Cthulhu Armageddon
Page 1
CTHULHU ARMAGEDDON
The Cthulhu Armageddon Series, Book One
By C. T. Phipps
A Macabre Ink Production
Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Third Digital Edition Copyright © 2016 C. T. Phipps
LICENSE NOTES
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Meet the Author
C. T. Phipps is a lifelong student of horror, science fiction, and fantasy. An avid tabletop gamer, he discovered this passion led him to write and turned him into a lifelong geek. He is a regular blogger and also a reviewer for The Bookie Monster.
Bibliography
The Rules of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #1)
The Games of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #2)
The Secrets of Supervillainy (Supervillainy Saga #3)
The Kingdom of Supervillany (Supervillainy Saga #4)
The Tournament of Supervillany (Supervillainy Saga #5)
I Was a Teenage Weredeer (The Bright Falls Mysteries, Book 1)
An American Weredeer in Michigan (The Bright Falls Mysteries, Book 2)
Esoterrorism (Red Room, Vol. 1)
Eldritch Ops (Red Room, Vol. 2)
Agent G: Infiltrator (Agent G, Vol. 1)
Agent G: Saboteur (Agent G, Vol. 2)
Agent G: Assassin (Agent G, Vol. 3)
Cthulhu Armageddon (Cthulhu Armageddon, Vol. 1)
The Tower of Zhaal (Cthulhu Armageddon, Vol. 2)
Lucifer’s Star (Lucifer’s Star, Vol. 1)
Lucifer’s Nebula (Lucifer’s Star, Vol. 2)
Straight Outta Fangton (Straight Outta Fangton, Vol. 1)
100 Miles and Vampin’ (Straight Outta Fangton, Vol. 2)
Wraith Knight (Wraith Knight, Vol. 1)
Wraith Lord (Wraith Knight, Vol. 2)
DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS
Visit the Crossroad site for information about all available products and its authors
Check out our blog
Subscribe to our Newsletter for information about new releases, promotions, and to receive a free eBook
Find and follow us on Facebook
We hope you enjoy this eBook and will seek out other books published by Crossroad Press. We strive to make our eBooks as free of errors as possible, but on occasion some make it into the final product. If you spot any problems, please contact us at crossroad@crossroadpress.com and notify us of what you found. We’ll make the necessary corrections and republish the book. We’ll also ensure you get the updated version of the eBook.
If you have a moment, the author would appreciate you taking the time to leave a review for this book at the retailer’s site where you purchased it.
Thank you for your assistance and your support of the authors published by Crossroad Press.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Foreword
What would you get if you crossed Mad Max with the Cthulhu Cycle?
These are the kind of thoughts you have when you’re up at 5:00 am working on your master’s degree in college as well as a hardcore tabletop gamer. Cthulhu Armageddon was my first novel idea and I’ve re-written it six (count ’em, six) times since first coming up with the story. In the end, I always came back to the vision of a lone soldier travelling across a wasteland while Great Cthulhu loomed in the background.
It’s a very gamer image.
And I am a gamer.
Over the years, I’ve played ungodly amounts of Dungeons and Dragons, Call of Cthulhu, and Vampire: The Masquerade. I’ve also played a lot of video games, of which my favorites have included Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth and the Fallout franchise.
Cthulhu Armageddon is undeniably a mash-up fiction which is brought about from the idea of what it would be like to experience a post-apocalypse survival tale from the perspective of someone who was more akin to the Road Warrior than Giles from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer (more typical of Lovecraft’s protagonists than Mel Gibson).
For those looking for a traditional telling of H. P. Lovecraft’s work about the cosmic horror of humanity in a nihilistic universe where nothing makes sense, I suggest you look elsewhere. This is a work drawn from my own experiences of treating Lovecraft’s bestiary as my own personal Monstrous Manual.
I love Lovecraft’s work even if I suspect my anarchist, pro-racial-equality, pro-gay, theistic viewpoint of the world wouldn’t go down well with him. Then again, Lovecraft had quite a few odd friendships, so maybe we would have gotten along on our shared love of monsters.
No, this is a novel which was written with the idea of soldiers and survivors traveling across the blasted hellscape of a planet warped by the rising of the Great Old Ones. It’s fantasy-horror at best rather than just horror, and I can assure you many monsters are horribly killed. The cold nihilistic universe of Lovecraft is no friendlier to the Great Old Ones than it is to humanity.
In a way, my book does them a service because this is a world where the Great Old Ones have incontrovertibly won. Earth has been warped beyond recognition and mankind is reduced to scattered bands of survivors. They are survivors, however, who have learned to adapt to their new world, however. While Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth may rule the cosmos, mankind may be the ants which ruin their picnic.
