Shotguns v. Cthulhu

by Larry DiTillio

There hadn’t been a sweep since before winter, so the concrete slope was home to nine or ten homeless men and women. None of these were thrill seekers like the Ave Rats. They were the damaged and discarded, mentally or physically ill, junkies and alcoholics, unwilling or unable to accept help from a shelter or one of the city’s charities.

  Walker huddled in a green tarp on the far southern edge of the concrete. He was sitting up and seemed alert. In fact, as she came closer Rebecca saw he was watching her, as if he’d been expecting her arrival.

  He had only a small square of gauze taped to his forehead. Rebecca could have sworn the wound was worse than that. The EMTs had mentioned broken ribs, and Patrick said something about a CT scan. It was crazy to think he’d walked out of the hospital under his own steam, but here he was.

  “Did you bring a gun?” he asked.

  The question alarmed her, but Rebecca controlled the impulse to reach for the Glock. “Why, do I need one?”

  He shrugged. Rebecca opened his mouth to speak, but he interrupted. “Here’s what you need to know.”

  He unspooled a tale of profound and schizophrenic paranoia. Walker wasn’t his real name, he said. It was his avocation. He and others like him patrolled the cities infiltrated by alien beings—creatures like the one Rebecca had seen. He and his colleagues traveled on foot because so many of the clues the enemy left behind were too subtle to notice by those speeding by in cars.

  Rebecca liked this detail. She’d burned enough shoe-leather walking a beat to see the truth in it. But she had also dealt with enough mentally ill people to recognize the power of a compelling detail to make the most absurd fantasy irresistible to a tractable mind.

  With their advanced technology, Walker explained, the aliens had transplanted their brains into the bodies of key government officials to ensure their goals would be executed. He admitted he did not know the exact nature of their designs, but he believed passionately that the aliens saw humans as little more than beasts or tools.

  Walker had been one of a cell watching for alien activity in Seattle, and he’d found it. For the past two years he’d been stalking city government functionaries, consulting fellow “walkers” who kept an eye on contractors and other key business leaders. Putting the clues together, they discovered that the creatures intended to activate a massive machine on March 26 in the Kingdome.

  Not “the kingdom,” as Rebecca had misheard. This second nice detail gulled her momentarily into thinking she was talking with a sane person.

  She knew now that she should go home and leave a tip for social services to pick him up in the morning. That’s exactly what she would have done, except for one thing.

  She’d seen the alien.

  “What exactly is this machine supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Walker. “But you’ve felt what the small version of the machine does. What do you think it’s for?”

  Rebecca thought of the stinging in her eyes, the confusion in her thoughts as the green luminescence pulsed on the metal device. Did it affect her mind? What would have happened if she hadn’t fired those shots? Would the aliens have controlled her mind?

  She shook her head, frightened to realize she was thinking of Walker’s aliens as real beings, not the products of a psychotic break. But if they were delusions, she could not explain why she too had seen them.

  Maybe she was the one who needed a visit from social services. One thought of the stigma of a visit to the department shrink for anything other than her annual checkpoint squelched that notion.

  Walker could not be delusional, because what he described was the same as what she had seen, and Rebecca knew that she was not delusional.

  She decided that was enough existential crisis for one night. While she still felt some equilibrium about her own mental state, she would get a good night’s sleep and decide what to do tomorrow.

  “Where can I find you tomorrow afternoon?” she asked.

  “Give me your cell number.”

  “Give me yours,” she countered.

  “Can’t,” he said. “Haven’t got one yet.”

  In the end, Rebecca chose the hooded man with a firearm story. It was weak, even the union rep said so, but it was unlikely to get her charged. It was, however, certain to cost her the bump to detective and the pay increase that was the lynchpin of her five-year plan.

