Detour de Force

Link to article: Detour de Force.

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[[include :scp-wiki:info:start]]
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**Detour de Force**
Come along with me...

**[[[http://www.scp-wiki.net/this-page-intentionally-left-blank|More by this author!]]]**
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+ ##990011|2003##

++ 9 September
[[span style="font-family: BauhausLTDemi; font-size: 120%;"]]**[http://www.scpwiki.com/secure-facility-dossier-site-43 Site-43]: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada**[[/span]]
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----

Melissa was rigid at Harry's side, and he squeezed her shoulder until his hand hurt. As one entity they slid back from the corner -- Ambrogi's gleeful red-streaked visage disappearing as the glass slipped away -- and began to creep in the opposite direction at the slowest speed their nerves and muscles would allow. Harry could feel his every joint creaking with the effort required to not break and run.

Ignaz Achterberg was dead, and his murderer stood mere metres away. The former would have reduced him to tears, or doubled him over once more with nausea, except that the latter took vital priority.

The left side of this corridor faced on sheer bedrock. There were, nevertheless, windows punched out of the partitions; some engineer had figured that salt crystals sparkling through glass would provide pleasantly striking mood manipulation, and nobody in the long line of bureaucracy had had the heart to kibosh their design. Matching windows on the right looked in on a single vast room, served by a set of double doors standing ajar a few metres away. They'd been chocked open with rubble. Harry couldn't make out any details beyond, as the interior lights were off, but he knew what was in there anyway.

[[div class="muddle"]]
The Small Finds Repository at Archives and Revision has one of the most simultaneously accurate and misleading names of any room at Site-43, which is saying something. As the vast majority of anomalous items can be classed as small finds, this is the largest storage space in the Section outside of the salt caverns: eleven towering shelf units packed with boxes packed with Rosetta Stones and demagicked grimoires and cult inscriptions on human skin, with automatic retrieval systems bolted to their frames. New hires are often paraded through the aisles, to give them a feel for the true scope of our containment work and its palpable historicity.

[[>]]
-- Blank, //Lines in a Muddle//
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They crept from the corridor at a painfully slow pace, listening for Ambrogi's footsteps or the resumption of that awful clapping but hearing only instead the pulsation of their hearts, in tune. Harry fancied he could feel hers through the back of --his-- --her-- their leather jacket, and the palm of his trembling hand. 

There were two automatic lights set in semispherical receptacles to either side of the double doors within the Small Finds hall, hooked up to motion detectors in the ceiling. One of them was either already dead, or attached to a dead sensor. The other worked just long enough to shatter in a hail of sparks. They both reached out on instinct, as though to shush it, to mute the sound, to stop the glass tinkling to the tiles, and then Melissa differentiated her taut body from his to pull him bodily into the nearest aisle. Harry had no idea what this was meant to achieve. The moment they set foot between the metal racks, lights far ahead began snapping to life. There was no sound -- bulbs audibly activating was the kind of thing confined to either fiction, or the Acroamatic Abatement Section -- but there was now obvious proof that someone was running through the repository.

They were advertising their presence to anyone who might come wandering past the windows, and leaving a fluorescent path to follow.

He assumed there was a good reason for doing this, so he didn't ask. He also didn't ask because he now associated the merest sound with instant death. He was only thankful that the lights they passed beneath came to life less explosively than had the one at the door. 

The illuminated scene was pure chaos: someone had gone through the boxes like a tornado, such that the ones which were accessible by hand from the floor were mostly //on// the floor, and the ones up above had been rifled through only a little less thoroughly. The two of them danced over spilled containers featuring strange and wondrous things which they had no time to pause and appreciate: a split sack of rice boasting the entire collected text of Wikipedia, updated through meticulously-documented anomalous processes every fifteen minutes, each grain covered in layer upon crosshatched layer of microscopic black -- the talk and edit history pages were in ten sacks at Site-15; a druidic stone in the shape of a 5 and 1/4 inch floppy disc which only worked on Acorn-brand computers and which featured an extensive manual for the growth and care of oak groves; the oriykalkos cores for a Foundation-made information retrieval system which had been irretrievably damaged by its creator and owner, graphic novelist Alan Moore, in an incident the FBI's Unusual Incidents Unit was still attempting without luck to disentangle. Those were just the items Harry knew by sight. A glimpse between the boxes revealed that the next aisle over, to the right, had been pushed over against its opposite neighbour. Harry had a mental image of the whole place falling down like dominoes, them in the middle, and not for the first time in the past few minutes wished he could stop forming mental images altogether.

When they reached the far end of the hall, thirty seconds or lifetimes later, Melissa stopped. Harry stopped with her. There was another bank of windows, these looking in on what the archivists called the Clothesline.

[[div class="muddle"]]
A dozen concentric wire circuits hang from tracks in the ceiling, hung with documents sheathed in opaque spellophane. A complex bank of cameras can peer through the protective sheets, machine-read the raw data, excise any cognitohozards present, then transmit the results to any terminal in the Site. 

[[>]]
-- Blank, //Lines in a Muddle//
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Harry knew this all intellectually, though he couldn't see any of it. The lights, again, were off.

He turned from the darkened glass to see Melissa prising one of the boxes out of the frozen claws of a disabled retrieval arm, then plonking it down on the tile floor. He could have whispered any number of snarky comments about stopping to loot the stores while the riot cops were coming, but when he saw which box she'd chosen, he had to smile. She needed to swipe her keycard through an attached reader to get it open; needed to swipe //two// keycards, in fact, and his smile rather faltered when he saw her pulling a whole sheaf out of her jacket pocket and selecting the second from a wide selection. A dozen faces, some of them familiar, flashed by with overexposed stares. This box was double-locked and monitored because it contained a significant security risk, a big bag of cat's eye marbles -- only the eyes weren't cat's eyes at all. They were the eyes of various high-security Foundation personnel, precise enough in the details that they could be, had in fact been before their acquisition, used to fool Foundation retinal scanners. The case had been classified up the wazoo, and everyone who knew about it desperately wanted to know the details. Then again, almost nobody at Site-43 knew about it.

