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Resistance: Fall of Man - An Oral History

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[Information on the Chimeran invasion in the Far East remains scant at best, but even the most skeptical of experts agree that China suffered the most casualties out of any Asian country. Fractured by civil war and home to a population of several hundred million, the Chimera, it was rumored, had consumed the entire country within a Month. Due to the small numbers of Chinese survivors and the lack of any concrete record, we may never know what truly happened in the fight for the mainland. Only one last stand account of any note has been recorded by survivors, which is known today as the siege of Nanking. One of the largest cities in China, it held over two million souls by the time the Chimera had arrived at their doorsteps. Frank Xing, a former army medic and presently, a practitioner of Oriental Medicine in San Francisco, recalls the hectic, nightmarish conditions he faced during the siege]

My past memories of Nanking as a city were good. To be a citizen in one of the most celebrated capitals of China, its greatest literary, artistic and political location. Ever since I grew up in the city, I've always had been fascinated by all the imperial palaces, lavish tombs, museums and memorials, not to mention the beautiful lakes, gardens and mountains that surrounded the outskirts. As a child, I would always take the train to the countryside with my parents just to observe. It was also because of the heat. Our city was known as one of the great furnaces in China, and during the Summer, we would always join the crowds of people as they left the city for the seaside resorts. I've lost track of the number of times we spent our nights conversing with neighbours in the street, and sleeping in the open air of the countryside. To me, Nanking represented both the modern and the ancient China in its best form. It was called "The New York City of China".

When Summer came, we heard scattered reports of the war front up north. None of us paid any attention.

The rumors of war were far off at the time, and none of us thought the Japanese would ever reach our doorstep.

At that time, I didn't think anything of it. The Japanese had been at war with us for years, so much so it had become routine. No one thought that it would have only taken a few weeks for the madness to reach us, before we knew it our homes were in flames and our streets drenched with blood.

Weren't there any warning signs?

None what so ever, the warlords was just as adept at keeping information from us as your western governments. But even I doubt they would have known about the true extent of the danger.

If you're looking for any clues, perhaps I should mention the weather. Historically, our region is considered one of the hottest and most humid in China, hence the 'giant furnace' nickname. But the past year or so we noticed a very sharp decline in temperatures. Warm perhaps for your standards but unusual for us. The countryside was no longer warm enough to sleep in the open air in, and less and less people began leaving the city to visit the country in the summer.

We thought it was a routine cooling, but before we could even guess at what might have caused it, they invaded.

The distance from the front to Nanking was guessed at 100 miles. They broke through the Chinese front that quickly?

I wouldn't be surprised, considering the confused nature of our war. We had warlords fighting each other as well as the Japanese, there was no front line to speak of from my understanding.

But yes, it happened as fast as they said, perhaps even faster! One morning, upon arriving at the clinic, I felt a very cold chill in the air, and the next thing I knew, the entire city went to hell.

The sirens were our first warning, a warning that we should have picked up weeks ago. No one thought much of it, even my assistant nurse asked me, "Are they giving us an Air raid practice? They didn't announce this in the papers."

This was no unusual, with the war against the Japanese growing worse, the officials ordered us to drill for an air raid, as well as construct bomb shelter and camouflage for our houses. Every you saw men painting black on red rooftops and digging holes for their families to hide in. My friend jokingly remarked to me that it was like the city was preparing for "a funeral on a large scale."

Thinking back on it. It chills me to think how right he was.

The first bombardments took the city by surprise. None landed near my office, but I saw they were firing large rockets at us, a dull rumbling sound that resembled thunder. Minutes later, we heard the machine gun fire and airplanes overhead. It was then that I told my assistant to get everyone in the clinic ready for an influx of patients. I also took the time to call my family and told them to make their way to the harbour.

I remembered being horrified at how the enemy bombed us so indiscriminantly. The missiles hit schools, hospitals, powerplants, even the poorhouses and slums. The streets began filling with a tidal wave of people, trampling each other to get out of the city. I noticed too, from my office that large sections of the city had fallen deathly silent, save for this inhuman screech that made us shake.

The city was in full panic. I've heard stories of families who strapped themselves underneath overcrowded trains to leave the city, hanging literally inches off the ground. Others hide in cemetaries and the countryside, I dont think any of them were seen again.

A good chunk of the city however, like me, chose to remain, adopting a wait-and-see attitude. For us, the first week of the siege was terrible. Our troops had suffered harshly against these monstrous creatures, and every day we'd have more men returning from the battlefront, shaken, exhausted, wounded and completely demoralized. We didn't know what enemy they faced, but we took heart at the presence of almost 300,000 fresh troops in the city, with tanks and modern rifles and machine guns.

General Tang, the commander of our front, personally sent orders through the civilian radio, to reassure us of the defense.

Almost overnight the troops transformed Nanking, digging trenches in the streets and laying down underground telephone wires and stringing up barbed wire at all the intersections. They shut down all the gates save three, leaving them for military use. The troops had the gates barricaded with sandbags twenty feet deep and reinforced with wood and iron. Nothing was getting in, we thought. Several gates were simply walled up with concrete.

