“Oh Rich,” she said, looking down at me, “thank you for not seeing what was going on. Thank you. If only you were pretty, it would make up for you being so fucking stupid.” She stretched out her arms and her bag fell to the ground, her long hair boiled up in a great mass behind her head sucking the light into it. The ends of the hair flickered with dark energy, pulsing out of our world, into another and back. Her eyes emptied to blackness as she intoned the ritual.
“Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. By Your foulness do I know Ye, by Your name do I call …”
I lunged and caught her round the middle. She crashed backwards onto the handrail, gasping for breath. I kept up the pressure, my arm now under her chin, and pushed her half back over the barrier towards the track below. The hair was alive. It gripped and wrenched my shoulder and I span round, almost off my feet. I managed to hang on, getting one hand across Sarah and under her armpit. And there was what was left of Tag coming across the walkway at us. His face was split completely in half, the two sides falling away from his shoulders as black ropes of flesh clawed up from inside his body and flailed around out of the stump of his neck. One grabbed my leg, searing through my jeans and flesh. Hair and tentacle pulled me this way and that; I felt ligaments snap and bones grind but still I clung on to Sarah. With a sickening moist sound, the rest of Tag sloughed away revealing the dark hairy body and cloven hooves of an enraged monstrosity. Great holes in its side with many teeth screamed and chattered. The tentacles struck out wildly and ripped me up into the air. I dragged Sarah up with me, tearing her prehensile hair where it clung onto the balustrade. The creature whipped us round and flung us far out, over and down onto the track. The 16:45 from Clacton was late and only moving at ten miles an hour but it wasn’t going to stop for us.
Last Things Last
A. Scott Glancy
(based on an idea by Brett Kramer)
In the darkness, a cell phone is ringing. It squawks out “Hooray for Captain Spalding,” Groucho Marx’s theme music from You Bet Your Life. Agent Winifred struggles under her comforter to find the ringing cell phone. She brushes her own silent cell aside and digs for the burner her Cell leader gave her. That phone has never rung before, and after tonight’s opera she’ll drops it down a sewer drain and it will never ring again. When she finally finds her Cell’s cell phone, she checks the caller I.D. It reads “ALPHONSE.” She immediately answers.
“This is Winifred.”
The computer-generated voice on the other end sounds as warm and avuncular as Stephen Hawking.
“Agent Winifred, execute identity protocol Kappa. Forty-six, left, thirty-two, three.”
Winfred jumps out of bed and goes to a bookcase across her bedroom, withdraws two old volumes. She opens the first titled Selected Prose and Poetry of Rudyard Kipling. She opens the book to page 46, checking the left column she counts down to line thirty-two. The passage reads—
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
and the women come out to cut up what remains,
jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,
an’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
She reads the third word of the thirty-second line. “Wounded.”
“Confirmed,” answers the phone.
Winifred opens the second book, Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon.
“Protocol Theta. One eighty-five, four, five.”
The anonymous voice squawks “Sap.” Winifred checks the text. It reads—
I won’t play the sap for you.
“Confirmed. You are go for mission details.”
“You are cordially invited to a night at the opera,” came the expected opening line. “Confirm your availability for a twenty-four hour engagement beginning immediately.”
“I’m available for that window, but if I’m held over I’ll need an intervention with my supervisor.”
“That has already been arranged with your Special Agent in Charge.”
“So what’s the rumpus?”
“Agent Grendel will contact you at Jumbo’s Clown Room on Hollywood Blvd. at 11:45 tonight. His contact code is ‘Mamacita.’ Your response is ‘Chupa mi culo, hijo de puta.’ He will bring the script and play the lead. You are the understudy. Bring no registered weapons or ID. Sanitization is paramount. Dress for the office. Any equipment will be allocated from the local green box. Understood?”
“Understood,” she says, checking her alarm clock. It was 11:04. “But I’ve never worked with Agent Grendel before. How am I supposed to find him?”
