The Faith

by Byron Craft

  They smiled at her instructions, but the male aide with the shaved head spoke in a practiced monotone: “Huey.”

  The prematurely graying male aide said, “Dewey.”

  The severe-looking female aide said, “Jennifer.”

  “Of course,” Hampton said with a sigh.

  * * *

  The Raven Rock Mountain Complex was the ne plus ultra of Department of Defense doomsday mineshaft installations: a subterranean Pentagon impervious to nuclear, chemical, biological, or (being far underground) psionic attacks. It was home to Continuity of Government headquarters; emergency operations centers for the Army, Navy, and Air Force; the Defense Threat Reduction Agency; FEMA’s command center as well as its Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center. It was an executive branch complex, fully staffed at all times so the president could get right down to work; the Defense Systems Information Agency, which managed thirty-eight different communications systems for the Defense Department and the executive branch; and the 114th Signal Battalion. It handled all official emergency communications with the outside world, such as transmitting EBS messages to the public or, say, instructions to all military personnel to report immediately to the Air Force base in Minot, North Dakota.

  They entered a curved-top tunnel with a Vegas-like welcome sign; Hampton appreciated this bit of whimsy on the part of an apocalyptic bunker complex. Computer apparatuses had automatically detected the beacon from Marine One and pinged by automatic communications responders, but everyone breathed a serious sigh of relief when an actual human being got on the line and acknowledged their approach.

  Those inside the complex knew the president was coming, and they would open the doors for her and her group momentarily. They had been sealed shut at the same time as those at NORAD, and, as at NORAD, could be unsealed only by direct order of the president.

  Luckily, the president was standing right outside the door.

  In the middle of their tromping down the steep grade of the entrance, Patterson put out a hand for everyone to stop. He had unofficially, but unmistakably, assumed the role of Secret Service detachment chief and deputized his aides as special agents. The president and everyone else stopped after a few additional steps on the downward incline.

  “What’s the trouble, Ja—Sweet Lord Cthulhu, what in the hell is that?” Hampton cried at the sight on the concrete in front of them.

  “No idea, Madam President,” Patterson replied in Secret Service mode. Inside the ten-foot-wide tunnel, between them and the door, were five mammoth green blobs with ingested alien eyeballs staring out at the group of humans. As soon as the things saw them, they started moving toward them.

  “Oh, come on,” Kevin Berry said. “Shoggoths? Really?”

  “Is that what shoggoths look like? They’re straight from ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ by the Lord’s scribe!”

  “That’s basically the concept of them now, green blobs full of the eyeballs of creatures they’ve eaten. Technically, in the story, they can assume any ...”

  “Shut up, Major,” General Patterson snapped, “unless you or Judy—I mean the president, knows how you kill … shoggoths.” The whole damn thing was stupid it would have been funny if they weren’t about to join the rest of humanity in grisly death.

  Despite their predicament, Hampton laughed. “Jack, the incredibly powerful Elder Things couldn’t kill them. I don’t think we can do what an advanced alien race couldn’t.”

  “All due respect, Madam President, but you are completely off your rocker.”

  “We are often misunderstood in our own time,” she replied, which didn’t help.

  Patterson refocused: “Berry, let’s go. What do we do? We need to get to that door when the appropriate staff members open it for us. Are these things going to attack?”

  Berry watched the nauseous green super blobs slowly work to narrow the distance between themselves and the humans, leaving a sizzling trail of slime on the concrete behind them. “Looks like it, sir.”

  “Well, damn, son! What are we ...”?

  Patterson was interrupted by the loud crrrank of something metal, and huge, grinding into motion behind the innocuous-looking double doors twenty feet beyond the cluster of shoggoths, which didn’t seem to notice. After a few seconds, the grinding stopped with a resounding clack, like the tumblers of a lock falling into place.

