Phagocytosis

Moscow, European Federation, February 2038

Whether it was 2038 or any other year, Volodya Zheglov's desk and office were buried under stacks of papers, everywhere except the small space reserved for his ashtray and the worn photograph of his wife and daughter. At 39 years old, standing 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighing 220 pounds, the former Russian infantryman seemed too big for the cramped office, yet he moved through it like a predator in his territory. A police lieutenant and head of his precinct's anti-gang unit, Volodya carried the weight of the city's darkest corners on his broad shoulders the same way he carried scars from a few superficial stab wounds. Veteran gangs that rose from the ashes of the war, hardened groups from Central Asia entrenched in the capital, and the latest plague, gangs exploiting RFID spoofers to drain bank accounts in the crowded subway cars,all demanded his unrelenting focus.

"Pasta, tuna, and mayonnaise. Every day at work. That and my wife's chicken. No need to die at the gym, just keep busy and eat well," he says, ending our conversation about bulking.

"Fuck me if we ever had tuna in our rations. Buckwheat porridge in the morning, canned beef stew and hard biscuits for lunch, instant noodle soup with something pretending to be fish or meat in the evening. Barely enough for half a day's calories," he continues as he checks the new papers on his desk. He turns around and sorts them into the right piles with the practiced precision of someone who knows exactly what each pile holds.

"You guys don't have computers?" I ask.

"Ha! When the old leadership bailed at the start of the war, they wiped every damn government computer clean. Now you see why we stick to paper. If you want to hide evidence, you gotta drag it outside and burn it in a barrel," he says.

"No, but we didn't have a bite to eat all day. Supply chain was totally fucked. Everyone—from the bosses to the driver of the T72 I was riding on, just wanted this shit to end and have us shove that damn salient from Bialystok in Poland all the way to the Baltic Sea. Crabs pounding us day and night. Didn't have a second to open the rations or cook anything. Dodging blasters, tripods, irradiated zones. Man, it was one thing after another," he goes on like he's talking to himself.

"That day?" I ask.

"You want me to tell about the first time I saw those things?" he asks.

"Yeah, sure, but tell it your own way," I answer.

"An hour by car from Gdansk. Before the war, so maybe a day or two back then. Again, we were getting hammered on our flanks by crabs. The western forces hadn't taken Warsaw yet and there we were thinking we could just stroll casually north of it. The heart of that marsiane infestation was to our north. Kaliningrad, Lithuania, all that good farmland. How fucking stupid was it that the people who made the call not to nuke it weren't actually on the battlefield," he says as he pulls out a cigarette.

Playing with my lighter, I flick it on.

"Spasibo," he says after lighting it.

"Fucking bureaucrats. Expecting us to still have a place for people to live after the battle they expected us to win. They could have shoved a Lithuanian family into my living room for all I cared."

"Oh well. If you can't move the mountain to Mohammed," he says before stopping.

"Just a village. We rolled in maybe three hundred meters from it while the artillery was still pounding down. The tank commander gave the signal, the crew shut all their hatches, and my squad jumped off that tank. Some BMP-3 was close by. They'd started mass-producing those 'Duck hunt' shells for the autocannon. The gunner could set the range to fifty, one hundred, or two hundred meters. Fired rounds that exploded in the air and sent fragments like buckshot raining down on the targets," he smiled and waved his hand in the air. "Boy, those things could fuck up a dozen crabs in ten seconds."

His smile faded as he went on. "My sergeant next to that BMP-3 outisde with the radio's hand held device blaring orders. He gave me and three others the order to check out a farm just outside the village. Said it was only fifty meters away. The rest of the platoon would stay put here in case we all went to check the farm and get obliterated by a stray mortar round. Or something, I don't know what that guy's deal was, He wasn't scared, just lazy."

"The rest of the squad and the platoon stayed put, waiting for the artillery pounding the village to finally stop while they smoked cigarettes and pretended to watch their sector. We were the ones sent out first, walking through the mud and broken fences while the shells still screamed overhead. Didn't want to die, but I didn't want to die at that moment, so close to the end, you know."

He rubbed his jaw as if tasting the dust again. "We reached the farm. Place looked like a ghost had chewed it up and spat it out. Roof half-caved in, doors hanging loose, windows blown out. I told the boys we were doing this by the book. No cowboy shit. I stacked them up by the doorway, took point myself, and pushed in slow."

"The second we breached the front door, I heard something. From the back of the house, near the kitchen. Something scurrying, fast. A chair scraping across the floor, a couple of pots crashing down. Couldn't see anything, just the noise. I froze for a second, listening, waiting for it to come back, but nothing. Just silence and my own breathing."

He leaned forward, eyes narrowing. "By the time I reached the kitchen, the back door was wide open. Mud marks across the floor, long, uneven, like whatever it was had claws or something that didn't walk like a man. The rational part of my brain thought it might just have been a stray dog or fox that had set up shop here, the lizard part of my brain was telling me that it probably wasn't that simple."

As I cursed myself for not putting a man on the back of the house when we went in, I caught sight of the barn door across from us. It was swinging, slow and heavy, like something had slammed through it on the way in.

