“Thank you,” I said, looking down at the dusty ground beneath my bedroll. “I mean that.”
“I want you to live, no matter the cost. One more monster won’t make this world any worse. Maybe you’ll be able to remember it when everything else is dead.”
The bitterness in Mercury’s voice surprised me. It shouldn’t have. Mercury wasn’t just speaking grim cynicism, but prophecy. Nyarlathotep, the Messenger of the Other Gods and the inspiration for countless divinities, had spoken to me of humanity’s fate.
Three generations.
I did not know if he meant the accumulated lifespans of three humans or sixty years, but he had been clear in the rest of his statement’s meaning. Humanity, that weak race of primates I could no longer call my own, was doomed. Extinction would claim our race after Nyarlathotep’s ambiguous deadline passed and no force in the universe would stop it. I had sworn myself against this destiny, proclaimed I could stop mankind’s destruction, but that had been hubris. How could I save humanity when I couldn’t even save myself?
I reached over to grasp Mercury’s hand with my left one. Our fingers touched. “No one knows how long we have on this world. I might be cursed to something horrible in a few months or I might die tomorrow. The condition could reverse itself as well. Where there is life, there is hope.”
Even if it was a fool’s hope.
“Damn, you’re a bundle of joy tonight.”
“I thought I was being cheerful, actually.” I gave a half-smirk.
Mercury abruptly changed subjects, still squeezing my hand. “Do you think Jackie will be all right while we’re on this trip?”
Mercury was speaking of her our adopted daughter, Jackie Howard. Jackie was living under a curse every bit as dreadful as my own, possessing the hybridized blood of human and ghoul. Like my dear lost friend, Richard Jameson, Jackie would undergo a terrible transformation when she reached her thirties and cease to be as she was. The ghouls were not an evil race, their love of human flesh aside, but she would be forever ostracized from humanity thereafter.
“We left her in a city of murderers, pimps, and slavers—she’ll be fine,” I said, smiling.
Mercury snorted. “Not funny, Booth.” She was smiling, though.
I wasn’t joking. Kingsport was a town of criminals—it was also the only civilization I trusted not to kill Jackie out of hand should her true parentage become known.
“Mister Death has promised to look after her. The Dunwych tribesmen do not think of the E.B.E.s the same way we do. They think Jackie’s blood makes her strong.”
I did not trust the tribal shaman as far as I could throw him, but I did not believe he would betray our trust. I’d saved his people last year, as much through luck as anything, and he owed me.
“I just worry about her. Jackie’s the one good thing that has come out of the past year, our relationship aside.”
“Jackie is, indeed. We had to come out here, though.” One could not survive long in the Wasteland if one didn’t have a useful skill to trade for food and water. To feed our non-traditional family around me, Mercury and I both needed to work, and caravanning was the only thing that allowed enough payment for research into a cure as well as comfortable living.
Well, that and banditry. I wasn’t about to turn desert pirate, though.
“We will be home soon,” I reassured her. “You can continue to teach Jackie all the skills she needs to be a doctor or medic.”
“Fat lot of good they’ll do her in Ghoultown.”
I snorted. “Who knows, maybe they’ll find it amusing to learn about what humans called their bones.”
“Versus supper?” Mercury said, making an unfunny joke.
I laughed anyway. “Yeah.”
“I love you, Booth.”
“I love you, too.”
I leaned over to kiss her and as our lips met, I felt a dreadful pain in my chest. Pulling away, I placed my hand over my heart and felt it beat several times faster than normal. Looking up, I stared into the darkness and saw.
In a spectrum denied the three dimensions afforded to humanity, I saw past the dusty plains we were camped on to a group coming at us. A very large group. Dozens of gray-robed figures, each holding rods of crystal, were approaching in an eerie octagonal formation.
Some were men and women.
Humans.
Others were not.
“Mercury, awaken the camp,” I said, sucking in my breath.
“Alarm!” Mercury shouted at the top of her lungs, running around the camp and waking up the guards who weren’t already on watch. “We’re under attack!”
