The Book of Cthulhu 2

by Ross Lockhart

  From above Paskow yelled down, “Bob! Bob!”

  “I’m okay, I think,” Hennessey added weakly, suddenly realizing that he couldn’t see his Thompson anywhere.

  “Stay put. I’ll find the stairs.” Hennessey could hear Paskow picking his way over the creaking timbers above. Alone in the dark, he began groping for the submachine gun. His gloved hands ranged back and forth over the cold stone for what seemed like forever. Then, with trembling relief, he lit on the still-warm barrel and pulled it to him, hugging it like a lost child. For a moment, Hennessey almost sobbed his relief. Then he heard the movement.

  Something was with him in the dark.

  He backed up until he hit the wall, bringing the Thompson up to his hip, but there was nothing to see. Nothing but blackness. Even so, he caught that fishy smell again, pricking at his nose. “Charlie! Don’t come down here!”

  “What?”

  “There’s some of those things down here! Stay upstairs!” Hennessey tested the weight of the weapon and figured he had better than forty rounds left in the drum. Plenty for what he was going to try. Holding tight on the fore grip to keep the barrel low, Hennessey squeezed the trigger and swung the barrel in a long arc from left to right. Suddenly the cluttered basement was illuminated by the strobing muzzle-flash. Then the things started jumping and moving, scrambling from between the rotten crates and collapsed shelves. Hennessey swung the Thompson and hosed them down. First one, then another, then two more went down howling. Then nothing. Silence.

  “Bob? Bob, are you okay?”

  Hennessey felt dizzy with relief. “Sure. I’m fine. C’mon down.” To his right Hennessey could hear the stairs creaking under Paskow’s weight. After peeling off the exhausted drum, Hennessey replaced it with a thirty-round stick and began to pick his way through the rubble to the stairs. A moment later the room was bathed in white light by another parachute flare, gleaming through the Swiss cheese holes of the roof. Gaping craters in the floors above were plainly visible for the second it passed overhead. And so were the four bodies of the family Hennessey had slaughtered.

  The mother and father had the signs. The bulging eyes, the fish-like mouths, the skin that seemed too dry. But the two kids—the girl maybe six, the boy just a toddler—they looked just fine. It was hard to tell, of course. Firing from the hip, Hennessey had caught each in the head with a whopping .45 round. “Ah Jesus!”

  Paskow looked down at the scene just before the flare drifted away and took their light with it. “C’mon, we gotta go.”

  “Jesus, Charlie, I fuckin’ killed ’em.”

  “Nice shootin’.” Paskow grabbed Hennessey’s equipment harness and pulled him up the stairs. “Now move it!”

  “But—”

  “They ain’t people,” Paskow hissed. “They’re deviates. Sub-humans. Understand this, Bob, we ain’t Marines tonight. We’re exterminators. This town, and everyone in it…We’re gonna hafta burn it all.” Paskow looked positively gleeful at the prospect. “But first we gotta get out of here.” With that, Paskow pulled Hennessey up the steps and out a door onto Fall Street. To their left was the Manuxet River and the Federal Street bridge back into the south side of town.

  All around them the operation was coming apart. Men ran every direction, screaming, firing their weapons at who knows what. At the intersection of Fall and Dock Streets, Paskow and Hennessey were nearly run down by a careening truck full of Marines. It took the turn onto the Federal Street Bridge rather poorly and slammed into the railing at about forty miles an hour. The driver shot out through the front window like a human cannonball, arching through the air, his arms pinwheeling until he slammed into the frozen Manuxet river with a crack that was part ice, part bone. The Marines on the truck fell over themselves pouring out the back.

  Then there was a crash like thunder behind them. Six feet tall and spread across Dock Street like an enormous black mound of dough, the horror from Water Street rolled into the fish-packing plant five blocks away and splintered the loading docks like dry kindling. It was a freight train. An avalanche. A tidal wave. Hennessey was distantly aware he’d shat himself.

  “Don’t look! Run!” Paskow screamed. On the bridge, Paskow stopped. “Waddaminit!” His iron grip brought Hennessey to a sliding halt. Then Hennessey saw it too. Downstream, past the ruins of the Fish Street Bridge was a second bridge, one linking both sides of the wharf across the Manuxet. The mountain of slime wasn’t crossing that bridge; in fact it was moving away. Someone down there had a pair of flamethrowers going. The long geysers of fire shot out and bathed the creature, driving it back against the fish-packing plant, collapsing the outer wall like something built out of a child’s blocks. The plant disintegrated as the thing rolled through its interior, smashing walls and support beams. It was coming their way now. Right towards their bridge.