For example, he hadn't been under the impression that Melissa did.

He just had time to wonder whether she had some clever, complex plan to bypass secret security measures with Director McInnis' eye, or Ibanez's, or even his own for some reason, when she tipped the box over and sent the marbles spilling out across the find-strewn floor. Most of them didn't get too far, striking baubles and trinkets and confiscated heirlooms and plain old boxes or box lids, but there were quite a lot of them, and they rolled very well on the polished porcelain. Before long, the entire hall was filled with rolling eyes.

And one by one, the super-sensitive motion detectors signalled the overhead lights to come on.

//That's my girl.//

Melissa didn't give him time to feel guilty about this mental phrasing, though he did have time to reach down and pocket a few of the less excited marbles before she hauled him back toward the double doors again. He realized they were going to try cutting back through the hallway they'd just left, leaving the brightly-lit repository as one giant and glowing red herring. But they both stopped dead at a distant sound rattling toward them through the corridor.

Whistling. Specifically, a spirited rendition of "Whistle While You Work" from //Snow White.// It didn't sound very good with the whole thing whistled. It didn't sound very good to them at all.

Ambrogi was already coming.

Swearing under her breath, Melissa towed Harry back towards the back of the finds hall. Once there she hung a left, and after passing the first three stacks they came upon yet another example of what Harry now knew to be a core architectural feature of Site-43 in this timeline: a break in the wall. They slipped through into the Clothesline cavern, then hunched down out of sight. For a moment he wondered if they were simply going to wait it out, but then Melissa started crab-walking east, keeping her head below the window sill, and he followed her scuffling lead. Creeping along the back wall, listening to the sheets shaking in a breeze which had never been meant to blow through here, he was put in mind of a forest in autumn. He could almost imagine the stray documents and spellophane sheathes were leaves crunched underfoot.

Only he liked forests, he liked leaves, and he liked autumn.

He couldn't resist the urge to occasionally peek up at the hall, where all the lights were now on. As he watched, the ones they'd triggered by entering the room began to snap off, one by one, erasing their initial route. If Ambrogi was back there somewhere, he'd have a hard time gauging where they'd gone.

The wall stretched on to infinite nowhere, warm air moaning in time with their laboured breaths, and soon they had left the lights behind. The ocular carpet hadn't reached the last few rows by the time they did, which meant it probably never would. Now there was nothing visible but black on either side, nothing at all but their small and frightened sounds, the scent of their anxious sweat, the strain of their muscles and the suspicion that they were still hunted. Harry hadn't even had time to notice just how readily his body had accepted the burdens of this frantic flight; he poked at his folded stomach experimentally, and found it far smaller and more resistant to poking than he was sure it had been this morning.

//Apparently I've been working out.// Now that, that sounded like something which could only happen in a nightmare.

He was about to suggest that maybe, just possibly, they had shaken -- or never even acquired -- their pursuit, when a single light snapped on to the left. They both dropped below the frame again, then slowly rose up to see what had happened. The aisles were long, so it was a far-distant sight, but there was a black silhouette beneath the light. Its hands were held away from its sides, and there was something streaming off them, onto the floor.

It started to advance.

The diversion hadn't worked. Somehow, Ambrogi knew where they were. Melissa cursed again -- he couldn't tell what she'd selected from what was, so far as he knew, a comparatively tiny vocabulary of frustrated exclamations, but the sharp and abrupt intake of breath said it all -- and tugged him further along the wall. The windows ended a few metres on, and when they stood up straight again they doubled the pace. The floor was brushed concrete rather than tile, a dirt path beyond the pulpy meadow, and his workboots gripped it better. The hanging sheets dulled the echoes considerably, and so they were able to make much better time.

//Except Ambrogi isn't trying to be quiet, so if he decides to break into a gallop, we're truly and completely fucked.//

A new light source appeared on the left-hand wall, and as they got closer Harry realized it was yet another break. Melissa took the turn like a SWAT cop, clearly ready to start blasting the moment she saw movement, and this time he stuck as close to her as he could without restricting her movement. He felt helpless, knew he'd be useless in a shootout, knew he'd be just as likely to hit her or blow off his own foot as to manage a headshot on a loping lunatic, but it was driving him even deeper into distraction to let her assume all the risk.

Risk, but not yet reality. There was nothing alive in the corridor.

Harry was grateful, nevertheless, that they were only cutting across to dart into the long-term server room. He wouldn't have wanted to spend too long with the swirling fractal patterns drawn on the floor with blood and shit and strings of human entrail -- at least, he assumed they were human.

Until today, he'd had no reason to need to know what that looked like. 

Archivist though he was, he wasn't grateful for the knowledge.

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There was, improbably, nothing going on in the server room. No cryptic postapocalyptic messages scrawled in bodily fluids on the walls, no spark-showers, no busted machinery, not an electronic hair out of place. The floor even looked freshly-swept, though not well; there was dust and grime pushed up towards the edges, where the grey-on-grey institutional lino rolled up to meet the wall plaster. All the server stacks were humming, their blinkenlights blinking away merrily, and what was more, the door lock responded to Melissa's keycard as easily as had the forgotten finds box. All of this was very good news indeed, because it meant they could stagger into the centre of the CROW computer cluster and catch their belaboured breath. The towering grey octagons were clicking and clacking to beat the band, not too loud to be comfortably spoken over, but loud enough to drown out the scream rising up in the back of Harry's brain.

"Ambrogi," he said dumbly, when he had the air to spare.

She nodded. "All he does now. All he's done for months."

He shook his head, hair slapping and sticking wetly to the side of his face. Fit or not, this was an exerting excursion. "Why?"

She shook her own head, sliding to the floor against the CROW's backside. "Don't know. Started slow, little things, got worse fast. Tearing through the walls, floors, then machines, then people. Not like he's looking for something, not like he's... not like he's //angry.// Like it's just the only thing he..." She looked, for the first time, approximately how he felt. "Only thing he enjoys."

