After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft)

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Aware that sooner or later a Fomorian was going to get lucky, Lieutenant Green ordered a halt, and the seven of them took cover in the snow-filled gullies, and returned fire. The Fomorians were not difficult to target, but they were horrifyingly resilient. A penetrating shot to the central body mass was a minor inconvenience for them. A burst from the L86A2 support weapon tore the gun arm off a target, but it simply reached down with its remaining hand, lifted its fallen weapon by what passed for its barrel, and shook it vigorously until the hand of the amputated arm lost its grip and fell to the snow. The creature juggled the device awkwardly until it was holding it correctly, and then continued toward the commandos.

  “Head shots, boys. Head shots!” called Corporal Barnaby. More fire, and a Fomorian fell, its head pulped. A burst from the support weapon, and another collapsed, but only because its left leg had been blown off at the knee. It crawled onward, grunting in liquid hatred.

  “Fucking hell, Migsy,” said Barnaby, “how’s that his head?”

  Green had observed how effectively the steam had confused the Fomorians, and decided to act on it. “We don’t have time for this bollocks, Corporal,” he called to Barnaby. “Lay down smoke and chuck a couple of HEs in the middle of them.”

  It was impossible to call the Fomorian advance a “line”; they were each individually making the best speed they could up toward the commandos and were scattered across the Ukudikak bed and up both sides of the banks right to the shadow of the low cliff in the east. The leaders came to a cautious halt as the first smoke grenades landed just forward of the humans, and something like a Fomorian line formed by accident as the stragglers caught up. They were forming clumps about twenty-five meters away, which was bad news for them, as the commandos had at least three men who could hit the middle bail of a wicket at pretty much that range with total consistency. On this occasion, they didn’t have to be nearly so accurate.

  As the smoke swirled around in the falling snow, lowering poor visibility to almost nothing, two fragmentation grenades plopped with little fuss among the approaching rank. A third clipped a Fomorian on the shoulder and it looked around, trying to see what had struck it. All three grenades went off almost simultaneously. The commandos did not see the blasts, as they were very aware of just how far stray shrapnel from a grenade can fly and were facedown in the snow.

  Through the smoke bank, they heard the muffled detonations, and they heard screams that no human throat would make without tearing itself raw, and strange ululating shouts that rose in crescendo before stopping abruptly, sounding more like the calls of birds in some alien jungle. Firing a few rounds into the murk where they thought they saw shapes flailing in agony, the commandos fell back. Mount Terrible stood before them, and time was short.

  Toward the top, Green thought he saw the momentary sweep of a headlight flash across the falling snow at the last bend in the treacherous road, but it was impossible to be sure, and it was not repeated.

  * * *

  The note of triumphalism inside the dome suffered a major setback when it was abruptly pitched into total darkness. Somebody working on the ZPE weapon dropped a component and it clanged heavily on the concrete floor.

  “For God’s sake! Calm down, all of you!” bellowed Dr. Weber into the blackness. “If you’re handling something large, put it down carefully. It’s nothing. Just an outage. The cold may have affected the generators.”

  Now that they had a moment for their eyes to adjust, they realized the darkness was not quite absolute after all. Several pieces of equipment had independent power, and one—the radio set—drew current while it was available but had its own battery, too. It was one of the standard mobile units, the expedition having several, this one only being different in that it was immobilized on a workbench against one gracefully curving wall by being encased in a Faraday cage to prevent it from interfering with the experiment. Its usual aerial had been removed, however, and replaced by a shielded lead that terminated on a screw mounting in the wall above it. This, in turn, connected to an external aerial as—even without the Faraday cage—it was unlikely the steel-mesh-reinforced dome would allow a signal to travel in or out. In the sudden quiet of the electrical systems and ventilation falling silent, the insistent beep and flashing red light to indicate an incoming call were hard to miss.

