Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear (2 page)

The plane barreled over onto its side and plunged earthward. By this time, Green, his copilot, his flight crew, and every passenger had already been struck with violent dizziness and vomiting, even unconsciousness; the plane’s spiral toward the ground wasn’t even noticed. Every person on Flight 314 was in too much agony to be conscious of anything but the tremendous, sharp pounding in their heads, in their eyes and ears. The world was shrunk down to three pounds of organ—the brain—which has no pain sensors. Instead, the brain relayed the excruciating signals coming from the eyes before it and the ears on either side, in the sledgehammer throbbing in the back of each person’s skull.

So no one on the plane realized or felt it when the left wingtip struck the ground and the 777 shattered into uncountable pieces, none larger than a dinner plate. The air traffic controllers didn’t notice either, since they had, to a person, collapsed in agony themselves.

In the forty-five seconds that it took the attack to relent, more than one hundred airplanes between Mexico City and the Event fell from the sky. Most passengers and pilots died on impact with the ocean or the ground. Those in planes just beginning their approach to the city—500 km or so closer to the Event—died instantly from single destructively painful aneurysms before they crashed. But thousands upon thousands died in the air, as well as millions south of Mexico City dying on the ground as their blood vessels first pulsed, then burst.

Planes landing in Guatemala, just 700 km farther from the Event than Mexico City, were able to do so despite their pilots’ sudden cluster-level headaches. This was because, although after a few seconds those men and women passed out from the erupting pain, they remained functional enough, long enough, to engage the very automated landing system that Captain Arthur Green had switched off just before the Event.

Those planes landed in Guatemala and in other nearby airports with the pilots, crew, and passengers all unconscious. The air traffic controllers, too, had been unable to endure the horrifying pain, and they passed out as well. But other than those souls on a couple of airliners that ran into others due to the sudden number of planes on the ground at La Aurora International, everyone lived. Inside the terminal, every human was on the floor or slumped in chairs for the five minutes or so it took for people to come back to consciousness. And, now, to fear.

Papua New Guinea

9.5°S 147°E, 10780 km from 50°S 100°W

18 months before the Event

Against the advice of her dissertation committee, Kristen Frommer had devoted much of her doctoral research to tribes in the wilds of Papua New Guinea. Her advisors told her that those heady Margaret Mead days were long gone in this age of television and cheap air travel. With the outside world more of a factor in these people’s lives every year, they said, she had more chance of buying pot in Papua New Guinea than being cooked in one.

She had never needed to rely on funding to get her through graduate school—she got her trust fund when she turned twenty-one and promptly spent all of it on continuing her academic studies after getting her bachelor’s in anthropology. The money for the flight and stay in New Guinea ate up pretty much the last chunk of this money that was supposed to last her for several more years, so she had to make it count, prove her committee wrong, and get a good-paying academic job as a reward for finding something entirely new while she was down there.

With the welcome the natives gave her—wearing their sunglasses and Simpsons T-shirts—it took Kristen literally one minute to realize that her committee was right, that she was covering ground that had already been extremely well trod. It was disappointing, especially since she had hoped to get some oral history of their cannibal cults from those who had seen it firsthand or even been a part of it. Cannibals were like catnip to anthropologists.

Not only had every native willing to talk to her already talked to a hundred other anthropologists, but they could in fact anticipate the questions she was going to ask, in some cases even seeming amused at
her
naïveté about how the world worked. It was humiliating.

Her second night there, watching from her hotel window an old—hell, almost mummified—beggar playing his two-string guitar and howling something vaguely melodic, she got an idea:
Talk to the people nobody talks to
.

So she got dressed and went down to the street where the ancient man sat leaning against a bank building’s wall. It was dark indeed except for the lights from her hotel and the streetlight that cast a yellow halogen haze over the beggar. He probably didn’t speak or understand English, but she had a $100 bill he would probably understand quite well and maybe take her somewhere she could find something worth researching.

“
Skius
,” she said in Tok Pisin, the official language of the country. “
Yu save long tok Inglis, a
?
”

The old man looked at the slim blonde American in front of him, taking in all of her body.
Fine
, she thought,
if letting a horny old guy stare at my
susus
makes him happy and willing to talk, stare away, pal.

“
Ya or Nogat?
”
she said, slightly more emphatically. “
Mi nidim halivim bilong yu
.”
(“I need your help.”)

He put the guitar aside. “I tok English at pretty girl.”

Yes!

“What you want to tok?”

She sat down next to him and leaned on the wall, too, and tried to think of something to say that would convey both the gravity of her request as well as its unusual nature, but in simple English the old man would understand. “I want to know secrets.”

His mouth opened to let out a wheeze of a laugh. Not a lot of teeth in there. “What kind secrets you tok?”

“I want to meet a tribe—”

“
Ha!
You want cannibals, ya? Everybody want cannibals!” he said, and put a bony hand on her knee. “
Mi sori
, pretty girl, I give you truth. Nobody cannibals no more. Everybody
American
now!” And he laughed some more.

“Listen,” Kristen said, and threw ethics out the window by unrolling the $100 bill from her jeans. “I don’t care about cannibals, okay? I just want a tribe that’s
different
.”

The man’s eyes never left the money. “Different?”

“Yeah, some people that you maybe heard about in your many years. People who are weird, not like the other tribes. Take me to them and this is yours.”

His eyes now darted between her face and the money she held.

