Worse, the underside of the hands was completely covered in eyes. Blue and green and hazel and gray in the iris, all white around. Every natural color there, but to call the sight unnatural would be… an understatement. The fingers themselves weren’t covered, only the palm, and only the parts of it not ripped off like necrotic flesh to expose the tendons, but everything not moving the fingers along was covered in all different sizes of eyes.
And all through the halls Anya saw the suicide-scorpion-finger-spiders. Hands the size of cars with heads blown open waiting for her, some motionless, some jittering, some moving along the halls toward her destination. As she approached Central Command Anya began to see another form of the creature as well: a tiny version. They were about the size of an actual hand (a small lady’s hand, nails unpainted) despite having thirteen fingers and theoretically needing to occupy more space. It wasn’t like they came off of real creatures anyway, at least Anya hoped not. There were literally thousands of them, skittering along the walls like roaches in a crack den. The backwards-facing thirteen-jointed middle finger with the exploded head on top looked like a tiny pom-pom there, or perhaps an open or smushed red grape.
Anya’s stomach rumbled. Oh how she wished for food! But the spiders’ name really couldn’t be “suicide-scorpion-finger-spiders” that was both cumbersome and unreasonable. It was almost certainly a murder incident! No one goes into a suicide and comes out a mutilated hand with a backwards-facing head in an apocalypse and goes “yeah, I’m going to really enjoy myself now in this new body.” She was pretty sure they weren’t intelligent, either, given they seemed to skitter around like actual roaches or spiders. Peter probably had some name for them. “little ones” or “necris” or something. Anya wanted to call them “handlings.” At least that name didn’t underscore the disturbing reality of the situation. It didn’t seem possible to use a non-disturbing name for the larger ones that made her shudder even in brushing past.
“Tridecadactle” was… clinical, even for someone like Peter. Perhaps they could be “children,” as they came about alongside the giant star child. She laughed softly at the names. At least they weren’t another “necrite.” Why underscore the horror of a situation you can’t escape? It’s much better to laugh at it.
But Anya stopped laughing quickly when she came upon the open doors to Central Command. Her mealtime had taken long enough for the necrites and children to reach the command room, and her comrades, like the handlings’ many faces, were splayed open inside. Torn apart at the seams and thrown to the sides of the room that, like the base itself, had changed. The walls were taller now, the material a dark hue that clicked softly against her heels like brickwork, and the ceiling spanned some fifty, sixty, seventy feet off in the distance with spires that extended much farther. The walls were decorated with the splayed-open forms of bodies rendered in abstract glass paintings that showed nothing behind them, only more of the fleshen walls and their many striations. Long semi-ornate chandeliers hung from the ceiling, strewn red with gore. Even though this room itself was not made of flesh, its every surface was covered in gore. And yet, somehow, Anya knew not all of her comrades were here.
She could sense that Yuna, Peter, and Lululu were missing. Raethor had been bisected at the waist and thrown apart. Alissa had a finger-sized hole through her chest cavity (that is to say one of the eight-foot tall finger’s holes), but her legs were missing. Dio’s head had been crushed like a melon, attached only to the upper part of his left shoulder. Jesús was sliced in half vertically, perhaps by a fingernail. The two halves were still connected at the spine, but again the lower half was missing, likely atomized. Luther was missing. Melissa’s left arm was hugging Raethor’s torso. Her bottom was smashed in half but still vaguely recognizable. There was a set of naked burning male legs next to them, perhaps from Alex. His torso was… hanging from the ceiling, shattered and strung between several of the chandeliers. Chris was missing, as was Jessica. Henry was… in one of the piles of smoking ash where explosives had propelled organs and skin in little fragments all over the walls? Will also seemed to have been atomized, though one of his feet was tucked against Malissa’s arm and Raethor’s torso, seemingly propelled or placed there posthumously. There wasn’t enough information from the strewn intestines and gore scattered about the already flesh-colored room to tell what had happened, but one thing was clear: the children and handlings had torn them all apart before they had any chance to offer resistance.
For all their focus on training, for all their guns and bombs and ammunition, for all their preparation and funding, for all the words spilt by all the greedy politicians about how defence was so important: it all fell meaningless now. Their preparations were laid bare against true power, and it was far greater than they could ever have dared to imagine.
In the first loop they had fought until their very selves ran dry and no more of their infinite bullets remained. It wasn’t enough. In the second loop they had driven a globally-significant weapon of mass destruction large enough to make the heavens shake. It wasn’t enough. In the third loop they had wielded a God-destroying heavenly sword once thought too powerful even for the emperor. Even under his aegis, the weapon had fallen short.
The heavens had opened up and the sun had bled a river, spawning the bastard child of a star and fifteen-thousand-thousand hands. The hands had torn them all apart and the very building had changed to meat, as if mocking their fate. And Anya had thought four or five or six or seven loops had passed when it had only been three. How laughable! How lamentable! There was no hope of resistance here, what meaning was there in fighting the child of a star whose fingernails spanned planets? Whose very sight drove one to madness and immediate suicide?
