“Yeah, I guessed that would happen!” I called back, turning around to look for an appropriate vehicle to steal. I was rewarded by nearly being conked on the head by a flying human torso. Apparently, the shoggoth hadn’t liked the taste of that particular cultist.
The shoggoth’s terrible piping noise grew louder and louder as it proceeded to raise itself up to the entire height of the massive door we’d run through. Staring at it, I felt the first true and lasting fear I’d ever experienced in the presence of an E.B.E. The shoggoth was magnificent, terrible, and godlike at once. It was every bit the dragon described by Jessica, a creature more powerful than anything I’d ever seen, excluding possibly the Color.
Having endured so much torture and pain at Doctor Ward’s hands, my mind felt on the brink of breaking. Seeing it about to bear down on me, for a brief moment—very brief—I was ready to let it kill me. It was one of the few moments of genuine despair I’d ever experienced in my life. In that moment, I understood how some Wastelanders desired nothing more than to throw themselves into the mouths of the Great Old Ones. Thankfully, I was with someone who was a little stronger-willed.
“Go back to hell, bastard!” Jessica shouted as she pulled a blessed Dunwych spear from one of the arsenal piles. She hurled the weapon into the shoggoth with tremendous force, the tip penetrating one of the creature’s many eyes. Almost immediately, the shoggoth reared up, letting forth a cry that sounded distinctly like pain.
“It can be hurt,” I whispered before staring at the arsenal piles around me. Amongst their contents, I saw the same golden revolvers Doctor Ward had used to fight his monstrous creations. Before the shoggoth could recover from its minor wound, I scooped up the golden revolvers.
“Huh. Well that’s good,” Jessica said, more amazed than proud by her action. She saw me charge right at it. “Captain! What are you doing?”
I was beyond listening to reason by that point. My momentary cowardice combined with the days of torture I’d endured, the loss of my squadron, and the very sanity-shaking nature of the shoggoth itself, was too much for me to handle. My mind broke and all rationality vanished, replaced with a blood rage fueled by anger and hatred.
Lifting the two guns in my hands, I fired the R’lyehian weapons through one of its tendrils, severing it cleanly. I could see the chambers for the revolvers and they did not miss any rounds. The tentacle turned stark white and crumbled to pieces before I fired into another one. The battle fury filling my heart led me to shoot everything standing between me and the central bio-mass which stood before me.
Somewhere, deep in my ancestry, there was a long line of grim-faced berserkers and bloodthirsty gunslingers which had waited generations to be unleashed. It was a romantic sentiment for what amounted to simply a fight-or-flight response gone horribly wrong, but I felt no pain or fear while I fought.
The hefty recoil of the ancient guns should have slowed me down, but instead my attacks became as fast as the beating of a hummingbird’s wings. The laws of physics were defied as adrenaline, madness, and the chemicals Doctor Ward pumped into my veins combined to form an inhuman strength equal to anything the legendary god-kings of old possessed.
Despite the fury of my assault, the shoggoth was not overwhelmed. Quite the contrary, it probably wouldn’t have even noticed my attacks if not for the strange properties the revolvers possessed. Each of my shots struck a piece away from the monster. These pieces burned away in the air as if dissolved by acid, the strange sorcery woven into the folds of the guns’ strange metal being antithetical to the science which had spawned the shoggoth.
Seeing my attacks were causing it harm, I threw myself further into the folds of the monstrous thing, watching it back away and allow me more room to deliver brutal blows to its bulbous flesh. In any sane world, I would have been killed within seconds.
But this was not a sane world.
I felt two of my ribs crack, followed by a kneecap, as the shoggoth finally started retaliating, using its whip-like tendrils to land blows against my body. The attacks barely seemed to slow me down, my pain just giving me incentive to continue my relentless assault. Ancient berserkers would often die after they finished their blood rage, their wounds catching up with them after their fury ended.
If that was going to be the case, I cared little, because I only wanted to see the monster killed. All that was John Henry Booth, honorable soldier and family man, disappeared in the trauma of the man who had failed his squadron before suffering unspeakable tortures. In that moment, the shoggoth became the embodiment of all the indignities inflicted upon me by Doctor Ward.
