Shotguns v. Cthulhu

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Shotguns v. Cthulhu Page 24

by Larry DiTillio

This street is toast. I get the eff out of Dodge. My gait is completely screwed. I’m still not hurting yet, which is simultaneously a godsend and alarming as crap. Weirdly, I’m fast, but in a hunched-over, loping way. I check the soles of my feet. The other shoe is gone, too. If I were remotely aware of my own condition I’d double over and hurl. The layer of ground-in debris jammed into the skin is almost sole-thick. It’s glass mostly, with concrete pebbles and fragments of melted plastic thrown in for variety. The toes still look too long, the nails longer still. The thought that this is an elaborate hallucination crowds in again until survival voice bats it away.

  The moment I’m no longer in any building’s shadow, I stop to orient myself. My heart should be a raging industrial press but I can’t even feel it pump.

  It takes effort to straighten my spine. I three-sixty the city. Gray-black billows veil the skyline. It’s hard to tell but it seems like a bunch of the landmark buildings are gone. Like teeth punched out of a guy’s mouth.

  A shockwave sends me airborne. I land on chin, chest and elbows. Rolling, I see that the Commerce Court has fallen.

  Home is north. I need the shortest route with the lowest density. Smaller buildings equals less to fall over onto me. I’m on foot so I don’t have to worry about traffic. A bunch of sideways jogs will get me out of the downtown and into a circuit of residential neighborhoods.

  I speed my lope.

  In the square up ahead I see my first living people since Gilbert cashed out. A pair of cops and a couple dozen civilians huddle on the pavement. They cluster on the part of the square closest to the street, out of topple range of the city hall building. All of them ghosted by a thick layer of dust. The cops wave shotguns like aimless pointers.

  Maybe they have water. Or a medic and an aid kit. I stumble their way. The civilians stand. They’re shrieking, as if something awful looms up behind me. I whirl but see nothing, so I continue on toward them.

  The cops aim their shotguns. Stupidly, I turn again. What can I be missing? Then off blasts a round.

  Survival voice: Move your ass, nitwit! It’s you they’re shooting at!

  I try to shout at them but produce only strangled, high-pitched garble. Has my voicebox been crushed? The shot goes way wide. I think I might be out of range. The cop is definitely shaking and so are the concrete slabs beneath his feet.

  I bound a retreat. I can’t go south; there is no south anymore, just fallen skyscrapers. Crazy shotgun cop’s crazy shotgun cuts off my desired route west and alternate route north. He’s leaving me no choice but to go east, deeper into the commercial district. There’s a park a few blocks away. Maybe I can deke north through it, then into a different residential zone, then make my way east further up.

  A wind descends. It blows dust and shards at my back. Overhead billows part. The sky is red and orange. It swirls like one of those sixties rock band light shows. Red blobs eat orange blobs. Orange blobs explode as seeds within them, popping the red blobs. Then all over again.

  Bodies strew the street. A few wounded people shelter in front of shattered shop windows. Some shrink back when they see me. Most stare inwards, completely shut down. I’m not here. They’re not there. I want to yell at them to get out of debris range of any building. Their stunned faces tell me I won’t get through. Even if I can force decipherable sounds from my larynx.

  Up ahead a streetcar lies on its side. A hunchbacked figure scuttles at it. His clothes have been blasted off and he’s a mess of open sores. He punches in a window. Reaching in, he starts scavenging. I react initially with outrage—he thinks this is a looting opportunity? Then I figure he must be replacing his missing clothing and see his side of it. Then I see blood spurting onto his arms and face and go far, far past outrage.

  Finally it starts to seep in that whatever is happening belongs to some other frame of reference entirely. This isn’t a person raiding the fallen streetcar. He tears at dead flesh—what I hope is dead flesh—with elongated arms. Clawing nails slice and dice. The hairless face mixes features of dog and caveman. It’s hard to tell with the gobbets of meat on its face, but the mouth looks like a freaking snout. Legs fold beneath him, lever-legged like a toad, reverse-kneed like an ostrich.

  I’ve tottered closer to it. Only a few dozen yards separate us. The mechanics of those legs could send it leaping onto me in a few easy hops.

