MANUFACTURA ORGANICA: FORNAX IUGULUM




I rested my spine on the chain link fence. Behind that was a cold wall, as the fencing was simply uncoiled from a large spool. Brooms and mops were littered around me, a murky rainbow of cleaning chemicals leaked hypnotically into the corroded drain in the center of the room. Ten feet above me, through reinforced steel and concrete, was my old bed. I’d sleep up there, and think that just ten feet below me was the boiler room, and how cold I was compared to the blazing belly of heat below. The same mechanical droning that lulled me to sleep was far louder and more abrasive to the close ear, and now this racket had driven me mad. My whole body was now remolded into the fetal position, like evolution had reversed its course and now I was back to stage one. It’d been thirty-six hours since I got the distress signal from above, the control dock in near the ground floor. There was another attack like the outbreak in Treblinka, or the one in the “северная рвота” or “The Northern Vomit,” which was a gulag held in deep Yukon territory, but this time there were more survivors. They were refugees from another collapsed gulag, and most of them had been trained by captured soldiers and vagrants. This meant that there were arms, brains and bombs out there, and that was enough for everyone in the underground project to panic.

My name is Tars, and I’m writing to whoever finds this and cares enough to read it. Right now I’m stationed in an undisclosed location, I don’t know where in the world I am, but from the best guesses I’ve heard, we’re pretty far north, in the Siberian wastelands. I do know that this whole structure used to house ICBMs during the cold war when we were afraid that the Americans would use Alaska as a launching platform. In other words, I’m trapped in this subterranean missile silo, in the very lowest part, beneath the actual blasting pad. Something is being installed in the great long esophagus that had once housed tremendous missiles. All I knew when I arrived was that I’m here to work on the electrics. Building a structure from the ground up is so much easier than rewiring an already dilapidated one, but I guess I can’t complain. The whole reason I ended up here is because of my death sentence, I had accidentally killed an MP in the midst of a home-invasion. I was pardoned from my fate to work in this hole, not because of my amazing skill, but for the fact that they could kill me, and not a word would be said. This is what drives my work ethic.  

The boiler room was just beneath our sleeping quarters, just east of the launch pad, which was one hundred meters deep from the iced surface. There was another silo, but it was abandoned after mishap fueling in 1956, and now it’s entirely sealed off. I’ve been working here for around eight months, and until about a week ago, I knew only the most basic of knowledge of the project. The team that I ‘led’ was gathered across all of Russia, and because of that, the four of us speak different languages. An American spy was captured and brainwashed, and now he does grunt work. We named him Igor, after the famed assistant in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, out of a desperate attempt to make light of the situation. He seemed to understand Russian, so I had to explain work for him, which proved to be more difficult than presumed, as he couldn’t ask any questions. Grzegorz is a polack who is four years my senior, and he knows far more about wirework that I could ever care to know. Zhi Zhang was a fifteen year old Chinese boy, who looked to be about as thin as the wires themselves, but his incredible capability to work with minute fixtures and to do so in cramped crawlspaces was irreplaceable. We couldn’t communicate, but eventually, we developed a sort of language that combined all aspects of Russian, Chinese and Polish, relieving Igor’s system of nods and gestures. We later found out that his vocal chords had been badly mutilated. He knew how to talk, but was physically unable. This is what drove his work ethic.

For months we were intensely focused on running command lines between the laboratories and supply vaults, even though we were never allowed to enter either. The biggest problem was the fact that we were only handed a bundle of wires and cables and told to connect them across a labyrinth of pipes and tunnels. Grzegorz knew which wires would need to be bound to which end, but that wasn’t the beginning of our problems. The wires we were first given to work with were mismatched, warped and—here is the terrible part—multicolored. Remembering red goes with red is easy, but remembering that orange/green connects with teal/blue is another, especially when there are nine different endings of teal-blue. The lengths of wire were never long enough, the tools were unfitting and working by a candle for twenty hour shifts managed to wear each of us down to shriveled fuses. We never had enough energy to fight, and seeing the complete desperation, we managed to bond, our friendships strengthened through every hardship.

