After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft)

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Garner turned the key to the On position, and then, at a nod from Kelly, twisted it to run the starter. The engine roared, stumbled a little, but then picked up.

  Kelly stood, grinning. “She’s a new engine. We did the best we could with her, but try to be as gentle as you can.”

  “We can’t really do that, man,” said Carter, “we need to be on that mountain as soon as we can.”

  “She’ll be fine, probably,” said Garner. “Modern engines are pretty good right from the manufacturer. Ever ridden one?” Carter shook his head. “Oookay,” said Garner. “Maybe you should take it gently for both of your sakes.”

  “You ever ride a motorcycle, Dan?” asked Lovecraft.

  “Not since I was a teenager.”

  “I had a Suzuki up until a couple of years ago. I’ll go up front, you hang on.”

  “A Suzuki?” said Garner. “Is that a motorcycle? Sounds Japanese.”

  Lovecraft looked at him as if he was joking before realizing her faux pas. “Long story, and we ain’t got time. Let’s get this thing outside and get started. I will try my best not to get us killed.”

  Chapter 30

  WORLDS WAR THREE

  Lieutenant Green’s men had decided, independently and tacitly, that there was an excellent chance that they might not be alive in twenty-four hours, and that they would therefore consider themselves dead men until proven wrong. It was not a bad state of mind to be in, not so much fatalistic as pragmatic. They didn’t want to die, and would do their damnedest to avoid that happening, but if it did happen despite their best efforts, well, that was the job.

  The Thule—inevitably dubbed “Tools” by the men—were not the major threat in their equations. If they’d been up against Ahnenerbe troops, that would have been different, but both their own intelligence sources and the confirmation offered by the American contacts (research into the hitherto unknown detached service section of the OSS called the CIA was still ongoing) showed that the Thule in the dome were scientists first and fighters second. They were probably only lightly armed and had only basic firearms training.

  No, the Thule agents were not the primary threat. That was the nuclear hunter killer, the HMS Alacrity, from whose Chalfont hangar they had deployed half an hour earlier. The hangar, a so-called dry dock shelter, was mounted behind the fin. A large can-like structure, it contained the minisub the SBS team used to travel to and from operations. Green and his seven subordinates had parked the minisub on the seabed some fifty meters from the beach and were swimming ashore. The Alacrity, meanwhile, had withdrawn to a range of about ten kilometers. Green knew that Captain Trescothick would have at least two Lancet missiles loaded into the Alacrity’s bow tubes. If the commando force hadn’t gotten in, done their job, and gotten out again in four hours, both missiles would be fired at the dome. It would only take one of them to reduce it to fine rubble; the other was purely insurance. If Green and his team were still there in four hours or if the captain decided the mission was compromised and fired early, then that would just be too bad.

  Lieutenant Green made a point of emphasizing to his team that he, for one, would prefer not to be a victim of friendly fire, and they should crack along with all dispatch, the sooner to scotch whatever the Thule were up to. The team agreed this was a good plan, and although, as commanding officer, he did not need their approval, he had it anyway.

  They came ashore, slogging up the black sand toward where the snow marked a line of the falling tide, and took a moment to hide their underwater gear and prepare for the three-mile ascent of the mountainside. This time they’d emerged at the east side of Temnac Bay, and walked up the bed of the Ukudikak until they were clear of the beach. There was little they could do about leaving tracks in the snow, but at least the current steady fall would obscure them quickly enough.

  “Sir?” Green looked up from checking his assault rifle to find Corporal Barnaby addressing him. “Sir, we’re missing Cowley. He was last out of the mini, but he should have made land by now.”

  Without a word, Green walked back down to the water’s edge, flipping down his image-intensifier eye-set as he did and using his binoculars through them. Beside him, Barnaby did the same. It was unlikely an experienced diver like Cowley would get lost on the short trip from the minisub to the beach, but in dark waters even the best could sometimes lose their bearings. Green stood ready to use his torch to signal to Cowley if he’d surfaced somewhere out in the bay and needed a bearing, but he could see nothing. Then he heard Barnaby mutter, “Whoa,” under his breath and then whisper, “Sir, hundred meters, south-southwest.”