  Intellectual processing re-emerges to toss a question at survival voice: Why the hell didn’t you pull me out of this?

  The scavenger takes notice of me. Locks eye-contact. A gnawed ear falls from the grip of sharkish teeth. It plops onto his clawed foot.

  The ghoul produces a sound: Meep.

  Then the shitstorm. Non-metaphorical. Loose stool precipitates from the brown and roiling sky. Fecal clumps thud like hail. They smack against fallen, leaning shards of plate glass. Explode on ruptured pavement. They slick surfaces. Shuffling survivors slip and slide. It’s not a pissing rain, it’s raining piss. Steaming, acidic urine sheets down.

  I run for cover. I lose my balance. I carom off the pavement. I bump into a wall and hit my head. I stagger up. I learn to use my new leg configuration. I leap. The shitstorm is localized. I outpace it.

  I reach the park.

  A block further down lies the blazing hospital. An enormous object juts from a blown-out window bank. It’s a long tube, glistening like fish-skin. Spot fires dot its scales. The end of the tube puckers. Hooks and suckers line the rim. Battered survivors, heads bobbing as if hypnotized, form a queue before it. At the head of the line stands a lithe, short girl with a ballet dancer’s body. She throws back her arms and raises her swanning neck. Feelers enfold her. They push her into the hooks. They pierce her flesh, forcing her onto the suckers. Together the appendages shove her through a bony mesh. It’s like those baleen things that whales use to scoop up plankton. Just before she liquefies, the dancer recovers her senses and fights back, wailing. Then she’s blood spray. The person in line behind her doesn’t flinch. A salesman type in suit and tie. He relaxes his frame and leans into the tube’s embrace. Feelers enfold him.

  The survival voice says: That’s a god.

  Or part of one.

  They’re worshiping.

  I run.

  I zig through the park, around crisped trees, over blackened grass. A landmark stands at the heart of the park: a towering church. Yellow-brown bricks pelt down from it. Creatures stick to its roofs and steeples. They’re escapees from a deep-sea nature documentary, blown up as big as buses. With crayfish claws they cling to its green copper spires. With translucent appendages they tear at its window frames and wrench loose its guttering.

  Why is all this happening?

  For no reason at all, the survival voice answers.

  For no reason at all?

  It’s just what happens.

  But I have to understand.

  You can’t and you won’t and it doesn’t matter.

  I hit the street adjacent. Past burning pawn shops, crumpled nail salons, collapsed variety stores. Buildings here are three stories, tops. Half are already rubbled. Blocked by smoking, overturned cars, I skitter up a slope of stone facing and pavement chunks.

  There is one thing you do have to understand, the voice tells me.

  A crazed melee breaks from a half-extant newspaper office. The crowd divides into beater and beaten. They drop a television set on an elderly woman’s head. They’re smashing a baby stroller. If I knew who to pray to, I’d pray for it to be empty.

  Turning west will take me back toward the high buildings. East will divert me even further from my destination. I decide to chance the mob. They’re busy whaling on each other. Maybe they won’t come at me.

  I skulk the perimeter of a caved-in parking lot. Crouching behind the remains of the attendant’s booth, I wait for a moment of maximum chaos. Then I’ll make my sprint for it.

  Closer up, I can see that not all of the people in the flailing scrum are people. Not any more. They used to be, judging from the scraps of
clothing still clinging to them: distended T-shirts, scraps of sports sock, bits of jewelry, tattoos stretched out of shape on impossible flesh. Some are man-apes now: sprouting coarse hair, baring dagger teeth. Others fuse features of human, frog and fish. They’re devolving on the spot. It’s these beings who lead the rampage. They howl in pain and visit that pain on the ones who aren’t changing. Two of the fish-men pick up a goateed bike courier and pull him apart. The entire crowd, including them, pauses for a gasp of collective revulsion. Courier viscera spatters broken tarmac. The ape-men notice the fish-men. The fish-men notice the ape-men. The ape-men hiss. The fish-men gurgle. They launch themselves at one another. They rend and bite and slash. The undevolved crawl away sobbing.

