Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear

by Sean Hoade

  “Ay, there’s the rub.” President Hampton sighed the quote from the Bard, removed her glasses, rubbed her tired eyes, and replaced the glasses. “We don’t know what this threat even is as yet,” she said, making eye contact with Lieutenant Berry and getting the message across that he should keep the full story between the two of them for the time being. “We can’t send any personnel down there yet because the kill zone could still be in effect. We’ve sent unmanned drones and collected the pictures you all have seen. There is also video.”

  “Why have we not seen this video?” the Russian president said through an interpreter, even the translation sounding indignant. “What are you hiding?”

  President Hampton clasped her hands, then relaxed them, before she responded warmly: “Alexander Ivanovich, we have taken the lead in this investigation because it happened nearest to our shores, plus the fact that we have the most sophisticated UAV fleet in the world.”

  Zhikin grumbled, his question not yet answered. “And this video?”

  Vice President Steele spoke up for the first time in the meeting. And when he spoke, his distaste for the Communist countries dripped from every word. (This attitude had made him a great choice for vice president but also had voters afraid to support him in his run for president.) Responding to the Russian president, he barked, “We’ll share what we want, when we want to share it. Your people have barely suffered; ours have been threatened, sickened, killed—”

  “The video has been found to produce a certain effect on those who view it,” Hampton cut in firmly but diplomatically, shooting her VP a look that probably made her old students burst into flame back in her teaching days. Besides, she thought, the only piece of intel she wasn’t sharing was that it was only the live feed that caused problems. “Temporary disorientation, enervation, loss of speech, to name a few. It would be irresponsible of us to allow the video to be seen at this point. That said, we have the unmanned aircraft to perform effective reconnaissance—”

  As the term “unmanned aircraft” was translated, Zhikin cut in with clearly agitated invective that interrupted President Hampton in English a few seconds later. Zhikin shouted, speaking so rapidly that his interpreter was forced to pause a few times to make sure she herself understood what the Russian was saying. “The United States has no privilege to send these planes into the airspace of sovereign nations!”

  The room was silent. The President was silent.

  “The United States is committing acts of war,” Zhikin continued. “You are using a situation that you yourself have created in order to extend your reach over parts of the globe you have no right to claim.”

  “President Zhikin!” Judith Hampton cried, leaving behind her earlier friendly use of his patronym. “How can you make such accusations? Thousands, perhaps millions, of US citizens have died, while Russia and China have emerged practically unscathed!”

  Vice President Steele literally applauded, making some in the room laugh but which Hampton completely ignored.

  As the Chinese leader received his translation, he immediately started to howl invective, but Zhikin cut him off: “Unscathed? With the United States taking over an entire continent? You are trying to strategically gain a foothold in the Southern Hemisphere that by rights belongs to Russia.”

  “To Russia?” the British prime minister yelped. “The first explorations of the entire southern half of South America by white men were conducted by England! We own protectorates down there in which every one of our citizens has died, yet we don’t make any rash claims about some global chess match!”

  “You and the United States work together,” Zhikin said flatly. “Against Russia. Against Russia’s allies in Arabia. Against China.”

  At this last, all eyes in the Sit Room moved to the round face of Chairman Zhang. He sat placidly but with rage visible beneath his expression as he listened to the translation. A moment passed before he said, “President Zhikin is correct. Your weapon has somehow, perhaps by magic, managed to kill only the weak and poor people of the southern continent who could not fight back. You have left the Communists alive so you can enslave our people.”

  “Bullshit!” Vice President Steele jumped up and shouted, leaving the four leaders who could not see him on their screens looking alarmed and confused. “We could say the exact same thing about you! South America would be a perfect staging ground for your ultimate invasion of the United States!”

  “Mister Vice President!” Judith Hampton shouted in shock. “Algernon, what—”

  “Blast it!” Steele yelled at the large screen showing the Russian president’s face and then the one next to it with the Chinese leader’s shocked visage.

  The Marine sergeant who had earlier replaced now-Lieutenant Berry swept the camera off of the President and onto the Vice President, who everyone in the room—and now in the halls of power around the world—could see was far from done with his speech.

  “God only knows what they have been planning these decades since we won the Cold War! Scheming in their secret societies, their little yellow enclaves, telling us about ‘decommissioned’ weapons—this attack was a test, Madam President, one they are trying to make us look responsible for!”

  Everyone in the Sit Room and on the screens looked stunned by the sudden vehemence of Algernon Steele. No one knew what to say, and even if any had known what should be said, they were sure as hell not going to be the one to say it. Steele was the loose-cannon firebrand that Hampton had added to her ticket for his hawkish credentials, since her military expertise was limited to lecturing about it in fifth and sixth periods, but this was unprecedented. This was madness.

  “Mister Vice President, take your seat, sir!” the President shouted, and Steele sat down immediately, looking slightly abashed but mostly flushed red with fury, and the A/V tech brought the camera to bear on Hampton once again. “I must apologize for my second-in-command. This is a very trying situation, as I’m sure you know—”

  “You think this is something the People’s Republic has masterminded?” Zhang said, the monotone interpreter’s voice belying the anger in the chairman’s voice and face. “You think we are killing millions, is that correct? To keep this lie alive—is that why you have not shared this with us?” He held up a black-and-white photo, one of the stills from the video collected by the American UAVs.

