…Lately i've been getting more sleep - SCP Foundation

The road was dark on the way to work. A thick wall of mesquite trees lined it on either side, their branches hanging low and heavy like claws. When the wind blew, they'd sway back and forth and whip the cars that drove by. It was a terrible sight. It was a lonely old prison that just went on for miles and miles. Nobody drove on it anymore unless they had to. They said it made you feel like a rat in a tunnel full of toxic gas. It bent at odd places and would at random times thrash up and down like it was trying to throw you off. It was suffocating, the bullsnake. The bitter bullsnake. They told him stories of repairmen who had gotten so sick of it that they crashed their cars into boulders and let themselves bleed out in the sun to escape. They told him how their eyes sunk down into their skulls and shriveled up like little white grapes. Their blood dried and cracked, their skin blackened, and their souls were carried out through their lips by the devil wind.

It scared the shit out of him. It crushed him, really. The fear of dying was something that he experienced so many times working for these fascists that he had forgotten what it really felt like. He knew almost exactly how much force it took to break a femur, how many bullets it took to get a strong man to seize up. Death was no longer a surprise to him, just an unfortunate consequence for making a mistake.

No, death would be there and the road would be evil, but what made his heart sink was how large it was. It was overpowering. In the daytime the trees would block out so much sun it felt like driving down a tunnel, and at night there were no stars in the sky. There was nothing blocking his headlights, he knew that, but still they felt so pathetic compared to them. They were nothing, children's flashlights. It reminded him that he would always be close to death, whether he was standing alone or being protected by two tons of steel. He would always be slower, he would always be weaker, and he would always be so small, so immeasurably, immeasurably small.

It was a quarter past midnight and he was ten miles from the Site. He kept a good grip on the wheel while his mind came up with reason after reason for why he should turn back. He could them them he was sick or hungover or didn't really care to do it today. He could commit suicide and leave the burden on somebody else's shoulder. He could run away.

He kept driving though, for one reason or another, it didn't matter. He just had to.

He cranked the radio up and told himself it wouldn't be that bad, really. It was boring, but it was never deadly. Nobody had died at the SCP Foundation in years. They were all so over-trained and cross-trained that he could probably survive everything up to the complete annihilation of reality.

The song was fucking awful, but it didn't matter. He didn't want songs, he wanted noise. Pure good, stupid, stupid noise, noise that gutted his brain and made his hands stop shaking. It was the closest he could get to zoning out on the job. He needed to do that if he wanted to stay sane. For a long while he wondered if he could somehow get himself lobotomized or amnesticized so that he could keep his memories but he wouldn't have to think while on the job. His boss told him it'd be unethical, that they needed their employees to be able to disobey orders in case the executives got compromised by something. It was a stupid excuse.

He cranked up the volume. The song grew more distorted as the speakers rumbled louder. At first he could pick out a snare, a guitar, a bass, and some loud bat-screech-thing he assumed was the singer, but the further he drove out the more those parts began to melt into one another. Words bled into riffs which swallowed the bass. It was like a ball of razor-wire, frustrated and sex-crazed like Clef in his younger days. He loved it. It was impossible to think at these volumes. Soon he found himself cranking it up even more to see how stupid he could make himself.

He fiddled with the knob as a thin line of sweat pooled together along the curve of his back and began inching its way down to his ass like a long black worm.

In a rush, something in his chest slammed hard against his ribs. He gasped for air. Slammed on the fucking breaks because oh man it could be a heart attack. He never felt anything like it before, it was like a hammer smashing into his chest. But as the car screeched to a halt he realized that if he did stop, he would surely die alone out here. He would become another nameless face they told legends about.

But maybe, goddamn, maybe if he slammed on the gas instead he might make it to the Site before he blacks out and slam his car into the wall and set off the alarm. Then maybe someone might not shoot him in the head long enough to realize that oh, this is the guy and oh, they should help him out. Or maybe (fuck! fuck! fuck!) he could just crash. That wasn't the worst way to go.

But right when he came to terms with his own death, the pain disappeared. It lived for a little over three seconds. Maybe it was a rough breath, an awkward interaction between his stomach and his lungs. Yeah, that was probably correct. Still, he couldn't help but feel like it meant something. He couldn't help but think that it was an omen for something terrible, though he had no clue what.

It didn't matter. He wasn't here to kill the Devil or make a deal with God. He was here to repair something. He was a repairman, a thirteen-year veteran of the SCP Foundation. Death didn't care about people like him. He was too small and insignificant to be killed. No, death was off fighting some SCP Foundation superhero in the Atlantic or constructing another murder plot for the Council to solve. The only things out here were himself and his coworkers and some very large animals.

