Akhkhazu

Death came to many on the wisp of a name few even knew. Akhkhazu completed what no other Akkadian demon had ever managed to do, she slipped the space time gap and clawed her way from the days of the ancient empire to the here and now.

Those who saw the demon, and survived the encounter, recounted the tan pointed face with her thin slits of eyes holding midnight blue orbs, no discernible nose other than two holes along the flattened face, and a mouth that hid more danger than the over-large curved fangs showed. Her long spindly arms and legs moved her long in an awkward fashion when she lumbered along. There was nothing lithe in this monster, just lethal.

Weeks ago, she crawled out of the cave along the jagged outcroppings on the mountains bordering the rough landscape of the Mesopotamian shrub desert. Her brain was still waking up to this new world, and the new possibilities, around her. Since Akhkhazu’s emergence she had wandered, spreading death mostly among the small populations she found in the scattered regions.

In her own time she had been known as “The Seizer” and was the bringer of fevers and plagues. The daggers of death in her mouth may have seemed an immediate threat, but the greatest danger was the green mist she exhaled into the world. The pestilence that would devastate those she visited. The loud, busy noises and bright lights of the large city drew her attention. That would be where her real name would first be mentioned by scholars and those who studied the ancient world.

In a matter of days the city was awash in the dead and dying, the plague she brought had no modern cure, no way to stave off the death it brought. Those who did survive were thought to have some type of natural immunity.

Word of this demon spread by the local people who encountered her made its way into the mouths of the governments of the world. The calls for the destruction of Akhkhazu were spoken before the cameras, but in the back offices of shadowy places the talk was more of capturing her. Kill or enslave would be the fate men ascribed to the Akkadian demon.

While thousands died in the places Akhkhazu haunted, millions in money were spent in tracking and discovering ways to contain the demon of old. All the major world powers wanted to control this ancient creature and each assembled scientists, Middle East archeologists and mythologists, and military planners to that end.

Months passed, the death toll was now in the millions, but the American initiative, Lore, had made a breakthrough. Epidemiologists, aided by satellite tracking, were able to project the path Akhkhazu would likely pass through. The task within Lore to capture the demon had made strides in its research of symbology as a method that would almost certainly contain Akhkhazu when found.

With everything in place, Lore made its play for Akhkhazu in the outskirts of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. After a skirmish with a Russian military contingent there for the same purpose, the battle for the demon was at hand. Support personnel set up the trap and stood by to activate the symbols. Cavalry Scouts with the 82nd Airborne were tasked with finding the creature and herding it toward the area set up for capture. Helicopter gunships flew support and a guided missile cruiser in the Arabian Sea was on call to deliver the nuclear option should all else fail.

Akhkhazu had never encountered anything like the forces amassed against her, her time in this new world had been unimpeded until now. The Seizer, the one to bring fear, for the first time knew fear. These gnats seem to buzz at her as she released her death clouds upon them, but still they came on.

Ahead a dark crevice in the hillside drew her attention, she loped for the escape underground it would bring. Headlong into a steel container she ran as she climbed into the cave. The doors were shut and the power activating the symbols was turned on. Akhkhazu crashed to the floor of the container, gravity seeming to pin her down.

The container, under heavy escort and across land and water, arrived at its final location at the arctic island base now christened The Menagerie. The thought being, where one creature could find its way to us, so could others. Here, Akhkhazu could be made into a weapon and any new similar threats would have a cage.