Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear (10 page)

Camera Three, which now showed Jamie’s empty chair, was abandoned for Camera One and the perplexed male anchor, who was obviously taking Jamie’s role for the moment. He read from his teleprompter:

“Thank you, Tim.” His voice was weak, but he cleared it quickly and continued. “Federal and state authorities are struggling to clear the nearly fifty thousand miles of interstate highway to allow mobilization of the National Guard, but it is slow going since, as Doctor Goswami implied, there are fatal pileups similar to the one we just witnessed along almost every mile of our national system.

“Reports are coming in from all levels of government, from Federal to municipal, that they are attempting to clear the roadways under their jurisdiction this morning. However, they say that many of the vehicles that would have been used for this purpose were themselves on the road at the time of the Event, either leaving their drivers killed or the equipment trapped in pileups or damaged too badly to operate.”

***

Howard nodded at the men, and they switched off the antiquated set and carried it back to the trailer. “You got questions,” he said to Kristen, who was shaking so badly a cultist put a warm ceremonial robe around her shoulders.

Suddenly she barked a mirthless laugh. “Questions? Where do I start! Are you terrorists? Is this related to what happened to me yesterday?
What
happened to me yesterday?
What the hell is going on?
”

Howard smiled, but gently, not wanting their guest to think he was mocking the dead, which he was not. His smile faded, and he said solemnly and slowly, “We are not terrorists. We did nothing to help cause what happened all over the world yesterday. In fact, we didn’t even know
exactly
what form the Call of
Tulu
would take. Our Book says only that an Event like no other would announce His arrival. It also told us when— that He would rise when certain astronomical occultations and conjunctions occurred, which is now. When
Tulu
opened the breach, His herald’s Call sent every human being into fits of irresistible agony. For almost one full minute, all unbelievers were given a taste of terror and pain, a warning to those who think themselves the dominant species in the universe.”

“Or death. Hard to learn from
that
warning,” Kristen said, goggling at the almost-naked man spewing nonsense in front of her. “So this all is the work of ...
Tulu?
”

“
Tulu
does not have to ‘work’ to bring this about. He need only rise even for a mo—”

“Yes, yes, but … why weren’t any of
you
affected? The last thing I remember seeing before I passed out was the bunch of you raising your hands to the sky and looking very much
not
in agonizing pain. Quite the opposite.”

At her words, every single cultist in her field of vision broke into a broad, proud smile. Howard said, “Our minds are different from yours. Their mouths are different from ours and they find English uncomfortable, even painful, to speak. So are the minds of
Tulu
’s faithful, spread throughout the world, different from almost everyone else’s on Earth. We
knew
He was coming. It has long been foretold. We put our faith in Him and heeded His Call.”

“So … your
belief
in this god—in
Tulu
—saved you from the suffering?”

“Yup. He turned ours to ecstasy. We smile at the emanations of our god because we have worshiped Him for a very long time, going back many, many generations for these tribes. But it’s not just us—very soon, everyone will come to believe.
You
will believe.” He smiled and spread his hands in what was either a welcoming or a threatening gesture. “One way or another.”

Kristen shuddered.

Howard’s smile returned as he said, “You are in a very special position, Miss Frommer, possibly even a
unique
position. You are probably the only outsider on Earth who knows what’s coming next and how to liberate yourself.”

“
Next?
What in the hell could be coming
next?
”

“
Tulu
has sent out His Call to the faithful and unfaithful alike. Next, He rises and claims what has always been His.”

Knowing the answer even before she asked it, Kristen said, “Which is … ?”

“The planet. The planet Earth.”

She buried her face in her hands. “Why?
Why?
”

“Only
Tulu
knows. Our place is only to worship Him and help Him claim what is His. It is long foretold, as they say in the movies.”