  “Fire,” Paskow hissed. “It don’t like fire! We gotta seal off this bridge with flamethrowers!” Whirling around, Paskow stopped and stared at two Marines stumbling out of the crashed truck. They were shrugging their flamethrowers off their backs and turning to run.

  “You!” shouted Paskow. He let go of Hennessey’s equipment harness, sending him sprawling into the snow. “Get over here with those torches!”

  “Fuck you!” screamed the ashen-faced kid, his acne scarlet against his snow-white skin. Paskow shot the kid right in the face. Paskow turned the .45 on the second Marine.

  “Are your tanks full?”

  He nodded furiously. Paskow shot him through the heart for good measure. Jamming the .45 in his belt, Paskow jerked Hennessey to his feet and hurled him towards the first flamethrower. “Strap that torch on!” Hennessey was weeping with exhaustion, but did as he was told. Meanwhile dozens of Marines raced past them, heading for the Arkham road and out of town. Out of Massachusetts if they could manage it. Fuck Innsmouth. Fuck Massachusetts. Fuck New England. No fucking way were they slowing down before they hit Tierra del Fuego.

  Paskow snapped the chest buckle from the flamethrower’s harness into place and ran to the truck. He flipped up the canvas flap and began rummaging in the back. Hennessey was just shrugging the tanks full of liquid fire onto his shoulders when Paskow said, “Bob! Heads up!” Hennessey turned in time to catch a pineapple-sized white phosphorous grenade. Paskow tossed him two more. Then, shouldering a satchel charge, he craned his neck and looked back behind them; his pupils widened. “Move your ass, Bob!” Hennessey saw the rolling obscenity coming down Dock Street right towards them. It wasn’t alone. Right behind it, hopping and leaping around the fat, greasy bag of slime were more of the sea devils, barking and croaking. One carried a human arm as a club. And alongside them were men, men like Mr. Sergeant, carrying shotguns and rifles and cleavers and scooping up the weapons of the fallen Marines.

  Paskow pulled the fuse pin from a second satchel charge and tossed it into the back of the truck. It landed right between the three cases of white phosphorous grenades and the six cases filled with bricks of TNT. “Runrunrunrun!” Paskow and Hennessey tore across the bridge with fifty pounds of jellied fuel sloshing on their backs. Just one hot fragment! Just one! was the only coherent thought in Hennessey’s head. As they reached the south end of the bridge, they peeled off to the right around the grimy Waite and Sons’ Restaurant, with its swinging placard showing a fish-head impaled on an enormous barbed hook. A moment later, Hennessey saw the searing flash of light and earth-shaking concussion send the placard airborne, flying over New Town Square.

  The blast wave surged outward like an invisible wall of cement traveling at the speed of sound, trailing a cloud of debris that included head-sized cobblestones. Laying flat on their faces, their hands over their ears, Hennessey and Paskow would have been torn to rags if not for the thick walls of the Waite and Sons’ Restaurant. As it was, over a hundred yards away, they still felt the concussion suck the air out of their mouths and noses. When the wind subsided, Hennessey heard the townsfolk screaming, heard the fish-men braying and then a horrible unearthly
keening, louder than the rest. They dragged themselves off the cobbles and emerged in Federal Street to find that most of the abandoned mill, which had been just yards from the truck, had disintegrated and its water wheel blown out of the ice. The Esoteric Order of Dagon was gone. The side of the building facing the explosion had smashed through the opposite wall, squeezing the shattered interior onto Federal Street. Flaming shards of its timbers lay all about amid far more magnificent fires: the three cases of white phosphorous grenades, with the assistance of the TNT and satchel charges, had spread their contents over most of the area in front of the north end of the Federal Street Bridge. Those made of bone and meat who hadn’t been disintegrated by the concussion had been showered with a downpour of burning metal; everywhere figures flopped amid the rubble, skin and clothing ignited by white-hot fragments like a thousand little suns.