The brutal swath of a hundred or more bullets I put into the shoggoth were not enough to kill it, though. Stun it? Perhaps. The creature backed away, shifting its terrible mass as I tore away more chunks of it with every blow. The shoggoth did not remain troubled for long, though. Extending a half-dozen tentacles with thick shark-toothed mouths, the shoggoth bit into my legs and shoulders with a savage ferocity. I barely felt them before swinging my revolvers to shoot away more of its black tentacles. The pain was almost enough to shake me out of my fury, but I instead focused more on my desperate need to kill it.
If I was going to die here, I intended to make it a glorious end.
Blood poured from the wounds where I’d been bitten, slowing down my attacks despite my efforts. Still, I kept shooting into the side of the creature. A blow from one of the monstrous, oil-slick-looking tendrils landed against the side of my face and caused my vision to blur, possibly causing a concussion. I almost laughed, the mad, twisted sort of laugh the cultists routinely exhibited, life and death having no meaning in this battle.
The shoggoth’s countless mouths opened, screaming a single word over and over again. “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”
The creature proceeded to grab me by the leg with one of its tendrils, breaking my ankle with its crushing grip. Bringing my left pistol around once more, I shot myself free even though it sent me spinning down to the hard stone surface twenty feet below. Slamming against the floor hard, I could barely move when the shoggoth once more reared up its amoeba-esque form to attack. It was simply too powerful for any single human being to defeat, no matter how determined.
“Die already!” I spit blood from my mouth before struggling to my feet and spinning around like I was hurling a discus. Throwing my right revolver into the center of its bio-mass, I fell to the ground and collapsed. It was a final gesture of hate, brought up by a need to spit in the face of death before it struck me down.
“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” the shoggoth shouted, almost sounding alarmed. Of course, it was impossible to read emotions into the strange piping noises it made.
“Jessica …” I muttered, my palms pressed against the stone surface beneath me. “I’m sorry.”
I wasn’t able to see much once I did so, my body having no more left to give. Yet, the creature didn’t finish me off. The shoggoth shuddered as the revolver sunk deep within the monstrous beast’s folds. It burned away the top of its oozing, gelatinous form before slinking towards the ground. The shoggoth’s frame transformed itself into a white powdery substance before exploding all over the walls.
“John!” Jessica shouted, running up behind me. “I don’t believe it. You killed the dragon!”
I couldn’t really hear her, my entire mind having collapsed in on itself. Dropping my remaining gun, I let loose the kind of mad laughter I’d seen a thousand times on the broken prophets of the desert, “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!” It was the kind of mad chuckle of a person who had seen too much of what man was never meant to know, the sort of glee which would have probably sounded very similar to the cries given by Abdul Alhazred himself when his villagers had stoned him to death.
The shoggoth’s death left me unable to think or feel beyond the current situation. Destroying the thing should have liberated my mind but it left me completely empty, unable to muster the willpower to try and escape. The fact the door was open meant nothing to a bro
ken man, for I was lost in the recesses of my tattered sanity. Jessica had to heft me onto her shoulders, carrying me to a car in order to drive us into the desert. The Hand of Nyarlathotep, even now active inside my body, kept me alive but it didn’t heal my shattered sanity. That would take both time and vision-quests worked by Richard while I was in my semi-comatose state.
I had only the barest knowledge of what happened to my body during this time, though I could vaguely recall spells worked over me by Richard to draw together the broken parts of my consciousness. From there, I eventually awoke in the middle of the night and walked from Scrapyard to New Arkham.
In my gibbering madness I had one desire and one desire only: to return to my family. I crossed the desert from Scrapyard to New Arkham on foot, strangling a nine-foot-long desert snake on my way.
A short re-enactment of the most recent events of my life followed, opening with Mercury interrogating me in a chair before ending with Ward holding a blade over my chest.
