Buzzards and crows orbited in thick clouds, gliding on thermal 
pockets of air. Irvine couldn't see them; sunrise was still an hour or 
so Off, but he knew they were there all the same. They were always 
there. It was a goddamn feast for the scavengers and carrion eaters. 
The skip's stench wafted for miles downwind, and everyone was 
answering the dinner bell. Not just the usual suspects of coyotes, 
raccoons and birds either; he'd also seen wolves and weasels and 
once he thought he'd glimpsed a mountain lion with its cubs. Their 
eyes reflected the headlights in green pinpoints as they moved 
sluggishly out of the path of the jeeps, indolent from gorging, bellies 
swollen with human flesh. 


In addition to the body parts the skip also left behind a residue as it 
passed, a fetid discharge of body fluids and tissue that was the 
consistency of watered-down porridge. Yeah, a porridge made from 
blood and piss and feces and vomit and tears, thought Irvine and he 
shuddered. Flies buzzed and crawled in a pulsating mat on the 
sludge's tacky surface. A musk hog, perched by the edge, lapped up 
clotted strands as if taking a sip of water along a riverbank. 


Irvine drove the M38 nicknamed Panar. He was once again in the 
lead position, flanked by Bruin and Mugger. They were under strict 
orders not to get within one hundred meters of the anomaly, and that 
was an order Irvine had no intention of disobeying. He'd seen 
firsthand what the anomaly was capable of. From this distance the 
skip sounded like a baseball stadium right after the home team wins 
with a walk-off homerun. It wasn't until you got closer that the ear 
was able to discern tonal cues of anguish and pain and terror. 


lts shape was amorphous and mercurial. Irvine had seen it sprout 
into a skyscraper to try and swat a helicopter out of the air, and in 
order to bridge a box canyon it had cambered into a block with 


dozens of pylon legs, each roughly the size of a telephone pole. Ata 
trailer park it changed to a spiral galaxy, spinning around its axis, 
protoplasmic arms cracking open trailers like they were tin cans and 
devouring the occupants inside. Most of the time though it seemed 
to prefer a tubular shape, its motion similar to caterpillar tracks. The 
people that made up the tread were the lucky ones — they died 
quickly, their bodies crushed into paste with each revolution. 


The anomaly was people. Just people. A sea of bodies, thousands 
and thousands of them, seething and writhing, stacked on top of 
each other at impossible angles and staggering, vertigo-inducing 
heights. Stampeding. Trampling and routing and contorting. When 
Irvine had first seen the instance, the sight of it immediately 
triggered an old memory he hadn't even realized he still had. In it he 
was a boy of ten, maybe eleven, and his family was vacationing in 
Maine. They'd taken a day trip from the beach in Wells to visit 
Camden Hills state park. Irvine, following a strange noise, had 
wandered off one of the paths and away from his parents. It 
sounded like there was a malfunctioning electrical transformer right 
smack in the middle of the woods. What he found instead was a 
massive colony of honeybees. The hive must've recently swarmed, 
and they'd temporarily relocated onto the branch of a beech tree. 


He'd watched the insects for close to half an hour, mesmerized by 
their sheer numbers and constant, frenetic turbulence. 


The skip was the swarming beehive all over again. Gravity held no 
influence on it, and although basic logic told Irvine it couldn't move, 
couldn't do anything except collapse and disperse, what he 
witnessed with his own two eyes told a different story. 


Its migration pattern implied awareness, as it typically sought out the 
nearest human while ignoring all other life forms, which remained 
unaffected by its phenomena. Early into the containment mission the 
skip had targeted Foundation personnel and vehicles, but quickly 
learned what was too fast for it to catch and gave up, intimating 
sentience, if of a single-minded variety. Standard possession had 
already been ruled out by Slanted and Enchanted, so it remained 
unclear what motivated the instance or how it even functioned. 


Mobile Task Force Eta-8, "Man-Eaters", specialized in the capture 


and neutralization of both anomalous and non-anomalous 
humanoids, but Irvine wasn't sure this skip qualified for either 
category. While it was certainly made of humans, that was about as 
far as the similarities went, and he couldn't recall ever having such a 
bizarre assignment. 


He again thought of the bees on the beech tree — of swarm 
intelligence, a decentralized global system dictating behavior and 
interactions with the environment. It naturally occurred in flocks of 
birds and schools of fish. Was that what was happening here? An 
emergent, atavistic behavior causing people to steer toward a 
random center of mass and form cohesion? 