Harry hadn't spent more than a moment examining Romolo Ambrogi after he and his co-morbids had popped back to life just over one day prior, but he knew roughly what the man had been up to. A tearful reunion with his boss and 'uncle', Noè Nascimbeni; a visit to the mural which purported to depict the departed heroes of 8 September 2002, all of them now hale and hearty again; apparently a brief conversation with Udo Okorie, Harry's girlfriend, which she had duly reported to their fire-forged friend group in a monotone monologue oddly devoid of particulars. Harry had chosen the better part of valour on that one.

If Ambrogi had been sticking his arm through solid matter or murdering people during that brief interval, well, Harry hadn't been told, and he rather felt he would have been.

"What about Markey?" He and Ambrogi were inextricably linked in Harry's mind, as the two members of Nascimbeni's crew to perish in the breach. Harry had actually spoken directly to Markey during this year's unexpected recurrence of last year's disaster. He'd told the veteran tech how to stop everything from exploding, in point of fact.

//Fat lot of good that did.//

"Markey... makes stuff." Melissa rubbed her damp forehead. "Out of stuff. Everything's Play-Do to him, he shapes and re-shapes it. Ambrogi tears stuff apart, Markey puts it back together. Differently." She winced. "You saw that thing in the Salt Mines."

He nodded. He would never forget that thing in the Salt Mines.

"They made that together. Ambrogi gathered the... materials, and Markey put it together. Made it stick."

The monument in question was so revolting and bizarre, even by the standards of his recent experiences, that Harry felt half-sick discussing it. He nevertheless forged ahead. "It looked like someone... messed with it. Afterward." The spinal column buried in a neck of rosaceous goop still glowed bright in his mind's eye.

She nodded. "They don't get along anymore."

As if in response, there was a loud //thud// from the direction of the door. They both stood, trading panicked looks. She pointed at the space between two of the server stacks flanking the CROWs, and he nodded.

They heard a strange hissing from behind as they squeezed between the metal casings, careful not to stumble over rubber-lined power cables and loose floor tiles. Harry knew this room to be the ultimate dead end: only one way in or out, surrounded on two sides by bedrock. It was one of many corners in A&R's janky footprint. He wondered if the culmination of his partner's plan was to cower behind a tower and await discovery. Ambrogi wouldn't need to smell their fear to find them, their perspiration would serve well enough.

//...oh.// He really ought to have known.

There had once been three aisles of servers on the western end of the room, but as they rounded the corner to the south, Harry saw that only two remained. The third and final featured all the chaotic destruction he'd thought absent from the room: hollowed out, burned out husks, smouldering softly, slowly dissipating in wisps of black smoke which crawled up the wall to disappear through a recycling vent. This carnage was nothing, however, next to the general remodelling which had seen both the wall itself and the Site's second skin removed entirely. A spacious bedrock tunnel, smooth and round, opened up before them. It glowed, softly, pink.

"What the fuck," he muttered as she took up her Solid Snake position against the aperture's edge, then wheeled to ensure the strange coast was clear.

Then they heard the door collapse behind them, and ran like hell ahead.

Hell followed at a leisurely stroll.

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Site-43 was constructed piecemeal in a massive complex of disused tunnels carved into the bedrock one kilometre beneath the surface of what is now Ipperwash Provincial Park. Though the precise origin of these caves and the identity of their creators cannot be known for certain, local mythology suggests their long time residents were responsible: the Mishepeshu, Lords of the Beneath World, chimerical panther-serpents once ranging from Great Lake to Great Lake, swimming in the depths (and pulling ancient hunters down with them, to drown) or stalking the riverine isles and forests. As every word of wisdom derived from First Nations elders by the staff of the Nexus Affairs Section has fallen somewhere between a nugget and a veritable goldmine of truth, this explanation has been generally accepted.

The Mishepeshu were industrious enough in carving out this home for themselves that, once they had vacated it, there was plenty of room in which to plonk down the single largest manmade interior space on planet Earth (at the time) with caverns on deep, dark caverns to spare. There are resultantly any number of vacant tunnels and switchbacks and grottoes spiralling away from the Site in every direction, some of them directly accessible via the exterior passages which ring each Section the whole facility 'round. These are monitored and patrolled, and have been extensively mapped. There is no back entrance to the Site which isn't guarded by either a Mobile Task Force, a hardened camera array, or an aging reality bender. (Once again I remind the reader to mind their security clearance levels when discussing the contents of this chapter.) No water panther has ever been discovered in the tunnels, which is probably to everyone's benefit.

Whether Dr. Rydderech has encountered them in his eternal factory, only he knows -- and so far as we can discern from his disjointed ramblings, he might not even know if he knows.

[[>]]
-- Blank, //Lines in a Muddle//
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Harry had only occasionally set eyes on the panther tunnels surrounding the Site, mostly while engaged in monthly inspections of the access points to the salt mines, but the expansive and damp spaces had made more than enough impression on him that he was unlikely to forget what they looked and felt like. They looked rough, uneven, and craggy. They felt cold, and they were very dark.

This tunnel was not one of those.

This tunnel was warm, very warm, and smoothed to a near-mirror sheen as though someone had crafted it from concrete, gone over it with a trowel, then engaged in some seriously dedicated glazing. The surface was pockmarked and pebbly, reminding him of...

//Skin.//

He reached up to touch the bedrock ceiling as they ran along, noting that he could place his palm flat on the surface -- in other words, the tunnel had been carved out in proportion to the reach of an average male human being. He'd seen enough to understand the implications of these facts in combination. As they stumbled down the straight and narrow path, pressing their own hands into the porous stone, listening out for Ambrogi's approach from behind, he realized this was probably the single worst path for them to take.

They were running a maze which its minotaur had custom-crafted for his own purpose, and that purpose was hunting for sport.

There was a terrible sound from the server room as they approached a sudden turn, and Harry looked back to see the technician walking straight through the surviving server stacks. Not neatly, like a ghost, but in a red hot screech-and-tear: metal folded away from him, blistering like paper, melting over his vest and exposed skin in rivulets of steel and rubber. He brushed it off, brushed at his greasy mane and let the meltfall tumble over his shoulders like rain. He looked happy.

