After the End of the World (Carter & Lovecraft)

by Jonathan L. Howard

  He looked at Kurt, considered, then shook his head. “You stay here, Kurt. Help finish the device.”

  * * *

  Carter and Lovecraft had decided that, if they had to wait while a bunch of scientists choked on carbon monoxide, they could do it in more comfort than crouching behind vehicles that had heating systems. Now they waited inside two of the Kübelwagens. Helpfully, the cars were ex-military stock, and it seemed the Wehrmacht feared not being able to get a vehicle going in a hurry more than it worried about theft. None of the vehicles had keys, none of the doors could be locked, and the ignition had a permanently mounted key bow that worked exactly like an ignition key, but that could not be removed. Both of them had cleared the exhausts from the snow, ran the engines long enough to warm the interiors, and then switched them off until needed again. Lovecraft had found the one she was in had some sort of music system, but after listening to about five seconds of heavily synthesized, light-industrial Europop, she turned it off, and it wasn’t only the cold that caused her to shudder as she did so.

  She was also the first to notice the dome’s door opening. She slid out of the car and took up a firing position by the front edge of the Kübelwagen’s driver’s door, aiming the Mossberg over the hood. Taking his cue from her, Carter also left his vehicle quickly, and stood with his forearms braced in the snow on his Kübelwagen’s roof.

  The door creaked loudly, the hinges not having received nearly enough love during the site’s refurbishment. From the gap a stick topped with a white handkerchief appeared and fluttered in the cold air. “Mr. Carter?” Weber’s voice called. “Miss Lovecraft? Kindly do not shoot. I’m coming out.”

  They held their fire while Weber cautiously emerged, his hands up and the flag of truce gripped in one flapping dismally in the icy breeze.

  “That’s far enough, Doctor,” called Carter once Weber was at the top of the short stoop of steps leading down to the entrance. “You can say your piece right there.”

  “Mr. Carter, first, I want you to understand that Nick’s death was an … no, not an accident, but a misunderstanding. One of our number mistakenly thought Nick was armed and that he was intending to draw his gun. It is very regrettable.”

  “That’s bullshit,” said Lovecraft. “None of the techs have guns. Why think Nick did?”

  “To be brutally honest, Miss Lovecraft … hello…”—Weber waved awkwardly at her with his free raised hand—“he was mistaken for Mr. Carter. Everyone looks alike in these parkas and, with the snow…” Weber shrugged.

  “We’ll leave that for a court of law to settle, Doctor. Right now, you need to tell your people to surrender.”

  “Oh, dear”—Weber shook his head—“no, I am afraid that is impossible. I didn’t come out here to negotiate our surrender. I came out to negotiate yours.”

  Carter was about to say what he thought about that when he became aware of a subdued electronic bleeping. He’d left both the long-range walkie-talkie from the settlement and the British military radio on the passenger seat of his car and, glancing through the window, he saw it was the former signaling an incoming call.

  “Hold that thought, Doctor. We can have a good laugh about it in a minute while your crew chokes to death in there. Got to take this call. Emily?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Blow him in half if he tries anything. I’d be happy to.” She nestled the butt into her shoulder and sighted directly at the doctor’s torso. “Hi, Doc. Guess what a twelve-gauge cartridge will do to you at this range.”

  Dr. Weber smiled wanly.

  * * *

  Carter climbed into the car, closing the door behind him, and picked up the walkie-talkie. “Hello, Carter here. Go ahead.” He was expecting to hear Lo’s voice. Lurline Giehl’s came as a surprise.

  “Dan? Listen, I don’t have long. First, the gas won’t work quickly. They’ve found a vent that opens directly to the outside and, with the doors open, there’s a Bernoulli effect drawing the bad air out. Don’t depend on the gas doing your work.”

  “Shit,” said Carter, and was about to expand on that, when she interrupted him.

  “Just listen! They are going to try to rush you anyway. You’ve distracted them and Weber wants to get rid of you and take control of the generators.”

