Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear (11 page)

—that was probably attached to “a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.” (The description was fresh in his mind, as he had reread the story several times on his tablet before the intern even handed out the photocopies.) How could this be true? How could he be sitting here, alone with the President of the United States of America, looking at pictures of Cthulhu rising from his watery tomb? He was dreaming! But he was definitely not dreaming.

Mother of God,
Berry thought, and shuddered.
This bullshit better
not
be true. If it is—

“Kevin?”

He nodded absently as he continued to take in what it seemed that he was looking at. The front of the head—at least, that’s what it would be if this were, in fact, a head—had two black circles for eyes, like those of a shark or a spider. But it had a third eye, as large and complex-looking as the other two. They also were the only part of the leviathan that was a different color from the rest of the head, dark where the rest was much brighter.

Then there were the tentacles. The entire head looked like it was made of glowing smoke, and the exact shape the smoke seemed to form was slightly different in each of the five photos the President had shared with him. But there could be no doubt that the shapes formed on the lower half of the face were analogues of ropy tentacles that seemed to be roiling out of it before plunging beneath the waterline.

Berry made sure his voice didn’t quaver as he said to the President, “If this isn’t Cthulhu, then it’s been created to look exactly like him.”

“Been created? Do you have any theories on that point, Lieutenant?”

“No, ma’am. The eyes are a different color from the rest, so it can’t just be some kind of smoke illusion. And even if it were, waves don’t lap up against smoke,” he said, and pointed out how the wave patterns around the head were slightly different in each picture, exactly what one would
not
see if this were some kind of trick, even a sophisticated one.

“There’s video, too,” the President said. “But it can be viewed only when it’s
not
live from the drone.”

“What? Why?”

“There seems to be an …
effect
… on the airmen who viewed the images as they were sent by the UAVs. My Air Force Chief told me that they became unresponsive and babbled incoherently if they looked at the screen showing the live footage too long.”

Berry put his face in his hands and managed, working through the sudden anxious spasming of his digestive tract and the panicked tearing of his eyes, to murmur, “Oh my God. Oh my
God
. It
is
Cthulhu.”

Lieutenant Berry jumped from his chair, triggering the Secret Service detail outside the Sit Room to immediately rush the doorway as he ran on jelly legs to a small trash can in the corner and vomited into it.

The President wished she could do that as well, but the dread in her stomach was content to sit right there, like a lead weight pulling her body down into a watery grave.

New York City

Event + 24 hours

Martin Storch and Percy took the vintage elevator down to the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel and stepped cautiously from the car onto the marble floor. Martin had despised the introduction of television sets into the shared area of the Gonk—not least of which was its beautiful and well-stocked bar—but now he was grateful for it, because he could see he was not alone in his great confusion and even greater curiosity about what had happened. To the city. To the country. To the world. Hell, to
Percy
. And why hadn’t he been hit as hard as his loyal assistant?

The lobby was empty except in view of the flat-screen TVs, which were tuned to various 24-hour news stations, where thick knots of viewers stood without moving, their gazes fixed on footage coming in from all over the world, surveillance camera images and videos of the screaming, the unconscious, and, in some cases, the dying.

All the same in effect, all different in execution. It was a real-time unraveling of what everyone (himself included) had always assumed was the fabric of reality. It wasn’t like 9/11, when at first one couldn’t believe his eyes; this was less disbelief than a complete lack of comprehension. And fear. So much fear in the face of everyone he saw, except the man in the mirror. That face just showed a lightly booze-addled perplexity regarding the mysterious lenity shown to him.

Time and time again the news programs showed helicopter footage—apparently from those not in the sky at the time of the Event, for they would have been piloted right into the ground, Martin assumed—sweeping over vast tracts of interstate which were nothing but piled-up crashes as far as the camera could take in. Some wrecks had dazed people wandering around near them, but again and again were heads smashed through windshields, exploded airbags not being enough to save their drivers from an 80-mph full-speed crash, and almost every ditch between the ribbons of interstate filled with overturned, crushed, burning vehicles.

“Forty-five seconds is an eternity if you’re trying to drive while insensate with pain,” Percy said to his employer, who nodded.

“Bloody Americans with their need for speed,” Martin said, trying to present a facetious tone, but it fell flat, even to himself, as they joined the crowd packed in front of the lobby’s largest widescreen television. So for once in his life he shut the hell up and just took in what his mind and his runaway mouth could not yet process.

In a scroll at the bottom of the news channel screen was a long list—so long that Martin never saw it repeat in his ten minutes before retreating to the Algonquin bar to realign his brain—of airline flights that never made it to their destinations. Dozens upon dozens of Qantas flights originating from Australia; scores of Aeromexico planes in Central America;
hundreds
of Chile’s LAN and Brazil’s TAM flights spreading all over Latin America; and even more from the huge American carriers flying in the Southern Hemisphere, at the equator, over the ocean, everywhere forty-five seconds of flailing, blinding pain, and aneurysms would be quite enough to put an aircraft into an inescapable freefall.

But it could be sixty seconds, or even ninety, before the pilots fully recovered their faculties, judging from Percy and those of uncountable drivers on US highways. Those pilots may have still been too dazed even to realize where they were, let alone what was happening, in order to avert a crash.

The air carrier and flight numbers continued their rapid scroll along the bottom of the screen, never repeating, while the shaken news anchors strove mightily to keep up with the burgeoning understanding of the scope of this disaster.