“So what’s coming next is ‘
Tulu
claims Earth.’” Kristen wanted to label it the rankest bullshit, but her anthropology training was kicking in: You never doubt what the native (or whatever demographic) is saying; you simply try to find out what is
meant
by what is said. “And I’m the only person in the world who can …
liberate
myself?”

“Maybe not the
only
person. There could be other strangers like yourself who were at the time of the Call visiting other worship groups, what the outside world likes to call ‘cults.’ But we in the Tribe of
Tulu
don’t swap emails or anything.”

“No?” She was thinking of the Coke and the generator and the television set.

“No. We don’t need to ‘keep in touch.’ There’s no explicit connection between the Esquimaux or the Pacific Islanders or other groups of the faithful. We’ll recognize one another as the liberated, those celebrating His rise from the sunken city of R’lyeh.” Howard didn’t seem to be fazed by the utter nonsense he was spewing, but that was a cultist for you, Kristen thought, not unkindly.

“So how do
I
get liberated? I take it there will be more headaches, mass death, and so on when
Tulu
does rise? I mean, if just His, um,
Call
killed millions of people? How do I get around
that?
”

Howard’s expression turned from beatific to practically ecstatic as he responded with just one word: “Sacrifice.”

Nellis AFB

Monitoring Unmanned Aerial Vehicles 500 to 2,000 feet above South American Airspace

Event + 21 hours

The drones had already been sent out again as soon as the sun broke over the eastern coast of the South American continent. The fresh personnel guided the refueled UAVs over sovereign nations’ airspace, leaving behind the legal niceties of international waters and breaking every treaty that existed on the subject. They flew in very low, within pistol-shot range of the major cities, risking the safety of the very expensive aircraft if anyone were alive and armed and wanting to fire.

But that didn’t matter, just as the brass had briefed the operators to be prepared for. “The President and all the Powers That Be have signed off on believing that this was a massive mortality event,” the major in charge of the Chair Force said. “It’s up to us to confirm it.”

It didn’t matter that the drones were exposed to gunfire because there was no one on the ground to shoot at anything. The streets of the cities large and small were packed with endless traffic jams in which no cars jockeyed for position but simply stayed pressed to the bumpers of the vehicles in front of them. The drone operators couldn’t see inside the cars and trucks, of course, but it was reasonably assumed that their occupants were dead. They were as dead as the bodies lining every street and piled onto one another in every neighborhood in every sector of every city, every slum, every village, every farm … everywhere they could see, where they could see through the smog of a million internal combustion engines running until they ran out of fuel.

There was only death.

***

Drone operators were relieved every fifteen minutes. It wasn’t enough to keep them from stumbling back to the cafeteria with its food that no one touched and the break rooms with their video games that no one even noticed. They retreated from their stations hollow-eyed, speechless, nauseated, waiting for their next fifteen-minute turn at the monitors.

It was a rotation which would never come, because the operator flying the drone dispatched to the apparent epicenter of the Event started screaming. A cluster of MPs and off-rotation drone operators ran to the airman’s aid, some of them purposely or accidentally looking at what showed on his monitor, what the special long-range drone sent specifically to 50°S 126°W was capturing with its camera at that moment.

Those who glanced at it and then looked away felt a sense of unease. Those who looked long enough to register what it was that they were seeing—but then were able to turn their eyes from the screen—were blanketed with dread and had to steel themselves not to let out a cry of distress.

But those whose attention was caught by the black-and-white image on the airman’s screen as the drone circled the spot, they joined the stricken airman in screaming, clawing at their own faces in an effort to dislodge themselves from its power. They screamed and screamed until people too far from the airman’s station to see the monitor were able to shove an empty pizza box from the break room in front of the screen. This calmed the screamers, who now merely gibbered, sick and confused as they tried to shake away the afterimage still in their eyes and the memory of the image still in their minds.

None of those who stared would recover everything they lost that day.

No one could look upon this and remain the same person.

The camera on the long-range UAV fixed on the shape rising from the water in the extreme South Pacific. It was massive—half a mile wide, the thing’s “head” all that had broken the surface of the waves, so its height was practically unimaginable—and it glowed, illuminating the water all around it.

