Cthulhu Unbound 3

by Brian M. Sammons (ed. )

  The man behind him let out a single word, “Bitch!” before his screaming started. Instantly the arm was removed from around Harrison’s throat and Peel crumpled nearly unconscious to the floor.

  As for the American killer, he clawed at his face with both hands. He took several unsteady steps in various directions and never stopped screaming, even after the blood began to flow like a running faucet from between his fingers and over his expensive suit. Even after Cater dropped to his knees and the cries of pain were reduced to gurgling, wet sounds, he continued to do his best to scream.

  Peel used that time to clamber upon one knee and with a shaky hand he rubbed his swollen throat. His face was bright red and his left eye had blood in it due to burst blood vessels from the chokehold. His tongue felt thick and dry and he could still hear the thunderous beating of his pulse in his ears.

  Standing now, he drew the Walther from his pocket, chambered a round, and turned to look at Carter.

  The man was quite simply a mess. The assassin was sprawled out on his back, one leg kicked out, the other tucked underneath him, and he was quiet at last. But he wasn’t yet completely still. His arms and legs jittered and twitched despite the four inch hole that bore through the center of man’s face. He was obviously dead, just all the parts of his body had yet to receive the memo.

  Harrison looked at his wounded and bleeding hand. Small shards of glass were embedded in his palm from the vial that Jordan had given him in Lima. That vial had once housed a tiny, shapeless creature of white goo inside it. Peel had been attempting to transport the alien thing without the CIA watchdogs finding it. That meant using his secret abdomen pouch, even if the idea of smuggling a hostile life form inside his body had been a frightening one. He had wanted to bring the creature with him in case he needed to show proof to his superiors of Centarus’ dangerous operations. Using the jar and the thing inside it as a weapon was the act of a desperate man. The small, now obviously highly corrosive, slime beast could have just as easily attacked Peel’s hand as it had Carter’s face.

  Harrison once again looked down at the ruined mushy pulp that had been Carter’s face and a small pang of guilt rose within him. Killing a man was one thing, letting something like that monstrosity bore its way into someone was quite another. Still, the phrase ‘better you than me’ came to Peel’s mind as he turned towards the conference room’s door. He had to set his mind to figuring out some way he could leave this jet alive, and right now that wasn’t looking very good.

  As if waiting for the most ironic moment to happen, horrible bubbling and tearing sounds started to erupt from the corpse behind him. Peel’s realized that his odds, however poor before, had just gotten a whole lot worse.

  Not wanting to, but unable to help himself, Harrison Peel turned around. He had a good guess of what he’d see before he did, but he had to see it with his own eyes if he had any chance of escaping it.

  Sure enough, the once tiny creature of slime had devoured most of Carter’s insides, turning the man into a hollowed-out shell that it had just burst out of. Now the thing had the mass equivalent of a large man and Peel knew from previous experiences that such things were always hungry for more.

  The pulsating thing began to form dripping tentacles out from its center mass. Each ropy appendage soon sprouted one or more gnashing mouths along their surface. At first the tentacles flailed around wildly. The beast was essentially a newborn and it had to become accustomed to the world. Soon enough it sent two tentacles to wrap around the legs of the nearby conference table, perhaps in an effort to pull itself along. It never got the chance. The wooden legs smoked and sizzled at the creature’s touch and quickly snapped in half. The whole of the beast seemed to be coated in an incredibly powerful acid that was fast dissolving anything in contact with it.

  Peel knew it was time to leave.

  He opened the conference room’s door, quickly went through it, and then slammed it behind him, hoping that it would buy him a few moments at best. Turning, he saw Zoe Isles and two male CIA agents moving down the aisle towards him. Both of the men had their guns drawn and Zoe wore a grim mask of determination on her face. He felt the jet lurch, realized that it was descending, perhaps in response to whatever the creature was doing to the jet’s systems.

  Peel’s first instincts were to shoot both the men, their ready weapons made them immediate threats. But something inside him stayed his hand and instead all he could think to do was to ask a question. “Tell me Zoe, did you know why Carter was here?”

