He tested the LIDAR system. The ping returned a gray three-dimensional map of a vaulted, cavernous complex. Sahim’s captors huddled in a circle nearby. There were fourteen men with their faces obscured in elaborate turbans.
The walls of the complex were tilted and skewed with a bizarre geometry uncoupled from human scale. Hundreds of ornate columns and niches lined the walls and funneled Atkins’s attention toward a singular imposing figure.
The colossus rose floor to ceiling inside a deep niche three hundred meters tall. It was cut from the surrounding stone—or was perhaps once buried and now exposed. It absorbed and refracted the LIDAR, rendering the edge of the three-dimensional map as a shifting fog. A quasi-human silhouette flickered in and out of the static. An elongated head suggested the double crown of a pharaoh. The outline and protrusions were vague while the face remained a perfect void.
Reed and the mission controller leaned over Atkins’s chair, staring at his screens. “They brought the RPC back topside?”
Atkins shook his head. “The signal is broadcasting at full strength, but he still appears to be underground. The GPS says he’s in … Egypt.”
The mission controller shook his head, “That’s impossible.”
“Wait, he’s in Syria … damn it, they’re spoofing the GPS.”
Reed sighed. “I knew it. They’re using their own gear to broadcast the RPC feed from their spider hole. This is going to be another decapitation video.”
The mission controller pointed to the audio channel. “Can you hear anything?”
Atkins unmuted the external microphones on Sahim’s helmet. The operations cell filled with a deep guttural chant. The alien sound buzzed and swamped itself with overlapping echoes.
Reed covered his ears. “What the holy hell is that?”
The automatic translation software blinked on one of Atkins’s screens: dialect unknown.
The mission controller reached over and muted the audio.
“The mic is damaged. Any chance for some facial recognition?”
The angle of the LIDAR map shifted. Two men were dragging Sahim toward the base of the statue.
Sahim began to sob. “Mister Bradley, provide for my family … you promised.”
“Just look around, Sahim! Help us find you and get you out!”
The bag was ripped from the helmet. The night vision lenses autofocused and stained the LIDAR map with shades of green. Atkins examined the mysterious colossus. The night vision detected nothing there but a shifting, pitch-black vortex.
Reed grunted. “Night vision’s busted too.”
Sahim grappled with one of his captors. An unseen thump dropped him back to the ground. Atkins gasped and clenched his jaws to mask the corresponding pain in his spine. He tried to turn Sahim’s head to look for an exit. It was useless. He could switch through the channels of data broadcasting from the RPC, but he could not send in signals of his own.
He killed the night vision. High-definition cameras jostled with blurs of red and brown as the men in turbans closed in. A man with wide, black eyes glared through the lenses toward the operations cell in Langley.
“N’yarlathotep rabb thal’a Nazara!”
The automatic translation software scrawled the words across the screen: “ARABIC: Look upon the face of {non-standard/named entity: Nyar lath otep}.”
They stepped aside to reveal the face of the colossus.
Sahim and Atkins screamed, and their EEGs red-lined.
Director Shackley slams his fist on the table. “What the hell happened?”
“Airman Atkins suffered … self-inflicted wounds to his eyes. He then mutilated his crew members … and four others … before being fatally shot by military police,” says Lieutenant Chapman.
“I know that! What the hell caused it? What did he see?”
Chapman breaks eye contact with the director and looks to DeWalt for help.
“The last transmission was corrupted, sir. Our best analysts have been unable to recover the data.”
Director Shackley sits down and rubs the bridge of his nose again. “I read your theory, Chapman.” He flicks open the folder and reads aloud. “‘Airman Bradley Atkins, suffering from battlefield stress and excessive caffeine consumption, witnessed the execution and experienced a psychotic break.’ I can sell that.”
He closes the folder and slides it across to DeWalt. “We are all going to sell it until we’re blue in the face. We can’t stop until the RPC program is fully reinstated.”
“Director, sir?” Chapman interrupts. “I strongly caution against it. We can’t devise a safety protocol because we don’t even understand the threat. I was ordered to write that report, but there is no way in hell we can blame this on caffeine and stress.”
