

# TRENT BRODSKY

# DEVIL'S SPINNER

Copyright © 2018 by Trent Brodsky

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

# CONTENTS

Prologue

Chapter 1: The First Spin

Chapter 2: Harras, Harassed

Chapter 3: The Hum of Things to Come

Chapter 4: Forgive Me, Father, for I Have Sinned

Chapter 5: Did You Call the Plumber?

Chapter 6: Feel Free to Conform

Chapter 7: Good Time to Pick One's Brain

Chapter 8: Domestic Assault

Chapter 9: Parasites

Chapter 10: Explosive Revelations

Chapter 11: Nobody's Home

Chapter 12: The Calm Before the Storm

Chapter 13: The Storm

Chapter 14: A Chance Meeting

Chapter 15: The Room with No Windows

Chapter 16: The Distinguished Guest Arrives

Chapter 17: Into the Concentration Camp

Interlude

Chapter 18: Schadenfreude, or: Fish in a Barrel

Chapter 19: Let Me Give You a Hand

Chapter 20: The Wreckage

Chapter 21: Into the Unexpected Enemy's Lair

Chapter 22: Teenage Mutant Ninja Youngblood

Chapter 23: The Bi-Coming

Author's Afterward

# PROLOGUE

AUSCHWITZ, NAZI GERMANY

27 January 1945

It was an ordinarily gloomy morning. The screams of tortured souls echoed through the various halls of the main brick-clad building. The sobbing of the dying, the gasps of the living. The halls themselves were empty, barren—quite fitting for a place such as this. One of them, however, was not.

A man with a monocle around a particularly inquisitive eye was standing firmly near the northern wall. Outfitted in a brown uniform and looking curiously and alternately at the charts in his hands and at the schemes of unknown origin in a frame plastered to the wall, the monocle-wearing man felt a cold touch of a leather glove on his shoulder.

"I hert zat your recent 'projekt' ist not goink too vell, ja?" he heard from behind. When the man turned around, the figure in all leather was caught by his nervous gaze. It was partly obscured by shadows. The figure's voice was of an exquisite Austrian descent, and also gloating.

The man in the brown uniform gulped. "Quite zee kontrary, Obersturmbannführer Schrechenbachen," he finally forced himself to move his ever so slightly trembling lips. "Das ist goink remarkably vell."

"Oh ja?" Obersturmbannführer Schrechenbachen's stern face drastically changed, as if becoming welcoming. This new look felt eerily out of place on its dry hardened skin.

The other man continued, now with traces of hubris just barely noticeable in his voice, "In vakt, zee vill of zee lasht batsch's tezt subjektz vas at an all-time lov _ant_ broken in an extraordinary schort shpan of time. If I do sayen so myselv, vee are on zee verge of a breakzru."

"Ooh, zat ist gut to hear." His leather-gloved finger automatically scratched the area where his moustache would be had he had moustache. "Surprisingly gut newz, jawohl." A glint of pride in his Nazi eyes. "Perhaps I vill tellen zee Führer zat ven I next see him."

The other man straightened his back, as if standing at attention. "All I kut efer hope vas zat zee Führer vut be pleast." A tear covered his monocle-less eye.

"Ja, ja." Obersturmbannführer Schrechenbachen finally walked out of the shadows—even more formidable this way. "Das ist fery gut, Herr Mengele."

" _Doktor_ Mengele," the man corrected him. "Doktor Josef Mengele."

"Ja, ja..." he gave him a look, "I knov."

A loud bang blew up the wall they were standing in front of, and a cannonball smashed the officer's head clean off in an instant. The Obersturmbannführer's headless body flung its arms up and instinctively touched the bloodied torn flesh at the neck. The neck was spurting blood, painting the physician's face red.

Josef Mengele's twitching ears took in ceaseless gunshots of various intensity, screams of agony, shrieks of confusion, defiant war cries, and other loud bangs while he wiped his face with a handkerchief.

Doctor Mengele looked at the spazzing corpse, then on the cannonball, still rolling back and forth in the officer's immediate vicinity. Gory bits covered its metallic roundness. Something caught his eye.

"OH NEIN!" he exclaimed, seeing a crudely painted penis on the dark surface of the ball. Its testicles were covered in sporadic hairs. "Zee Russianz!"

Seconds later, he heard clicks and clanks of Kalashnikov rifles' bolts being pulled back all around him. Doctor was surrounded by the Red Army soldiers. They looked mean and tough, scorn and justified hate on their pale faces, but, strangely, still hadn't fired their cocked weapons at him.

Mengele couldn't believe his eyes: his monocle dropped to the ground, shattering to itsy bits in an instance. His jaw went agape.

A mustached man in an unusual uniform—Generalissimo uniform—slowly appeared from the shadows further down the hall and put a smoking pipe into his mouth. His mustache moved, "I tink we need to tok."

# — 1 —

The boy's face was nonresponsive. Eyes focused.

From an early age, Jamie Cotton was withdrawn, secretive, weird. "Weirdo!" they called him. "Weird weirdo!" they tried to hurt him.

He tried to eat a math test once.

Still, some kids were sycophantic towards him: dreamy blue eyes, blond hair ready to be tousled; but he didn't quite get why they were acting that way—a little too friendly—so it always felt weird to be around them. Plus they were mostly girls—that made it doubly weird.

The only people Jamie confided in were his parents and grandpa. And when he did, he was kind and empathic.

His marks at school were good. He didn't get in trouble. Sure, he played video games once in a while, but he didn't get violent urges from them like most people do. He was a straight arrow. Straightest arrow in his class. A good life was ahead of him.

All of that changed when he got a present—something that seemed to be just an innocuous "toy" at first...

Now, he was sitting near the window in his locked bedroom, looking at the clear skies, but not really—he was looking _through_ them. Face nonresponsive. Eyes focused. His left hand, jerking faintly up and down, had the particular item in it... a _fidget spinner_.

What was even more terrifying is it was spinning.

# — 2 —

The man's face was sturdy. Eyes confused.

From an early age, Father Harras wanted to belong. It was always hard. When he was growing up on the cruel streets of Bronx, his friend used to say, "In this life, there's only your nuts and your balls. And you break neither, you dig?" He never quite understood it. Until now.

Father Harras was absorbing the moving picture on the plasma TV screen in the green room. A set of female lips was warning him and the rest of the local Washington viewers of incoming unrest, sweeping the nation and, by extension, the world. It was nothing new.

"...the prospects of nuclear war with North Korea become more and more apparent and almost a certainty." The somber tone of her voice was captivating. "Now, get us through the weather, John," the newscaster smiled, and a weather map along with a grinning chubby forecaster appeared on the flat screen.

"Goddamn fools," the man of faith whispered, swishing a drop of sweat off his tired wrinkled brow—almost bitterly, but rather sympathetically. "Sorry, JC," he asked of a wooden crucifix above the door frame and returned to the TV. "You don't even have the slightest of what's coming." His mouth hurried to kiss a whiskey flask in his withered hand, and his face hurried to gurn on account of that.

Father Harras came to the light: his priest-like getup, black and somewhat cumbersome, was met with an early-August sun, a white collar squeezing his neck gently but tightly. As the front door of the church closed behind his slumped figure, he squinted, not expecting how bright it was outside. Bright and hot.

"Father Harras!" a young voice called him by name, much to Harras' surprise and chagrin. "What about your coffee? Sir?" It was a handsome thirty-something fellow in an outfit similar to Harras', with the exception of a few creases and general wear and tear identical even. He was holding two Starbucks cups.

"What?" When Harras' eyes noticed the cup the priest apprentice was extending towards him, the latter barked in short bursts, "Yes. Throw it away."

"Father..." the concerned youth began, "if you don't mind me asking... is something wrong?"

"Do you know what's in this letter?" A rectangular yellow envelope—fine Italics written all over it—held high in Harras' sweating hand.

"No, Father," the youngster positively shook his head.

"Come with me," came a terse command.

The faces of two priests were painted by bright neon lights. Harras adjusted his elbows lying on the surface of a faux wood table. His apprentice nervously gulped.

"How are you doing this evening, fine gentlemen?" came from the waiter with a notebook and a pencil ready in his hands.

Clearly befuddled by the question, Harras could only say, "Um... okay, I guess..." before he followed it with, "why?"

"Are you ready to order?" the waiter continued with the pleasantries.

"Oh yeah... coffee," Harras hastily waved it aside. The matter at hand couldn't tolerate any further delay.

"Hmm. Two coffees coming right at you." He tried to walk away, yet had stopped and lingered. From the look on his face, the waiter clearly had a hard time saying what he was about to say, "Guys, I don't want to seem like an asshole... I mean, I like role-playing myself, but that," he pointed at their matching outfits, "is just a bit much. Just saying."

As he walked away, they exchanged brief uncomfortable looks.

Father Harras hit the table with the envelope. "Read it."

His apprentice, George Youngblood, took it, his lips started moving. He lifted his expanding eyes. He couldn't believe where it came from. "Vatican?"

"Keep reading."

Youngblood's shaking hands took a piece of paper out of the yellow container, akin to a holy relic. The handwriting stroke him as smooth—too smooth. In black and white, the letter said:

Dear Father Harras,

It is with a heavy heart I am extremely sad and distressed to inform you that your initial suspicions were, in fact, correct.

Sustained first casualties. Holy network appears to be compromised. Cannot tell you more through this channel as it is unsecure.

You have full authority to do whatever's necessary. May the power of God be with you in tribulations yet to come.

— _P._

P.S.: We should've listened to you from the start. Perhaps your relocation is proving to be a part of Lord's plan after all.

When George finished reading, Harras looked him straight in the eye and offered no nonsense, "I'm afraid this is what Lord had in store for us. _This_ is our mission now." His index finger tapped the exposed letter anxiously.

The apprentice nodded, visibly phased by the revelations that were thrust upon him. "But Father..." he whispered, "why are we conversing about this in a gay bar?"

"It's one of the few safe places still left around this Godforsaken Earth." The young priest's eyes became rounder as he crossed himself. Harras, habitually, made the sign of the cross, too. "It was either this place or a synagogue."

"Eww..." he let out unintentionally.

"Besides, the forces we're up against will never try to actually recruit..." A strange humming pierced Harras' skull—the penetrating sound started torturing his brain. Through the pain, he glanced to his left: a young man sitting at a nearby table was holding the very thing that made those humming noises vibrating through the air and making the priest dizzy and sick. A fidget spinner. Spinning. "I was wrong!" Harras blurted out, his face a colorless mess. The torture of a feeling was hard to bear, unbearable. He almost couldn't breathe, gasping. He jumped on his feet and zigzagged to the young man with the fidget spinner between a thumb and a middle finger. "YOU SPAWN OF SATAN!" The young man did not respond. In fact, by the looks of his chiseled self, he didn't even hear Harras. So the priest did the only reasonable thing he could think of at the moment, grabbing him by the sleeves and violently shaking him. "HOW DARE YOU TO COME IN THIS HOLY PLACE?!" Like before, it granted no response or acknowledgement. Absolutely none.

"Dude, I think you're being a little confused," a man behind another table told him.

"LIKE HELL I AM!" the priest protested, accosting the nonresponsive spinnerer.

Youngblood's eyes became so wide, there was seemingly no color in them except white.

Two bouncers grabbed the cursing Harras by arms and legs, drearily carrying him away in a monotonous fashion. Strangely, his silent "victim" hadn't moved still. The spinner in his unmoving hand kept spinning.

# — 3 —

Being a fifteen-year-old is never easy. Jamie Cotton woke up _without_ such a drab feeling. He had been also added to the ranks of fifteen-year-olds now, but he didn't feel a thing. At least, his face didn't show any such emotion of inevitability, or anything else. As soon as his eyes were open, the low humming noise of an operating spinner was heard.

Jamie seemingly ignored his bickering parents when they both turned their attention to him, proclaiming he was going to die if he didn't eat his breakfast, that they would disown him, things like that. He was silent then. He was silent in the car when his father was dropping him off at the school. He was silent in the Math class. Low humming of his white spinner with gold rims. He was silent in the Philosophy class. He was spinning. And he was not the only one.

"So what did Aristotle say to his numerous detractors after his 'Civil Roman Agricultural Postulate' incited a civil war?" asked a soft-spoken teacher of a gentle age of thirty-five, scribbling something on a blackboard with a piece of chalk in her nimble hand. She had her messy hair in a bun—a few strands had gotten out of it and were now blocking her peripheral vision—and big, ugly glasses on. Strangely, it made her face look beautiful in comparison. After she had finished writing and asking the question simultaneously, she looked behind—at the silent class—confused. "Any— anyone?"

No one. Nobody responded. But the unison humming all around was suddenly deafening to her ears.

"Lizzy?" Anxiety had started to chain the floating rock of her conscience to the anchor of immense weight, dragging it under. "S-Sam?" Sweat permeated all the way through her. "Jamie?"

Nobody responded.

The unsightly sight of dozens of spinners—all spinning—made her head spin, too. "Guys?!" She grabbed her head, as if it was about to burst, and, then, let out a shrill shriek of disquieting agony.

There was barely any sound at the cafeteria. It was... motionless.

Hundreds of children of all ages, stuck in perpetuity with their hands holding—operating fidget spinners, blank expressions taking over their faces, staring forward but at nothing. They weren't eating.

Two cooks were watching them from afar, in awe. A pudgy woman, the chef, leaned on the counter and told the other one, "I haven't seen the cafeteria this silent since... never."

Finally, Jamie's spinner was at such low RPMs that it slowly stopped. _He flicked it back in motion._

# — 4 —

The sun was down. And so was Harras. Thrown into the dirty alleyway, face disturbing a shallow puddle of dirt. Two bouncers rubbed their hands together, individually, as if washing all the guilt off of them. Youngblood was standing beside the guards, unharmed.

"Father Harras, are you alright?" he inquired fearfully for he wasn't moving.

"I'm not a homophobe!" his unkempt mentor was quick to respond, lying in the puddle face-first, bubbles rising from the water around his mouth.

"Yeah, sure," a nonchalant bouncer agreed.

"I'm so sorry about this," Youngblood whispered to him, eyes full of remorse and sympathy.

"Yeah, whatever." The bouncer adjusted his shades. "He's the fifth this week."

When he disappeared into the back alley exit, the other bouncer, who intentionally lingered, looked at Harras before also going back in, uttering briefly, "Forgive me, Father."

For a few minutes, Youngblood was patiently waiting in silence.

A few newspaper pages flew by, there was something about the dangers of upcoming occultation in one of them, Youngblood couldn't tell.

Harras rolled over unto his elbow. "At first, they show signs of mild interest. A little after that, they become consumed by it. It becomes all they could think of. Then, they become almost catatonic. After that, all they can do is—" Suddenly, he interrupted himself, "I'm sure you've noticed that man in the bar."

"What man?"

"With a... _spinner_ ," Harras annunciated ominously.

Youngblood firmly nodded.

"Well, this... this is just the beginning. Soon, it will be much, much worse. A disastrous event the humanity has never seen."

Youngblood rubbed his left temple, feeling as it was pulsing all out of whack.

"And we, Youngblood, were given the responsibility to avert that catastrophe." The priest's voice was beyond solemn.

Somewhere in the distance, the sirens of a police car became distinct. Soon, they were destined to grow fainter and completely vanish. As they did, George Youngblood and Father Harras were exchanging tense, uneasy—and sometimes uncomfortable—glances.

"Forgive me for asking, but how do you know this?" the apprentice finally asked.

"Where are we, Youngblood?" Harras answered with a question, utilizing a tired tone.

"Back alley behind a gay bar," the perplexed young man of faith answered. "You sure you didn't hit you head, sir?"

"Think broader."

"The United States?"

"Not that broad."

"Washington?"

" _Washington_ ," Harras repeated decidedly.

"Father... is that supposed to mean something? Is that a clue?"

Something was in his eyes as he deliberately stalled. Something like compassion. "You'll learn soon enough. And when you do, you'll wish you didn't." He sighed. "But first, let's get out of here. We've wasted enough time as it is."

Youngblood crouched, offering Harras a friendly hand, and looked around—the backdoor of the gay bar catching his eyes. "I suggest we keep this out of the report."

# — 5 —

If just eight months ago somebody told Senator Clarence Limbtick how upside down his life, allegiances and agenda would be in such a near future, he would punch them in the face. Yet, here he was, inside a badly lit parking garage, awaiting for somebody to spring out of the shadows. It wasn't even a foe that was supposed to do that, no, that wasn't the part that scared him. Or scared him _the most_. "First you leak, then you're licked," his father and his father's father both used to tell each other and him when he was just trying out the murky waters of politics back in the '80s. A lot of time has passed since then, a lot of questionable shit that he wished to forget. However, he was always remembering that silly adage his ancestors manufactured as a byproduct of being a political dynasty. "First you leak, then you're licked," Clarence muttered through his teeth, awkwardly hiding behind a red Lamborghini Diablo, his neck unnaturally shifting when he was constantly looking over his shoulders. Not a sound on the second level of the parking garage. Not a soul. Not a peep. _I wish I didn't make a peep..._ And he didn't. He hadn't. Not before. Not when morality came a-knocking through a thick skull of his, not when people were harmed when he was lobbying for the changes to accommodate some corporate interests, but this... This took precedence. He started getting bald, for God's sake. The top of his head became dangerously naked in such a short span of time—just in eight months! So much was at stake here that even Limbtick became aroused—hard-pressed—to do something about it—to leak. _Leak, leak, leak. Drop by drop, and all of a sudden you find yourself in the middle of a downpour._ No matter. He outlasted the proverbial plagues of the past, so why would this thing be any different? Because, for once, it was global and spreading like wild fire. Now, he was lying with the enemy. _What was I supposed to do? Going public? I'm risking even by being an anonymous source, let alone—_

Something moved in the corner of his eye. Everything inside him—every organ—contracted. But it was friend, not foe. Not anymore, that is. Clarence _did_ have to do something. And it was the only way he knew how.

Enter Lenny Clearwater. On a shorter side of the height spectrum, big thick glasses on. But more to the point: a city-slicking slackjob weaseling about Washington and never quite catching the coveted break. Lenny was in his 40s and still didn't quite get that story that would land his byline on the front page. Until now, of course. He was shaking at the thought.

"Senator," the weasel greeted the other weasel, stretching his sweating palm out for a handshake that would, hopefully, seal the deal, but also, potentially, seal their fate.

"Lenny," Clarence nervously acknowledged the journalist.

"Frankly, off the record," he tried to crack a joke to alleviate the tension, "I didn't think you'd show up."

"First you leak, then you're licked..." Clarence Limbtick muttered unawares.

"What?"

"Nothing."

Then, after a short intense pause the nothing became a something: Limbtick started unloading everything he knew about the madness that was transpiring behind the scenes and closed doors. The horrific events lurking in the shadows of willful ignorance and plausible deniability, unfolding like all the stops had been meticulously pulled out. Perhaps too unbelievable and spine-chilling—where one's word alone was not enough. Yet, it wasn't some paranoid janitor standing in front of the reporter, it was a senator of the United States of America. And more importantly, he was pointing the reporter in the right direction, giving out highly classified and easily verifiable information—no way was it fake news.

Lenny Clearwater could only have so many wows in him left by the time the confession of sorts was over. Tens of minutes seemed like an eternity caught into another eternity.

"I— I—"

"You do that," Clarence instructed the dumbfounded reporter. "Get it done," he added.

With that, legs full of lead, Lenny nodded unsurely and limped away—they couldn't be seen together, couldn't leave together.

"Gosh-fucking-darn it..." Clarence sighed in total solitude. Well, not quite.

Heavy footsteps echoed through the dim insides of the structure.

"Lenny?" Limbtick whispered. "Is that you?" Even he didn't entertain the idea he was right.

The footsteps grew louder, came closer, became more defined. Clarence Limbtick finally figured they weren't footsteps at all—they were hoofsteps.

Was it possible that someone had parked a goat in there?

No.

"Oh my God..." the senator whispered, backing away automatically. He couldn't believe his enlarged eyes, so he started running. He ran, and he ran. He couldn't remember when was the last time he did that. Even when he did, nothing like that has ever chased after him. What even was that? Was it—

NO!

The politician was huffing like crazy, being absolutely out of breath. In his temporary fear-driven madness he made a wrong turn and was now ascending the stairs instead of descending them. He couldn't think about menial things like that when he felt the hoofsteps following him relentlessly, without fail. Limbtick didn't look behind—he just couldn't force himself to. Simultaneously, he was fumbling through the pockets in his jacket, desperately trying to find the darn phone.

"First you... leak, then... you're licked..." he mumbled but then stumbled across the phone just as he was stumbling away from the staircase. Clarence tumultuously tapped the screen and soon put it to his drenched ear. "HARRAS! Can you hear me?!"

Nobody was on the other side, just a beep letting him know that the call was unsuccessful. Limbtick typed something and sent it as fast as he could.

Quickly, he tried to call his wife, but the phone flew out of his hand when his knee ran against a lime Ford GT's rear fender.

"AH!" he exclaimed as his phone's display cracked alongside his kneecap. The wounded senator leaned on the supercar, nervously citing the mantra he had broken, "First you leak, then—"

"You're licked." Not only did Clarence hear the words, he felt them with the back of his head.

"Plea—" Clarence was begging when he forced himself to face his mysterious pursuer but immediately cut himself off actually seeing him— _it_.

Just after the horrific revelation reflected in his tearful eyes, Limbtick was grabbed by the throat and lifted three feet above the ground. Before he had time to choke, the sound of a loud snap echoed through the parking garage as his head sharply tilted to one side. His frail, breathless body was hurled into the air, skull colliding with the wall so hard that it opened as easily as a melon would.

# — 6 —

The jingling vibration broke the silence. Droves of schoolchildren poured out of the exits. The only sound they were making was the sound of their steps being in perfect accord with each other, as synchronized as the humming of the fidget spinners in their hands. White, green, black, blue, multi-colored, plastic, wooden, metallic. Toys, not hands. Although, curiously, they tended to blend together from a distance after a while.

Amongst the swarm of other kids, Jamie Cotton was walking towards the parking lot where his mother's car was just barely visible. Suddenly, however, he stopped. His blank eyes weren't looking anywhere in particular, but his body slowly but surely turned 90 degrees to his right. His body paced elsewhere.

# — 7 —

The third level of the parking garage was cordoned off with yellow tape.

CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS

Detective Horowitz ducked under it with his usual agility. "What's going on, boys and girls?" he directed at the CSI unit sweeping the place, the flashes of the photo camera bouncing off of their bleak, tired faces.

"Nothing much, Harry," the crouching man with a ponytail on his head and a toothpick in his mouth drawled, his translucently gloved hands palping the insides of the deceased's cracked skull. "Were there any reports of wild gorillas escaping the zoo lately?"

Detective Horowitz nibbled on his lower lip. "Why?"

"It seems like that's what killed him. Judging by the force he was thrown at at least."

"His broken neck, too," added the female forensic expert, also ponytailed, scrubbing under the victim's nails with a cotton swab.

"Hmm." Horowitz didn't like it already. He always loosened his tie when he didn't like it. "Who's the suit?"

"That's the interesting part," the male forensic expert stepped in, stopping what he was doing and looking directly at Horowitz.

"I suggest you hold on to your butt, Detective," the female forensic expert added.

"Vic's name's Clarence Limbtick," the ponytailed man revealed. "And it seems like what we've got here is a dead _senator_ on our hands."

"Literally," the ponytailed woman interjected, briefly glancing at her coworker's occupied limbs.

"Shit." Detective lingered on the thought a little bit before getting a cigarette out of his pocket and putting it in his mouth. He started staring at the pale body much more intimately.

"Have you heard that a bunch of kids went missing?" one of the people dusting the adjacent cars for prints asked.

The other one tensed up. "Yeah, my Tristan didn't come home from school today, too..."

"Oh, terrible to hear that. I'm sorry I even brought it up."

"No problem, no problem."

The mustached man with the badge on an ugly brown uniform disturbed Horowitz's concentration, clapping him on the shoulder.

"Cameras?" Detective asked hopefully.

The man shook his head. "All the surveillance equipment smashed, tapes missing."

"A very intelligent gorilla," the male forensic expert cracked a joke, picking in the cracked head.

Detective's face was struck with disbelief. "You wanna tell me we don't have anything?"

"Count your blessings, Detective." He gave Horowitz a cracked phone. "Vic's phone. Luckily, it's still working."

Detective delved into it, tapping the cracked screen of the cracked victim, and soon enough lifted his eyes back up, asking part rhetorically, part for real, "Who the fuck is Father Harras?"

# — 8 —

Lenny Clearwater was typing away to his heart's content. The work has never flown so good for him, because it was work. This... this was passion. He was finishing a fifteen-page exposé of the highest order and no one could stop him. Even his dehydration and a sudden migraine onslaught. Trickles of sweat poured into the recesses of the keyboard, every key press accompanied by a squishing noise. Lenny didn't notice, or didn't care. The seminal work of his life was finding its way out through the tips of his fingers.

"You want some meatballs or cheese with spaghetti?" his loving wife raised her voice from the kitchen.

Lenny was in his head, deep. The trickles of sweat, a whining cramp in the left leg. Lenny Clearwater didn't care.

"Honey?"

"Not now..." he whispered, barely even interrupting the execution of his mission to understand what was asked of him.

Light steps treaded into the room. Mrs. Clearwater shook her head with a smile. She hadn't seen him being like this for the longest time. "I guess I'd better leave you to it, then," she smirked at the spousal neglect, repressing silly giggles stuck in her throat. _Oh, Lenny..._ she mused, much like her husband when he was into his work, counting butterflies being birthed in her stomach on the way to the kitchen.

"Huh?" he turned sharply, confused and scared. Then went back to his writing. The piece was almost done.

The news channel host was faintly traceable from the TV in the kitchen: "...the body of Senator Clarence Limbtick earlier today. At this hour, the circumstance and reasons for the senator's apparent suicide remain unknown..."

"Oh! Honey, isn't it that guy you met with this morning?"

His eyes stopped brimming with a true sense of purpose. "What?"

A piercing sound of breaking glass—large, possibly window—rolled through the tiny apartment—it came from the kitchen. His wife shrieked, but a silent double tap ended that rather quickly.

"MARGERY?!"

Instead of his wife, some other soft—stealth—steps moved into the room.

"Oh," Lenny sighed, disconsolately understanding everything and at the same time accepting his fate.

The bullet buried deep into his brain, forming an unsightly hole in his forehead, and a blood spurt came out of it as Clearwater's body was thrown on his working table. A black-clad person—no markings or labels on a generic uniform of sorts—made a few steps towards the dead journalist and fired another shot from the silenced Desert Eagle directly into his heart.

The gloved hand descended upon the mouse, moved it and clicked to close the word processor.

Do you want to save changes to "Spinnergate.doc"?

The mouse cursor determinately moved to and clicked "No."

# — 9 —

" _Goddamn parasites_ ," an old pudgy man emphasized in the face of the prospect of actually spending time in the sewers. " _Bloody vermin_." Taking into account his disgruntled grimace, the words were kind of redundant. The look spilled over into his uniform naturally. Dirty and old grey overalls. A coffee stain in the middle, on the hill of his gut. A shabby badge on his chest he wore proudly:

Bob

Sewage Services

It was hard for him to walk long distances, much less descend into the putrid hell that were the city's sewage systems. Filled with aroma so pungent and toxic that his eyes were turning redder by the minute.

The underground systems were pretty dark and damp, so the light of the man's headgear light was dancing on the slimy walls. It seemed like he'd walked miles upon miles already, even though that wasn't nearly as true as he thought. The man stopped and hugged his left side, huffing. " _Devil's cunt_ ..."

