Lockdown:

A File from the Parahuman Security Initiative

By Alexander Isaacs

Content Warning: The following is intended for mature audiences and contains mild body horror as well as descriptions of suicide.

“WEN­dih­go. Wen­DEE­go. Wen­DIE­go.”

I muttered the syllables to myself, trying to suss out the proper pronunciation as I read the description on my HUD:

The wendigo is one of the Primals, a category of immortal parahumans which represent the most basic, animalistic human needs. The wendigo in particular embodies the drive to survive at all costs, and is thought to originate from acts of cannibalism in isolated locations. First encountered by the Algonquin people in what is now known as Canada, the wendigo is perpetually hungry for human flesh, and can assume the form and voice of any of its victims and extends its lifetime by devouring new victims and stealing away the remaining years of their life.

“Charming fella,” I said to my fellow guard, a middle-aged Latina woman by the name of Roberta.

“No wonder the Director just decided to kill it and be done with it,” Roberta concurred, her faint Long Island accent telling me more about where she came from than she’d ever told anyone at work directly.

“So what’s with this whole set­up? Do they have to do some kind of ritual to destroy it? This one of those ‘back to hell with ye, spawn of Satan’ type scenarios? Love a good demon roast.” I asked, and gestured at the interior of the massive furnace that had been constructed for the sole purpose of burning the miserable fuck to death.

“Not exactly,” Roberta said, “According to the Director, it has to do with the way the wendigo regenerates. Every time you kill the thing it just loses one of its stolen lifetimes. We have to kill it enough times to account for every last one of its victims. And this one’s old according to what I’ve heard. Been eating folks for well over a century, the sick bastard.”

             Lovely, I thought, I get to lie to my wife about why I’m not home. Again.

             It wasn’t like I had the option to tell her the truth, and she wouldn’t believe it if I did.

            Yeah honey, I’m not actually a garbage man and I work for a secret intergovernmental organization dedicated to arbitrating affairs between humans and the supernatural and we had to burn a cannibalistic, super powerful, nigh-­unkillable Native American folk nightmare for a couple days. Be sure to tuck the kid in for me and lock the garage. ‘Kay, thanks, bye!”

We stood in silence for a few moments, until I broke the silence with “You know it’s almost a shame in a fucked-up way? It’s like cutting down an ancient redwood you know? But you know, a redwood with teeth. That eats people.”

Roberta didn’t answer.

“Yeah, sorry, bad joke.” I muttered, embarrassed, and went back to silently standing guard.

I gazed through the thick, tempered glass at the creature restrained within. It resembled a human in much the same way the three-day-old roadkill carcass of a buck resembled a deer. Its body was completely hairless. Its skin was pallid and its gut bloated and distended, as if it contained more than the normal amount of organs, which I reminded myself, given its diet, it probably did. Its flesh hung unevenly on its frame as if it had been fastened there with staples by drunken hands. Its black, lidless eyes were narrow and disconcertingly close together and together with its mouth filled with jagged, mismatched teeth its face was twisted into a permanent lascivious rictus. Its neck and torso were unnaturally elongated, and its ribs were so prominent that I imagined it could use them as a sort of weapon all on their own. Its real weapon, however, were the claws that protruded from its long, bony fingers like butchers knives. The cruel blades scraped the floor of the furnace room as the Wendigo struggled in vain against the titanium restraints that held it fast to the apparatus of death upon which it stood.

        “LOCKDOWN ENGAGED,” intoned the robotic voice on the PA system as the facility sealed itself up. The lights dimmed and the massive locks rumbled into their tumblers with a disquieting finality. Nothing could get in or out without the correct voice command, and the command could only come from a registered member of the Parahuman Security Initiative (PSI for short), in other words, one of us.

“So it can talk to you in your head, right? It’s psychic?” I asked Roberta. “Yeah, but don’t worry about that. Our helmets will shield us just fine, same as when we rooted those poltergeists out of that elementary school,” Roberta replied. I chuckled, recalling the incident. None of the children had been killed or seriously injured and the worst I got of it was several plastic apples filled with pencils launched at my head at what were, admittedly, alarming speeds.

“All we’ll hear is sweet, peaceful, boring quiet, while Ol’ Toasty down there screams his rotten lungs out.”
               Christ alive, if only that had been true.