  This is my moment. I sprint around the skirmish. A wounded man on hands and knees changes course to avoid a falling fish-man. I clip him with my foot. He tumbles. I tumble. I’m up on my feet seconds later but the devolved have spotted me. I belt it out of there. Objects hurl at my back. They hit my neck and shoulders. A car mirror bounces off my head, drawing blood. I find more speed. A clarity descends on me as I give in to the exertion. Soon this is going to cost me. One body can produce only so much adrenaline. There is so much running left to do.

  I scan the avenue ahead. Smoke clouds restrict visibility to a few blocks. No signs of mob scenes. People gather in twos and threes. Nobody’s on the move. Finally I can close some distance.

  Survival voice repeats a statement from before the mob attack: There’s something you have to understand.

  I have to get back to them, I think. The workings of my dissociation do not concern me. I am not asking myself why it knows stuff I don’t.

  You’re going in here, it decides.

  Seizing control of my gross motor functions, survival voice steers me over the demolished threshold of a décor shop. I wade through ankle-deep glass shards. At the back of the store there’s a wall of mirrors and miraculously a couple of them are still mostly intact. I see myself.

  I’m an exact double for one of the creatures back there. The solitary one feeding off the streetcar victims. It’s a point-for-point match. The elongated snout. The recessed eyes. The pulled-back ears. Clawed fingers, clawed feet, the reversed lever legs. I tug at my rubbery hide. I expose a mouth of blackened gums and gator teeth. Thick tears occlude my vision. A grotesque self swims back at me.

  I’ve devolved.

  Why?

  It’s always been in you.

  Memories flash. Mental locks untumble.

  My mother, at the kitchen table, the plastic tablecloth with the apple and pear design. Late grade school. As a project, I’m supposed to research our family tree. She’s discouraging me from covering her side of the family. “Do your father’s instead,” she tells me. She says it’s more interesting—there’s the founder of a town and a cabinet minister. I do not think this is more interesting, because I’ve heard hints at gatherings, about a crazy uncle who got in trouble selling coffins dug up from cemeteries. That’s not as good as a horse thief or pirate, but it will do. Then another flash: I’m working on the project and drawing in the entry for the founder and the cabinet minister.

  Ahead six years: my mother dead. I’m lying on my bedroom floor, over the heat register, listening to an argument between my dad and my maternal grandmother. My dad wants an open casket, like his family has always had. Grandmother says under no conditions and in fact Mom will be cremated, in accordance with her wishes, as her family has always done. And there will be no headstone, no burial of the ashes. Grandmother warns him of consequences. He scoffs. But flash ahead to the memorial service: she’s on a plaster pedestal, in a marble urn.

  I’m in your blood, says survival voice. Many thought themselves wholly human, but had a trace of other pumping in their arteries. Until today, when the other broke loose.

  No, I think. At long last the crash of exhaustion comes. I fold. I throw myself into the only unbroken chair: a faux antique of wood and leather. I can’t imagine moving. I have to rest.

  No, says survival voice. You have to keep moving.

  I can’t.

  You must.

  I physically can’t. Hard to believe I got this far.

  You must. The voice swivels my head.

  Poking out from behind the counter, I see a slender, gore-specked arm.

  No.

  You must.

  I can’t.

  You can.

  I won’t.

  You will.

  Then I am over at the woman’s side. She’s not moving. With my new clawed hand I try to find a pulse. I was never any good at this before.

  She’s dead. You know this. The smell tells you. It’s instinct.

  No.

  Yes.

  There’s a cleaning rag behind the counter. I lumber to the bathroom, in the back. Pour water on the rag. Go back and clean the fine white particulate from her arm. I undress her. I bite down, starting with the forearm.

  I am moving again. The feed has replenished me. Days may have passed now. It is hard to judge. Since the disaster there has been no sun. The sky irregularly shifts from the swirl of red and orange to blackness. Bloated new stars hang low over the toppled city. I haven’t seen a functioning clock since I left the downtown core.

  Visions from the journey crowd my head.

  In the sky, black-winged phantoms glide and caterwaul.

  The horizon shifts. I turn on my heels to face the waterfront. A vast shape rises from the lake. Fat stars dance around it. The ground rumbles as more buildings drop.

