by Greig Beck
“We’re going the right way,” he said.
“How do you know?” Abrams asked, turning and shining his light back at Matt’s feet so as not to ruin his night vision.
Matt stared off into the dark, wondering that himself. “I don’t know how I know, I just know.”
“Well, might have been nice to make the announcement before we split up.” Abrams looked at his watch. “Two more minutes.” He turned and moved quickly along the edge of the wall, with Matt following. A hint of breeze sprang up, and in another minute, it seemed to increase.
“Something up ahead, I think.” Abrams started to pick up the pace, and then in the next moment, he stopped dead, his arms pinwheeling in the air.
Matt lunged forward and grabbed him by the collar, holding on – the man’s toes were already over the edge of a cliff. He dragged him back, the major falling onto his ass.
“Jesus Christ.” Abrams got to his feet, and leaned up against the wall.
The path had simply ended, and their tunnel had opened out into a larger cavern. The size was unknown, as their lights couldn’t find either the other side, the roof or, coming to the edge again, the bottom.
“Wow.” Matt put a hand over his face. Wafting up from somewhere deep down in the blackness was a foul breeze that once again reminded him of dead fish and bloated drying bodies on a beach.
“A fucking cliff.” Abrams was still shaken, but he came forward and peered over the edge. “Hey, thanks, Matt. I knew you’d come in handy.” He straightened. “I guess this is as far as we go.”
Matt shook his head. “Look over there.”
Starting beside them, and then set in along the wall, was a wide pathway carved directly into the stone. It circled along and downward, spiraling along the outside of the enormous vacant space, until it disappeared in the dark. The path crossed over in front of other darkened tunnels just like their own, each with the same strange alien shape that Matt had earlier noticed.
Abrams reached into a pouch and pulled free a glow stick, cracked it and then shook it. It phosphoresced a bright lemon yellow, illuminating the entire platform they stood upon. He held it out. “Get ready to start counting.” He dropped it over the edge.
It fell, and fell, and eventually struck bottom as a tiny dot.
“How long?” Abrams asked.
“Eleven seconds – what does that make it?” Matt asked.
“Not too bad,” Abrams said. “Given things fall about thirty-two feet per second, and ignoring wind resistance, I put it at about three-fifty feet down.”
He leaned out even further over the edge and looked down. “What the hell?” The dot of yellow light was moving.
“Well, someone is home,” Matt said, feeling his stomach flip nervously at the thought of who, or what could be down there. “Could be Drummond…or maybe it’s Adira,” he said hopefully. “We should get Hartogg and Andy.”
Abrams nodded. “Agreed; at least to see if they found anything.” He went to turn away, but stopped. “Hang on; looks like we don’t have to.” He pointed.
About two hundred feet down and further along the wall, standing still as a post in one of the cave doorways, stood Andy and Tania, side-by-side, entwined, and naked. They stared back at them.
“What the hell is this?” Abrams growled in his throat.
“I thought she was dead.” Matt felt confused, and recalled the piece of face in the upper tunnel. “Maybe it wasn’t her.” He looked up and snorted. “Andy sure didn’t waste any time.” He waved, but neither Andy nor Tania returned the gesture. “Can they see us?” He lowered his arm. “If they’ve found Tania, maybe she can lead us to Drummond, and the Book.”
“Where the hell is Hartogg?” Abrams lifted a small pair of field glasses and focused in on the pair. “You know, I’ve seen something like this before.”
“Andy.” Matt only raised his voice above a whisper, but it still bounced around in the huge cavern, and should have carried to the geologist. The young man didn’t seem to hear, or if he did, still didn’t acknowledge them. He just stood there, hugging Tania, and staring back as though he was a wax dummy.
“Help me.”
The words floated up to Matt and Abrams. Matt swung to the Major. “Did you hear that? That sounded like Tania.”
Abrams was frowning as he pulled the glasses away from his face. “Oh no, god no…”
Matt started to jog down along the path.