 It wasn’t so bad, the first couple days. Sure, we heard the occasional psychic yelp here and there, but it rarely lasted long, and it wasn’t all that surprising, seeing as the creature was old, powerful and no doubt in quite a bit of pain, if it was still human enough to feel pain. It slammed its face against the glass and licked it with a tongue that had to be at least a foot­ and­ a­ half long. As it lingered there, still burning, face still pressed against the glass, its agonized face transformed itself into the shrieking visage of a frightened blonde woman, probably not out of her twenties.

 I cast my gaze downward. I knew it was just a trick. I knew it was just someone that the Wendigo had killed and eaten as some point in its long, brutal, grisly existence, but it still bothered me to see a human face expressing that kind of abject agony. They say fire inflicts the worst pain the human body can experience.

“Hey Mitch, cover for me for a sec. I need to go get something to eat from the mess hall.” Roberta said through the radio in her helmet, now memetically sealed to make sure the psychic shielding held fast and no corrupting thoughts could make their way through. “You sure that’s a good idea,” I asked, “Won’t the thing be able to get into your head if you take the helmet off?”

“I’ll be way out of its telepathic range by then, and besides, I haven’t eaten in fifteen hours. This keeps up and I’ll bet the one resorting to cannibalism,” she said with an awkward laugh.

Oh sure, you get to make tasteless jokes, but when I do, it’s crickets!

I laughed back, just as awkwardly, “Yeah, sure, go ahead, I’ll cover for you.”

“Thanks, Mitch,” she said, and turned down the hall. She returned a few minutes later, and even through the dark visor I could tell something was wrong. “Hey, Roberta,” I offered, as cheerily as I could.

 “Hey.”

“Did you eat?”

“Yep.”

“Gotcha.”

Her breathing was uneven. It was heavy enough for me to pick up over the communicator and it stopped and started, interrupted by what sounded like a snorting snore, like the restless sleep of an apnea sufferer.

“Roberta, you doing okay?”

“Yeah, I’m doing just fine,” she said in a strange, warbling cadence, as if talking in her sleep, “You ever wonder what people taste like? They say it’s ‘long pork,’ right, but does it really taste like pork? You don’t have any source but cannibals and they can hardly be relied upon to give accurate information.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Laugh you fucking ingrate!” she screamed, and not in a joking way.

I immediately did as I was told, lest I upset her further. I’d never seen or heard her like this before. It was probably fine, though; it was a grueling job and not everyone was cut out for these long haul jobs.

 To get away from Roberta and her… discomfiting state for a bit, I did a lap around the exterior of the furnace room and noticed that a few of the other grunts were starting to get a little weird. They looked nervous… dejected.

“Brinks, you doing okay my guy? Haven’t heard from you all night.”

Brinks acknowledged me with a glance, only for a second started beating his helmet against the wall, slowly and rhythmically at first, then rapidly quickening in pace.

“Hey, whoa, Brinks, stop that, man!” I said, trying to restrain him before he compromised his helmet.

He shoved me backward with unnatural strength, and let out a sustained animal screech as he slammed his head against the wall with renewed vigor. His shrieking mixed with the sounds of crunching visor and electronic distortion as the helmet began to fracture in a scrabbling cacophony.

I quickly muted him and his guard partner scrambled over to try and help him out. Without even looking, he whipped his gun off his belt and unloaded a round into his buddy’s visor, knocking him down and leaving spiderweb cracks on his visor. I pulled out my own gun and aimed for Brinks’ legs, but before I got my shot off he ripped off the fragmented remains of his visor, spun his gun around, crammed it in his mouth, bit down on it like it was a hunk of meat and pulled the trigger. The pink mist of brain matter that geysered out of the back of his helmet missed me by mere inches, and his friend who’d been shot in the visor stood up and started at the ceiling.

 By this point I was trembling, rocked by what I’d just witnessed, but I managed to compose myself enough to read the nametag of the man that was still alive and said “Hey, Stetson, you okay?” It was a stupid question, of course. I knew full well that he was emphatically not okay. I just wanted to see what kind of response I could get from him. What I got was nothing. He just stood there serenely and raised his gun to his visor, gruesomely finishing the job that Brinks had started.

