Enemy Revealed

“Before we begin, you should know your enemy.” With that cryptic Sun Tzu statement, Stone led me out of the gym and officers mess and out of the general quarters area. We walked along many corridors to a restricted elevator. He punched in a code, it did a retina scan and allowed us to proceed down several floors. I tried to ask where we were going but the Major kept his grim silence.

At last we came to the brig. A large warehouse area with cells all along the walls. Several humans were mounted on translucent platforms within, similar to what I had been mounted on in my room. Major Stone ignored them and we walked to the cells at the furthest end of the large area. When I first saw it, my skin literally crawled in response. It was not on a Sim platform at all, and instead the cell looked like a more traditional jail cell.

Metal bars separated it from us, in addition to a barrier force field.

The creature was not looking at us; instead, it was methodically hitting its head against the wall. Blood and tissue smeared along the area it was hitting. Its body appeared bipedal; perhaps it had been human at some stage, but that was not the case now. It stopped banging its head when it sensed us and turned its undead and horrendous gaze towards us. The mashed features of its forehead dripping gore into milky white eyes. The eyes themselves seemed blind and yet the creature was looking at us, there was absolutely no doubt. It opened its mouth in a hideous rictus and gave a full-throated roar, spittle flying in our direction. The jaws extending unnaturally wide. I could see its teeth were all sharp amidst the rufescent fetid flesh of its gums and immediately realized it had been an elf, although what it was now I could not rightly say.

“Oh my God!” I exclaimed in horror.

“Meet Elfie, ” said Major Stone in a low and understated voice.

“What the F…” I couldn’t even finish my expletive as my hand reached for my mouth. I was shocked and horrified to my core.

“Yes Laddie, what we face is nothing short of a pure nightmare.” Stone’s face was stern, “Elfie was one of the first to ever be contained. He was here long before I joined up. They have had him down here for a very long time feeding him rodent type creatures. It’s quite a shock to see them for the first time. This then is the enemy, a Reaper Devourer. One of their millions of ground troops. This particular one comes from Elf stock. He was infected and then turned when he returned to his people. They kept him alive and contained and have given him to us for our training. What you will meet out in the field will have the same basic characteristics although the Reapers use any sapient body form. We have taken to calling them Zombies. They see, but they are not using the eyes of the body they are inhabiting, so blinding them physically doesn’t work. They are literally animated cadavers and like all ghouls of stories past, the only way to make one dead is to cut off its head.

“Is it a virus? How does one get infected?”

Stone shrugged “I don’t rightly know, but I do know if they bite you and consume your flesh, then you will turn into one of them over time after a short agonizing illness and then death. A simple glancing bite or scratch won’t do it, so their saliva is not the contaminant. Your flesh has to pass down their gullet. Hugo was bitten once, lost part of his calf but he chopped off the creatures’ head before it had a chance to swallow his meat. He’s still going strong.”

Inwardly I cringed. I had trained with several K9 units in the past and those dogs were incredibly ferocious. When I saw them take bites and sometimes consumed what they had bitten off of human suspects had made my skin crawl. Those were just dogs, fair enough, they were large dogs, however, these were sapient, intelligent beings with no feeling at all and they wanted to eat you alive. I didn’t know quite how to feel about it.

“You say ground troops, but what about their officers?” I enquired, still mesmerized by the huge gaping maw that seemed to be stuck in an open-mouthed silent scream. Elfie had moved to the bar, and was trying to ram his head between them. Major Stone pressed a control that caused the barrier separating us to change color preventing Elfie from seeing us, but we could still see him.

The creature… the zombie continued to try squeeze itself through the bars in our direction. “They have a sixth sense for life energy, a desire to eat any living flesh they can get their hands on. Without working eyes, they navigate fairly complex areas, understanding about doors, about going around or over things, and once aroused they have an uncontrollable urge to rend and kill. Their strength is inhuman, and as a group, they incite each other into a frenzy that increases their strength to even greater heights. When damaged, they can heal by eating living flesh. It has to be alive though when it passes their lips, and somehow they drain the life power from it and broken bones mend, stripped flesh grows and tendons and sinews even repair themselves."

