SNAFU: Heroes: An Anthology of Military Horror

I drew my Beretta. “What’s down there? I mean really, no bullshit about werewolves or boogeymen. What the fuck are we going to find down there?”

Felicity turned toward me. In the crowded confines of the bathroom she was very close to me. I could smell her perfume. It was the same brand Grace used. What the hell was it, standard issue by Barrier? Or maybe it was the top-selling scent in England and I was out of the stylistic loop.

Her body was achingly familiar and devastatingly female. It was the kind of body that no matter how well-balanced and normally un-sexist a man is, he can’t help but be profoundly aware of it. Of hips and breasts, of long legs and a slender, graceful throat, of animal heat that was purely, inarguably, powerfully female.

And yet…

Standing this close to her, there was something wrong about her.

Maybe it was because she was so like Grace that knowing she wasn’t Grace made her feel fundamentally wrong. It was meeting a deliberate fake, a double or stand-in for someone I loved. Everything similar suddenly felt like a cheat, like a fraud perpetrated on my broken heart by a cruel and vindictive universe.

And beyond that, there was one other quality. One other thing that was not anything my senses or my personal pain perceived. This woman, this Special Agent Felicity Hope, seemed strange. Sure, I was still rattled by her sudden appearance in the dark, and by her similarity to Grace, but there was something else. She had a quality that made her not…

Not what?

I really had no idea how to finish that thought.

And no time.

Felicity moved away from me and began descending the steps. She moved well in the darkness and if her feet made any sound at all on the metal stairs it was beyond my senses to hear it. With great reluctance and confusion, I followed.

The stairs zigzagged down two levels and I realized that we had to now be at least twenty feet below sea level. Cape May is pancake flat and houses in the center of town had basements. Certainly nothing built this close to the bay would normally have a cellar. But the stairs went down and down.

With each step the smell of rotting meat increased.

I almost said, “There’s something dead down there.” But it would have been inanely obvious. Something was not only dead, it had been dead for some time.

Felicity slowed her pace and took her gun in a two-handed grip.

Sweat was beginning to run down the sides of my face and pool inside my shirt at the base of my spine. It would be nice to lie and say it was because the stairway was oppressively humid, but that would have been bullshit. I was scared. Really damn scared.

Changeling, whatever it really might be, in whatever horrific form the madmen at Koenig had conceived with their perverted science, was down here somewhere. Hopefully it was dead, or it was nothing more than samples of transgenic animals that had died without food and water. I really didn’t want to have to euthanize some kind of mutant rhesus monkey or lab rat. I like animals far more than I like people and I’ve seen what scientists do to chimps and dogs and pigs in labs. Dead animals would be easier to take. Sure, that’s a cowardly view, but fuck it.

Changeling.

What was it? Where were these guys going with research to allow deliberate shapeshifting? Where could they go?

Since signing onto the DMS my optimism for common sense and bio-ethics has taken a real beating. That thing Michael Crichton said in Jurassic Park rang true every time. We spend so much time wondering if we can, we don’t stop to think about whether we should. Or words to that effect. I’ve encountered monsters and mutations already. I wasn’t sure how many more I could face before something inside my head snapped. How long did you have to fight monsters until you really became one?

And how long could I dance at the edge of the abyss?

Bad questions to ask yourself in the dark.

Bad questions.

As we descended, though, the darkness changed, becoming cloudy and finally yielding to the glow of a security light in a metal cage mounted on the wall beside a big metal door.

It was a massive door as solid and ponderous as a bank-vault. There were several high-tech scanners beside it and even though I had plenty of gadgets for bypassing all kinds of security systems, I could see that I wasn’t going to need any of them.

The door stood ajar.

It was held open by a corpse.

I think it had once been a man.

But it was impossible to tell.

The body was swollen and black, the tissues distended by expanding gasses as putrefaction ran rampant.

And… it had no face.

The flesh had all been torn away to reveal the striated remnants of muscle and the white of naked bone.

This hadn’t been done by a knife or any kind of weapon. The flesh was torn in very distinctive ways.

By teeth.

Not small rat teeth, either. And it didn’t look like dog or cat teeth. The flesh was savaged by very large and very sharp teeth. Not fangs, but rows of teeth. There was enough left of the throat to see that much.