Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear (25 page)

Louisiana Bayou

Event + 34 hours

“It would take us
three weeks
to get to Washington by foot,” Kristen Frommer told her tribe. “That is
way
too long. The television says that the roads are impassable even on I-20 going through Shreveport, our closest city, so even if that pickup could drive a thousand miles, it won’t make it.”

“Not Washing-Ton. We must get to
Tulu
. To
Cthulhu
, I mean, Priestess, excuse me,” said a middle-aged worshiper dubbed “Water Man,” brown as a nut and with skin loose on him like with all of the elder members of her tribe.

Being called “Priestess,” even though that was obviously the term the tribe used and accepted, still made her feel equally silly and proud. “But the people with the power, with all the communications—they’re all in Washington. If we can convert the President, make her see the
truth
of what we know …”

Howard had told her everyone in the group could understand English and some could even speak it, but the man’s speech was halting and sounded like square pegs trying to fit into round holes. Water Man continued, “Washing-Ton is north, Priestess. Great Cthulhu calls us to Him in the south.”

“South? How far south?”

“All the way. Until there is no more south to go, Priestess.”

I took Kristen a moment to understand what that implied, but then she realized: the South Pole. “Why there?”

“Priestess, you already know this. In the time of His rising, the prophets must behold His terrible face.”

Because that is where Cthulhu calls us.
“Of course,” she said. “But we have no airplane, we have no way to walk there, what can we do?”

“We have boats, Priestess,” Water Man said. “Small boats here, big boat in Port Lafourche. We will take boats south to Great Cthulhu.”

“Do you know how to pilot a boat?”

“Priestess, I am
Water Man!
I lead the tribe through boat drills. We make ready crew.”

Kristen saw that they had a little fleet of airboats, enough to take the whole tribe through the stagnant swamp and onto an actual river, where (Water Man told her) they would all get on a barge to take down to the Port. From there they would sail the big boat,
The Fear
, through Central American waters and all the way down the South American coast to Antarctica. “Aren’t we all a bit underdressed for the South Pole?” she asked the knowledgeable mariner. “We’ll all freeze to death.”

“Oh, Priestess!
Tulu
—I mean Cthulhu—provides. We who believe will not suffer.”

How many times had she heard “God provides” when talking to indigenous populations ruined by Christianity or Islam? And how many times did that actually happen? How about
never?
This in mind, she accepted Water Man’s words with more than a few grains of salt. But at least this was a Being she could see for herself.

She looked at her watch: it was a little past 10 p.m. She shrugged and said, “Do you need rest first, Water Man? We’ve all been up for more than 24 hours.”

“Once we are on open water, someone can take the wheel while I rest. The navigation can be automated.”

Kirsten smiled, impressed. “Your vocabulary is very good.”

“I have not always lived in the swamps, Priestess. Only once I heard the Call did I come, more than fifteen years ago. Do you need rest?”

“The Great One is filling me with energy. Let’s get packed.”

“Indeed, Priestess!” Water Man said with a grin so wide his already chunky diction was almost unintelligible.

“It’s time to meet God.”

Near the Washington Monument

Event + 36 hours

The five blind and deaf, half-mad scientists—Norm Tyson, Betty Baker, Len Sibbald, Li Clarke, and Molly Gibson—had managed to get out of the basement laboratory of the Eisenhower Building, making a human chain behind Baker, since she said she was more familiar with the layout of the basement and first-floor levels than any of rest of them. They climbed stairs
very
slowly and minced and shuffled behind Baker, each scientist with hands on the shoulders of the one ahead of them.

They were able now to carry on a conversation among themselves quite naturally using their minds instead of their voices, and shared theories on what would happen next even as they made their way out of the building and toward (according to Baker’s navigation) the Washington Monument Metro station.

Gibson:
Is Cthulhu going to eat us? On t-shirts and websites and things, it always says He thinks we will taste good or can’t wait to devour us or some such.

Li:
If he disappears, will ‘carrier wave’ cease? We would not hear each other thoughts like now. We just be deaf and blind!

Sibbald:
There are so few people alive. I know you all can feel it, too. Who’s going to clean this up? I mean, if almost everyone is dead?

Tyson:
Baby steps, people. Let’s not try to run before we can walk, right? All we need to worry about right this second is whether we can sense even one person moving at train speed beneath us, so keep your eyes pointing below us. Metrorail is automated, so there’s a good chance it hasn’t ceased functioning. That will get us out of the city
tout de suite
and we get us going on our way south.

Sibbald:
Why south—oh, jeez, never mind.

In their minds and possibly out loud, the five had a laugh.

Gibson:
Does anyone else see that one guy lying down and moving at like 30 miles an hour?

Tyson:
I see him!

Baker:
Or her.
All I sense is a human in pain approaching the Metro station.

Tyson:
Quite right, Betty, sorry for the chauvinism. But let’s get down there before we miss our train—we won’t know another one’s coming unless there’s a living person on it.

All of their minds spontaneously thought the same thing. It was, approximately,
And we all know how likely
that
is.

They followed Betty down the stairs and, after a few minutes, onto the train with the dying man—and it was a man after all—on the floor. None of the scientists could see or hear him, but somehow they felt confident that his eyes had been torn out and the tacky substance on the train car floor was his drying blood.

