Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear

by Sean Hoade

  Doucette came back in and secured the hatch above him. “You got it, buddy—I’ll do the driving. Mitch, get him an MRE and a Coke, willya?” He reached the bottle of whiskey out to Horan.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Suit yourself, old boy, but don’t blame me when you go crazy and we have to kick you out of the tank,” Doucette said, and slid into the driver’s reclined seat under the front hull. “And off we go. I take the median so there’s fewer obstacles, but any car in our way is just gonna feel like a second’s worth of bump. You’ll sleep right through it, I guarantee.”

  Horan said “thank you” very clearly to Doucette and then to Sergeant Mitchum, who brought him food and drink and found him as good a spot as any to pass out. Mitchum, a tank communications guy by training but who originally was trained as a medic, cleaned and bandaged the eating man’s feet. “We’re all in this together, man,” he said to his patient and patted his leg. Then he took a swig from his own bottle, knowing only that the drunk—or just buzzed, really—didn’t get the crazies like all of the sober, but having no idea why.

  Fortunately, being in the Army, he was used to doing things he was told to usually without knowing the why behind them. He settled in as comfortably as he could, and swapped bullshit about what they were going to do when they got to Washington while Horan slept the entire six-hour journey, through the crushing of thousands of cars, vans, SUVs, and light trucks and a stop by the Letterkenny Army Base for a top-off of their 300-gallon gas tank.

  Mitchum thanked God that so many soldiers snuck booze with them on duty. It meant there were enough people without their faces ripped off to get them refueled and on their way to Washington. He took another swig and realized they’d need to knock down the wall of a liquor store for provisions at some point.

  And realizing how easily this first “realization” had come into his mind—an idea involving half a dozen felonies and court-martial–level violations of the UCMJ—Mitchell knew that this could very well be the end of the world. He didn’t know why, but he and Master Sergeant Doucette were of one mind on this. Laws, rules, anything that stood in the way of survival, these would be crushed under the treads of their tank like a thousand compact cars.

  The Office of the Vice President

  20 minutes later

  Vice President Algernon Steele had met with the Chief Justice and made sure of what the Constitution seemed to imply. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment was very clear, and even if this exact situation required a review by the Supreme Court, the Chief Justice assured Steele, the legality of the Vice President’s plan of action would surely be upheld.

  The Justice had barely left the room when there was a polite knock at his door. “Mister Vice President,” his main aide said after Steele acknowledged the knock, “there is someone here I think you will be very pleased to meet with.”

  Steele cocked an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah? It must be somebody pretty damned important to interrupt my—”

  After thanking the aide, in walked Kevin Berry.

  Steele couldn’t have been more shocked if Jesus had walked in and tried to sell him a magazine subscription. After a few seconds he said with an involuntary smile, “You have got to be kidding me. Well, if it isn’t Sergeant Cthulhu.” He eyed the metalwork on Berry’s collar. “Sorry—Captain Cthulhu.”

  “Mister Vice President,” Berry said solemnly, ignoring the slight, “I believe there is a problem with the President.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes, sir. She seems to have … embraced the idea of a literal sea monster. I don’t know how to say this ... President Hampton has gone off the rails.”

  “Oh, ho, boy, your timing is perfect.” Steele motioned to a chair across from his desk.

  “Sir, I never intended … this ... to happen. It’s like I planted a seed and now the thicket has grown beyond all sense. I think I’m responsible for driving the President into insanity.”

  Steele waved that off. “All you did was speak your mind. Out of turn and improperly, but someone would have suggested this to Judith eventually,” he said. “But while my staff is preparing the paperwork, why don’t you tell me what she’s doing?”

  Office of Science and Technology Policy, Washington, DC

  Event + 32 hours

  Secretary Norm Tyson and Undersecretary Bob Nye stood at opposite ends of the huge “scratch table” in what was formerly a lush conference room. They and the scientists they had brought together today did their best thinking while standing. And their best thinking had never been so urgently needed, not like the 30-year forecasts or decisions on the efficacy of new weapons they usually were called upon to deal with.

