There is a building in the backwoods. It's back, far back, behind stands of trees grown plantation-straight, under toxic creeks and sewage streams buried underground. On the wrong side of the Potomac, far away from that seat of power, at the back of the line of the DMV, there it stands.
Where the trains don't go and the leylines don't run and the rails get rusty and swarm with tetanus rot. Where the roads are crumbled gravel and broken asphalt, flanked by battered signage with paint-flaked kill agents. Where the heart of industrial decomp lies, there it stands.
It is squat and thick and gray, a bloated botfly buried in the melanated skin of endless tarmac. It forgoes neo-classical for brutalism, cement instead of marble. A vicious looking building. Antagonistic. Smooth and angular and abstract. In an act of Mertensian mimicry, it mocks Roman columns with concrete proboscises, smooth pillars sawing into the flesh of the earth, anchoring it there, feeding it there. A holdfast on the soil, a death-grip on the budget. Not even nuclear war could dislodge its grasp. Not even if the building crumbled and died and had long held empty. A corpse with white knuckles, dusted gray.
Follow the pillars. Deeper.
A hundred feet underground. A hundred agents at a hundred desks, pecking at typewriters and wearing shades in the dark.
Burnt incense and tobacco smoke and fermented sin mix in the vaseline-lens haze. The scent is intoxicating and paralyzing. It fumigates curses and invites cancer, but the lungs get used to it eventually. Eventually.
Deeper.
Smoking pipes and steaming vents. A building built on and over itself, again and again as it expands and grows, gluttonous with offal and awful with gluttony, the half-century product of taxpayer dollars and civil asset forfeiture. The lower levels groan and creak, the weight of the institution unstable on rotten foundations. A lone technician tightens the joists, back bent and creaking, twins with the wretched thing he maintains. A demon on his shoulder tells him he's two weeks away from a coronary. They won't find his body for two weeks. When he dies, no one will replace him. He fixes what he can with what he has left.
Deeper.
The deepest sublevel, beneath miles of steel and cement and buried bone, there is a panopticon of an office. Lead-tinted windows line every wall, showing up and out and the typewriters and the technician and the dingy sign out front, riddled with bullet holes and ennui. The ceiling sweats and swells, plaster the color of curdled lard puffy with internal rot. The wood floor buckles and rolls, years of damp and decay taking its toll. The curves render the office organic and unwell and sclerotic.
The diseased heart of Unusual Incidents.
Intelligence flows in through pneumatic veins, out through typewritten memoranda, signed by fountain pen on mahogany. Dictats from on high below, directing the most powerful paraintelligence apparatus in America. On Earth.
That's how its supposed to be. That's how it used to be. Now the office is a golden albatross, the holder handcuffed and handicapped. A dead end job. A hostile political assignment for a rising star, a bunker in more ways than one. Fat trimmed and belt tightened until ribs were showing and clavicles were jutting. Austerity for America anorexic. Now, the office is just busy work for a busybody, better meant sticking their nose in musty files than other people's business.
UIUseless.
Enter stage left memo between manicured nails, placed on a pile of the same, left by the same. URGENT is written across the cover page in bold and tone. The Assistant Director plucks the paper from the stack, exhales her own smoke into the haze and leans in to read.
The Foundation is dead. O5-7 is loose in the Interior. The PENTAGRAM is hot on her heels, heading towards the setting sun. MANIFEST DESTINY.
The sound Assistant Director Quinn Law makes is more cough than laughter. Reanimated parenchyma can only do so much. "Can't have that, can we?"
A blackened nail bitten to the quick depresses a dark button inset in the desk. "Cristóbal, call them in. I have a proposal to discuss."
A rising star snuffed is still rising. A handicapped player is still a player. Nothing's a dead end for a necromancer.
Salt is poured.
Blood is spilled.
A fell hand erupts from the American Seal, eagle eyes red with flame and feathers black with soot. Salt sizzles and tar flares as Asmodei's kin rips through Hell to emerge full in Quantico. Many hands, countless hands, clasped in alms or covering eyes and ears and mouth, reaching out against the sparking sigils, pressing slit-pupiled palms against mountain salt wards.
"What is it that you seek?"
Smoke rises from a tidy man in silhouette, standing outside the ritual circle. "The location of O5-7."
Smiles unzip fingers. "It will cost, Agent."
"Name your price."
"Hrn. Your name first."
"To know or to keep?"
"Merely to know, master."
An ember glares from the dim. Inhale nicotine, exhale smoke. "SAC Kenneth Spencer."
The demon considers his price, taking his measure of the man. "One hundred children."