  Zoe stopped in her tracks, gave Peel a pained look. Harrison’s usually accurate ability to size someone up was muddied by his emotions. He simply didn’t want to believe what he saw in the woman’s eyes before him. Yes, she had known, and maybe she didn’t approve of it, but she had allowed it to happen nonetheless.

  Peel’s gun hand began to rise on its own. His question answered, a calm clarity filled him. He would do what he always did; whatever it took to survive. Yet, with Zoe’s forehead in his line of sight, he still couldn’t squeeze the trigger.

  Before he, or the CIA agents in front of him, could fire, the door at Peel’s back burst open and a bubbling nightmare surged forth. The creature had quickly learned how to move without the aid of grasping the fragile objects in the human world. It rolled forth like a large snowball from hell, using its bulk and a changing center of gravity to pull it along.

  The three Americans were not as accustomed to staring down cosmic-spawned abominations as Peel was, so while he quickly dove to one side of the rolling mass, the others stood frozen in terror. It took the thing running into the lead CIA agent and quickly engulfing him to spur Zoe and her remaining subordinate into action.

  As the screams of the dissolving CIA man filled the plane, Zoe stepped back, reaching for the automatic pistol at her side, and putting the other man between the shapeless monstrosity and herself. That other agent also snapped out of his stupor and began to dutifully fire round after round into the creature, all to no effect.

  Peel could have told the brave but foolish man that guns would do little good against the beast. After several firsthand experiences with such monsters he knew that amorphous creatures such as it simply didn’t have any internal organs to burst with bullets, bones to break, or muscles to tear. Shooting at a huge, sentient pile of pudding would have had the same effect.

  Yes Peel could have told the man that, but he knew the gesture would be useless. The agent was doomed, as was everyone on the plane. No weapon any of them had would stop the beast, so if it didn’t just eat everyone on board, the acid that covered it would eventually breach the fuselage and cause explosive depressurization that would most likely bring the jet crashing down into the Pacific. So with that in mind, Peel stepped up from where he had dove out of the way of the creature and looked towards the front of the plane.

  “What the hell have you done, Harrison?” Zoe screamed at him.

  He grabbed her arm, dragged her towards the front of the airplane.

  “Peel?”

  “We’re getting out of here.”

  The creature was wrapping sizzling tentacles around the head of the CIA man. That man continued to pull the trigger on his empty weapon as his face started to dissolve and his eyes melted away.

  “Where are we, Zoe?”

  “Probably about to cross over into the Pacific, any moment now.”

  “That’s not good.”

  The lights dimmed. The engine spluttered. The creature’s acid was already decimating the airplane’s systems.

  “Well it’s just gotten a whole lot worse.” Zoe screamed at him. It seemed the moment where they were about to kill each other was forgotten.

  Peel had seen an emergency closet towards the front door. Still holding onto Zoe, they ran towards it despite the lurching interior. Inside he saw a first aid kit, a flare gun, and more importantly life vests, a quick-inflating raft, and parachutes. He slipped on a parachute, passed one to Zoe.

  Before she could take it the
plane lurched suddenly and violently, throwing them both off their feet. Peel and Zoe barely managed to hold onto chairs as the rear of the Learjet fell away, dragging the acidic white blob with it. They might have mercifully escaped the creature, but unfortunately that also meant they only had half a plane left to them.

  Air rushed around them. Everything in the emergency closet vanished with the howling winds.

  “Harrison!” Suddenly Zoe was gone, sucked out into the cold thin air.

  Peel let go of the chair, allowed himself to fall through the wreckage of the Learjet. He’d jumped just in time, the airplane had lost its upward momentum, and was falling with him.

  Strapping the parachute to him so it was secure, Peel shaped himself like an arrow so he would fall faster. Zoe was below him, a dozen meters or so closer to the earth, screaming. Further below, kilometers earthwards, the border between the desert coast and the frigid Pacific Ocean awaited.

