The Book of Cthulhu 2 Read online

  I heard similar tales from western and eastern refugees. They fled inland, away from the stench of brine and blood, and the drifting islands of bloated bodies.

  The military tried fighting back, but there were too many of those things claiming the coast. That’s when the plague started. It floated across the land in great, black clouds, like dust storms during the Depression. Those who breathed the stuff didn’t die…they changed. They grew gills, and fangs, and writhed like snakes, spitting venom. Feeding on each other. Soon there weren’t any more soldiers.

  I heard they tried nuking Manhattan, where something big as the moon crawled out of the ocean. The missiles didn’t fire. Something shorted out all the technology, every computer on the continent…probably the planet…every piece of electronic equipment…all dead. Air Force jets fell out of the sky like dead birds. Somebody called it an electromagnetic pulse. As if the rules of the universe had shifted. In a flash, the modern world was done.

  There was nothing to do but run. Hide.

  Hordes of the Biters took to roaming the plains, the hills, the valleys and mountains. Those poor souls that didn’t get taken by the rolling clouds eventually got rooted out by the Biters, or the worm-things that followed them around. Big, saw-toothed bastards, like leeches the size of semi-truck trailers. I saw one of the Biter hordes hit Bakersfield, saw a school bus full of refugees swallowed whole by one of those worms. Still see that in my nightmares sometimes…the faces of those kids…sound of their screams.

  Whiskey helps, when I can get it.

  About fifty of us from farms in the San Joaquin Valley had banded together, loaded up with guns, ammo, and canned food from Lloyd Talbert’s bomb shelter, and headed east in a convoy of old pick-ups and decommissioned Army jeeps. We figured out that the black clouds usually preceded the Biters, so we stayed one step ahead of them. We tried to pick up some relatives in Bakersfield, or we would have avoided it altogether. Barely made it out of there, and we lost twelve good men in the process. Nobody got rescued.

  It had rained for two months straight in California, nonstop ever since the Big Waves. Farther inland we went, the less rain we got. We figured out that the Biters liked the wet…they hated the dry lands, so we went on into Nevada. Thought we’d find kindred souls in Vegas.

  That was a mistake.

  Sin City had been smashed flat by something terrible that came out of Yucca Mountain, where they buried all that nuclear waste. We couldn’t tell what it was, but we saw it slithering through hills of rubble, rooting up corpses like a hog sniffing for truffles. We watched it for awhile from a high ridge, until it raised itself up and howled at the moon. Its head was larger than a stadium, and it split open like a purple orchid lined with bloody fangs. What grew along the bulk of its shapeless body I can only call…tentacles. Looked like something from a B-movie filmed in Hell. It was the Beast That Ate Vegas.

  Then it belched out one of those black clouds, and slammed itself back into a sea of debris that used to be a sparkling dream of a city. This cloud wasn’t like the others. There were things inside it…flying things…maybe they were miniature versions of the Vegas-eater. We thought our vehicles could outrun the cloud, so we headed back west, until the Flyers came down on us.

  I was riding in a jeep driven by Adam Ortega, a man I’d known since Iraq. We were two lone wolves who had gone through a lot of shit together and somehow came out alive. One of those Flyers swooped out of the dark and landed on his face. It smelled like fish guts. He screamed, and the beast pointed its orchid-face at me. A cluster of pinkish tongues quivered between the rows of fangs, and I raised my shotgun just in time to blow that thing to Hell. My shot also took Ortega’s head off. God knows I didn’t mean to do that. I was scared.

  The jeep veered off the road, hit an embankment, and sent me flying. I blacked out, and when I woke up the entire convoy was in flames, every man lost beneath a mess of black-winged monsters. But they had forgotten me, at least for a few minutes.

  They were good men, all of them, but there was no helping them now. Some had brought families with them. I heard women screaming. And children. Me, I’d always been alone, ever since my divorce. Farm life was lonely life, but it was good. My daddy passed away three years previous. Now that I think about it, I’m glad he went before all this happened. And that I never had kids of my own to see all this evil shit coming down. But some of my friends had loved ones they weren’t about to leave behind, so there they were…deep in the middle of the shitstorm with the rest of us. I hid in a ditch and watched a few stragglers try to escape, but the Flyers tore away from carcasses like flocks of ravens and flapped after them.

