by Jacob Hammes
They stopped just shy of the huge pyramid-shaped silos that were so iconic with the logging companies of old. There in the trees, they would rest and eat as much as they could stomach before turning around and hiking back to their vehicles at the head of the trail. The place was nice, cool, and shaded. They had rested their butts in the same place quite a few times, laying back to watch the clouds pass across the clear blue skies.
The sound of wind slowly making its way through the tall trees relaxed them both. It felt cool as it passed over their sweaty skin. It had been a long walk. The sounds of nature was everything they could ask for.
“Nice day,” one man said to the other. He smiled through a thick beard as he looked up through the trees as one particularly large cloud passed across the sun. “Best day I’ve had so far for hiking.”
Three men and one woman exited the building behind them and jumped in their vehicle. They couldn’t see the hikers from their vantage in the deep dark trees, but the hikers could see them easily enough. Neither of them could remember a crew of older men and women coming up here. They must be the owners, or maybe land developers come to check the area out for future development.
The car started and quietly pulled down the road, leaving the men in quiet contemplation once more. They ate their sandwiches in silence and downed as much water as they could without leaving themselves empty for the walk back. Ten miles through relatively hilly terrain could make a man thirsty rather quickly.
Ten minutes passed as the two ate and talked quietly. Once done, they put their garbage deep inside their backpacks, pulled them high up their backs, and made to head back to their vehicles. In the long silence that signaled their hesitation at marching back so soon, a peculiar sound pierced the relative quiet of nature.
A woman, or severely injured animal, screamed shrilly. The hair on both of their necks stood on end as it trailed on and on for what seemed like eternity. Once it stopped, they looked at each other with confusion and worry.
“What the hell was that?” the man with the beard asked the clean-shaven gentleman. “It sounded like a woman, yeah?”
“Yes,” the other man responded in a deep voice. “I think it came from inside the silo.”
Another scream pierced the air, causing birds to take to flight from the high boughs of the trees above. Neither of them needed to be told what to do. Both men took off at a dead sprint toward the silos. The soft ground was littered with pine needles and fallen leaves that cushioned every footstep. They moved quickly and silently toward the old logging mills and the screams rushed out to meet them.
Whether it was by sheer force of will or an odd coincidence, both of them managed to get at least ten feet away from the silo before they started feeling suddenly and violently ill. They stopped, heads swirling as something made their vision change and blood rush. Where the skies had once been a beautiful blue, they now roiled with a bloody red. The clouds smirked down at them in evil faces and the trees howled with the terrible sounds of the dead.
The bearded man trudged forward, wondering what type of craziness had just infiltrated his rather grounded mind. He had always stayed away from drugs and took very good care of himself. Immediately he wondered if his friend had slipped him some sort of hallucinogenic drug.
The howling scream of a dying woman forced him through the mind-numbing terror that surrounded him now. He looked back to make sure his friend wasn’t feeling the same effects, hopeful that one of them would be capable of going on. He only realized that something was wrong when he saw that his friend had taken a knee.
“Derek,” he said. His voice was strangely muffled. “Derek, you okay?”
His wobbly feet carried him over uneven and undulating terrain to get back to his friend. Regardless of whether or not there was someone being tortured in that hellhole behind them, he chose to help his friend first and foremost. Though the ground seemed to want to throw him down and keep him there, and his eyes felt as if they were presenting him with torturous images that threatened to make him vomit, he trudged on.
In a few steps that left flames where his feet had fallen, he managed to get to his trembling friend. The backpack he once wore seemed to be made of flesh, not fabric. Regardless, he knew that something inside of him was causing these hallucinations. He knew none of what he was seeing was real.
“Derek,” he said again, reaching down and grabbing his friend’s shoulder firmly. “You seeing all this, too?”
The man slowly tilted what used to be his face up to meet his friend. Instead of the clean shaven skin he had once worn, there was nothing but rough meat. It seemed as if his friend had lost huge portions of his head. The holes had teeth, though, and seemed as if they were ready to masticate whatever they came in contact with.
Instead of shying away, he moved closer. His extremely grounded mind told him that this was all unreal. He would simply investigate what should be instead of what actually was.
“Dude,” he whispered. “What the hell is going on with you?”
His friend either couldn’t speak due to his grotesque wounds, or he wouldn’t. He could see his shaking shoulders heave up and down as his face contorted into what might have been a grimace. Though he really didn’t have eyes at the moment, it seemed as if the holes where his eyes used to be were squinting.
Derek, the man on the ground, was whispering.
“What?” his bearded companion said, leaning down toward his friend. “I can’t hear you, man. Speak up.”
He leaned down farther, so that his ear was near his friend’s mouth. At the moment when his face was just inches away from his friend, a piercing, white hot pain, shot through his abdomen.
The clean shaven man had not taken the visions so well. His experience was much worse. Twice he had wretched on the shaking blood-covered ground and the demons that had closed in on him from every angle were now touching him. When he had looked up into his friend’s face, he saw a maw that threatened to devour him.
