A long ways away, in another life, a short, fat man would sprawl ina 
battered armchair at the training center he ran and would tell Jack all 
he knew about the births and birthings in a serious, lucid tone, a 
rarity preserved for close friends. Jack would tend the old brick 
fireplace and open some liquor and they would drink and the blond 
haired veteran would tell him about the myths in the field, stories of 
cattle dying and dogs being nailed on trees. The storms and violent 
winds. Cars flipped and people gone. Hume readings fading in, out, 
spatial anomalies. Kant counters breaking, phones not working. 
Guns jamming. 


The child would be born within 5 miles, and when it would breathe- 
said the old rumors spread around GOC task forces- all the strange 
happenings would stop, and so no one would notice it; only lasted 
the mother’s labor. The universe preparing for a new god. The star 
of Bethlehem. 


Stranger things have happened, said the man with the rifle. No way 
to test it; would make sense if it was true, | suppose. The way they 
come and they way they leave, all these kids, not just the greens, 
the legends are the same. Always a little strange, ‘post to get worse 
with the power and significance, all that kind of shit. | knew guys that 
used to peel out if they saw the cattle run, you know. 


Do you believe it, was Jack’s question. Something he knew the 
answer to. 


The man sighed, readjusted slightly. Jack, science loathes 
coincidence. Ask any shithead on the street and they'll say they’ve 
seen something strange at some point in their life. For the sake of 
standing on solid ground- no, | don’t think | do. 


Jack on the rainy steps, pale and weak, decided he was too tired to 
think about it right now. Leaned his head so it rested on the 
splintering wood railing. Watched Claire splash in puddles with her 


friends under a sheet of rain. 


Jack on the rainy steps was born with his umbilical chord wrapped 
around his throat in a tight death grip. They thought he was dead; 
didn’t cry for minutes as they worked to loosen it off. 


When Jack on the rainy steps was four, he caught pneumonia that 
landed him in the hospital for a month. They thought he would die. 


When Jack on the rainy steps was eight, he ran into the street to 
chase a raccoon and was hit by a car; the impact sent him skidding 
on the ground, bleeding from his chest. 


When Jack on the rainy steps was eleven, the top of their snow fort 
caved in on top of him. 


Jack on the rainy steps, at 19, couldn’t understand why he couldn’t 
do anything right. Why TJ and their parents were gone; why there 
was no reason for him to really be here at all. He feels listless; he 
wants to hurt something. He doesn’t know where to let the anger go. 
He wants to know why he feels this way, why he can’t pull himself 
together long enough to be an adult for Claire. Why he can’t just be 
like he was a year ago: happy and content and not barley 
functioning and exhausted. 


Jack on the rainy steps doesn’t want to die, but doesn’t want to live. 
Jack on the rainy steps wants to fall asleep and not wake up 
anymore. 


12 


When the agents came like Jack knew he would- the tree falling in 
the forest agents with their bulletproof vests under stiff button up 
shirts- Jack crosses the house to the kitchen, reaches up on top of 
the refrigerator, and loops his fingers on the old iron revolver that 
clacks quietly in his hands, a dangerous weight. Jack has never 
been a terribly good shot, but his father had had him and Mikell 
shoot enough dead-eyed plastic deer that he was decent. The shiny 
dress shoes fitted with concealed steel-toes make the old wood of 


the front porch creak, and Jack has a sharp moment of panic like an 
electric shock at his holding a gun. What did he expect to do? Shoot 
them? A person in a stark black suit wasn’t a pheasant or a squirrel- 


“Jack! Someone’s at the door!” 


Jack whipped around to meet the tree in the forest about to fall, 
playing with her dolls. Her eyes widen when she sees the gun, and 
Jack fumbles silently- 


“Go. Room.” There’s a sense of urgency in his voice that he hopes 
carries. “Now. Hurry, Clarie.” 


Claire abandons her dolls and bolts down the hall to their shared 
bedroom just as the knock comes on the door with knuckles that 
have been broken, healed, broken again. Jack’s chest compresses 
tight again for a moment and he remembers tree in the forest, if a 
tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, tree in the 
forest, tree in the forest, they’re here for her and his chest swells as 
the constant anger he’s felt burning inside him for a little over four 
months now suddenly blazes into hot fury. 


He swallows, palms starting to sweat a little. 


And when they took his little sister away, that hot Midwestern 
afternoon, her shrieks rang and echoed down the empty street and 
resonated in stagnant air and the buzz of lazy insects. Jack did not 
shoot. He did not shoot because they took her from her room, 
because there had been four of them, not two, and because he was 
foolish and sick and lost and didn't know what to do when they 
immediately grabbed him and threw him to the floor and knocked 
him out. He didn't know what to do when he woke up alone and 
wandered around the house in a daze looking, looking, looking as 
bats roosted in nearby barns and herding dogs barked in the 
distance. 


