After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft)

by Jonathan L. Howard

  At least, those were the only resolutions discernible by the man and the monsters. In the larger context of entities from outside that closing circle, a third possibility was that it would give Lovecraft time to get her skimobile down the mountain, and out among the Fomorians.

  She appeared amidst them like a cat among pigeons from hell. The first inkling they had that all was not well was when the spine of one, the skin and flesh above it, the cartilage-like bone around it, and some of the organs beneath it became a fall of burning ashes, pluming from its back like soot from an untended chimney. It made a piercing, ululating shriek, and fell forward.

  Lovecraft was not entirely sure what she had done to trigger the device, but it had been as instinctive as squeezing a trigger, she knew that much. She also knew well enough not to expend the weapon’s full charge in one shot, which meant she was aiming before firing as opposed to firing before aiming. She could only guess the Fomorians did it their way because it was tough setting up a firing range on the seabed. She’d turned the headlight off on her approach, but now she toggled it back on and the creature shied from its brilliance at least as much as from the armed and angry woman behind it. She fired again and again, and although the curling bolts of fire went wild thanks both to her unfamiliarity with shooting a weapon from a moving platform as much as the erratic terrain, they did serve to finally represent something the Deep Ones feared.

  Corporal Barnaby looked up from charging his rifle to find a Valkyrie on a snowmobile come to a halt at the edge of the large circle around the gully where not only had all the snow been vaporized, but the rock itself was marred and molten.

  “Where are the others?” shouted Lovecraft, bringing up her shotgun to bear and engaging the Fomorians ahead of her.

  Sudden hope is a wonderful thing. Barnaby scrambled up out of the gully and across the dark powder that used to be his commanding officer. “They’re dead, ma’am! They’re all fucking dead!” His rifle was carried at the ready, and he head-shot a blade-wielding Fomorian as it ran at the rear of the snowmobile.

  The Mossberg had run dry. She let it drop on its sling and drew the weird-ass ray gun from where she’d jammed it between the gas tank and the seat. It didn’t look well, some of the filaments at the emitter end had become bent, and, she felt irrationally, wounded. The motes of blue light ran through the wires sometimes like cockroaches and sometimes like anxious blood, and she felt ruination within it.

  “Well, this isn’t good,” she said as Barnaby climbed onto the snowmobile’s pillion.

  “Go! Go! Go!” he shouted right behind her.

  “Yeah, I’m right here,” she snapped at him, tossing the strange artifact over her head, and brought the snowmobile to bear on the road again.

  “What was that?” said Barnaby as the weapon glittered over his head, the blueness of it beginning to tend toward white.

  “Fire in the hole,” said Lovecraft, and opened the throttle. Behind her, she felt Barnaby half-turn to look and maybe to fire. “Don’t look back!” she shouted. She felt him look forward again. Perhaps he hadn’t heard exactly what she had said and was going to ask her to repeat it. It didn’t matter. All that was important was that he wasn’t looking at the device when it …

  Exploded.

  The Fomorians understood their equipment well enough, although Lovecraft had real doubts they had made any of it themselves. They knew what the frantic vibration of the motes and the shift in color meant. They ran, but they were on land; gravity was cruel to them and their swiftest sprint was like the shamble of a drunk with his pants around his ankles.

  The device failed in light and in heat and in something else that chewed away the bonds in molecules, the orbits of electrons, the affinity of quark to quark. A white wave of annihilation traveled out and obliterated each stumbling Fomorian where it stood, consuming it and, on finding another artifact, condemning it to a similar effect. Brilliant white spheres blossomed like fruiting bodies of fungus seen in time lapse. And then they flashed into nothing, and the battlefield was bare, but for perhaps a dozen large hemispheres melted from the rock, each about ten meters across, each smoothly walled. In the whole chain of destruction, the only sound was that of the snowmobile.

  As the light flicked off in an instant, Lovecraft brought the vehicle around and they looked back into the darkness.