Acting as any scared man would, Derek stabbed a hunting knife deep into the vision’s belly. Before the monster could attack him anymore, he turned and fled as quickly as he could. Flames and screams followed in his wake, but at least the demonic image couldn’t threaten him further. He knew he had hurt the thing.
It wasn’t until he got back into the woods he realized things had changed again. He didn’t care though. Derek would run and run through the woods without his friend, without his backpack which he had shed and without any thought of food or water until he got back to the car. There, he would call the police and have every single cop, priest, and exorcist that existed descend on the area.
Unfortunately, his friend would never live to see another day.
Chapter 11
Brenda had stepped away from the control room in the headquarters of the UOD just moments before the bullets started flying. She didn’t know anything about what had happened or what peril the team was in. Instead, she was very concerned about how large the cup of coffee she had just poured had turned out to be. It was nearly the early morning and she was tired. In fact, she had been so tired she hadn’t even bothered staying awake for most of the slow ride into the Nigerian jungle, as seen by U2 spy plane from far above.
Now, knowing that they were on the cusp of some sort of discovery or other she decided she should stay awake. The only way she was going to do that was by choking down ample amounts of tarry, black coffee. It was dense enough to keep a spoon standing straight up, she was sure.
I’m going to need to bleach my teeth after this crap, she thought to herself.
“Miss Vaughn?” a mousy woman said behind her. She nearly dropped the coffee, which made her curse out loud before recomposing herself. The nametag on the very short, extremely petite black woman said Sheila. Though her skin was the color of milk-chocolate, she had gentle features and straight hair. The nice clothing she wore told Brenda that she was most likely a senior analyst, or some other subset of more-skilled asset to the UOD.
“That’s me,” Brenda said through her sleepiness. “What’s the big idea?”
“I was hoping to find you here,” Sheila smiled. “I came across some pretty important information I wanted you to look at before I presented it to the rest of the Division higher-ups.”
“Who exactly are you?” Brenda asked, wondering why the woman was trying to find her instead of her own supervisor.
“My name is Sheila Davis; I’m one of the senior medical examiners here.”
“Sounds like a tough job,” Brenda said between yawns. “Do you ever hear from Tiffany Flipske?”
Sheila smiled. Brenda was referring to the damaged woman and sole survivor of the last case their department had worked to solve. Her brother had tied her naked to the floor of a cave in preparation to sacrifice her and bring an end to humanity. He had already killed her entire family and sent her through hell and back before then. She had been given a spot as a senior surgeon in the extremely secretive agency.
“Sometimes I do,” Sheila admitted. “But that’s not what I’ve come to talk to you about. I was present during the autopsies done on the bodies from that ship.”
“So we have you thank for such gruesome pictures?” Brenda chided. “Don’t look too serious, I was only joking. We heard there were some very distinct abnormalities in one of the victims. Did you ever find out any more information on what those abnormalities might be?”
Sheila’s smile widened and an unnatural light filled her dark brown eyes.
“That’s why I’ve come to find you. I think I may have stumbled upon something that could help you in your case to find the girl and figure out what that box is.”
“Both issues resolved at the same time?” Brenda was genuinely intrigued. “Do tell.”
The two grabbed a table together in the break room and Shelia started spreading files out before her. Some seemed old while others had just recently been filled with page after page of technical and medical data.
“Well,” Sheila started, “it begins with World War II and a document called the Cerberus Project. It’s from a British source and it simply claims that men and women were dying too rapidly during the war. The project, operating under the guise of saving thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives, was given the thumbs up in late October of 1941.
“What followed was an exciting new look into the prospects of medicine in their time. They used calculations to factor in the worst areas in the war and moved the entire project to a discreet location that was tallying up an enormous amount of casualties.”
“Shouldn’t have been too hard for a war that killed over 70 million people,” Brenda said between sips of coffee. “When does this get interesting?”
“Well,” Sheila continued, unabashed. “Do you know much about Greek and Roman mythology?”
“I guess,” Brenda said. “Cerberus was a three-headed dog, right?”
“That’s right.” Sheila had fire in her eyes. “Cerberus was the three-headed dog that guarded the River Styx. He was charged with never letting a soul cross the river back into the realm of the living.”
Brenda was starting to feel the importance of the project’s name.
“Doctors were trying to bring the dead back to life?” Brenda asked.
“Not exactly,” Sheila went on. “The truth is far more gruesome than that. The plan that doctors had devised included first killing patients—”
“Killing patients?” Brenda asked incredulously.
“They theorized that since the human body produces an extremely small amount of electricity, that electricity must be somehow correlated to the soul. What they hoped is that they could simply store the life-force of a human being in giant capacitors. This way, the corpse would be dead while doctors worked to stop bleeding or reattach limbs while the life-force of the person remained intact within the capacitor.”
“Sounds like a longshot to me,” Brenda joked. “So how did they plan on charging the capacitors?”
“By passing huge amounts of electricity through the dying soldier. While they were electrocuted on one side, a battery collected the current and stored it on the other.”
