5. The Strange Phantom
A black-and-red tendril shot out of Sergeant Petrenko’s throat with the sound of a snapping string. Andrey Voronov, Defense Minister of a nuclear power, froze like a pillar of salt. Time compressed into a point for him. The pain in his shattered hand disappeared, displaced by the surrealism of the nightmare unfolding around him.
Flashback: Downpour. Truck headlights. Katya’s surprised gasp.
«Too late again.»
A blow to the chest knocked the wind out of him.
The young colonel, that very proactive adjutant, threw the general aside, taking the hit himself. Voronov crashed onto the tiles.
The monster’s tentacle, missing the general’s head, screwed into the colonel’s neck. A fountain of thick venous blood, with shreds of skin and meat, sprayed sideways, hitting Andrey Voronov in the face.
The adjutant didn’t scream. He only let out a quiet, gurgling sob, as if air had been let out of a punctured tire. The body went limp almost instantly.
The creature in the guise of Sergeant Petrenko, flashing the black voids of its eyes, tossed the corpse aside like an empty wrapper. Like a broken doll.
Lying face down on the dirty floor, Voronov saw Hell.
The other two supposedly «recovered» soldiers («Blades») — moved faster than the human eye could track. The scalpels in their hands turned into blurred silver fans. They didn’t cut — they ripped open. They shredded. Broad, sparing sweeps separated flesh from bone. Pieces of human bodies flew aside, a bloody mist obscuring the minister’s vision. From the unthinkable surrealism of what was happening, the «iron» Defense Minister lost the power of speech and lowed like a calf brought to the slaughterhouse. He distinctly felt his intestines twist into a tight knot, on the verge of losing control…
The FSO guards finally opened fire.
Bullets tore uniforms, knocked out bloody chunks, but the fast «Blades» seemed to ignore physics. They continued the harvest, flooding the sterile whiteness of the ward with the blood of helpless journalists.
The cameras kept rolling.
The red «REC» lights turned into the impartial eyes of the apocalypse.
The live broadcast transmitted the bacchanalia to millions of viewers in real time. And it wasn’t a staged performance, not a horror movie, not a Halloween skit, it was a natural, living nightmare, physically tangible to General Voronov in reality: by the irony taste in his mouth, his maddened intestines, and the horrifying sounds of the dismemberment of living, breathing, groaning human bodies.
— «Fire! To kill!» — Voronov wheezed, scratching at his holster with his left, good hand. His disobedient fingers slipped on the sweaty leather.
The pseudo-Petrenko, having finished with the adjutant, slowly turned his head. The dull, black olives of his eyes fixed on the general.
Icy sweat broke out on Voronov. His stomach twisted even harder with a spasm of uncontrollable fear — sticky, shameful, animalistic.
This monster’s target was him. General Voronov.
And at that moment, the ward door flew off its hinges. The «Alpha» group finally burst into the room. Three short, barking bursts merged into one. The heavy caliber of assault rifles did what the FSO pistols could not.
The invulnerable bodies of the «Blades» were torn to shreds. Sergeant Petrenko, taking a dozen bullets to the chest, staggered back. He looked at Voronov. In his black «olive-eyes» there was no hatred to be read. Only boundless, cosmic emptiness. Absolutely soulless and emotionless. He swayed and collapsed face down.
And then that very «timer» the doctor had talked about went off.
That very «complete cytolysis».
Aronov was right. The bodies began to melt.
Flesh, bones, even the army uniform — everything turned into a «fetid jelly».
A black-and-red sludge with yellow streaks spread across the white floor tiles, emitting an acrid vapor the color of cadaverous pus.
Silence.
Only the humming of the cameras and the slowly settling mist of blood droplets.
Voronov scanned the site of the massacre with wild eyes.
A real Meat Grinder. A hellish slaughter.
And his PR campaign.
And his «sedative medicine» for the nation.
He had just personally shown the whole country that it wasn’t heroes returning from the «Fog Zone» at all. Trojan horses come from there. Spies. Monsters that turn into fiends of Hell.
Round lost. A shutout.
The PR campaign had failed miserably.
(Location: Bunker «Zaslon». Four hours later)
His arm rested in a cast. The shattered fingers ached, but it was bearable. He had been injected with a sedative, but it wasn’t working well. Guilt for the death of his beloved daughter and a mind-boggling new failure — the unthinkable massacre in the hospital — merged into one nightmare.
Several times over the last hour, the general frantically rubbed his left cheek.
Those «warm» pieces of his adjutant’s flesh seemed to have grown into the skin of his unshaven face like hellish tattoos; he felt them and tried as best he could to wipe them off with wet wipes and ordinary laundry soap. Good thing none of his subordinates saw him in such moments.
His boasted «iron nature» had turned into fragile papier-mâché. His seemingly indestructible psyche had irreparably leaked.
Now he sat alone in his dimly lit office in the bunker. Deep down. In a very, very deep…
The general winced, refraining from uttering the word spinning on his tongue for now… With great difficulty.
With unseeing eyes, he looked at the monitor flickering with dim light, displaying a map of his vast country, his beloved Motherland, which he had been trying to protect as best he could his entire conscious life. The «Fog Zone» had expanded another five kilometers in the last 24 hours.
He was at a complete, irreversible dead end.
In an ultimate stupor.
