by Byron Craft
He barked a laugh out loud. Hey, that wouldn’t do any damage, either! Slam away! He drove on, staying to the shoulder whenever possible at the tank’s maximum speed.
The scare startled him from his train of thought, and his Jack Daniel’s-sodden mind was unable to get it back. It was a mercy.
Doucette had been thinking about the change in Horan Marmalado: how he suddenly lost the ability to form coherent sentences, how, seized by fear and anxiety so strong he damn near chewed off his fingers. He didn’t think something had made the man go schizo all of a sudden; after all, Martin pretty much told them that Horan had to be an escaped mental patient. Rather, it seemed to Doucette like something was missing from Horan Marmalado, not just missing but taken away, something that had been present inside him until the nukes hit Washington.
But it wasn’t just that. And it wasn’t just Horan.
Doucette had noticed that he no longer felt the soul-crushing pain and panic since the bombs fell, of the kind he and Mitchum had experienced before they discovered the magical effects of booze. The kind that the tank’s loader, Corporal Ward, and official driver, PFC Pius, experienced before Ward smashed his head to bits inside the tank and Pius took his sidearm and shot himself through the heart. It was after they refused to drink on duty, especially during a national emergency.
Not only the feeling of imminent self-harm was gone; even the unease during what Martin Storch had called “the troughs of psionic waves” no longer buzzed inside Doucette’s brain. He noticed this only once the effects of their moderate, but constant alcohol consumption wore off a bit. Over the previous two days, rising panic and pain had always alerted him to get some more numbing alcohol into his system.
But since they had received the order to get their asses to Minot, North Dakota, as literally in the middle of nowhere Doucette could imagine, he forgot to do it until he’d knocked out his tankmates and started driving. However, he was still under the influence, so maybe there was still enough in his system. So, he still drank up, because there was no reason to take any chances, not to mention that he might end up physically or mentally unable to dose himself with whiskey if a new psionic attack caught him unawares and sober.
It felt good, not having that doom every second inside his mind. Maybe it was over. Maybe Minot had done something, and it was over.
But no matter how good it might be for himself, Doucette recognized, something bad had happened to poor Horan, their oversharing “prophet of Cthulhu.” Doucette was as normal religious as the next guy, but he believed he knew what was going on.
For some reason, he couldn’t begin to guess, why Horan’s God, Cthulhu, had withdrawn his holy grace. And how do I get rid of the shoggoths beneath my seat?
Raven Rock Mountain Complex
39.73°N 77.42° W, 2054 km from Point Bombadil
Rising + 7 hours
The sun was up when United States President Judith Hampton, NSA chief and retired Marine Major General Jack Patterson, Marine Major Kevin Berry, three NSA aides in black suits and sunglasses, and Marine One pilot Alan Fisk took off from Monongahela National Forest. At the SH-3 Sea King helicopter’s maximum speed, it took them a mere two hours to reach their destination just north of the Maryland-Pennsylvania line.
The trip didn’t take long in the advanced helicopter, but it might as well have been a lifetime to the occupants of the Sea King because their destination, the Raven Rock Mountain Complex, was buried within and under a mountain seventy-five miles north of Washington, D.C., forcing them to pass within sight of the nation’s capital. This flight path provided a panoramic bird’s-eye view of the devastation wrought by the Russian and Chinese ICBMs. There was no White House anymore, no Capitol; there was nothing at all remaining of the buildings housing the federal government. Black smoke heavy with radiation intermittently blocked the sight. Marine One was well-protected from radiation and poisonous air, with safeguards much like those on the M1A2 Abrams tank; but the heat forced Fisk to fly higher. From this vantage point, the scene looked even worse: concentric rings of blackened earth that still burned. The two missiles could have been carrying as many as twenty warheads. The closest intact buildings …
There were no intact buildings they could see anywhere inside the Beltway.
The rest of the time aboard the helicopter was spent in silence.