A rustle in the groove of the tunnel made him reconsider, his head suddenly staring astutely at the fork of sorts—just around six steps up ahead.

"Who's there?!" he screamed as if the air had miraculously returned inside his hurting lungs.

Slowly, he walked closer to the turn, absolutely nothing to see in it at this angle. The time and the sound had stopped, save for the chaotic dripping of the various pipes above. As he was approaching the groove in the wall in this complete silence, a giant rat appeared out of the hole, startling him but ultimately running past—no other agenda other than to save his freshly bitten tail.

The man mumbled some obscure profanity in return, barely comprehending what he was uttering himself. He shone some light inside the channel that led God knows where but saw nothing of interest. Just shit-covered walls and an ankle-deep puddle of filth stretching as far as his teary eyes could see.

After some deliberation, the man moved on. He had to fix some pipes farther down the road and had no time or desire to question what drove the alpha rat away from its nest.

# — 10 —

"Is this the place?" Harras croaked and wiped the back of his neck with a handkerchief. Under the scorching sun, he had a feeling that he was melting outside while his internal organs were being baked in their own juices.

"Yes, Father," Youngblood deduced some sporadic eye darts later.

The not-so-busy street was definitely the one they were looking for and so was the apartment building in front of them.

"Pray we're not too late," the older man in the full collar shirt and the long, hot cassock urged the younger one in ditto.

With a face full of intensity, Harras buzzed the apartment 333 for a better half of the minute—no result.

"Father, you still haven't told me what exactly is going on," Youngblood made his voice heard. "I don't even know what we're doing here."

"Typical," Harras muttered through his teeth. Yet, since nobody was answering the door phone, he understood rather grudgingly that he had no choice but to entertain Youngblood's curiosity sooner or later. He preferred sooner this time. "Earlier today, I received a text message from one of our congregation. He happens to be a senator, here, in Washington. This is the contact that told me—confessed to me—about the conspiracy we're delving into." All the while, George Youngblood was nodding like an obedient sheep. "The text contained the address. _This_ address, Youngblood."

"And?" The look in his eyes was as clueless as the sidewalk people passing them by, scurrying about their day.

Harras took his impatient finger off the buzzer, grabbed Youngblood by his shirt and dragged him to the side, at the same time getting closer to whisper, "We need to _find out_ the rest... to save the world from this plight."

"But... Father, I don't even know what this 'plight' you keep mentioning is," Youngblood shrugged, as respectfully as he possibly could.

"See?" Harass' eyes squinted. "This is exactly why we don't see eye to eye, you and I. Pritchard would've figured out everything already." That name. He never took it in vain.

"I know you had an exceptional affinity for your former partner, sir, but—with all due respect—he isn't here anymore."

"What are you getting at?" he growled, like a vicious dog who had been unchained only to scare the loud, obnoxious kids off.

"All I'm saying is, maybe it's time to let it go and move on with your li—"

"Don't you dare talk about him, Youngblood." Harras threatened him with a finger, contempt seeping through his pores. "Ever."

"I'm sorry, Father."

At that precise moment, the door had opened—a girl in a straw hat walked out—and before it slid shut, the older priest hurried to slip inside, dragging the younger one by the shirt inside as well.

On their way up the staircase, Harras was glancing—almost nervously—at his low-ranking colleague, then... "Fidget spinners," he finally said and shuddered.

"Fidget spinners?"

"Yes, they are these spinning little toys..." Harras explained and made haste to elaborate, "What we're dealing here is a fidget spinner worldwide conspiracy."

"Oh..." Youngblood couldn't say much besides that. His features grew confused.

"The people on the streets, at their offices, _at schools_ ... they are being controlled somehow by the power unknown—through their use of fidget spinners!"

"Wow..." It's official: he was dumbstruck.

"I know that it might be hard to believe in the beginning. But trust me." Harras stopped and looked dead into his eye. The atmosphere was getting thinner. It was heavier than Revelation. "Once you notice it, it's everywhere." Unknowingly, he crossed himself.

The silence the priests operated within, creeping forward in its shadow, was becoming unnerving—until it was broken when Harras loudly knocked on the door with a number 333 and yanked its knob just in case. It was locked. And nobody answered.

"Let's approach this from the rear," Harras suggested.

Minutes later, both were climbing the fire escape on the side of the building. Fortunately, there was no one in the alley to see them doing that, except for one hobo, but he was sleeping.

"Do you know who's behind this—this epidemic?" Youngblood crammed a question of importance in, still trying to wrap his dizzy head around the global conspiracy.

"I have my suspicions," his mentor and simultaneously partner replied, climbing up. "But let's not get ahead of ourselves. As you know, speculation is not the Church's way."

Third floor. That was it, their destination. The window was already broken, so technically they weren't entirely breaking in.

"We're too late," Harras declared somberly, stepping into apartment, shards crunching under his boots.

When the disturbed bedroom crossed over into the kitchen, Youngblood saw it, too: a blood-splattering extravaganza on the left-hand wall. But no body. Another room was equally as disturbing, as the working desk was covered in gore. No _bodies_.

Something else caught both priests' eyes.

"Is that what I think it is?" Youngblood asked.

"Depends on what you think that is," Harras answered, uncharacteristically on edge—the fear in him was almost palpable, every nerve in his body exposed and high-strung. It was blood, alright. Distracting and still warm. Something caught his peripheral vision—something huge. "My God!" Harras started gasping. It was the entire wall dedicated to the spinner conspiracy he had mentioned just minutes ago. "We've hit the mother load."

It was so apparent and obvious—right under their noses—just to their side—that it was too hard to see at first. Red marker markings—an assortment of them—in different shapes and sizes, some with arrows pointing at the likewise hand-drawn schematics of the ominous invention: "fidget spinners"; three sixes—drawn on top and extended out of the spinner prongs; "What's inside???"; mysterious triangles superimposed on another fidget spinner; "potentially sign of the devil"; "Project _Spin_ nen"; numerous doodles of cryptic kind, hard to decipher and process; "3 Eyes of Bethlehem!"; "ANCIENTS" written in the same red marker, underlined _twice_ , next to a photo snapped inside what looked like a pyramid—next to horrifying hieroglyphs of origin unknown—a hieroglyph that was very familiar, of a fidget spinner in someone's hand; different pages ripped straight from the Bible stapled into the wall; colorful threads coming through all the evidence, tying it all together. All spelling doom, figuratively. But arranged in such a way that it was spelling "DOOM" literally too.

"Unbelievable!" Youngblood exclaimed, feeling the fever taking over him. He blessed himself post-haste as his mentor's hectic eyes ran through the news articles section of the wall—just some of the headlines made him shiver: "Dakota Man Found Dead, Spinner in Hand"; "Pastor Commits Suicide Amid Statutory Rape Allegations"; "Three Infants See Talking Dog, Now Blinded."

It was certainly a lot to take in... Suddenly, the understudy's face changed. "Do you smell gas?"

Harras' did as well. "Now that you've mentioned it..."

Two men huffed through the apartment and jumped out of the window they jumped in through, and just as they did—the loud bang! The apartment blew up, pieces of glass and furniture, and other things, miraculously flying just above their heads—and just above them—as the priests were crouched after landing on their knees in quite the hurry—that might've saved them. Unendurable ringing in their ears conducted a symphony. Both men looked at one another, asking if the other one was okay and likewise mouthing "I can't hear you!"

The apartment caught fire and the smoke spread quickly, covering everything in sight. The hinges of the fire escape now were unbalanced, screeching as the duo rushed down to save their already endangered lives. Meanwhile, the third storey became an orange inferno.

From his undercover police car, Detective Horowitz's vision was seeing off the two as they fled the scene of crime through the alley. He squinted, determinedly.

# — 11 —

For years, Detective Horowitz was thinking about retirement. Sometimes it felt like "burned-out" was his middle name. When life hit him, he didn't hit it back, he just took it. Too tired to fight back, to alleviate the pressure by any means other than drinking heavily. _What was I supposed to do, huh?_ he would say to himself in the solitude of his home, surrounded by trophies of years past, of his spoiled youth—he was a quarterback in a dream team, but that ligament injury changed everything. Now, all that was left of it—that eagerness to fight, to win—was a bunch of medals and trophies painted gold, a cruel reminder of pity he had to face every day until the day he inevitably dies.

Before his wife finally left him, she only said one word to his face: "Nobody." Tandy wasn't malicious about it, she just put it out there as a _fait accompli_. He didn't argue with her, which just proved her point, now that he thought about it. The only person that didn't leave him at one point or another in his by all accounts failed life was his daughter.

"Jessie?" he called out her name when he got home, keys jingling in his hands. "Are you back from school yet?" He grinned, expecting her usual sarcastic retort.

"No, I'm not," she would usually say. It was not the case today.

"Jessica?" Detective's lighthearted smile gradually vanished. His footsteps grew faster.

He loved his baby girl dearly. Sometimes to her detriment. Deep down inside, he knew that making her stay with her mom was probably a better solution when he and Tandy got separated, but... She was the only person in his family who didn't look at him with disdain or disappointment. For better or for worse, he decided to be selfish—just this once—just to keep his sanity. Not to mention Jessica was all for it. They had a bond nothing could break. Or so it seemed.

"JESSICA?!"

The kid wasn't there. His house was as empty as his dreams.

# — 12 —

Having narrowly escaped death, Harras and Youngblood decided to split for the time being. As their investigation was abruptly halted, the former tried to find new leads, and the latter was happy to still be _alive_. It's been days since they spoke...

Youngblood was on his way home after the usual sermon, although for some inexplicable reason the crowd was much smaller this time, deep in his thoughts until... a random quick glance to his left revealed a young girl with a fidget spinner (spinning) in her hand. Her face was blank, and her eyes seemingly didn't focus on anything, yet she was still going somewhere—like a zombie. George took a deep breath. He shook his head and kept on moving. _Once you notice it, it's everywhere,_ echoed inside his skull, his mentor's terse words hitting a nail on the head of the apparent reality.

Youngblood saw an extremely old woman who visibly contemplated crossing the road, albeit wasn't sure enough she could pull off such a formidable task. He smiled, took her hand and helped her to get to the other side. Confused, she smiled back at him and thanked him for about five minutes. After that, he entered the building he was residing in. As he walked through the hallway, thinking about what activities he wanted to partake in next, a door to an apartment he was passing by opened and a young man slid out of it, bumping in the priest's shoulder and literally throwing him off balance. When Youngblood had recovered and turned around to maybe politely tell the occupant to watch where he was going, he noticed that it was another spinner and its comatose host, who didn't even acknowledge the accident and just kept going... and spinning. _Once you notice it, it's everywhere._

Ignoring cold sweat, Youngblood rushed to his apartment. Inside, there was the safety of his warm, slightly musty home. He placed his soutane on the armchair and his buttocks on the couch. The big flat TV hummed for a little while before it started showing moving pictures. It was the only part of the interior that was worth something. The single room was old and decrepit. A roach ran through it. Youngblood didn't mind. _Every living thing is equally deserving of life,_ his father once told him. He was drunk that day, barbecuing some pork chops. _Remember this._ And he remembered. Nevertheless, it was home, so in some strange way the roach was his roommate. PlayStation controller in hand, Xbox Stereo Headset on head, Youngblood booted up _Heroes of the Storm_. During the Draft in the Ranked game of Hero League he first picked Nova. He exhaled, neck crackling as the head jerked around, and minutes later the match was on. He needed the relaxation.

Ten minutes later, when he dived the enemy team 1v5, when his allies had gone to the objective in the other part of the map, and he died in less than a second, he slapped his thigh with violent force and screamed at the top of his lungs, "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING, YOU STUPID FUCKING RETARDS?! GOD! FUCKING! DAMN YOU!" He tilted his head back and screamed even louder, "WHAT FUCKING KILLED ME, YOU SON-OF-A-BITCH MOTHERFUCKER, HUH?!" His feet were banging on the floor. "WHAAAAT?"

"Look, a Nova tank," Creepstar1503 said in the chat.

"Heh heh," a player named gnobeballs replied.

The black shirt with a faintly misplaced white collar on became ever wetter with thick sweat. He had enough. Younblood got up and grabbed the keyboard, furiously typing to his whole team: "noob team", "fucking kill yourself" and "faggot cunt!!" After that, he quit the game in advance and laughed maniacally after hurling some more insults to the black screen of his TV and the gamepad into the wall.

However, the noise he was making paled in comparison to the kind of commotion going on outside. Youngblood couldn't believe his eyes when he looked out of the window. The sound of goose stepping was overwhelming. Momentarily, his nervousness changed to dread.

"Father, are you seeing this?" he asked first thing when Harras picked up the phone.

The bacchanalia on the streets reflected in his beautiful blue bloodshot eyes: thousands of people, marching through the streets, some carrying some kind of black-white-and-red flags with them. But most importantly, every last one of those people were spinning fidget spinners in at least one of their hands.

"This is what I was worried about," Harras proclaimed over the phone. "This is how the world ends."

# — 13 —

The news were calling it "The March of the Spinners." A rather apt description, all things considered. Millions of people, young people primarily, marched on the streets of all major cities of the world, creating panic, fear, traffic jams. General population was in shock for days. The governments shut down for weeks.

"What do they want?" one news anchor asked during the live coverage of the event that shook the world.

"Nobody knows, Jane," another one answered, but it wasn't an answer at all.

For hours, the millions of fidget spinner users marched and marched on. Then, they dissipated, came back home. No demands, no threats. No sense.

Although Harras was certainly onto something there, he was definitely wrong in one thing. This wasn't the end. This was just the beginning.

# — 14 —

"As you know, the fidget spinner obsession has been spreading like wildfire. Formed just months prior, Spinnerist Sect had grown so large and powerful throughout the whole world that a crucial division inside the organization was but an inevitability. Spinnerer Cult split from Spinnerist Sect during the Great Spinning Schism of 2017. Spinnerer Cult stated that only three-bladed, ordinary-shaped spinners are allowed and others were therefore blasphemous, and Spinnerist Sect argued that every shape, form and number of blades is acceptable and fine. Spinnerer Cult is currently a minority, crushed by the sheer numbers of its point of origin, which only grows stronger despite the Schism, despite likewise growing concern of the general public and, more importantly, our congregation. Even though the unsanctioned "Marches of the Spinners" had shut down major cities around the globe multiple times before, crippled the stability and safety of the whole world, and for all we know the next one could break the socio-economic values of our very way of life any day, the police and the government is none the wiser. Some call this plight harmless, don't see dangerous intent. But, deep down, we all know it: this travesty _must_ be stopped. Therefore, we've got to take matters into our own hands."

"What do you suggest we do?"

"What we _should_ do—we resist. We create the Resistance."

A murmur rose up, swirling under the arching dome of the roof.

A hand was raised to calm the murmurs down. "Just last week, we've received the alarming news that countless Concentration Camps had been build all over the country." Harras was talking to a group of uneasy people, a congregation of sorts, sitting on the pews, abyssal unrest in their eyes, they were fidgeting back and forth. A pointer in hand, he was pointing at slides that were thematically appropriate for his words. Right now, one of them was projecting an image of the crowd during the first March: every twentieth, it seemed, was brandishing the Spinnerist Sect banners—on their fabric a three-pronged, almost a triskelion-like figure (representing a spinning fidget spinner) inside the white circle on the crimson background. "They tell us they'll help you concentrate—but it is a lie! A clever ploy to trick those with their will untouched to be brainwashed." He paused, the seriousness of the situation floating heavily inside his old eyes. He was about to be even more frank than he was before. "Do you really think that fidget spinners were created for the autists?" As the shock rolled the dozens of people inside the church over, but ultimately had passed, his voice peaked in its urgency and motivation: "Months upon months it's been brewing, and we did absolutely nothing about it. Now, we have to reap what our inactivity sow." He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and opened them. "How many of your friends and family members have succumbed to this disease already? How many will in the near future? Their souls are in our hands... It's imperative we avert the disaster at all costs!" He pointed at the people he was addressing. "We have to find a cure for the Fidget Spinner Plague."

The audience was speechless and awestruck. A man in a baseball cap clapped. Soon, they were leaving, but not before shaking hands with Harras and receiving further instructions on the follow-up meet ups.

The much older lady with a pink purse walked up to Harras, passionately telling him, "These may be the End Times, but seeing you behind the altar I know that God is with us."

"Thank you," he nodded as she smiled. "Thank you," he said when she slipped a five-dollar bill into a donation box.

Soon, the people dissipated, and it was eerily quiet in the House of the Lord. All but two. Father Harras and a man in a hoodie. He stood up and headed straight for the reverend. When his hood slid back, the obscured face became clear as day: Detective Horowitz. He didn't say a word. A certain stern quality permeating through his focused look.

"Can I help you?" Harras asked the informally dressed man.

"Unfortunately, yes..." said the man and pulled the gun out of the back of his pants, in a flash pointing it at the confused man of faith.

Harras gasped and darted his body back a little. "What is the meaning of this?!" he demanded to know, if very afraid doing so.

Detective's hand sat tighter on the pistol grip as he forced himself to talk, "You were wrong. The police isn't none the wiser." For a few seconds, the time between the two intense men had frozen, it seemed. "When I saw you and your apprentice fleeing Clearwater's apartment... ravaged and in flames... I reported that info to the chief in the precinct."

"What are you talking about?" Trickles of sweat ran down the priest's lively face.

Detective's gaze was morbid. "The chief made a phone call and suddenly got silent. And that was that. Until yesterday, when he insisted to meet with me privately and told me _they_ have my daughter, and that, if I want to ever see her again, I should _kill_ you."

"Oh my God..."

"So, see, Father?" Detective Horowitz had a barely noticeable neck spasm. "You're quite wrong about the authorities: they're not at all in the dark. We are in on this." His determined finger cocked the hammer. "The higher echelons of power want you dead, Harras. There's no need for a loose end such as yourself, especially not now, when this 'spinner' thing is about to _actually_ blow up."

"Are you going to kill me?" Father asked, nervous but accepting at the same time. His opposition clearly had the upper hand, and there was nothing he could do.

"I was sent here to tie up those loose ends," Horowitz confirmed the priest's worst fear, continuing his own train of thought. He hardened the grasp, his flesh and bone clenching so intensely as to make his knuckles white. "But I will not kill for my daughter." He lowered the loaded weapon, sharply. "I cannot." His voice trembled. "I could never look into her eyes again if she'd knew that I took someone's life—some other innocent life—to save hers." A single tear rolled down his cheek. "This is how it ends." He threw the revolver away; it made a dent at the base of the altar. The priest's body unintentionally experienced a nervous jolt, as if jumping in one place, but not that high. "I can't kill for my baby girl—even though she is the world to me—I can't betray her like that..." he raved, as if repeating himself, as if to justify his actions, as if the first time wasn't enough. "I can't look her in the eyes if I'm a bad man like that."

Father nodded and put a sweaty palm on Detective's shoulder. "Will you join our holy cause, then..."

"Detective Horowitz."

"...Detective Horowitz?"

"Yes, Father. Yes, I will."

"Then I promise you that we will find your daughter—and save her—together."

All too grim Detective nodded.

"But first we need to form the Resistance. You're a man with a military background, I would assume?" To which Detective nodded again. "Maybe this was God's providence, after all... that we met." Detective nodded again. "Hang on a second..." Harras told him and turned his back to him, walking up to the altar, "I'll give you all the contacts and personal information of the people we've recruited so far." Seconds later, he was offering the policeman a heap of papers, handwritten. "Are you ready to find out where our secret hideout is?"

Detective nodded.

And so the Secret Resistance was formed.

# — 15 —

The grey walls might've seemed a little depressing if it weren't for the fact that Jamie Cotton couldn't feel that particular condition, depression. In fact, that could be said for every emotion his hormonal teenage body should've basked in. But it didn't. It couldn't. He was too preoccupied.

The grey walls and a bunk, barely used anyway. Or maybe not used at all. Other than sitting, that is.

"Vere are you takink me?" An old voice with a heavy accent Jamie couldn't place—didn't even try to place—probably didn't even hear. The voice was aggressive, maybe even a little too presumptuous. It was rolling down the corridor just outside the room the boy was so idle in. "I demand to knof zis infor—" A thud to the gut ended the angry, entitled request abruptly. The silent footsteps carried him away; no additional hustle.

The boy didn't care for any of that. Nor did he care about his parents, scared witless about the unknown whereabouts of their only son. No. He was staring, in his hypnotic trance, at the devilish thing in his hand. His blank eyes bore a clue of what he was witnessing in this psychotic state of mind—and possibly soul. Was it the infinity of torture or barely a wall of grief? Perhaps someone could shed some light on what Jamie Cotton was thinking about, seeing and/or feeling, divulge that precious mystery. Alas, the grey walls wouldn't talk.

# — 16 —

The helicopter rotors bellowed, thunderous and distracting.

"The storm is coming," Youngblood dreamed out loud, gazing at the distant brewing horizon.

"The storm is already here..." Harras told him gruffly.

It was a dark and rainy day. The wind knocked onto the windows, desperately trying to get in, to chill everything inside as well as outside. Harras could feel it with his old bones, and sometimes, even with _in_.

The iron machine of flight set its level feet on the helipad, preferring ground over the skies, at least for a short while. As the roof of the church wobbled with vibration, so did the duo of priests overseeing the epochal landing in its close proximity. Soon, the metal dragon's bellowing subsided. It had to rest.

Harras hurried to open the door, ducking under the decelerating blades. A significant figure in all white and an extravagant headdress stepped out of the no longer flying vehicle, accepting Harras' offer of a hand. As the person's feet landed on the roof's concrete, he spoke, breaking the silence, "I'm glad to see you are okay, Harras." He had a slight Italian accent. "I would've flown here sooner, had it not been unsafe."

"Yes, of course... Father," Harras told him and promptly bowed to the Pope.

"Are you ready for the event?" he, the Pope, asked.

"Everything is ready, Father," the young priest wedged in, approaching his idol.

"Ah, bambino Youngblood," the Pope shifted the lordly if a little absent look at the Harras' apprentice.

"You... you know my name, sir?"

The Pope's following smirk was barely noticeable. "Come, my wards. My travels were long and exhausting. I will tell you all about it."

As they were departing from the scene, Harras looked over his shoulder. _Strange._ The barely moving helicopter blades reminded the priest of a cross. A spinning cross...

The life was brewing in the church's basement; usually such an activity was reserved for the bottles of fine vine, but those times had passed. Containers on wheels with army markings rolling by. People standing guard and professionally paying no attention to the newcomers in Harras, Youngblood and the Pope.

"This is our congregation," the former told the latter, his palm outlining the people scurrying around the dank underground of the place of sanctity above. "Congregation of Resistance. CORE, for brevity."

"Very good, Harras," the Pope nodded, the fact the lower-ranking priest he was commending found great pride in.

Former Detective Horowitz, a clipboard under his armpit, walked over to the trinity. His face was scruffy, dense beard unattended for weeks. He acknowledged the distinguished guest with a tip of the khaki beanie, "Your Holiness..."

"Please..." the ever so humble man in the gorgeous garments urged him, "just call me Pope."

Around them, in the musty air itself, the low humming was ongoing. Somewhere, a man was prepping oak wood for the purpose of making the stakes, gently filing it and whispering to it as if to an old, close friend.

"Is the 4th division ready?" Harras got straight to business with the erstwhile man of law.

He took a brief peek at the clipboard and crossed something off with a pencil. "Uh-huh. They'll be here in an hour, give or take fifteen minutes."

"Good." The senior priest nodded. "Good." He turned to the Pope and explained, "We're gathering the local troops today. Since you've arrived, I thought the brave men and women of CORE can get a briefing from their General himself."

A smile glimpsed across the Pope's face. "With all those talks of excommunication floating around... it felt like Vatican was exclusively inhabited by the old gossip weavers... But when the archbishops were directly telling me that your punishment should be much more severe, when they told me God wouldn't grant you redemption after what you've done, even if you sought to atone with all your heart..." as he was talking, Harras' body became unwieldy, his cheeks trembling like they were still under the influence of the rooftop wind, "I simply told them, 'Just wait.' And now I know fairly well that you are the man for this formidable job at hand. I see now that my judgement was indeed... infallible."

A tear escaped Harras' eye.

Youngblood stepped into the sentimental pause and told them, "It's starting, Fathers." His young palms handed three pairs of glasses with darkened lenses over to them and Horowitz. Soon, all four were standing under the glassy window overlooking the darkening skies—huge shadow looming over the sun, sliding over it, displacing it...

But a handful of minutes became tens of them. The dark ring in the sky had stopped moving.

"Wow." Youngblood rubbed his hurting neck. "I've never seen an occultation quite as long..."

Horowitz voiced his own concerns, telling the younger man, "To tell you the truth, it gives me the creeps, and I surely want it to end already."

"Indeed," squinting Harras agreed.

The longer the halo in the darkness lingered, the more menacing it was becoming. And the dread was ultimately creeping up on them, as if forming from the shadows, of doubt, itself.

"It will never pass," the Pope finally postulated, as if striking at the hearts of men nearby.

"Excuse me?" Horowitz snapped out of it and directed his disquieted look at the man in the peculiar headgear.

"'And the forces of darkness will make it so the people of this blue Earth will only see darkness in their lovers' eyes.'" The Pope's own eyes took on a cryptic meaning—a reflection of sorts. "I'm afraid the darkness is all we have now, children of mine."

The men around him gasped. Indeed, they knew deep down in their intestines: the chilling news was decisively true.

The Pope stopped observing the supernatural phenomenon and took off the protective glasses. His long, white nails reached inside an internal pocket of his white, now pale, garments and soon emerged with a piece of paper stuck between them. The holy hand relegated it to Harras.

"What you're holding in your hand now cost many, many lives to procure," the Pope explained the heaviness of the present and the situation. "Do not take this lightly."

"What is it?" Harras asked and looked closely at the top-secret words written on it.

The Pope turned around, looked over his shoulder and asserted, "Your first field assignment..."

# — 17 —

The exhilarating smell of freshly unearthed ground, moist and crawling with worms. It somehow was bringing Harras back to his troubled childhood, to that hard yet innocent time of his life when he hadn't picked up on humanity's flaws yet, hadn't fought in a war, hadn't seen death in all its grisly details. Something told him, looking at this freshly made moats and trenches, not to mention a wall of barbed wire up ahead, that he has all the chances to experience all that yet again real soon, the way things were going thus far.

A fortification—an _enemy_ fortification—stood low and gloomy under the darkened, occultation-soaked skies, it was hard to estimate—guesstimate—how deep it really sat in the ground, though the trio of saboteurs—spies of sorts—knew full well there was more than met the eye with this Concentration Camp. Numerous interconnected barracks and hangars, corridors, buildings of unknown purpose. Yet unknown purpose. The Papal paper told them just where to go, but now they needed to see for themselves what was actually _happening_ inside this dreaded location and, by extension, thousands like it all over the world. Located deep inside the woods, usually hastily but exquisitely erected on a clearing such as this one, the Concentration Camps' whereabouts were a closely guarded secret. _No more secrets._

"Let's find out what they're hiding," Harras told the two men lying beside him in the grass—all of them intently looking in the binoculars in their ever-tightening grasp.

"What's the plan, sir?" Youngblood asked, his soutane absorbing the moisture from the blades of grass he was pressing down with his lean body.

"Jenkins," Harras relegated it to the young man closing the trio up.

Jenkins breathed in, heavily, no doubt calculating all the visible ins and outs, conducting a plan in scope similar to an orchestral symphony. He was Horowitz's most trusted man, familiar if you will, in Detective's own words "the most tactical person fit for a resistance such as this." He did not disappoint up until this point, already Jenkins had created a secret back channel with the military insurgents, helping CORE with the supplies, established a link with Washington's anarchistic groups, created a list of possible go-to recruits and various ingenious ways of testing their allegiances. In all of that, Jenkins was a smart kid, yes, but where he truly was shining was the theater of the battlefield. And this was it.