Dmitri nearly made me jump out of my skin when he appeared behind me, rolling a cigarette between his fingers.

"Nothing upstairs," he said, fiddling with that poor excuse for tobacco.

"In the barn," I told him, eyes still on that door.

"Yeah, I heard it. Must be a dog. Heavy thing, probably eats bodies," he muttered, casual as ever, like the fool he was.

"Put that fucking cigarette away and hold your rifle properly," I snapped.
The words burned coming out. I wasn't usually like that, and the others felt it. Dima and Sasha both stiffened, rifles snapping up like puppets on strings. They knew something had crawled under my skin, and now it was under theirs too.

Dmitri just stared at me with that crooked grin of his. Bastard. Even if he thought there was something nasty waiting in that barn, he'd rather swagger right into its teeth than let me look like I'd lost my nerve.

He smirked, the cigarette dangling like a dare. Like one of those villains in old Soviet films, he blew smoke straight into my face. My fists itched,I swear I could've dropped him with one punch, even with the rationed scraps of food keeping me on my feet.

"Radio your boss," he said, cradling his rifle like a child, already striding toward the courtyard.

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"Dima, go cover that fool," I said. Dima hesitated, his jaw tight, then followed. Dmitri was already at the barn door before Dima was halfway—

"Chief inspector! Mother of one of the suspects we arrested is here making a scene"

The memory ripped away like a torn bandage. A plainclothes officer stumbled into the office, sending a stack of papers teetering. My heart thudded once, hard, before I remembered where I was. Volodya shot to his feet, barking at the man for not knocking as I sat there, pulse still beatingin the past.

"Tell here she can come back for him at 8am. Not a minute earlier." He said, calmly this time.

"Understood chief inspector, I apologize for barging in like that." The man said like a scared puppy.

"It's ok, don't worry about it, now go" Volodya told him before the man stepped out.

Volodya sat back down, fingers hovering over his pack of cigarettes as if wondering whether to light another.

"Anyway," Volodya said, clearing my throat, "I joined Dmitri inside just as I heard him call out."

"What's wrong with you? Are you hurt?" His voice was steady, but something in the way he asked it made my stomach twist.

I stepped into the doorway. He was standing by a stack of straw, his back half-turned to me. And then I saw it.

At first, I thought it was a man crawling across the floor. The dim light cut from outside into its back and legs, legs that moved wrong.

If I'd seen its face or even the rest of that body, I think I would have shot it right then.

In war, you see things. Burned men. Ghouls that used to be soldiers, dragging themselves with what's left of their arms. Fire and shrapnel rip clothes from a body, cook the skin until it's something black and shiny. You can't always tell what you're looking at.

But this thing,
This thing was worse.

I saw its arms. Human, almost. But they weren't what it crawled with. Its real arms were longer, jointed in the wrong places, like a spider made of burnt sticks. And they were black. Blacker than shadow.

It started to rise.

God, it was tall. Seven feet, maybe more. Its back still to us. I didn't see Dmitri's face, but I didn't have to. Even with his usual grin gone, I could feel it, the bastard wasn't having a good time either. I saw him move his hand to the safety of his AK. I heard Dmitri flick his gun to automatic.

And that thing heard it too.

It moved. In a blink-and-you'll-miss-it way. One second, it was crouched low, its grotesque frame coiled like it didn't weigh a thing, and in the next breath, that black arm, longer than it had any right to be, was inches from Dmitri's skull.

It didn't move like a man. Not like any animal I'd ever seen either. Birds twitch. Lizards jerk. Squirrels dart. But this thing,
This thing snapped between points in space, like inertia meant nothing to it. It wasn't running or lunging, it was just there. Its limbs didn't swing with weight or effort. No buildup of muscle or momentum. One moment it was on the ground, the next it was towering over him, as if it had skipped every frame of motion in between.

The air barely stirred when it moved. No shuffle, no drag of mass against the floor. It was like watching shadows change shape when you blink, here, then gone, then suddenly closer.

I felt my breath lock in my chest as it snapped Dmitri's neck with one flick of its arm. Those eyes, man, I see them every night. Black. A crab's eyes are black too, but they are like pool balls, hard and empty. These were different. Organic. Almost human.

The skin it wore, those detached arms that barely had any bone in them, just hanging from where it guessed they should be attached. Things with weight aren't supposed to move like that. Bones, muscles, they all follow rules. This thing didn't. Its body twisted, each movement out of step with the laws of balance, its head tilting in a way that made my own neck ache just to watch.

Fuck me, I don't even know if it was looking at me or at Dmitri as it mimicked that unnatural angle his head was bent at when it had shattered his spine.

Someone shot first. I don't know if it was Dima or Sasha. But it saved my life. I was too scared, I'm ashamed to say it, but that freeze I had is what kept me alive.

It jumped over the straw stack as the two behind it fired their rifles. The impact knocked me sideways, my shoulder felt like it had been hit by a truck. I hit the ground hard, landing on my ass, just in time to see it go to work on Dima. Pinning him to the dirt.

