{"id":809,"date":"2010-11-27T13:34:53","date_gmt":"2010-11-27T18:34:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=809"},"modified":"2011-03-30T12:31:59","modified_gmt":"2011-03-30T16:31:59","slug":"gooseflesh","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=809","title":{"rendered":"Gooseflesh"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Jack Frey
\n
<\/br>
\nTwo minutes is a long time underwater.\u00a0 It was a dupe, right from the start, Konrad now realized.\u00a0 A plot to uncover the research program and maybe even to start a war.\u00a0 The fake scuba tank, with a gauge that always read full<\/em>, even if there were just three breaths left.\u00a0 The phony GIs, with their perfect Midwestern, Corn Belt accents.\u00a0 And now, beneath him, in the black depths of the Arctic Ocean, the divers were circling.<\/p>\n

The program, codenamed Gooseflesh<\/em> and overseen by the Pentagon, had been in existence for three years. \u00a0Here\u2019s what they knew for sure:<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0 The Soviets had developed (accidentally discovered?) a way to revive the dead.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0 Although the corpses regained some function, and were apparently capable of following orders, the necrotized flesh decayed rapidly.<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0 The Soviets had begun using the undead as divers beneath the polar ice cap, where the freezing temperatures maintained the bodies in a state of near refrigeration.<\/p>\n

With the permission of the Canadian government, a monitoring station had been built on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island, where the Navy could track the progress of the Soviets.\u00a0 Of course, this was particularly difficult, given the enormity of the polar region, the adverse weather conditions, the thickness of the ice, and the simple fact that when using sonar a single human body beneath the water, truly living or otherwise, is very difficult to distinguish from a beluga or a narwhal.<\/p>\n

From time to time, the scientists and Navy personnel got lucky.\u00a0 They found one, trapped in the ice about sixteen miles off the coast.\u00a0 Probably a woman, or had been once.\u00a0 Its head was caught, locked in the ice, or else it might have just chewed through its ankles or wrists to get free, like a fox in a trap.\u00a0 But the thing must have had some sort of temperature sensor, or else it was just that sensitive to heat, because as soon as they had chopped it free and dragged it into the station, it turned black and began to rot.\u00a0 Within five minutes, the corpse stopped twitching, and after that the meat turned to stinking paste.<\/p>\n

While the scientists could be sure of nothing, there was a lot of speculation back in Washington.\u00a0 The Pentagon believed that Uncle Joe was at the top of it all, that Stalin himself had authorized the program.\u00a0 He was reputedly obsessed with the paranormal, and had built a psionic resonance parabola on Severnaya Zemiya.\u00a0 But President MacArthur swore it was Rasputin himself who oversaw the operation.\u00a0 He claimed that Rasputin had never been killed, or maybe had, but then turned himself into a zombie, possibly as early as 1922.\u00a0 MacArthur had been elected on a solid majority after he turned the strip along the Yalu River between North Korea and China into a radioactive wasteland, and anything he said carried a lot of weight, especially for a project like Gooseflesh<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But none of that mattered especially.\u00a0 Not now.\u00a0 At least Konrad\u2019s gauss rifle was real, he knew that much.\u00a0 It was his own, a bearing model with a harpoon slide, not some fake handed to him by the people who had infiltrated the program.\u00a0 But it couldn\u2019t blow through three feet of ice.<\/p>\n

How had it happened?<\/em> he wondered.\u00a0 How had the Russians got in?\u00a0 Or had they always been in, skunking the project right from the start?<\/em><\/p>\n

Seventy-three seconds had passed since the hole in the ice was sealed up behind him.\u00a0 Those three breaths had long since bubbled out of his lungs, floated up to the flat sheet above him that blotted out the sunlight.\u00a0 Konrad had imagined all this before, in the warmth of his bunk at the station.\u00a0 He\u2019d imagined it and dreamed about dying beneath the ice.<\/p>\n

Konrad had a light, fixed to the end of his gauss rifle.\u00a0 He shone it down into the depths, swung it in slow circles.\u00a0 His diving goggles were fogging over.\u00a0 He thought he spotted a dull white object, far below him, moving fast.\u00a0 And even though Konrad knew he ought to fear the undead creatures that he would soon encounter, his mind was elsewhere.\u00a0 He was thinking about the Inuit woman that he\u2019d met on the ice few days earlier, and the way that her long black hair fell across her round face.\u00a0 He wanted to kiss her, even now.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, a noise that was impossible to ignore, impossible, impossible to think at all.\u00a0 At first Konrad thought it might be an earpiece, a bug in his ear, but the noise was inside his head, and only there.<\/p>\n

