Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear (19 page)

Whether they possessed average brain chemistry or something slightly different, their ends were the same.

Their screams turned to mad laughter as they were struck by the impotence of trying to break through walls that would never budge, the horrific realization that they would not be able to get any farther away from the terror than they were right then. That was the moment when, one by one, tortured by blind fear and adrenaline-fueled psychosis, these once-sanest workers in the world set upon one another, gibbering and spitting and ripping out eyes—others’ and their own—from the stalk. By the time the crest of the psionic wave gave way to a trough and took away the irresistible impulse to flee or destroy, COMINT’s polished floor was slick with blood and ripped flesh and gelatinous eyeballs dragging their bloody optic nerves behind them like the hair of a drowned corpse.

Those who survived in the monitoring room, those who could still see and had not passed out from the pain of cheeks and noses and ears being torn from their heads, stared blankly at nothing for hours. Some of the commanding officers who had been alone in their offices were able to come down even though their noses were broken and forehead ripped open, but the men and women under their command were hollowed out for the moment, completely PTSD’d.

They would come around. They would regain their senses and first-aid kits would be emptied for the less serious injuries, trips to the fully-stocked NORAD mini-hospital for those who had no faces anymore so they could at least be bandaged and filled with morphine before infection set in and killed them. (Antibiotics were reserved in lockdown situations to those who would be able to recover enough to return to duty. Heartless, perhaps, but in non-crisis situations, badly injured personnel could be taken to a hospital. The on-site facility at NORAD had no way to restock during a lockdown crisis.)

But those able to return to duty would do so, the officers were certain, and COMINT would continue its mission whether the lockdown was lifted or not. They could not have known that these were
waves
of energy, and that meant another crest would be coming soon.

NSA SIGINT Data Collection Center

15 minutes earlier

It was against protocol to drink alcohol while on duty, but Tucker was just an Airman First Class and had never had to handle this kind of shit. He was the one who notified the officer on duty fifteen minutes after the event that all COMINT chatter in South America—anything being sent by one person to another person through the airwaves or through wires, whether copper or fiber-optic—had utterly ceased. He had brought this major bit of information to his superior officers, becoming more and more frightened by the implications of what the televisions in the break area showed, and then by what he heard from the far-off Chair Forcers about what was going on moment to moment in the South Pacific.

He was freaking out. He had no other excuse for completely breaking the rules of being on duty, removing his flask from his foot locker and downing every last drop of the Pendleton whiskey that had formerly filled it to the top. He lay down on the break/rec room couch and after a few minutes had drifted off, aided by the liquor.

Then the world shattered in his ears and made him jump from the couch, trying desperately to get his bearings.

He had been blasted awake by a shriek unlike anything he had heard in his short military career, not to mention his twenty years of life before the Air Force. It was the shriek of a person boiling in oil. Of
people
.

It was what screams would sound like in Hell. And the banging and scratching and frustrated moans made it even worse than what had occurred during the Event, because those were “only” cries of pain and shock.
These
sounds seemed purposeful, and when that purpose was denied, explosively angry beyond sense.

In seconds, he was on his feet and running down the hall, joining just two of the SFs—
where were the rest?
—already in their protective gear and double-timing it toward the source of the bedlam.

The heavily armed Security Force Airmen, as was protocol, burst into the monitor rooms housing the SIGINT station, with Tucker and a few other enlisted men bringing up the rear—to do what, they didn’t have any idea, but they were trained to help, whatever that “help” might entail.

Tucker stopped dead in the doorway to the control room, frozen in place as he saw airmen he had worked next to for months shrieking and smashing their foreheads into the walls (actually, just one wall, the northern one opposite from the doorway he was standing in) and three of them running at the SFs, who pulled out their automatics but—to their everlasting credit—didn’t fire. Tucker was shocked at the security personnel’s presence of mind, but then realized that it was easy to see that the eyes of the berserk service members weren’t on the security force officers, but
past
them.

They were looking past the SFs.

They were looking at Tucker.

“
Jesus!”
he yelped and ducked out of the doorway as the three crazed airmen flew by the rec room door and down the hall.

He immediately stuck his head back out into the hallway and saw the trio run full speed into a fire door automatically bolted in the lockdown. Their combined impact didn’t open the door, but it did turn their faces into hamburger, and now blood was splashed across it as they backed up and rammed it again. Their hands pushed against the panic bar uselessly again and again and again. Blood smeared against the door and the bar and the wall and the floor.

After a couple of minutes, they seemed to realize that this solid steel door was not going to open. So they turned, looked upon the others’ broken noses, split lips, broken jaws, and hanging flaps of forehead—and started tearing to pieces those already ruined faces.

Now the SFs unloaded their weapons into them. All three fell in the hail of bullets that ricocheted off the fire doors after they traversed the airmen’s bodies, which were now in an oozing heap.

“
What the holy hell!
” Tucker cried, and the SF flipped up her helmet’s Plexiglas face shield, shock on her face as well.

“They were … pulling their eyes out, man,” the security officer stammered, and Tucker could smell on her breath what was no doubt on his own. “Master Sergeant, I’ve been drinking. Have you?”

