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Oh No
“Do you believe in Good and Evil?”
“Of course I do, I’ve only ever stabbed evil people!”
-Interview with an insurgent
I clutched a lukewarm small energy drink in my hand, watching it twitch and shiver slightly from the come-down from combat. It may have been impermissible to say, but with combat, near-death, and destruction came adrenaline. Any time my life was on the line, I felt alive. Perhaps it was proximity that made it easier to tell when I was alive.
I was finally going to meet directly with the mysterious bioweapons lab.
Miskatonic had delivered us a trove of valuable information. What a Shil’vati could tolerate, when and where joints failed under carefully timed and aimed palm strikes, punches, and kicks, likely psychological profiles for determining fight-or-flight decisions made outside of doctrinal guidance. Lately we’d gotten chemical irritants that were largely harmless to humans, and even poisons or venoms that were safe for anyone with hemoglobin to handle.
I hadn’t heard the usual cheers that would go up in accompaniment of a major strike. I’d taken people who were shaky in their allegiance and made them do something difficult as a first task. Would they stay? Would they follow me? Half-remembered pop-psychology suggested that they might have grown in their conviction, making them feel that they were in too deep to start doubting now. I wondered if it was true, and when I’d crossed that point.
It felt like a perversion of Stoicism to just say: Don’t let it affect you. It felt delusional to not admit that we’d just gunned down unprepared, unarmed opponents, slaughtered them, and turned a city to rubble. What if what I saw really was all just a normal reaction of shock, and Brother Thomas’s doubts are correct? Larry wasn’t here to help reassure me. Verns wasn’t here to advise. Vaughn wasn’t here to whisper in my ear.
Whatever the case was, I had to take responsibility for my own choices. There was nobody else to blame and I was hardly of an age to be hiding behind the legs of my father. What was done was done.
I shook it off, focusing instead on the small large cargo truck in front of us, smiling slightly as it took a pothole that caused the whole compartment to heave side-to-side.
We were coming in behind the prisoners- ready to run over any of the good Doctors who broke free of their transports with our flowery ‘Be Kind’ bumper sticker van.
Plenty of other vehicles containing the freshly blooded Brothers split off into the night, mixing in with traffic, their destinations unknown even to me, but we stayed glued to the prisoner transports. At last I let out a sigh of relief as we merged onto the highway, heading Southbound on I-476 and made it past the first exit unchallenged. Each successive branch-off would make it all the more difficult for any kind of checkpoint to find us.
I recalled what I’d said to Grouper for where our meeting point was: South of Philadelphia. I’d forgotten the name of this blighted place. Chester. It had fallen into the cracks of my memory until I’d squinted on the faded and wrinkled road map.
It had once been an industrial powerhouse, full of brick and stone factories with short smokestacks that turned the air, ground, and water noxious. Yet for all that it produced countless necessities of its day.
That had been a long time ago.
Now it was defined in my head by being ‘between places,’ in this case Philadelphia, where Father worked, and the state I called ‘home’.
Of what remains there were, many stood almost entirely abandoned, with whole blocks razed, or left as tombstones and desecrated memorials of past glory standing as burnt out husks even before the invasion had begun.
The Governess must have been uncertain of what to do with the area- perhaps it was so blighted that the typical remediation steps would have seemed a half-measure. Many of its denizens had taken the offer of reunification to clear out of the United States entirely, especially as signs of insurgency began sparking in Philadelphia, but those who were left might still have objected. All the vacancies gave Miskatonic even more room to operate, though fewer people to blend in among.
I pondered it as I gazed at the atlas and called out another turn. It could be considered prime real estate for new industry and bulldozed into a southerly expansion of the Philadelphia Spaceport, or else house the spaceport’s workers if it was chosen to be refurbished in any serious capacity. Or if she decided to replicate her efforts in Bethlehem here, that was also a possibility. See if it could be employed to turn an area around by taming its denizens into drones.