God, but what if tonight were the night? What if he was the target of the next great tragedy? He thought of Talloran and ████, the innocent ones who were doomed to hell for no understandable reason. He wondered if tonight was when he was going to make that final mistake and die just like his father and his grandfather. God he hated this road. It reeked of decay. It was a stupid riptide that had gotten caught on its own entrails and twisted in on itself over and over until they burst.

Dirtier thoughts entered his mind. If death really were to take him tonight, what would he be able to do? He had no chance of fighting back, no chance to stop it from doing with his body what it wanted. He was a droplet of water in a black ocean that wasn't afraid to sweep him away from everything and everyone he knew.

That was hippie bullshit though. I mean it had control over him, yes, but that meant he must've had some control over it as well. He could embrace it or he could run from it. It would always catch him, but whether that happened in five seconds or five million years was up to him. Maybe that was the point of life (FUCK).

It didn't really matter. Reasoning didn't matter to death, nor beauty nor justice. He had recently learned that there was no mechanism in the universe that would punish evil, so he never really gave a shit about it. A man was gonna come and kill him, and even though it was a paranoid thought and he knew it was a paranoid thought it didn't matter. His paranoia was right: his death was real and it was coming for him and it would ultimately be a boring affair. Some self-proclaimed tragic white trash motherfucker was gonna shoot him in the head and he just had to go on with it. Same as everyone.

His grip on the wheel grew tighter.

So yes, his death wasn't in his hands because his hands didn't matter. Well, none of it matters. But he did remember some time when he was a kid where it did matter and he did believe — so it could all just be lies. He could get it back if he tried hard enough. Death had come for humanity thousands of times at least and each time a brave soul or two had managed to fend it off. Sure he wasn't important like those guys but their deaths were coming for them as well, so if they could do it then surely he could do it himself.

The song was dead now. He couldn't even tell where he was in the track. Each note was louder than the one before it and when all of the instruments lined up it felt like a kick in the gut.

He was in the valley, the last mile or two from the Site. It was the darkest place on Earth. The mesquite trees ended here, a wall of them extending forever off into the distance like a line of soldiers who refused to march even an inch further. The sky was strange and sleek like an eel's back. No stars. Wide open desert extending for miles around him, and the dark mountains in the distance. They looked like the castle walls he saw in his childhood picture books, and those ones were lies but they looked alive at least. They looked like they could breathe if they were given enough love. The mountains here, their skinny peaks reached up thousands of miles into space like dead tentacles.

He passed a pack of cacti. They shined blue at this time of night, from the moonlight probably. Their arms and legs were wrapped around themselves. Some of them huddled close while others stood alone. One or two were sunken into the ground.

Death was here the most. It was so quiet, so punishingly quiet. He could feel the blood running in his ears. There weren't any crickets out here, that's what got to him. At first he thought that maybe this was something anomalies, something that the SCP Foundation put here to scare people off, but after enough years he realized that the executives didn't care about small things like this. Cemeteries were better than landmines and all that.

This was nothing to them. It was a drop of paint in the corner of the canvas, it didn't matter that much to them. People, ideologies, morality, important things like that, not bugs in some desert. And if he were allowed himself to be a little crazy, he would say that the crickets probably knew that as well. They fled on their own just like everything else.

Fuck, though. Goddamn he felt like something was here, maybe in alternate reality or pocket dimension, something was here. Yes he had to accept that there was no evidence for that for the sake of his job, but there was a big black crow of doubt that attacked him at every moment. Maybe not an animal, maybe not even a demon or an anomaly or something the labcoats could measure but surely something. A ghost, a dead wind that didn't want to leave yet, that clung to the earth like an insane mother to her dead child. Something that made his lungs rumble with so much power and so much hope that he could hear it shouting as loud as a lion a loud, defiant, "I was here!"

And yet, there was nothing. What he should have heard he didn't, and all he did hear was his own blood.

He guessed that was why the Site managed to stay secret all these years. It wasn't hard to find, really. If you wanted to you could walk off of Old Yuma trail and reach it in an hour, tucked inside of a small gap between two mountains. It was really, really bafflingly easy. It racked his brain for years how nobody, not even a lone hiker or a plane or anything, had managed to spot it. But after enough time he came to the uneasy conclusion that the silence was why.