Chapter Two
Cultists. There was one scourge greater than any other across the Wastelands, and that was those humans who’d chosen to devote themselves to the Great Old Ones. Not because they were more dangerous than the monsters around us, but because they focused their rage squarely on humanity. Not all the Great Old Ones’ worshipers were evil. The Dunwych, for example, walked the balance between fear and awe with practiced ease. Cultists mistook the Great Old One’s indifference to the Old World’s destruction as deliberate malice and attempted to curry favor by slaughtering their fellow man.
Now we were surrounded by them.
I did not know this group to be cultists because of their attire—robes were just practical desert wear, after all—but by the crystal rods in their hands. I’d last seen them wielded by the Elder Things on a trip to the Dreamlands—a dimension even more chaotic than our own. The weapons could deliver terrible electrical shocks and perform all manner of other, seemingly mystical, feats. No human could acquire them on their own. They had to have been given to madmen.
Our caravan wasn’t composed of fools. They went for their weapons and defensible positions. Everyone in the camp was armed and had ammunition to spare. Even a century later, it wasn’t difficult to find guns in the former United States—not that regular bullets did much against monsters. Hopefully, we’d get in some lucky shots.
On my end, I went for my A19 rifle. It was one of many composite weapons the United States Remnant had constructed in the aftermath of the Rising. A combination of a sniper rifle and an assault weapon, it had seen better days. Still, it was a weapon I knew well and had been trained in the use of. Furthermore, I had a secret weapon—a clip of orihalcum ammunition I’d managed to recover from the wreckage of a crashed Remnant helicopter. Made from a Deep One’s metal harvested from the bottom of the ocean floor, orihalcum could kill the unkillable.
Sometimes.
Lifting the weapon’s crude half-functioning night scope, I gazed out into the darkness. The robed figures were a few dozen yards away now, having somehow traveled farther in the short time than they could have walked (or run). The one at the head of the group, a tall brown-skinned man wearing slightly more ornate robes than the rest, lifted a crystal rod as if to signal the others to do the same.
Snapping a cartridge clip into the chamber, I wasn’t fast enough to fire before the air filled with glowing bolts of light. The bright beams arched through the darkness like mortars before landing on our campsite. Explosions knocked over and killed many of the workers around me, igniting our cargo. The fire burned unnaturally fast, leaving a near-instant ruin of char in its place. Some of the guards I’d befriended—Davidson, Bone-Face, and Hillary—were already dead. I intended to avenge them.
It was Mercury who scored the first kill as she raised a pistol and fired repeatedly into the night. I saw one of her bullets strike a cultist in the chest and send him spiraling to the ground. I switched to automatic fire, gunning down another figure with tentacles for a mouth before switching to a second, and a third. The air filled with staccato bursts. My ears stung, but I ignored the pain, concentrating on taking down as many attackers as possible.
Unfortunately, the battle was lost before it began. More energy bolts sailed our way, adding to the slaughter. I saw a woman, Mavis, fall to the ground with her entire chest burned out like it was kindling. Her eyes star
ed into the star-filled sky, the orbs glazed over with a primordial terror.
The cultists continued to advance. Their weapons could tear us apart from a distance, but they chose to move closer, enjoying the slaughter. More of the robed figures dropped as the five or six of us remaining relocated behind cover to retaliate. As advanced as their technology was, the cultists weren’t bullet proof, and more of them died every step they took. The problem was, their steps were not normal. Somehow, they were warping space and time, not running, or taking long strides, but seeming to flash ahead, every foot they moved seeming more like a yard.
I kept firing. The cultists ignored the bloody bodies they left behind, proceeding as if not assaulted by a hail of gunfire. Only the brown-skinned man in the lead reacted differently. I targeted his head with my rifle and pulled the trigger. He showed no response at all—it was as if my bullet had passed through him.