  Outside, Lovecraft’s shotgun never wavered from its target. Carter half-laughed. “Yeah, he’s out here now, and that’s not really working out for him. I don’t think he knew Emily is a BAMF with a boomstick. And a library degree.”

  “I don’t know what a ‘BAMF’ is,” said Giehl. “It doesn’t matter. This is important. The device they’re building is a bomb, I think. A ZPE weapon. If it detonates, it will kill everyone on the island. I don’t really understand why they’re doing it. Weber talked about stabilizing reality. It’s like a shared delusion for them.”

  Carter sucked in a breath of shock. “The Fold…”

  “Yes! He called it something like that. You understand what he means?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I do. They’ve got to be stopped. Do you have any weapons?”

  “No. They all seem to have pistols except me. They only half-trust me. I’m Abwehr, but I’m not Thule. Their loyalties are skewed.” Her tone was bitter. “They’re fanatical. I wish I could blow them all to hell.”

  Carter glanced at Weber. He was looking cold and uncomfortable out there. Good. “Yeah. I’m beginning to wish we still had Jenner’s bomb. That’d fuck up whatever they’re building.”

  “Yes,” she said, wistful for a bundle of explosives. “How did you get rid of it in the end?”

  Carter frowned. “How did I get rid of it? That was your job, Lurline.”

  A pause. “I had—” The carrier wave light extinguished and he knew she was gone. He could only hope it was by choice.

  * * *

  Kurt stood over Giehl, his eyes flickering nervously from the radio set to her and then back again. “Who were you talking to, Doctor?” he demanded.

  * * *

  The snow was the devil’s addition to the hell of Attu Island. The ground the commandos were covering between the bay and the mountain would be hard to traverse at speed in broad daylight and in dry conditions. In darkness during a heavy snowfall, it was a winter wonderland of traps and snares. So far they’d had several close calls as boots skidded into hidden cavities or tripped on covered rocks. Some hundred meters from the mountain road, their luck ran out. Marine Marshall’s foot slid into a dip in the rock and his boot locked against the sides of the socket while his body tried to keep moving.

  The sound of his ankle breaking was sickeningly audible to all of them, and if they were in any doubt as to the severity of the injury, Marshall’s grunt of agony and muttered, “Oh, fuck!” served to dispel it.

  “It’s knackered, sir,” he said as they laid him out, three of their number taking positions to provide cover. The Fomorians were well behind them, but they knew they wouldn’t stop coming. “It’s well fucked.”

  Corporal Barnaby carried out a cursory examination and came to much the same conclusion couched in similar terms. “We can strap his leg up, keep him moving.”

  “There’s no time, Corp,” said Marshall. “I’ll get us all killed. Move on. I’ll rear-guard.”

  Barnaby turned to Green. “Permission to stay with Marine Marshall, sir?”

  “No.” It was Marshall who spoke. “Don’t be fucking stupid, Corp. You stay with me, we’re both dead. Move on, complete the mission. Leave me the ’86. I’ll slow the buggers down.”

  With the fewest words possible, they swapped his assault rifle for the support gun, helped lay him down facing toward the enemy, deployed the weapon’s bipod, and conducted themselves as in the offices of those at a deathbed. They left him there, wishing him good luck, and they meant it.

  Two minutes after they left him, they heard the support weapon open fire. In the snow-streaked night behind them, they saw shadowed muzzle flashes. Then they saw the snow lit with electrical blue-and-violet fire. They kept moving as the hidd
en drama played out, as the whining crackle and muffled cracks of different weapons of different species warred. Presently, the low lightning stopped, but not one of the marines thought for a moment it was because Marshall had prevailed against their pursuers.

  * * *

  A change in the wind brought the distant sound of an automatic weapon firing from a mile or so away to the mountaintop. Lovecraft and Carter exchanged looks and, simultaneously coming to the wrong conclusion, crouched for fear of being flanked.

