Dead Easy

by Mark William Simmons

A god no other god, godling, or avatar, was willing to face.

  While I was starving to death in the process.

  Samm donated a couple of pints of her blood. She offered to let me take it direct from the vein but I told her it was too risky at this stage of The Hunger. I don't know, maybe it was. Mostly it was an intimacy thing and someday she'd thank me.

  Dakkar also donated blood. Since Liban's had been so potent it was hoped that maybe another preternatural being's hemoglobin would pack an extra wallop. Unfortunately, the key words had come from Dakkar's lips the night before: unclean spirit. Yuck!

  The kappas tasted better than the one brief sip I'd had off that Deep One I'd nipped in hand to mouth combat. But not very much better. Maybe it was that diet of cucumbers that Dakkar was feeding them out of the ship's stores.

  Irena proved a heady brew, however. Her pint-and-a-half made me sit up and take notice. She was certainly willing but even less able than any of the others. A little undersized to produce the quantities with the turnaround I really needed but, then, one takes what one can get. Or at least one does up to the point of a whispered invitation to exchange hickies back in the cabin after lights out.

  And still I could not see how my needy nanos were going to be any help in taking down the thing that had all the other major players taking a big step back.

  If nothing else, I would do the one thing I could do and that was show up.

  My boat was gone, my home was gone, my family out of the way. Theresa, if she was carrying the other fetus, had either found a way to survive or she hadn't. Nothing I could do about that now.

  Nothing except do my damnest to keep their world from turning into an abattoir.

  Funny thing about depression. At a certain point you decide you can only do what you can do. After that? It's a shrug and a que, sera sera.

  It felt almost like a path to recovery.

  Mardi gras was in full swing when we returned to New Orleans. The streets and parks were filled with hundreds of drunken revelers swaying and stumbling about. At least that's what it looked like as we glided up to Jackson Square, past the defunct riverbed and Woldenberg Park, and across the remains of the Washington Artillery Park.

  Then you realized that everyone was under a hundred feet of water and undead. The tides and currents moved the water between the buildings and up the streets to give the drowned dead that extra degree of awkwardness in their shambling gaits.

  Several hundred kappas swam about overhead like deranged seraphim.

  The St. Louis Cathedral looked like it had been hit with a bomb, yet the buildings on either side looked relatively untouched. It was the work of cunning hands not tidal forces or random acts of nature.

  Scattered piles of bones evidenced work begun then reversed. Dakkar's troops had been busy in our absence.

  "You've amassed quite an army," I told him as we watched dozens of Deep Ones probe the undead's flanks and then withdraw from the slow-moving bloodsuckers. The kappas, however, were much more nimble, darting down and driving their evil counterparts back into the reach of their less mobile allies. "How do you direct them from a distance?"

  "It is part of the third secret of Vishnu," he said. "I would not share such knowledge even if I could."

  "I must say, this seems to be going better than I expected."

  He furrowed his great orange and black-striped brow. "It should not be enough. I have spent the past four years circumnavigating the North American continent, passing underneath Central America via the Nicaraguan conduit. What I have gathered so far may be remarkable in many ways but is yet no match for what we currently face! Though I have hunted these creatures in ever increasing numbers during that time, it is another face that Lord Vishnu shows me in my dreams. Another who is to save us, he whispers in my ear."

  "And that's me?" I asked.

  "I can never quite make out the face in my dreams," he answered. "But the signs and portents eventually led me to you. I followed the trail to you, enemy of my enemy."

  "I live a long way from the sea," I said. "Couldn't have been easy running a sub this size all the way up the Mississippi, Red, and Ouachita Rivers. Too bad the gods aren't a little more forthcoming considering how invested they all are in this."

  The tiger-headed rakshasa shrugged. "It is for men to work out their parts in the grand scheme, as well. Otherwise we are but puppets and playthings for the older souls. And it was not so difficult as you may think. Traversing land and waterways to stalk you in the Cuttlefish took only hours. It was chasing after that one," he nodded his head toward Suki who was cleaning a paw by the pipe organ, "that was the difficulty. Time spent wondering why she would not remain under my control. Picking up her trail. Following her to you. And waiting, watching, trying to discern if you were a part of the dharma I must incorporate into my task."

