Blood Lite II: Overbite

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Bored again, he wandered away from the city, into the countryside, past fields of humans petrified into still-burning charcoal. Finally, when the others had finished drinking the sun and darkness fell upon the planets, Gorger watched the ruins of a small town. It was a few hours into his contemplation that Shebboth found him.

  “What?” Gorger asked, not bothering to look up.

  “I, uh. I got you a gift.”

  “What sort of gift?” he asked, disinterested in the conversation already.

  “I wasn’t gonna share it with anyone, but seeing how you’re my best friend—”

  “We’re not friends.”

  “—beat me less often than the others, I thought you should have them.”

  “Them?”

  Shebboth lifted his plated rib. From beneath, he pulled out a city bus covered in black ooze. “Ta-dah!” he said with a chirp that shattered the town’s last windows.

  “Ta-dah what?” Gorger asked, staring at the mucus-covered bus.

  “Oh, sorry,” he said. He licked the windows with his massive gray tongue and presented it again.

  “Still not getting it.”

  “Well,” Shebboth said, shaking the bus. “They’re in there.”

  “Humans?”

  “Found some hiding and caught ’em,” Shebboth said, shaking the bus some more.

  Gorger snatched the vehicle from Shebboth and peered inside. “They’re not moving.”

  “Maybe they’re scared? Or maybe they’re playing dead?”

  “Or maybe you forgot to punch holes in the lid and they’re not playing,” Gorger said.

  “Oh, no,” Shebboth replied. “And I collected them carefully even though I squished a—”

  “Squished?”

  “—ate a few.”

  “Yeah,” Gorger said, brightening slowly. “But if you found some, maybe we missed more.”

  “But Cthulhu said we won . . . in his speech.”

  “Cthulhu wrote a speech?”

  “Well, Yog-Sothoth helped. The speech kinda rambled for a bit before the end when a thousand Mi-Go spontaneously burst into flames, but we got the point.”

  “Right. Well, this makes things easier.”

  “For what?”

  “To find more humans.”

  “And eat them?”

  “Nope. Raise them. And maybe, just maybe, start over.”

  The sky was black with snow. More buildings fell as the great beasts took to scratching their backs, and more laid about, staring up at the dark heavens and asking, “How crazy do you think that cloud is?”

  Gorger and Shebboth, however, set about rebuilding humanity. And for that, they needed more humans. They peered inside basements and sent Gorger’s tentacles probing, searching through corridors and rooms. After a week, all they had for their efforts were an army of mannequins that Shebboth called “keepers.” Why they earned that distinction, Gorger thought it best not to ask. The only thing that trumped insanity was stupidity, and Shebboth’s deck was well stacked in that regard.

  As Gorger searched, his arm shoulder deep inside an underground garage, a swath of strange lights fell across him, touching his gray skin like spiderwebs soaked in tar. He looked up. Sometimes a rainbow and sometimes a cloud of indescribable colors shifted and scintillated. Well, indescribable to humans, but to Gorger they were rather kitschy.

  “What?” Gorger asked.

  “! . ! ?” the Color-from-out-of-Space responded.

  “Who says we’re looking for humans?” Gorger replied, straightening.

  “. ! . . .”

  “He did, did he?” Gorger asked, looking for a strangely absent Shebboth. “And if we are?”

  “. . .”

  “You kept some humans? Why?”

  “. . ., . . .”

  “No, I didn’t know they made good hair curlers. But, you don’t have—never mind. You have humans—?”

  “!”

  “Hair curlers. My mistake. What do you want for them?”

  “, . . !?”

  “Real hair . . . riiiight,” Gorger said. “Show me your humans first.”

  The cloud shivered and stretched, parts of it vanishing from different spectrums. A gap formed, an orifice in the marrow of the universe; a lightless place where colors screamed. From it tumbled a shivering human. He was white-haired despite his youth and well-pruned from the green gel covering his naked body; he shuddered and heaved, before vomiting a stream of green gunk.

  And then he began shrieking. Not in any way that suggested sanity, but in that moment of cognitive flight when the near-mad realize that “race car” spelled backward is “race car.”