  It irked Green that, despite repeatedly being told, Barnaby still insisted on giving compass bearings as if he were aboard a nineteenth-century whaler. Holding his irritation, he looked to about 200 degrees and studied the surface. At first it was difficult to make anything out through the steady snowfall, but then he saw something wallowing in the waves, black and slick as the water washed over it.

  “He’s facedown. I’ll get him,” said Barnaby and started for the water’s edge.

  “Wait!” Green’s sharp command brought Barnaby to a dead halt. “Why’s he floating at all with all the gear we’re carrying?”

  It was true. Cowley should have been carrying enough kit to hold him down; their own experience of coming ashore had been less swimming and more like walking into a high wind.

  “He might have dumped his kit off to get to the surface?” said Barnaby, but even he didn’t sound convinced.

  “Including his rebreather? Back up the beach, Corporal.”

  “Sir?”

  “Do it.”

  With evident reluctance to leave a comrade in trouble, Barnaby did so. Then he saw Green was readying his rifle. “Oh,” he said, realization dawning, “fuck.” He looked back to the sea in time to see Cowley’s body—for he was surely dead—jerked below the surface as violently as if taken by a shark. He had been bait in a hastily conceived trap, and—now that it had failed—the trappers had angrily reclaimed him.

  “Heads up, lads!” Barnaby’s voice came through every headset. “The Foams had Cowley!”

  “Form up,” said Green. “Fighting retreat off the beach. We still have to get to the mountain no matter what.”

  Barnaby clicked off his microphone to speak directly to Green. “What about the mini, boss? The Foams’ll have it on bricks by now.”

  “Worry about that when we get to it. Push comes to shove, we yomp to the north and Alacrity sends us an Avon. Right now, focus on the job in hand.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  They were almost at the mouth of the creek when the water rose in a dark mound, shockingly close to the water’s edge. It sloughed off a black, glistening hide, and the first of the Fomorians came ashore.

  It stood perhaps seven feet tall, and it was naked but for something like military webbing slung across its shoulders and secured at a belt. The material was uneven and looked organic, as if it had been extruded by some creature rather than manufactured. As for the rest of the Fomorian, it was just a dark shape in the snow when viewed by the naked eye, and a confused blur of shimmers and white flakes through the night-vision goggles. Behind it, the sea bloated and another thrust up into the air.

  They’d never seen a Fomorian at close quarters. Yes, they’d seen pictures from other engagements and even pictures from postmortem dissections, but those had always seemed distant and academic, like pictures from a school biology textbook. It was impossible to believe such things existed and, if they did, that they were intelligent creatures, that they thought coherent, abstract thoughts that were not as the thoughts humans think, that they could create and use complex artifacts.

  The first Fomorian reached for its belt and unhooked an object like an irregular, asymmetrical crescent made from bundles of fibers that looked like metallic nerves. It began to raise it and Green shot it through the head.

  For a moment, it hesitated, as if it had just remembered a small chore that needed doing tomorr
ow, then it continued to raise the object. Green swore under his breath, toggled his rifle to burst fire, and turned the Fomorian’s head to offal with three rounds. The creature continued to walk through the surf for another three steps before finally falling forward and lying still in the shallows. A wave that seemed to growl with anger swept into the bay and broke like a snarl over the carcass. When it fell back, the body was gone.

  The commandos weren’t there to see it, however. They were already heading inland in a determined jog that they knew they could keep up for miles. Behind them, shadowed figures rose from the waves all along Temnac Bay and walked forward through the swirling snow.

