by K X Douglas
That’s it! He doesn’t have a backpack or anything on him; he couldn’t have brought that much ammunition!
“Haven’t you?” he asked.
“I killed Hastur. I’ll kill you, too!” Tadhg yelled.
Fuck! I can’t have him ranting about Hastur. Not here. If this idiot summons Hastur here we’re all going to die.
Peter steadied himself and aimed the gun at Tadhg’s chest this time. With his other hand he gripped the barrel of the shotgun and held it against his chest. Forming a mouth on the palm of the hand that was holding the shotgun, he began to bite at it, trying to damage it enough that it wouldn’t be able to fire.
“You have a death wish, don’t you, you fuckin’ weapon?”
Peter kept gnawing away at the barrel of the gun, hoping that Tadhg wouldn’t notice until it was too late.
“You’ve shot me a couple of times now,” Peter said. “I’m still standing. In fact, I’m not even bleeding. How many shots do you think it will take to kill me? How much ammunition do you have?”
Tadhg simply stared him in the eyes.
“Just go home,” he continued. “I know you have two children who would be absolutely distraught if they learned that you were shot on the job. I really, really don’t want to have to kill you, but I will if it means preventing you from killing more people.”
Finally, Tadhg lowered his gun. He walked away without saying a word.
Peter let out a sigh of relief before it occurred to him that he was surrounded by human corpses. He looked at each of them in turn; even if he didn’t have to talk down Tadhg, he didn’t think he’d be able to save any of them; most of them had been within five feet of the barrel when they were shot, and as a result they were missing very large chunks of flesh from their bodies.
Finally resolving to leave them to the chief medical examiner, Peter ran off to fetch his coat. Luckily, it was in the exact same place that he left it. Transforming back into his normal human form, he donned it and returned to where he had last seen Victoria.
She was nowhere to be found.
Right, I have her number now.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and saw that he had over a dozen texts from her.
She replied instantly.
He ran back to the parking lot and saw her waiting for him.
She was crying. As soon as she laid eyes on him, she glomped him tightly, smearing makeup into the shoulder of his jacket.
“I thought you were dead!” she shouted.
Peter simply returned the hug.
“What happened?” she asked as she took a step back.
“The shooter’s gone,” Peter replied. “He killed a couple of the people who were conducting the ritual.”
“Oh my fucking god!”
Peter could hear police sirens in the distance.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “I really don’t want to have to give a statement to the cops. They’re probably going to be interrogating everyone that they can find.”
They both climbed into the car, and Peter started to drive back to campus.
“I’m sorry for scaring you like that. I…I don’t know what I was thinking,” he lied.
“Peter, can you stop somewhere for a sec?”
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I just wanna talk for a bit. Is that okay?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Peter stopped in the first parking lot he could find that didn’t have a meter.
Victoria grabbed Peter’s head and kissed him on the lips. Her hands were cold against his face, and her perfume flooded his nostrils.
He ran his hands through her hair as he kissed her back.
“Come on,” she whispered. “Use that tongue of yours. Don’t act like I didn’t watch you nearly suffocate Heidi with it.”
Victoria unbuckled her seatbelt and climbed into the back seat.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Peter followed after her, subtly bending his bones to more comfortably squeeze between the two front seats. As soon as he was sitting on one of the back seats, Victoria straddled him and pinned him down on his back.
I thought she just wanted to talk? Dammit, why does this keep happening to me?
She kissed him again, this time biting into his lower lip before tracing the tip of her tongue along the edge of his mouth.
Peter slowly extended his tongue into her mouth, eliciting a muffled moan. Her tongue tried to wrap around his as her eyes rolled into the back of her head. He quickly retracted it, eliciting a look of mild confusion from her.
“Is that okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she whispered between heavy breaths. “Keep going.”
“Okay, snap your fingers at any time if you want me to stop.”
Victoria unzipped his jacket and helped him remove it as quickly as possible before she started to remove her dress.
“Hold on. You and Heidi haven’t…been intimate yet…have you?”
“No,” Peter said, “we haven’t.”
“Okay. Then we should wait. It would be weird if I fucked my roommate’s boyfriend before she does, even if you’re in an open relationship.”
“Yeah.”
I don’t get it, but okay.
They returned to the front seats and Peter started the car back up.
“Peter, wait a second. I just realized something. Did…did you know about the shooting beforehand? All that talk about disrupting the ritual earlier…”
“I thought he was going to be there, but I didn’t think he was going to go in guns blazing!”
“You knew the shooter…,” Victoria said.
“I did,” Peter said. “He’s Serena’s father, and he works with Professor Carter hunting aliens and cultists. But he’s not all there.”
“What the fuck? Is that why you ran off. You were trying to stop him?”
“Yeah. I convinced him to stop, but people were already dead. I was too late.”
Peter started to drive back to campus.
