'There was nothing to be done about Branch's disfigurement. The artificial skin had saved his life, not his looks. There was so much tissue damage that when it healed, even he could not find the shrapnel wounds for all the burn scars. Even his own body had trouble understanding the regeneration.
His bones healed so quickly the doctors did not have the chance to straighten them. Scar tissue colonized his burns with such speed that sutures and plastic tubing were integrated into his new flesh. Pieces of rocket metal fused into his organs and skeleton. His entire body was a shell of cicatrix.
Branch's survival, then his metamorphosis, confounded them. They openly talked about his changes in front of him, as if he were a lab experiment gone awry. His cellular "bounce" resembled cancer in certain respects, though that did not explain the thickening of joints, the new muscle mass, the mottling in his skin pigment, the small, calcium-rich ridges ribbing his fingernails. Calcium growths knobbed his skull. His circadian rhythms had tripped out of synch. his heart was enlarged. He was carrying twice the normal number of red blood cells.
Sunlight―even moonbeams―were an agony to him. His eyes had developed tapetum, a reflective surface that magnified low light. Until now, science had known only one higher primate that was nocturnal, the aotus, or night monkey. His night vision neared triple the aotus norm.
His strength-to-weight ratio soared to twice an ordinary man's. He had double the endurance of recruits half his age, sensory skills that wouldn't quit, and the VO₂ max of a cheetah. Something had turned him into their long-sought super-soldier.
The med wonks tried blaming it all on a combination of steroids or adulterated drugs or congenital defects. Someone raised the possibility that his mutations might be the residual effect of nerve agents encountered during post wars. One even accused him of autosuggestion.
In a sense, because he was witness to unholy evidence, he had become the enemy. Because he was inexplicable, he was the threat from within. It was not just their need for orthodoxy. Ever since that night in the Bosnian woods, Branch had become their chaos.
Psychiatrists went to work on him. They scoffed at his tale of terrible furies with women's breasts rising up among the Bosnian dead, explaining patiently that he had suffered gross psychic trauma from the rocketing. One termed his story a "coalition fantasy" of childhood nuclear nightmares and sci-fi movies and all the killing he had directly seen or taken part in, a sort of all-American wet dream. Another point at similar stories of "wild people" in the forest legends of medieval Europe, and suggested that Branch was plagiarizing myth.
At last he realized they simply wanted him to recant. Branch pleasantly conceded. Yes, he said, it was just a bad fantasy. A state of mind. Zulu Four never happened. But they didn't believe his retraction.'
The Descent
(Pages 82-84)
The only way i can articulate how i feel after reading this book is to show you visually:
I bought The Descent on a freaking whim and now i'm in mourning for it.
God dammit.
It wasn't the gorefest i thought it was going to be.
The first chapter tricked me and i'm not even mad about it.
I'm bloody ecstatic because it was an intellectual downward spiral into a subterranean colony of Bosch-like creatures with a history that almost certainly goes further than us mere mortals could imagine.
To some that may seem like boredom in literary form but for me, someone who naturally gravitates towards hell and all its creatures, it was intensely compelling and most of all, weirdly plausible.
Yeah, there was some gore but mostly it was a writer positing the idea of an actual, physical Inferno existing in the core of the earth.
Ancient and dark and quite possibly where our species evolved from.
Spilling out its inhabitants as they flee from something much darker than themselves.
Even just saying that makes it sound overly fantastical but Jeff Long somehow managed to write his characters and the unreal situation of being miles underneath the surface of the earth, trying to track down a mythological 'Satan' with a magnificent amount of, for want of a better word, realness.
I'm not saying i believe there's a labyrinth of caves underneath my very feet, leading the way to Hades - always turn left by the way, Dante's orders - but it's an idea i couldn't entirely dismiss.
Maybe i'm just overly in love with the first of Long's, Hadal series but it's really struck a nerve.
Reignited a love i have for the darker side of religion and a need to investigate it further.
Apocryphal or not.
A tutor of mine once asked me why everything i created was so dark and creepy.
Why the lighter side of things didn't attract me.
I responded with a shrug and told him that i found no depth to the light.
No crevices to find secrets in.
Nowhere to hide.
The dark had more stories to tell and i wanted to know them.
I still do.
And Jeff Long fed me over 400 pages worth.
...
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