The ship and its condition and that of the crew were reminding me of something else, of documents of events that I had reviewed and filed away in my mind, but now given an impetus several uncorrelated contents were coming together and the implications were terrifying. I ran back to the bridge and confronted Peaslee screaming to be heard, “This is a Tillinghast Resonator isn’t it?”
He looked at me with those cold eyes and said nothing so I called out to Royston. “This is the same technology that was employed on the USS Eldridge back in 1943 isn’t it? The Resonator built back in the 1920s by Crawford Tillinghast.”
Royston nodded. “I’ve made some improvements, and so have the Russians, but the principles are the same, yes.”
I turned back toward Peaslee and pleaded, “Why would you do this? You are going to get us all killed.”
Peaslee started to say something but then as the first visitors became apparent he stopped. They were small at first, and like the image Royston had shown me they were a merger of familiar invertebrate forms and the wholly unreal. Things that were like squid and fish swam through the bridge with bands of pure light knitting their segments together. Crabs with six legs and one claw crawled across the ceiling, their legs jointed in a green illumination. Flatworms that consisted of nothing more than a ring of tissue encapsulating a miasma of shadowed phosphorescence inched across the deck. There were dozens of these things, swimming through the air in schools and herds and pods. They covered the ship and moved amongst the crew without fear. With each passing second their numbers seemed to grow until the I could not see the crew through their amassed forms. The ship had become a kind of extra-dimensional coral reef, a host to thousands, if not millions of lifeforms, and as I watched the effect spread away from the ship and into the surrounding ocean itself.
I watched with a desperate sense of dread, my eyes darting to and fro through the nightmare creatures. I was looking for something, they had to be there, you couldn’t accumulate these kinds of numbers and not expect them to show up, and then, they were, sharks cutting through the alien life like knives through butter. They weren’t sharks of course, but in their actions and appearance the similarity was striking. They were sleek, muscular things built for speed and destruction. They flashed through the lesser things and left a trail of gore and fluid behind. Whatever these creatures used for blood it wasn’t red, but a frightful black that congealed almost instantly and floated in the ether like a cloud of dust. Peaslee saw them and muttered “The Hounds of Tindalos, lean and athirst.”
With all the prey, with all the predators about it was inevitable that a mistake be made: A man screamed as a shark passed through him and tore his arm clean off. A gunner saw this and reacted accordingly. In moments the ship had erupted in gunfire with weapons pointed not at an enemy in the distance, but rather at the ones that had engulfed the ship itself. Men died, but whether they did so because of the monsters or because of panicked fire it was impossible to say.
Outraged I screamed at Royston to turn the thing off, and he seemed inclined to do so, but as he moved toward the control panels I heard a familiar sound and turned to find Peaslee pointing his gun at the engineer. “Do not touch anything Royston. Everything is going according to plan.”
And it seems Peaslee was right, for then, as if by clockwork the thing appeared. It stalked out of the sky, using those weird unearthly, inorganic, immaterial legs to climb down out of the unknown and find a purchase in our world. It was a massive, monstrous thing, cyclopean in its construction, and promethean in its design. The center, the globular cluster of extra-dimensional flesh seemed to be ringed with five eyes around a central mouth all of which faced downwards. Short fleshy appendages jutted out from between the eyes ending in emitter like organs from which the wholly unnatural spine like legs emerged. They were great conical spindles of dusky energy that seemed to have no definition, no mass, and no substance, and yet somehow they held the central mass aloft. As it walked it raised one these spindles and the fleshy emitters rotated forward adjusting the length of the weird spike until it found its place. It then shifted its weight, rotating forward and repeating the process. Some legs seemed to be hundreds of feet long, while others merely a dozen. Then as it moved those proportions would shift and the thing would come closer, slowly, but surely closer.
Somewhere a Russian voice cried out “Kuz’kina Mat!” and the entire crew looked up at the thing as its mouth opened wide and an array of tentacles fell out and began snaking their way toward our location.
I turned to Peaslee and told him he was an idiot. “These things aren’t monsters, they’re animals. They’re not attracted to the resonator; they feed off the things attracted to the resonator. It’s not an attack, it’s ecology. The only time they pose a threat to us is if we get in their way. All we have to do is not use the resonator, which seems easy enough.”
Peaslee shook his head. “This is our world; there is no place in it for monsters or aliens. I’ve spent my life fighting things like this. The Kuz’kina Mat will fall before us, just as the others did.” He turned to the captain, “Tell the fleet to open fire.” The captain grabbed the radio and cleared the channel, but before he could say anything something struck the ship and set all of us flying. As I fell I saw the second thing as it crawled down out of the ether and settled onto the ship itself. The captain cursed as he slipped, as did Royston. Peaslee caught the edge of the captain’s chair and swung himself around grabbing the mike and bringing it up to his mouth. “Strike fleet,” he called out, “this is Peaslee, the order is given. You may fire at will!”
