Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear (29 page)

Sharing a mindspace created us as a holographic unit
, they thought in Len Sibbald’s words.
Any part of it contains the whole. We are all in one mind now. You feel separate but you are not.

Norm Tyson’s words came next:
Each one of us feels that he or she is the sole survivor of what just happened to our ring. We can’t know who really
is
alive, because we have no apparatus to sense that anymore. I feel myself, alive. Injured and burned but alive.

As do I
, each voice sounded.

But I can feel my body,
“Betty” thought.
My hair is singed, but I can feel it. I can feel my moustache—wait, what?

As a group, it laughed in one another’s minds.

There’s no way to know which of us survived,
the mind said.
In a way, all of us did. We are a holographic ‘it’ now, an isomorphic ‘we,’ residing in the survivor’s body and mental substrate. One of us knows this from Lovecraft:

That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons even death may die.

It felt happy at remembering the quotation, which was of course all too apt, and what aeon could be stranger than the one it found itself in right now?

It said,
It is quieter now that we are one. We can see the people clearer. We can see the herald form of Cthulhu setting into the ice like a polar sun. We can see what comes next.

What comes next?
it asked itself.
What do we mean, ‘what comes next’?

Look
, it said.
Look and see. It is the future.

We can’t sense anything but minds. How is that the future?
it asked.

We perceive only the relations of minds to minds. We do not have context or meaning, just what is perceived.

How do we even know this?
it begged. But it did know it. It knew everything except what any of it meant. So many people running north, away from the horror.

The legs of the survivor walked south, keeping to the extreme right of Federal Highway, using the curb there—and the grassy edge when it walked out of the city—to keep it on the road.

We must continue. Whatever body this mind is in, we must push it south. We lie dead but dreaming. But to the living and awake, we shall be as an oracle.

NSA SIGINT Data Collection Center, COMINT division

Event + 39 hours

A1C Tucker and the Security Force Master Sergeants Bell, Brooks, and Diamond spent hours upon hours carrying bodies and shreds of skin and eyeballs and dropping them down the incinerator chute. They spent more hours taking fewer than a dozen technically-still-living personnel and placing them on the officers’ quarters, on the relatively soft beds. None of them was conscious or could be roused by the four survivors, so they at least tried to make the dying men and women as comfortable as they could.

Then they swept up the tinier bits of flesh and mopped until the floor shined. Down the incinerator chute all of that went as well, including the broom, dustpan, and mop.

Then they drank some more, and finally they collapsed onto their own bunks and passed into gloriously dreamless sleep, a sleep that was broken only for Airman Tucker, who was trained to recognize the emergency signal on COMINT. It was one-way, no reply requested or even possible on that frequency.

The repeated
whooooop
roused Tucker within 30 seconds, after he had been asleep just a couple of hours. He got his bearings—he was in his bunk, the facility was in complete lockdown, almost everyone was dead—and then hurried to the monitor bearing the emergency message. A click of the mouse stopped the alarm, but Tucker’s hand shook when he read the words on his screen:

NUCLEAR ATTACK ON WASHINGTON DC

CITY BELIEVED LOST

STATUS OF POTUS, VPOTUS, SCOTUS, CONGRESS UNKNOWN

ICBMS EN ROUTE TO ANOMALY AT SOUTH POLE

NO OTHER INFORMATION AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME

Immediately Tucker turned to check the lockdown signal above the metal doors that surrounded the heart of COMINT. The light was still red.

“We’re trapped,” he said out loud, and hit several buttons to put the Armed Forces Television Service on the big screen. AFRTS had headquarters in Maryland, but Tucker was sure that it would have been lost when the nuclear strike—
Jesus Christ, a nuclear strike!
—hit the capital. Fortunately, as a COMINT staffer, he knew that the actual broadcasting came out of Riverside in California. If there was anyone still alive over there, they would definitely—

The channel was found and the screen was a panic of scrolling text describing how many were estimated dead, how many megatons were exploded in the double attack, how American missiles were headed for Moscow and Beijing as well as the South Pole to destroy the “anomaly.” The talking head onscreen—someone Tucker had never seen before, which made him wonder if the usual announcers were dead from the anomaly’s radiation—said that no other land-based ICBMs or missiles from Russian or Chinese ships, submarines, or aircraft had been detected as fixed on United States targets.

