Shotguns v. Cthulhu

by Larry DiTillio

  Rebecca realized what she was doing and tried to throw the gun away. She managed to point it at the ceiling before she paused, reconsidering her action.

  What was it she was supposed to do here?

  The heckling laughter of automatic fire interrupted her reverie. Another security guard had appeared. He stood over the limp body of the man the mi-go had dropped and shouted, “Steve, what the fuck? What the fuck, Steve!” He fired into the upper stands, spraying bullets across the area where Rebecca had last seen the green light.

  The feeling of a hand on her spine relaxed.

  “Walker, are you all right?”

  He did not raise his head, but she heard his muffled voice reply, “I’m okay.”

  “I’m going to get away from you and find some more of those things. You try to blow this place.”

  She ran for the nearest entrance, but Steve’s buddy spotted her movement. He swung his Uzi in her direction, but she was faster. She threw him three quick rounds from the Glock, and he hit the floor grasping his belly.

  Rebecca put her back against the wall of the entrance and holstered the pistol. She raised the Glock and scanned the upper rings for movement. When she saw a dark crustacean shape floating thirty yards away, she fired a burst. She held the trigger longer than she’d intended and lost count of the rounds. Six or eight, at least. Enough to make the thing withdraw.

  She ran out of the arena into the outer hall. There she surprised another security guard, leveling the Uzi at his face before he could raise his weapon.

  “Drop it,” she said. When he complied, she said, “Get the hell out of here.”

  The man fled. She took his weapon.

  The panic of surrendering to the alien impulse subsided. She didn’t think she was a danger to Walker any longer, but she was reluctant to return to the open space of the arena. She could at least clear more of the guards or their masters from the perimeter.

  She continued the circuit with the extra Uzi slung around her shoulder. When she saw a green reflection on the walls ahead, she fired several bursts and kept running forward. With every second, she doubted her choice. She should be with Walker to protect him, or else she should run. Even if she couldn’t find help, she could at least get away from those canisters. She would rather die than become a bodiless prisoner.

  Walker’s voice called out, barely audible above the buzzing inside the arena. Rebecca followed it to the next entrance, paused at the corner to check for enemies, and ran inside.

  His voice came from an unexpected direction, a trick of the acoustics of the stripped-down arena. “Found it.”

  “Good. What do you think, ten minutes? Five? How far away do we need to be?”

  “Go now,” he said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  At the time, it seemed only reasonable. When Rebecca felt the inaudible buzzing of the mi-go approach, she ran for the outer doors. The fifth one she tried wasn’t locked, and she burst out into the sunlight. Across the parking lot, she saw the guard she’d released running to the east. She went west, toward the fence Walker had cut.

  She almost made it when the shock wave threw her against the chain links and pushed her through the ragged gap. For an instant she saw the blue sky, and then she saw only smoke. She heard a dull thrumming in her head.

  Then she heard the buzzing that was not a sound but a transmission.

  There’s an election coming, if you can call it that. It’s all the other walkers talk about, until they notice I’m nearby. Some of them blame me for what happened to Henry. Or Harry, or Hal, or Hank, or whatever he called himself. I’m sorry I never found out his real name. He was nice.

  Most won’t even listen to me anymore. They must think something happened to me when the Kingdome went down. Some of them know what really happened, but they don’t let on. They pretend it was all a planned demolition, like the broadcasts showed them. They don’t remember that no one mentioned a new arena before March 26, only afterward.

  Oh, sure, you can look it up online. I suppose you can even find a copy of the newspapers they manufactured after the explosion. But you couldn’t do that before. It’s all after the fact.

  Just like me. I’m after the fact.

  Sometimes I take the bus or walk back to my old condo. There’s a new couple living there now. I could have gone back, but I knew it was a trap. It’s enough to have a look once in a while to remember how dangerous it is.

  That first night they were waiting for me inside, so I didn’t linger. I found Walker’s tarp where he’d left it. It isn’t warm, but it keeps the damp off, and I feel safe there when the seizures are bad. I don’t remember having them before the kingdom fell, but I have them all the time now.

