INTERLUDE 2.A

As promised, that's two in one day for the second time this week! Talk about a comeback, and I don't just mean ms kardashian baybeee! Felt like a goddamn joy to do this, and I can't wait to replicate this energy going forward. Gotta make sure to watch for burnout, but right now, also gotta make sure to ride this high as my brain either stabilizes with its proper meds or hits a high before a low. Either way, answer's the same- be productive! Raaaaah!

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Thunder and brimstone and all the rest are not enough. It is not enough to bomb all that should not be out of existence. I wish that it were. I wish that we were capable of throwing enough bullets and bombs at the world that it would bend and break and still have anything worthwhile left over, but we can’t. Our enemies are in deeper than that. They are in our homes, in our streets, among our organizations, they are in many of the bombs and bombers we wish we could deploy- never mind the weakness that it would show, to bomb our own streets. 

Our methods have to be subtler. No less brutal, no less ruthless, not even necessarily less violent- but more controlled. It’s not enough to be destructive, one must also be effective. We must utilize every tool at every opportunity, or the enemy will deceive us, outsmart us, and make use of advantages that we have overlooked in our desire to achieve a simple victory in a complex conflict. 

In the old world, we made spears and clubs from the teeth and bones of the things we hunted. The things we hunt today are far more complex- but so are the weapons we can carve from their still-bloody bones.

-Executive Official Of The Board Sarah Matthews, amidst the peak of the XXXXXXX crisis, 1964.

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Sam doesn’t really like kids. 

They’re messy, for one thing. For all the boring annoyance that comes from being in the military, mess isn’t one of them, at least not at his level. Get orders, follow orders, keep things clean and running, make sure everything’s going well, get new orders, rinse, repeat. Maybe there’s mess in the inventory stuff and in the management and logistics- but that’s not his job. His job is to get orders, follow orders, keep things clean and organized. 

Kids are not clean and organized. They’re famous for it, actually. 

Kids with legs made of corpse-meat are extra not clean and organized.

It took a while to wrap his head around that. He’s seen stuff in the containment rooms, sure, but that’s just normal, mostly. Like the computer that sometimes shows things it’s not supposed to- that’s weird, sure, but it’s not like that couldn’t happen. Plenty of reasons for it. Most of the stuff in the hidden rooms is like that- weird, but not like alien weird. Stuff you’d read about online, rather than something they’d make a movie about. 

Corpse-legs is something they’d make a movie about, probably. 

“What’s that?”

“That is a panel that I have to clean three times a week.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s a panel I have to clean twice a week.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s the controls for the cameras in sector D.”

“What do they do?”

“If you press the buttons in the right order, you can select a camera, make its view the main one on screen, swap to other cameras, or move the camera around. Sometimes. Not all of them can move around, only some of them.”

“Which ones?”

“Cameras 1, 2, 3, 6, and 17.”

“Why just those?”

“Because some of them don’t have functioning actuators anymore, and some of them have wires that weren’t properly maintained so they failed, and some of them weren’t designed to have mobility because they didn’t need it.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did-”

“Oh my god in Heaven can you two please stop doing this bit for like a minute?”

Sam frowns, turning to face Renee. “It’s all valid questions. Besides, if I’m answering questions, then they’re not running around acting crazy and touching everything and leaving crumbs everywhere.”

“I’m not that messy! Grandpa taught me to always clean up after myself so that there would never be any mess for things to track you by, and…”

The kid’s face turns down, his mind slipping back into remembering the fact that his grandfather’s dead, and Sam winces at his faux-pas. “Well, it’s just always good to be informed about this sort of thing, you know? It’s important to know about your surroundings so you can know how to navigate through them and what to do in case of emergencies. You remember where all the emergency evacuation points are?”

The kid, for all that he’s pretty annoying to be around, is pretty easy to distract. Sam’s not one to diagnose others, but he has to assume some kind of attention-deficit situation, maybe. 

“Colorado test site 3, which is not set in Colorado so none of the bad guys can figure out where it is, is an important place that has many evacuation points. One of them is next to the fire escape, and one of them goes down the hallway and out the side door over near where the garage is so I can get into a car really fast. And one of them is down the hallway, out the door, and down the street in the fake town that’s there. There’s also one thats’s-”

“Excellent job, hub, but we don’t actually need to go over every one of the evacuation points right now, ok? We’re sitting quietly so that we can all hear it very clearly when the orders come in, which is very important because they’re going to tell us what to do next. Ok?”

Sam turns to Renee with a raised eyebrow. “Agent Renee, with respect, I might not know much about kids, but I’m fairly certain that telling them to be quiet is not the best way to get them to be quiet.”