It was insubordination for a lowly E3 to ask something like this of a Master Sergeant four pay grades above him, but her shock and Tucker’s confession before the question mooted any indignation. “I was off duty. Me and Diamond and Brooks were having a few when this shit went down,” she said in a daze, and Tucker could hear the mayhem slowly ebbing behind him in the main data collection room. “The three SFs—you know, two males and a female, like our team—all started crawling the walls and screaming at the same time. Scared the living shit out of us, but when we heard the same thing happening down here, hell, we suited up and did what we’re trained to do.”

Shooting your own people?
Tucker thought, and it seemed that Master Sergeant Bell could read the flicker of the airman’s eyes and said, “They … they were attempting to exit a secure area during a lockdown.”

“Exit it with their
faces
,” Diamond, her burly SF teammate, said as he and the mustachioed, medium-sized Brooks joined them, also looking dazed, like they had gone to their happy places for the moment.

Big, medium, small.
Like the Three Bears
, Tucker thought, and didn’t even twitch a smile at the observation. Everything at that moment just
was
.

“I never seen anybody pull out an eyeball before,” Brooks said, his blank expression belying the horrible images still in his visual memory. Slowly his focus returned and he looked at Tucker. “We
had
to shoot. Didn’t you see what …”

Then Brooks’ gaze slipped off of him as he looked into the main room, into the abattoir. His mouth fell open and Tucker could smell the booze on his breath as well. Tucker caught Diamond’s attention. “We need to get all of the alcohol in the facility together, Master Sergeant.”

The SFs looked at him like he was insane.

“Look,” he said forcefully, then added in a low voice, “I mean please look, sirs. Master Sergeant Bell had said you all were all drinking—off duty, obviously—before the …
whatever the hell this is
happened. I had a full flask myself. And none of us just went through
this
. We weren’t climbing the walls, we weren’t smashing our faces against doors, we weren’t attacking each other. It’s got to be the alcohol.”

“Hold on, son,” Brooks said, his brow furrowing, his Selleck-grade mustache twitching. “
What
has got to be the alcohol?”

Bell slapped him in the arm. “For Chrissakes, man, people with liquor in their system are … I don’t know,
protected
somehow!”

“That’s why the cantinas in South America still had lifesign,” Diamond said.

“
What?
” Tucker blurted. “I mean,
What,
Master Sergeant
?
”

Diamond waved it off. “The press doesn’t know nothing about this yet, and I hope they don’t find out for a long time. The Chair Force guys have been picking up signs of life inside bars in Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, all them places. Not a lot—those places are pretty small anyway—but definitely life in places where everybody else is dead as shit.”

“We got to get that booze,” Brooks said.

“Something else,” Bell added, now taking her riot helmet off and shaking her blond hair loose. “The insane asylums. The loony bins. The UAV guys picked up the same kind of heat signatures and motion from inside those places down there. Every blip they checked against the database—
boom
, another nuthouse.”

“So being crazy protects you, too?” Brooks said.

“You should be safe, then,” Bell said, and after a little laugh, they once again noticed the carnage everywhere around them and got to work “requisitioning” every drop of alcohol they could find.

Bell stopped. “Tucker, get this information out on the official channels. Get it to the White House. We can’t have the entire executive branch ripping each other’s’ faces off.”

“But—I don’t know how to contact—”

“Pick up the
phone
, Airman. If this hasn’t already hit Washington, we’re lucky as hell. Tell them to drink, and do it fast!
Go!
”

And then what?
Tucker thought miserably as he made his way through the nightmare of blood and the dead everywhere, slipping and almost vomiting as he got to his desk telephone.
We’ll all be drunk and immune—and
then
what?

The White House Switchboard, Washington, DC

“Thank you for calling the White House comment line. Our office is currently closed.”

On the other end of the line, A1C Tucker looked at his watch: it would be 8 p.m. there.

“Your call is very important to the President. Please—”

Tucker cut the call. He dialed another number listed on the White House Web page.

“Thank you for calling the White House Visitor’s Office. Our office is currently—”

“
Dammit!
” He cut the line and tried the third and final number he had.

EEEEERRRRRRRRRRONNNNNNNNNNNSSSSSSSSSFFFFFFFFF!
a fax line screeched in his ear.

Thousands of miles from the White House switchboard computer, Tucker threw the telephone against the wall. All the officers who would have the direct line to a
human
in the Executive Branch were probably lying in pools of blood, their flesh ripped off from jawline to hairline.

So much for lucky as hell.

The Oval Office, The White House

Event + 31 hours

Actually, in that way the Executive Branch
was
lucky as hell: the madness had not yet hit Washington. The same psionic wave that struck NORAD full-force at full crest happened to pass over the nation’s capital at the bottom of a trough. Some felt a slight desire to shift their chairs a bit to the north, some walked to that side of a room or elevator, but nothing strong enough even to be consciously noticed.

Washington was lucky for the moment, but any topology graduate student knows that when any kind of circular wave—like the ripple from a stone thrown into a pond—spreads over the surface of a sphere, it’s impossible for the frequency of that wave to exactly match a whole number of the wave’s frequency. This is because the geometry of a sphere means the crests and troughs will not rise and fall at the same locations when returning to the point of origin. Also, depending on the amplitude of the waves—and Cthulhu’s psionic waves were
very
high in amplitude—interference patterns can arise when newer waves cross older ones still in existence. That interference makes crests twice as powerful, troughs doubly weak in effect, and cancels out effects anywhere that a crest and trough meet.