  The air was thin, it was hard to breathe. Peel dived and screamed at Zoe to increase her surface area to slow her decent, but his words were lost in the howling winds. Yet somehow he was gaining on her. As their gap decreased Zoe hadn’t seemed to have noticed him, or was too distressed to respond.

  “Zoe!” he screamed. He didn’t want to lose her. He couldn’t lose her, despite everything.

  Somehow, she heard him.

  The ground was rushing up at them at an incredible speed.

  She caught his eye. “Harrison!” she screamed, reaching out a hand.

  Peel caught her, held her tight.

  “Don’t you let me die! Don’t you let me die!”

  “I won’t. I promise.”

  Peel was swept away by a torrential wave of cold, salty water. Hundreds of corpses were washing over him, threatening to drown him. Every single corpse was Jordan, thousands upon thousands of them, falling upon him as the dead weights that they were. They were tangling him, smothering him.

  Peel remembered where he really was.

  He pulled the ripcord, tore himself away from the corpses and return into cold, high altitude air.

  Zoe was falling still, but hundreds of meters beyond him now.

  4. Moscow

  It had been twenty-three days since Jordan had last spoken to Peel and tried to warn him about the assassin on his jet. Twenty-three days, and nothing but silence since. The chances were high that the Australian was dead and that upset Jordan more than he would have thought possible. Loosing brothers in arms was a given in his profession, but as much as he’d never admit it, Harrison Peel was one of the few people Jordan had marked down under the friend column in the mental rolodex he kept in his mind. If he was gone that left only three names on that list without big red lines drawn through them.

  Currently that third name was sitting across from him, field stripping and cleaning his AN-94 rifle. Not that he needed to, but simply out of boredom. Sixteen days cooped up on a submarine waiting to kill something will do that to you. Jordan just hoped that Matvei wasn’t on this boat waiting to kill him.

  Jordan wasn’t a betting man but if he had to place the odds that he would soon be feeling the business end of Matvei’s keepsake Khyber knife, a prize he claimed from a dead tribal chief in Afghanistan, he’d have to say it was even money. It was only little things. A look, a strained silence, and nothing more but Jordan lived and died by his ability to read people and what he was reading from the Russian wasn’t good.

  It had started when Jordan arrived in Vladivostok, after bouncing from Lima to Mexico City then to Honolulu and finally one last layover in Tokyo. As soon as his Aeroflot flight landed, Matvei was there with a big grin on his face, a bear hug to welcome him, two tickets to Moscow, a bottle of Dovgan vodka, and questions, lots and lots of questions. Oh the Russian asked them over drinks, with a smile or a laugh, but he would ask the same questions four different ways spread over their eight-hour flight. Jordan knew interrogation techniques enough to know when he was being asked them. Popular myth says that interrogations involved rubber hoses, bright lights in the eyes, or the most recent favorite; waterboarding. The truth was it was more productive to obtain reliable information simply by asking the same questions, phrased differently, over a period of time and comparing the answers. Plying the jetlagged interrogated party with premium Russian Vodka only made it harder for him to remember his lies.

  Luckily for Jordan, lying was as easy as breathing.

  Once in Moscow, and going on hour thirty-eight since he last slept, Jordan was whisked away by Matvei in a waiting car with two serious, and seriously large men to Yasenevo and the SVR headquarters to answer even more questions.

  “Old school?” Jordan asked his friend.

  Matvei was sardonic when he said, “Does a bear shit in the forest?”

  Jordan shrugged.

  “It has to be this way, my friend. You’ve been gone too long. There are gaps in your story.”

  The two men muscled Jordan inside. He was taken downstairs, where it was dark and the cold tiled walls would ensure that no screams or begs for mercy ever reached the streets above, were ordinary Russians went about the ordinary business of just living.

  Jordan was made to strip. When he was naked and his body probed and examined, and his clothes torn to shreds, he was allowed to dress in overalls. He was then told to sit, and the questions began.

  There were no smiles, laughs, or vodka this time, just grim looks and implied threats. The crux of the matter was that Jordan, as ex-Spetsnaz freelance agent ‘Yegor’, had been out of touch for an uncomfortably long time. His sudden return to the fold had raised questions.

