Once again, he was running.
This time, though, he wasn’t fleeing a disembodied face in a dark hallway, or a nuclear rainbow. No, he was fleeing . . . was that a human?
No, it was not. Or at least, it had not been for a long time. Its entire body was red as if someone had slashed it apart, revealing only a layer of blood and muscle. Its unblinking eyes stared into his soul, while it ran at an inhuman speed on unsteady legs. It was on a level of disgusting and horrifying that he could not have hoped to imagine before entering the uncanny hell.
However, it didn’t look like he would be killed by this twisted person today. There was a corner just ahead—with luck, he could dash into it and escape. Then—yes!—a dark alcove, hidden behind the corner. He ducked into it, watching the beast lurch past. He was already trying to think of whether it was safe to leave when he felt it.
Arms, reaching out from the dark. Hundreds of them. They were reaching, grabbing, hands within hands hands…he could not move. He could not flee. He could already feel the chitters whatever these limbs were attached to make, could feel them beginning to nibble at his flesh before taking large, juicy, meaty bites…
He screamed in terror.
And then he awoke.
Hugh Simmons sat straight up in his cot, gasping. Looking around, he saw everything was fine—or, as fine as anything could be in the Backrooms. It had just been a nightmare.
He stayed awake for a little while longer, his hand near his revolver, frightened that something might come running around the corner thinking how nice he would taste. He knew that he was probably in one of the safest places in the Backrooms—Level 4, one of the only levels with no entities, and he was sleeping at the M.E.G.’s headquarters—one of the most secure places in this liminal hellscape.
But when emotion and reason collide, reason rarely wins.
As Simmons knew would happen, nothing came except the guard.
“H-hey, Cal,” said Hugh, still a little shocked from his perceived near-death experience.
”Hi. Surprised to see you up this early,” he replied. Dexter Cal had been one of Hugh’s closest friends since he reached this place. When Hugh first arrived, Cal had just signed up for guard duty. Now, he was the leader of the “night” shift and was tasked with making sure nothing that he wanted to kill indiscriminately got into the base.
“Yeah, so am I,” chuckled Hugh. “Just had another one. They’re getting better, though.”
“Don’t worry about the nightmares. I had them also—I still do. I hate to say this, Hugh, but you’ll always have them. The best you can do is to just remember that they aren’t real, and you’ll wake up just fine eventually.”
“Thanks, Dexter,” said Hugh, waiting for the inevitable small outburst that would follow anybody using Cal’s first name. But it never came—he had already gone back to his post. Eventually, Hugh went back to sleep.
Naturally, it felt like he had just gone to bed when he was awoken again.
The clang of the bell was the first thing he heard.
“All hands on deck! Wake up, people! There’s a big shipment coming in!”
Groaning, Hugh rolled over and checked the time. Well, it was 7:00, no way to escape it now.
He eventually fully woke up, pushed the blanket away, and began walking over to the staircase. Just down a couple flights of stairs lay the entrance to the Hub, where already a crowd of about 50 people was moving bottles of Almond Water and stacks of food into the base. Eventually, the crowd—and Hugh—dispersed, their goal accomplished: by his reckoning, there would be enough to support the 300-some people here for another month. Then they would have to do it all over again.
He pitied the people doing the supply run. Their job sounded simple: pick up supply crates in Level 1 full of Almond Water, the vital drink that nourished people and kept them sane, and food. But that was just the beginning. Although the M.E.G. had established three bases on Level 1 already for the express purpose of collecting crates to be transported to its outposts, it was rarely enough. When that happened, the supply team had the unenviable job of searching across the level for more. And then there was the challenge of getting them across the Backrooms.
And there was never enough.
It was a rare day when they came back with the amount they were supposed to collect. Hugh could not remember a time when they had not been rationing—although he could remember when the rations were larger. Now, with an entire outpost having been found abandoned (with blood stains everywhere), not a minute passed when he did not feel some pang of thirst. If conditions across the Backrooms were like this, it was a miracle any organization had survived for more than a month.
Hugh could count himself lucky in that he didn’t have any specific job. Little did he know that that was about to change. But until then, he was a “floater” like the majority of people here at the M.E.G. headquarters. He just helped out wherever it was needed.
