by Sean Hoade
“But Mister President,” the junior senator from Virginia said almost too quietly to be heard, “what if they plan to do the same to us?”
Steele laughed. “It would take at least two direct strikes right on the center of Washington to get that hellfire down this deep. My fellow Americans, we’re safe as safe can be.”
Interstate 95, just south of Stafford, Virginia
Event + 39 hours
Once they got past the demolition derby that was the DC Beltway, the crew and passengers of the M1 Abrams Heavy Battle Tank saw pretty smooth sailing as they traveled south, putting sixty miles between themselves and Washington. They’d have to refuel in a few more hours, but doing what the madman wanted was a top priority, even if they didn’t have anywhere better to go anyway.
Mitchum and Doucette knew that with not enough people manning the utilities and supply logistics systems for food and other necessities, things were going to turn very ugly for the world’s survivors of Cthulhu’s attack, and quick. They had MREs as well as 3,000-calorie nutrition bars in the tank, enough for five people. They had four, including Martin Storch, who was slowly coming awake to see the situation he had somehow gotten into, with a gun trained on him and two booze-drenched soldiers crushing cars underneath them at a breathtaking rate of speed.
Oh, booze! Martin thought, and pulled the Johnnie Walker red out of his voluminous jacket pocket. It was unbroken. Another miracle. Cthulhu be praised. He opened it and took a big swig. It wasn’t in the same league as Black Label, but it would do just fine.
“May I ask,” he said to Horan Marmalado, “why you are pointing a gun at me?”
“You support the false prophet.”
“I do? That seems damned unwise.”
“You want President Hampton to kill people as sacrifices.”
“That is not true. She killed my best friend. If she is a prophet, I’ll take the loss.” He snickered at his own wit and took another swig.
Horan hesitated and said cautiously, “Do you support the true prophet, then?”
“I assume you are referring to yourself?”
“I am the prophet of the Old One.”
“That’s what I said. No, I’m a big believer in whatever you are preaching. My goodness, yes,” Martin said and took another large gulp of the Scotch whiskey. “Ïa! Ïa! Cthulhu fthagn! Right?”
Amazed, Horan put the Beretta back into its holster. “You do believe!”
“You have no idea.”
Horan moved toward the front and gave Sergeant Mitchum the gun and holster. “Thank you for letting me use this,” he said.
“Uh, sure,” Mitchum said, snatching it away quickly and exchanging yet another look of What the fuck is going on? with his tank commander. “Glad to be of service.”
“So, O Prophet, what’s our plan?” Martin asked, the warm alcohol haze slightly soothing the throbbing in his head, where the Army spade had made contact with it.
“Plan?” Horan said. “The plan is that we go to Great Cthulhu and—”
He was cut off by the loudest sound he had ever heard, and he was inside a tank. A few seconds later, the 74 tons of M1 Abrams was shoved from behind as if a giant’s hand had spanked it in the ass and it got so hot inside that it hurt to touch the bulkheads. “Staff Sergeant! Deuce!” Mitchell yelled, sweat already running into his eyes after thirty seconds, too stunned even to use his friend’s name. “Jesus, what’s happening out there?”
Doucette checked the aft camera monitor and said with a mouth numb with shock, “I think they just nuked DC, man. There’s a mushroom cloud going a thousand feet in the air.”
“Great Cthulhu calls us south,” said Horan Marmalado in an airy, ecstatic voice. “He is saving us—saving me—for a greater purpose.”
Another miracle, Martin thought with a smirk. This is getting to be a habit with you, Big Green.
Then a cacophonic blast even louder than the first erupted, rendering everyone inside the tank momentarily deaf with tinnitus and made the outer bulkheads too hot to touch, Doucette looked at his monitor again.
Mitchum said, “What, did they nuke it twice?”
Pale and suddenly dry of mouth, Doucette could only nod his head.
Mitchum looked back to the crazy man and the drunken writer, then turned to watch a second mushroom cloud bloom on the monitor. “What now, man?”
