Resurrection House

by James Chambers

  “Just a second,” Fordren said. He approached the lab door and pulled a ring of keys from his pocket.

  Charlie put a hand on the scientist’s wrist and stopped him. “Next door first,” he said.

  That’s where they found the source of the ripe stench. Charlie probed the surgery with his light, unflinching at the carnage it exposed. Fordren started to scream, a sound he choked down as he gagged and fought against vomiting. Brenner peered in and swore under his breath. There were five bodies laid out on the floor, men and women, all dismembered to various degrees, clothing shredded, their torsos torn open, and their innards drawn out and strewn together in a red and purple slick across the tile. Charlie raised his light and surveyed the far corners of the room.

  “How many were there on your team altogether, Doctor?” he asked.

  “There were—,” Fordren coughed, almost threw up again, “—there were twelve of us.”

  “Well, including you, ten of them are now accounted for,” Charlie said, using his flashlight to highlight two more gutted bodies and a woman’s legs stacked against the opposite wall.

  There was no sign of anyone living. Two stainless steel operating tables gleamed in the flashlight beam, and on a countertop the razor edges and elegant curves of surgical equipment glinted. Tools to cure disease, tools to change a man into something more, thought Charlie. Tools to kill as efficiently as heal. He crossed the surgery to a bank of supply closets, skimmed the contents through the glass doors, and located the sedatives Doctor Fordren had named. He scooped up the ampoules and half a dozen plastic-sealed hypodermics, then picked a path back to the door and handed the drugs to Fordren, who slid them into his pockets.

  “Time to check the lab,” said Brenner.

  Fordren, pale and sweating, opened his mouth to object. Charlie saw the terror churning in the man’s eyes. He wanted to run, and Charlie couldn’t blame him. He massaged the leaden ball of his own fear, easing it deep into the recesses of his mind, keeping it only close enough to surface level to fuel his survival instinct. He left it to Brenner to coax the scientist along. The general did so using his command voice and flashing Fordren the stare that had compelled other men in other times and places to leap into the face of death at his order. It proved no less effective on the scientist. Fordren popped the key into the keyhole and unlocked the laboratory.

  Inside a lone man sat hunched over a computer keyboard, his neck craned upright so he could stare at a bank of monitors. His lips trembled and he muttered a continuous string of nonsense syllables. The red and orange streaks of the tie-dyed T-shirt he wore beneath his lab coat blended into a loud blur in the glow of the console. He looked up as the men entered.

  “Cranston?” said Fordren.

  “Something’s wrong with him,” Charlie said.

  “Look at his eyes. He’s terrified,” said Brenner. “I’ve seen others like him. Cracked under the stress. Probably locked himself in here when the killing started, and then he lost it.”

  “Cranston,” Fordren said. “Are you all right?”

  “Forget it,” said Brenner. “Three months in a psych hospital, a suitcase full of pills, and then you might get an answer out of him.”

  “He’s a brilliant cybernetics technician,” Fordren said. “Very high strung, though.”

  Cranston’s fingers rattled over the keyboard, tapping without pause, typing and retyping the same word over and over again. It scrolled up the blue and white face of the desktop monitor, a flickering line of letters rising beyond the edge of the glass and into infinity, a code waiting to be cracked: “Kau-ahu.”

  “What’s that mean?” said Brenner.

  “Rings a bell, but I can’t place it,” Fordren said.

  “What’s all that on the other displays?”

  Fordren eyed the array of screens. “It’s…the anomaly, and—oh, my God! It’s huge. It’s got to be a mile across now. This is off the charts. And it’s right off shore.”

  “What is it?” Brenner said. “Submarines? Mines?”

  Fordren scowled. “No. You can tell by the EM-signature it’s a living organism. Or maybe it’s a vast school of huge living organisms. Cranston, how did you stop the sensors overloading? Cranston?”

  Fordren gripped Cranston by the shoulders and spun him around in his chair. The technician yelped and slapped Fordren’s hands away. He twisted back to his work, picking up his pace at the keyboard. His body bobbed like a scarecrow in the wind. The clacking plastic sounded like a whipping rain.