The initial straightaway had planted false hope in the overlapping stack of neuroses which presently made up Harry's conscious mind. Beyond the bend the tunnels began to branch out and backtrack and intersect, lacking even the animalistic intent of the wandering pantherways. There was a roughly square block, the size of a //city// block, of bedrock between the corner of A&R and the dorms they'd just escaped from and were presumably on their roundabout return to. The best way to get through that would be to run a diagonal, northeast to southwest, and this was of course precisely what was not on offer. Instead the tunnels wound and wended, splitting and unsplitting in untidy progress to the north. Ideally they wouldn't penetrate too far in that direction; too far north was Health and Pathology, which had, he remembered hearing but not remembering or really understanding, apparently 'exploded'.

He didn't look over his shoulder again. This might not be a dream, but he was damned sure it wasn't a movie either, and only in dreams or movies could forward motion mix with looking back and not lead immediately to disaster. Even with Melissa pulling him forward, exerting half the effort required to get his increasingly-reluctant muscles moving for him, he didn't want to miss a trick and meet a wall with the side of his skull.

He also didn't care to know whether Ambrogi was following at a saunter, like a supervillain, or sprinting to catch up. There wasn't anything he could have done with that information but worry, and his nervous system wasn't taking on any new tasks today.

It occurred to him to wonder why the passages, with no visible light fixtures, were glowing pink at about the moment he found out. Melissa pulled him around one rock-faced corner and into a small cavern, which opened onto a larger one, which opened onto a larger one still, and even after everything he'd seen so far their contents still brought him up short. He didn't mind the broken pace. His lungs were on fire anyway.

The first cavern was filled with stalagmites and stalactites -- he knew the difference between these, because he was a collector of useless trivia, and also because his demesne contained more of each than did anyone else's among the Chair and Chief set -- which pulsed in waves of pure rose light. It was bright, but somehow didn't strain his eyes. Each finger of rock... and they //were// fingers of rock, weren't they? He could see the texture in them, the grain, the striations. They were granite, these fingers, and yet each of them was nevertheless semitransparent. Like rose-coloured glasses. Like the abhorrent cake in the Salt Mines. Something hot and bubbly roiled within, casting strange shadows in every direction.

The stalactites and stalagmites in the next cavern, the only other one he could see clearly from his vantage point in the southern aperture, met in the middle to form speleothems. From the ceiling they oozed a sticky green syrup which sizzled when it struck the cave floor. From that floor they rose up as blazing yellow, indignant flame. Where these met and mixed, they were stellar pinpricks far too bright to look directly at.

The third cavern loomed in the distance, blood red, but that didn't really matter right now because David Markey was standing in the centre of the second.

He was stripped down to the tank top he wore under his J&M work shirt, vest absent, cap on. His wavy grey hair was slick with sweat, his beard was thick and filthy, and he was kneeling in a puddle of what had to have once been gore. It wasn't gore anymore, because he was stirring it with his hands, curdling it, shaping it into...

Well, he was shaping it into a stalagmite, of course, and when Harry's breath caught, he realized he could hear it softly howling.

They were all, in fact, softy howling.

Markey turned his head, as though alerted by the contrast between their sudden silence and the roar of their previous exertion, and when he saw them, the howling ceased to be soft.

The old technician smiled, and stood. He smoothed down his vest, and said -- audibly, despite the screeching forest of shaped human slurry surrounding him -- "Just what I needed." The voice was Markey's, but there was a strength and a confidence there that seemed alien to its tone. The voice belonged to one of the laziest, most apathetic people Harry had ever known, and Harry had known both himself and Lillian Lillihammer. Markey went with the flow, and rolled with the punches. His eyes didn't burn with determination in the dark.

There were footsteps behind them, very close together.

There was no other exit from this end of the cave system. Melissa pulled Harry along the southern wall as Ambrogi walked through from the east -- again walked //through,// literally, the rock burning bright orange and blue before cooling much too fast in his wake as he shook red-hot dust from his uniform, fabric sizzling. One sleeve of his undershirt caught fire; Ambrogi glanced at it, then grabbed the attached cuff and pulled. The sleeve came off at the shoulder, and he crumpled it up in his hand, and of course it, too, caught fire.

He tossed it at the nearest spire, which began to smoulder and audibly weep. Pink tears rolled down its surface in tune with each gasping sob.

Markey's expression distorted into a mask of ferocity, all mirth and false friendliness gone, and he raised one finger to point at his former shift partner accusingly. Ambrogi laughed, and pointed back at him in obvious mockery. Harry wondered what would happen if the tips of their fingers met; God uncreating Adam, or God re-creating God, or...

"Get out," Markey snarled.

"What's yours is mine," Ambrogi grinned. He redirected his pointing finger at Harry and Melissa, creeping around the base of the nearest stalagmite, taking great care not to touch it. "Don't you want to share?"

"You left the work," Markey snarled. "You don't get to come //back.// Not after what you did."

"I'm not here to //work,//" Ambrogi laughed. "I'm here to //play.//"

Melissa began edging around the rockface again, and Harry followed suit as the two figures advanced on each other, accusatory fingers still waggling. It should have been comical. All of this should have been comical.

When it became clear that neither of them were going to pay any further attention to the two fugitives, they once again broke into a run, heading for the second cavern. This time Harry couldn't resist looking over his shoulder, with his partner in the lead; he saw Markey kneeling to the cavern floor and //scooping it up,// throwing a solid wall between the two of them, while Ambrogi extended both arms outward in a t-pose and //clapped// against one of the stalagmites. It exploded in a shower of pink, and this time the howls of protest from both the cavern and its creator were deafening.

The floor of the second cavern was covered in moss, and the moss stuck to Harry's workboots as he pounded it flat. He wasn't sure if he was imagining it or not, the sigh of almost sensual relief it made as it sucked back into shape behind him.

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The tunnels resumed off the west wall, and they left the warring technicians far behind. Harry now had too many questions to choose from, and not enough breath to give voice to any, so they ran in silence save for their increasingly-desperate respiration. He almost wept for joy when the passage terminated in the Site's outer skin, penetrating into a dorm room less fancy but far better-preserved than his own had been.