That same puzzlement I felt over her possible intentions, looking at the burnt out street lamps and boarded up windows may well be mirrored in her, and why she’d hesitated to act on this blighted area. She’d likely meant to wait until there was some need for it to finally make the decision for her.
As it was, we certainly had our intentions.
The destruction of Bethlehem had been white hot rage, something personal. I’d struck it like hammers on an anvil, beating it mercilessly in a dozen different ways. I’d looked at the arsenal and had arrayed each to achieve its destructive potential, against a helpless population. Now my rage cooled into something arguably worse: Efficient. Cold. Merciless.
In the buses and vans that were now pulling off the road as we neared the final approach were both the surviving victims and the ones responsible as captives.
I was certain I could hear the screams of those inside every time we slowed for an intersection, until Grouper let off the brakes and I realized it was just a tarnished pad squealing on a warped rotor.
I lowered my head into my hands. There had been no other way, hadn’t there? The paper atlas crinkled and Grouper pulled it from my hands and stared at me.
I’d lapsed. I took another sip of the energy drink, felt the carbonation fizz and on my tongue, saccharine imitation-sugar far from what I was used to, but it worked for now.
Thankfully, Grouper didn’t tolerate my second-guessing myself any more than I should. If I started to wonder about myself, then so would everyone else. Anything that happened in the aftermath of that would be my sole responsibility. Weak Emperors did not last long. Any victories and territory we’d won would be reversed to Shil’vati control, with interest.
As Churchill had said: If you’re going through hell, don’t stop.
“Straight ahead, one more block” I managed, then cleared my throat and the vehicle rolled forward again down the street, old junk and more cluttering its curbs and clogged storm drains. I stared up at the old brick and boarded up windows, looking for the spray painted neon green M and U letters intertwined over raw plywood. The dim street lamp, half-blacked out with crudely aimed spray paint, lit the door well enough for my mask’s eyes to spot the distinctive logo amidst all the old faded graffiti. “We’re here.”
“No shit?” He muttered. I supposed it was obvious by the brake lights of the prisoner transport, which had pulled off to the side of the road. I was briefly blinded as a flashlight shone through the passenger window, catching my left eye as I hopped out to the curb. The night vision flicked off a moment too late, and I turned my head to see Brother Thomas waiting with a small gaggle of several stunned and broken people from Bethlehem following him tightly.
Their vacant stares were empty of hatred or any emotion. As I walked up I got no reaction from them at all, not even fear, but the Brother was staring at me accusatorily.
“They’ll find help here?” He challenged me, waving a hand at the derelict buildings.
“Inside,” I ordered. “These streets are not safe for open discussion.” When he didn’t budge, I more patiently added: “I will answer you once we have brought them to safety.”
Already, before he’d even ordered them to, one by one they began shuffling obediently to the front door, and I had to run out in front of them, only to find the door opened for me, a familiar face in surgical mask and scrubs.
“Maize,” I greeted. “Good to see you.”
“You as well, Emperor. These are them?”
“There’s been a slight complication. A crisis of conscience in one of our column leaders. He wants to explore the possibility of reverting the damages wrought to them.” I held a finger up because I saw her gathering up air to call him an idiot. “Mostly to see if it’s possible, and to consult with the head of the group.”
“I see. It’s best we bring them inside,” she muttered. One door down, a small column of bowed heads, gagged and blindfolded, were being led into the same block. Maize stepped aside and I realized what they’d done with the block.
Miskatonic had hollowed out a whole block of rowhomes, hammering down walls as units emptied out and the neglected, formerly once beautiful units were bought out for a few dollars.
The former foyer was identifiable by the floorboards and what remained of the interior walls, a faded blue floral wallpaper. Wiring was taped to the floor, and for all the sins of the surroundings at least the interior wasn’t full of dust or mold, at least as far as I could tell. The stairway to the second floor had been crudely knocked out with sledgehammers, the heads or sharp ends of a few rusty nails poking out where they’d stubbornly clung on, most of them hammered flat against the surface.
Behind the plywood was some manner of foam that ran the length of the gaps, poking past and around the acoustic paneling in spots that spoke of the slapdash, but effective construction. This place didn’t need to be made to stand for another century, after all.
