The Mission Is Never Over—Last Things Last

Photo by Philip Greenspun.

It was 4 pm on a weekday in the city of Boston, MA, and the Agents' case officer had directed them to Government Center—or rather, to a dead drop in the parking garage across the street from Government Center. In a stairwell out of sight from parked cars and security cameras, the members of this new Delta Green task force held their first mission briefing.

• Special Agent Wren Harris of the FBI, flown in from [DATA REDACTED]
• Dr. Malachi Danielson, a field botanist with the Massachusetts Division of Fish and Wildlife
  
• Dr. Rex Marianetti, the best medical examiner at the worst hospital in Denver, CO

The dead drop was a broken guardrail: someone had stuffed a manila envelope inside the hollow tube, concealing a burner phone, a key, and two documents written in code. Rex, a man of many hobbies, decoded their mission objectives and a profile of a former agent codenamed BEAN COUNTER. It turned out BEAN COUNTER's body had been removed from his apartment the previous day, and while there was no evidence of foul play, the apartment had to be sanitized of incriminating materials before anyone else got there. His children were expected to arrive within 48 hours; tick tock.

The Agents left the garage in Malachi's personal vehicle just in time to get stuck in rush hour traffic. Wren and Malachi exchanged pleasantries on the drive, while Rex resisted sharing his name with them, seemingly out of stubbornness rather than security concerns. It also became clear that Rex was teeming with bugs of various species, forensic(?) entomology being another of his hobbies.

The streetlights were coming on when the Agents reached BEAN COUNTER's apartment building in the  Roslindale neighborhood. They were able to walk right in, and what few cameras they saw were obviously broken, a fact confirmed by the toothless overabundance of signs threatening trespassers and package thieves. When they reached the apartment, the doorknob wouldn't even turn: its only use was to provide a deadbolt made useless by their key.

 

Once inside, everyone split up.

 

The living room was littered with old magazines addressed to "Clyde Baughman." Rex shook out all the Sports Illustrateds, the Reader's Digests, even a book of New York Times crossword puzzles. A note fell out of the latter: "Practice for our Sunday crossword competition. Get your brain in shape before I kick its ass! Love, Sharon."

 

The kitchen was barely used, every surface covered in dust. Wren searched the drawers and cabinets until she found one that rattled suspiciously: behind a false back was a handgun with the serial numbers filed off. Wren took it and moved on, noting a crayon drawing on the fridge signed by "Cassie, age 4."

 

In the bedroom, Malachi found a picture on the dresser of a younger Clyde and his wife Marlene, over a decade dead according to their intel. His search revealed nothing suspect: this room was clear too. He took the opportunity to raid Clyde's closet, walking away with a vintage leather trenchcoat.

 

Rex and Malachi explored the bathroom together. There were bloodstains on the sink, immediately catching Rex's notice: the blood was a few days old. His body might have been removed yesterday, but Clyde had been lying here a long time before anyone found him. Rex then raided the medicine cabinet, popping some of Clyde's anti-anxiety pills.

 

Meanwhile, Malachi noticed a sticky note on a plastic spray bottle nestled among the cleaning supplies: "Spray anyone exposed to it. Pink = they're gone." Despite his knowledge of chemistry, Malachi couldn't learn anything more, as neither Wren nor Rex would let him test it on them.

 

All three reunited in the last room, crowded with cardboard boxes and a filing cabinet full to bursting. They decided to examine everything that night and declare the mission complete in one swoop. While Wren and Malachi got started, Rex left to get them all coffee.

On his return, Rex ran into a building resident named Carla Janowitz out walking her corgi Mitzi. She was excited to meet "Jeremy," who claimed to be Clyde's godson, until she got to see his erratic personality ("Did Clyde ever spray you? Trust me, if he had, you'd know.") and the shocking number of bugs on him (Mitzi kept pulling at her leash to chase them and gobble them up). But Rex managed to appear harmless, so Mrs. Janowitz made her excuses and hurried away.

Clyde's files contained the deed to a cabin across the state line in Vermont. Now past midnight, the team left the apartment more-or-less as they found it (thanks to Wren's diligence) and slept at a motel outside the city. 

 

 

They arrived at the cabin late the next morning. This had clearly been a happy place for the Baughmans once upon a time. Children's toys and board games were scattered about the living room, and every room had duck-themed knickknacks, an odd choice of decor that must have brought someone joy. Most tragic was the kitchen: where the only food in Clyde's apartment had been a box of stale supermarket doughnuts, here the Agents found a full set of cast-iron cookware and an oak dining table perfect for family dinners.

The team split up again, each of them quickly realizing something was wrong.

 

While raiding the bathroom for more medicines (nothing but expired Advil), Rex noticed the sink drain was full of concrete, as was the toilet bowl.

 

Wren found a military-style footlocker in the bedroom, stuffed full of unusual items. At the top was an envelope marked with a green triangle.

 

Malachi went around the cabin to the tool shed. Inside were twenty 1-gallon gas cans, a bizarre find even before he realized the cabin had no generator.

 

Inside the envelope was a plea from Clyde, begging whoever read it to destroy the thing in the cabin's septic tank. Wren tried to put it out of mind for the moment and keep searching the footlocker, but suddenly she experienced a vision of the inside of the septic tank. She saw the corpse of an old woman down there, its hair fallen out in clumps and its flesh bloated and purple. But worst of all, it could see Wren too: its head swiveled on its neck to track her through the tank, through the earth around the tank, as she moved about the cabin.