  No, all reports coming in to their office said that bands of violent, insane behavior were moving slowly across the country—indeed, the world—and gaining power as they traveled. There was a major on-foot exodus to the north. Not to anywhere in particular, just people lucky enough to be outside at the time of the wave’s reaching them running to the north, without exception. Their office was also receiving eyewitness testimony that those trapped inside a room without a northern exit were going berserk, bloodying themselves against walls before they turned and attacked one another, going after eyes and other parts of the face. A complete Grand Guignol on a scale never seen before.

  The President’s Office of Science and Technology now had all these reports at its fingertips, summaries being given by aides when necessary but some scientists unable to keep from reading the massively unsettling texts themselves. All of them took notice on the wall-size computer display that the bands were definitely moving north from the anomaly in the South Pacific as it moved toward Antarctica, and one band was just an hour or so away from reaching the Capital—and so all of them and the rest of the federal government, the President, Congress, everybody.

  These energy bands (soon to be dubbed “insanity waves” by the white-coated crew at OST) were obviously the crests of waves, and so far they had been lucky enough to sit in a trough. But that was coming to an end. Over the next hour or so, the violence and horror would increase in Washington until everyone there, too, was fleeing to the north or killing themselves and others by flaying away the parts that made them recognizable as humans.

  The scratch table was where diagrams could be laid out—not everybody wanted to use computer rendering all the time; some were still fans of butcher paper and grease pencils, others good old chalkboard and eraser. Each scientist called in had his or her own way of doing things, and those “things” were often ideas that no one had ever before devised.

  The map with the moving bands was on the wall monitor, but on the scratch table were diagrams and logarithmic estimates of the wave’s impact, while others countered with mathematical descriptions of an exponential impact. No one knew which was accurate, because the information they were getting from all over the world was being reported by those in the throes of violent insanity, by the inebriated, or by the schizophrenic suddenly tame.

  Being some of the world’s best thinkers, they took a very short time to see that a brain affected by alcohol or by chemical imbalances producing abnormal behavioral expressions was affected much less, if at all, by the insanity waves. “We have about fifty minutes, ladies and gentlemen,” Tyson said gravely, “before we need to get liquored up, maybe ingest psychoactive drugs, or we’ll be killing each other or running north with no idea where we’re going. So what do we know?”

  Doctor Betty Baker, one of the most respected authorities in cognitive science and a biologist known to be on the Nobel Prize shortlist, jumped in: “Is this a living thing, or is it some kind of static energy field? If it’s alive, perhaps we could kill it. If it’s just a radiating ball of energy, we could try to disrupt its integrity through electronic means or some kind of nuclear ordnance.”

  Some of the twelve assembled around the table blinked and smiled in surprise. They all thought she would talk about how they could try to understand the entity’s perceptions, etc., etc.—cognitive science
stuff. “Betts, you sound positively militant!” the eminent geologist Doctor Rob Lieb said with amusement.

  Baker smiled back and said, “It seems that there is a certain urgency to the situation.”

  “Just so,” Tyson said. “Betty’s given us the basic distinction we need to make: Is this a creature with some sort of agency, or is it a non-conscious natural phenomenon?”

  “I agree with the President. It certainly looks like Cthulhu, risen from the depths,” Lieb said. “How did they kill Cthulhu in the story?”

  “They didn’t,” several of the group responded simultaneously, making the group laugh in self-deprecation at the intense geekiness that produced scientists.

  Len Wills said, “As I remember, the ‘stars weren’t right’ after all, and so Cthulhu went back to sleep—”

  “People!” Tyson barked. “This isn’t literature or Defense Against the Dark Arts class. Give me some theories now, let’s go! Betty, just give us the cog-sci viewpoint since you started us off.”

  “Yes, sir,” Baker said, and took a deep breath before turning the now-famous still photo of the anomaly so the group could see it right-side up on the table and continuing: “Note that the anomaly seems to have three eyes.”