I didn’t know what Peaslee was thinking. Had he gone mad? We were right beneath the target; we were going to be collateral damage, something which he apparently didn’t care about. I grabbed a helmet that somebody no longer needed, strapped it to my head and once more tried to make my way off the bridge. It wasn’t as easy as it had been the first time, and going out onto the deck had been a mistake. The air was full of bullets and the metallic stench of explosives. There was a rhythmic thumping noise which I realized was an antiaircraft gun, and the chatter of smaller arms as they tried to mow through the swarm of things that had enveloped the ship. A quick glance at the sky showed me traces of fire headed toward both creatures. Tentacles like thick gray cables had been spooled out of their mouths and were snatching what they could from the mass of prey. They seemed oblivious to our attacks.
A sudden boom came, and then another, somewhere someone had upped the ante and brought the heavy cannons into play. I watched a pair of shells arc through the sky and hit one of the creatures in the central hub. It let out a roar, and one of its legs seemed to flicker. It rocked toward the missing limb before rebalancing itself as the spindle of light reestablished. The beast was still roaring as two more thumps reached my ears and it took two more shells to the body. More legs flickered and it fell. It fell from the sky and landed in the ocean just yards from the ship. The impact sucked the ship forward, and then the wave formed and flipped the ship’s bow up. I slid back into the bridge and as I fell I caught Peaslee and Royston. We held on to each other as the sea vanished and the sky was all that I could see. My ears and senses betrayed me as I was suddenly upside down and the world went black. The last thing I remembered was the cold and the smell of sea water flooding my nose.
I woke back on the Miskatonic, with no clue how I had gotten there, or who had rescued me. Colonel Peaslee was staggering across the deck, he was soaked and blood stained the right sleeve of his shirt. His jacket and tie were missing. I looked at my watch and learned that it was almost 11:00. I had been out for hours. I turned to look at the sea. The Soviet ship was capsized, but the sea around her was still strange, and still infested with thousands of unearthly lifeforms. In the sky, three of the pentagonal monsters were desperately trying to reach the mass of their prey while avoiding the shells of the attacking ships. Of the creature that had fallen there was no trace. I found out later that it had retreated, that it had climbed into the sky
and vanished, like a bird amongst the clouds, except the sky was clear. It had climbed up into the sky at an unknowable angle, one man was not meant to know.
Peaslee rose and began to stumble past me. As he walked by he was muttering something unintelligible and once I realized he was heading for the Command Deck I knew I had to follow him. There was something cold and distant in his eyes, a mania of sorts. He wasn’t himself; it was possible that he was in shock. As I stood to fall in behind him something in my left ankle gave out. It felt like a spring or pull cord had snapped and was curling up inside my leg. I screamed as the pain and failure in my ankle forced me to crumple back to the deck.
I crawled after him in desperation. He wasn’t much faster, but he gained distance and entered Command well before I did. I cannot say what I would have done if I had reached him in time, if I had been there when the order was given. But my leg had betrayed me and I only entered the Command Deck as the confirmation of his order came back over the radio. I turned and watched as a plume of smoke rose up from Johnston Island. It was both beautiful, like a god riding a pillar of flame into the sky, and terrifying, for I knew the power of the Gods themselves dwelt within that white metal casing. It was like watching Thor’s hammer being thrown against the giants. I smiled for an instant, for I thought that at least the mission would be accomplished. My life was likely over, but the mission would be accomplished. Then I remembered that the mission had been designed by a man who I suspect had gone a bit mad.
I tried to watch the Thor missile as it screamed across the sky, but as I did there was suddenly a horrendous noise and something large and dark passed in front of the sun. I don’t remember what it was. When I try, the number five seems to dominate my thoughts, and there is a desire to link the shape to those things that we had futilely battled, but I cannot be certain that is true. There is a shadow, a thing that at times seems to be part starfish and part squid, but on an unimaginable scale. Behind me Peaslee screamed two words in Russian, and mercifully I lapsed back into unconsciousness.
As part of the official inquiry I was allowed to review the telemetry data from the Thor missile. The warhead detonated at an altitude of 250 miles with a yield of 1.42 megatons and was seen as far away as Honolulu. The electromagnetic pulse was significantly larger than expected, shutting down street lights and tripping burglar alarms throughout the Hawaiian Islands. The microwave telephone link between islands was damaged. Immediately following the explosion, three low earth orbit satellites were disabled. Colonel Doctor Peaslee was not present during the inquiry, and I never saw him again. My separation from JACK was handled swiftly, and I was retired with a minimum of fuss. That the use of Royston’s lure and the attacks continued seemed obvious. Newspaper reports, particularly from Hawaii documented the “testing” of nuclear weapons in the South Pacific through the beginning of November.
All of this was a long time ago, and seems irrelevant to the issue at hand but I assure you it is not. Nor are they the ravings of a madman. Please do not think that. I have kept these things secret, forgotten them, and chosen not to think of them for decades. But that day, that day when you set out to destroy the anthill, all of this came rushing back. I remember it now because what you did seemed reminiscent of what I had seen before. Your children were playing, tormenting the ants and when they were hurt you came, your voice booming and you rescued them. That seemed innocent enough. Later when you came with the ice water and tried to drown the nest, that terrified me. Nearly the same thing had happened in the Pacific all those years ago. Only I and the fleet were the ants and we were being played with, and when we hurt one, we learned . . . we learned but we didn’t understand.
