040. Histoire noire, 3

(Luka)

Most of these things and truths about the past, unfortunately I would only hear and learn near the end of times and my life.

My mother gave me too little of the full story, but shared her obsession with me.

Hearing the whole tale as was concluded, at least it gave perspective and meaning to what I had been through. Learning truth you ignored before reveals how many things were sent on their course long before.

Before the end of the tragedy.

In the last fair moments where we were free to choose our destiny and everyone else's in a way, understanding a wider picture put so much clarity toward what we ought to do and be.

It's like learning near the end of a journey who was the real traitor and murderer who plagued it all along the way, in a sad way...

How each of us reacts in the face of tempting powers, misery to face, fear of upcoming death, and the unfairness of reality in various aspects and levels.

I think we were all petty, wishing for wider justice when asked and acting as such in front of others, but deep down thriving for individualism.

This sad collision and course for further tragedies down over time, it began unfortunately long, long before I was born. As much as I wished or believed it to be as a teenager, it didn't start with me.

It began once upon a time, in a very old city of the peninsula called Forodlystiev...

~

Like everywhere else, the last century past had been challenging, leaving half the town's infrastructure abandoned and condemned.

With the population spared and left, the town lived on rather peacefully nonetheless. There was just too many buildings from before like everywhere else, so most of them were left to crumble behind barriers and fences.

The region's heart was its younger neighbouring city of Krikfalgorod, a short sail away, with the university attracting the youth of the whole mostly autonomous Krai.

Politics were as they always had been on the wider scale, compromising and somewhat pragmatic with our fascist neighbours. That wasn't a direct problem.

Until someone smart enough came to do something about it, and make a bargain with the devils. Some older demons, and some new ones.

Sadly for us, an alignment of interests from the secret society hidden in the northern mountains, and the isolationist southern city state of dubious morality, they struck a deal with each other, brokered by an evil scientist in the middle.

Someone gains power from ambition, and he was. With the right know-how but lacking the supply chain and back-up to proceed with his dream.

Evil never works alone.

No matter how easy it is to hide behind the powerful figurehead.

Again, it was an alignment of interests.

The man and doctor was called Gains. And I'm not sure whether I wish his name should be remembered in infamy or completely scratched from history.

He was a biological design engineer with good ideas and no ethics. And at a time when my mother was still only a child, he disappeared in the underground of Forodlystiev, quite literally.

Underground bases from previous centuries were rebuilt and furbished by his new patrons, so he could work his nefarious plans in impunity.

Oversimplifying his life's work, it was researching how to achieve immortality.

It was about biological resilience and regeneration processes applied to humans, but not with a careful and theoretical in vitro approach, oh heavens no.

No, he was focusing on experimenting the old fashioned way, the most inhuman way.

He turned captured people across the country into guinea-pigs in his underground laboratory.

People disappeared for years, even before I was born.

And his powerful friends sheltered him all the way.

However things were not evolving the right way for some reasons. I'm sure there was some political struggles behind or above him I'm not aware of, since I've seen what they could become in the end.

But what partially got things to blow was the town's water supply getting gradually tainted by... some weird things.

And things gradually devolved out of anyone's control.

I cannot say whether he was better at his work as a scientist or a politician, because it lasted for many many years without him ever being worried by anyone apparently. So perhaps his work didn't progress on the field, but at least he covered his back very well.

The secret society in the north and the foreign city state couldn't care less about the local population being butchered obviously. That was why they chose this little back water city to settle him.

However they probably were annoyed with the lack of useful results for them. He had promised no less but cures to various forms of death, convincing everyone that it was finally achievable then.

They had knowledge from the secret group, technology from the isolationist city, none of them were concerned about ethics on foreign population in the slightest, and he had a trump card.

He had found something like a key, not quite a tool nor an equation, but something that had the potential to unlock the final doors to his destiny. Of course that unclear treasure he kept close to himself, while using and consuming possibly hazardously in his research.

He and his team, including young people recruited by the secret society, they had found how to boost processes to regenerate animal flesh to astonishing levels of efficiency and speed. Regenerating nearly entire organs, and as much flesh in general.

However on their unwilling human trials, things generally didn't do very well.

Whatever his ground-breaking catalyst that allowed otherwise impossible reactions to occur, and multiplied their metabolic rate incredibly, it was unstable.

His lab managed to selectively unlock some cells reproductive abilities alright, allowing for much faster growth of damaged tissues nearly immediately. Nevertheless, keeping the process in check afterward and avoiding overmultiplication and cancerous mutations, that was another ordeal. Opening a box was easier than putting back a lid on it apparently when it came to metabolic possibilities.

