by Byron Craft
“Mitch? What’s going on up there?” Doucette got himself to an upright, if not completely standing, position and made his way up front, where he saw Mitchum staring at the side monitor, the one that pointed east. “What in the hell?”
It was hard to make out exactly what he and Mitchum were staring at on the monitor, the brightening in the east unable to be seen through the smoke of what looked like a hundred wildfires a few hundred feet from the tank that stretched all the way to the horizon. “Where the hell are we?”
Mitchum said in a weak voice, “Washington.”
Doucette was too stunned to say anything to that, but he traded places with Mitchum, so he could peer out the three slim viewports made of 75 mm-thick projectile-flattening polycarbonates, just below the hatch. He called back, “Mitch, gimme a gas mask, would ya? And you guys put them on, too.”
“Why?” Mitchum asked but handed out the masks. After he put on his own, he helped Horan get his on and held it in place until he was at least sixty percent sure the still-babbling man wouldn’t rip it off immediately. “What are you doing?”
If Doucette hadn’t been drunk for the past two days, he wouldn’t have said: “I can’t see a damn thing like this” and broken the seal on the hatch. If Mitchum hadn’t been the same way, he would’ve stopped Doucette, with a bullet if necessary. But they were, Doucette did, and Mitchum didn’t.
“Hell’s bells, man, there’s radiation out there!” Martin Storch cried, trying to jump to his feet and cracking his head against the steel overhead. “You can’t open that damned thing!”
But Doucette had already pushed it open and popped his head out to see the horror with his own eyes. And what horrors he did see.
Like any megalopolis, the nation’s capital and its surroundings were always extravagantly illuminated 24 hours a day, and the D.C. Beltway was packed with vehicles no matter what the time of day or night. One could drive with the headlights off and suffer no loss of visibility.
But now, except for the orange flames, all was dark. Doucette took in as much of the deathly panorama as he could in the few seconds he dared to keep his head extended into the poisonous atmosphere. He literally couldn’t see a single electric light other than the headlights from vehicles on the Interstate. The air was noxious not only from radiation but also from a more immediately life-threatening source: the clinging, miasmic exhaust from so many internal combustion engines running in one place without moving.
The whole vista was pants-wetting weird, with the sky just light enough to show the extent of the smoke from fires visible as far as it allowed him to see. He incautiously took a breath and coughed so hard and so long he thought he’d pass out and fall back into the tank. But he didn’t; he remained right there staring out at the landscape of destruction.
“It’s bad?” Mitchum said.
“It’s bad,” Doucette said. His eyes were streaming with tears from the vile air, but not just the air. “Martin, you wanna look?”
“Indeed, I don’t, but thank you. However, I would appreciate it if you closed the hatch.”
“Right.” Doucette closed it up and locked it, his face feeling burned. He didn’t know how much radiation he had just absorbed, and he didn’t want to know. It didn’t matter. If everyone was going to die soon anyway, and that sure as hell was what it looked like, he wouldn’t have to worry about cancer. He stayed in the driver’s seat to let Mitchum have a rest as well as his turn to watch their mental patient.
“Sergeant,” Martin asked Mitchum without any idea what he might do with a negative response, “are we safe in here? Relatively speaking, of course.”
Mitchum took a long drink from a bottle of water, replaced the cap, and nodded. “We got a … wait, I had to memorize this … it’s ‘a composite-material air-intake plenum and precleaner assembly.’ That means it filters the crap out, so we can live long enough to kill anything that didn’t get killed by the crap the filters filter out.”
“That’s a comfort, or it would be, had your compatriot hadn’t just filled our environs with the stench of a thousand flatulent robots. And radiation, too, well done.”
“Relax, Mister Storch,” Doucette called from the driver’s seat as the tank started moving again, rocking as it crushed more cars and throwing Doucette forward before he could catch himself and secure his safety restraints again. “We got the full CBRN defense package on this tank. That’s chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear. You didn’t breathe nothing in, and the hatch wasn’t open long enough to get you radioactive. Don’t worry; we’ll get you safe to Minot so that you can die there along with everybody else.”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” Martin said. “How exquisitely reassuring.”