Still, Anya made her way to the forges where Peter and Lululu had been. There was something missing in the situation here, she knew. As she approached the room the larger children became scarce, more and more handlings showing up on the walls; crowded out of them and forced to the floor. It took perhaps three or four or thirteen minutes to find the door, but while it had become easy to understand the layout of the base, an almost entirely subconscious pull in one direction or another, this time it was especially easy. As she approached the doors the floor became covered in roaches, handlings, exploded-head-backwards-finger-scorpions. Whatever they wanted to be called, it was creepy to look at them scurrying over each other.
The flesh door was smashed open, blown inside as if by a bomb, skin exterior ripped away to reveal the attach-points of bone and tendon to a black metal-seeming core. Anya carefully shuffled through, doing her best not to crush the handlings that had become a carpet beneath her feet. She failed, and many were smushed, but not because of her crumbling sanity… or, well. She stumbled, breath leaving, palms sweating, pulse weak.
The walls where the pregnant women had been were still there, every one of the bellies distended. They were embedded in the walls of flesh, only their open mouths and stomachs visible. The nose and eyes and face and chest were all covered with skinless muscle and sinew. Surprisingly, most were not screaming. It seemed intentional their mouths were left exposed rather than the noses, as the room was still open and cathedral-like, clearly intended to bounce their screams to the center table— this also converted to some bone-like black metal— but perhaps because they couldn’t see or hear or smell anything but salt and blood there was no purpose in screaming but to scar the lungs and vocal chords. It wasn’t like they could hear Anya enter the room, and the only sense of new touch they could possess were the many writhing handlings that actually seemed to avoid the flesh of the forge-slaves.
What purpose was there in screaming with no way to know if anyone was there? Surely they had tried it by now, but it had been perhaps hours. After ten minutes of screaming most would likely have tired themselves out. After twenty it must have become unbearable. After thirty it must have felt like six or thirteen days had elapsed stuck in the wall, soundless, sightless. Perhaps there was no pain, but living without sensation must be equal in suffering to all but the worst of torture.
At the left-center of the room just offset from the ebony table were Chris, Yuna, Peter, Luther, and Lululu. In their center was a pillar of pure light whose form only became unfocused with time. Pleroma seemed to be operating at maximum capacity despite the fact nothing was happening. It outshone all the other lights in the room and blasted the scene with white light. The pregnant stomachs reflected it and the whiter ones became almost like mirrors. Perhaps some thirty or forty percent of the forge-slaves were white, with the rest filling out the gradient between light brown and midnight black. This, luckily, made the scene somewhat easier on Anya’s eyes.
She ran (slide-shuffled) up to the huddled group. The panic was hot in her voice.
“Peter, what the fuck is happening!”
Behind them she saw a slumped-over corpse. It was Jessica, shot through the head. Lululu spoke instead of him.
“Peter woke up the sun, and now the effects of its black rays aren’t going to reset between loops.”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“It’s going to get worse!?” Anya was screaming with hysteria.
“All this and you’re telling me it’s going to get worse!?”
“Anya,” Lululu began, but Anya didn’t stop.
“The walls are covered in spiders made of fingers and there’s pregnant women embedded in the walls and you’re telling me it’s going to get… worse!”
“Yes Anya.” Lululu said. “It’s going to get worse.”
The words were like cold water.
“Peter, you did this. For what possible reason did you do this!?”
She pulled out her gun from behind and pointed it directly at his shoulder. She pulled the trigger and the pregnant mouths flapped. More screams rang out, perhaps feeling the gunshot resound, but there were no words, not when their tongues were gone.
He didn’t breathe a word of pain, but his right hand moved to cover the wound.
“I told you, Anya.”
She moved again to scream and then to fire, but stopped when Peter removed his hand from the bleeding wound in a clear gesture to stop. He wasn’t in pain, and he knew the pain wouldn’t last. If she killed him he’d just regenerate and she would learn nothing.
“We waited for you here.” Lulu said, fanning her hands out to Chris, Yuna, and Luther, who remained silent.
Peter would reform right there if she killed him. He would run and she would learn nothing.
“Speak.” She demanded. Her voice was firm.
“I told you, Anya, that Jessica found something she shouldn’t have.”
“I’m not going to tell you what she found, I want you to see it for yourself, but what I’ve done— what we’ve done—”
Anya scoffed.
“With your finger on the trigger, is to accelerate the process of a scene transition. We woke up the star because we have to.” He motioned to the room around them. The handlings were swarming everywhere, and Anya could feel them vaguely on her feet, though didn’t dare look at them— not out of fear but an overwhelming disgust.
“The weapons we have aren’t enough because weapons mean nothing in the face of magic. What does a bullet mean to a star? To a wall of energy or fire? It means nothing. This “magic” in the air isn’t an abstract thing, it’s a representation of the power of humanity distilled into a usable form.”
Lululu lit a small fire in her hands that rose quickly to her finger, as if on cue, flickering at the tip there like a candle or fat-based lighter.
“She’s burning you there, Anya. She’s burning your power and authority under the Emperor’s Mandate. It’s his power that fills the air, and it’s his power that she wields in combat.”