“Holy shit, Peter. Does…does Serena know anything about this?”
“She knows about the aliens, and she knows that her father has killed people before. I don’t know who will be the one to tell her about today, or if anyone will. As far as I know, her father managed to escape the scene.”
“It sounded like he was pretty heavily armed. What the hell were you expecting to run into at the festival?”
“Something that can soak up a fuckton of bullets. Something that could have killed absolutely everyone there with ease.”
They arrived back on campus and Peter parked his car in the usual spot.
“For the record, I’m sorry that this happened. I wish I could have prevented it.”
“Oh, no, I don’t blame you. You did everything you could. From the sound of things that guy’s a bit of a psychopath. I, uh, I had fun up until everyone started dying.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to go let Heidi know that we’re okay before she hears about what happened and starts panicking. See you tomorrow.”
“See you.”
Peter entered his dorm and locked the door behind him. Taking the gun back out from his pants, he put it into his mouth and swallowed it.
The last thing I want is to be kicked out of residence or expelled for keeping a firearm on campus.
He checked his phone and saw several messages from Heidi.
Peter typed a reply.
You know, I ought to explain to Serena what happened. She’ll eventually start to wonder what’s been going on with her
father, anyways.
He ignored any further beeps from his phone for the time being and walked over to Serena’s dorm.
When he knocked on the door, Isabelle answered.
“Hey, is Serena around?” Peter asked.
“Yeah,” Isabelle replied. “Is something wrong?”
“I’ve, uh, got some news about her father. He’s not dead or anything, but this is kind of important.”
“I…see.”
Isabelle disappeared, and within a minute Serena answered the door.
“Hey, Peter, what’s up?”
“Serena, I have some bad news. Your father killed someone again. Several people in fact.”
Serena went slightly pale.
“You heard the story about him, I’m guessing? About him killing an intruder?”
“Yeah. This time I saw him kill people.”
“Oh, god. How many?”
“At least four. Victoria and I were at the Mabon festival tonight by the river, and he just showed up and started blowing holes in people.”
Serena stood there for a full minute, too shocked to respond.
“So he’s in jail, I’m guessing?” Sweat started to trickle down her face. “God, there’s no way in hell he’s going to get bail this time.”
“No, I’m pretty sure he escaped.”
“How in the hell did he escape?”
“Well, it kinda took a while for the cops to show up, for one thing. He just ran off before they showed up.”
“I…you know what? Come inside.”
Peter walked in and shut the door behind him. He took his shoes off before joining Serena on the couch.
“I don’t know why in the hell he’d kill those people. What kind of festival did you say this was?”
“For Mabon. Wiccan holiday. So, uhh, you remember that weird book and the alien attack?”
“How could I forget? Wait…are those things connected?”
“Yeah. You remember the dreams we were talking about, then? I had another dream after I finished reading the book, about a ritualized human sacrifice that summoned a group of those aliens to Earth. I was absolutely certain that this was a vision of the future, so I told Professor Carter about it, and we had planned to attend the Mabon festival in order to make sure that it wouldn’t lead to the events in my dream. He contacted Tadhg and Silas for help, but when I got there I saw that it was just a harmless ritual. Tadhg apparently didn’t get the memo.”
“Hold on, you know Silas?”
“Kind of. He showed up at my dorm, trying to intimidate me into staying away from you. He seems to think I’m a bad influence on you.”
After a moment, Serena sighed.
“Ignore him.”
“I’m not sure whether that would be safe. I know both he and your father have quite the gun collection. He lent me a few.”
“Trust me, he’s harmless. He just likes to act tough. But still…human sacrifice? Aliens? What the fuck are you all getting yourselves involved with here?”
“I know, it’s a lot,” Peter said.
“God, just hearing about it all makes me want to fire up the hookah.”
“I’ll pass this time.”
“You sure? You’ve got to be hella stressed right now.”
“I’m sure.”
Isabelle left her bedroom and sat next to them on the couch just as Serena prepared to light the hookah.
“Serena, can you not?” she said. “We’ve been over this.”
“Alright,” Serena said dejectedly.
“I couldn’t help but hear the conversation,” Isabelle said. “This is…this is wild. At this point I don’t think either of us is going to get a choice as to whether or not we’ll get involved. We’re already involved. So, Peter, is there a way that we can help?”
“I…I don’t know,” he said. “Anything I can think of would be something that’d put your lives in danger, and…I can’t do that. I’ll have to have a talk with the professor.”
“I’ll have a talk with Silas,” Serena said. “Maybe I can convince him to start treating you a little better while I’m at it. What’s the next step?”
“Okay,” Peter said, “so I have reason to believe that on the next full moon, someone will try to summon one of the Old Ones to Earth. The Old Ones are…entities…you could probably call them gods. They have incomprehensible power and little regard for any other form of life. Many of them reside far beyond the confines of Earth.”