Indeed, besides the missing wall -- which was chipped away quite neatly, with no rubble left behind -- the only sign that anything untoward had ever happened here was the corpse smashed over the computer workstation, smashed flat, a stained jumpsuit in the rough shape of a human being but lacking quite a lot in three-dimensionality. Various fluids and viscera forced out of the deformed head by whatever had brought it crashing down were puddled on the carpet beside the desk. Harry couldn't tell who it was, not least because he couldn't look too closely at it for fear of repeating his failure in the A&R offices, but it was definitely someone from EPAU: the Emergency Psychiatric Assessment Unit.

Which was one hell of a coincidence, since he could very much have used their help right now.

They finally stopped running, just short of smacking into the far wall. Before she had a chance to react, Harry grabbed Melissa by the shoulders and turned her to face him. She looked surprised by the gesture, but... but that was it. Once again, he had the information he required.

She wasn't precisely pleased about the course of their little jaunt so far, but not too much about it had particularly upset her.

//What the fuck kind of year did you have here, Mel?//

But he didn't ask. Instead he nodded, muttered an apology, and dusted off her jacket. By the look on her face, she seemed to guess what he was thinking. 

She turned away and tried the door handle.

The door fell into the hall, and Harry belatedly noticed it had no hinges. They both winced at the sound it made when it impacted the tiles beyond.

They were closer to the centre of Habitation and Sustenance than when they'd started, in the cheap seats occupied by those researchers who possessed neither their own team of underlings nor accommodations too complex to require more than two rooms -- a combination bedroom/kitchen/living/work area, and a washroom. The door to this dorm's washroom was closed, and Harry was already developing a sympathetic superstition about closed doors, so he resisted the urge to walk in and splash his face with cold water. For all he knew, the water was now running red-hot 24/7, or else the taps didn't have water in them at all.

He refocused on the hall. There was a fissure down the centre of the tiles, about one foot wide, along a line of grouting. It was streaked with blood in several places, and there was some sort of mushy red substance filling one of the wider crevices as though -- and Harry was automatically certain this was what had actually occurred -- someone had taken a perfectly fine human body and jammed it in, like plunging a mass of something foul up and through the u-bend of a toilet. //Be fair. It could just as easily have been Markey putting in an honest day's work on repairs, for a change.// There were open wall panels full of bent girders and hanging wires, every panel save one in the drop ceiling was missing, and the floor was covered in water. The water was pouring into the chasm, which wasn't filling.

//Ipperwash Falls,// he thought deliriously.

The water was coming from a large set of open double doors across the way, and Melissa pulled him toward them. The room was labelled overhead, but of course Harry, who had written a vast and self-satisfied monograph on the Site's physical history, knew full well what it was. It was the Site's swimming pool, which had always seemed to him to be an absurd luxury for an underground base before Noè Nascimbeni had informed him that this was the most naturally-damp location in the caves, and since a small subterranean city needed more than a small city's worth of amenities to be a psychologically survivable habitat, bending to mother nature in this respect had been nothing but sheer pragmatism.

The pool facility was a simple complex: washrooms, changerooms, maintenance rooms, and the pool itself. The pool itself was, of course, filled with bodies. Harry's monograph had also gone into detail on the various jumpsuits and labcoats worn by each Section of the Site, and so although he wasn't too regularly conversant with people outside of his own narrow field he was able to identify them all, face-down in the water or not: one from Quantum Supermechanics, in grey; two from Memetics and Countermemetics, in dazzle camo; one from Replication Studies -- he felt bad for feeling relieved to see it was a woman in the blue labcoat, and not William Wettle, and he was also not wholly certain why he should have rated the Site's least-favourite employee's survival so highly in his list of mental priorities; one J&M tech, one EPAU agent, and two Security and Containment guards in their blue shirts with black pants. There was something particularly wrong about that, but he wasn't about to start pondering dead people with living ones close at his heel.

He wasn't sure how any of these people had died, but in any event, the water was crystal-clear. He supposed--

The water geysered up, splashing them both, and Melissa spun on her dress shoe heel to snap off a few instinctual shots. A man-shaped blur of greenish oil spun as well, Melissa's bullet tearing off the side of his (?) neck. He fell noisily into one of the doors, sending it slamming into the outer hall wall then back again with an incredible shriek of unlubricated metal. A green oil-woman stepped primly into his place, aimed with one hand, and returned fire.

She had no face. Neither of them did.

Harry slipped on the slick surface, and took the opportunity to pull Melissa down as she struggled to make another hit. A light sconce beside them, directly behind where Melissa's head had just been, exploded. They scrabbled across the room, Harry even attempting a few wild shots over his shoulder when he was absolutely certain his partner wasn't in the way, and he found himself leading before they reached the back set of doors. Which were closed.

But not locked, which was good, because he hit them like a bulldozer and sent them slamming open so hard that their outer handles took the finish off the wall tiles on the other side. The hall between the pool and the water tanks was narrow and ill-travelled, but apparently not enough to avoid catching its own case of peculiarity: the tiles were gone, the floor joists were gone, the systems below were gone down to raw bedrock, and they had to leap across the resultant one-metre dip through the opened door on the other side.

This turned out to be the first case of architectural malevolence which suited them fine, as Melissa was able to firmly shut the door and lock it with her keycard. Harry doubted their pursuer would even be able to reach the reader on the other side, from the sunken ground, or gain purchase enough to climb.

And so he felt safe in asking: "Who the fuck was that?"

"That," said Melissa, "was nobody."

And then suddenly, shocking him more than anything he'd seen in this cavalcade of shocking sights, she burst into tears. She shook like a pine in the wind, reached up and scraped her fingernails across her scalp, pulling at her hair and gibbering.

He put his arms around her, and she fairly burrowed into him, still shaking, still weeping. He felt her arm working its way up between them, and she clamped her hand over her mouth, and pressed the hand into his shoulder, and then she screamed.

She screamed, over and over, for what felt like several minutes. He didn't know what to do, so he tightened his grip on her back. In response she burrowed in more deeply still, so he gripped even more tightly, and once again they were as inextricable as one of Markey's revolting flesh-sculptures, but still alive.