“He’ll find you.”
The caller disconnects without ceremony. Winifred puts down the phone and goes to the closet. Hanging among the conservative suits is a bullet-proof vest and a windbreaker with the letters “FBI” stenciled on the arm and back in yellow. She’s dressed and in the car in ten minutes. In thirty she pulls up to the curb across the street from Jumbo’s Clown Room, an inexplicable strip joint in a strip mall. As she crosses the street a nondescript car screeches to a halt right in front of her, cutting her off from Jumbo’s. An old man with horn-rimmed glasses and steel-grey hair sticks his head out the window. He’s much older than Winifred, perhaps by two or three decades. Where she is dressed in a conservative suit, he wears a corduroy jacket and jeans with no tie.
“Hey Mamacita! Jump in and we’ll go for a ride.”
“Chupa mi culo, hijo de puta,” she responds dutifully but without conviction.
“It won’t get you an Oscar, but good enough. I’m Grendel. Let’s go.”
“Winifred. What about my car?”
“Leave it. We are not leaving tracks tonight.”
Winifred goes around the rear of the vehicle. Grendel watches her in the side and rear view mirrors. As she crosses to the passenger side he moves his sidearm from the passenger seat to a holster at his side. She gets in he pulls off.
“Is this stolen?” she asks.
“Registered to a dead person. I’ve got all the ID and papers we need to pass getting stopped by the cops. A Cell picks up the fees and makes sure the ID and car papers stay current. Hasn’t your Cell-leader walked you through the process of making an invisible car?”
“We had other priorities on our last opera,” she says coolly.
“How many is this for you?” he asks. It was the standard shoptalk for newly acquainted agents. It was also not supposed to happen.
“Four.” L.A. flies past the windows in a blur.
“See any real action?” Grendel presses. “I mean, besides the one that got you recruited.”
“Is this the part where you give me the buddy cop movie speech about how you’re not my baby-sitter, my wet nurse or my Yoda and I’m going to have to pull my own weight around here?” she snaps. “If it is, I’d prefer it if you kept that shit to yourself.”
Grendel gives her a tired sideways glance, but keeps driving. He breaks the silence after about a ten count.
“This is a blind date. I just want to know what depth you’re pressurized to.”
“Want a war story?” she asks.
“Sure.”
“Last year my Cell busted up a genuine, no-shit, snuff porn operation run by a bunch of fat fucks calling themselves the Cult of the Feeding Hand. We didn’t make arrests and we didn’t make the papers.”
“Did the avatar of Y’golonac manifest?” Grendel asks without skipping a beat.
“Avatar of what?”
“I’ll take that as a no. Okay, so you’re as cold and hard as a coffin nail. What’s the rest of your resume look like?”
“I graduated Quantico four years ago. Before that I got an MS in computer sciences. I’ve clocked no time in the military so don’t expect me to field strip an M-16 in the dark. So what’s the op?”
“We’re going to sanitize a former agent’s apartment,” Grendel says as he turns the car on to Hyperion Avenue and heads towards Glendale. “He dropped dead a couple days ago of a coronary. Landlord found hi
m this afternoon. We had a friendly in the coroner’s office take a look and it doesn’t appear like anything more than an old guy having a heart attack. The next of kin have been notified and they’re flying in tomorrow morning.”
“A black bag job?”
“Yep. Go in, search the place for anything connecting the guy back to Delta Green, leave no sign of our search and send anything we find off to A Cell.”
“Rule number one is no trophies, no souvenirs, and no diaries. He’d have to be some kind of idiot to keep that kind of stuff around his place.”
“I worked with him a couple of time, back when he was my age and I was yours,” says Grendel. “He cut his teeth back in the OSS. Didn’t go to the corner store except by Moscow Rules. But even a guy like that might fuck up. Especially after A Cell moves him to the inactive list. People get slack, lazy or even, god forbid, nostalgic for the good ol’ days... back when they got to go toe to toe with the shit nobody believes in anymore. Anyway, this is standard procedure. If you and the rest of the incoming class do your jobs right then someday you’ll get to go through my shit to make sure I was a good soldier.”
