That was the clicking he had heard.
Though it had no eyes, he knew the Mi-Go was looking at him. He had the feeling it was gloating. He knew very little by that point, but he knew it was gloating.
In a tormented, boyish voice, Philly said, “Oh please…oh please…no…don’t touch me…don’t you touch me…”
“No pain, little one,” the buzzing voice said. “Only deliverance…”
They were all around him by that point, six or seven of the Fungi from Yuggoth. He was down on his knees before them sobbing with a warm madness in his head. And when they reached out and touched him, his mind broke like a blood blister and ran like sap.
27
Warden Sheens had been working late when the prison shook. He, too, went on his ass and by the time the dizziness retreated from his head, everything was dark.
The phone was dead.
His laptop was dead.
His cellphone was dead.
“What the hell is going on?” he cried out. “Where are the fucking lights?”
And that’s when he knew he was not alone in the room. A pale and flickering blue light seemed to spill from the walls and Eddie Sloat was standing there, striding towards him like death.
He was a somnambulant shade with a face of corpse-slime and a body of rustling, hungry shadows. He reached towards the warden with fingers like white candlesticks and out of his mouth came two looping black tentacles that were perfectly smooth, perfectly oily, and perfectly deadly.
By the time Sheens thought of screaming, the tentacles were already sliding down his throat and screaming was no longer possible.
28
Chaos, utter chaos.
As the guards pulled themselves up from the floors, many slit open and bleeding from flying glass, the prisoners—now free—went on a rampage, yelling and shouting and screaming. They beat down hacks, cut them, piped them, dismembering them in a manic blood-ritual. They took the prison in minutes, flooding out into the yard and into the administration building as shooters in the gun towers tried to cut them down using sniper rifles equipped with night-vision devices. But there were simply too many.
Within twenty minutes, all the hacks but a few were dead.
The prison was shattered, every corridor packed with bodies and blood, flames engulfing the PI and chapel buildings.
And when there were no more hacks, the prisoners went after each other in slavering packs using shanks and pipes and shards of glass, table legs and purloined guns.
The Mi-Go waited on the high walls like grotesque gargoyles, visible finally, horribly amused by the herds below which ran and raided like swarming white ants on a hillside, killing their own in a great cleansing, a purification, a purge of raw, savage primate aggression. Stretching their ribbed wings and signaling each other with the chromatic language of their jointed antennae, it was exactly as they had foreseen it.
Prophecy fulfilled.
And it was about that time that the black gulf in the sky sheared open with a spinning vortex of gravitational, magnetic, and pulsating kinetic energy.
Nemesis had arrived.
29
The prison was trembling, vibrating with something like seismic waves that Coogan could feel right through the soles of his feet. As the cons raged and the night became a wild shadow-show of bodies rushing down the corridors and catwalks, voices yelling and screaming, he held onto the bars of his cell with Luis at his side. Buildings were burning outside and a flickering orange half-light bathed the cellblock.
“It’s here, Coog!” Luis said above the din. “We got to find Sloat! We have to kill that motherfucker! That’s the only way this might stop!”
Coogan watched as groups of cons poured down the corridor, crazed, hungry for blood and retribution, gangs going at each other with homemade knives and pipes. More than one man screamed out there as he was thrown over the railing or crushed beneath the mob.
Madness, absolute madness.
Now and again, Coogan thought he saw shapes moving with the crowds…vague, shadowy, indistinct…ghosts that were hopping like locusts.
The whole goddamn prison had breeched now.
He did not know where they were, but it certainly was not on Earth. Not anymore. He doubted that very many of them out there knew that yet, but they were feeling it, that everything they had ever known had been sucked into some black transgalactic corridor.
Luis slid something into his palm: a four-inch steel blade with a handle covered in black electrical tape.
“We got to find him!” Luis said.
Coogan nodded. “If we got to cut our way through everyone of them! Let’s go!”
They parted, threading out into the mulling violence of the crowds searching for the maker of shadows.
30
Chi Chi was caught up in the madness like everyone else, carried along by the stream of enraged cons, made part of the psychotic, wrathful beast they had become, hitting and being hit, knocked down, trampled, beaten, then clawing to his feet again so he could kill and kill again. Reason was gone and he did not remember what it was, he only knew that he had to survive and that his enemies were to the left and right and all around, drooling subhuman things that wanted to kill him.
He wiped blood from his eyes, searching for a weapon and in the back of his mind a shrilling sing-song voice was saying: Gather now, gather now, you must gather now.
He had to go out into the yard; the compulsion was irresistible.
But the rioting mutations around him would not let him. He ducked away from clutching feelers and jointed limbs and slime-covered hands that dripped like hot wax. He crawled on his belly through pooling blood and over ravaged corpses.
He saw cons moving in apish clusters, swinging their arms, most barely walking erect. He could hear them grunting, smell the monkey-piss stink of regression on them.