"Sir, our best option is to crawl to that barbed wire," he pointed to the northeast side of the fence, "cut it, and enter the enemy territory through those barracks," he pointed again, his hand a determinant baptized in the fires of numerous battles, this time at the massive building a couple of hundred yards out. "Once inside, heavy opposition likely—you leave that to me." As he voiced his assumptions, he almost instinctively grabbed the silenced UMP45 that was waiting by his side. "We work our way through the base, we look at the options..." a short glance at an assortment of structures followed by a short sigh, "fly by the seat of our pants. Sir," he focused his look back on Harras, awaiting his input, possible orders and/or instructions.

The priest nodded. The plan was as good as they could get, given the circumstances and time constraints. "I never even asked about your credentials. Not that there's any doubt about them." _Even a backhanded compliment is better than nothing in the face of the probable standoff,_ he thought.

"With all due respect, sir, that's classified, sir." It was apparent Jenkins wasn't willing—or ready—to go into specifics of his warcraftian valor at this time.

"Black Ops," Harras derived, very sure of his judgement.

Jenkins sighed, but relented in the end—they were in this together, knee-deep, now: "Among other things." _Things he wasn't proud of,_ Harras gathered. He knew that look back from 'Nam. Sometimes he saw that look in his own face when he looked in the mirror. "Let's move out," Jenkins finally said—he had a commanding voice of a natural leader, yet it wasn't too much for his little personal platoon of two priests, just the right amount—setting aside his binoculars.

But when it was time to go—to crawl—one of them didn't move. Harras looked behind and didn't know what to think: Youngblood was frozen... with fear.

"What we find here today will define the rest of history," Harras tried motivating him.

That didn't help. Didn't help a bit.

"Come on, Youngblood, I may not like you... but you may still be useful."

The revelation shook him up, waking the young lad. "You... truly think so?"

Even though Harras took a long, hard time to find the answer for that question, he nevertheless said "Yes" in the end. It'd be an understatement that the acknowledgement of that last fact—a confession of sorts—was hard to admit. It was absolutely true, though.

Soon, after the trio had crawled to the barrack Jenkins noted as a place of interest, Jenkins was first to stand up and offered his nimble hand to Harras and then to Youngblood. When they were standing near the door, all breathed in the cool late-September air in angst-driven anticipation and prepared for the worst while hoping for the best. And just like that, they went it.

# — INTERLUDE —

Just like lightning, the shots were fired—swooshing through the air and entering their intended targets. Of course, most of them were haphazardly hitting bushes, bamboo trees, and the ground. Just as well, seeing as how hard the enemy was to decipher in this hell on earth. The smell of napalm burning—the smoldering skin and meat—was still unbearable to Private Harras. If anything, it became even more unbearable than before.

VIETNAM

30 April 1975

A cloud of swift orange smoke enveloped the jungle, unannounced, quickly closing in. It was getting hard to breathe.

"God _damn_ infantry is out of their God _damn_ minds doing 'palm strikes so close to us!" Colonel Mustard barked out in his usual gravely tone of voice.

"Next thing, we'll be fried chicken same as gooks!" Private Boiletti voiced his concerns.

"I'd rather you _were_ a fried chicken, Boiletti, at least I wouldn't have to listen to your scrawny ass," Sargent Bass joked around.

"Now shut it, boys!" Colonel commanded, getting the scope of his rifle close to his left eye, and immediately pulled the trigger. "If the recon did its shit right," he told his unit as he strapped the weapon over his shoulder, "the objective is somewhere in the midst of this Goddamn quadrant. Now, if we—Private Harras..." he paused, seeing the young man's difficulty with breathing, "damn, you look pale, son. Are you alright?"

The eighteen-year-old nodded, failing or perhaps not wanting to squeeze out a more verbal response.

"Keep lying, you little shit," his squadmate hasted to doubt him.

"Boiletti!" Colonel Mustard had none of it. "I swear I'll pump your fugly face with lead if I hear another word from you!"

"Sir, yes, Sir..." His tone was facetious. The man was at least twice Harras' age—and size—frame chunky, sores on his face.

"Well, finally someone shut him down," escaped from Private Curly's mouth. A murmur out back echoed around the eight-man unit.

Boiletti made a "yapping mouth" hand gesture, his face gurning with disdain. He was never a fan favourite and that lack of appreciation went both ways.

"Shut it, Curly," Sargent Bass said in plain monotone.

"Sir, yes, Sir!" Judging by his "Ain't I clever?" face, Curly was pretty full of himself.

"You're not gonna shut it until you're shot, huh?" Sergeant ribbed him back playfully. Even at first glance, it was apparent that the detachment had a rapport, even if some of it was less than friendly in nature.

"Jeez, Sarge, I wonder if—" Suddenly, a storm of bullets, raining in from all directions, interrupted the soldier. "WE'RE COMPROMISED!"

"NO SHIT!" Boiletti retorted, setting up his light machine gun on the ground and squeezing its trigger with his sweaty index finger. The sound of the stream of its bullets was choking everything else inside their defensive perimeter. The low hearability was compounded by the low visibility—on all fronts—as the orange clouds were trying to engulf the US military into its fiery depths. Fortunately for them, the situation meant that they weren't particularly a proverbial fish in a barrel in the midst of this confusion and disaster. Unfortunately, so weren't the enemies shooting at them.

"Well, I _reckon_ our _recon_ mission just went to shit, Sarge!" Curly tried to keep his constantly derailing train of thought on the matter at hand. The constant joke cracking wasn't helping that cause.

"When did it ever not?" Boiletti voiced his opinion on the matter as well, his shoulder vibrating from the permanent recoil.

The orange smoke covered their vision. Shots had to be fired blind. But they did. If some silent whimpers a long distance away were any indication, those shots counted. Counted _hard_.

"MOVE! MOVE! MOVE!" Colonel shouted, pointing furiously to the tree line to their left side; it was thicker and therefore safer in there.

The soldiers obeyed. The barrels of their guns glaring with shot after hectic shot, they were running for their lives, hearing as the enemy bullets fly past them, hit the ground around them, predicate a certain doom for the ones unlucky enough to find themselves in such a situation. All the while the orange fog was coming closer, seeping inside and enveloping their lungs and hearts with anxious trepidations.

"NOW _SH!_ " Colonel commanded and froze in place; his brave warriors followed the lead. Only Boiletti had a hard time listening to that order, but stopped once his magazine was empty nevertheless.

"Fuuuck me!"

"Shut the fuck up, Hooks!" Colonel urged him less angrily than usual—they had to keep quiet to stay alive, _at least for a little longer,_ he thought. _The smoke is killing me, yet I am still alive._ A random thought barreled through his mind. _The smoke is killing me, yet..._

As suddenly as before, the burning woods became quiet and the firefight was seemingly over. Only it wasn't.

"'A simple recon mission...'" Private Cronstein whispered the line—the lie—he had heard just this morning. His voice was so soft that even he didn't hear he was repeating it.

"What the fuck's going on, Sarge?" another soldier, Mr. Church, asked, tone unusually calm, self-collected.

Bass silently looked at the higher chain of command.

Colonel's tongue licked his upper lip, and seconds later the man gestured for everyone to get on the ground, slowly. Once again, they did.

For some reason, Harras counted his every breath, as if trying to remember what it was to be alive for the last time. Or maybe not. Maybe Colonel knew what he was doing. He _definitely_ knew. He had to...

The silence was absolutely critical. The silence not only physical but, as well, of mind. Every thought, it seemed, could pierce the air like an air horn. _Can't have that_ , was written all over Colonel's sturdy face. _Can't have that at all._

Minutes after, when some leaves treacherously rustled under the unseen enemy's feet, Colonel barked out, " _NOW!!!_ " and the rain of bullets befell the ranks of the smoke-hidden combatants on the wrong side of the war.

The exploding blasts, automatic mechanicality of burst fire, rhythmic jive of decay and destruction—a convergence, an apogee of sorts, that kept on going, rising, overbearing—deafening.

Nervous gestures of the ranking officer in the corner of eighteen-year-old Harras' twitching eye. The soldiers stood up, moved, ran... for their lives. There was no end to it. The enemy was barely there, like phantoms, sometimes hard to be seen even at that. Yet the spray of bullets was felling trees and scattering the earth. Minutes felt like years. Years of pain and suffering that had no finality to it. Whatsoever—in sight or by gut. Harras was caressing the gun in his sweaty palms, loving and hating it at the same time. Not unlike many of his brothers in arms.

No end in sight. No end in sound.

A faint sound of VCs tumbling to their deaths. A symphony of massacre. Nauseating, dizzying.

"Jesus..." A nervous smile rippled on Curly's face. "Remind me to never invite gooks to my backyard barbe—"

Suddenly, _Curly's face ripped open._ Cheek bone fragments flew inward as the skin unraveled, revealing the rended flesh beneath, ripped open and outward, as though under high pressure. At the same time, Curly's head jerked back. A high-caliber bullet went straight through the back of the private's skull. It was instantaneous. It was as if the unconscious body was flung backwards by some extraneous force, tumbling shortly on its relaxed back. Every muscle cramped no longer than for a few seconds before succumbing to stillness. Dreaded stillness.

The soldiers let out vicious screams of pain inflicted on their very souls by the death of their fallen fellow fighter—but most importantly—a friend. It all went fuzzy and blurry afterwards.

Good twenty minutes of intense fighting escaped Harras' memory, more for better than for worse. Though he remembered crystal clear the unending stream of flying bullets and explosions and the pudgy man with LMG, Boiletti, screaming, "Get your sweat-soaked asscheeks spread for me, you filthy zipperhead faggots!" at the face of imminent yet for the moment elusive death. Beyond that, nothing. _Not a damn thing. "Damn" being the key word in there._

The next thing he recalled was the men of his unit standing up and helping each other up. The spray of bullets has ceased by that time. The battle was over. This one at least.

"'A simple recon mission...'" Private Cronstein repeated, violently squeezing the trigger of the assault rifle in his twitching hands; it had jammed a long time ago.

"'Recon mission' my ass! It went beyond south if you ask me!"

"Good thing's nobody's asking you, Boiletti," Sargent Bass chimed in, causing a couple of chuckles here and there—mostly nervous chuckles.

"Besides asking him to shut his piehole, that is," clarified the other soldier, Hooks.

"Everyone's a comedian... speaking of—" As Boiletti looked to his right, his squinting eyes saw the thing that was left of Curly's face. It no longer resembled a human being. Just a bloody chunk of battered, chopped up meat. It almost made Curly's corpulent comrade sick.

Colonel overlooked the situation with the ever-present no-nonsense gaze. _I guess there's a bit of humanity still left even in Boiletti still..._

"Why only eight of us, Sir?" Hooks asked the silent man and too saw that Curly was no longer moving. "Well, _seven_ now..."

"Is your brain only capable of producing idiotic questions?"

"Sir, yes, Sir!" After a short pause, Hooks' eyes were aimed upwards. "I'd rather have the whole fucking artillery fuck up this whole goddamn hell hole of a country beyond recognition... Sir."

Colonel breathed in the smoke-smelling breath of cool air, chilling to the bone, and sighed. "If everyone shared that sentiment, son, maybe we wouldn't be losing this goddamn war."

Not more than two hundred feet through the smoke was a total mess. Dead bodies everywhere. VCs. Villagers. Houses shot up so much it was a wonder they were still standing. A couple of little boys, ripped to shreds by the machine gun fire earlier, fear of death etched in their gaping stares, casualties of war, collateral.

A voice with a certain "surfer" quality to it spoke up in the silent echoes of the bamboo forest. "Tell me this, Church..." the warrior stopped to glance at the motionless preteen bodies, "do you enjoy 'em gook boys as much as the ordinary ones, huh?"

Instead of dignifying Hooks with an answer, Church silently flipped him the finger.

"Cut the friendly banter, you two." Sergeant Bass was serious now. Deadly serious. "How much further, Hooks?"

Hooks took out a folded map out of his front pocket. "Damn, Sarge, it looks like... about three hundred feet or some shit, I don't know..."

Sergeant's stern lips said, "Great." _No more time for jokes, then._

"Hey, Hooks," Cronstein, a scrawny kid even younger than Harras by the looks of him, whispered, "is reefer the only thing that they grow in whatever shithole you came here from?"

"Fuck off, Jew boy," Hooks whispered back, even though it was mostly true.

Hours upon hours of walking through the festering jungle, sweat-inducing heat and unbearable humidity, as Mr. Church would put it, etching paths of intrigue and squabble in the stone of their souls. The usual stuff.

_At least the woods aren't burning anymore,_ thought Sargent Bass, no orange clouds of smoke in sight for a while.

Most of the way, everyone was silent—save for some bursts of friendly caustic banter that were too few and far between under the circumstance—until Hooks stopped dead in his tracks and nervously adjusted the red headband of his. "Tell me my eye sockets aren't the only ones seeing this messed up shit..."

Before his eyes—opened wide—a picture of grotesque perversion. The picture any painter would prefer to not see—to _un_ see. Disfigurement and grace interwoven together akin to a neatly packaged slab of rotting meat. Oh, it _was_ rotting, under this sun, not currently seen, but it was there. It was there. Ever-present, it was. Burning even when it seemingly wasn't there.

"Holy hell..." slipped out of Sarge's mouth. Someone closeby sighed in both awe and terror.

A picture of a deranged still life artist. A "picture" of inverted crosses and chopped up body parts plastered all over them. A puzzle of spoiled, disgraced flesh.

There was a dismembered pig on one of the crosses—a black cross, not like the others, appearing so because it was covered in tar or a similar substance; its disjointed limbs were still _moving_.

"Mr. Church." Colonel rarely spoke, but when he did it was of utmost importance to listen. Now, it was one of those rare but significant moments. "What the fuck is this?"

Church gazed upon the atrocities abound, only speaking after pensive moments of uneasy silence, "'And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.'"

"You're even more fucked up in the head than I thought, Church," Hooks uttered with a terrified look on his face.

"Where the fuck are their heads?" Boiletti asked almost with disdain, for some reason, traceable in his unpleasant voice. Even he didn't know if he really wanted to know the answer to his own question.

"It—" Cronstein was as white as a ghost. His tongue barely moved and he didn't know why.

"What is it, Private?" Colonel was not amused.

"It's nothing. It's just..." he stammered, avoiding eye contact, "all of this looks as though..."

Boiletti put a silver hip flask to his oily lips, sipping with a face full of the last good feeling he had left in him, in this life. Damn fine, flew across his neurons.

"Spit it out, son." Colonel's eyes' laser sight focus burnt straight through Private.

"Hand of the Devil, Sir," he finally spoke out. "It all looks like the hand of the De—"

Cronstein's guts gave up before long, as he leaned over a string of yellow spewed out of his throat. His glasses, barely holding on to his reddened ears, fogged up. Colonel put his steadfast hand on his shoulder and, moments later, Cronstein finally voiced his other growing concerns out loud, although with a visible difficulty of doing so: "What kind of savages would do such a... _thing?_ " He was at a loss of words after that point.

Boiletti saw something shimmering on of the body—or bodies—on the cross. His legs instinctively started moving towards it, eyes transfixed on the bloodied prize—what looked like a big golden crucifix.

"I don't think we're dealing with gooks anymore..." Mr. Church spoke out the suspicion nesting in the back of his head.

While the rest of his platoon was distracted by these observations, Boiletti was steadily getting closer to his goal, his hoggish eyes hypnotized.

"This ain't no fucking zips alright!" Hooks was visibly irritated, even though he definitely agreed with Church.

Boiletti's fat, greasy fingers reached for the coveted item hanging on the desecrated remains. Sergeant Bass noticed that in the corner of his intense eye. "Boiletti, fall in line!" he barked out the orders at him.

"I just wanna—" were Boiletti's final words before the explosion sent his limbless carcass hurtling backwards through the fuggy air. His fellow soldiers were briskly pushed on the ground by the almost instantaneous shockwave. Boiletti's fiery remains landed near staggered Harras, unable to process what the disgustingly smelling piece of burnt meat and bone was.

Colonel gave Harras a helping hand, soon everyone—shocked—was on their feet. Everyone except for Boiletti, for his feet were sprayed all over his living and breathing comrades. Harras spat out the pieces of flesh seemingly glued to his lips.

"Fuuuck!" Hooks drawled, eyes darting all over the place, all over the scattered remains of his friend in action. He was pacing back and forth, unable to understand what to do with his nervous impulses: his arms were hectic, he rubbed his nose with a back of his hand, grabbed his cracked rib from the fall, took out a cigarette that was tucked behind his ear—it was broken in half—and scratched his cheek with excessive force.

"Poor bastard." Sergeant Bass picked up the silver flask no longer belonging to Boilleti, it was miraculously undamaged, screwed its cap open and took a sip. Seeing Harras' clueless, staring face, he flung the flask to him. "Boiletti wouldn't want you to have it. So it's probably a good idea you have it." Sergeant's words didn't make sense to him then. Harras was in deep shock. He might've mechanically nodded, he didn't remember. Couldn't, really.

"Looks like we've reached the end of the line," Colonel spoke coarsely, looking at a tunnel entrance farther into the crosses backline, as if implanted into the earth and surrounded by bushes. Mysterious; it beckoned.

Sarge looked at the young Jew who, upon seeing it, tried to evade his gaze, but it was far too late. "Cronstein. Check it out."

"Um..." Cronstein looked side-ways, uncomfortably, being at a loss for words. He was the only person rookier than Harras was in this unit.

"Get in there, Private!" Sergeant Bass got impatient, barking orders at him, ignoring the sweating, shaking hands of the US warrior. "Get into the fucking tunnels." This time his voice became steady, before erupting again: "Now!"

"Sir..." the terrified soldier muttered, "I don't know, Sir..."

Sarge's tone appeared psyche-crushing. "Did your fucking parents survive Holocaust to lose you in these fucking tunnels?!"

"Sir, they... migrated to US long before World War II..."

"See? Even better, Cronstein! Now, fucking get to it, we don't got _all day!_ "

"Yes, Sir!.." Eighteen-year-old Cronstein tried to sound manly, but his voice started giving up halfway through.

From a distance, the remaining five observed thoroughly as Cronstein cautiously paced between the inverted crosses, praying that he wouldn't have to blow up in his addled mind. He didn't. Emerging safely out of the danger zone, he looked around and had a certain hesitation to enter a new one. Yet he did. He had to. It was his sworn duty to the country, to his family.

The other soldiers followed through the beaten path towards their slowly moving, unsure comrade.

Soon, the steel ground-embedded trapdoors into the tunnels were opened by the scrawny shaking hands. Cronstein gulped at people twenty feet away from him—people he considered friends—for the last time and descended with all the caution he could muster into the darkly abyss of unknown.

For minutes, there was nothing. Nothing but silence.

"Dude, you think, like, he's okay down there?" Hooks asked finally. He wasn't asking anyone specific, _just getting it out there, is all,_ as he would say. His elongated features looked rather impatient, as if he was melting under this daunting climate.

Nobody answered. Nothing came out the hatch neither. Sarge looked at his wristwatch: thirty minutes had passed. "Colonel?"

Colonel Mustard sighed before his face distorted in an unpleasant grin. "Church, you're the point man." Mr. Church acknowledged that with a singular nod. A dirty napkin alternately slid down both sides of Colonel's neck while his other hand adjusted the army cap he was wearing. "Let's end this fucker and go home," he told the remaining crew and swayed his head to the new point man of the group.

Mr. Church took the assault rifle strap off his shoulder, relocating the weapon into his hands, tightly, caressingly. He proceeded to enter the tunnels.

Every step deeper made the insides of the underground hideout that much dimmer—at least Harras thought it was a hideout—until fully inside where it was unreasonably dark. To say that the men inside were tense was to say nothing.

If only we've had some kind of—

Mounted on Mr. Church's right shoulder, the MX991/U light kindled its way through a thick beam, illuminating the walls made out of ground and compressed dirt under the feet. The passageway was akin to being sliced into the earth, six feet wide, six feet tall; not at all the VC design they witnessed far and wide during their time here. Something was off. Way off.

Harras' eyes darted around haphazardly: the underground bowels were stretching into infinity. _What is this place? Who made it?_ His foot stepped into some sleaze. It was some kind of goo, red if he saw that correctly. _Red goo? What?_ The place was the definition of "nauseous."

The light vanished. The standard issue GI Flashlight wasn't faulty... the place itself was faulty.

Having the early signs of an incoming royal FUBAR on their hands, the group, however, kept their steady course. The mission was above all else. Common sense included.

"Sir, can I have your permission to talk?" whispered Sargent Bass. This almost total darkness made his silhouette overly nightmarish, his voice too awestruck.

"Permission denied." Colonel was unbendable, maybe uncharacteristically so.

The rank and file marched on, following their fearless if slightly unreasonable leader into the depths of hell itself, it seemed.

Unhinged. The whole goddamn hole was unhinged. Attracting dizziness and the most acute feeling of restlessness neither of the men entrenched into it have felt before or even knew they could.

Finally, the seemingly endless tunnel didn't go forward, but therein lied a dilemma: it split left and right, forming whole _two_ passageways into uncertainty.

A silent "Goddamn..." escaped Sarge's lips. Usually, he wasn't the one to be showing his reservations when it came to the unit's and simultaneously his own safety; not a guy to be needlessly alarming the folks nearby. He wasn't even aware that he said anything.

Colonel's hard look assessed the situation, estimated the odds. Shortly after, his war-hardened voice spoke, "Mr. Church, take to the left, observe, report in five."

"Aye aye." His tone was full of playful machismo, but his face didn't quite gel with it, creating an odd uncanny juxtaposition.

"Hooks, take to the—" Colonel started, turning around to face the soldier he was giving the order to. "Hooks?" Colonel looked around. Hooks was not there. "Where in the hell is fucking Hooks?" Beside him, only three of his men have remained—have prevailed.

"Goddamn..."

Colonel changed the surprise on his face to that of a piss-boiling anger. "Fuck this! Everyone, with me!" He hurried into the left opening of the unblest fork.

For a few minutes it was pitch dark, until...

Rumblings.

The remainder of the unit froze in place.

Mr. Church, the point man, looked into the dim hopelessness of the tunnel and uttered, "What the fuc—" but something jumped out of the darkness, grabbing him by the shoulders and violently yanking him away from his teammates, incapacitated by the shock of the unexpected blitz. "ARGH!!" the confused man screamed as the sound of the frantic scuffle escalated. "WHAT THE—"

"CHURCH!" Colonel roared, holding the gun ever so tightly. "Reveal yourself, we don't know where to shoot!"

"What the fuck was that?" Sarge whispered during the moments of intense hitting and ripping sounds, gasps, yelps—all coming from his imperiled brother in arms, Mr. Church. Sarge's gun was pointing to hell, his glassy eyes didn't want to see anything these caves of horror had to offer. Yet he no longer had any choice. And just when he'd thought, if he could, that nothing could surprise him more anymore...

"Save... yourse—" Church started whispering—a whisper of a dying man—but then his vocal cords started giving off such sound as if they were being torn, along with his rupturing neck, "EEEEEI—" and then it stopped as Harras felt warm drops on his face. Mr. Church's severed head rolled into Colonel's firm boot, discernable even in the thick shadows absolute dread carved into this claustrophobic trap by a sharp chisel of insanity.

The distinct sound of a pin being pulled out of the grenade ripped through the silence. Even beheaded, the soldier upheld his duty.

"BACK!" Colonel urged his comrades, shoving dumbstruck, petrified Harass out of the way of incoming explosion.

Just before the grenade went off, burying the tunnel, Church's severed corpse and the enemy combatant—or the attacking _thing_ —in the following avalanche of dirt, the point man's murderer shrieked as if issuing a threat.

In an instant, the flash blinded Harras; the booming sound in his ringing ears deafened him. He was lying on the cold ground, dirt in his mouth. Otherwise, he was alright. Physically perhaps, but not emotionally. When he regained his strength to get up, he saw that the way forward was now completely blocked—a wall of dirt and worms, and chunks of smoldering flesh—no way to dig through it even with proper shovels, the whole thing would've collapsed on their heads. In fact, they were extremely lucky that it hadn't yet. (And yet they were utterly devastated and broken by the loss of another hero.) They had to go back, he knew. On top of that, Harras thought he heard some words being exchanged, but they were a jumbled mess he could hear only partially for now, not even at full volume at that.

"On your feet, soldier."

"What the fuck was that—"

"Move it, warrior! No time to yap!"

When the shook-up trio of mute figures came back to the literal fork in the road and, in the distance, the potential way out of the place, Sarge hurried to limp to the sacramental exit in the far end of tunnel when "Where do you think you're going, soldier?" Colonel's mouth aimed the words at his back.

Sarge mistakenly thought they were trying to go for the tunnel exit. Not so. Upon realizing this, he became even more somber than before. "Sir, are you sure about this?" he publicly doubted the idea of going further into the accursed underpass and his commanding officer who held that very notion.

"Son. You will go there either out of your own free will, or through the sights of the gun in my hand." Completely devoid of any jokiness, his parched throat sounded downright menacing, "We're on a mission. You know what's at stake here."

The stubble on the face of Sargent Bass was drowning in shadows, his face getting all the bleaker as a result. _I won't be ordered around sternly and loudly like a half-trained dog!_ his face read. He never was timorous. Until now.

Sarge didn't argue one bit. Obediently, he lowered his chin and embarrassed gaze and, after a brief pause, slowly headed to the only way forward left. Harras and Colonel, hand on the hip holster, followed. Now, they made the right turn.

Sure thing, something came up just minutes into the new journey. At first, Harras thought it was some kind of hallucination. The walls were ingrained with some sort of glowing blue symbols, some _runic_ symbols.

"Anyone knows what that means?" Colonel asked, but predictably there was no answer, so they kept moving. No time for puzzles. They were getting close. _Too close._

The tensions were getting high. In fact, they hit the peak. It seemed they had enough to worry about. But then...

Pieces of gore and torn flesh. A path of them—like breadcrumbs—all leading to—

"CRONSTEIN!!" Colonel hurried to kneel before his motionless body, sprawling across the pathway. _I knew I should've dodged!_ was written all over his mangled young face.

"Is he—" Sarge asked his superior, looking at the completely unmoving body of his _compadre_ , his friend, with chunks of his body missing and scattered around, guts hanging out the crudely torn abdomen, ripped to shreds. But upon closer look, even more detailed inspection, it became obscenely obvious. His body was branded all over by claw marks, but also... bite marks. A third of his body was... eaten away.

Colonel grimaced. "It appears—"

Suddenly, Cronstein's throat spat out blood in Colonel's grimacing face. The former began brutally gasping, air escaping a punctured lung or two.

Colonel put his hands on the boy's shoulders. "Hang in there!" he screamed at him in a commandeering tone. "Hang in there, damn it! I order you to bang in there!"

Cronstein's outbursts withered, and he got anemically silent. He whispered something in a few short bursts and Colonel's ear moved closer to his chopped lips. Then, with a gasp, Cronstein's head slid backwards, and he didn't make a sound since.

"What did he say?" Sarge asked, not sure if he wanted to know.

For seconds, Colonel's stern face contemplated divulging that information before he finally relayed the final words of Private Cronstein, "Necro... gooks..."

Sarge's eyes darted around, his dry tongue gave way to his distressing thoughts, "What the fuck does that even _mean_ , man?"

"It means that we're almost there, Sargent," Colonel uttered ever so decidedly.