He didn't know what to do and didn't know where to go. He felt 
frustrated and furious but empty and dull and sick with anxiety. He 
wandered out of his house and down streets with the hurried pace of 
someone looking for something they know they've lost. He ran until 
the street lights ran out and he hit gravel roads and long, endless 


fields of corn and beans, obscuring his vision into the clear, 
cloudless night sky and the lightning bugs that blinked among them. 


And eventually, he turned around, because what else could he do? 
Where else could he go, to find the person he needed to protect? He 
walked until the sun came up and it hit his neck in a hot, humid haze 
of morning, and kept walking, walking. Sweating in the morning sun. 
He walked past his brother's horse grazing in Jamie's pasture. He 
walked into his neighborhood with the kids playing basketball down 
the street. He wandered back in with a pained sort of desperation 
settled tight in his chest, but his body felt heavy and his spine felt 
tight. 


So Jack Bright slept, and slept alone. 


Dream Sequence: 


From bed, Jack finds the strength to move. 


He is shaking with anticipation but never has he even thought of doing this before, 
no, all thoughts are driven, pointed, he is sure, not Mikell, not his mother, not Tu, 
no, nothing and no one could stop him- the hallway to the bathroom is a dark 
green mile that he walks briskly. Someone has pulled the trap door out from under 
him and there is nothing below but hate and disgust. 


Claire is (not anymore shes not here anymore) sleeping in the bedroom next to his 
own, and when he locks the bathroom door someone drives down the rickety 
concrete outside and he sees the headlights continue into nothing from the tiny 
bathroom window, hyperaware. Jack refuses to see himself in the mirror- he has 
not moved far from bed in weeks- and instead opens it to the tiny metal shelves 
and scans quickly, like a man dying for water, like a man craving. His mother’s 
medication sits gathering dust. Mikell’s toothbrush. His father’s razor. 


Some strange, distant part of him doesn’t take apart the razor for the blades 
because he cannot bring himself to break something of his father’s, but the blades 
are still sharp- Jack has accidentally cut himself with less. There’s a moment, as 
Jack holds it in his hands, that he wonders what his mother would say. It is not 
factored in. Jack knows what she thinks of him. 


Damage: 


Pain screams down his arm and leaves him stunned, drunkenly happy, high off 
fumes. There’s buzzing in his body and screaming in his mind that tells him to 


strike again and he complies, dazed and ruptured, riding the feeling that feeling 
gives him. His breathing starts to slow. Relaxation. His mind is spiraling down like 
a dying plane from the sky. 


Damage! 


Jack’s knees are week, the world is spinning. He strikes a third time, barley able to 
see his skin through the nine even scores of ragged, bleeding flesh, and the 
craving leaves his body like a soul. It stings and burns like nothing he’s ever felt in 
his life, exploding and shrieking, his breath comes in a calm, even rhythm. There 
are black spots in his vision. He rinses off the razor and red fluid he forgot he had 
runs in streams down his arm and dribbles into the sink. Jack is okay. Jack is 
calm. Tranquility comes over him as the hate starts to leave his body with his 
consciousness. 


Ethereality: 


Jack is awake. 


Crickets sing out in the summer air that rustles the soybeans outside 
in the grey heat of early morning. He’s thin enough now that Mikell is 
able to scoop him up from the bathroom floor and out of the puddle 
of red fluid staining his shirt. Jack feels like all the energy he had is gone 
from his body, and lets his older brother carry him-slumping into his chest in the 
most direct form of human interaction he’s experienced in weeks. Another car 
drives by outside, a farmer headed to the fields. when he’s laid down on 
the beaten couch, Jack almost wishes Mikell would keep holding him, for just a 
while longer; human touch has become a rare commodity. Gauze and 
bandages pull against half-clotted blood, swollen red cuts and 
bruised skin sting with rubbing alcohol. He feels sick, lightheaded, but 
satisfied. Mikell squeezes the cloth wrapping his arm gently, letting it 
soak up the access fluid. All the hate is gone from his body. He deserved 
that. He deserved that. He deserves more, is too weak to deliver. His brother 
presses an ice pack to the wounds, lays his arm at an incline on 
Jack's chest. The popcorn ceiling is a color in the early morning light that Jack 
hasn't noticed before. |here are blankets pulled over his pale body, up 
to his chin, and feels a warm hand on his forehead. It’s shaking with 
fury in the moment it lingers there. He has made Mikell angry in the 
past, but not like this, not furious into silence. Jack feels no remorse, lays 


there in a silence of his own. Cold, feverish, distant. Floating. The scum of the 
earth. 


the surrounding tissue, which often causes problems for the 
intermediate host. 