One of their number came in his direction and Chi Chi pulled a baseball bat from the cold fingers of a dead prisoner. The ape cantered towards him, wanting badly to run on all fours. When it got close, snarling with territorial imperative and showing its teeth, Chi Chi hit it in the face with the bat. And when it still moved, Chi Chi jumped up and down on the beast, breaking bones and then, swinging the bat over his head, drove it into his victim until the end was stained with blood and clotted with tissue and hair.
The other apes scattered.
From every direction there were cries and screams from dying and mutilated men, other sounds like braying and howling and strangled bestial noises that could not be from men at all.
And that voice of absolute domination: Gather now, gather now, you must gather now—
Three convicts moved up the metal stairs to his left. They crawled on all fours. Their faces were the faces of rats. They dragged serpentine tails behind them.
Chi Chi ducked away from them.
Then he was running again, stumbling down corridors that bled into one another, blurring, unable to hold their shape. Cells were dissolving, iron bars flowing like hot tallow, walls bubbling. The ceiling ran like a river of blood. The mobs of prisoners were reshaping and re-imagining themselves with each step they took. Some became worms that crawled through the concrete walls.
The world moved, shifted, angles intersecting and splitting open. Like melting film, great holes began to burn through the walls revealing an endless blackness beyond. From these dimensional sink holes, things were watching with eyes of purple crystal, calling out in voices of shattered glass.
Other things were swimming through the holes.
Chi Chi saw pulpy clouds of yellow tissue that were pursued by schools of polychromatic bubbles swimming around each other and through each other as if they were made of mist. They were followed closely by great luminous concentric rings of crystal teeth…like living shark jaws.
They moved right through solid walls and floors like they were made of smoke.
Chi Chi felt his mind begin to fold in upon itself.
He saw cons who had the
enormous multi-lensed compound eyes of flies. Others that scuttled about on too many legs or suckered themselves to the walls. Everywhere: hopping, jumping, slithering and squealing as gangs met gangs and blood wars broke out.
He was knocked down, kicked mercilessly by a group whose heads had been replaced by squirming protoplasmic pseudopodia that were writhing, in constant motion. Another crowd of convicts that had degenerated into bloated toads give chase to them.
Chi Chi got to his feet, clubbing down two men who were nursing growths of transparent tentacles at their bellies and was knocked aside by a grotesque dragging thing with flat yellow eyes and gill slits at its neck.
Then a toad-thing.
It hopped in his direction. It reached out for his face with fingers that were puffy, fleshy pads. A black shiny tongue licked blubbery lips. Chi Chi screamed and swung the bat, smashing the thing’s left orbit, the eye squeezing out in a tangle of tissue like a pip from an orange. The creature went down making a horrible pained croaking and Chi Chi went mad with it, swinging the bat and breaking limbs, puncturing organs beneath the heaving pebbly skin. With a final shout of rage he split the thing’s head open and that was not enough. He sank blood-sticky fingers into the cleft at its skull and pulled until the head came open and he could get at the glistening frog-spawn it had for a brain.
Splashed with gore, he hopped away from the toad on all fours.
All around him were repulsive subhuman things. He was the only man left and he must stay alive. He must because…because—
Gather now, gather now.
You must gather now.
But he knew he wouldn’t make it for a mixed gang of creepers and crawlers hemmed him in. They moved stealthily forward with knives and clubs and slats of wood sharpened to spears.
“There he is,” one of them said. “Do you see him? That’s the monster…”
But they were wrong: they were the monsters, not him.
As they closed in, their faces were distorted and grotesque as if crushed by intense pressure or melting into threading strands of red-and-white pulp.
When the first spear sank into him and a slashing knife blinded him, Chi Chi cried out in a screeching, defeated voice, but it was not out of pain but out of the remorse that he would not make it to the yard to gather and look upon what was waiting out there.
As he died he cried out, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn…”
And reached out towards the sky with yellow-suckered fingers.
31
Luis wiped blood from his face, stepping away from the con at his feet that was bleeding out. He watched as the mess hall was enveloped in a fluidic warm green sea that felt like gelatin as it flowed past him, shivering, shuddering with torpid currents. He saw creatures, great and small, that were something like insects, living black and red exoskeletons that swam and flew and often dissolved into agitated streams of bulbous worms that frantically tried to escape gigantic drifting clusters of pink, pulsing eyes that themselves were fleeing vast pulsating bladders with thousands of wavering arms that were composed of a corpse-white jelly.
He did not dare move, afraid they would see him.
They circled around him, passed through him.
He looked down and the floor seemed to be gone.
There were things like craggy, branching tree limbs growing up from a titanic black abyss far below. They bore no buds or leaves, just an immense latticed forest of twigs that wiggled like fingers, reaching out for him.
Screaming, he fell back into the corridor.
32
Coogan was knocked aside by the hysterical crowds. He was hot and feverish, slicked not with sweat but what almost seemed like a fine layer of mucus slime like afterbirth. His hand felt alien as he brushed his face with it.
Dear God.
There was a fine membranous webbing between the fingers.
He was physically changing, mutating, becoming less human like the others. A monster. He was becoming a monster. The breeching was changing them all.