  Once again, Jordan used lies like Michelangelo used paints. He first started off strong, but knowing that the questions wouldn’t stop until he gave them something, he purposely began to show signs of exhaustion and let slip a few conflicting stories. After two more hours of what the SVR men jokingly called ‘debriefing’, Jordan began to hint that there might be things he was hiding to whet their appetites. Then to throw the hounds off the real scent, he admitting that he had done a few jobs for the Russian mafia in the United States which was a good start, but the SVR spooks wanted more. So Jordan made a desperation call that he knew would either end with a Makarov being put to the back of his head, or it would satisfy the interrogators that they had found the dirt they were looking for. He played the part of the broken man and told them that he had sold some small arms to Chechen terrorists while he was there killing the very same people for Mother Russia. Afterwards he waited to see what would happen next.

  The SVR men believed the lie. Considering that Jordan didn’t get his brains blown out, they seemed to take his confession in their stride. They actually thanked him for his honesty, said they would let their superiors know everything, and finally let him get some sleep. It was a cold dark cell with only stained woolen blanket to keep him warm, but it was enough.

  The next day he was given proper clothes, Russian cut. He was taken upstairs, into an office where the big shots from the SVR, Russian Military Intelligence, and GRU awaited him. There was also one old man amongst the mix that Yegor wasn’t supposed to know, but Jordan did. His name was General Alexey Nikonov and he headed up a secretive branch of the GRU called SV-8, Special Department Eight.

  “Hello, Yegor. You’ve been keeping yourself busy I see,” Nikonov’s raspy voice sounded like his tongue was scraping across sand paper. “So busy, I’d say, that coming back to the homeland now would not have suited your interests.”

  Jordan said nothing. He knew who GRU SV-8 really were, the Soviet era flipside to the unnamed organization that Jordan unofficially worked for now. In short, they were the Kremlin’s monster hunters. Jordan had no idea why Nikonov, a relic of the coldest of wars, was at the meeting, as Jordan had purposely kept otherworldly details out of his story. He was also surprised to see that GRU SV-8 was still active, as most Washington think-tankers had written them off when the Soviet Union imploded. He would have to report to someone that they were still around, if h
e lived that long.

  Once more Jordan fed the Russians lies and half-truths. He had to get them interested in what Centaurus was doing out on the oil rig in the middle of the Pacific, but he didn’t want to confuse them, or entice General Nikonov with tales of extraterrestrial bioweapons. So instead he used the threat of manmade bioweapons in the form of an experimental virus based off of a newly discovered sea cucumber. Jordan was particularly proud of the sea cucumber angle, it sounded just crazy enough to be plausible.

  “I don’t believe you,” Nikonov kept saying. “What is it, Jordan, that you are not telling us.”

  For a second Jordan thought he heard Nikonov use his American code name. It took every effort not to react to a word he wasn’t even sure he had imagined.

  “I’m telling you everything.”

  Nikonov stared at Jordan, waited. When Jordan did not react he said, “But why are you telling us this? Why is it important?”

  “I came across some intel about the bioweps while working as a mercenary for a private military company, you know, a PMC. They were providing security for Centaurus operations in Iraq.” Jordan told them an abridged version of the real events. He even spun his own bombing of the orphanage as the Americans’ doing, a scorched earth response to a viral outbreak in one of their top secret test laboratories.

  Jordan, as Yegor, next said that when he discovered this he knew Russia would want to know about it. Also, he was willing to oversee the investigation to its conclusion, provided he would be well compensated and that his past transgressions against the Motherland would be forgiven. All that he would need would be a submarine and a crew to get him to the oil platform.

  “I see,” said Nikonov stroking his chin.

  They left him alone for a while after that. An hour later, maybe two, only Nikonov returned. “Some of your story checks out, Yegor.”

  “Of course it would.”

  “What does check out is of very much interest to SV-8.”

  Niokonov left him again, told Jordan to wait while senior intelligence directors discussed the matter. Three hours after that he was called into a conference room. He was a bit unnerved to see Matvei had joined the proceedings.