Our connection to the world outside was minimal, it was luck when we found out about the recent attacks, and even that was in question until recently. Like the prisoners in so many concentration camps across the world, we conserved every unused part we could. We were not being held captive; we were workers, but unpaid and underfed ones at that.

The guards dotted the hallways, and I was capable of having brief conversations before I was whisked away to work, or random chores. The garbage and filth compiled for everything we ate, the byproducts would remain with us. This silo was totally cut off from the world, it was our own city, only without sunlight, wind or comfort. If we were to be found slacking off, we would be placed in the tremendous and chaotically festering colon that was the mess hall, and told to clean the refuse. It was grueling, and never finished.

At one point, about three months ago, I discovered a stack of newspapers that was hidden behind vast mountains of trash. I had to mime my finding to Grzegorz, and he lit up. He excitedly improvised his response, something suggesting that he had placed them there before hand, and was waiting for the right time, or that he had something else planned. He grabbed a gutted box of detergent and began to write crude instructions with childish pictures. From his illustration, I gathered that I was to wear his pants, as they were several inches larger than my own, so that I could fill them with the newspapers, bring them back to our quarters, and then he drew a party hat. I was skeptical, but at that point, anything goes.

Wearing his pants was one thing, but because we all had to be on call at all times, Grzegorz had to have some other kind of clothing to cover himself. My pants wouldn’t fit him, Igor needed his and Zhi was far too small. Utilizing a bent bayonet, which was about as sharp as a bread knife, my bed sheets were soon in tatters. Our candle was hot enough to make a thin wire into a needle, which Zhi was able to use in making Grzegorz’s pants. Soon, our plans were in action. I had to be caught at the right hour in order to get mess duty, or else I’d be reassigned to another location for cleaning. After several days of study, which began before Zhi had started on the pants, I found that 1600 was the right hour to be caught. The guards were just leaving dinner and the mess was fresh. I managed to get caught, and while on duty, I diverted avoided detection from the remaining staff, and seized the newspapers.

Grzegorz was a hulk of a man, not excessively tall or large, but he managed to fill his average dimensions with a dense armor of toughened skin and a coarse beard. His facial hair seemed to eat up more and more of his face as our friendship lasted on. I had never seen him as excited as I did when I handed him the newspapers. He handled them with soft hands, this was a treasure like none other. As I slept, he kept his small bulb lit, and he read into the night. The following day, even though he was running on no sleep, he was still jittery with excitement. The newspapers were old, but they were his only connection to his homeland. The day lasted on and I could tell that he wanted to speak to me, to anybody, of the joy he had in reading, but he couldn’t. It was like watching a jar of bees, so frantically excited as they try to escape, but their efforts are smothered by the inevitability of the scenario. This was the pain of the language barrier, an insurmountable wall that divided us, our most bitter enemy. In the utmost blackness of the night, a new light blazed into Grzegorz. His rancid breath woke me up before his voice. He pointed eagerly at newsprint he clutched in his massive hand. At first, I couldn’t understand what he was talking about, I thought he had something interesting from Poland, but still, that wouldn’t apply to me. As my eyes focused, I saw something immediately recognizable, and in a moment, its true value would shock the dreary fog from my eyes. The newspaper was in Russian and Polish. This yellowed artifact had just become the Rosetta Stone of our contemptuous world.  

In the following weeks, Grzegorz and I taught each other our languages, or as much as we could. This discovery had originally made Igor and Zhi very happy, but soon enough they looked far beyond blue, as they realized that there would never be a mode for them to communicate. We gave them a lightened load for their shifts, which turned out to look less selfless than we had hoped, as Grzegorz and I could speak to each other as we worked. The days marched on, my knowledge of the silo grew, and my attention to detail swelled.