No, that wasn't it, Irvine thought as he lit another cigarette off the 
dog-end of the last. This couldn't be just another neural aberration 
because the skip had an area of effect that extended out spherically 
from its surface, pulling people into it. Nothing mental or imagined 
about that. It was like a tractor beam he'd read about once in a Buck 
Rogers pulp magazine. The humans trapped in it wailed and cried 
out for help, but that same tractor beam kept them rooted in place 
and adhered to one another, preventing separation. 


Irvine grabbed the radio mic hooked to the dashboard. "Hey 
Martinez, what's our location?" 


Martinez rattled off longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates that 
meant almost nothing to Irvine. Boyle, riding shotgun in the 
passenger seat, jotted them down in a notebook. He would need to 
relay it back to Mercury. Aerial bombardment was scheduled to 
recommence at daybreak. 


They were on a southeast header, always southeast, approximately 
ninety klicks north of the Mercury forwarding base and two hundred 
klicks northwest of Vegas. Target Wintermute was moving at an 
average speed of fifteen kilometers per hour. 


At that pace they'd reach Vegas around 1700 local time. Irvine was 
curious as to why the skip ignored the Mercury forwarding base, 
which was much closer than the city. If it hadn't been for its evasion 
of the Chimney Sweep trap explained by the Silver Creek cemetery, 
he would've believed that it somehow knew most of the facilities 


were underground and unreachable, or that they had aircraft 
standing by in case of evacuation. The entire staff could be in the air 
in under thirty minutes. But it couldn't know that, right? That would 
be impossible. 


Boyle's walkie-talkie chirped, signaling an inbound call from 
Mercury. The radios on the dash were suitable for communication 
within Man-Eaters' formation, but at Mercury's distance it required 
the transmitter. 


"Man-Eaters. Yes... copy that. Lieutenant, | think you're going to 
want to take this." Boyle extended the receiver to Irvine. "It's 
Mercury sir." 


He figured as much. As Irvine brought the receiver to his ear, Boyle 
added: "They say they have positive identification on the skip." 


6 


After sharing dinner with Dr. Keller, Bruce was allowed some privacy 
to place a phone call to his wife, assuring Grace that he'd be home 
soon. He'd concocted an excuse that the department store was 
getting cold feet, threatening to pull out of the firm's advertising 
proposal, and as the broker of the contract Bruce had been forced to 
drop everything and fly to Chicago for damage-control and to try and 
salvage the deal. Leonard's frequent calls lent credence to the lie. 


Back in the dormitory, in his room, good ole’ number thirty-aught-six, 
Bruce stared at the blank white walls. A stack of boxes and 
documents that hadn't been there this morning towered in one 
corner, reaching halfway to the drop ceiling. All of it pertained to 
either the skip or the Foundation as a whole. The top file, as thick as 
an encyclopedia, was titled A Comprehensive Analysis of Amnestics 
A-D and stamped in red as Top Secret. Even if he had two weeks to 
spare he'd never get through it all. 


Bruce had no motivation to learn further about the Foundation or its 
procedures; he was already suffering from an overdose of 
information. When he'd read the SCP file he'd blanked out on the 
object classification, and had been too embarrassed to ask Dr. 
Keller for clarification. Keter? What'd that even mean? It was 


naggingly familiar, and he thought Leonard might have gone over it 
with him during orientation, but if he did Bruce had already forgotten 
the definition. 


The containment procedures, skeletal in their brevity, hadn't been 
much help either, and had essentially amounted to stay the fuck 
away from it. Bruce wasn't sure why they'd bothered. 


He laid his head down on the scratchy pillow. The overhead room 
light remained on. The springs in the cot dug into his back, but he 
felt so exhausted he didn't think it would matter. He could've slept 
standing up with his eyes taped open. 


"How come it took you guys so long to identify it?" he'd asked after 
reading over the file for a second time. 


Dr. Keller had answered, "The man that wrote that has been dead 
for more than twenty years. There have been onlly five verifiable 
incidents, and three of them took place last century. It was only the 
clue from Silver Creek, that it affects deceased people, that led us to 
its identity. Now, | admit our filing system could use a bit of 
streamlining, but | hope you can understand the delay." 


Bruce rolled onto his side, knees curled up. He didn't want to think 
about it. Less than a day ago he'd been going about his life, blissful 
in his ignorance of the supernatural, and now his world had been 
turned inside-out. Although Leonard hadn't provided specifics 
regarding any other anomalies the Foundation contained outside of 
the Wintermute target, the implications were clear. And it had slowly 
dawned on Bruce while he'd been listening to Leonard's deep, 
droning voice that not only was everything he'd believed a lie — that 
the bedrock of his sanity was nothing more than sand and straw — 
but that reality was purposefully being twisted and concealed by a 
global cabal. 