It wasn’t an animal, nor a Japanese monster-movie
kaiju
. It didn’t seem entirely solid, instead upon more careful inspection appearing to be made of smoldering bioluminescence, tight illuminated smoke—the word “glow-fog” popped into some people’s brains, never to leave—creating the shape of a head, with three distinct eyes, two facing forward and one high up near the crown of the head. It looked like tentacles flowed from where the nose and mouth would be, but they were not tentacles—they were ropes of constantly roiling smoke, the same pale shade as the rest of whatever this was. It was all that one color (although which color it was could not be seen on the black-and-white video feed), so the “tentacles” and the shape of the head were defined by their static loops of glow-fog. The three-lobed eyes, however, were lidless and Stygian black.

Only what seemed to be the head was out of the water, but the waves lapped against it like it was solid, not a shape formed by smoke or mist. Those airmen who had read Lovecraft—and that was a large percentage of the nerdy Chair Force—couldn’t help but see Cthulhu rising from the sea. Others who had not read the story or seen the T-shirts and plush toys sardonically portraying the Old One knew only that it was something altogether
alien
. Either way, familiar with the residents of Lovecraft’s bestiary or not, those who beheld the sight either lost their senses or soon wished they had.

Once it was figured out what was turning hardened drone operators—many of whom had accepted and executed repeated orders to drone-bomb civilian targets in the Middle East—into gibbering, shivering basket cases, the live feed monitor was switched off and everyone instead viewed the video only once it was recorded and replayed. Image captures were made for closer analysis. It was only the
live
footage of whatever the hell that was near Point Nemo that sickened all its witnesses and forced them to lie down in a dark room for several hours before they could speak or understand what was said to them.

They emailed the still images and video to Washington on a secure connection with a detailed report of the effect the live drone feed had on those who watched it too closely. The last thing they needed was the President with all her generals and advisors drooling and spacing out in the Situation Room with the nuclear football just an arm’s length away.

West Wing of the White House
Event + 22 hours

The assistants and secretaries of the White House Chief of Staff mobilized to take a file from the newly minted Marine Lieutenant Kevin Berry, print the document, photocopy it, and get it into plastic-comb binders with clear covers. Then another squad of interns distributed a binder to every member in every office of every level of command of the executive branch of government housed in the White House. The President got a copy, every member of her staff, every member of the Cabinet and their staff, every Chief of anything relevant all the way down to the interns who were much more used to
making
copies than to being
given
copies of material the President herself was going to be reading.

The document was “The Call of Cthulhu.”

Berry had downloaded the Lovecraft story from the Project Gutenberg repository at
gutenberg.org
—the document was in the public domain—and saved the file to a USB drive. Now an intern entering the Situation Room, where Berry alone remained behind on President Hampton’s direct order, and handed him an acetate-fronted bound document with a printout of the very file that he had given to somebody’s assistant to somebody of something just ten minutes before. Things moved quickly when the President herself wanted them done.

He flipped through the pages of the story, here printed in government style on only one side of the creamy paper with the White House watermark on it. This was the story that had gotten him into reading the work of Howard Phillips Lovecraft back at the beginning of high school. He recognized passages on each page that he’d read and reread, savoring Lovecraft’s dedication to verisimilitude even when depicting the fantastic, the monstrous.

Berry checked himself. It wasn’t fantasy at all, though, was it? It had to be, clairvoyance and prophecy not existing in the first place, let alone being powers the Old Gent from Providence possessed and disguised as fiction. There was always a whisper that Lovecraft did as Nostradamus had centuries before: couched his prophecies in a form unlikely to make his psychic gift obvious to the masses.

That was ridiculous, Berry thought, an idea literally worthy of ridicule. But heck if it wasn’t one hell of a string of coincidences: The date. The spot in the Pacific. The psionic waves (if there were such things) affecting the minds of humans everywhere on the globe.