  Weber couldn’t hear the shooting from where he was, so far from the cliff edge leading down to the road’s first meander and over the sound of the generators in their nearby shack. He was momentarily baffled by the Americans’ disappearance behind cover, but got over his surprise quickly. He lowered his free hand and used it to signal in a series of wafting motions, as if driving away a wasp, that the three men and a woman crawling so low behind him that their faces brushed the freezing concrete should seize the moment. It wasn’t acted upon quite instantly, but then one of them saw his signal, entirely misinterpreted it, leapt to his feet, and ran up the stoop past Weber, wearing what passed for a war-face in scientific circles.

  “No!” shouted Weber after him, “the generators!”

  The runner, Decker, a specialist in particle physics whose entire weapons training had consisted of a rainy half-hour on a Wehrmacht range at Bad Münstereifel, was too hyped on adrenaline to listen. He ran forward out into the open, exposed, snowy expanse in the middle of the area, painfully visible even in the weak light.

  Carter and Lovecraft, crouched behind their Kübelwagens, exchanged glances and rose to see what was approaching. Seeing shapes move behind the cars, Decker fixated on the closer, and ran toward Lovecraft firing wildly. Lovecraft yelped with surprise as a bullet punched through her car’s passenger-side window, then its counterpart on the driver’s side. She ducked behind the hood while she decided what to do about this. Believing he’d hit her, Decker ran harder for the front of the car to flank it and shoot her again to be sure. Filled with triumph, he had forgotten all about Carter.

  Carter had braced his arms and was setting Decker up for an embarrassingly easy shot. He took a breath, held it a beat, hesitated out of pity, then steeled himself and fired twice. Decker went boneless, then ran on a little farther as his legs failed, reminding Carter pathetically of the scarecrow from Oz. The dead man piled forward into the snow and lay still.

  A shot plinked off his car’s bodywork, the metallic reverberation absorbed by the layer of snow. He looked over to see Weber waving his arms around, gabbling unhappily in German at dark shapes that scurried behind the veil of white.

  “Tell your people to get back inside, Doctor!” he shouted.

  Weber turned slowly to face him and stood, his arms raised in an eloquent shrug, the false flag of truce still gripped in one hand. “Too late, Sheriff Dan. You should have cut us off at the pass while you had the chance.” Then he ducked back quickly into the shadows of the doorway. A shotgun blast blew a cloud of chippings and dust out of the upper-right lintel of the door. Lovecraft racked in another cartridge, but he was gone.

  “How many got into the shack?” she called to Carter.

  He shook his head. “Hard to tell. Two, maybe three.”

  “We got to take it back, don’t we?” she said. She didn’t sound enthusiastic, and Carter was with her in that. In the same way they’d had the advantage while the Thule people were holed up in the dome, now the two or three in the generator shack would have an easy time picking off anyone who tried to enter. Carter bitterly repented letting Weber come so far out of the door now. The generator shack occupants would start shooting as soon as Carter or Lovecraft appeared at the doorway, white flag or not. He’d wasted their advantage by not wanting to shoot a man under a flag of truce, and look where that had got them.

  “I’m too softhearted,” he said to himself as he started trying to devise a method of killing all the Thule agents in the generator shack without giving them a chance to defend themselves.

  Lovecraft took a moment to head in a crouch to the cliff edge to see if their reinforcements were showing up yet; if the British would just make a triumphant entrance, they could take the shack in a New York minute and then she could talk to Marine Ryan about her etchings or some other shit.

  It should have been hard to see anything in the gloom, but the sea to the south seemed to emit a dull glow, like the idea of light, that illuminated the snow-covered island like a dreamscape. It seemed she could look out across the little land like a child taking in an incredibly detailed illustration in a book. Every exposed rock was delineated, every flake of snow could be numbered. Lovecraft grimaced. Her mind was starting to hurt. Too much data. Too much everything. What the hell was happening to her? She remembered how Carter had tried to describe what “dreaming” in that very specific technical sense was like, and she hadn’t been able to grasp it. Now, however, she was beginning to understand it all too well in principle if not the specifics. This was not what he had talked about, but the way he had spoken of the very inhuman … unhuman experience of it bore redolence of the sensory misalignment she was now feeling. She could feel waves of information from her surroundings, and things that lay above and below the current reality, and it made her giddy and vertiginous. The cliff looked less like a death trap and more like a minor geographical feature that part of her mind considered so trivial that she could safely step off it. The rest of her mind disagreed and she fell to her knees to make it more difficult for the suicidal urges masquerading as merely megalomaniacal conceit to take her over the edge. She could hear Carter calling to her, but it was just another datum in a galaxy of data. And amid the points of truth, she could discern figures down below on the approaches to the mountain, and on the road leading up.