  A flashlight clicked on. “Give me that,” demanded Weber, instantly commandeering it. As he made his way to the radio, more penlights and flashlights flicked into life. Almost everyone carried a light source on Attu; it was crazy not to. Weber had left his flashlight in his room in the panic that Giehl had dumped on him, and he was embarrassed by the oversight.

  He approached the radio slowly, as if not quite sure what it was. He knew the set had a relatively good range as such things went, but it was still only thirty-five miles or so. Whoever was calling was somebody on the island, and there was nobody on the island yet outside the dome he really wanted to talk to. Despite a strong feeling that he shouldn’t, he picked up the handset and toggled open the channel.

  “Hello.”

  “Dr. Weber?” said the American voice through the speaker. Everyone in the dome heard it very clearly. “This is Daniel Carter. I just wanted to tell you that you don’t have any power in there because we just cut it. In a minute, we’re going to restart the generators. That won’t help you, because we’ve physically disconnected the power cables. We’ve also run their exhaust pipes into the air-conditioning vents. You have one minute to throw out all your weapons and then come out as directed.”

  There was a sound of Carter’s handset being jostled, and then Lovecraft’s voice cut in. “Just in case you’re having problems with the ramifications of that, he means disarm and surrender, or else we are going to gas you motherfuckers. And that’s ironic in ways you really won’t understand.”

  Weber toggled off the handset. “Block the vents! Now!”

  * * *

  Lovecraft returned the handset to Carter and laughed a little smugly as she did. “Think that did it?”

  “Wouldn’t you? They’ll block the inlets and try to keep working by flashlights. I give them five minutes before somebody thinks they smell exhaust fumes and freaks out. Give it another five to get heated, then we call again and tell them we haven’t turned the generators on yet, but we’re going to. Chances are, if they haven’t sent anyone out in those ten minutes to find out what we’re doing, they will when they hear that.”

  “When did you get this sneaky?”

  “Right from when I was a beat cop. You have to learn negotiating skills. Most of the job’s one kind of negotiation or another.” They walked out of the generator building to take positions in case the Thule tried a rush.

  “On the street, usually talking people down, calming things down, like you’d expect. But sometimes you had to talk people up. Push people so they’d act without thinking it through. Our big advantage”—he drew his pistol—“is they don’t know they’re being played. In ten minutes, when they find out, they are going to be pissing vinegar. That’s when they’ll make mistakes, big brain scientists or not.” They took positions in cover behind two of the hastily parked Kübelwagens, the four there of which already bore good coverings of snow. Where the fifth car had been, the void in the snow was softly filling in. Carter and Lovecraft had met Dr. Malcolm and his colleagues walking down the road already starting to freeze, their parkas insufficient to protect them from the environment. Carter and Lovecraft had continued to the summit, then Carter took a Kübelwagen and drove it back down the mountain shadowed by Lovecraft on the snowmobile. They handed the car over to the grateful scientists and told them to get back to the settlement. The scientists had not been able to tell them much they didn’t already know, although confirmation that the Thule agents had more than one gun among them was useful.

  For several seconds they waited in silence crouched behind the cars, the snowflakes drifting down around them. Then Lovecraft called, softly yet loud enough to be heard in that near sou
ndless place, “Hey, Dan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s pretty here, isn’t it?”

  Carter considered the question.

  “Yeah.”

  * * *

  Kurt was doing what he did best, which was being an entitled asshole. It had become very clear to Weber early on in his association with Kurt that somebody at Wewelsburg was looking to get rid of Kurt, and committing him to the Seidr project on Attu was a way of doing it while seeming to make a selfless sacrifice for the good of the Reich and Greater Germania. There had been few opportunities for speaking privately since they had arrived on Attu, and Kurt had been there since the Peter Strasser had dropped him off with most of the equipment, over a week before the Frederick Cook’s arrival. In any case, Weber had assumed that everyone—with the exception of the Abwehr and Gestapo contingent—was fully aware of what the activation of the device would do. He had slowly come to realize, by Kurt’s smug anticipation of his heroic return to the Fatherland, that this was not true. Kurt honestly thought he was going to go home after Seidr was accomplished.