Still alive.

Eventually she stopped shaking, and started sniffling. She pulled away and produced yet another of her makeshift handkerchiefs, blowing into it messily, then shooting him a shy and embarrassed look through red-rimmed eyes. "Sorry."

"Sorry," he repeated. "Are you shitting me?"

She guffawed, tears still streaking her flushed face, and then she stood up on the tips of her shoes and kissed him on the cheek. He was still recovering from that when she said: "Those people weren't real. You won't see them again. You'll see others, and they won't be real either, but they'll kill you just the same. Don't ask where they're from. We don't have time." She pulled a datapad out of her jacket lining, and turned it on. "Where next..."

Where next turned out to be out of the tank room and a straight shot down a hallway with dorms on either side. To Harry, this looked like a mistake; their pursuer could easily catch their east-west route by exiting the pool hall and bearing down on them via a perpendicular access way. Melissa shook her head, and by way of explanation, led him out of the roar of pipes and pumps.

The cave ceiling had fallen in across the north-south hallway, he saw. On top of the rocks there were broken desks and cracked conduits and insulation and fragments of crawlspace rubber; Applied Occultism on the second sublevel had descended to fill the remaining space. If the unreal woman was still after them, she'd have to find another way.

It hardly seemed possible, but this stretch of dorms was worse off than the one near Harry's complex. It seemed like every service was exposed, the plaster and tiles pulled away and discarded in dusty heaps, and there were a //lot// of services at Site-43. The fire suppression system pipes were covered in bulges and blow-outs, with hardened suppressant foam speckling their surfaces like white boils; the sprinkler pipes were on the floor instead of in the ceiling, all run dry; a once-hidden track of the book circulation system was bent straight through a wall, a small pile of monographs deposited at its feet; there was a faint smell of gas in the air, and Melissa made a point of visibly pocketing her handgun. It wouldn't do to produce any sparks in this segment of hall.

It occurred to him that he should have mentioned the smell, that gas leaks were rarely long-term tenable processes and more like suddenly explosive short-term events, when a hidden main made its presence violently known.

The rubble ahead disappeared in a cloud of fire, and the floor shook violently before breaking apart. Harry fell face-first into a dorm room door, and was only knocked silly instead of unconscious by the serendipity of it already having been unlatched. He tumbled through as a rumble and roar rose up behind him, the sound of an entire hallway and its contents tumbling down into the depths.

He rolled over onto his back,, and removed his glasses to clear his streaming eyes. This was a stroke of luck, because it meant they were in his hand and didn't shatter when a second explosion flung the door off its hinges and into his skull again, with enough force this time to make the difference.

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Harry couldn't have been unconscious for long, because his ears were still ringing from the blasts. There could easily have been a third while he was out, but even a sequence of explosions using up all the gas being pumped into... wherever it had been pumped into, was not likely to have taken place over a wide stretch of time. Once again, event as opposed to process.

He stood up without considering the state of his body, or where he was. His vision was filled with light, and there was a revolting smell; he realized his hair was cooking, so he reached up and scraped his hands across it until it wasn't anymore. This revealed that he was still clutching his glasses, so he put them back on and reached out to find the nearest wall.

It was warm, very warm, so he pulled away and squinted. He could just barely make out the cavernous space ahead of him, which from its lack of distinguishing features he assumed to be the blast zone. He looked down, saw smouldering carpet, and stomped until it stopped.

Then he threw up.

By the time he was done throwing up, he realized he'd also fallen over again, planting both hands in the smoking Berber. They came away sooty, but unburned, so he tried once more to stand. He succeeded.

Like an obsolete computer, fans filled with dust, his central processor finally spun back up. "Melissa?" It was meant to be a shout, a scream even, but his throat was full of smoke. His eyes began to sting as the smoke thickened, so he cleared his throat as best he could and hollered: "MELISSA!"

"I'M FINE!" The voice was faint and distant. "KEEP GOING!"

He felt much better, and a little bit worse, with this response. "WHERE?" He put both hands to the sides of his mouth, because... well, because on TV, this helped your voice to carry. He was long past distinguishing between fact and fiction.

"AUDITORIUM!"

He looked around the shattered dorm room. The wall between it and its neighbour was largely knocked down, as was the next one, as was the next. //Maybe someone ran a tank through here. Wouldn't be the stupidest thing I've seen so far.//

He began to pick his way down the makeshift thoroughfare. He passed a bed, which was burning; the sheets were gradually melting into black blobs which caught on the air conditioning and sailed up to the blackening ceiling, revealing, of course, of course, that there was a prone and motionless form in the mouldering mattress. He passed a computer console which was somehow still on, displaying nothing but static. He eventually found a break in the back wall of the fourth dorm, leading into the next hallway over, and when he stepped out into that relatively undamaged space a voice came over the overhead PA system.

"She walks, friends!" The voice was jubilant; a man, a big man from the intonation. "I know you can't see it, but she walks. It's like I'm there with her..." The voice caught, then resumed. "She is striding down the Mexican panhandle, making for the Andes. She's going to find them. You know it, so I know it, so she knows it, and it's going to happen. She's going to walk all over them, //through// them, and they're going to pave the way for her from Brazil to Cape Horn."

This was the end of enough. After unnumbered things he did not understand all in quick succession, most of which had either nearly killed him or else posed extensive existential conundrums he did not yet have the time to even begin addressing, random ceiling gibberish was entirely unacceptable, and so he muttered out loud to himself: "Oh, shut up."

The conversation was, unfortunately, one-way, and so the voice didn't hear him. "Once she has walked the length of this land, she will start upon its breadth. Once she has crossed the continent, truly //crossed// it, she will walk across the water and arrive in the ruins of the old world as its long-awaited Messiah. I will witness, and what I witness I will share. Because I love you."

Harry flashed the nearest speaker an ironic thumbs-up as he turned the corner to the auditorium approach.

And nearly died again.

