VISCERAE

"You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road."

~ Richard Price

Seventy five years.

A long time. Longer than most get, even in the modern age, so full of medicine and modification, of lifestyles and professionals trained in maintaining a failing body past its would-be point of expiration. Time enough to have children, and for the children to have children, and for another round of it all after.

The man with the stars on his lapel has met his great-grandchildren. A blessing that few ever get, and that fewer still get to enjoy. In spite of how much his joints ache, how his hands occasionally suffer the tremors of arthritis, how much it hurts to stand up and sit down and piss and sleep, he does enjoy it. What a privilege it is, to see the world change. What a joy, to see those you love grow old in the shade.

Seventy five years is a long time.

It's also an eyeblink.

Memory is funny like that. Time is funny like that. He could go another hundred years, see another dozen generations, and he's pretty sure that he would still be that young man, staring at those words for the first time, just as bright and artificial and crimson and damning as they are now.

They blink on the screen, down in the corner of the status update he's called up to his terminal. The machine is one of the few things left in the building older than he is, and yet it seems to exude some of the same vital, animalistic tension that he feels, that he felt first as a young, misguided fool so many decades ago.

Tiamat - Alpha - Void.

A classification. One that, by rights, should never have appeared again. In the worst case scenario he envisioned, planned for, theorized about, it would arrive at least a decade later than it has, late enough that he'd be well and truly dead, that he'd have lost any possible excuse to hang on to his rank and post. As it stands, it blinks on the screen, staring at him. He stares back.

It keeps blinking. The alarms on the terminal make it so, draw the eye to it.

But the man with the stars can't help but think of it as something beating. Or breathing. Or perhaps laughing, long and slow and strange.

Fifty years. Fifty years, maybe a bit more, since the last time he saw those words, but he remembers it like it was yesterday, like it was minutes ago. The pulse pounding in his ears, bright and hot and confused, the claxon ringing and screaming through the room and its concrete walls as he tried to understand what was going on. They'd briefed him, of course, given him a dossier, told him all the code words- or so he thought. The one in front he knew.

Tiamat. Some… dragon god, all about chaos and mess and whatever the hell the tribe that came up with the name could come up with. He'd never seen it appear on that terminal before, had never seen it in reports or heard it spoken of the few times he was out in the field, but the name was on the list of official classifications. It was the other one that stood out, that gave him more fear than the sirens or the blinking red light or the way his commanding officer nearly broke the damn door down running into the room, an armed escort surrounding him, some of them bleeding, the smell of gunpowder ripe on them.

Alpha too was recognizable. Basic greek alphabet shit, even if he'd never seen this one on the screen either. The highest it ever got to before was Beta, and that one had… that one had hurt to look at. Had made the air taste like ozone and the back of his throat feel… wriggly.

But it's the last one that made him feel like he couldn't breathe. The one in the third part of the categorization, the part meant to indicate the type of response that the detected entity warranted.

Purgatory; send out a containment squadron, maybe a research team after the location is secured. Meant to be captured alive if possible, and indicated something that might be useful in ways he didn't have the clearance to know about. Study and utilize, in short.

Tartarus: A minimum of three containment squads, as well as heavy duty ordinance. Something that could be killed, but which would be more useful left locked up in perpetuity.

And then, of course, the third kind, the last of the three in his training; Abaddon. The kind where the response he was trained to call up didn't bring out containment squads, but anti-armor, exterminators, or low-flying bomb runs. The kind that, independently of how "strong" they were or what type, were just better off gone. He mostly met Abaddons in his time at the terminal.

And now here was a fourth kind.

Type: Tiamat. Level: Alpha. Response: Void.

His commanding officer had shouted something. At the time, it had been a life raft, something to hold on to and guide him out- now, after so many years, it's nothing more than a few half-remembered syllables, disconnected from meaning. He'd saluted, said "Yes, Sir!" like a good soldier, and turned to relay the orders-

And then there was no more commanding officer.

It took six inoculations and two sessions of hypnosis to recover the memory of it after the fact. There are some things that a rational, functional, normal human mind are not meant to remember. The doctor had told him about how the brain processes away the way that the gelatin of the eye jiggles, or the ways that sound gets categorized, how the way his mind hid from him what he'd seen was just another version of that.

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The man with the stars knows better. It was self defence. Mutilation for the sake of self-preservation.

Sometimes, when he sleeps, he can still see the way that the base commander just… stopped. The way that he became so still, like a statue. The way that, for a moment, as the young soldier leaned back to get a look, to understand what happened, the man had looked… flat. Like a thin piece of paper.

If you looked at him from the right angle, he'd just… disappear.

And then the guard detail had gone flat too.

And the world had shifted, like a picture coming into focus, and they had all slid into and behind each other, even though they were so flat that there could be no inside or behind or in front.

