After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft)

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Did the Fomorians’ lives matter even to them? wondered Barnaby. They barely used cover. They hardly seemed to care. Were they too stupid to preserves their lives, or did they really not think of their existence as something worth preserving? The commandos had been briefed any number of times on the known capabilities and mentality of these enemies, but they had always been represented as essentially humans that simply looked like monsters. Yes, the intelligence spooks had talked about the inhumanity of the Fomorians, but they barely touched upon their unhumanity. To them, the Foams might as well have been ragheads or provos, just another bunch of terrorists who needed dissuading with bullets. For the first time, Barnaby wondered if they were not the whole be-all and end-all, that there wasn’t some fish king of the fish men telling them what to do. What if they were all soldiers in somebody else’s fight? And what if Barnaby was, too?

  Corporal Stephen Barnaby realized nobody was firing anymore and that he wouldn’t be getting answers to his questions. Around his tiny redoubt, the creatures slowly closed in.

  * * *

  “We need to set this up, right here.” Kurt pointed at a space next to the ZPE device the remaining scientists were close to finishing.

  “What?” One of the scientists, Huber, looked at him as if he was an idiot. Kurt had become used to looks like that. She shifted her attention to the unit he had wheeled over. “That thing’s a fake. I don’t even know why we brought it.”

  “It’s not a fake,” said Dr. Giehl, joining them with a length of telemetry cable she had gotten from the storeroom. “It just doesn’t do what the Americans thought it was doing.”

  Nor, she knew, would it do what Kurt was expecting it to do. She had hoped that Kurt’s discovery that the ZPE would blow the top off the mountain had been preying on his mind, and, yes, it had. A very great deal. When he had challenged her, he had been willing to believe almost anything she suggested as long as it led to a resolution in which he didn’t die in the ass-end of nowhere, surrounded by people who treated him like an idiot. She had told him that she was an Ahnenerbe plant, sent to monitor the project, as it was believed it would be used to provoke a war with the U.S. and, in passing, eliminate some members of the Thule Society that a power group within the society wanted dead. Kurt’s death, specifically, was intended to undermine his father within the Ahnenerbe.

  It was all inspired lies, and Giehl was pleased with how well it meshed with current events without being in the slightest bit true, although now she did find herself wondering why Kurt had been assigned there. Perhaps she had inadvertently stumbled on a little bit of truth. In any event, Kurt gobbled up her lies and became almost pathetically eager to help her undo this villainy and, incidentally, save his life.

  She had told him her ZPE detector unit was actually intended to disable the ZPE field when it was created, causing an attempt to trigger the device to fail and probably burning it out in the process. She’d muttered some nonsense about an “EMP hysteresis feedback effect” and he’d nodded eagerly as if he’d just been reading about them.

  “But it has to be close by,” she said. “I need to rewire the components to do its job properly. You make yourself useful with them, and I’ll make the necessary alterations.” By “rewire the components,” she meant “arm a bomb,” and by “do its job properly,” she meant “blow the ZPE device to shit and shrapnel,” but there was no need to burden him with the technicalities. Kurt had nodded, pathetically grateful, and done as she asked, while she unscrewed the detector’s maintenance hatch and reattached Jenner’s crude but effective bundle of dynamite to the power bus.

  Huber was looking the box over now. “So what does it do?”

  “It’s a monitor and failsafe.” Giehl’s gift for impromptu bullshit had suddenly deserted her. The description didn’t sound convincing even to her.

  It didn’t seem to be making much headway with Huber, either. She looked at Kurt, but he was making a great show of placing the detector just so, in an attempt to avoid being asked questions. He need not have troubled himself; she would have as soon consulted a Ouija board as ask him for technical details.

  Huber turned her attention back to Giehl. “How are we even supposed to connect them? There’s no provision, no ports, nothing.”

