Apparatus 33 by Lawston Pettymore (bearly read books TXT) 📕

frosting resembled snow but was warm to the touch. A filigree of dead ivy tendrils, decayed to brown and black, could be seen through it. Too delicate to support any weight, each crunchy footstep sent warm shards of the icing material and puffs of rotting material into the air, both accumulating on the boots and leggings of the soldiers. Bending over to inspect the material meant breathing in both.

Tales of mutated flora and fauna were not exaggerated. Shrubs were actually stunted trees that looked like they could have contracted polio themselves, took forms of crones with brooms or crutches, the leaves shaped by a fun house mirror. And there was utter silence; no birds, lizards, or any other scavengers could be heard.

Meter-high cairns of dusty quartz rock grew from the floor around the glass lake. The symmetry of the arrangement, with perfect distancing between each rock, formed a sort of glassy Stonehenge.

A soldier broke the silence, and the tension, with an attempt at showing his bravery. He patted the top of the cairn nearest to him as one would do a beloved dog, then he said, “First Secretary Brezhnev sends his regards, Comrade, and we’ve come to relieve y…” At that moment, the soldier’s hand fell through the brittle glass veneer that formed the exterior of the cairns, and into the pasty muck inside. A puff of organic gas held within exhaled through the fist-size hole he had made, releasing a cloud smelling of rotten of eggs and a Soviet gulag latrine on hot day. Warm glass shards the size of bee stingers slipped deep into the flesh of his palm.

The laughing stopped, the cairns receiving more attention now, the soldiers gently stroking nearby cairns to visually inspect for any similar fragility. Blowing the dandruff-like dust off, the translucent shapes confirmed that the contents were soldiers from 1944, their uniforms and rank insignia burnt and corrupted but still recognizable. Their eye sockets stared blindly towards the sky, or each other, looking twenty years into their future for answers, but receiving none.

One by one, the members of the platoon held a free hand to their mouths, trying to overcome the first wave of nausea. Others dropped their weapons and backpacks, hastily shed their pants like molting dead skin, and ran for the woods to deal with the offal of explosive diarrhea. Die Kuppel had not finished its revenge for the pummeling Soviets dispatched two decades ago.

With pants gathered around his ankles, a corporal pulled his radiation counter from his backpack and switched it on which screeched loudly. His eyes told the story for his astonished comrades. For the second time, a Russian officer commanded his men to run, but the word died in his throat. He knew, by the warmth on his hand and the glow of the cairns, that their lives were beyond saving now. All that was left was for the macerated cell membranes of soft intestinal and ocular linings to hemorrhage and dissolve. This was their fate if they remained standing, or later, on a fluid soaked hospital bed.

He dropped his pistol and the radio to the ground. With his shoulders slumped, he responded with a single word to the shocked looks on the faces of his platoon.

“Srat24.”

Poles

Wermut skirted the edge of the Moons disk as seen from Earth, from pole to pole, in its so-called highly elliptical Halo Orbit, its radio receiver almost always within reach of the numbers station broadcast. Every eight days the voice sent from Earth reached Wermut, reciting in the correct order of audio frequencies and within the expected range of the female voice for every one of the thousands of receiving windows. Even years later, someone was instructing Wermut that the time to return to Earth was not yet nigh.

Wermut would remain in this orbit until either the dead man switch fell silent, or until the power supply, the same type of radioactive thermocouple power generator made famous by American spacecraft, dropped too low to power the onboard radio and the re-entry sequence, at which point it would be rendered inert and relatively harmless.

During these 20 years, Pyotr’s body had worked through the inevitable stages of decay that began the moment the last heartbeat stopped - self-digestion and molecular death, followed by the breakdown of soft tissues into gases, liquids, and salts.

With some oxygen remaining in his lungs, and mostly in the cabin, the normal waste disposal mechanisms of Pyotr’s body slowed to a stop; the byproducts of metabolism became an acid that quickly etched away cell membranes and normal bacteria, both rupturing their contents. There was a shift from aerobic bacterial propagation, which required oxygen to grow, to anaerobic ones that did not. But both fed on body tissues, fermenting the sugars in them to produce gaseous by-products such as toxic methane, hydrogen sulfide, and ammonia, and increasing the pressure on board the Wermut capsule.

Basted in this effluence, the surface of Pyotr’s muscles and internal organs began to form blisters, causing bloating, and eventually rupturing their own nutrient-rich fluids. This added a sheen to his skin that glistened in the dim light that came from the few miniature bulbs that backlit the panel controls. After some time, the skin loosened, then floated away after it sloughed off during the accelerations of apogee and perigee. It floated in the weightless confines of the warhead for several months on his journey to apogee.

While Zerrissen, Nicolaus, and Halina pursued their lives in East Germany, enzymes made new life within the capsule as they leaked from the microorganisms and bacteria of Pyotr’s corpse. These enzymes then combined to form the many gases of the “putrefaction” class, the most recognizable of which to humans since the dawn of man were the sulfur compounds, causing his body, small and legless, to double in size. The lice and other parasitic insects that prospered on his body during the final days of the Bunker followed him into the warhead to became fellow travelers, sputniks as they say in Russia,