He grabbed the side of the cot and peered over the edge. 


I'll start going to shul again, he thought after confirming nothing was 
under the bed. That's what I'll do. And not just on Shabbat or the 
holidays, but everyday. Twice a day. 


He tossed and turned. As worn-out as his body was his mind was 
racing and he couldn't shut it off. After a restless hour he decided to 
take a shower. Sometimes that helped him fall asleep. 


Bruce shuffled out of the room and down the corridor to the 
communal bathroom. He disrobed and slipped into one of the 
shower stalls, running the water as hot as he could bare it. Still his 
thoughts refused to slow down, and he began deliberating on the 
anomaly's file again. It'd been the description that he'd found most 
interesting. He tried to recall the details as the water streamed 
through his hair and down his body. 


...a phenomenon in which at least two Homo sapien 
(human being) torsos enter a state of physical attraction 
to one another. This attraction is comparable in strength 
to a magnetic field intensity estimated at 12 Teslas, or 
12 Wb/m 2, causing the torsos to adhere to each other at 
points of contact. The phenomenon is communicable, 
spreading to any human torso which comes within a 5m 
spherical radius of an instance. 


It is unknown what causes an event to trigger or end. 
The only viable means to manually initiate termination is 
the complete and utter cremation of all impacted torsos. 


Directional movement appears to be based on human 
population size, density and proximity, regardless of 
distance or line of sight. Vectors have displayed a 
preference for the nearest and most concentrated 
populaces. Aberrations in this directional pattern have 
been observed at an occurrence rate of approximately 
35%. The variables which cause these aberrations are 
currently unknown, although evidence supports both 
inaccessibility and velocity of targeted humans as 
factors. 


While movement appears to be motivated by growth, 
instances exhibit no collective or group consciousness, 
and interviews with affected survivors have substantiated 
a lack of anomalous changes in cognitive function. 
Participants describe having no control over their 


movement, and instances display little to no self- 
preservation. It is also unknown how instances are able 
to generate and maintain locomotion, as the cessation of 
human life has no impact on the speed or mobility of an 
instance. The highest recorded speed of an instance was 
measured at 40 kilometers per hour. 


That wasn't it, not exactly word-for-word, but his paraphrasing was 
pretty damn close. During the briefing Leonard had shown him 
black-and-white footage of the skip rampaging through a small town, 
shot by the Foundation several days prior. The film was grainy and 
frequently swam out of focus — that, combined with its shaky 
handheld quality, hadn't made much of an impression on Bruce. It 
looked fake, the special effects for the people and houses way 
worse than the stop-motion miniatures in King Kong, and for a split 
second he'd wondered that someone wasn't playing the most 
expensive and elaborate prank in history on him. 


Even after seeing it he still couldn't wrap his head around the basic 
concept. Tens of thousands of people in motion, packed like 
sardines, stacked like cordwood. His imagination wouldn't permit the 
tableau to be completed, he just wasn't designed that way, and the 
closest he could conjure was a crowd of people, which was about as 
far off from the truth as you could get while still being in the 
neighborhood. 


Bruce turned the faucet off and stepped out of the shower, fingers 
pruned and skin flushed. He grabbed a towel from a rack. The 
bathroom was empty save for himself. In fact, he hadn't seen 
another resident of the dorms during his short stay, not even in 
passing. He cinched the towel around his waist and returned to his 
room. 


He flopped onto the bed, the frame groaning under his weight. 
Again, he didn't turn off the light. He told himself he'd just forgotten 
to and now it was out of laziness, he was already lying down and 
didn't want to get back up, but he knew the real reason, and he 
couldn't stop himself from leaning over the side and looking under 
the bed, making sure nothing was lurking under there since the last 
time he'd checked. 


7 


They were approaching the point of no return — once they crossed 
that invisible threshold nuclear detonation would have a greater 
likelihood of irradiating Vegas, flash-frying cameos into the walls of 
the Fabulous Flamingo casino and along the strip. Already they 
were close enough that, depending on the wind, a bomb could bathe 
the city and the surrounding suburbs in radioactive fallout. 


Irvine waited for the helicopter to land, shielding his eyes as the 
rotors stirred the sand around him. It was four hours past sunrise. 
New orders had been handed down from Mercury: he was going to 
rendezvous with the bird, while the rest of the convoy was headed 
back to the forwarding base. Conventional aerial bombardment had 
once again failed to stop the skip. If they'd had more time they 
could've coordinated another bombing run, but if they waited any 
longer it would shelve the nuclear option. 


Command had decided to go with the latter.