“Hey.” Abrams took off after him, keeping close to the wall.
Andy and Tania stood in the cave doorway, waiting. Both had turned to Matt as he approached them along the steps. Matt held his flashlight out, lifting it from the path to the naked pair. He noticed they hugged each other tightly, and seemed to glisten in his light beam.
Matt stopped a dozen feet back, breathing hard. They just stood watching him, or at least facing in his direction. Neither moved a muscle and he started to feel a slight rise of the hair on the back of his neck. “Hey buddy, how are you?”
“Help me.”
Matt turned to Tania. Was that her? he wondered. Though he had been looking at Andy, he hadn’t noticed her speak. Her lips were slightly parted, but she could have been catatonic for all the expression she was giving him.
“Andy, where’s Lieutenant Hartogg?” He took a few more steps.
Matt felt a hand ease down on his shoulder, and he nearly leaped off the walkway. “Shit.” He spun. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?” He turned back, shrugging Abrams’s hand off.
Matt went to step closer, when Abrams grabbed him. “Don’t…fucking…move.” The major’s hand was like a vice. “Professor, we need to back up, now.”
“Huh?” Matt couldn’t understand why Abrams wouldn’t want to ask them where his SEAL was. He half turned. “But…” He saw the look on the major’s face – determination, dread, and worst of all, fear. Abrams’s eyes were wide and fixed on Andy.
Matt’s head spun back, and he moved the beam of his light over the pair.
“Oh shit.” He saw now what Abrams already knew. The pair weren’t just intertwined in some sort of lover’s embrace, but instead seemed to have melted together. Where their ribs, thighs and arms touched or overlapped, the flesh had merged, as if the skin, muscle and bone had melted together like some sort of protoplasmic wax.
“Oh.” Matt took a single step back just as an explosion of thrashing black tendrils shot from the figure of the geologist – not just from him, but burst from his face down to his bellybutton. He opened like a clamshell to disgorge a countless number of the whipping appendages.
Matt was covered instantly, and Abrams fell back, holding up an arm that was quickly enveloped in the greasy ropes that had also now shot from Tania.
Matt cried out as his skin burned. The touch of the revolting mass was like a combination of venomous sting and scalding hot-oil burn. He could see through the mess that Andy just stood there, arms by his side, face and gut split wide as more and more of the waving arms unloaded. He was a bottomless pit of the stuff.
“Shoggoth!” Abrams screamed.
The tendrils thickened, and then Matt started to feel them begin to work their way into his skin. Beside him, Abrams was almost totally enfolded, and his grunts and strains told him that the major wasn’t going to go down without a fight.
More coils wrapped around Matt’s neck, and he held tight to one and noticed a bulge form on the limb. The lump then popped open and Matt was horrified to see it was an eye. The bulb swiveled toward him, regarding him with the pitiless stare of a predator.
Jus then, there came a staccato burst of gunfire and the Tania half simply exploded in a geyser of black jelly. There came more gunfire, and Andy, who had been as immobile as a storefront mannequin, started to shiver and dance as holes appeared all over his naked body.
The greasy mesh that covered both Matt and Abrams fell away as another figure stepped out of the tunnel mouth, and let loose another burst from her machine gun directly into the rapidly expan
ding Andy. His human skin split away and he started to rapidly inflate. Dozens of mouths broke open all over the putrid bloated body, each one screaming in agony.
Adira strode toward it, lifted her leg and kicked what had so recently been Andy Bennet off the ledge. She watched it plummet into the darkness. Her teeth were bared, as her eyes followed it all the way to the bottom, where it exploded like a balloon full of toxic fluid.
She turned, her face ferocious, and approached Matt and Abrams. She held the gun dead level, its muzzle moving from Matt to the major. “Speak.”
Abrams held up his hands. “Don’t shoot, Captain Senesh. It really is us.”
She turned the muzzle on Matt. “You too…Now, quickly!”
