And—
Look, you—you know this shit. The sub went down. Period. Why do you need the details? You’re not making a fucking documentary.
I know, it’s just that—
Fine.
So it’s every man for himself. I barely even have a chance to take a breath before the ocean closes over my head and I’m diving down, pushing buddies and body parts out of the way, and I’m fucking scared, man, I can’t see anything except bloody backlight and blue sparks as the electronics short out. The sub’s still groaning around me, it’s crumpling into a paper ball and at least the screams stop underwater but you can hear metal grinding on metal as though it were right inside your fucking head. We get through the forward hatch, it’s still black and blue and red everywhere except there’s this jagged tear off to the side, this blue-black crevice seething with bubbles. I push through. I look up and there’s pale dim light, and I look down and there’s this great dark wall of metal sliding past, gashed to shit and bleeding rivers of air. Somewhere down there the bow’s already hit bottom because there’s a big honking cloud of black mud boiling up from below, engulfing the hull like something live. Like something starving.
And all that matters, in that moment, is that I get to the surface.
There’s no Semper-fucking-fi down there in the deeps, let me tell you. Maybe if I’d had my rebreather on. Maybe if I’d had more than one lousy lungful of air to get me thirty meters to the surface. Maybe if I wasn’t fighting off flashbacks from fifteen years ago. But no: I don’t try to free the trapped or assist the wounded or carry the unconscious to safety on my back. I don’t even think about it. There are things in my way: Some are sharp and hard and some are soft and gooshy and I don’t fucking care, man, I bull through them all without prejudice or favoritism. I’m an eight-year-old kid again, and I’m dying, and I know what that feels like. Not again. God, not again.
So I’m fighting my way to the surface. Didn’t even have the presence of mind to grab a pair of fins, you know, I’m just kicking at the ocean with these stupid little ape feet and all I know is it’s dark in one direction and a little less dark in the other and my chest is so tight it feels like it’s going to burst, like somehow I’ve got a whole roomful of air jammed in there ready to explode. And it almost does, I almost suffer a fucking embolism before I remember that that last gulp of air I took, it was under pressure: the closer I get to the surface the more it expands, the harder it pushes to get out. So I open my mouth. I open my mouth and I vomit all that precious air into the sea and I follow the bubbles as fast as I can, I pray to God the air doesn’t bleed out of me faster than it swells up inside. I’m kicking and clawing at the water and suddenly the light overhead has texture somehow, that dull greenish glow resolves into distinct shafts of light and they’re dancing, I swear to God they’re dancing. Suddenly there’s a roof over my head, like a writhing mirror, like mercury, and I break through and I feel like I could swallow the whole fucking sky and I’m so glad to be alive, man, you have no idea. I couldn’t care less about Behrendt or Chino or even poor old conspiracy-crackpot Leavenworth. I’m so glad to be alive I don’t even notice the hellscape I’ve dragged myself into—
Oh, that.
Yeah, I am a bit more eloquent than I used to be. Sometimes. Writhing mirrors and dancing lights. Never used to talk like that before. Now I just, you know. Switch back and forth. Don’t even notice it half the time.
But you know that story, don’t you? Improved vocabulary’s just a side effect. Just another reminder that I’m never alone in here.
What I am, and what I was, and whatever this damn armor thinks it is.
Heh.
We are legion.
To: Site Commander D. Lockhart, Manhattan Crisis Zone
From: CELL Oversight Secretariat
Date: 21/08/2023
Cc: CryNet Executive Board
Commander Lockhart,
Following this morning’s Supreme Court emergency session ruling, and pending a formal announcement by the president, US Marines are to begin deploying in the Manhattan Midtown area under Colonel Sherman Barclay. Their mission is described as humanitarian intervention, but they have been briefed for other combat eventualities as well.
The constitutional outrage of these measures notwithstanding, you are to cooperate with Colonel Barclay’s force and afford him any assistance he may require, so long as it does not conflict with your existing mandate.
Let us be clear in this; the decision to deploy US military forces on American soil is considered by the board, as by many of our friends in Congress, to be an extraordinary lapse of judgment by a president too weak to follow through on the legislative innovation of his predecessor. We fully expect this measure to be revoked within a short time.
In the meantime, we hope we have made clear the operating latitudes you are afforded, and we have the fullest confidence in your ability to manage the situation as befits a senior officer and shareholder of our company.
I’m born again into dead of night. About a dozen others are on the surface ahead of me, looking around while I’m still frenching the atmosphere. A few more pop up like Whac-A-Moles as I get my bearings. There’s oil everywhere, streams and patches of it mottling the surface.
Oil on the water, but it’s the sky that’s on fire.
New York stretches around us like a big dark tumor. Most of the skyline’s blacked out; ten dark buildings for every one or two that still have power. You can still make stuff out, though; a smudge of moonlight through the clouds, and the overcast flickers with something like orange heat lightning. If that’s reflected firelight, whole city blocks must be on fire in there. I can actually see an apartment building burning in the distance; it looks insignificant from out here, like a matchbox crawling with orange fireflies. Closer to the waterfront a whole office tower has just given up and slumped into the next building over. Black oily smoke crawls into the sky from a hundred spots we can’t begin to make out from the waterline but there’s no missing the great dark blanket they feed into, hanging over the skyline: It’s so heavy I wonder why it doesn’t crash down and flatten everything that’s still standing.
“Holy fuck,” someone says. “What happened here?”
Leavenworth. You made it out, man. You made it out.
I turn, tracking his voice, but the thing that bobs into view is not Leavenworth, not military, not alive. It barely even looks human anymore; it looks back at me with clumps of pulpy gray tumors where its eyes should be. A network of, of—veins, or tendons, or something like that runs down its cheek and roots in the shoulder, like, like—
You know those big industrial meat grinders in the supermarkets? You feed all the leftover chunks and waste cuts and bits of bone into that hopper at the top and there’s this kind of grille at the bottom where the hamburger oozes out like a twisted cable of limp red worms?
Something like that.
And I see now that the whole harbor’s dotted with these rotted floating things, that half the people I took for brothers-in-arms are dead civilians turned monstrous. So now I’m barely keeping my lunch down and I’m wondering if everyone was right, if it was a syntheviral and a nuclear strike and a coup d’état—hell, why not throw in Leavenworth’s rogue biomorphs while you’re at it? Maybe someone’s launched the mother of all out-and-out assaults, maybe it’s all of those things at once.