Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear (5 page)

Or it could have been a terrorist attack.

Either way, he could hardly wait to talk about it.

Ipswich, England

52°N 1°E, 14770 km from the Event

George Gilman raised a fresh evening pint to his lips at the Cult Café Bar (called for years “the Kai” before the Lovecraft festival nonsense). He almost dropped the heavy glass, however, when a dull but persistent ache suddenly asserted itself in his eyes like someone had poked him with their fingers in a crappy slapstick pantomime.

He pinched the upper bridge of his nose, trying to rob the pain of blood (an old trick his da had taught him at the beginning of George’s drinking career). His eyes got a little watery, but he could see everyone in the pub doing it as well. Or a variant—some put a cold glass against the offending area, some just lay their heads down on the bar (which happened a lot anyway), some just shouted “Holy shit!” or “Christ on His cross!” depending on upbringing and natural tendencies. Nigel the Barkeep actually screamed like a banshee and held his head like it was going to explode, not quite collapsing but damned close.

Almost as soon as it had started—under a minute at the longest, George saw by the creepy clock draped in tentacles that Nigel had put up to commemorate the pub’s new name—the pain stopped and everyone in the pub regarded one another with a look of confusion mixed with tension that it would happen again. Nigel, who was by far the worst affected, now seemed fine except for some trembling in his usually rock-solid hands.

“It’s the sonar experiments, I’ll tell you,” Nigel said shakily to George, and then again, louder and more firmly, to the whole tavern full of people gradually realizing the nasty bit of headache had vanished as quickly and mysteriously as it had appeared. “They strap sonars onto the big fish in the North Sea and force ’em up the River Orwell. A nasty business, that.”

Bailey, by the snooker table, seeing that Nigel and everyone else were in fact all right, found it incumbent upon himself to take the piss. “To what end? You think the Martians are comin’ every time the power station sheds a load.”

Nigel smiled, but his words were serious: “They’re keeping an eye on us, mark my words. The sonar fish fit right into their master plan.”

“To the master plan!” some relieved wit called out as he raised a glass, and everyone laughed and drank. If not for the sirens in the distance, they all could’ve sworn it was all just a gas leak downstairs or some stout gone off in the barrels.

Talshik, Kazakhstan

53.6°N 71.8°E, 19320 km from the Event

(antipodal location)

Almost exactly on the other side of the globe from the Event, Tselmeg Ibragimov dreamed of prodding a laggard sheep to join its brothers and sisters in the middle of the field, where he could keep a good eye on them. He loved being out with the animals, even the feisty ones, where he could—

A slight discomfort asserted itself in his head, which must have been caused by the ground shaking under that approaching Yeti. The white beast stomped into the snow-patched field and scooped up three sheep, dropping them into its mouth like they were pine nuts.

After a minute or so, the pain stopped and the Yeti left his dream. Tselmeg hadn’t even been awakened by the touch of headache. He slept well until sunrise and awoke refreshed, with only a vague uneasiness in his mind, one that soon passed.

Manhattan Psychiatric Center, USA

40.7°N 74°W, 10403 km from the Event

The meds nurse hadn’t yet made it to his cell—
no don’t call it a cell jesse james don’t let them monopoly know you know they know you know they know it is a room—
so Inpatient 02-05-9691-B watched the sunbeam coming through his little grated window, watched it move infinitesimally—
I know words grape jelly I can use words it’s just in the bag what I say they can’t listen to philco television set father wanted enough to hear
—across the soft floor.

I can pay attention wheat thins are america forever until medsnurse medsnurse comes with her cuppy cuppy cuppy cuppy.
He would love to knock it away, make her pick them all up, and then he’d do it again and again to show her
I don’t like you belong here I need to concentrate on mahjongg king kong not have medsnurse medsnurse medsnurse meds and talking to groups of crazy people that’s where it’s at cracker mccracken
.

He saw the face in the window of the meds nurse and heard the orderly’s keys jingle as they went into his cell door’s lock and then—

The faces disappeared. People were screaming. People
not in the cells
were screaming. Inpatient 02-05-9691-B stood and put his face against the rectangular grated glass of the door’s window. The door pushed open with the pressure.

Medsnursemedsnursemedsnurse and theorderlyman are screaming they’re what’s it to you screaming and their stomachs inside their cabinetry puking something is wrong where are my meds I don’t want meds I need to concentrate on this

Then his eyes shifted to take in the face in the little rectangular window in the room across the hall. That face was also watching the white-coat people squirm and thrash in agony, and when that face noticed Inpatient 02-05-9691-B’s face, it let out a laugh.

