ASHES

35. Lovecraftian Horror.

I was in a hurry to post this while there’s still Halloween out there somewhere, so it might still be a bit of a mess. Sorry for that. I’ll fix it and put it up on ao3 until the end of the year.

Two More Shall Take Its Place

Brock Rumlow used to befriend his teammates; Tony Masters and Eric O’Grady to name a few, and most especially Jack Rollins, a man Brock had held dear. But all of his men, men he had known well, men he had cherished or at least respected, met their gruesome ends and were replaced by fresh meat, and the fresh meat was replaced by fresher meat, and so on and so on, until Brock detached himself from his team and all he knew about them were their skills and names.

He wished he could say they all died in battle; that they were heroes that sacrificed their lives for the greater good, and that was ultimately what he had been telling their families. But the truth was they had all been found in the Ideal Federal Savings Bank, alive but their sanity gone. Then they would spend a few days in the Medical Bay until declared dead. All their funerals were closed casket, and if Brock hadn’t seen Jack’s body in the morgue with his own two eyes, he would have suspected they were still alive somewhere.

Taking care of Jack while his body was still functioning, but his soul—or however one named whatever made him Jack—so very clearly gone was the most heart-wrenching. Jack had been multilingual, and though mostly silent, whenever he spoke, his tongue mixed the languages, so nobody could understand him. He didn’t look at Brock with recognition, and would sometimes react violently to his attempts at communication; other times he’d sit completely still and dead to the world.

A day before his passing, Brock had grabbed Jack by the shoulders and, in his sternest commander voice, asked him what caused the state he was in—a desperate shout of a desperate man looking for answers impossible to get. He had not expected to receive a conscious reaction, but this time Jack looked him in the eye with the scraps of sanity that shouldn’t have been in his possession anymore, and replied in a grave voice, “Cut off one head—” before returning to his multilingual hopeless babble.

The day Brock said his goodbyes to Jack in the morgue might have been the saddest in his life, but it brought him peace, too, to see him finally undisturbed by whatever horrors had been haunting his mind.

Brock had seen his share of horrors, first in the war, then in black ops, and those days, he could proudly say not many things made his hair stand on all ends, but one of those things was Ideal Federal Savings Bank. And he wasn’t the only man whose face would twist in fear at the bare mention of it; his teammates, young people at most, whispered between themselves about the old agents found mumbling incoherently in the vaults underground and the same agents dying days after. Because everything that anyone ever told them were the official stories, stories that Brock could attest weren’t at all true, they made up their own theories of what was happening in the maze of vaults-turned-laboratories, and whenever they were called down there to serve as security, Brock saw in their eyes that they were awaiting death.

But his teammates were as wrong in their assumptions as the official stories, as they believed the source of their older coworkers’ doom was the thing that was kept in one of the vaults; the thing that, as the scientists working there said, once upon a time used to be human. Their skin would break in sweat whenever they attended the vault and surrounded the machine the thing was strapped to, and they avoided the thing’s cold blue eyes and grasped their rifles tighter at the slightest move of its metal arm, but they wouldn’t dare to pull the trigger until absolutely necessary, aware that the brass valued the thing more than they did any of their subordinates.

Brock had worked with and guarded the thing—the Asset, they called him—for a decade, and he knew it couldn’t have caused his late friends to go insane. The worst the Asset could do was to kill, and Brock long ago stopped fearing death. Furthermore, he had noticed the same symptoms of losing sanity in the Asset; its tongue would mix languages it spoke, and it would become violent for no apparent reason. But every time it happened, it was put in the machine that treated it with shocks until it calmed down and was focused again, ready to comply.

Brock knew it wasn’t the Asset that should be feared.

What he feared of was whatever made the marble floor of the Bank tremble and cover in slime. Once upon a time, when he was young and foolish enough to think asking questions was a good idea, he had learned the vibrations were caused by scientific machinery; as for his inquiries about the slime, he only got shrugs of shoulders in response until one time, maybe two years into his work with the Asset, early in the morning he had acquainted a janitor mopping the floor.

“Where is all this slime coming from?” he had asked as he watched it cling to his combat boots.