single-recipient-message—omnilang—prepare-to-encounter<\/em><\/p>\n

Telepathy.\u00a0 The Pentagon didn\u2019t know about this.\u00a0 The undead creature swam near enough to give Konrad a clear view, a milky-soft white texture to its naked body.\u00a0 The flesh along its back was almost all gone, scraped away, or eaten by fish, perhaps.\u00a0 Ribs and vertebrae, yellow like ivory.\u00a0 The thing turned its face towards him, and Konrad saw that its lips and eyelids were in tatters, fluttering in the icy current.<\/p>\n

single-recipient-message—omnilang—disable-weapon<\/em><\/p>\n

Konrad struggled to stay focused, to keep his head.\u00a0 He had to stay near the hole in the ice, even if the Russians had closed it over with a steel lid.\u00a0 There was no other way out.\u00a0 He gripped the rifle, gave the trigger a quick squeeze.\u00a0 In the moment before the steel bearing connected with the thing\u2019s head, the noise came again.<\/p>\n

multi-recipient-message—omnilang—target-aggressive-full-assault<\/em><\/p>\n

After that, the creature\u2019s head burst, dissipated in a fine cloud of bone and colourless tissue, no blood.\u00a0 The diver\u2019s body went completely limp and began drifting slowly downwards, into the deep.<\/p>\n

But now Konrad heard them, their telepathic voices muted across the distance.\u00a0 They were coming from all directions.\u00a0 Faster now, swimming like snakes beneath the ice.\u00a0 He spun, waved the light in a broad arc.\u00a0 A white shape.\u00a0 He fired.<\/p>\n

This time he only caught the thing in the chest, and while its ribcage was now splayed open, it swam on.\u00a0 Another round, another ball bearing, and this time the creature\u2019s head shattered, the body motionless.<\/p>\n

Beneath him now, another one, shredded fingers grasping at his boots.\u00a0 But he brought the rifle down quickly, fired point-blank into the thing\u2019s skull, kicked away the pulpy mess. \u00a0The noise, from all sides.<\/p>\n

multi-recipient-message—omnilang—consume<\/em><\/p>\n

Everywhere, and no air.\u00a0 Lungs burning, blood pounding in his throat, eyes going dark.\u00a0 They were everywhere.\u00a0 Ninety-seven seconds and no air.\u00a0 Two more rounds, two imploded heads, the water thick with floating particulate.\u00a0 Konrad felt himself beginning to black out.<\/p>\n

He was fumbling with the harpoon now, trying to slide the bolt back, to set it in position.\u00a0 But his fingers were numb.\u00a0 The things were all around him now, circling, coming up under him, snatching and clawing.\u00a0 Their limbs, their faces, lurching beyond the shaft of light, spongy and dead.<\/p>\n

Konrad\u2019s eyes were closing, the hands at his ankles, his wrists, no air.\u00a0 One hundred and fifteen seconds.\u00a0 The rifle was moving down now, the light falling away from him as it slipped from his hands into the unseen depths.\u00a0 But on his face, on his mask, fingers.<\/p>\n

One hundred and eighteen seconds.\u00a0 A shaft of white that swallowed up the sea.\u00a0 The steel lid was pulled away and sunlight poured into the hole.\u00a0 Two, then three splashes, lifeless bodies falling into the water, but this time, blood.\u00a0 The phony GIs, with their perfect Midwestern, Corn Belt accents.\u00a0 Konrad felt the lip of the icy hole, and strong arms grabbing him.\u00a0 He felt the slick touch of the things below, shredding the newly deceased.\u00a0 One hundred and twenty seconds.<\/p>\n

On the ice now, steam rose from his body.\u00a0 Konrad drew the Arctic air into his lungs, burning him, making him bleed.\u00a0 There were boots on the snow, people around him now, living people, and he lifted his face towards the sky.\u00a0 The Inuit, the ones he\u2019d met on the ice, and they carried ancient Lee-Enfields.\u00a0 And then Konrad saw that she was there, too.\u00a0 The one with crow-coloured hair and beautiful face that was round like the moon.
\n
<\/br>
\n
<\/br><\/p>\n

\u201cGooseflesh\u201d originally appeared on the website staticmovement.com. And by \u201cappeared,\u201d Jack means in the Douglas Adams sense of the word: \u201cIt was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying \u2018Beware of the Leopard.\u2019\u201d<\/h6>\n

JACK FREY<\/strong> lives in Winnipeg, Canada with his wife and two young boys. He plans to walk across Asia on foot, but is still searching for the perfect pair of hiking boots. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shelf Life Magazine, Rose & Thorn Journal, Fractured West, and the Last Man Anthology, among others. Like many of us, he is currently working on his first novel. jackfrey.wordpress.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Jack Frey Two minutes is a long time underwater.\u00a0 It was a dupe, right from the start, Konrad now realized.\u00a0 A plot to uncover the research program and maybe even to start a war.\u00a0 The fake scuba tank, with … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":792,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-809","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P15duy-d3","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=809"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1279,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/809\/revisions\/1279"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}