Of course, Cthulhu didn’t melt anyone’s brain in the story, his rising being only temporary because “the stars weren’t right.” But the implication was that the Old One would eventually rise again when the stars
were
right, and that would be the end of humankind. In the story, there was an extremely covert cult dispersed throughout the world that worked to keep their god’s existence a secret, and they killed whomever they thought had figured out what was going on down there underneath the icy antipodal waves.

But it’s just a story
, Berry reminded himself.
A very good and effective story, but a
Weird Tales
pulp magazine story published while Prohibition was in full swing, for goodness’ sake
. He had been billeted to serve as the audiovisual operator inside the White House and had been in the presence of the President a dozen times. But now Judith Hampton saw him as some kind of Lovecraft expert—which he supposed he was, if that meant he read both the stories and a lot of the most well-known criticism regarding the Old Gent’s work. How in the hell that could help anyone, he had no idea. But he was a lieutenant now because of the President’s apparent confidence in him to make sense of what had happened, maybe even to help find a way to keep it from happening again.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents,” the familiar voice of President Hampton read out loud, making Berry jump to his feet and stand at attention.

She waved a hand at him to indicate he should retake his seat. Then she sat two places down so there was a comfortable buffer of one seat between them. “May I call you Kevin, Lieutenant?”

“Wh—of course, Madam President!”

“Good, good. I’d tell you to call me Judy, but then all the alphas in this room would get awfully jealous,” she said, and they both smiled. “Speaking of whom, the generals and the admirals and all the rest of them have been called to meet us here in about fifteen minutes. We’re going to have a live patch through to the other members of the UN Security Council. I have been given some disturbing new intelligence that we haven’t shared with them as yet, or with the NSA, or with anyone outside of the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and the unmanned drone operators at NORAD.”

Berry fought to keep his eyes from bugging in anxiety. Why was she sharing this with
him?
Why not S.T. Joshi or Robert Price or Mike Davis—they had probably forgotten more about Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos than he had ever known. But this was happening. It was not a dream.

I can’t wake myself out of this
, Berry thought, and shivered.

The President laid out several glossy 8 x 10 black-and-white, resolution-enhanced photographs obviously taken from the drone, with the reference crosses not even removed as yet. In the center of the photographs was something terrible, something impossible, something obviously malign and not meant to be.

Berry was looking at the head of Cthulhu, jutting from the water like a new island born of violence on the ocean floor. His voice shook as he said to the President, “This isn’t possible. This must be some kind of hoax. A joke.”

She nodded. “If so many millions hadn’t died in agony yesterday, I’d be right there with you, Kevin. But the Air Force isn’t kidding. NORAD and the NSA certainly aren’t kidding. There is some kind of leviathan poking its head up out of the ocean.”

“And you believe it’s Cthulhu, the ancient alien god from the Lovecraft story?”

The President gave Kevin a wry half-smile. “
I’m
not the one who blurted out,
It’s Cthulhu!
in a room full of the world’s most powerful and also most humorless people.
You
did that. And that’s why I’m asking you before I talk to the rest of them. You’re an imaging and video expert, right? So tell me what is in this picture. Forget for a moment whether it’s possible or not:
Is this Cthulhu?
”

Berry leaned down to take in what was really depicted in the long-distance photographs.

The size of the thing couldn’t be determined without some other object in the picture for reference, but the President had called it a “leviathan” and the spy drone seemed to have been high enough above the water judging by the depth of field. So if this was supposed to be the head of the Old One, it was apparently the right size, which was mind-bogglingly enormous.

The “head” itself (soon Berry would remove the quotation marks when he used that word) was oblong, like an egg on its side. Whatever was beneath the waves wasn’t visible in the photo, but he imagined that this elongated “skull” curved back to form some kind of “neck”—

Stop trying to distance yourself
, Berry scolded.
You can see what this is
.