LEGION: CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
- Barry Commoner
The environment is everything that isn't me.
- Albert Einstein
Let the bodies hit the floor
- Drowning Pool
The Mandrake's Secret
“Mandragora.” Steinbeck said it once as if to taste it, and then again, more satisfied.
The tone Steinbeck had used had been low and thoughtful, not grand and perfectly enunciated like his quotations or medical orders, low enough in fact John might have thought it was an air conditioning vent, or a passing medical bed. Steinbeck however, was not the sort of man to mutter as he worked, when he spoke he spoke plainly or in a rich, pronounced tenor that always sounded to Jack like an actor expounding to an audience, so the fact that he had spoken a solitary word quietly was enough to arouse the younger man’s suspicions.
Jack looked up from his work, another chemical test to check the spore properties on infected mammal blood, and eyed his colleague seriously. Steinbeck had been handling a delicate dissection of what had once been a US Special Forces soldier from behind the glass of a security cabinet. The body was fresh, the spore having been flushed from the system a mere hour ago, and Steinbeck had worked a mass of the infected tissue out of the body in record time. The tumor-like bulge had three of the red flowers growing from it and several large, black, spines; it lay abandoned atop the corpse like a grotesque sport’s ball.
Steinbeck himself had withdrawn his arms from the protective sleeves that aloud him to interact with the sealed container inside the cabinet, and was now standing tall, his arms crossed over his improbably long chest. He was of course dressed from head to foot in his jet-black containment suit, all eight feet two inches of the man concealed from the potentially harmful effects of the outside environment, the ever imposing breathing mask covered his immense skull, the two Red-tinted lens that Steinbeck observed the world through were opaque, hiding any hint of the Giant’s humanity from the human eye.
When eyeing Steinbeck with his most scrutinizing surgeon’s glare failed to elect a response Jack Snyder cleared his throat loudly and spoke with irritation in his voice: “What did you just say?”
The Giant fixed Snyder with an eyeless stare and cocked his head to one side. The effect of the overly-theatrical movement should have been comical, perhaps had even been meant to be comical, but it seemed slow and inhuman, cold and distant, and just caused Jack to tense up a little more.
“Mandragora. That’s what I’m calling them from now on, the spore I mean, not the Legion. I think I’ll contact the project leaders and make it official, it’s easier to discern the two apart if we refer to them as different entities, and it has a suitably Gothic tone to it…don’t you think?”
The headache Snyder had been holding down for the past hour finally broke due to frustration and he sighed loudly. “What are you talking about? We have work to do!”
The Giant moved up close to Jack, the trip across the lab only took the man three great strides. Jack was 5’ 11” a decent height, but he barely reached the taller man’s lowest rib bone, and as the giant reached him, then stooped to eye him closer he felt a sudden inner panic. He's the monster Jack, the one from the old dreams, you know this, you've known since Africa, the one from your closet, he’s finally found you, haha, ma said you were safe, not so safe, no one’s safe!
“My good Dr. Snyder, your face is flushed like I haven’t seen it since Africa, and your eyes are practically swollen with blood vessels. Get back to your bunk, take the night off, you and I are the only ones left awake on this whole level anyway. Get some rest my friend; I’ll see you at first light.”
First light was when the glass panes glowed with faux-morning sunshine to simulate the dawn, the simulation of a 24 hour sun cycle was key to the sanity of underground dwelling humans. With a flourish that struck Jack as dismissive, Steinbeck went back to the medical cabinet and began to enthusiastically don the safety gloves that would allow him to finish his dissection.
“But I haven’t finished the tests, and there will be a dozen more to run on whatever you find in the Lieutenant over there-“the Giant cut him off smoothly, his voice disinterested, his meaning authoritative.
“I have discovered that all human evil comes from man being unable to sit still in a room. Blaise Pascal.” Another quote; he was infuriating. “Get some rest Dr, it will keep till the morning.”
Snyder hated being dismissed by the older man, who never seemed to sleep, but he found himself gathering up his things, clipping his notes to a clipboard, and rising to his feet with the intention of departure. So as not to seem over-eager to leave he inquired of The Giant: “Why Mandragora? What does it matter what the damn thing’s called?”
Steinbeck didn’t pause in his work, his doubly gloved hands once again wrapped around the growth, which miraculously had already begun to sprout several more dark red roots, reattaching itself to its deceased host, hungrily searching for nutrients to gorge itself on. It was the tenacity of the spores, the newly dubbed Mandragora, that spelled doom for the eco-system that existed on the surface, they could draw strength from anything, and any attempt to sever or crush them only resulted in the disbursement of the red haze, a crowd of microscopic spores that seeded themselves anywhere they landed.
Jack sighed and made for the lab door, the security doors beeped at his approach and a flat woman’s voice cautioned him about removing contaminated equipment from the room. He hadn’t really expected a reply from the Giant, he was engrossed in his work, but the answer he received he could have done without.
“The Mandragora, belonging to a genus similar to Nightshade, and equally as poisonous to the human body, is a odd root long associated with death and witchcraft. It was said when the bowels loosed from a hanged man as he died, a mandragora would spring from wherever these leavings fell. It was also said that the scream a mandrake made when pulled from the soil would kill a man.”