  President Hampton visibly paled. She had not shown the photos to anyone except Second Lieutenant Kevin Berry, who had not been out of her sight since she had entered the Situation Room with the stills. She had been assured that the images were sent directly up the chain of command from the airman who was monitoring that drone to the President herself.

  It was not a spy within her ranks, she felt sure of that. No, she knew what it was, and made herself calm down before saying it out loud and risking an international incident, like her bull-headed Vice President seemed all too willing to do.

  “Mister Chairman, would you please tell me how you came into possession of that piece of United States intelligence?” she asked very evenly, although she could see both her Vice President and her Chief of the NSA positively boiling with rage. “I believe you have hacked into our UAV communications.”

  Chairman Zhang smiled, or pretended to. “Let us leave aside diplomatic niceties for the moment, shall we? Madam President, this is a photograph pulled from a drone video captured hours ago by your military spies, correct?”

  Steele looked like he was going to jump up and scream again, but Hampton gave him a surreptitious “stand down” gesture out of the camera’s view and said, “That is correct, Mister Chairman.”

  Perhaps he was not expecting a direct answer—Hampton was the head of a major power, after all—because his face softened a bit as he nodded at her admission. “Then if you would please tell myself, President Zhikin, President Durand, and Prime Minister Cosgrove … What in [untranslatable Chinese idiom] is this thing?”

  The Situation Room suddenly found itself in a sticky situation indeed. Army genera
ls looked at Navy admirals who looked at Marine generals who looked at the Air Force Chief of Staff who looked at the head of the National Security Agency who looked at the Secretary of Defense who looked at the Secretary of Homeland Security who looked at the Vice President who turned his gaze onto the President herself. Staff both civilian and military were too freaked out to look directly at anyone. Lieutenant Berry looked at the A/V sergeant, who looked back at him with a confused shrug, her eyes wide.

  “President Hampton, I demand an answer.”

  “As I do,” Zhikin said.

  “And I,” Durand said.

  “I’m sorry, Madam President, but we need an answer as well,” Cosgrove said as if each Received-Pronunciation–accented word were cutting him on the way out of his mouth. “What is this?”

  At the time of these events, at the time just before Judith Hampton spoke her next words, the office of the President of the United States was inarguably the most powerful position in the world, not only because of the unprecedented military and economic might of the country, but also because of its intricate webs of support and alliance with almost every nation on Earth, including those which were technically considered “enemies.” With one sentence, with six words, the stressed-to-the-breaking-point President Hampton changed everything.

  “I believe,” she said as she braced herself, “that it is Cthulhu.”

  The room exploded in shouts of disbelief even among those who had no idea what a “Cthulhu” was. No one else had yet seen the video or the stills except as shown by Chairman Zhang a moment earlier. Those who were familiar with the science fiction monster whose caricature was made into ironic stuffed toys, slapped onto T-shirts, and featured in bizarro low-budget movies—the same wonky nerds who knew the Alien from the Alien movies was properly called a “Xenomorph” and the word “Wookiee” has two e’s—shouted even louder, not thinking the President had lost her mind but knowing it. Even if it was a joke—a strange, completely inappropriate joke made to other world leaders after the deaths of half a billion people—the fact remained that Hampton had to have gone completely insane.

  The heads of state on the four large screens first listened to the translation (with that single untranslatable name) and then could plainly hear the bedlam occurring in the White House Situation Room from those Americans who made the world go ’round. No one, including their interpreters, could distinctly make out what the Yanks were saying, but every one of the foreign leaders uttered in his or her native language an almost exact cognate of what the British prime minister said in English: “What is going on in there? What in blazes is a Kuh-thoo-loo?”

  Their confusion was bad. Once they were told, everything was much worse.

  Vice President Steele said to the new A/V tech, “Turn off the monitors, Sergeant.”

  For a moment, the room grew completely still.

  “Sergeant, now,” Chairman Adamson barked, and the sergeant broke out of her daze and pushed a few buttons that darkened the giant monitors bearing the stunned expressions of the other Security Council mugwumps.

  President Hampton said nothing in protest to Steele’s presumption, but instead used the wiles that had put her in the Oval Office in the first place: “Thank you, Algernon. Now we may consider our plan of action without prying eyes.”

  Steele sputtered and reddened, but finally mumbled, “You’re welcome.” All could see that his obvious attempt to challenge the President had been jiu-jitsued right back at him.

  “Bob, Norm, I need you to circle the wagons on the science end. Ask every question and answer them. Why is Cthulhu—or this Cthulhu-like entity—rising now? Why did the attack last only forty-five seconds, even though that head is still out of the water? Will this kind of attack happen again? If so, when? If not, why not and how do you know?”

  Nye and Tyson answered together, “Yes, Madam President,” and rose to leave.

  “Take your copies of the story—they’re the only reference we have.”