  The source of the keening revealed itself then, as the polymorphous horror emerged from the wreck of a nearby warehouse, a hundred mouths boiling out of its flesh amid blazing chunks of phosphorous. It rolled towards the river, crushing the faint life out of a dozen or so maimed and burning townsfolk. The faster it sped, the more the air whipped its coat of stars to new brilliance. The thing somehow knew it had to get back to the sea; it crashed into the ice and poured like lightning through the hole.

  Unfortunately, phosphorus burns just as well with the oxygen in water as it does with the oxygen in air. The water under the ice began to boil.

  Hennessey began laughing like a fool. It was so fucking beautiful. The whole north end of the bridge was an inferno. All along Dock Street blazing scarecrows that used to be men, and less wholesome things, ran back and forth trying to extinguish themselves. Some rolled down the embankment to dive into the river, its uniform sheet of ice now a broken tangle of bergs. “Burn! Burn, you sonzabitches! Burn!” Hennessey sang as he danced in a circle waving his arms, the nozzle of his flamethrower clattering against the cobblestones at his feet.

  But then the groan of the rending ice brought him back.

  “Light your torch!” shouted Paskow. Charlie’s eyes were still black and hot, and Hennessey dared not disobey. Cranking the ignition nozzle to full, he lit the blow-torch-like stream of gas off a burning fragment of the mill’s water wheel. Over the thick granite railing on the bayward side of the bridge, about forty yards from where they were, Hennessey could see a two-foot-thick sheet of ice being levered out of the river by a muscular pseudopod. The thing began flowing out onto the ice like a rope uncoiling in reverse. Glittering black eyes winked open across its steaming surface. Alone but for Charlie, not a single Marine in sight, Hennessey wasn’t even remotely scared. They burn, he thought gleefully. They burn and they scream! The fifty pounds of jellied gasoline on his back didn’t scare him anymore, either. He loved it.

  Paskow ran to the railing’s edge. The shiny black thing was done shitting itself out of the hole it had punched. “I’ll get its attention,” he grunted. First, he pulled his .45 out of his belt and emptied the magazine at it. The bullets dimpled its plastic flesh with no effect other than to send it rolling towards them. They each uncorked a phosphorus grenade, Paskow barely breathing, Hennessey giggling like a girl.

  “Wait,” murmured Paskow. The thing was at the river’s edge and rolling up the bank. Sweat stung Hennessey’s eyes.

  “Closer,” Paskow hissed. At ten yards, Hennessey could see mouths and eyes rolling over the surface of its twenty-five-foot-wide amoeba-like surface.

  The black tide hit the bridge supports and flowed upwards, grasping and reaching hungrily. “Now!”

  Hennessey hurled his grenade after Paskow’s down into the flabby bulk and then ducked behind the bridge’s stone wall. The sizzling splash of phosphorous was followed by the hideous wail of a pipe organ made from burning men. Rising up to bring his flamethrower to bear, Hennessey could see tongues waving like snakes in dozens of mouths. Despite the phosphorous, the thing rolled forward. Some of those mouths were no longer screaming; instead, their teeth were bared in what could only be a grimace of hate. Hennessey cackled like a maniac as he hosed it down with blinding flame.

  Like burning water, the jellied gasoline filled every open orifice. At first, the thing kept coming, stupid with hate and pain and wanting to kill the tiny thing that was hurting it. But suddenly it must have realized that it was not just hurting, it was dying. It hesitated in Hennessey’s shower for a second, before retreating under the bridge.

  “Keep it under there!” Paskow yelled as he ran to the opposite side of the bridge. Paskow let loose a blast of fire a moment later. “It’s coming back your way!” The thing’s wailing peaked, hit an octave that was too human. Hennessey greeted it with flame the instant it poked out.

  Then the shooting started. A stuttering fusillade of bullets peppered the bridge, knocking razor-sharp chips of masonry loose with their impact. Somewhere across the river, the freakish townsfolk were rallying to the defense of their aquatic angel. One slug missed the fuel hose on Hennessey’s flamethrower by about half an inch. Both Marines dropped to their knees.

  “Did you see where it—oh fuck!” Paskow cut himself short. The white phosphorous grenade clipped to his belt was missing its spoon. It had been shot away in the hail of bullets. The fuse was lit on Charlie Paskow. With two grenades, a satchel charge of TNT, and at least forty pounds of gasoline on his back, it pretty much meant Hennessey was fucked, too.