This time the threat was static, and would not follow him, so there was that at least. This north-south hallway terminated in a hole; a shaft, really. Leaning over the edge, Harry noted that neither the top nor the bottom were visible from where he stood. As he had been over the past //how many?// minutes, he was right in the middle of something he wasn't equipped to understand.

//Someone's been fracking,// was his first thought. That had been one of the original suggestions for excavating space for Site-43, before the true extent of the Mishepeshu caverns had been known; he'd discovered that in his research, and it had made him shake his head. Why go to such extreme measures? Why not just build elsewhere?

A warning shiver ran down his spine, the primal sense of being watched, and he saw something move in the haze across the abyss: a flash of red and black in the general shape of a person. He flattened himself against the nearest wall, cursing the lack of proper cover, but whatever it was didn't come screaming across the gap toward him or raise alarum or start shooting, so he supposed he was probably safe.
Ha ha. Yeah.


In any event, yet another detour was in order. This one Harry could figure out on his own, not that he had a lot of choice. The corridor was also blocked on the north by another rubblefall -- hopefully Melissa's parallel path would still be clear -- so he'd be forced to enter the H&S library and loop around this obstruction. 

It occurred to him that, if he hurried, he could deal with any threats in the library before they endangered Melissa's life again.

It also occurred to him that unlike her, he had no survival skills to speak of. He was an academic, however. He knew how to sort between vital and junk data.

He drew his weapon, put one hand on the door handle, and pantomimed secret agency as best he could.

He flung the door open, entered the room before his instincts could hold him back, and swept the stacks with no natural talent or training but plenty of experience in first-person shooter video games. It sufficed; he quickly determined that the space was absent of immediate threats. The H&S library was immense, dozens on dozens of tall stacks filled with books all accessed via a variation on the small finds system. The carpet was burgundy, but stained deep brown throughout, and there was a strange earthy scent in the air. He looked up and noted that the pine ceiling panels were also stained, and dripping. They were dripping teal, milky and thick, and it was streaking the stacks and their contents until they shone in the flickering fluorescents. The longer he looked at the books, the less he could shake the impression that they were flexing, increasing and decreasing in size beneath their greenish-blue liquid sheathes. He stopped trying when he saw one literally burst its bindings, the pages now swimming free, falling slowly to the carpet in a stop-motion treacleflow.

Because why not, honestly.

He walked past the circulation desk, heading for the door Melissa would enter through if she hadn't encountered any further obstacles, and that was when he suddenly saw her.

Not Melissa.

Karen Elstrom.

The assistant to the Chair of Administration and Oversight was standing stock-still between two stacks of books, staring at them, her long honey-blonde hair falling slack over a Security and Containment uniform: blue shirt with black trim, black bell-bottom pants, tall black boots, badges and shoulder-patches and belt holster and all, and Harry belatedly realized why this combination had given him pause earlier. It was last season's style, long since replaced with form-fitting jumpsuits. Elstrom was dressed up as a guard, a job she had not and could likely never hold except on some sort of honour assignment. The only element of security Harry could imagine Elstrom working was the kind where you struck a pose and held it.

She was certainly holding this pose, head cocked to one side as she intently considered a shelf of sodden, oozing volumes. Harry approached her cautiously, mindful of the fact that nothing going on today had been either safe or sensible, but also aware that he had once considered this woman a friend. Of sorts.

"Karen?" he said, and she turned her head.

Not to look at him. Just enough to acknowledge that she'd heard a sound, as though she were a cat. So he repeated himself, more firmly: "Karen?" and she turned in place, head still listing dramatically to her left. Her blue eyes were unfocused, and her hips and arms were swaying aimlessly, and she said "Oh."

He approached her, weapon still aimed at the ceiling. "Karen, are you alright? It's not safe here."

She shrugged. Her head stayed in place. "Oh. Okay."

"Do you know what's going on?" He paused. "Did this just happen to you, too? Do you remember anything?"

"Sure." They were just a few feet apart now. "Sure, alright. Haha."

It was rarely a good thing when someone said 'haha' instead of actually laughing, in Harry's experience. He took Elstrom by both shoulders, thumbs pressed into her S&C insignias, and he said: "Why are you wearing that uniform?"

She smiled sweetly at him -- even made eye contact for just a few instants, though there was nothing behind hers -- and said "Don't know."

And then she turned and walked away, idle hands knocking a sopping-wet volume off the nearest shelf.

"Harry?"

He spun to see Melissa stepping briskly to one side, and realized she'd been prepared to dodge if he'd opened fire on her in fright. She'd apparently absorbed a lifetime of paramilitary training in a very short space of time. He lowered his weapon, and she approached him. Her face was streaked with soot, but she looked otherwise unharmed. He felt a lump in his throat he hadn't noticed let go.

"What were you looking at?" she asked, peering around him suspiciously. He stepped aside, and gestured at Elstrom's retreating back, and Melissa tensed up immediately. "FUCK." She was still whispering, but she whispered that word very emphatically. "Now we're in for it. Come on."

She took him by the hand again and pulled him toward the third and final west-wall entrance, the one that would hopefully allow them to circumvent the Site's bizarre structural instabilities. This time he planted his feet, and let the tension in their grip advise her to stop and talk a moment. Her lips were a thin line when she turned to face him again.

He said: "What's wrong with her?"

For the first time, Melissa did look truly troubled. "We think Wirth does it. There's no fixing it. Once it happens, they're gone."

"Once //what// happens?"

Melissa sighed in obvious frustration. "We don't know what he does, but it... turns their brains off. Makes them into zombies, basically. Until he turns them back on, and then..." She shook her head. "We're not sure, but we think he can read their thoughts. And put new thoughts in their heads. Controlling them. Which means we really need to get //away// from that thing before it tells him where we are, and then he tells Mukami."

"That //thing,//" and he felt his cheeks getting warmer, "is Karen Elstrom. And you //shot// Mukami."

"And I'll do it again."

She refused to clarify, pulling harder until he was forced to either let her go, or follow.

So.

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Once back in the hall, it was a straight shot to the mustering point before the auditorium. Each Section had its own designated space for employees to group up and receive instructions in case of event or disaster, and this was the one for H&S. It featured the most prosaic tableau of catastrophe Harry had yet seen on their whirlwind tour.

