by Sean Hoade
His hand over his mouth in horror, Tucker almost leaped when Master Sergeant Diamond put his big hand on the airman’s shoulder. Diamond took in the AFRTS broadcast on the big screen, which now showed footage from various stationary cameras at military installations outside the blast zone. These automatically uplinking video stations were close enough to DC to capture the blast, the whiteout, the shock waves, and finally the surreal image of a blooming mushroom cloud.
Before that cloud was fully dissipated, the second blast came, even more powerful than the first.
“World War Three,” a woman’s voice—Bell—said from behind Tucker and Diamond. Brooks was awake and present now as well, his eyes tearing up at the sight of Washington being obliterated from the face of the Earth.
“The red light is still on,” Bell said after the loop of footage had stopped and the announcer’s face was back on the screen.
Brooks shook himself out of his daze and said, “Holy shit.”
“Isn’t it supposed to be on during national crisises?” Diamond said, a better security force member than a thinker.
Diamond found himself staring at the red light above the double doors as well, and went into training mode, since teaching new SFs was his job when he wasn’t on duty as security as well. “The light is red. That means every blast shield is down with its bolts doing ten feet into the ground and into each bulkhead. Every door is electronically sealed. No one could possibly get to us in here; we’re completely, hermetically sealed. We have air filtration systems, food products, and water for years to come, if needed.”
Bell’s face fell as she said, “There’s no one alive in Washington to give the all-clear. We’re stuck in here forever, until rain and wind wear away the mountain a million years from now. Aren’t we? Aren’t we, Brooks?”
The mustachioed SF just nodded. “No way in or out,” he said robotically.
“Can’t we reach anybody?” Tucker said, not knowing the full protocols the way that the SFs had to. “We’ve got all these ears and no mouth?”
Bell almost smiled at that. “Who do you want to call? We’ve got two-way connections to anywhere that hasn’t been melted like DC Anybody who has a radio, cell phones, landline, whatever—they can hear what we broadcast, even if they can’t respond.”
“Can we tap into the drone feed, Tucker? Maybe someone at Nellis is still alive and watching the monster or whatever it is. We need all the information we can get,” Brooks said, leaning over the airman’s station.
“Need it for what?” Diamond muttered, to himself but also to the others in the room. “Washington is gone, guys. Unless the President and the generals and shit got out of there, there’s nobody who could unlock our doors even if they had the codes, which they don’t. We are fucked. We are stuck in here forever and we are fucked.”
“Speaking of that,” Bell said, “we ain’t playing ‘Adam and Eve’ here. I’m married and I’m not having sex with anybody else, whether or not my husband is alive.” Her left eye gave a twitch so subtle it was hardly noticeable. But it was noticeable.
“Bell? Come on, we’re not rapists in here,” Diamond, the biggest and strongest of any of them, said with his palms facing her in the ‘nothing to fear here’ position.
“It’s not that,” Brooks said, putting his hand on Bell’s shoulder now. “Her husband is stationed at the Pentagon.”
There was nothing to say, so they said nothing.
“I’ve got the drone signal. They must have it circling the Pole.” He put it up on the main screen, moving the AFRTS broadcast to a secondary monitor.
“And there’s our monster,” Brooks said. The drone imposed latitude and longitude lines on the image, and the walking glow-fog creature, this tentacled and winged three-eyed monstrosity, this “Cthulhu,” was very near where all the longitude lines converged.
But even as he watched the lumbering entity on the big screen, as he read the information scrolls and saw the footage loops and shell-shocked announcers on the smaller screen, Tucker was thinking There has to be a way out of here. He knew it was safer inside the facility than outside in a time of crisis, but he would be damned if he was going to watch this war as a spectator and, even more importantly, he was not going to rot away and go insane inside that impenetrable mountain.
There has to be a way out, his mind insisted. But he knew there wasn’t, and he wished that he had been one of those cut down by the SFs. He didn’t have the guts to kill himself, so they should have done it. He should’ve acted crazy and attacked them. They would definitely have gone rock ‘n’ roll on his ass then.