  A change of tack was required. Giehl shrugged. “How am I supposed to know? The thing just turned up at my laboratory a few days before I was due to go to Arkham. There was a sheaf of instructions and an order to burn them after reading.” Huber showed no sign that this seemed extraordinary or even unusual to her. Giehl took a leap. “I have no idea how it works. Really, Gabi, do you know how that thing works?” She nodded at the ZPE device.

  Huber’s lips tightened and Giehl suddenly realized she had said exactly the right thing. “I just do as I’m told,” said Huber.

  “As do I. Let me just set the thing up and I will leave you in peace.” She finished placing the detector as if there were specific rules to follow other than “as close as possible,” and plugged in its power lead.

  “It’s useless without power, though. What about the device?”

  Huber nodded and looked to the door to the entrance anteroom. There was still no sign of Weber or any of the others. “We need power. Unless they can get the generators up again to energize the device in the first place, we’ve wasted our time.”

  “You carry on,” said Giehl, playing up the role of reliable colleague. “I’ll find out what’s happening outside.”

  * * *

  Previously, hanging up parkas and changing out of boots in favor of soft work shoes in the entry room had been de rigueur. Tonight, however, nobody much cared. Giehl had dumped her own parka by her workplace and not bothered changing her footwear at all. Now she shrugged back into the coat and, telling Kurt to keep an eye on the detector and make sure it wasn’t moved or interfered with, went out into the antechamber.

  The first thing she saw was Dr. Weber stretched out on the floor groaning. His head was bloodied and, for a moment, she thought he’d been shot there. But no. The wound seemed to have been caused by him falling down the stoop, presumably while being shot at. There was no sign of the four others who had gone out with him, and she assumed they were either lying dead outside or had occupied the generator shack.

  In the unhealthy yellow-green glow of emergency cold light stick racks that some wise head had decided should be fitted in the anteroom but not in the dome itself, she rolled him onto his back and looked at him. His parka was holed around the right shoulder and she realized he had been caught at the edge of a swarm of shotgun pellets. Giehl saw the hand of Emily Lovecraft at work there.

  “Weber? Weber!” She slapped him as much because she wanted to as to make him focus on her. “Where are the others?”

  “Others?” The idea confused him, then he settled on a meaning. “The others. They killed Decker. Decker’s dead.”

  “And the other three?”

  “In the generator shack. Have they repaired it yet?”

  “No. Not yet. Weber, listen to me. All this, the ZPE device, stabilizing the world or whatever you meant. Who is it for?”

  He looked at her curiously as if he’d never truly noticed her before. Then his gaze left her and looked past her shoulder. “Oh, Lurline. Such wonders. To be even spared crumbs is more than we deserve. It is humanity’s only hope. If we resist, we die. If we submit, we live.”

  “You’re talking about slavery. Slavery to whom?”

  Weber shook his head and winced at the pain it brought him. “No. Service given willingly isn’t slavery, and even if it was, better living slaves than dead heretics. No. No, better to be servants than slaves.”

  “Heretics? What are you talking about?”

  Weber laughed a little, and said, “You’re right to question that. Heresy means denying a faith. No need for faith when you have hard, scientific proof.”

  “Of what?”

  He looked at her in that curious way once more, but now she saw he considered her a foo
l. “Why, of gods, of course.”

  Something was going on outside. She could hear raised voices and then the sound of an engine rev and speed away. Giehl searched Weber’s pockets and found his pistol. “We make our own destiny, Weber.”

  Again that look, that pitying look. “No, Lurline. We have never made our own destinies. Do you even know what Seidr is?”

  “The name of this project.”

  “The name of?” He laughed hoarsely again. “It is the old magic, Lurline. The magic of fate. We may pluck at a few of the threads of the tapestry, but we are not the weavers.”

  Giehl blanched at the mention of magic. “I believe in science.”

  A quiet laugh. “There’s a difference?”

  Giehl had had enough. “You’re insane.” For the first time in her life, she realized that she actually meant those words.

  “To do other than I have done,” he murmured, “that would be insane.”

