Cthulhu Unbound 3

by Brian M. Sammons (ed. )

  “I saw it too, Lieutenant,” Peel said clutching his M4 assault rifle, re-checking that his favored handgun, the Gloch 9mm, remained secure in its holster.

  The Navy SEAL had no chance to respond. The top half of him turned inside out, spattering flesh and blood everywhere, including across Peel. There was no reason for his demise that made sense.

  The ground underfoot became unstable. Although gravity said otherwise, the ocean seemed to be on a forty-five degree angle to where it should be.

  Another SEAL fired at a target Peel could not see, only to have the bullets bend through space and time, and carve holes through his own chest. Another soldier walked into a wall without seeing that it was there, then fell into a dozen perfectly sliced slabs of meat. A third became stuck in a time loop, calling for help as the meat in his leg boiled, then healed and he yelled for help again, boiled, over and over.

  Everything was happening too fast, like watching a movie sped up.

  A massive wave crashed upon Peel, knocking the air out of him and smothering him with crushing forces. He was rapidly dragged through a channel of rock, or stone buildings, or shapes of things he could not describe. He lost his assault rifle, not that it seemed to matter when the structure of universe itself seemed to be falling apart around him.

  The icy water still crushed him. When he thought he was about to drown, when he was ready to give up and let the salty fluids into his lungs, the water vanished, and he was sprawled, battered and bruised, on a balcony.

  He looked up, unbelieving to what had just happened. Yet he remained within the singularity, where surreal was commonplace. Navy SEALs fell past him, not from above but from left to right and other random directions, crushed like pancakes as they hit the cold stone walls of tall towers. Some were crushed as they fell. Others landed unharmed, only to flatten tens of seconds later.

  Between the cyclopean towers, Peel was drawn to a shape coalescing from writhing shadows in the spray and mist. From some angles it looked like an octopus, from others a bat. Sometimes it resembled nothing at all or nothing that his human mind could describe.

  It was at least half a kilometer in height, and it moved like a living entity.

  Peel crawled, afraid to trust his legs or what his eyes saw. The gigantic shape moved through the water, creating enormous waves as it did. Something attached to it that might have been a fist punched the water. Seconds later huge metal shards the size of cars ripped through the air like missiles. Some passed straight through the buildings as if they did not exist. Others flattened like dropped dough, or became like liquid metal and flowed away. Then an F/A-18 Hornet pierced through the hull tumbled through the air over the top of him before it disintegrated into millions of tiny marble sized pieces and vanished. Somewhere, out where the world was still rational, another ship in the US fleet had been decimated.

  Peel covered his head with his arms. He was mad to have thought that he could have descended into R’lyeh and survive for more than a few minutes. Nothing made sense. Everything would kill him. He was only alive because of blind luck.

  He had no idea about anything, or where or when he was, because when he thought he saw a pre-World War Two yacht called the Alert floating in a surreal, calm patch of water, he thought he might be time traveling too.

  The gravity on the island suddenly shifted. What had seconds before been a floor was now a wall, and he was falling, his military fatigues dragging across the rock until he smashed onto the new floor.

  Peel groaned then alternated his wails of pain between whimpers and rages of frustration, because everywhere he was battered, bruised, and lacerated.

  Through swelling bloodshot eyes, he saw through an arched window another wave of tidal water gathering on the horizon, only it was black and flashing with thousands of tiny lights. Skyscraper sized, it would be upon him in minutes at the most.

  Hadn’t millions died around the world already? Was this the tidal wave that had killed so many? Cause without effect? Effect without cause? Nothing made sense.

  Peel unclipped his Gloch, held it tight in his bleeding hands so he wouldn’t loose it like he had the M4. This was R’lyeh. This was the heart of a naked singularity. This was Cthulhu Unbound. Nothing would ever make sense. Everything was only going to get worse, and then worse again, and again.

  He wanted death on his own terms.

  Trembling, bleeding, he pressed the weapon to his temple.

  He tired to pull the trigger, but couldn’t. He wanted to. He wanted to be brave, to save himself now before things became unbearable. And they would get much, much worse than this. He might not even die here. The horror he was experiencing now might last forever if he didn’t do something about it soon.

  Then he remembered the thousands of Jordan corpses he had been seeing for weeks leading up to this moment. Perhaps he was shifting in and out of those displacements right now without even noticing it, or perhaps these were events still to be. If that was his future, he still had time, and hope, to make a difference.

  Peel struggled to stand, despite the pain that wracked every major muscle in his body. Something thick and wet flowed in his eye, so he touched his forehead to brush it away, realizing that it was blood from a deep cut. Probably one of many, immaterial concerns right now.

  He growled in frustration, wiped away the blood. Once again the world began to shift. Walls, ceilings and pillars folded, rolled and changed shape. He had to jump, roll, and sidestep continuously not to be crushed or fall a dozen meters into what moments before had been upwards.

  From his left a curtain of water passed through the area, chasing him. Peel tried to outrun it, but again he was too slow, smothered and drowning again. The water was so cold, like ice on his skin.

  He swam hard, where to he didn’t care because any direction was better than nothing. Each time he hit a wall that was all he hit. There were no exists. There was no escape.

