After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft)

by Jonathan L. Howard

  She tried to bring the gun around, but something grabbed her, something with a dark, rubbery skin that was way stronger than her, and suddenly she was on all fours and she didn’t have her pistol anymore. She’d been disarmed by a Deep One. She wondered if it would be able to get its dumb-ass toad fingers through the trigger guard and guessed that, with her luck, the answer would be “Yes.”

  She rolled awkwardly onto her back on the wide bank of the little stream and tried to look at it, but everything was double images and glare, her head was starting to throb, and blood ran into her right eye, making it sting. The Deep One stood over her and she saw it level a weapon, maybe her own although she really couldn’t tell, at her. Okay, this wasn’t how she’d always envisaged checking out. “Don’t shoot!” she shouted at the implacable, inhuman creature, “don’t you fucking shoot, you fucking frog-faced freak!”

  The monster hesitated. Then it said, “Sir? What’s our policy on topping Yanks?”

  Chapter 25

  THE SECRET INVASION

  It was a pretty shitty place for an interrogation. If they’d been taken by the Gestapo, at least there’d be a nice warm cellar to be tortured in. But the men who’d captured Carter and Lovecraft didn’t have one handy, so instead they were sitting on a boulder in the lee of the little meander island, disarmed, wrists zip-tied, while their captors made tea. The tea was the sole plus point in this equation.

  “You’re British?” said Carter wonderingly as a marine corporal tended to the cut on Lovecraft’s brow.

  The senior officer, a man with a pale complexion and red hair offset by a nose that had been broken somewhere along the line and the shoulders of a rugby player, looked him over appraisingly. “Not sure how much we should tell you. My orders are vague about prisoners.”

  “Prisoners?” said Lovecraft, and then “Fuck,” as her looking up suddenly rewarded her with antiseptic gel in her eye. “What’s this ‘prisoners’ bullshit? You’re on U.S. land here. We’re U.S. citizens and you sure as fuck ain’t. Didn’t think we were at war or nothing, so what’s going on here?” She allowed the medic to finish his work. “Special relationship, my ass,” she muttered.

  She was in a foul mood for any number of reasons, but paramount was that she’d mistaken a man in a wet suit for an inhuman monster. It was a reasonable mistake to have made, but between that, and totally failing to defend herself effectively, she was not feeling happy with herself or those that had doused her in the water. “I’m going to die of pneumonia sitting here in wet clothes,” she added in an undertone.

  “Yes,” said the officer. “You being Americans has complicated things.”

  “It’s an American island,” said Carter. “Why wouldn’t we be Americans?” Then he thought of the concrete dome and realization dawned. “Oh. I see. And if we’d been Germans?”

  “That would have been far more clear-cut,” said the officer, his meaning very clear to them both. He crouched on the sand spit before Carter and Lovecraft. “How much do you know about your German colleagues?”

  Carter looked around at their captors and wondered what was the wise thing to say. There were six there—the officer, the medic, one with some sort of submachine gun who never looked away from them and whose job was pretty obviously to kill them if they tried anything, one at each approach of the meander, and one hidden among the straggling grasses atop the little plateau in the middle. He had a scoped rifle on a bipod, and Carter feared for anyone who came looking for Lovecraft and him. All the men wore wet suits although they had gotten rid of the fins, which lay in a heap nearby.

  The enmity between the U.K. and Germany was well known, as was the U.K.’s inability to do anything about it. As a result the Reich treated the U.K. as a joke, and had reasonable grounds to do so. Nobody cared to deal much with them for fear of provoking the Germans. That had been the case in 1941 when the Second World War stopped before it could become truly global, and it was still largely the case today. Isolated and marginalized, the U.K. was a ghost of what it had been in 1939.

  In which case, thought Carter, coming all the way out here to mess with the Germans and possibly incurring the wrath of the U.S. in the bargain was a pretty ballsy move. Suicidal even.