While working on the laboratory’s end of the wires, a sweat slicked Igor moaned with great force to gather all our attention. He drew a finger to his lips, silencing us. With methodic, delicate motion, he edged his ear to the cluster of wires and focused.  With a sudden epiphany, he shined an intense face at each of us before scrambling for a pencil. He paused and we watched closely. With short taps, he imitated a Morse-code transmitter, and continued as he looked to Grzegorz. Both men were clearly wrapped in a thick stream of thought. A distant flashlight beamed our way, and work resumed. No one was focused for the rest of the night, our minds divided between the task at hand and the potential for finally gathering crucial information.

That night, long past Zhi had fallen asleep, we’d began to develop our plan. The simple conversational skills shared between Grzegorz and I succeeded in doubling our worldly knowledge. The Morse code machine had a transmitter that was probably linked to the rest of the building, and in order for us to be on the list, we would need to splice the line and lead it to our room. This is where we could access an unused P.A. system speaker, which would relay the messages back to us. Igor knew Russian and Morse code from his training in the states, so he would lead the decoding, I could explain the written text to Grzegorz. Zhi was ultimately out of the loop, but he didn’t seem to be too concerned. I hoped that his will hadn’t been cracked by the grief of day to day living, but even then, I had no mode of expressing my empathy. He would need to remain vigilant in order for our plan to come to fruition.

In order to splice the wire, Zhi would have to crawl his way into the lab , find the correct wire for the transmitter, splice it, and lead the resulting wire back to us, without being caught. This is where the trouble began. Our room was wedged between the cacophonous boiler room[in reality, the door lead to a small unused storage closet, and a staircase that lead to the boiler room] and the tunnel which ran a closed circuit around the circumference of the blast chamber. Our only exit was locked during sleeping hours, and the lab was busy during waking hours. Every day there was a roll call that had to be kept, so Zhi couldn’t disappear during the day shift. The most difficult time in life is when one must wait for an anomalous instance to occur to proceed with his plans.

Weeks passed. Our plans were absolutely perfected, and they could fall into order at any given moment. Nothing happened through day to day work. We left the laboratory-to-storage vault tasks undone and picked up other projects in order to preserve the connection. We ran cables to and from every unlit hallway to every back up generator, we found that this silo had a small hospital, and we rewrote the electric plans for the entire ward. Our focus was still divided. It wasn’t until four weeks later that the unthinkable finally occurred. The lights flickered and gave out. Candles lit, our eyes met and the conception was mutual. With complete and surgical precision, we went to work. There was an outbreak of some sort four layers above us, and the entire network went into black out. The near silent murmur of gunfire was like raindrops on a distant ceiling. The halls were our bones, each creak and crevasse was utterly engrained into our minds. We knew the system start to finish, and we were able to blindly traverse without fear. Once we reached the mess of wires for the lab, we snuffed the candles. Zhi had his own matches and candle, Grzegorz handed him the splice and took the coil of wire that emanated from it. Watching him burrow through the entanglement was like watching a staph infection dig its way out of the skin.

Seconds felt like minutes. We were in complete and utter darkness. The wires heated up, and Igor grunted. I reached my hand into the wires and snapped my fingers. I couldn’t hear Zhi moving at all, nor could I see him through the tangles. His light was out. My stomach heaved a petrified sigh when I heard the groan of the generators, the lights flickered on, my eyes winced shut. Igor and Grzegorz quickly ran the wire into the vent shaft that connected to our room and sprinted to sanctuary. I stayed back, attempting to signal my lost comrade. The minutes wore on me, and I made the hardest decision I’d ever made, and left. The hallways were clear of guards and there was no sign of an attack on our floor. What occurred above didn’t bother me; my mind was once again split between two worlds: My partners and my own.

When I returned to the den, Igor and Grzegorz were absorbed in dismantling the speaker, and the rewiring of the assorted parts. It was like Igor was finally living up to his name, as he took something dead and brought it to life. Soon enough, he had wound the proper wires, and we were receiving an audible tone. Igor had the pencil and I hawked over him, reciting every word to Grzegorz. The transmission went as follows:

“abortive. reanimation outbreak in n4. called to work. Face front. Red, two three, red, four five.”

This repeated for a few minutes. Minds spinning, we were broadsided as the information began to change.

