Within Stranger Aeons

by Fisher, Michael

  “Again,” Megyn said to Deak, “I am SO sorry.”

  “Not any more your fault than mine,” Deak said. “I was trying to keep clear of this scary asshole who called himself Chaos so I kind of crowded Aurora over into you, I guess.”

  “You mean that big creepy-eyed tank next to you? Oh, I can’t blame you for that.”

  “You saw him?”

  “I look around a lot,” Megyn said, nodding. “I was mostly watching Mel—I’ve got a thing for Mel—but I turned and saw him once. He was actually checking out your girlfriend’s butt at the time. Skanky piece of crap. I mean him, of course.”

  The nurse had his stethoscope on and was having what looked to Deak like just a little too much of a good time checking for a heartbeat. But he didn’t say anything. The nurse looked up at him.

  “Her heartbeat’s fine. I doubt she has a concussion—just a lucky hit, I think—but she should still get checked out by someone in more detail within a day or so. You want me to wake her up? I could smelling salt her. Not generally approved, but I could put it under the category of ‘needed to awaken to observe for possible concussion.’ It’d get you folks all out of here on your own feet instead of the old ambulance routine, which quite frankly isn’t cheap. Plus this doesn’t seem worthy of a ride anyway.”

  Speaking of concussions, several great rhythmic ones—kettle/bass drum flourishes, greatly amplified by towering stacks of sheer sonic force—rattled the very ground in the next moment.

  BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

  “Aw fuck!” Deak said. “‘Let Us Open the Gate’,” he said. “This is the song that’s supposed to have the missing part…the part they’re about to do.”

  “So,” the nurse said, “smelling salts?”

  Deak told the guy to go ahead. Megyn was giving him an odd look.

  “I think you should take her by ambulance,” she said.

  “I deliver pizzas,” Deak said. “An ambulance ride is six month’s income.”

  “I’ll pay for it.”

  The nurse was already administering the salts. Aurora’s head snapped back abruptly. Her arm came up and she found the nurse’s hand and shoved it away faster than he could.

  And then the screaming started.

  ***

  The sound that rose up around the tent was gut-wrenchingly terrifying. Mass terror, striking instantaneously.

  Both Deak and Megyn rushed independently to the exit. She got there first.

  “Oh my god…”

  There was no need for her to explain…or point. The problem was obvious.

  The entire stage had been swallowed. By a gigantic flaming blob.

  The roof was already all but gone, with flaming swaths of canvas falling here and there into the crushing ring of mass exodus from which Megyn had inadvertently saved them all…if but temporarily, from the looks of it.

  The blob, at least two stories tall at its center was no mere mass of inexplicable red napalm. Thick pseudopods were erupting from its shifting surface, thrusting out and grabbing handfuls of concertgoers at a time. The fiery goo simply stuck to those unfortunates its lunges were finding and drew them back in handfuls, or podfuls in this case, the burning victims stuck to the ends of the pods like bugs on flypaper as they screeched out their final agonies.

  Before either of the two of them—or the med tech “nurse” who’d tended to Aurora and who’d moved up to the tent door next to them—had even come to terms with what they were seeing, there came sounds of falling objects and screaming from right behind them.

  The panicking crowd was stampeding the first aid tent.

  “Oh shit!” Deak said. “Aurora…”

  He rushed in to help his still prone girlfriend, who was awake enough to at least be sitting up. Knowing there was no time, seeing the wall of the tent being pushed down behind her back, he bolted over to her, grabbed her by the wrists and jerked her to her feet.

  “What’s…?” Aurora said. She was obviously still a little dazed. “Where are we…”

  Deak let go of her wrists, grabbed her upper arms firmly and hustled her out just as the tent roof was coming down.

  They emerged into a crush of hysterical humanity and had no choice but to slip into its stampede of a flow. Megyn and the nurse were already gone.

