After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft)

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Giehl stared at the screen, unable to bring herself to touch the keyboard. She had long been aware that she was a very small piece in a very large game, but she’d never been given the slightest idea that Weber was Abwehr too. Now to find out he was apparently a senior agent to her … her pride was hurt, but she was also afraid. Just what did they mean by “American interference must not be tolerated”? They were on American territory; the Abwehr command could not seriously be intending for them to assault Americans on their own land? That was tantamount to a declaration of war.

  A new message appeared. “Confirm your understanding.”

  With as much reluctance as if she were signing her own death warrant, Dr. Giehl typed, “I understand.”

  * * *

  Lovecraft was awoken by her phone buzzing. This didn’t happen too often on Attu, and it was the first time it had happened at night. It meant that she’d received a text on the island’s intranet, but she knew she wasn’t on many people’s fast dials. She checked and found, not surprising her in the slightest, it was from Carter.

  “Come to the sheriff’s office asap. Be QUIET,” it said, intriguingly though uninformatively.

  That meant going outside. Lovecraft lifted the corner of the blind over her bed and looked out of the window. What she could see in the site’s external lights looked very white, and there were flakes streaming across the nimbus around them. The snow had finally arrived and settled in with a vengeance, slowly cocooning the land and the man-made structures upon it. Lovecraft muttered dark imprecations on the head of whoever thought it was okay not to have all the living units joined as she quickly dressed and pulled on her light boots rather than the heavy ones she used if she was going to be out in the cold for more than a few minutes.

  Remembering to be quiet, but not enjoying the brief period of pretending to be a bargain-basement ninja that it entailed, she made her way to the office.

  There she found the shutter down over the window and reminded herself that she did the same in her room; the last thing she needed was a snowdrift smashing its way through the window, as she’d been told could happen if it fell deeply enough. She knocked gently on the door, it sounding even gentler than intended due to her gloves, and she opened the door a crack, largely out of paranoia. Reassured by the sight of Carter behind the desk—he looked up and gestured her in urgently when he saw her—she entered and stamped snow off her boots.

  “Holy Jesus, it is storming out there,” she said, pulling her gloves off. “If it keeps up, the units’re going to get buried.”

  Carter ignored the weather report. “Need your eyes on this, Emily. You said you can read German, right?”

  “Yeah. Decent conversational, I’d guess you’d call it.” She frowned. “So?”

  “I need you to look at this.” He got up and left the chair out for her. “I’ve got an English/German dictionary here, if you need help.”

  Still frowning, she sat and turned her attention to the screen. She seemed to be looking at a transcript in German. “What am I looking at here?”

  “I’ve got a feed to the offsite computer in the comms office. The one we get Internet time on.”

  “You’re kidding me!” She looked up at him. “I didn’t have you down as some sort of hacker.”

  “You’re right not to. I’m a PI. Occasionally we buy spy shit. When I heard about the communication setup, I went and talked to a guy I know. He set me up with a hardwired tap. I installed it the first night we were here. All it is is a little gizmo that goes between the monitor plug and socket in the back of the machine. I poked a hole through the wall with a screwdriver, fed the wire through, then closed the hole with sealant. The gap between the units is pretty narrow, so nobody goes down there, and there’s a bundle of cables running along it anyway. Now it’s all covered in snow, which is good. Other end of the wire comes in here, where I’ve got an external hard drive set up to take a snapshot of what’s on the screen. Nice thing about doing it this way is it’s undetectable with malware scanners. They assume somebody is remotely hacking in with root kits or whatever. They don’t sniff a physical tap like this.” He saw her expression. “No, I haven’t been monitoring everyone. Just Lurline Giehl and Hans Weber.”

  “Wow. This is some heavy-grade intrusion of privacy you’ve got going on here.”

  “Yeah, yeah, life’s a riot with Spy vs. Spy. Thing is, Giehl uses some kind of chat app that I’m damn sure isn’t installed on that machine. She must be running it off a thumb drive. She starts talking to somebody in German. No greetings, no ‘Hi, how are you’s,’ just straight into it. And look what she says.”

