Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear

by Sean Hoade

  But that wasn’t quite right anymore, she realized, and held up her hands for silence, which immediately descended. “We must make a correction, my dear family! Beloved of Dagon! Ha ha, yes, we must!”

  They all looked upon her with excitement and reverence.

  “We must now sing Cthulhu m’glhal!” she called and led a new chant, pronouncing the unpronounceable without error: “Ïa! Ïa! Cthulhu m’glhal! Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh m’glhal!”

  All of the assembled “degenerate cultists” immediately knew why it now was “Cthulhu” now instead of “Tulu.” The name “Cthulhu” was the form of Tulu used when he was no longer dead, no longer sleeping while trapped in his sunken city of R’lyeh. The other new word, “m’glhal,” meant “awake.”

  They all chanted, as if they had known this altered song from birth: “Ïa! Ïa! Cthulhu m’glhal! Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh m’glhal!”

  Kristen Frommer tasted each word as it melted into English in her mind:

  Praise! Praise! Cthulhu is awake! Cthulhu is free from R’lyeh, alive and awake!

  And her mind added:

  Awake ... to destroy!

  ***

  From Martin Storch’s essay, “Where Are the Aliens?”, in the Festschrift Billions and Billions: Thoughts on the Legacy of Carl Sagan:

  Doctor Sagan famously declared that visits from alien lifeforms of any kind were not only unlikely given the tremendous distances involved, but virtually impossible. The gulfs of matter-free space between planets and stars, let alone galaxies, are much more vast than the human mind can even envision except by analogy, and even then only roughly because the analogous distances used (e.g., if the sun were one foot in diameter, then Proxima Centauri—the nearest star to our solar system—would be five thousand miles away. The Andromeda galaxy would be sixty billion miles. And the sun, you may have noticed, is a whole hell of a lot bigger than one foot in diameter) are themselves too large to be really understood by brains evolved to figure out how far away an apple is on a tree or a mammoth in a field.

  No alien—or human being, for that matter—could travel these galactic distances in a spaceship, being inherently limited by Einstein’s cosmic speed limit. What about from other parts of our own galaxy, then? No luck there either, I’m afraid. Although the planet-free, boring binary system of Proxima and Alpha Centauri is “just” five thousand miles away in our one-foot-diameter sun universe, the radius simply to the center of our own Milky Way would still be 1.5 billion miles. (In the universe we live in, with a sun-sized sun, that’s about the actual distance from Earth to Uranus. Which takes more than a decade for our probes to reach even though they travel at tens of thousands of miles per hour.)

  However, Sagan didn’t explore in depth other ways that distant civilizations could visit Earth, probably because he was trying to save the world from nuclear war and other trivial side projects. (Why aliens would want to come to such a speck of dust around an average, variable star on the edge of an unremarkable galaxy is a question we’ll put aside for now as well.) There is the tried-and-false idea of opening “wormholes” in space, a concept that would be more enticing, perhaps, if the energy to create such a hole weren’t more than the entire output of our sun during its entire 10-billion-year lifespan. Even with some kind of gift of magical energy from the universe, however, there is no theory, educated guess, or even wild conjecture made by even the most speculative of mathematicians or physicists about how a wormhole could be held open for more than a nanosecond. As with most Star Trek physics, the idea of keeping a wormhole open is more conducive to philosophical, rather than scientific, investigation.

  What of higher-dimensional entities, then—that is, if such an idea if even physically coherent? Theoretical speculation reveals that a two-dimensional “being” could travel instantly from one point on a 2D plane to another without having to travel the distance (in two dimensions) between the points by “folding” their two-dimensional world through a higher dimension, our familiar third spatial dimension. (Think of it as having the two pages of a newspaper laid out flat—this is our 2D creature’s literal plane of existence. But by folding the pages together through a dimension one higher (3D space), a 2D creature sitting on the upper left corner could simply step to a spot in the upper right corner and be instantaneously transported to a spot on the upper right corner of the opposite page.