Hugh was enjoying his Almond Water coffee—well, enjoying was a bit of an exaggeration—when someone came over. Naturally, it was Ivan.
Officially, as Hugh had learned, the M.E.G.—and their headquarters here—was run by a shadowy group of ten people. Only their names were known, and even those might be lies made to keep them safe. Naturally, their survival was important to the Group. However, they rarely intervened in what was happening in the headquarters—or, as it was known to the people who worked here—the “Capital Office”. After all, managing what was happening across the Backrooms took precedence over one small section of it.
Filling the void left by the official leaders of this community was Ivan. Though he held no real position and was just a floater like Hugh and most of the residents here, Ivan was by far the most respected of all of them. Nobody knew when he got to the Capital Office, but since he had, he had become the de facto leader. The Consensus trusted him enough to manage what was going on here, which was saying a lot.
”Hugh! I have something for you to do.”
”What’s going on?” inquired Hugh. “No—please tell me it’s not another supply shipment, or that the fax machines need servicing. I’ve done enough of that.”
It was true. A couple of years ago, someone had found that a truck transporting fax machines had no-clipped into Level 2. Immediately, the M.E.G. realized the potential of these things, and collected them, planning to distribute them across the Backrooms. It was envisioned that these little white things could facilitate mass communication across the M.E.G.’s vast domain. Unfortunately, the truck had been heavily damaged, and only thirteen of the machines were still working. By last month (July of 1995), only five of the machines were still working, all of them at the Capital Office. But that was when Simmons, with his passion for electronics, had shown up. He had kept them working, but . . . one could say that his old interest in how these things worked had been replaced by a hatred for repairing them.
”No, Hugh,” chuckled Ivan. “Don’t worry about those. The faxes are still flowing. And even though you’re the only one who knows them inside and out around here, we’re bound to pick up another guy who you can pass the torch to.”
“Finally,” sighed Hugh, “you don’t come to me to ask about the fax machines. What is it, then?”
”Hugh,” said Ivan, “I’ve got a job for you.”
Already, Hugh’s interest was a little piqued.
”Recently, one of our people here, Carson Frost, asked for and received permission to move to our Level 11 base. Something about wanting to see his friends again. However, we discovered that he left a lot of work to do. You see, Dr. Frost had been helping to update the Database. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Database, right?”
Hugh nodded. Everyone here knew about the giant collection of papers on every single element of the Backrooms, from the levels to the entities, that was kept here.
“Part of his job was to go through the transcripts of interviews the M.E.G. has conducted and to see if there’s anything in there that isn’t in the database, such as a new entity that someone encountered. When he left, there was still a lot of transcripts. He probably didn’t intend to do this, but he did it anyway.”
Hugh did not like where Ivan was going with this.
“So . . . you want me to go through the transcripts and do what he didn’t?”
Ivan nodded. Hugh let out a long sigh.
“All right, time for some paperwork. Where did he leave it?”
Ivan pointed to the right, towards a workroom.
“You’ll find all you need in there. And—Hugh?”
Hugh, who had already turned to do the job he was dreading, turned around.
“Please, even though I can tell you don’t like it, try to get it done as soon as possible. Who knows? You could save lives with this paperwork.”
But the chance of that was close to zero.
The M.E.G. had been established in the 1800s, and since then, it has grown extremely large. It had outposts on several levels, from as far up as Level 130 to as far down as Level -6.
But what did it do?
Sure, it distributed supplies and aid to those trapped in the Backrooms, as any other group of sufficient size would. But since its founding by The First, the M.E.G. had strived to be different. Whereas other communities would provide aid, the M.E.G. would govern. It would try to organize expeditions to crush entities. It would try to secure parts of the Backrooms for human settlement.
But it did none of those things.
Despite being so large, the M.E.G. had no way of communicating across levels, and the only thing it possessed to communicate other than talking were five fax machines. Their control began and ended at their outposts, and sometimes they didn’t even control them fully. The Consensus didn’t even know of the five new ones that had been established.
The M.E.G. looked big and strong on the outside but was nothing of the sort on the inside.
But that was about to change.
And it would begin with ten words that few cared at all about or even knew existed.
Ten words in a piece of paper within a Level 4 workroom.
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A Multipart Story |
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