  “Assuming it is a living creature,” Lieb remarked.

  “Yes, for the time being let’s take that as a given.” She pointed to the three black circles on the anomaly’s head. “The creature, living cloud monster, Cthulhu—whatever you want to call it—seems to have three eyes. There’s one on each side as with familiar binocular animals, but this third apparent eye may reveal some very important information about the nature of this anomaly.”

  Undersecretary Nye said, “Even if it is alive, how do we know that’s an eye?”

  “We don’t know anything, Bob, unfortunately,” Tyson said. “The only things that have been able to approach it have been our drones. The Russians have lost aircraft piloted by humans, the Chinese have lost contact with a submarine. These insanity waves directly disable the minds of those who try to approach the source. But hold on to that—Betty, please continue. What about this third eye?”

  Baker acknowledged the secretary’s courtesy with a nod. “Doctor Nye, I believe it is a third eye for several reasons. First, it shares the appearance of the two apparent eyes on the … let’s call it a head for purposes of this discussion. All three are black and circular, like a shark’s eyes. And what I’m calling an “eye” on the top of the head doesn’t seem like the light-sensing spot on some snake’s heads, which aren’t eyes as such, just sensors that are an alert for shadows of predators like hawks approaching from above.

  “No, this third eye seems to be a functional eye, or at least as functional as the two we would normally call ‘eyes.’ But the fact that the creature—excuse me, the anomaly—has this apparent eye at an angle perpendicular to the line of the other eyes brings me to an possibly incredible conjecture.”

  The table waited in silence, watching her build up her determination.

  “I believe that this creature exists in a four-dimensional realm. It can see in four dimensions and it can move at will through a fourth dimension as we do through our familiar three.”

  All eleven of the other scientists plus Tyson and Nye erupted into immediate discussion with their fellows, words and numbers and concepts being batted back and forth until Georgetown mathematician Doctor Len Sibbald said loudly, “That is patently impossible. It has been proven mathematically that something from one dimension cannot enter a different dimension. So it must be some kind of static energy field.”

  “Except it’s not static,” Baker said. “It’s moving.”

  “Thirty minutes, people,” Tyson warned in a low voice. “Let’s leave the quibbles aside for now.”

  “Actually,” Harvard physicist Molly Gibson interrupted, “Len is quite right that an entity from a wholly separate dimension cannot enter another, but that is assuming we don’t live in a universe with four spatial dimensions. String theory calls for ten or eleven dimensions—not that they would be visible to us, but it’s not an impossibility if this creature, thing, whatever it is, exists in our universe, just in a higher dimension of our universe. It could be four-dimensional, five-dimensional, whatever, but as long as three of those dimensions are our familiar height, length, and depth—even if we never see them cross our three-dimensional ‘plane,’ if you will, it’s entirely acceptable mathematically.”

  Tyson nodded and said, “We’re going to run out of time, people—just one more thing for Betty and then we’ll get moving forward again: Why does the arrangement of its eyes suggest that it’s four-dimensional?”

  “I extrapolated from what we know about depth perception,” Baker said. “One eye allows the owner to see in two dimensions, but no depth. Two eyes gives the owner the ability to perceive three dimensions. Following that logic by analogy, a creature with a third, perpendicular eye should be able to see in four dimensions. And relying on Darwinian logic, it would be a completely unnecessary expense, biological-resource–wise, to develop the means to perceive four dimensions without needing it to actually function in four dimensions.”

  The room was silent except for a muttered, “Whoa.”

  After a moment Nye spoke up. “All right, we have a strong argument in favor of it being a living creature living in at least four dimensions, but which for some reason has entered our three-dimensional space. Who can argue the other side, that this is some kind of naturally occurring energy field?”

  One hand went up, hesitantly. It belonged to Li Clarke, a Chinese physicist who did not speak often in meetings … but when she did, everybody listened. And so it was again. Once she had everyone’s attention, she said in her quiet, accented voice, “This is not energy field. This is living thing with enormous brain. Enormous brain.”