  Deak put Aurora in front of him and pushed her along, keeping her corralled and also not letting her see what he didn’t particularly want to look at anymore either. The screaming was still going on and that was all the verification of danger Deak needed. He glanced back over his shoulder just in time to see one of the pseudopods cram half a dozen flailing, screaming victims right into the gelatinous core of the giant fiery monster. Revolting as that was, he somehow noticed something else: Effectively looking down from the rim of the former valley, he saw a single figure—a hulking, shockingly familiar one—strutting around between the flailing “fire tentacles” with apparent impunity.

  Chaos.

  The hulking brute wasn’t at all worried about the horror from the looks of it. In fact, he had his back to the stage and was making grand gestures out toward the desperately fleeing crowd…not that anyone down there was watching him.

  That was all Deak had time to see because of the crush pushing him along. Soon the invulnerable madman was lost to him behind bobbing heads and terrified faces, so he went back to keeping Aurora safe as possible right in front of him.

  Over the screaming, shouting din he heard something else. Metallic, high-pitched, jingly. He looked around and saw what was making them easily—the crowd was knocking over the 8-foot-tall chain link fencing. And not just in one place but several within sight.

  He and Aurora were so close to the choked entrance gates by that point that Deak decided to ride it out there. Shuffling along toe to toe he had time to look back over his shoulder again.

  The pseudopod arms were getting longer. A pair at least fifty feet long whipped angrily about against the nearly pitch black storm clouds. Then both slammed down and the crowd clamor peaked again.

  The crowd kept pressing in on them harder and harder with each passing moment, and it soon had reached a point where Deak was worried about both of them suffocating and/or getting trampled.

  Then the authorities arrived in force and made everything ten times worse.

  ***

  They weren’t cops, nor were they standard army soldiers, National Guard or anything else well known to the public. Their coal black uniforms went head to toe, were highly protective-looking, probably Kevlar or something tougher, and they were wearing not only helmet but full-face masks. Nary a face could be seen as they deployed from the troop transport vehicles, just a whole lot of heavily armored bodies sprinting here and there with obvious and quiet remarkable focus.

  Lots of them, Deak noticed right away, had pairs of tanks strapped to their backs and were toting what looked like very bulky rifles. These presumed civic defenders ignored the escaping throng while moving through it in various directions.

  Deak eventually figured out what these “specialists” were doing. By then he and Aurora were finally passing through the lung-squeezing bottleneck of the main gates so he couldn’t do too much looking, but a quick scan of the pressing crowd revealed to him that the tank guys had taken up spots every forty to fifty feet or so along the outer side of the fence. The handful he could see were all just standing around, and not one of them seemed to be paying any attention to the crowd.

  “Who are these guys?”

  Aurora looked up over her shoulder at Deak.

  “I don’t know,” Deak said. “Special Forces?”

  At last they were through the gates. The pressure fell away immediately as the press of humanity split apart into its components, who fled at top speed in just about every direction.

  Deak’s curiosity got the better of him. He pushed Aurora along straight ahead, right through all the military (or paramilitary?) trucks that were just as dark and unlabeled as their owners, and directed her into the city park’s woo
ded core.

  “What are we doing?” Aurora said.

  “I’ve gotta see what happens. You’re okay, aren’t you?”

  “My head hurts a little, but yeah…I guess.”

  “This is crazy shit, babe.”

  “What’s going on?”

  Deak realized she hadn’t seen the horrible giant fiery blob that had already eaten hundreds of Gorloth fans and—from the sound of it—was still at it.

  “Hey!”

  Deak and Aurora saw Megyn coming their way. Her eyes were on Aurora.

  “What are you still doing here?” Deak asked her, hustling up to them.

  “I saw you guys and wanted to make sure your girlfriend was okay. I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m okay,” Aurora said. “What’s going on back there? Is there a fire?”

  Megyn and Deak’s eyes met.

  “Yeah,” Deak said, “you could say that.”

  “Then why the military guys? Who are they?”

  Neither Deak nor Megyn had an answer.

  “No clue,” Deak finally said. “But I sure wanna see what’s gonna happen next.”