  Exactly like that, in fact: less than a second after the clack, the double doors banged open and no fewer than six figures powered through, each armed with a flared, blunderbuss-type weapon. They wore NFPA Level A chemical-protective encapsulated inner bodysuits made out of acid-proof Dupont™ Tychem® TK. Housed within this layer is a reflective, silvery, acid-proof, aluminized fiberglass outer suit complete with a 220-degree-wide expanded face shield fashioned from three layers of advanced transparent laminate: 40 mil of polyvinyl chloride, five mil of DuPont™ Teflon®, then another 20 mil of PVC.

  “I’ll be damned,” Huey muttered, unaware he was speaking out loud.

  One of the protection-suit figures said through a Stormtrooper-like comm, “Please stand aside, Madam President. Everybody.”

  They moved to the right wall and flattened themselves against it as much as possible. The shoggoths now seemed to realize there were humans behind them as well, some of the eyeballs shifted over to that side, so now the things didn’t have a particular front or back and stopped moving toward the president and her entourage. Then, the shoggoths let out a high-pitched wind piping, Eeeeeeee! Wawk! Tekeli-li! Eeeeeeee! Wawk! Tekeli-li! and launched themselves at the armed figures. The things still couldn’t be fast, but it was unsettling how quickly they would close the twenty-foot gap.

  BOOM! In unison, the blunderbusses blasted barrages of white granules that kept on shooting out; thick hoses attached the guns to hard-plastic 55-gallon drums visible just behind the doors the silver-clad personnel burst through the opening. The white crystals were pumped fast out of the guns and slammed into all five shoggoths.

  The monsters let out sanity-cracking shrieks and squealed like trapped hogs as the substance ate through them, literally burning away and reducing to blackened shreds anything it touched on their gelatinous bodies. The creatures contracted as they screamed, trying to protect themselves, but the fusillade was unrelenting; inside of thirty seconds, all that was left of the enormous blobs was a grouping of dark stains on the concrete floor of the tunnel. The shrieks and squeals continued to ring in everyone’s ears (although not those of the protection-suited personnel, equipped with 3M™ PELTOR™ TEP-200 tactical earplugs), but the shoggoths weren’t just dead; they were erased.

  The group let out a whoop of celebration.

  “Your name?” Hampton asked the leader of the crew.

  “Lieutenant Derek Koch, Madam President.” He pronounced it cook.

  She went to shake his hand, but he held back his possibly biohazard-covered gloves. (Of course, these weren’t just gloves. Even rugged Army-issue gear would have been recklessly inadequate for fighting advanced biological threats like shoggoths: covering Koch’s hands was a glove system comprised of three layers. The innermost was Ansell® Barrier® gloves providing protection against a broad range of hazardous chemicals; worn on top of that were gloves [developed by DuPont™] molded from Neoprene®, a flexible synthetic rubber made of polymerized chloroprene; and, finally were outermost gloves knit from Kevlar® to resist abrasion and violation of the protective envelope.)

  Hampton gave a little bow. “Thanks for your caution. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mister Koch.”

  “Likewise, ma’am. Now, this way, please.” He set down his blunderbuss next to its salt barrel and started down the tunnel with Hampton and Patterson. The other five silver-colored team members parted and stood at attention with their backs to the tunnel walls. After a few steps, Koch turned and said, “The rest of you, too.”

  * * *

  Gee, thanks, Berry thought, then realized “the rest of them” could have just as easily been refused entry to t
he complex and had to fend for themselves outside, like Fisk. Fisk! Berry stopped and called, “Wait, what about the pilot?”

  Koch stopped and turned. “HMX-1 personnel stay with the president’s aircraft. It’s their job,” he said. “Major Fisk knew that when he landed. You can join him if you wish, Major Berry. But hurry the doors are about to close.”

  The president and General Patterson impatiently eyed Berry, who appeared creeped out that this person knew his name. He said, as casually as possible, “No, thank you. I’m with the group.”

  The figure turned back and resumed his march down the grade to the elevators that would send them a thousand feet underground. The other shoggoth-fighters brought up the rear of the group. The tunnel was rounded at the top, but its concrete walls met the concrete floor at ninety-degree angles. Hampton noticed stains just like the ones outside the double doors everywhere on the floor. Little desiccated shreds of organic matter stuck to the floor within some of the stains.