  For the rest I make do with what change people can spare.

  I watch the faces of the people who go by. I listen for the buzz that isn’t a sound, but I still don’t know what message it transmits. I’ll figure it out one day, when the seizures let up. It’s easier when I keep moving. I like to take the bus around the city, but most of the time I walk.

  And I Feel Fine

  Robin D Laws

  I’m climbing up up up up up UP up up UP through sudden twilight. Grabbing girders. Wriggling through jabbing lengths of exposed, twisted rebar.

  Pulverized grit showers down. Hits me in the face. Gets in my eyes.

  It feels like forever, but has really probably been minutes, since I was strolling through level three of the underground parking lot, having slammed shut the door of my champagne-colored late model mid-size fuel efficient family sedan, laptop bag slung over left shoulder, travel mug of rapidly cooling Timmy’s in my right hand, thinking about the paper trail for the Lennox and Euclid property line dispute, thinking about the kids’ soccer schedule, thinking about possibly ditching the lunch she packed for me in favor of the new Korean place down in the food court

  When WHAM

  The world upends.

  Breaking it down, because likely it will prove important, when I get up top, if I get up top, to understand the nature of the calamity and navigate accordingly:

  Felt it first in my feet. A shifting. Not like the gentle wuss-ass earthquakes we oh so rarely get around here. A wrenching back and forth of the concrete beneath my sneakered feet. (Thank goodness, by the way, for the habit of putting on the dress shoes only upon arrival in the office. The pebbly worn undersurface of my Chuck Taylors coping surprisingly well on bent steel and crumbling concrete.)

  After the tremor, the sound. Distant and all around me all at once. Omnidirectional. It comes from below, from the sides, from above. Registering in my bones and in the pit of my gut before I can hear it as a sound. Running up the tonal scale from subliminal bass, crescendoing, crescendoing, from roar to screech. When it hits the high notes my knees give out. I fold. Lie on cold parking surface, hands covering the sides of my head. I realize I am wailing along with it. My screams echoing the world’s. Dampness on my palms: I check them and, yes, it’s blood. Pouring from my ears, drenching my neck, soaking into the collar of my shirt, the collar of my jacket.

  Then the instant of silence, the oh shit silence, the calm before the cataclysm. Then everything coming apart. The girders and beams of the structure’s metal skeleton, shaking itself like a wet dog. Shedding concrete blocks, wiring, light fixtures, signage, junction boxes.

  Explosions of sparks.

  Fire.

  Ceiling chunks whump down onto vehicles. Car alarms chorus. I can hear and can’t hear. The sound underwater, muffled, overwritten by a cycling cicada buzz.

  I crawl under an SUV. Hope it doesn’t collapse. Hope it doesn’t catch fire. The structure pancakes down.

  Lying flat, I see the dead. Heavy woman in security guard uniform by the elevator door. Blond ponytail woman, paralegal-looking, by the wheel of a minivan, legs broken and splayed. Part of a business-suited torso.

  Gilbert from document management still alive by the handicap spaces. Debris pins his legs. Eyes bolted open. Screaming like I
am screaming. I consider crawling out and rescuing him. My body won’t let me. You’re going to fucking survive this. From deep within the voice emanates. Like from my center of gravity. Think of her. Think of the kids. Fuck Gilbert. Gilbert shares none of your DNA. Fuck everyone else. Them only. Survive for them. Survive for their survival.

  Plummeting rubble renders moot the one-sided internal debate. It pulps Gilbert’s shrieking head.

  SUV shock absorbers shudder as more debris lands on the vehicle roof. I flatten. The car holds.

  Then the dust cloud. Powdered building floating all around. The falls let up. A great groaning overhead. Won’t hold for long. The survival voice tells me it’s time. Time to get out.

  It is not a level of underground parking anymore. It is a column of collapsed materials. Small pockets of space between disarranged building elements.

  I can hardly see. Faint beams of light moting through the gathering dust. Piercing from above.

  Climb up into those spaces, the survival voice tells me.