  He was just beginning to formulate an answer that was cagey without sounding too much like it when Lovecraft said, “One’s Abwehr that we know about. Another was Gestapo, but he got shot by a Polish guy in Arkham. He’s dead. Both of them, that is. They’re both dead now. As for the rest of them, who knows, but I’d guess it’s hard getting a gig like that unless you’re Party members. So, yeah, Nazis.”

  She noticed Carter’s expression. “What? You think they don’t already know all this? What do you think they’re doing out here with a sub in the bay? Bird watching?” She looked at the officer. “Disappointing trip if it was.”

  Carter wasn’t about to let her get away with that. “Maybe, but you don’t just tell them everything right from the get-go. Jesus, Emily, you must suck at poker.”

  “Ohhhhh.” Lovecraft took this in. “That’s what I’ve been doing wrong. Seriously, though, hey, James Bond, what are you? Royal Navy? Commandos? What?”

  The officer looked at her oddly. “You’ve read Ian Fleming?” He half-laughed. “I didn’t think they were available outside Great Britain. Which is your favorite?”

  “From…” She hesitated, clearing away eidetic debris from the Folded World in her mind. “From Berlin with Love.”

  “That is a good one.”

  “Kind of wish he’d called it From Prussia with Love, though.”

  “Oh?” The officer seemed sincerely interested. “Why’s that, then?”

  “It’s just … I just think it sounds better.”

  The officer nodded. “You may be right. But, of course, you run a bookshop, so you may have an insight into which titles work better.”

  Lovecraft looked at him suspiciously. “How in hell did you…?”

  The officer reached over and held up her bag. “Your ID’s in here. We’ve already checked up on both of you. Which makes us wonder”—he straightened and looked down on them—“exactly what a private investigator and a bookseller are doing in a such a godforsaken place as Attu Island?”

  “I really doubt you’d believe us if we told you,” said Carter.

  “I’m very open-minded. Try me.”

  Briefly, Carter explained how he’d moonlighted as a security guard at Miskatonic University, had ended up defending the scientists against Jenner, and been invited along nominally as security, but more as an honest broker in arguments that would inevitably break out among a small isolated population for a couple of months. “They needed an administrator, so I put Emily’s name forward,” he concluded, “and that’s all there is to it.”

  There was a short silence during which it was brought home to them just how silent the marines—if they were marines—were. Carter had also noticed the submachine guns they carried had suppressors mounted on their stubby barrels. He guessed they were probably loaded with subsonic rounds, too. They would be able to kill Lovecraft and him very quietly if they so decided, assuming they didn’t just use knives.

  The officer crossed his arms. “Is it?”

  “Is it what?”

  “Really all there is to it? How did you know two of the German contingent belong to Reich intelligence and security? You say I won’t believe your story, and then trot one out that is entirely reasonable as far as it goes. And then we have what Miss Lovecraft said as she was being disarmed. Ryan?”

  “Sir?” The marine standing by with his gun ready responded without taking his eyes off Carter and Lovecraft.

  “Remind us what Miss Lovecraft said while you were relieving her of her weapons.”

  “Yes, sir. She said, Don’t shoot, don’t you fucking shoot, you fucking frog-faced freak, sir.”

  Everyone was looking at Lovecraft. “I was upset,” she said.

  “Upset enough to call him a ‘fucking frog-faced freak’? I mean, real
ly, look at him. Marine Ryan is a famous ladies’ man in the unit, an Adonis in a beret. ‘Fucking frog-faced freak’ seems a tad unkind, wouldn’t you say? Unless”—the officer had been pacing as he spoke; now he stopped and looked at them—“unless you feared being attacked by something that might reasonably be called a ‘fucking frog-faced freak.’ There’s always that possibility, isn’t there? So”—he smiled, not unkindly—“why don’t you tell me your little story again and, this time, please make it something I’m less likely to believe.”

  Lovecraft and Carter looked at one another. “You tell him,” she said. “I sound like a lunatic to myself whenever I have to talk about this shit out loud.”