If you’re a Lovecraft purist, this will not go over well, but I’m far from the first man to think the best thing to do when you meet Cthulhu is call the Ghostbusters. Hell, there was even an episode of the cartoon where they defeated Old Batwings. Likewise, Brian Lumley wrote a series of novels (the Titus Crow series) where his protagonists beat the living crap out of them with a flying coffin-TARDIS.
This is just my contribution to the genre.
- C. T. Phipps
Chapter One
The sun blasted against our environment-reinforced uniforms. We were moving through the Great Barrier Desert, a massive Tainted Zone larger than the New Arkham Dust Zone by several orders of magnitudes. Our dust masks and goggles kept the worst of the radioactive sand away but not all.
I was leading Gamma Squadron Rangers and carried a T-17 heavy assault rifle in my hands. We were on foot, having left our jeeps to recharge their sol
ar batteries. All of us were carrying more equipment than usual, looking like a collection of walking arsenals. Recon and Extermination missions were usually the most dangerous and we were equipped accordingly, but there was something about this mission which made us double stock on weaponry.
Strangely, the thing I was most aware of was the weathered Stetson on top of my head and the leather duster around my back. The hat was my single most cherished possession, a legacy from my father. He’d been a member of Gamma Squadron before me and I’d requested the right to wear his hat. It was stupidly romantic of me, but I sometimes felt his ghost was looking out for us. I felt it was the least he could do after trying to murder me as a child.
“Look alive, Gammas,” I spoke into the microphone hidden in my mask. “We should be spotting this ‘Black Cathedral’ any time now.”
I remembered our mission now; it was an errand of mercy. We were performing a rogue operation the Council of Leaders never would have approved of. We were just supposed to scout the area, find out the local tribes’ numbers and armaments, but one of their chiefs had persuaded us to look into a series of mass kidnappings. Our team wasn’t at full strength, only the six of us remaining from our original eight-man squadron, but the Remnant had neglected to reinforce us. We’d just have to make do.
I’d exceeded our orders by taking us on this investigation, but there had been children involved. Children always changed things; they were the one universally precious thing to all of humanity. Whoever was taking slaves from the local villages wanted especially young captives. That was enough to melt even the hardest soldier’s heart.
Well, almost.
“I still don’t know why we’re looking into a bunch of illiterate savages having their brats stolen,” Joseph Stephens said behind me. A blond-haired and blue-eyed man’s man, Stephens seemed to think he was a purer example of humanity than other members of the squadron, ludicrous as that may be. “If we manage to get them back, they’ll probably eat them. Then they’ll try and eat us.”
“You’re doing this because I ordered you to,” I said in response. In fact, that wasn’t strictly true. I’d asked for volunteers and Stephens was the only one to object.
“You’re a heartless bastard, Stephens,” Jessica said, speaking in a smooth Southern drawl. She was a pretty, brown-haired girl underneath her mask and armor, something which many individuals had noticed on our treks across the Wasteland.
It was fruitless, though. Jessica wasn’t interested in a relationship. She might gently flirt but she’d lost her husband only a year ago during the “Color Incident.” I felt more than a little guilt for the fact I hadn’t been able to pull him out of it alive. There was also what had happened to her children. Frankly, I didn’t understand how she continued to function—much less joke around.
“It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds,” Jeremiah “Jimmy” Schmidt said, quoting some figure from Old Earth’s past.
Jimmy was the most educated of us despite being the youngest. I was a distant second, understanding roughly half of the references he made. Occasionally, he’d catch flak from Stephens for his African descent. It was one of the reasons why I’d made a number of requests for the latter’s re-assignment. Not the least because I was every bit as black as Jimmy.
“This whole cathedral is probably just a hoax. Don’t you think we would have noticed a huge stone temple sticking out in the middle of the desert?” Stephens was clearly more nervous than he was letting on; part of that had to be his own superstitious fear of the Wasteland.
I was of the mind that Stephens was more ignorant than actively malicious, but his manner had always grated on me. Still, he was a part of my squadron, and that meant he was closer than anyone but family.
“The Wastelands can hide a lot of things,” Jessica said, her voice hanging in the wind. “My grandmother once saw a dragon in the Wastelands.”
“Your grandmother didn’t see no god-damned dragon.” Stephens said. “There’s no such thing.”
“Have you ever seen a dragon?” Jessica asked.
“No!” Stephens snapped back. “I just said that’s impossible.”
“Then you can’t say they don’t exist.” Jessica stuck out her tongue, a childish gesture but one that made me chuckle.
“That makes no …” Stephens trailed off as he bumped into my back. Spread out before us was a particularly deep valley in the sands. In the center of the dusty wastes was a cathedral. Not just a temple or an old church but a genuine, honest-to-god cathedral with soaring towers and architecture like the kind humanity hadn’t been able to build since before the Rising.