The team reconvened around the padlocked hatch to the septic tank, Rex with a bone-handled knife taken from the footlocker. A weak voice called out for Clyde, then for help when she didn't recognize the voices. The voice called herself Marlene Baughman. When asked how she was still alive, Marlene went quiet for  a long time. Finally she admitted she wasn't sure she was alive.

Art by Dennis Detwiller.

The situation had Wren visibly shaken. She tried to assess whether Marlene was being truthful, but it was impossible with the hatch between them. She asked Marlene what she would do if they let her out: "I want to take a bath. I want to sleep in a bed. I want to hold Cassie again and eat... spaghetti. With sauce. Lots of red sauce. I think that will be soft enough for the teeth I have left."

 

Wren decided to open the hatch, with the others poised to slam it shut at the first sign of trouble. But Marlene didn't lash out. She begged piteously for help, then repeated her story at Wren's urging. She'd been sick with cancer for a long time. She went to the hospital, but then things went dark and she didn't remember anything else until she woke up in the cabin. Clyde was there, and he looked happy at first, but then he became disgusted. He attacked her with... an ax? a knife? and cut her apart. He threw the pieces into the septic tank and locked it behind him. Eventually they reformed into a whole body again, and she begged him to let her out, but he never came back.

 

While her voice sounded sincere, her demeanor communicated... nothing. At all. Her body language was void of emotion in a way Wren had never encountered before.

Disturbed, Wren walked away from the scene, leaving it to Rex and Malachi whether to act on Clyde's final wishes. But first, they conducted an experiment. Rex told Marlene to put her hand through the hatch, and in his eagerness to test the spray bottle, he accidentally looked right at her. At the loose skin sloughing off decayed flesh; at the white bones protruding where she'd worn away her fingers clawing at the hatch.

Spritz! Rex sprayed Marlene. There was no visible effect, but she made the mistake of saying she could feel the liquid, which provoked Rex's curiosity. His knife went through her finger off, cutting it off, and Marlene fell backward, screaming. Malachi looked for anything anomalous in her reaction but only saw an old woman weeping in pain.

Back inside, Wren examined the rest of the footlocker's contents. Several items drew her interest as possible ritual components, but none of them described a way to raise the dead. Sure they must have missed something, she started searching the cabin top to bottom—and in the living room, under the rug, she found it. Drops of melted wax. A dark, gummy substance that could have been old blood. And gouges in the wood, like a heavy blade had landed there. Clyde had cleaned up after himself; no one would have noticed these signs without specifically looking for them. But Wren was, and she had.

Satisfied with the data they'd collected, Malachi started pouring in gasoline while Rex held the hatch open. Marlene sobbed, begging them to stop. Desperate, she told them sometimes, in the loneliness, her mind would drift away from her body and she could see the world from outside. She'd learned things this way. She knew the location of a new species of insect no scientist had ever seen before, one Rex could name after himself; and she offered Malachi weapons so no one could hurt his family ever again. Rex was briefly tempted, but they agreed these offers were too enticing, hardening their resolve to burn her. With the gasoline still raining down, Marlene started yelling about a "catalyst manuscript." Wren came out to investigate the noise; Marlene started speaking in a different voice, one the others didn't recognize.

"Supplemental to stress simulation 3.9, presidential assassination scenario one. Twenty-four hours after denying everything, the subject has now confessed to assassinating the President of the United States. However, his account of how he did this is incoherent: I suspect he still believes himself innocent and is merely wagering a confession will spare him the death penalty. Personnel are not to interact with the subject for the next five days. If he tries to force interaction when his meals are delivered, he is to be beaten and moved to a padded cell. At the end of the five days, the subject is to be told a full week has passed, and interviews will resume. Let's see if we can induce false memories of the event."

Wren demanded to know how Marlene knew that voice. Marlene repeated that she could see the world from outside. She knew Wren was looking for a woman. She could tell Wren where to find this woman, could lead Wren directly to the woman, but first Wren had to let her O̶̲͉͇̗̻̜̥̺̙̭͉͔̥͒̿̓̂͠ͅŲ̶̛͖̞̜̠̥͈̮̦̝̼̯̰̝̂̈́̓͛͒́͠ͅͅT̶̛͙̲͈͚̃̐̀̍̍̅̇̑͆̑̀́̋͐͋̚͜.

 

Wren threw in a lit match instead.

With a howl of rage, Was-Marlene launched itself upwards through the hatch and, showing a special hatred for Rex, slashed him with its bony talons. Rex hauled ass to the car while Malachi covered him, firing on Was-Marlene with the handgun from Clyde's apartment. Wren followed Rex and jumped behind the wheel, gunning the engine, but Was-Marlene sprinted past the tree line before she could run it over... and there it collapsed, consumed by flames.

 

Malachi put the fire out before it could spread, but Was-Marlene started to regenerate. The team dragged its remains back to the septic tank, tossed them inside, and used the rest of the gas to keep them burning until the flesh stopped growing back. Nothing was left of the thing that had called itself Marlene.

...except for the finger Rex had severed, safe and sound in a test tube for later experiments.