by Byron Craft
Mesmerized by the spectacle the Professor didn’t take notice of the helicopter landing nearby. Zachary Taylor Harris set the SH-2G Super Seasprite down a good one-hundred yards away from the fire. He and Spuds Biddles ran towards the blaze just as the walls of the two-story structure collapse inward, an inferno filling the cellar.
Zach stared at the still corpse of Alan Ward in the backseat of the car. “What happened to your friend here?” he managed to spit out after a hard swallow.
Ironwood turned and looked at him, the fire delineating his stoic features, the flames reflecting in his eyes, “heart failure,” he answered, his voice lacking any emotion.
CHAPTER 23
SUNRISE
Travis thought that he and Dorian looked positively erotic in their Navy uniforms. “Sexy,” he proclaimed as they stood side by side admiring their reflections in the full-length mirror that hung on the bathroom door. “We are lucky that we found these two boys in the nick of time,” he added. “They are both the right size for us.” Dorian giggled. The big lug was always doing that when he was nervous. Travis had done a lot of brainstorming. He always did the thinking for the both of them. Travis was the brains, and Dorian was, of course, the brawn. The big sensual body builder never ceased to excite Travis. I masterminded the whole thing; he prided himself, putting his lust aside. He thanked Ganymede, the god of homosexual love, for the military’s policy of DADT, Don’t ask, don’t tell. All he had to do was to locate the gay bars in Ridgecrest; the internet supplied the info for him, and then search for their doppelgangers.
Ganymede brought them good fortune last night because the first club they attended was fruitful. It wasn’t even difficult to entice them to their motel room with the promise of a foursome. And, it wasn’t a game of golf they were going to play either. Travis and Dorian smiled at each other with intense satisfaction. In the king sized bed laid the nude corpses of the two servicemen. Both were face down, bullet holes in the back of their heads made by 9mm’s with silencers. They had timed the shootings to occur simultaneously. The smaller one was exactly Travis’ size while the other, although big like Dorian, was chunky and soft, not ripped like his sweetheart. Even so, his uniform fit Dorian well with only minor adjustments. Travis had removed his earring and filled the hole it made in his left earlobe with Clearasil. The uniforms were spot-on and their doppelgangers ID’s, which now belonged to them, were textbook.
Travis and Dorian had wiped the bathroom and bedroom clean of all their prints. They had rented the road house room, on a stolen credit card, for three days beyond the time when they would have left town, and they put a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. There was no way that they could be traced. Everything was letter perfect. Now it was time to go to work.
***
Lieutenant Jason Riggs’ smart phone made the sound of Doctor Who’s TARDIS. Snatching it off his bed table, he answered in a sleepy tone, “Riggs.”
“Admiral Hawkins here,” a voice on the other end announced.
Riggs quickly sat up in bed, “Yes, sir.”
“Sorry to disturb your slumber Lieutenant, but you are to report to the Michelson Lab, Q-Section.”
Jason always got a kick out of the name of the top-secret test center within the NWC Laboratory. “Q-Section” sounded like something out of a James Bond film. Whoever dreamed it up must have had a campy sense of humor. The bed sheets rustled, Gwen Gilhooley rolled over and hugged him. “When, sir?” he asked back into the phone.
“On the double Lieutenant,” the Admiral shot back.
Gwen kissed Jason on his neck, and his voice cracked, “Aye, aye sir!”
“And,” Hawkins ordered, “bring Petty Officer Gilhooley with you.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” he said again, his ability to speak becoming a whisper. Lieutenant Jason Riggs knew that he wasn’t in just hot water, he was going to be boiled in oil or maybe made to walk the plank. He and Gwen had discussed it. They thought they could keep their newly formed relationship a secret for a short time while they decided which one of them would resign from the Navy. Gwen thought she could get a job with a local engineering firm. Construction was starting to boom again in and around Ridgecrest, and her chances of acquiring employment in her field would be promising. He knew now that he didn’t want to lose her. He loved her blond hair that smelled of fresh green apples and the line of perspiration on her top lip after they had made love. And, they both knew the U.S. Navy’s policy on fraternization was strict and to the point. They had read and re-read the regulation together dozens of times:
REGULATIONS 1165: Prohibits personal relationships between officers and enlisted personnel that are unduly familiar and do not respect the differences in grade or rank. Such relationships are prejudicial to good order and discipline and violative of service tradition. Conduct is prejudicial to good order and discipline if it calls into question the senior’s objectivity, results in actual or an appearance of preferential treatment, undermines the senior’s authority and compromises the chain of command.