  The two of them repeated the earlier assent, collected their papers, and exited.

  “Secretary Katt,” Hampton called to the head of the Department of Transportation, “I need you to get the interstate cleared, all of it. We need room for our tanks and missile vehicles to get through to fight this creature. The drivers are dead—run a troop transport ahead of … ahead of whatever you use to clear the highways—and pick up stranded passengers first. I don’t care what you do with the cars.”

  “Yes, Madam President,” Katt said, and left the room with his staff following right behind.

  President Hampton surveyed the room, looking into the eyes of every Cabinet member still present as she went. “Whatever your department, ladies and gentlemen, I want you to put into action a plan to get us through this mess. We need personnel to man the power grid, the water system, the whatever else your job covers—and if your job doesn’t cover it and you think of it, get it done anyway. There is no chance of redundancy here; everything we need, we probably need twice and then some.”

  Chairs squeaked as the Cabinet members stood—

  “Take your seats, please. The bell has not rung.” She allowed herself a smile, which released the stress enough for a small laugh to be heard here and there in the room. She turned serious again and continued: “We need the dead collected and the living brought to safety. We need any living Americans abroad called back home. We need to commandeer the airlines and trains to get everyone as far north as we can, as far away from Cthulhu as possible, since that might help mitigate the effects of another Event.”

  The Vice President jumped to his feet. “Madam President, there is no Cthulhu! There are real dangers here, not movie monsters! The Russians and the Chinese are ready to take advantage of this disaster, no surprise since they were probably the ones who—”

  “Stand down, Mister Vice President!” Hampton bellowed, getting to her feet herself. “I need you to be my point man on the front line against this creature.”

  “The hell I will,” Steele spat, and gestured for his staff to leave the room. “You have taken leave of your senses, Judith. Millions dead, and you’re talking about Godzilla’s brother-in-law like this international catastrophe is a joke? This job has proved too much for you.” With that, he swept out of the Sit Room after the last of his staff.

  “That certainly sounded ominous,” Hampton’s Chief of Staff said.

  “He’d just better do his job, or I’ll have him shot for treason,” Hampton said, making some still in the room literally gasp. “Now let’s get to work. I’m giving a new address to the American people in fifteen minutes. No, make it a press conference—let’s get this information out there. People have to know the federal government is in control of the situation.”

  “Madam President?” her press secretary said in confusion. “We haven’t cleared any time with the major news outlets—”

  “Then clear it now. Go.”

  He sent several staff members to make it happen. “Any other hurdles any one of you professionals need me to jump for you?” The room was silent. “Then go! These aren’t suggestions, people! Communications team, huddle up. It’s time we made the world aware.”

  “Aware?” the press secretary asked with real perplexity.

  “Of Cthulhu.”

  “Of course,” he said, looking a bit green himself, then quickly gathered his papers and retreated.

  Some left the Sit Room for their own department’s or team’s conference rooms; the Secret Service attached to the President stayed in place; and the press and communications team all moved to chairs closer to the President to draft her address. However, there wasn’t a soul among them—including Second Lieutenant Berry, even though he still had no viable alternative to the Cthulhu “theory” he had volunteered—who didn’t think that Judith Hampton’s mind had completely snapped.

  Nellis AFB

  Event + 24 hours

  Everyone’s attention was glued to the screens depicting the tentacle-faced head of a leviathan�
��these wonky nerds too were aware of the monster Cthulhu as an ironic pop culture “star,” Godzilla with a worse attitude, and this WAS Cthulhu—but in a corner, the airman piloting an infrared-viewing drone over the outskirts of Bogotá had to force himself to blink twice before he could at all credit what he was seeing.

  Signs of life.

  Heat signatures of living things—maybe animals, but very much looking like the general size of human adults—were scattered here and there inside the buildings during a cool Mexican morning. Maybe if the temperatures had been higher outside, the drone wouldn’t have been able to pick up the infrared radiation from the heat of moving, living things, but there it was. The tiniest pockets of people in Mexico City were alive.

  “Major!” the airman called as urgently as he could while not sounding like he was commanding his superior officer. “You want to see this, sir!”

  New York City

  Event + 24 hours

  Martin Storch had been accused many times of being an egotist at best and a complete solipsist at worst. But this was one of those times for any human when the rest of the world falls away and he feels that he is being directly, uniquely spoken to. It’s what it must feel like, he guessed, when the holder of a lottery ticket sees his numbers come up on the television screen one by one, finally finishing a sequence that points to him and only him (and maybe a few who used the same numbers) in the entire universe.

  President Judith Hampton was talking about H.P. Lovecraft. About Cthulhu, for god’s sake. And it wasn’t a joke or a metaphor—every channel showed the photographs and short snippet of video that the White House had shared. To those who knew the work of the reclusive writer of Providence, it was obvious—and terrifying—that they were gazing upon the face of Lovecraft’s most famous and malign entity.

  This was Martin’s area of expertise. His love of logic, his insistence on real causes and effects instead of supernatural “miracles,” his first interest in being a writer, all of it started with H.P. Lovecraft. And with “The Call of Cthulhu.”