  “Holy shit,” said Corporal Barnaby. “That was one of their guns cooking off? Pretty fragile.”

  “Yeah. They are,” said Lovecraft, but it was a lie. She recalled how, as she took the artifact from where she’d put it, she’d deliberately wedged the emitter tip into the gap and bent it, just so, to such a degree and no further. And when she’d held it, she’d done something to it just like she knew how to trigger it. Then and only then the motes had grown distressed and the energies had started to build. She didn’t know quite what she’d done, or how she had known to do it.

  She shook the feeling that she was no longer quite human away. She’d just read a book, that’s all. Just reading a book doesn’t make anyone into a monster, although the jury was still out on Dan Brown’s.

  “You still got any ammo left for that thing?” she said, nodding at Barnaby’s assault rifle as she pulled cartridges from her bandoleer and loaded them into the Mossberg, consciously feeling like a real badass while she did so. It was a nice feeling, but then again she’d just saved a guy and she wasn’t dead, so she felt she deserved some ego reinforcement.

  “Most of a box in it, and another two in reserve, ma’am. How’s the head wound?”

  “Healing well, thanks. Now we got to go and wave guns at some Thule scumbags. You up for that?”

  Barnaby looked at the patch of land where five of his mates had died. “I am, ma’am. I am very much in the mood to fuck up the people who are responsible for this.”

  Lovecraft nodded and drove back toward the road.

  Chapter 35

  BROTHER AND SISTER

  Carter’s options, which had not started as a broad panoply, were further hobbled by the precipitous departure of Lovecraft. Rushing the generator shack by himself was a losing proposition, so he was reduced to waiting to see if Giehl was able to get him into the dome.

  The sound of a shotgun carried up the mountainside, and he looked down. The snow was a fraction of what it had been earlier, but over distance, layer upon layer, it still made visibility poor. He could see the beam of the snowmobile’s headlight far below, almost at the end of the mountain road, but as they reached the last corner before descending onto the approach road, he lost them and the night grew darker, but for a fitful blue iridescence that throbbed beyond the snow like a dull headache.

  He gave up—the Battle of Gettysburg could be being fought down there but he’d hardly know it—and was just beginning to turn when the night became white. He could see his shadow, hard-edged, utterly black, and long, drawn across the mountain spire behind the dome and onto the distant clouds. For a moment, it seemed the snow vanished from the very air, and he braced himself for the inevitable blast that must follow.

  It did not come, the light only seeming to change direction in random jerks across a small arc, and then flicked into nothing, leaving Carter with his night vision utterly gone. He closed his eyes and reopened them slowly, trying to recover it. Great, there was the ground in front of him. Not much, but he would take what he could get. He carefully found the cliff edge and looked down again. It seemed much darker now, but he thought maybe he saw a light veiled by the snow, a solitary headlight. Either Lovecraft wasn’t dead, or there was a Fomorian on a snowmobile coming; he concluded the former was the more likely scenario of those. He went back to his chosen Kübelwagen and settled in to warm up while he waited on Lovecraft and Giehl.

  * * *

  The lights came back on in the dome. One of the assistants started to cheer, but—seeing he was alone in this—allowed his voice to fade as if he were doing so ironically.

  “Finally,” said Huber. “Dr. Weber managed it. It’s a
shame we can’t wait for him to get back.”

  “We should,” said Giehl. “It is only right he should be here at the end.”

  Huber shook her head. “It sounds as if the Americans won’t let him get back to the dome entrance alive.” As far as she was concerned, Weber’s plan had worked brilliantly; he and the others had triumphantly taken the generator shack in a hail of bullets, and he was leading efforts to restore power, and not, for example, dead and hastily concealed behind a packing crate in the antechamber with a tarpaulin thrown over him. Giehl had emphasized how willing the Americans were to fire, and how difficult it would be to reach the shack. This had seemed wise when she said it in order to discourage anyone else from going out there, but now it denied her an opportunity to play for more time.

  Huber signaled to one of the others. “Check the power leads and stand by to trigger.”