  “What do you mean?” Aurora said.

  Deak looked around. Had he not spotted exactly what he’d been looking for they might not have stayed, but there it was not twenty feet away: a majestic white pine tree whose lowest branches were still close enough to the ground.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get a look at what’s going on.”

  He really only meant that for Aurora, but Megyn followed along. They reached the tree and Deak turned to Aurora.

  “I guess you really shouldn’t be climbing, huh?”

  “Screw that.” Aurora sounded wide awake and looked it too, despite the bruised temple. “I want to see what’s going on.”

  “Me too,” Megyn said.

  They ducked in under the huge tree’s bushy lower limbs, found the trunk and went up. Deak found a spot with a decent view about twenty feet up and the women eventually worked their way up to him.

  “What the hell IS that?” Aurora said. “My…god …”

  “So much for the atheism, huh?” Deak said. “I’m pretty sure it’s alive. I saw it eating people.”

  “Eating …?”

  “Scooping them up on the ends of those sticky tentacles and cramming them right into itself.”

  Aurora was slack-jawed and speechless, her bright blue eyes currently reflecting the red flames that were entrancing her. Megyn, too, was just staring. So Deak shut up and joined them.

  The crowd was gone, the fence flattened out here and there—and surrounded by the paramilitary figures. As one the tank bearers lifted their weapons and fired, and though their bulky-looking armament appeared to be some kind of flame throwers what actually jetted forth from their grenade-shaped muzzles was exactly the opposite: cold.

  Projectile cold, that is to say: forced blasts that funneled out and crystallized the fence sections in front of each “ice thrower” in a flash. Deak, Megyn and Aurora watched in amazement as the soldiers pushed forward and the muzzles of their weapons struck the brittle chain link, which literally disintegrated on contact leaving seven foot diameter holes through which the tank bearers—and their more conventionally armed comrades—proceeded to flow into the venue.

  “Who the hell is that?” Megyn said.

  Between the flailing pseudopods, Chaos was still strutting around: gesturing like a wound-up evangelist, he hollered out at what was by that point a paramilitary-only audience of around a hundred or so.

  “The crazy bastard I was trying to stay clear of,” Deak said. “The freak calls himself Chaos.”

  “You think he’s the cause of this?” Aurora said.

  “No clue. He’s a total freak, but he didn’t come off as a mastermind.”

  “Looks like one now,” Megyn said.

  One of the pseudopods stretched out to nearly a hundred feet, a move that thinned it down to no more than the thickness of a human torso, and slammed down at the leading “ice thrower.” But the soldier was ready and met it with a smoky white blast from his weapon that stopped the protoplasmic tentacle’s descent and sent it reeling back toward its source in full recoil.

  Other pods slapped and slashed but this bizarre force was ready for them. Soon enough the fiercely burning blob covering the stage was no longer the core of a spiny urchin-style array of clutching “arms”—the assault had these in full retreat, pulling back into the great pile of blood-red goo. And as if its appearance wasn’t already eerie enough the monstrosity was by that point pulsing and rippling at the center of a venue-wide layer of frosty mist at least four feet deep.

  Conventional-sounding guns—they looked like Uzis—opened up on Chaos. Appearing completely unaffected, he put his hands on his hips, stood there and just took the onslaught. His head tilted back, and he taunted his assailants with a great rolling bellow of laughter.

  And then he quite simply faded away, taking his mirth with him.

  The trio in the tree were so fascinated by the goings-on that they didn’t even notice when the tree’s branches started flapping violently all around them. By the time they did pick up on it, the stealth chopper had passed over their heads—and right over the top of their tree—and was gently setting down in the lawn seating area, driving back a wide circle of cold fog in the process.

  Six figures debarked quickly through the softly thumping black chopper’s rear doors. Three were tank-bearing soldiers, but with a twist—a smaller red third tank nestled between the regular two. Two of the other figures, amazingly, were wearing dark suits.

  The standout figure, at the very center of the procession that formed and advanced slowly toward the monster, was clad in green and black robes.