  “Guess he’s not in the mood for show and tell,” Charlie said. “That’s all being recorded, right?”

  “Yes,” said Fordren.

  “Then it’ll be here when we get back from checking the tube.”

  Now Brenner led them. He spun the heavy wheel mounted at the center of the airlock door until it clanged, and then he pulled it open into the hallway. The three men stepped into the compact chamber and sealed it shut behind them. A handprint streaked in blood marked one wall, a glossy omen almost black in the pale of their flashlights.

  “It’s a safe bet they at least came this way,” Charlie said, and then noticing Fordren shiver, changed the subject. “Do we have to wait for the pressure to equalize?”

  “No,” Fordren replied. “We’re barely a hundred feet deep. The airlock was only designed to keep water out of the facility.”

  “All right, then.” Brenner opened the door to the tube. “Here goes.”

  Amber illumination spilled from miniature emergency lights mounted along the length of the glass and steel cylinder. Brenner and Charlie inched forward into it, blinking as their eyes adjusted to the subtle gloom. From an intercom near the door came the steady click-clack of Cranston at the keyboard and the unflappable murmur of his babbling. The tube—ten feet in diameter and with a steel walkway erected three feet above its lower curve—stretched sixty feet into the sea, an artificial protrusion probing waters black as char. Charlie could barely discern between the curve of the clear walls and the sea. Shapes floated through the murk. Swimmers and drifters. Ropy fronds whipping in slow motion. Amorphous bubbles curled in conch shell fractals; shadows danced through ghostly rays of light escaping through the glass.

  Charlie spied the white bellies of the sharks he’d seen from the beach. Six of them roved in circles inside their submerged cage, but there were many more outside the mesh. All Great Whites. They darted through the haze like living missiles. Their dead eyes absorbed the weak glow of the emergency lights from the tube, and their mouths hung casually askew to bare intricate rows of razor teeth. For a chilling moment Charlie experienced a premonition of the glass cracking and shattering, the water flooding in, washing him away toward some unknown abyss, a shunt waiting to feed an insatiable, primal hunger.

  Predators, he thought, and prey.

  The Glock felt like a toy in his clammy hand.

  “Wild animals, don’t forget,” he said. “Predators kill to feed or to protect their home and young. Great Whites have been known to break off after attacking humans because they don’t like the taste, but no animal gives up when it’s driven, when it’s hunted.”

  “Enough with the Discovery Channel bullshit,” Brenner said.

  Noise from the far end of the tube jerked the two men back to attention; they leveled their weapons and waited. A figure approached, shambling through the half-light, and followed by two others. The three missing soldiers. Each one wore a silver and black headpiece like a set of earphones wrapped around the back of their skulls. A hazy red and green aura surrounded them like a failing mist passing across colored fog lights. Streaks of blood painted their hands and faces. Their fatigues were sodden with it. The two men in the rear dragged the torso of a dead woman between them, each one gripping a wrist.

  “Kau-ahu hungers,” said the lead soldier. “Have you come to pay tribute? All living things owe tribute to Kau-ahu.”

  “Stand down!” Charlie shouted, alarmed at the sudden nervousness in his voice. For just a moment it
had seemed that the darkness outside the tube had deepened, but he didn’t dare take his eyes off the soldiers long enough to be certain. “Do not take another step.”

  Brenner edged forward. “Major Nance, is that you? Tamora? Pinto? Have you men forgotten your orders?”

  “Sir?” Nance said.

  “You are to stand down, all three of you,” said Brenner. “Drop that body and get down on your knees. Now!”

  “Kau-ahu hungers,” the two men behind Nance said together.

  “Sir,” said Nance. “Have you come to offer Kau-ahu tribute?”

  “Soldier, I gave you an order!” Brenner shouted.

  Fordren lurched into the tube and pushed his way between Charlie and Brenner. “Yes! Yes, we’ve come to pay tribute. What does Kau-ahu require?”

  “Back off, Doctor,” Brenner said, shoving the scientist back. “We’ll handle this.”