“Dismissed.”
Chapman stands his ground. “Sir, I must protest …”
“I said you are dismissed!”
Lieutenant Chapman scurries out. The door seals behind him with a hiss.
The director rounds the table and glares at DeWalt. “Find another shrink to rubber stamp some safety measures. We have to learn how this Alhazred organization hacked our system. I want every Afghani that can walk wearing an RPC helmet. I want them in every nook and cranny in the Hindu Kush. I want spec ops and drones and gunships ready to scramble. Nobody goes home. Nobody sleeps until we find this N’yarlathotep.”
Jeff C. Carter lives in Venice, CA with a dog, two cats, and a human. His latest stories appear in the anthologies Delta Green: Extraordinary Renditions, Humanity 2.0, Apotheosis, That Hoodoo Voodoo That You Do, A Mythos Grimmly, and issues of Trembles, Calliope, and eFiction magazine. You can follow him at jeffccarter.wordpress.com.
Innsmouth Redemption
Joette Rozanski
Kisam Zuber woke from his reverie and saw the darkened town of Innsmouth hunched against the starlit Atlantic. A gibbous moon shed its light on the restless waves and nearby salt marshes. Here, enemies established their capital. Here, they ruled the remnants of the ravaged east coast of the United States.
I. The Collegians
He placed his hand over the small square of paper beside his heart; it was the last love note his wife had written him. The five other Collegians were occupied with their own thoughts, unsure of what waited. They had read the reports and viewed the televised images. Kisam Zuber lost his wife to the New York tsunami, but he’d never seen a Deep One up close.
Kisam covertly watched Cecily Mason’s slim face, but she betrayed no emotion as they began their descent.
Their small plane set down in a meadow beside a ruined house nearly a mile from the furthest suburb. The engines whispered into silence. The door opened, steps rolled down, and he and his companions emerged. A cold April breeze brought the faint scent of fish from the nearby town.
Kisam glanced back but saw nothing. The plane was invisible now, its shield revealing little more than an intermittent shimmer against the stars. He tugged his cloak tight and pulled down his night glasses before joining the others. Black turned to green, and he saw the sparkles that outlined his team. The metal-infused material of their cloaks was unwieldy, but they couldn’t risk being detected as they crossed the fields.
The nearly deserted Innsmouth of yesteryear had been gentrified over the last decade, filled with boutiques and bistros. The Deep Ones spared it from the earthquakes and tsunamis that devastated other cities. Innsmouth was sacred to Dagon and the ancestors who mated with humans.
The government of the United States hadn’t become aware of the Deep Ones until too late. The Collegians tried to warn the president; however, the military did not listen to leaders of underground nations that nobody believed existed.
Kisam’s people, the civilization that sprang from the Invisible College of the 1600s, had known about the Deep Ones for centuries and prepared for their incursion; the Invisible College visited the islands where humans and Deep Ones interacted and learned much of their customs and future plans. But there were too few of these descendants
of alchemists, even with their advanced technology, to save doomed millions from the abyssal enemy. Kisam’s hidden realm of reason and romance watched the downfall of surface civilization and searched frantically for a way to repel the oceanic predators. Innsmouth was their last hope.
At the outskirts of town, Kisam and his friends removed their cloaks, putting them into their backpacks. They were dressed in black but did not fear detection in the shadows since the Deep Ones’ big eyes were adapted for the water and had difficulty seeing people in the dark. Their smell and hearing also functioned better in water than on land.
The houses lining the streets stared with empty eyes, dormers peering over mangled overturned automobiles, remnants of the night the Deep Ones invaded. Fresh corpses lay scattered over the cobblestones, the results of recent hunts. Deep Ones regularly gathered humans from further inland and brought them here as sacrifices to Dagon.
The bulk of humanity had been reduced to savagery once their networks of power and communication were destroyed. Meanwhile, most of the Alchemical World remained safe in caves around the globe, like Kisam’s home under New Mexico.