He espied from the corner of his eye the 9mm pistols the three of them carried on their persons. What would he have to do to get them to kill him?
There has to be a way out.
Nellis AFB
Event + 40 hours
Inside the glorified shed that housed the “chair force” operating and monitoring the UAVs, only one airman remained alive. He watched the Armed Forces Television broadcast and he saw that the drone—which he had put in a stable loop around the South Pole, where it had been obvious Cthulhu was headed—showed the creature almost at its destination.
He didn’t want to know what new horrors would happen once it reached its goal.
So, after he made sure the drone would keep sending video until it ran out of fuel, the last airman at Nellis pulled the Beretta 9mm from his dead SF’s holster, put the barrel in his mouth, and blew his brains out.
The South Pole
Event + 40 hours
The glowing, foggy herald form of Cthulhu reached the southernmost tip of the planet. Having cleared the path for this matter point, it slipped back into the fourth dimension, where it would then dissipate. Just after the last bit had vanished from the three-dimensional world, thousands of nuclear-tipped missiles reached the airspace near the pole and unleashed their hellfire. The explosions were staggered slightly because none of the five countries’ missiles had originated at exactly the same place or same time, giving the tens, then hundreds, then thousands of warheads a syncopation of destruction.
Again and again and again huge plumes of radioactive clouds rose from the barren plateau, the measureless heat pushing the atmosphere back and then spreading ruin from the other direction as the hot vacuum collapsed. Again and again and again.
Even almost 10,000 megatons of firepower could only melt a small amount of the three-mile-deep ice underneath the pole. But the entire continent was now a radioactive badlands, a huge radius where humans could not go for tens of thousands of years to come. Antarctic animals were to a being dead now: whales, penguins, seals, fish of every kind were boiled alive where they swam or were crushed in the nuclear explosions that rent the air, dissolved the surface of the ice, and compressed the water into concussive waves.
To those entities folding their spacetime dimension as they traveled through countless matter points, however, this would prove no deathly place.
Chapter 6: The Invasion
US 1, south of Alexandria, Virginia
Event + 41 hours
The scientists who could see nothing, hear nothing, and, because of the burns to the surviving member’s body, feel almost nothing, could sense the presence of other humans and most of all the powerful source of their psionic “carrier wave,” the entity called Cthulhu.
They could sense—but not identify, of course—every other person in the world. If the scientists had wanted the data and worked around the clock, they could have counted every living human on planet Earth in less than two weeks. But they didn’t need that data.
They sensed it when tens of millions of sentient lifeform signs vanished in Beijing and Moscow and Washington, DC
They could sense the reduction in size and strength of Cthulhu at the South Pole as the herald form finished clearing the path of this matter point. They felt it disappear, but to where they could not tell.
And they felt it when dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of new sentient beings poure
d forth from the spot at which Cthulhu had slipped back into the fourth dimension. Like a burst water main, a riot of small psionic sources flooded out and out. And among these smaller entities, one massive beacon of terrible magnitude appeared in the scientists’ collective mind.
The scientists’ mind had no way of telling whether this was happening at that moment or if it were some prophecy of the future. Even if they could have, it wouldn’t have mattered: The body and its fivefold mind screamed in agony, screamed because it could not look away from the overwhelming horror no matter which way they pointed the body’s ruined eyes.
Smoky Mountains National Park, Tennessee
Event + 41 hours
Former President Judith Hampton, NSA Chief Jack Patterson, Marine Major Kevin Berry, Pilot Fred Fisk, and the two silent NSA men sat at a wooden picnic table near where they had touched down in the helicopter. The sun was rising and they drank coffee while listening to Armed Forces Radio tell them of the destruction of Washington and the Communist capitals.