There was also a plan by the General to scorch the land around the entire circumference of the city, burning many of the attackers alive. Every one of us who has survived recalled that the first three nights were bright as day. The fire was unstoppable, consuming petrol and ammunition dumps, barracks, parks and farmhouses. I could tell by the resolve of the army that we were prepared to resist for months.

[Xing shakes his head visibly]

We lasted perhaps two days at most.

It is only today that I realize how badly the defenses were planned. When the government officials fled the city days before, they took all the sophisticated radios and equipment with them, our army was large, and none of the parts could communicate with the other. Our troops too, spoke different dialects, the army having been meshed together from different regions. This created endless confusion in the hospitals and barracks.

The attack didn't last long. The waves of enemy simply climbed over our barricades and swarmed the streets. Our men fought as bravely as they could, but there was no coordination or order, and the monsters simply broke into houses and foxholes, shooting everyone or tearing them apart or consuming them alive.

We didn't know it then, but by the first day, over half the city was lost, the streets were filled with bodies and the ones who could still move were taking flight. The roads were jammed full with cars, horses and refugees. Anyone with half a brain was trying to escape now.

It was horrific, because now we know that they invaders were infecting bodies, but there was so much people in the city, it took them days to catch and eat or infect them all.

The order to retreat came, and by then the troops were thrown into chaos. Officers ran through the streets, yelling at any soldiers they found to drop their weapons and run, leaving the civilians in the area exposed. While in other places, the order never reached them and they assumed the fleeing soldiers were deserters, machine gunning them down almost on the spot. I saw one tank rolling over a crowd of civilians as it tried to flee through the city gates, crushing dozens of them before a grenade destroyed it. Other soldiers were hysterical, stripping their uniforms and taking civilian clothes in hopes of being safe. Those idiots, did the monsters even spare civilians? Had the thought not even occur to them?

second_sino-japanese_war_chinese_refugees.jpg

"mass Panic"​

My clinic was overrun by the monsters by then, and I took my staff into the streets in hopes of escape

By this time, non-humanoid creatures attacked the crowds, like giant spiders plucking random people from the fleeing masses and tearing them apart or wrapping them inside these cocoons while screaming. (this is the first document sighting of 'spinners' known to SPRA) While in the houses, the monsters ripped their way into the masses of humanity. The streets themselves were beginning to feel slippery with blood.

[Xing visibly shakes at the memory]

Night came hours later, and the screams continued. My staff and I watched from one of the government buildings near the outskirts.

I think there were people still fleeing the city, not knowing how the majority of them were killed in the day. Mobs of people still wandered the streets, terror-mad and being slaughtered. I don't think the shooting and shelling stopped any time during the two days. Nanking was a large city, and even the creatures had to take time hunting down everyone alive. They ignored the infected carpet of bodies, going after the still living ones. Fires broke out on the Chungshan road, and flames began sweeping through heaps of abandoned ammunition and houses and vehicles. I saw several soldiers tear themselves away from the mob, climbing the walls rather than get pressed into the inferno as hundreds of others were.

The harbour itself was bedlam, with thousands of people diving into the war in logs, boards, buckets, bathtubs, anything that could float. Manysimply shot them in the water, or they fell victim to the sea creatures by the harbour.

That was just the first day. I don't know how many hundreds of thousands perished.

How did you manage to keep the Chimera out of your hiding place?

We followed the common practice that many other surviving groups tried, we barricaded the entrances with bodies. Infected bodies. It was a grisly resource, but they were plentiful, and the monsters were taking their time gathering all the hundreds of thousands of bodies in the streets, we figured it would be a while before they reached us. It remains a mystery to us, but the creatures seemed to avoid the infected bodies, perhaps already regarding them as one of their own.

The second day revealed to us just how much Nanking had been destroyed within a day. Sections of the city were still on fire, almost all the buildings were reduced to ruin. The streets were filled with bodies and smeared with blood, and we saw the creatures were hard at work. The humanoid ones were carrying and eating the carcasses of horses, while the little insects began spinning their webs around the bodies of the still civilians. Thousands of civilians were being suspended in mid air, being engulfed by these red fleshy cocoons. Most of the mobs had been either killed or infected, but there were still groups of people fighting, as we heard from the gunfire around the city center. Screams continued on through the day , as they did in the night....I did not even want to contemplate what they were doing to the ones still alive.

We wasted no time, we chose the evening of the second day to move to the Airport. The last transmission on the radio waves was that the airport was the last point of resistance, with the British and Americans offering evacuation with their temporary control of the skies. We estimated we had perhaps a day at most before they were gone.

How did you elude the Chimera?

The same way we did before. We took any infected bodies we could carry, in some cases, children lying motionless in the streets, and crawled our way through the carpet of humanity.

There were ten of us then, and some of the staff couldn't take it. One of my nurses screamed in horror as she recognized the face of someone in the carpet of corpses we were crawling through. All of us remained still and silent even as the creatures tore her apart limb from limb...

[Xing lowers his head, shamed by the memory]

We went through an old warehouse in the former industrial district, it was then that we noticed that the thick carpet of bodies soon became a mountain....They were gathering them in this place.