  * * *

  Carter knew he had some weirdness in his head. Lovecraft said he was a “dreamer,” like it was a job description, and—in the rolling ball of extradimensional fuckery that was the Unfolded World—maybe she was right about that. If “dreaming” was a superpower, Carter felt shortchanged. Flying would have been nice, although he’d have settled for superstrength and, importantly, invulnerability.

  It had never occurred to him that Lovecraft might have a superpower beyond being smart, and well read, and, worth repeating, really, really smart, but—now that she was concentrating on the snow-covered death trap it pleased some to call “the mountain road,” concentrating to the exclusion of all else, including her passenger, and he realized that even if she wasn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to hear her over the wind and the engine—he saw her superpower was to be able to look into the maw of destruction and to tell it to fuck right off. He needed that right now, because without it, fear was eating him.

  Since the Suydam case, well over a year and a half and a world and a universe away, he’d had to deal with things no one should, and he’d weathered it because of the dreaming and because of Lovecraft. Yet now, trapped in the little bubble of his isolation behind her, he found time to dwell on what they were getting into, and he felt a sick sense of fear that he hadn’t felt since he was a cop facing situations that he knew were about to go real sour.

  He wasn’t afraid of Weber or his fellow Thule pals and what kind of fight they might put up. Yeah, they might get lucky, but none of them had ever struck him as especially combat-oriented. He’d seen one of the research fellows playing a first-person shooter after hours in Arkham, and he had sucked. It was just as well he’d been playing a player-versus-player game with a fast respawn, because it was painful watching him die pointlessly time after time. He’d charge into an enemy position, shoot at everything, hit nothing, and then spend the next five seconds swearing furiously under his breath—presumably at the injustice of his sudden and completely predictable death—while waiting to reenter the game. These might be people with paid-up membership for an actual, functioning secret occult society with its tentacles making the Third Reich dance, but they were not an impressive corporeal threat.

  No, it was what they might do if not stopped that frightened him. Reality was a far more fragile thing than Carter could ever have believed or that they seemed to understand, and he didn’t want this bunch of self-serving maniacs knocking it off the shelf with their elbows while trying to do whatever the fuck it was they thought they were doing.

  To coalesce all the existential dread he felt into a single thought, Carter was not afraid of dying at the hands of the Thule nearly so much as living into a sinister reality they might create out of stupidity and hubris.

  Sometimes he could feel the dreaming circling at the edge of his awareness like a wolf at the edge of the light cast by a campfire. It was a positive thing, Lovecraft had assured him. The dreaming gave them an edge. An unusual edge, perhaps a unique one. It wasn’t a threat. It wouldn’t get him killed. It would not drag him into madness. He needed her to say that now, but she could not, because the storm made a ghost of the world and the engine roared, and all her concentration was on the snow-covered death trap it pleased some to call “the mountain road.” Lovecraft was focused on it to the exclusion of all else, including the man behind her.

  * * *

  The great steel column at the center of the chamber was being opened section by section. Initially built in the Reich, the sections had been transported across the subjugated Greater Protectorate that was once Russia by rail to the naval base at Dönitzhafen (formerly Petropavlovsk), where it was picked up by the Kriegsmarine aircraft carrier the Peter Strasser and subsequently shipped to Attu Island, where the sections were airlifted by dual-rotor helicopters to the top of Mount Terrible.

  The sections looked very much like larger versions of the ones that had gone to make up the column at the Miskatonic University, but that was the whole point. The interior of each section was profoundly different, however. Where the Arkham column had been a reasonable attempt at building a device to isolate and generate zero point energy, the Attu version was purely a mule by which some very different equipment could be imported. One of the sections, for example, had contained a case that looked like an instrumentation mounting, but was entirely empty of electronics, instead containing handguns and ammunition. This was the source of the Thule agents’ seemingly miraculous supply of weapons. By and large, the cylinder sections contained the component parts of an entirely different device, a device whose principles would have confused the American scientists and whose function would have horrified them.

  “What is it?” asked Dr. Giehl as the others cut open some parts of the cylinder and unscrewed other sections, removing pieces of equipment that meant nothing to her. “What are you building?”

