Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear (12 page)

Before they even got to the cluster of shouting guests and visitors, however, a man turning to leave, his eyes wide, was stopped by Martin stepping in front of him to get his attention. “What’s going on? What’s happened?”

The man struggled to keep his voice from shaking as he said, “It’s the President. She’s lost her shit!”

***

From
H.P. Lovecraft: Hero or Hack?
by Martin Storch:

As Lovecraft enthusiasts know, the Old Gent based many of his most-acclaimed stories on dreams he had while sleeping. Sometimes the dreams merely suggested an element of a story, an image or a particular wording to express the essence of the dream. But more often his dream gave him the entire story, everything except the actual words. He called these his “trips to the Dreamlands.”

Lovecraft’s luminous inner space allowed him to know where his stories were going—the scientists or scholars in the stories had to find out by horrible experience what was going on, but all of this was, Lovecraft himself claimed, presented to him in full, like an “info dump” that put him in possession of (what he considered) occult knowledge.

He didn’t believe it was anything God-given, not in the usual Judeo-Christian sense, but perhaps imparted by some entity just beyond the veil of our three-dimensional reality. Recall, if you will, our earlier exploration into his prescient (if not exactly rigorous) description of other dimensions so close to ours that we could touch them if only we could figure out what extra direction in which to move our fingers. Surely Lovecraft had read the epochal insights provided by Abbott’s
Flatland
, published six years before his birth, and this may have started the rumination on other dimensions that fed his trips to the Dreamlands, from which he returned with stories written to entertain (and to buy those cold tins of beans he was forced to eat before the New Deal financial safety net).

The parallel is absolutely striking: Edwin Abbott Abbott (yes, that was his full name) wrote his “romance of many dimensions” as a commentary on Victorian social mores. Lovecraft wrote his as adventure and spooky tales for magazines like
Weird Tales
and
Astounding Stories
, read mostly by the under-15 set and by connoisseurs of the Weird like his acolytes Robert Block and Donald Wandrei. But Abbott’s work is now seen as a deeply insightful treatise on the perception of higher dimensions, and of course HPL’s body of fiction is now understood as his expression of the cosmic horror he experienced at first hand in the Dreamlands.

Some say Abbott was actually a metaphysician in the guise of a British schoolmaster. And many, including myself, see Lovecraft as a visionary, even if I don’t consider him an actual clairvoyant. These men wrote stories replete with groundbreaking, perspective-altering insights, but both disguised them as fiction, as satire on society or as chilling stories for teenagers and capital-W Weirdos.

When will we figure out how to touch these higher spatial dimensions? When will we know if Lovecraft’s cosmic horrors point to something real? In my opinion, it will happen soon; perhaps with the completion of the Large Hadron Collider, which is supposed to create mini–black holes, we will be able to confirm or negate Abbott’s insights. As for Lovecraft, these openings to other dimensions may prove the Dreamlands to be reality. And what is reality but a shared and persistent dream?

Or is it a nightmare?

White House Situation Room

45 minutes earlier

“We could scramble fighters down there right now and put an end to this,” Admiral Harper told the room, which included the four large screens showing the faces of the leaders of the other Security Council permanent members plus one presenting a looped slideshow of the half-dozen clearest images from the UAVs. “We have lost dozens of ships and thousands of sailors from the Seventh Fleet due to this … this … whatever the hell it’s supposed to be. Madam President, the Navy should be charged with carrying out this mission.”

“There is no mission yet, Ben,” the President said in a stern tone. She had just fended off requests—demands, really—couched in as diplomatic a language as each of the Joint Chiefs could manage. The Chief of the Marines had requested permission to send a troop vessel down to the South Pacific and take this new “island” like it was Iwo Jima. He was denied.

The Chief of the Air Force made an argument for her branch’s fliers to “go bomb the shit” out of whatever the hell was down there, use tactical nukes if they had to. She, too, was denied, as was the head of the Marines, despite his claim that he had battalions at the ready right at that moment to fight … whatever the hell was going on.

“Ay, there’s the rub.” President Hampton sighed the quote from the Bard, removed her glasses, rubbed her tired eyes, and replaced the glasses. “We don’t know what this threat even
is
as yet,” she said, making eye contact with Lieutenant Berry and getting the message across that he should keep the full story between the two of them for the time being. “We can’t send any personnel down there yet because the kill zone could still be in effect. We’ve sent unmanned drones and collected the pictures you all have seen. There is also video.”

“Why have we not seen this video?” the Russian president said through an interpreter, even the translation sounding indignant. “What are you hiding?”

President Hampton clasped her hands, then relaxed them, before she responded warmly: “Alexander Ivanovich, we have taken the lead in this investigation because it happened nearest to our shores, plus the fact that we have the most sophisticated UAV fleet in the world.”

Zhikin grumbled, his question not yet answered. “And this video?”

Vice President Steele spoke up for the first time in the meeting. And when he spoke, his distaste for the Communist countries dripped from every word. (This attitude had made him a great choice for vice president but also had voters afraid to support him in his run for president.) Responding to the Russian president, he barked, “We’ll share
what
we want,
when
we want to share it. Your people have barely suffered; ours have been threatened, sickened, killed—”

“The video has been found to produce a certain
effect
on those who view it,” Hampton cut in firmly but diplomatically, shooting her VP a look that probably made her old students burst into flame back in her teaching days. Besides, she thought, the only piece of intel she wasn’t sharing was that it was only the
live
feed that caused problems. “Temporary disorientation, enervation, loss of speech, to name a few. It would be irresponsible of us to allow the video to be seen at this point. That said, we have the unmanned aircraft to perform effective reconnaissance—”

As the term “unmanned aircraft” was translated, Zhikin cut in with clearly agitated invective that interrupted President Hampton in English a few seconds later. Zhikin shouted, speaking so rapidly that his interpreter was forced to pause a few times to make sure she herself understood what the Russian was saying. “The United States has no privilege to send these planes into the airspace of sovereign nations!”