A voice muttered in his earpiece. Philip Aston spoke through his throat microphone, warning them to stop. Kisam lifted his night glasses and saw a bonfire nearly a hundred meters in front of them. They had passed many such bonfires, all of them deserted. Most of Innsmouth’s citizens gathered for evening worship at the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Most, but not all.
A block ahead, several Deep Ones armed with spears and tridents pursued three men dressed in tattered clothes. The Deep Ones were tall, their skin as rubbery as a dolphin’s. Wide, dark eyes gleaming with anticipation, frog-like mouths lined with sharp teeth. A metamorph—a human with abyssal ancestry—wearing jewelry indicating it was male, ran with them; strands of ginger hair dangled from its otherwise bare scalp. Their prey screamed and tried to dash down the dark side streets. The metamorph hurled his spear at the slowest man, skewering him and pinning him to the ground, and leapt upon his prey. He tore away an arm and began devouring it as he watched his fellows run past.
Kisam bowed his head. He could do nothing to help the hunted men. He stared at a nearby corpse, its eyes wide with the terror of death: a young woman Cecily’s age, her legs reduced to ribbons of flesh, one arm flung toward the Collegians as if in accusation.
Philip grasped his shoulder, and Kisam gathered his thoughts. He and his team ran down a cobblestone street to the left. In moments, they arrived at a large, yellow building with an ornate cupola. Most of the windows were dark, but a few shuddered with the pale uncertain light of candles.
This was the Gilman Hotel, bowed by the weight of years that a recent renovation couldn’t entirely erase. Kisam and his companions hurried around to the back. He paused and looked up. Ray Marsh, their last best hope, lived on the second floor. The window was dimly lit; Ray hadn’t joined his mother at the temple or the hunts.
Again, Kisam touched the square of paper beside his heart. Their first redemption was at hand.
II. Desperation
Two hours ago, Ray’s mother forced a spear into his hand, pointed down the street, and told him to hunt with the others. He remained still, dropped the spear, and shook his head.
She struck him across the face and addressed him in a blubbery, barely human voice, “They are nothing. They are food. Treat them as such.”
He said nothing, allowing the rain to soak the jacket and trousers he insisted on wearing. His eyes were adapted to the dark, and he could see the sharp teeth that overlapped his mother’s lower lip. She wore nothing but royal jewelry; her rubbery body needed no protection against the chill air.
She waved one webbed hand at him, and two of her servants seized his arms.
“Take him to the Gilman,” she said.
The rain stopped, and the moon shed its pale light into the hotel room. A wooden table and chair were near the window where he could look out at the ruined town. Bonfires flickered in the streets as the Deep Ones reveled in a new hunt.
A single candle mixed its light with that of the moon. Ray held his right hand over the flame, marveling at how quickly the webs between the fingers had grown back. He’d taken scissors to them last week, and here they were again.
Ray knew he couldn’t fight the transformation much longer. Another month at most, he estimated, and his mind would be gone, descended into the same madness that possessed the others. Like his mother, he was royalty. Hundreds of Deep Ones would obey him, but to what end? Ruling a lost civilization? Stalking survivors of the greatest disaster to overcome humanity? Immortality as a beastly Dagon worshipper?
Ray was free to roam the hotel, but the guards on the first floor wouldn’t let him past the front door. That was all right; he had no wish to leave, at least not to the blood-soaked streets.
Several months ago, his mother’s servants searched through the hotel and removed anything that might harm him, but Ray had hidden a sharp metal sliver in the bottom of the chair. His fingers searched the cracks in the wood until they found the makeshift knife. He brought it out and admired the sparkle of the metal in the candlelight.
Ray had his memories, but they wouldn’t last much longer. And he never wanted to lose his memories of Cecily. Her soft brown face, cheerful dark eyes, curly hair. He remembered how he’d found her stolen earrings in the Miskatonic pawn shop and redeemed them. He remembered her happiness and her promise of introducing him to her family.
That’s all he wanted, memories of her love as he drew the metal across his wrists.
III. Rescue
Cecily could have been the one to rescue Ray, but she didn’t trust her emotions.