They had been cohabitating for less than twenty-four-hours and command already found out. Riggs hoped that when the Admiral got through with him that it would be quick and painless. Maybe they would use the firing squad.
***
Admiral Jack Hawkins, who had seen things throughout his long and perilous career that would freeze a normal man’s blood, was stunned to silence. He stood with hands clasped behind his back and stared through the four-inch-thick polymethyl acrylic barrier into the fifteen-foot square cubicle. The barrier was as clear as the windshield on his 65 Mustang except there was nothing appealing within its interior.
The tentacle was growing. It had devoured three lab rats, and now they were getting ready to feed it a guinea pig. Hawkins knew that the word “devour” was not appropriate for its feeding, hell he didn’t think that “feeding” was an appropriate term either for what it was doing. When the damn thing partook of its first live snack, a gobbet of gray-green flesh oozed out from one of its suction cups and encased the white rat morsel in goop. He could tell that the rodent was in pain by its squeaking and squealing until one of the techs turned off the sound system. After a while, the rat stopped moving and shriveled up to half its original size. Then they fed it another one. It grew with each successive feeding. The tentacle extended and the goo expanded so that the creature was, now, the size of a coffee table.
There was a small acrylic door that swiveled. They used it to pass each lab animal into the containment chamber. It reminded Hawkins of the revolving doors they used to have on the old style department stores. This one, on the other hand, was no bigger than a breadbox and it functioned similarly to an airlock. Dr. Marinus Bicknell Willett and several lab technicians retracted the solar shade screens from all the skylights in the Q-Section Laboratory and turned the incandescent lights dimmer on “Full.” The amount of light created a showroom environment that made everything seem garish and movie-set-like. Hawkins, at first, was grateful for the extra light as it dispelled the sensation of foreboding he felt. All were lit up like stage actors. Willett removed a black and beige guinea pig from a cage and slipped it through the mini-airlock. The oversized rodent slid down a stainless steel chute and came to rest inches from the organism. The guinea pig ignored the living thing and, surprisingly, the living thing ignored the guinea pig. Everyone’s eyebrows raised behind the Plexiglas.
“It appears that Professor Ironwood’s theory that the creature sustains itself by absorbing solar energy is accurate,” announced Dr. Willett, wiping his hands on his white lab coat. It is also apparent that when that source becomes scarce, it resorts to the absorption of living carbon based organisms. However, his premise that the thing drains energy from its hosts causing fatality is considered, for the moment, as speculation by the administration of Q-Section.”
"Everything that’s a ‘thing’ has some energy associated with it," said Ironwood as he approached Willett.
“That may very well be,” replied the doctor
to the professor. It may also be that the ‘thing’ absorbs the proteins, carbohydrates and fat in animals as fuel and converts it to energy. It will take further study I am sorry to say. Only time will tell.”
“We don’t have time Marinus, that ‘thing’ is a shoggoth. There is another one out there, somewhere, much larger, and it must be stopped. If it isn’t, it will gorge itself on the life force energy of all living creatures on this planet.”
“We agree on more things than you know, Thomas. Your shoggoth, as you call it, is not an indigenous biological.”
“What do you mean?” demanded Hawkins.
“Not of this earth Admiral,” answered Ironwood, looking like the weight of complacency was piling up on his shoulders.
“That can’t be,” he shot from the hip.
