Them That Chase

Art by Dennis Detwiller. April 25 (con't) Driving back from the dive bar, Wren noticed something in the rearview mirror. A gray shape like a cloud blotting out the stars in the night sky... except the red glow around its edges meant it was way too close to her tail lights. She swerved and managed to avoid getting dive-bombed by the Chiropractor, luring it towards isolated roads outside town. Eventually it broke off, but Wren stopped and shouldered her rifle. BANG! It was near ly out of sight, flying straight up and getting smaller and smaller. But gray sludge fell, splattering against a nearby tree. Back at the motel, Wren and Malachi caught each other up. Devon Malouf's corpse had been dumped in a nearby salt marsh, but Dr. Santorini was dead too, and Rex was semi-conscious. They decided Rex would have to stay at the motel: admitting him to a hospital would raise risky questions, and they could keep Doug busy nursing him back to health. Rex would've exposed ...

From the movie Sca n ners .  April 24 (con't) An unknown number called the Agents' burner phone. "MELANIE" identified herself as a friend of MARCUS and wanted to speak with them ASAP about the "birthday cake." She directed them to a military hangar at Francis S. Gabreski Airport., where they found eleven young airmen doing pushups while their CO watched. They seemed too young, too well-rested and well-adjusted to work for the Program... or maybe to know they worked for the Program. The CO ordered his men to their feet and out the door when he saw the team. At the other end of the hangar was a woman in officewear and combat boots typing at a laptop. "MELANIE" introduced herself as Dr. Rebecca Thornhill. She got right to it: the Program believed the Chiropractor was some kind of "EBE" with volatile tissues, and the remains must be recovered for study. She provided the team with biohazard suits, body bags, and a metal coffin-like device that...

Art by Jenna Barton .   Home Pursuits With the Valdez residence in ashes, the Agents left Alabama just in time to share Christmas with their loved ones. Wren and Malachi were glad to put the operation behind them, but Rex had become surprisingly attached to his teammates. He decided to track down MARCUS and make a friend of him too, meaning it fell to his intern Doug to do the tracking down while Rex occupied himself with his experiments and his bugs. Doug tried his best over the following weeks, but with so little to go on, he wasn't expecting to find much. He certainly wasn't expecting to find a burner phone sticky with soy sauce among the Chinese takeout he'd ordered for lunch, nor a single text on it saying, "Tell your boss to cut that shit out." But while Doug was shaken, Rex was thrilled: he was getting closer! Malachi arrived back home with poinsettias. Ash cursed at him: bursting through the door had interrupted his killstreak in COD Warzone, but Malachi w...

  From the movie Hereditary.   December 17, Night Rex and Wren came up with a plan to interview the previous abduction victims under the auspices of a medical study investigating brain activity in people claiming supernatural experiences. Rex used his medical credentials to arrange for lab space in a hospital equally crummy to the one where he worked in Denver. Meanwhile, Malachi left to visit a sporting goods store and came back with a shotgun. December 18 After sleeping through the morning, Rex and Wren met with Eileen Brown and her mother in Rex's borrowed lab space. While asking about her medical history, Eileen let slip that she'd recently had a spinal tap but shied away from sharing further details. A brain scan revealed high activity in regions of her brain usually dormant, but without asking about her abduction directly, they let her go without further information. Rex then tested Wren (who showed similar activity to Eileen) and himself (who displayed extremely high, u...

From the movie Enemy .   December 15 Wren was still reviewing Patrolman Revett's encounter with Gina Bullock when Gina actually called. She and Emily were flying back to Birmingham later that day, but first they were going to fill up on breakfast at the Red Fox Inn. She invited Wren and her team to join them, an offer Wren leapt on. Up at Indian Rocks, Rex and Malachi were not having such an easy morning. Malachi's head felt like it was going to explode; Rex's camelhair coat had spontaneously caught fire, leading him to stop-drop-roll in the thawing mud; and both realized the other was somehow responsible for their predicament. Unnaturally responsible, even. Malachi drew his pistol on Rex, who crabwalked backwards into the abandoned pickup truck: he was convinced Malachi had been the one to attack first, but that wasn't something to quibble over with his life on the line. Wren saved Rex's life by calling Malachi at that moment, offering to pick them up. In the car,...

With Clyde Baughman's indiscretions covered up, and Delta Green's secrecy maintained, the Agents went home to be with their own families. The spitting image of a sitcom dad, Malachi threw open his front door and called out, “Honey! I'm home!” He shared a drink with his wife Claire before dinner, first bemoaning what a little shit their son Ash had become now that he was a teenager, then describing the alpine moss he'd been away studying on Mt. Greylock. An environmental consultant, Claire could mostly keep up with Malachi’s research, but she had no idea alpine moss doesn't grow on Mt. Greylock. Wren went digging into the FBI's files on Joy Schusterman, once a psychologist specializing in prisoner behavior until she fled arrest in 2008, and found a paper in which Joy had praised Albert Yrjo. His story was similar to Joy's own: a psychology professor until 1964, Yrjo was disgraced after a test subject killed multiple people during one of his experiments. Wren ...

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 pr...