His hand over his mouth in horror, Tucker almost leaped when Master Sergeant Diamond put his big hand on the airman’s shoulder. Diamond took in the AFRTS broadcast on the big screen, which now showed footage from various stationary cameras at military installations outside the blast zone. These automatically uplinking video stations were close enough to DC to capture the blast, the whiteout, the shock waves, and finally the surreal image of a blooming mushroom cloud.

Before that cloud was fully dissipated, the second blast came, even more powerful than the first.

“World War Three,” a woman’s voice—Bell—said from behind Tucker and Diamond. Brooks was awake and present now as well, his eyes tearing up at the sight of Washington being obliterated from the face of the Earth.

“The red light is still on,” Bell said after the loop of footage had stopped and the announcer’s face was back on the screen.

Brooks shook himself out of his daze and said, “Holy shit.”

“Isn’t it
supposed
to be on during national crisises?” Diamond said, a better security force member than a thinker.

Diamond found himself staring at the red light above the double doors as well, and went into training mode, since teaching new SFs was his job when he wasn’t on duty as security as well. “The light is red. That means every blast shield is down with its bolts doing ten feet into the ground and into each bulkhead. Every door is electronically sealed. No one could possibly get to us in here; we’re completely, hermetically sealed. We have air filtration systems, food products, and water for years to come, if needed.”

Bell’s face fell as she said, “There’s no one alive in Washington to give the all-clear. We’re stuck in here forever, until rain and wind wear away the mountain a million years from now. Aren’t we?
Aren’t we, Brooks?
”

The mustachioed SF just nodded. “No way in or out,” he said robotically.

“Can’t we reach anybody?” Tucker said, not knowing the full protocols the way that the SFs had to. “We’ve got all these ears and no mouth?”

Bell almost smiled at that. “Who do you want to call? We’ve got two-way connections to anywhere that hasn’t been melted like DC Anybody who has a radio, cell phones, landline, whatever—they can hear what we broadcast, even if they can’t respond.”

“Can we tap into the drone feed, Tucker? Maybe someone at Nellis is still alive and watching the monster or whatever it is. We need all the information we can get,” Brooks said, leaning over the airman’s station.

“Need it for what?” Diamond muttered, to himself but also to the others in the room. “Washington is
gone
, guys. Unless the President and the generals and shit got out of there, there’s nobody who could unlock our doors even if they had the codes, which they don’t. We are fucked. We are stuck in here forever and we are
fucked.
”

“Speaking of that,” Bell said, “we ain’t playing ‘Adam and Eve’ here. I’m married and I’m
not
having sex with anybody else, whether or not my husband is alive.” Her left eye gave a twitch so subtle it was hardly noticeable. But it
was
noticeable.

“Bell? Come on, we’re not rapists in here,” Diamond, the biggest and strongest of any of them, said with his palms facing her in the ‘nothing to fear here’ position.

“It’s not that,” Brooks said, putting his hand on Bell’s shoulder now. “Her husband is stationed at the Pentagon.”

There was nothing to say, so they said nothing.

“I’ve got the drone signal. They must have it circling the Pole.” He put it up on the main screen, moving the AFRTS broadcast to a secondary monitor.

“And there’s our monster,” Brooks said. The drone imposed latitude and longitude lines on the image, and the walking glow-fog creature, this tentacled and winged three-eyed monstrosity, this “Cthulhu,” was very near where all the longitude lines converged.

But even as he watched the lumbering entity on the big screen, as he read the information scrolls and saw the footage loops and shell-shocked announcers on the smaller screen, Tucker was thinking
There has to be a way out of here.
He knew it was safer inside the facility than outside in a time of crisis, but he would be damned if he was going to watch this war as a spectator and, even more importantly, he was
not
going to rot away and go insane inside that impenetrable mountain.

There has to be a way out
, his mind insisted. But he knew there wasn’t, and he wished that he had been one of those cut down by the SFs. He didn’t have the guts to kill himself, so they should have done it. He should’ve acted crazy and attacked them. They would definitely have gone rock ‘n’ roll on his ass then.

He espied from the corner of his eye the 9mm pistols the three of them carried on their persons. What would he have to do to get them to kill him?

There has to be a way out.

