by Byron Craft
That’s all, indeed, Darius thought. That was the final post on the page.
“Jesus,” Will said blankly and crossed himself even though he was Presbyterian. “Holy hell. They’ve gone and done it, haven’t they?”
No one else spoke for a moment, everyone trying to get their heads around the end of the world if that’s what this was. They were so far from everything it would be weeks before the fallout spread to the South Pacific (unless targets in Hawaii were hit, but that seemed not to be the case), they had no direct evidence.
That occurred to Darius. He said, “We should be prepared for this being as another experiment within the experiment. The boys over at Human Behavior might be seeing how we react to a worldwide catastrophe, one that doesn’t directly affect us, remember, we’re on Mars, which would result in our kind of loss of communication because there would no longer be anybody to communicate with.”
“So, the people on the forum were plants? How did they know we’d go there?”
“We did go there, didn’t we? It’s all psychology. That’s exactly what this is.”
“No,” Sheila said. “I mean, yes, possibly, even probably, but what about the headaches and the puking and the passing out? NASA isn’t gonna pull that kind of thing, not on live webcam.”
Darius reflexively looked up at the little black eye, which positioned at the tangent of the dome parallel to the floor; all of them did. Ceilings obscured their sleeping and bathing quarters, but it was still creepy. That was what they had all signed up for, he knew. But something none of them signed up for was to be zapped with some remote torture device. (Actually, they might have signed up for that but not noticed. Astronauts were an eager bunch, and the contract was thick.) “I don’t know if they would do it, why they would do it, or how they would do it,” he said, careful not to suggest a remote torture device, “so I don’t know about the pain episode. But I think we have to assume this is an unannounced drill, part of the research. Do we go on when we think there’s no hope? Or do we give up? I doubt there’s a place on the real mission for anyone who ignores their job just because they can’t raise anybody on the radio.”
Darius, invoking Occam’s Razor to keep them all from multiplying explanatory entities unnecessarily, had eased everyone’s minds, including his own. The rest of the day after that was spent as normal, although the continued radio silence cast an eerie mood to their normal “colonist” activities.
However, this new morning was full of yellow sunshine from a star that looked about 50 percent too big for Mars. It was cheery, though, and he knew that as soon as he sat down with his crewmates this morning, Mission Support would conclude the experiment within the experiment and call them at last.
There was that, and something smelled good. It was going to be a fine day.
Lemon pancakes, which had sounded incredibly nasty to Darius before he first tried them at culinary training before the start of the mission, were now his favorite. In fact, he would sometimes trade Will to … get … more …
Something had dripped onto the slab of pancake Darius had impaled on his fork. It took a moment before he noticed anything had happened, but the spot where the drop hit the pancake sizzled away. The area of the fork right under it melted some and one of the tines slowly drooped and fell onto the plate.
He instinctively looked up, but as his eyes took in what was happening, what in the hell was happening? Sheila screamed in a pitch so high he almost lost his presence of mind from that alone. More droplets fell onto them, the first hitting Will, who shrieked and tried to lift himself over the back of his seat to get away. Then Dalka, who smashed her hand in pain against the table; then Yong, who had endured years of torture by his insane North Korean jailers, was hit by a dripping as big as a flank steak. The green glob fell directly into Yong’s upturned face.
His arms shot out as if nailed to a cross, and the scream, Darius had never heard anything like it. Sheila’s sanity-rending cry of seconds earlier was like a polite cough compared to the sound that came from Yong, and he had been tortured for years on end. The pain must have been unbelievable.
Darius didn’t have to wait long to find out for himself. A new green blob, no bigger than one of the lemon pancakes, dropped onto his shoulder and ate through it like a paper napkin. The agony forced him to the floor, his skin like ice, his body in full spasmodic revolt. More drops, larger green blobs, and smaller green spheres fell from the dome’s thousand angles. Each, he could see before everything went mercifully dark, was a complete little slug creature. Each drop was a different size but an entire malevolent creature. The hole in his shoulder burned like it had been hit with a magnesium flare, but even through the shrieking in his mind, he could see one of the blobs fall onto Thalía’s head and knock her to the floor. Her terrified eyes looked into his as she tried to scream. And then the blob, the thing, slid over her head and absorbed it, and started to grow.
