According to its file — which Mercury had rattled off to him over the 
radio — the longest recorded instance of the anomaly had lasted 
less than five hours before inexplicably dissipating. Well, this 
instance had lasted over five days and it showed no signs of slowing 
down. They couldn't sit back, twiddle their thumbs and hope that it 
would somehow miraculously expire between now and when it was 
scheduled to arrive in Vegas. 


They'd waited too long, spent too much time on abortive 
containment attempts, wasted two whole days on an exorcism and 
supplication, then another two days on the Chimney Sweep debacle. 
When the instance had crossed into Nevada from Oklahoma, they'd 
tried to corral it in an enclosure, the walls of which were built from 
shipping containers, prefab trailers, and even a diner and the 
caboose of a train. Anything they could get their hands on that was 
large, durable, and generally square. What part of the skip hadn't 
poured over the enclosure simply smashed through, ripping steel as 
if it was tissue paper. By the time the Foundation issued the order 
for termination the anomaly had already passed through half the 
state, and the MTF was left scrambling for heavier firepower. 


SCP-865: The Gentleman's Lash 


Item #: SCP-865 
Object Class: Safe 


Special Containment Procedures: SCP-865 is to be kept, 
unloaded, in a locked firearms safe in the secure archive room at 
Site 73. SCP-865 is to be equipped with a trigger lock when not 
being tested and is to be marked with a tag indicating that it is non- 
functional and is not to be deployed in case of emergency. 


As of / /20 , all test firings of SCP-865 are to be conducted by and 
on D-class personnel only. No other staff are to be within visual 
range of SCP-865 during testing. D-class involved in testing are to 
be fitted with explosive collars and informed that any attempts at 
disobedience or resistance will result in summary termination. 


SCP-865 is to be disassembled, cleaned, and reassembled before 
and after testing by a staff member trained in firearms maintenance. 
All test subjects are to be debriefed and monitored for lasting 
psychological effects. 


Description: SCP-865 is a handgun of unknown make, superficially 
similar to a SIG Sauer P226 of the type manufactured after 1996, 
and bearing no identifying marks. SCP-865 can be disassembled, 
cleaned, and reassembled in the same manner as a normal pistol of 
its type. Several circuit boards and microprocessors have been 
incorporated into SCP-865's grip. The purpose of these devices is 
not fully understood at this time. 


SCP-865 is capable of chambering any round compatible with the 
P226 and is compatible with standard-size and extended-length 
magazines. When fired, SCP-865 produces a muffled report similar 
to that made by a firearm with a suppressor attached, and a shell 
casing is ejected from the weapon's side. The bullet itself is not 
ejected from the barrel; high-speed photography has indicated that 


The skids of the helicopter touched down. It was carrying gasoline 
for the convoy that was promptly unloaded. Irvine planted one hand 
on top of his hat to keep it on his head, and shook Kontos's hand 
with the other. His sergeant would be in command of Man-Eaters 
until his return. 


"Take care of yourself," Kontos said. 


"You too," Irvine replied. He climbed into the helicopter through the 
passenger door, swearing at himself that if he died, "You too" would 
be remembered by the task force as his last words. Why couldn't he 
have come up with something clever and empowering? Like "Death 
and destruction!" or "For Christ's sake men—come on! Do you want 
to live forever!" or even "Nuts!", only... original and relevant to the 
situation. 


He saluted his men as the bird took off across the desert, the 
helicopter's shadow playing on the flat below. Almost everyone in 
the unit had volunteered for this last stretch, but Irvine had refused. 
It didn't feel right, not seeing the mission through to the end. 
Besides, now that he knew they were all safe and returning to base 
for some hot food and much-deserved rest, he could finally let go of 
the paternal anxiety that always weighed heavily on him while 
leading troops in combat. 


The pilot indicated for him to put on a pair of headphones. Irvine 
obliged, fitting the cans over his head beneath his Resistol. He 
heard communication chatter sandwiched between layers of static. 
The pilot then handed him a blue pill wrapped in foil. 


"It's iodine," he informed Irvine. "Helps protect the thyroid from 
absorbing radiation." 


Irvine hurriedly swallowed it down with a chaser from his canteen. 


Target Wintermute was two klicks ahead, biting and clawing its 
nebulous mass toward Las Vegas. The city was a little over one 
hundred kilometers to the southeast. The skip was accelerating as it 
drew closer, traveling at twenty kilometers per hour, and that 
number was rising steadily, like it could smell the approaching fifty 
thousand residents. 


Irvine's orders were to mark the target and supply coordinates to the 
B-29 Superfortress plane that'd be delivering the package "Able", a 
one kiloton-yield nuclear bomb. He was then to observe from a safe 
distance to provide visual confirmation of detonation and update the 
status of the target. 