  "So when did you decide that I was the guy?"

  He shook his head. "Decisions are processes. This one is taking awhile."

  A quick reconnoiter of the city convinced us that the demolished St. Louis Cathedral was the intended site for Cthulhu's throne and no alternate construction was immediately evident elsewhere.

  The disparity of forces—our hundreds to their dozens—was too good to be true, despite the losses we'd inflicted on these amphibious demons in recent days. I remembered the vast trail of webbed footprints marking the seafloor and felt a profound disquiet.

  We headed back out with Dakkar, himself, up in the little wheelhouse, steering the Nautilus out across the flattened holocaust of Algiers' Mardi Gras World on the other side of the Mississippi riverbed.

  If our theory was correct, and the Deep Ones were bringing their god to the city, and more specifically to Jackson Square, then we had a good chance of intercepting them close to ground zero. Catching them farther out was a more difficult proposition: the bit of trail we had picked up about a day's cruise on "full steam" did not line up on a straight path back to the city (we had followed that course). Nor did it seem to follow predictable routes back to either of the two originating coordinates on the charts. Obviously such variables as currents, obstacles, and terrain were at play, perhaps other factors, as well. It was a big ocean even twenty miles out, so how were we going to find a needle in a haystack?

  Dakkar tried doubling our odds by launching the Cuttlefish with Irena on board. A kappa rode along since our budding marine biologist was still getting her learner's permit but it was evident that someone had been giving her private lessons while I was off brooding on other parts of the sub.

  I felt a mild flash of annoyance. End of the world time and the tiger and the panther are spending a little too much mutual interest time together? Annoyance gave way to guilt. What was wrong with that? Millions of people die but the world goes on. For a little while longer, anyway. He lost his wife and kids . . .

  You lost yours . . .

  Oho! So, I'm jealous? Of Dakkar? Or Irena? I could have the illusion of human consolation if I wanted to give in and pretend. Better to keep my head in the game. No illusions . . .

  No disappointments . . .

  Shut up. I still haven't figured out what to do about Mr. Sleepy God when we find him.

  Relax. It will all be over, soon. So, you might as well enjoy yourself in the meantime . . .

  A hand came up and caressed my shoulder. "Chris?"

  I jumped. "Don't do that!" I yelled at Samm.

  "Sorry," she said, "I didn't mean to startle you. I just had an idea . . ."

  "I'll bet you did."

  She looked at me strangely. "I was thinking. If these things are on foot, they'd want to follow the path of least resistance."

  "Yeah?"

  "Well, if I was walking up to the Big Easy from down South—no traffic, mind you—I'd stick to the roads."

  Less than ten seconds from her lips to my ears. But another thirty seconds from my ears to the functioning part of my brain. I took off running for the wheelhouse. Up a level and down to the front of the submarine, I had to climb a
nother ladder and pop a hatch to join Dakkar in the elevator-sized steering control room.

  "It is customary to request permission to enter the bridge," he remonstrated as I squeezed up into the small windowed room to join him. "In another life I would have dealt with you harshly for such an infraction." He seemed to be speaking more to himself than to me and the absentmindedness of his tone was more unnerving than if he had administered an angry tongue-lashing.

  "Here," I said, pointing to a map of greater New Orleans, next to the charts on his map stand. "Here . . . this is Gretna, Belle Chasse, on down to Port Sulpher . . . it's the Great River Road of Plaquemines Parish. Eighty miles and mostly four lanes, it stretches from what used to be the West Bank of the metropolitan area to the southernmost tip of Louisiana's Mississippi Delta. Tell me that isn't going to be their path of least resistance."

  He rubbed his white furred chin. "There will be debris."

  "Hell, there'll be debris out to sea, there'll be debris anywhere there once was dry land. But if they're toting something by foot, a firm level surface will make a big difference."

  He handed me a transceiver. "Use this and stand your post at the view port. I will contact Irena."