  Gorger watched the human for a few seconds, and then glanced at the Color-from-out-of-Space. “Any that aren’t lunatics?” he asked.

  “! ! !”

  “Yes, well, I suppose that would drive someone insane. So all of them? Stark raving?”

  “, , . ?”

  “Fine,” Gorger sighed. “I guess they’ll have to do.”

  If any of the Elder Ones had noticed the Color-from-out-of-Space floating around with a dozen wigs in orbit, none commented.

  Gorger, in Shebboth’s company, crouched inside a domed stadium . . . their new human colony with a dozen people in all—each of them a chorus of dissonant screams and moans, each very much insane in ways that went beyond such clever palindromes as “race car” and “pickle.”

  “I like it,” Shebboth said. “Think we could charge for a concert?”

  Gorger grunted noncommittally and watched as the humans flailed about on the Astroturf and tore at their hair and faces. Some were still trying to claw out their eyes, but Gorger had anticipated that problem. That’s why they all wore giant foam fingers uncovered in the stadium store, duct-taped at the wrists. That, perhaps, was the hardest skill to master, and one Gorger eventually had to entrust to the smaller arms lining his thorax.

  “What do we feed them?” Gorger wondered aloud as he watched them.

  “The dreams of the slaughtered?” Shebboth suggested.

  “No.”

  “The souls of mountains?”

  “No!”

  “Other humans?”

  Gorger eyed Shebboth. “In all the eons we spent waiting to shatter the veils, you didn’t spend much time studying them, did you?”

  “I was . . . busy.”

  “And suddenly Pompeii makes sense.”

  “I said I’m sorry!”

  “And just when we’d gotten them to the brain-insemination stage,” Gorger said. “Look, to breed humans, you need to understand them better. Humans eat meat—”

  “Oh! Feed ’em Mi-Go.”

  “—and plants—”

  “Mi-Go are both meat and plants.”

  “—and fish.”

  “Mi-Go are also—”

  Gorger sighed deliberately loud enough to interrupt him. “Mi-Go are not the universe’s answer to the buffet. But we might as well try something. Hastur.”

  Before Shebboth could protest, five Byakhee appeared, flapping their batlike wings and shrieking their insect heads off. That sent the humans into greater despair, as they pointed their giant foam fingers at the winged servitors of Hastu—He-Who-Should-Probably-Stop-Being-Named. In turn, the Byakhee noticed the humans and tried to sweep down upon them.

  Gorger lashed out, grabbing Byakhee and crushing them. The winged creatures fell, pulped, while the humans scampered away.

  “Lesson one, Shebboth. Let starvation take its course,” Gorger said.

  “So, lesson two. Byakhee tartar is a no,” Gorger said. The humans had degraded, their diet of profane meat warping their bodies. For some, their spines were twisted 180 degrees so that they stared down the backs of their legs. For others, they grew webbing between their loins, or their arms and torso, or each other. Flesh flaps covered their eyes and three died when their skin suffocated them. A couple more perished when Shebboth discovered that “mouth-to-mouth resuscitation” and “inhale” were in fact t
wo different sentiments.

  “I found more humans for the colony,” Shebboth offered.

  “Alive?”

  “Punched the holes in the bus myself.”

  “How many?”

  “Oh, lots of holes.”

  “How. Many. Humans.”

  “Twelve. This time we should feed them the flesh of cooked cows. I found some of those, too.”

  “Did you,” Gorger asked, suspicion lacing his voice. “How convenient.”

  “Isn’t it,” Shebboth said, chuckling nervously. “I’ll go get ’em.”

  “Wait,” Gorger said. “How’d you suddenly start figuring things out?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied, his chameleon eyes darting left, right, behind . . . anywhere Gorger wasn’t. “Evolutionary leap? Maybe I ate someone smarter.”

  “A retarded lobster says what?”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t eat someone smarter!” Gorger snapped. “Who’s helping you?”

  “Nobody!”

  “Who?”

  “Nobody important!”

  “Who?”

  “Nobody bad . . . okay . . . Nyarlathotep.”