  Lovecraft looked at where Carter was pointing. FOMORIAN. “Well,” she said. “Now ain’t that a coincidence?”

  “Can you translate the rest?”

  She glanced up and down the text. “Oh, yeah. This shouldn’t take too long.” She pushed the keyboard back and took up a notepad and pen. “Meantime, make yourself useful and get me a coffee.”

  Nor was she exaggerating. In less than ten minutes she’d sketched out a working translation and showed it to Carter.

  “Okay,” he said as he read it through for the second time, “so mainly bad news with maybe a little good news.”

  “Yeah? Maybe it was added in translation, because the only news I saw in that was maybe we should have kept our yaps shut on the corridors even when we thought we were alone. Kind of late for that, but whatever.”

  “Doc Giehl. Look at what she says. She’s all business until they get excited about us saying ‘Fomorian.’ Then she gets real evasive and tries to talk it down. Her bosses at the Abwehr won’t have it, but she tries. The stuff about American interference is what really rattles her. Then there’s when her boss tells her to alert Doc Weber. If our information’s right, he’s probably Thule, but she doesn’t know that. She probably thinks he’s Abwehr, too, but now she’s wondering why she wasn’t told that.”

  “There’s such a thing as ‘plausible deniability,’ Dan. Very popular with the spy crowd, I believe.”

  “Why have multiple intelligence stooges in a single team? It’s bad enough there was a Gestapo simp she didn’t know about, now there’s somebody attached to the same agency and she wasn’t told? Doc Giehl’s not an idiot, but they’re trying to play her for one. Look at what she says here and here.” Carter pointed at lines close to the end of the conversation. “She’s backpedaling from her earlier questions. Yes, sir, no, sir, three bags of bullshit, sir.” Carter looked at Lovecraft. “She’s frightened. I think she’s finally caught on that her bosses’ loyalties might not be to the Fatherland. Or at least not the same Fatherland.”

  Lovecraft turned the office chair to face him, and looked up at him with her arms crossed and her expression unimpressed. “Please tell me you’re not thinking of trying to recruit Eva Braun to the Scooby Gang.”

  “We don’t have many friends we can rely on out here.”

  “We got a submarine full of buff guys with sexy accents. We don’t need the Ice Queen.”

  Carter made a backward nod in the direction of Temnac Bay. “They’re all the way out there. We could do with friends right here. We can’t even depend on the American contingent. By the time we can convince them things aren’t how they seem, it could be way too late.”

  * * *

  Bowles had been unable to sleep. He was a city boy at heart, and while it had been hard work to adapt to all the changes in environment that the project had imposed upon him since they had left Arkham, he had managed to accept them and get his head down after a hard day’s work easily enough. Tonight, however, felt different. It took him a while to realize it was the snow that was doing it, it was the snow that was eating the sound of the sea and making the island as silent as a deep cellar. He tossed and turned, tried reading for a while, and considered quiet masturbation, but the deadness of the night but for the occasional clicks and shudders that ran through the units depressed and distracted him, so instead he decided to go and fix the tran
sfer switch on the reserve generator. There’d been an outage in the late afternoon, and the standby had failed to start automatically. Irritating, but not the end of the world. He’d promised everyone he’d check on the problem in the morning after he fixed whatever the problem with the main generator had been. That turned out to be the first thing he’d checked for—a loose connection on the battery—and once the main was running again, fixing the standby dropped off everyone’s radar but his. As he couldn’t sleep, maybe an hour fussing with a transfer switch in a cold maintenance shack would make his bed feel more welcoming.

  He was just coming to the conclusion that the switch was a piece of shit and they might have to order a new one, or maybe a whole replacement generator if loose switches weren’t to be had, when he heard low voices outside the shack.

  It never for one moment occurred to Nick Bowles to lay low. Why should he? He was on an isolated island, he knew everyone else there, and everyone knew him. He considered himself a nice guy, and that was not an unreasonable supposition. Most would have agreed. There was nobody on the island who did not at least think Bowles was okay. He did not have a single enemy there.

