Adam holds on to her for another long, long moment. He can hear 
the baying too, now, and he can even barely perceive what it is, far 
off behind the hill, that SCP-4987 is frantic about. That distant dot, 
that fleeting second-hand glimpse of the shape of it, far off, is 
enough to terrify him. 


He has faith. He knows how fast Marion can put the jigsaw pieces 
back together, work against a universe which makes no sense to 
her, isolate the truth. He knows she can take the universe. But a 
sharp misgiving jabs him in the stomach and he can't stop himself 
saying: "And what if you lose?" 


She kisses him. It's a stranger's kiss, there's nothing there Adam 
recognises. He breaks off, unsettled. It's a whisper now: "What if you 
lose?" 


Wheeler exits the containment unit; she slams and deadlocks the 
door with a single movement. The heavy metallic crack makes the 
whole building shake. 


There are people outside. Gauss, Julie Still and a few others, 
comparing notes. They look appalled. 


"Fill in his backstory," she tells them. "He was never married. 
Relocate him to where I'll never find him, incinerate all the evidence, 
then report to me for surgical memory erasure. I'll do myself last." 


Gauss looks as if he has an objection. She stares him down. 


"My husband's dead," she says. 


Next: Fresh Hell 


Fresh Hell 


There's another conglomeration of severed fingers in the last room, 
coating the room's interior like the innards of an exploded elephant. 
Parts of the sprawl are feeling their way, like mould, into a medical 
cabinet and the rest is splayed over a foetal shape on a medical 
gurney. The mass reacts sharply to the new light as Wheeler opens 
the door, rearing up and angling parts of itself toward him. Wheeler 
reels backwards and pulls the door to just in time; there is a heavy, 
fleshy thump as the mass hits the door from the far side. The door 
holds. 


Wheeler trips on his own foot and slumps against the far wall. The 
shape on the gurney was a coiled-up human. Not a corpse, but a 
living human with one wide-open eye whose whole body was being 
slowly consumed and processed into more fingers. They were 
growing out of his throat. Wheeler didn't see this. He thinks he saw 
it, but he knows he couldn't have. 


And that's it. Wheeler casts around the corridor. Every other door 
he's tried is blocked or locked. The place is below ground, so no 
windows. No navigable ventilation. 


There are two more gunshots up at the far end of the corridor, ear- 
splitting in the enclosed space and echoing for many seconds. 
Hutchinson rounds the corner at a dead run, gun in hand, and 
reaches him quickly. "Find a way out?" she asks, pointlessly. She 
can read Wheeler's expression. He's found nothing good. 


"This place is infested," Wheeler says. "Every room, all the 
stairwells... This is absurd." 


At the far end of the corridor, the main mass heaves itself around 
the corner. From this distance, it looks like an ambulatory eight- 
tonne pile of mouldy mashed potato and fat, wiggling maggots. 
There are toes in there as well as fingers, and small teeth, and bits 
of bone. It has twenty bullet holes in it, and blood is flowing from all 


of them, but if it has vital organs they must be elsewhere in the 
building because none of the wounds have slowed it down or 
otherwise altered its slow, methodical homing behaviour. It smells 
powerfully and creatively disgusting, like concentrated medical 
waste. 


It lurches forward in intermittent phases, coating the walls and floor 
with scarlet ooze as it moves. It'll be on them in about half a minute, 
squashing them against the end of the corridor and then pulling 
them into the mess to be remade. 


"| think we're done," Wheeler quavers. "Thanks for trying.” 


Hutchinson, for her part, just stands there, gun lowered, watching 
the thing come. It moves slowly, like a steam roller. It fills the 
corridor almost to the ceiling. 


She has two bullets left and she's considering where to spend them. 
Shooting the mass itself is like shooting pudding. She'd kill for a 
grenade. Even a fire axe would be something. She might not be able 
to stop the thing, but she could at least make herself known with a 
fire axe. She could make it feel some regret. 


"There are worse fates, | guess," Wheeler goes on, finding himself 
unable to stop talking, "than being digitised by that thing, but not all 
that many." 


Hutchinson glances in his direction, apparently paying him direct 
attention for the first time since they met, sixty crowded minutes ago. 
She says, "Riser cupboard." 


"What?" 


She pushes Wheeler aside. There's a white-painted wall behind him. 
There's a lock in it, and a long vertical seam. She spends a moment 
choosing the right part of the lock to shoot, and shoots it out. Behind 
the tall, wide panel which opens is a shallow, dusty, metal-edged 
space like an elevator shaft with no elevator, allowing filthy pipes 
and cables to pass vertically between floors. She looks up. There's 
just enough room to admit a person. 


SCP-584: Many Fingers, Many Toes 


Item #: SCP-584 
Object Class: Euclid 


Special Containment Procedures: Vial samples of SCP-584 are to 
be kept in cold storage, in accordance with established biohazard 
protocols, and access is restricted to personnel of at least Level 2 
clearance. Research requires Level 3 approval. 