  I still had my .45 Desert Eagle and knew I was probably dead anyway. I could run, maybe live awhile longer. But one of the women trying to outrun those things was pregnant. So I started picking off the Flyers chasing her, one by one. A man ran behind her, and the things took him down. He screamed her name and I knew who she was.

  “Evelyn!”

  That was Johnny Colton and his wife. They hadn’t been married more than a year.

  Johnny’s blood spouted as the damned things tore his heart out, then set to work on his face.

  I ran toward Evelyn, shooting two more Flyers out of the air. I’m a pretty good shot. Got a lot of practice in the Mideast. Kept up my skills at the shooting range over the years.

  One of them landed on her back and she fell, not twenty feet from me. I was afraid of shooting her, so I came at it with the hunting knife from my boot. Sliced it clean in half, but its blood was some kind of acid, splashed across my left cheek…burned like the Devil’s piss. Still have one helluva scar from that.

  I helped Evelyn to her feet, and we ran together. She cried out for Johnny, but I wouldn’t let her look back. The black cloud was bearing down on us, blotting out the stars and moon. I smelled the stink of the ocean rolling over the desert…the smell of dead and rotted marine life.

  I grabbed a satchel of gear from the overturned jeep, and we took off into the desert. The Flyers must have forgot us after awhile. They had a big enough feast back on the highway.

  As the sun came up, red and bloated in the purple sky…it had never looked right since the Big Waves…we came into Pahrump. The tiny town was deserted, and corpses littered the streets. We saw they had been gnawed up pretty good, probably by the Flyers…or something just as bad. There wasn’t a single living soul there. But we did find a good supply of canned food, bottled water, a gun shop full of ammo and a few rifles, and some other odds-and-ends.

  It was Evelyn who told me about the old silver mine on the edge of town. She was a Nevada girl before she married Johnny.

  “Maybe we can hide there…in the mine tunnels,” she said. “Maybe they won’t go underground. Those mines are pretty deep. We’ll be safe down there, Joe.”

  I didn’t believe we would, but I looked into her big, blue eyes, crystalline with tears shed for her dead husband, for her dead relatives in San Joaquin… for the whole damn world gone to Hell.

  “Yeah.” I lied to her. “We’ll be safe down there. Good idea.”

  We loaded wheelbarrows with provisions, water, guns, blankets, and I picked up an old ham radio from the gun store. I didn’t expect it to work, but it was something. Something to pin our hopes on. When the world is ending, you’ll take anything you can get.

  Evelyn was five months along when we moved into the mine. We weren’t exactly comfortable down there in the belly of the cool earth, but it was as close as we were going to get. Even a blanket laid over hard stones feels good when you’re half dead from exhaustion and worry. She tended the wound on my face, and I told her hopeful lies to settle her nerves. I said this would all blow over and things would be back to normal in a few months. I didn’t believe a word of it. Maybe she did, or at least she wanted to.

  I started playing with the radio, hooking it up to a portable battery and listening to the static. I scanned every frequency, every day for weeks, but there was nothing out there. Nothing
at all. I imagined all those ham radio geeks lying dead in their basements, or their bones in the bellies of nameless beasts, their radios crushed to splinters or lying in forgotten barns covered with dust.

  Slowly, the months crept by. It turned out Evelyn was right. We were safe underground. Her belly grew bigger, and she stopped moving around so much. I started mentally preparing myself to deliver the baby, something I had never done before. But I’d seen so much blood and suffering, first in the war, now at the end of the world, that I knew it wouldn’t matter. How hard could it be to pull this little bugger out of his momma’s belly? She would do most of the work.

  “I’m gonna name him Johnny,” she said. “Like his father.”