Then the radio service broke into its own news report to tell of the titanic concentration of nuclear explosions at the South Pole meant to destroy the Cthulhu entity, the force of the roughly 6,400 bombs going off at about the same time slowing the spinning of the earth by a fraction of a second. They could not report on whether the anomaly was destroyed by the onslaught, but it was widely agreed that nothing could survive that kind of concentrated nuclear attack.
“Is it over?” Berry said, fearing the answer.
“Let’s say it is,” Patterson said. “Our nation’s capital is gone. The way I’ve been figuring the survivor ratio, there’s maybe one million Americans left alive after the initial Event and the destructive psionic waves. Most of those people remaining alive are either alcoholics or mentally disturbed.”
“Or believers,” Hampton added. Her face was streaked with tears.
Patterson and Berry shared a look that said We already covered ‘mentally disturbed.’
“We at the NSA had filing cabinets and entire hard drives dedicated to options we might have after an OPERATION FATCHANCE-level disaster. But that’s all under the radioactive slag heap of Washington, DC now.”
“So what do we do now? Is that it? Is the world going back to the Stone Age?”
“What we do now is up to the President,” Patterson said.
Hampton wiped her eyes and said, “I resigned, Jack. Steele is President now.”
“If Algernon Steele is alive—which I highly doubt—then he still has nothing official making his case for assuming the mantle of the Presidency. You are our President, and you need to decide what we do next.”
The men around the picnic table all nodded tactfully.
“We killed God,” Hampton said, weeping anew. “Where do you go after you k—” She stopped speaking as if a phone line had been cut. Her face lost its pallor and the tears that leaked from her eyes now were tears of joy.
Oh, hell, Patterson grumbled to himself. “Madam President, we need to decide—”
“He is alive! Cthulhu! He and his slaves are ALIVE!” she shouted and leapt up from the wooden bench. “We must go to Him! He needs his prophet!”
Patterson put his face in his hands. The NSA agents and Fisk shrugged at one another. Berry knew what she was talking about—they all did, really, but faked denseness, confusion, anything to keep her from dragging them south to Cthulhu and His … did she say slaves?
“That’s a direct order, gentlemen! He is resurrected! He is risen in the south and we must go to him now! Berry, collect our things! Take down the tent! Fisk, get the helicopter started—move your asses, people!”
“Judy, what are we going to when we get there—if we can get there?” Patterson asked, standing now but otherwise not moving to follow any orders. “If something has even happened? You’re not a psychic!”
“If I’m not psychic, then how do I know that he has risen and grown to Cyclopean proportions? If I’m not psychic, how do I know that his eternal servants will find unbelievers and eat them alive?”
“That doesn’t sound like anything we should be wanting to go toward.”
Hampton stepped up to the Major General and said in her trademark stern tone, “Are you not listening to me? I have been anointed as prophet to Cthulhu, the most powerful Being ever known. You know for a fact what He is and that He exists, Jack—your buddy Berry told me about the self-hypnosis—so you know he must be worshiped and his gospel spread anywhere humans are allowed to survive. So walk out into the woods and become a mountain man, or get thee behind me, asshole! I alone have the Word to save the world. And I am, as you just said, still the President. Whichever you prefer, prophet or President, let’s assume that I know what I’m talking about, all right? Now stay and help or I’ll have my agent shoot you through the heart.”
“Cthulhu will make a slave of you,” Patterson said calmly. “Maybe of all of us.”
“I can think of nothing more glorious,” Hampton said, and she remained standing there, waiting for him to make his decision.
Interstate 95 near Fort Lee, Virginia
Event + 41 hours
They got the tank gassed up with the specialized jet fuel it required and traveled just a few clicks south in order to rest. All of them were exhausted to the point of collapse, and the tank commander, Doucette, drove the Abrams to an I-95 rest stop, where they would sleep most of the day, he hoped. He was in the most comfortable seat in the tank there in the cockpit, but as tired as everyone was, anywhere seemed comfortable enough. Mitchum had been in tanks so long he could sleep sitting up, and he was doing exactly that.