As I lifted my rifle, I saw the arm it had pressed against Dima's skull go deeper, pressing down with an impossible weight until the skull finally gave out. It ripped Dima's arm clean off. Sasha was backing away, screaming as he kept firing in panic, and the thing hurled Dima's arm at him.

I fired three rounds into its back before it disappeared outside, as fast as it had struck. I heard Sasha yell, then everything stopped, gunfire, screams, like the world had gone silent for a heartbeat.

I stood up and ran out, blood already pouring from my arm. I hadn't even noticed that one of the shots behind me had hit me.

The creature was on Sasha, punching and kicking him like a wild animal. I lifted my AK-12 despite the pain and the blood dripping down my sleeve and fired, and fired.

At one moment, I got confused, impacts were coming from the right of it. The rest of the squad had finally decided to show up, and they were all shooting.

Sasha was dead. What was left of him was being pulverized under a hail of bullets.

I think the beast was confused too. Unlike Dima and Dmitri, Sasha had been wearing a helmet. I saw it try again and again to absolutely destroy it, pounding at the kevlar like it could crack it open.

As if it thought the helmet was the brain.

The idea that it knew exactly where to aim was as terrifying as the fact that my bullets barely seemed to slow it down.

Once there wasn't anything left to hold the helmet on the mush that was Sasha's head, it looked at it, taking bullet after bullet. Even the helmet in its hand was blown away by a round.

It looked to where the round had come from, set its eye on Uzoqova, and again it moved with the speed and grace of a hummingbird. As it pounced on him and went back to slashing, punching, and removing the guy's head, everyone was losing it.

It had moved so fast that the seven or so guys standing there were forced to fire with each other in their backgrounds. I reloaded just before the rest of the guys did.

Despite the seven rifles and machine guns shooting at it, it was awkward when everyone had to stop shooting to reload. They had started firing all at the same time, and now they were all in a contest to see who would be the first one to put in a fresh magazine.

It was Pavlov, and his grand prize was catching the beast's attention next.

It hurled toward him, grabbed him by the neck, and lifted him up. I was already on the beast's back as it tried to squeeze the life out of Pavlov.

If bullets didn't take it out, I remembered my training. Like the big beetles, you had to find a soft place between its armor. At collarbone level, right below where the human skin, or what was left of it, on top of its armor had a gap. Purple, god knows why.

I put my rifle on automatic and squeezed the trigger as Pavlov's neck was turned into beef jerky.

It spun around with a screech. And I mean screech. I was thrown away like a human ragdoll. I had something else on my mind, but that sound could pierce your eardrums, I believe.

I landed on my side. As I got up to one knee, I tried my best to lift my rifle, but my bleeding arm just wouldn't respond. Everyone was shooting while trying to take as much distance as they could from it.

My good hand went for my pistol as it did its best to crawl back to the barn. Not a slow crawl, mind you.

I nearly vomited a few weeks ago when my daughter showed me a video of a cat that had lost control of its hind legs. The poor eight-year-old girl had to listen to me cry in the other room as her mom explained it wasn't her fault.

It moved like that, fast, using its front arms to crawl, like a damned paralyzed cat. I don't know why it stopped—maybe it knew it was going to die and wanted to take me out with it. It just stopped moving and looked back at me as I lifted my QSZ-92, a Chinese pistol I had found on a body a while back.

Hard to hit anything with one hand. I knew I had fifteen rounds, but I was just scratching its paint, peeling off one piece of dry human skin at a time. I nearly shot my own knee off trying to stand up and move away. Instead, I just fell on my ass like an idiot while that beast kept coming at me.

I nearly thought about using my pistol on myself before the thing just disintegrated.

The BMP-3 had finally decided to show up. That gunner, God bless him, didn't miss. He fired from the side with its 30mm cannon loaded with duck-hunt shells. I saw one limb after another get torn apart before they scattered in the wind.

And like a dumbass, I still kept shooting at it with my pistol.

When it finally stopped moving, you'd think we would've regained our composure, but no. As I put a tourniquet on my arm, I just reloaded and joined everyone else in the party of shooting, like that would make us feel better.

You should've seen us when the rest of the company arrived. Even dead, that thing was the three-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. We were scared shitless, shoving our company commander out of the way just to hide inside any armored vehicle we could find.

And with the radio transmission, you'd have thought an entire meteor of crabs had descended on us. All that drama for one demon.

That's what we called them from then on. Demons. Everyone called them that, and not for nothing. They were rare, yes, but they occupied the thoughts of millions of soldiers. A whiff, even a rumor of one somewhere, and every air asset in range would be rerouted toward it.

What was it? Ten thousand crabs for one demon? Just one of those seven-to-eight-foot-tall beasts, some of them wearing human skin, god knows from where, stretched over their armor.

They spit them out from somewhere we couldn't figure out. Couldn't see them on thermals.

Night watch turned from a smoke break and a few precious hours of half-sleep into a nightmare of jumping at shadows. The only reassurance, if you could call it that, was that these things didn't let you hear them coming.