  Three-dimensional creatures such as ourselves would “fold” 3D space (if such a thing exists) to travel from point to arbitrarily distant point, appearing briefly in 2D space for the actual transfer. Four-dimensional creatures would fold their dimensional space and appear briefly in 3D space to make their leap, and so on.

  This is all very well and logical mathematically, but how does one “fold” their dimension “through” a higher dimension? Other than the fact that it would take mathematics and technology far beyond our current understanding, no one has any idea, of course (except perhaps for Madeleine L’Engle, as she “wrinkled” time), and perhaps that’s why Carl Sagan chose to focus on issues literally much closer to home.

  What has this to do with my wheelhouse of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and his stories of cosmic terrors? A great deal, in fact, since his Old Gods and Elder Things, although godlike to little carbon-based, oxygen-addicted beings such as ourselves, were actually mostly portrayed as powerful, super-intelligent alien beings that crossed through to this dimension from their own higher plane. Sometimes they were summoned, but most of the time, they found us on their own and for their own nefarious purposes …

  NSA SIGINT Data Collection Center, COMINT division

  Event + 30 hours

  In a traveling wave there are alternating crests of highest intensity and troughs of lowest intensity. The NORAD facility in Colorado happened to sit where it was exposed to the very top of the cresting wave, and its amplitude had jumped arithmetically since its issue from the mind of Cthulhu traveling through our 3D spacetime toward Antarctica thousands of miles away.

  Every door leading into the COMINT control room—just like every door and hatch leading into the NSA facility as a whole—had been sealed from entry from outside for the past 30 hours and would remain sealed until the crisis was officially deemed to have passed, which was standard procedure in a security crisis situation like the Event. It was stocked with supplies for a three-year siege, kept at levels and continually adjusted to provide every person in the facility with 2,000 calories and 64 ounces of clean water per day. No one from outside the facility could get in until the security lockdown was lifted by order of the President or highest-ranking surviving member of the US chain of command. The concrete walls were thick, lined with six feet of lead, and of course the mountain surrounded them with a kilometer of rock at its thinnest, making the NORAD facilities impervious even to gamma radiation.

  Psionic waves, however, passed through it all like sunlight through a freshly washed kitchen window. Possibly like neutrinos, if neutrinos made you rip people’s faces off in frustration when you can’t get through a thick concrete wall lined with lead inside a mountain.

  That rendered moot all of the careful planning to keep its secure personnel well-fed and healthy, because what no one had anticipated was that the people inside would en masse try to get out during the siege protocol. Such prospective escapees would not able to get through numerous blast shields and other emergency barriers—until the electronic order from Washington opened them, it would be impossible even if one had 50 years to do it. But even if they could magically pass through the barriers, and even if they were not shot (and they were supposed to be shot, according to protocol) before attempting to unlock or bust through the outer doors, going outside in a doomsday situation was inadvisable. So it made sense that this was not much of a consideration by the survival planners inside NORAD and the NSA. No one would be getting out until the threat was officially considered over.

  That this was a flaw became immediately evident when the screaming started and all anyone wante
d was to escape the terror, the panic, shrieking inside them, making them rush to the north wall of whatever room or hall they were in when the wave struck, to do anything to get away from the psionic source thousands of miles to the south.

  These men and women, now clawing at their own eyes and smashing their heads against impenetrable bulkheads, had, since their first assignment to SIGINT, to submit to near-daily testing to make sure that they were the most psychologically stable—the sanest of the sane—personnel in the entire US Armed Forces. They had to be, since they were the soldiers and airmen not only with their eyes on other countries’ nuclear arsenals, but also with the keys to launch a world-ending nuclear attack within two minutes of confirming the order.