As he spoke, the Giant wrenched the new roots that connected the core of the plant to the dead Lieutenant. Once severed, the by now familiar red haze rose and filled the operating cabinet, at the same time, the corpse twisted violently and let loose a high death rattle as its lungs finally collapsed, and chest caved, the green house relationship it had share with the core now gone forever.
Steinbeck proceeded to put the shriveling core into a containment case; one filled with a vicious blue liquid. He closed and locked the lid once the core was deposited inside. “It’s real Dr. Snyder, the Mandragora are real. We are living in a dangerous new world where the dead walk, monsters rule the sky, and plants hunger for human flesh. I think its time the higher ups in the coalition stop looking at things so damn clinically. I think they need to realize the gravity of this…mankind’s final hubris.”
Snyder stood frozen in the doorway, and felt a chill that had nothing to do with the industrial air conditioning run up and down his spine. “Yes well…Surely not mankind’s...final hubris?” Steinbeck still didn’t turn around as he answered. “I teach you beyond Man. Man is something that shall be surpassed. What have you done to surpass him? Friedrich Nietzsche. Sleep well Doctor.”
--------------------------------------
Jack was in for a unpleasant surprise as he stalked down the clean hall, a bottleneck of narrow rounded hallway that were separated from the main complex by several blast doors to contend with contaminants, effecting his best late-for-surgery stride.
At the end of the clean hall were the decontaminate showers, in the antechamber before the shower room, anyone leaving the testing facilities had to dispose of all the clothing and equipment they had on their person by way of a steel disposal chute, and then enter the shower room to clean themselves. Jack was glad he was always alone for these excursions; the other staff already long clocked out and returned to their dorms.
Jack was not so much self-conscious of he body as he was paranoid about how he was percieved; he felt even though the decontaminant showers were reliable, that they should have been conceived as a solitary experience, definitely not a co-gender one.
As he stripped and disposed of everything he carried, disposable glasses, his pens, socks, and shoes, he noted that most of the sanctuary was set up that way. Public bathing areas, community pools, and dorms, very few areas of the complex lent themselves to solitary activity.
Snyder realized that this was probably to stave of isolation complexes among the workers, boredom and isolation being two of the biggest problems about being confined to a subterranean complex for extended periods of time, but he didn’t think that was all.
The Sanctuary had been built to house several dozen thousand survivors of a unforeseeable disaster, more specifically, one that endangered humanity’s above ground existence. As such, it had also been built with the mindset of preserving mankind, surely reproduction and proliferation played a large part in this process, and as such, a sense of community became more then necessary, to the imaginative architect it became imperative. Thus co-ed everything, bathrooms, bunks, locker rooms.
Snyder disposed of his lab coat, the mantel of his trade, last and shivered as he felt the chill of the powerful air conditioning on his bare skin. The last set of doors slid open and all he could think of was the impending misery of the cold chemical bath, soon afterward replaced by the reassuring warmth of the steam room.
What he hadn’t expected was to find Dr.Hazlit, the very attractive petite red-head from the neurological unit to be on her hands and knees, gasping for air, her naked form covered in blood, her eyes wide with panic. “Dr. Snyder!” he’d never heard her voice crack under strain, never before heard her howl in fear. “It’s the President Doctor! He’s trying to kill me!”
Nothing of her Yale education or her groomed prodigy upbringing remained evident in her panicked voice, nothing remained of the quiet and cool neurologist who had made modest passes in Snyder's direction, there was just a wailing, terrified child covered in blood, blood streaming from cuts made in her flesh by human nails. All that was left of the attractive and intimidating scientist was a hysterical child whose eyes bulged like the prey before its immanent destruction.
Jack had time to think She's mad! She's lost it, clawing herself to death; is it a side effect of the Spore or the Virus? Which one is free in the Sanctuary!? before the president himself came crashing through one of the glass privacy panes.
They had taken him alive to further examine the effect Hunters had on Feeders, the president had been a incredibly clever hunter and capable of far more intricate orders then most of his kind had been noted for. They had learned much about the Legion's feeding and leading habits from him, but all Jack Snyder wanted to know about him now was who let him out of his holding cell, and perhaps more prudently, why.
He braced himself as the last leader of the united states stalked toward him, naked and gibbering in the Legion un-tounge, a slash across his face turning his once charming smile into a nightmarish smirk. One of his ears were missing, and the other was shredded, his head, usually clean shaven was now bereft of hair due to the new hormones his body was reproducing.
His skeletal frame stretched out his dark skin, every hint of his rib and hip bones protruded like knives.
Snyder thought ruefully, well, when I voted for him he seemed the decent sort, he was going to bring change, ha! How things have changed! as the former president elect fell upon the prone woman, her screams could be heard across the shower room and down the halls.
Snyder heard a second set of screams mingle with hers, to his horror he realized they were his...
-------------------------------
The age of man is over,
A darkness comes at dawn
These lessons that we learned here,
Have only just begun...
We were the kings and queens of promise,
We were the victims of ourselves,
Maybe the children of a lesser God,
Between Heaven and Hell...
-30 Seconds to Mars