It'd be the first nuclear detonation in the continental US since the 
Manhattan Project conducted Trinity, in New Mexico, during World 
War Two. 


The B-29 would make its approach at an altitude of seven miles. It 
would take the bomb a full minute to descend. At that height the 
bombardier probably wouldn't be able to spot the skip, despite its 
immense size. That was where Irvine came in. The boys back at the 
lab had cooked up a high-frequency beacon that would transmit its 
location via megahertz radio pulses aimed at the B-29's firing 
mechanism. All they had to do was hone in on it and the payload 
would automatically release. 


That was if the beacon worked. It was all theoretical, and Mercury 
had been evasive when Irvine inquired about the efficacy of its 
range. It seemed doubtful that the thing could squirt an accurate 
broadcast seven miles out. The device was a reflective cylinder 
weighing in at twenty pounds with three telescopic antennae. 


The helicopter glided over the anomaly, careful to stay out of its 
reach. The bombardment earlier that morning had set it ablaze with 
a partial hit. A column of smoke rose into the sky. Maybe it will aid 
the B-29 in locating it, thought Irvine. The skip was a crisped 
marshmallow, its surface scorched and bubbling. Greasy flames 
licked its edges, and rivers of molten fat sluiced off its sides and 
dripped like melted candle wax. By now most of it was dead, but it 
kept rolling on. The bodies — it was easier to think of them that way, 
instead of actual people with lives and families — were naked, 
clothes rubbed away by friction. Their skin, where it wasn't broken or 
charred, was fire-engine red, baked by the Nevada sun. Except for 
the few that still clung to life, the ones that hadn't died in the 
bombing had perished from suffocation and blunt-force trauma. 


The only confirmed way to halt an instance was the complete 
incineration of the torsos. But even at one thousand degrees 


centigrade it could take up to an hour to thoroughly burn a human 
adult body. And there were so many bodies that Irvine wasn't 
convinced Able would do the trick. It would vaporize some of them, 
sure, maybe even most, but it also might just scatter the rest, and 
instead of a single anomaly they'd be left chasing multiple 
radioactive skips. 


As he stared Irvine saw a woman gnawing on a hand, lips frothing 
as she worked her mouth around a stubborn finger bone. Her eyes 
were wide and glassy, nothing behind them except a feral madness. 
It was impossible to tell whose hand it belonged to. Maybe it was her 
own. 


Then she was gone, replaced by a new set of faces, spinning like 
the reels of a slot machine... 


Even high up he could smell it, a broth of human secretions and 
putrid flesh, now with the added flavors of broiled meat and a 
soupcon of burnt hair. Irvine resisted the urge to retch, salivary 
glands pumping, working overtime. He shook a Winston from the 
pack, hissing as he lit it and inhaled deeply and exhaled through his 
nose, trying to block out the stench. 


They were now hovering directly above the skip. It roared beneath 
them, that stadium cheer, rah-rah, only he could make out individual 
voices in the rabble. They begged to be killed, pleaded for help, for 
God, for their mother. Someone kept repeating the name Donald 
over and over again. Others just howled like a pack of rabid dogs, 
and buried under it all was the porcine squeal of a bawling infant. 


Irvine gripped the beacon and leaned out the door, his right boot 
balanced on the skid. He screwed his eyes shut, hair whipping and 
tears streaming at his temples. 


It's just the wind and the sun. Don't listen to them. Don't listen... 


He couldn't help it, though. Slanted and Enchanted is down there, 
somewhere, he thought. The whole goddamn unit, trapped in that 
abomination, that living obscenity. And they're not just another face 
in the crowd you can ignore and forget. You knew them. Hell, some 
of them were your friends. 


He swung the beacon up and out, letting go at the apogee of its arc. 
It was the only thing he could do now to try and help Slanted and 
Enchanted. He knew if their positions were reversed he'd pray for 
the release of death. 


The beacon spun ass over tea kettle, down, down, until it was 
swallowed by the instance. 


"Beacon away," the pilot announced into his microphone, and 
yanked on the cyclic control while his feet played with the pedals. 
The bird responded, dipping its nose and yawing before banking to 
the west, away from the anomaly. 


"Roger that," Mercury replied on the other end. "Able is green. Man- 
Eaters, what is your location?" 


Irvine returned to his seat. He was surprised at how calm and in 
control his voice sounded. "Man-Eaters actual. We are... uh... 
three-six-point-four-niner-three-two north and one-one-five-point- 
niner-five-eight-eight-three west." He repeated the location for 
verification. 


"Mercury this is Poundstone," crackled a new voice in the 
headphones. "Cruising at thirty-one thousand feet. Bomb is armed 
and primed." 


Poundstone was the Boeing Superfortress bomber. Irvine tried 
looking for it through the windscreen. It'd be coming from the base's 
airstrip to the south. He thought he glimpsed a heliogram as the sun 
reflected off its fuselage, but it might've been his imagination. 