  I smiled as if it mattered. The kid had no future in a world like this. I cleaned my .45 and contemplated putting us both out of our misery. Why go on living? What was the point? We’d both be better off dead. I loaded a clip into the chamber and tucked the gun behind my belt buckle. I went over to sit by her on the makeshift bed we’d been sharing. I had never touched her sexually, but we’d hold hands in the dead of night. It brought some measure of comfort…more for her than for me, I told myself.

  The baby was kicking today, and she was excited. I lowered the flame in our lantern and told her to get some sleep. I might sneak out later and hunt a hare for dinner, I told her. I always said that, but I’d never found any living game outside in the three months we’d been there. Still, sometimes I’d sneak out between the rolling black clouds and scavenge, or look for signs of life. I knew I was kidding myself, and I was tired of it.

  She would nod off soon and I would end her life painlessly, one clean shot through her skull and another to finish off the unborn child.

  Then one last round through the roof of my mouth and right into my brain pan.

  All this suffering would be over for us. The baby would never know a world of crawling Biters and hungry Flyers. It was the right thing to do, I told myself, my mind made up.

  But Evelyn…she stopped me without ever knowing my plan.

  She looked up at me with those big, blue eyes, her dark lids heavy, and she raised her head a bit.

  She kissed me, damn her.

  She kissed me like she loved me, and I took her into my arms. We lay there for awhile, then fell to sleep. After that I knew I could never kill her. Not even to spare her the pain of living in this dying world.

  Two weeks later she went into labor. I had the towels and the boiling water, and even some painkillers I’d looted from a burned-out drug store in Pahrump. She started screaming, and I could see the baby pressing outward from inside her belly.

  She screamed, and I coached her to breathe, breathe, breathe. She pushed, and she screamed. A gout of blood and placenta flowed out of her, and I knew something was wrong. Her screams reached a higher pitch, and she called out for Jesus, for her mommy and daddy, for poor old Johnny.

  I fell back when her stomach burst like a ripe melon, a gnarled claw protruding like a dead tree branch. She writhed like a snake, and her wailing was a white noise in my ears as the thing inside her ripped its way out. It slithered across her splayed abdomen, and she fainted. I couldn’t move…I stared at Johnny Colton’s baby, my mouth hanging open, my heart a hunk of lead in my chest. The stench of the deep ocean filled the cavern, overpowering the human odors of blood and afterbirth.

  Its head was a bulbous thing…emerald and coated with bloody slime. Two lidless eyes bulged like black stones, but it had no other face to speak of. A mass of quivering tendrils writhed below the eyes, headless snake-things dripping with gore and mucous. It crawled out of Evelyn’s body, and I knew she was dead. Nobody could lose that much blood and still be alive. She was a hollow shell. Her vacant eyes stared at the tunnel’s rough ceiling. I remember thinking it was a good thing she didn’t live to see this thing that had grown inside her.

  It hopped from her corpse in a splash of dark fluids, walking on its clawed arms and feet. Two more appendages grew from its hunched little back, and as they spread I heard a crackling sound like stretching leather. They looked like the wings of a big bat, though far too small to carry this thing with its melon-like head and bloated stomach. It had to weigh at least twenty-five, thirty pounds, I was sure.

  It looked at me for a timeless moment, then turned to explore its dead mother’s body with those twitching facial tentacles. I heard a horrible sucking sound as it lapped up Evelyn’s blood like mother’s milk, and then the cracking of bones as its tendrils encircled and squeezed her body into pulp. Already it looked somehow larger.

  The sound of her bones snapping broke my trance, and I leapt for a sawed-off shotgun I kept near the blankets. It turned to face me again, as if it knew I was about to put an end to it. The big, black eyes narrowed in their sockets, and the remnants of its own afterbirth sluiced from its hidden squid-mouth. It stared down the twin barrels of my gun, and I swear it spoke.

  Even though it was only minutes old, it hissed at me, a single word I had never heard before, but somehow sounded familiar. Maybe I’d heard it in a nightmare.

  Cthulhu, it whispered before I blew its head off.

  I’ve heard that word for months now. Every time I close my eyes.

