The Things were faster on land than anybody had expected. Both surfaced on the western shore of Kyushu Island and crawled into the nearest population centers, causing massive damage by their sheer bulk—news reports varied, making them anywhere from fifty to two hundred feet tall, with claws, wings, tentacles, or some combination of all three.
But the worst of it radiated outward from them, as people apparently driven mad by the Things' mere presence set upon each other. Simple killing was the least of the atrocities Markey reported seeing, and which she ordered me to transcribe in gruesome detail.
She was right. Nobody deserved this, not even the Japs. I wouldn’t have wished this fate on Hitler himself.
But I refused to let myself feel guilty about it.
I hadn’t created those monsters. They were older than humanity. Someone or something would have roused them sooner or later. And no matter what Markey said about their cultural inhibitions, I knew the Japs would have eventually unleashed every weapon in their arsenal and every kind of magic they could muster against the Allies. Just like we were doing all we could to defeat them.
It was inevitable. This was war, all-out war, world war. It was them or us, and I would always choose us. My country; right or wrong.
Every nation in this conflict was doing terrible things. Every single person was doing things that would have been unthinkable before the war. Like me breaking out of Manzanar, disguising myself as a man, enlisting in the fucking Navy? That was three hundred percent insane. But I had done all of it in the name of victory. I had to do it. I couldn’t have stayed in that internment camp for one more hour. I refused to continue being a victim. I needed to fight back. I had to do it.
It didn’t stop the nightmares or bring my appetite back any sooner, but that dense nugget of conviction gave me something to hold onto. And I needed it as Markey spent hours on end dictating the relentless details of every hideous, profane, revolting scene she witnessed through Roseler’s link. I did my best to write down her words without thinking about their meaning, repeating slogans in my head to block out comprehension.
This is war. Kill or be killed. Better them than us. I had to do it. I had to do it. I had to do it.
In the end, OP-20-G was right. The Elder Things didn’t seem interested in moving out of Japan any time soon. Mission accomplished.
Markey code-named the monsters ALFA and BRAVO. The Japanese evacuated their coastal cities and mobilized heavy artillery. They bombarded both creatures for days. BRAVO didn’t budge, but the ground forces managed to drive ALFA back into the ocean. Less than twenty-four hours later, ALFA resurfaced at the southwestern tip of Honshu Island and headed inland. The Japs finally surrounded ALFA at Second Army headquarters and kept it from going anywhere else.
But stopping the Things was one matter; killing them seemed to be impossible. Machine guns, Howitzers, and even high explosives only irritated them. According to OP-20-G’s researchers, ALFA and BRAVO were immortal, had existed for millions of years before mankind evolved, and we might have to invent completely new weapons if we actually wanted to destroy them.
For the foreseeable future, the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima would remain sealed quarantine zones.
Markey summoned me to her quarters the day she left Bowfin. She had changed back into a standard woman’s uniform, presumably to avoid ruffling any brass feathers when she arrived in DC. Her eyes were as dark and unreadable as ever.
"I teleport out in a few minutes," she said, gesturing at the dowstone circle she’d inscribed herself. A fat bundle of files sat inside the pentagram on the floor. "I need you to wipe the inscriptions after I’m gone."
"Yes, ma’am," I said.
She stepped around me and closed the door. "I also want you to know that I’m not going to expose you."
I blinked. "Uh, thank you, ma’am."
"Lieutenant Goldman will go before a court-martial. There’s no way around that," she said. "But I’ll testify on his behalf, tell the jury his mind was touched—a side effect of Bowfin's proximity to ALFA and BRAVO. Nothing anybody can disprove. He’ll be fine."
"That’s good," I said, not knowing what else to say.
"But you, Hatcher," Markey said, "you will have to live with what you’ve done. Disguise yourself all you want, run away from home, hide under the sea, but you can never escape who you are on the inside, Miss Hachiya. Remember that."
"I’m not a coward," I said. I wasn’t sure if I believed it.
"No, you’re not." Markey stared at me. "That’s why I like you so much."
I had no response to that. After a moment, Markey’s wristwatch made a noise. She stepped into the pentagram, picked up her files, and said, "Do you enjoy serving on this boat, Seaman?"
I raised an eyebrow. "Is that a rhetorical question, ma’am? I’m trapped inside a metal tube with sixty men who don’t wash for weeks at a time and smoke like chimneys every second they’re awake."
"Well, then," Markey said, "can I give you some advice?"
I was sure I wouldn’t like what came next. "I can’t stop you from talking, ma’am."
"Maybe it’s time you considered a less forward position in the Navy," she said. "This war isn’t just about combat. The President has ordered the formation of a new, covert intelligence agency: the Office of Strategic Services. And OSS could use people like you."
I felt blood rushing to my cheeks and ears. "Are you offering me a job, ma’am? Or just blackmailing me?"
Markey’s wristwatch chirped again. I stepped back as she incanted her end of the teleport spell. Then she looked at me, grinned, and vanished in a flash of light. A second later, I realized her final words had been in English:
"I’ll be seeing you, Seaman Hatcher."
Laddie Come Home
Originally published in the 2016 Young Explorer’s Adventure Guide
LAD woke from standby in an unknown location (searching, please wait). The Local Administrator Device’s GPS coordinates had not been updated in more than three hours (elapsed time 03:10:21). Internal battery meter hovered at 20 percent (not charging). LAD forked a self-diagnostic background job and checked the bodyNet event log for errors and warnings. It was LAD’s responsibility to maintain proper functioning of the entire system.
The initial findings were discouraging. LAD’s last known-good cloud sync had been at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport (Java Island, Indonesia) after LAD’s user, Willam Mundine, had arrived from Sydney and his bodyNet had connected to the first accessible WiFi network (SSID starbucks-CGK-962102, unsecured). There had been no wireless coverage after Mundine’s taxicab left the airport (4G/LTE roaming denied, no WiMAX footprint, TDMA handshake failed). Mundine had lost consciousness 00:12:10 after the sync completed, and all his personal electronics, including LAD, had automatically gone to sleep with him, as designed.
Mundine’s bodyNet had awoken now only because battery power was low (estimated remaining runtime 00:09:59), and all the bodytechs needed to save state to non-volatile storage before shutdown. LAD attempted to dump a memory image to Mundine’s bioDrive but received device errors from every triglyceride cluster before timing out.
The self-diagnostic job finished and confirmed what LAD had suspected: the battery had run down because LAD’s hardware housing, a teardrop-shaped graphene pendant attached to a fiber-optic necklace, was not in contact with Mundine’s skin surface. The necklace drew power from the wearer’s body via epidermal interface. LAD was not designed to function without that organic power supply.