"Copy, Poundstone. You're green from Mercury." 


"Roger that. Green for Able. Poundstone closing in on target, ETA 
two minutes." 


"Man-Eaters, you're to reach safe distance and then maintain 
position for visual confirmation of detonation." 


"Copy Mercury," replied the pilot, throttling the joystick between his 
knees. 


Minimum safe distance was two miles. 
8 


Dr. Keller hung up the phone and passed a shaking hand over his 
face. "They did it. They actually did it," he said. "Sohn einer Hundin! 
They dropped an atomic bomb." 


"What?" Bruce said. "When?" 

"Ten minutes ago." 

"On Vegas?" he asked. 

"No," Dr. Keller said. "About fifty miles from it." 

"You... you have access to that sort of thing?" 

Dr. Keller snorted. "Who do you think invented it?" 

Bruce sat back, stunned. "Could they see it?” he managed to say. 
"See it? They could fee! it." 


The desk was covered in a drift of newspapers from across the 
country. All of the front pages featured banner headlines about the 
worst natural disaster in the history of the United States, 
accompanied by photographs of towns in Nevada destroyed by 
tornados. The death toll was in the tens of thousands and expected 
to climb. It was the greatest loss of life on US soil since the Civil 
War. Initial estimates reported damages above fifty million dollars. 


"Did it work?" 


Dr. Keller took a nervous draw from his pipe. "It hasn't been 
confirmed, since the site is still hot. Preliminary reports indicate 
success, but personnel are also hesitant to go into the area, not just 
because of the radiation, but if the instance is still active and 
someone gets within range — if someone gets within range of its 
area of effect they'd be feeding it a new torso, and the process could 
start all over again." 


"These amnesiac drugs you told me about..." said Bruce. 
"Amnestics." 
"Right, amnestics. What if we put it in the Vegas water supply?" 


"Lake Mead?" Dr. Keller stroked the stubble on his chin. "No, that 
won't work." 


"Why not?" 


"I'm just guessing, but Lake Mead must have billions of gallons of 
water." He ticked the reasons off on his fingers as he went along. 
"Even if we had enough water soluble amnestics — which we don't 
— there would be no way to control the administration. You'd be 
giving children the same dosage strength as an adult. People would 
be showering and cooking with it. Watering their lawns. Giving it to 
their pets. And Lake Mead isn't just the water supply for Vegas. It 
also feeds into most of Arizona and even parts of California. No, no 
it won't work." 


"What about air dispersal?" 


"There's a prototype, but you run into the same problem. Quantity 
and administration. No, | don't see any way of erasing the memories 
of fifty thousand people. Even if we were able to, a nuclear 
explosion leaves behind physical evidence. Most of the radioactive 
isotopes have a half life of only a couple of days, but there are 
others that last for centuries. As we speak, fallout is being blown into 
Utah. And if the Soviets don't already know about the detonation, 
they will soon." 


"You're telling me there's no way to hide the fact that we just 
dropped a nuke," Bruce said. 


Dr. Keller sighed. "| don't see any." 
"Then we don't deny it." 
"What do you mean?" 


"| mean we have to admit we dropped it. You said it yourself that we 


can't hide it and we can't erase their memories. What option does 
that leave us? We need to come out ahead of this thing. Tell the 
public we dropped a nuclear bomb." 


"In the backyard of a major population center? While we're at it, why 
don't we tell them there weren't any tornados." 


Bruce had barely slept in the past two days and wasn't in the mood 
to trade barbs. If they wanted his advice on how to spin this he'd 
give it the old college try, especially if it meant he got to go home 
sooner, but in order to do that they had to listen. "We tell them it was 
a scheduled test," he said. "That it was planned far in advanced and 
perfectly executed." 


"With no prior warning to the community." 


Bruce waved the comment off. "There was plenty of communication 
preceding the detonation. How many people do you have like me, 
who work for the Foundation that we can use, living in the Nevada 
area?" 


"| don't know for sure — I'd have to check. Not many. Probably fifty, 
maybe a hundred. Certainly no more than that." 


"It's not enough. You may have to pay some people off to say that 
they knew about the test. Prominent figures. We'll put handbills in 
past newspapers, say... two weeks ago. You're going to have to 
control the media somehow. Broadcasters, radio pundits, news 
anchors. They have to sell this for us like it was completely ordinary 
and expected. When Bob comes into the office on Monday morning 
complaining about the explosion over the weekend, | want his 
coworkers to tell him they all knew about the test ahead of time and 
had even discussed it in the break room on Friday. He was there, 
didn't he remember? In two weeks time Bob will actually believe that 
he knew about it, too." 


"Who's Bob?" 


"He's a figment of my imagination, Felix. | made him up as an 
example."