  Make it quick, he begged.

  He started choking on the salty water. He was dying, finally. At least he only faced oblivion now.

  The water rushed away, and he was being lifted. A hand had him, dragged him onto a stone podium. Fingers were in his mouth, opening an airway and then Peel was choking, puking. He coughed up water, some seaweed, the salty tasty horrific and unbearable in his throat.

  “Saved your life again, Peel.”

  Peel rolled over. No longer did he have the energy to sit up. Jordan leaned over him. He wore a Russian military wetsuit. He had an AN-94 rifle gripped so tightly in his hands it was like Jordan and the weapon had become a single organism.

  Seeing Jordan’s bruises and cuts that matched his own, the water that drenched him as thoroughly as it had drenched them both this last month or more, Peel laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  Peel couldn’t answer him. At least something was going right. They were together again, as their time travels said they would.

  “Do you see anything?” Peel sputtered his words.

  “Like what? This place is insane.” Jordan looked to be in shock. Peel had never seen his friend so afraid.

  Peel finally found the strength to sit. “Like a portal, or a door? Better still, multiple doors.”

  Jordan looked over Peel’s shoulder. The surprised expression on the black ops assassin told Peel that he had found something of interest.

  Peel turned. There was indeed a portal, nothing more than a thin ropy tentacle shaped rock forming a hollow rectangle. It was easy to see through it, but the space inside oozed a wrongness Peel would never be able to explain.

  “Unbelievable.” Peel cackled again.

  “I’m going to leave you here Peel, if you don’t start acting like a sane person. I can’t keep saving your ass.”

  Peel laughed again. “No Jordan, or whatever your name really is, this time, I’m going to save you.”

  The world lurked, gravity and shape changing again. Peel was ready this time, and used the moment of confusion to tackle Jordan, roll with him as g
ravity shifted, and fling him inside the Infinite Replicator.

  * * *

  Jordan ran from a portal, found himself on a high stone rampant far above the ocean. Sunlight streamed through the tiniest gap in the churning clouds. A shadow passed over him.

  He looked up in time to see a green bulbous fist the size of a mountain crush him, as the tower he had appeared in collapsed into a mountain of rubble.

  * * *

  Jordan ran from a portal, stood in what should have been a road but was instead a mighty river waist deep. Corpses of Navy SEALs washed past, their blood mixing with the saltwater. Some of the corpses floated a meter or more above the water, suspended in thin air.

  Cylinders of flesh shot out of Jordan. He was alive long enough to see three holes appear, before his head opened as a tunnel made of skull, brain and blood.

  * * *

  Jordan ran from a portal, fell upon a mountain of bodies. There were hundreds, thousands, millions of Jordans riding a tidal wave.

  They were the tidal wave.

  Those that were not crushed screamed their battle cries. They fired their AN-94s. They threw their grenades. They were a wall of black water.

  Ahead was their target, huge, a mile or so in height. Its skin was a gangrenous green the texture of rotten fruit. When an eyelid opened, and the yellow infected eye with blood streams the size of rivers stared back at the million or more Jordans, each realized that he had not been looking at the totality of the thing, but only an eye. The rest of Cthulhu lurked elsewhere, deep in the ocean or folded within unseen dimensions.

  Before Jordan was crushed, before he fell a mile into the sea or upon the stone of the corpse city of R’lyeh, he emptied his clip of bullets into the eye, and then started throwing grenades.

  * * *

  Jordan ran from a portal, saw hundreds of himself in a line. “Join us,” said one Jordan. “Help us save Peel.”

  They were a conveyor belt of flesh, manhandling the unconscious body of Harrison Peel towards the ocean and the waiting dingy.

  “There is only one of him?”

  “He didn’t pass through the portal.”

  Jordan joined the line, took his place as he helped pass Peel to safety. Then their corner of the universe collapsed, as thousands of Jordans were sucked into a black hole, alive for the barest seconds.

  * * *

  Jordan ran from a portal, found himself in an army. Thousands of him fought to stand in the shifting gravity, braced against the rain and torrential walls of water falling from multitudes of directions. Everyone fired their weapons, threw grenades. They were all him, every single one of them. There were more Jordans than all the people who had ever lived. Their target was the Centaurus oilrig.

  It had beached upon a putrid field of washed stone, were creatures that should have been fish but weren’t, and corals that were infected with mouths, barbed tongues and vomiting orifices, dying now they were exposed to the air and the sky.

  Storage tanks, once filled to the brim with the white sticky fluid that Jordan had first seen in an orphanage in Baghdad, now flowed across the field and began to take shape. These shapes there were being mowed down by suppressing fire from the seemingly unlimited army replicated from one man.

  Jordan noticed the drill head. It had breached something indescribable, with the gangrenous green texture of rotten fruit.

  It was the skin of Cthulhu.

  Jordan screamed, ordered his army of clones to concentrate their fire. The breach had to be mended.

  * * *

  Jordan ran from a portal, and died, again, and again, and again.

  * * *

  Peel woke with a jolt, from dreams where he was being smothered, torn apart by wild animals, and crushed by the weight of stone monoliths falling upon him from gigantic mountains.