His door was open.
Medsnurse orderly Medsnurse orderly Medsnurse orderlyman unlocked it I am free now I run

And he ran. He ran in his laceless orange Keds slip-on loafers down the hall, shoving open the first door he found, running down the stairs, and setting off a piercing alarm as he shoved the panic bar of the door leading outside. The workers in white coats were writhing on the ground even here, but their charges in wheelchairs or who shambled around didn’t seem to feel a thing, just like him.

They are the crazy orderlymen whitecoats they get pained for not believing me they will never catch me Claude is raining I am invisible but still seen by the eyeballs of the things

Even as the attendants seemed to stop suffering, slow to get to their feet or even to regain consciousness, Inpatient 02-05-9691-B starting screaming with laughter. He laughed until his throat dried out and bled, laughed until he passed out from exhaustion fifty blocks away in a nice, safe Dumpster
They
pointed out to him. When he woke hours later, he could still hear himself laughing, although his voice had been exhausted by that point.

He climbed out of the Dumpster, brushed off some of the foulness stuck to his baby-blue patient scrubs, and headed south. He didn’t know which way was south, but
He
knew. A calm overcame him that he hadn’t known since before the strep throat when he was twelve, when his brain changed its chemistry and made him, ultimately, into Inpatient 02-05-9691-B, a once-clever murderer who now couldn’t remember not to piss himself when under the horse tranquilizers they gave him to keep him calm.

He looked at his arm, which had an open plastic restaurant orange marmalade container stuck to it.
Marmalade. I hereby make my name Orange Marmalade
.

Inpatient 02-05-9691-B—that is, Orange Marmalade—never did get his meds on that glorious, perfect, utterly calm day. The day when he started walking south, walking to answer the Call.

***

From
Not an Apology
, a mid-career memoir by Martin Storch:

I had been reading Lovecraft for several years by the time I passed A-levels, and I think the Old Gent from Providence actually was helpful in some of my academic success. His plots and his characters always stick to the strictest logic, making his stories much like science fiction instead of “horror,” a genre category which didn’t exist when HPL was writing.

In Lovecraft stories,
this
seemingly fantastic or impossible event happens because of
that
, and the reader soon realizes that the event is neither fantastic nor impossible but instead the clear result of other actions or events. His stories are, of course, fiction, but these untrue events are untrue only in that their antecedents have not occurred. Had those earlier, causal events taken place in the real world, Lovecraft implies, we would ourselves be witness to new and fantastically improbable events.

Logic first, logic last, logic always. As Sherlock Holmes famously said, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

NSA Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) Data Collection Center, Communications Intelligence (COMINT) division, Colorado Springs, Colorado

Event + 15 minutes

The National Security Agency’s SIGINT arm was charged with listening to and, when necessary, interpreting all electronic communications and transmissions by humans, by satellites, by airport calibration beacons, by anything and everything sending any kind of signal through the aether. SIGINT collection was divided into two categories: ELINT (ELectronic INTelligence), which monitored nonhuman-originated signals such as automated transmissions and radar; and COMINT (COMmunications INTelligence), which monitored electromagnetic traffic from intentional human transmission such as beacons, Internet, email, communications radio (commercial television and radio were not tracked), and any other electromagnetic waves created to send information from one human to another.

At the moment of the Event, all listening personnel at COMINT and ELINT—analysts, supervisors, everyone in the Colorado station—were wracked with the forty-five seconds of excruciating headache that all humans situated at Colorado’s distance from 50°S 100°W endured. The difference at COMINT was that on duty was an officer whose pain threshold was high enough for him to crawl to a large black button under a plastic lid, flip the lid, and mash the button with his fist, sealing every door in the facility.

If COMINT were under attack—and they could not know at that time that it was the entire planet under “attack”—then the protocol was automatic: Lock everything down and continue intelligence signal collection to the degree possible. This was different from its sister division, ELINT, because COMINT would carry communications from the President, the military command, and anyone else cleared to give orders or request information. If COMINT were compromised by terrorist infiltration during a crisis, the main conduit of the chain of command could itself be compromised and missiles could not be launched. Or false orders to launch could be given by the terrorists themselves. So the facility became one with the mountain, allowing no new “human vectors,” friend or foe, to come inside.

In case of all-out nuclear war or “just” a single nuclear attack, their mission was as critical as that of the DoD’s
North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)
facility, with which they shared the Colorado mountain location believed impervious to anything but a direct multi-gigaton nuclear strike. So every access point, every dropped blast shield, everything was shut tight until the release code was given. If it ever was given.