“That’s kind of terrifying,” Serena said.
“But they can be killed. Your father managed it somehow with Professor Carter’s help.”
“What did he use, a nuclear bomb?” Isabelle asked.
“I think we would have known if a nuclear bomb was used, Isabelle,” Serena said. “You can’t exactly cover up a nuclear detonation. Not these days.”
“I’m not exactly sure of the details, but all I know is that your father killed one of them for good.”
Peter pulled out his phone to check his messages again. He didn’t have any, but he saw that it was nearly midnight.
“I should be heading out,” he said. “Classes tomorrow and all that. We should all keep each other updated on happenings related to tonight.”
“Yeah,” Serena said.
Peter returned to his dorm and spent the night browsing the internet, often mashing the F5 key on various news and social media sites. It didn’t take long for news of the shooting to spread everywhere, and soon enough Peter found himself watching the usual debates unfold. Surprisingly, there was little in the way of video evidence of the incident.
By the time morning came, news of the shooting was everywhere. However, Peter couldn’t find any concrete information on what happened to Tadhg; was he arrested? Shot? Had he escaped?
He checked his inbox and saw that it was empty; there was no word from Professor Carter regarding the previous night’s events.
Was that him that I ran into at one point? I’m still not sure.
When he attended class the next day, there was a piece of paper taped to the door of the classroom where his English class was held. It said that class that day was cancelled. Many of the students who approached the door and saw the message groaned and cursed to themselves, angry that they woke up and got dressed for nothing.
“Well this sucks,” Eric said.
“Figures he’d cancel class after what happened last night,” Peter said.
“Hold on, Peter, do you know something that I don’t?” Eric asked. “About the professor?”
“It’s a long story,” Victoria said. “You’re going to want to sit down. Serena, Peter filled you in, right?”
“He did,” Serena replied. “Dad’s in jail at the moment, awaiting arraignment.”
“He was denied bail, wasn’t he?” Peter asked.
“Yup.”
They all walked over and sat down in the nearby forum, which was a wide-open space with several tables arranged around a coffee kiosk.
“So,” Serena said. “My dad is a friend of Professor Carter. Last night, Dad decided to show up to the Mabon festival in the river valley with a shotgun and start shooting people. Peter and Victoria were there, and apparently a few people died.”
“Jesus Christ,” Eric said.
“At this point, I think everyone here at least knows that humanity isn’t alone in the universe,” Peter said. “There are other civilizations out there in the cosmos, and one of them has taken an interest in humankind, so to speak.
“Is Earth being invaded?” Heidi asked. “I remember that…that thing…attacked Isabelle a week or so ago.”
“There are people trying to make that happen, yes,” Peter replied. “Serena’s father thought that the people conducting the ritual for Mabon were some of those people. That’s why he killed them.”
“So, since you’re saying that Dad killed the wrong people, does it mean that the people who are trying to facilitate an alien invasion are still out there?”
“Correct,” P
eter said. “Eric, I told you about the dreams I’d been having, right? That and those murders that’ve been happening downtown?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“I’m pretty sure the last dream I had was a vision of the future. I initially thought that the event would happen at the Mabon festival, but now I’m starting to think that it’s going to happen on Samhain, which is on Halloween.”
“So, we have a little over a month,” Heidi said. “What are we going to do, though? There’s probably going to be a ton of security at the next festival, because the authorities will be all paranoid about another shooting happening.”
“Serena, I’ve decided I’m going to help break your father out of jail.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“…and how do you plan on doing that, Peter?” Serena asked.
“I can’t really tell you,” Peter said. “I have a plan, but I don’t want to risk the government finding out about it. It’s hard to explain without giving away details.”
“Is there any way that any of us can help?” Isabelle asked.
“I…I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
***
Professor Carter’s class was cancelled again on Friday, but Peter’s other classes continued as normal. When his other class on Friday was over, he went straight to his car and started it up.
The prison where Tadhg was being held was located approximately thirty-five kilometres southwest of campus, well outside city limits. The drive was simple; Peter just followed the highway about a quarter of the way to the next city. His phone beeped several times during the drive, but he ignored it. By the time he arrived, the sun had set.
He parked his car in the lot at the front of the complex and stepped out. Looking around, he saw that there were no guards outdoors.
Well, that makes my plan a little more difficult.
He returned to his car, climbing into the back seat before removing all of his clothing and transforming into his shoggoth form. After oozing his way out of the car without opening any doors, he made his way towards the building. Again he kept himself as flat to the ground as he could, hoping to blend in with the ground in the darkness.
Peter moved past the main building, which he surmised was not where the prisoners were being held, to the cluster of x-shaped medium security buildings behind. It was trivial for him to squeeze through the fence and climb the brick walls to the second-story window. It was just as trivial for him to smash his way through the window and crawl inside.