  Carter sighed. So did he, but she’d bailed on the responsibility first, so he guessed he’d have to be the one who sounded insane. “When we came here, to this beach, and came up this riverbed, we weren’t looking for anything human.”

  “Ah,” said the officer. “Seals, perhaps?”

  “No,” said Carter feeling his temper rise. The guy had all the guns; why did he feel the need to bait his captives, too? “Not seals. Not people either. Something else.”

  “Deep Ones,” said Lovecraft quietly, deciding to weigh in after all. “Things that might have been men, but surely ain’t now. I felt that neoprene or whatever your suits are made out of and thought it was like frog skin. That’s why I freaked out. Sorry, man,” she said to Marine Ryan, “I was kind of upset when I called you that. You’re very pretty really.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” said the marine.

  Lovecraft looked at Carter. “He called me ‘ma’am.’” She grinned.

  “So you thought you’d been ambushed by monsters,” said the officer. “That’s your story.”

  Carter shrugged.

  “Good,” said the officer, “now we’re getting somewhere. We call them Fomor or sometimes Fomorians, although in the heat of the moment, that usually gets shortened to Foams, or lengthened to ‘fucking frog-faced freaks.’”

  Carter and Lovecraft looked at him with open astonishment, as if somebody had just told them the content of a secret dream. He smiled benignly. “Now we’re past the horseshit stage of our relationship; why don’t you tell me everything you know about them and what you’re really doing on this island?”

  * * *

  It was a relief to be able to talk to people other than themselves or Harrelson who could listen to tales of outsider dimensions, cosmic horrors, and alternate time lines. Almost too much of a relief—it was hard to hold stuff back. Yet, by mutual unspoken consent, they somehow managed to keep Martin Harrelson out of it (because even alluding to the existence of a friendly cop from the other side of the Fold seemed like snitching) and Henry Weston (because it felt dangerous to do so). Otherwise, pretty much anything was game.

  And through it all, the Royal Marine officer listened. He had their hands freed and gave them cups of hot tea. He apologized to Lovecraft that there was little that could be done about her clothes, but they were well chosen with regard to materials, and if she stayed active walking up and down as she talked (“Between here and there, ma’am, and no farther,” Marine Ryan had warned her. “I’d hate to have to shoot you.”), her body heat and circulation would do a lot to dry them out.

  “And then we came out here because of what Dan saw in the bay and on the beach, you jumped us, and now we’re all up to date. So”—Lovecraft looked at the marines—“what now?”

  “Thank you, Miss Lovecraft, Mr. Carter. You’ve been very candid.”

  Carter stood slowly, working out the kinks in his shoulders. “As Emily said, you’ve got all the guns.”

  “Is that the only reason you were so forthcoming?”

  Carter looked at the officer. The guy looked like he could bull-rush a small elephant, but his questioning had been smart and his eyes were shrewd. “No,” admitted Carter. “It was a relief to talk about it. It’s crazy, but it’s true.”

  “Alas, it is both. But this Fold of yours, that’s new to us. It might explain a lot. The Third Reich fell on the other side? When?”

  “1944. U.S. and U.K. and Commonwealth armies in the west, Russians in the east. Russians got to Berlin first. Hitler chose suicide over capture.”

  “1945 in the war against Japan,” added Lovecraft. “We, that is, the U.S., dropped a couple of atom bombs on mainland cities. They sued for peace after that. The German A-bomb project got nowhere near a working bomb. Still can’t understand how they managed it on this side with the Operation Sunset bomb over Moscow.”

  The officer checked his watch. “You should be getting back. If you’re missed, it could cause problems we’re not ready to cause just yet. We don’t want to compromise you.”

  Carter and Lovecraft glanced at one another. “You’re letting us go?” said Carter.

