Franz helped Lola stand on her new legs. He held her steady as she learned to balance on the tiny baby feet. The precarious hand-knees held steady.
“They’re perfect,” she said.
“I’m glad you like them.”
“Oh, Franz.” Lola threw her arms around his neck.
Franz kissed her on the cheek, then squirmed out of her embrace. “Look, we can’t stay here. Cthulhu has transformed the earth into a teeming horror. The rest of our kind, dumb as they are, went aboveground to greet the new darkness. They’re out there being slaughtered and probably much worse. I imagine they’ll all be dead soon.”
Lola’s response was cut short by a shout outside their cell. They hurried to the door and peered through the bars.
Fang Foot crawled across the stone floor, dragging his large feet behind him like a pair of ball and chains. He reached the barred door and pulled himself up by the bars.
Unlocking the door, he fell backwards, freeing Franz and Lola. They stepped out of the cell and stood over the fallen Council leader, who flailed on his back like a tipped turtle.
“Bessy the milk cow was too dry for cunnilingus that morning,” Fang Foot wailed, in a strange voice they had never heard before, “so I revoked my tongue from her pastry-puffed, shit-crusted pusshole and gouged her eyes with a screwdriver. I hate it, how the hollow-eyed cows will scream, but Bessy was a good cow, owing to the leather medicine ball bondage gag weighing her head to the hay-strewn floor.”
Franz and Lola exchanged nervous glances. Neither of them had any idea what Fang Foot was talking about, nor where he picked up this bizarre, drawling accent.
“He must have gone mad on the battlefield,” Franz said. “This cow he speaks of, it must be the name of a monster out there.”
Fang Foot continued to rant as if Franz had not spoken. “She expelled globules of congealed piss and blood, quivering turds of hair and shit and stomach worms, all streaming out of her pusshole with the canned consistency of a cheese whiz enema. Farmer’s secret between you and me: cows are afraid of going blind. If you’ve got an old cow with a dried-up pusshole, gouge her eyes. She’ll get moist. Just be sure to break her legs first. You don’t want a blind animal running around freely. Somebody might get hurt. Me? I break all my cows’ legs before they get any idea how to use ‘em. Fuckers may as well be born with flippers. Poor Bessy, though. She was really old. I always did have a soft spot for Bessy.”
They edged away, ready to abandon Fang Foot and make a break for it, when three vampires in the scientists’ white uniforms appeared at the end of the hallway.
“There he is!” a scientist shouted.
The three charged down the hall and dogpiled Fang Foot.
Apparently satisfied that Fang Foot would not try to escape, the scientists leapt off him and hastily rolled him into the cell, locking the door with the very key he’d used to free Franz and Lola moments earlier.
Fang Foot was sprawled face-down in a pool of Lola’s blood, gibbering to himself.
“What happened to him?” Lola asked.
The scientists took notice of her and Franz for the first time.
“He’s been possessed by a demon,” one of them said.
“A farming demon,” added another.
“He raped a girl out there,” the third said. “Kept calling her his little sow.”
“Sow?” Franz said. “He, er—the demon—was talking about a cow. Is that one of those monsters outside?”
“A cow is a creature,” one of them said.
“A sow is a baby cow,” added another.
“They were kind of like large chickens,” the third said. “Please don’t mention this to anyone. We would hate for word to get out about cows.”
Franz and Lola nodded acquiescently.
The scientists began talking amongst each other.
“We’re running low on men.”
“Should we recruit this one?”
“What about the woman?”
“Will they go for it? They’re environmentalists.”
“Traitors are the perfect type to send to war.”
“What about sending one and not the other?”
“Check out her legs.”
“She’s as bad off as the ones outside.”
“We’ve got to organize an army.”
“We must do a little reconnaissance first.”
“What are you talking about? We were just outside. Cthulhu has destroyed the planet.”
“His darkness is more evil than ours.”
“So it’s settled.”
“What’s settled?”
“We send the boy and leave the girl.”
Unable to bear listening to the bewildering discussion any longer, Lola interjected. “First off, tell us what you plan on doing with us. Second, what in sea wolf’s name is going on? Who is in control?”
“We’re in control,” declared two of the scientists.
“Fang Foot is unfit to command an army, and the Council has devolved into a bunch of spineless weaklings without him. The battleships are being prepared as we speak.”
“Battleships?” Franz said.
“Yes, ships left over from the days of the sea wolves. We’ve kept them secret from the public, preserved underground as an emergency measure in the event of mass flooding or an extraterrestrial invasion.”
Another scientist picked up the thread. “We’ll send out a team to secure a path to the sea, then we’ll transport the ships out to open waters, where we can most effectively initiate war against Cthulhu’s army of ghouls.”
“Hasn’t the war already begun?” Franz asked.
“Not until we say it has.”
“I saw what’s happening out there.” Franz shook his head, dismayed. “The whole planet has become Cthulhu’s army. We can’t take on the whole planet at once.”
“What we mean by ‘most effective’ is merely the coordinate farthest from Cthulhu. Even in our battleships, we’re too weak to take him head-on.”
“We need to win a few minor battles first.”