Matt opened his mouth, but no words would come. Instead, there were the whispers, chants and screams of an ancient race. There were images of burning lands, monstrous beings, and things whose size defied nature and sanity itself. The burning touch of the Shoggoth and its intrusion into his system, even only briefly, had united with the traces of the Al Azif he had absorbed, and they mushroomed into meaning.
“Last chance.” Adira had moved the gun muzzle to Matt’s face.
“I…” Matt got to his knees. “I’m okay.” His vision cleared. “Adira…I’m okay. It’s me.”
She fired.
“Fuck!” Matt grabbed at his head. Blood ran from between his fingers.
“Okay, it is you.” She lowered her gun and held out a hand.
“You shot me? You fucking shot me?” Matt looked at his bloody hand, his mouth hanging open in disbelief.
“Don’t be a baby; it’s just a graze.” She shrugged. “I had to be sure.”
Beside him, Abrams breathed a sigh of relief and wiped at his face.
Matt grabbed the outstretched hand and she pulled him up. Adira then turned to Abrams who was already on his feet and now vigorously rubbing his hands over his face.
“Yech.” The major spat something onto the ground, and then wiped his hands on his pants. There were still glistening snail trails all over his body and in his hair.
Matt guessed he looked the same, but it was what was inside him that worried him the most. He winced as he dabbed at the red graze on his cheek.
“Salt, huh?” Adira cradled the gun in her arms. “I could smell it in among the nitro discharge – worked a treat – especially on a few men of the cloth I ran into.”
“Salt…yeah.” Abrams ran a hand up through his slick hair. “These things are closer to slugs than animals, so salt turns them to mush.” He looked back at her. “Hartogg?”
“Dead,” she said evenly. “I came across what was left of him in the cavern.” She motioned to the cliff edge. “Captain Kovitz there, or what she had become, was waiting for you, Professor. Seems you’re more a threat than they thought. Poor Andy was just another way to get close to you. They obviously didn’t need Hartogg, so consumed…most of him.”
She handed Matt a sidearm, and only then did he notice she had strapped on the man’s knives, which were now hanging on her belt with her own guns. Her pockets bulged, and reaching in she pulled an extra magazine and handed it to him.
“You got twenty shots – choose your targets carefully. We’ve got a long way to go.”
Abrams looked over the edge. “You’ve been down there?”
She walked to the edge of the walkway. She seemed to have no fear of the height. “Only part way. There are…things down there. More like Andy and Tania, but I saw other creatures even worse.” She turned to Abrams and lifted her gun. “Let’s hope they’re also like slugs.” She looked down. “In my years, many people have told me to go to Hell.” She stepped back from the edge. “And now, I do.”
*
General Decker put the phone down and sucked in a deep breath, his chest swelling in his uniform. He held it for a second or two and then eased it out, before turning to the room. Most of his Forward Command was assembled, waiting on his instructions.
Decker was now in charge, and his reporting line was to the Commander in Chief – the President, and only the President. The fate of the country was now in his hands.
“That was the President of the United States. By executive order, we have been given the green light. God bless America.” There was a round of applause.
Decker lifted the phone again – it went straight through to bomber command. “Executive Order Fox-Delta-Orion-Victor-nine-nine-three-seven-two-one-nine – we have green light.” He placed the phone back on its cradle and then switched on a large monitor on his wall. It showed a view from an air-force control tower, and a colossal plane beginning to move slowly down a runway.
Decker felt his heart swell with pride at the sight of the massive bombing arsenal – the B52 Stratofortress. The winged monster weighed nearly half a million pounds and could deliver its payload from fifty thousand feet. Which was just as well, as conservative estimates were that the twenty-megaton bomb would produce a cloud to forty-eight thousand feet with a significant EM-pulse.
Two F22 raptors would accompany the bomber to the drop zone to ensure air superiority over a clear flight path. Nothing would be allowed to get in the way of the flying fortress’s mission. The raptors would peel away before the drop and rely on their 1.82-mach speed to get them well away from the magnetic disturbance or radioactive corruption. At least that was the plan – both pilots were volunteers, and knew the risks.