A pregnant pause. "Too greedy. The UIU doesn't have the PENTAGRAM's deep pockets. Ten."
"Seventy-five."
The ember again glowers darkly. "Twenty-two. No more, no less."
The creature snarls. "Then you will rot ignorant of the location of the number you seek, SAC Spencer."
The shadow pauses, deliberates, nods. Another agent steps forward, swipes clean the salt circle with their foot. The demons surges forward on all tens towards Spencer, growling and cackling and howling at once. Twin cold-iron barrels swing out to press against its forehead. Its rudimentary realspace nervous system twinges with something akin to fear.
BOOM
Kenneth Spencer stares at the steaming body on the floor and flicks his cigarette onto the oozing corpse. "Run it again."
Salt is poured. Blood is spilled. The eagle's eyes glow red.
HUMINT is finite. DEMINT is infinite. A warehouse of imps on typewriters, howling like monkeys. The UIU will know the location of the last O5.
"What is it that you seek?"
It's just a matter of time.
The movers and shakers filter into the conference room, murmuring to each other. AD Law is already there, blackened fingertips rattling like phlanges on the table. The ashtray beside her overflows with smoky stubs. The air will get unbearable soon.
Her guests speculate as to the reason for their assembly. Her message was terse and vague, but still commanded obedience. Many already know why, and merely bite their tongue. They can't talk now, not with the door still open and the dampening sigils inactive.
There's always somebody else listening.
SACs of Miami, Austin, Chicago, Detroit. Members of the Finance Division, Criminal Investigation, Personnel. All offices and departments Law has suborned either partially or fully, wresting control from the unaware, incompetent, Director. It has taken years, fly-by-wire as she extended tentative feelers into new departments, new divisions, referring loyal, like-minded candidates for promotion and lateral transfers. She had turned entire offices into cuckoo's nests, places for the UIU to raise imposters as their own, before they left the nest for pastures new.
She never broke the letter of the law, even if she twisted its spirit into knots. It's well within her capacity to recruit and recommend and refer, and even moreso to call a conference like this. Prima facie, at least. A room full of agents loyal on their face to the agency, but in reality only loyal to her, the flag, and the Dream. They take marching orders from Law, and Law alone. They could bring a third of the agency's resources to bear, unknowingly and unwittingly to anyone beneath them. Treasonous tail wagging rabid dog.
It still may not be enough.
Law knows the danger present in this. The danger of people loyal to a figure, rather than an institution, the written rule. But the ends justify the means. They always do. She argues with Cristóbal that loyalty to a weak institution is no better than no loyalty at all. Strengthening the UIU will change things, put things back to how they should be.
A superhighway to Hell, painstakingly paved with nothing but good intentions.
Everyone who was able and invited to come has already arrived. The seats are filled, the back of the room is packed with still more, and they all look expectantly to her. Her flock. Her loyal soldiers.
The Assistant Director has already parceled out her soul in bits and pieces over the years, to powers both temporal and spiritual, to get where she is and the abilities she possesses. A fractionalized soul, with only the slimmest majority still in her name (52%, she checked). If she is building a road to Hell, then its a place she already is already destined to go.
Quinn Law stubs out the latest of her ever-present cigarettes and rises out of her chair to address her congregation. Her voice cuts through phlegm and fog and to the heart of the matter.
"Ladies. Gentlemen. The Foundation is drawing its last breath."
Body language speaks while mouths remain silent: approval, awe, and apprehension. Approval: the Foundation has operated with far too much impunity on American soil, interfered with American operations, and has stepped on too many toes for anyone to regard them with fondness. Awe: the Foundation is, was, deeply rooted in the American heartland and elsewhere. For them to be destroyed, so cleanly, without much in the way of civilian casualties, takes a power only American hegemony could wield. Apprehension: The Foundation was deeply rooted in the American heartland, but they, integral members of the UIU, were never informed nor involved in their destruction. Whatever may replace the Foundation, if not for the UIU, may prove to be a worse player than the Foundation itself. Indeed, it has already shown to not care for them in the slightest.
AD Law steels herself to confirm all of her audience's emotions. "The PENTAGRAM dealt the first and final blow. They are in the process of cleaning up the remainder. One Foundation leader is still alive, and a manhunt is ongoing on American soil."
Silence as loud as gunfire. Nerves crackle raw like fireworks. Connections fire like cycling pistons. The air is thick and pulpy with smoke and stress as the room tries to count cards held in the hands of God. Tough for the slower in the room.
The creaking of an old chair, and the dour countenance of a battered mage leans in. MOOT Commander Jesse Davis, one of Law's first. "They planning on taking him alive? A trial? Nuremberg?"