The janitor threw him a scolding look over his shoulder as if to let him know he should have known better than to ask. “Cut off one head—” he replied nonetheless and went back to work.

As Jack had been yet alive and well back then, Brock hadn’t thought much of it—perhaps, he had concluded, the janitor wasn’t very bright. He was, after all, only a janitor. But after the saddest day of his life, Brock had remembered that conversation and ever since he had connected the mysterious deaths of his men to the slime.

Another thing he wasn’t as much afraid of as it made him uncomfortable were the lonely nights at the barracks. It was where he was haunted by confusing vivid dreams. It was enough for him to lie down in his hard bed to see sparks under his eyelids and to feel something heavy settle on his chest, something cold and slimy, and he’d wake with a start every time, his hands absently rubbing at his body, trying to get rid of the nonexistent caustic substance soaking his top.

That night when he sat up in his bed, pulling off his undershirt that was soaked not with the slime but sweat, and looked up, his blood ran cold at the sight of the Asset standing still in his room, cold eyes watching him from above the half-face mask it was wearing. Seconds passed in silence before Brock realized the Asset didn’t come to kill him as he would be already dead if that was the case.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I was alone,” the Asset replied.

Brock sat still for a moment before nodding. The Asset wasn’t supposed to be left alone, and somebody’s head would roll for leaving it unattended. It was Brock’s duty to report it, but looking at the clock revealed it was the middle of the night still—his boss would hate to be woken up even for such a serious reason.

He scrambled out of bed and approached the Asset. The combat suit it was wearing looked uncomfortable, and Brock ordered it to strip. The Asset complied and peeled away its Kevlar jacket, vest, and shirt, and took off its boots. Brock helped it out of the mask, and it took in a deep breath, and then another. It nodded when Brock asked if it wanted to rest, and so they both lay down in bed, back to back, and though he was reluctant to fall asleep again, Brock eventually closed his eyes and his vision went bright from hot electricity surging through his head.

Once he blinked away the dark spots temporarily clouding his vision, he saw the Asset’s face hanging above his own. It was holding his head, one hand warm and the other cold on his cheeks, and Brock mused on that duality of it. Suddenly he realized its hands weren’t the only dual thing about it, because while he was staring into one pair of eyes, there was another right beside the first one. The Asset had two heads. Brock was given no time to wonder about it, to let it fully sink in, as one of the heads leaned in, and its mouth covered his own.

It was never something that was supposed to take place; definitely not something that was allowed, but one night, under the cover of the dark, it just happened and kept happening; Brock had no explanation for that but maybe loneliness and a desperation to kill it. What was driving the Asset though, he did not know. On the nights like that one, when he was on the verge of sleep and feeling unreal, he felt a kind of bond between them, and he supposed the Asset, being not a human but something higher, was accustomed to sense it all the time.

Getting lost in the kiss, Brock almost forgot about the second head, but the flesh and the metal both touching his skin at once kept reminding him; then he felt that second mouth kiss his untouched lips, and because his were already occupied, he realized with a jolt—he had a second head, too.

The Asset was stronger than him, but somehow Brock managed to shove it off. He ran to the bathroom and punched the lights on. He leaned against the sink, clammy hands gripping the porcelain too tight, and his ragged breath clouded the mirror, but as he stared at it desperately, he could only see one pair of eyes.

As he stood there, catching his breath and watching his face, he realized that wasn’t the first time he had a dream like this. He wasn’t even sure if it was a dream, or if in his not quite awake state, he was becoming aware of things his hard common sense refused to consider true. He tensed when he heard footsteps outside—at least the Asset showing up in his room wasn’t a dream.

The door opened and the Asset’s face—only one—showed up above his shoulder in the mirror, and Brock heaved a sigh.

“What is wrong with me?” he asked, and though he didn’t really expect an answer, the Asset parted its lips.

“Cut off one head—”

Brock turned on his heel, scowling, tired of hearing the same phrase over and over again that did nothing to clarify anything, and he was about to demand an explanation, but his voice died in his throat.

The Asset was dripping slime onto the floor.