Sloat. Get that sonofabitch.
Yes.
He moved with a loping gait up the corridor.
An old woman walked through the wall before him. Her face was like threadbare wicker, eaten through with innumerable holes which spilled an inky blackness. She held a plump brown rat in her arms with a human face that grinned malevolently. With her stood three or four tall creatures whose bodies were like tapering barrels. They had great membranous wings and wriggling starfish heads, the arms of which terminated in brilliant red eyes.
Coogan could feel them trying to invade his mind, wanting to draw him into the angles which were fragmenting the prison.
He pulled himself along the wall, a brown fluid sweating from his pores that stank like rotting fish. He came to a barred window and looked out into the world.
Beyond the wall, everything was gone. There was just that greenish mist moving in plumes and eddies.
Rising from it he could see a honeycombed city of red-mottled towers and pipes that looked much like the narrow elongated chimneys of hydrothermal smoker vents. There were things living in the city, things that swam, propelling themselves about with fanning wings. The red-eyed things that had been with the old woman.
Above, Nemesis was opening in the sky.
His hand. It was swollen, the fingers broad and flattened, that fine webbing between them. The entire thing looked to be made of some white blubbery gelatinous material like pork chop fat. He could plainly see the elaborate system of blue and green veins just beneath the skin that threaded through the hand and forked into the fingers like climbing ivy. It was taking his whole arm.
Then he saw Sloat. He was leading a group of cons down the stairs and they were following him like squealing rats.
Coogan caught up with him just as he made to step out into the yard.
Sloat turned. Too late.
Coogan came at him with a demented instinctual rage. When Sloat turned, Coogan slapped his misshapen fleshy white hand over his mouth and slammed the shank into his chest, burying it right to the hilt. Sloat made a whimpering sound in his throat and Coogan ran his gears—pulling the blade up and over, then down and over like shifting gears in a car. Sloat fell backwards, arms pinwheeling, a shrill ear-splitting bray breaking from his lips in a mist of red. He tried to cry out, but throat was filled with blood and all that came out was a stream of scarlet vomit that splashed down his chin as blood fountained from his gashed-open chest and belly.
Coogan stared down at him, his mutant arm throbbing, swollen nodules on his belly tingling.
Sloat looked up at him, his face spattered with blood. For one moment he looked almost grateful…then it was gone, his face pulling into a sardonic mocking grin, the eyes blazing with deranged amusement.
And that’s when it happened.
At the very point Sloat should have pitched over and died, what had been living in him, feeding off him like an engorged leech, decided to show itself. Sloat arched backward, his entire body shuddering rapidly with convulsions, a black sap bubbling from his eyes and leaving inky trails like mascara tears down his slack, clown-white face. Milky bile boiled from his mouth and flaring red nodules rose on his cheeks, forehead, and chin…each erupting with a wire-thin transparent tendril like a coiling hookworm. And so many that his face was soon gone beneath the crawling infestation.
Coogan fell back with a cry, gripping the bloody shank.
Sloat’s abdomen sheared open like a birth canal with a spray of clear jelly…and some writhing, disjointed thing like an undulant amoebic slug veined hideously purple and blue pushed up out of the anatomical waste. It was greasy and jellied, yellow eyes like clustered eggs irising open, a dozen oily crimson whip-like appendages like the snaring tentacles of a lion’s mane jellyfish emerging and slithering around for something to grasp.
Coogan batted a few away, slashed another open with the shank and it spilled a yellow-green blood to the floor. Another tore out a handful of
his hair and yet another, almost lovingly, brushed over his bare arm and it was smooth, almost silky to the touch.
Then from somewhere outside there came a strident, eerie whistling that was soon answered by what seemed a hundred other such whistles that rose up into a shrill, deafening chorus that reached a singled blaring, cutting, ear-splitting note that brought every man in the prison to their knees.
Coogan, all the blood drained from his face, pressed hands to the sides of his head so his skull wouldn’t blow apart from sheer internal pressure.
From somewhere, a hot wind of pestilence began to blow with cyclonic intensity.
Nemesis was taking its offering.
33
Luis Cardone barely paid attention to the rioting prisoners or the smell of smoke or the bodies tumbled and heaped about the prison.
Something else was calling to him.
A song of sirens. It was a summoning and it was irresistible. He stumbled along the corridor getting knocked this way and that by a mad flight of prisoners whose eyes were huge and glassy and utterly insane. He could hear something like the manic squealing of a thousand scalded infants and knew it was the men in the yard dying…dying of fright.
He stepped out into the night and looked up into the sky.
The Million Malignant Minds.
Nemesis.
A living primal darkness, an elemental magnetic ghost, a disembodied multidimensional wraith composed of a million malevolent eyes, an irradiated organic dimensional wormhole powered by a seething hot reactor core of decayed alien intelligences hungry for sustenance: human gray matter riven with terror, with fear, with devastating simian superstitious dread.
Cthulhu Unbound 3 Page 20