It was an indescribable thing. Better than walls, better than guards (he hated how large of an assumption he had to make to say that it was real thing and not a figment of his imagination). It had no power other than the power that came from its own existence and did nothing but inspire fear. It was a monster that worked for nothing and never stopped, not during the blackest nights of fall or the brightest mornings of summer. It was more than a fact or a strange paradox, it was a warning — a giant warning that whispered into the ears of every living thing a painful, shameful, "Turn away. This place will destroy you."

He turned the radio up.

He wasn't meant to be here tonight. Sites at this hour were supposed to be under lockdown with an artificial intelligence or some overnight guards at the very most, never a Director. What was even stranger was that this Site was by far the safest on this side of the country. Breaches usually ended seconds after they occurred, and if an anomaly were to escape, they'd never get far. There was nowhere for them to go, nowhere in the world they could possibly be safe.

He hoped it was another small fix that wouldn't matter. That was how most of his days went: cleaning shit off of walls or collecting dead bodies that nobody wanted to touch. Last week he had to reel in the torso of some poor sucker that died in an awkward position and was stuck rotting there for the next five days. Sometimes he'd tighten a screw or two.

DOWNTOWN SUCH A FAST, IN MY EYES

He chewed on the sides of his mouth. He couldn't stand it.

WOULDAKNOWN WHAT’S A DAMN, FOMO

It didn’t even sound human.

THE ENERGY THE SENSE OF SOUND, IN MY EYES

He could see it in the distance, the moonlight shining off the concrete.

ADELAIDE NEVER TAKES, MY SUICIDE HEY–

Then it was quiet.

His stomach fell. His hand shot to the knob and cranked it all the way to the right, but nothing came out. The sound was gone. He turned it and not even air came out. The faint rumbling of the engine felt so very quiet, dangerously quiet. Stupidly fucking quiet. He wanted to rip off the goddamn hood and smash the thing to bits for being so goddamn stupid to leave him alone out here. The noise! The noise was what kept him safe!

He felt the moon staring at him. He saw his own dead body, crushed into pulp in his car, cold, empty. He felt his mind crying about this and that and yes, this was real and yes, he wouldn't ever be prepared for it but it was okay because there was no way in hell it had actually noticed him. It must be a delusion. It must be a nightmare. He cranked the knob back and forth and back and pulled and pushed so hard and—God fucking dammit why was he out here!? Why couldn't he have been born some rich white woman and fucked his way to a nice position!? Still nothing. Was it an alarm? An escapee? Fuck that's what he was called for anyway, a containment breach a big one. Oh God it had him. Fuck he was so dumb, he was such a dumb fucking creature he couldn't hear the engine humming.

He slammed on the breaks and the car skipped forward twenty feet. He caught glimpse of a bright white eye in the corner of his vision — large, massive a fucking Lovecraftian creature that had found him of course it had. He turned to it expecting to die before he did. Stomped on. Crushed into pulp. He hoped they'd give his money to his mom.

And he looked and he saw the moon.

He laughed. Of course, God of course. It was after midnight and it was beginning its descent back down to earth. From this position in the desert, in this time of the year, the moon looked massive. He felt like a small child standing underneath a chandelier, craning his neck all the way back just to catch it completely. It was larger than everything; it made the mountains look like ants beneath it. It crushed him. It crushed everything and that made him want to die. Sure, death was real and it was meaningless, but the things which would kill him were also meaningless. Two rocks colliding into each other at the edge of space.

Andrè looked forward and saw that he was here. He was at the Site. The radio was silent and the entrance gate stood only a few feet in front of him, maybe ten feet tall. It kind of looked like a prison yard gate, except stronger and painted white. He swiped his keycard at the scanner and the gate creaked open. Its hinges were rusted. At a Keter-class Site that was normally a violation worthy of execution.

He drove forward into the parking lot, which was a small dirt field surrounded by a broken wooden fence. Three other cars were parked there. A thick layer of sand and dust were coated on their windshields. In the center of the lot was a light post and the bulb was burnt out.

He parked and stepped out into the cold. The personnel entrance was a small white door illuminated by a harsh yellow light that made his eyes hurt. As he got closer, he saw that the door was barely standing. The paint was withered, there was a large dent in the center, and the hinges were caked in even more rust than the gate. The keycard reader looked older than him. Andrè sighed. He knew he could probably kick down the door if he really wanted to. As he slid his keycard back into his wallet, he wondered again why he was here.

From inside he could hear the immortal's shrieks echoing off the walls.

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