  She had the rapt attention of the greatest collection of scientific minds in the country. They stood absolutely silent, awaiting her explanation.

  “The energy that went out in big Event yesterday was like … turning on iPod with earbuds already in and it’s on full volume. It what happen when the anomaly passed into this dimension. Now, as it move, it creates not ‘insanity wave,’ but psionic wave. Mind wave.”

  Li looked around at the stunned, disbelieving faces. “These wave affect only complex human brain. Animals not affected at all, you see. We humans getting telepathic information from anomaly, but our complex and sensitive brain can’t handle.”

  “Telepathy? Psionic waves?” Sibbald repeated. “These are not real, Li. No experiment has ever provided a scintilla of evidence—”

  “No, listen!” she interrupted. “Human brain not have enough electrical power to affect other brain, that why human ESP experiment always fail. This creature has enormous head with enormous brain—it like a huge transmitter and humans are receivers.”

  “And what might this transmitter be sending to our brains?”

  Li hesitated, clearly measuring her response, but then went for broke: “It saying we can obey it, or we can die. People get this message not in words, but as adrenaline and panic signal.”

  Nye cleared his throat and said gently, “And the drunk or insane?”

  The Chinese scientist shrugged. “If brain not working at full efficiency or working different than most brain, maybe transmission is unsuccessful. We only know that it work, not how it work. We maybe should take precaution soon,” she said, and everyone looked at the clock on the wall. They had twenty to thirty minutes at most.

  “So we should get drunk?” Nye said incredulously. “We don’t keep booze in this office.”

  Li Clarke shrugged. “Then maybe we go unconscious? Let the wave pass?”

  “Or go insane,” Betty Baker muttered, seeming surprised at her own words. “Not insane insane, just a little mad.”

  “Is that something one can do in a temporary manner?” Tyson asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never tried it. But unless someone can get us a large amoun
t of alcohol in the next twenty minutes—with the streets filled with wrecks and soon-to-be-running-amok crazies—or figure how to knock all of us out for a set period of time. Remember, anyone left awake in however many minutes would irresistibly be forced to run north or turn savagely violent, and this room doesn’t have a northern exit.”

  They all looked at the clock again. Even though the moment of the crest of the “psionic wave” was still at least 15 minutes off, they all could feel a definite urge to move to the north—or, more precisely, to move away from the south—an undeniable anxiety about remaining standing where they were.

  “We have to decide,” Tyson said, “How would you even do that, make yourself just a little mad?”

  “Mercury fumes!” Baker said immediately. “Inhale mercury fumes and your brain goes sideways for a period, several hours at least, enough for us to survive the psionic wave. Inhale too much and it may never work the same way again. Inhale more than that and you’ll die.”

  “Mad Hatter’s Disease, the uncontrollable shakes and schizophrenia-like mental disorder,” Sibbald said. “Of course, that was after months or years of exposure. A quick exposure would probably … um, probably not give you that?”

  Panicked looks around the room. To these people, their brains were everything.

  Baker noticed this and nodded in sympathy. “I know, I know. But we have mercury in the basement of this building, in the laboratory thermometers. We can bring it to temperature and be inhaling it within five minutes.”

  Five of the scientists simply walked out of the room, immediately turning toward the north exit as they entered the hallway. They would be madly running in a few minutes, possibly screaming as they tried to escape what was at the southern end of the world, but this was their choice ahead of putting their brains—which each had worked all his or her life to cultivate—at risk.

  That left Norm Tyson, Bob Nye, Betty Baker, Li Clarke, Molly Gibson, Ron Lieb, and—surprisingly—Len Sibbald remaining. The formerly dismissive mathematician noted their expressions and said, “Everything that’s happening right now is impossible. Other dimensions breaking into this one, psionic waves, telepathy, monsters from science fiction invading Earth. Logical thought, even the best science, by definition cannot help us with the impossible. So I vote with you all—we must save ourselves the only way plausible in the time we have left, by inhaling volatile mercury to induce a transient mental confusion.”