"As I said, the only cure for this creature is to lop off its head. Their senses are not universal though. We have found they can see…” Stone made inverted commas in the air, “…in only one direction. Their hearing is pretty poor, but their sense of smell and sense of life is very capable. That cloak you are wearing would protect you from their scrutiny, but only beyond a ten-meter radius. Any closer and he will know you are there like he does now.”

He then looked at me. “The Reaper officers are not seen often, they control these troops from behind the scenes, some kind of mind control. The officers seem to have a mind link that gives them full control of the zombie, which lessens the further the creatures are away from them. This zombie has never had a controller. The so-called officers control between 50-100 Zombies each. They, the officers I mean, are often encased in some form of armor and some of them even have magical body shields. In all our missions, we have never tangled with an officer directly, only their minions. You should well know that small teams tactics require we get in, achieve the objective and get out. We don’t mess around. Our orders are to stay out of these officers way and make as little contact as possible, preferably avoiding the Ghouls, which are smarter versions of Elfie as well as the Zombies. Our focus is on destroying their ability to find life rather than wiping them out.”

“So you are telling me that in all the years you have been fighting the Reapers, the 121 successful missions of your unit, that you have never fought an officer directly?” I asked incredulously.

Stone nodded resignedly. “Aye, our war on the Reapers is little more than an annoyance to them. Our main objective to date has been to disable their detection posts, hindering their ability to sense any emissions from Earth’s direction. The radio detection posts and similar type tech are used by them to detect sapient civilizations. The officers leave the ghouls and zombies to guard them once they have set up posts. Sometimes an officer is present but even in that case, they stay concealed and protected, out of harm's way. Often the ghouls are remnants of the sapient life from that particular planet and the Reapers use the post to narrow in on those survivors left on those worlds. Eventually, the entire world gets wiped out. People of consequence are captured, tortured and whisked away to either be consumed or kept as a source of knowledge, but when the knowledge runs dry, they are consumed too. The planet we are going to has local sentients called Scalars. Large-scaled grey beings with four arms and two legs. They also have three eyes. Strange looking fellas but with all that's going on, you should be used to strange beings by now. When they are turned into zombies or ghouls, they are formidable enemies.”

I shook my head. We were getting nowhere with this war if we only took out the troops. The masterminds behind it should be our targets. I kept my thoughts to myself as I asked “Do we have a General or similar person in charge? Someone who controls our movements according to some overall master plan?”

“Well, no, not really in the way you mean it. The Absinthe has a command structure they answer to, but the Absinthe we work for are incognito. They are going against the wishes of their controlling bodies by enabling us and assisting us. The missions we go on are just missions of opportunity rather than any coordinated effort to undermine the enemy.” I could see Stone was frustrated just by the way he answered me.

“Colonel, you are the highest ranking officer that has ever joined us. We need someone stepping up and taking the fight to the enemy, but I think both you and I know that you are way under-cooked to be doing anything else except learning for the next while. My hope, and I suspect the Absinthe’s hope is you will be our main man once you have gained enough experience.”

I took a last look at the terrifying creature and considered what I could do against a nation of undead creatures with only a few hundred trained men. Men who couldn’t even use modern weapons unless we acquired them in the field. I would have laughed if not for the overwhelming sense of wanting to cry. On the way back to my room, I questioned Stone about the Scalars.

They were a medieval level technology sapient race that was losing their world piece by piece. We were just spectators trying to slow down the Reapers progress from the sidelines. The Scalars didn’t even know we existed. It made little sense. Major Stone led me back to my room, and I plugged myself in, not quite literally, but close enough. It involved lying down on the translucent barrier and assuming a relaxed, restful pose.

The robotic arms would extend out and clamp my head, then something would happen, and I was immobilized completely. Grant's voice would reverberate inside my head asking if I was ready and then the stomach tube would insert and several other tubes would attach making bodily functions automatic.