“Yeah! My teacher always says that quiet time is supposed to be-”

Renee, who’s sitting at one of the consoles and staring aggressively at her phone, lets out a long, slow, exhausted groan. “Ok. It’s not quiet time. And I’m glad that you’re where we can keep an eye on you. And I’m glad that you’re learning important stuff about the extremely classified military base that you aren’t supposed to tell anyone about, Sam. But why don’t we focus on your games, ok?”

Brian, the kid, looks down at the phone he’s holding. It’s Sam’s phone, though he had to give it to Renee so that she could download games onto it. He doesn’t really use it, so that’s fine, but he is a bit unhappy at not having his full set of equipment on his body. One of the eyes on the boy’s torso, partially hidden by an extra-large set of cargo pants they found for the kid, swivels to stare at Renee, narrowing to a glare. It’s somewhat ineffective, considering the greyed-out nature of it has already made it near impossible to tell where it’s looking. 

Renee still scowls back at it, rolling her own eyes.

“My mom used to tell me that games like that aren’t good for you. She told me it’s important for kids to play outside, and that’s why-”

Again, the kid’s mind sort of skips over itself as it re-remembers the fact that his whole family is literally dead, most of them killed right in front of him- and at least two members of them actively decorate his torso and legs, functioning as a necrotic exoskeleton. 

“Well, you’re still healing, right?” Sam says, interrupting the kid’s little brain-hiccup. “So it’s not good for you to be outside and running around and stuff, not yet. You’ve still got to get used to walking around again. That’s why it’s ok to be inside and do inside stuff right now.”

The logic computes enough to stop the short-circuit yet again, and the kid nods, his head finally going back to the phone with the games on it. Renee shoots an exasperated but grateful look over towards Sam, which he mostly ignores. Frankly, he’s been mostly ignoring her a lot these days. There’s a lot of other stuff going on that he’s more focused on. 

The alarms won’t stop going off.

The main one, the biggest and loudest one that started off this whole last month of chaos, which felt like the whole building was screaming, hasn’t popped back up, but other, lesser screechers certainly have. It feels like once a day for the last several days, some sort of signal has been tripped, some perimeter futzed with, some warning signs blared at maximum volume over something or other. More often than not, checking the cameras or the alerts leads to nothing- Sam’s pretty sure that the interfaces for most of the functions waking up right now have been disabled, broken, or were outright removed years ago.

And yet, in spite of the fresh and ever-increasing chaos, there’s been not a peep from the higher-ups. 

No notification of reinforcements, no new orders, really nothing more than a “stand by” message. Ever since they deployed themselves to deal with the kid, their commands have been radio silent. He never actually found out the name of the man on the Red Phone, which feels vaguely appropriate, but Renee seemed to have a much clearer grasp on the chain of command than he did, and she’s been fuming at the constant silence.

It doesn’t help that most of the alarms, as mentioned, come with no real information. Nothing beyond “something, somewhere, happened in a way it shouldn’t have”, which isn’t very helpful. The ones that do are often on a delay, with nothing present when they arrive, or claim that the detected dangers are too minor to be considered threats and require “no immediate response”.

They’re finding plenty of the consequences of the alarms, of course. Nevermind the kid and his dead family, murdered much too carefully and with too much force to be anything normal, the whole county has just been off. Deer sightings significantly higher than they should be, in places deer most certainly should not be in (in the maintenance shaft of an elevator, in someone’s windowless basement bathroom), which, by the time anyone shows up to confirm, are gone. Small town police officers responding to even less of the calls than they’re expected to, patrolling in weird patterns. An ever-increasing number of calls about minor thefts and missing personal items. Repeated calls about men in strange business suits loitering around construction sites, which also seem to miraculously never run out of money in spite of a dwindling number of people moving in and an ever-dying number of businesses looking for real estate.

And that’s just the shit that pops up, just the things they are explicitly able to keep an eye on. The likelihood of there being a lot more weird shit going on than they’re hearing about is damn near guaranteed.

And yet, every time they’ve driven out of their home base to talk to the locals, canvas an area or try and hunt down a sighting of something, they’ve been met with no success. Some small evidence, if they know where to look (and Renee always seems to know where to look), and the occasional glimpse of something- but never anything they can track down, never anything that sticks around long enough to be recorded or captured like the kid. Days of this has put Renee blindingly on edge, and she’s started a bad habit of smoking around the kid.

Sam’s a little bit less bothered by it. It’s mostly just annoying that he has to add babysitting and going out in search of weird shit rather than just do his job. Not that that’s gotten any easier.

The storage rooms have been… ornery. 

Not all of them, and not even by that much, but years of tending to the ins and outs of the ghost town he calls home have left Sam well-attuned to the place’s rhythms. The computer, for one, was well lit, and then went dead for a few days- only to pop back up, changing web-pages more often than ever. The room with the beehive has had a weird background humming noise to it for days, even though he’s pretty sure that room’s been hermetically sealed since before he came to the base, and the room with all of the newspapers and the one weird stuffed animal has been… different. He can’t prove it, but he’s pretty sure some of the articles on the newspapers have swapped places. 