They drove for a while, away from the burning capital, eventually crushing enough vehicles that they made it off the Beltway and north to where some green was actually on either side of the highway. Before Mitchum said, “All right, here’s the situation, folks: Command is still sending that message about everybody having to get to Minot AFB. Why they don’t say. And how is not their problem, I guess. But we’re going, especially now that Cthulhu’s prophet back there is on a little vacation.”
“Limejello,” Horan said. “Limejello.”
“Sure,” Mitchum continued, ignoring along with everyone else the latest stream of nonsense coming from their companion. “Now, I have to think the roads will be less filled with dead people in stalled-out cars the farther we get from D.C. so that we can go a little faster. But the computer tells me that Minot is approximately 1,500 miles away, and we can’t go faster than 40 or so in perfect conditions, 25 running over everything. So, it looks like we’ll be on the road for pretty much the next 48 hours. Mitch, I want you to plot out where we can stop and try to gas up. Storch, you get babysitting duty for Pinkie McChewsalot back there.”
“Lovely,” Martin said. “But understood … Sir, is it? Should I call you ‘Sir’ since I’m in the Army now, apparently? Calling me ‘Storch’ and giving orders and all that.”
“Limejello.”
“Call me whatever you want,” Doucette said. “Just do what I tell you to do so we can all get to that desolate hellhole base in one piece.”
“Limejello limejello.”
“Yes, Sir,” Martin tried out with a laugh. “I rather like that.”
“Good for you,” Mitchum said. “Now ...”
“Limejellolimejellolimejello!” Horan shouted with increasing agitation, pointing at one of the very few corners inside an Abrams tank, most everything being curved or with its angles covered by monitors and other equipment framed by shock-absorbing bands of rubber composite. But there were a few interior corners of less than two inches between rounded rivets, and where Horan pointed had something oozing through right above the head of Martin Storch. It did look very much like lime Jell-O.
“What?” Martin reflexively asked Horan, then looked at Mitchum, who unbuckled and moved very slowly toward him, eyes focused on the spot just above him.
“Um … I’d move, if I were you,” Mitchum absently advised, squinting at the weird, glistening substance.
“—limejellolimejellolimjellolimejellolimejellolimejello—”
But Martin couldn’t simply move out of the way; he had to unbuckle and pull the restraint over his head. He started to, but as he went to unlatch the seatbelt, he naturally crooked his head to see what fascinating thing was going on, and the little green blob fell into his eye.
He shrieked so loudly that Doucette startled and jacked the two steering levers, sending them off the car-littered highway and onto the wide slope of the grass median, coming to a jarring halt at the bottom. Mitchum fell backward, hitting his head on the low overhead support. Horan Marmalado kept screaming about lime Jell-O.
“Damn bastard mother of pain!” Martin’s right eyelid caught the brunt of the acid blob’s impact, burning both the lid and the front half of the eye right off, deflecting it onto the deck, where Martin tried to squash it with his boot, rath
er than allowing it to eat through to his brain. “I’m blind! Correction—blind in one eye! But damn it! It hurts like hell! GAH!” He expressed many other colorful metaphors as he tried vainly to keep the aqueous humor, the eye juice, held back with his fingers.
“Get out of there!” Mitchum shouted at Martin as he spotted another blob squeezing through the angle, then grabbed him and yanked him out of his restraints. Then he jumped up and banged his head hard against the steel overhead and yelled “OW! MY FOOT! WHAT THE HELL?”
Doucette unbuckled from the driver’s seat and turned around just in time to see Mitchum lift his boot in distress. The bottom of it was eaten away by the damned thing, and blood seeped out of the hole in the ball of Mitchum’s foot.
The flattened blob steamed as it tried to eat through the deck, but the bottom of the M1A2, like the tank’s entire shell, was made of a composite material so impenetrable it would absorb a direct strike from a 152mm Howitzer shell. The thing couldn’t ingest inorganic material, apparently, and its acid couldn’t burn through depleted uranium, one of the densest substances on the planet and the main ingredient of the composite. It had nowhere to go.
