They retreated down the hall, the way they had come. At each door, they threw another Molotov cocktail, saving two for the front entrance. Everything along the route out was now aflame, and they were almost back to the door.
Within a hundred feet of the entrance, they were attacked by a couple of dozen of the foul creatures. They streamed out of the final two doors in the hallway, and they came from the area just ahead of the part of the corridor engulfed in flames.
Garret's flamethrower again spurted to life, hosing down the approaching things in the fire as they approached. Not all of the foul things were set on fire, and as these came after the group, the guns thundered death, and the few who crawled out of the killing zone fell to the blades of the five.
Once the attackers were disposed of, the group passed through the outer doors and threw their remaining two Molotov cocktails into the only part of the school that was not already on fire. They closed the doors and retreated to a vantage point some fifty feet from the doors.
The doors burst open, and several of the beasts tried to leave the fire zone. Parts of their bodies were aflame, and there was desperation in their attempts to escape. The five of them leveled their guns on the fleeing creatures as they tried to flee. After the initial rush, the mutations ran out of the building one by one.
There was almost that carnival shooting gallery air to the minutes of disposing of the enemy as it tried to push its way out of the flames. After a couple of moments, there was on other attempts to leave the building, and the group could finally relax, finally done with the battle.
"Oscar, did you get scratched?" Garret asked. "Do we have to worry about infection?" He was referring to the attempt of the things to hold the man.
"Nope," Oscar replied. "I thought that I was a goner, but everywhere they tried to grab me, my coat and coat sleeves kept their slime off my skin. I'm good."
The five of them returned to the vehicles, all of their muscles aching to the bone from the exertion of battle, almost ready to fall asleep on their feet. Garret told them that he would take them to see the killing grounds on the way home, and they all mounted up for the short ride to the site.
For unknown reasons, the misting fog was slightly thinner now, and the group had the secret hope that they were responsible for the thinning. If they could have such an effect on the climate by their actions, there might be some hope that they could win after all.
At any rate, only a couple minutes passed before they arrived at a position on the roadway that was adjacent to the Killing Grounds. Garret pulled his car to a stop on the road, and Oscar pulled up and parked his car behind Garret. Everyone got out to inspect the area.
Garret brought out some binoculars and some night vision goggles and passed them out to the group to look out over the field. The regular binoculars were actually more useful than the night vision because the thinning of the fog had made the landscape just lighted enough to blind the night vision function.
Freya had one of the regular glasses, and she said, "Hey, has anyone else noticed that there is some sort of a mountain over there?"
Now that she mentioned it, everyone could catch at least a glimpse of the mountain to which she was referring. As the only non-native in the group, it was up to Garret to ask the stupid question.
"Yeah, I see the mountain," he agreed. "What about it?"
"This is East Texas," Freya explained. "There are no mountains around here. Where did it come from?
The other pair of binoculars was in the hands of Oscar, and he made the next discovery. "Something is moving at the top of the mountain," he said.
Everyone started an intensive examination of the out-of-place mountain in this flat landscape, and it was not long before they decided that the Feeding Grounds and the hill were connected to each other in some way. Wilber advanced the first theory about the situation that made a feeble sort of sense.
"The things moving on top reminds me of the Kraken from 'The Clash Of The Titans,'" Wilber suggested. "Some sort of tentacles or shadows or something whipping around up there. I think that we must be looking at a young Chthonic creature, like an old one, or a titan, something like that. I would guess that it grows from some sort of a root, and that root is probably the Feeding grounds. We have to get rid of this thing before it grows up!"
The group discussed it for several minutes, but they could not improve their understanding of the strange phenomena. Garret suggested that he knew a guy who might be able to do something about killing this thing.
They spent the short time riding home in silent worry about the tasks they must accomplish to prevent the destruction of the lives they knew. When they reach home, Garret parked in the garage, and Oscar parked on the driveway outside. The five of them filed into the house in weary silence.
They all put away their things, and Ian went into the kitchen to start a pot of coffee, while Freya went upstairs to check on Jonny. At about the same time that Ian returned to the living room to await the brewing coffee to finish, Freya came slowly down the stairs with a depressed expression on her face.
"Jonny is dead," Freya sobbed. "He died while we were gone. He died alone."
21 disinfection
Thursday 18, 2019@ 8:00 AM
Ian jerked awake to another dreary morning. The night's dream had crossed some sort of threshold of meaning, more intense than ever before. The imagery was almost an afterthought, and the essence of the dream was pure concept. The entity behind the changes had no doubt about the outcome, and it wanted every human on the planet to know that what it sought was inevitable.
Freya was not in bed, so she must have already woke, and be downstairs now. The events of last night would be foremost on everyone's minds this morning. It may have been a victory of sorts, but it was a pyrrhic victory.
Ian arose, and dressed, and descended the stairs to the lower level. He found the other four in the kitchen, somberly sipping the morning coffee, and lost in their own thoughts. He suspected that, like himself, each of the others was thinking a tangled web of thoughts, where the victories of the last few days also had a flip-side of defeat, and no one could disentangle the true status of the events.