  He opened the shack door and found what looked like the entire German contingent of the project climbing into the four Kübelwagens parked under the covered carport, the fifth being up at the dome. As he watched, three of them moved off in convoy, heading for the mountain road. He checked his watch; 2:00 a.m. local time. They had to be crazy to go up in the dark with visibility down to maybe five yards at most. He ran to the last car, seeing Dr. Weber just loading some gear in the trunk. He couldn’t see who was waiting at the wheel, but—as he approached—he caught a glimpse of Dr. Giehl in the backseat. She didn’t look happy at all, he thought. She looked almost like somebody who’d just had really bad news. Bowles wondered if something had gone wrong at the dome and the experiment might be a washout. He hoped not. ZPE was going to change the world for the better. How could it do anything else?

  Problems up at the dome or not, however, there were protocols in place that had to be observed.

  “Doctor!” he called, dogtrotting through the driving snow. “Dr. Weber! Sir!”

  The doctor turned to see him. Bowles noticed that the man slouched, sagging at the shoulders, almost as if he was disappointed to see him.

  “Nick,” said the doctor, “you should get indoors. The weather’s getting worse.”

  Bowles hesitated. He hadn’t even known Dr. Weber knew his first name, much less that he was prepared to call him by it. “Look, Doc, I’m sorry to be a pain in the ass, but you can’t take the last car. One always has to be at the station in case of emergency.”

  “There’s been an emergency.” The doctor said it without conviction, like a man reciting a line from a first read through of a play he didn’t want to be in. “We have to get up there as soon as we can.”

  “I have a paramedic certification—”

  “No. Please, no, Nick, it’s not that kind of emergency. I do not have time to explain. Please go indoors.”

  Weber was lying to him, but Bowles couldn’t understand why. He had a feeling that whatever was going on was above his pay grade, and that he should hand it off. “Look, I’m going to have to talk to Doc Malcolm about this.”

  “Dr. Malcolm is up at the dome,” said Weber. He seemed tired, almost depressed. “Everything is in order. Go back to bed, Nick. It is a full day tomorrow.”

  “I can’t sign off on this, Doctor, I’m sorry. If Dr. Malcolm’s up there, I’ll have to talk to Dr. Lo about it.”

  Weber looked him in the face, then sighed and shook his head. He said something under his breath in German that Bowles was pretty sure was an apology, although he didn’t know what for. Weber looked over at the secondary entrance. “Here is the doctor now.”

  Bowles looked over, but no one was there, least of all Dr. Lo. The door was secure, the station silent. His lips were just starting to form the word, “Where?” when Weber shot him through the back of the head. The snow ate the sound of the pistol as Bowles pitched face-first into the snow.

  Weber shook his head. “Why couldn’t you just go in when I asked you?” He turned at the sound of one of the Kübelwagen doors opening. Dr. Giehl looked at the corpse with a strange, empty look, the expression of one who is watching an unsought inevitability.

  “You cannot leave him there,” she said simply.

  Weber was standing, looking at the pistol in the palm of his gloved hand. It had forced him across a Rubicon he thought was still a little way away. He took a deep breath and put it back in his parka pocket. “We must catch up with the others,” he said with new steel in his voice. He pushed Giehl back into the car and sat alongside her. The fourth Kübelwagen drew out from the parking area and followed the tracks of its predecessors into the white-and-black night.

  Chapter 28

  RED AND WHITE

  They’d concluded there was little else they could do that night and so Lovecraft left the office to go to bed while Carter closed down the computer and put out the lights. He’d hardly begun when Lovecraft came back in, agitated and urgent.

  “Nick Bowles! He’s dead!”

  Carter’s first thought was there had been an accident, but Lovecraft closed the door behind her and pointed at the arms locker. “I need the Mossberg.”

  “What?”

