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Dog Days Three
01/21/2025
STYX Containment Facility, Nebraska Exclusion Zone
96 hours post escape
Snow slowly cleared from the sky, white flakes melting from view to be replaced by the hideous red glow of fire. Choking pillars of black soot rose like arms to the sky, climbing from tongues of the inferno that swept through the north portion of the town.
Heat blistered across my face, sweat trickling from newly regenerated glands to cake my skin in a miasma of discomfort.
We had struck just as first contact was made with the outer wall, a relatively flimsy thing of wood and scrap metal that extended around the perimeter of the town.
Indeed, if it weren’t for the massive metal tanks feeding liquid fuel through thick tubing to metal nozzles, the Hound would have probably just blown clean through it.
But it knew better then to try that. From the memories of CAPCI’s finest, many a roving pack of bandits or beasts had been driven from the walls of Prosperity by gouts of oily flame.
As such, it had drawn out their vehicles, smashed them one by one, and only then revealed the size of its horde.
The surviving militia had pulled back to the outer wall and prepared for a final stand, meaning that when me and John snuck in through a drainage ditch to the rear we found no resistance.
Something screamed in the distance, and I raised my hand to shield my gaze from the glare. There was no need for that, another pair of eyes had replaced my own at the subconscious, undesired request a deep part of my mind had sent out.
From a literal bird’s eye view I watched as the fire reached a barn, the animals inside left to suffer and die in the resulting rain of flaming planks and cracking crossbeams, their human companions having long fled.
The view shifted away.
For some reason, even after all the human suffering I had seen, the sound of those poor livestock roasting alive caused my heart to clench.
I wondered if I was a bad person, for reacting more strongly to their misery then that of the townsfolk.
That worry was shattered as John spun around to face me, hearing my thoughts.
I glanced away.
I could still know that he mouthed “no” and “its okay”.
The screaming continued.
Some of it drew closer, and I found that I had no choice but to raise my weapon, a twisted length of barbed wire wrapped around a plank of solid wood.
Blood dripped from the torn chunks of scalp still caking its frame, and I stared into the smoke as a trio of figures emerged.
Fuck.
It might have been a forlorn one, but I had hoped our role would mean we wouldn’t need to do much more then sow chaos.
That others would be the ones to actually go in and… take the town, and the people in it.
I knew that was a stupid thing to wish for, that the people were suffering regardless.
Indeed, I felt a small burst of energy and indescribable emotion as several more Branches were joined to the STYX Tree.
Ah.
These were the remnants of a breakout attempt.
A man, a woman, and a child, splitting from the main outward thrust when it was ambushed by the dead.
I raised my weapon.
John raised his own, a gun.
The man tried to respond, but his veins were full of adrenaline, not the cocktail of paranormal stimulants Cleo had designated “STYX B”.
He never stood a chance.
With a pair of shots, the man fell and the child screamed, the woman sweeping them off the ground and diving into a ditch.
I advanced, moving to circle them.
“Please…”
John was trying to talk to them.
“We… it will be easier if you…”
The response was a hail of curses.
We both knew this wasn’t going to work, John.
But I need to try. I… don’t want them to suffer. Not more then they need to.
Neither do I, but… if the living dead besieged your town, killed your friends, and then started asking you in gravely voices to just give and let yourself be taken…
I realized that a sentence like that might be slightly funny in any other context.
I know. I still want to try.
You don’t need to feel guilty. You can’t save them.
He didn’t reply.
I swung around the husk of a hobble, momentarily breaking line of sight.
Instead, I found my vision switching to that of John, just in time to see the woman toss something towards him from the ditch.
We both immediately recognized the form of a grenade, and if it was slightly more accurate, John would have been able to smack it right of the air to explode harmlessly in the distance.
It wasn’t accurate. It was a blind throw, one that placed the explosive far enough away that he couldn’t rush to throw it back but too close for him to escape the blast wave.
A small spike of panic flew through me before I convinced myself that even if he was blown in half, he wouldn’t be leaving me.
It went off with a small thunderclap, and my vision was immediately cut off again.
“John!”
I swung around the side of the house, dropping the plank and turning to sprint to his fallen body.
He stumbled, one leg amputated, eyes tore out by shrapnel, the left side of his body a metallic pincushion of steel shards.
“STOP MOVING!”
The woman screamed.
I hissed, and would have ignored her if I hadn’t noticed the bottle in one hand, slip of fabric wrapped around its head, lighter raised up to it.