Whatever
this
attack was, however, it was different. It wasn’t a bomb anyone had ever heard of, or radiation, or …
anything
, really. After almost a minute of irresistible agony, all personnel felt it lift as if it had never happened, and most were able to return to their posts within minutes. Their equipment appeared undamaged, and they saw most worldwide communications immediately spike as chatter about the Event itself commanded the attention of everyone with a cell phone, radio transmitter, or Internet connection, all hitting the aether all once.

But Airman First Class Jason Tucker, who spent the better part of each ten-hour shift at the headphones tracking and running density chatter algorithms over most of the South American continent, noticed within minutes of his quick check-up and okay from one of the facility medical personnel (which all were subject to after the physical horrors of the Event) that something extremely strange was going on. Or, more accurately,
wasn’t
going on.

Every ELINT source in South America continued transmitting as before the massive assault struck everyone in the facility. Automated systems sent out beeps and blips just as before. Radar system data was unaffected. Whatever the attack was, it seemed exclusively anti-personnel.

Thus, ELINT, the collector of automated boops and beeps, observed no change in South America, but
every
COMINT source—that is, human-to-human electronic communication of any kind—in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and everywhere else on the continent had been cut off immediately and entirely. There were channels left open, thousands if not millions of them, but no coherent information distinguishable from radio noise could be detected by his geographically defined section of COMINT’s extremely sophisticated system.

Tucker looked around him and saw his colleagues at their headsets, trying to keep a handle on the explosion of traffic in their electronic demesnes. This … whatever it was ... obviously represented a global attack of some kind. He couldn’t doubt that as he watched their frantic efforts to separate military from government from civilian chatter to at least see what the hell anyone was saying about what had just transpired. He didn’t know if they were succeeding mere minutes after what had hit them, but he did know that his station was different.

He was getting nothing—
nothing
—on the COMINT wavelengths. It took him a few seconds to swallow and wet his throat enough to call to his immediate supervisor, “Sir!”

The officer on duty immediately left off staring over another A1C’s shoulder at the riot of information on his screens and walked double-time to Tucker’s station. “What the hell?” the lieutenant muttered as he saw the blankness of the COMINT screen but the normal level of activity of his ELINT screen. “Tucker, what am I looking at?”

“Sir, we seem to have lost all COMINT in all—
all—
of South America and the South Pacific. Antarctica, too. No radio, no email, no Internet packets, nothing,” Tucker said, tracking the hundred or so channels coming out of the antipodal wasteland that fell under his electronic ken.

“Diagnostics?”

“Ran them immediately, sir. Nothing’s wrong with the equipment as far as the system is concerned. ELINT seems unaffected.”

“Why would ELINT—was there some systemic failure of South America’s human communication systems?”

“Ours were unaffected, sir, so I assume theirs were as well. And their ELINT sources are transmitting as before, as you can see.”

“I can, Airman.” The lieutenant stood from bending over to see Tucker’s screens and made a decision to allow a slight violation of the rules that prohibited discussing data with COMINT’s noncom collection personnel like A1C Tucker. Taking a long breath, the lieutenant once again bent close to him and said, “Half of Australia has gone silent, too—the western half, closest to South America. We’ve also lost any chatter from shipping in most of the Southern Hemisphere as well. And now a whole continent.”

“Holy sh—er,
wow
, sir.”

The lieutenant put a hand on the enlisted man’s shoulder. “No, it’s okay, Tucker. This is a
holy-shit
–level situation.”

Air Force UAV command, Nellis AFB, Nevada

Monitoring Unmanned Aerial Vehicle 10,000 feet over Brazilian coast

Event + 8 hours

Rio de Janeiro was dark. Many municipal and other infrastructural lights on automatic timers kept the outline of that and other population centers visible, but where any human hand would have turned on a light, there was only darkness. The sun had set more than an hour earlier, and the US Air Force drone operator—one of hundreds of members of the cheekily named “Chair Force” currently guiding unmanned aircraft through legally permitted areas of the Southern Hemisphere—could detect no sign of life whatsoever.

Her companions at monitors all through the cavernous control room exchanged glances with her. The slight shakes of their heads told her everything she needed to know.

Everyone on the continent had to be dead. Whatever had given them all the tortuous headaches eight hours earlier had completely wiped out any sign of humanity in the South American darkness anywhere—everywhere—their remote aircraft could see.