“Fuck,” I muttered, focusing on the other cultists, who seemed more vulnerable to my attacks. They were less than thirty feet away now and their numbers had halved, but they still outnumbered us. They probably could have killed us, and I wondered if they planned to drag us back for some sort of ceremony. If so, I vowed to save the last bullet in my gun for myself.
“They’re not slowing down, Booth,” Mercury shouted, scoring her seventh kill. She was having more luck than I was. I noticed that several of the bodies I’d gunned down earlier were getting back up.
“No shit,” I muttered, before shouting, “We need to fall back!”
The other surviving guards didn’t get a chance to respond, as less than ten feet away, the cultists aimed their crystalline weapons and obliterated them. So much for not killing us. Their bodies didn’t get blasted apart as Mavis’s had, but were burned with such heat that they seemed to melt where they stood. Soon, only Mercury and I were left.
“Fuck!” I swore again, this time running backwards as I fired. Mercury did as well. All of the corpses on the ground we’d shot to pieces had risen. I decided to switch to my orihalcum clip but wasn’t sure those would do any good either. How did you fight an opponent who wouldn’t stay dead?
“What was that about us heading back to Kingsport after this?” Mercury baited me. “Funny, I seem to recall the word ‘easy’ for this mission.”
“Not the time!”
The two of us maneuvered through the burning wreckage of the carts and composite cars, firing at the cultists as we went. They were forming a circle around the camp. My head started to ache as I heard the chanting of Azathoth’s name in the back of my head change. No longer was it the sound of his distant court, but instead, seemed far closer and in an eerie language that was not meant to be spoken by a human tongue.
“F’gnarrgaa haaa’ra abagarnaaa cathaaal Yith. F’gnarrgaa haaa’ra abagarnaaa cathaaal Yith. F’gnarrgaa haaa’ra abagarnaaa cathaaal Yith.”
Taking yet another shot, I grimaced, feeling like my head was about to explode. I understood that language. It spoke to memories locked in the fabric of my DNA, or perhaps some spiritual link my consciousness had to the greater universe. Moreover, I knew the word Yith.
Spoken of in Unknown Kults, they were an ancient race which had once inhabited the Earth during the Cretaceous Period. Advanced yet peaceful, they psychically sailed the oceans of time and space, learning about other worlds by seizing the bodies of lesser creatures. They had lived among the dinosaurs before the latter’s extinction and occasionally popped up to record humanity’s dying days in the present. Did the cultists worship the Yithians, or had they simply adapted the word to their use with no understanding of what it meant?
Reaching the end of my clip, I bumped into Mercury as we slipped behind the one composite car undamaged by the cultists’ hellish bolts. A former school bus, the vehicle had carried the largest portion of cargo in the caravan—foodstuffs like grain, rice, and fruits for the people of Arkham. The other goods had been destroyed out of hand, but the cultists had left this one alone. Was it simple robbery? Were they just cattle rustlers and horse thieves? The lives of dozens sacrificed for the price of a few crates and animals? Perhaps. I’d seen people killed for much less.
Behind us, the inferno of three carts that had been pulled by a now-half-melted truck hid us from the cultists now encircling our campsite. I had no doubt they knew where we were, though, and that they could kill us at any time. Indeed, it was strange they hadn’t done so already. They had killed everyone else without hesitation. We were being kept alive for some reason.
Why?
Mercury turned to me, sweat covering her brow, her eyes reflecting the flames around us. The heat was tremendous and it was difficult to breathe. For all the horrible changes I’d undergone, I still needed to breathe, and we’d run out of the battlefield into what was close to a raging inferno. Still, I saw no hopelessness or terror in her face.
Only anger.
“If you have any ideas, now would be a good time to share them.” Mercury’s voice was choked, but I knew she’d rather go down fighting than become a cultist’s pet.
So would I.
I lifted up my ammo clip of orihalcum bullets and switched it out for the one in my A19. “Perhaps these will make a difference.”
“Ia Cthulhu, motherfuckers!” a voice spoke from the doorway of the bus beside us as the drunken figure of Rodriguez Castro stumbled out.