  What she needed was a new plan. After a night’s sleep, she realized how perilously close she’d come to losing her mind to Walker’s crackpot story. She’d put the world’s shittiest day behind her. Maybe it would be seven years until she could move out of her father’s condo and buy a house in Ravenna. She hoped it wouldn’t be ten.

  Regardless, she felt a great weight come off her shoulders as she left the interview room. Through his office window, the lieutenant nodded as she returned to her desk to put her files in order for Patrick. She’d spend another nine days on leave before returning to work, with or without a reprimand. Probably without, if the description of her assailant was sufficiently vague. At least she didn’t have to worry about Walker’s turning up to contradict her story. He’d exhibited no desire to press charges for the accident. Still, it was good to be sure.

  She stuck her head in the lieutenant’s door on the way out.

  “Any word on the poor guy I ran into?”

  He looked up from his monitor and smiled. “Looks like you scared him back to California. Our Mr. Walker bought a bus ticket under his own name a couple of hours after he left the hospital. He’s SFPD’s problem now. I doubt we’ll see him again.”

  Rebecca failed to conceal her surprise.

  “Don’t worry, we all have a few smudges on our sheets. This one won’t amount to much by the time the next review rolls around.” He winked at her, a cold gesture devoid of sexual innuendo and thus all the more chilling.

  Rebecca smiled a straight line and bobbed her head. “Thanks, Lieutenant.”

  He touched two fingers to his brow. “Be seeing you.”

  Rebecca’s hands and feet felt cold as she stepped out of the station. Minutes after her interview, she’d received an email notification that her car was ready for pickup—another favorable sign—but instead of catching a ride to impound, she took the next bus back home.

  She sat by the window and watched the buildings and alleys go by, surprised at how often she spotted an unexpected walkway sheltered by the boughs of a tree, or a door where she’d never noticed one before. Sometimes she caught a brief glimpse of a building hidden from the street and craned her neck for a better look, but it was gone before she could see just what it was.

  She got off near Harvard, half a mile from her condo, and walked the rest of the way. She noticed the circuit of cables that joined the houses to telephone and power lines. Their patterns were more intricate than she had ever realized. Following them, she began to perceive the subtle relationships between buildings, their dependencies and secrets. With every block she saw some feature she had never before discovered, and she felt as she had the first day she stumbled upon Freeway Park, that startling maze of trees and flowerbeds perched directly over the I-5.

  She spent the rest of the afternoon tidying the condo, alphabetizing her bookshelves, culling the boxes of magazines that had accumulated in her home office—anything to stop thinking of the queer lie the lieutenant had told her. Anything to stop wondering what she would say to Walker if he called.

  But no one called for the rest day, and at last she finished a bottle of Chardonnay and fell asleep under the gentle radiation of the muted television. She dreamed of the drone of insects.

  She woke in the dark to the buzzing of her cell phone.

  “Meet me at the Pergola.”

  “Listen …” said Rebecca. She wanted to say she shouldn’t have given him this number, that he could call her at the station if he had anything to say, but that was stupid. She had already thought about two or three reasons why the lieutenant would have lied about Walker’s leaving town, and none of them was
any good.

  “Today is the twenty-sixth,” said Walker.

  Rebecca stepped off the bus right beside the Pergola, the Victorian canopy that had been the neighborhood’s principal landmark for over ninety years. Hours from now, tourists would take each other’s photo beside the wrought-iron structure as they waited for underemployed stand-up comics to guide them through Seattle’s Underground. Until then, most of the residents were homeless people shuffling awake after sleeping in the nearby park.

  She’d seen Ghost Mountain clear as a postcard picture on the ride over. That’s what her father called Mount Rainier, which was invisible in the distant gloom so many days of the year. When it materialized in the southern distance, he called it an omen. He would never say whether it was a good omen or a bad one.

  Rebecca saw Walker round the corner with a coffee cup in either hand. He’d showered and shaved since she last saw him. Years of living rough left a specter on his face, but he looked less like someone she’d meet on a call and more like someone she might see on a date.