  He sat up straight, rocking the dingy he shared with eight other men. Every single one of them wore Jordan’s face.

  “What the hell happened?”

  One Jordan pointed to the horizon. R’lyeh was sinking, the highest peaks churning in the ocean as they dropped back into whatever dimension they had come from. Peel looked behind them. A US frigate rolled in the stilling waters, welcoming them.

  “It’s over,” said another Jordan. “We stopped it, whatever it was that was causing R’lyeh to rise.”

  “How?”

  Another Jordan shrugged. “You ever heard that expression, Peel, concerning an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters?”

  “Yes. Douglas Adams if I remember, about one monkey eventually coming up with a script for Hamlet?”

  “One of us worked out how to stop all this. One of us saved us all.”

  A Jordan interrupted. He looked mad. “But I don’t think that one of us who worked it out is ever coming back to tell the tale.”

  “No,” said another, an edge to his voice Peel didn’t like, “one Jordan is enough for this world.”

  All the Jordan’s fell silent. Each stared the others down. They all became twitchy.

  Peel became uneasy, as one Jordan rapidly drew his Makarov and shot another.

  Another did the same.

  Bullets exploded. Blood everywhere, corpses fell into the dingy and out into the frigid waters. Peel ducked, afraid for the bullet that would find him, but none did.

  When there were only two Jordans left, their handguns clicked while the muzzles rested on opposite foreheads. Their clips were spent.

  One raced to reload his weapon.

  “Wait,” shouted the other.

  The other Jordan was loaded and had his weapon on the other survivor’s forehead, but he had not yet pulled the trigger.

  “You and I are all that are left. I think I now know how we can work this out.”

  7. Tibet

  Peel lowered his binoculars, tightened his parka against the cold high-altitude wind. The sight of the USS George Washington was like no ship wreck he had ever seen, sprawled across a snow-capped mountain range five thousand meters above sea level.

  Peel mused that he should be used to sights like this, because this one made sense in a twisted kind of way. For a start it was harmless and stable, unlike his experiences in the heart of a naked singularity. The R’lyeh Singularity.

  “In time it will become a tourist attraction,” said Jordan, who stood next to Peel similarly layered in clothing against the cold. After their experiences in the frigid oceans of the South Pacific, both men had sworn never to be cold again, and yet here they were a fortnight later on the roof of the world. They were both still experiencing time and space shifts back into R’lyeh, transitions that probably would plague them for the rest of their lives, yet hopefully with lessening frequency. Because Jordan had been replicated infinitely, he was experiencing far more shifts. “You think Yanks and Aussies would pay money to see this?”

  Peel nodded. “I don’t think we can hide any of this from the world anymore.”

  “The carrier?”

  “Everything. I mean, horrors from beyond, Code-89 threats, ESBs. Ten million dead, hundreds of millions of refugees, a global economy on the brink of collapse, and—”

  “And all eyes firmly on the hole we left in the Pacific. No, you’re right my friend, the world is about to change forever.”

  A hundred meters ahead of them, down the hill and in a procession across the sparse plains of the Tibetan Plateau, thousand of monks with their liturgical chanting, drumming and trumpeting, were in prayer to dismiss malevolent spirits that had fallen from the sky with the aircraft carrier. Prayer flags to purify the air and pacify the gods were strung everywhere, like litter.

  “The locals don’t seem to like it,” jested Jordan.

  “The carrier should have burnt-up on re-entry.”

  “Yes, but can you explain anything that’s happen to us while we were in R’lyeh?”

  Peel said nothing. His body still ached everywhere. His muscles were stiff and his skin bruised. The last thing he needed was a three day trek into the wilderness to see a
ship he had spent two weeks onboard before it had become an high-altitude wreckage.

  “We only succeeded because we got lucky. We had no plan. We’re losing our edge.”

  It took Jordan a long moment to answer, because he obviously thought otherwise. “You think so?”

  “What are we doing here Jordan?”

  A helicopter sped overhead. Peel looked up just in time to see the Centaurus logo on its sides. It was on a direct path towards the George Washington.

  “Don’t tell me, Ben Henbest is on that helicopter.”

  Jordan nodded. “He’s about to get a special tour of the Washington. Once inside he is about to have a serious ‘accident’, which unfortunately, he is not going to survive, at least not as far as the world’s press is concerned.” Jordan made quotation marks with his gloved fingers. “His ‘body’ will never be recovered.”

  Peel knew the Americans were all over the George Washington, stripping it of anything a foreign power could salvage and use against them. Detonations to follow would clear anything that could not be recovered. One team of a hundred or more specialists was similarly busy deactivating its nuclear power plant and ballistic weaponry as a priority.

  “You can’t almost destroy the world, and then expect its citizen’s to continue to act like you had nothing to do with it.”

  “Even when you bring billions of dollars into the economy?” asked Peel.

  “Don’t worry about that, Harrison, Centaurus will go on. The corporation going to get a whole lot of new defense contracts to pacify shareholders.”

  “You’ve been brought back into the fold, haven’t you?”