Before Darius mercifully lost consciousness, his final sight was two eyeballs, wonderful Thalía’s eyeballs, surfacing within the gelatinous body and staring right at him the way Thalía had a moment before.
It was a shoggoth, although Darius would never know the word. Knowing was for the living.
Drilling jack-up Medusa 2, Gulf of Papua,
Papua New Guinea
−9°S 144°E, 9007 km from South Pole
(9207 km from R’lyeh)
Rising + 6 hours
There are no straight-line angles on the sea. In fact, as far as the Transocean Ltd. derrickman Mick Wilson could see over the Gulf of Papua, the water was entirely flat. There were small systems of ripples formed by the wind, but nothing like the 90-degree angles of a rectangular room or even the highly obtuse ones that made up a 36-foot-diameter geodesic dome.
Mick Wilson wasn’t thinking of angles at that moment, although his job required constant reference to drilling angles, working with the drillers to make sure shafts didn’t break from going in wrong, bringing up the crude wrong, or being taken out wrong. Although the Medusa 2 was a jack-up and therefore didn’t suffer the shifting angles of attack that a semi-submersible or straight-up drillship had to deal with, there were plenty of ways an angle could be wrong and ruin everybody’s day right there. Of course, whether you were drilling off the shore of Papua New Guinea, 1,800 miles from civilized Sydney, or practically within sight of the Opera House, any driller’s day wasn’t going to be all that great in the first place.
He did like looking out at the water when it was his twelve hours off duty, though. Placid, even peaceful despite the 24/7 shouts of his compatriots and rumbles of the platform. Storms came through here like anywhere, but they were anchored to the floor twenty meters below, so even those were interesting. And he didn’t have to think about the damn angles of this and that for a damn change when he wasn’t guiding or monitoring the drills.
But the rig itself, other than the cylindrical support columns holding it above the water and the drills themselves, was a bunch of metal boxes welded together. Medusa 2 was nothing but angles. Not a round corner anywhere on Medusa 2 and that meant hundreds, if not thousands, of interior angles, the ones that worked like doors to the abominations mindlessly sent forth by Cthulhu.
Mick Wilson couldn’t give a rat’s rear end about Lovecraft. The only reason he had even heard of the bastard was that everything in the world went nuts the day before yesterday. Every man on the rig got in the queue for the sat phone once the wave of violent seizures passed through them, forty-five seconds of nightmarish excruciation during which many of them lost consciousness entirely.
When the psionic waves came hours later, anyone on the exterior of the rig ran right off the south-most edge and fell two-hundred feet into the sea. Some died upon impact; others, bones were broken, wished they had died upon impact; and others got lucky and made it back up the ladders.
Several hours following that, the Operations boss made an ashen-faced announcement to the sixty or so remaining crewmen out of an original contingent
of one-hundred-thirty. Fires were burning throughout Perth. An estimated million were dead in Sydney. And they couldn’t raise anyone at any level in Christchurch; there was nothing but dead air on every RNZI shortwave frequency.
“Helicopters aren’t coming anytime soon to get us,” he said to them. “Something serious has happened. No idea what, but those on shore got enough to worry about without us crying to go home. We got food and water enough for nine months at a minimum.”
“But how will we know about our families? Talk to ’em and check on ’em?” Mick asked.
“We’re gonna be running three shifts on comm, that means one of the sat phones will be available 24/7 for you gents until further notice. But, um, I need to warn you … I haven’t been able to reach one person yet at home in Brisbane, no matter how many different people I can think to ring. It could just be the phone lines are down. But it could be the worst. Just mind yourselves, that’s all.”