  Lurline Giehl found she was standing by the detector, the lie in a box that had dragged her from Germany first to Arkham and now to an American island most Americans couldn’t find on a map. It seemed fitting, somehow.

  “Power is nominal, Doctor,” called back the assistant. “Capacitors now charging.”

  Giehl ran her hands along the upper edge of the detector and down the upper sides, and then gripped it as if she were leaning on a lectern. “Before you activate that, I have a few words I would like to say.”

  The others looked at her with astonishment. “A speech, Doctor?” said Huber. “I’m not sure this is the time.”

  Giehl looked sideways across the dome at Kurt. He was sitting behind one of the desks, barely aware of what was unfolding, a spent force. As she watched, he laid his head upon the desktop as if falling asleep. He would be no use to her, but neither would he prove an impediment. This was good. She was in control here. She returned her attention to Gabrielle Huber.

  “Not a speech so much as a declaration, and this is the ideal time.” She looked at them and saw she would have their attention for a few seconds. That was all she needed.

  “My whole life, I have been loyal. From the Hitlerjugend when I was old enough—the day I first wore my Jungmädel uniform was one of the proudest of my life—through my studies and my academic career, every waking moment has been dedicated to the Party, the state, and the Fatherland.” She unconsciously touched her left bicep where once an insignia had been worn upon a uniform blouse. “Blood and Honor.” She lowered her hand, and allowed it to slip into the pocket of her jacket. “I thought I understood what that meant, but—until today—I was wrong. Blood. Human blood. Worrying about a scruple of melanin when that blood is threatened is foolish. What a luxury it is to despise the Semite when our true enemies wouldn’t know an Aryan from a chimpanzee.”

  Huber’s expression was curiosity mixed with an indeterminate but growing rage. “What are you saying, Dr. Giehl?” she demanded with an awful propriety.

  “I am saying that the most barbarous black and the vilest Jew are brother and sister to me in the face of what you plan. I stand with them, shoulder to shoulder. I stand with them.”

  “Then you’ll be exterminated with them.”

  An electronic tone sounded. “Capacitors fully charged,” called the assistant.

  Huber glanced at the detector and Giehl was sure that she now knew it was a threat. Huber shouted, “Activate it!”

  Giehl drew her pistol and shot the assistant where he stood. The others scattered, crying out in surprise and sudden fear. Huber’s rage wouldn’t let her. She stood her ground, drew her own sidearm, and fired before Giehl could react.

  Being shot hurt her more than she had thought being shot might. She wasn’t entirely sure where she’d been hit, but there was pain down her left side that made breathing hurt, like a spidery cramp. She could see Huber coming toward her, and she heard another shot. The pain suddenly became distant, the dome darkened with it. She heard a clatter and realized she had dropped her gun. She hadn’t even felt it leave her grasp.

  Giehl knew she was dying. One last thing. She put her weight on the detector, and it rolled obediently on its wheels to come to rest by the ZPE device. Huber was trying to reach the device’s activation board, but the fallen assistant was in the way and she had to step on him. Lurline Giehl watched her stumbling like an idiot on the injured man’s body, slipping in his blood, and she laughed. She was still laughing when she pressed the detector’s power switch.

  Chapter 36

  THE TROUBLE WITH EMILY

  Lovecraft arrived with Barnaby and drove around the back of the Kübelwagens to give them a little cover. Carter looked at Barnaby with barely concealed curiosity, a look the corporal caught. “I’m it, mate. The fucking Foams ambushed us.”

  Carter had never been in the military, but a police force is, by nature, paramilitary, and he could understand a little of what the corporal had been through. He also knew he didn’t need to go through it again right then. Instead he said, “Shit, man,” and Barnaby nodded and they understood one another.

  “What’s happening in Thunderdome?” asked Lovecraft, making a reference that only made sense in a different iteration of the world.