  “There must have been quite the battle here,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Koch said. “Lucky for us, they don’t seem to be able to appear underground, not as far as the depths the elevators can reach. And it took us a little while to assess the exact nature of the threat ...”

  “They’re shoggoths.”

  “Understood, ma’am, thank you,” he said, and continued, “So, about an hour ago, one member of my response team said, ‘These look like giant slugs. Maybe we should try pouring salt on them.’ We laughed, but we tried it. Worked like a charm.”

  The group laughed in amazement. Berry thought about what this implied: if salt worked as a fatal desiccant on shoggoths the same way it worked on slugs and snails, then the monsters had to be water-based, just like life-forms on Earth. They may have been from another star system and could teleport and were a billion years old or whatever, but they were alive. That meant as the group had just seen, they could be killed.

  He wondered: Did this mean that Cthulhu could be killed? In the Lovecraft story, the crew of the Emma tries to ram its sharp prow through Cthulhu in the South Pacific, but the Old One can rearrange his atoms somehow, and the ship passes right through him. That sounded pretty invincible to Berry, but now he understood the concept of a “herald form,” which, as the president had somehow (literally) divined, was some version of Cthulhu that appeared for whatever reason in advance of the corporeal Cthulhu. In the original story, the stars weren’t aligned quite “right” to allow him to rise for good, and so the bodily Cthulhu wasn’t able to follow his herald form and rise.

  Did that mean Cthulhu would arrive soon, in the flesh? Was he already on Earth? (Berry no longer felt that buzzing in his mind that seemed to emanate from the herald form, but he had no idea what that might portend.) Maybe the bastard could be killed. Berry glanced at President Hampton as they walked.

  But would his prophet allow it?

  * * *

  Several hundred yards inside the complex, the steep grade eased into flatness. As they walked on the new level, but still concrete, they passed through a circular opening twelve feet high, on which an open vault door three feet thick hung on enormous hinges. The president and NSA people must have seen nuclear blast doors on tours of various doomsday facilities, but Berry hadn’t. To the newly minted major, the slow swinging shut of this giant door behind them, much louder than the lock they heard opening behind the double doors, was his final confirmation that the excrement had truly hit the fan.

  “Wait, please,” Koch said, and they all halted. The rest of the protection-clad people joined him at a regular-looking door off to the side of the main walkway. He raised a hand to indicate the Army officer in camos walking briskly toward them. Koch turned the blunderbuss duty over to the man in camo. “Madam President, we are now entering Site R. I will be your liaison from now on.”

  A “candidate’s smile” formed immediately on Hampton’s face. She nodded and said, “Thank you, Lieutenant.” A politician through and through, Berry surmised. She’ll remember his face and name as long as he served a useful purpose and then toss it away, like so much refuse, when no longer needed. Is that what is in store for me, Major Berry?

  “Please, call me Derek.”

  “Thank God, one less rank I’ll have to keep in mind” she said, and everybody laughed.

  “Shall we get downstairs?” Derek said amiably, and they all followed him toward the tremendous elevators. The rescue crew, now in command of the man in camo, stayed behind; their job done until the next Lovecraftian monster attack, Berry imagined. Maybe Night Gaunts.

  “Where are you from, Derek?” the president asked. “Your diction is excellent.”

  “Portland, Oregon. I’m an all-American boy. In my previous life, before the military, I was in broadcasting; radio.” He entered a code into the keypad, placed his hand against a flat reader, and bent to get his retina scanned. After a moment, the doors to both elevators opened at the same time, and he waved the group inside.

  “Madam President, we’ve met before, when you came to visit the facility a few months after you took office,” Lieutenant Koch said affably. “So, you know how deep down we’re going to be. General Patterson as well, of course.”

  “I do remember now, Derek, both meeting you and coming through six miles of tunnels from Camp David to get here. That was interesting. A reason I prayed there wouldn’t be a national emergency.”