Patterson thought about his family, every member incinerated. His wife and two teenage boys were guaranteed a place with him in the bunkers far below the White House, where the momentary, self-appointed president, Algernon Steele, and other essential personnel had retreated, but just about every road in the entire country was impassable unless you were driving a damn tank. Witnessing the hellscape that had been, just twelve hours earlier, the heart and mind of the free world, Patterson knew that even if his loved ones had been able to make it underground with Steele and the rest, that White House bunker was nothing but a slag heap now. Everyone and everything there was buried in molten metal that would be too radioactive to touch for the next ten thousand years. He would cry later if he got a later.
* * *
Fisk kept his mind as much as possible on doing the job of four dedicated Nighthawks, the HMX-1 officers entrusted with keeping the fifteen presidential Sea Hawk helicopters in operation. The job was made easier, despite the lack of air traffic control, by there being no other aircraft in the sky. Also, the chances of any terrorists or other assassins remaining alive and in place to attack Marine One was minuscule. It allowed him to take in the end of the world and try to come to terms with the fact that he was the only Nighthawk left from “Whiteside,” the HMX-1 Executive Flight Detachment. The rest were almost certainly dead; there was nothing left of the alert facility Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling except smoking rubble. His family lived in Ohio. They had died the day before. He had already done his crying. He hoped he’d live to do more.
* * *
Berry wished he had never heard of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, never joined the Marines, never impressed his bosses and gotten assigned to the outrageously prestigious job of White House Situation Room Audio-Visual Specialist. He also wished he had never met the president, never shot up from an E-3 to an O-4 in less than two days … that he had never been in a position to say one word about Cthulhu. If none of that had happened, he would probably be happily dead like just about everybody else in the world. Dead somewhere in the Southwest, in Arizona probably, his home state. As it was, he had to assume all of his family and all of his friends were dead. Even if the phone lines everywhere in the country hadn’t been overloaded and inaccessible since the Event, he had been too busy, too embroiled with crazy President Hampton, to call anyone. He didn’t know what he would’ve said to them, anyway: Enjoy the apocalypse? Hope you were right about the afterlife? Good-bye? Berry had cried much of the night, trying to be quiet. He wept more on the trip to Raven Rock, as loudly as he wanted. The general, the president, the pilot, the NSA aides with their dark sunglasses they wore even at night, Berry was certain the eyewear incorporated heads-up displays; why else would they wear them 24/7? He didn’t notice, didn’t care, or just didn’t say anything. They were a group, but, looking out at where Washington used to be, each of them felt utterly alone in the world.
* * *
However, this feeling of isolation, of desolation, was something located much deeper within Judith Hampton’s psyche, much more profound than anything the childless widow president consciously felt about the loss of her family, her friends and colleagues, or the vast majority of the citizens she served. Something more fundamental was absent.
For the rest of them, the loss of signal was a good thing. The herald form was only a projection, barely a facsimile much less potent than the corporeal Cthulhu sent to clear this matter point for the Race’s galaxy-spanning bridge. To achieve this, the herald’s acute “waves” of malign influence had turned the Earth into a global slaughterhouse; but its presence also brought about a subtler, more chronic effect. Inside every human being ha
d been constant feelings of illness, of dread, of scrabbling desperation that remained even when unusual brain chemistry had blocked the psionic peaks of madness and violence, intoxication, or Black Ops mind-mastery techniques. From the Event until the moment the herald form vanished, this soul-deadening nausea persisted every second in every person.
Almost.
For Hampton and other worshipers of the Old One, this effect was anything but deleterious. The president felt connection, understanding, and insight from the herald’s psionic broadcast, something that enhanced her understanding of the Truth of the Old One as conveyed by his scribe. Just looking at, not even necessarily reading it, the gospel of H.P. Lovecraft inspired her with a faith she had never known, not as a child attending church, not as a schoolteacher accommodating all religious traditions in the classroom, and not as President of the United States, entrusted with the protection of all believers of any stripe within her dominion. Cthulhu’s gospel had brought her communion.