  Fluids rain down. Blood. Sputum. Bile. A clear and ropy substance I don’t want to think about. Where it lands, the plants transfigure. There’s a color in them I’ve never seen before. That’s not supposed to be possible.

  On a grade school track field, writhing figures furiously copulate. Their heads split open and blossom like meat flowers. They keep at it.

  Tracked vehicles mobilize down a residential street. I duck behind a low stand of Chinese sumacs. Soldiers and irregulars perch on top. Assault rifles in hand, they strike vigilant poses.

  I wait till they’re out of sight before moving again. Not long after, I hear screams and autofire from their general direction. The screams outlast the autofire.

  A fish-man hangs crucified on an electrical pole. They used a nail gun. It croaks at me. I trot on past it.

  The residential areas are not quite so hard hit as the downtown. Maybe one in five homes is burned out or flattened. The destruction is randomly distributed. Cars choke some streets; others are clear. The dead have been piled on the curbs, like banks of snow.

  Suddenly ravenous, I stop to haul a fat dude in flip-flops and a jam band T-shirt into an open tool shed. This time I do not bother with the washcloth before cracking his ribcage.

  I reach my neighborhood. I haven’t been letting myself compute the odds of their being okay. On that one, the survival voice and I are in agreement.

  Finally, I turn onto my street. There’s a commotion at the end of the cul de sac. Hollering. Rocks thrown against brick. Breaking bottles. A rhythmic pounding on recycling containers.

  They’re in front of our house. A crowd of a couple dozen, give or take. The words are tough to discern.

  I hear, “Get out!”

  I hear, “You can’t be here!”

  I hear, “Monsters!”

  I hear, “Ghouls!”

  I put it together. If the disorder is in my blood, it’s in the kids’ blood, too. They’ve devolved, just like Pop. The nabes have seen them. The nabes are restless.

  They must still be alive.

  Is she?

  The mob is so intent on the house that none of them are looking behind them. I stalk up the middle of the roadway. Nearing my destination, I can see that the roof drips with water. It’s been hosed down, as protection against Molotov cocktails and other flaming projectiles. The kids could never have thought of it or pulled it off. That has to have been her. She’s alive too. Unless they got her in the
interim.

  In their hands: metal pipes, kitchen knives, two-by-fours. There’s only one gun I can make out. Thank goodness this isn’t Detroit.

  Is this happening in Detroit?

  Is it happening everywhere?

  I’m nearly on them when one guy turns around and yells. It’s Mr. Friedrichsen, who wears a farm equipment baseball cap even though he’s a retired actuary. “Holy shit it’s another of them! They’re coming! They’re coming!”

  He swipes at me with a cleaver. I snarl and stomp a foot toward him. Mr. F blanches and leaps back.

  He’s cleared the way for the guy with the gun. I don’t recognize him. He might be one of the recent move-ins who bought the Melkus place.

  I try to duck but you can’t duck a gunshot. The moment of impact is like a wallop with a board. I stagger back but stay upright. The bullet hole sizzles between my second and third ribs, on the left hand side. So much for the survival voice.

  I wait for the gusher of blood.

  All that leaks out is a clear, mucus stream. The hole spits out the bullet. Its rubber edges seal up.

  I leap onto the gunman, knocking him down. I tear the pistol from his hand. I beat him in the face with it. His jaw cracks in two. He slumps. I smack him a few more times.

  Everyone else stands there, stupid with incredulity.

  My altered hand is no longer designed for a pistol grip and trigger. Awkwardly I thread my claws around and through. I wave the gun around. The muzzle aims at whoever’s closest.

  I try to reason with them but the sounds come out burbled. One genius locates the nerve to edge up behind me. I smell him coming. I turn and gut-shoot him. He drops. It’s Sam Peterson, who organizes the annual street festival.

  The crowd surges in. I empty the pistol at them. About half of the rounds land true.

  Bodies all around me. Instinct begs me, wheedling, cajoling, to hunker down and start chowing. It’s freaky and deep but I suppress it.

  A woman throws a frying pan at me. I duck. It hits Todd Lobke, who has been trying to get a headlock on me. In the moment of distraction I dig claws into his throat. The woman barrels at me, weaponless. I grip her forearm and snap it.

 

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