  “You don’t understand,” Fordren said, as he shifted behind Brenner. “I knew I recalled the name Kau-ahu. I’ve seen it in my readings. In Hawaiian lore Kau-ahu is a shark god. Native Hawaiians called sharks Aumakua and believed they were guardians of the sea, but Kau-ahu was a fierce shark king. An angry, violent god. General, is one of the men you assigned me for the test from Hawaii?”

  Brenner squinted. “Private Tamora.”

  “Sir, yes, sir,” said Tamora.

  “Well, whatever that thing out there is, he’s given it a name,” said Fordren. “He thinks the anomaly is a god, part of legends he probably learned as a child, and he’s muddled it all together.”

  “Kau-ahu hungers,” the three soldiers repeated, slightly out of step with each other.

  Nance crept forward. “Kau-ahu’s emptiness is great. He desires the thinking things to fill him. He watches many worlds and is grateful for those who have shown him this world is not barren as the vicious swimmers suggested.”

  “Do you mean the sharks?” Brenner said.

  “Kau-ahu sees them, touches them,” said Nance. “But they are hollow. He craves the meat of the upper minds he did not think dwelled here. He is starved for it.”

  A Great White, nearly twenty feet long, coursed by above the tube. Nance turned his head in an arc, watching it. Tamora and Pinto mimicked him, their faces twitching, eyelids fluttering. After the shark vanished into the cloudy water, the three soldiers seemed fixated on something else in the darkness, visible only to them.

  “Did you consider, Doctor,” Charlie said, “what might happen to their perception of reality once you gave them a sixth sense derived from one of the world’s greatest predators?”

  “Yes, of course. That was the whole point of the experiment,” Fordren said.

  “I don’t mean their perception of the physical world. I mean their psyches, their consciences. Do you think a Great White feels guilt when it uses its sixth sense to help it devour a seal or snack on a surfer? Did it occur to you that changing how these men experience the world would change how they relate to it?”

  A shape moved near the tube, too far off to be identified, but this time Charlie had no doubt that the shift in blackness was real. For several seconds it was as though an area the size of a compact car had brightened and blinked like a gargantuan eye. On the intercom Cranston’s chattering turned to peals of high-pitched laughter. The tick-tack of typing ceased. His hysterics continued for several seconds and then silenced.

  “Kau-ahu,” whispered Nance.

  Tamora and Pinto echoed him.

  “Something’s out there,” Charlie said.

  “The anomaly,” said Fordren, pressing his face against the glass wall.

  “No,” Brenner said. “They’re tricking us, getting inside our heads. There’s nothing out there but fish and sand. All we have here are three lousy, fucking soldiers who’ve lost their minds. And you’re buying their crap.”

  “Use your head, Tommy-boy,” Charlie said. “Think! It’s like standing on the beach, watching their fins cut the waves. They’ll never know you’re there unless you splash in beside them. Electromagnetic fields aren’t neatly defined like lines in the sand. They interfere with each other.”

  “Oh, God,” said Fordren. “You’re saying the anomaly wasn’t aware of us before now. Until we plugged the men into the EM field, it had no idea we even existed.”

  “A hunter can’t track what it can’t scent,” said Charlie. “It knew of the sharks but had no interest in them.”

  Outside the tube the swarming sharks crisscrossed one another’s paths, rising then diving, circling, darting in and out of sight, and then in a moment they were gone, scattered in many directions into the undersea gloom, all but the six in the pen. A ripple passed through the murk before an invisible current gripped the tube and shook it. Metal and glass groaned with the strain. Again the surrounding blackness moved, seemed to swirl, and then twisted like a whale rolling onto its belly.

  “Kau-ahu hungers!” Nance screamed.

  The soldier jolted forward, his bloodied hands clutching air. His mouth gaped in a feral snarl, and Charlie saw lines of blood tracing his gums, tiny flecks of flesh caught between his teeth. He shuddered. Nance was no longer a man. He’d become an embodiment of the craving for nourishment, survival, death. Kill the other. Take its life before it takes yours. Nance, along with Tamora and Pinto, could see the life force of men. Through them, so could Kau-ahu, and with the soldier’s minds filtering their perception, the vast thing understood what the sharks’ primal brains had concealed.