That feeling of being blessed had utterly vanished.
After the nuclear strikes that had almost knocked Marine One out of the sky the night before, Hampton found herself suffering from this intangible loss, even once they landed at Monongahela and were safe, as safe as anyone could be under nuclear attack. Of course, a nuclear attack that destroys everything important in one’s life does tend to bring one down; but her ache, her feeling of loss, sat atop her grief over the destruction of the capital of the nation she was supposed to lead. It was personal, fundamental, metaphysical. It felt like Great Cthulhu had vacated her soul.
She lay within sleeping gear kept for the president only on Marine One, different layers and intensities of grief and desperation filling her mind until her consciousness could take no more, and she fell asleep. When she woke, nothing in her mind had changed. But, now that she was rested, it came to her almost immediately what she needed to do.
While the others were lost inside their heads, Hampton spent her time in Marine One reading something she had downloaded onto her custom iPad right after consuming the printout of “The Call of Cthulhu” provided to her and all White House security-cleared staff by then-Lieutenant Kevin Berry: The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft, (a 99 cent Kindle). Cheap at a hundred times the price, she decided. Over the previous two days, ever since the Truth had inhabited her from the first story, she read it whenever a spare moment came, or she was enduring something not related to the proselytization of Himself. In the same way, one didn’t have to read the Christian Bible from beginning to end to feel the Truth of that supposed deity, Hampton skipped around Lovecraft’s gospel, from “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” to “The Statement of Randolph Carter” to the minor allegories and poetry. But she always circled back to the most important, “The Call of Cthulhu,” which portrayed the glorious return of her Lord and Master. In the story, Cthulhu didn’t fully rise as he now had in real life, but all prophetic scribes had to veil their truths from those fearful haters who would never be able to understand and would persecute those who did.
However, unlike before, she could no longer feel the Truth within the texts. The inspiration and communion she had experienced were absent. A bit early for a crisis of faith, isn’t it? She scolded herself, but there it was. She believed, oh, how she believed, with all her heart and soul, but she no could longer feel His eldritch presence.
Before she was quite manifestly a prophet of Cthulhu, not His scribe but spreading His Word to a world suffering because they didn’t understand His power. He wasn’t a kindly God who was fond of his creations; neither was He an Allah, deciding what happened to each of his creations based on his preferences and will; and He wasn’t even a Yahweh, angrily crushing all those not following.
No, Cthulhu was like none of these so-called supreme beings, she decided. First of all, from what Hampton could glean from Lovecraft’s holy texts, Cthulhu wasn’t a creator God, in fact, the scribe, H.P. Lovecraft, believed that the very idea of a universe-creating deity was ridiculous. The scientific and logical arguments against some Prime Mover who could perform creatio ex nihilo were significant, Hampton had to admit. After the extremely short tenure of the writer Martin Storch as her aide-de-camp, she found online some of his arguments regarding the “Problem of Evil” written long before Cthulhu came to town. He maintained that a creator God was assumed by those trying to attract adherents to whatever monotheistic faith they were pitching, an absolutely powerful, completely good, and infinitely wise being, it did sell well in the metaphysical marketplace. There was more spin by monotheists than there was from politicians: what we think is “evil” is really God’s way of showing us to the “good,” the ways of the Lord were mysterious, blah blah blah. Bullocks, is what Storch had written, finishing his essay. Hampton had to assume that Martin Storch was dead along with the other ninety-nine percent of the world, and that was too bad. If he excluded Cthulhu from his atheism, he would have made a fine bishop in the new Church, she unwaveringly decided.
The somewhat rattled President Hampton determined that opposed to the untenable superbeings of Middle Eastern lore; Lord Cthulhu was logically the perfect one. In a moment of sudden revelation, she muttered to herself, “After all, Lovecraft never said Cthulhu was a creator god or a god at all in the sense of being a literal deity. He was, plainly, an alien, but one so powerful that he filled the same role to humans as a traditional God.” That may have been a bit of semantic wordplay by Lovecraft to keep himself off the heretic’s pyre, she concluded, but it was on the mark: an alien with the powers of a god appearing on Earth counted for more than any literal deity who, for all its alleged power, never showed up.