How they had stopped being flat just long enough to scream. Just long enough for the young soldier that became the man with the stars to hear a crunching noise, and then a wetter sound after, as something reached down out of nowhere and-

He's never found a sound quite like either one. But, when debriefed and asked over and over and over again, he'd come close.

"Like gelatin and cereal. Like if someone put them under a car tire."

It wasn't right. It wasn't the right comparison, wasn't truly what he'd heard, but the thought stuck, and that's what they eventually wrote down in the report of that night.

Half the people in the building had been gone. They'd had cleaning crews for days, mopping up something, but the young soldier had never been able to see what it was, no matter how hard he looked, and no one ever told him where everyone went. No one needed to tell him that they weren't coming back.

He saw the town he'd been posted in. A little place, barely a village. Thatch huts as much as brick ones, with dirt roads and little people who'd never seen the wider world, who couldn't and wouldn't understand why the strange men were there and what they were doing.

Most of it was gone too. There were only three houses left, and one of them was… missing something. Like it wasn't right, no matter how you looked at it. Like it was smaller on the outside, maybe.

The reports he'd read, years later, told him that all three hundred people of that village had somehow been extracted from that third house, with the exception of one. The last one was in what was once the house of an old woman, sitting at a table, and at a chair, and in a bed, and in the fireplace, and partially in one of the walls.

They burned the area for three square miles in every direction. They made sure that no one left. It had looked like an angry god had come and thrown down a lightning bolt, turned a whole chunk of the jungle to ash.

They talked to him about it, later. Told him it was necessary, that his contribution had been important to the war effort, that the ongoing dangers of the world required people to make hard choices. They'd told him about how the Reds were trying to change the world, to bring it under the umbrella of their ideology, to drag mankind under the heels of a dictatorship and worse.

He's not sure about that last part. He wasn't back then, either. What he'd seen… wasn't something that felt like it belonged in the Kremlin. It didn't feel like something a person could touch and still be.

But the rest? The rest he already knew.

He saw what had happened, after all. If they'd asked his input, he'd have told them to keep bombing.

Sometimes the only way to make the world a place worth living in is to take something out of it. That much, at least, he still believes.

He never saw the classification again after that. Heard plenty of stories about other places where the orders said to fire and forget, to mop up and burn away the mess, especially after word got around of where he'd been stationed. Soldiers like to talk, after all. Some of them were grinning as they said it, overjoyed at the experience of unleashing that much firepower, given permission by the orders from on high to let loose at last. He didn't bother listening to them more than he needed to. It was the quiet ones that he knew had really seen things. The ones who understood more than the rage of those who'd lost brothers-in-arms, more than the hatred of whoever they were pointed at, more than the joy of destruction. They were the ones who understood.

Sometimes the only way to make the world a place worth living is to take something out of it.

He spent some of the next few decades doing just that.

And then… it got quiet.

The world kept turning, but more and more, the things that demanded outright removal just… stopped showing up. The mission remained, but the targets grew scarce and more dangerous by the day, the month, the year.

He remembers the last one he was personally involved with.

Remembers the way it held onto the stuffed bear. Remembers the way the bear smelled; of old meat and smoke and something that tasted sideways, that didn't quite fit right with the rest.

He remembers how it landed, softly, to one side of the stains.

Sometimes the only way to make the world a place worth living is to take something out of it.

The light on the console is blinking.

Tiamat - Epsilon - Void.

The strangest type, the weakest rank, the rarest response. "Don't fuck with it," says a system older than he is, which had gone unused for decades. The occasional blip, sure, easily dealt with by sending out a burn squad from another division or calling in a favor from another department, but proper use, actual alerts… no.

He's got other things he needs to look at. Fresh reports, sent in from the absolute infant that some dipshit put in charge of the monitoring station, informing on their movements. Undoubtedly there'll be more manifestations, ripples brought about by the presence of something detectable by the old, outdated sensors, things he'll need to cross-reference and review… but he can't quite convince himself to turn to them.

He just watches the blinking red light.

Fifty goddamn years, and it still feels like it never stopped. Like that moment and this one are the same, and he's the thing that's changed, become something wiser and weaker and more afraid than ever, because now he doesn't just remember, he understands. As much as any normal mind can understand, perhaps.

He sighs, feeling his body creak as the air leaves his lungs.

There are some things that don't take priority. He has limited responsibilities, and limited powers, given his current role and the way he's anchored himself to this post, to this rank. Some things, he has to let slip, or has to take his time to respond to, calling up the right people, those in the know enough to hear from him and damn well do something when he tells them to.

Maybe this is one of those times.

Then again, maybe not.

Sometimes the only way to make the world a place worth living is to take something out of it.

He reaches for the Red Phone.

The person on the other end of the line picks up on the second ring.

"Mr. Deputy? This is General Langstrom. I was hoping for just a moment of your time."