“We keep going south. We got a prophet on board who just got us out of DC in the nick of time. If he can’t keep us safe, then there ain’t no safety to keep.”
30 miles from Washington DC, altitude 800 feet
Event + 39 hours
Major General Jack Patterson, head of the National Security Agency, did not accompany the new President, military and policy chiefs, and odd members of Congress down into the subterranean bunker of the UDCC. He and his closest advisors as well as Marine Major Kevin Berry, all of them self-hypnotized against the psionic waves, got to an NSA helicopter two blocks from the White House and lifted off with one of his men at the controls. Patterson examined a hand-held electronic device and called to the pilot, “South! Get down close to US 1, Federal Highway.”
“Why south?” Berry asked against the loud chopper rotors and the wind, knowing he would probably not get an answer and was on the helicopter only by the sheerest luck.
Surprising him, Patterson turned the electronic gadget so Berry could see the red blip over a map of southern DC. The red blip was, in fact, on Federal Highway.
“What is that?”
“It’s Judith Hampton. We put a chip in our commanders-in-chief like you do a new puppy, and for the same reason! We’re going to pick her up and get her the hell out of Dodge.”
“But she’s not the President anymore!”
Patterson laughed at Berry’s naïveté. “Son, we’re sworn to protect our ex-Presidents, too. She’s exposed and in a lot of danger running down the street at midnight.”
“But she killed that guy, live on the Internet!”
“I don’t have to explain anything I do to you, son. Besides, you’re the one that got her started on all this Cthulhu business. You’re the one who drove her crazy!”
That may have been the reason Berry didn’t to see her again, especially after he came to see she was right after all. “Except she’s not crazy, right? OPERATION FATCHANCE—it’s all true.”
“It’s all true and President Hampton may be crazy. But that doesn’t—” Patterson cut himself off and pointed out a spot on the ground to the pilot, Fisk, who swooped them down. One of his men slid the helicopter door open the instant they touched the ground and called out, “Madam President!”
A disheveled and dirty Judith Hampton stared at them in disbelief.
The two NSA agents hopped out and guided her into the helicopter, which immediately took to the skies again.
“Madam President? Judy? Are you all right?” Patterson asked as solicitously as he had ever asked anyone anything.
Hampton took a huge gulp from the water bottle one of the men handed to her. “South. We need to go all the way south.”
“That’s what we’re doing, okay? We’re putting Washington behind us, look.”
She glanced at the lights falling away, and collapsed in exhaustion against the bulkhead. “I shouldn’t have quit, Jack. I could’ve helped—”
“We’ll get it all sorted out, Judy,” Patterson interrupted.
“No—I could’ve helped bring so many more people to Cthulhu. I am His prophet, and I had the biggest bully pulpit in the world. We must go see Him ourselves, Jack.”
Oh, good Christ. Patterson was grateful that he had his mouth as locked down as the NSA itself.
“How far can helicopters go without stopping?”
“Not quite that far. But don’t worry—this is a fast machine. We’ll find a safe place and—”
WHOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMP
An unholy blast of white-hot air pushed the chopper forward so hard that they all thought they’d lose a rotor of even the whole tail of
the aircraft, then yanked it backwards as the vacuum created by the nuke collapsed. But being thirty miles from DC already, they were able to maintain altitude and keep the machine intact. Then the sound reached them, and every one of them of them screamed, General or President, Major or NSA staff member. The only way they knew they were still alive and flying was the fact that they could hear their own screams. After a few minutes, Hampton had passed out from exhaustion and Berry was unconscious as well.
Patterson inched forward and spoke into his helmet microphone, “Fisk, Find a clear patch and touch down somewhere in the Smoky Mountains Park. We need to rest where no one is looking for us or the President. We all need to rest while we figure out what we’re supposed to do next with our magical prophet here.”
“Has she gone crazy, sir?”
“I’m afraid not, Fisk. Very afraid not.”