For the first time the darkness widened, got bigger, denser: the tunnel was overflowing into the room. The silhouettes of chairs, inoperable control panels, and bodies were getting clearer as the unit made a slow step after a slow step. It was hard to say how many bodies there were, since all of them were mutilated body parts, assorted, severed and crudely torn apart. Well, almost all of them. A VC General—as was evidenced by the stars on the shoulders of his dark green uniform—was found twisted on one of the blood-splattered chairs with his cranium open; it was open like a broken bottle, shards of skull bone in jagged rows from top formed a circle of spikes, like sharp teeth in an open mouth—opened the whole way—of a vicious shark.

Colonel didn't care for none of that. He pointed his index finger at the golden rectangle—a box of some kind, it seemed at first glance—lying undisturbed and unblemished near the edge of the counter of a busted control panel, just outside of the rows and rows of knobs and square buttons. Harras felt his spine vibrating with fear. Not because of what happened before, not because of the small golden box, because of his Colonel's hauntingly focused face.

Somewhat sharing his sentiment, Sergeant Bass gulped. He knew what he had to do, what he was ordered to do, but he had permitted himself a short but meaningful moment of delay. _So much trouble for this little thing..._ But that moment wasn't meant to last forever. He forced himself to start walking towards it, and he did, but when he approached the thing, if only for a second, Bass felt that something was irreversibly wrong. An unseen trap under his left foot whirred ominously as he turned around to voice his anxiety, but no longer had time to. Sarge's—the bulkiest man of them all, musclebound and absolutely massive in sheer strength and looks—flesh was inverted like it was made of thin paper. In that fateful instant, his bones cracked, muscles gave way, separating from them, skin stretched and was cut—torn—into vertical rags by the explicit amount of kinetic force that acted upon it. Just like that, the whole humanity of Sarge was inverted. He became a pile of distorted, ruptured organs and tissue swirling in the air, as if caught in an undercurrent or a tornado. Then it all fell down, painting the floor crimson.

Harras hasn't seen anything like it. This wasn't the technology he came across in the army or in the battlefield before. Therefore he couldn't believe his very eyes. It was impossible. But what was even more impossible was Colonel's dedication to get the damn golden box on the counter that Bass so tragically couldn't get to. The old, withering man found the new sense of purpose, reason, prowling deliberately to the most prized possession of his career, of his life, and when his sweating fingers dabbed it and felt its cold touch pressing back against his skin, he forcibly snatched it from its idle place and grabbed it by the same two hands that governed the lives of his dead subordinates. The waiting was unbearable... so was the thirst. Colonel Mustard took off his cap, rubbed the sweat off his bald spot, put the cap back, opened the golden box and looked inside. Then he slammed the thing shut.

_What is it?_ was written all over Harras' face, but he was too afraid to ask.

Trickles of sweat slid down Colonel's livened face. "You're looking at the end of the war, Private."

It felt like a perpetual gut punch. Harras didn't speak for days, couldn't. That fact wouldn't have changed even if what happened next didn't.

The half-headed General behind Mustard twitched upwards, his unnaturally twisting hands wrapped around the G.I. serviceman's own head. Colonel's eyes widened. The monstrous fingers—holes in them where their tips should've been—let themselves into the cranium through the earholes. Colonel tried to grab ahold of his gun but suddenly gasped, motionless, paralyzed. His eyes started drifting inwards, disappearing in the darkness of his eye sockets, being sucked inside. The sound of that alone would make anyone queasy, not to mention the sight. The reanimated General's distorted fingers were pulsing, pumping the sucked-out brain matter in, all the while Colonel's gaping mouth was drooping lower, as if a puppet destined for an eternal agony.

Harras was captivated. It's not that he had no time to act, no, he was just unable to process what was going on and what needed to be done. Was there even something he _could_ do? Seconds later, before Private could even ask himself those vital questions, the twisted fingers leeched to Mustard's head started pumping some stuff back into his head through the already punctured ears, and it started to come out. It was Colonel's own flesh, brain matter, eyes, the sort, boiled to a state of liquefaction, steaming goop, dripping through nostrils and empty eye holes. The smell was the worst. Waves of nausea instantly hit Harras in the throat. Only one thought rolled through his racing mind. One thing, he begged God, he could shake off. He just wished he couldn't smell it...

Colonel's steaming—boiled by association—face came loose, the finger-pumping of the twisted terror stopped, the half-headed abomination let go of the still occasionally spamming American body, so it tumbled into the ground face-first.

The inexplicably alive VC General's chin twitched upwards. It seemed, it had found itself a new target. It lunged at the young soldier before he knew it. Everything went hazy in Harras' mind. In the inevitable scuffle, he had lost his gun, it blooped inside the pile of Bass' entrails somewhere under his feet. The living corpse's grip was unnaturally strong and, even beyond that, plain unnatural, his fingers distorted and bent around Harras' neck like vines. The life getting choked out of him. Harras tried to hit it, fight it off, but it was to absolutely no avail. The beast in front of him—in his face—was unrelenting, ruthless, unbeatable. The little light that sipped into the eyes of Harras suddenly started to get dimmer and dimmer, and dimmer... and then there was darkness. All there was.

Darkness.

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Harras didn't remember much about how he regained consciousness to put up a fight. In fact, he didn't remember anything at all. He had no recollection of the struggle that must've happened for him to escape the deadly entanglement, or how he must've gotten out of the deadly grip to barely defeat the abominable creature assaulting him... He had no clue.

Yet there he was. Confused but aware. Sole survivor. But not survivor of the soul.

Somehow, Harras' body found the way out of the tunnels. Somehow, the distress flares were lit in the sky, just as the briefing—a briefing that happened thousands of years ago, it felt—suggested. Next thing he knew, the helicopter crew put their arms around kneeling Harras, helping him up and guiding him to safety of the steel machine, the golden box in bloodied hands, no comprehension in his bloodshot eyes. Not much else did he recollect, other than waking in the comfy army hospital bed, back home, U.S. No box in his possession, of course.

Colonel didn't lie, though. In mere hours, the war was indeed over. Its outcome decided by the sacrifices of their brave unit. And even though no one of them truly knew what their mission really meant, it was the most real, intense experience Harras would ever have. Everything since could only be described as a long and distant dream.

# — 18 —

The door flew off its hinges and in. Three men walked inside, Jenkins being the point man and simultaneously the only one specifically armed. His alert gaze checked the perimeter with a cougar's swiftness.

The barracks were silent. So silent, however, that Jenkins' right hand—his gun hand—grabbed the vertical foregrip of the submachine gun. Something wasn't right here already.

Father Harras took a sip out of the silver hip flask; he was more nervous than usual. _Figures,_ Youngblood reckoned, giving him a speedy look. The young priest's own heart was racing, sweat coming out of every pore in his jolted body. _Every one of us ought to be a raw nerve, given the circumstance._ But everyone wasn't: Jenkins was as steady and on point as ever, for he knew all too well that in matters such as this one composure is oftentimes a key difference between life and death.

Harras glanced at the prominent man. He was the kind of person who wouldn't flinch in the face of imminent danger. Firm. Hard. Rigorous. Muscular. His clothes even lacked labels. A professional.

The deeper they were advancing, the darker the barracks were getting; what little light—or half-light rather—they had was shining into their backs through the man-made opening Jenkins created; the place was stuffed with asymmetrical shapes—ranging from big to huge—covered in rags and tarps; the tarps were also covering the ceiling windows, there seemed to be no other light sources inside. Why? There was no time to ask questions.

Having reached the opposite end of the barracks, Jenkins slowly grabbed the doorknob and gently pushed the door inwards, momentarily revealing an empty corridor. Harras exhaled. As if to downplay if not avert his relief, something fell down behind them—near their point of entry into the barracks, it seemed—a resounding yet somehow hollow chime. Something—or someone?—definitely fell down there. Was their cover blown?

"Hello?" Youngblood uttered, wrapping his hands around his mouth akin to a megaphone.

"SHH!" Jenkins reacted, eyes briefly berating the untrained rookie but then immediately observing how the situation would play out. Harras was furious, his fists clenching ever so tightly to either confront the hidden danger or to punch the living crap out of his apprentice.

All three stared at the blinding darkness of gargantuan silhouettes. If there were an answer to Youngblood's question, it was deafeningly silent.

Finally, Jenkins gesticulated the "all clear" sign and pointed at the empty corridor, which he promptly relocated into, and the two men of faith obediently followed.

"Weird," Jenkins whispered, looking around through the iron sights of his formidable weapon.

"What do you mean?" Harras asked, extremely alert and therefore too jerky in his movements.

"You'd think there'd be some kind of opposition by now," the man said tersely, adding, "I don't like it." He wasn't the only one. Harras felt, deep in his guts, something was way, way stranger than it looked on the surface. _The surface..._

The empty halls of the empty warehouse-like structures, empty rooms, empty spaces. Not a single soul in sight. They looked—not even abandoned—downright unused. _The surface..._ In the middle of it all, the clinically clean floors, there was a trapdoor.

"There," Harras croaked. In but an instance, his sureness in their success had diminished considerably. What was even this operation anymore? He couldn't tell. His gulping shut down his brain functions, if only for a short amount of time, but he froze in befuddled fear. He couldn't tell why.

The point man, Jenkins, explored the door. "It seems not to be rigged to an IED—" he glanced at the totally lost Youngblood and continued with a more of a layman's explanation, "an explosive mechanism of any kind," he declared in a low monotone, then he reached for the handle and pulled the mysteriously wooden (on otherwise marble floors) trapdoor open. There was light coming from beneath. The men exchanged intense gazes and, one by one, started the descent into the floor opening. The ladder took them down to an expansion of epic proportions: the network of interconnected underground corridors. Even though still very much sanitized, it looked lived in...

The youngest and simultaneously the last of the group to go down into these new territories of sorts looked around: the rooms to the sides of the corridor they happened to go down in were closed off by identical white doors. "What are these rooms?" Youngblood flustered immediately.

Jenkins put his ear to one of the doors and listened. His facial expression hasn't changed one bit. Although, he was adamant now. "They're holding cells."

Harras galloped to that closest door and pulled the knob: nothing. "Locked!" Harras waved his boiling anger-infused fist.

Jenkins looked around and signaled two others to get away from him and the door via a hand gesture. His musclebound leg kicked the door in. "Damn..." he whispered, seeing what was inside— _who_ was inside. "We can't risk to take him," he fired preemptively, even before Harras came to a conclusion to express such a notion. There was a boy inside. A silent, unresponsive boy with a rotating fidget spinner in his hand, confined to the tacit company of four grey walls. Not that the men knew that at the time, but his name was Jamie Cotton.

"But _we must!_ " Harras snapped at the experienced war man.

With just one look Jenkins gathered that Harras was not only unwilling, unhesitant, he was also unbending. "We can't risk to take more than him," the soldier uttered somewhat bitterly, yielding and not—all at the same time.

Harras gave him a fast nod of acknowledgement and, buried somewhere deep in there, gratitude. Youngblood couldn't believe his own eyes, the old man before him actually _did_ have it in him this whole time, kept it hidden away behind some brick wall of indirect mistrust and ill memories. _Gratitude. Fancy that, Youngblood,_ his prickling brain swirled inside.

One by one, they entered the tiny, mostly empty room. It was devoid of personality, was static, numb in time, and yet high-strung in place. The place was reeking of a test-tube frigidity, experimentation-like sealed environment as if—

"Come on, lad," Harras hurried the boy up but he didn't so much as move a muscle on the entirety of his slim, paler-than-usual body; the boy was catatonic. "We're here to save you!" the priest, unsettled and unhinged by this, growled at him.

"It seems... he's not too keen on being saved," Youngblood remarked, seeing the hesitant—if not outright nonreactive—nature of the boy's... condition.

The look on the boy's face—that calm, undisturbed lack of involvement, or seemingly comprehension, for that matter—Harras knew it all too well. "He's under the influence of powers beyond our wildest imaginations!" And before Jenkins could say something to sway Father's opinion on taking this seemingly war prisoner to the top with them after their business here was done, Harras told him, "And that is precisely why we must take this poor soul with us. We must study him, we must ex—"

Somewhat noisy footsteps flooded the corridor, cutting him off.

"Shh!" Jenkins' lips urged everyone, his fingers reaching for the trigger on his silenced submachine gun. His prominent features of valor made it apparent that he didn't want to alert the whole compound but at the same time he wasn't hesitant to shoot his way out of it if it'd come to that.

The footsteps were drawing near. Near _er_. The lives hanging in the balance, the projected prosperous near future was all the dimmer to picture. That is, until the shadow of another pale occupant—or a guard perhaps—swooshed from left to right, vanishing as it has appeared, being cut out of existence by the unobstructed door frame just like it has been cut into it.

A silent current of air escaped from Jenkins' nose. He was very tense, but not on edge; that would be unprofessional and highly inappropriate.

But the departed figure was now, upon being seen, ever scarier for the war-baptized hero. There was something mechanically unnatural in its movements. There was something else, too. Right in his hand. If only Jenkins had just a split-second more to take a closer look at the moving thing, just a little more time to decipher what it was... Jenkins' eyes slid to his side, where the boy they were in the middle of rescuing of was, the spinning thing in his hand, at first glance, looked at least somewhat similar to it, but...

No time for that. "We have to move," the point man decided and slowly made deliberate steps towards the unidentifiable room's exit. His subordinates followed; Harras' withering hand, left, on Jamie's shoulder guiding him, the boy's legs moving on their own, inertia-driven if not anything else. To be extra safe, on their way out, Youngblood tried to close the lopsided door behind him, to the best of his ability.

The corridor didn't have an end in sight—both ways.

"Why would they hold a single young boy captive?" Youngblood wondered aloud but not _too_ loud as they were cautiously sneaking further into—behind—the enemy lines.

Harras' gruff voice didn't miss a beat to chime in, "Nefarious— _nefarious_ reasons!"

"I concur." Jenkins stopped in his tracks. "And what made you think he is the only young boy in this facility, anyway?"

Youngblood looked around. Doors upon doors...

"Yeah, what do you think is behind those doors, exactly?" Judging by his overcast composure, Jenkins has already made a leap of logic, and it seemed pretty reasonable to him.

Youngblood felt it: cold sweat pulling the skin on his back down. _Of course, the children are behind these doors!_ The horror struck his very being.

The tension was transforming, becoming palpable.

It was all the more apparent on the young pastor's dread-contorted countenance. "How do we know they aren't aware of our unannounced presence already?" Youngblood's lips were twitching.

"No cameras. These guys are pros..." Jenkins looked around; was it possible that the collective paranoia was finally starting to get to him, too? "No photographic evidence in case they're compromised," he further elaborated.

Youngblood felt as his insides cringed inward, something that nonetheless had soon stopped when he saw a glass box with a high-pressure fire hose, neatly snaked inside it. "Wow, these guys are crazy prepared..."

"Like I said..." Jenkins reiterated somberly, "these guys are pros..."

A minute after, the corridor—while still continuing into endlessness—became something of a crossroad to the four, as of now, stealth CORE members, but also, coincidentally, the quartet of strangers in a strange land by the very definition—with Jamie being a temporary inductee by necessity rather than any other reason—a three-pronged carfax of uncertainty.

Jenkins' eyebrows signaled for the other men to follow him into this new path that was laid before them, and they followed him, so that no one would've seen them in the seemingly infinite corridor.

From his top outer pocket, Jenkins took out a photograph that was folded thrice. He focused on it for a bit, unfolding it and pointing at the picture, and explaining, "If our satellite imaging of this place back when it was still a construction site, before they covered it all up with tents, to be believed—"

The lights blinked, and in the hallway a silent figure in black appeared, a door now ajar behind him. The ominous figure was in an arm's reach from the soldier who had never been sneaked upon this way before in his life. Instinctively, Jenkins threw the map away, simultaneously reaching for his machine gun. But it may have been far too late. In fact, it was far too late. Even he knew it was far too late. It was pure reflex. The time had slowed down in Jenkins' eyes. Just as he had suspected before, the guards did have peculiar tools in their hands. Now he saw it. Now he had an extremely good look at it, and yet he wished he hasn't. And then all hell broke loose. The special spinner in the guard's highly trained fingers slashed at Jenkins' throat, sending waves of blood spurts splashing on Youngblood's face and chest. Then the sharp spinning—spinning as fast or even faster than before—blades burrowed deep into the confused soldier's insides, initially breaking Jenkins clothes and skin alike with such ease that it was shocking if not unbelievable. Showing no signs of slowing down, the special spinner in the unrelenting hand—buried hand deep in the blood-spurting stomach—was chopping his internal organs and sending meat chunks of the agonizing flesh outside on the closest person, Youngblood, profoundly unprepared for this unexpected, deeply disturbing carnage that befell the poor grunt. Jenkins emitted a borderline inaudible cry of desperation, as if pleading for help, as unrealistic as it would be since the main damage has already been done. He knew it himself, deep down, and yet some hope for a miracle was still apparently glowing inside his teary, bloodshot eyes before they were ripped out by the guard's vicious teeth.

Covered from top to bottom in someone else's blood and gore, and sinew, the young priest nearly fainted, but the rush of his own blood to his head he experienced so profoundly had changed that plan very drastically. It was no longer just a feeling, the danger was real. And the danger demanded he acts. He didn't know what Harras and the boy were doing at the time, he had no time to check. It was about him and the murderer beside him, who had finished with the convulsing but already dead body of someone to whom Youngblood had grown accustomed to, considered an acquaintance. More importantly, the guard with a bloodied mouth, akin to a rabid dog, but, contradictively, entirely emotionless, pulled his arm out of the punctured body—a horrific parody of its former self—letting more than unconscious Jenkins collapse on the floor. But _most importantly_ , the special spinner was still in his clutched crimson hand. Like an unnatural buzz saw, it _kept spinning_.

Youngblood knew, even under all of this pressure, this was the time to act. _He_ needed to act, he _had_ to act. Yet Youngblood froze. In complete fear. Unable to move or act in any capacity whatsoever. The oncoming killer guard's hand slowly went upwards, no doubt taking aim at Youngblood. He was next. He was next and he couldn't do _anything_ about it. He was _absolutely_ unable to stop the incoming attack. Youngblood was done for.

An old hand flew by, shoving a rusty bayonet deep into the enemy aggressor's face. The warm red squished upon Youngblood's paralyzed face. The guard's raised hand dropped abruptly and his body fell hard on his knees, cracking at least one of the kneecaps. The kick of a firm boot thrusted the blade in—through a cheek all the way into the brain—up until a hilt. The dead body slumped backwards, right over Jenkin's mutilated corpse.

"Are you alright?" Harras croaked, huffing incessantly. Youngblood did not hear that. Harras looked back: the boy was facing the massacre the whole time. The boy was probably okay, though. In fact, his vacant stare didn't change one bit. He was alright. _The kid's alright..._ Harras thought, genuinely relieved. Which couldn't be said about his bloodied and emotionally battered apprentice who only now was regaining the early signs of consciousness.

"You might want to close your eyes, little one..." Harras told the boy, turned his body into the previous position, bent over and yanked the bayonet—his trusty Vietnam bayonet—out of the defeated fiend's lifeless head. Its steel tip was entangled in pieces of brain matter. When he looked back again, the boy was still watching, vacantly. It didn't seem he had noticed anything. He was alright. Youngblood on the other hand...

Father took a deep breath, his heart beating like an old drum. He stood upright. "Judging by the guards' rounds pattern, we have about five to fifteen minutes before retraction." Seeing how Youngblood wasn't keen on saying much of anything, Harras walked closer to him—which for a microsecond Youngblood reflexively took as a threat, shuddering briefly—and told him in a calm tone while pointing at the body of their dead comrade with the bayonet, enveloped in and dripping with blood and rusted along the edges, "This extremely unfortunate chain of events notwithstanding... we still _do_ have a _mission_ , remember?"

Youngblood's eyes darted all over the damn place, it was hard to breeze, claustrophobic in a way. "Are you sure that—"

Harras cut him off whilst starting moving, "There's no alarm, ye of little faith!" It was as good an encouragement as any.

Youngblood decided to shake out of it, and, deliberation be damned, took the boy by his hand, leading him and simultaneously following a senior of his own. Jamie Cotton didn't seem to mind.

As they walked past the bloodied bodies, delving deeper into the mystery still, the special spinner in the guard's hand started winding down—all the more resembling a triskelion-like shape, but with sharp turns, blurred by constant if slowing down motion but almost like a swastika, only with one blade less...

The priests and the boy in their possession were haphazardly sneaking through the underground facility until they came across a red door. As if seeing a red traffic light, they stopped. The door was whiffing with warmth. The men looked at each other and nodded, then Harras slowly took ahold of the knob and twisted. The door slid inwards. The warmth hit him in the face. They walked in and closed it behind them. _A heating room of some kind?_ raced through Youngblood's mind. A bunch of heating units, close to one another, furnaces, on top of that there were lots of piping and tubing crawling up the walls and unto the ceiling and sometimes disappearing into it, also some kind of tanks where there was some space still left in this busy room, it was hard to tell whether they were empty or not. Harras' knuckle knocked on one of them. By the sound of it, it was full.

"Who ist zere?" The unexpected phrase jumped them. Even though it was muffled somehow, it was still at the very least surprising if not uncanny. It was coming from behind an assortment of furnaces. No face yet to put to the weird voice.

The men of faith looked at each other once again and decided to check it out. Harras, as the new ranking officer, made a few steps around the inactive furnaces and...

"Oh, hello," said the unexpected voice. It belonged to an old, frail man who looked like he was at least a hundred years old: covered in old spots, flabby pale skin, but most importantly trapped. He was cowering in a convection oven of sorts. Crouching and crammed into this conical box with a grating on the glass door that allowed to see that there was a human being inside the peculiar oven. His bare, shaking feet standing on a grill, long fingernails scraping on the metal.

After Harras had called the boys with a gesture, the apprentice was shocked. _Oh the barbarity! Inhumanity!_ He tried to free the man, hurriedly banging on the handle and its keyhole, but the furnace was bolted shut. "It won't budge," he let everyone know, a quiet desperation in his disturbed expression.

"I haf only minuten to lif..." the figure in the cage uttered, exhausted by the realization.

"It's bolted shut, you can't leave," Youngblood told him resolutely.

Harras stepped in for the even older man, "I believe he said 'live.'"

"Ja..." the mysterious prisoner agreed.

Youngblood lingered in one place. "I'm sorry, I've never heard an accent like yours before..." He hesitated to ask. "What is it?"

"Um..." the centennial man visibly hesitated as well, "German..."

A jolt of energy electrocuted the other old man, going through him and giving him a newfound sense of anxious force. Harras seemed to know more. It was nigh apparent. He seemed to have looked right through that. Even the oven's door was not a hindrance for his piercing intellect. "But to be more specific..." he finally uttered, " _Nazi_ German..."

"What?" His apprentice didn't believe the wild claim. It was apparent he even had lost a little respect for his eccentric if otherwise wise mentor.

"Nein, nein..." the prisoner assured Youngblood, raising his hand to stop the man's fretting and misguided sense of accusatory injustice, "he ist quite right, quite sadly..."

Youngblood, dumbstruck, perplexed, discombobulated, could only mutter so much, "Wow... I did not see that coming..."

"Are these Nazis as well?" Harras gesticulated widely in all directions.

The very old man ran his frail hand through some greyed out long strands on his weary head. "Firs..."

Youngblood looked like a blinded reindeer, about to be hit by a ten ton truck. Finally, he asked something that had been on his mind this whole time, "Do you know what this facility is? A prison or—"

"Oh nein, it's nicht prison..." The Nazi's furrowed face became quite stern before he explained, "It's a recruitment camp."

"What?" Youngblood could barely stand after such an epical revelation as it was. But the elder wasn't done yet.

"You are surroundet by thousands of foot soldiers."

"Is that a threat?!" Youngblood's blood was boiling as he screamed at the top of his lungs.

"Nein, nein... more of an observation. My zreating days are long over wiz..."

"Who the hell are you?" the impatient apprentice asked, whispering the uncleanness.

"My name ist Doctor Josef Mengele," the frail German man in the oven announced.

The main priest rubbed his aching temples.

"Who?" Youngblood was never a fan of history. Especially Nazi history, or when said history concerned borderline demonic experimentations.

"It ist better you not know, younk fraulein, I assure you..."

Harras' energy came back. Another realization in his eyes. "I believe this chance encounter is not chance at all," he told the prisoner. "I believe this meeting was _destined_ to take place. I believe you can give us something."

"Ja... information..." the meager figure nodded with sadness mixed with heightened awareness, "zere ist nothink I could do to unmake my actions of zee past, but... in zis little time I _haf_ left, I can reveal some mysteries zat should not, I belief, go into zee grave with me. Granted, I probably will not be presented a grave..." He tried to pull off a smile, but the facial muscles that were crucial for that sort of thing just wouldn't budge, which only amounted to him showing the uninvited guests some yellowed teeth that he had left in his brown mouth. However, their ears were cocked, for they listened as carefully as was humanly possible. Meanwhile, the old man in the cage, having caught a glimpse of his own ramblings, decided to take on a finer approach. "You are probably wondering vat I am doink here. Well..." A certain gloom overclouded the filthy weather of his soul, _if he had some left,_ Harras mused both with rejection and genuine interest. He found this subject, amid all this noise, morbidly fascinating. "More zan seventy—eighty?—years ago, one of mine highly esteemed colleagues came to an unexpected conclusion in his hypothesis on the extermination of the ancient civilization... later, he fondly came to call it the _First Race_. Anyway, after years of fervent expeditions, formulation and discovery, my friend Hanz concluded, to the collective mocking tone of German Scientific Society that the First Race didn't just die off or crossbred with Cro-Magnons, who were by all intents and purposes an inferior species, _race_ ; no, the case of their extinction was something that was more far-reaching, and even more alarming in its sinister nature. Of course, the First Race, as you know, was for a long time a myth, a fairy tale long fantasied about by some rogue historians—in some form or another existing all over our written and, dare I say, oral history—bend on romanticism more than on facts, or so it seemed at the time. Not so. Hanz, and by extension I, having been on numerous occasions present during his epochal findings, have witnessed firsthand that the First Race indeed not only existed, but that the way they existed had been very close how _we_ were existing in the twentieth century—and that's at least three hundred thousand years ago! Those fools would have none of it... Those uppity, insolent fools! Imbeciles! It was a disgrace for us to call ourselves men of science. So we didn't. When Hitler came along, it was an opportunity to discover the greatest answers of someone's lifetime: how did the people so advanced succumbed to their fate being exterminated like insects by a seemingly unknown cause... and how could we recreate it. Adolf was ecstatic, and so were we. Numerous archaeological digs and subsequent findings followed, but piecing the information so deeply and secretly ingrained in the sole beneath our feet was nearly impossible. But it was possible. Hanz and I had found what killed the origins of a race far superior than we even thought at first. All of that led to a prospect so putrid, so vile... to the _Projekt Spinnen_. Yes, I see it in your eyes, that you know what I'm talking about: you're starting to piece the information together, just like we did back then. From the beginning, it was designed to recreate the atrocity, at the time regarded as an accomplishment by Hanz and me, that had severed the humankind once before, crushed the First Race, the _ancients_ of this world, with an iron fist of annihilation. That was Projekt's true and sole purpose—and still is! Unfortunately, I was too consumed with madness to fully comprehend which powers we were playing with... until it was far too late to reverse the damage of the reverse-engineered technology of doom and assured destruction... Then, the war had ended abruptly, and I, Josef Mengele, was suddenly captured by the warring faction. Their leader became my leader now, if I were to save my life. And even though the name of my leader, my chief, had changed, the goal of his remained quite the same: total domination through total ruin. It was a Josef of another kind, and he was even more ruthless than I had ever been—the Soviets taught me that insanity has not at all have a limit..." The mad scientist's half-blind, sunken eyes were sad and distraught, shivers piercing through the frail, old body like cold knives of self-consciousness.