Alice Swiftdeer and Howard Pomancek donned their microfiber sticky gloves and climbed the hotel’s wall. The electrically charged water tension in their fingers, palms, and soles of their boots enabled them to cling to and scale the boards. Alice and Howard paused at the window. They hadn’t much time. Howard smashed the glass, and he and Alice swarmed inside. Cecily, Kisam, and Philip unrolled an invisibility tarp.
After a few minutes, a body was pushed out the window, and they gently lowered the metamorph to the ground and bundled him into the tarp.
Loud, inhuman voices came from around the corner of the hotel. Cecily and the others quickly pulled their cloaks from their packs.
Cecily lowered her night glasses. Several Deep Ones ran by. A female paused to sniff the air, lingering behind her companions. She was large and wore a tall tiara made of precious metals—a ruler, a member of royalty. She growled and looked about with unblinking black eyes.
She was a metamorph, nearly completely transformed. Cecily slowly slid her hand inside her jacket and reached for the holstered laser gun. How easy to burn a hole in the creature’s chest and fade away with no one the wiser, except the rescue team. She’d tell them she panicked; she’d never been on a mission, so they’d believe her.
Except Kasim would know. The only one among them who’d lost a family member yet didn’t draw his weapon would know.
The metamorph turned around and around, obviously confused. She knew Ray was nearby. She paced back and forth, her webbed feet sliding across the grass of the ruined garden. Could she be Ray’s mother?
The gun was nearly out of its holster. One dead metamorph compared to millions of human casualties around the world.
Kasim remained still. She saw the sparkles around his cloaked figure, but he made no move.
She knew why. Her people, the Invisible College, the only group of humans that clung to civilization in this world ravaged by Deep Ones, valued reason above revenge, civility above anger. Its members had escaped the superstitions of race, gender, nation, and religion Hidden for centuries because so many leaders valued war and greed over the delights of science and exploration, the group clung to the best characteristics of humanity.
Cecily replaced her weapon. After another minute, the metamorph joined the Deep Ones at the front of the hotel. Alice patted her shoulder. She
watched the sparkling shapes of her companions as they lifted their captive and began the trek back. The snarling voices near the Gilman soon receded, and the team hurriedly made their way across the tough meadow grass to the waiting plane.
A half hour later, Cecily sat beside the sleeping Ray. He was carefully strapped into a seat near the rear of the plane. She gazed down into the face she barely recognized from a year ago when they attended Miskatonic together. Ray Marsh, nearly transformed into a Deep One, retained his human heart. Collegiate spies had contacted him and promised rescue.
Howard told her that when they jumped into the room, they found Ray with a sliver of sharp metal pressed to his wrist. He was ready to deliver himself from the fate that overtook the great families of Innsmouth.
Kasim slid into the seat beside her.
“You did well,” he said. He gestured at Ray. “He will help us. He knows the symbols that will send the Deep Ones back into the abyss to sleep.”
“There are millions of Deep Ones.”
Kasim smiled. “We’ll find a way. Maybe we’ll project images across the sky. It’s been done before.”
“How can that be? Why do they fear signs and symbols? We reject superstition. Why don’t they?”
“Sometimes science can be so advanced it looks like magic. Science is there, Cecily, we just haven’t discovered it yet. We’ll find it when we have more time.”
Cecily looked down at the frog-like metamorph. She brushed away the few strands of dark hair that fell across his forehead and lay her hand against his cold cheek.
Several weeks later, Cecily again sat beside Ray, who was awake and strapped to his bed in the brightly lit laboratory of Dr. Ramirez. They were in a hospital beneath New Mexico. Ray’s wide eyes betrayed his fear. She smiled and took his cold hand.
“Don’t worry, my love. Dr. Ramirez believes she can reverse the transformation. My people have studied the Deep Ones for centuries and believe we can alter the changes at the cellular level. The process will be long and painful, but you will survive.” She looked down at him. “Ray, if this isn’t what you want, tell me. We’ll take you back to Innsmouth.”
Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories at the Dawn of Posthumanity Page 17