TARTARUS RESPONSE PROTOCOL TIER 1.01

NON-VIOLENT PRISONER CONTAINMENT PROCEDURE:

FULL-BODY RESTRICTIONS: CUFFS, ANCHOR-POINTS, STRAITJACKET, BLINDFOLD, GAG, MUZZLE (OPTIONAL)

CONTAINMENT UNIT: 10x by 10x by 10X ROOM DIMENSIONS, LIMESTONE AND CONCRETE MIXTURE, FARADAY CAGE WIRING, ELECTROCONDUCTIVE FLOORING

NUTRITIONAL PROGRAM: MILD SEDATION, MULTIVITAMIN AND INTRAVENOUS SUPPLEMENTS, LIQUID DIET AS NEEDED

AUTHORS NOTE: If it seems harsh, it's because you haven't seen these things in action. Count yourself lucky, and follow the goddamn protocol.

- Recovered file from [REDACTED], recovered from storage on order from Ranking Officer [REDACTED]

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Special Agent Renee Fayez is not having a particularly good time.

Babysitting duty has never been her favorite. It’s not easy, proving yourself to an organization like hers. It takes years, it takes violence, and above all else it takes dedication, the kind that takes sacrifice. There are no days off, no time outside of work, no compromising connections, sometimes there’s not even time to sleep, and she has done it. She’s beaten out other scores, closed more cases, kissed more ass, shot down more undeserving assholes than anyone else around her, which is why she’s made it this far.

And now… babysitting duty.

Some little shit no-name, no record, no nothing, out in the middle of absolutely nowhere. The closest thing to anything nearby is a bunch of nowhere towns, full of dying shops and old folks with nowhere to move to, or who are too stubborn to do so- hell, the county has at least two ghost towns in it, fully abandoned.

But here she is anyways. Babysitting.

She still remembers the phone call she got, the folder that got delivered to her desk right after. “Tiamat Void”, the reading had said. The last time anyone saw a Void-response entity, the Cold War was still ongoing, and a Tiamat type to boot? She had her go bag on her shoulder before she was done reading, and was out the door, headed to the airport, before she got to the second page.

Which, honestly, is her own fault. She probably could have known to not be quite so eager if she’d seen who they put in charge of things.

Sam Wittiker, resident fuck-up and no-name nobody.

The only conclusion she can come to is that someone called in a favor, somewhere, to keep the kid in the loop. That, or he’s someone’s precious nepo-baby. Nothing else makes sense. In military terms, he’s barely above a Private, no matter what his “ Provisional Supervisory Agent” status might say (she’s pretty sure that’s not even a real rank). The fact that he’s here, operating alongside her, is more than he deserves- the fact that he’s the one who’s taking orders from the red phone, and not her, has to be one of the most frustrating professional insults she’s ever received.

And to make matters worse, he’s so. Damn. Nice.

“Hey!” Sam says, her thoughts summoning him like the world’s most pathetic demon-clown. “Coffee order coming in! You didn’t mention what you liked, so I got you a black coffee, but I asked them to put one of those blueberry shots in it, and then there’s cream and sugar in the bag.”

“Did I ask for a blueberry shot, soldier boy?”

His smile falters, like a puppy that’s just been shoved over. “Well- I mean, I just-”

She interrupts his stuttering by taking the cup out of his hand and taking a sip of it, ready to throw it out.

And then she takes a second sip, with her back turned to him, because it’s actually really good.

“No major updates since you’ve been gone,” she says, rather than chuck the coffee down the sink in a show of pettiness. “Just more of… this.”

“It’s… only been a week. You said that Epsilon types aren’t really a big deal, right? Maybe it takes time for them to interact with things.”

“Well it absolutely does, newbie, but we should have gotten something by now. We know someone stole an asset from the site, and we know that asset’s signature, so we should have seen something by now.”

Sam gives a bit of a sheepish smile. “Sorry, but that’s… sort of par for the course here. Most of the time nothing ever actually happens around these parts. This alarm is the craziest thing that’s happened in… well, the whole time I’ve been here.”

“And that doesn’t bother you?” she asks, one eyebrow raised high enough to be uncomfortable. “I’m a woman of action, Sammy-boy, and this is the least action I’ve seen in months. Usually a hunt involves at least some wandering around, but half the people in half these towns are a bunch of rednecks who start loading shotguns as soon as they see a uniform.”

Sam shrugs, seemingly unbothered. “No one likes the tax man, and everybody knows everybody in towns like these.”

“Right! So they should know who’s been acting strange! But nothing!”

She flops back onto the desk chair she’s been using, staring up at the bank of flickering screens before her in vivid frustration.