  Sometimes I dream of New York, or Los Angeles, or even London. I see the great landmarks of the world that was…the towers that once conquered the sky…I see them tilted and crumbling and fallen into the sea, and a mass of cold-blooded amphibian things swirling about them like maggots on a decaying corpse.

  I see Evelyn Colton’s baby, too, or something like it. It stands above those ruined cities, wings spread like thunderheads, singing a wild song of triumph and murder. It squats like a colossal ape on the skeleton of the Empire State Building as if it were no more than a fallen log in some world-sized swamp.

  I see its children, spreading across the globe, filling the low places with brackish seawater, turning the high places into wastelands. A billion-billion monsters spew from the angry seas, screaming its name beneath the bloody moon.

  Cthulhu.

  Flocks of Colton-babies fly down from the cold stars, soaring around their god like masses of buzzing flies.

  That’s what it is, I come to understand…it’s their god.

  It’s the god of this new world.

  It’s been a year now since I buried Evelyn. Her grave sits in one of the mine’s westernmost tunnels, marked with a cross I took from the husk of an old church.

  I listen to the endless static on the ham radio every day. Found a little generator in the ruined town, and I’ve been siphoning gasoline from an abandoned filling station to power it. The static fills my ears, and sometimes it even drowns out the echoes of Evelyn’s wailing as that thing tore itself out of her. Sometimes I broadcast, not giving away my location, but hoping someone—anyone—will answer. I feel like those SETI scientists who used to beam radio messages out into space, into the darkness of infinity, on the off chance that someone out there is listening.

  But there’s only static.

  It rains all the time now, up there. I can’t even go topside anymore because strange things move through the rain clouds, and the puddles breed miniature terrors.

  The world is still drowning.

  The stink of oceanic brine rolls down into the tunnels of the mine.

  I tune the dials of the ham radio, call out a few more S.O.S. messages.

  The .45 sits on the blanket before me. I stare at it, gleaming with silver promise.

  Evelyn isn’t here to stop me this time. One quick, clean shot, and I won’t smell the ocean stench any more, won’t have the dreams anymore, won’t hear the static. The unbroken, white static.

  My bottled water is running out. I can’t drink the rain, but I know sooner or later I’ll have to. I don’t want to think what it will do to me. But thirst is a demon no man can outrun for long. I sit staring at the gun, listening to the radio static, making my decision.

  I pick up the .45 and slide the barrel into my mouth. It tastes co
ld and bitter. Static fills my ears. I fix my thumb so that it’s resting on the trigger. I say a silent prayer, and think of my daddy’s face.

  Something breaks the static.

  A momentary glitch in the wall of white noise. I blink, my lips wrapped around the gun. I pull it from my mouth and fiddle with the nobs. There it is again! A one-second break in the static…a voice!

  I turn the volume up, wait a few moments, then pick up the mic, dropping the pistol.

  “Hello!” I say, my voice hoarse like sand on stone. “Hello! Is anybody there?”

  White noise static…then a pause, followed by a single word, ringing clear as day from the dusty speaker, thick as mud.

  Cthulhu.

  I drop the mic. Something twists in my gut, and I step back from the radio like it’s another monstrosity burst from Evelyn Colton’s belly.

  Again it speaks to me, a voice oozing out of the cold ocean depths.

  Cthulhu.

  The word sinks into me like a knife, a smooth incision…a length of cold metal between the eyes would be no less effective. The pain is a spike of understanding. I bend over, my hand hovering between the silver-plated pistol and the radio mic. I grab the mic, not the gun, and raise it to my lips.

  I stare into the darkness at the back of the cavern and sigh out my reply.

  “Cthulhu…”

  I drop it to the floor and kick over the little table where the radio sits. It crashes against the stone, spilling the lantern. Flaming oil ignites the blankets, and the cavern fills with noxious smoke. I turn my back on it and walk toward the smell of briny rain, my throat dry as bone.

  As I come up out of the silver mine for the last time, the storm rages, winged things soar between the clouds, and I hear a chorus of howling and screeching punctuated by moaning thunder. Thirst consumes me.