He pointed again at the skittering handlings.
“It’s his power that powers them and this base. The base doesn’t have communications equipment powerful enough to speak to the Most High on a whim because they need to talk to us. It’s there to send and receive his authority, his connection to the mandate, to the air. If they sever us from that divine light the concentrated air will attack us, foreign contaminants that we are. And if we lose their mandate, we lose ourselves. There are other systems of power even here, even in the heart of their nation’s power, but the power isn’t asleep anymore, Anya.”
“It was never asleep, not really. When he willed it to kill those who disobeyed the promised few granted a mandate of his authority and a guarantee of his everlasting power, the air obeyed. The air always obeyed, but only within the confines of his authority. That authority spilled far beyond our borders but it’s shrinking, and it’s incapable of acting upon those who never resided in it.”
“So our great emperor tasked us with expanding the scope of his air’s influence and we did. We gave it organs and embedded the organs in all the nations of the world. They accepted us because the organs gave them great power. But with that power came a price— they were made a part of our air.”
“That sword cut both ways. As greater and greater leaders came under the scope of our emperor’s authority, his authority began to wane. The other powers detected our plot and began usurping his control. Every one of our soldiers is embedded with the new flesh, you see, so a loss of control over it means a loss of control over our military. It was an existential threat so he and his Most High asked me, “Peter, can you restore our authority?” And I told them “Yes.””
He spread his hands again.
“It turns out I was right.”
“We gave the sun a pulse and we killed it, usurping the life of a star to feed our own ambition. And now the star seeks to reclaim the things we stole from it. The rays of the black sun will continue to bring festering decay to this world until we give its organs back.”
He paused for a long moment. The silence that was a baseline of scittering hung heavily in the air.
“Or we kill it.”
“And how do you kill a star, Peter?” Anya demanded.
He didn’t answer her.
“You need to go deeper into the base and see what Jessica saw. We will accompany you, and when you’ve found it we will exit this loop together.”
He hadn’t explained why they were in a time loop, but that was good enough. Peter clearly knew what was going on and while Anya wasn’t sure if he actually wanted to stop it, whatever Jessica had seen had driven her mad. Her corpse was over there, rotting, waiting for the end. Whatever Peter’s ambitions were, Anya was pretty sure no one here wanted to see things get worse. The walls had already turned to meat. What next? Would they, too, be trapped in the walls and made pregnant with hands?
She looked at the wall and regarded one particularly thin looking man. His skin appeared youthful and his every hair was shaved off. His pregnant stomach bulged and one could see the muscles rippling on the surface in pain as the mind danced in the only thing it could experience as a frog-leg ripped off and doused with salt. The experience of life had been taken from him and the others, replaced with a fine nothing that would stimulate their sense of agony, that would cause their muscles to bulge and writhe. Beneath the muscle there was a writhing of forms. Were there actually hands in there?
Some twenty or thirty percent of the bodies were male, by no means the majority, but that one caught her attention first, looking back up at the room. How did she even know the body infested with organs soon to be ripe was male? Why were there male forms at all?
It didn’t matter.
“Peter, what are they pregnant with?” Anya said, gesturing with her head at the male form she had regarded.
“Organs, Anya, with what will soon become new flesh.”
“I want to kill them, Peter, their existence is agony.”
“Go right ahead. They will be back tomorrow.”
Anya hefted her rifle and began pointing it at where their heads should be.
*BANG*
The first shot fired. Blood ran down the wall, smearing over the protruded female stomach.
*click*
She pointed it at the male form.
*BANG*
Blood ran down the wall.
*click*
The hole reminded her of the bleeding sun.
*BANG*
A hole in the wall, a hole in the wall. Inorganic in the front, bleeding from flesh sandwiched between a wall of flesh on the other side.
*click*
She pointed the rifle at a female form.
*BANG*
It bled profusely.
*click*
Yuna looked at Anya worriedly.
*BANG*
Anya was shooting faster now.
*click*
*BANG*
*click*
*BANG*
*click*
And on it goes.
*BANG*
*click*
*BANG*
*click*
*BANG*
*click*
*BANG*
The last body died.
*click*
Its wall bled profusely.
In that moment of the last death, the stomachs began to bulge and the handlings began to crawl over the now-dead bodies of pregnant men and women whose last moments had been filled with profound darkness. When they reawoke in the next loop, would any time have passed at all? Would they even know they had died? Did it even matter? Perhaps not, but Anya was glad she had done it. Such an existence deserved to be ended. Calling it a life was a bad joke when it wasn’t one at all.
The organs inside them began to writhe faster as the first handling tore open the first stomach with its backwards-facing exploded-head stinger. There were teeth on the edges that acted like a can-opener of flesh. From inside tiny little baby hands burst out, completing their parasitic life-cycle. They would be nurtured and grow, surely into the larger child abominations. Perhaps they wouldn’t have burst out so quickly had Anya held her fire, but if not it was better to die in darkness from a gunshot than the exploding open of the stomach from organs turned hands ripping through the uterus (or whatever the male equivalent was) from inside.