As the memories became present-time reality, I soaked in the sights and sounds around me. My body was lying bruised and battered on its back, ravaged by the Elder Things’ attacks. The sky was still raining blood around me, filling the ground around us with gore and crimson puddles. Shockingly, I was still alive as reliving my lost memories had taken less than half a second.
Ward finished bringing down his sword cane towards my heart. “Goodnight, Sweet Prince.”
Fueled by memories of torture at his hands, my eyes blazed.
Chapter Twenty
Slapping my fingers against the edge of his weapon, I prevented it from impaling me while he struggled to force it down.
“Not today, Doctor,” I said, hate in my voice.
Doctor Ward stared at me, his eyes boring into mine as he shouted, “You irritating little maggot! I tried to give you immortality and you threw it back in my face! You even killed my shoggoth! Do you have any idea how rare those are?!”
Spinning my leg around, I knocked his legs out from under him and ripped the sword from his hands. The blade spun in the air and landed in the gore nearby. Throwing myself on top of the insane scientist, I proceeded to deliver a repeated series of blows to the madman’s face. Blood poured out from where I struck him, his teeth shattering from a particularly powerful blow.
The brutalized doctor reached up for the Elder Sign amulet hanging around his neck but I grabbed it first and tore it away, tossing the talisman over my shoulder.
“I am going to squeeze the damned life out of you!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, wrapping my fingers around his neck.
Ward’s face was already a blood-stained mess, his nose broken and several teeth missing from the force of my earlier blows. It was my hope to throttle the life out of him, letting him know exactly what was happening to him as he died. The Necromancer was far from helpless, however. He raised his palm, and I was thrown backwards with a blast of telekinetic force that sent me hurtling through the air. I ended up bouncing for ten feet across the muddy, blood-soaked ground.
Ward had a cocksure smile on his face as he said, “John, surely you could have come up with something better than that. They don’t really serve as appropriate famous last words for a man of your caliber.”
Ward walked over to pick up his amulet as I reached into my jacket and pulled out the Dreamlands representation of the golden knife Martha had given me. Hurling the weapon forward, it pierced both the Elder Sign and the hand which held it.
Letting forth a terrible scream, Doctor Ward stared down at the terrible wound he’d suffered. The Elder Sign promptly caught fire before exploding, leaving a burning, flaming stump in place of the man’s hand.
“I prefer to let actions speak louder than words,” I said, barely managing to stand up. Hobbling, I took a deep breath as I prepared to finish off the psychopath, fully intending to kill him. “If you die here, I’m pretty sure you’ll die in the real world. Prepare to meet whatever gods you worship, Doctor.”
Ward just stared at me, biting his lip and saying, “Adieu, John Henry Booth. It has been amusing.”
Rushing at him, I hoped he would be too disorientated to cast any more of his black magic. Unfortunately, I failed. I watched Doctor Ward’s body transform into a flock of deformed crows, the myriad disgusting birds scattering to the four winds. I slid across the mud, watching my quarry escape into the night.
“Ward!” I called out, sinking down into the bloody mud around me. The crimson rain continued to fall upon me, occasionally joined by organs and other disgusting hail from the surreal clouds above me. I could barely breathe, my body injured from the fragments of stone lodged within my knees.
Though I could barely feel it, I also knew the Elder Things had scorched parts of my body with their crystalline rods. The wounds weren’t lethal, yet, but they would kill me without proper medical attention—medical attention which was not exactly available in the Dreamlands.
Knowing what happened to my squadron did nothing to alleviate the pain; it only heightened the outrageousness of the situation. Doctor Ward, my former professor, was going to mutilate hundreds of children to turn them into monsters.
Struggling to get up, I failed, unable to move any farther. My body was battered, exhausted, and spent. I tried to wake up, to end the vision-quest and return to my mortal body, only to find my mind was trapped within the confines of the Dreamlands. The Necronomicon might have contained some spell or ritual to free my mind, but I hadn’t finished reading it. The book also lacked any astral reflection, left in my orange pants back on Earth. Even attempts to will into existence exits failed, leaving me alone in the shadow of the Elder Things’ tower.