  “The shape-shifter?!”

  “Yeah.”

  “The Crawling Chaos?”

  “I think he’s upright these days.”

  “The Charmer and Deceiver?”

  “Well, you can’t believe everything his exes say,” he replied defensively.

  “Shebboth! The colony is a secret!”

  “He tricked it out of me,” he pleaded.

  “Tricked you how?”

  “Well he asked if I‘d seen any humans around and I said no.”

  “Shebboth!”

  “I said yes. But he was very cunning.”

  Gorger hesitated and thought about it a moment. “So he has humans and a few cows, does he? What’s the exchange?”

  At that, Shebboth paused with an expression that suggested he had a thought, and that in coming to it, it was a terribly painful experience. “Y’know, he didn‘t say. Maybe he did it out of the kindness of his heart.”

  “He doesn‘t have a heart.”

  “Sure he does, I saw it.”

  “His own heart?”

  “Oh! I see what you’re getting at. Then, no.”

  “I’m not agreeing to any terms with Nyarlathotep, not without seeing all his hands on the table.”

  “What do I tell him?”

  “That you had no right to strike a bargain with him, and certainly not on my behalf. Look, Shebboth, this may be our last chance to find humans. And nobody knows more about them than Nyarlathotep.”

  “So I say what now?”

  Gorger sighed. “Tell him to deal with me.”

  “Right. And what about the retarded lobster?”

  “We’ll kill it later. Promise.”

  Nyarlathotep was a dashing figure—human in appearance, his skin a dark Egyptian bronze. A pinch of a beard, shaven with the precision of a sharp word, black hair greased back and eyes that reflected all gilt of snake. He wore a black suit and sat in the owner’s box so that he might stare straight into Gorger’s abyssal deep eyes. A scarab pin adorned the lapel of his jacket. It was upside down, because that’s how he rolled.

  “Something to drink?” Gorger offered. The stadium seats groaned under his bulk as he leaned to speak into the owner’s box.

  “Please,” Nyarlathotep replied, smiling.

  “Hastur,” Gorger said casually. A squadron of two dozen Byakhee appeared, looking angry. They dive-bombed Gorger, spitting and hissing at him. War had been declared, but as in all such things, the Byakhee had been partying the night prior and were too drunk to send the declaration in time. Gorger naturally took the ambush in stride, “naturally” being relative here. He snatched one Byakhee from the air and twisted its head off. The black ichor poured out of its neck spout into a plastic cup that Gorger’s lower hand carried. Shebboth caught the tossed carcass and devoured it with lip-smacking greed.

  The other Byakhee screeched in panic and abandoned the battle; they vanished. Nyarlathotep accepted the cup and sipped the drink graciously before grinning at Gorger.

  “They don’t seem to like you.”

  “A misunderstanding,” Gorger replied. “They misunderstood their chances.”

  “Ah. In that case, shall we dispense with the usual verbal parry and thrust and get to business?”

  “You have humans.”

  “Yes.”

  “And cows.”

  “And assorted other animals that proved themselves.”

  “Proved?”

  “As lovers. Meals. Both, really.”

  “How?”

  “Well, for starters, approach from the rear least you spook—”

  “No, no. Why did you hide them?”

  Nyarlathotep nodded in sudden understanding. “Forethought.” He leaned forward, in confidence. “Just between the two of us?” Nyarlathotep said.

  “Uh-huh,” Shebboth responded, leaning forward as well. Gorger nudged him back and motioned for his guest to continue.

  “I knew this would happen,” Nyarlathotep said. “Maybe the other Ancients can get away with an air of otherworldly indifference, but the rest of us defined ourselves by humanity’s conquest.”

  Gorger straightened up in shocked understanding. “Of course. You cannot hate or want something without it characterizing you. And that when humans were gone?”

  “Our reason for being vanished with them.”

  They were quiet a moment, contemplating the significance of this.

  “That means—” Gorger whispered.

  “One good turn deserves a human?” Shebboth offered.

  “No.”

  “What is the sound of one human clapping?”

  “No.”