Subjects accidentally contaminated with SCP-584 must be 
quarantined immediately as contact biohazards and must submit to 
involuntary antiviral treatment. If subject shows no signs of lesion 
activity for 12 weeks and tests negative in two consecutive biopsies, 
performed at six and 12 weeks following exposure, quarantine 
procedures can be downgraded. Follow-up biopsies at 12 and 24 
months must also return negative results before the subject is to be 
considered "clean." 


Any subject with a positive test for SCP-584, or displaying 
characteristic lesions, should be terminated. 


Description: SCP-584 is a highly infectious viral pathogen that, if 
left untreated, causes a disfiguring overgrowth of supernumerary 
limbs (see file photos). Structurally similar to the herpes simplex 
family of viruses, SCP-584 spreads via direct person-to-person 
contact and through contact with infected bodily fluids, and can also 
cross the placental barrier from an infected mother to her fetus, 
resulting in characteristic birth defects. SCP-584 typically lies 
dormant deep in the dermal tissue of those infected, largely 
suppressed by the immune system except for sporadic outbreaks. It 
is estimated that upwards of 80% of those exposed to the virus are 
asymptomatic carriers, making actual infection rates unknowable. 
(Current estimates place the highest rates of infection in Asia, 
particularly India and China, where the virus likely originated.) The 
virus appears limited to humans. 


"Can you climb?" she asks Wheeler. Without waiting for a response, 
she sheds her suit jacket, sticks a flashlight between her teeth and 
hauls herself up into the darkness. After a brief moment of scuffling, 
there's another gunshot. The other riser cupboard door. 


"No," Wheeler finally manages. "No, | can't climb!" The mass is 
almost on him. He's transfixed by its motion, its all-too-familiar 
grasping behaviour. 


"| figured," Hutchinson calls down. A hand descends, a human one 
with the conventional number of fingers. "It's clear up here. Come 
on, I'm braced. Mind this lip here, it's metal. Come on!" 


Wheeler keeps his own jacket on and buttoned; it's the only part of 
the situation over which he still has firm control. He has to jump to 
catch hold of Hutchinson's hand, and just as he jumps, the main 
mass lunges for him, crossing the last few metres in a rush and 
catching hold of him by one foot. 


He sees himself die. 


His sweating hand immediately starts to slip out of Hutchinson's. 
She braces her other arm and hauls him up fifteen or thirty 
centimetres with an angry grunt, then releases his hand for a split 
second and reaches down like a flash to take firmer hold of his wrist. 
She keeps pulling. The mass closes around Wheeler's foot like 
aggressive, proactive quicksand. He yelps and kicks at it with his 
other foot until it finally pries his shoe loose. The mass retreats for a 
second, taking a crucial moment to realise that its prize is not living 
flesh, but by that time Hutchinson has hauled Wheeler up another 
half-metre and Wheeler has started pushing himself upwards off the 
pipework with his feet. The mass lunges again, but falls short, and 
seems too unintelligent to climb after them. It sloshes around, 
probing its surroundings, perplexed by the shoe. 


Hutchinson hauls Wheeler over the lip into the next corridor. He 
scrapes his ribs badly and arrives crawling, eyes watering. He 
doesn't die. He can still see himself dying. He stays on all fours for a 
significant amount of time, processing what just happened. 


"Fuck!" 


Hutchinson is already standing, and apparently not even significantly 
exerted. "We need to get to the roof. | might be able to get a signal 
out from there." 


"You're at the gym pretty often?" Wheeler pants, sitting back. "You 
train for fresh hell like this?" 


"Yeah." 


"That's great," Wheeler says, "because | play the violin. It's not quite 
as physically demanding. As careers go, | mean. When you said you 
were a county health inspector, that was an enormous lie, wasn't it?" 


Hutchinson ignores the question, out of habit, and waits impassively 
for the man to cool. 


"This is asinine," Wheeler declares. "This is brain damage." His skin 
crawls, and grotesque visions flood through his brain. Eventually he 
recovers his breath and gets to his feet. He stands lopsided, so he 
takes his other shoe off and throws it back down the riser for 
symmetry. 


"We need to get to the roof," Hutchinson says again. 


Wheeler blinks a long blink, then focuses on something around the 
corner, something on the wall which Hutchinson can't see from 
where she's standing. "Yeah. One second." He goes to it — it's a 
red panel — and pulls something down. "Here, you were having no 
luck with the gun. Try this." 


It's a fire axe. 


He stepped on a rusty nail backstage after the show, and came to 
the emergency room for a tetanus injection. While waiting, he slowly 
realised that more than half of the people waiting with him were 
clutching partially or entirely severed fingers. Bandsaw accidents; 


hands caught in car doors; hands trapped in door hinges; hands 
crushed in machinery; every one of them unrelated. There was an 
epidemic of physical injury, which should have been impossible, and 
when he tried to bring it up with the medical staff they didn't seem to 
understand what he was saying. 