Martin patted the drained-looking Percy and made it to the hotel’s lovely bar.
I had alcohol in my system and was spared last time
, he thought,
so who am I to mess with success?
It took a moment for him to pull the bartender away from the smaller television, but eventually the young woman sat a fresh double scotch in front of him and let him start building up his apparent immunity to worldwide catastrophe.

As he let the whisky coat his throat and his soul (the only time he believed in one was when dear John Walker was doing his work), someone took the plush barstool next to him, settling in and gently but firmly speaking to capture the barkeep’s attention. His soft but authoritative tone had her hopping in seconds to make him the double gin and tonic he requested.

It was Archbishop James Morley.

He was dressed impeccably in an expensive but not particularly clerical-looking charcoal-gray suit. If Colbert hadn’t been preempted by … by whatever the hell this was, the archbishop would have worn a simple clerical collar, vest, and black suit. But here he was, hair slicked back neatly, his incongruous suit and the tie appropriately, anonymously conservative. And it was incongruous only to Martin, because he knew who was wearing it. If Morley hadn’t been sitting three feet away from him, he doubted he would have recognized his old friend and sparring partner.

Martin said, “It’s good to see a friendly face, even if its wearer is dressed for a day at the Stock Exchange.”

Morley looked down at his tailored suit as if he had forgotten what he was wearing. “I can’t wear the costume of someone to whom people turn for answers. It would be false advertising.”

“Oh, come on, Jimmy. It’s a disaster, yes, of unprecedented proportion, sure, but it’s just a large-scale disaster, no need for wearing the hair shirt. Even one from Brooks Brothers.”

“Marty,” the archbishop said with a face looking suddenly old with distress, “what in the devil is going
on?
What
is
this? All I hear are pleas for mercy, penitents thinking they have brought down God’s wrath upon the world.”

If millions hadn’t just died, Martin would have replied with
Good for business, huh?
but they had and so he didn’t. Instead he said, “Are they wrong? Being serious here, is this the kind of thing modern scholarship says your God would do to signal the End Times? Kill an entire continent of Catholics? I know He works in mysterious ways, but—”

“God doesn’t work like this.” He looked at Martin and took a long sip of his drink. “I mean, of course it is His hand that allows it, but only in a Deist sense. No intercessory prayer would have stopped this. Goodness, nobody had the
time!
I was in a meeting when it struck yesterday, and I watched seven people go mad with agony for what seemed like an eternity.”

“Watched them?” Martin asked, his analytical radar pinging loudly. “Were you left … unaffected?”

The archbishop’s head bowed in shame. “I felt a slight pressure in my temples, like the beginning of a tension headache, but it vanished before my fellow diocese board members had even regained consciousness or stopped … well, stopped vomiting.” He turned and pulled on Martin’s arm as so many of the distraught and penitent had on his own arm during his nearly fifty years in the clergy. “Why was
I
spared, Marty? I am not without sin—
no
man is! I don’t care if you believe in sin or God or any of it, Martin—just tell me:
Why was I passed over by this calamity?
”

Martin held his good friend’s hand and summoned a bit of courage, for this was not an easy question to ask. “Jimmy, be absolutely truthful with me. You know this will not go beyond us.”

The archbishop nodded eagerly, tears in his eyes.

“How much had you been drinking before the meeting?”

Morley’s bristled. “What does
that
have to do with anything?”

“Just tell me. It’s important.”

“Well, my hip has been bothering me since the golf fund-raiser—”

“Just tell me, Jimmy.”

Morley swallowed, let go of Martin’s arm, and said, “Quite a bit, if you must know. I wouldn’t say I was inebriated to the point that anyone else in the room would be able to tell.”

“Did anyone else in the room have any alcohol in their systems that you know of?”

“No, they’re all a bit humorless when it comes to libations. Too much influence from the Baptist propaganda machine,” he said, allowing himself a little smile. “In fact, their pompous sobriety is one reason why I partook just before we met.”

“The Archbishop of New York calling someone else
pompous?
My goodness, this
must
be a crisis.”

Jimmy gave him a smile, although his eyes were still pleading. “But why are you asking me about drinking? What does
that
have to do with anything?”

Martin turned his gaze upon the archbishop’s gin and tonic and his own (refilled) double Johnnie Walker Black. “I am forming a hypothesis.”

“About why I was spared?”

“No, my friend,” Martin said. “I believe that you spared
yourself
. As did I myself. What I’m trying to work out is how the hell we did it.”

Morley looked truly confused, following Martin’s gaze to their glistening glasses of alcohol. They had drunk together many, many times. Each knew the other’s proclivities when it came to intemperance. In an instant, the archbishop put two and two together: “The booze?”

Martin didn’t even need to nod. He stared at his glass and then at the rows of bottles behind the bar. “Jimmy, how much cash have you to hand?”

“W-What?”

“I would wager this particular commodity is about to become an
extremely
in-demand resource. Let me gather Percy, and we shall—”

They were interrupted by gasps and then laughter all through the hotel lobby. The laughter started out as a rumble of amused surprise, but soon people were shouting “
Bullshit!
” and “They’re making that up!” and a hundred other vectors of disbelief.

They had to assume it was something on the television, but the TV at the bar had no sound, so the video of the President’s wan face gave them no real information. The archbishop and the professional skeptic shared a glance before leaving their stools, glasses in hand, to hear what the others were hearing.