Sam, for his part, just sort of sighs, the long-suffering sigh of someone who’s had to deal with cranky superior officers before.

“I’m not really sure what to expect in a situation like this. You know I got promoted in a rush- how exactly do these ‘hunts’ of yours usually work?”

She sighs, leaning as far back into the chair as the uncomfortable office-space furniture allows. “It depends, honestly. Most of them, we have people freaking out, paranoid, making a big show of things. Solid chunk of the time you can find the target by looking at recent medical cases and arrests. Out here in the boonies, not so much. Every now and then, you get one that’s a real threat, someone with carbomb-level danger, and-”

“You… still haven’t explained what that means. You know I’ve basically been operating on guesswork, right? The Phone doesn’t exactly talk me through things, and the debrief was… not very thorough.”

“Lots of redactions, right?”

“Like all redacted.”

She rolls her eyes. “It’s fine. You won’t really ‘get it’ until you see your first one anyways. Crazy is as crazy does, and every now and then there are real crazies. All the anomalies, the issues that we’re supposed to keep an eye out for, they all pose a threat, and most people don’t know to look for them. Usually there’s signs- biohazardous materials, calls to the CDC, or every now and then, one of the cults the FBI’s keeping an eye on starts getting hinky in a certain way. Every job varies. This one’s quieter than most, ergo why the’re keeping you on it. And thank fuck for that, because you have got to tell me your secret.”

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

“My… my secret?”

“I sincerely and genuinely have no clue how you stare at these all day and don’t go insane.”

“In my defense,” Sam grumbles, “I usually go on walks out and around, check the locks, make sure nothing’s gone wrong. Helps to keep in shape.”

I look him up and down, noting how skinny he looks. Not exactly the height of military physique, but…

“...alright, fair enough. But how doesn’t that bore you to tears?”

He shrugs again, his hands out in a “what can you do” sort of gesture. “Like you guessed a week ago, I didn’t exactly get put here to thrive in my professional career. I got demoted to caretaker a few years back, I do my job, I get paid. Besides, you do actually have to check on things from time to time. The cameras have a lot of blind spots, and this room doesn’t have any visuals for the inner compound. All of that needs to be checked by hand.”

She quirks her other eyebrow, turning to look at him as she sips at blueberry-shot-infected coffee.

“Inner compound? I thought it was just this, the barracks, and the boomtown.”

“Well… it is. Kind of. This place is basically just a big office building, with the security room in the middle here. Then there’s the barracks, off to the west of “boomtown”, but boomtown proper has some installations in it. It’s not just a dummy town, some of the buildings doubled as offices, and some of those offices and rooms are still locked up. I have to check them out, make sure nothing’s broken in, that the site’s secure.”

“And you… actually do it?”

Again, the gesture; “what can you do”. “You asked for the secret. Can’t really use the internet in here, and I like to do a good job. Every few hours, I just… rotate through, check everything out, get a little cardio, and then come on back. By the time I’ve done it two, maybe three times, it’s usually time to clock out.”

“Huh.”

She looks down at the console in front of her, and then back up to the cameras. And then back down to the console again.

“Do you… think you could maybe show me one?”

He cocks an eyebrow, tilts his head in surprise. “I… why?”

Now it’s her turn to shrug. “You hear stories about places like this. All the old guard, talking around covert operations and shushing you when you ask about where things took place. Now you’re telling me we’ve got secret locked rooms in the secret government blacksite belonging to the secret government organization? That’s got to be more interesting than all this waiting and finicking with old tech, trying to get a trace. Any of them have something fun in them?”

“I… I mean they’re locked. And it’s not like I’m going to break in.”

She rolls her eyes again, harder this time. “Of course not. I’m merely suggesting that if there were, perhaps, a more intriguing sort of location amidst this incredibly creepy little ghost town, you could take me there before I claw my own eyes out from the headache these screens give me. Come on, there’s got to be something that’s a bit outside the norm here.”

She watches him struggle a bit. He hems, haws, bites his lower lip, taps his foot. He’s got all the energy of an awkward teenager, compounded by what looks like severe social isolation. If she didn’t know better, she’d have guessed that he spent all the time he’s been assigned here on-base.

Except she does know better, and that kind of isolation would leave a person basically feral. So that can’t be the case.

“Well…”

“Well what?”

“There is one thing.”

The look in her eyes is enough to convince him that he’s not going to talk her out of it now that he’s given in.

“It’s not even interesting! It’s just-”

“Nope. Take me there.”

He sighs.

And then, like a good little soldier boy, he does as ordered.

That, in particular, has to be Renee’s favorite part.