  Charlie stood up and, without even meeting Hennessey’s horrified gaze or uttering a word, vaulted over the side of the bridge. Neither the creature nor Charlie Paskow had time to scream.

  Hennessey was thrown face down on the stones by the concussion. Twin fireballs rolled out from either side of the bridge, flashing the snow and ice into steam and blackening Hennessey’s white winter greatcoat. Forcing himself up onto his knees, his bones still ringing with the blast, Hennessey immediately thought, I hope Charlie’s okay. With shame and horror, he realized then that he was alone. No, not alone. Those fuckers who’d killed Charlie were out there somewhere.

  Hennessey shrugged the tanks of fuel off his back and cast around for a discarded weapon. There were plenty to be had. Spotting a Lewis Gun that still had a magazine loaded, he pulled it to him by its barrel sheath. He checked the drum-pan magazine. Not jammed. Never even fired. He poked his head over the bridge’s upstream wall for a second. The shots came fast, from somewhere downstream. The Marsh Refinery. Hennessey scrambled to the opposite side of the bridge and hugged the wall. He poked his head up again and this time at least three rifles opened up on him. Still, the shots did little more than reveal their positions. The snipers were on the roof, no doubt huddled together for safety. Good, Hennessey thought warmly. Grouped nice and tight.

  Hennessey crawled forward about ten yards and then came up again, this time with the Lewis Gun. He balanced the bi-pod the bridge’s stone railing as a bullet bit the masonry right in front of him. He had his sight picture and then he opened up. Hennessey’s first burst got him his range to the refinery’s roof, the second found the snipers’ roost. Then he poured it on. All three flopped like rag-dolls. One lost his weapon over the side.

  More weapons opened up on his position from the black shuttered windows and doorways across the Manuxet. Hennessey had forgotten all about dying. He was too angry. Angry that these things had wiped out his platoon. Angry that he’d shit his pants with fear. Angry that Charlie was dead. Angry that he’d felt bad for killing the basement family of abominations. Hennessey wound his clock springs and went to work.

  First, the one on the crumbling roof at the corner of Fall Street. Then the two down by the shore to the right. Then the one in the doorway nearly a hundred yards along Federal Street. A hunched thing broke for cover on the left and got about two hopping steps. Then back to Federal Street, where four of them tried to advance around the burning debris from the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Then another at the window a block over on Church Street.

  Now they were running, turning tail and runni
ng. Just like Hennessey had minutes before. Running like women. But not from a monster. Not from a living mountain of shit that gobbled men and shrugged off bullets. No. They’re running from me! Hennessey thought. They’re afraid of me!

  “Run!” he screamed, laughing. “Run!” He held the trigger down and chewed the rest of the magazine up in seconds. “Run, you fuckers!”

  Somewhere he could hear a Browning machine gun chattering away. Turning back around, he felt a little disappointed to see the bridge filled with Marines, all of them firing past him and advancing by squads. All around him Marines were firing and charging forward. Suddenly two grabbed him by his numb arms and began to pull him back to the south bank.

  Are we winning? he thought, and then blearily asked the question aloud to a Marine on his right.

  “Jay’sus, lad!” the guy sounded like they’d just whisked him out of County Kildair. “If’n we aren’t, it’ll be no fault’a yore own. Who’dya think yar? Sah’gent Yark?”

  “What’re you talkin’ about?”

  “’Bout half the battalion saw you two on the bridge,” said a mustached Marine sergeant, grinning foolishly. “I heard the old man himself say you fellas looked like Horatius times two out there. He’ll want to see you after you’re fixed up.” Some kind of triage station had been set up behind the First National Grocery. Hennessey was gently lowered to the ground. “Congressional Medal of Honor, f’sure,” the grinning sergeant said. “You just sit tight and a corpsman’ll be ’long t’check you out, okay?” Hennessey could do little more than dumbly nod his assent. The night was passing like a blur. Someone came and looked him over, but Hennessey had no idea whether the guy was checking him for wounds or rummaging through his pockets. Sometime later he noticed that his face and neck were burned, and his greatcoat was actually smoldering. He leapt to his feet to shrug off the flamethrower before he exploded like a Roman candle, but suddenly remembered he’d ditched it back on the bridge.