  “The shack’s too dangerous, near as damn unassailable with what we’ve got. Even with the corp, we’d probably get shot to fuck. Lurline’s going to try and get us into the dome, though. Still a firefight, but at least we’ll have surp—”

  The explosion blew out both the antechamber’s inner door and the main door. All three of them threw themselves to the snow as a first reaction and lay there, hands over heads, for several seconds until it became clear there wasn’t going to be a secondary blast.

  Lovecraft raised her head and found Carter crawling forward on his belly to get a clear look at the dome. “Dan? I guess she … I’m sorry, Dan.”

  He looked at her, emotions shifting across his face. “She meant to do this. She wanted me to stay outside. The whole time, she meant to do this.”

  Barnaby was looking from one of them to the other. “Who’s this we’re talking about?”

  “Lurline Giehl,” said Lovecraft, “one of the Reich scientists.”

  “Giehl. I know that name from the briefing. Abwehr. No known Thule connections.”

  “Yeah. A good Nazi.”

  The main door to the dome lay down the slope of the stoop, its hinges shattered and even the concrete where it had been anchored torn out. Rusted steel showed at the fractures, the concrete rotted around it.

  “I’d never noticed that before,” said Carter, climbing to his feet. “The door opens inward. If it was supposed to protect against missiles, wouldn’t it open outward?”

  “Shit!” Barnaby checked his watch. “Sir, do you still have the radio Lieutenant Green gave you?”

  “Sure.” Carter fetched it from the car he’d been using. “Need it to get picked up?”

  “Yeah,” said Barnaby, “that and stopping us all from getting blown to shit if the Alacrity hasn’t already launched missiles.”

  He opened a frequency and hailed his submarine. Lovecraft looked at Carter. “Shouldn’t we be, like, getting out of here? Just to be safe?”

  Barnaby shook his head. “They must have seen the explosion and not launched. I can’t raise the CIS, but it’s past the time Alacrity was scheduled to fire and we’re not dead. Captain must have thought better of it, thank fuck.”

  A disturbance near the dome made them bring their weapons to bear. The door to the generator shack opened and three figures emerged. They seemed stunned, and Carter wondered if some of the blast had caused an overpressure wave to travel down the cable conduit between the dome and the shack. Stunned or not, he was past feeling compassion for the Thule agents.

  “Get your hands up!” he shouted at them, advancing with his gun aiming at the nearest and more than happy to fire if they gave him any trouble.

  Then he looked at the dome and came to a sudden halt.

  He heard Lovecraft breathe, “The fuck you say…” behind him.

  The dome was melting.
<
br />   The concrete was cracking and falling inward like melting polystyrene. It had no right to look organic, but there was a strange sense of an egg hatching, of something struggling to emerge. A roaring glow was growing in the gloom of the antechamber and its shattered doors.

  “The ZPE bomb,” she said, and Carter knew they were going to die right there and right then. The dynamite hadn’t destroyed the device; it had triggered it.

  For the last time, he felt that hollowing sense of dislocation that Lovecraft called dreaming and as it gripped him, he thought, And a lot of fucking good it’s going to do me.

  The Germans by the generator shack had turned to see what was happening, and as realization took them, one swore, one screamed, and one said nothing because what was there to say? Destruction hatched from the dome, and the all-consuming blast swept out to burn them to gas. The light was so intense, the whole world turned to white, and stayed white as …

  Carter expected death by evaporation to be less drawn out than this. Or perhaps it had been instantaneous, he was dead, and there was an afterlife after all. Given what he knew about the reality behind reality, it wasn’t going to be an afterlife he would enjoy.

  “What have you done?”

  The voice was not angelic or diabolical, just curious and very slightly pissed. Carter turned and looked around.

  The world was turned to white, pure cheap eighties-promo-video white, but that was a simplification. There were stark black lines and, as he started to see them as lines of perspective, he realized they were still at the summit of Mount Terrible, and all the color in the world had been leached away. Everything was either stark white or stark black, there was nothing else. He could see the unmoving sea, the land of Attu, even a few flakes of snow, rimed in black outlines like a ray-traced animation.