I did a double-take, seeing the wizened old man. Rodriguez was seventy years old if he was a day, but the white-bearded, hunched-over figure seemed more defiant than either of us.
Wearing a brown vest, linen pants, and a moonshine-stained shirt, he was carrying a small carved stone figurine and a revolver. I had not spoken to the man much, but my brief experience with him told me he was a lunatic who’d survived more terrors in the Wasteland than perhaps anyone else in Kingsport.
“Stay in the bus!” Mercury shouted, stunned by his appearance.
“I choose this!” Rodriguez shouted, waddling over to nearest flaming wreck and tossing the stone figure into it. “Die and burn!”
Then he shot himself in the head, And the ground started shaking.
“That was unexpected,” Mercury muttered, blinking rapidly.
I couldn’t quite believe what I’d seen. “Yeah.”
Mercury tugged on my sleeve. The psychic repetition in my head dissolved as I heard rapid discussion in a variety of languages ranging from the alien tongue I’d heard earlier to English. The last voice spoke words of panic and warning, and very suddenly, a sense of terror from our attackers. Whatever their mysterious plan, they had not counted on dealing with what we were now faced with.
A summoning.
Summonings were just one of the black arts mankind had turned to in the wake of the Rising. Ancient and inscrutable creatures had taught us the secrets of drawing them to this dimension through the power of will alone—I suspected this was akin to ringing a dinner bell as far as they were concerned. Controlling such creatures was possible if one were a very powerful psychic or if you were the one who summoned them.
I was not a powerful psychic and Rodriguez was dead.
“I’m not sure which way to run,” I said, clutching my rifle.
The ground beneath us began to crack as the air charged with static electricity. The largest of the cracks expanded while Mercury and I backed away. Like a rift between worlds, the ground beneath us had become a portal to somewhere else.
Mercury sensibly looked away from the manifestation, but I stupidly gazed forward and saw the harrowing sight of an alien world beyond. Its skies were green and storming with metal raindrops while vast glowing clouds hung beneath the planetary rings. A horrendous sickly-green tendril, as luminescent as the clouds of its world, moved up through the portal and planted itself on the surface of our world.
On its native planet, the creature might have been an average or weak member of its species, but Earth was fantastically blessed for fostering weakness even in its present shattered state. Evolution had created life in places
where gravity was hundreds of times worse and the air would sear the flesh of men like dry paper when tossed into a fire. Here, this creature would be all but indestructible.
Yet another god in a world ruled by them.
My apathy toward death dulled my reflexes and left me staring at the creature in admiration while it rose to its full height. The glowing-green creature was several long tentacles stretching from a single body that resembled a half-melted wax candle possessed of a single enormous maw. Hundreds of glowing orbs of blackish light were buried into the side of its rock-like carapace, and above its head there was a nimbus of colorless energy swirling around its central stalk.
Mercury, thankfully, wasn’t as entranced by the monster’s sudden appearance as I was. Grabbing my A19, she aimed the weapon and began firing into the surface of the horrible, yet majestic abomination before us. Black orbs and pockets of its flesh exploded from the orihalcum bullet strikes. The creature thrashed and hissed under the fire, feeling the sting of the mysterious metal.
“Yeah!” Mercury shouted, keeping her finger pressed on the trigger.
Right until the clip ran out.
“Fuck,” Mercury hissed.
I pushed Mercury out of the way before she could do the same and found myself wrapped in the crushing vise of the alien monstrosity’s tentacle. As the creature’s carapace burned, its body heat felt like a hot iron pressed against my skin. It seared away my clothes where it touched, and with the slightest squeeze, it could have bisected my body like burning metal through cheese. The pain was immeasurable, erasing rational thought.
I cried out, the sound an incomprehensible roar. Inexplicably, I found my golden side-knife, a gift from my ex-wife Martha, in my right hand. A weapon of the Deep Ones, it was made of orihalcum and woven with spells far above those any human wizard could inscribe. Animal instinct took over and I jammed the weapon into the monster’s tentacles.
Tower of Zhaal Page 2