  Giehl looked into his face—serene, calm, self-assured—and didn’t know whether to fear him for his insanity, or envy him. She said, “You shouldn’t have killed Nick,” placed the gun barrel on his half-closed left eye, and shot him through it.

  Then she went outside.

  Chapter 34

  BAMF WITH A BOOMSTICK

  Lovecraft was adamant. “We have to help them. They’re on our side. They’re friends, right? We help friends.”

  Carter was trying to be reasonable, but Lovecraft’s single-mindedness was almost maniacal in its intensity and she was worrying him badly. “Emily, the cavalry’s supposed to ride to our rescue. If a squad of heavily armed professional soldiers can’t handle the fish men, what are we supposed to do?”

  She looked up from the field of muzzle flares and violet fire and glared at him. “I just said what we do, Dan. We help them.”

  She got to her feet, staggered momentarily as if on the deck of a pitching ship, and steadied herself. “We help them,” she said to herself, and walked to the snowmobile.

  “Wait, wait, wait.” Conscious that they were both out of cover and with half an eye on the entrances to the dome and the generator shack, he went after her. “You can’t seriously intend to go down there?”

  “Fuckin’ A,” she said, sweeping the snow from the seat and straddling it. She unshouldered her shotgun and reversed the strap so the gun hung the right way up under her arm.

  “Emily! C’mon, don’t be crazy! You ride down there, you’re dead. You know that?”

  “Maybe.” She started the engine. “We’ll see.”

  She roared off in a flurry of white, almost clipping Decker’s partially snow-covered body.

  Carter watched her crest the drop onto the road and vanish from view with mixed emotions, none of them positive. He looked quickly to the dome and the generator shack in case any of the Thule bastards had come out to see what the fuss was about, but the shack’s door remained closed, and the dome’s door still ajar, but almost in its jamb.

  As he was looking at the door, he heard a sound from within, a muffled crack he was confident was a shot. He raised his Colt to cover the door as shadows shifted in the unnatural light within the entry antechamber. Then the door opened and Dr. Giehl was standing there, a pistol in her lowered hand.

  “Where’s Weber?” said Carter, his gun aimed squarely at her chest.

  She seemed disappointed, but answered, “He’s dead. I shot him.”

  “Just now?”

  “Just now.”

  Carter took this in and lowered his gun. “Good. Can you get me into the generator shack?”

  She shook her head. “Weber’s orders were specific. They’re to hold the door until the generators are supplying electricity to the dome again. Even if I go in with you, they’ll shoot us both.”

  “Into the dome, then?”

  She glanced back. “That would be easier. Where’s your friend?”

  Carter didn’t want to say the first thing that came into his head, which was, “She’s probably dead by now.” Instead he said, “She’s gone to get reinforcements.”

  Giehl laughed without humor. “On this rock? Can you see Lo with a gun? Stay here, Daniel. They’ll get suspicious if I’m gone too long. I’ll find some way to get you in there.”

  * * *

  For the first few hairpin corners of the descent, Lovecraft was muttering, “This is a stupid fucking idea,” repeatedly to herself. By the time she turned the antepenultimate bend, she had put it to a little tune and was singing it in her mind. Anything to distract herself from what she was about to do.

  As the second meander of road above the approach opened out before her, so did her sight once more, a wave of perception that rode out before her and told her everything she would ever need to know and far too much more about the upcoming encounter. There were two Deep Ones, Fomorians, fish men, bad guys on the road. One was dead, its head mulch, but the other was holed in the torso. She could detect its pain as a grumbling irritation more than a life-threatening wound, and if she hadn’t been wary of their durability after reading a piece of marginalia in her copy of the Necronomicon, she surely was now.

  She wondered when she’d started feeling so possessive of the Necronomicon that she considered it her property, but then the Fomorian was climbing to its feet and looked over to see her coming.

  She hit it heavily in the side and sent it ricocheting off one of the roadside boulders and thence over the cliff edge and a steep drop down eighty feet of rock face. She had a sense of its irritation growing that felt like an ear at high altitude waiting to pop, and then the feeling blinked out and she knew it was dead. She figured that was probably her one easy kill of the night, and hunkered down behind the windshield to prepare for whatever came next.