  “He was shot. He’s out by the motor pool facedown with a hole in the back of his parka hood, getting buried by snow right by the lights. Thought he’d fallen or something, lifted his hood, that’s when I saw the hole in his head and then the one in the hood. I thought we were supposed to be the only armed ones on the island?”

  “We are.” Carter didn’t hesitate as he turned to the locker with his keys, opened it, and passed it over to Lovecraft. He looked at the locker’s other contents, then pulled out spare magazines for their handguns and a cartridge bandoleer for Lovecraft. She accepted it with evident surprise.

  “Oh, God. Really? We going to war or something?”

  “I think the war’s come to us, Emily.”

  Lovecraft led him out into the night, the snow coming in harshly angled from the north. Drifts were already becoming deep. Her tracks in the snow, visible in the harsh, oblique lighting of the external lights, were still plain, though; the clear, steady footprints out, and the blurred footprints back, marked by plumes of loose snow thrown by her running feet.

  Bowles lay where Lovecraft had found him. Carter didn’t spend much time checking the body; Lovecraft had already told him all that was immediate and necessary. Instead, he looked around him. He could see Bowles’s footprints, still visible but growing softer by the second. He could see them leave from the maintenance shack toward the motor pool, and its sheltered port. Many people had come from the site’s primary and secondary entrances. When he looked closely at the footprints, none of them were toward the doors.

  “They’ve taken all the cars,” he said finally, reasonably sure he had worked out the series of events.

  “Who have? The Germans or the Brits? This is a Thule thing, right?”

  “Yeah. I think Giehl telling her handlers about Fomorians has really poked a hornet’s nest.”

  Lovecraft thought through the ramifications. “So, they figure us for British agents, or American agents working with the British. Nah, must be British agents. U.K. is a pariah state in the Unfolded. OSS wouldn’t work with them. If they figure us for, like, MI6, why didn’t they come after us?”

  Carter had been searching on the ground based on where the tracks stopped. He suddenly knelt and picked something out of the snow—a shell casing. “I think this is pretty much all the evidence we can expect to find here. Help me get Nick into the shack. Take his feet.”

  It wasn’t a task Lovecraft savored, and she was glad Bowles’s head lolled back as they carried him so she didn’t have to look at his face. As they carried him out of the storm into the shack, the door of which still stood open as Bowles had left it, Carter said, “
They’re scientists first, evil occultist fuckers second. Whoever shot Nick could just as easily have done it to his face, but it looks like he was suckered into looking away. The shooter didn’t want to see his face. That doesn’t sound like a cold, clinical killer to me. Same goes for us. They didn’t want a shooting match, so they just took all the damn cars and left us stranded. I guess they were kind of hoping we wouldn’t even notice all this had gone down until morning, by which time I’m guessing it’ll be too late.”

  They laid Bowles down across some pallets and Carter found an opaque blue plastic tarp to put over him.

  Lovecraft watched him as she fidgeted with the bandoleer, trying to make it rest more easily across her shoulder. “They’ve gone up to the dome to do whatever it is they’re planning on doing, but what the fuck is that, Dan? The Brits didn’t know either.”

  Carter shrugged. “Weird science, and it must be something major if they’re prepared to burn their bridges with the U.S. like this. I’ll tell you something—I’m really wondering if the dome ever was just an early-warning station. Locations are so important with the occult stuff. Maybe they found something up there and studied it for a while, but they didn’t get anywhere, so the DoD or whoever was paying for it pulled its funding. It fell off everyone’s radar, so when the Germans said, ‘Hey, this place is ideal,’ the State Department said, ‘Yeah, whatever,’ and didn’t even tell the DoD because the place had been derestricted years ago.”

  “We going to stop them, right? We got guns, we’re badasses, we’re going to go up there and kick Thule butt. That’s the plan, yeah?”

  Carter nodded reluctantly. “It’s why Weston went to so much trouble to put us out here. It must be. I don’t like being his puppet in all this, but I got to admit, I feel motivated to get involved. Maybe now that we know he’s a player, next time he’ll just ask instead of fucking us around like this.”