“Say, look at his arm,” one of the scientists said, pointing at Franz’s mutant arm.
“I always appreciated the methods he employed with the environmental committee,” another said, “even when his opinions were bogus.”
“That is a mighty arm,” the third said.
The three scientists nodded approvingly.
“Would you like to join our crew? Our battleships will need a strong leader like you,” said one of them.
“Although we’d like to test your mettle, and that beautiful arm, by sending you out with the path clearers first,” said the one who pointed out his mutant arm.
“Show me where to sign up,” Franz said.
“Right this way.”
The scientists motioned for them to leave the prisoners’ quarters together. The three white-coats walked in single-file formation. Franz and Lola remained where they stood.
“Under one condition,” Franz said.
“Make that two,” Lola said.
Franz glanced at her, surprised and confused.
The scientists halted in their tracks.
“I demand total pardon for both of us,” Franz said.
“And I demand to be united with my family,” Lola said.
The scientist last in line turned on his heels and addressed them with a toothy grin on his face. He seemed pleased with their demands. “Of course you’ll be pardoned. And we’ll do everything we can to reunite you with your family. While the gentleman is briefed on his mission, my colleagues here will search the records for your family. We have already amassed a complete database of all known refugees.”
“Does that account for the victims of Cthulhu and his monstrosities?” Franz said.
The scientist’s grin vanished. He turned on his heels and muttered, “Foiled again.”
“Do we have your word that you’ll uphold this agreement?” Lola said.
The scientist spoke without turni
ng to face them. “You are pardoned, yes. We will aid you in your search for your family to the best of our ability. Surely you’ll understand that this latest complication makes it difficult.”
Franz and Lola gave a nod to each other.
“By the way,” the scientist continued, “call me Commander Pink. As of this moment, I have decided I’ll be taking full command of this army. As my first executive decision, I declare that my colleagues here shall henceforth be known as Barthelme and Barthelme, respectively.”
The scientists started down the hall and Lola clutched Franz’s hand, urging him on. Despite her wobbly baby steps, Lola was still a faster walker than Franz. He looked on with amazement at her little baby legs as they hurried hand-in-hand after the scientists. In the midst of all this insanity and trouble, he felt a sense of comfort—and yes, joy—to be with someone as tough and adaptable as Lola. And the ceaseless silent messages, flowing like electric currents from her hand to his, informed him that she felt exactly the same way.
A hamburger champion towered in the distance. Compared to Cthulhu, the hamburger was quite small. In comparison to other hamburgers, many stacked up larger, but regardless of size, this hamburger was a destroyer of them all.
Cthulhu bounded toward the hamburger champion, eager to plunge his tentacles into its many perfect holes of glory and deliciousness.
This was the hamburger he’d been waiting for, the hamburger that would unlock his oldest, most unknowable powers and enable him to wipe out the vampire race in one deft swoop.
He prayed for no pickles.
Sarah burst out of Cyrus’ room when the Lugosi children started to scream. An image of their mother squirming out of the ropes and then torturing the children (before coming for Sarah) haunted her brain. Sarah paused outside the kids’ room. She’d forgotten to grab a weapon. She slid her Ice Chatter out of her pocket and clutched it like a knife. In a pinch, she might be able to bash the mother over the head with it. She slid the Ice Chatter open, deciding to mass text everyone she knew before entering the room. If something happened, they would know where to find her, for Bruno had not come to rescue her.
I am at the Lugosi’s. Please send—
The children screamed for help.
She shut the phone, cancelling the message in progress.
She heard wet sucking sounds from within the room. She shuddered, imagining what those sounds must mean. She held the Ice Chatter above her head, the way people who don’t know how to hold knives always seem to hold knives in movies.
She pushed on the door and held her breath as it slowly creaked open.
The boy and the girl cried her name when they saw her.
The chair where she’d tied the mother sat empty, a coil of ropes heaped around the legs.
The door slammed shut behind Sarah. Mysteriously. Without provocation.
Keeping her eyes on the room and the Ice Chatter poised to strike, she reached behind her and jiggled the door handle. It spun and spun, like the helm of a ship beyond control.
She gave up on the door. She searched for the mother.
“Where is your mother?” she asked the children.
“In the closet,” the boy said between sobs.
“Untie us,” the girl said.
“Let me find your mother. Then I’ll untie you,” Sarah said.
“Please untie us,” the girl said. “The squid will get us.”
Sarah froze. “The squid?”
A tentacle pushed open the closet door from inside, then retreated between two legs hanging out of a soiled nightgown. Sarah followed the legs up to the purple face of the mother. She’d been hung. Another tentacle, wrapped around her neck, held her suspended off the ground.
Sarah dropped the Ice Chatter and retreated for the bedroom door. She banged on the door and tried the handle, which transformed into a slimy tentacle in her grasp.
She stumbled back and fell. The floorboard cracked. Black fluid bubbled up through the splinters.
The children screamed to be untied.
She got up. She untied them. The little boy and the little girl hugged her. She hugged them closer.
Tentacles unpeeled themselves from the wood grain of the walls. More tentacles were born in the darkness of the closet. They fed on the hanged mother’s flesh. They dug into the mother and performed a marionette show.
