by Tim Curran
A mix of charred flesh and foam, Priscilla rolled off him and whimpers in pain.
“Jeff!” Mason yelled. “Are you all right? What the hell is going on here? Have you heard the police band? The whole city’s going crazy!”
The detective hauled himself to his feet, ignoring the burns on his hands and face. “Don’t give a shit about the city,” Jeff said, “I’m gonna kill this fucking bastard.”
Jeff lumbered into the lab room, which was still filled with smoke. Slowly, the water dissipated it enough to see what was going on. There were four people standing before him, protecting a dark figure that was huddled in the back. Behind Jeff, Mason and Dr. Munroe slowly edged into the room. Elaine stood as far back as she could where she could see through both the window and the door at the same time.
“Time’s up, asshole,” said Jeff as he drew his gun.
The four patients parted like the Red Sea. Two men on the left and the two women on the right. Jeff looked past them and could see what used to be William stumbling to get up. His wings spread tentatively, searching for purchase. William’s skin was completely dark now with an absolute absence of light. He was the embodiment of the dead girl from the woods.
“Hi, Jeff,” William said, “I’m glad you’re here at the end. But let me show you something first. I want to share with you what tomorrow will bring.”
Like a wave, the vision swept over them all and suddenly they could see everything. They could see the world wiped clean and terrors walking the Earth. People screamed in torment in a world that had become a literal hell. Mason stumbled backward and crawled out of the room in a useless effort to escape the scenes before his eyes. Munroe felt his bowels give out as he fell senseless to the floor, while Elaine’s mind shattered.
William floated over to Jeff. Looking in his eyes, William said, “I should kill you now, but letting you live will be more painful.” The walls of the building began to fall away, and William had started to move through them when he stopped and looked back at Jeff. With the last semblance of his mind, Jeff emptied his gun at William but the bullets melted as they hit William’s flesh. “I’ve changed my mind,” William said and gestured at Jeff, who flew apart like a meat balloon filled with blood.
This is the Emergency Alert System. The United States is currently in a state of Emergency. Citizens are encouraged to seek refuge in their homes or secure locations. All trains and air travel have been suspended indefinitely. 911 and emergency alert systems are no longer available. National Guard and Army members are ordered to report to their emergency posts immediately. Anyone traveling on the roads without authorization may be shot. Stay tuned to this channel for further updates.
Mason Turner, after leaving the Miskatonic University lab, went home where he shot his sleeping wife and two young daughters to spare them what he had seen. Afterward, he sat down in his living room and put his favorite movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, into the DVD player. Near the end, in between his tears, he swallowed his gun.
Dr. Munroe violated Elaine in all the ways he had always fantasized about and, when he was done, began to eat her flesh while she was still alive. Her mind had shattered with the first vision, and whatever was left bore little resemblance to what had once been Elaine.
William rose into the sky and opened himself up to the outside. His flesh rippled like water and tore like paper, but he held strong and the gate opened wider, allowing the first to come through. After that, the way was easier for the others.
On an island in the South Pacific, two mammoth doors opened and a mountain walked into the burning air for the first time in centuries.
THE LAST NIGHT ON EARTH
Edward Morris
Look. In the sky. (A hushed whisper meaning Not To, an awful twisting of the gorge perpendicular to the head.)
Fungi the size of a man, with moist, wet wings, their every mandible cold and pitiless as the grave, making landfall on the cobblestones of Allegheny Street, on the Town Diamond, on the Courthouse lawn,on the horizon. POP. POP. POP. Not fireflies. Not Perseids. Not aerial phenomena.
Not bedbugs. Too big. But… Like that. Moving like that. One mind. One chewing, crawling Space-Invader mind that always needs batteries. Hungry. More batteries. More…
Not very many people screaming in the streets, really. More in the houses. Among themselves. There’s nothing left to do.
It’s never been now and that’s it, and that’s why it’s the end. I’m tired. Someone left the water running in the kitchen. Not me. Not fixing it. Not going in. Again.
Even before I woke up, the starlit stream of hours through the sky grew progressively red and my room grew way too hot. I heard people shrieking here and there, out in the rotting suburban roofline of fish-eyed houses that gave no quarter and asked for less even on nights that weren’t tonight.
Two of the shriekers sounded like men. It was all far away. But even before the dream, everything was off, off far beyond my dream-plagued childhood that brought this curious lack of fear, this wonder now. This Now.
The dream said it was the last night on Earth. But not from something that came from somewhere else. Not completely. Part of it would. Part of it was called from beyond the curved rim of Space itself, but there was more to it than that. I saw a lot, in the dream. A lot of things, and what those things carried under their wings.
Things. It felt like a tide. One part gets drawn, one part recedes. Diffusion. Something moving from an area where that something is highly concentrated…to an area where it isn’t. Or isn’t much.
It was no other country that this doom came from, no hurtling missile missive from any region NORAD could yet track. Not the way any previous nightmare had gone. The nightmare came in the simple racing thoughts before waking. A voice saying things would stop. The closing of a book, frightening and numbing by turns
Diffusion. The hills called them. The Allegheny Mountains, and all the mountains everywhere ever, inhaling-exhaling the way they do with shadows at night-time, just that natural, wordless, not involving us.