  After considering the likely results of disabusing him of this fallacy, Weber had quietly told the others not to say anything to Kurt about what was actually coming. While they died in glory, Kurt would die in ignorance; his glory would be postdated.

  Dr. Weber, however, had had neither the opportunity nor the motivation to ask Dr. Giehl to keep quiet on the subject. After all, he had never envisaged a situation where she would have the chance to tell him about it.

  “They’re all insane,” whispered Giehl to herself, watching the device being built by torchlight. The Thule people were working more urgently now that they realized that perhaps they should have been more ruthless at the settlement. Maybe they should have shot the Americans while they slept. It certainly looked like they should have hunted down and dealt with the sheriff and his deputy. The assumption had been that, by the time a retaliatory force could reach the dome on foot, the job would be done and defending themselves would be moot. It was a mystery how Carter and Lovecraft had gotten to the dome so quickly, the snowmobile having been among the American supplies brought by ship and unknown to the Germans.

  “No,” said a voice near her, and she belatedly remembered how well sound traveled in that space even with the hum of electronics and the air-conditioning running. She looked up to see Kurt standing near her, watching the work proceed with a smile. It did not surprise her in the slightest that he was on the sidelines; she wouldn’t have trusted him with a screwdriver either. He stood, arms crossed and a gun at his hip, the very model of a conquering hero. “We are making Germany great again.”

  “The Reich is already the most powerful country in the world,” she scoffed. “When did it stop being ‘great’?”

  “We can’t allow weakness. We must always seek strength.” He looked down at her and she would have been delighted to slap that smug, pitying look from his face. “The Reich is vulnerable. Did you know, every month a procedure has to be carried out at Wewelsburg simply to maintain the stability of the state? What we’re doing here today will ensure that is never necessary again.”

  She looked at him as if he were quite mad for a moment, then her expression softened, as she appreciated that, no, he was simply a fool. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about. How will detonating a bomb here change anything for the Reich? At best, we’ll look like lunatics and, at worst, we’ll start a war.”

  She looked up at him as she spoke, and was surprised and pleased to see the complacent smirk falter, and his brow lower. “Oh,” she said, seeing she had the advantage here at least, “they didn’t tell you that this is a suicide mission?” He didn’t answer, so she pressed home her advantage. “What sort of procedure? How can anything that goes on in that nightmare of a castle maintain the state? What are you talking about?”

  “You should help them move some of the newly freed components together, Kurt.” Weber had appeared from nowhere. “They’re quite heavy and a strong young man like you would be very helpful.”

  Kurt looked at him as if he’d just offered to sleep with Kurt’s mother. “Doctor, this project, what exactly is going to happen?”

  “Exactly what you have been told. A focused energy device will stabilize a problematical causal schism, thereby securing the future of the Fatherland.”

  “It’s not a bomb?”

  Weber laughed. “No. In a bomb, energy is released universally. In this case, it’s focused into the causal membrane, to weld shut a door.” He reconsidered. “No, that’s a poor metaphor. More like taping down the corners of a piece of paper, so it cannot be folded again.”

  “Again?” said Giehl.

  “At all,” Weber corrected himself. “The mathematics of it are complicated, but we have reason to believe that a causal schism exists that would rewrite history from the late 1920s into the present. Ah…”—he raised a hand, seeing Giehl was about to argue—“I appreciate this sounds absurd, but we have empirical evidence. Stabilizing that schism can only be done in certain places, and politically and practically, here was the best one. We will doubtless have to grovel a little to the United States about our activities here, but they are sensible people and we shall be able to assuage their anger with a few concessions, I am sure. After all, there are as many in Washington, D.C., who will be delighted by what we do here as in Berlin.”

  “The Americans are complicit?” asked Giehl.