Brenda remained silent. The mere thought of coming in off the battlefield only to have your own people kill you via electrocution was enough to make her feel something other than good. She wondered immediately how many people had had to endure such treatment.
“No more than a couple dozen,” Sheila answered the unspoken question. “They figured out pretty quick how stupid they had been and scrapped the entire mission. The paperwork was kept intact, however, which made for a pretty interesting read.”
“Go on,” Brenda was very much involved in the story now.
“Well, those present often referred to some of the components as ‘parts of the crazy machine’. It was used so much that they put the nickname in the paperwork along with a description of why. You see, one of the machines that were supposed to be focusing the ‘life-force’ of the individual ended up emitting high amounts of energy. The energy coming out of this thing was so intense it gave many people hallucinations which lasted only as long as the machine was turned on.”
“Sounds a little too familiar to be a coincidence,” Brenda said, slurping down another large slug of coffee. “Any documentation on where the machines might have ended up?”
“This is where it gets interesting,” Sheila said. “The machine itself is comprised of a few different components—the crystal inside only being one of many. Apparently it’s already common knowledge that the crystals come from a failed diamond mine in Nigeria. What you may not know is that the patent to the machine was sold to a former colleague of Mr. Lambert Frederickson. He acquired the rights back in the fifties. Nothing ever came of it and this is the first recurrence we’ve seen of any machines that even resemble the ones used in World War II, but it just seems a little odd.”
“Does the former colleague also hold stock in the diamond mine?”
“No,” Sheila said flatly. “In fact, he died in nineteen seventy-three. The cause of death was never quite figured out, but there is yet another coincidence we can’t pass up.”
Brenda was starting to bite the inside of her lip. There was too much information for her to guzzle down at once and she felt as if she needed a pen to keep her thoughts in order. Whatever the situation, she was getting information that would have to be passed onto Gregory and the rest of the team. It might even be beneficial to her colleagues in Nigeria at this very moment.
“Spill it.” Brenda wanted to forge ahead. “What was it?”
“The man, Roscoe Billings, died from an intense fever at the ripe old age of fifty-one. He had been seeing doctor after doctor for years about a fever he couldn’t control that just kept coming back. The tests done on him never indicated he was anything but healthy. In fact, the doctors just blamed the entire ordeal on his immune system. Apparently Roscoe got sick a lot, and had a hardly noticeable temperature abnormality.
“When he died, the doctors did an autopsy on Roscoe. What they found was a body that had been mistreated by what they figured might be alcohol for years. Wrinkled, diseased-looking organs were all that they found.”
Brenda froze. The implication had finally hit her. The similarities between the man they had pulled off the ship and this man were too obvious. She would have never seen the symptoms as part of a larger illness without Sheila. Now, she had too much information to syphon through in the short time that she had to present it to Gregory.
“You’re going to have to come let my boss know all of this,” Brenda said flatly. “He’ll want to know immediately.”
“So you don’t think this is some crazy coincidence?” Sheila looked genuinely relieved. “I wanted to ask you because you used to be an analyst and you work so closely with the field agents. I would hate to present something that Mr. Scott might find irrational.”
“You may have solved a rather large part of this puzzle,” Brenda said, patting Sheila on the arm. “Have you been able to figu
re out anything more about why these organs look so diseased, yet function properly?”
“No.” A look of disappointment passed over Sheila’s face. “It’s not like anything we’ve seen before. They aren’t really diseased in any sense of the word. The discoloration looks as if they may have some sort of chemical burns, or like they’ve been cooked quite honestly. It doesn’t stem from any underlying illness, though, nor does it come from excessive alcohol intake or any other drugs that we can see.”
“Maybe it’s something new?” Brenda prodded. “I’ve seen reports lately of a new drug circulating the world that’s capable of burning entire hunks of flesh off if done too much.”
“We did an analysis on blood, stool, urine, and the flesh itself. There are no foreign chemical agents present. That also wouldn’t account for the man who died in the seventies. If there were enough drugs inside these people to cause this kind of damage in the intestines, you’d best believe we would be able to trace them down.”
Brenda sucked her teeth. She knew there had to be some underlying cause that would damage tissue inside the human body, but had no idea where to start. Perhaps it was because of the high amount of energy pouring off of the machine, or maybe even because of some occult practice the group might be delving into. Regardless of what she thought, she needed to get the information to her boss as quickly as possible.
She sighed heavily and sucked down another big sip of coffee. She wouldn’t be finding any sleep during the day and quite possibly the following night. It meant that she would be drinking huge amounts of coffee to keep her awake for what could prove to be days, not hours. She knew then why the military had experimented with methamphetamine.
Gregory can do it, she thought to herself. If that old oaf can, then so can I.
The sudden sound of running footsteps broke her out of her thoughts. An analyst who had been helping Phillip and Brenda set up the communications for the drone and U2 spy plane feeds came running around the corner. As he did, he slipped and slammed hard onto the ground, soda can flying from his flailing arms. His white shirt and yellow tie were immediately covered in the dark liquid, yet he didn’t seem to mind.