“Outbreak undone. Passive duty. Confirmation from n4 hclab. Reanimation successful on dh 021, dh 032, dh 045, dh 046. all half ambulatory, retrograde systems active. reanimation neutralized. Zone sanctioned and quarantine placed. No systems awake.”

Nervous eyes shot between us. All of this was totally foreign. The ground shook, dust fell lightly from the ceiling, and a distant thump radiated our way. More gunshots could he heard from above. In an instant, the lights were cut. Igor’s cold hand lit his candle and he proceeded to write down the newest transmission.

“n0 inbound. Dog-heads breached rlab. Captive forgot. Dog-heads incoming. Abort.”

The sound was cut. N0 was our floor, negative zero, working backwards, it’s the very lowest point in the shaft, but for the boiler. 'Dog-heads' was a complete mystery to all of us. Our three remaining candles were lit, and muffled sirens droned in the distance. A generous amount of the room was illuminated, enough light for basic manual labor. We dragged and overturned our beds so that we had a fundamental barricade against the door. Minutes passed with no activity. Igor stood up and gestured to the door, showed me five fingers and drew a line across his neck. If he was not back in five, consider him dead. I protested and Grzegorz couldn’t interpret the argument until Igor jumped the barricade. Loud and profane Polish danced off the walls as Igor showed us his five fingers once more, before heaving the great blast door open and gently securing it shut.

More gunshots pelted the floors so far above us. Time melted away as our trains of thought were chaotically shot through a frenzied maze of synapses. My candle had accidentally lit one of the mattresses on fire, but I had yet to notice the slow burn. The Doppler effect was active as fast and far footsteps grew louder and quicker as they came closer, climaxing in a two-fisted clamor against the door. Grzegorz leapt over and threw his back to the wall and drew the vault open. An exasperated figure collapsed to the floor, he pawed violently at the slicked concrete and attempted to slide himself further into the room. By now, I had noticed the flames on the mattress, but I did not dare extinguish them for fear of the noise I would make. A guttural commotion throbbed from the corridor, the varied choir of screeches and shouts echoed and amplified. Grzegorz bent to heave the man inside, perceiving him to be Igor, but his strength was spent in vain. His candle illuminated the figure, proving it to be a guard and not Igor, and all his might couldn’t pull him from the grasp of darkness. Something in the depth dragged the body in, and noisily devoured it. Grzegorz was pressed against the wall, his face flustered and eyes wide. With a single explosive force, the door swung fully open, smashing against the unknowing polack, instantly crippling him. Gigantic figures sprung into the room, the mattress now fully engulfed, the walls were now lit and dampened with a toxic haze.

They were somewhat human, faces stretched and blown out; their skin was covered in a dense thrashing of scars and staples. Now I knew what they were, and where their name came from. They were the Dog-Heads that the transmission had warned us about. The left arm was completely missing, and in it’s place, was a dogs head, awake and panicking, foaming and thrashing violently. Bones protruded from skin, bullet holes leaked thin blood. The largest creature towered over me; its head was bulbous and twitching, completely soaked in briny sweat. My heart stopped, my head went light, and my hands fell numb. I was tearing down the stairs to the boiler room before I even realized that my feet were being diced on cold steel. My hearing resumed and I could detect the dog-head racing after me, the other one must have stayed in the den. The furiously hot heart of the silo was only four meters away, and in one last dive, I tumbled in. The door secured behind me, it was only a short moment until the dog-head slammed against the hot steel, its’ deep reverberations knocked me down to my hands and knees. At this point, my mind collapsed.

It could’ve been hours later, I awoke in a rapturous headache, my body strung dry of sweat and my every joint and fiber of muscle tissue was aching with deep bone-warping pain. At this point, I realized the short tenure of my life, and the critical need for its documentation. I found a pencil and began writing this story by the light of the furnace. I only hope that this effort will be remembered.

And only moments ago, the cables to the boiler room have been severed from several floors up. Now I write to you more from the faint glow of the candle than the light of the embers of the fire. The dog-head beyond the door has stopped his noise, and I believe now is my time to leave this hell. I will write to you further, when time permits.

MWNL.

W.