The room was silent. The President was silent.

“The United States is committing acts of war,” Zhikin continued. “You are using a situation that you yourself have created in order to extend your reach over parts of the globe you have no right to claim.”

“President Zhikin!” Judith Hampton cried, leaving behind her earlier friendly use of his patronym. “How can you make such accusations? Thousands, perhaps millions, of US citizens have died, while Russia and China have emerged practically unscathed!”

Vice President Steele literally applauded, making some in the room laugh but which Hampton completely ignored.

As the Chinese leader received his translation, he immediately started to howl invective, but Zhikin cut him off: “Unscathed? With the United States taking over an entire
continent?
You are trying to strategically gain a foothold in the Southern Hemisphere that by rights belongs to Russia.”

“To
Russia?
” the British prime minister yelped. “The first explorations of the entire southern half of South America by white men were conducted by
England!
We own protectorates down there in which
every one of our citizens
has died, yet we don’t make any rash claims about some global chess match!”

“You and the United States work together,” Zhikin said flatly. “Against Russia. Against Russia’s allies in Arabia. Against China.”

At this last, all eyes in the Sit Room moved to the round face of Chairman Zhang. He sat placidly but with rage visible beneath his expression as he listened to the translation. A moment passed before he said, “President Zhikin is correct. Your weapon has somehow, perhaps by magic, managed to kill only the weak and poor people of the southern continent who could not fight back. You have left the Communists alive so you can enslave our people.”

“
Bullshit!”
Vice President Steele jumped up and shouted, leaving the four leaders who could not see him on their screens looking alarmed and confused. “We could say the exact same thing about you! South America would be a perfect staging ground for your ultimate invasion of the United States!”

“Mister Vice President!” Judith Hampton shouted in shock. “Algernon, what—”

“Blast it!” Steele yelled at the large screen showing the Russian president’s face and then the one next to it with the Chinese leader’s shocked visage.

The Marine sergeant who had earlier replaced now-Lieutenant Berry swept the camera off of the President and onto the Vice President, who everyone in the room—and now in the halls of power around the world—could see was far from done with his speech.

“God only knows what they have been planning these decades since we won the Cold War! Scheming in their secret societies, their little yellow enclaves, telling us about ‘decommissioned’ weapons—this attack was a
test
, Madam President, one they are trying to make
us
look responsible for!”

Everyone in the Sit Room and on the screens looked stunned by the sudden vehemence of Algernon Steele. No one knew what to say, and even if any had known what should be said, they were sure as hell not going to be the one to say it. Steele was the loose-cannon firebrand that Hampton had added to her ticket for his hawkish credentials, since her military expertise was limited to lecturing about it in fifth and sixth periods, but this was unprecedented. This was madness.

“Mister Vice President, take your seat, sir!” the President shouted, and Steele sat down immediately, looking slightly abashed but mostly flushed red with fury, and the A/V tech brought the camera to bear on Hampton once again. “I must apologize for my second-in-command. This is a very trying situation, as I’m sure you know—”

“You think this is something the People’s Republic has masterminded?” Zhang said, the monotone interpreter’s voice belying the anger in the chairman’s voice and face. “You think we are killing millions, is that correct? To keep this lie alive—is that why you have not shared
this
with us?” He held up a black-and-white photo, one of the stills from the video collected by the American UAVs.

President Hampton visibly paled. She had not shown the photos to anyone except Second Lieutenant Kevin Berry, who had not been out of her sight since she had entered the Situation Room with the stills. She had been assured that the images were sent directly up the chain of command from the airman who was monitoring that drone to the President herself.

It was not a spy within her ranks, she felt sure of that. No, she knew what it was, and made herself calm down before saying it out loud and risking an international incident, like her bull-headed Vice President seemed all too willing to do.

“Mister Chairman, would you please tell me how you came into possession of that piece of United States intelligence?” she asked very evenly, although she could see both her Vice President and her Chief of the NSA positively boiling with rage. “I believe you have hacked into our UAV communications.”

Chairman Zhang smiled, or pretended to. “Let us leave aside diplomatic niceties for the moment, shall we? Madam President, this is a photograph pulled from a drone video captured
hours ago
by your military spies, correct?”

Steele looked like he was going to jump up and scream again, but Hampton gave him a surreptitious “stand down” gesture out of the camera’s view and said, “That is correct, Mister Chairman.”

Perhaps he was not expecting a direct answer—Hampton
was
the head of a major power, after all—because his face softened a bit as he nodded at her admission. “Then if you would please tell myself, President Zhikin, President Durand, and Prime Minister Cosgrove … What in [
untranslatable Chinese idiom
] is this
thing?
”

The Situation Room suddenly found itself in a sticky situation indeed. Army generals looked at Navy admirals who looked at Marine generals who looked at the Air Force Chief of Staff who looked at the head of the National Security Agency who looked at the Secretary of Defense who looked at the Secretary of Homeland Security who looked at the Vice President who turned his gaze onto the President herself. Staff both civilian and military were too freaked out to look directly at anyone. Lieutenant Berry looked at the A/V sergeant, who looked back at him with a confused shrug, her eyes wide.