If there was a small mercy to the situation, it was that no more Elder Things came out to finish me off. The loss of two more of their brethren probably told them it was suicide to try and risk any more of their lives to retrieve my body. It was ironic, given I couldn’t have resisted them in my present condition.
Instead, I just lay there as minutes turned to hours and I expected to die at any time. In the end, I regained enough force of will to make one last attempt to save my life. Knowing no one else would be able to stop Doctor Ward, I turned to forces I never expected to—sorcery. I had to survive, though, to win justice for Jimmy and Stephens. To protect every single life Doctor Ward would take in his plan to transform the human race.
Sticking the tips of my fingers into the mud, I drew an elaborate circle before surrounding it with crudely drawn arcane runes. Each of the glyphs was dedicated to one the Great Old Ones worshiped by the Dunwych. I didn’t know where the Dunwych had learned of the Other Gods or the Great Old Ones spoken of by the Necronomicon, but for once I allowed myself to believe they were worthy of worship. I wasn’t a psychic, not like Martha, but perhaps in the Dreamlands it was possible for a normal man to work magic. It was ironic that I, who hated magic, desperately hoped now to use it.
The process took over an hour, my body collapsing several times during the procedure. Finally, I drove my fingernails hard into my palm in order to draw blood. Tossing the contents into the central circle, I called out, “Ia Cthulhu! Ia Shub-Niggurath! T’yanna Shub’Niggurath Naw’tecan! Ia Hastur! Uh’ah aja’fyanna Hastur gna Kadath! Yost Nyarlathotep!”
The spell, spoken in an alien language nearly impossible to speak with a human mouth, caused the world around me to shake. Like the tearing of paper, the sky split in half before the ground beneath me shattered into multiple pieces. Both above and below me were starry expanses leading to constellations I did not recognize. The Elder Things’ tower leaned and tottered before falling downwards into the infinite blackness surrounding me. Everything else similarly dissolved, reducing the once vast graveyard to nothingness.
Soon, I found myself standing on a shaft of earth rising out of an alien asteroid belt with naught but floating bits of the tower’s wreckage surrounding me. I imagined I could breathe in space, knowing that if I stopped believing it for a second I would suffocate in the vast blackn
ess around me. I tried desperately to tell myself it was all a trick of the subconscious, but I knew my dream had long since run away from me, becoming something far beyond anything my conscious mind could come up with on its own.
Stepping out of the emptiness of space, walking across the astral infinity as if it were a paved road, was a man in black. Wearing a midnight-colored duster and Stetson identical to my own, he possessed skin as black as coal mixed with features close enough to be my twin’s. He was a being I recognized instantly as the Black Soldier, one of Nyarlathotep’s countless forms. He walked with a kind of otherworldly majesty that was neither good nor evil but terrified me to the bottom of my soul. I was in the presence of a god.
The figure removed his hat and put it over his heart before bowing. “Hello, John. It’s been a long time.”
“I don’t recall meeting you before. You’ve made a strange choice for an avatar,” I said, coughing. Standing upward, I felt strength returning to my limbs. Pulling off my blood-soaked shirt, I saw the scars in the shape of a hand glowing.
“You conjured me this way,” the deity answered. Reaching over, Nyarlathotep placed his hand on my scar, where it fit perfectly. The god’s touch was cold, like ice, but it burned like a branding iron. “There, that should put you to rights. All it required was a dozen or so inconsequential lives to repair you.”
For a second, I felt and knew the names of all of the people across Earth’s ruins who Nyarlathotep killed to heal me. Ruby a shopkeeper, Tom the caravan driver, Eldoc the Deep One, and others whose lives ended in an instant for the purposes of giving me a little more life.
I stared at him, horrified. “I didn’t ask for you to do that.”
“No, but it’s what you think gods do. They strike down the innocent and the guilty alike, never bothering to explain why. Azathoth was born in primordial nuclear chaos, the Big Bang being one of his baby-like belches, but it was sentience which gave birth to gods like me. You wanted a reason for all the horrible things that happen to people, a meaning for your impotent, unimportant little lives to strive towards. So, here I am.”
Cthulhu Armageddon Page 17