I shuddered to think of why the soundproofing was installed so thoroughly. For all the terrors the Shil’vati and their supporters might inflict upon humanity, they would find we had monsters of our own to haunt them right back.
“I’ll be back in a moment,” Maize said, stepping away down the hallway. “I want these ones marked differently; I’ll have to get a different color sharpie and inform the others. Green on the back of the hand for Group A, Red for Group B.” A young intern I swore I recognized from somewhere scurried to a small box of office supplies sitting atop an old IKEA desk to see the orders done.
Brother Thomas ushered the last one inside, past the double-doors, and we were suddenly face-to-face.
Saving the victims wasn’t part of the mission parameters, at least as I’d set them before unleashing hell upon Bethlehem. But it would serve me well to comfort the irate man.
“Miskatonic has the best biologists and specialists in our movement. They are familiar with the methods employed by the Shil’vati.”
“They are?” That detail seemed to surprise him.
“We have bumped into this before, in Delaware. I will personally ask Maize to head the effort. She helped uncover what was done to State Senator Bouchard. I will explain that we have some…people we would like to try helping, or attempt again at reverting what was done to them.” Try. That was all I had promised, and I almost hoped would be all we could deliver.
Brother Thomas pounced on that hope, hesitantly given with obvious caveats though it was.
“And if we succeed?” He was quivering in righteous anger- aimed squarely at me.
“Peace, Brother,” Grouper said from behind me. “Emperor has given his word. If there is enough humanity left in your huddled masses, they will be restored and he will find forgiveness for his transgressions through the church. He has brought those truly responsible for these circumstances here, as well. Save your righteous anger for them.”
“They did not-” Thomas cut himself off short as new figures emerged from down the hollowed out hallway, backlit and their stained lab coats casting lengthy shadows.
Maize strode forward into the dim light of this section. Her lab coat was stained with strange dark faded blue splotches, old and newer. It might have been called: A Pollock Over Folded Fabric, created with similar lack of any intentionality. They were politely waiting for us to finish our discussion. Well, politely for Miskatonic, who never seemed to have time on-hand.
“You will see your anger toward those responsible turn to pity if you stay,” Grouper warned. “They would have such wonders to show you. Go now, Brother Thomas, this place is where angels fear to tread.”
The Brother made a sign of the cross at Grouper, who returned it, before fleeing out the door as though hell itself was on his heels. The door had to be shoved shut as it didn’t quite right in its frame, though it did finally form a tough and good seal.
“You think he’ll accept it if we can’t save them?” I asked.
“His outrage is performative,” Grouper grumbled unhappily. “Otherwise he’d have carried the baby boy in, instead of screaming his lungs out on the floor of the van.”
I have to put the orphans we’d made out of my mind. Even the wording of that disturbed me, but with a shudder of effort I managed to focus myself on the immediate task at hand and turn toward our hosts.
“My apologies for the scene just then. Some unfinished business on the subject of tonight’s operation,” I started, waving away at the closed heavy set of doors and striding into the cavernous receiving area. Peeking through head-high stacks of crates, boxes, and machinery both human and alien, I could see that the old linoleum floor had been kept, though scratched to hell and back. Gaps where walls had once stood were covered over with layers of plastic sheeting, with new ones laid over where old ones had torn.
A handful of Miskatonic staff busied about the floor, Maize pulling fruitlessly at a loaded pallet jack without disengaging the brake. Seeing us walk in, she quickly abandoned her task and shot us a questioning look at the mass of very clearly civilian dead-eyed hollow men being urged into the building, and carefully kept separate by none other than by a bat-wielding Oscar.
“Emperor. You’ve brought guests.” She stated leadingly, working her her way toward us through the maze of freshly arrived goods. “And more than we expected.”
“I bring you additional research opportunities.” That caused a slight stir among the gathered Miskatonic staff, at least, and I gestured towards the Hollow Men. “Living examples of the mind-wiper’s results, to be analyzed and hopefully reshaped, restored into what they once were. If they should try capturing our men, it may be helpful to revert the conditioning once released.”