Law raises her chin. "They do not plan on leaving anything of her to try."
The tension hardens in the room, thickening and cracking into isotropic cartilage. She rests her knuckles on the table, and watches. She lets the moment hang, to punctuate and accentuate, before she finally reaches for her lede.
"Which is why we must get her first."
Yellow grass crunches underfoot as MOOT strides across the lawn, filings of aged toenails, sharp as glass. They move in paired rows, two across, six down. They move under cover of night and forged affadavit. Just have to hope no one looks too close.
There are plastic toys scattered all over the yard. Their placid faces passively smile up as ironshod boots run roughshod over them. No one will notice the difference.
The dirty white house with dirty white fence in a dirty white neighborhood in Akron. The siding is recently stripped, or had never been there in the first place. Copper wiring torn expertly from the wall and reeled up neat. The bare spars of the roof jut in the sky, the exposed ribs of a beached beech whale. Under construction since 1996. Occupants never had the money to finish it. The American Dream never dreamt.
Never will be.
The front door is reached. Team lead knocks. tap tap. They start the count. Twenty seconds. It's painful waiting until they can knock the door down. Fingers tense on trigger guards. Killology-bred paranoia flares like white phosphorus.
No one answers, so they let themselves in. MOOT flashbangs
[raid an autistic savant child's house to interrogate her? show how bad the UIU are?]
[Davis raids a Pentagram informant's house]
The conference room is full of voices and smoke, the dampening sigils on the walls spark and weep pus. Anyone on the outside listening close could hear fits and spurts of conversation, though so garbled through thaumic static it would make less sense than nothing.
Endless debates, spiraling talks of escalation and deescalation, of injunctive orders and preventative measures and surgical strikes. There wasn't enough coffee or cigarettes to go around.
Quinn Law watches them all closely. Taking note of the aggressive ones, the capitulating ones. Updating her priors, observing how they have changed through their years of service.
"We go to a judge, then! Frost, Kann, they like us, they know we're in the right!" Morin, young, still idealistic. Shame.
Davis bites back. "The PENTAGRAM, Rene. You think they would care? They would feed the court order to the dogs, and get Rehnquist to eat the leftovers." She's been hardened by MOOT, good. Davis is missing an eye from a jurisdictional squabble gone hot. It lends credence to her argument
"The optics!"
Nose to nose, now. "The whole agency is their darling, and you know it."
Just one of many arguments happening simultaneously, and Law keeps track of all.
"We don't have the manpower needed-"
"Hit them where it hurts-"
"-onstitutional crisis if we go into all out war-"
"We cannot let the fascists win, we just can't-"
"You're talking fully out of your ass-"
"Outright meme warfare has too much risk of escalation!"
"Do you understand what our budget actually is?"
"Go after their funding, cripple their ability to act-"
"You have any better ideas?"
The AD feels a shadow lurking over her shoulder, and feels the unsaid question, unable to be asked. Good boy. He had been skulking in the background until now, waiting for his moment.
Quinn nods, and bare knuckles rap against the table, bone on wood. Two dozen eyes look up to match gaze with the empty sockets of a flensed skull, silent and leering above a starched collar and tie. Special Counsel Cristóbal Gonzalez demands their attention.
All UIU agents have skeletons in their closet. Law's just happens to be her right hand man. And now the room quiets to hear her again.
"The PENTAGRAM has done enough damage already by enacting Blockbuster without us. If they succeed in their aims, and kill O5-7 on American soil, that will be the final death knell for the UIU and the final blow to our credibility as an organization. The PENTAGRAM, the Senate, even the President himself will view us as a leper. A useless limb to be amputated, our resources better allocated elsewhere. We must not allow the PENTAGRAM to be the dominant domestic power."
She raises a hand to forestall any comment. "We must assume that everyone outside of this room works for the enemy. Any lended ear, any offered hand, from anyone not vetted is assumed to be suspect." Law grimaces. "We are at war for the soul of America. And it is a war we must win at all costs."
Cristóbal's fingers spark like flint and steel to light her cigarette. "We need options."
Morin speaks, a quavering voice hardening to steel. "We have to discredit them. Leak failures to Congress. Scandals to Veiled press. Total informational war."
Spencer draws his own cigarette down to the filter. "Like it as not, America is more ours than theirs. Home field advantage. They might as well be in foreign territory, no matter how much other agencies kowtow to them. We have access to things and places they don't know about."
Davis looks around warily, before growling her own assent. "Morin was half right about the judges. We can get warrants signed, go after some of their undercover assets. Cripple their domestic capacity. Feign ignorance. They'd believe it. For a little while."