Nellis AFB

Event + 40 hours

Inside the glorified shed that housed the “chair force” operating and monitoring the UAVs, only one airman remained alive. He watched the Armed Forces Television broadcast and he saw that the drone—which he had put in a stable loop around the South Pole, where it had been obvious Cthulhu was headed—showed the creature almost at its destination.

He didn’t want to know what new horrors would happen once it reached its goal.

So, after he made sure the drone would keep sending video until it ran out of fuel, the last airman at Nellis pulled the Beretta 9mm from his dead SF’s holster, put the barrel in his mouth, and blew his brains out.

The South Pole

Event + 40 hours

The glowing, foggy herald form of Cthulhu reached the southernmost tip of the planet. Having cleared the path for this matter point, it slipped back into the fourth dimension, where it would then dissipate. Just after the last bit had vanished from the three-dimensional world, thousands of nuclear-tipped missiles reached the airspace near the pole and unleashed their hellfire. The explosions were staggered slightly because none of the five countries’ missiles had originated at exactly the same place or same time, giving the tens, then hundreds, then thousands of warheads a syncopation of destruction.

Again and again and again huge plumes of radioactive clouds rose from the barren plateau, the measureless heat pushing the atmosphere back and then spreading ruin from the other direction as the hot vacuum collapsed. Again and again and again.

Even almost 10,000 megatons of firepower could only melt a small amount of the three-mile-deep ice underneath the pole. But the entire continent was now a radioactive badlands, a huge radius where humans could not go for tens of thousands of years to come. Antarctic animals were to a being dead now: whales, penguins, seals, fish of every kind were boiled alive where they swam or were crushed in the nuclear explosions that rent the air, dissolved the surface of the ice, and compressed the water into concussive waves.

To those entities folding their spacetime dimension as they traveled through countless matter points, however, this would prove no deathly place.

US 1, south of Alexandria, Virginia

Event + 41 hours

The scientists who could see nothing, hear nothing, and, because of the burns to the surviving member’s body, feel almost nothing, could sense the presence of other humans and most of all the powerful source of their psionic “carrier wave,” the entity called Cthulhu.

They could sense—but not identify, of course—every other person in the world. If the scientists had wanted the data and worked around the clock, they could have counted every living human on planet Earth in less than two weeks. But they didn’t need that data.

They sensed it when tens of millions of sentient lifeform signs vanished in Beijing and Moscow and Washington, DC             

They could sense the reduction in size and strength of Cthulhu at the South Pole as the herald form finished clearing the path of this matter point. They felt it disappear, but to where they could not tell.

And they felt it when dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of new sentient beings poured forth from the spot at which Cthulhu had slipped back into the fourth dimension. Like a burst water main, a riot of small psionic sources flooded out and out. And among these smaller entities, one massive beacon of terrible magnitude appeared in the scientists’ collective mind.

The scientists’ mind had no way of telling whether this was happening at that moment or if it were some prophecy of the future. Even if they could have, it wouldn’t have mattered: The body and its fivefold mind screamed in agony, screamed because it could not look away from the overwhelming horror no matter which way they pointed the body’s ruined eyes.

Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee

Event + 41 hours

Former President Judith Hampton, NSA Chief Jack Patterson, Marine Major Kevin Berry, Pilot Fred Fisk, and the two silent NSA men sat at a wooden picnic table near where they had touched down in the helicopter. The sun was rising and they drank coffee while listening to Armed Forces Radio tell them of the destruction of Washington and the Communist capitals.

Then the radio service broke into its own news report to tell of the titanic concentration of nuclear explosions at the South Pole meant to destroy the Cthulhu entity, the force of the roughly 6,400 bombs going off at about the same time slowing the spinning of the earth by a fraction of a second. They could not report on whether the anomaly was destroyed by the onslaught, but it was widely agreed that nothing could survive that kind of concentrated nuclear attack.

“Is it over?” Berry said, fearing the answer.

“Let’s say it is,” Patterson said. “Our nation’s capital is gone. The way I’ve been figuring the survivor ratio, there’s maybe one million Americans left alive after the initial Event and the destructive psionic waves. Most of those people remaining alive are either alcoholics or mentally disturbed.”

“Or believers,” Hampton added. Her face was streaked with tears.

Patterson and Berry shared a look that said
We already covered ‘mentally disturbed.’

“We at the NSA had filing cabinets and entire hard drives dedicated to options we might have after an OPERATION FATCHANCE-level disaster. But that’s all under the radioactive slag heap of Washington, DC now.”