  The next bend came and with it, blue fire. A dark figure stood in the road a hundred yards away, and a fountain of angry fire hissed and crackled from its hand. But it was surprised, alerted by the falling body of its comrade and assuming the threat came from elsewhere. It also wasn’t ready for a powerful full-beam halogen headlight blazing into its eyes, and so its aim was poor to start with, and over the few seconds the weapon vomited its burning torrent of blue, it only deteriorated.

  The flame slid into the night and darkness. The shooter stumbled amidst the road edge boulders, its arm over its eyes. She would have loved to run this one down too—the meaty “thud” of amphibious bastard bouncing off the Ski-Doo had been the sort of thing that, if she ever had more evenings past that night, would surely keep her warm on cold ones. Trying to ram it while it was shielded by the boulders was too risky, though, so Lovecraft improvised. She drew up in front of the gap between the boulders and looked at the Fomorian, and it looked back at her. She could see now the weapon it had tried to kill her with gripped in its hand, a twisted, curved thing made from silver wires that seemed to have grown into an organic shape. Small blue flares of lights swarmed over the wires, slowly forming a pattern that, to Lovecraft’s cold pleasure, she understood. He’d shot his bolt and now the weapon was—recharging was somehow the wrong word—recovering. She didn’t read fear, or even an analog of fear from the creature, only a sense of fatalism. That seemed only right and proper to her.

  “Morning, fuck face,” she said, and shot it at point-blank range.

  A fountain of viscera—or as Lovecraft named it in the heat of the moment, eviscera—rained off the road edge and onto the approach road and its verge below, momentarily followed by the dying Fomorian. Out on the relatively flat area on the other side of the road, a circle of the creatures was closing in on an area where the rock was rucked and furrowed. From it, steam and smoke rose. For a moment, that was the only movement she saw, and she feared she was too late. Then she saw a flicker in a gully, and a burst of fire cut down one of the encircling creatures. The Fomorians responded immediately, hosing down the area, but the shooter had already slid back into cover. She counted twelve of them, and an idea that others who had been approaching were returning to sea as they wouldn’t be requ
ired. That, she hoped, showed overconfidence on their part. None of them were showing any interest at all on the light-and-guts show she’d been participating in on the mountainside. Okay.

  She looked down at the strange alien weapon lying on the snow where the Fomorian had dropped it when it and its internal organs had parted company. There was no obvious trigger or safety or any sort of mechanical interface on it at all. She leaned down and lifted it. It felt awkward in her hand, more awkward than its shape suggested. She drew off her glove and gripped it again. Simply touching it with her bare skin was like handling an entirely different object. Now it felt lighter, and fitted her hand easily. It wasn’t so much that it was changing in itself, as changing the spatial relationships between her skin and the silver mesh. She could understand that. She had an art project cluttering up her study in Arkham that demonstrated several similar principles if one knew how to look at it.

  Blue motes fluttered under her fingers, and she knew the device was ready again. “Okay,” she murmured to herself as she took in where the Fomorians stood. “I got my Mossberg, my Webley, and my ray gun. Let’s see how far they get me in fucking up some frogboys.”

  * * *

  As she turned onto the flat road, the snow glowed violet again with another salvo. More steam, more molten rock, but no closer to killing their tormentor in the gully. They seemed baffled more than cautious, and did little to avoid being shot at unless a half-squatting posture to reduce their profiles can be considered taking cover. The last couple of bursts from their prey had scored no significant damage, but they had greeted each with a universal return of fire, and then half-squatted while their weapons recovered. They would have won the battle a lot earlier if they would advance while firing, but this was apparently not doctrine for them. The man with the gun had perhaps realized this, and waited until they straightened up again and took a step closer before firing and forcing the cycle to repeat. It was a desperate tactic, and the endgame could only be the circle closed tightly enough that the gully no longer provided sufficient cover, or that he ran out of ammunition.