Infinitely more disturbing than the blob on the floor, however, was the fact that the bastard now stared at them with the absorbed front half of Martin Storch’s right eyeball.
Seeing this, Martin vomited to great olfactory effect within the small confines, fingers pressed against his ruined eye, halfway to losing consciousness from the pain and, frankly, terror. He managed to say weakly, “You’ve got to be taking the piss.”
“Limejello,” Horan Marmalado insisted, regarding either the mass on the floor or the new one coming through the wall, or both.
Doucette didn’t take his own eyes off the insane sight as he zipped open one of the tank’s first aid kits and removed two syrettes of morphine, a z-folded pack of gauze, and two wound seals. “Get that boot off, Mitch. Martin, keep pressure on that eye.” He stuck Mitchum with the pre-filled syringe, and the patient’s pain-tight muscles began to relax immediately.
Of COURSE, I’m going to keep the pressure on it, you damnable cretin, Martin thought, but didn’t say out loud. Insubordination and all that. Besides, it was a moot point, since he didn’t think he could take his fingers away if he tried.
But those thoughts remained at the back of his mind, even as Doucette unloaded the syrette’s payload of morphine into his vein; his attention was focused on the green globule on the floor staring back at him with his eyeball. “Oh, for God’s sake. That’s a bloody shoggoth.”
“A what?” Doucette said as he efficiently wiped clean the pit eaten out of Mitchum’s foot, stuffed it full of gauze, and applied the blue patch that which would seal and keep the pressure on the wound until the bleeding completely stopped.
The morphine had rendered Martin extremely relaxed now, even though (a) the inside of the tank would soon fill up with shoggoths; and (b) there were frigging shoggoths in the world now. Was this reality or was he stuck inside the damned Call of Cthulhu RPG? Things certainly didn’t feel very real at the moment. “You’ll remember our dear friend Mister Lovecraft, inventor, or predictor, of our other dear friend, Mister Cthulhu.”
“I got to say, the man’s been on my mind,” Doucette said, approaching Martin with the wound seal for his horribly raw eye socket. But he stopped and looked at Horan Marmalado, who was once again staring at the angled spot high on the bulkhead. He continued to mutter “limejello” over and over again, but now he alternated the words with biting hard on the pinkies he had once again shoved between the molars on each side of his mouth. It was the worst of both worlds, Doucette thought.
He didn’t want to turn to see what Horan was freaked out by now, but he turned just in time to watch another one of the creature finish squeezing through the angle and plop onto the seat Martin had just occupied. It sizzled and ate right through the cover and the padding, stopping when it encountered the impenetrable composite material.
Doucette ignored the shoggoth; he remembered now what a “shoggoth” was from his RPG days, although he’d always thought of them as being big as woolly mammoths, and put up an index finger and said, “Hold that thought, Mister Storch.” He went back and opened another first aid kit, taking out another morphine syrette.
“I doubt I’ll lose the thread,” Martin replied, using his good eye to look back and forth at the stomped creepy-eyed shoggoth and the new one trying to pull itself out of the smoking hole in Martin’s former seat. Now, he saw, the next squelchy bastard was pushing itself through the angle into the tank. What was next, Night Gaunts?
Shut up, Storch, he snapped at himself. That’s an order.
Doucette put his hand on Horan’s shoulder. “I don’t know if you can understand me, Mister Marmalado, but I’m gonna need you to relax. Lemme have your arm.”
His jaws slowed as he investigated Doucette’s face. He lowered his left hand and extended that arm, “Jesse James?”
“Jesse James,” Doucette agreed, in the most soothing a voice a tank gunner could muster, then paused as he looked at Horan’s arm. The scrubs were short-sleeved, so the scarring from God knew how many emergency shots of Ativan and Haldol was unmistakable in the crook of his elbow. Medical training for infantry was based on triage in less-than-ideal conditions, so Doucette quickly found a vein despite the scars and sent the shot home. Shooting an uninjured man full of morphine, he was injured, Doucette supposed, but still, it wasn’t something the Army would smile upon in normal circumstances, but he needed to calm his new friend down, or they were all gonna go nuts from jessejames and damn limejello.