“I’m following a bloody prophet,” Martin slurred and pointed at Horan Marmalado. “There is no God, but there is a Cthulhu. O, the irony.”
“Great Cthulhu cured me.”
“Of what? Being a nutter? Sorry, mate, you’re still a frickin’ nutter if you think Cthulhu is going to reward you for glorifying His name. If you get within a thousand miles of the Old One, your former schizophrenia is going to look like your affliction was a hand-washing ritual. Your mind will be in tatters. Trust me, I know Cthulhu.”
“Ha!” Horan scoffed. “You’re not even a believer.”
“Do you know who I am? Do you know what I did for a living until … oh, about two days ago?”
“I didn’t know anything for years and years until two days ago.”
“Just so,” Martin said, and he could feel a certain pleasing pompousness come into his voice. “While you were bouncing around whatever cell they stuck you in at the madhouse, I was flying around the world as the world’s most prominent skeptic. Do you know what a skeptic is, Horan?”
“Indeed, I do. Do you know what a boor is, Martin?”
That made Martin laugh. “Okay, sorry. Well, I am Martin Storch, the world’s most influential atheist and skeptic. I expose frauds, speak truth to the brainwashed and frightened, write books about reality and impossibility in the universe, and more. But I am also the top living authority on one H.P. Lovecraft. That is why the President needed my assistance.”
“The President, as you call her, is a murderess and wants others to murder for her beliefs. She calls herself a prophet but does not even understand what Great Cthulhu wants, how He wants to be worshiped. I will call myself the top living authority on Cthulhu. Ha!”
“But there is much more to H.P. Lovecraft than Cthulhu. Things that could help us as we try to …” He was going to say fight Him, but realized just soon enough that his tankmate would not like that very much. So he finished with “... find Him and serve Him.”
Horan did like that, apparently having forgotten that Martin had just been saying they shouldn’t get within a thousand miles of the Old One, and smiled as he nodded. But then he knit his brow knotted and said, “Who is H.P. Lovecraft?”
Martin stared at Horan for a few seconds before lying down as well as he could in the loader’s bay. “Say goodnight, Gracie.”
“Goodnight, Gr—” Horan star
ted, but he was cut off by the shrill emergency radio transmission signal, which immediately shook the two soldiers awake. Everyone in the tank turned to listen to the words following the signal:
ALL UNITED STATES MILITARY PERSONNEL ARE ORDERED TO REPORT TO MINOT AIR FORCE BASE IN MINOT, NORTH DAKOTA IMMEDIATELY. IF YOU NEED TRAVEL ASSISTANCE, USE MILITARY BAND TO REQUEST PICKUP AND TRANSPORT. ANY MILITARY PERSONNEL NOT REPORTING TO MINOT AIR FORCE BASE WITHIN 48 HOURS WILL BE CONSIDERED AWOL, A CAPITAL OFFENSE IN WARTIME.
REPEAT: ALL UNITED STATES MILITARY PERSONNEL ARE ORDERED TO REPORT …
Doucette groaned as he lay back in the tank cockpit. “I guess I know where we’re going when we wake up.”
Mitchum said, “Minot? An Air Force base? All the way up in North fucking Dakota? That’s in the wrong direction, anyway—didn’t Marmalado here say Cthulhu was in the south?”
“Mitch, think. That’s probably why they want all living personnel to head north.”
“Wartime?” Horan said as if he were hearing the word for the first time. “Who are we going to war against?”
“Who do you think, man? Who else would it be but … um …” Mitchum trailed off, being stopped short by the writer guy making the “cut” movement and then twirling his finger by his own temple to indicate that the sergeant was just about to upset a very crazy person in a very small space. “Fucking Chinese. They blew up Washington. I mean, probably they were the ones.”
Horan’s eyes lit up. “We can entreat Great Cthulhu to fight the yellow men alongside us!”
Doucette groaned again and said sharply, “What we’re going to do is sleep, get up, shower, shit, and shave, and get our asses moving north to Minot.”