  “In the name of my master…”

  Deak, Aurora and Megyn heard the woods booming out from the chopper itself.

  “…ruler of all the darkness of this world…”

  “What the fuck,” Deak muttered. “They’re exorcising it?”

  The woman in the robes was gesturing in arcane fashion, and it certainly seemed as though the words must have been hers as well.

  “…you are trespassing upon this soil. Invited you may have been, but leave you now must…”

  “Invited?” Deak said.

  The ice thrower wielders had turned their weapons on the blob itself. Its great flames were shrinking down as the creature’s mass grew ever more torpid, as though it were being forced by the cold attack to congeal.

  The tree was vibrating beneath the trio hiding within its boughs.

  “Cthugha!” the female voice boomed, and the tree-bound witnesses saw the robed figure gesture emphatically with both arms. “Servant of the God of Chaos, whose realm no longer claims this world, return to your sleep in the depths of R’lyeh. Depart from this time and place. The great god Set demands it!”

  “Holy fucking shit.”

  Aurora had said it. Despite the wild show both Megyn and Deak looked down at her.

  “She’s a priestess of the god Set. She’s driving back the servant of Cthulhu, her deity’s arch nemesis.” Seeing Deak staring at her, obviously not quite getting it yet, she shook her head. “Lovecraft?”

  “Who?” Megyn said. “Wait, I know that name.”

  “Of course you do. He’s the greatest horror…”

  Aurora shut up because the Set priestess was incanting something in a non-English language. Sure enough the word Cthulhu popped up loud and clear right in the middle of it.

  “Hear that?” Aurora said. “Oh my god …”

  “So Set’s a good guy—I mean a good god—driving back this evil one?”

  “Oh no,” Aurora said. “They’re both evil as shit. But this is apparently Set’s domain.”

  The monstrosity was struggling as hard as it could, shivering across its entirety, bulging from the front of its mass as it endeavored to create one last desperate pseudopod. The tank wielders were blasting it from top to bottom with a number of them focused on
that swelling central area.

  Whatever the Set priestess was incanting at that point sounded like some kind of mantra.

  “Nerielien Cthugha R’lyeh!” She was saying it over and over, with conviction.

  “That’s the exorcism, I bet,” Aurora said. She was fully awake now, no doubt about that. “Kind of her version of ‘the Power of Christ compels you!’”

  Perhaps that was the case, maybe not. Either way the ground kept shaking the tree harder and harder and the fiery blob kept struggling to make that last attack “tentacle.”

  Finally it fired out what it could, but not as a pseudopod.

  A ball of flaming red napalm erupted through the sort of skin that had formed over the chilled fire monster. The gooey mass streaked through the air and struck the three guards as the priestess and the two suited men withdrew. The guards shrieked and melted down into the puddle, joining it and vanishing inside, even as other tank-wielding soldiers hustled over and hit it with everything they had.

  The ball of flaming goo crept forward toward the priestess and the suits, but it was quickly overcome and forced to retreat. Under heavy attack it barely managed to crawl back and merge with its creator, which was virtually motionless by then, its flames a mere glow from a cherry red semi-solid mass.

  A mass which released a blinding flash of energy.

  ***

  Deak’s vision cleared up first.

  “I think it’s gone,” he said, as Megyn and Aurora squinted out into the near darkness. “Can’t tell for sure, but I think she actually sent the fucking thing…wait…”

  The fiery blob was indeed gone. No trace of red remained. But Deak realized he was seeing something else—little electrical arcs jumping around here and there where it had been, like quiet miniature bursts of spider lightning. Beneath that strange phenomenon, icy fog had puddled deep, though not deep enough to hide the fact that the stage, amps, instruments—and the band itself—were all gone as well.

  But what were those flashes? They were still going on.

  The storm clouds were abating, not that anyone was really noticing. Yet still that area kept flashing, streaking with energy. And that fact was hardly escaping the notice of the paramilitary folks, much less the Set priestess and her two business suited buddies.