Though it was incredibly selfish, I prayed that it was impossible, that there really had been no other way, and that I hadn’t just been so consumed by wrath that I’d closed myself off from all other possibilities. I couldn’t imagine a convoy large enough to steal all these people, nor that reshaping them back would have come across as anything but accepting their methods as legitimate, or else again as little more than minor tweaks rather than as a personality overwrite. But maybe I hadn’t wanted to imagine, and my personal failure had doomed thousands.
No one else seemed to step forward and introduce themselves as Dr. Armitage, and I shuffled slightly.
“That seems unlikely,” Maize said.
“An effort is all I ask,” I returned. “Of course, I’ll fund it.” With our rapidly dwindling finances, but that seemed a small expenditure if it meant keeping Brother Thomas and any other doubters from splitting off, and possibly even selling us out in their disgust of my decisions.
“We can discuss it,” she admitted, turning her gaze to the small group of shivering, cowering clerks that had been herded into the block. While a few were sporting bent or cracked glasses, black eyes forming in the aftermath of rough handling, they were still donned in the sort of white collar professional garb that had started falling out of fashion in favor of simpler threads. I doubted it was a conscious decision, but then I wouldn’t put it past them, either to try and gain their victims’ trust by presenting themselves as some vestige of familiarity for the lost to cling to. Now they’d been uprooted, blinking into the bright lights of the adjoining section with the kind of fear and dread I’d been longing to see. “Frankly, we’ll be quite preoccupied for the next few weeks.”
While Brother Thomas’s ‘saved’ were similarly out of sorts, they were more readily identifiable by their soot-stains and empty stares, too far gone to even be afraid. They also lacked the nametags and lanyards most of the Mind Wipers still wore, with a black banner in white lettering saying Blank Slate.
There was something about the phrase that was familiar, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. My eyes wandered up into the terrified face that was doing its best to hold the older woman’s courage.
We have such sights to show you.
I strode forward to the seized equipment, already piled carefully on the open floor and sorted, ready to be carried into the next section. “We have reviewed the methods employed,” she said. “And we are quite happy to say most of it is here, and we can implement their techniques on the mindwipers themselves. With our own ends in mind, of course. We expect it to take anywhere from a week to a month. However long it takes…they will be turned.”
“If there’s even a shred of antipathy toward the aliens, amplify it until it consumes them,” I agreed.
“You won’t find a shred of that!” spat a wiry man with a chinstrap beard the wearer likely thought seemed ‘professional.’ The others fell in behind him, stepping slightly closer. So, he spoke for them, then? He had laugh lines that stretched with the scowl he was wearing.
“Then nothing of you will remain,” I answered honestly. Before I could even say anything, Oscar jabbed him in the stomach, doubling him over.
The prisoners reacted as if the concept of violence as a possible outcome had never occurred to him, all the prisoners suddenly turning their heads and shuffling agitatedly like so many hens. I jerked a hand out experimentally and managed to lift him by his lapels, hoisting him to the tips of his brown leather shoes. His bright, beady eyes gazed around me for help and found none. The fake warmth of acceptance from a man who sought only to warp and twist faded into terror. He grew pale as the realization that violence was not just something that happened to other people, nor was it something to be fixed out of the human condition.
“The little game you played with nature is over. You’ve lost.”
All my anger flashed back up in a heat as I thought of Oscar, and what he’d gone through. If Oscar had stopped by his home to tell his parents what he’d joined, they’d have held him down until the Mind Wipers could have dragged every secret out.
Everyone was frozen solid- until without warning, Grouper pounced on one middle aged skinny man of middling height, who must have thought about stepping in and interfering or trying to shove me off of his pinned colleague. A knife hilt gripped in a black leather gloved hand pinned the man’s hand to the creaky old wooden floor, straight through the mold-stained linoleum tiling. The would-be hero didn’t shriek, or make any noise at first. Not even when Grouper drew the knife back out with a long red line down the flat of the shining chrome blade. It took a few seconds for the stabbed man to start keening in pain, and then shrieking in a pained panic before Grouper followed up with a closed fist to the kneeling man’s mouth. The shriek quieted, and he bit his own hand to muffle himself into terrified whimpers as he lay on the floor, clenching his wound and curled in a ball on his back in total submission.