The building stood alone, no surrounding infrastructure or community. It was a testament to its builders’ dedication and resourcefulness they’d been able to construct something like it in the middle of nowhere. Yet, I couldn’t admire them too much because the building was disturbing in a way no piece of Old Earth architecture could match.
On a very primal level, looking at the alien building made me sick. The color of the building was black, darker than obsidian, with stones seemingly formed from the very night itself. Grotesque statues lined the outside of its walls. The obscene statuary included both Great Old Ones and mutated humans, each more hideous than the last. Its cyclopean walls were covered with stained glass windows made of some twisted organic crystal.
The building itself seemed as much grown as constructed in some places. Every time I blinked, the building seemed slightly different, as though my eyes weren’t able to fully grasp its entirety. A disgusting black biomass was growing out of the ground and wrapping itself around the building’s towers.
“What the fuck is that?” Stephens said, summarizing the entire unit’s opinion.
“Who the hell builds a cathedral out in the middle of the fucking desert?” Jessica asked, staring. I hadn’t realized until now she hadn’t thought the name was literal.
“Mormons?” Jimmy suggested.
“Very funny,” Jessica muttered. “I don’t think they’ve changed that much since my great-grandpappy’s day.”
I would have guessed the cathedral to be Extra-Biological Entities (E.B.E.s) in construction, possibly mutant or alien in origin, if not for the familiarity of the place. Despite how sickened I was to look upon the building, I felt a definite sense of déjà vu. Parts of the building were less inhuman than others, resembling the most ancient of human structures. Yet, its alien components dwarfed those familiar constructions, as if all I could recognize was a pale shadow of what this building’s mad architect had achieved. The Black Cathedral was magnificent; it was abominable.
“I can tell you what it is.” I loaded up another magazine. “It’s our target.”
“Are you sure you want to continue, Captain?” Sergeant Misha Parker asked. Parker was a pale-skinned woman with half of her face having been badly damaged by acid but with still-functioning sight. Parker was new to the group but someone I still trusted. She was a survivor of Alpha Squadron and came highly recommended from that now-defunct group.
Still, I hated when she questioned my orders. “Yes, Parker. I’m sure.”
“I’m ready, Sir. We’re all ready,” Private Thomas Garcia added, reminding me we were understaffed with only six soldiers. Garcia was a thin but tall man with glasses and a shaved head. He was openly gay, though received no flak from Stephens over it. I suspected that was because they were cousins.
“Speak for yourself, Garcia,” Jessica said. “This is weird even by our standards.”
Jimmy walked up beside me, pulling out a pair of binoculars to get a closer look. “Parts of it look Ancient Egyptian and other parts early Byzantine Empire. There are definitely influences of both Maya and Medieval European architecture as well. A lot more of the influences I can’t place though, nor would I want to. For example: the semi-organic motif.”
“Thank you, Jimmy.” I glared at him.
“You’re w
elcome, Sir.”
“That was completely useless.” I rolled my eyes.
Jimmy grimaced. “Yes, Sir.”
I understood what he was saying, though. The place looked simultaneously influenced by every culture on Earth but being recognizably none of them. Despite the fact it couldn’t have existed before the Rising, it almost seemed to predate humanity. There was a primordial feel to the place. I felt in my bones this building had seen the rise of humanity and would exist well past our extinction. That was impossible, though. Nothing like this had ever been constructed by Pre-Rising mankind, especially not in the middle of the Great Barrier Desert.
Taking out my binoculars, I did a quick survey of the terrain. “I don’t see any guards or sentries. But this place is huge, larger than some Old Earth skyscrapers. If the slavers are inside, there could be hundreds of them.”
“They’re likely to be packing a lot less, Captain.” Jessica adjusted her cowboy hat, a relic similar to mine she wore with my blessing. She gave her heavy assault rifle a humorous slap, as if it were a gun from the Old West. Drawing from her courage, Jimmy and Stephens exchanged glances before nodding.
“We should go in,” Jimmy said. “This could be a threat to New Arkham and the United States Remnant.”
The Remnant consisted of New Arkham and some outlying villages, so saying both was traditional but redundant.
I smiled, proud of Gamma’s dedication. “Very well, I suggest we go in quietly and see what we can see.”
“Are you sure we shouldn’t radio headquarters? The General should know about this,” Parker said, looking nervous.
I took back what I’d said about their dedication.
“Kind of defeats the point of a secret mission, doesn’t it?” Stephens said, giving her a sideways look.
Parker looked down at the ground.
“Just shut up and keep a look out,” I said, feeling strangely drawn to the place. Even more than rescuing the children we’d been sent to find, who were most likely dead, I wanted to go inside. There was a terrible energy bubbling beneath the surface of the Black Cathedral’s walls. An energy which, despite how insane it was, felt familiar. Walking forward, my team traveled through the Black Cathedral’s broad open doors and we encountered no hostiles.