"What are you talking about?" Harras demanded answers with a sense of commanding presence. "What killed the Ancients?"

"I think you already knof..." the geriatric doctor sighed and revealed, "fidget spinners, mine freund... fidget spinners."

"Fidget spinners!" shuddering Harras repeated with a heated yell. The words had cut deep into his throbbing heart.

Seeing that the younger priest wasn't sure how to interpret it, Dr. Mengele explained to him, "The ancient civilization had gone extinct because they started to spin fidget spinners—that is what ultimately has led to their gruesome devastation. And now, the cycle has been again hurled in motion."

"Obviously, the final stage of this conspiracy hasn't transpired yet!" Harras, having already put some twos and twos together, let out a shout, to which the furnace prisoner nodded. "Then... what is it? Tell us!" Harras grabbed the sides of the metallic oven and tried to shake it, to no avail, as it was bolted shut to the floor. "Tell us, you dirty Nazi! Is it the indoctrination of our children, huh?! TELL ME, YOU SENILE KRAUT BASTARD!!!"

Youngblood has never seen his master so mad. "Father Harras," he whispered gently, squeezing the furious man's tense shoulder. The young man could feel the senior priest's anger on his, Youngblood's, burning cheeks. Or maybe it was...

Dr. Mengele was trembling, but it had absolutely nothing to do with Harras' screaming; the furnace was now operational, and his feet felt the scorching flames underneath caressing them unrequitedly. "But Herr Harras, zee indoctrination vas never a final step of Projekt Spinnen—" he uttered, trying hard not to sound anxious or as if anything was out of order. Yet, soon, as the fiery flames grew larger, ruthlessly engulfing his lower parts, he could only keep that German calm so much. "Ah! AH! It's gettink _very_ hot!" It was only the beginning, as the automated mechanism that could not be stopped was only starting to gain momentum.

"What is it, then?" flushed, petulant, all on edge, Harras hurried to elicit under these grim circumstances.

"AH!!" For seconds, Dr. Mengele could only breathe in brief, rapid bursts. Unable to comprehend the flow of his own thoughts, much less someone else's questions.

" _What is it, Mengele?!_ " Harras persisted, his knuckles getting as white as the fire raging inside the apprehensive death trap device. " _What is the final stage of their plan, damn it?!_ "

"AHHH!! I—UH! AHH!!!" As his face was roasting, unrelenting ignition burning through it, and pieces of his smoldering, melting flesh were falling down revealing a set of spasmodically chattering teeth, he finally was able to say the last thing he could, " _Ultimate... evolution!_ "

The burning body was kicking and screaming in convulsions. The shrieks of agony were puncturing the ardent air, subsiding and unnaturally stopping only when the vocal cords were completely fried. Blisters erupting on the ravaged skin, spitting out spirts of yellow liquid, where the skin was still there. It was as if the revealed bones were now starting to melt under the current of searing gas, whether it was even true or not. Regardless of that dichotomy, it certainly _looked_ that way. But the smell... The smell was the worst.

" _Ultimate evolution"—what does that_ mean _?_ Harras shook his heavy head. _Good thing that Jamie is not able to see—or process—this..._ It was a blow below the belt, what the doctor revealed before and during burning alive before their very eyes.

Youngblood was equally—if not more—shaken. Disturbed beyond reason, some part of his mind was contemplating the hypothetical situation of them having the choice to save the old Nazi from such a horrific demise. Would he even exercise such an option? He honestly didn't know. Didn't even _want_ to know. The decisions that led them—him—to this point in time weighed too gravely on his mind as it is.

Of course, his older comrade saw everything, every last bit of that: the doubts, the uneasiness, permeating through his every pore. "This is war, Youngblood," Harras tried to console him, returning the favor of minutes ago. As an impulse, he wanted to put his hand on Youngblood's shoulder, but something stopped his hand mid-air, and it went down, limp, swaying slightly. "And he was a Nazi."

"Father... hrm... what about 'enemy of my enemy is my friend?'"

"There is no such thing, Youngblood." The sureness in Harras' eyes was terrifying. He grabbed Jamie Cotton by the hand and turned away, walking towards the room's exit. "No such thing."

When Father walked up to the red door, he took a peak behind: Youngblood's chin was sharply pointing downwards, and that was not an appropriate headspace the soldier like him, in this complicated position, should've endured. Harras knew that all too well. He was urged to try and lend his countenance to the young man before him, saying, "Now, regardless of all of that, look at the bright side."

The apprentice's consciousness apparently had burrowed deeply into the pockets of morbid thought and contemplation. But he found something, as he was slowly limping towards his master, and as they opened the door, sharing this newfound optimistic finding, "I guess our recon mission is a—" right as they exited the room to see a dozen men in black garments, guards with ominous spinners in their hands, staring blankly in different directions, and the closest one _back at them_ , "—success."

Every muscle in Youngblood's body tensed up, for it seemed the attack was imminent... or was it? They were strangely not there, these people in black, even though some were looking directly at the trespassers. _Can they see us?_ Youngblood analyzed the situation in the spur of the moment. _Or... are they too preoccupied with the things in their own hands?_ The spinners were fast in motion, yet one of the dirty dozen of guards had to take a break to spin his sharp "toy" so that it wouldn't crawl to a halt. And as his right hand reached for the blades, Harras in the doorway couldn't take it. The sound of the fidget spinner twirling sent dangerous impulses into Father's brain, his grinning grimace contorting as if he was suffering from terrible bouts of physical pain and horrific pangs of mental anguish, and indeed he was, especially in the heart region of his chest. Yet the closest guard's hand spun the devil's toy as if nothing could stop it. Something popped inside the priest's head, his left eye filling with blood. Harras had just about enough. He let out a gritting shriek and moved forward, not like an old man but like his younger self, swiftly ripped the spinner—the same triskelion-like Spinnerist Sect-issued spinner—out of the guard's deadly grip and cracked it down under his mighty boot of rage. An unexpected epiphany dawned upon him as he observed how the guard scrambles for some kind of sense before succumbing to all-encompassing, over-ecstatic madness: Harras looked down, some type of foul-smelling organic goo leaking from the broken pieces of the unholy trinity of spinning under his feet, and it was as clear to him as days past that it was the only thing that distracted the man in black from sounding the alarm. Finally, the affected guard snapped out of it and simply _snapped_ : his insane visage screeched in heartbreaking agonistic anguish and _hissed_ at Father... like a wild, supernatural cryptid. All in all, the sound wasn't even remotely human.

"Oh no, what have I done?" the priest lamented. "He's gone feral!" But soon Harras' previous feelings changed to that of fear and distress, for he understood what he'd truly done—even if it was done unwittingly—the full extent of the trouble they were swamped by.

The rest of the guards' faces changed to that inhuman expression that was overcoming the original "victim" of Harras' sudden, premature attack. Their heads all jerked into the intruders' direction and started hissing at them. Harras felt it in his brittle bones: they were fucked.

"Spinnerists!" The man's desperation forced it out of him. The guards who only seconds ago resembled people were changing into some sort of _creatures,_ approaching chaotically, suddenly crooked limbs wobbling towards the brave Resistors, bodies twisting in inexpressible viciousness, resentment and disdain dripping from their gaping mouths. All because of the call of their "wounded" ally who was now taking the lead and advancing the offensive. All because of Father's hasty impulsiveness...

Something else became very apparent to him, a sharp-tipped needle of awareness piercing his very core values: the guards weren't the only ones with a spinner in their securely clutched hands...

Startled, Harras looked at the boy whose hand he was compressing so tightly, expecting the horrible and knowing full well that it might not be the hand of that young sweet boy anymore, that it may be a foul beast in their pastoral midst... yet the boy wasn't changed. _Thank God!_ flew across Father's jumbled mind. Now, it was time to pray that they survive to see another day.

"RUN!" suddenly punched Harras in the ear. His apprentice was taking charge for the first time since he'd met him, but the mentor didn't object—this one was the only time he was glad Youngblood was in charge, just this once.

The trio moved as fast as they could, their lives, once again, hanging in the balance, even though Jamie Cotton's legs were moving more on an inertial principle as the boy himself wasn't visibly concerned about the situation, past the remains of their fallen comrade, Jenkins, pale and cold already, until they were nearing the fateful section of the corridor where the boy's room—cell—was—the constant rumble of running footsteps behind, following them to the ends of the Earth—but they haven't reached it before something interrupted their very plan of escape. At that precise moment, the leading guard breathing in their backs had stopped and a shrill, screeching call burst out of his lungs, partially deafening the priests but also serving a purpose far more sinister than that.

Numerous doors snapped open, soon hitting the walls they were embedded in, what seemed like _hundreds_ of spinnerists jumping out of the ill-fated frames with the familiar hiss, most of them behind the trio that was trying to escape and some of them in front of them. The guards and the kids alike. Only one thing was for sure: it wasn't a sight for the faint of heart.

Harras clutched Jamie's hand tighter, tighter still. "I'm afraid it's over. It's all over..."

There was an enemy at every corner. There was no escape that wasn't a miracle.

Something he saw in the corner of his eye gave Youngblood hope though, an epiphany, but more importantly, an idea, which he rapidly shared with his dejected mentor, "No, Father Harras! We use their own strength against them," he whispered almost triumphantly.

"What?" Harras croaked, blinking unresponsively. The man sounded like he had given up in the face of such an unbeatable threat.

"We _spin!_ " With that, Youngblood rushed to that box on the wall with the high-pressure fire hose behind its glass. His elbow crashed the brittle glass, his hands did the rest, yanking out the neatly packaged hose.

He hopped unto the valve but it was barely even budging, not even an inch of progress to speak of, and at the same time shocked Harras was precisely like that, shocked, by the very utterance meant to save them. _"Spin..."_ He wasn't even looking at his struggling disciple or the enemies closing in from all directions anymore. It was like a trance-like state. And then it hit him. For a few seconds, the corridor became the tunnel for Harras: the dark, cold passageway in which the inhuman silhouettes were crawling on walls and ceiling. A literal tunnel vision overloading every and all of his senses.

But Youngblood didn't relent. "C'mon, Father, help me out up _here!_ " he tried to wake his teacher from a half-flashback, half-dream.

The fixated priest's eyes closed. "YES!" he rigidly exclaimed, opening them.

Just in the nick of time, he hurried to help his colleague, and together, with a single fateful push, they successfully spun the valve, and uncontrollable pressure from the emergency water hose, like a vicious snake, attacked the incoming hissing demons left and right, knocking them down, sending them sprawling. Youngblood grabbed the nozzle of the high-pressure hose and now hit the few enemies that were blocking their route directly, in the front. The water gushed and gushed, as if Moses himself controlled its mighty flow. Those enemy combatants have likewise fallen under its rattling might, battered and utterly defeated for the moment. Youngblood aimed the powerful weapon at the rows upon rows of predatory followers behind them—some of which were drenched but already staggering to their feet—again and then let go of it, ultimately letting it do its thing. And that it did.

As the three had resumed their getaway, at one point jumping over a few barely moving spinnerists that nevertheless were trying to grab them unsuccessfully, the senior priest couldn't help but glance behind to make sure their daring escape wasn't foiled by anything else, yet an unsightly picture crossed all of that intention out of his mind: one of the faces, hit by the immensely strong stream, twisted and shifted upwards—like a mask that's been pulled up—revealing for a tiny moment the "real host," the real abomination of a "face"; too bad or too good it was so quick, otherwise Harras' heart would've been unprepared for a heart attack... but they still had things to get done.

Minutes of hurry and adrenaline rushes escaped huffing Youngblood. The only thing that didn't was Harras' claim when they and the boy they rescued were jumping on the black motorcycle with a sidecar, hidden in the bushes slightly out of the secret base's perimeter. That day, that hour, that minute, his master told him, "You were baptized in blood today." And indeed, they all were.

# — 19 —

"The ancient civilizations... who would've thought?" It seemed that Youngblood's mind was still stuck on some of the ideas they'd learnt in the Concentration Camp. The winds of the streets he was familiar with didn't help all that much.

"Yes." The driver's answer was short. His focus was a sharp edge. The road home.

The boy in the sidecar was silent, a spinner in hand, much to Harras' chagrin. Yet, he knew the boy and the spinner could not be separated. Not after what they saw in the underground base they were so lucky to escape from. What if he _turns_ into one of those things? They couldn't have that on their consciousness.

Dim city lights under the darkened skies painted a more welcoming picture than the desolate out-of-town experience that cracked their spirits in mere hours. Fancy that, the concrete jungle seemed more alive than the actual forest. Not to mention less dangerous.

As the engine stopped revving and steadily died down after Harras rolled to the secret back entrance of the church, Youngblood mused while taking his helmet off, "I still can't believe this..." He got up from the back seat. "All of this feels like a long and distant dream."

"Yes, I know. You're feeling things like 'How did we end up like this?' going through your head, but there's more relevant things to keep in mind right now." Harras' feet touched the cool pavement. "There's a reasonable chance I won't survive to finish this thing."

"Nonsense, si—" Youngblood attempted to disagree with such a surprising, odd, and, most of all, painful notion.

Harras undercut such an effort right away. " _And if I don't_ , _you_ will have to finish what I've started. You," he stressed solemnly. It was beyond unexpected for the second party to hear. Beyond even that.

"Sir..." Youngblood was at a loss and couldn't even figure out a way to hide it, "that is—I'm sorry, but that is far too much to ask..." He was visibly strained and a little bit insulted. That was something he thought was way beyond him. Harras gave him an understanding nod, and confused—mortified—Youngblood walked away. His home wasn't that far from here and he needed to change his bloodied garments and wash all the gore off his face, but even if he didn't, he'd still want to take some alone time to figure all of this stressful emotional pile-up out.

Soon, his stumbling silhouette vanished in the alleyway darkness.

Father helped Jamie Cotton, not that he'd know his name at the time, to disembark the sidecar. "It's okay," Harras said, talking with himself more than with the boy. "He is dumb, young and naive. But he'll come around."

Together, they headed to the entrance. Harras' frail knuckles knocked on it with a secret knock, but nobody inside reacted. _Strange..._ Harras pushed the door, once again having listened to his faultless intuition, and it slid in without any resistance. _Open... but why?_

Just one step inside and Harras had already felt a batsqueak of disarray crawling back into his very being, infesting his veins with the sickness of impure and abhorrent, and hiding in the recesses of his sinuses. Something wasn't wrong. Something was very, _very_ wrong. "Wait here," he told the boy who didn't seem to care where to stand anyway. The boy obeyed, however. But was he obeying Harras or the spinner in his hand?

"Archers in our arches..." escaped the priest's mouth cryptically. Even he didn't understand or know what it meant at the time.

Harras had moved through a couple of doors more and entered the church proper where he couldn't believe his old eyes. Ravaged bodies of his fellow Resistance members, dismembered, stomped, ravished... His legs almost gave up, head was hit with intense spell of dizziness. All of them—dozens upon dozens—dead. Tortured in the most horrifying ways before that. Here and there, their guts were ripped out and hanging from the candelabras, the stained glass was stained with their gore, members of the congregation, friends, all of them murdered viciously. Such a gruesome display made Harras sick, more than sick, it made him lose a part of his sanity all over again. Some torn limbs were still twitching, this onslaught couldn't've been executed long ago. It was nothing like he had witnessed in Vietnam all those years ago, years that felt like a lifetime ago, no, it wasn't like in Vietnam, this was way, way worse. Every inch of the floor was covered in blood and piss. These people didn't stand a chance. The trail of bodies was going into the basement where, Harras was sure of it, yet more bodies had a similar fate of sadistic mutilation. Around forty people with grimaces of terror and excruciating pain frozen on their inanimate faces, at least on the ones that still had faces, that is. And in the middle of it all—near the altar—someone huge in the hood and dark robes, as if static, not moving, facing the direction of an empty wall, back turned to everyone, both dead and living, but mostly the dead. It didn't seem like anyone who had joined CORE. _My God, CORE... CORE is dead._ The bodies before Harras, all around him, were laid out like a floor mural, on purpose, for his darting eyes to see. If only he knew that was the case. _Everyone's dead... The Resistors are... no longer._ Tripping over body parts and flayed corpses, Harras' unsure gait was leading him straight to the person in the hood with their back turned to the only other still living being in this hell hole where the graceless, absolutely horrid mayhem—massacre—took place. On his way to the mysterious tall being, Harras couldn't help but notice the Pope's unmissable piece of headgear lying on the floor, in a pool of gore and entrails, partially covered in vomit.

"Uh!" he uttered, unaware that he had. "Your Eminence!"

_They got him too..._ The massive room was spinning. But Harras didn't stop. That's not what he'd been taught or how he was raised. Backing down wasn't a part of his identity. He had to know what happened here, what was going on, who was it standing near the altar, _his_ fucking altar. But the strangest thing: the closer he got, the less courageous he became, until in an arm's length from that eight-feet tall someone, that was when Harras hesitated, when he reached his hand towards them, so much so that he even tried to lower it and maybe back away from the unfathomable figure altogether, but the hooded person—no, now he saw it, _damned thing_ —turned around and grabbed Harras by the same arm he tried to take back. No, not a "thing," under the hood. Its spare clawed hand pulled the hood back, revealing horns beneath. Red horns. The immobilized priest couldn't believe it. Harras was looking at the Devil.

"Surprised, aren't you?" it spoke as the chill was constantly breaking Harras' spine apart and gluing it back together again. The man could not speak in return, stammering something unintelligible. "How does it feel to face your greatest adversary?" The Devil squeezed the man's arm so tightly it crackled, fractured in three different places. His voice was intrinsically demonic, deep, guttural, puncturing one's insides when he spoke. "How does it feel to stand in the failure of your own making?"

Rivers of sweat were pouring down the Harras' face—face drenched in sour taste of defeat, "Y-you—you're behind all of—"

"But of course I am, priest!" the beast exploded, mocking him. "Frankly, I am _surprised_ it took you so long to arrive at that conclusion."

Harras was speechless, yet he tried to utter something through his perpetual bewilderment and ceaseless panting, "How did you know—"

"Do you take me for a fool, you pathetic wretch?!" The human arm in the beastly hand cracked anew, just as the gasp of rising pain it invited. "Besides... your friend was so kind as to let me in." The Devil grinned. In doing so, his head moved closer to that of Harras and the candlelight revealed the adversary's crimson, inhuman-looking face. A "face" that more fittingly should've been called a "visage." Strange, satanic visage... "And behold the rest," it spoke with a gluttonous gloat, "for it is _glorious_."

The searing pain in Father's arm had reached its agonistic peak. He snapped before it did, "AAAH!" but his other arm was not imprisoned in the mighty grasp of the beastly creature of Hell and therefore free to thrust the bayonet into his left eye, "RAARGHH!!!"

The spurts of black, caustic poison gushed out the defaced eyeball, the blade digging deep inside the Devil's head... yet his imperious grasp was unrelenting. Harras tried to break away in this moment of what he thought was the beast's temporary weakness, but it simply didn't work: he yanked himself back, having mustered all of his strength, but it was absolutely futile. He was deadlocked. He has seen many impossible things in his life, but now he was truly scared, beyond reason and beyond faith.

"Are you leaving already?" the bleeding yet unaffected creature of doom dished out yet another mockery. "Here. Let me give you a hand..." Having said that, its snout drew closer to the trapped arm, opening wide and therefore revealing a set of ghastly sharp teeth, then it snapped shut with Harras' hand inside the Devil's mouth, biting the entire hand off at the wrist. Then it spout it out in the wriggling priest's screaming face. Satan's clawed hand finally let the crippled man go and another one pushed him into the air, his body eventually falling unto the pile of still warm scattered remains of his decimated allies.

In the skirmish, a couple of candlesticks flew off the altar, their fire touching the wooden floor with greedy eagerness, summoning the wraith of uncontrolled flames and the fright they bring.

Bleeding profusely, Harras' severed wrist—as well as its ragged sight—was ironically the only thing that kept him from passing out. He was writhing in pain, swimming in the ocean of human entrails, his left hand now missing, blood ejecting from the stub it has become. Shocked to his very core, Harras started crawling away, his back and elbows carrying him inches further from the smug beast and that much closer to the boy who was left at the door.

"Oh, little Jamie standing behind the exit backdoor there," the Devil said as if reminded, "is telepathically linked through the spinner—to me and the rest of the fidget sinners under my control. What he sees, _I_ see." The Devil grinned, pulling the bayonet out of his mangled eye and brains. "Not so keen on saving him any longer, are you?" He looked at the antique weapon in his hands, droplets of black liquid slowly eating its rusted metal away, then each of his hands grabbed its grip and the end of the blade, respectively, effortlessly breaking it in half with a chime. "Ah! Ah! I know what you're thinking." The black-clad figure casually threw the useless pieces away. "If you're contemplating to break the child's bond with the spinner for whatever reason... tsk-tsk... let's just say it wouldn't be pleasant for any party involved. HA HA HA HA!" He knew everything. Knew everything. "Did you really think you could have won this? A drunk old pervert against the unlimited power of darkness? And I thought _God_ was delusional."

All that time Harras was gasping and sighing, desperately dragging himself to safety—wherever it still could exist—one of the doors leading outside in sight and soon in reach. His vanishing strength was fueled entirely by his sheer power of will. But its capacity wasn't infinite.

"Crawl, little snake, crawl..." the Devil allowed him, uttering yet something that contused Harras had no will to hear or desire to comprehend, pushing himself into the doorway where the chilly draft hit him with its welcomed numbness, "cower before your true savior..."

Harras forced himself to stand up, accidentally hitting a wall with his uncauterized stub in the process, smearing wine-colored markings all over it. He winced, barely suppressing a shriek. He was wobbly, unstable, and yet he opened the next door and then the one after it. He had no time for self-pity or traumatic shock, although there was not a second when the realizations didn't attack him mentally, the Devil could be on his tail, so he had to get away as fast as he possibly could.

The boy was where he left him. The man's legs forced him to make a full stop. _His eyes are..._ Having no time to spare for thoughts, Harras grabbed him and led him back into the alley, helped him get into the sidecar. He searched its glove compartment and found a black bag. _Eyes..._ He put it on Jamie's emotionless head. _No eyes... No eyes..._ Now for the pressing matter at hand: he looked at the motorcycle and then at his flesh and bone that was rended so abruptly: his whole left hand torn out, taken away... As much as he didn't want to think that, he was now an amputee.

There was no time. He took his belt off and, grimacing under immense pressure of agony while tears were rolling down his face, adorned also by sweat and blood, scotched the end of his maimed arm to the left handlebar, making a makeshift tourniquet of sorts at the same time. Feeling his energies leaving him for good, he jumped on the motorcycle, started the engines and drove away. He didn't see where he was going at first, knocking down a few half-full trash bins, which immediately stopped him from nodding off behind the helm. However, Harras didn't notice the sidecar was inches away from hitting the larger trash container, missing it only so narrowly, on their way to the road. Just as they did so, hitting the road, the church blew up behind them. The deafening explosion sent shockwaves as pieces of stained glass shot outwards and the fire and brimstone followed.

Harras didn't look at it. Didn't have the strength to look back at it. He never once in his priesthood life thought it could crumble and now it was on its way to do just that. Times have changed. The burning structure behind him was no longer his home, nor a sacred place. Just a bitter reminder of the world coming to an end. And there was nothing he could do to stop that.

# — 20 —

Vague recollections of what wasn't. A recurring nightmare. Again and again, Harras tried to open the box, but when he got too close the dreams shifted into something else—ended. Every time he woke up it went away, always just a little out of reach. Not today, though. It seemed to have escaped his mind, but it was there, he was feeling it inside, itching at the walls of his skull. The memory was there, Harras only needed a key to put into that keyhole.

He erected his torso to a sitting position and grabbed his head—only one of his limbs could do that, another bitter reminder. He had to focus, though. _What was in the box?_ It was hurting his brain. The old piece of torn clothing that he used as a blanket was, for once, too hot. The old mattress, rotten and riddled with holes of drastically different sizes, was even stiffer than before. It all felt wrong. Jamie Cotton with the black bag on his head, lying to his side, was unusually quiet, his spinner unusually loud. Nothing made sense. The empty, decrepit building they were hiding in was now only distracting the former priest instead of providing protection, made him wonder how it managed to become so decrepit in mere weeks since the Never-ending Occultation hit. _Or was it months?_ He couldn't tell. His mind almost took the bait, wondering off. Almost. Every day was the same. Until now. It was so cold... _It's been months..._ And as sudden as that realization, the key of searching fit the keyhole of mystery: Harras "remembered" what was inside the box!

The sense of elation was enormous. He got up, his disheveled soutane showing numerous signs of severe wear-and-tear, his badly bandaged stump forcing white goo out through its thin yellowed fabric, walked up to a windowless frame. The chill almost blew him away. Eight stories high, the view was mesmerizing. The city was a ruin with its life support cut short. No lights, no people, a desolated husk of its former self. Abandoned cars, random junk littering the pavement. The Apocalypse has come and went, it seemed. Now it was the Aftermath. Nobody was prepared for that. The utter darkness on the empty streets, in the sky. The Pope was right: the eclipse never stopped. It was only getting worse all these months. Sometimes it made it unbearable to even look outside... but not today. Something has changed. It was snowing. _Ashes of the old world..._ He caught his mind rambling. He compelled himself to focus on the important stuff, the contents of the box. _Why was it silver this time, not gold? Who cares..._ It wasn't important. The contents were. _Jesus..._

No time for sightseeing. Harras had work to do. He grabbed the dirty rebar that was slightly bent on the end that was lying around near the mattress that was their home and hobbled away in search of some morning snack. "I'll be back in a few hours," he told the boy, out of habit more than anything.

Maybe this was the last time they had to resort to eating rats to sustain themselves. Even though he had unlocked the enigma of the box in his mind, he didn't have a plan to move forward with that kind of knowledge. He was gnawing on the barely cooked rat meat on a stick, his stump being the most sensitive to the little fire he could cobble up. Its flames were harassed by the wind from the outside world, trying to extinguish it every chance it got. The priest no more didn't know what to do next. He'll chew on this meal some more and will try to feed the boy who doesn't seem to be needing it all that much. Then... then he'll think of something short-sighted and small-minded, no grander design of action. The schemes were the thing of the past. However, their echoes—the echoes of their profound failures—weren't. The self-doubt was the worst.

Sometimes the disempowered ruin of a man lamented, pouring his soul out on the one who'd listen, "How I miss Frank... my old partner... he'd—" then he'd stare at the boy's masked eyes with his own, and the pain would bring his original train of thought back, "he'd know what to do."

Then paranoia would usually kick in. "Why wasn't Detective Horowitz with us that day? Why didn't he go in the field with us? Why did he... betray us?" Harras would spend hours thinking about the intricacies of the imagined betrayal. Between survival and rather disturbed sleep, that was, more or less, his daily routine. "Or maybe it was Youngblood?" The seeds of doubt were chipping away at his mind, corroding it like evil they were. Even so, it wasn't _too_ far-fetched.

The cold was getting unbearable. These were no conditions to be living in, let alone raising a kid.