  Dr. Weber had assumed a supervisory role, but the team was well drilled and needed little oversight. Instead, he amused himself by talking to Giehl.

  “Your field isn’t nuclear physics, Doctor,” he said, “but the root of all this is in the Moscow detonation that heralded Operation Barbarossa.”

  “I’m not a historian, either.”

  “Of course. Still, you must have heard all the conspiracy theories about how we managed to beat the Americans to the first deployable atomic weapon, despite them holding all the aces?”

  Giehl thought about it for a moment before venturing, “The Abwehr stole atomic secrets from them?”

  Weber laughed. Giehl had always liked the sound of his laughter, but she wished he would stop now. “Yes! That’s the one. Usually mouthed by the Americans, because they have such trouble believing they might be beaten in anything, despite all the evidence to the contrary. It’s nonsense, though. The Americans were still years from developing a viable weapon despite all their advantages. At best, stealing their secrets would only have given us the bomb in ’44 or ’45. But, you see, if you go into the ruins of Moscow with a Geiger counter, you will only get the sort of readings that you might almost get on the streets of Berlin. I know—I’ve done it myself. I have stood in the overgrown rubble that was once the Kremlin and listened to the slow clicks of a site that is now barely contaminated at all. I could hardly believe it. That’s when it was all explained to me. The ‘Sunset’ device so famously detonated over Moscow by Hugo Trettner—may his sacrifice always be honored—was not an atomic weapon.” He chuckled at Giehl’s expression. “I know! I know! That was exactly how I felt.”

  “If not atomic, then what?” Giehl was trying to keep a tight rein on her emotions, but it was proving difficult. She wanted to say Weber was plainly insane, but the rest of her German colleagues were all with him in his insanity, as was her own country. They couldn’t all be insane, but if that was true, what did that make her? “Antimatter?”

  Weber cocked an eyebrow at the suggestion, considering it. “What an excellent idea. You know, I’d never considered that. But, no. It wasn’t antimatter.” He smiled again, like an uncle about to perform a famous conjuring trick at a children’s party. “You will love the irony, Lurline. Moscow was destroyed using zero point energy.”

  She could not reply. She dared not reply. She could only look at him as he smiled about how history was a lie.

  “Yes, we had access to ZPE all the way bac
k in 1941, but there’s a catch. It’s extradimensional and uncontrollable. The ZPE we see manifesting routinely in this world filters through the membrane from elsewhere, if you will forgive the oversimplification. If we attempt to break that membrane, to access it, to exploit it, it pours through and then the membrane repairs itself. But we are talking of terajoules of energy, you understand. Perhaps petajoules—it’s a chaotic release and well-nigh impossible to measure. More than enough to blow away a city and, alas, vaporize the device that created the breach in the first place.”

  Giehl looked at the machine the scientists and technicians were diligently building from the cannibalized column. A terrible, unacceptable idea had entered her mind. “What is that?”

  “Well, said Weber indulgently, “I suppose you might also call that an irony. Our fake ZPE column was concealing a real ZPE device the whole time.”

  Chapter 31

  A HIGHER AUTHORITY

  The commandos were making good enough time across the rough terrain; being pursued by inhuman creatures from the ocean depths was providing excellent motivation. At first they’d tried to ignore the Fomorians, but then a tumbling stream of violet fire had sought them out in the darkness, searing the snow from the bedrock and sending clouds of steam up where it swept. The Foams couldn’t shoot for shit, but their weapons maintained a beam for almost three seconds before cutting out, and in that time they could walk the beam onto a target just like a machine gunner might walk a stream of tracer-laden fire onto his mark. The first beam had failed to hit anything but the ground. The plumes of steam brought into the chill air seemed to have surprised the shooter as much as anyone else, and there was a pause of over a minute before the pursuers attempted the same trick. Again their aim was poor and only snow was vaporized, and not flesh.