All the furniture was gone, and the floor was covered with body bags. Dozens of them.

He turned to face his partner, and he asked her: "How many people are left?"

She bit her lip, made a face he associated with mental math, made eye contact, and told him.

[[div class="muddle"]]
Site-43 is the fourth-largest SCP Foundation facility (the first, second and third are Site-19, Site-17, and Area-150) with just under six hundred employees at any one time. Gene Roddenberry once wrote in his series bible for the original //Star Trek// that a starship with about four hundred crewmembers would allow the writers to introduce an expert in any field of science which the plot of the week might require, along with a healthy helping of expendable cannon fodder. (He didn't write that last part, but it was definitely the way the show ended up operating.) Site-43 has at least one hundred more people than that, covering all the disciplines even Roddenberry's spacious imagination had no room for. Losing any significant proportion of the Site would be an unprecedented catastrophe for the pursuit of esoteric knowledge, and the survival of the human race.

Site-43 might not be the centre, but for the reasons listed above and a few others I'm not at liberty to divulge it absolutely, positively, cannot fall.

[[>]]
-- Blank, //Lines in a Muddle//
[[/>]]
[[/div]]

"Jesus fucking Christ," he breathed. 

There was really no way to follow up a statement on that level of cataclysmic brutality, so Melissa walked past him to the double doors and pushed them open. He could see the strain in her muscles, and the fresh singe marks on her hair and the lapels of the old leather jacket, and at the moment that sight struck him he suddenly realized he was absolutely exhausted. It was easily past seven o'clock, and by six thirty this had already been one of the longest days of his life.

//Two in one.//

The auditorium beyond was coliseum-style: four quarters of seats in ten rows of fifteen each, colour-coded by Section, enough for every member of Site staff plus any number of privileged visitors. There was a stage and podium at the centre... or, at least, there once had been. The stage was still there, but the podium had been cast aside. Where it had stood, now stood three women in bright and flashy dress.

One of them was wearing a short golden dress. The one in the middle was wearing blue jeans, a tie-dyed green jumper and an exposed blue sports bra. The third was in black jeans and a fitted white work shirt. All of the clothes belonged, Harry realized in a rush of remembrance, to Karen Elstrom. All the women were smiling: shyly, snidely, and flirtatiously.

All of them were Ana Mukami.

Harry looked from face to face, completely speechless. 

Melissa raised her pistol. "Go on, get it over with."

"Get what over with?" asked the one in green.

"Your dumb speech. Start talking. Give me the excuse you know I want."

Mukami-in-green laughed. Ana Mukami was known for her soft, musical laugh. This wasn't it. "We've tried talking to you before, Dr. Bradbury. We know what it gets us."

"It's going to get you that anyway." Melissa adjusted her aim, bracing her shooting arm with the other. "You might as well get something else out of it. Come on, try. Try your bullshit."

The one in gold //tsked// softly. "I don't know why we always need to be so confrontational. We're just old acquaintances meeting by chance in an old, familiar place. We can be //civil.//"

"You're being civil because you think you've got us surrounded." Melissa tapped the trigger, but held her fire. "Karen tipped you off, and you're tightening the noose as we speak."

"But that's just it," the one in white cooed. "We're //talking,// aren't we? That's all I've wanted from the start. If you'd only listen to reason, we could be done with all of this unpleasantness. You bring it on yourselves." 

"I don't know why we keep giving you these chances," the one in green sighed. "It's simply not worth it. You know what? Fine, two more for the pile. What's this bring us to?"

"Two more?" Melissa pretended to count on the fingers of her free hand as doors on the upper landings -- northwest, northeast, and southwest -- snapped open and blue-shirted guards began spilling out from either side. Harry swung his own weapon back and forth between them as they took up sniper positions. "Three hundred and eighty-one."

"That low?" Mukami-in-gold shook her head, still smiling. "Time for a big push, I suppose."

"Putsch, more like," Harry muttered.

Green grinned at him. "Hey, look at you! More baffled than morose. What changed?"

He couldn't begin to answer that, so he simply shrugged.

"What happens to your flunkies if I put one through your shiny white teeth?" Melissa drawled, cool as a cucumber.

Green shrugged, and the jumper rolled back to expose her muscular shoulders. "They get a really bad headache for about five seconds, then cut you into ribbons, I guess." And then her head exploded.

Her head exploded.

"TAKE COVER!" a familiar voice shouted, from the galleries, from the southeast, and Melissa grabbed Harry and threw them both at the foot of the stage behind the discarded podium. A hail of gunfire erupted over their heads, blowing down the light fixtures and projector equipment; most of that action came from Mukami's guards, who were indeed visibly disoriented by their leader's sudden death. //You and me both.// The return fire, from the door which hadn't opened originally, was far more precise. The one in white fell to both knees then faceplanted on her doppelganger's back, blood spurting from the hole in her head. The one in yellow caught a bullet in the shoulder, then another in the sole of her right foot as she fell off the stage to break her jaw just inches from where Harry lay. One by one, the blueshirts fell; the last two took refuge behind a row of chairs, and their attacker advanced down the aisle with a spray of covering fire behind her. She took a knee, braced her firing arm, and put two tidy clusters through each chair.

The chairs were not, of course, bulletproof.

Harry stared at the woman in the burgundy shirt and her pair of blue-shirted escorts, at her fury-twisted rictus, at her immaculate shooting pose, and knew he had only once in his life been happier to see a woman than he was at this moment.

It was Delfina Ibanez.

"Get your ass up here," she hissed. "There'll be more where those came from, and they come //express.//"

This time Harry led, but only because Melissa had managed to twist her ankle on the dive and was now only capable of a shuffling waddle. He ducked under her arm and acted as a crutch, much the way he'd been leaning on her expertise since waking up to this bad, bad lucid trip.

"Straight shooting as always, Chief," Melissa grunted as they reached the galleries. "I'm glad someone else knows what's what."

Ibanez laughed in her face. "I've got no fucking clue. Shouldn't you be in a coma?"

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