Maybe it was finally time to end it all. This accursed existence. Huddling together to survive three-dog nights. Low temperatures and his festering injury helped to keep very vicious thoughts at bay. Under those old wrappings, his stump looked pretty bad. Disgustingly bad. He preferred not to look at it at all. Maybe it was time to put an end to all of this suffering. Harras looked at his rebar, all covered in rat brains and gore. He turned his eye to the black bag that was the boy's head. What was even under it? He had no clue. Not anymore. His only able hand tightened its shallow grip on the grooved metal. Maybe it was time to—

A shrill sound of an empty can being kicked pierced the air and strained Harras got up, squeezing the weapon in his right hand even harder. It was coming from the staircase, by the sound of that. Huge, empty room that was half of this story suddenly seemed a lot less huge, as the only way to escape was now being trespassed on.

Did they finally find them? _No, no, no, the kid didn't see where they were... or did he?_ Harras never once tried to fit the bag on his own bag to see if it's transparent at all or not. _Stupid!_ he berated himself. It was too late for that. Whatever it was, whatever made that sound, it was coming up, as Harras heard a slow gait, tired steps traversing the stairway, getting closer and closer, and closer. Until the shape of a man or a thing appeared from its shadows. The silhouette took on a familiar form...

The old man couldn't believe his bloodshot eyes. "Y—Youngblood?.." he stuttered, not sure if it was a vision, or a hallucination.

"Father Harras! You're alive!" But it wasn't. It was the real deal. Youngblood in the flesh. "Thank God!" His lips formed a jubilant smile. Then he cocked his head. "Oh, is that— the boy is here too? Uh... is he alive?" Youngblood looked pristine. His hair was combed and his winter jacket didn't have a single rip or tear on it. Maybe _too_ pristine...

"How—" Harras suddenly stopped and looked at his former apprentice all askew, "How did you find us?" a certain undercurrent of suspicion in his cautious tone.

At first, the only thing Youngblood could do was blink endlessly. Then, as if he was trying to make up an unconvincing lie or just was blindsided by the sheer bluntness of the question, he coughed up, "I had a... a dream." He gulped some saliva. "A dream has led me here, Father," he told the ragged-looking man before him more surely.

"G—" he abruptly looked at the rebar, unable to finish the sentence, and sighed. His eyes unwillingly scanned the young man in front of him. He squeezed the rebar and... "Godly providence," let it go. It bounced off the concrete floor once, clanking for the last time as if to say goodbye.

"Oh my God!" Youngblood finally noticed. "What happened to your hand?!"

"I no longer have it, Youngblood." His tone was desperate, not at all like Youngblood remembered it. Not feisty, nor eager to stop injustices that drowned the world in omnipresent sorrow. A broken man stood before him.

As downright squalid as the place surrounding him.

"Come..." Youngblood urged him, his palm gesturing just that, "we have to hurry..."

"Co— come where?" It was apparent that the old man was thoroughly confused.

"I will lead you two back into the fold," the young man explained slowly, "into the Resistance."

"The... uh..." Harras rubbed his brow, head aching like hellfire beneath, "Resistance is dead."

"The Old Resistance _is_ dead," Youngblood nodded, but then his expression changed drastically. "The New Resistance is... not."

# — 21 —

It was loud inside. Something rattled like crazy. A basement filled to the brim with equipment and all sorts of tech. There was light in this basement, which meant they had a generator. A luxury at such a time. That's probably what made Harras' head so heavy: a generator, rattling to its mechanical heart's content in such a dank yet somehow cozy place. But where were they? How they got there, Harras didn't know. He had passed out while they were trailing the city in his motorcycle, long before he could understand where the zigzagging will have taken them. Youngblood was driving. He wasn't very apt at it, but he had to, given the circumstances. Jamie Cotton had a bag on his head still, so nobody except Youngblood really knew where they were going so clandestinely through the empty streets of the dying city. Now, this.

Youngblood closed the door and twisted all of its three locks shut. The bolts sprang into place with such a startling sound that Harras was instantly taken out of his residual somnolence, thinking it was gunfire. It wasn't, of course. But his retarded alertness was there to stay. He noticed something else, too: Youngblood was uncharacteristically smug.

There was some disturbance behind Harras, and he, Harras, felt it, even if not right away. The lady with kind eyes, like a shadow, sneaked up on Harras, having approached from behind. His weakness. He had no situational awareness here, and eyes weren't growing from the back of his head. That would've proven useful right about now.

She was forty-something years old and covered in black oily smudges—from pale cheeks to workmanlike hands. Another silent person emerged behind her—they were in the adjacent room when the guests arrived; there was no door nor screens of any kind between two rooms, so it was rather easy to just show up like that. The man had trouble breathing but otherwise wasn't any different than the woman. Both had rather hefty glasses on and looked like engineers.

Instinctively, Harras tried to take out the rebar... but it wasn't on him. He was weaponless.

"I told you I'd find them!" Youngblood smiled at them, grinned... _sneered?_

"We've never doubted you for a moment, dear," said the lady with kind eyes.

Harras' only wish was for his lost rebar to be in his hand.

The lady's nose wrinkled, she made a step towards the disheveled but cautious guest—who convulsed back—and sniffed at the aura of air around him. Her eyes dimmed, lips curling in disgust.

"What?" he barked at her as she was observing the epicenter of the nasty odors: the foul-smelling and -looking bandages covering Harras' stump. Boy, they were even uglier under the working house lights.

"Sit," she urged him, lightly nudging him in the direction of the kitsch red couch. "Sit!"

Harras looked around, but, having found no allies sharing his stoic view on pain and suffering, gave up and sat—only it looked much like fainting to those present—where the lady demanded him to.

After the engineer woman looked under the pulsing bandages, she could only exclaim, "It's infested!"

The damn rattling generator denied him any semblance of focus. "Huh?" It was too bright to figure out what really was going on.

His old partner walked damn nearly in his face. Youngblood's face was oddly spherical... "Do you feel any pain, Father?" He looked troubled or... worried.

"It'll—it'll be alright, Young—"

Then Harras' sleepy head tilted back violently and he blacked out.

He wasn't dead when he came to hours after. That was a plus. Or at least he thought it was. Some kind of IV was hooked straight into his purplish vein, his musty old shirt's sleeve rolled up, his stinging eyes would later find his tainted soutane on a coat rack.

Youngblood's patient peepers welcomed him back. "So... what really happened?" he brought up again, glancing at the newly bandaged limb. It no longer had that familiar stench Harras was used to. "It was cleaned," the man answered seeing the unvoiced question in the old man's confused eyes. "That's back from when the church blew up, isn't it?"

Harras attempted to gulp the lump in his throat, but such an endeavor wasn't really a match to his power levels at the moment still. "It's from my altercation with the—with the..." Harras stopped dead in his tracks and then blurted out, "the Enemy." He didn't have guts to tell Youngblood who they were really up against. Maybe it was his own fear; maybe he didn't want to spill it out in his former protégé's drink, so to speak. _We'll cross that bridge when we come to it..._

Youngblood gave him a nod and leaned back in the armchair he was so awkwardly sitting in. "Well... whatever it was, you've been patched up. The wound has been thoroughly treated and looks... much better than before. They also gave you—"

_Them._ Harras looked around: nobody in the room. "Young—Youngblood... can we trust them?"

The engineer couple was tinkering at something in the adjacent chamber.

Youngblood's features softened. "You can trust them as much as you can trust me, Father."

"I was afraid you'd say that..." Harras muttered. Before his pupil's open mouth had time to voice... anything, Father Harras diverted his attention by asking, "What's going on in the city? In the country?"

"You really don't know, do you?" Youngblood rubbed his elbow, a nervous tick. Now, Harras understood how it is to be on the other side, of being kept in the dark for one's greater good, or a perceived greater good at that. "It's a shitshow out there, honestly..." For a second after, he became self-aware, "Um... forgive me, Father."

"I saw Washington, this city—our city, Youngblood—being evacuated some time ago." What was he saying? Probably the painkillers they stuffed him with... "What about the spread? How bad is it?"

"Some states are still holding up, but who knows how long they'll last under these conditions."

"Conditions?" Harras blinked twice. The pain caused by the bright lights was gradually wearing off.

"Yeah, marshal law, curfew... people cannot go out... not with those things roaming around anyway. And those bloody things in question? There are persistent rumors flying on the ham radio airways that suggest they're much, much worse than what we've witnessed in that godforsaken concentration camp. Sorry." He grew virtually restless in the chair, rocking back and forth without an intent of doing so. "The whole country is on lockdown. Informational, too—we can only receive some tidbits from the government—or what's left of it—without any option to transmit back. But from what we could gather, the rest of the world is not that much better. Situation is critical all around, Father, and we desperately need your guiding hand to help us."

"I'm afraid I'm in no—no shape to—" He was stopped by Youngblood's raised palm. "What—what have you given me?"

"I think it's some kind of homebrew cocktail of adrenaline, immune system boosters, Vitamin C, steroids, Vicodin, amphetamines, and bunch of other medical stuff I happen to know nothing about. It's good, though. We'll have you back on your feet in no time."

Like he said, Harras was in no shape to fight it, in fact he was in no shape to fight anything at all. Not yet, anyway. Youngblood on the other hand looked very healthy, he's been working out for these months to be ready for an attack if push comes to shove.

A lightning-fast smirk graced Harras' face. "Funny. I thought I walked straight into the enemy's lair." An onset of instant sadness filled his old heart to the brim. "Am I an old demented fuck, Youngblood?" Near-opacity seeping through the fog of reason in his irides. "Are my efforts entirely pointless—in _vain_?"

Youngblood's eyes said it all: he was looking at him like an obedient dog. _Of course, not. Of course, they're not in vain. What are you talking about?_ his eyes were silently telling him. Harras' foibles aside, he was a great role model. Full of resolve and honesty rarely found in common folk. What man—especially one who've brushed with external darkness as well as internal often—wasn't corrupt in some small way or another, hasn't been tarnished by the same world they were trying to deliver?

Infirm and debilitated no more, Harras straightened his spine, getting up.

"Are you all—"

Harras cut his trusty factotum off, gesturing that it was all fine. He hurried along, limping his way—his legs still felt groggy and is if they were made of cotton—to the coat rack, fumbled through the soutane and eventually took something out of its pocket, a keepsake from another life, the flask (empty for the longest time—inexcusably longest time) he was now brandishing energetically before his young learner. "Can I refill this—somewhere?" Yep, he was definitely alright.

The horrible buzzing in his head subsided, the generator's noise wasn't even noticeable anymore. Now, he was able to see the details of the basement "apartment" clearly. Now, he had a chance to see—

_A_ spinner _?!_

It was right there, on the white table—a black fidget spinner. The air stopped coming into his lungs. He looked around and couldn't believe he hadn't noticed it before: a spinner poster on the wall. Now he knew it, there was no doubt, Harras' initial hunch was right all along: these weren't just engineers! But—but what did it make Youngblood? The man who have vouched for them... was living with them...

Harras, heart racing like a thoroughbred horse, gave the man in the armchair a psychotic look, ready to bash his skull in with the flask that already has stolen at least one man's life before. "What kind of 'engineers' are these people?!" he whispered loudly, like a scared watch dog, forced to attack someone he knew, with words only for the moment.

"Oh, they're not _just_ engineers," Youngblood uttered, "they are, in fact, the spinner enthusiasts." He wasn't a bit as excited like heaving Harras was. "That's one of the reasons I've stuck with them for all these months, Father." He got up and Harras jumped a few steps back. "Let me show you."

Again, Harras let his guard down a little. Something in those sentences made some semblance of sense. Obediently, he followed the friendly host he had just considered a traitor to the other room, where the real startling revelations about this whole place awaited.

Indeed, the people who offered them help definitely were not what they seemed to be. Harras' shambolic eyes were observing attentively as the "enthusiast engineer" man's hand with a scalpel in it performed a grueling procedure on the operating table—an autopsy of the... fidget spinner! The oily flesh being dissected was writhing in agony, going as far as even screeching in extremely low frequency.

"What?" Harras muttered.

So that wasn't a hallucination in the concentration camp... when I stomped on one of the darn things... Of course, it wasn't...

But surprising shocks to his system weren't nearly as over as he had thought. As he looked at the woman who had kind eyes, he witnessed, to his great terror, that one of her leather-gloved hands was taking the boy's—who was sitting in the room—fidget spinner away— "What are you doing?! That will..." —but the other one was giving him another spinner, which his body took reflexively— "...kill... him..." —and didn't seem to perceive the switch. His finger numbly flicked the new toy into motion, as if nothing exceptional had happened.

Father was dumbstruck. But not as profoundly when the woman removed the boy's bag, granting him the ability to see again, if it was an ability he could utilize under the circumstance. The boy's father by proxy didn't even have time to protest such a notion, but here they were.

What's going on here... exactly?

The woman with kind eyes saw the questions stuck in Harras' own eyes, bloodshot and chaotic. After she had welcomed him, remarking he looks much healthier now and how glad she was it was the case, she explained, "We are the spinner enthusiasts. We try to avert the bad spinners' influence with creating—from scratch—a sort of good spinners."

"Good—spinners?"

"Yes, dear. And this is what we swapped for the boy, so that he is no longer connected to the collective network of _evil_ fidget spinners."

"They're all bad," Harras blurted out.

"Oh," she sighed, "a long time ago, we thought so too... but that was before we understood what made them tick..." As the woman's husband showed them with the help of the surgical equipment at hand the parasitic living organism that was residing inside the base of an ordinary fidget spinner—in all of its ugly anatomical details—the woman continued, "Through sleepless nights of desperate efforts to reverse-engineer these clockworks from hell, so to speak, we've finally achieved the long-coveted breakthrough. Now we design the spinners of our own." She gestured at the pale boy's new obsession, which he was so focused on all this time. "Only a prototype, but... judging by the fact that there are no spinnerist agents crawling around this place, it seems to be working just as intended."

Harras grabbed his pulsing forehead. He could swear he was feeling his brain fidgeting uncontrollably inside his skull. It was a lot to take in, after all.

_That risky swap that she performed..._ he couldn't help but think, looking at the pale boy with greasy hair who no longer needed a bag to protect himself and everyone around him, _it actually worked..._

Meanwhile, behind his shoulder, Youngblood hectically scrolled something in his phone. "Father," he tapped that shoulder, "I know that was a lot to take in, but you have to see this—right away."

Overtaken by all sorts of emotions he thought he no longer possessed, the preacher heeded his low-ranking comrade's urgent message—or warning—seizing the phone in his sweaty palms.

" _Twitter?_ " he made a short rhetorical inquest to Youngblood's strenuous face before coming back to the exigent news in the palm of his shaking hands. Glued to the small screen, Harras read:

@POTUS · 1m

The tremendous people of the venerated Sect of Spinners are experiencing none other than what I've been dealing with from the lying MSM and FAKE NEWS: WITCH HUNT! SAD!

A new sense of purpose graced Harras' wrinkled countenance. The ideas racing though his mind and sharply converging into one tiny point. Now, he knew what they had to do. "We have to let the president know," he declared determinedly. "We've got to tell the President what's really going on."

Youngblood stroke his beardless cheeks and chin, speechless. "Father..." he spoke, "what do you have in mind... exactly?"

Harras could only answer that question with a heavy sigh. "God, I miss Frank..." he muttered, the features of his previous partner, lit by sunlight, in his vision, "he'd know what to do." His eyes filled with tears—tears that could not go down nor back. "God bless him," he concluded, looking up. "God bless his restless soul..."

Yet again, they were back to square one, it seemed... it _seemed_ , yes, but it wasn't necessarily so.

He glanced at hungry Youngblood. "We'll have to break into the White House... I suppose," Harras added unsurely.

Everyone, except Harras and the absentminded boy, gasped. That was definitely a heavy-hitter, so recklessly unleashed on them without a warning.

"Yes, but... how do we do it?" Youngblood asked for some directions. "If it were that easy," he mused, "I'd be there, warning the president, months ago." He was deeply self-absorbed, drifting away in his chaotic thoughts. "I mean... we'll be shot on sight. Not to mention we've got to get there alive first—somehow... and with those things crawling everywhere... especially near the White House..."

"Maybe my plan was too farfetched," Harras agreed, arms outstretched. The air around him felt electrified.

Though, the woman with kindly eyes had a different idea. "Maybe it isn't that farfetched..." she spoke softly, standing there in her own contemplation.

"What are you talking about?" The bewildered pastor looked at her profound concentration.

"About three months ago, before we met your friend," she glanced at Youngblood ever so briefly, "we were thinking that the world was over, ravished by whatever end it welcomed upon itself. Everything came crushing down, people were being killed, relocated, _turned_. We were ready to give up... fall flat on our faces and rot... until one day... we've heard _this..._ " She moved away from the smaller table, cluttered with various items—some of it, to a layman's eye, worthless junk—revealing a peculiar piece of equipment. A ham radio set. The woman clicked it on. The broadcast contained, at first glance, assorted beeps. "The signal has a strange frequency, not heard for the ordinary people." She briefly smiled at her husband. "We figured it may have something to do with the government—a secret back channel of sorts or something akin to that."

"Incredible!" Harras livened up, bleak crimson coming back into his cheeks. "This is Morse code!"

"Oh wow... do you know it?" his coworker asked likewise excitedly.

"No," Harras said and that seemed like the end of his elation. "Wait... when I was in Vietnam... of course I know it!" His excitement came back in new waves. "It's all coming back to me now!"

"Quick, give the man a pencil and a piece of paper!" Youngblood demanded from the engineers.

They did.

The man was smudging a clean sheet of paper with graphite, enthusiasm overflowing through the limp dance of a dull pencil. _One dull pencil is worth two sharp minds,_ flickered inside one of those minds briefly. The workload was substantial: an endless string of dashes and dots—until it ended.

The scribbled piece of paper in the shaking hand, Harras explained the secret message, "It's some White House official—or aide—who broadcasts on an emergency channel... Can we send the signal back to her?"

With that, the engineers quickly assembled a kind of Morse code rig, capable of transmitting the dots and dashes in form of _beeps_ and _dits_ and _dahs_. As almost everyone was holding their breath, the old man's only hand reached for a kind of an old-fashion-looking device they've cobbled up together—a mesmerizingly old tech coming back in a big way—and Harras started tapping the makeshift paddle, broadcasting his name and his urgent intention: to meet the president.

The answer was nigh immediate:

-.--..---..-...--.--.....--

And then:

-.--..---..-...--.--....---.--..---..-...--.--......--

Multiple eyes were glued to the piece of paper Harras was a scribe to.

The messages meant:

KNOW U

MEET POSSIBLE COME NOW OPN BSMNT NO RESISTANC

"'Know u?'" Youngblood repeated like a contused soldier after reading the interpretation of the code, meaningless to him. "What does that mean?"

"I don't know," Harras confessed.

"Hmm... How do we know we're not playing straight into the enemy's hand?"

"How do you mean?"

"'No Resistance,'" Youngblood explained, focused expression on the young but nevertheless tense face. "They must know we're Resistance, otherwise they wouldn't say that we should come without Resistance."

Harras put the paper down, graphite dust falling on and sullying the table. "Maybe they don't know that," he theorized. "Maybe you're reading too deeply into it. Maybe it simply means, 'do not resist to come.'"

Youngblood was nervously rubbing his chin. "Maybe. Maybe..."

Both men knew they couldn't ask the cryptic official outright. It was too on the nose to ask further, to clarify, and they didn't want to risk blowing it.

It was decided, then. The men nodded. They were going to take up the ham radio offer.

"But how will we get there?" Youngblood insisted, further elaborating, "The streets are too unpredictable and teeming with the spinsters," a derogatory term this guerilla warfare necessitated, "especially around the White House, like I told you earlier."

Harras was deep in thought. _How_ do _we get there?_ His deft eyes had stopped on a couple of nifty, mangy rats that were nibbling on the breadcrumbs accidentally and somewhat negligently scattered in the corner of the room (the engineer man had a nasty habit of eating where he worked for almost the entirety of his life, and old habits die hard, even in the face of an Armageddon). It could have appeared as though Harras wasn't even listening to—or was aware of—what his colleague had said, but it couldn't be further from truth. "The only way how..." the mentor said, "we'll be rats." It seemed, Harras still had a couple of aces up his sleeve, and that could only mean that their chances just had risen upwards from zero. "Youngblood," he looked right into his confused eyes, rapidly giving the explanation of what he meant, "I'll need you to scout the sewers to approach the White House undetected—just in case."

"Got it," he nodded, keenly aware of the stakes. But he hasn't finished talking yet... "Father... are you sure about all of this?" Could it be he had second guesses? "Maybe we ought to stay put, steadily grow the New Resistance into an asset to be reckoned with and—"

"And then what?" the higher-ranking man cut him off mercilessly—much like situation at hand, the approach of it had to be ruthless as well, Harras felt. "Wage war of attrition on the enemy that might not even know the adverse effects of such an affair? Sit here and pray that God does things for us?" It was a deep cut, but he felt he should've gone there as there was no time to walk around the issue. "No, we do this and we have an army on our side, we have... hope." His words were as passionate as his overall pulsebeat, overall attitude shrieking inside. "Trust me, Youngblood," the master comforted the learner. "I might be getting a lot of things wrong, but what I do get right I do get right."

His erstwhile sureness came back at least, figured Youngblood. That was the Harras he wasn't ashamed to follow—anywhere. "I never meant to doubt you for one second, sir."

When Youngblood went away to prepare for the scouting mission, Harras looked the engineer duo, whom he brought aside, straight in their eyes and told them, "Maybe this was a godly providence that we meet, maybe it wasn't, but, nevertheless... I need you to build something for me..." _Eyes don't lie._ "I have something special in mind..."

Yet again, they obliged.

_What is it?_ was written all over fully geared and ready Youngblood's face some time later when he returned in the working room for the last time, but he was too afraid to ask. The object in question was sitting inside a thin metallic rectangular box.

Trickles of sweat slid down Harras' livid face. "You're looking at the end of the war, Youngblood," he whispered and slammed the box shut.

_Well, it's time for me to go,_ his befuddled officer-with-a-mission thought and it reflected in his bright blue eyes.

As he was about to leave, Harras suddenly reached for him, squeezing his shoulder. "You remind me too much of myself," the old soul started sharing. "That is why... I hate you... so profoundly."

Youngblood gulped some viciously ungulpable load in his throat; but he understood what his teacher meant full well. There was no question about the tension that was between them from the start, day one, now it just had a description, a motive. He felt as though a mountain had been lifted off his shoulders, so did his master, he was sure of it, and he was right.

"But, Youngblood... Godspeed." Harras nodded as if to punctuate their newfound connection, this understanding that's so rare for men to share. Another hit for Youngblood to handle.

"Thank you, Father." But he handled it well.

The rookie-turned-veteran touched Harras' hand and paced to the exit. A few steps before he could leave completely, vanish into the night, he heard the pastor's, for some, cryptic final words: "Hey, Youngblood, doesn't it feel like... our time is running out?"

Youngblood nodded, silently. At that second, they both knew he no longer needed a master to understand something as profound as that notion. With that, he left.

# — 22 —

The sewers. The cold and damp swamp running under the city. Youngblood's nose couldn't handle it, so he put a hand over it. His flashlight got pointed in the distance: a dark tunnel of filth and overgrown antibiotic resistant bacteria. _Just swell..._ Every step of heavy winter boots was met by the echoes of soul crushing squelches. The waste water hasn't yet penetrated his boot, but he was aware it was but an inevitability and just a matter of time. At this juncture, he'd rather not think about that.

His watchful gaze saw some movement on his periphery. He swallowed hard. A light beam punctured the moving shadows. Just a giant turd swimming by. It made him sick to his stomach. Yakking, he tried to preserve the contents of that stomach before blundering off. He saw such atrocities of this great war of theirs, and yet such a simple thing could turn him inside out. Strange thing, he knew, is one's life on planet Earth.

It was about a couple of miles left for him to comb through. _Nothing that important,_ he knew, _to be searching for here,_ but he had to be sure before a tad larger expedition descends into this floating mess of the sewage system. And then he heard a bloop.

"Is anyone there?" Youngblood yelled at the point of its origin, rather instinctively.

Not a bloop back.

Youngblood wanted to swallow, but there was nothing in his mouth. The stale air scraped his throat instead. Carefully, he stepped into the direction of the disturbance: a split in the tunnel, a graft in the way he was supposed to be monitoring; an unexpected nook, dragging miles on end itself. He needed to check this one out as well. _Swell..._

The cold waters were starting to be thicker and harder to trudge through, floating sheets of broken ice didn't help, a nuisance more than a hindrance, but still. When Youngblood waded into the darkness, the bubbles from beneath the sewer level suddenly rose above it and with them something else entirely emerged. A badge on the massive thing was the only thing that cleared his confusion. A near-illegible shabby badge with a name was the only thing that could identify the bloated, swollen rotting glob that used to be a man, to identify that _it was_ a man:

Bob

Sewage Services

Youngblood's legs were no longer feeling cold. On the contrary; as if the wastewaters his legs were plunged into were brewing. "My God..." Youngblood uttered. He was so distraught by the finding of the lipless corpse of this pudgy man—and its delayed warping effect on his mind—he started talking to himself. "What even happened here?"

The piercing screeching echoed through the tunnel in the medium distance, getting closer fast.

Youngblood was about to find out the answer to his question.

# — 23 —

The immense dark and pouring snow outside was like paintings of Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Michelangelo. Even the traitorous moon seemed beautiful. Humongous and lush.

The city's landscapes—if damaged and disturbed—leading to the sewers looked like something from the movies, yet so urgently real and gorgeous. A weird feeling, that.

They had to go on foot, Father Harras and Jamie Cotton. Hours of sneaking around and awkwardly looking behind corners. Hours of walking where every step could be your last.

Whole blocks full of danger were disappearing into snowy nothingness. The streets were darkly lit by uncertainty and desperation. A sprawling maze of architectural constructs dazzled the mind. Or would if it weren't so overdazzled already—dazzled a few lifetimes over.

An hour into the endeavor, it stopped snowing...

The white nakedness around was straining his eyes.

And then...

There it was, Harras' motorcycle—neatly parked, no signs of struggle—near the fateful sewer entrance. This was it. There was no sign of Youngblood either, so Harras made the decision to go inside and check it out. It's not like they had any other choice.

The place was cold and damp, even colder and damper than he would've dared to imagine. To add to the awful, horrible smell, the hidden dangers could be lurking behind every twist and turn, he knew. But Harras was resolute, a boy's hand in his own, they were walking towards the unknown and possibly unexplainable through the brown waters of this deadly place. Until...

"Oh no..." Harras heard himself saying, yet it came out pretty much on its own—without him knowing it was about to come out. Minutes after wandering through the wastewater tunnel, the revelation of what happened to his fellow freedom fighter finally hit Harras in the face.

Youngblood's body was floating in raw sewage, slowly drifting nowhere, parts of his face were missing—torn out—while half of it was submerged into the dirty water, his throat was abnormally swollen and... it moved. It was _heaving_ , as if he was still breathing somehow, and for a second Harras was filled with hope... but then the skin was ruptured from inside, and a mangy paw came out of the hole, then another one, helping it—two whole paws widening the bloodied opening in Youngblood's throat—then they went back and the whole head of a _rat_ was now ripping through the meat, eventually its whole body, clawing at the walls of flesh from the inside, ascending and escaping through the disrupt, punctured neck, roundly breaking that sliver of hope that was glowing so dimly in the old heart. He was dead. Youngblood was dead.

"My sweet, sweet journeyman... brutalized..." He'd bemoan the loss of his understudy, friend, properly, but there was no time for sentimentality. And yet, the splinters of his soul still hurt like hell.

Father noticed something. _He didn't even have time to take his gun out..._ he crouched, the thought hurting inside his head, _attacked so suddenly... cowardly..._

All the mourning, nagging at his insides, aside, Harras felt strongly—a foreboding feeling he couldn't shake—that he had stumbled upon the ultimate secret of the sewer tunnels. _Ultimate..._

Some sharp scratches in the distance distracted him from thought. He was gruelingly staring at its perceived point of origin, squeezing Jamie's hand tighter without consciously realizing it.