My staff and I realized that the creatures were gathering here, and decided to make a detour through the main road. taking our chances on the fact that there were so many bodies that they wouldn't notice us.

Still...there was one odd thing we noticed about the bodies in the warehouse, although they resembled what used to be human beings, we noticed that almost all of them were distinctly female....The creatures never violated any women to be sure, preferring to eat or tear humans apart...but maybe the purpose was something just as sinister.(similar 'gathering grounds' of female bodies were observed in the French campaign, the purpose can only be speculated.)

It took us the better part of the day to crawl through the bodies, by the evening we were running out of them to hide in, the creatures had already taken most of them to be placed into Cocoons, sooner or later we had to run for it. We followed the Chungshan east road towards the Airport, where the gunfire was getting louder and louder.

By then the creatures had noticed us, so the remaining nine of us ran. The American and British troops noticed us, along with the creatures, and a firefight ensued. Two of my men screamed when they got tagged in the back, torn to pieces by the enemy bullets before they could respond. Another was impaled by a giant spider like creature that hid amongst the bodies.

I didn't see, all I did was run towards the human voices above the shouting, like a madman. Before I knew it, I felt hands pulling me into the nearest helicopter out of there.....I didn't remember anything after that.

I didn't know it at the time, but out of the ten of us....only two of us made it to the aircraft.

I was truly lucky that day, ever since then, I've learned that their were other groups like mine, some even numbering hundreds or thousands. Pockets of resistance from citizens who couldn't escape continuing in Nanking for weeks after the initial battle. Many of the bodies were put into cocoons, transforming the cityscape into some kind of organic fleshy colour.

By the end of week two, aerial surveillance of the city showed nothing but red, smears of blood, bodies, and cocoons...with one noticeable difference.

Most of the Cocoons had already been opened up...from the inside.
 
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Hell yeah! Update time!!!! Cocoons you say? Sounds very grim. Humanity seems to constantly underestimate the Chimera and their attacks
 
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China, the big Chimera producer machine... The world is doomed. If it was bad with the USSR falling, now, with the human reserve... and the woman being "kept" for something unknown... Doom, doom, doom...
 
Valhalla's Call said:
Great update. The cocoons and female stockpiling is creeeeepy.
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This unfortunately does take place in the game universe...:D perhaps resistance retribution can tell us more.

Cloneof Exactly what i had in mind :D

asd21593 said:
I have arachnophobia....so that update legitimately scared the crap out of me...
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I guess you wouldn't enjoy fighting them in game, they are 10x as freaky as in writing :S

Enewald said:
Hmm, if Nanking is in the far south china, how could the jap-chin front go near it?
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I threw it in for the historical signifiance, but the Japanese managed to reach it in WW2. so doesnt seem that far fetched as Cloneof and kurt suggested.


Treppe said:
Great update. It makes the chimera even more sinister and horrific.
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Thanks Treppe! I personally didn't think it was possible, considering how horrible and sinister they already are :S

The Hunter said:
Has the woman factor been explained in the game or added for extra twist?
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The woman factor was from a throwaway line in the latest Resistance : PSP game. Like cloverfield, I just love the Resistance universe because they scatter so many little clues for us to find.

Though never truly explained, I believe the gathering (and reproduction) of female bodies has something to do with the Chimera running out of human bodies to infect, and the dismantling of the Conversion centres (which I alluded to an eternity ago) ;)


Kurt_Steiner said:
China, the big Chimera producer machine... The world is doomed. If it was bad with the USSR falling, now, with the human reserve... and the woman being "kept" for something unknown... Doom, doom, doom...
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What if I told you there was a happy ending? HAHA doom doom doom?


Raaritsgozilla said:
Hell yeah! Update time!!!! Cocoons you say? Sounds very grim. Humanity seems to constantly underestimate the Chimera and their attacks
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Or too busy killing each other to unite against them :) Ironic that you should use the word 'grim' hehe. They were the most freaky enemy in the sequel.

------

Updates TO COME (not listed in order):

1.) Takuya Yamazaki - The invasion of the home islands - Civil war
2.) Pierre Rene - The Fall of France (The Maquis, Resistance groups, 'Leviathan'?)
3.) Ahmed Fareed - The Freezing Deserts - Africa Korps

End of 'The Darkening world' Chapter

Then the remaining chapters of this AAR:

Fortress America - interbellum
Homefront 1953 - Revelations (it's a surprise ;))
 
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Enewald said:
So it is NanJing not Nanking? :p
The one around Suzhou and on Yangtze delta?
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Well it depends. the 'jing' element in the name is Chinese for 'capital'. Thus, Beiping->Beijing and Nanking->Nanjing and back.

So it's interchangable, depending on ruler.

In other news, I wish I had a PS3 so I could PLAY THIS GAME.
 
This still happening?
 
Enewald said:
Hmm, if Nanking is in the far south china, how could the jap-chin front go near it?
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The japs held most of the coast.

The Japs couldnt take what was deep into China.

That Nanking was in the south is not an explanation why the Japs would not be able to take the city, rather an explanation to why the Japs could do it.
 
Is this AAR officially on hiatus or just hasn't been updated in a while?
 
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