“So what do we do now? Is that it? Is the world going back to the Stone Age?”

“What we do now is up to the President,” Patterson said.

Hampton wiped her eyes and said, “I resigned, Jack. Steele is President now.”

“If Algernon Steele is alive—which I highly doubt—then he still has nothing official making his case for assuming the mantle of the Presidency. You are our President, and you need to decide what we do next.”

The men around the picnic table all nodded tactfully.

“We killed God,” Hampton said, weeping anew. “Where do you go after you k—” She stopped speaking as if a phone line had been cut. Her face lost its pallor and the tears that leaked from her eyes now were tears of joy.

Oh, hell
, Patterson grumbled to himself. “Madam President, we need to decide—”

“
He is alive! Cthulhu! He and his slaves are ALIVE!
” she shouted and leapt up from the wooden bench. “We must go to Him! He needs his prophet!”

Patterson put his face in his hands. The NSA agents and Fisk shrugged at one another. Berry knew what she was talking about—they all did, really, but faked denseness, confusion, anything to keep her from dragging them south to Cthulhu and His … did she say
slaves?

“That’s a direct order, gentlemen!
He is resurrected!
He is risen in the south and we must go to him
now!
Berry, collect our things! Take down the tent! Fisk, get the helicopter started—
move your asses, people!
”

“Judy, what are we going to when we get there—
if
we can get there?” Patterson asked, standing now but otherwise not moving to follow any orders. “
If
something has even happened? You’re not a psychic!”

“If I’m not psychic, then how do I know that he has risen and grown to Cyclopean proportions? If I’m not psychic, how do I know that his eternal servants will find unbelievers and eat them alive?”

“That doesn’t sound like anything we should be wanting to go
toward
.”

Hampton stepped up to the Major General and said in her trademark stern tone, “Are you not
listening
to me? I have been anointed as
prophet to Cthulhu
, the most powerful Being ever known. You
know
for a fact what He is and that He exists, Jack—your buddy Berry told me about the self-hypnosis—so you
know
he must be worshiped and his gospel spread anywhere humans are allowed to survive. So walk out into the woods and become a mountain man, or
get thee behind me, asshole!
I alone have the Word to save the world. And I am, as you just said, still the President. Whichever you prefer, prophet or President, let’s assume that I know what I’m talking about, all right? Now stay and help or I’ll have my agent shoot you through the heart.”

“Cthulhu will make a slave of
you
,” Patterson said calmly. “Maybe of all of us.”

“I can think of nothing more glorious,” Hampton said, and she remained standing there, waiting for him to make his decision.

Interstate 95 near Fort Lee, Virginia

Event + 41 hours

They got the tank gassed up with the specialized jet fuel it required and traveled just a few clicks south in order to rest. All of them were exhausted to the point of collapse, and the tank commander, Doucette, drove the Abrams to an I-95 rest stop, where they would sleep most of the day, he hoped. He was in the most comfortable seat in the tank there in the cockpit, but as tired as everyone was, anywhere seemed comfortable enough. Mitchum had been in tanks so long he could sleep sitting up, and he was doing exactly that.

“I’m following a bloody prophet,” Martin slurred and pointed at Horan Marmalado. “There is no God, but there
is
a Cthulhu. O, the irony.”

“Great Cthulhu cured me.”

“Of what? Being a nutter? Sorry, mate, you’re still a frickin’ nutter if you think Cthulhu is going to reward you for glorifying His name. If you get within a thousand miles of the Old One, your former schizophrenia is going to look like your affliction was a hand-washing ritual. Your mind will be in tatters. Trust me, I know Cthulhu.”

“
Ha!
” Horan scoffed. “You’re not even a believer.”

“Do you know who I am? Do you know what I did for a living until … oh, about two days ago?”

“I didn’t know anything for years and years until two days ago.”

“Just so,” Martin said, and he could feel a certain pleasing pompousness come into his voice. “While you were bouncing around whatever cell they stuck you in at the madhouse, I was flying around the world as the world’s most prominent skeptic. Do you know what a
skeptic
is, Horan?”

“Indeed, I do. Do you know what a
boor
is, Martin?”