Walking through the “boomtown” to their destination feels surreal, like it always does. Even driving through the streets to go chase down interviews or check some of the other sensors, just in case something’s been picked up, feels like a haunting experience. There are no mannequins, thank fuck, though apparently there used to be, but the space is still outright liminal, like walking through a school with all its lights off. A hundred houses and buildings, but not a single lit window. Lit streetlamps, but no cars beneath them, no yards to maintain beneath carefully manicured plastic left to rot. It’s a funhouse mirror of a town, all the humanity and life taken out- or, more accurately, never put there in the first place.

But Sam seems to know his way around with an almost preternatural ease. He waves to cameras she can’t even see, moves around cracks in the pavement and unsteady footing like he’s done it a million times, and doesn’t seem bothered by the space at all. He doesn’t seem comfortable, per se, but there’s none of the tension in his walk that would indicate he’s nervous and just hiding it well.

The soldier-boy walks along, and she follows behind, the unease and curiosity better than the sheer numbness of waiting.

Until, eventually, he turns to what looks like a storefront, its upper floor clearly an office space or residential, its lower lobby a glass wall with empty shelves inside. He pushes open the door, which swings open with only a mild squeal of old hinges, and makes his way inside like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Renee is right behind him. She’s seen worse.

She keeps her hand near her holster as she walks.

Instead of heading up, towards the offices as she expected, Sam turns towards what looks like a back room storage space, an “employees only” sign hanging proud and dusty on the front of it. This door too is unlocked and it swings open surprisingly smoothly.

They pass through a shadow of a break room, all the right shapes and none of the right details- and he turns to a third door.

This door is not like the others. This door is open.

The hinges squeal, not with disuse but with rust, their edges creaking loudly as he pulls the door open further. Unlike the others, the locking mechanism is on, the handle refusing to turn as Sam uses it to pull open wider the path beyond, but ironically, due to being locked, it can’t close. The bolt stands out, hitting the doorframe rather than pinning the door to its interior, as if someone locked it but didn’t close it behind them for some reason.

Behind the door is a hallway made of solid concrete. No windows, no bricks, no walls- just dust and grey stone, like someone poured this part of the structure out of a mold.

At the end of the hallway, there is a fourth door.

This one isn’t like the others. This one is shut.

She can see three locks on the outside of the door, all three of them bolted into the wall, with a thick, padlocked chain wrapped around what looks like a combination lock. The structure is metal, possibly stainless steel, though it’s hard to tell with the only light coming from the door they’re in and the flashlight Sam’s holding.

The same flashlight that glints off of the surface of the door, near the top. Its reflection illuminates a single square of thick, solid glass, dusty from times long past… but intact.

Without a word, Sam walks into the hallway. As if it isn’t in the top five most fucked up hallways Renee’s ever seen. Like it’s normal.

She’s starting to reevaluate her conclusion on how much being here has affected the kid.

He makes it to the hall a little ahead of her- and then looks back in surprise when he realizes she isn’t right behind him.

“It’s… um. You alright?”

She cocks an eyebrow at him, all swagger and easy, laid back energy. “Hmm? Just admiring the architecture is all. How’d you find this place?”

He shrugs. “It’s on the route of places to check, but they never gave me a key or anything, so I couldn’t unlock and close the door. I sent a report about it, but no one ever got back to me, and it’s not like anything’s getting through all this.”

Looking at the door he’s waving at, she can’t help but agree.

“Well… what’s in there?”

“I mean… you’ve come this far, right? Might as well look.”

Well. Now there’s really no way for her to chicken out. Not that she would have anyways- she’s dealt with freaky before, and this is just tantalizing.

She steps up to the door, looking through the window, seeing, in the dark room beyond… a glow.

A familiar glow.

The glow of a computer monitor.

She stares through the grimy glass, frowning.

“Sam? Why is there a desktop computer in there?”

She can hear him shrug behind her. “No clue.”

“And why is it on? That thing has to be, what, forty years old? Is it- yep, I see the plug over there, it’s got power. Why?”

“Also no clue. Sometimes I check in and it’s got stuff on the monitor, sometimes it’s blank. I think it’s some old spy program they set up and no one told anyone to shut it off.”

“...Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“Get the car.”

“...ok. Why?”

“Remember how I said that usually, there are signs whenever we have a target crop up?”

“Well, yeah. But you mentioned calls to the CDC and stuff, no?”

She points through the glass at the screen.

There, glowing on the monitor, is what looks like a newspaper website for something called “The Hollow Springs Gazette”. In bold letters at the top of the page, made grainy by the computer’s low resolution and the dust on the glass, stands a rather loud title.

DEVASTATING ACCIDENT AT HOLLOW SPRINGS CONSTRUCTION SITE!

“It’s no call for disease control, but I think this counts.”