US 1, aka “Federal Highway,” south of Alexandria, VA
Event + 39 hours
The five scientists looped their arms together and made a circle … or not: This is like a five-molecule Cyclopentane ring! Tyson thought, but that was quickly met with How about we just call it a pentagon? from Sibbald, the irony of such a shape name being lost on none of the government scientists. They each faced outward, the better to keep their new psion-detecting sense covering all 360 degrees around them. They could sense living humans; they could sense Cthulhu far away; they could read one another’s minds—in fact, they were starting to feel like one mind with five different voices—and they could feel tactile sensations and smell and taste.
But they were all utterly blind and deaf. Their polygonal shape made for awkward movement (although they each got the hang of walking sideways or backwards pretty quickly) but it kept them a coherent unit when one member would bump up against a ruined car or feel the ground fall away into a ditch and be able to stop the group almost immediately.
They went south, walking as a ring, using the presence of other humans—not that there were a lot of them, and what there were usually were not moving at all, probably close to death—to keep themselves moving in the right direction. It was extremely slow-going, but each member of the ring was dazzled by their second sight that they were well occupied in just taking it all—
Holy!—shit!—tā māde!—Jesus!—AIEEEEEEEEE the voices in their heads all screamed in unison, their lungs and throats and mouths screaming with them as what felt like a giant blowtorch burning every inch of exposed skin into blisters. Their arms unlooped and they fell to the scorching ground and screamed anew.
Seconds later they were lifted by the force of a hurricane wind and slammed into crashed cars, swept along the broiling asphalt, or thrown against a tree. Seconds after that, the enormous power of the wind lifted them again and threw them in the opposite direction, although by that point the scientists were so beaten up they barely noticed.
Burned to the second degree, arms dislocated, bones broken, the former Cyclopentane ring’s human molecules were scattered over several hundred square feet. Even if they had been able to see or hear one another, not all of them would have been able to move to join their fellows.
Then it happened again, and every one of them died except for the one who had gotten caught in the fork of a tree by the first blast and was shielded by the tree—now smoking and shredded on the side opposite from what couldn’t have been anything other than two nuclear blasts.
Betty Baker couldn’t see. She couldn’t hear. All she could feel was serious burns over her exposed flesh. All she could smell or taste was smoke and burning metal. And now the only living humans she could sense were to the south, far to the south.
She couldn’t hear the thoughts of her fellow psychonauts or whatever the hell they were supposed to be. She called to them in her mind: Norm? Molly? Li? Len?
We are here, Betty sounded in her mind, one voice that included the frequencies of all her colleague’s mental voices.
Here? “Betty” thought. Where is here? Why can’t I feel your presence like I can all the other living humans?
All of us are dead but one, the combined voice thought. We are dead but dreaming.
Dreaming?
It is hard to explain. None of us will understand until we explain it.
What? “Betty” thought, sounding even to herself tremulous and frightened beyond anything she had ever known. This is some trick of a damaged brain.
Nǐ néng míngbái wǒmen zài shuō shénme? It was definitely Chinese-sounding phonemes, even though the conglomeration of mental voices was made up of more than just Li Clarke’s.
I can make up gibberish fake Chinese as well as anyone, “Betty” thought. I’m a cognitive scientist, remember? I don’t—
The next words were recognizable as Molly Gibson’s, but her voice was only part of the whole. We are a resonant standing wave in your mind. The five of us, because of the madness we induced and the presence of the enormously strong psionic wave from Cthulhu, remain in a sympathetic vibration. When we think, you hear our voices mixed. When you think back at us, we hear your voice mixed with the rest.
Sharing a mindspace created us as a holographic unit, they thought in Len Sibbald’s words. Any part of it contains the whole. We are all in one mind now. You feel separate but you are not.
Norm Tyson’s words came next: Each one of us feels that he or she is the sole survivor of what just happened to our ring. We can’t know who really is alive, because we have no apparatus to sense that anymore. I feel myself, alive. Injured and burned but alive.