A molotov cocktail.
My eyes widened.
“YOU TALK, YOU CALLED HIM A NAME! YOU CARE WHEN HE IS HURT!”
The woman chuckled to herself sadly.
“THAT MEANS YOU THINK! I KNEW YOU DID, I TOLD JAMES, HE DIDN’T LISTEN BUT I KNEW IT!”
James. A memory flashed across my vision, from the perspective of one of the newest Branches. Of the same woman, face pale, trying to convince the man I was seeing the thoughts of that she had seen how the horde withdrew, how they were planning something.
He had laughed and called her insane.
“AND THAT MEANS YOU KNOW WHAT THIS IS!”
She gestured with the cocktail.
“YOU ARE GONNA TELL YOUR FRIENDS TO LEAVE US ALONE, LET ME AND MARY LEAVE! IF YOU DON’T, I AM GOING TO ROAST THAT ONE ALIVE!”
She pointed towards John.
I… no. It wouldn’t kill him. But I couldn’t let him burn either.
For a moment, I smiled sadly. Even if I tried, even if I wasn’t liable to have control wrenched from me, this poor soul was doomed. They would never make it.
Something crashed in the distance.
“Fine.”
I stepped back.
“Let me take him, and we wil-”
My words were caught in my throat as my mouth clamped shut, the tip of my tongue flipping down to the ground in front of me in a spray of necrotic blood.
Everything in my body tried to panic, tried to scream in horror, but the Hound plucked my puppet strings to force me to awkwardly dance to the side instead.
The woman screamed herself and dashed forwards, tossing the molotov and then rushing to grab something from the man’s corpse.
I didn’t pay attention to that, instead tracking the tiny blip of light on the end of the motolov’s cloth as it spiraled towards John.
This time, the grenade was on target.
With all of my might, I struggled for control of my own limbs. It was less then useless, muscles locked into place with nary a twitch.
The grenade spiraled, and my stomach tried to leap into my throat, but even that sensation was entirely stalled by the Hound’s grasp.
No…
Its okay.
It wasn’t okay. I felt as if my mind was going to rip itself asunder, and just as I scrambled to try and think something to John, all of that panic vanished as a massive black form smashed through the ruins of a building and intercepted the bottle.
The improvised grenade shattered and ignited, only to instantly be snuffed out as the Hound brought its paw down and buried the miniature inferno into the ground, smothering it completely.
It growled, impossibly low but still loud enough to rattle my very soul.
The woman’s eyes lost their luster as I was forced to look away from John, look away from the Hound, and watch her die.
Then she drew the gun in one hand, a knife in the other, and let loose a primal scream of her own.
The Hound actually stalled for a moment, and I felt its grip loosen enough for me to cry out.
“Run!”
It snorted in annoyance and I found myself immobilized again.
The woman laughed and stepped forwards, stomping down hard on something lying next to the mans corpse.
In an instant, the Hound lunged, crossing the distance so quickly that all I saw was a blur of black and tiny spurt of red.
It spun around, howling in… rage.
Somewhere in the distance, there was the sound of gunfire.
I found myself pitching forwards, control entirely returned to me as the Hound…
It didn’t matter. All that mattered was
“JOHN!”
I rushed towards him, skidding to my knees and grabbing his hand as the mangled mess of what was once a young man stumbled to his feet.
He grinned, despite the way ribbons of torn flesh hung from his eyes over the rest of his face like some sort of macabre mask.
“I’m fine.”
I punched him.
“You dumb motherfucker!”
He swatted blindly, as I closed our visual link.
“You need to be more careful!”
John fell to his butt and clasped at the stump of his leg.
“How was I supposed to know she had a grenade?”
His voice took on a somber tone. Then he tried to crack a joke.
“I… probably need to compliment her when she, you know…”
I huffed and leaned in, grabbing a particularly large chunk of shrapnel and ripping it from his eye socket, watching as the flesh began to slowly knit itself back together.
“I am not sure she is going to be joining the Tree, not with big, black and angry over there so pissed.”
He shrugged.
“I don’t know, I can’t see.”
“But you can hear. Obviously.”
John shrugged again, even as he started to feel around the ground for his missing leg.
“I mean, those could be happy howls of dismay.”
My face scrunched, something I only noticed because John’s own sight was starting to return and he was sharing it with me.
A thought struck me like lightning. I stared down at my hand, clenching his. Making contact. Tears began to run from my eyes, of both utter euphoria at contact and dull terror for what that meant.