  You’ve got to be fucking kidding, I tell it back.

  So it disables my faculties of higher reasoning. My inability to process, my unwillingness to suspend disbelief—these are not positive traits in this situation. The voice rewires me.

  I find myself hopping onto the caved-in SUV roof. From there onto a minivan. From there onto a Prius, which is flipped onto its passenger side, which has been thrown onto the driver’s side of a crumpled sporty mid-life crisis urban pick-up truck. Cherry red, it looks like.

  The Prius topples beneath me but by then I am holding onto a dangling electrical bundle. On one level I am thinking that what I am doing is crazy. The insistent voiceover that has commandeered my head instructs my incredulous prefrontal cortex to STFU.

  From there I don’t so much listen to the voice as obey it unquestioningly. And that’s how I am climbing up up up up up UP up up UP. Girders, rebar, grit. Wriggling, pulling, resting, anticipating its shifts, waiting them out, moving on. There are still aftershocks, or writhings, or whatever they are. Below my feet the spaces I crawled up through have pressed themselves shut.

  Something is strange with my feet. My first thought is, I’ve injured them but I’m not feeling them because I’ve gone into shock. The sneaker has entirely come off my left foot. The right sneaker is ripped and bursting. Are they swelling? Slashed open? It’s hard to tell, because they’re covered with dust. They’re cremains-gray. The nails look extra long and yellow, like the toes are extruding them. It’s weird, because I clipped them just the other day. Maybe it’s the other way around. The flesh of the toes is retreating from the nails, making them look bigger. They feel off but then all of my body feels that way.

  More shifting above. New spaces open up. The survival voice scuttles me up through them. I see the same illusion affects the nails of my hands. They too seem longer, yellower. And jagged and bloody, of course. This climbing is tearing them up. I scrape and stretch through snapped spears of stress-graded lumber, through cement chunks, through painted tarmac. I clamber through a layer of cars. To get to one space I open the rear door of a tuna-canned Chevy Malibu and lever myself through its popped trunk. Stereo cords constrict around my legs. I rip them loose.

  A childhood dream dredges itself from the memory vault. I am buried and digging to the surface. Through earthen tunnels my kid frame motors. With oak roots for handholds, I heave myself toward a faint and distant light. I displace stones and sticks and bones. All roll beneath my shoeless feet. Giving me traction. Lending me purchase.

  Epiphany klaxons. I used to have this dream all the time.

  Though you think it would be, it was never a scary dream. It was fun, it was playing. I would wake up from the dream with excitement raging through my veins. Like in my sleep I’d eaten a dozen candy bars. Yet instinctively I knew it was a secret, not to be shared with Mom or Dad. Mom because she was frightened of me being frightened, always hiding from me horror images and monster stuff, no matter how mild. Dad because he was frightened of Mom, or at least of her displeasure.

  It doesn’t go with my job description as an expert in real estate and property litigation, but on occasion I wonder about psychic stuff. What if premonitions are the terrible events that happen to you, rocketing backwards through time, to reach you as a warning?

  In other words, the dreams of happy tunnel-crawling, the fearless movement toward the light: was my trauma in this moment sending them back to my past self, to my childhood bunkbed, into my dreams?

  Or did I know then what would happen now. Were they a rehearsal?

  Option two is the more optimistic one, so I decide that. I let my body fall back into the state of those dreams. Embrace whatever instinct they encoded in me.

  The way becomes harder, but the progress swifter.

  I hear street sounds. A new round of alarms. Sirens. Moans. Intermittent impacts. The shafts of light transition from very dim to a little less so.

  Physically, I am definitely messed up. When the shock wears off the check’s gonna come, and it will be a motherfucker. It’s exhilaration now, but beneath it the signals are beyond haywire. I’ve been rearranged like this former parking garage has been rearranged. My bones twisted like its girders. The muscles stretched and bruised around them. I am an adrenaline throb. Even my face feels wrong. Like it is elongating, pulling my nose and teeth forward, my ears back. I could swear to you my brow is sliding down, my eyes pushing back to shelter themselves beneath its expanding shelf. My ears wrapping back. The skull flattening.