Little by little, the agents spoke in turn. Adding to the plan, expanding it, reinforcing it. Their experience, their positions, the agents turn them into assets to bring to bear against threat on the horizon, the serpent in the grass. Law couldn't do much of anything in her position, hampered by political necessities, hamstrung by procedural bogs. As Assistant Director, she couldn't do much but delegate. But she was always good with handling people, dead or alive. And as her people speak, she feels a grim sense of pride.
Soon, the last voice has spoken their piece, and Quinn Law stands one final time. "You all are dismissed. You have your marching orders, and you have your people. You know what you have to do. God bless you all, and God bless America." She exhales a draft of smoke. Law hasn't prayed in years, but reconsiders that failing now. "We're sure to need it."
Spanish moss drags across ASAC Sasha Grimmer's lapels as her boat glides across the swamp. Birds shuffle and call among the bald cypress stands. There is the bassy growl of a distant gator, clapping its jaws shut over an unlucky fish or bird or rival. The salty wind whispers through the trees, making the boughs creak and rub against each other.
The hollow thunk of water slapping against the metal hull is the only artificial sound to join the choir. No one else in the boat talk. It's too hot and muggy to talk. It's the kind of air to weigh down, dampen hair and soaks pits and make Sasha feel five, ten pounds heavier.
No one else talks, not unless they have to. They just sit, wait, and listen.
A thin, bubbling scream like air blown through a reed pierces the sky, silencing the herons, storks, and eagles. They quiet to hear the call.
SAC Sasha depresses the button on her radio twice, rubber giving way under her thumb. The squelch was enough to ready the other boats across the bayou, and the agents move into slow, sodden action.
A man pulls the boat's ripcord, and the motor stutters, stumbles, and starts. The large fan on the back roars to life, and they rapidly triangulate on the scream.
The boats converge on the remnants on what must have been a stilt-shack over the water. Scorched, worm-riddled spars of lumber jut out of the muck. Twisted, broken fingers. The air is thicker here. It's hard to breathe, hard to think. Tied to the boughs of a nearby tree is a rope the color of algae, its end snaking into the soupy water. Methane bubbles make the water roil and churn, and the watery scream can be heard again from beneath, as clear as day.
ASAC Grimmer nods, and the rope is untied and pulled. Coiled hemp turns to rusted steel chain, steel chain to cold-iron, and finally barbed bronze bands padlocked around a struggling, linen-wrapped body.
Bootlegger turned swamp sage, dumped in the '20s to rot. The gases of the swamp keep it alive on an eternal hypoxic high, always drowning, never dying. It sees things on that knife-edge. Real things. True things. Buried in the effluvia of the Mississippi Basin, the wastewater of the Western Rivers, the creature is connected to its flowing heart, its rushing blood, to the delta and the tributaries and creeks and brooks and half of the water of America, and half its people.
Sasha brings the wretched thing to rest on the raise-ribbed hull of the fan boat, and asks it a simple question:
"Where is O5-7?"
He, she, it, they speak in two voices, overlapping. overwhelming. They/it stare into her and nothing and everything at once, and shrieks.
O'ER THE WEST OF THE WESTERN RIVER
WHERE JACKSON BROKE THE INDIAN RACE
EAST OF THE MOUNTAINS OF HOOVER AND DONNER
WHERE OF GOLD PLAQUES THEY FOUND NO TRACE
ALONG THE ROAD THAT GHOSTS MAY WANDER
WITHIN THAT MOST SACRED OF PLACE
A WOLF A HUNTER AND NOBLE RANGER
DUEL TO DEATH AND FALL FROM GRACE
O'ER THE WEST OF THE WESTERN RIVER
WHERE JACKSON BROKE THE INDIAN RACE
EAST OF THE MOUNTAINS OF HOOVER AND DONNER
WHERE OF GOLD PLAQUES THEY FOUND NO TRACE
ALONG THE ROAD THAT GHOSTS MAY WANDER
WITHIN THAT MOST SACRED OF PLACE
A WOLF A HUNTER AND NOBLE RANGER
DUEL TO DEATH AND FALL FROM GRACE
Grimmer blinks the spots from her eyes, and nods. She keys her radio again. "We got it. She's on the Ghost Belt, headed to Vegas."
With its purpose done, with its request fulfilled, the swamp sage can only struggle as Grimmer grabs it by the padlock and sinks it back into the bayou.
Until the next agent comes with a question, the bootlegger can do nothing but scream at the herons, gators, and wrens that make up its custodians.
Sasha Grimmer
Cristóbal Gonzalez
Quinn Law
Kenneth Spencer
Landen Eckhart
Ari Perkowitz
Jesse Davis, MOOT commander