  The debris field was surprising light and sparse. This far out from the mainland the stronger Gulf currents had cleaned up the majority of the destruction, moving it on down to the dark blue mysteries waiting farther out. The area down this way was eighty percent water before the final blow. The communities had been rural, agrarian, mostly poor. When the big storms came, folks tended to hunker down rather than evacuate: they were either too stubborn, too old, or too far from any other refuge so, practically no vehicles out on the roads.

  We came upon the Dread God Cthulhu and his funerary procession about an hour out.

  It was like some horrific Reichsparteitag, a Nuremburg Triumph of the Will a hundred-and twenty feet below the surface of the ocean! Nearly a thousand Deep One were arrayed like ants, using hundreds of tethers and lines to pull a great obsidian sledge across the seabed. The scale was such I couldn't begin to estimate the size of the coffin-like structure. Just a vague sense that once Octogod stood up, he was going to think he was in the shallow end of the pool!

  There was another way to measure. As we began our second pass I could count the seconds using the length of the Nautilus and the speed of our travel to calculate how long it took to pass from one end of the sarcophagus to the other.

  And then I forgot all about numbers and math and calculations.

  We were close enough to pick up a lot more detail now.

  In my dreams the Deep Ones had fashioned a great pallet to bear the sarcophagus upon. But now I could see there was no such structure: the great obsidian box hovered a good ten meters above the ocean floor. Anti-gravity? I shook my head: neutral buoyancy. Instead of a massive mule-team, our undersea escort was more like a crew working the big balloons at the Macy's Day Parade.

  And now another detail caught my eye: a flicker of lights along the top of the sarcophagus. I picked up the wireless microphone that Dakkar had given me so that we could communicate while he was in the wheelhouse. More Vishnu magic? I turned it over and saw the RadioShack nameplate on the back. "Captain," I asked, depressing the talk button, "Can you bring us about and take us directly over the object so I can get a better look from above? Just not too high . . ."

  But not too low, either, Mr. Cséjthe," was his response. "We are not the only ones doing the observing."

  I looked again as we came about and ascended for a top down view. A group of fish men were headed toward us with pike-like objects in hand.

  I pressed the button again. "Captain? We're about to have visitors."

  "Noted, Mr. Cséjthe. Please inform me when the majority have made contact or are in close proximity."

  We came up over the giant box and I pressed my hands against the cold thick glass as I leaned forward and stared down at an unholy spectacle.

  A childhood memory in the toy aisle of the local Wal-Mart flashed through my head: a boxed action figure of the alien hunter from the movie Predator behind the cellophane window, crisscrossed with more cardboard packaging for that secured, peek-a-boo effect.

  And now, below me, Dread, Dead Cthulhu stared back up at me through wide, unblinking eyes, visible through a clear view port of his own, built into the top of his coffin! Unlike the colorful cardboard packaging for the toys of my childhood, this container was a uniform flat black, its only color coming from a series of tinted lights that marked what might have been an instrumentation and locking mechanism.

  I felt a pounding begin inside my head.

  I looked back up to the transparent portion of the top: its eyes were open! They were staring at me as if it knew, IT KNEW, who I was and why I was here! A crushing black curtain of panic fell over me. This thing was—was—what? It was too much! Mercifully, my mind was shutting down from an overload of terror. It was—it was—

  The Cuttlefish glided across my line of sight, momentarily blocking my view. By the time it had moved on, so had we and those horrid eyes, those staring inhuman ancient eyes were no longer visible from our position above the sarcophagus.

  The transceiver crackled in my hand. "Did you get a look at the markings on the cartouche plates?" Irena's voice asked through a noticeable flange effect. "I'm no language expert but we're not just talking ancient, here, but alien, as well."

  "Of course," Samm said softly, behind me. "When the stars are right, the Great Old Ones plunge from world to world . . ."

  I thought about that as a kaleidoscope of concepts wriggled through my head like a host of voracious maggots. A vortex of thought rotated and clicked into place like the tumblers in a vault. "Wait a minute," I panted, still fighting my way out of a miasma of darkness. "Are you telling me this thing is an extra-terrestrial?"