And then he saw one of the fingers escape. He followed it as it 
wriggled away down a long corridor to a far corner of the hospital, to 
an ajar door which nobody in the hospital seemed to be able to 
perceive except for him, and into a different building where there 
were no people at all, just hundreds and hundreds of wriggling, 
exploring, slowly reproducing and lengthening fingers. 


He slammed the door and tried and failed to get someone, anyone, 
staff or patient, to see what he was seeing. He found a payphone 
and dialled for emergency services and ordered off the menu, 
asking for emergency industrial-scale pest control or hazardous 
containment or psychic support or something. 


And there was a long pause, and he was connected to what was 
either a very measured, dispassionate human or an impressively 
articulate robot operator. It told him to wait by the phone; an 
associate would be with him shortly. Marion Hutchinson arrived in 
person, slightly less than fifteen minutes later. 


He showed her the door. They went a few paces inside, Hutchinson 
crouching and aiming some kind of flashlight/scanner at the finger 

worms. Behind them, something reached out and gently pushed the 
door closed with a click. They turned, and saw what it was, and ran. 


Hutchinson hacks her way through the last of the flesh-clogged 
stairwell. They're almost at the roof. This part of the distributed 
infestation doesn't seem to be mobile, although it is freakishly 
grabby. 


Wheeler stands three paces back from her, partly to avoid the 
backswing but mostly so he doesn't have to watch. It's butchery, and 
it's grisly, and Hutchinson barely seems perturbed by it; she slices 
methodically until there are waterfalls of gore coming down the stairs 
and soaking her shoes and his socks, and she does it with the 
manner of someone trimming a hedgerow. 


Whunch. kKrunich. 


Wheeler is shivering, and starting to crash. If he doesn't stay still 
right in the middle of the stairwell, the remaining fingers tug at his 
hair and sleeves. In another few minutes it may finally dawn on him 
that this is really happening. "This is crazy, this is nuts," he says to 
himself, over and over. 


"What was that word you used back there?" Hutchinson asks, 
suddenly. 


"Mmm?" 


Whunch. "Don't tune out. When the mass was coming down the hall. 
Did you say '‘digitized'?" 


"...Um." Wheeler seems to change gear, and wake up. "Yeah. Uh, 
but, in the old sense of the word—" 


™Digit' meaning ‘finger’, so ‘digitized’ meaning ‘turned into fingers’. | 
just got it." She's smiling, he can tell from the sound of her words. 
Chlunk. "That's great." 


"It is?" 
"What kind of violin music?" 


"Uh. What kind would you like? Tonight's— last night's— Christ, 
yesterday's concert was Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1. Anda 
few other pieces, of course, but that was the main course for me. 
That was where | got my teeth in." 


Hutchinson stops hacking and turns around. She actually looks him 
in the eye. "That piece is a nightmare." 


"It's a challenge," Wheeler admits, brightly. 
"No, | mean it's chaotic. It's unlistenable." 
"| can play anything you like," Wheeler states. 


Hutchinson appears to spend a moment considering this possibility. 
"Bach. You can play some Bach?" 


"Just get me to a violin." 


Hutchinson thinks for a moment longer. She smiles and nods, and 
goes back to hacking. 


And they hit the roof, and Hutchinson's radio finally works, and she 
calls everything in. She speaks in rapid keywords which Wheeler 
can't quite follow, although he can pick out his own name and 
"hazmat" and a repeated word which sounds to him like a brand of 
cassette tape: "Memetix". 


It's very nearly dawn. This wing of the hospital is a few storeys 
shorter than its main body, so rows of bright-lit wards look down 
over the roof, while the roof looks out over two sprawling car parks 
and then greenery and roads and a faint, dull red where the Sun is 
due to come up. Hutchinson quickly ascertains that there is no fire 
escape from here; the intended fire exit from the roof is the stairwell 
up which they just came, so they'll have to wait for a helicopter. Or, 
more likely and less romantically, a long ladder. 


"Backup is coming,” Hutchinson concludes. "They have to come in 
from the next city over, so it could be a few hours. They'll have 
decontamination gear, antibiotics, blankets, tedious debriefing 
forms, you name it. But most importantly, coffee." 


Wheeler makes an inarticulate sound, the sound of one who could 
use the coffee, and after that, a drink. "God, | have another concert 


today," he says. He sits on the thick perimeter wall, rubs his eyes, 
rubs his sore feet, and begins to shut down. 


"You'll be there," Hutchinson says. "The nasty part is over. You did 
well for a civilian. I've seen far worse." 


"Worse than this?" 
Hutchinson says nothing. 


"I'm sorry." Wheeler opens his eyes again. He gestures at the 
mayhem from which they just escaped, the fire door and everything 
it leads to. It's all still down there. "You've seen worse than this?"