It was endless torture with people dying always from his experiments, in his little hidden realm. It must have been a horrific place. The cities provided assistance and the people working there became complete psychopaths, but he kept the reins.

At least he clearly held some control over the elements that allowed him to bypass most known biological limits.

Meanwhile, while people young and old were dying to his horror, something unclear later down the production line apparently tainted the underground waters, gradually all along his work continued unchecked.

The horror only grew. They didn't realise that the faintest levels of whatever they were creating that they evacuated through the waters was accumulating elsewhere outside.

Something awful was brewing quite literally from the accumulative torment down there.

Pressure grew, in some tanks and around him, until more mistakes were made.

A group of teenagers began investigating where they shouldn't have, and my grandfather disappeared with them, along with nearly everyone else in the city, when things really turned to hell.

~

A group of teenage friends became the unexpected grain of sang blocking the cogs of the hidden slaughterhouse.

That had never been their ambition to discover so much horror below their streets and homes.

But being too curious around adults a little too nonchalant, they opened the wrong doors in search of some missing friend or parents.

Things were about to be revealed in town as horrible abominations were beginning to really appear outside the laboratory. Things they had never designed were rising.

Out of everything inhuman they had done below, what brewed and eventually prevailed after being flushed out, what survived that continuous unnatural selection, it was monstrous.

Something like a strain, eager to grow and multiply and hard to kill most likely.

The friends fallen in the wrong holes had to fight off a horrific scenario directly, between terror to survive, and fury to avenge their killed and butchered family and friends.

Hell was going loose in the undergrounds as it turned rapidly to violent firefights, spilling over to the surface.

Explosions occurred, probably as they tried to incinerate the laboratory and all its works, but meanwhile on the surface, things were an eruption.

Panic began, and authorities reacted at county level as appropriately as they could have. Although they had been corrupt and blind at some levels, to the building up infestation at their roots.

While a few teenagers were dying and fighting to death the evil in turmoil below the ground, the cities above were evacuated in a hurry.

Forodlystiev was in a mess and the realisation that something really toxic had been spilled all around. The evacuation was more of a panic, leaving a massacre behind and many people missing, soon presumed dead, like my grandfather.

Krikfalgorod was a little more distant and was evacuated more orderly.

From the luck few surviving the underground onslaught and reckoning, were two people I would later meet, Artom and Shan. They were rather young boy and girl at the time, barely my age now.

They made enough mayhem down there to force the operations to shut down, and some of the shadow masters involved to flee for their lives.

They found and faced the man responsible for it all, Henry Gains.

They shot him dead multiple times without trial. Anyone else in their shoes would have done the same after the horror they had witnessed or even faced. Monstrosities were being made, unwillingly perhaps most of the time, but not always.

Then they fled before the fire and crumbling ceilings would catch up with them.

The others ring leaders had already escaped meanwhile. Two of them would later rise to power and be met again.

The youngest, Stephen Ash, would later pick up and resume Gains's work and dream.

The, let's say more pragmatic one, Robert Steir, would gradually succeed in rising through the ranks of the shadow organisation and even overpower the council eventually, seizing control of their base of operations hidden in the mountains.

Together, in the lead scientist's wake and rubbles, they would take over his dream and ambition, over time.

We wouldn't learn any of them even existed long before reaching their own future demise.

Artom & Shan managed to escape while my young mother was evacuated without her dad.

The lazaretto wall was built all around the infected country in great haste, and proper engineering too apparently.

All the refugees were relocated in Cordov, the third city of this land, that became the last.

Most of the people didn't witness the real horrors made below that caused these events. Generally at worst, they saw people getting furiously sick and dying from some violent infection, but not much more.

The government likely still corrupt from the shadows, managed to keep everything true buried behind the wall surrounding the toxic area.

They did enough work to safely seal everything behind. I don't know if Cordov's mayor back then was aware of what the northern secret society would resume doing shortly. Maybe, maybe not.

Everything would be ready to brew again, to explode in another tragedy down the line.

These people we didn't know resumed their unholy work as soon as they could, and continued from another location.

Too many people who lost someone were left frustrated and in pain.

Unbeknownst to them, they could eventually disappear as well...

A generation later, another group of friends would begin poking where they ought not to.

And once again, circumstances out of our control entirely would simply blow up everything we knew to oblivion.

Nothing made a lick of sense when it blew in my face.

That was until I would really meet them, right at the end.

~