Decker was already counting down the seconds. It would take them thirty minutes to reach the drop site – lock and load, as they say. He sat down, his hands unconsciously crushing into fists. The men and women behind him, the noise, the heat, all of it, meant nothing compared to that plane and its destination.
*
Abrams stopped and peered over the edge of the path. They had been winding around the outside of the pit, moving quickly, and descending ever lower. Many smaller tunnels finished at their path and, though they were empty, Abrams had the impression that someone or something lurked back in the darkness. He could have thrown another of his glow sticks into any of them, but the truth was, if they were being left alone, then he’d leave them alone. Still, the skin on his neck crawled with warnings as they went past every one of them.
He looked down at his watch once again, and grunted. “It’s time. If General Decker has received approval, then he’ll be on his bombing run.”
Matt stopped and stared for a moment, but then just nodded.
“Good.” Adira scanned the pit’s bottom and then half turned. “If everything is obliterated, then we won’t care any more. Until then; we go on.”
Chapter 25
The raptors flew over the drop site, taking several images and then peeling away, stepping on the gas and leaving nothing but vapor trails. Decker looked at the aerial shots as they appeared on his screen. The slimy mess that had been the verdant Mammoth National Park was now like an anthill, crawling with the amoebic Shoggoth monstrosities.
The General ground his teeth, feeling an almost physical pain as he saw the lines of people being led into the holes in the ground. He couldn’t save them – they didn’t yet have enough ammunition to mount a successful ground operation against the Shoggoth. These people were already lost; all he could do was stop them from suffering.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered as he got slowly to his feet. Then his jaws clenched. “But I promise every one of you that you will have your vengeance.”
“Counting down to drop.” The laconic voice of the pilot of the Stratofortress came in as he began his final run. “Five, four, three, two, one…payload away. Returning to base.”
The aerial shot was taken from maximum height, where the national park was just a field of green, with a black smudge as a target in the distance – with a drop from fifty thousand feet, the amount of forward movement of the bomb would ensure it travelled many miles before reaching its mark. Military technology allowed a calculated precision that would mean a strike within a dozen feet of what they wanted to hit.
The
big plane turned like a super tanker in the air and started to wing away. It would take several minutes for the bomb to detonate, as it was designed to be the biggest bunker buster in the history of mankind. Its goal was to penetrate deep into the bowels of the massive monstrosity making its way to the surface.
Decker held his breath.
“Detonation.”
The rear cameras of the plane whited out and they lost their images. It was just as well, as no human eye could withstand the white-hot heart of nuclear detonation. He turned to look at the feed from the banks of seismometers dotted throughout the state to detect earth movement. The lines measuring the seismic waves barely registered anything above a normal background range.
“What the hell?” Decker frowned. He had expected the machines to scribble widely as they either registered the massive hammer-blow to the earth, or the sensors were destroyed – the digital feeds registered neither result.
“What’s going on here? What just happened?” He turned to the room and was met with confused stares.
“Goddamnit, give me the VELA feed, now.”
Decker’s screen flipped to high-altitude images from the satellite, and he drilled down to the black stain over the Kentucky landscape. He had expected to see a towering mushroom cloud of heat, and the debris of the earth, the burrower beneath, and vaporized human souls rising into the atmosphere. There should have also been a massive shock wave obliterating everything in a giant ring growing out from the detonation point. Decker knew that a nuclear detonation of that size would have achieved temperatures of around 180 million degrees, about ten times that of the surface of the Sun. Everything should have been slag. Ground zero, the melt zone, should be nothing but a crater like something only seen on another world.
But instead, it was as before. Decker leaned forward, squinting – not quite. The ground moved and heaved, like a monstrous blanket stirring with a waking sleeper beneath.
“Did we not get burn? He spun left and right. “Well? Talk to me.”