But the biggest reason that Cthulhu’s rightful place was as god-master of Earth, to the President, was that he suffered from no existence-nullifying paradoxes regarding theodicy. Evil was not a problem for Cthulhu, so far as she could understand from the text. He wasn’t all good either, that much was obvious.
Cthulhu was almost certainly not “all-knowing.” He didn’t profess to be all things or that all things were him. And, since Cthulhu originated somewhere far away and came to Earth (kind of like an evil Superman, now that she thought of it), he was located in space and time. In a bajillion dimensions, probably, but not everywhere at once. An all-knowing being would have to be everywhere at once; since Cthulhu came to Earth, he wasn’t here before and thus was not in all places at all times.
It also meant, to Judith Hampton, that Cthulhu could be powerful in ways the human mind couldn’t begin to comprehend, but he couldn’t exercise influence everywhere in the universe instantly, which was pretty much the monotheist’s very definition of “all-powerful.” He had to obey the laws of time and space, even if he found them much less constricting than did puny humans.
Finally, like an Abrahamic God, Cthulhu was to be worshiped, feared, and, for the lucky few like herself, President of only a few, loved. But, unlike the monotheist’s conception, Cthulhu didn’t care what you did or didn’t do, she was certain He didn’t even notice it. There would be no moral judgment from this lord and master: His hell was a place right here on Earth.
Which was good, considering Judith Hampton had murdered a man the night before.
It was done in the throes of zealous ecstasy and in the middle of Armageddon, true, but it was murder. Even a president of the United States wasn’t allowed to kill people. If there had still been a Congress, they would have impeached her ass.
Of course, this wasn’t a problem, since everyone in Congress, along with the vast majority of the public, were dead.
As Fisk lowered the helicopter onto the Raven Rock Mountain Complex helipad, Hampton used a technique she had long mastered between periods as a teacher in the public schools: she wrapped up her thoughts and came to a tentative conclusion quickly before any new demands came to her attention.
The conclusion was that, for whatever reason, she no longer subsumed within religious ecstasy, and she missed it. Cthulhu was still within her heart and mind, but she would
hesitate to kill for Him again. She would probably still do it if she had to, but it would be far from automatic. To her at the moment, the texts were just stories, parables about the Old One; but not His own words as shared with his holy scribe.
She smirked despite herself as Marine One landed on the helipad. No crewmen, no one at all, was present on the ground. At a facility created for the federal government, not one Army private awaited the arrival of the President of the United States. Of all the sudden changes in the world, Judith Hampton found this one especially unnerving.
They all unbuckled and exited the Sea King. Fisk stayed behind to inspect the enormous helicopter, something his full flight crew and destination ground crew would have finished in fifteen minutes but would probably take the lone surviving Nighthawk more than an hour.
The three NSA aides, wearing superspy sunglasses that she knew displayed a smorgasbord of data to the wearer, didn’t look as weird as they had the night before when the two male aides and one female aide slept with them still on their faces. That’s how she found herself thinking of them: two male NSA aides and a female NSA aide. At this realization, Hampton smirked again, this time about how she had disobeyed her own Teacher’s First Commandment, something that had also come in handy in politics: learn and use everybody’s names.
She approached the aides, who, even though they had slept within ten feet of her all night and had sat next to her on a helicopter for the last two hours, straightened respectfully as she approached them on the landing pad. “Guys, I can’t keep thinking of you as ‘the NSA aides.’ You know who I am, call me ‘Madam President’ or ‘Judith’ or ‘Judy,’” she told them with her old unshakeable candidate’s smile. “But not just ‘Hampton,’ okay? ‘Hey, Hampton!’ I hate that, I’m not a soldier in the Army or a character in a science fiction novel. Now, what are your names?”