 My heart was threatening to beat its way out of my chest. I checked my helmet again, just to make sure it was secure. That was when the wendigo started getting personal. It was one thing when a couple of guards ate their guns from the stress of having to listen to this thing for so long. Any time we did an op like this there were inevitably a few unstable types who succumbed to the horrors of what we were exposed to on a daily basis, but they were usually few and far between. It was tragic, but they could be replaced, and their families would receive a ton of posthumous hazard pay. I could handle that. After all, they knew full well what they were getting into when they accepted the invitation to join PSI. I could reconcile that with the rigors of the assignment… until I heard it myself… I mean really, really heard it. Not a snippet. Not a stray yell… but four solid hours of the creature’s bloody howling, in a voice that I knew from not that long ago.

 “HELP ME!” it screamed, “JESUS HELP ME! I’M BURNING! OH GOD, IT HURTS! IT HURTS! SOMEONE HELP ME! SOMEONE GET ME OUT OF HERE!” the voice, as human as you or me yowled before collapsing into a jag of agonized sobbing. I had been acquainted with Roberta and her husband briefly before she joined. They never told Roberta what happened to her husband when she was recruited, only that if she wanted to stop it from happening to others; that she should sign up with the Parahuman Security Initiative.

At that moment, as I watched her, tears streaming down her face, put her pistol in her mouth and pull the trigger I knew. I called out to her, begging her not to do it, but the horrible bang from the barrel of her gun drowned out my scream. I curled up in the corner I radioed for someone, anyone in the facility to talk to me, to help me deal with what I’d just seen: one of the strongest, most hardened warriors I’d ever known reduced to a slumped, tear­stained corpse and a stain on the wall… but no one answered.

“Please, for the love of God someone answer. Someone come get me. I can’t do this anymore. I need help. You bastards promised us we’d be safe! You said these suits had been tested! We were the test, weren’t we! This was all a set-up to test the limits of the memetic sealing! Damn you all! You’ve killed us, and you know it and you don’t fucking care! I hope it gets out and I hope it eats every last one of you traitorous fucks!” I collapsed into a sobbing pile, not knowing if anyone could even hear my tirade.

I turned up every channel in my communicator, hoping the heaving breath of my teammates would drown out the wendigo’s screaming, but all I got on the other lines was static. As the silence of my dead teammates began to close in, it was broken by a deeper silence. Roberta’s husband, at long last, succumbed to the flames, his horrid screams petering out into pathetic whimpers. A hollow, wretched peace overtook me as I comforted myself with the obvious lie that it would all be over soon.

“DADDY HELP ME!” my son’s voice cried out from nowhere and everywhere. “DADDY, THERE’S FIRE COMING! DON’T LET IT HURT ME DADDY!” he cried out again, his six-­year-­old voice devolving into squeals of pitiful terror as the furnace hummed, preparing to burn my helpless child alive. It was at that moment that my terror and sorrow and despair all melted away. It was at that moment that nothing else mattered but getting him out of there alive. A small, cowardly voice screamed at me in the back of my head. It said it wasn’t real. It said it was just a trick that the creature was playing on me; that it wasn’t my son back there. But the wendigo hadn’t eaten my son. The Initiative would have told me if it had. It wouldn’t have put me here. My son was safe and sound just as long as I got him out of here. It was mix­-up of course. He followed me to work. Stowed away in my truck and wandered all the way down here. That was crazy but it had to be true. There was NO WAY ON EARTH I WAS LETTING HIM DIE!

 “DADDY! DADDY HELP, THE FIRE IS COMING!”

“I’m coming kiddo!” I called back out loud. “Computer, disengage furnace doors!” And, thinking quickly, I added “Disengage furnace!”

Dodged a bullet there. Now, to save my son.

And there he was, standing on the metal floor, right as rain, smiling up at me with his rosy cheeks through his curly blonde bangs. I’d better get him a haircut when we get home, I thought, deliriously happy to have saved him at last. I went over and picked him up and rustled his hair. I rubbed his back and whispered that everything was going to be okay, right before he sank his teeth into my shoulder, piercing right through my body armor, shredding me limb from limb and devouring every scrap of my flesh in a matter of seconds. It didn’t hurt a bit. It felt like a dream in fact, the kind you laugh about when you wake up.

I woke up and the wendigo opened my eyes… ­­its eyes…­­ and with my lips and my tongue calmly uttered just four words in my voice. “Computer, disengage base lockdown.”

“LOCKDOWN DISENGAGED.”

My legs… its legs… our legs… carried us back out into the wide world, warm sun on our face, our belly hungry and our future bright, my son and I and all the rest of our new friends.