There’s other, smaller things going on, but they only add to the overall tension.

Something’s happening in this county. And they can’t find it, see it, or fight it. They can only respond to it, at best, and so far, that’s led to a threatened local and a kidnapped kid they’ve had to take care of, who’s borderline unresponsive at times from the trauma he should definitely be getting counseling for. 

Renee lets out yet another long and agonizing sigh, finally shutting down her phone and clicking out of the computer panel in front of her. The series of minor alarms, all unconfirmed, all unverifiable, all too far away to reach in good time, all go dark as she stands up and stretches.

“Alright. Stakeouts suck, and this is the suckiest stakeout in the world, officially. If no one even picks up when I fucking call, what the hell is the point of bothering with these updates? Or us even being here? I got directed this way to do things, not babysit.”

“That’s not very fair. I’m the one doing most of the babysitting.”

“I’m not a freakin baby, I’m old enough to go on a hunting trip even!”

Sam nods at the kid, acknowledging it. “Sure, but that’s just what they call it when you’re taking care of kids. Kidsitting just doesn’t sound good.”

Brian opens his mouth as if to argue, and then pauses, and seems to get lost in the idea that it doesn’t sound good and that he’d be arguing a losing position. Before he’s able to decide whether or not to dig this particular hole, Renee steps past the both of them, heading out of the control booth and into the hallway beyond.

“Whatever. I’m going out for a supply run.”

“Oh! Can you bring back more water bottles? And some filters? And more coffee? And-”

“Christ on a fucking cracker, Sam, just text me a list! I’m gonna be out for a while. I feel like checking on some stuff while I’m out.”

He frowns at that, getting up and going to the door, making sure she doesn’t leave his line of sight yet. “You sure you want to go solo? If you’re going to do something that might involve trouble-”

“As much as I appreciate the big strong army man clomping around behind me, Sam, I think I might have more luck on my own here. I’m not going to deal with anything crazy, just gonna look in on that infected civvie we met a while back. She’s the last real manifestation we saw that we can track, and considering how nothing else has been worthwhile in this fucking debacle, can’t hurt to do a stakeout of my own. Away from the kid.”

He frowns a bit harder at that, stepping out of the room entirely in the hopes that the kid won’t hear as well with him blocking the doorway. 

“Wouldn’t hurt to be less shitty to him. He’s going through some tough shit, and plenty of weird stuff besides. Just because that gross goo on him doesn’t seem to do much doesn’t make it any less freaky, and he’s just a kid.”

She seems a bit taken aback by his reaction, pausing to look over his shoulder towards the kid. Then she sighs. 

“I just… I’m not comfortable around kids, alright?”

“And I am?”

“I mean… I assumed so. You’re really good with him.”

Sam snorts. “I treat him like a person and answer questions. It’s not the same thing as being ‘good with kids’. And what if something happens while you’re gone? What if his goop-legs go crazy, or some new alarm comes on?”

She shrugs. “Nothing’s happened since we got him. The kid doesn’t even seem aware of where he is half the time, and all that “goop” ever does is help him walk around, smell like rotten meat (which it is) and give me the stink eye. If something does come up, I’ve got my phone on me, and there’s other vehicles in the bay with gas. Worst case scenario, we meet up somewhere in town or back here tomorrow. I’m not trying to jinx it, but nothing has happened since we picked this kid up. It’s been the better part of a week, maybe more, and not one unusual death, not one notice about property damage, nothing. I’m going after the only other confirmed suspect we have until I get orders otherwise, either from the boss or from those old-ass computers in there.”

“I-”

“It’s my job, Sam. I investigate the weird cases. It’s why I was able to drop everything and come here. No one else does this job like me, and right now, my gut is telling me to do something. Alright?”

This time, he’s the one who ends up sighing, his shoulders drooping with the motion. “Yeah. Alright. Just… if something crazy happens, call me in for backup, alright? I can leave the kid in the bunks and come running.”

“Come driving, it’ll be faster.”

He rolls his eyes, but it does get a laugh out of him. “Alright. I’ll come driving.”

She smiles, punching him in the arm as she starts walking away again. “Relax, soldier boy. It’ll just be a few hours. What’s the worst that could happen?”

Well fuck, thinks Sam. For a moment, he swears he can almost feel the universe tremble at the challenge. 

It’ll be fine. Nothing’s happened in a week. Every sighting after the first major event has been too small to even measure. It’ll be fine. 

…Damnit. 

He shakes his head and heads back into the control room, pulling up the cameras they’ve planted next to the subject’s known address alongside the older ones set up in Hollow Springs. Might as well put them up on the big screen and make sure one of the other jeeps is gassed up. Juuuust in case he has to get somewhere fast.