We had thought we were fighting what the Soviets called “Kuz’kina Mat” but we were wrong. I think Peaslee figured it out, but I never saw him again to ask, but when he screamed out, I think he knew. Those things had not been Kuz’kina Mat, we should have called them Kuz’kina. That thing that roared and gathered up the others before leaving, the thing that had blotted out the sun, which I have blotted from my memory, the thing that was what Peaslee had seen too, and why he had screamed, that was Mat, a parent that had come to the rescue of her children!
I live in fear of the day of return, when she comes to deal with a pest that has hurt one of the children, just as you did. My only hope is that she is less vindictive, more understanding than you were. I hope she can dismiss our actions as simply instinctual and inconsequential, and beneath any need to respond to. I hope she sees us as tolerable pests.
But I doubt it. God help us, I doubt it.
With Bright Shining Faces
J.C. Koch
“You can’t draw monsters!”
Mrs. George looked up from her lesson plan. It was Quiet Time and her first graders were normally quite good with coloring quietly for a few minutes, especially because Story Time came right after.
Cody, the boy who’d just broken the main Quiet Time rule, glared at Sukie, who sat next to him.
Sukie was busy drawing. She didn’t look up, just shrugged. “Can too,” she said mildly.
“Can not,” Cody insisted. “Especially not like those.” He punched his finger onto Sukie’s drawing. Sukie shrugged again and moved her paper further to the left, away from Cody.
Sukie was a small, quiet girl with straight honey-brown hair, big, bright blue eyes, and a serious demeanor. She normally kept to herself, and this should have made her the class outcast. But it was quite the reverse. As opposed to being shunned by the other children she was always invited to play with them, and most of the class wanted to partner with her whenever a buddy was required.
Whether it was because she didn’t like any of her classmates more than the others, or because she knew she was popular without seeming to try or care, Sukie never chose the same partner twice in a row.
Other than when she was required to be a part of a couple or a group, Sukie kept to herself. The other children were respectful of her apparent wish to be solitary, and none of them ever mocked her.
Cody wasn’t normally a belligerent little boy, and the other children were rarely this confrontational with Sukie. Mrs. George could reprimand him, and her first instinct was to do so, lest whatever hold Sukie had over the other children be broken and she be turned into the class victim and, by extension, Cody into the class bully.
However, there was something in the way he was upset—there was fear in the little boy’s tone, easily as much as anger.
Mrs. George got up and went to see just what Sukie was drawing and to provide the calming influence the teacher standing next to a student normally enforced.
Cody looked up at her, eyes wide. “Make her stop it, Missus Gee. She’s drawing bad things.” Yes, he was frightened.
“May I see, Sukie?” Mrs. George asked gently.
“Sure.” Sukie moved her drawing back to the center of her desk.
Mrs. George was prepared for something horrible—many times students drew things they experienced at home, terrible things, and part of her job was to determine if the drawing was real and, therefore, if the child needed to see the school psychologist, nurse, or on-campus police officer.
Sukie’s father was an oil rigger and her mother worked as a cocktail waitress in one of the more popular casinos in Gulfport. Those professions didn’t necessarily provide a stable home life, though most of the children in her school had parents working on the rigs and/or in the casinos.
Sukie’s grandmother took care of her and her older brother, Spradlin, and Mrs. George had met her when she’d had Spradlin in her class. Mrs. Selwyn appeared normal, but she’d always made Mrs. George nervous, even though the older woman really just liked to talk about how Spradlin was named for his mother’s family and how the oil rigs were destroying the ecological balance of the world, her son working on one or no.
However, Mrs. George had a hard time determining what about this picture was upsetting Cody so much. It was a rather crude drawing of what looked like a fatter version o
f a Tyrannosaurus Rex. It was a little early for it, but because of a traveling exhibit, they’d done a whole week on dinosaurs last month, culminating in a school field trip to the University of Southern Alabama Archeology Museum when the dinosaur exhibit was there. All the school had been involved, so Sukie still being interested in the ancient creatures didn’t seem out of the ordinary.
However, Mrs. George had been teaching for many years now, and Cody’s reaction felt quite real, not made up to get Sukie in trouble or draw attention to himself.
“Sukie’s just drawn T-Rex,” she said reassuringly, as she patted Cody’s shoulder. “And very well, too,” she said to Sukie. This wasn’t a lie—most first graders weren’t going to take the art world by storm, after all—and this was a serviceable rendition of a giant lizard. “And she’s allowed to draw whatever she wants, just as you are.”
“But look at it,” Cody said. “Look.”
She did. It remained a fat, crude rendition of a T-Rex. “Cody, you know monsters aren’t real, don’t you? Besides, Sukie’s drawing a dinosaur.”
“No,” he insisted. “She’s drawing monsters.” His voice dropped. “Real monsters. And monsters aren’t supposed to be real. My mom said.”
Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters Page 30