  He offered both cups, allowing her to choose one. The gesture took her off guard, and she realized it hadn’t occurred to her that he might have drugged or otherwise tainted one of them. When she picked one, he produced packets of cream and sugar from his pocket, but she shook her head. Then she tasted the coffee and changed her mind. After two creams and a sugar, the stuff was drinkable.

  “Whatever they’re doing, it’s today,” Walker said without preamble. “Most of the security has left the site. Last night I cut through one of the fences, but I decided to call you before going in.”

  “Slow down. You’re still talking about the Kingdome, right? What’s going on in there, and what do you expect me to do about it?”

  The place had been closed for renovations since early January. Over thirty years old, the place was starting to fall apart. Calls for repairs or replacement of the entire facility had grown louder since another ceiling tile fell on the fans five or six years back.

  “I know how nuts it sounds,” he said. “The truth is I don’t know exactly what’s happening in there. They aren’t renovating the place, that’s for sure. What I need is a credible witness. You’ve seen one of the mi-go, and I can tell you haven’t written it off as a hallucination. Maybe you’ve heard and seen some other strange things. You’re a cop. Of course you have.”

  He asked for so little, Rebecca felt suspicious.

  “Put your coffee down,” she said, assuming her work voice.

  “What?”

  “Hands on the wall. Spread ’em.”

  He did as she directed. She patted him down and found nothing dangerous.

  “All right, we’ll take a peek.” When they found nothing unusual, she’d give him a card for social services and wash her hands of him.

  They walked the six blocks to the Kingdome, but Rebecca instantly saw that something was wrong. Despite the signs declaring the renovation and the names of the three contracting firms involved, there was no equipment on the lot. Even the foreman’s trailer was missing, and not a single vehicle was parked within the chain-link security fence.

  Rebecca felt Walker’s eyes on her. She had the feeling he was appraising her reaction, maybe even reading her mind a little. That idea did not disturb her the way she thought it might. There was a vast difference between human empathy and whatever that—it was difficult even to think the nonsense word—that mi-go’s green energy device had done to her.

  Walker led her to the place where he’d cut the fence. He’d left the bolt-cutters on the ground. Rebecca wondered briefly where he’d gotten them and decided it was not an urgent question. He picked them up and held the fence open for her as she slipped through.

  They walked across the empty parking lot. There was no point trying to sneak across the barren space in the clear morning light. They reached the northwestern entrance unchallenged. Walker cut the chain on a service entrance. They went inside.

  Rebecca had expected silence, but an electric hum filled the interior. They followed it past the ticket gates, where Walker touched her arm. The gesture startled her, but he pointed toward the food court ahead. There stood a bald man in the uniform of a private security company. He wore an automatic weapon slung over one shoulder.

  Rebecca recognized the weapon as an Uzi.

  No security firm in the city was licensed to carry such weapons.

  She drew her Glock and gestured for Walker to follow as she retreated to the next arena entrance. They remained close to the wall as they descended the stairs and looked around.

  There’d been no renovation work, although thousands of uniform holes had been drilled and plugged all over the walls and ceiling, where patches of water damage and missing tiles were obvious even in the upper gloom. All the light came from the floor level.

  Throughout the arena sprawled a vast tangle of electrical and hydraulic cables. Pools of yellow fluid leaked beneath a few junctures, glimmering under blue-white lights that reminded Rebecca of the fluorescent tubes of old office buildings. Countless metal canisters lay on the seats of the lower spectator level and on bare catering tables forming five or six rings around the arena floor.

  All of that mad business was little more than a matte painting in a science-fiction movie compared to the monstrous spectacle in the center.

  Hundreds of half-naked bodies, maybe over a thousand corpses, lay in neat rows on the arena floor. Each of their heads had been shaved just enough to clear the way for a large incision on the back of the head. Fascination gained the upper hand on revulsion, drawing Rebecca closer to the ghastly pile. There she saw the purpose of the incisions: the brains had been removed.