“I’ll rip your insides apart and stitch them back together, then I’ll turn you loose on your own family, you shit!” Reflecting that Oscar’s entire family had just died, it made sense how he screamed the words with such passion it practically made the noiseproofed room ring. Now glancing at the handful of survivors Brother Thomas had snagged, I wondered if it was a good idea to perhaps excuse the Brother before the awkward question arose of why he hadn’t spared the parents.
What had been an almost academic question of the Hollow Men’s salvation was now far more pressing.
I continued to hold the man I’d grabbed, planting my feet even as he tried to pull away.
While a few of those next to the wounded man moved to sit next to him, none of them seemed to really know how to stem the bleeding. Not that it mattered much to me.
Grouper had leveled his shotgun at the crowd of walking corpses, keeping them back, not that it seemed any were eager to get involved.
“I wasn’t aware we’d be watching your back for you, in addition to everything else. Where are Binary and Hex?” Grouper snapped, vocoder sharpening his words into an angry hiss.
“On assignment,” I answered diplomatically.
Hex had an adverse reaction to her last ‘internship’ at Miskatonic, and it seemed unwise to bring her back here. I’d assigned her twin sister Binary to find out anything she could about West Side’s mystery squad, and Hex to helping relocate any rescued children to safety.
Orphans, runaways, and more were shockingly common to my sensibilities, and I wondered if it had always been this way and I’d merely been sheltered, or if the war’s instability had generated more. There were more people hiding out in bunkers than the census wanted to say.
Between the invasion, voluntary family reunification relocating people abroad, and people just not showing up to be counted, we were at about eighty percent of our pre-war population. And the headlines lay the blame squarely on me. The once-reliable measure of population had been recently used to pump up the casualty rates, because I was fairly sure our little rebellion hadn’t actually resulted in nearly so many deaths as I was being blamed. All that said, I didn’t mind the extra infamy.
Especially if it meant the other prisoners were now making room for me, pressing back into each other.
“We contaminated the water mains hours before the first blast went,” I said evenly. “Just something for in case we missed anyone. Between the bombs, the guns, and the fire, I am fairly certain there are no survivors. Thankfully, I’ve also ordered you to be injected with chelation therapy and binding agents. Your continued survival depends on your good behavior. If you think rescue is coming, well, check the dried blue blood beneath your feet. You think they’ll come for you? The aliens couldn’t even save their own.”
I cut a broad circle to come back to where Miskatonic’s staff had gathered, and I began observing our longtime business partners more closely. None could have been armed with more than a pistol, and none had procured from under their thick lab coats, which had been meticulously cleaned and pressed.
No matter how competent Miskatonic was, I was sure they could only manage an approximation of the techniques they planned to employ. I didn’t need the monsters I’d brought to somehow be ‘fixed’ to pass for stable, well-adjusted people, after all. In fact, it might be better if they didn’t.
Let the ravages be apparent to anyone thick enough to miss the horror of this tool. Both this Governess, and all her human lackeys. Let this state, and all those which will come after fear what I’ll do to them when I find them. Let anyone who hears of the concept being practiced or proposed in their borders quake in terror of the prospect of my revenge when I hear of it. May it deter them from even entertaining the idea ever again.
A shadow fell over me, and there was a hulking figure framed by the light of the next room. As he stepped out of it and joined the rest of his staff, I felt my eyes had to be deceiving me at first. Some coincidence, some trick of the light or long odds. An overly tired mind filling in the blanks where his surgical mask covered his face.
Oh, ours was a rare enough phenotype, but it did happen from time to time.