  “Some of them. How do you think we were able to get permission to set up here so easily? It isn’t simply because this is a cooperative effort with Miskatonic University, I assure you. There are sections of the U.S. government who know there is something unusual about the peak of Mount Terrible. Why do you think this structure was built here?”

  “An early-warning station?” said Kurt.

  Weber smiled at him. “Quite right, an early-warning station. But to provide early warning of what?” He nodded at the device. “Help the others, Kurt. We are working against the clock.”

  Confused but obedient to authority, Kurt went to do as he was told.

  Weber continued smiling as he watched Kurt walk away, but when he spoke from the side of his mouth to Giehl, he was not amused. “Do not try to upset the boy again, Lurline. I don’t have time to hold his hand.” He drew up a chair and sat by her. “Why can’t you just accept what is happening here? You’re a patriot. You’d die for your country, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she replied without hesitation. “I just doubt that’s what I will be dying for. You’ve set yourself above the Party, above the state, above your homeland, Weber. Just who will you be dying for?”

  He shook his head, amused by her naïveté. “Those are all petty temporal entities, Lurline. If you believe the Reich will exist for even a fraction of a thousand years, you’re as deluded as poor old Adolf was. The Thule Society sees that. We are very good at looking at the long-term good.”

  “Whose good?”

  Weber looked at her, head cocked, considering her like a challenging artwork. Then he leaned close and whispered in her ear, “There are higher authorities than the Führer.”

  * * *

  “Dan?”

  “Yes?”

  “I changed my mind. I don’t think it’s so pretty out here anymore. Now I just think it’s fucking freezing. They’re not coming out, are they?”

  Carter sighed with frustration, his breath pluming into the air. “No. I guess not.”

  “Plan B?”

  “Plan B.”

  While Lovecraft continued to keep the door covered, Carter went around to the generator shack to restart the engines. It looked like they were going to have to gas out the scientists after all.

  Chapter 32

  A DANGEROUS INTELLECTUAL

  The acoustics of the dome became more oppressive as every minute ticked by. Those working there had never entirely appreciated how much of what made the dome a bearable working environment was the humming equipment filling the stru
cture with an ambient tone that did much to muffle its echoic qualities. Every sound seemed altered in some way and either too clear or not nearly as pure as it ought to be. There were mutterings among the Thule agents of whispering galleries and parabolic reflections, but none of them had dealt with acoustics beyond their school years and it was all conjecture. Those were not the only mutterings, however, for they seemed to continue even when all those present were silently absorbed in their work. There were whispers and other sounds that sounded like they might have been words, but the language was unfamiliar, as was the form of larynx that might create such syllables.

  The scientists grew fretful and short-tempered. They knew more about the truth of the world, the universe, and the things that lay above and below and behind the universe, but knowledge is not the same as experience, and reading about “metasensory phenomena” was a very different thing than being exposed to them.

  When a mechanical thrumming note began to resonate through the dome it was a relief, as—just for a moment—the Thule agents were in a happy second where they were spared both the torment of the whispers and the fear that came with the realization of exactly what the thrumming was.

  “Oh, God,” the first to understand said, “they’re doing it. They’re pumping carbon monoxide in!” None of them were chemists or biologists but they remembered enough from their school careers to know that carbon monoxide and a closed environment were a losing proposition for anything that had hemoglobin in its veins.

  “Why aren’t the vents sealed?” demanded Weber, “I asked that—”

  “We don’t have the materials to make full seals, so we just had to cover the lower vents and hope the gas wasn’t under pressure when it came,” said one of the assistants. “But there are vents higher in the dome that we can’t even reach.”

  Weber shook his head in irritation. “Then we have little choice. There’s a lot of air in here, but it will be unbreathable in half an hour or less. We have to go out and close down the generators.” He looked at those around him, lit unevenly by a dozen flash-and work lights. “There are only two of them, but they have the advantage of being able to wait for us to come out. I shall require volunteers who aren’t afraid to use guns.”