“That is precisely what it is I’m sorry to say Admiral,” rejoined Willett. "This alien life form you brought us has been bioengineered, made of complex hydrocarbons. More like basic tissue matter, with a simple cell structure that is almost protoplasmic. The lab boys are stumped because the proteins do not make sense. They are biological, but a biology straight out of a nightmare. It could be a mammal, could be a reptile, could even be jellyfish with all the mismatched DNA strands they’ve identified so far . . . And some don’t match anything in the global genetic data bases.”
“This doesn’t work for me, Doctor Willett!” Admiral Hawkins fuse was burning short. He had been summoned out of bed at four in the morning with the news that Captain Eastwater and two of his seabees had disappeared in the tunnel after several shots were fired and now all he was getting was scientific gobbledygook. “I sent for all of you!” he shouted, “To get answers, and so far, I’ve got nothing.”
“Oh, but we have learned a lot about it,” Willett answered, excitement rising in his voice. “For example, we know that it is a true primitive, but we have ascertained that it also has some level of intelligence.”
“Intelligence?” interrupted Ironwood also losing his patience.
“Yes, yes!” Willett answered enthusiastically. “It has a basic instinct to protect itself from harm, similar to the behavior of human beings and animals. When threatened with a destructive force, such as extreme heat, it retreats. We poked it with a red hot metal rod and observed the thing withdraw to the other side of the containment area. What is most remarkable is, if the damaging effect of the heat is continually applied, and a portion of the creature is destroyed, it will re-grow the missing segment once the destructive force is removed. Besides a rudimentary nature of self-preservation, it can regenerate body parts, if we can consider, ‘It’ has a body.”
“We’ve heard this before,” Hawkins fired back his anger mounting. “Professor Ironwood told us what Alan Ward had said about the recuperative powers of shoggoths. If they were damaged, they would simply grow replacement parts and repair themselves.”
“That is how they were designed to perform,” the exasperated Ironwood interrupted. “The shoggoth’s makers programmed it to repair itself when damaged. We are wasting time here. We need to mount a force to destroy this thing.”
“That remains to be seen Ironwood, and right now my empirical evidence rivals your snap judgments,” Willett parried. “Your contributions are priceless; it’s your conclusions that I find faulty. Time, of course, is at the core of what we do here. I’d have more answers by now if it hadn’t taken us a half hour to figure out how to open the damn lid on that tube you brought. The samples of what you thought were brown wires and yellow silt, that you so generously supplied, after careful scrutiny turned out to be organic cousins of that thing in its plastic cage. All of this has taken time to analyze. But after this careful study, we can conclusively say that all, including my samples of the wall tiles, have the same recuperative powers!”
“Are you also telling us, Doctor, that you know how to kill this thing or not?” barked the Admiral, pressing for answers.
“In a sense, yes Admiral. That is if ‘killing’ is the correct term. I will say, with all prudence, that we have a couple of theories on how to destroy it. Eradicate it. Lieutenant Riggs and MS Gilhooley’s testimonies were most valuable in helping us to discover the creature’s Achilles heel so to speak. Which is the complete evisceration of every part of the thing, disintegration.”
Admiral Hawkins had been watching Lieutenant Riggs and Petty Officer Gilhooley with intense scrutiny ever since they first walked into Q-Section. Riggs especially. The young officer looked like he was about to keel over with fright until he was asked to relate their encounter with Ironwood’s ‘shoggoth.’ Hawkins more than sensed that the Lieutenant and the Petty Officer were exceedingly overjoyed when confronted with a debriefing. It was as if they were expecting something else, something terrible to happen and then relieved to discover otherwise. “Continue,” he commanded keeping one eye on the two.
“Well, the Lieutenant here temporarily repelled the anomalous organism by spraying it with an insecticide.”
Everyone in the room stared at Willett in anticipation of expecting more.
“Don’t you see!” he hollered. “Insect-repellents have been known to use chemicals from the carboxymethyl group, the resulting core being pyrethric acid. Acid! It was the acid in the insecticide that caused the larger version of itself to go into its self-preservation mode. The repellent probably wouldn’t have had any damaging effects on it, but something inside of it told it that acid was ‘bad’ and retreat. Kind of like the Frankenstein monster running away from a flame bellowing, ‘fire bad!’”