It wasn’t happy. It was angry, so angry that it had entirely let up control of us.
I opened up the link, just enough so that John could read that thought as I forced it to the forefront of my mind.
He stopped moving, eyes going wide, pupils constricting into pinpricks.
Then I felt something vanish in the corner of my mind. For a moment, I wasn’t sure what it was, indeed, it was almost more of a weight lifting then anything else.
A moment later, I realized with growing concern that several Branches had… lost connection.
John must have noticed it too, if anything, he realized the problem before I did.
Two more dropped away. Their names meant little to me-
Hey, I knew them!
-but that they vanished at all was worrying.
More worryingly, another Branch was snipped from the tree, and I realized that a trail was being made.
One that led directly for… us.
I stood up, staring towards what was now a feeling of creeping dread, one that permeated the entire network.
The Hound stood still, hackles raised, teeth bared in a snarl to put a Great White Shark to shame.
Then, it emerged, stepping forth from the dull smoke and black ash, wind from nowhere causing the tattered dress hanging from its skeletal figure to tremble just as our hearts did.
It was a girl, perhaps fourteen years old, eyes sunken beyond belief, face twisted into a hideous smile, twin lengths of razor wire dragging behind her like the tail of a serpent.
A yellow 15 was emblazoned onto the frayed fabric of what I realized was nothing less then the tattered remnants of a straight jacket.
The Hound stepped back slightly, unconsciously, and a memory slipped forth.
One from Dahmer herself, of the monster in women’s skin signing off an order absentmindedly, an order to transfer “dangerous but non-essential subjects” to certain settlements as part of her plan to form a “Containment Confederation” based around the STYX Containment Wall.
They would be used to… train militia, as the project proclaimed, to deal with increasingly more hazardous anomalous threats.
Unfortunately, it seemed the town of Prosperity hadn’t “expended” their assigned testing equipment as was agreed upon, another memory flashing from the same James who captained the watch.
This one was of… huh.
They felt bad for her.
Unfortunately, that little act of mercy hadn’t been enough for Subject 15 to cooperate, and they were forced to keep her locked away.
Until we had set her free.
John forced himself to his feet and reloaded his gun.
“I… yeah, I was wondering what that remote was about.”
Oh.
His own memory flashed across my mind, that of him wondering why the man was taking more care to avoid dropping a small remote with a single button then he was to avoid harming his companions.
I took a step back, desperately reciting the limited information I was given about Left Hands.
They were parasitic telekinetic monsters, engines of utter destruction, and might have been directly responsible for ending the entire world.
The Hound was classed as a Grade B threat on Refinoc’s anomalous threat scale.
Left Hands, as a species, were A+.
I became aware that my thoughts were not private as the Hound growled and locked us both into place.
It let out a short bark, more a challenge then anything, and stepped forwards cautiously.
The Left Hand, Subject 15, whatever it was, it cackled and without even a second thought, leapt forwards, riding a wave of boiling vapor.
Leaping with so much force that the snow beneath it practicality exploded, the Hound matched her charge, mouth open as if to swallow the tiny figure whole.
Subject 15 let out a giggle, and just before contact was made a length of wiring sprouted from one of her wrists and lashed out like a strike of steel lightning.
The length of superheated metal slashed brutally across the Hound’s eyes, but it merely shut them and continued ahead, landing to find that 15 had almost daintily sidestepped the attack.
It spun like a rattlesnake about to strike and swatted at her with claws larger then her own limbs, and I felt my own eyes locked onto the action with inhuman precision as the Hound made sure to not let her pull the same trick again.
It didn’t matter.
The Left Hand didn’t bother trying to sidestep.
Instead, she met the attack head on, raising both hands and…
Space tore, the dust kicked up by the Hound’s swipe vanishing as if swept aside by an invisible wall that then slammed into the Hound’s paw.
I watched in slight awe as thick padding was torn away, to expose raw red, one of the Hound’s nails splitting down the middle as, impossibly, the paw was slowed.
It wasn’t stopped, not in the slightest, but it was arrested just enough for the twin coils of razor wire from 15’s spine to swing forwards and wrap themselves around the forelimb of the Hound.
They went rigid, and I watched as the solid metal tendrils were used to… almost push the body of 15 around, just ahead of the lethal claws.
Then the tendrils began to loosen.
For a moment I thought that she had run out of stamina, that trying to meet the Hound head on was too much for her.