  “If a human falls in the forest—”

  “No!” Gorger shouted. “It means we’re tainted.”

  “Well, I knew that,” Shebboth said. “In fact, that’s what Azathoth told me. “Do,” he said. “Do, rey, rey fa sol ti ti la.”

  “And what a wasted initiative that was,” Nyarlathotep remarked. “Whose bright idea was it to use Julie Andrews to spread Azathoth’s musical insanity?”

  They both glanced at Shebboth.

  “Hey!” he complained. “‘The Hills are Alive,’ was a great song until they changed the lyrics.”

  “So what did Azathoth say?” Gorger asked.

  “The higher-ups worry that humanity has influenced us,” Nyarlathotep responded. “So, we found a new world, teeming with life. We’re going there to—”

  “Start over?” Gorger said with a colossal groan that shook the stadium’s rafters.

  “Well, the first part’s not so bad,” Shebboth offered. “All the planning was fun. Besides, this time they promised it’d be different.”

  “They always say that,” Nyarlathotep replied. “But when the slaughter comes, we lose control.”

  “Then it’s done,” Gorger said, his mouth tentacles slumping. “We’ve wasted an eternity here and we’re looking at the same ahead of us. So much for the human colony.”

  “Maybe not,” Nyarlathotep said. “I have to go because the others no longer trust me. They think I’ve been among men too long—this is the only way to regain their confidence. But you can stay behind.”

  “And raise your humans?” Gorger leaned forward with renewed interest.

  “Yes! Help my worshippers survive and thrive until the sun shines again.”

  “Then what?” Gorger asked.

  “Then genocide . . . on a small scale,” Nyarlathotep replied. “The occasional city, nothing extravagant. But this time, no Cthulhu to flood Europe with his three left feet, or Color-from-out-of-Space trying to dazzle all those blind children at the orphanage.”

  “They did seem perplexed,” Shebboth said.

  Gorger exchanged glances with Shebboth and then nodded. “So how many humans we talking about?”

  Nyarlathotep s
miled deeply.

  They could not be seen towering above the human enclave. The ring of glacier-topped peaks and frozen wilderness surrounded the Edenlike jungle below them with its self-contained warmth. Upon closer inspection, the mountains proved to be colossal edifices of staggering height, irregular in proportions and alien in the organic spirals carved into the icy rock. That Nyarlathotep had hidden humans in the Mountains of Madness was, in fact, a credit to his twisted genius. And now that the Great Old Ones had departed with the Lesser-but-Still-Rather-Swell-Ones in tow, Gorger and Shebboth were the remaining greatest of the mythos.

  “So,” Shebboth said. “What should we do with them?”

  “This place should suffice until they become too many. Then,” he said, “we cast them to the four corners to populate the—”

  A scream followed and Gorger watched as a human went flying over the mountains toward the horizon. He grabbed Shebboth’s arm before he could lob another. “Figure of speech,” he said quickly.

  “Oh,” Shebboth said. “My bad.”

  “We have to be careful now,” Gorger replied. “As much as they’re Nyarlathotep worshippers, they’re still only human. They’re still susceptible to insanity and disease and the elements. We leave them to fornicate and grow. And we make sure nothing kills them off.”

  “So we can’t eat ’em.”

  “No,” Gorger said. “That’s part of keeping them alive.”

  “Oh.”

  “Still, I think this calls for a toast? To our new enterprise?”

  “Sure,” Shebboth said.

  “And I know just the drink . . . Hastur.”

  The Byakhee appeared, but this time by the thousands. They filled the sky, black against pitch. They rocketed for Gorger and Shebboth, slamming into their faces, their bodies. It didn’t hurt so much as surprise the pair.

  Gorger swept his arms through the cloud, blindly batting them away by the dozens, but it wasn’t until the humans screamed that he realized the ruse. Another panicked sweep of his arms scattered the swarm enough to reveal the carnage below.

  The Byakhee, outnumbering them, tore at mortal and animal alike; two or three pulling them apart, slicing through muscle and bone, devouring flesh, carrying them high into the air and dropping them.