“Are you saying Doctor, that the only way to get rid of this thing is to bathe it in acid? If what Professor Ironwood has told us is accurate, the thing is bigger than a bus, and we’d need truckloads of the stuff to dissolve it out of existence let alone a way to come up with an effective delivery system in time to halt its trip topside.”
“No, but complete incineration would probably do the trick.”
Everyone jumped when they heard the scream. Gwendolyn Gilhooley had been leaning against the Plexiglas chamber listening to the squabbles. Her back was to the containment area. Turning slightly, Gwen looked over her shoulder, and that is when she cried out. The shoggoth had increased in mass exponentially and sprouted several more tentacles. It was, at the moment, the size of a compact car.
“It’s the radiation from the sun and the incandescent lights,” shouted Ironwood.
“Kill the lights,” Hawkins ordered.
Willett and the laboratory technicians scrambled to their wall switches hurriedly shutting the solar screens and turning off the overhead lighting. The emergency LED lighting automatically kicked in.
“I’ve seen enough,” announced the Admiral, primed for red duty. Turning to face Ironwood he instructed, “Professor I want you, Willett, Lieutenant Riggs and half the technicians here, at the tunnel site on the double. There will be two Sikorsky’s on the helipad in twenty minutes. You will figure out a way to contain this creature’s cousin until I send a company of Marines with heat. And I do mean heat. When bullets, shells, and explosives don't get the job done, we’ll burn the bastard down! We have access to some M2 Flamethrowers. The majority of them were scrapped years ago when they were declared obsolete, but we saved a few for testing, and they work damn well! Lieutenant, until further notice, you are in charge.”
Hawkins, Ironwood, and Willett peered once more into the containment area. In a lowered commanding tone Hawkins directed, “Willett, I want your remaining techs to destroy this thing, incinerate every last drop of it. Even if you have to burn down the entire building to do it.”
“Yes, Admiral.”
“How did you refer to it?”
“An anomaly?”
“Yes, that was it, and Ironwood here calls it a shoggoth. Perhaps abomination is a better term. You know when the sun goes down will they just hang around street lights or will they go about gulping down everything that moves?”
“I’m afraid it will be the latter Admiral,” answered Ironwood
in a whisper.
The shoggoth behind the Plexiglas was a ghostly blue-white under the illumination of the LED emergency lights. Provoked by the lack of infrared radiation it mounted the guinea pig draining the tiny mammal’s life force.
***
It was a fifteen-minute flight from the heliport to the site of the original tunnel discovery. Ironwood was exhausted and even if he were able to sleep, a quarter of an hour of rest would not have been sufficient. Power naps didn’t work for him. Hopefully, there will be time later, but not now. There was a nagging sense of unease in the pit of his stomach. The thing was a massive amoebic creature made out of protoplasmic slime. The Elder Beings had also modeled their tough plasticity into various useful limbs and organs. Multiple eyes floated over its surface, popping open momentarily to stare, before striking it prey. If it escaped to the surface, finding an ample source of solar radiation, what would happen then? Do shoggoths reproduce by fission? He wished that Alan Ward had imparted more information to him before passing. He felt selfish for wishing that, but expediency was key. The chopper crew had taken Alan’s body to the base sick bay where, later, it would be transported to the morgue in Ridgecrest. When this was over, if it were ever over, he would have a lot of questions to answer to the local authorities. He would make the funeral arrangements at that time.
Ironwood had been in the second helicopter. Lieutenant Riggs and several others had gone ahead in number one. Reaching the site and going down the ladder, he started to quickly walk the mile or so towards the tunnel’s end. Half way to his destination, he spotted a large commotion amongst the people gathered there. Increasing his gate, he sprinted to what he believed to be the dead-end, based on the last time he had been down the passageway. Marinus Willett was standing off to his right, still wearing that damn lab coat, looking lost. Gwen Gilhooley was being held firmly in place by two seabees. She was struggling to get free and kept shouting over and over, “We’ve got to get him out of there! We’ve got to get him out of there!”