  Her use of prayed gave Berry a chill. Who would she be praying to if it came down to her country, her planet, versus her actual living God?

  “Will anyone require a dose of anti-anxiety medication for claustrophobia?” Derek asked as the elevator car plunged lower and lower into the bowels of the mountain. No one took him up on his offer, although Berry was certain that every single one of them, including Hampton and Patterson, would have loved a fistful of Valium as they watched with irrepressible alarm on their kissers as a mile of excavated rock, visible through the elevator’s small windows, swept rapidly up and out of sight.

  Chapter 4:

  The Underground Pentagon

  The Raven Rock bunker is the emergency operations centers for the United States Army, Navy, and Air Force. Along with the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado, it formed the core bunker complexes for the continuity and protection of the U.S. Government, what there was left to protect. Considering it was a mile underground, the room reserved exclusively for meetings including the Chief Executive, looked almost identical to those found inside the White House: an immaculate Seal of the President of the United States on the door; a magnificent rosewood meeting table and chairs that had, literally, never been used; and a state-of-the-art presentation system. The only sign that you were down as deep as an anthracite mine was the twelve-foot-high ceiling of sheared granite. Hampton wondered how long it would take to be able to sit in that room and not be utterly distracted by the fact that there was a million tons of rock right above your head.

  She knew very well that she might find out for herself since all of them might end up spending the rest of their lives down there. She was in the early days of a second term; would she finish out her presidency in this bunker? Would there still be an election, one with more than fifty voters, anyway, in November next year, or would she remain, president, until humanity recovered? (If humanity will recover.) Or would they agree to ‘suspend’ the Twenty-second Amendment and allow her to serve out the entire upcoming war, FDR-style?

  Wait a minute, Judy. Hampton hoped no one noticed her sudden alarm as she took the seat in the middle on the table, facing the biggest of the room’s four vast video screens. Now you want to go to war with Cthulhu, to defeat your GOD? Why? Just because you’re the elected official of the most powerful country in the world? Or because he isn’t stroking your ‘prophet President’ ego for a whole five minutes?

  No, of course not, she answered herself, watching the Site R staff busily getting ready for whatever the hell they were going to tell her and Patterson. Berry and the aides were there
too, of course; all four of them kept glancing at the ceiling. But I’m not just “an” elected official. I’m the President of the United States. Ever heard of the separation of church and state?

  Her mind’s response to itself screamed Ever heard of you are full of crap?

  Hampton stared at her iPad, which Dewey the NSA aide was holding for her. Even while family, friends, and every member of the federal government not present inside Site R were all dead or dying horribly, she never let the iPad out of her sight. It was like the Presidential Emergency Satchel, the forty-five–pound Zero Halliburton briefcase known as the “nuclear football,” had been during her tenure before nutty Algernon Steele took over and got himself buried in molten metal and rock.

  Her iPad contained the entire gospel of H.P. Lovecraft. She had purchased the Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft for 99 cents. That had to count for something; she hadn’t lost her faith. Communion or no, she still itched to open it, fire up the Kindle app, and luxuriate in the Truth.

  But this was, manifestly, not the time.

  Lieutenant Derek Koch, who had not yet entered the room, now came in with a smaller man also in camo uniform and a woman who was stouter than Hampton but almost identically dressed, in a white blouse and navy skirt and jacket. She even wore the same style of American flag pin on her left lapel. They stood with Derek near the lectern at the front of the room.

  He indicated the bespectacled, dark-skinned officer. “Madam President, this is Lieutenant Colonel Aadesh Shankaracharya,” he said, pronouncing the horrifying mishmash of phonemes like it was no big deal. He heads up the 114th Signal Battalion and will brief you on our present communications status.”

  Hampton stood and extended her hand to step over and shake. “Good to meet you, Colonel Shankaracharya, Is that East Indian?”

  “Thank you, my pleasure as well,” he said in a slight accent. “And yes, my mother was U.S. Army, but my father is from Mumbai. If you would be comfortable, everybody calls me ‘Desh.’”