  Walker tugged at her sleeve again. He pointed upward at the holes Rebecca had noticed before. She looked to him for an explanation.

  “The place is rigged for implosion,” he said.

  “How do you know that?” She remembered he’d done construction work and said, “Never mind. What the hell are they doing with these … remains?”

  She couldn’t bring herself to say “brains.”

  “Their devices affect our thoughts. You felt it, but you stopped the thing before it could control you. Maybe this is some way of affecting many people at once.”

  “The whole city,” Rebecca whispered. She tried not to imagine the effect, but thoughts of plague and Hiroshima roiled in her imagination.

  Walker dropped to the floor. She did the same before following his gaze to another arena entrance.

  A pair of hovering mi-go glided down the stairway. From the semi-crustacean limbs of one dangled a coil of cable and a pair of plastic grocery bags. The other dragged the limp body of a man dressed like the security guard they had spotted earlier.

  “They’re eating their own,” whispered Walker.

  Rebecca sensed that he was correct and that it must mean they were near to … what? Broadcast? Detonation?

  She had no idea which would be worse.

  More importantly, she had no idea what to do about either prospect.

  “Can you—?”

  A spray of automatic fire covered them in fragments of concrete. Walker jerked to the side. Rebecca crouched and raised her weapon, seeking a target. The bald security guard stood at the top of the ramp. She squeezed off two shots. He withdrew behind the corner.

  Walker took a step and fell. Rebecca pulled him by the shoulder of his jacket and retreated to the stands. When Baldy poked his head around the corner, she fired another round. His head snapped back and he hit the floor.

  The gunfire alerted the mi-go, who dropped their burdens and floated away from the commotion.

  Rebecca lifted the hand Walker pressed just above his left hip. It was a clean wound, through and through. Not good, but not as bad as it could be.

  “We’ve got to get out of here and report what we’ve seen.”

  He barked his astonishment. “To whom?”

  Rebecca blinked at his exacting grammar, but she got the point. Even if she was wr
ong about the lieutenant, it took a lot of clout to allow a thing like this to happen in the Kingdome of all places. If the issue was as urgent as she felt, she’d have to deal with it herself.

  “Can you blow this place?” she said.

  “Probably, if we can find the detonator.”

  She scanned the arena and saw no sign of the mi-go. “Start looking.”

  Rebecca ran over to the fallen guard. Her shot had struck him in the cheek, and the exit wound had sprayed a ragged cone on the floor behind him. She collected his machine gun and tried not to think about the fact that this was her first kill.

  Walker was already hustling around the ring of canisters. He paused to open one, his fingers twisting and pressing at catches she couldn’t see. At last the cylinder split vertically, releasing a pink-gray mass of exactly what she had feared was inside. A high pitch whine rose from the table he had disturbed. An alarm.

  “Forget that,” she said. “Follow the explosives.”

  She followed about ten feet behind Walker, keeping her eyes on the entrances. When she caught a flicker of green light from above, she realized her mistake. By the time she raised her weapon, the nauseating sting was in her eyes.

  Rebecca aimed at the center of the green blur and fired a round. She blinked, fixed on the target, and fired two more.

  It felt as though a cold hand slipped inside the back of her neck and gripped her spine just below her brain. For an instant she saw it all in perfect clarity.

  She and a thousand like her would be the conduit of the message. Their thoughts, harnessed and aligned, would inform the thoughts of every human mind watching listening reading the television radio Internet. She could not know the content of the message, but every atom of her body yearned to deliver it.

  And yet not every atom of her body was necessary to the conduit. A facilitator would arrive to divide her useful essence from the dross. Before the facilitator could approach, however, she had to remove the interference.

  She aimed the Glock at Walker and fired. The shot missed him by yards. His eyes widened, and he dove behind the cover of the arena seats. She fired again, again, each time closer to his last position.