  This isn’t possible, is it?

  I’m delirious, hallucinating.

  Maybe I’m still back under that car. Crushed and dying. The climbing, my personalized white-light tunnel. The debris column, my Owl Creek Bridge.

  Don’t think about that now, the survival voice tells me.

  It blankets me with determination, concentration. It shuts off the eternal processing of the internal monologue. Upward it pushes me, through another floor of rapid-junked cars. Scrabbling and squeezing.

  I grab onto what I think is a cord and it’s a woman’s dead slim arm. Hunger wracks me. The human body is a crazy thing. It must have twigged to the energy deficit I’m putting it through.

  Panicking, I try to get her blood off my face and hands. I only end up smearing it on me. Some gets in my mouth. It’s coppery. The image of the steak from last night’s partners’ meeting pops to mind. Ultra-rare. Sprig of rosemary on top. The secret’s in the garlic rub.

  Another rush I didn’t think I had. Up up up up up. Clawing, pulling, flattening. Stuff falls upon me as I tear at the wreckage it rests on: a fire extinguisher, half a GPS tracker, a miraculously untouched full box of Krispy Kremes, scalp bits. Up UP up up up.

  And I’m out. Nosing from the ruins like a gopher from a hole. Chunks of mortar rolling off my suit-jacketed back. Like the departed burrowing from their graves on resurrection day.

  I expect rescuers, cops, ambulances, hard hats, urgent shouts, flashing lights, bullhorns, sparking saws slicing through rubble. Nothing but eerie quiet. Where are the first responders, and why are they not first responding?

  Then I see: it’s not the building. It’s the whole city.

  It has to be a war. This can only be a bomb. The nuke plant out in the exurbs couldn’t do this degree of damage, not here, not even worst-case. So scratch that. It has to be The Bomb.

  The mental disconnection goes loopier. Here I am, swaying, wounded, mere shambled steps from my exit point, and the processor kicks in, and all it has to contribute is: the geopolitical situation had its kinks, but I sure had no inkling this was coming.

  The survival voice puts the intellect back in its box for the duration. It says:

  You’ve got to keep moving.

  This is not safety.

  Getting yourself out was step one only.

  You’ve got to find them.

  It’s about them.

  They are your DNA.

  Family, if you want to call it tha
t.

  Survival voice interrogates intellectual processing while leaving it constrained in its box: Where are they?

  Luckily, replies intellectual processing, it is a PD Day at school, so they’re home with her. All of them are home together.

  Then we’re going home, says survival voice, and I hurl myself, staggering, limping, onto the pitched-in street.

  Only then do I look around, and at that strictly to assess routes and degrees of hazard.

  Hearing is still shot, a dulled electronic flatline overlay obscuring everything. Beneath that: keening metal, shattering glass, heaving pavement. Beneath that: weeping, groaning, and a distant half-song. This last noise bores into me. It scares the part of me I identify as myself. It also scares the detached overseeing impulse I have hived off and am referring to as survival voice. There is so much weirdness to grapple with. The fact that somebody has chosen, in response to this unfolding disaster, to make music. The droning notes themselves, both vocalized and not, like Enya crossed with death metal. If it’s words they’re singing it’s not in any language I understand.

  And yet, I do.

  I shrug off the sound. I ignore the smells, which are the blood and dust coating my nostrils from the ascent.

  Visuals. The towers of the financial district sway like plastered drinking buddies. They shuck off their windows, their metal framing. A crevasse widens in the street, as if it’s been sliced open on the lane dividers. Pavement pulls away from the streetcar tracks as it drops into the hole. A streetcar teeters on the edge. The handful of people still in its seats are either unconscious or dead. The driver’s body—headless for some reason—pitches forward. The streetcar pitches forward. Its dedicated overhead power lines snap. They wildly whip-snake across the street. I duck back. The end lashes past me, zapping around a marble stanchion.

  Smoke envelops the disappearing streetcar as it slips into the hole. Empty trucks and cars, doors flung open, follow it down.