Instead of going limp, however, the wires coiled and as 15 kicked off the ground with her legs, they helped to swing her up and over the body of the Hound.
My jaw would have dropped if it wasn’t locked shut.
The Hound snarled in frustration as the length of razor from 15’s hand was dragged down its back, superheated wiring slicing into its thick matted fur with a burst of smoke.
15 let go, the twin spinal tendrils likewise lashing at the Hound, neatly cutting off a large clump of fur from its flank.
It spun again, but this time it didn’t swipe at her.
Instead, it stepped back and with one massive paw, launched a small avalanche of rubble and soot towards her.
I ignored the pale form included into the debris tossed, instead focusing on how each and every projectile larger then a dime was swatted out of the air by invisible force.
The cloud was split as a lance of roiling air slammed into the Hound’s snout, blowing away yet more matted fur and drawing a slight spray of red.
Faster then lightning, 15 gestured with her other hand, a second lance of black metal leaping from her wrist and lashing like a snake to force its way into the wound.
Blood boiled and the Hound roared, shaking the ground. If we were still bound by mundane biological processes, we would have been crippled, our eardrums all but ruptured by the sheer noise.
As it were, we stood still, watching as 15 was momentarily stunned, flailing in agony, wire tendrils coiling protectively around her.
The Hound gnashed its jaws, cutting off the onslaught of noise. It charged, once again swinging with a colossal paw.
15 reacted, once again meeting it head on.
A pulse of sadistic anticipation went through the STYX hivemind.
The paw was slowed by a wave of invisible force, slowed enough for the Left Hand to use her spinal wires to wrap around the forelimb and once again use this to stay ahead of the dread claws of the Hound.
As she was pushed, 15 lashed with both wrist cables, aiming to gouge the eyes of her colossal opponent.
Once again, she seemed to loose steam.
Once again, she prepared to vault over the Hound.
This time, she didn’t make it.
In a single blinding movement, the Hound snapped forwards, the flash of white teeth causing 15 to tighten her grip on its paw to keep her distance.
The bite was swift, brutal, but woefully short of 15’s body. It wasn’t aiming for that, however, the jaws of the Hound clamping tightly around the length of wrought iron stretching from the Left Hand’s back.
It stopped moving for half a heartbeat.
Long enough for 15 to realize her mistake, for her face to twist into a horrible look of pure dread, but not long enough for her to anything more.
With a single motion, the Hound yanked on the chain, ripping 15 off her feet and into the air.
It twisted its neck, sending her spinning into wall of a burnt out house with enough force to splinter the charcoal black wood and force the limp body of 15 clean through the building.
The Hound let go, the chains slowly sliding from rent gums, bringing with them a slight drizzle of blood and black saliva.
With one paw, it used the chains to hoist the body of the Left Hand from where it fell.
To my shock, 15 was still moving.
Her legs, twisted around backwards, occasionally twitched, her body convulsing.
Blood and gore boiled off of her as the air itself was bent into a corona of heat, and I watched as her missing right hand was slowly rebuilt, as her neck began to snap itself back into the correct direction.
The Hound stood, waiting for her eyes to flicker back open and lock with its own, before it delivered a single, light bite to her left leg, taking care not to crush her body between jaws able to crumple a car.
Instantly, connection was made, but instead of the expected sizzling, stinging sensation of a new Branch being added, a single, cohesive thought was set slamming into the network.
It wasn’t so much of a word as it was a concept, one that seemed less human and more animal in origin.
“NO”
The Hound flinched back in surprise as over half a heartbeat, 15s body vanished in a spray of red mist with a colossal pop.
It stared, just as we did, at the small molten crater that was left, trying to make sense of what had happened.
Then it turned to the sky and howled in frustration. My eyes widened, the unfamiliar feeling of true joy, and something like hope flooding through me.
It hadn’t lost, but it hadn’t won either. And it was hurt. Actually hurt. For all of its power, for all of its cruelty, it had been denied its prize.
More then that… the other Branches hadn’t regrown. They were gone, detached… dead. Truly and permanently.
Those souls were freed, and as I realized what this meant, I glanced to John, who merely muttered something indecipherable.
The Hound twitched and turned, and my body locked up as it glanced down at us. Even from forty feet out, it seemed to loom over us.
Dread flushed through me as I remembered my thoughts were not private, the malicious aura radiating from the black colossus crushing any hope that my momentary defiance of it went unnoticed.
I clenched my fists, taking care to push the warm feeling from holding John’s hand to the back of my mind as silently as I could manage.