: “That’s Chinese propaganda, and you know it. Congress investigated. They issued their finding
s. The plague was a natural disaster.”
Von Schade: “Actually, that’s American propaganda. American colonists were evacuated just before the plague was released. It was delivered in capsules with U.S. military markings. The capsules weren’t meant to be found, of course. But every now and then a settler or miner still comes across them. We have several in our archives.”
General: “What is it with you people?”
Von Schade: “We people?”
General: “We know who you are.”
Von Schade: “Domestic surveillance is a slippery slope, General, if that’s what you’re talking about.”
General: “There aren’t many of you, thank God. Though I wonder why there are any of you. It’s a testament to the First Amendment and the good graces of the American people that your institute is still standing.”
Von Schade: “Sir, I’m…I don’t know what to say. I’m sure you’re not advocating violence against people who disagree with you. We all need to be careful with our words, especially now and in public. We are suffering a national crisis. These are dangerous times.”
General: “These are times for patriots, madam, not excuses for the enemy.”
Von Schade: “General…”
O’Ryan: “You’re a mother, Professor Von Schade, am I right?”
Von Schade: “I was.”
O’Ryan: “Was?”
Von Schade: “She died.”
O’Ryan: “I’m sorry.”
Von Schade: “It was years ago. A flu brought up from below.”
O’Ryan: “As a mother, doesn’t this tear at you? How would you feel if something had happened in your home last night?”
Von Schade: “The same way you would feel, I’m sure.”
O’Ryan: “Desperate? Frantic? Ready to die?”
Von Schade: “Yes.”
O’Ryan: “And yet you defend these hadal animals.”
Von Schade: “The hadals need us, that was my point. And once upon a time we needed them. They were our Adam and Eve, leading us from the wilderness into civilization. Fear is our greatest enemy right now. But peace is still possible.”