Once Horan sat back in his bucket seat, sedated. Silent, and not chewing on anything, Doucette returned his attention to Martin and pulled the patient’s fingers down, so he could patch up the gaping wound where an eye used to be. “All I remember about shoggoths is you don’t want to run into ’em,” Doucette said. “So, brief me: what do I need to know?”
“They, um, can travel from their nth dimension through any sharp interior angle into ours,” Martin said sluggishly. “Or no, pardon me … I’m thinking of the Hounds of Tindalos. Hell, the universe hasn’t read its Lovecraft very carefully. Damned sloppy of you, universe! Or multiverse or what have you.”
“Okay … Mister Storch, stay with me. How are these things getting through 700 millimeters of uranium? That’s more than two feet in American.”
“Thank you, sergeant.” Martin snarked through his fog. “Since we are apparently just screwing off to go live within the pages of Weird Tales circa 1928, I’d wager that the shoggoths are teleporting from wherever the hell they live to interior angles wherever they detect the presence of humans and our delectable eyeballs; they don’t need to cover the intervening space.”
“Interior angles,” Doucette repeated, unclear on how that was different from regular angles.
“I can identify only one sharp angle inside here, Sergeant, good work …” He paused, no longer looking at anything in particular. “Buddha on a bloody bicycle, I haven’t had morphine since Balliol. Good stuff, Sir, I should say.”
“I need you to hold it together, Storch. Listen: if I put some foam sealant over that corner, that’s kind of rounded, would that work? Get rid of the sharp angle, keep the bastards from getting in?”
“I say bully for you, old boy.”
Doucette griped under his breath and retrieved the can of sealant tank crews used in case of failure of the tubing that sealed the hatch. He had to wait for the third little shoggoth to ooze its way out and plop on top of the one sitting inside the seat cushion hole. The new one used the first for leverage and pushed itself onto an undamaged part of the seat cover, which didn’t remain undamaged: within seconds, the new shoggoth sank into its little smoking hole.
He didn’t give it another chance. He applied the foam, which quickly puffed out and hardened. Boom, no more angle. He did it with the two other “interior angles” (at least, he thought they were, sealing them up just in cas
e). Next, he covered the hole in the seat cushion with a Kevlar flack jacket. And then looking around the deck of the tank he spotted Martin’s eye perched on a green blob peering up at him. It is backed into the rounded floor corner, he realized. Need something round to trap it. Quick thinking on the Sergeant’s part had him snatch one of the Advanced Combat Helmets (ACH), the Army's current combat helmet from the overhead and plop it over the one-eyed shoggoth. The inside is cocave, that should do the trick, he told himself.
He let out a breath he wasn’t aware he’d been holding and surveyed the rear of the tank: Mitchum, Horan, and Martin were each in their private la-la-lands. If he recalled his first aid training correctly, they’d be out of commission for about three hours. He could try to catch a catnap himself before the next two days of constant travel, but then he realized that when Horan Marmalado woke up, he’d probably start singing the ballad of Jell-O James again and not stop for a good while. If he stayed awake and drove now, however, he could enjoy three extra hours of not having to listen to whatever the hell had happened to his favorite escaped mental patient.
All right, he would stay awake, but not sober. Too dangerous. He took a couple of epic swigs from the plastic jug of Jack Daniel’s they had liberated from a package store back at the beginning. They’d run out soon, they could’ve taken more, but there wasn’t room inside the tank, but there were a million liquor stores between Washington and North Dakota.
Even freshly intoxicated, Doucette could slip into the driver’s seat, back the Abrams out of the Interstate’s median, and get moving toward Minot AFB in his sleep; and, as occupied as his mind was at that moment, that’s what he did. He found himself snapping out of his thoughts only when he was forced to veer sharply to avoid slamming into the back of an 18-wheeler fuel tanker. Veering was no problem since the tank wouldn’t be damaged by running over a few lanes of vehicles full of the dead. But crashing into a fully loaded tanker truck full of gasoline? That would really be …