UN Headquarters, New York City

Event + 8 hours

There was no time for an in-person summit meeting. The highest military and elected officials from every permanent member of the United Nations Security Council—China, France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States—regarded one another on five large screens installed for this very purpose. It was 10 p.m. in New York and Washington and the middle of the night for many of the leaders who would not be sleeping that night in any case.

Chairman Zhang Mǐn and the head of China’s Central Military Commission glared at the camera when they weren’t glaring at the other four heads of state; French President Noémi Durand and her Minister of Defence looked only at their camera and not at any of the other leaders; President of the Russian Federation Alexander Zhikin and his General of the Army spoke to each other in hushed voices while waiting for the unprecedented meeting to begin; the young new King of England, William the Fifth, had exercised his power as technical ruler of the UK to sit with his Prime Minister, John Cosgrove; and US President Judith Hampton looked impatiently at each of the screens in turn, but the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stared unblinking into the camera set up in the War Room in the basement of the White House.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Julia de Kova, sat alone in front of the camera in her office at the UN headquarters in New York. It would be some time before she had anything to relate to the ambassadors from all 195 member countries already clamoring for information and answers down in the General Assembly. De Kova had been leader of the body for three years and had seen the world’s players through terrorist attacks, brushfire wars, and the collapse of Japan.

Those had been but minor hiccups in the world order compared to the Event, which television news anchors almost immediately named as the cause of death of nearly 400 million people, mostly in South America but also on every continent in the world. Asia had come through the Event more and more unaffected the farther north a city was located.

This focused suspicion on Russia and Asia, since their populations (save some in Indonesia and other southern regions) had seen almost no mortality at all—almost—in the forty-five seconds that killed off almost a tenth of the world’s population. Secretary-General de Kova had been briefed on this stance, so chose to call on Chairman Zhang and then President Zhikin to speak first, lest they feel accused of a crime no one could even name yet.

Interpreters’ voices sounded in the attendees’ listening devices several seconds after Zhang began his expression of horror and condolences to the rest of the gathering. It was fairly routine leader-talk until he said, “The loss of life has not been as heavy in our part of the world. We understand that. But more than one million of our citizens living outside the borders of China are believed lost. Also, the pain and suffering has affected our people gravely, with much traumatic syndrome, heart attacks, and accidents of every kind.”

Zhang let the interpreters finish their work and, only after seeing the nods from each head of state to continue, added, “We will work with any nation,
every
nation, to bring the cause of this disaster to light and to bring criminals to justice. Thank you.”

There was no applause as there might have been if Zhang had stood at the dais in front of the General Assembly, but each of the other four leaders nodded sagely at his words. Rarely had they heard such unguarded sympathy or generosity of attitude from the Chinese.

“Thank you, Chairman. President Zhikin, please speak now.”

It took a few seconds for Zhikin to hear the interpreters relate the translation around the world, but once he had taken it in, he started immediately: “Although the Russian Federation did not suffer this calamity to the degree that did most countries in the Southern Hemisphere, we also will marshal our resources to bring to justice the perpetrators of this unprecedented act of terror. We will not be cowed by the United States or any other country to put its interests ahead of our own in this matter. We will strike unilaterally should we decide it is time for action. We do not care about the reaction of the world community. We will show that we are not ‘the sick man of Europe’ and can strike at any time, against any target, for any reason related or unrelated to this Event. That is all we have to say on the matter, and we will not be contradicted.”

De Kova looked a bit pale, as did the French President, who spoke next. “President Zhikin,” Durand said with a sternness in her voice which made her French sound cutting even to those who didn’t speak a word of the language, “you will not threaten France or any member of this august body. We do not yet even know the cause of this mortal occurrence. Your saber-rattling serves only to make tension where there should be teamwork.”

“With France at the head of this team, no doubt,” Zhikin retorted, with acid.

“President Zhikin, please allow—”

“Please allow Britain its rightful say in all of this. As have many of our assembly, we have lost many expatriates and other citizens around the globe,” Prime Minister John Cosgrove said with real sorrow in his voice. “I daresay that Russia has suffered the least loss of life. Perhaps you should consider a less aggressive approach, since this matter hardly concerns you compared to the suffering the rest of our nations has endured this day.”

“Заткнись, иди на хуй!” the Russian shouted, yanked off his microphone, and stormed out of the camera’s field. Perhaps remembering the Cold War day when Russia accidentally abdicated its Security Council vote by storming out of a meeting, Zhikin’s General of the Army remained seated and in view of the camera.