“No gold watch.”
“No gold watch,” Grendel agrees.
Grendel pulls the car up to the front gate of a 24-hour self-storage facility. Grendel punches in the code on the security pad and the steel gate rolls aside.
“Okay,” he says. “Let’s get tooled up.”
Inside Grendel opens the six padlocks on the unit with keys on his keyring. “Is this your green box?” he asks Winifred.
“No, I’ve never used it before.”
“You really should talk to your Cell leader about that.” Grendel rolls the door up and pulls the string on the bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling.
The green box is a tangle of paramilitary and occult bric-a-brac. Shotguns and automatic rifles lean against bookcases filled with old books, ring binders and loose-leaf manuscripts bound in string. Some of the binders have titles on their spines like “How to Kill Things” while others are marked “Things You Can’t Kill.” An Ouija board with what look to be bullet holes in it is propped next to the binders. An M72 LAW anti-tank rocket is perched precariously atop a stack of steel ammo cases of various calibers. The steel shelves are filled with rolls of duct table, a pick and shovel, bolt cutters, an oxyacetylene blowtorch, and power tools with rechargeable batteries. A sawn-off 12-gage shotgun with a bouquet of withered roses taped to the barrel sits near a blood-spattered jacket from a floral delivery company. A Tuxedo in a plastic dry cleaning bag hangs next to several military-grade biohazard environment suits. A shelf marked “Clean Up” holds bottles of bleach and glass jugs of sulfuric acid. Empty vials of injectable painkiller and antibiotics litter the floor along with dirty dressing and bandages around a blood-stained military cot.
As Agent Winifred marvels at the cache, Agent Grendel reads a clip-board hanging from the wall. “Check around and see if you can find any .40 caliber shells. There’s a Glock 18 with a shoulder holster and two extra magazines in box seventeen.”
Winifred starts opening the ammo cases and checks through the mismatched boxes of ammo inside. She comes up with two boxes of fifty rounds.
“Got it.”
Grendel digs the pistol and shoulder holster out of box seventeen and tosses them to her. She slides it on and puts her jacket on over it. “Can you pick a lock?” he asks.
“Aced the course at Quantico.”
Grendel tosses her a lock pick set. She puts it into her jacket pocket.
“That MS mean you can hack a personal computer? Do data recovery?” He grabs a small tool kit, a crow bar, a short sledge hammer, a stethoscope, what looks like a laptop computer, a bunch of cables, and stuffs them all into a black gym bag.
“I specialized in digital forensics. What’s all that for?”
Grendel continues to pack tools and technology into the gym bag. A couple of flashlights and a pair of bolt cutters go in. “I’d rather bring a tool we don’t need, than find we need something we didn’t bring.”
“Fair enough.”
Grendel zips the bag shut and slings it over his shoulder. “Okay. Let’s Watergate.”
Thirty-eight minutes later Winifred pops the lock of their deceased colleague’s Culver City apartment. It is sparsely furnished. There is a small television, a frayed couch, and nothing on the walls but a couple of bookcases. No signs of pets or plants. Any signs of life rest with the dirty dishes in the sink.
Winifred and Grendel carefully remove the police tape and step inside without a word, locking the door behind them. They snap on rubber gloves, close the blinds and draw the shades throughout the apartment before turning on their red-lensed flashlights. They search each room one at a time. They close the doors to each room to keep the light from spilling out into the rest of the apartment as they search.
They move from room to room, opening drawers and cabinets. Grendel unscrews the vent covers and checks inside the ducts while Winifred checks the toilet tank and medicine cabinet. In the bathroom Winifred finds the outline of a body marked in tape. There is a small bloodstain on the tile floor and dried smear on the edge of the sink. The tiles are ugly and the grout between them badly stained with mildew. Winifred wrinkles her nose at the floor. It’s a shitty place to die, but she’s seen worse.