  These most-tested and repeatedly confirmed most psychologically stable enlisted men, officers, and civilians with the highest security clearance possible moved as one animal as they jumped back from their computers and activity monitors, fell over in their chairs, and scrambled to get away from conference tables all at the same time and with equal intensity. Screams filled every room and corridor, shrieks like someone was pressing a hand onto a sizzling frying pan.

  To a person, they slammed themselves against the walls facing north, some of them—men and women with slightly different brain chemistries from the rest—realizing that they could not get out this way and thus running for the doors to the room and then to the main doors, screaming even harder to keep the panic from overwhelming them. They had to contain the panic enough to allow them to adjust a few feet to the south—toward the horror—to get out of a room even though they almost lost control of their bladders from terror moving even an inch in that direction.

  But those with more average, completely healthy serotonin reuptake—no OCD, no repetitive thoughts, no ADD, brains in perfect chemical balance—were utterly unable to push aside the icy terror that was forcing them to flee in a straight line away from the psionic source, away from Cthulhu, reducing their faces to pulp and bloodying the north walls of control rooms, bathrooms, hallways, everywhere a barrier to due north stood before them … and everywhere to the north inside the complex ultimately led to a barrier, since the system of doors and hatches to exit the complex was located to the south.

  Whether they possessed average brain chemistry or something slightly different, their ends were the same.

  Their screams turned to mad laughter as they were struck by the impotence of trying to break through walls that would never budge, the horrific realization that they would not be able to get any farther away from the terror than they were right then. That was the moment when, one by one, tortured by blind fear and adrenaline-fueled psychosis, these once-sanest workers in the world set upon one another, gibbering and spitting and ripping out eyes—others’ and their own—from the stalk. By the time the crest of the psionic wave gave way to a trough and took away the irresistible impulse to flee or destroy, COMINT’s polished floor was slick with blood and ripped flesh and gelatinous eyeballs dragging their bloody optic nerves behind them like the hair of a drowned corpse.

  Those who survived in the monitoring room, those who could still see and had not passed out from the pain of cheeks and noses and ears being torn from their heads, stared blankly at nothing for hours. Some of the commanding officers who had been alone in their offices were able to come down even though their noses were broken and forehead ripped open, but the men and women under their command were hollowed out for the moment, completely PTSD’d.

  They would come around. They would regain their senses and first-aid kits would be emptied for the less serious injuries, trips to the fully-stocked NORAD mini-hospital for those who had no faces anymore so they could at least be bandaged and filled with morphine before infection set in and killed them. (Antibiotics were reserved in lockdown situations to those who would be able to recover enough to return to duty. Heartless, perhaps, but in non-crisis situations, badly injured personnel could be taken to a hospital. The on-site facility at NORAD had no way to restock during a lockdown crisis.)

  But those able to return to duty would do so, the officers were certain, and COMINT would continue its mission whether the lockdown was lifted or not. They could not have known that these were waves of energy, and that meant another crest would be coming soon.

  NSA SIGINT Data Collection Center

  15 minutes earlier

  It was against protocol to drink alcohol while on duty, but Tucker was just an Airman First Class and had never had to handle this kind of shit. He was the one who notified the officer on duty fifteen minutes after the event that all COMINT chatter in South America—anything being sent by one person to another person through the airwaves or through wires, whether copper or fiber-optic—had utterly ceased. He had brought this major bit of information to his superior officers, becoming more and more frightened by the implications of what the televisions in the break area showed, and then by what he heard from the far-off Chair Forcers about what was going on moment to moment in the South Pacific.

  He was freaking out. He had no other excuse for completely breaking the rules of being on duty, removing his flask from his foot locker and downing every last drop of the Pendleton whiskey that had formerly filled it to the top. He lay down on the break/rec room couch and after a few minutes had drifted off, aided by the liquor.

  Then the world shattered in his ears and made him jump from the couch, trying desperately to get his bearings.

  He had been blasted awake by a shriek unlike anything he had heard in his short military career, not to mention his twenty years of life before the Air Force. It was the shriek of a person boiling in oil. Of people.