That made Martin laugh. “Okay, sorry. Well, I am Martin Storch, the world’s most influential atheist and skeptic. I expose frauds, speak truth to the brainwashed and frightened, write books about reality and impossibility in the universe, and more. But I am also the top living authority on one H.P. Lovecraft. That is why the President needed my assistance.”

“The President, as you call her, is a murderess and wants others to murder for her beliefs. She calls herself a prophet but does not even understand what Great Cthulhu wants, how He wants to be worshiped. I will call myself the top living authority on Cthulhu. Ha!”

“But there is much more to H.P. Lovecraft than Cthulhu. Things that could help us as we try to …” He was going to say
fight Him
, but realized just soon enough that his tankmate would not like that very much. So he finished with “... find Him and serve Him.”

Horan
did
like that, apparently having forgotten that Martin had just been saying they shouldn’t get within a thousand miles of the Old One, and smiled as he nodded. But then he knit his brow knotted and said, “Who is H.P. Lovecraft?”

Martin stared at Horan for a few seconds before lying down as well as he could in the loader’s bay. “Say goodnight, Gracie.”

“Goodnight, Gr—” Horan started, but he was cut off by the shrill emergency radio transmission signal, which immediately shook the two soldiers awake. Everyone in the tank turned to listen to the words following the signal:

ALL UNITED STATES MILITARY PERSONNEL ARE ORDERED TO REPORT TO MINOT AIR FORCE BASE IN MINOT, NORTH DAKOTA IMMEDIATELY. IF YOU NEED TRAVEL ASSISTANCE, USE MILITARY BAND TO REQUEST PICKUP AND TRANSPORT. ANY MILITARY PERSONNEL NOT REPORTING TO MINOT AIR FORCE BASE WITHIN 48 HOURS WILL BE CONSIDERED AWOL, A CAPITAL OFFENSE IN WARTIME.

REPEAT: ALL UNITED STATES MILITARY PERSONNEL ARE ORDERED TO REPORT …

Doucette groaned as he lay back in the tank cockpit. “I guess I know where we’re going when we wake up.”

Mitchum said, “Minot? An
Air Force base?
All the way up in
North fucking Dakota?
That’s in the wrong direction, anyway—didn’t Marmalado here say Cthulhu was in the south?”

“Mitch,
think
. That’s probably
why
they want all living personnel to head north.”

“Wartime?” Horan said as if he were hearing the word for the first time. “Who are we going to war against?”

“Who do you think, man? Who else would it be but … um …” Mitchum trailed off, being stopped short by the writer guy making the “cut” movement and then twirling his finger by his own temple to indicate that the sergeant was just about to upset a very crazy person in a very small space. “Fucking Chinese. They blew up Washington. I mean, probably they were the ones.”

Horan’s eyes lit up. “We can entreat Great Cthulhu to fight the yellow men alongside us!”

Doucette groaned again and said sharply, “What we’re going to do is sleep, get up, shower, shit, and shave, and get our asses moving north to Minot.”

“What? No, I must go to Great Cthulhu!
We
must!”

“Mitchum,” the staff sergeant said, “unfold that digging spade again and knock him unconscious if he says that name one more time.”

Mitchum smiled and said to the puffy writer and the crazed prophet, “Welcome to the US Army, boys. We’ve got a war to fight, and I don’t think the recruiters are too picky right now.”

The South Pole
45 minutes earlier

It had been hundreds of millions of years since the Old One known as Cthulhu had walked on Earth. He had been trapped in a four-dimensional anomalous loop, unable to move more than its body length in the first, second, third, or fourth dimension. The only dimension it experienced was time, deep time, time so far back in this matter point’s history that no indigenous creatures walked on land. So far back that R'lyeh was on dry ground. Cthulhu had watched as rocky plateaus became the bottom of deep oceans, raindrop by raindrop.

He could not move. He could not send any psionic signal because of the loop in spacetime that had swallowed Him and kept Him separate from everything else in the universe. He lay dead to the unlooped world but always dreaming in his colossal mind.

After so many, many years of excruciating inactivity, Cthulhu was freed by a gravitational interaction between the stars of this part of the galaxy. The pull of each star was subtle, but eventually they were in exactly the right position to pull apart the four-dimensional loop.

Over more than one hundred years, Cthulhu remembered how to move, how to send its black thoughts to others, and why he had built a city on this matter point in the first place. It was to create a herald form to open the gate and allow matter transfer to this furthest point from the homeworld.