Everyone rendered a wordless and melancholy greeting to Ian, as Freya silently handed him a full cup of black coffee. He sat down and waited for someone to break the silence, as all such silences must be broken.
"We have to do something about Jonny's body," Oscar finally broke the silence. "He died because he was infected with the fungus. Fungi do not die when the host dies; they continue to grow as long as the nutrients are available. I haven't seen the sporifying stage of this fungus, but every fungus I know of has that stage, and if the body is still here when it happens, this whole house will be contaminated. We need to disinfect the room, and get rid of the body."
"You are the man who knows what to do," Garret agreed. "We need to have a proper send-off for Jonny, anyway. Would you work out the procedure for doing what we need to do safely?"
"It is simple enough," Oscar said. "We can use bleach to disinfect the room, put the body in a container to stop it from spreading the fungus, and create a funeral pyre to burn the body and the threat, and also have a proper funeral for Jonny."
"Okay, if the four of you can take care of that, I need to go to the precinct to look for a satellite telephone to call in an air strike on the Feeding ground and the Old One, before they get out of hand," Garret advised. "If you will direct the disinfection process, Oscar, I will handle getting some help with the other matter."
"If the other three will give me a hand, I will take care of it," Oscar agreed. "Freya, if you and Wilber will help me in the room, and Ian can bring a few things to where they are needed, we can get it done in a half hour or so."
Everyone agreed to do their part in fulfilling the tasks requested, and Oscar started assembling the needed materials for his task, while Garret prepared to go to the precinct to complete his work. Ten minutes later, everyone was hard at work.
At O
scar's instruction, Ian brought bundles of plastic sheeting and gallons of Clorox into the restroom closest to Jonny's room, while Oscar brought out a level-one hazmat suit, several pairs of latex gloves, and a package of facemasks for the use of the disinfection team. Oscar also came out with a hand sprayer and filled it with pure Clorox. He had Ian run a hot half-tub of water in the bathtub, and pour another gallon of Clorox into the water.
Oscar carefully put on the hazmat suit and instructed Wilber and Freya to put on a pair of the gloves and a facemask. He also suggested that Ian do the same, even though he was not going to enter the room himself.
It took five minutes to prepare, and then, Oscar, Freya, and Wilber entered the room, while Ian stayed just outside the door. The three's eyes were immediately drawn to the body of Jonny. There was the pronounced stink of death in the room, and little root-like strands covered his face and every other part of his flesh that was exposed.
"He is already saturated with Hyphae runners," Oscar's muffled voice informed the other two. "The fungus has already invaded every part of the body, and it will infect you if you but touch any one of these root-like structures to your bare skin.
I am going to spray down the body with the bleach, to kill the fungus on the surface. You two will carefully lay out a plastic sheet. Then we will move the body onto the sheet, and wrap it up, sealing the sheet with the duct tape. We spray down the room, spray down the outside of the sheeting, and then we leave the room, where we disinfect our protective gear and seal the room. One day in the sealed room should halt the surface growth on everything. Tomorrow, we will burn the body, and that will take care of that."
The process immediately began as proposed. Oscar spent a few moments liberally spraying down the body, soaking the clothing and exposed skin until everything was wet with bleach.
Freya and Wilber spread a sheet of plastic beside the body, and Oscar liberally sprayed the sheet and the area around the body with bleach, ensuring that no part of the body packaging was contaminated. While Oscar devoted his attention to spraying the rest of the room, Freya and Wilber very carefully rolled Jonny's body onto the sheet, wrapped his body up in the sheet, and sealed the body in the sheeting with the duct tape.
Freya and Oscar left the room and went into the staging restroom to wash up. They carefully removed their protective gloves and masks and put them in the bathtub of Clorox and water. Using more Clorox at the sink, they thoroughly washed their faces and hands, and then they put another set of gloves and face masks on and went back to Jonny's door.
As soon as Oscar left the room, Freya and Wilber immediately began to tape the edges of the door and the jambs with the duct tape, sealing the room with an airtight seal. Oscar went to the restroom, disposed of his hazmat suit in the tub, and washed up, donning a pair of gloves and a facemask for the final inspection.
Oscar spent another five minutes scrutinizing the seal, before pronouncing the job well done. Everyone, including Ian, returned to the restroom for a final scrub-down, before returning to the kitchen for a second cup of coffee of the morning.
Garret at the Precinct
Garret pulled into the precinct parking lot, where one police car was still parked. From the amount of litter and dust in the lot, it was apparent that nobody had maintained the area for the last week or so.
Going to the main precinct entrance, he noticed that the door was hanging open about five inches, as though the last man through it had neglected to close the door. He entered the building, and the first impression he got was that nobody was there, or had been there for days.
"Hello," Garret called anyway. "Anybody here?" The only answer he got back was echoes. Now that he was inside the building, the smell of abandonment was unmistakable. Nobody had been here for a couple of days now.