SCP-1003-2's development mostly follows the pattern of normal 
human prenatal development, but at a faster rate. By 8 weeks, it is 
as mature as a 3-week-old neonate, although it is similar in size to 
an 8-week-old embryo (approximately 13-16 cm). Once it has 
reached this stage, it will actively consume the intermediate host 
from within using sharp, hooked teeth. SCP-1003-2 growth is 
accelerated to an even greater extent as it is doing this. By the time 
it has fully consumed the intermediate host (usually after minutes 
or so), it will have developed into a child. The physical age of the 
child typically ranges from 10 months to 11 years, depending on the 
mass of the intermediate host, though in extreme cases (where the 
intermediate host is morbidly obese) it can be as high as 13-15 
years. 


Once SCP-1003-2 is finished, it will lose its hooked teeth, along with 
its cannibalistic tendencies, from whereon it will be functionally 
indistinguishable from a human in every respect, with no knowledge 
or memory of having been a parasite. It will even possess learned 
skills (e.g. language) that would be expected of a child its apparent 
age, despite there being no way it could have learned them. 
Instances of SCP-1003-2 are usually taken into orphanages and 
sometimes adopted by foster parents. Their only anomalous 
properties at this stage are that their DNA is somehow still identical 
to that of Echinococcus granulosus, and that their body fluids 
(including sweat and saliva) contain tapeworm protoscolex, which 
infect carnivores and develop into SCP-1003-1, thus continuing the 
cycle. 


Addendum: Testing of SCP-1003 with animals such as cattle and 
sheep (which are common intermediate hosts of Echinococcus 
granulosus) have found that its anomalous properties only manifest 
in humans, and in all other cases, its life cycle is normal and causes 
hydatid disease in the intermediate host. 


« SCP-1002 | SCP-1003 | SCP-1004 » 


Suddenly, Mikell has a bulky cell phone that he’s never seen before 

in one hand and is running his fingers through his hair with the other, 
sillueted in dawn light flooding through the kitchen windows, reading 
“Travis, Elder, Forty-two, sixty-six-oh-eight”. He vaguely remembers TJ 


and Claire, but there are no feelings, no connection in this moment in time. Briefly 
thinks of mom and dad, and wished they were here in an odd, offhand sort of way, 
as he’s wished for the past ten months. Dreamlike, condensation beads on 


the windows as the humidity rises. Mikell is pacing and talking on 
the phone, then redialing, redialing again, reading off numbers and 
letters and words. The old radio turned on low sings a song his 
father liked. Jack feels strange, but content with the pain searing in his arm. 
Claire left a polly pocket on the floor near the rocking chair. He’s so 
tired, angry. Across the street, the sound of the dogs Tu likes to play 
with waking for breakfast. He wants to fall asleep and not wake up. Ina 
distant, far off place, Mikell exhales in relief, “Mom”. 


13 


Jack is awakened by the kind of deep, rolling thunder that 
accompanies Midwestern summer storms, the kind that leaches 
humidity through the windows and coats the streets in a thick, 
sickening heat. The clock reads 2:24 PM and the world outside is 
cast in a deep black hue, the shadow of thick grey clouds forming a 
solid, rolling wall in the sky, like water rushing over a dam. There is 
no rain pounding on the window, and Jack becomes deeply, innately 
aware upon this realization of what this means; from where he lays 
still in his bed, the middle brother bright feels the wind whistling 
through the cornfields, hears the lack of hearing children at play and 
sound of the TV turned to the weather channel in the other room, 
senses the fundamental disturbance that comes with the testing of 
the old great plain. No dogs bark. No cars rattle down the cracked 
suburban asphalt. There is only the thudding of his heart in his 
bandaged arm and the sound of the clouds approaching. 


Mikell is at his bedside, absentmindedly picking under his fingernails 
with his pocket knife. He sees the ember glow of a lit cigarette 
hanging from his mouth. 


"| told you." Mikell growls under his breath, and the past two days hit 
Jack like a truck. "I told you to keep her safe. | told you." 


The room falls into silence, and Jack grips the sheets tighter. He 
grimaces for a moment, and looks at the ceiling. Mikell knew where 
she was. He must have known. 


But Jack has failed profoundly in many ways in the past six months. 
So instead, Jack looks back at him and says, 


“Don’t smoke in the house.” 


Mikell looks at him, takes a long, slow inhale, removes the cigarette, 
and exhales the smoke pointedly into the air. 


“Asshole.” Jack croaks. He feels like a grey scale; weak, sick, 
hurting, empty and strange, but no longer floating. Mikell takes 
another drag on his cigarette and leans forward, elbows on knees. 


“You were really out this morning.”