  “Emily!” Carter was suddenly at her side. He saw she was crying without sobbing, her eyes a long way away. “What’s wrong?” She felt his hand take her arm and it was an anchor she clung to.

  She looked at him, her gaze fierce and immediate. “I should never have read that book. I should never have read it. The Necronomicon’s fucked me up. I’m seeing things. I’m seeing everything.” She gripped his hand. “They’re coming.”

  “The British?”

  She shook her head.

  Chapter 33

  CASE SEIDR

  “Sir, there’s somebody up on the road. Up on the rise, there.” Marine Jones pointed into the gloom. The snow had abated slightly, but dawn was still some way away. Or, at least, it should have been. Things were easier to see than they should have been, but none of the men questioned it. They put it down to an effect of the snow-covered landscape, and never wondered why the light came from the south and not from the east.

  There was somebody up on the second meander of the mountain road, and another two on the first. For one forlorn moment, Lieutenant Green hoped that they were merely humans, perhaps the Thule agents, although he could have put up with Ahnenerbe hexensoldat if need be. But he saw how they moved, slouching resentfully under a gravity unmoderated by water, and he knew the hope was in vain.

  “Foamers!” he called. “Take cover, and kill them!”

  He didn’t say what they all knew. There was no possibility that their pursuers had somehow overtaken them. The creatures defending the mountain approach were a reserve that must have come ashore hours earlier. The commandos had been harried directly into their arms in a planned ambush.

  Purple-blue and amaranthine fire arced out of the oppressive gloom from behind them and Jones died before he had a chance to obey the order to take cover. Maybe it was a lucky shot, but they felt in their guts it was not—the Fomorians were much better with their weapons than they had been pretending. They had not wanted to become mired in a firefight too far from their reserve force, so they had chased the commandos, pushing them forward the way beaters raise game birds. Now that their quarry was within range of the skirmish line ranged along the base of Mount Terrible, the tr
ap closed, and the deception was discarded.

  A fall of black ash that used to be a man scarred the virgin snow. Lieutenant Green went at full length into the snow and found a gully. The only option was to push forward, even though the enemy had had time to emplace themselves. To go back meant going into waves of their reinforcements. He made a quick head count: there were five of them against perhaps ten ahead although he could only see the three on the mountainside road and one by the road ahead, and God only knew how many more behind.

  The commandos had entered the mission in the state of mind that they were already dead, and that tomorrow did not matter. Now they knew for certain that they would not see the next day. The only mark they could make on a world that did not even know they were there was not to go quietly. They aimed their weapons, conscious that these were among the last things they ever did, and they engaged the enemy.

  SA-80 assault rifles cracked, Fomorian weapons crackled their response, and the snow hissed into steam.

  Corporal Barnaby saw Marine Cox turn from flesh to soot in a great swathe from his shoulder to his waist, and he did not die, his guts and blood held into the remnant of his torso by the cauterizing fire. He looked into his comrade’s staring eyes and saw the agony and fear there, a man unable to scream because he barely had one whole lung left to him. Without hesitation, Barnaby aimed and put a bullet through Cox’s brain and thought it nothing more than what he would have craved if it had been him there, writhing in the snow.

  Barnaby turned to report Cox’s death to Lieutenant Green, but Green was gone with only a scar in the snow left to mark where he had been, the rock beneath glowing. Barnaby slid back into his protective gully as blue fire swept overhead. A Fomorian on the second meander of the mountain road dropped like an abandoned puppet and then the one by it was rocked back on its heels by a well-placed controlled burst to the head.