(“We don’t deserve it,” Mom told me when I was still waking up, still just outside in the dew, “We don’t not deserve it.” I hadn’t even seen her come out on the porch, but all I could do was clutch myself as I observed that which didn’t last very long. That which didn’t stay Mom very long, and eventually got up and went back inside.
She left her face on the grass. Her Mom-face. In wax. I won’t touch it. Won’t.)
I dreamed it was the last night on Earth. And I woke up and it was. So I got my notebook and just got dressed real quick and it is so bad this notebook is all I have until.
Until. People have been nuttin’ up. Dad shot himself. Just a bit ago. I heard the Ruger. I’m still scared to go back in the house or he’ll get up and bitch me out. There’s weirder stuff happening. Humor me.
It wasn’t a big movie-type dream. I remember gray storm clouds opening up on the stars, the words, the simple words. This is the last night on Earth. Last. Night. Only the mysterious part of what that phrase meant, but no other kind of mystery about it. Just worse.
Lots worse. My Dad shot himself when the thing fell in the yard. Because it talked to him. Through the window. I heard all its chompers buzzing on the glass. It was asking something. Something Dad didn’t want to give over. I heard all this from the front yard. Just moments ago.
Everybody dreamed it at the same time. Just like that. We could all tell. We all knew. It was going to be the last night on Earth. The night that nothing came before and This came after. The last night of our world.
The neighbor lady had a wax face for a face when she came back out, after the screams. Mrs. Long. That was also just now. But she didn’t stick around, or speak. Even before anything fell out of the sky, I knew that it wasn’t just creatures from outside.
It felt local. And old. It smelled all those things. The wind. The wind told me before I was even all the way awake.
Everybody dreamed it at the same time. The wind said th
at the hills called them, too, in a pact that was … interplanetary, rather than just extraterrestrial.
I dream a lot. Sometimes I remember words like that. Like Mi-Go. That means “Crustacean.” I’m pretty sure I dreamed that part, too. Mom always says I should be a writer, but there’s no time now. Except I’m writing this down. When I can. In bits.
I remember waking up and not going downstairs at first. Looking out my window, and seeing the old black man walking in the streets. He didn’t look happy. He didn’t want to look at anyone. He was so tall, so skinny, he looked like something out of a movie. But human. And black. Not African-American. Black. Staring into the stars. Stretching his stretchy hands toward the sky.
That frightful buzzing. That shocking smell. Calling them in. Calling them back.
Any tune. Any words. Any tune now but those thousand mewling voices from the hills, from the caves in the hills, up on Chimney Rocks, where there’s barbed wire and rock salt close but you can still smell the smell, the smell, worse than cliff-diving at the Blue Holes mere feet above Model T Fords, gangsters melted in caustic soda, flippered babies with bricks tied to their necks …
The hills called them in, from brooding gulfs beyond the Zodiac’s course, fused into one terrible swift drone. No chants to weird gods or beating old gongs. Just a wind. A call. A time.
It had to have been Time. We were pretty gnarly to begin with, anyway. There had been some sort of pact, some sort of blood spilled.
A covenant with that formless star-spawn from the remotest gulfs of Space, in an earlier age that made the wind rise backward from the caves of the planet we were all fool enough to call home. The wind that gave this wisdom at the end to the last one holding a pencil. Me. The wind in the hills.
The wind sounds like it’s trapped in a jar. Like a soul trapped in a jar. Like the screams that stop. And stop. And cap off. And even worse, that one family at the end of the block, the ones that dress like Mennonites or JW’s but different, sort of, the … whatsit, Akeleys.
They’re worse. Mom and Pop Akeley are both out on the porch, waiting. The children … The children have been restrained to accompany them. They … It’s … Duct-tape. They’re crying. But not making any noise.
No noise. There are too many to fight. We must have deserved it, because we can’t withstand it. No way we can.
Above me, across the void and through the space-hung screens, the stars are doing things no stars should, but even that’s no weirder than the squirming non-dreams that fold their wings, and turn the leechdisks of their faces toward the porch, antennae moving as one in soft pink stone with all those chompy claws up and down, up and down the rippling slime-mold of their off-Earth flesh.
No eyes. One of them is looking at me without eyes. I’m hooped. The whole world’s dead. I’m dead.
I’m going out to them. I may be back for this notebook. I can’t hope. Because I understand—
[remaining pages are blank]
THE INCESSANT DRONE
Neil Baker
It had been four months since the first wave of Thrashers had phased across North America and destroyed every capital and industrial city on the continent. By the time the Euro-Asia Coalition had formed, the landmasses that had once been Canada, the United States and Mexico were no more: half a billion people gone—crushed, liquefied, roasted or eaten. Cities were flattened, terrain was leveled, and waterways drained as the monsters took control. The desperate scurrying of the world’s think-tanks had provided no answer, other than that the Thrashers were precursors: ground troops preparing the way, cutting a path for their masters. This had been ascertained during the razing of D.C., when an air-to-air missile from one of the last remaining F-22s hit a Thrasher just as it phased out. Its impermanence, coupled with the energy from the blast, had briefly opened a rift—a window. For a split second the creature’s world was visible … and recorded. The playback revealed blasted deserts under roiling skies and legions of vast, crab-like beings waiting to enter and claim their spoils. These creatures were twice as large as the Thrashers, which themselves were a mile high.