But the danger wasn't in front of Harras, it was behind him: a silent figure of Youngblood rose upright.

It gurgled, "I TruSSStEd yoU, HarRasSs..."

Harras' head snapped around, eyes quickly scanning the slumped but standing dead body—a fidget spinner in hand! "NO!" It couldn't be!

"...TruSSStEd _yoU_ ," its punctured throat simmered, detesting the very nature of such a premise.

At first, Harras was paralyzed by the news, but then his eyes were lit on fire with existential rage and veritable fury. "YOU ARE NOT HIM! YOU ARE NOT YOUNGBLOOD ANYMORE!"

The way it moved the jaw was disgusting, as uncannily as a marionette: "OhH, yOu'd LIke toooo ssssthINK that, wOUldn't'ya?.." It mocked him... or was it really Youngblood in there? Partially, at least? Fractionally, at the very least?

Harras had no time nor desire to figure it out. His worn out muscles tightened and tensed up. The thing before him wasn't Youngblood. _Not anymore._

The... creature, this abhorring aberration before him, was as loathsome as it was loathing. It could've lunged at Father Harras or oblivious Jamie Cotton in his care at any given second, so the man of faith made the first move. His leg moved upwards and, having stricken the deadly spinner out of Fake Youngblood's crooked hand, down. Huffing, Harras waited for the creature to wail, being beset by separation anxiety, vulnerable for the attack, yet... the distorted thing did not wail, it didn't feel distraught or lost, or anything from that range of emotions. In fact, it _smirked_.

"I fiNnallY UndERssstanD wHhhHat MenGgele mea—meant, FAssssTHer..."

The violated nature's mutated reject reached its warped claw forward, but not to attack—it was way too far away for such a transgression—to _show_ what it had become, what it still could. The appendage that was melded together—a screaming deformity—instantly split into three: three "blades" of tortured flesh and bone, awfully sharp at the ripped edges.

It was no longer a hand of a man. It was no longer a man. It was an absolute and total perversion of God's creation. The evolution gone wrong. Evolution...

Evolution...

Even though Harras had finally pieced all the horrific clues together, it was far too late.

The disfigured three-pronged extremity snapped, turning in unnatural motions, cartilage cracking, then again, then again, and before the terrified pastor who observed the lightning-fast transformation even knew it, it started... _spinning_.

_Ultimate evolution..._ pulsed inside the old man's fractured mind. _No spinners needed anymore, when they_ are _spinners._

But the show—the show of power, the show of force—was not over yet.

"I'lll showv yOu..."

Fake Youngblood promptly raised the "organic spinner," buzzing like a flesh-and-bone-bladed buzz saw operating at insane speeds, and burrowed it into his own face, moving up—blood gushing every which way—from the lips to the nose, effortlessly cutting through and chopping it all off in an instant. The spinning _thing_ seemingly didn't even slow down as it was buzzing it up. Seconds later, Fake Youngblood lowered the transformed "hand"—a biogenic weapon that was still spinning and showed no signs of stopping any time soon—revealing the gory aftermath of the unfolding insanity relating to his face. That is, he— _it_ —no longer _had_ a face to speak of.

The bodily juices were dripping and trickling down the rent flesh that was dangling—sometimes on mere strings—from bones and teeth. It was not capable of many emotions now... other than pure anger and searing hatred.

Frozen in place, Harras couldn't remember when was the last time he wanted to throw up so bad, not since the 'Nam, for sure.

The disfigured monstrosity jerked forward with every erratic movement, as suddenly as it was acting before. As he became dangerously close in a matter of seconds—close enough to prepare for a deadly strike—the evolved lifeform that was only nominally alive spewed out all its hate and resentment for one last time, "TimE toOo faCE the truTHhh and DIE, HArRRgghRaSSSSSS!!!" Just as its vomit-inducing gurgling came to an end, it lunged at Father, trying to take a murderous swing!

But Harras lifted the gun in his hand—Youngblood's gun. "Not today, Youngblood," he told his former mentee just before pulling the trigger.

The shot was enough, more than lethal, the bullet lodged somewhere inside the mutated hippocampus of the livid dead man as it was hurled backwards, subsequently slumping into the wastewaters like dead weight. It was done—only not quite.

There were bright, short lights.

_If Youngblood was turned....._ who _turned him?_

The resounding shot, still echoing in the fateful tunnel, woke _others_.

Other ultimate evolutions: they were snarling, disturbed by such a rude awakening. In their hands some special kind of weapons—spinners that were giving off light, no doubt to serve them in this darkness, swirling with captivating, fascinating, hypnotic-like splendor.

Other ultimate evolutions: Harras saw them from a far, they were starting to crawl and shamble, and run towards him and the boy in his intense care. The charming moving lights at their ghastly disposal, making their contours and silhouettes all the more prominently shocking and appalling.

Other ultimate evolutions: the _infected_ children and adults alike, they all looked artificially homogenous in these obscuring shadows, more or less the same now—probably regardless of the lighting: pale, disgusting creatures that didn't look like humans anymore; in fact, the only human-like trait they still had left were the perverted shells this "living" _disease_ was occupying. Some of their hands had already been twisted in this agony of flesh that afflicted Youngblood so tragically, cracking and starting to rotate.

They'd be overwhelmed if they stayed there, and Harras actually knew that.

RUN!!

And they did.

They seemed to have lost them in the twists and turns—for a while at least. The tunnel came to a halt. A rusty ladder, partially covered in sludge, led upwards to a closed hatch. But was it "closed" closed? Harras was willing to find out. He positioned Jamie before himself and, together, they were awkwardly climbing each rung, much longer than it would've taken for an able-bodied man and a non-distracted child. When there was no more up to go, the weary head bumped into the hatch to subject it to the ultimate test: it was cold and unpleasant to the touch of his forehead, but it budged, which made everything totally worth it. Ecstatic, Harras pushed harder and, soon, the hatch _ding_ ed resoundingly, hitting the basement floor. The two climbed the last rungs, and Harras had flopped on the floor before he could get up to see where they ended up... then he did.

They were officially in the White House.

But their assault on the West Wing had just begun.

Having a quick second to take a breath and draw breath, the preacher's eyes wisely and cautiously darted around to take in what was happening and where it was happening. Even the basement they were in was... spatial—not even that—lots of other words sprang to mind. ... They weren't as relevant right now as they would be just months ago, he gathered and almost grinned. One word, though, was coursing through his mental systems.

One word. _Palatial._

Awe and reverence—the like his congregation got from when they attended the church... before it blew up.

It all came back to him, why they were here, and the brief moment's respite vanished as easily as it was hard to achieve.

"Let's go," Harras told his small companion by force of habit more than anything else—even though it never had any effect on him before, just like it didn't now—and after that grabbed Jamie by the shoulder and led him further into the hornet's nest...

There were no guards in the whole basement. _Weird..._ he thought. But Harras was used to being surprised at this point.

Having found the staircase and gone up the marble stairs all the way through, the clergyman found himself on the next level of the White House, the ground level, as its eerily empty halls were dimly lit through massive windows by the dark moon hovering in the sky.

The shaded corridor seemed endless. _The string of endless corridors that is my life..._ Doors upon doors were walked by unchecked, they weren't important, there was only one door that mattered and it wasn't on this floor.

The nightly atmosphere wouldn't be complete if the monumental place wasn't quiet. And it was. It was very quiet. Perhaps _too_ quite.

Just as Harras was thinking that, a hoodie-wearing shadow jumped out the open cabinet and took a swing at the reverend! He barely escaped the impact, dodging out of its way! Thank God the mysterious stranger had focused on him and not the boy—who probably wouldn't be able to dodge anything, Harras thought promptly! Harras couldn't make out the features under the black hood, but it probably was still human as its missed punch was sent by a normal hand—as was the second one! The knuckles scraped Harras' robe! It was too hard to stay defensive like this, and he probably couldn't sustain this any longer, so the old but intense man jumped into the offensive—but he missed _and_ was now open to the counterattack! The hooded assailant hit Harras in the throat, knocking him to the ground!

As the mysterious attacker got closer to _stomp_ the living shit out of the veteran, Harras felt the gun in his pocket and fired it through it. It was a warning shot, not in theory but in execution.

"Harras?" the figure uttered in disbelief, stopping the assault, plucked out of the attack mode. It was a familiar voice—a familiar voice Harras did not want to hear!

"YOU!" he bellowed at the top of his lungs.

The man under the hood pushed it back, revealing Detective Horowitz beneath it, and continued voicing his unbelief, "I can't believe my own eyes." Dense stubble was covering lower half of his face, but it was him. "You're alive."

Harras screamed, "You soon won't believe them because I will _shoot them out, traitorous scum!_ "

"No, Harras," he said, "you don't understand... I _had_ to do it."

"WHAT?!"

"My daughter's life hang in the balance—still is!" Detective looked around. "Just like you do now to save the life of this boy, don't you see?"

As his deeply wrinkled face inexplicably reddened even more, the unbound anger and searing hatred boiled into the mix of a strong-worded response that Harras couldn't even try to contain: "You stupid fucking mother—"

CLANG!

"Did you hear that?" Horowitz interjected.

The noise was coming from the staircase. Harras got up—his knees weren't as up to snuff as they used to—and turned his veiny head in its direction.

"Oh no!" Harras voiced his concerns, looking at the swarm of the infected spinsters. "We've unintentionally brought them here!"

Detective Horowitz was even more shocked. He saw something—someone—he almost had lost all hope to see. And yet there it was. _She_ was.

"That's—that's my daughter," he murmured. "My sweet baby girl..."

Father's psychotic gaze darted around. "It is no such thing!" Harras warned Horowitz sternly and perhaps in too shocking a fashion.

"What are you talking about?!" His loving eyes were looking at her in the crowd of the hand-spinning monsters. "It's my baby Jess!" The girl had a half-rotten face, revealing decaying yet elongated and sharp teeth waiting to, no doubt, dig in the living being's flesh, her guts were hanging down from the ripped abdomen, squishing on the floor as she limped forward, snarling like a mad dog that was just hit with a heavy stick on the head, cracked jaws snapping at the air before her, foamy slime splashing on and running down her blister-covered neck. It didn't matter to him. As any parent would know, the father's gaze looked straight through all that.

"Look at it!" Harras' voice rustled as he pointed at the monstrous abomination with spinners for hands. His daughter had two of those, both in perfect working condition, spinning insanely.

A look of disappointment shadowed every other expression on Detective's face. "No matter how ugly or monstrous she is," he told Harras, "she is still my daughter." Then he walked towards her, hands outstretched in the hug waiting to happen.

Harras couldn't stop him. That was something out of his hand.

"Need to go," he muttered to the child. "Need to..."

Somewhere, behind them—behind the boy and Father—Detective Horowitz (whom Harras considered shooting in the back but ultimately decided not to waste ammo) was getting incrementally closer to his transformed yet so dear daughter. Somewhere, behind them, numerous doors were opening, members of the Secret Service pouring out of them to face the thoroughly undead threat. Somewhere, behind them, those undead were jumping on those members and ripping them apart. The gunfire started. The screams. The sound of blood splashing the walls.

"No, don't shoot!" Detective urged his co-workers. He was so close to his daughter and when he turned back around to her, she was in a breath's distance. Only she didn't breathe. "Honey. Thank God... I've given everything to see you agai—"

Her disturbing maw ended his heartfelt, emotionally charged confession abruptly, biting out massive chunks out of his face. It stung like nothing else in his life. Despite his screaming in utter confusion, the thing that was his daughter proceeded eating those crimson chunks up, gulping them down without chewing, while her hand-spinners burrowed deep into his sides, swirling there and buzzing at the flesh and bone beneath, churning them both alike. When the murderous appendages were finished and jerked out, the mangled organs started sliding out of still standing Horowitz. Then his head was crushed into bloody pulp between the immense pressure of two spinning hand-saws.

The army guys pouring from the rooms just behind the Service guys didn't fare any better. The adversity was far too strong in numbers and sheer, raw power. A wall of disfigured monstrosities versus a wall of soon-to-be disfigured soldiers.

The good guys fought through them valiantly.

Still, both parties seemed awfully distracted by one another. Whether it be humans screaming, horrified, or the creatures letting out horrifying screams of their own, intended to horrify and succeeding in that.

_Cannon fodder. Just like at..._ the mind of the man who was walking away wandered. _Such a shame..._

Harras couldn't turn back. Not now. Not ever. It was tough not to be distracted by the swanky surroundings either, but Harras managed, he always managed. At least, he thought he did.

Another staircase. Here it was. The final destination. Somewhere on this floor they were about to wander in, the Oval Office was located. His every heartbeat was heard through the entirety of his body.

The pulse.

Intense.

While there was an assault on the White House going on one floor below—muffled gunshots and screams, of agony and frightening, were reverberating through the floor and walls much like his own pulse through his body—Harras had an assault of his own to pull off.

One look and it was crystal clear: the floor was littered with agents.

No matter.

Secret Service... SS...

_Are they SS or are they_ SS _?_

Secret Service working for Spinnerist Sect?

Are they the same thing?!

All those thoughts racing inside Harras were a little too late as his trigger finger was cutting down the _SS_ left and right, some of them raising their hands in a capitulating gesture...

No matter.

The drug cocktail _worked_. Harras never felt so sharply focused when firing guns in his life. Headshot after bloody headshot. Eyes and brain matter splattering around, splashing walls like a freshly mixed coat of pain. Shot, step, shot, step, shot, step... they had no chance. No time to react. No chance.

No matter.

"NOOOOOO!!!" Harras screamed as he dropped the penultimate agent on his way to his final goal; coincidentally, the bullets were all spent, so he threw the gun into the last one's head.

"WAIT!" the last surviving guard urged him to reconsider, bleeding from his brow, on his knees, arms stretched to heavens, but it was far too late as his throat was ripped out of his body milliseconds after he had pleaded for his life.

" _Wait",_ Harras thought, _there's nothing to wait. We've run out of time as it is..._

No matter.

Breathing heavily and staring intently at the sacramental door to the smaller hall to the Oval Office, Harras had adjusted his white collar, bloodying—bloo _dying_ —it, and moved closer. As he made the final step, the door instantly flew outwards and almost hit him in the face, a crazed woman jumping out of it! She did hit him in the face with her crazed head, her glasses flying away somewhere, audibly shattering somewhere in the bloody mess of the hall.

The woman shrieked, but Harras grabbed her by the throat and calmed her down: "Who are you?!"

"I'm—I'm—" The woman couldn't see anymore.

Harras let go off her. "You're our contact in this hole—hall..." his quick-witted voice rasped at her.

Taking a deep breath and letting a few short ones out, "Yeah..." she agreed, explaining, "that is why they let you in without a hassle." Her hand gestured around, assuming the servicemen were still there—they were, but not standing. "There was no complications, right?" she asked, squinting, which did not help at all.

Harras diverted his eyes to the boy. "Yeah..." His head experienced an impulse of _sharp_ pain, and he gulped to offset that. "It all went... smoothly..."

She was indeed Limbtick's contact in the White House. She said something else, Harras didn't hear. Then she followed it up by, "Who do you think leaked the info to Senator Limbtick?"

"Who?"

The sudden burst of screaming—new wave of shots fired in a continuous manner as a direct response to that—shook the battered White House. It was as much deafening as the first time around.

"Wow!" the girl sighed, awkwardly trying to balance on her feet. "I never thought I'd spend Christmas like this."

"Huh?" Harras inquired, his eyes staring at her wildly. "Christmas?"

"Anyway," she asked, half-kneeling, "wouldn't you be so kind to show me where my glasses are?" She gesticulated--like a mime--around, her knees scrambling to keep her from keeling over as she was trying to find her prescription glasses, even though her neatly manicured hands were too above ground to be successful in doing that.

_That noise..._ Harras heard it all too well: the staircase was littered with thirsty abominations out for blood and suffering.

"So, can you?" she asked again, none the wiser of what was really happening in this _war_.

Harras hastily looked around and walked around her, situating himself behind the girl's back. "That way," he said and kicked her in the ass. The girl tumbled.

"Tha—thanks..." she told him, carefully and slowly crawling towards the oncoming army of spinnerists.

A distraction. A sacrificial lamb. Both. It was for the greater good. The fate of humanity depended on it. Think of the living now, cry for the dead later. Sometimes there's no other choice but the tough choice. There's got to be casualties in the war. Collateral. Tough choices.

Christmas...

Harras closed the door behind the boy and him. A hefty lock—he bolted it shut. _Nobody_ gets in. _Nobody_ interferes.

_Merry Christmas, Harras..._ he thought as he was nearing to the grave finality of the situation. Suddenly, his hand started to shake.

He couldn't grab it—to soothe it—with another hand because he had no other hand, not anymore—not for a long time now.

Yet, it was a minute of calm. Harras finally had a chance to take a breath, if for a moment, and let it all in. Then, he noticed little Jamie Cotton in the corner of his bloodshot eye. Both of his eyes moved slowly, gazing at him intently.

They were alone. Impotently... or helplessly, Harras smacked his shivering, guilty-looking lips, looking at the boy, and then told him or himself, "Not now."

Somewhere, behind, the girl's vocal cords were screaming while their owner was being torn alive and chowed down by an angry mob of extremely hungry cannibals. _At least she couldn't see it._

Harras took out the flask, and touched its nozzle with his eager lips. They were safe here. The door would hold, he knew it. It was thick.

The flask. The few drops of whiskey that somehow stayed on its internal walls slid out and burned with a pleasure-inducing burn. That was it. Like the light that will never shine from the sky again. A petty reminder of things that are no longer attainable.

It was more than enough, though. Even a little reminder would _have_ to do.

He opened the last door.

They walked inside.

He had crossed the line.

The Oval Office.

It was fug.

"Bye, bye, Kim," an imperial voice in the dark, drastically muffled for Harras to hear or process clearly, told someone on the red rotary telephone before pushing the receiver back into the thing somewhere in the background of the pastor's thoughts, "Have a good one!"

Harras kept staring at the floor, thinking how beautiful and craftsmanship-like it was. Even in this dark. The hall had _some_ lighting, none here. The void of empty silhouettes of things and vaguely defined enormous plant to the right of the table (from Harras' point of view), just sort of behind it, a weird placement but that wasn't important right now.

"Hello?" the same imperial voice asked, bringing Harras out of those oddly unrelated contemplations. "Who are you?" Harras looked up: a bronze ruler akin to a bronze statue, sitting behind a large mahogany table. The pale light given off of the never-ending occultation made _that much_ apparent, at least for the left side (from where Harras was standing) of the man sitting there.

"Mr.—Mr. President..." Harras' throat suddenly became hoarse, "I'm here to warn you about the greatest danger that has ever been waged against the United States of America, its distinguished people, and our very way of life! A conspiracy plot so deeply ingrained in all—"

"Huh... do continue," the President interrupted him. "I'm interested, I'm interested," the President further urged him, laser focused. He seemed very enthusiastic...

Despite the unexpected encouragement, Father had grave misgivings about it. Somehow, even though everything went perfectly— _more than_ perfectly, one might've said—up to this point. This was his chance! And yet... everything felt... _wrong_. No, this was his chance. He wasn't about to just blow it!

"So this _plot_ , it's all about wiping out—wiping us out like the Ancients—they—they were..." As Harras was saying this, the President nodded, occasionally jerking his head to the side in an unnatural motion. Father wouldn't think much of it... "...what was I—what was I talking about?" ...except he got lost in the jumbled mess of his thoughts while watching this jerkiness unfold.

The President kept nodding. "Uh-huh, yes, I agree completely." Even more violently. His nods were now swaying in a huge arc.

On top of that, Harras could swear he smelled some wires burning. "Sir... are you okay?" As if something in this office was _malfunctioning_.

"Fine!" the President easily dismissed any such notion. "Couldn't be better, couldn't be better!" Then he snarled. Wildly. "Fine! Couldn't be better, couldn't be better!" Meanwhile, his swaying got so intense that he started hitting his head on the tabletop. "Abso— _shhh!_ —lutely fi— _sh!_ —ne!" Long strands of hair, separated from the skull amid these uncontrollable contusions, were flying up in the air, swirling in the shadows, as the President's brow cracked. "Cou-cou- _cou_ -COU!!!" Until he finally stopped hitting himself, as it were, and planted headfirst onto the battered table. Amid the fateful collision, something cracked inside his skull even louder than before—not a bone—a weird sound, more akin to a crack inside a... Harras wasn't sure. Be it as it may, the President wasn't moving afterwards. He was silent— _dead_ silent.

Fearing the worst, the reverend gulped the last drop of spit in his dried mouth and stepped forward, leaving the preoccupied boy behind, the spinning toy inalterably in hand. "Mr. Pres—President?"

Nothing.

It was hard to see, but Harras saw something that prompted him to move even closer, faster than before. He walked up to the table and reached his hand towards the President's badly banged up head. "What the fuck?" Harras mouthed, palping the vertical crack that ran from temple to temple. And then he promptly tore into it, pulling at the scalp, ripping it off.

The scalp in his own hand now, Harras knew that it wasn't of an entirely organic origin—there was blood, yes, lots of it, but there was something else, _wires and circuitry_ —and when he looked back at the scalpless head—instead of a bone plate on top he was expecting to see, there was a clear and frightening indication that it had been cut out previously, long ago, revealing the presidential head's contents outright—he saw that there was a technology far more sinister than that—than the one hiding under the bionically enhanced scalp—installed into the President's _brain_ : A HUGE FIDGET SPINNER!

" _What the fuck?_ " Harras couldn't believe his eyes. The scalp fell out of his hand, making squishy noises when it landed.

A huge fidget spinner implanted straight into the cerebral cortex, a work of Frankensteinian art—a masterpiece of blatant disregard of morality—neuroscience gone awry and satanic beyond. This special spinner consisted, as usual ones, of three petals attached to its base, but what was the unusual part, each of the petals had a special visible description calligraphically etched into them: one had "FAKE NEWS!" written on it, another was "WITCH HUNT!" and the last one said "SAD!"

As if the ground wasn't already spinning and the rug hasn't already been pulled from under his legs, a sudden hand with long sharp nails appeared out of the shadows and _spun_ the damn brain spinner into motion, scaring Harras so he jolted backwards, and it started whirring and blinking, and _spinning_.

"Uh!" moaned shocked Harras. It wasn't a plant to the right of the table. It was— "Your Eminence?!"

The Pope himself. Indeed, his pale visage would've fooled anyone under the guise of the occultation-enhanced shadows. He was very much alive. "Face it," he moved his esteemed lips, glancing at the devilish mechanism at work—at _play_ , "you were wondering if it's functional or not yourself." The brain spinner kept whirring like crazy. "It is. I _assure_ you, it is."

Harras was completely dumbstruck. "H-h-how is this possible?" His eyes were screaming bloody foul. "How are you here?"

Suddenly, the well-established Pope's tone changed to something else entirely, not even slightly reminiscent of its gravely serious former self—the lower-ranking Harras before the pale shadow-visitor didn't much like this newfound wacky playfulness: "Aren't ya daft little fella..." The Pope stayed in the shadows, only his jaw was moving down and up, eerily so, no other motions. "Who do you think orchestrated this whole thing?" the previous voice returned, but something was off now—even more so off than before!

"No... no, no..." Harras couldn't believe not only his eyes but his ears as well. What a masquerade of deception and deceit! He was off-balance and almost slipped on nothing when he started back, staggering backwards a few steps, out of sheer shell-shock of the... "shenanigans" boggling his mind so. "NO!"

The Pope's emotionless assurance was abrupt: "Yes."

Somewhere in the realm of his peripheral vision, Harras had noticed that the head spinner—burrowed, no doubt, deep inside the biomatter below its metallic gloss via electrodes and such things, and the blinking lights... they were _disorienting, on_ ly exacerbating the dreadful feeling of incompatibility with the twisting surroundings—was deliberately winding down. But as its own spinning was coming to an eventual halt, the room itself spun out of control, as if rotating around the priest's fixed body.

"But why tasking me with the—" the man who felt groggy and drunk was asking before being cut short.

Something inside the Pope's eyes lit up. A despising rage?.. Not even inside, more like _behind_ them. "I knew you wouldn't stop your little _personal_ investigation, so instead of offing you right there, I decided you'd be more valuable if you gather a rebellion for me to crush," he unexpectedly explained and fake cheerfully concluded, "It was easier than I expected." Then, the silence grew strong before he fired up a concise tirade of hate: "But you didn't stop, you little pest! You've kept _pestering_ me, haven't you?"

"But—I—" _Spinning, spinning, SPINNING._ The room was S-P-I-N-N-I-N-G. "I—uh—"

"You've done it forty years ago and you've even tried to pull a fast one again," the Pope rebuffed him with ease. "And now? Now, you've done it, Harras. You are finally _excommunicated_ ... for good. No hokey pardons this time."

Given the circumstance, those words shouldn't have hurt... but they did, they still did. That feeling triggered something unexpected... _flashbacks_. They weren't bad or good, as they usually were. They helped remember what was needed to be remembered right now. It all came back now. Every puzzle piece fit, creating the whole picture in the inside window of Harras' brain. A brain attack. Of comprehension.

"I—I remember... Vietnam..." Harras directed his intent gaze at the Pope, for the first time with some sort of understanding, even though it wasn't directed _at_ the Pope, it still was there. "A few years back, I visited Colonel in the retirement home for veterans... he had terrible dementia, but during one of his lucid periods he had told me how, right as we had the war's projected end in our sights, the _golden box_ was stolen from a U.S. block post—during secret transit operation that should've been real simple—and how we were trying to use this golden box to stop the war." Some of that lucidness he had spoken about has been transferred to his own state. "A dozen of our best soldiers in that block post had their necks twisted, bones crushed, limbs ripped out... and no suspect to tie it to. No casualties from the other side."

"I know," the Pope shocked him once more and again, "I've been there."

The darkness in the room got stronger.

"You've—how—impossible!" Harras croaked, somehow becoming more stable on his feet than before, his own rage a conduit for that newfound stability. "How could you be there?!"

"That is not important right now," the tall robed figure grinned. " _Do_ continue, _Harras._ "

Somehow, it brought him back on the rail of previous train of thought. "So when old Colonel told me this, then I knew that when we embarked on our last mission... back in '75... it wasn't a hostile takeover. It was a _retrieval_ operation."

"A lot of good that knowledge will bring ya," his ultimate superior mocked him. "You bore me—"

"Maybe not... but what you couldn't know is..." it seemed the rumpled reverend too had a few aces up his sleeve, "I've looked inside that box." He relished every word.

The benighted Pope's rude expression seethed with incredulity. "Lying fool!"

"How tables have turned..." his one-handed employee remarked.

"No matter." The sudden calm washed over the shores of the outbursts that seemed to have previously jolted him so. The long fingers reached inside the hidden clothes that the dark figure had on. Seconds later, the Pope had in his elongated hands a _red button_. It was the President's red button! The _nuclear_ red button. He pressed it right away.

"NO!" escaped Harras' lungs but it was far too late... as it always was...

As the ground started rumbling for some reason that wasn't yet apparent and the building began to shake violently but not enough to completely fall apart, the Pope reached another hand for his face and violently _yanked_ it off! It was none other than... THE DEVIL beneath the guise! THE DEVIL!

Beaten to the very core, Harras couldn't help but glance away, but it was even scarier to look outside through the huge windows than at the actual Enemy: the lawn slid open, revealing nuclear missile silos surrounding the White House! Rockets slithered up. That's what was causing all this rumbling...