Grendel searches the kitchen. He checks the cabinets, the oven, and refrigerator. He checks the seals on the boxes to see if any have been opened to conceal anything within. They look inside books, sift through an old green filing cabinet, but nothing incriminating turns up. Mostly it just looks like the sad refuse of a lonely life. Only one framed photograph sits on the dingy metal office desk. The photo shows a much younger man with his children. Winifred opens the frame and discovers that the photo has been folded so that the frame obscures the smiling woman embracing the children.
“Did he go through a nasty divorce?”
“No,” Grendel answers. “Cancer got her. The kids are grown.”
Winifred puts it back and keeps searching. While going through the filing cabinet she pulls out a file that contains bank records. Finding what she needs she puts it aside. The next file contains a deed and property tax documents.
“I think I’ve got something here.”
“Any sign of a safety deposit box?”
“Not according to his banking records,” she says, “but this isn’t his only bolt-hole. He’s got a cabin up in Arrowhead. Have you found any keys?
Grendel holds a ring of keys up and shakes them.
“Okay then. My turn to drive.”
It takes another four hours for Winifred to wind the car through the fire roads and up the dirt driveway to the cabin near Lake Arrowhead. It’s single story affair, well maintained, but drab, with a well-cleared lawn. Winifred kills the lights and rolls up the drive to within thirty yards of the cabin. They get out and approach the cabin cautiously, standing far enough apart so that anyone shooting at them can’t cut them down with the same burst of fire. Grendel tries the front door. It’s locked. He tosses the keys to Winifred and signals for her to wait a minute. Grendel tries looking through the windows but he can’t see anything through the curtains. He checks around back and the back door is locked too. He comes back around and draws his weapon. She does too. She opens the door with the keys while he covers her with his pistol.
They play their red-lensed flashlights over the interior of the cabin. If anything, it is more barren than the apartment. The two agents enter the darkened cabin after checking for trip-wires or other booby-traps. The simple furnishings include a metal spring cot, a large, padlocked steamer trunk, and a folding card table with a propane lantern on it. Several open bags of cement, three large jerry cans of gasoline, some road flares, and a double-bladed wood axe are stacked against the back wall.
“Don’t touch anything,” Grendel hisses. “Check the other rooms.”
Winifred goes to check the kitchen pantry and finds it filled with some canned
goods on the shelves and a rusty wood stove. The beam of her flashlight reveals that the sink has been filled with cement. She quickly moves to the bathroom and finds that the sink, tub and toilet have been sealed in exactly the same way. She taps the cement with the butt of her flashlight to confirm that it has set.
“All clear,” she calls out. “But you need to see this. Someone filled all the drains with concrete.”
Grendel’s hand trembles as he lights the lantern on the card table. The stick match jumps from his fingers. He stamps it out and sets his expression back to steely determination before he turns to face Winifred. He goes into first the kitchen and then the bathroom and looks over the cemented fixtures. He tries to look brave, but his expression is strained. He knocks on the pipe under the bathroom sink with his flashlight.
“Concrete goes deep into the pipe. Maybe all the way down to the septic tank, depending on how thick he mixed it.”
The two agents return to the main room. Grendel hangs the lantern from a hook in the ceiling and looks around. The large ratty carpet in the middle of the room is strangely off-center. He pulls it aside and reveals an old dark stain in the middle of the wood floor.
“Ah, shit.”
Grendel and Winifred kneel down to examine the stain. There are deep gouges in the floor, as if the boards were struck with a heavy, sharp instrument. Running her fingers over the splintered wood, Winifred looks at the axe propped against the wall. Its blade is stained with something black.
“Looks like someone used that axe to chop something up on the floor.”
“Something or someone.” Grendel’s voice sounds as if he is being strangled.
Shotguns v. Cthulhu Page 12