It hadn’t taken long to give the invading behemoths their moniker. Each of the Thrashers that phased into our world purely to level it was identical to the last; a vast column of gray putrescence atop two stubby legs that stamped across the land in quarter-mile strides. Two long limbs extended from the torso, just shy of the top, and each limb ended in a collection of fleshy tendrils as thick as redwoods that clawed at planes in the air and tore buildings from their foundations. The creatures had no face to speak of, just a gaping hole where features might have sat, and from this fleshy abyss poured emerald-green flames in mighty spouts that turned everything to ash and glass. The only discernible difference between the Thrashers themselves was their halo; a collection of symbols formed from orange fire and held in a ring by spindly plasma webbing. These ghastly crowns rotated slowly above them, and no two were alike. The symbols were more complicated than mere runes, with intricately woven designs enclosed within erratic shapes. Once in a while, before a city fell to one of the monsters, a recognizable symbol would be spied and recorded: a pentagram here, a magical sigil there. It was only after three months of fruitless investigation by the world’s leading surviving linguists that the research was handed over to students of the dark arts, who had been clamoring for an opportunity to work with the data, and they eagerly huddled over the reconnaissance photos with their crystals and questionable tomes. A month later, still no translation had been offered, and meanwhile the Thrashers had started materializing across Europe, starting in Germany and expanding their paths of destruction toward every compass point until only the outlying countries remained relatively unscathed, the United Kingdom among them.
Jasi inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with the oxygen-rich air mixture being fed into her flight mask. She held it for five seconds and felt a calmness wash over her, then exhaled sharply and eased the throttle forward, a familiar invisible hand pushing her back into her seat as the Eurofighter Typhoon hit Mach .75. A field of green stars exploded in her HUD, but a cursory glance out of the cockpit window was all the confirmation she needed to know that she was still in the midst of the pack. The airspace around her was thick with fighter planes, even more so now that they had caught up with the group of MiG 31s and H-Xs that had been given a head start. The background chatter, a Babylonian soup, was set to the lowest volume, which allowed her Wing Commander’s voice to cut in with sharp clarity.
“Mandrake, Rollover, take the lead. Pinball, Sixer, bring your fives and sevens around, cover the old girls.”
An assortment of affirmations peppered the radio stream and then Jasi watched her comrades peel out of formation to their assigned positions. She knew the WC, Moses, would bring her along for the frontal assault, served her right for being so damned good.
Moses’ voice sounded grim in her earpiece, “Squid, Hot Stuff, you’re with me on point. ETA sixty seconds. Brimstones up.”
“Roger that,” Jasi replied, banking left to squeeze between a pair of F-15s.
A deep voice rumbled in her ear, “This big boy’s mine.”
“Dream on, Squid,” Jasi barked back, “I’m on a roll.”
“That was a lucky shot last time, Hot Stuff.”
“That’s enough.” Moses’ voice cut them both off. “Target will be phasing in eighty seconds. Be ready.”
Jasi refocused to scrutinize the landscape ahead of her. Lake Windermere flashed below, a ribbon of silver, and then the Yorkshire Dales briefly bobbed up and down on her left like the nubs on a chameleon’s tail, before she banked slightly right, following her WC toward Liverpool. The brass had no idea why phase-signs had been detected on the outskirts of that particular city; its docks lay dormant, its streets empty of football fans and Beatle-worshippers. Phase-signs were never wrong, though. Two hours before a Thrasher materialized, the ground would become statically charged to a point where the very air crackled. Plastics became unwieldy and metals unc
omfortable to touch, which made evacuation of threatened populaces more chaotic than usual. She recalled how the phase-sign warning had been suppressed before the attack on London, the brass believing that a panicked populace trying to evacuate on such a scale would have been devastating. More devastating than what was approaching? That was why the air-coalition had fought even harder, tried new tactics, and eventually brought the Thrasher down over Kent by focusing their attack on one leg, decimating a square mile of countryside. The monster had phased out as it toppled but its leg remained, a vast lump of meat as long as an oil tanker and as wide as a stadium. Immediate studies revealed the severed limb was hollow and filled with whirling clouds of silica that shredded the first investigative teams and destroyed analytical machinery.
Jasi had been one of the pilots whose missiles had slammed into the Thrasher’s thigh, and she had every intention of doing the same again.
A static burst, then a chirp. “It’s a privilege to fly with the nation’s sweetheart, Hot Stuff.”
“Shut it, Squid.”
He was right, though. After the capital had been saved, the online rags had plucked Jasi from the ranks to serve as the face of the Saviours of London. She was a reluctant figurehead, doubly so when the journos discovered her call sign. One small consolation had been the brief moments of hilarity back on base, at Jasi’s expense.