  It was what screams would sound like in Hell. And the banging and scratching and frustrated moans made it even worse than what had occurred during the Event, because those were “only” cries of pain and shock. These sounds seemed purposeful, and when that purpose was denied, explosively angry beyond sense.

  In seconds, he was on his feet and running down the hall, joining just two of the SFs—where were the rest?—already in their protective gear and double-timing it toward the source of the bedlam.

  The heavily armed Security Force Airmen, as was protocol, burst into the monitor rooms housing the SIGINT station, with Tucker and a few other enlisted men bringing up the rear—to do what, they didn’t have any idea, but they were trained to help, whatever that “help” might entail.

  Tucker stopped dead in the doorway to the control room, frozen in place as he saw airmen he had worked next to for months shrieking and smashing their foreheads into the walls (actually, just one wall, the northern one opposite from the doorway he was standing in) and three of them running at the SFs, who pulled out their automatics but—to their everlasting credit—didn’t fire. Tucker was shocked at the security personnel’s presence of mind, but then realized that it was easy to see that the eyes of the berserk service members weren’t on the security force officers, but past them.

  They were looking past the SFs.

  They were looking at Tucker.

  “Jesus!” he yelped and ducked out of the doorway as the three crazed airmen flew by the rec room door and down the hall.

  He immediately stuck his head back out into the hallway and saw the trio run full speed into a fire door automatically bolted in the lockdown. Their combined impact didn’t open the door, but it did turn their faces into hamburger, and now blood was splashed across it as they backed up and rammed it again. Their hands pushed against the panic bar uselessly again and again and again. Blood smeared against the door and the bar and the wall and the floor.

  After a couple of minutes, they seemed to realize that this solid steel door was not going to open. So they turned, looked upon the others’ broken noses, split lips, broken jaws, and hanging flaps of forehead—and started tearing to pieces those already ruined faces.

  Now the SFs unloaded their weapons into them. All three fell in the hail of bullets that ricocheted off the fire doors after they traversed the airmen’s bodie
s, which were now in an oozing heap.

  “What the holy hell!” Tucker cried, and the SF flipped up her helmet’s Plexiglas face shield, shock on her face as well.

  “They were … pulling their eyes out, man,” the security officer stammered, and Tucker could smell on her breath what was no doubt on his own. “Master Sergeant, I’ve been drinking. Have you?”

  It was insubordination for a lowly E3 to ask something like this of a Master Sergeant four pay grades above him, but her shock and Tucker’s confession before the question mooted any indignation. “I was off duty. Me and Diamond and Brooks were having a few when this shit went down,” she said in a daze, and Tucker could hear the mayhem slowly ebbing behind him in the main data collection room. “The three SFs—you know, two males and a female, like our team—all started crawling the walls and screaming at the same time. Scared the living shit out of us, but when we heard the same thing happening down here, hell, we suited up and did what we’re trained to do.”

  Shooting your own people? Tucker thought, and it seemed that Master Sergeant Bell could read the flicker of the airman’s eyes and said, “They … they were attempting to exit a secure area during a lockdown.”

  “Exit it with their faces,” Diamond, her burly SF teammate, said as he and the mustachioed, medium-sized Brooks joined them, also looking dazed, like they had gone to their happy places for the moment.

  Big, medium, small. Like the Three Bears, Tucker thought, and didn’t even twitch a smile at the observation. Everything at that moment just was.

  “I never seen anybody pull out an eyeball before,” Brooks said, his blank expression belying the horrible images still in his visual memory. Slowly his focus returned and he looked at Tucker. “We had to shoot. Didn’t you see what …”

  Then Brooks’ gaze slipped off of him as he looked into the main room, into the abattoir. His mouth fell open and Tucker could smell the booze on his breath as well. Tucker caught Diamond’s attention. “We need to get all of the alcohol in the facility together, Master Sergeant.”