  "It comes from outside our universe—"

  "Enough with the metaphysical double-talk," I gritted. "All this time I've been buying into the shtick that we're chasing some kind of god, not some ancient astronaut from another dimension!" I shook off the nausea and stepped away from the view port. "That's it, isn't it?" There were images in my head. Thoughts. Pictures. A cacophony of visions that had no immediate context. And yet . . . "All those generations that came in contact with these things," I said. "They had no context but their own ancient myths and legends. Telepathy: nightmares! Aliens: monsters!" I turned back to the window. "How about we look at the flip side of the legends? "Death which cannot die? Suspended animation! Plunging from world to world when the stars are aligned? Plot a course to Starbase Eleven, Warp Factor 2, Mister Cthulhu; prepare to jump when vectors are complete! We even seem to have ripped off the carbonite ploy from Star Wars!"

  I shook my head. "It's a sad, old story. Superior intellect with trappings of advanced technology gets itself marooned among the savages. Sets its kind up as gods with the assistance of Clarke's third law."

  Samm was looking at me nervously. "Clarke's third law?"

  "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," I quoted. "So anything we try to do to destroy this thing is pretty much doomed because even after millions of years, he's got the edge in technology."

  Two of the Froggies swam up to the view port and raised their pikes to strike at it.

  I raised the transceiver and said, "Now, Captain!"

  Our finny foes twitched and jerked and then drifted slowly down to the bottom as Dakkar ran an electrical charge through the hull, killing or stunning anything within a few meters of the sub. More maneuverable, the Cuttlefish was steering clear of the other Deep Ones.

  "And now we will commence our first run of depth charges," Dakkar announced over the transceiver.

  "I thought you said we can't destroy this thing," Samm said as I closed the crash-doors on the view port and took a seat in the salon.

  "Unless Vishnu has given our good captain a fourth, terrible secret . . ." I mused, tilting my head back and closing my eyes. "His l
ittle torpedo upgrade was a nice add-on but, let's face it: it doesn't pack half the punch of an old, World War II torp and he has no targeting system. It's just a convenient retro-fix so he doesn't have to use the Nautilus as a battering ram in a world of steel ships. It's even too inaccurate for this job. He's dropping bags of timed explosives from the undercarriage like depth charges! Can you imagine that? We're using a submarine like a bomber! So, no. I don't think this is going to do anything but knock out a number of the honor guard. This isn't a bad thing, mind you. But it really is going to be up to me, now."

  I opened my eyes to see her hovering over me. Her dark face, once familiar and now so young and strange looked down with an expression of even greater bewilderment. "What can you do? And why aren't you scared any more?"

  "I'm going to go inside his mind," I told her. "That's why I'm the one. It's not the nanos or some special spiritual quality. I have this one gift, this one knack. That box has been on the bottom of the ocean for millions of years and its still working, it's still keeping its sleeping astronaut preserved, protected, safe. It's kept the ocean out but I can get in. I felt it just a few moments ago and you told me just a few days ago: they leak. They leak! Well, it's a two-way pipeline and I'm going in. He'll be used to fucking with other people's heads. I'll bet he's had no practice when it comes to someone fucking with his."

  "You really aren't afraid any more, are you?"

  "Sammy? Taking on gods is one thing. Outwitting an ivory-tower intellectual is another. Give me a few moments to prepare: I'm going in."

  The depth charges, as predicted, took out maybe a quarter of the Deep Ones, injured or scattered another third and pretty much left the field in disarray. It also bought us some time.

  Irena reported that there was an "area of effect" around the sarcophagus in proximity to some of the blasts, seeming to confirm my force fields theory.

  I only dimly heard. I was already fading from my surroundings, slipping farther away from my body.

  In terms of the technique, alone, this would not be like the other mind melds. Typically, bloodwalking involved a wound or injury providing the entry point by which I entered my target's mind. It might be anything—a cut finger—so long as blood provided the focal point for egress to the body's seat of higher consciousness: the brain. It wasn't mandatory, only simpler due to the unique nature of my own body chemistry. I had originally learned the technique of mentally accessing the target through a chakra point. This, however, required a lot of focus and concentration and why do it the hard way when there are simpler shortcuts?