Sarah searched for her Ice Chatter, but it was lost beneath the wet black muck now pooling around her ankles.
“Hold me close,” she said, as the tentacles in the closet tore their mother apart. “Children, close your eyes.” She closed her eyes as well, pressing her face into the girl’s soft hair.
She felt a tentacle slide across her feet and dared a glance downward. The kids’ room was full of tentacles now.
A tentacle burst out of the toy box and tore a teddy bear in half.
A tentacle fatter than Fang Foot crashed through the window and got stuck.
Sarah had no hope of salvation, and so providing the children with a modicum of comfort felt like the most important thing to her. As long as they had someone to hold on to when the tentacles ripped them limb from limb, maybe death would be a little easier to embrace.
She tried to imagine that the tentacles caressing her were only Bruno’s hands, lathering her body with lotion. She was just starting to accept the fantasy when the roof of the house was torn off by the tentacled hands of a giant squid. Cthulhu, Sarah realized, although she failed to fathom how this could be possible. Anyhow, there existed only seconds between the removal of the roof and the gargantuan head of Cthulhu bearing down on them, as if they were dolls in a little plastic house. The great squid god opened his mouth and inhaled, sucking up Sarah, the children, their dead mother, the Ice Chatter, and all the room’s furniture into a void of foul-smelling nothingness, to be digested at the sluggish velocity of an obese invertebrate’s metabolism.
Cthulhu burped, shuddering at the faint stink of eggs and children on his breath. The hamburger proved not to be a source of insanely evil cosmic power. In fact, it wasn’t even all that desirable.
Feeling sick to his stomach, he summoned his ship of stars to take a brief respite from his quest. Little progress had been made since he set out in search for the greatest hamburger. Every step resulted in disappointment. Perhaps now was the time to reevaluate whether cats on the internet were the most reliable culinary critics. Perhaps what Cthulhu wanted was not a hamburger. I can has cheezburger was cute, but was it backed by the rigorous mind of, say, Schopenhauer’s On the Suffering of Sushi, a work Cthulhu admired most fondly in his youth.
How he missed Schopenhauer.
He was long overdue for a refresher course from his favorite pessimist.
His ship of stars arrived and he climbed on board.
He slunk into his radiant quarters and passed into a deep slumber absent of hamburger nonsense.
Franz was taken to a stone-walled room with Bruno and two other vampires. They were told to put on one of the four light-proof scuba suits hanging in a wardrobe in one corner of the room.
Franz felt disbelieving. He would be venturing out into the horror zone with Bruno and two strangers. This was almost worse than being forced to go alone.
As he put on his scuba suit, struggling to squeeze his mutant arm into its sleeve, he wondered why the scientists invented light-proof scuba suits in the first place, and how these suits were supposed to help them clear a path through a teeming forest of monsters. However, he did not ask questions or protest. He wondered how Lola was faring. She had gone off with Barthelme and Barthelme to search the database for her family.
Commander Pink tapped a quill against the clipboard he was holding while another scientist inspected Franz and the three other vampires in scuba suits.
The scientist gave Commander Pink a thumbs up and exited the room.
Commander Pink began the briefing: “According to the ancient myth passed down from the mad sea wolf Abdul Al-Blahblahblah, Cthulhu is a cosmic warrior who fights
for environmental justice throughout the universe. We know from today’s events that he is highly dangerous. However, if we are to conquer this enemy and destroy him, we must treat him as a friend. If you make one wrong move, you will die. Are you with me so far?”
Bruno raised his hand. “What constitutes a wrong move?”
“Anything that gets you killed. Moving on. You are to remain in contact with the underground at all times. Is that clear?”
“So if we get into trouble out there, you’ll come rescue us, right?”
Under better circumstances, Franz would have kindly informed Bruno that they were being sent on a suicide mission.
“Negative,” Commander Pink said. “No backup team is in place. We’re counting on you to be responsible for your own lives. If your mortality comes under duress, please report all useful knowledge via Ice Chat.”
Franz perked up, but one of the other vampires spoke before he could get a word in.
“Is there a profit share on treasures yielded?”
Franz was appalled. They were about to be shoved out into the terrible new darkness alone and this idiot was concerned about a share of the treasure.
“No,” Commander Pink said.
Franz jumped in with his question. “You said we’ll be communicating via Ice Chat. Is there any way I might remain in contact with my wife?”
“The risk of revealing highly classified material renders communication with outsiders impossible.”
Franz gritted his teeth and willed himself to lie. “She suffers from an incurable disease. She could die any moment. If she passed while I was away. . . .”
Commander Pink glared at Franz over the top of his horn-rimmed glasses. “I suppose one outsider won’t compromise the mission.”
“One more question,” Franz said.
Commander Pink ignored him. “Your mission is to clear a path to the sea. We will follow the path you clear with our battleships. Bruno, many of the younger vampires look up to you. Therefore, you will make a good captain. Franz, we scientists have admired your courage and dedication for a long time. We are doubly enamored with your mutant arm. You will also serve as a captain aboard one of our battleships.”
Cthulhu Comes to the Vampire Kingdom Page 7