Gibson:
I wonder if he knows we’re here.

Sibbald:
I wonder if anybody knows we’re here. Or that we’re anywhere.

Tyson:
Don’t despair, guys. Science is what we do, and science will get us through this. What was mystical—psionic waves and a monster from fiction—has been reduced to an alien with a brain so powerful it can create an entire field in which our own, less energetic thought patterns can be carried to others near us, as long as they have few sensory distractions. Science shall keep us from despair.

Sibbald:
That speech is the first sign I’ve seen that the mercury really has made us insane.

Tyson sent out to Sibbald the thought:
Stick it, Len.

They all silently laughed again, and the train pulled away from the station. Since they could neither see where they were nor hear the automated voice calling out the station, Betty Baker—who took the Metro every day to work from her apartment in Alexandria, south of DC proper—kept count of the stops and got them off the train at the stop nearest her home.

Sibbald:
I’m not trying to be an asshole, but what now?

Baker:
You never have to
try
, Len.

Gibson:
What do we say instead of LOL? LOM, for Laughing Out of my Mind? Because that’s what I just did.

Sibbald:
You’re a true wit, Betty.

Tyson:
We need to go to the south.

Li:
Why south?

Tyson placed his fingers gently upon her chin and guided it until she was facing south.

Tyson:
Do you understand?

Li nodded so Tyson could feel it before he took his hand away. It was the direction away from which almost every living person in the world was moving. Some pockets of humans here and there were stationary, but most who were moving were running as fast as they could to the north. The scientists could see that south was Cthulhu, as if waiting for them to break from the masses and come to Him.

Front lawn of the White House

Event + 37 hours

Four in the morning. Everything was silent except for distant screams, occasional gunfire from the slums, and former President Judith Hampton weeping against the front gates of the White House, the barrier surrounding what was once her home but was now her a prison, complete with iron bars.

She knew that her companion, the soft and pickled writer Martin Storch, wouldn’t have been able to climb the gates even if he were stone-cold sober. His assistant didn’t look like he had the muscle to open a jar of pickles, especially not with the liquid diet Martin had been feeding him.

Of course, normally the Secret Service would have shot anyone to death who tried to scale the fence, but the agents who had shadowed her—hell, preceded her most of the time as well—for the past three years—were gone. Insane, maybe, or just blinded or killed by those who had lost their sanity, or doing what they were trained to do: Protect the POTUS and the “Castle,” their code names for the President and the White House, before anything else.

Or they might just all be dead
, she thought,
and even if they aren’t, I’m not the President anymore. I’m nobody. No one is charged with protecting me anymore unless I ask for it. If there were even anybody left to ask.

She
had
received protection, though, hadn’t she? Her companion, Martin, had kept himself well-sauced throughout the “wave crest” crisis and thus saved his sanity, but her? Her brain had been given no such protection from Great Cthulhu as He made His way from Point Nemo to the South Pole.

Great Cthulhu
, she repeated to herself.
I see His face. I trust His gospel.

Great Cthulhu Himself protected her. He protected her because she
believed
.

She had brought a copy of the tract—the story—and would read it again and again until she could go to Him. She was once the most powerful person in the world. Surely He could use her to … to do what, she had no idea, but whatever it was, she would serve.

She longed to go to Him, to go as far south as she could as quickly as she could be conveyed. She had rejected her Presidency too quickly.
Air Force One
could have had her there in hours. Not that there were any pilots left alive or sane, a thought that occurred to her as she noted the uniformed bodies on the White House lawn, bleeding and writhing if not actually dead yet. She could see that much even at almost three in the morning, since the lights were all automatic and the devoted White House power station still operating.

Without the human system in place but the electronic locks still at full capacity, there was no way she could get past the gates. She was like a Catholic anchoress, yearning for her beloved Deity but unable to escape the walls her choices had placed around her.

“Tuppence for your thoughts,” Martin said to the brooding ex-President, slurring just slightly. “That’s the British version, ha.”

“It is
not
,” Percy scolded through his alcoholic haze, and turned considerately to Hampton. “We say ‘penny’ just like you Yanks.”

Martin was used to being scolded by his man, and Percy was usually correct in his admonitions, so he just pointed at Hampton’s head and said, “Judy? What’s going on in there?”

“We’re trapped,” she said, holding and leaning between two bars of the gate as if she might be able to slip through them just by will alone. “We’ll never get to Him.”

“Him?”

“Great Cthulhu.”

“Oh, hell.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Hampton said, possibly the first time anyone had said that to the logician and essayist and made him feel it. “What do you
think
is happening?
You’ve read the story
—hell, you know Lovecraft better than anyone in the world, you told me yourself, remember?
You know what is happening! Great Cthulhu has RISEN!”
She was screaming at him by the end.

“Lovecraft was just an imaginative storyteller …” Martin countered weakly. He
did
know what was happening, but he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. “There are a lot of coincidences, I admit.”

“Belief is the only way to escape His wrath.”

“Well, that and drinking alcohol. Or going mad. Or being mad in the first place. Maybe other things we haven’t thought of as well.” He sat down on the grass, his back against the iron gate. “Either way, we’re stuck here. Maybe it’s for the best. There’s nothing out there but death and ruin.”