As do I, each voice sounded.
But I can feel my body, “Betty” thought. My hair is singed, but I can feel it. I can feel my moustache—wait, what?
As a group, it laughed in one another’s minds.
There’s no way to know which of us survived, the mind said. In a way, all of us did. We are a holographic ‘it’ now, an isomorphic ‘we,’ residing in the survivor’s body and mental substrate. One of us knows this from Lovecraft:
That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange aeons even death may die.
It felt happy at remembering the quotation, which was of course all too apt, and what aeon could be stranger than the one it found itself in right now?
It said, It is quieter now that we are one. We can see the people clearer. We can see the herald form of Cthulhu setting into the ice like a polar sun. We can see what comes next.
What comes next? it asked itself. What do we mean, ‘what comes next’?
Look, it said. Look and see. It is the future.
We can’t sense anything but minds. How is that the future? it asked.
We perceive only the relations of minds to minds. We do not have context or meaning, just what is perceived.
How do we even know this? it begged. But it did know it. It knew everything except what any of it meant. So many people running north, away from the horror.
The legs of the survivor walked south, keeping to the extreme right of Federal Highway, using the curb there—and the grassy edge when it walked out of the city—to keep it on the road.
We must continue. Whatever body this mind is in, we must push it south. We lie dead but dreaming. But to the living and awake, we shall be as an oracle.
NSA SIGINT Data Collection Center, COMINT division
Event + 39 hours
A1C Tucker and the Security Force Master Sergeants Bell, Brooks, and Diamond spent hours upon hours carrying bodies and shreds of skin and eyeballs and dropping them down the incinerator chute. They spent more hours taking fewer than a dozen technically-still-living personnel and placing them on the officers’ quarters, on the relatively soft beds. None of them was conscious or could be roused by the four survivors, so they at least tried to make the dying men and women as comfortable as they could.
Then they swept up the tinier bits of flesh and mopped until the floor shined. Down the incinerator chute all of that went as well, including the broom, dustpan, and mop.
Then they drank so
me more, and finally they collapsed onto their own bunks and passed into gloriously dreamless sleep, a sleep that was broken only for Airman Tucker, who was trained to recognize the emergency signal on COMINT. It was one-way, no reply requested or even possible on that frequency.
The repeated whooooop roused Tucker within 30 seconds, after he had been asleep just a couple of hours. He got his bearings—he was in his bunk, the facility was in complete lockdown, almost everyone was dead—and then hurried to the monitor bearing the emergency message. A click of the mouse stopped the alarm, but Tucker’s hand shook when he read the words on his screen:
NUCLEAR ATTACK ON WASHINGTON DC
CITY BELIEVED LOST
STATUS OF POTUS, VPOTUS, SCOTUS, CONGRESS UNKNOWN
ICBMS EN ROUTE TO ANOMALY AT SOUTH POLE
NO OTHER INFORMATION AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME
Immediately Tucker turned to check the lockdown signal above the metal doors that surrounded the heart of COMINT. The light was still red.
“We’re trapped,” he said out loud, and hit several buttons to put the Armed Forces Television Service on the big screen. AFRTS had headquarters in Maryland, but Tucker was sure that it would have been lost when the nuclear strike—Jesus Christ, a nuclear strike!—hit the capital. Fortunately, as a COMINT staffer, he knew that the actual broadcasting came out of Riverside in California. If there was anyone still alive over there, they would definitely—
The channel was found and the screen was a panic of scrolling text describing how many were estimated dead, how many megatons were exploded in the double attack, how American missiles were headed for Moscow and Beijing as well as the South Pole to destroy the “anomaly.” The talking head onscreen—someone Tucker had never seen before, which made him wonder if the usual announcers were dead from the anomaly’s radiation—said that no other land-based ICBMs or missiles from Russian or Chinese ships, submarines, or aircraft had been detected as fixed on United States targets.