“Well?” she said, shaking the bill in front of his face. “You know these people?”

“
Ya
,” he said, “but you not want to meet them.
Ol
pis pipel
.
Ol longlong
.”

“They’re ‘fish people’? Why are they all crazy?”

It was obvious that the old man didn’t want to say anything else, but he still stared at the $100 bill.

“Tell you what: you take me to them and I give this to you.”

“It is night!” he whined. “And they are far.”

“Okay, no problem.” She moved (slowly) to put the bill back in her pocket and stand up.

“
No!
No, I take you to them. But you hire car, not me.”

Quite satisfied, Kristen stood and helped the old man get up. “I’ll get my suitcase and gear, and you wait in the lobby until I come down, okay?”

“Okay,” he said. As they started toward the hotel, however, he called, “
Wait!
They no let people like me in the fancy.”

“They let you in if I tell them to let you in. I’m an American.”

***

The old man was as good as his word and earned his hundred dollars. The distant spot he directed the driver to was inhabited by a tribe of some sort, and indeed their skin looked like it was drying into fish scales, their odd faces like … well,
fish
.

They dropped her off with this strange new group, Kristen instructing the driver to come get her at noon three weeks hence. It wasn’t until the Jeep was just out of hearing range that she spied the first Coke can.

Aw, goddamnit
, she moaned to herself, but shook it off and approached the villagers with the humble Papuan greeting she had learned in her studies. To her surprise, they welcomed her even without advance warning that anyone was coming to see them. They didn’t speak English, but they did know Tok Pisin, a stroke of luck this far into the jungle.

She had three weeks to spend rooting out some secret of their tribe and developing an understanding of their practically Stone Age ways to better shine a light on modern life, etc. and so on. Whatever the “weirdness” of these “fish people” was, she was determined to root it out, examine it, and publish, publish, publish. What strange rituals would she witness? What eldritch ways of their ancestors would they bring to their evenings?

Three weeks. Time to learn and understand.

***

“All in,” Kristen said two weeks and five days later at the makeshift poker table with its well-worn playing cards. The tribe elder made a “
Bah!
” sound and threw in his hand.

“Winner winner, chicken dinner,” another of the elders said, in completely the wrong context. Kristen sighed.

She had been a sucker for the old beggar’s claims, reduced to spending her precious three weeks playing Texas Hold’em poker with the tribe’s elders for the baubles she had brought to entice them into telling her the incredible secrets of their people. They put up coin money from all over the world, further depressing Kristen, but they had good sweet potato mash alcohol. It was fun at first, even if it had as much of a bearing on what she would write for her dissertation as staying home in Baton Rouge watching TV would have.

The tribe chief’s grown son joined the game. He looked strong but also resembled Admiral Ackbar from
Star Wars
, as so many of the tribe’s men did. Was that it? Was the fact that they had facial aberrations their “big secret”? She wasn’t studying physiognomy, for Christ’s sake.

They had all been drinking the mash alcohol and getting crazy with big bets with no cards to support them. Then, at what had to be after midnight judging by the placement of the full moon, right in the middle of a hand the son of the tribe’s chief said the word “
Tulu
.”

At first Kristen didn’t realize anything unusual had been said, since the tribe unavoidably used some Tok Pisin words she didn’t know. “
Tulu
” didn’t sound like anything out of the ordinary, especially as the son said it in anger folding what must have been an initially promising hand. The word, dropped in the middle of what was essentially “this sucks,” must have been an expletive or interjection, not exactly the stuff of tenure-track research.

She didn’t notice anything about the
word
, but she sure as hell noticed how every one of the Papuans stiffened at its utterance. They all looked up from their cards simultaneously, fixing the chief’s son with a look first of surprise and then with annoyance and finally turning their eyes furtively as one to the anthropologist. She could see they were obviously trying to gauge if she had picked up on what the younger man had just blurted.

That
was interesting. Was it some kind of taboo word? Maybe this
was
the kind of thing that could get her hired on at a Carnegie I institution. She said as casually as she could, using the slightly unethical trick of imitating the lilt of the Papuan tongue: “
Tulu?
”

There was no mistaking that the younger man had done something he shouldn’t have in saying this word in front of an outsider, because every man narrowed his eyes at him before they all turned to Kristen with expressions that were patently opaque. The chief said in Tok Pisin with a dismissive gesture, “
Tulu
is a very inappropriate word to use among … guests. You are our guest for a few more days, so we do not want to send you off with that. Apologize, Kip.”

“It was very rude of me,” Kip said in the pidgin with doleful eyes as he looked at Kristen. “I do apologize most contritely.”

“I thank you,” Kristen said to the young man, as not to accept an apology because “none was needed” was extraordinarily rude. “But since I’ve heard this word now, what does it mean?”

The chief paused, then spoke an outright lie: “It is just a word. An, ehhh … what is the English for it? Yes! An
interjection
, like your
hey
or
fuck.
”

She nodded, keeping her professional demeanor even though the excitement within her made her want to press the elders for more, more, and more. This word
Tulu
was plainly something powerful, so powerful that they somehow forgot that Kristen knew their native language and knew its interjections. This may very well have been an “inappropriate word” to use with an “outsider” (surely the Tok Pisin word that the tribe elder thought to use but decided against before he used “guest”) but it seemed like it meant something more to this “weird tribe” of Papua New Guinea, something they would not share with those outside their cultural circle of fish people.