Garret had an urgent feeling that time was short, so he made his way directly to Chief Smite's office. Opening the door, he scanned the room for the telephone he sought, without success. Well, Smite was a desk jockey, so the obvious place to look was in his desk.
He found the satellite telephone in the last place he looked, of course. It was stuffed into the bottom drawer of the desk, an over-sized device from the last decade, but functional nonetheless.
He turned it on just long enough to verify that it had a full charge, placed it into the gym bag that he had brought along for the purpose, and left the police station. He had one more stop to make before he returned home to the others.
It was less than a mile to the hospital that they had visited with Ian, and he was there quickly. He had no intention of going inside the hospital, which he suspected would be a death sentence to enter. His objective was much closer at hand, in the one ambulance that parked in the emergency circle drive.
Garret went to the back door of the ambulance and opened it to search for a stretcher, of the sort that EMTs the world over used to transport the critically ill. There it was, right in front of his eyes. He grabbed the stretcher and made his way to the car, where he stowed it in the trunk of the spacious Impala.
Moments later, he was at home, drinking his second coffee of the day, and receiving reports from his companions on the status of all the activities of the day. Everything seemed to be in as good an order as could be expected. It was time to call in a favor.
He knew of a General Jenners at NORAD, who should be able to do something about the Old One problem growing in their back yard. He dialed the number, and after a few rings, a voice answered the call.
"General Jenners," said the voice. "Who is this?"
"I am Special Agent Garret of the FBI," Garret responded, "and I need you to do me a favor."
He proceeded to tell the general about the Old One and the Feeding ground, growing to maturity in the town, and the need to remove them before they spread to the rest of the world. He was surprised to discover that the concept of these things did not come as a shock to the general. Apparently, this wasn't the first such problem that he had dealt with.
"Garret, I can get a couple of fighters out there to drop some modified Hellfire missiles on your target, but it will be between twelve to twenty-four hours before they can do it," the general said. "We are understaffed, especially pilots, but we will get it done.
You might want to be a fair distance from the targets because the missiles have been modified to carry strategic nukes instead of the normal payload. You need to be at least half of a mile from the target. The blast radius is about an eighth of a mile from the zero point. It would be bigger, but they have been designed to tunnel about one hundred feet underground before detonation."
"That should do it," Garret agreed. "Don't worry about us. We will be a few miles away when it blows."
Garret gave the general the GPS coordinates for both the Feeding Ground and for the Old One Mountain, and they agreed that both would be targets. When he hung up, Garret was starting to feel much better about things. If the strike didn't take care of things, they didn't stand a chance, but they would have done all that they could do.
22 resolve
Thursday 18, 2019@ 12:00 PM
The five remaining companions had been up for about three hours, taking advantage of a lull in the emergencies that life seemed to consist of these days. They knew that it was only a brief respite, and they needed to milk all of the peace and quiet they could get out of the lull while they could do so.
Everyone was starting to get the impression that time was short. Sooner rather than later, they would lose, or they would win, or the situation would force them to move on into unknown circumstances.
Just because they could, they were defying the inevitable by spending a few domestic hours enjoying the preparation and consuming of a meal that was tasty and perhaps a bit unusual, a fusion of cuisines that ordinarily did not combine. Ian had cooked up a mess of corn meal mush. Garret had made a skillet of scrambled eggs with beef chorizo. Freya had cooked up the last frozen samples of red crawdads. Wilber had prepared a concoction of vegetables, rice, and exotic spices that
might be considered a bastard dish by a hundred different cultures. Oscar brought his appetite, which he found to be more than enough of a contribution on his part.
As they ate the strange combination of foods, the group discussed the status of their efforts, the world at large, and what they should do next. Nothing was certain in this new world they found themselves in, except that there was danger out there that needed to be stopped.
Garret was suffering from more existential questions than the others did. Ian and Wilber were totally open to the idea that events in this world were of a supernatural nature. Freya and Oscar did not have too much of a problem with the possibility of the supernatural. Garret had always had a nuts-and-bolts, concrete idea of reality that ran on the laws of physics and psychology, with no belief in the magical or paranormal at all.
He could no longer ignore that events were happening on a scale that precluded that human activities could cause them. They were too big even to be of this world. They did not obey any of the laws that Garret knew. They were caused either by something supernatural or by something so big that it may as well be supernatural.
"I am having a tough time dealing with what is happening out there," Garret admitted, as he waved a hand in the direction of the hypothetical 'out there.' "It is too big to be serial killers, or human actions or weapons. I don't know what it is, but it acts like the sort of supernatural shit that I always thought was bullshit. I don't know what to think now."
"I know what you mean," Oscar said, "but you really do not have to believe in anything you don't want to, as long as you react to situations that arise in the best way to deal with them. I don't need you to believe. I just need you to help us win, or at least stay alive."
Beyond The Chaos Gate: Lovecraftian Horror Page 12