In line for the sat phone was when somebody said “Cthulhu” and “Lovecraft” while talking to some others in line. Mick didn’t know what either word meant, so they told him. Complete and utter bollocks was what that was, and he told them so. People were dead, for God’s sake. It was disrespectful. It really chapped his ass when he tried to ring his wife, then his mother, then his brother, and got nothing but the harsh automated message telling him the number could not be reached.
No one had said the word “shoggoth” yet, and no one ever would, since the few men who knew the creature from tabletop RPGs were dissolved entirely before they could recognize one on top of them. The exterior angles of the structure of rectangles didn’t birth any of the horrors; shoggoths came through interior angles.
In other words, every cabin, every enclosed space, filled with shoggoths squeezing through from their place of origin, the South Pole. Filled to bursting, the rectangular cabin of the bridge saw its pressure eventually relieved. Only Mick Wilson momentarily survived, he had asked his mate to hold his place in line while he went to the toilet. He opened the hatch releasing the shoggoths and dissolved before he could scream. Soon every other enclosed space vomited forth its mass of death as soon as one panicked driller after another tried to get inside, away from the things spilling out onto the rig. The steel structure collapsed within the hour, and the Medusa 2 crashed, burning, into the sea.
* * *
New York and Pyongyang were thousands of miles further from the South Pole than Hawaii, or Papua New Guinea was. But distance made no difference to shoggoths, who could travel from anywhere through any eldritch angles anywhere in the world. It was unlike the Event, where the farther one was from R’lyeh, the less horrible the suffering would be; and the Cthulhu herald’s psionic waves, which traveled along the surface of the Earth and thus reached different locations at different times. The number and intensity of the invading shoggoths were the same whether they portaled from the South Pole to angles 1,000 kilometers away or places 15,000 kilometers away.
At any location, closer than about 7,000 kilometers from the Event in the waters above R’lyeh, very few were left to care. Everyone except the intoxicated and the mad was already dead. The shoggoths got them, too.
Chapter 3:
The Absence
The final psionic waves broadcast by Cthulhu’s herald form just before it vanished took several hours to propagate over the globe before dissipating. It would be almost a full day before the corporeal Cthulhu reached the surface of the ice and its great brain could resume sending out waves of influence over the minds of all sentient life on the surface of the Earth.
Interstate 495 near Falls Church, VA
39°S 77°E, 2522 km from Point Bombadil
Rising + 6.5 hours
Something was definitely wrong with Horan Marmalado.
It began shortly after the Army called all personnel on the North American continent to Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota: a blank stare that replaced Horan’s sparkly-eyed excitement at the feeling and, God knew, talking about Cthulhu’s spirit within him. An expression of utter, inconsolable desolation settled upon the face of the escaped mental patient formerly known (if only to himself) as Orange Marmalade. The weeping wouldn’t stop.
By 0515 hours, as the sunrise approached the Eastern Seaboard, the M1A2 Abrams tank containing U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Francis Doucette, Staff Sergeant Delbert Mitchum, writer Martin Storch, and (again, self-described) prophet of the Old One made it up I-95 to “the Beltway” circling Washington, DC. By this time, Horan Marmalado had stopped sharing updates about his Unity with Cthulhu and had chewed his pinkies up to the first knuckle for so long that the pain radiating from them made his whole body shake in agony.
“Don’t think that’s doing you any good, man,” Doucette said after watching him for another ten minutes. “You got to be just ripping up the muscles in there. You know the hospitals are probably full, right? Probably with dead people, not even any doctors there. Unless they’re dead, too, I guess. But hey, Horan? Horan, listen, man: what I’m trying to say is if you keep doing that, you’re gonna need a hospital, but we ain’t going to a hospital, so maybe quit eating yourself.”
Horan seemed, very slowly, to work out and comprehend the words the burly tank operator had just said to him, unfixing his eyes from the random point on the bulkhead and turning his head, so his gaze rested on Doucette. He lowered the mangled-looking pinkies from the sides of his mouth, a bridge of drool stretching between them.