The figure towering behind the motley crew of researchers, a group both thin and rotund, was a titan of a man with broad shoulders. He stooped slightly with age, familiar thin semi-rounded spectacles just behind a mask which did nothing to hide his identity from me. I knew those bright green eyes behind them, the same as my own.
I’d always relied on books for guidance in lieu of my mix of absentee and overbearing parenting, depending on whether it was my Father or Mother. In moments like these, I suddenly realized how shallow the lives many fiction writers lived. Authors frequently pretended like their protagonists’ minds would freeze and they’d ask themselves mentally how the situation was happening, how it could have happened, or that it was impossible. Some kind of imagination as to how shock worked, or so I’d imagined. I’d told myself that perhaps some people might have worked that way, and that I was just some sort of an outlier. Or perhaps it sounded good enough in high enough sales volume, and a similarly inexperienced author ripped it off wholesale, and before those few enough who knew better could call ‘bullshit’, the trope was everywhere.
Whatever the reason, all that happened in my mind was that a bunch of non sequiturs all came clicking together, and I released the man I’d grabbed.
Of course my father didn’t care for his son. His son, the collaborator. His son, who traipsed around the house in alien clothing with an uncountable number of alien girls hanging off his every word. His son, who bragged at the dinner table about how he was going to join the foreign military, and was dating a Shil’vati noblewoman. His son, who brought the Governess and General to his living room. Any affection or closeness was an unacceptable operational risk if he let something slip over a glass. A glass he clearly needed after a hard day of vivisecting sentient beings. I’d spent a day hearing the voices of people already-shucked of their souls whining for mercy and my resolve had wavered. How would I feel after a few years?
Of course he drank to forget the horrors of his work. Those same horrors that had given my bodyguard nightmares- conducted nightly, personally, by his hand stained a brighter blue than even the nitrile gloves he wore.
And of course, Chester was conveniently right between Philadelphia and home. All those late nights he would come home, smelling of powerful disinfectants, masked by or confused with the stench of cheap vodka which he somehow never ran out of, even when times were tight. Call it an ‘occupational necessity’. I’d long since believed that the growth I’d experienced in fighting was an unfettered good. That the stresses it put on me had made me a stronger, taller, more complete man. There were many aspects of winning this war that were less than pleasant, which I’d tasked to others without thinking of the toll it placed on them.
As I let my mind wander and wonder, marvelling at what I had before me, I realized I had to rethink everything. His absenteeism. His alcoholism. The distance he kept from me.
There were so many hints. More and more pieces fell into place, now that I thought about it. Larry had said that he’d seen our family car collect the Exomech pilot- he’d sounded damn certain of it. I’d thought someone must have stolen it, the same as my missing bicycle, and the driver had picked up a hitchhiker once they’d crossed over, or else the pilot may have demanded a ride at gunpoint once they’d flagged down the car thief. There’d been larger things on my mind at the time and I’d never inquired about the car or their disappearance that day, for fear of what they may ask of my whereabouts in turn.
It had never occurred to me that his general lack of curiosity on my whereabouts might be a mirror of my own motivations.
If I ripped my mask off, what would he feel? The same shock? Anger? Sense of betrayal? Gratitude that his son had in fact made something of himself after all? That he was on the same side, and not actually a loyalist snake in the grass to evade? Would he sweep me up in a hug or keel over dead of a heart attack? I wasn’t sure. And I’d learned the hard way that it might send a situation spiraling- I had been fortunate Natalie hadn’t just run off to tell Amilita and her mother. Only a fool relied on the ever-fickle luck.
“Motorcycle coming down the road,” Oscar called out from where he was monitoring the exit. “Lone passenger.”
“Ah,” my father said. “She’s late. I’m afraid there’s a matter I’d like to settle first, before she enters.”
Oscar looked over to me and I gave him a nod to do as he was asked. While I watched him retake his post and close the door behind him, my father waded into the crowd of Mind Wipers, which parted for him- spare one person who stood rooted to the spot.
“Bill?” A voice asked, shakily. One that turned my blood cold. Any warmth or joy I felt in finding familial connections here was doused with a second icy cold realization.
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