  Charlie’s fear erupted and surged with every shift of shadows he spied in the waters, every abyssal eddy that suggested the incomprehensible scope of the thing approaching them. His mind churned to give it shape but failed. Whatever was out there was a thing beyond the natural world, a monster, a legend come to life. His mind felt on the verge of crumbling, and he thought of Cranston; but then Nance’s threat snapped him back into the moment.

  The soldier grabbed for him, and Charlie fired, putting a round through Nance’s forehead at point blank range. The gunshot resounded like cannon fire in the enclosed space. Nance jerked back beneath a spray of gore, and the bullet traveled on, pinging against the upper surface of the tube, cracking it. Beside him Fordren and Brenner yelled, warning him not to break the glass, their words clashing into gibberish.

  Brenner seized Charlie’s wrist. “No,” he said. “We need them alive.”

  “Don’t you see what they’ve brought here?”

  “Get your head together, Agent Barrow, and hold your fire. That’s an order!”

  Charlie whirled, breaking Brenner’s grip and bringing his weapon around. The general responded too late, halting his gun hand as he faced the neat hole in the barrel of Charlie’s Glock. All at once the power of the gun flooded back to Charlie, sending a cool wave through him. The spreading tendrils of his fear curled back on themselves.

  “You’re the one who needs to get his head straight, Tommy-boy,” Charlie said. “Whatever guilt and baggage you’ve got wrapped up here, this is not about you. Don’t you see what you’re risking? That thing out there—can’t you feel the energy pouring out of it? The hunger? The savagery? It’s real. If you want to save lives, you need to do everything you can to stop it from going any further than this beach.”

  “You’ve lost your mind,” Brenner said. “Doctor Fordren, in case you were wondering, now would be a very good goddamn time to use the gun I gave you.”

  Fordren flinched and regarded the forgotten gun in his hand.

  “Stay out of this, Fordren,” said Charlie.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Brenner said. “Shoot him.”

  “No, General, I can’t,” Fordren said. “I feel it, too. That thing out there isn’t even from our world. Maybe the more we tried to track and measure it, the more we’ve drawn it out from wherever it belongs. We’ve nurtured it. We’re nothing but feeder fish. All of us. And we need to cut the line. I’m sorry.”

  Fordren exhaled and pointed his gun at Brenner. “Agent Barrow, you do what you have t
o.”

  “That’s my job,” Charlie said, swinging his weapon around toward the soldiers.

  Tamora and Pinto growled; the deep, gurgling noise rose from their throats, shifting up and down in pitch. They shook and lurched forward. Another powerful current rocked the tube, shaking the men. A pale shape slid toward them, a gnarled extension like rubberized bone reaching out of the blackness and testing the glass with massive cilia. The water shifted, moving clouds of sand, and Charlie saw the dusky spot of the eye once more, a parabola the size of a house, a bottomless well to draw them all down and drown them. The bony feeler lashed back and then whipped down, hard, cracking the glass. A hairline split ran from the point of impact to the weakened area where Charlie’s bullet had ricocheted. The appendage coiled for another blow.

  “You see that, don’t you?” Charlie said to Brenner. “It’s no trick.”

  Tremors from another riptide current jarred Charlie and spoiled Fordren’s aim. Brenner swore, but the obscenity faltered in the report of his gun as he drew and fired. The shot passed an inch to Charlie’s left, clanking off the metal frame of the airlock chamber. Another gunshot followed. Brenner’s chest spouted a brief stream of blood, and then the general toppled and slid along the curved wall of the tube.

  “Oh, shit, I actually hit him,” said Fordren.

  “Nice shot,” Charlie said.

  Driven by the sight and smell of blood, Tamora and Pinto rushed toward Brenner. Darkness swirled overhead like a congealing oil slick. Charlie backed away toward the airlock door, lifted one foot over the rim.

  “Where are you going?” Fordren demanded.

  “Charlie, help,” Brenner called as the soldiers grabbed him and dragged him deeper into the tube. “We can still get out of here. Take the men with us. Destroy the implants.”