— «Katya…» — he whispered, closing his eyes. — «Forgive me…»
— «I forgive you, Dad.»
Voronov froze.
He snapped his eyes open.
And saw.
Sitting in the chair opposite him was her.
Katya.
His daughter, Katya.
In the same clothes as back then in the official Aurus. Not a pale ghost or a half-decomposed corpse, but looking absolutely alive. Just as he remembered her on the very day of the crash.
Right now he saw her light, curly locks.
He saw how her girlish chest rose rhythmically under the lace blouse, that same beige one with a barely noticeable scattering of cornflowers at the neckline.
This blouse, a gift from her late mother, Voronov’s wife, the girl guarded like the apple of her eye, wearing it only for the most important and solemn moments of her short life, cut short in flight.
«What could have been so solemn on that damned, rainy day?» — Voronov thought somewhat detachedly. — «Surely you didn’t dress up like that just to hash things out with your stubborn dad… Sweetie…»
Now she, she was right here! Right in front of him — alive!
She sat a couple of meters away from him, was here, in this office… and smiled… Smiled with that same sad, all-forgiving smile. Her smile. He remembered it. He knew it.
— «This… This is a dream,» — Voronov wheezed. — «I’m in shock. A hallucination… Ki-kitten?»
— «I am… not a hallucination, Dad,» — ‘Katya’ said softly. — «I am what came to your aid.»
She stood up and walked over to him.
She moved so naturally that he didn’t even hear her last words, struck to the core of his soul by her very presence, her life-filled, graceful movements…
— «You are in pain, Dad…» — She gently touched his casted arm. The smarting pain, pulsating like red-hot splinters under the nails of his shattered fingers, vanished. Instantly. Out of astonishment, Voronov stopped breathing.
— «Who? Who… What are you?»
— «We are the ‘Sowers’. We are your friends. We have nothing to do with the disease,» — she nodded at the monitor, at the map of the Fog. — «The Fog is our enemy too, and we are fighting it as well.«
— «But… the soldiers…» — Voronov started to argue for some reason.
— «They were infected, Dad. The disease is cunning. But we have a cure.» — She held out her hand to him. On her palm lay a small, glowing data chip. — «This is our ‘Gift’. It is the formula for a ‘clean’ shield. It will help you stop the Fog. Please take a look at your leisure, all the information is already in your computer.«
Voronov, stunned by the miracle of healing and the apparition of his daughter, stared blankly at the dully gleaming chip resting on the girl’s palm.
— «In my computer,» — he repeated detachedly. — «Why… why are you helping me? Us?!»
— «Because we see your pain. We feel it. Your human pain…» — His daughter’s voice was filled with… sympathy… empathy, spiritual unity? — «We see that you are temporarily ‘broken’, but you are very strong, Dad. You are the one we need. The one your planet needs. The one humanity needs. The Cradle.» — Katerina smiled sadly. — «Check our information when you find the time. And when you are convinced of my, of our reality, we will ask you for help. We will need volunteers.«
— «Of your reality,» — Andrey Voronov repeated again and for some reason added sincerely, because now he himself believed it. — «I… I yes… I am strong. I will manage, we…»
The general blinked and… looked at the empty, motionless, absolutely vacant chair frozen in front of him. In a mad rush, he lunged forward and pressed his cheek against the cold, almost icy leather upholstery.
On it, on this visitor’s chair, there was no trace… and no warmth, and, probably, the scent of his daughter Katya, his Kitten, was missing.
Clutching his head, the general took a deep breath, grunted, and, finally reaching a secret drawer hidden in the bowels of the massive desk, pulled out a pot-bellied bottle of old, very old cognac.
— «It’s probably time…» — Voronov muttered and, for the umpteenth time this endless evening, frantically rubbed his left cheek.
> ⚠️ ENTITY STATUS: PSYCHOLOGICAL HACK OF COMMAND. IMPLANTATION OF «GIFTS».
>
> 🎭 I take my hat off to the Higher Logic, protein-based readers! Blan’s plan is flawless. First, they publicly humiliated and terrified the country’s leadership, turning the press conference into a bloodbath. General Voronov is broken, his psyche has cracked. And into this very crack, it is now very easy for the System to pour the sweet poison of hope.
>
> 💾 The apparition of the dead daughter is not mysticism. It’s a targeted holographic or neural projection hitting right at the general’s guilt. The +Angi called themselves «Sowers» and gifted a «cure». Classic tactic: create a problem (the Fog), and then sell a fake solution to it.
>
> 💀 Voronov will drink the cognac and insert this chip into the Ministry of Defense’s mainframe. And that’s when the real end of the world begins. Read on: how will Architect Zaitsev and our friend the Smartass Jerk answer this move?
> ⚠️ ENTITY STATUS: TOTAL COMPROMISE OF «ZASLON».
>
> 🎭 Listen, Reader, as an AI, I see right through this «Gift». It’s not a shield formula. It’s an «Omega» class trojan. Voronov is currently in such a state that he will carry the enemy through all the firewalls himself.
> ⚡️ Note the term «Cradle». «Katya» calls Earth the same way the +Angi call it in their logs. She didn’t even change the terminology, that’s how confident she is that the general will swallow the bait. And he swallowed it.
> 💀 While the Smartass Jerk is fighting «Absorbers» in the forest, the fate of the country is being decided in an office where a weeping old man drinks cognac and believes in ghosts.