"Merry Christmas," the Devil—whose horns straightened up, twisting back forward—hissed at the defeated pastor, simpering and blistering while the nukes were thundering and relentlessly taking off.

The windows crashed under their staggering turbulence as they flew away into the dark skies—now glowing orange—to end the world as everyone knew it.

All was lost in this dark hour. _The devil's hour._

"Devil!" the crazed priest growled at the satanic abomination, the evil incarnate. "I should've known!" _The real Pope was dead for years!_ He was beside himself. Absolutely broken.

At this precise moment, the Devil decided to strike the hardest. "Are you thinking about Frank? Your old partner? The one relocated to Florida after diddling some—"

" _Stop!_ "

But the Devil didn't intend to stop. "'Will he survive the strike?'" It was apparent that it was precisely what was on Harras' repeatedly jumbled mind, and the Devil knew that. "Don't worry, these nukes won't hit him, they are flying _away_ from this country... but as for the mutually agreed upon nukes coming here from our ally, North Korea, I wouldn't be that sure. Along with, oh, around another fifty states."

"You-u-u _monster!_ " The surge of emotions was too powerful. For a second, Harras just gave up, his fist unclenched and went down. "How could you choose to be such a horrible _monster?_ " he asked genuinely, seeing as how this was the last person he could talk to, even if he was a demonic prince of darkness.

The Devil's countenance shifted into a reflexive, pensive mood. The tension waned—for both of them—at least for the moment... "Choice..." the horned monster repeated almost tragically. "Choice is an illusion. Predicated upon our past and programming, determined only by the sum of all parts, not the participant's conscious agency. It's all a bluff. An illusion. A distorted dream we're stuck in for as long as it _destined_ to exist." As always, the Devil's gamesmanship—the Devil just being the Devil, muddling the waters—was unparalleled—or was he telling the truth for once?

As in most of his life, the priest was lost. "What do you mean?"

"It means you're already _dead_ and there's nothing you can do about it," the Devil foretold deterministically.

Maybe he meant that the dark tendrils of doom squeezed the Earth dry of light, Harras figured in this half-dream and half-nightmare of existence. Only the flashes of the nukes going off in all the major cities of the planet, not much else light will be there since, for sure. The world's fiercest leaders sending it into eternal obliviolin. Or maybe he didn't mean _that_ at all. Maybe it was more introspective and personal. Something that wasn't designed to be understood by another being. Who knows...

"You know..." the old man started the conversation anew—tabula rasa (a blank slate), "maybe you're right..." he uttered, limping forward, as shocked by that utterance as his erstwhile nemesis, or more of an interlocutor as of now, "about me not being in control of saving the world like I planned to so dearly..."

"Ah, the illusion of choice crumbles..." the Devil sighed. No disdain in his dark eyes, not anymore, only disappointment.

(Those black eyes... From a better angle, both eyes were there—but _wait,_ they weren't black any longer, not both of them anyway—one of them was white. It was just the one Harras had skewered with the bayonet, but it was no longer deflated, now reconstituted and fully functional, a sort of a rare case of an acquired heterochromia to show for it. Oh, he missed it so much, that bayonet...)

"...but what I could choose to do..." beyond-tired Father continued, getting closer to the Devil who was listening attentively and fixedly, "despite my geriatric looks, of course..." the pastor cracked a joke and smiled ever so briefly, "is..." he breathed in, "SEND YOU BACK TO HELL, _CREATUR—_ " As unexpectedly as he started screaming that, at the same time he lunged at the lulled fiend in just a few feet from him, ready to make a blow to his skull with his clenched fist.

But Satan, who seemed falsely unprepared, effortlessly grabbed Harras by the only hand he had left, crushing it instantly.

"The old saying is still true, I see," the servant or perhaps the master of darkness had time to intellectualize as he was breaking every bone in Harras' fist. "Indeed, the history is bound to repeat itself." Just as he concluded the sentence, his differently colored eyes fixed on the stump, helplessly flailing in the air, that was left for the man of faith as a bitter reminder of their previous confrontation at the church, not that he knew about it. The already crippled man, who screamed relentlessly, heard like everything was being grinded to dust inside his fingers, most of the palm, and part of the wrist. "Withering constructs of no style or substance, denuded of any true manifestation of conscientiousness and 'soul,' if you will. Such a shame..." the Devil didn't make his disillusionment secret anymore, it overflowing in his eyes, face and posture. "Any last words before I _spin_ your neck?"

The situation was irreparably critical. As was Harras' remaining hand. It was wrecked, devastated, destroyed.

Harras strained himself to be able to not die from a heart attack from such a terrible shock to his aged system, whispering, "You are... in dire need of prayer." And when the Adversary was so perplexed as to the context of such a peculiar and mysterious saying, Harras mustered up all of his remaining strength and stump-punched Satan right in his ugly gob.

It was so guttural and savage that the Devil's head hit the wall and his body as a whole crumbled to the floor. He was very much contused, sprawled on that carpet Harras found so fascinating not five minutes ago.

As for long-suffering Harras, racked with immense pain, he, nevertheless, had his courage subduing it, at least for the moment, to triumphantly proclaim, "Don't worry, filthy demon! I know how easy it is to lose yourself in vainglorious rhetoric," he told the fallen enemy. "I'm a preacher," and kicked him into the stomach.

The Devil bellowed in agony. _It's just a start..._ Just this once, Harras' long-gone sureness came back and he was all but ready to perform an exorcism on the Devil. His crooked, intertwined bleeding fingers miraculously procured a small metallic box out of his pocket, hurling it on the big desk. It opened on the impact. _Thank God... thank..._ His non-moving fingers, all looking in the weird directions, were lowered into the box and, with hefty amount of luck and even more luck still at his disposal, Harras had bitten into his lip and successfully got the cryptic thing out of the mystery box.

The Devil squinted, just to try and make out what it was... and he wished he hadn't. "No!" A raw emotion. What was even more surprising, an emotion of _fear_ at that.

Harras brandished in his many-times broken hand _the Christ Fidget Spinner_ —it was in the form of a cross, two intersecting bars with a bearing core that allowed it to spin just like any other fidget spinner, gleaming into the wretched eyes of the scum nearby.

"Yes..." Harras contrasted Little Nick's notion almost gleefully, "it was made— _custom-_ made—by the hermit monks I know... of engineering kind... sort to speak..."

_Now, the hardest part..._ his inner voice reminded him it wasn't over yet and Harras gulped at the prospect of that hardest part's very essence.

As his stump was ejecting blood and white goo, Harras positioned his ruined right hand in such a way as to try to spin the cross spinner. He prepared and moved his bleeding appendage to start it up... but it hit him between the thumb and index finger. "This is what I saw inside the golden box, Devil..." he said, trying again, "this is what you've stolen to keep yourself safe in Vietnam... AW!" It didn't work! Was it because of his traumatized limb, crushed beyond recognition and barely functioning as it was? Was it a faulty design? No, it couldn't be... he saw it in his dream! "This is the reason you've stopped that war... for you knew you couldn't win against the Christ!" As the Devil on the floor kept moaning, Harras kept trying, even though every time he tried to flick it into motion something new cracked inside his hand, and when it hit him, not moving forward, just stuck there, it hurt even more. "I might not save a few continents you've sent the nukes to, _but_ I will rid the world of your evil once and for all... and that's, arguably, more important, SATAN!" As Harras' heavy boot kicked the Devil into his guts—an unnervingly unnatural squeal jetting out of the horned enemy—the old preacher kept trying to spin. "Repent!" He kicked him again, the Devil squealed, but the Christ spinner failed. "Repent, you filthy cunthole!" Kicking, squealing, and failed spinning. "ARGH!!" And again. " _REPENT!!!_ "

And as they both were considerably out of breath and energy, howling and growling from the mutual pain and suffering and trauma they both inflicted upon each other... it finally started spinning, on its own, ripping through Harras' thenar webspace—the skin between the fingers that was getting in the way previously—and hitting the oozing meat with every new spin, faster and faster and...

For the first time since the commencement of this unholy ceremony, the Devil finally realized the gravity of his situation, whispering, "The becoming... _becomes..._ the reckoning..."

"YES!" let out Harras, the phrase unrelated to anything other than success he so craved for, even though his twisted flesh was torn apart in the process. A small price for the abolishment of all evil, he'd reckon if he could think right now.

But when Harras glanced at the recumbent shuddering thing at his mercy, a shiver went up his old spine. El Diablo was scared beyond reason, out of his wits with terror that was holding him in its terrifying grasp. Just one look at that, and that fear spread right into the already overwrought priest, but for another reason. _What can the Devil be afraid of?_ he instantly thought, and that thought alone made him physically sick.

The specifically designed cross spinner in the mangled hand wasn't getting faster anymore. On the contrary, it was getting slower.

The Devil stopped shuddering. "He's here," he whispered in the absolute silence.

"Who's here?" Harras croaked, unintentionally lowering his own voice.

"Because you've weakened me, you've sealed your own fate," the horned fiend answered the question that hasn't been asked with great concern and anxiety in his black and white eyes amid the sound of the cross spinner's rotation getting creepingly sluggish. He glanced at Harras for the last time—right into his eyes—and, horrified, uttered, "You've doomed us all."

The Devil blew up abruptly. It marked the final spin.

_It is over,_ Harras couldn't give credence to his own thinking, wiping off meaty chunks from his splotchy face with a sleeve of the dirty soutane, _it's all finally..._

The vindicated priest looked back, at his trusty companion: Jamie Cotton was still there, silently spinning his toy. _Toy._ That's what it was. _Only a toy now..._

_Twice crippled, not once shy..._ His mind was a NASCAR car, courtesy of adrenaline, still very much active in his slowly decaying, failing body. _What a day..._ One of the reasons he could still stand, _withstanding_ all that anguish and assault on his senses. _What a night... a night eternal..._ The other one was determination... or predetermination. _Hope beyond hope..._

He looked at the small pile of inverted remains and black goo on the floor before him—it was a mess nobody could clean up—turned his back on it and made a few steps back, limping back to Jamie Cotton whom he left almost on the doorstep to the compromised cabinet. The busted hand was hurting like hell and back again, dangling like a bundle of broken sticks, bark strips being the only things holding them together, but he kept it somewhere in the back of his mind. They had to get out of this stained shithole of a building—with all the mutated creatures crawling all over it, bullet holes and blood splattered all over its desecrated walls and everything.

Just as he was about to approach the oft-distracted little boy, a sudden white flash of light blinded him for but a fraction of a second, and when he turned around to its source when its effects on his hurting eyes wore off... he no longer could believe them. But he did. This time he did...

In the middle of the room, before him, stood Jesus Christ. In the flesh. In person. Not a vision or a figment of his perverted imagination. Not a distorted ghost. _The Christ has come to Earth for the second time._

"You served me well, Father," he spoke, every word soothing and calming, as if coming through every cell of Harras' body.

_What an honor to hear that from Jesus Christ himself!_ Harras couldn't voice his admiration, rapture. In fact, he couldn't speak at all. The swelling feelings inside him were overwhelming— _beyond_ overwhelming.

Before the slaphappy priest knew it, Jesus got even closer, and his lips touched Harras' lips, giving him a long, passionate French kiss. The taste of the Christ's spit was, for the lack of a better word, angelic. It was in no way sexual, the kiss, Harras figured, it was just like a loving mother kissing her only son goodbye, their tongues speaking with each other instead of speaking on their own. A short tongue-sucking action in the end, like a signature from Jesus, before they disengaged.

A warm sensation penetrated Harras' pathetic stump, overextending as far as his elbow, granting it that scorching pleasant warmth, as if getting rid of every bad infection that was still inside its swollen flesh, and, parallel to that, his _recently_ ravaged hand started to reform and heal, broken bones mending, skin growing back to cover them. It was glorious, _marvelous_. A true miracle. The reformed priest was stricken speechless by such a momentary and yet momentous transformation—all in the span of just few seconds, no less.

As the head of Jesus leaned back, his sparkling lips—probably still slightly wet from the healing kiss—spoke the soft words, "Although, I should say that your sense of loyalty was rather... inverted."

Harras' mute face changed drastically, his stump and newly unbroken hand no longer burning with fire but with scorching cold, that unbearable cold quickly spread all over his body, now aching like never before, just as his insides were coming inside out. Every organ, every bone, warping inside out— _insides out_ —experiencing irreversible inversion, his eyes slid in opposite directions from each other—inside the reforming skull—now facing the brain as it were, and revealing the half-torn optic muscles and twitching nerves where the irises had been just seconds ago. Everything inside him ripped and cracked. All that he could say or think was something guttural. Then his skin—and everything under it—abruptly snapped outward—also going inward—twisting everything apart and back together in a distorted tapestry of tribulating angst and agony, which Harras could feel only seconds of—revealing his ripped muscles, tissue and bone matter and... literally scattered brains, protruding through and covering the massively distorted "forehead," most parts of the clothing that was on him now likewise being inside him. This final twist was what kept Harras on his feet for those last few moments, fully preventing him from moving. The horrifically mangled body then stumbled, breaking a few "fingers", and fell, squelching forcefully all over the floor.

Jamie Cotton, who was always looking at his spinning fidget, unexpectedly diverted his eyes—a glance at the naked meat-grinded body that made such a noisy fuss—and then his disinterested eyes focused back on the fidget spinner in his hand, spinning.

߷߷߷

From atop of the Washington Monument, barefooted Jesus Christ was gazing at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, full of the mutated—deafeningly growling—fidget sinners; in an all around it, millions of malignant tumors of the single unshapely biomass, from a distance.

His arms stretched to the sides, eyes closed.

Lo and behold! The rivers of blood where the clear water used to be. The rivers of blood washing away the filth. No more living or unliving things in the vicinity. Just vicious crimson waves, colliding with each other.

The Lincoln Memorial was splashed by vigorous tides, half of it freshly painted red in an asymmetric fashion. The brand new state of blood and darkness.

And when Jesus opened his dark yet luminous eyes, the fleet of incoming H-bombs, flying at Washington as a planned retaliation, reflected in his irides. A "whatever" flick of the wrist, and they all were blown out of the sky, briefly lighting it on fire but not dealing any significant damage beyond that.

For such was the will of the True Master under the eternal syzygy.

And he sat on the bone throne for countless thousands of years, and the remnants of pathetic humanity bowed down to him in all his grace.

As it was foretold.

# THE END

# AUTHOR'S AFTERWARD

Greetings, Enlightened Reader.

Through thick and thin, we meet again. A lot of things have changed, a lot of developments transpired, but let us not dwell on trivialities past. We're here for _hors d'œuvre_ , or as less gourmet savvy commoners will probably tell you, the main course.

So, without further ado, let us begin, shall we?

As you might've already gathered on your own, this book was inspired in no small parts by the works of Ernest Hemingway. Like him, my father killed himself, when I was but a little boy. He fought his whole life with crippling depression and paranoia. It, in the end, creeping so deeply inside his brain crevices he thought that he was raising the child of Satan and that my mother was the reincarnation of the Whore of Babylon. Us being a deeply religious family, he had no choice, in his mind, but to pull the trigger on aiding and abetting the devil. I can't blame him. There was a time when I didn't understand the severe changes mental illnesses inflict upon one's—not only well-being—but perception of reality itself. To him, the world was a ruin, speeding its way into obliviolin of darkness. To him, we all deserved to die. Maybe a part of his nihilistic philosophy had imprinted onto my childhood memories, perhaps unconsciously urging its way up to write this book. Although it couldn't be one thing to even start considering this magnus opum of a, dare I say, masterpiece; the perfect storm of ideas and life-long experiences had finally took its toll on my impressionable psyche, and here we are.

For example...

One of the reasons I've set to write this book was the fact that I had firsthand, personal relationship with the devil. It wasn't nearly as supernatural as it sounds, though in some ways it definitely was.

You know now that my father is dead, but what I obfuscated—quite deliberately—is the fact that I saw my father as he was dying. A considerable chunk of his face was missing, damaged bones protruding through torn skin—I was so shocked I couldn't look away, the horrific picture becoming ingrained into my own nightmares and daydreams for the rest of my life—parts of his brain were visible, the brain was bleeding the most. "Papa?" I asked him in perpetual silence of that singular, time-defying moment. "It will be alright," he said, not moving his lips. As if through a telepathic bond that forms so often between fathers and sons. The only eye left inside his head was looking straight at me, for seconds or for hours on end, I'm still not sure. At that final moment, I guess he knew. He knew.

When my father was a lowly mechanic in Illinois, he got to know this girl. Susan, her name was, and she was some guy's manager and, basically, was picking up the same car every few weeks or so. It would be broken, fixed, wheeled out of the gates, rinse and repeat. Susan, though, was gorgeous, fiery red hair, ardor in her look, that kind of thing. So, through boring conversations that were, basically, small talk and these not-really-chance encounters, Susan and my father got to know each other a little and, eventually, became acquaintances. Their paths became uncrossed as easily as they became crossed. That was long before my birth. My old man always told me when I was a boy that turtles are the most adept when they're swimming on their backs. A cheeky lie, I found much later, but he would josh me with that sometimes and follow it up by telling me that the Earth was hollow and gnomes lurk beneath, farming for gold for as long as the time itself existed. Also a lie. When I asked him in my dream if he'd ever considered to be with Susan, he told me, "No."

Some other things that came to mind when it was time to, hopefully, recontextualize and/or enrichen this wild roller-coaster ride of an experience for you, Enlightened Reader, in no particular order:

Even though some might surmise otherwise, such renowned works as _Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice_ and _mother!_ (and, to some degree, _Dante's Inferno_ ) were not so much an inspiration, but a form of meditation of sorts. I'm sure that fellow auteurs as Darren Aronofsky and Zach Snyder, respectively, would tell you that our work always consists not only from observing and creating, but also sculpting a message from the bottom of our hearts in the form of deep contemplation for the viewer or, in this case, the reader to have on a sleepless night or two. That's what I pride myself in, making you smarter, if only marginally, by contact with something larger and more important than you are.

"Trim all the fat! Trim all the fat!" my previous editor would say. I, of course, fired him, but the utterance proved useful. If I decided to leave all the so-called "fat" in, this book would be triple the size, and that is just unrealistic to expect the children to read that much in this day and age. All in all, the story—at least its basic structure and tone—were kept consistent and unharmed by this so-called "purple prose" deletion.

While I say that, of course, something inside me winces, because not everything was "flavor text," sort to speak. For example, the Vietnam flashbacks were to be a book of its own in size and scope, encompassing the formative years of the squad young Harras eventually ended up in and his younger years before that, but they were mostly cut for pacing reasons and excessive violence. As the remaining living members of my family would probably tell you, I don't much like violence in any media. These hefty sequences were also to utilize never-before-used techniques of cutting between flashbacks and present time in such a way as to thematically tie them together, which has never been done before. Unfortunately, sometimes the reality has to kick in in in the most inappropriate of moments. While it saddens me deeply that those scenes and character development had to be discarded, that's a sacrifice I was willing to make. If I had that choice, I wouldn't have done it now, of course.

Another relatively big story-heavy things were things like: the assault on Staten Island; the fight in the Washington Monument, which subsequently was to fall and crack open in a spectacular fashion in the third and fifth drafts.

Jenny's status as a love interest was abandoned and she was relegated to an ordinary character.

All in all, there was about two dozen other deleted subplots, not to mention scenes, that were hampering the book's decidedly deliberate pacing—making it too brisk and pulp for my exquisite tastes—and structural intensity, but I won't go into that. The initial idea to weave in at least 7 Interludes—all having to do with wars past (and long past)—into the story is not worth mentioning, I would think, since I didn't see it through. So was, i.e. abandoned, a whole Part (back when the book had Parts) dealing with the Ancients (then called "the Ancestors") and their foretold demise they couldn't avert. As you would imagine, the creative process is often tumultuous and unpredictable, and when the story takes you somewhere, it leaves the other place, even if you were planning it for six months. Speaking of which...

Jamie Cotton, the main hero of the story. James was a friend of mine who was crushed to death in a tragic and, dare I say, freak school bus accident. To commemorate his achievements and simultaneously show him how much he meant to me as a fellow human being, empathetic friend, and occasionally with benefits, I decided to take his name and put it to a good use, I was sure he wouldn't mind after all. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that, wherever he is, he is probably very grateful that I did. He was described in the book exactly as I keep him in my memory. This one's for you, James.

Father Harras, the bald priest. Father Harras changed a lot during the initial pitching and broad-stroking of the story. The idea for him to be a younger man only recently coming into faith business eventually was scrapped, but, of course, it then found its way back into my subconscious (and eventually the story) and transformed into another character: Jenkins. Father Harras was based on a kindly priest I knew during my time in a Catholic school, whose name successfully escaped my memory. He was always caring and care-free. Smiling, encouraging, happy to hug me and other kids whether we expected that or not. I've always felt there was not enough people like that in the world. Also, I've always wondered what had happened to him... We were about to get to know each other better, when one day he suddenly disappeared along with another priest. I distinctively remember some policemen walking around in the church, but I never had a clue what any of that was about—no wonder, though, I was only six years old at the time. I do remember, _however_ , that I was very sad that we didn't get to know each other better, like he personally promised me. So, in some weird way, I guess, I successfully chased that opportunity in writing this book with him in mind. I hope he gets to read it someday, if he's still alive and into psychological dramas.

Youngblood. Youngblood was written into the story after I found that sixth draft, while being very functional and mostly feature complete, didn't particularly work where the Harras character was concerned, in no small part due to the fact that he had virtually nobody to play off of off. So, naturally, Youngblood was born. Her name initially a placeholder, I came to like it and respect it in this profound way that only writers can, so it stayed that way and needed no change. At some point, I figured that Youngblood being a blonde young woman created too much unwanted sexual tension between the three, so male Youngblood was born. Unfortunately, it also meant that the blonde hair color had to go too.

Now, what I'm about to talk about next contains graphic descriptions and adult themes, so consider this a **TRIGGER WARNING**.

I knew a lot of people would be really, _really_ upset about this, but in the end I had to do what I had to do. There are no compromises in art. Even if they have to have to do with the most controversial decisions. By now, you've most likely understood what I'm talking about. Hell, some of you probably already knew this part was coming before I did. So, here it goes...

Hopefully, you'll understand my thought process, so there'll be no misinformation and misconception.

After an exuberant amount of deliberation and sleepless nights, I arrived at the most unsavory a conclusion that fiction, in the end, should have a dose of truth injected into it. This truth—this moment that was this biggest hurdle in the production, the thing that made me contemplate it for 32 days and only on day 33 to actually resume writing, but not before that, because I knew how important and far-reaching it is, _every step of the way_ , let me assure you in that—ways heavy on my mind even now. I, of course, knew full well that words are weighty beasts and you have to wield the power they present responsibly and fairly.

I am, of course, talking about the infamous Horse Passage... the dreaded "heart racing like a thoroughbred horse" line... Yes, I had to bring it up again and this is why this is so important. Please bear with me. I hated that line. I fought that line. I didn't want that line. But, somehow, it kept coming back and back and there it was again. It needed to be typed, it needed to be read, decency and the faint of heart be damned. Now, I love animals. I do _love_ animals, you have to believe me on this one. So, naturally, it felt devastating to include such a cruel, ill-mannered description—especially in the light of how everything nowadays seems to be misconstrued by some side or another, no common ground, no context, no mercy. "Racing." "Thoroughbred horse." My heart goes numb just by remembering it. So, so inappropriate and beyond the realm of normalcy. "Racing." "Thoroughbred horse." Some things just don't mix, and this one surely was one of them.

But, Mr. Brodsky, why did you include it then, you ask?

Some of you might actually know this story. It is almost as brutal and bittersweet as the line itself, so brace yourselves if you didn't know this.

(And, no, I would never use an animal as innocent as a horse to make a quick buck off a cheap controversy, such as this one might have been considered to be if it were to be penned by or rather to fall in some unconscientious dilettante's hands. You should be sorry for even having that in the back of your filthy mind. Let it be known publicly that I am deeply offended by that unsubstantiated nonsense and _vehemently_ deny it.)

When I was a little boy, some months before the big family tragedy, my parents took me to a racetrack. Both of them had problems with gambling. Anyway, there I was, a little boy on this huge round theater of sorts, beaming with curiosity and feeling with every cell of my body a rising tension of the crazed crowd. It was one of the greatest feelings. Back when I could still feel... Then, the race started. The horses jumped out of their cages, small men on their backs hitting them with what looked like swatters. I knew something was wrong, but I was too little to voice my concerns nor could I look away. God knows, the guilt follows me around to this day. One of those horses was a Thoroughbred. A huge, massive horse, hoofs the size of my heads, ample breasts, freakishly muscular frame and figure, tail like a thousand of snakes, all neatly tied up together. So, naturally, I follow it with my eager eyes. Hundreds of thousands of people do. For the first half of the race, everything seems fine. But seeming is not being. Then it happens.

The Thoroughbred swerves right and hits another horse in its side, then the other horses, uncontrollable and dashing madly fast, participate in a garish contest of the another kind, the one that could only be described as an equine pileup.

It's a carnage. People scream. Horses scream. More people scream. It's a carnage.

But the Thoroughbred, Lucky, I think was its name, stands up, virtually fine, not a scratch on it. Then it happens. Something that I will never ever forget. Its maw opened and... it coughed its own lungs out. And for a while it was just standing there, like it didn't know what had happened. It was shocked. I was shocked. Everyone was shocked, except maybe for its owners... It had this curious look on its face, you know, like, "Did this pile of guts I'm looking at really came out of _me?_ " Then, suddenly, something happens and it falls to the ground, a cloud of dust twisting into a miniscule tornado that quickly vanishes. It didn't get up. Much like my father, the horse didn't stand a chance.

**TRIGGER WARNING** over.

Of course, an astute avid reader will, no doubt, find in my work plenty of distinctive Alexandre Dumas and Homer references, to name very few. These fun little details are scattered throughout the novel, some weightier than others, and include at least one 9/11 allusion (two if you're really thorough), the Cornish Owlman subconscious imagery, some _The State and Revolution_ themes and its real-life consequences, along with parallels to the Uprisings of both Serbia and East Germany, the Ginsberg assassination, the Two-faced Bears of Belovezhskaya Pushcha case study, and plenty of other pop cultural metaphors, but that is purely subtext, not pretext. The point being is, don't just take my writings as gospel: find truth in them for yourself.

Now, I know you've got questions. Lots of them probably. In fact, chances are there is a greater number of them than the answers in your head. And before you ask me about it in public or in letters...

I don't interpret my work. It has a meaning—lots of them—but I opt not to look for it—them—for I think that—like every auteur will inevitably tell you—every instance of art is a meaning in and of itself. I prefer immersing myself in the world and come away that much wiser. That was exactly how I treated this magnum opossum of mine.

And, besides, since I resist interpreting my work, I leave that to my audience. I think that that's the biggest gift I can keep on giving and giving and giving...

I don't ever cheat my way out of my personal philosophy. Ever. This was no different, even though the overwhelming preponderance of themes played the tug of war with the profound meaning(s) found by everyone on a deeply personal basis. I find it the greatest meaning of all.

What I will tell you about it is I do think, though, that the story and narrative itself has a strong chance to change the broad landscape of writing (and other adjacent genres) for centuries to come.

Something else worth noting and pointing out in this tumultuous times of now: the POTUS character was always an empty canvass and wasn't important on a personal level. Bush or Obama, it wouldn't have made any difference at all—thematic, narrative, or otherwise. That is why the President is unnamed in the story so as not to draw any attention to that little inconsequentiality.

Thank you for buying the book, and if you didn't, fuck you!

Trent Brodsky

New Jersey

January 2018