“Hey, buddy? Horan? That’s really good, yeah, just we’re just gonna let those relax for a little while.”
“Jesse James,” Horan said.
Doucette remained perfectly still like an animal does when it detects some unidentified danger in the vicinity. He looked at Martin Storch, the rumpled and slightly drunk author of a bunch of books who had been silently taking in both Horan Marmalado engaging in self-cannibalism as well as the slightly intoxicated soldier watching the man. Martin raised his eyebrows at Doucette, but that was all.
“Sorry, man, what?” Doucette said.
“Jesse James continental drive tranny listen, listen to the wind blow dead mambo in the free world.”
“Ah,” Doucette said, nodding at him for no reason. “Um … what?”
“Drive train south not south what what what what what, what.”
“I’m afraid our friend here may be a schizophrenic, Sergeant,” Martin said before Doucette could form another pointless query, the essayist’s plummy accent at odds with his unshaven, sleep-deprived, puffy face.
“What?” Doucette said again, only this time to Martin. “He don’t even have one person in there right now, forget about two.”
“Schizophrenia is a condition distinct from dissociative disorder, what used to be called ‘multiple-personality disorder.’ I’d call it a common misconception, but most people know the difference these days.” He cleared his throat meaningfully. “In any case, actual schizophrenia represents a breakdown of the brain’s ability to understand, assimilate, and communicate information. Everything’s a jumble that’s what his ‘word salad’ is about.”
“What’s with Jesse James?”
“Apparently that’s the chopped radish in this salad: it adds nothing, no matter how prevalent it is,” he said, making a mental note to use that analogy later if there was a later. He shook his head at Horan and said to Doucette, “Something’s happened to our friend, here. Something bad, by the looks of it. I can only assume that it is as much to do with Cthulhu as everything else.”
“Jeez. I’ve seen a bunch of people going crazy the past couple days, but that was, like, violent. Not like this crap, chewing on himself and saying … hell, I don’t know what he’s trying to say. Cowboy names or whatever.” He realized that he was talking to Martin like Horan Marmalado wasn’t even there. Which he wasn’t, but still?
“I’m sure you noticed his style of dress? His ‘scrubs’? In my experience, scrubs are worn mostly in a medical environment. Doctors and nurses, but more to our purpose here
, also certain kinds of long-term patients.”
“Patients? Like at hospitals? Don’t they wear those little tie-around gowns? I remember I had to have one on when I got that growth cut off my ...”
“Hospitals, yes,” Martin said, interrupting the soldier’s train of thought as decisively as possible, “but not the kind you’re thinking. I mean mental hospitals. Sanitaria.”
“Party planner mental time Jesse James,” Horan said.
“An excellent point,” Martin replied, then chastised himself and added, “I’m sorry, Mister Marmalado, that was unkind. You do not deserve to be mocked.”
“Jesse James marmalade,” Horan answered.
“Wait, he’s a psycho? A mental patient, I mean? How the hell did, did he get …” Doucette trailed off as the tank slowed down. For the past six hours, they had bucked against their locked restraints as the vehicle mounted and dismounted thousands of cars and trucks, crushing them underneath its treads as it made progress over the jammed Interstate. But now, Mitchum, at the helm, was letting up on the gas.
“Fuel time?” Doucette called at him. It seemed early since they hadn’t gone more than 150 miles in the past four hours and the M1A2 had an operational range of nearly 300 miles without having to top up. The two of them, the only survivors from a crew of four, had been ordered to turn around at Fort Lee and get their asses to the middle of North damn Dakota, along with every member of the military receiving the communication after the bombs were dropped on Washington last night. They’d been glad for the order, weird as it was to be sent to report at an Air Force base. Before that, the four of them were heading south, toward Cthulhu, as instructed by a mental patient.
What a SNAFU.
Mitchum didn’t say anything as the tank slowed to an idle, nudging out of the way vehicles lay in front of it. Eventually, they stopped altogether.