  “Of course. We try to avoid killing civilians, especially ones with whom I think we share common cause. What’s on the other side of this Fold of yours sounds vastly preferable to what’s going on now. I’ll leave you with a couple of thoughts. We’ve had agents in the ruins of Moscow, not long after the detonation. I’d be surprised if your government didn’t, too. The only radiation there is from uranium too far below weapon-grade to have been used to make a bomb. The boffins are pretty sure it’s from a casing that was around what did the real damage. And this experiment the Reich is so keen on taking place out here rather than any of the isolated spots they have access to in the corpse of the Soviet Union? If it has anything to do with zero point energy, than I’m a Dutch uncle. Your Gestapo and Abwehr stooges were and are probably the only ones on the team that don’t really understand what this is all about. They’re good little Party members and do what they’re told.”

  Lovecraft frowned. “What is this all really about?”

  “Yeah,” Carter said, “and why are you talking about the Nazis like they’re not behind it?”

  The officer shook his head. “To answer your first question, we don’t know. We’re here to find out. To answer the second, well … the NSDAP got into power by behaving like a virus in the Weimar Republic. Now they don’t seem to realize they’re infected themselves. Ever hear of Thule?”

  “No?” said Carter.

  “Oh, shit,” said Lovecraft.

  “Miss Lovecraft evidently has. You can tell Mr. Carter on the trip back.” He turned to the corporal who’d tended Lovecraft’s cut brow. “Barnaby, give our new friends the spare radio.” As the corporal handed over a compact military field radio, he said, “Encoded and secure. Use the channel it’s set to. Use the call sign…” He considered for a moment, then caught Lovecraft’s eye, smiled, and said, “Fleming. Do not get caught with it. If the Germans find out about you making contact with us, they will kill you. Have no illusions about that.”

  “Sorry I didn’t do a full job on the cut, ma’am,” said Barnaby, “but it would have looked odd if you went back with it fully treated. I used some Dermabond from your own field kit, but you should get it seen to properly when you get back.”

  “That’s okay, and thanks.” She grinned and looked at Carter. “I think I could get used to being called ‘ma’am.’”

  Chapter 26

  FANCY SHOOTIN’

  “It was knowing about James Bond that did it,” said Lovecraft as they walked along the beach toward the waiting Kübelwagen. “We bonded right there. Did you see it? ‘Hey, I can’t kill this awesome American woman because she’s read Ian Fleming.’ That’s what happened. ‘Bonded.’ Heh.”

  Carter was resisting the urge to look back. He wasn’t worried about being turned into a pillar of salt nearly so much as antagonizing the sniper he suspected was keeping an eye on them. “If you think that’s what it takes to talk a special ops team out of killing a potential threat, you just keep thinking that.” He looked sideways at her and found she was smiling to herself. “What are you so happy about, anyway? I mean, I’m glad they didn’t just shoot us or drown us in the sea to make it look like an accident or anything, but I’
m not seeing much else we should be cheering about.”

  She looked at him as if he were a loved yet slightly slow cousin. “You don’t? Dan, we’ve got a government behind us. Maybe even our own government could be a go-to if what the guy back there was hinting at is true. We’re not alone in this shit. I mean to say, apart from the Nazis and the Japanese and some homegrown lunatics, nobody likes the Unfolded as much as the Folded. Maybe we can get help. Hell, maybe we don’t have to lift a finger and crack teams of government agents paid for by our tax dollars will swing into action and fix it for us.”

  Carter did not smile. “If that’s true, why hasn’t the Fold been fixed before now?”

  “Well, maybe they don’t know about the Fold yet. Captain Shoulders back there surely didn’t.”

  “Emily, there are a shitload of things he won’t have been told because somebody has decided that intel is above his pay grade. When all’s said and done, the guy’s just a grunt.”

  “Don’t you talk about Captain Shoulders like that. He has a sexy accent, and looks like a younger Daniel Craig, ’cept with red hair.”

  “What is it with you and James Bond?”

  They arrived at the Kübelwagen and climbed in. The engine started from cold the first time. “We’ll stop in a mile and shoot up the cans,” said Carter as he guided the car up the creek bed. “While we’re getting there, tell me about … what was it? Tooley?”