Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear (15 page)

Maureen:
But what is your hypothesis? Should Americans be stocking up on alcohol? Or going crazy somehow?

Wash:
The science team led by Secretary Tyson and Undersecretary Nye will be speaking to you in roughly two hours. They should be the ones who address these questions. Thank you.

[
Wash steps away from the dais and the President takes it again.
]

Hampton:
Thank you, General. At—what is it, 1600 hours?—at four o’clock will be a science briefing along with any new developments or information that we have for you and the American people. Any final questions?

[
Hands go up, and Hampton points toward the back.
]

Reporter:
Madam President, if it’s not Lieutenant Berry, then who
is
the foremost expert on H.P. Lovecraft and his monsters?

[
Hampton looks completely thrown off by the question, but recovers quickly.
]

Hampton:
We are attempting to make contact with that expert right now. If this is Cthulhu or something based on or closely resembling that “Old One,” this expert is the one who should have some answers for us. That is why we right now are making contact with that expert right now, as I said.

Reporter:
Who is this expert?

Hampton:
No more questions. Time for us to get back to work.

Reporter:
But—

Hampton:
I said
NO!
Take your questions and
shove them up your asses
. Thank you.

[
Her team following sheepishly behind, Hampton storms out the side door, not looking at anyone but with an expression of almost inarticulable rage and frustration. The screen switches to the news network talking heads, who look as stunned and unsure of what to make of what just happened as their viewers.
]

***

The crowd in the lobby of the Algonquin simultaneously seemed shocked speechless while at the same time exploding in uproar. “What the hell is a Cthulhu?” and “She’s insane” were heard over other voices shouting invective and still others expressing fear and still others screaming for their loved ones as they ran out of the building altogether.

“This is madness,” the archbishop said, and Martin wasn’t sure if he was referring to the press conference or the bedlam in the lobby, or both. “It seems you were on the right track with the alcohol idea.”

“It’s all guesswork,” Martin said, and he himself wasn’t sure how far he meant that remark to extend. What he was really thinking was
Thank Whomever the lights are still on and the communications network hasn’t gone down yet
. He supposed that people with forty-five to ninety seconds of blinding pain wouldn’t be prevented from doing their jobs on the power grid or the fiber optic network the way that pilots or automobile drivers would be.

He was thankful because it was obvious that the Powers That Be hadn’t contacted any Lovecraft “expert” as yet. The President may or may not have lost her mind, but she had certainly lost her patience and her ability to smoothly sail through any untruth necessary to keep the Ship of State afloat. Her stumbling about a Lovecraftian expert was something a kid running for class president might do when asked about kangaroo meat in the cafeteria’s burgers.

Who would they contact? S.T. Joshi? He lived in Seattle but traveled all over the world all the time (as did Martin, he realized). No planes were flying and the highways were filled with wreckage and carnage. New York was much closer to Washington than Seattle, anyway, if Joshi even happened to be at home.

Maybe Bob Price? He lived in North Carolina, but his emphasis in his Lovecraft analysis was mostly theological. Unless they were planning to pray to Cthulhu (
which might not be a bad idea
, Martin thought with a small smirk), Price wouldn’t be the man and he also lived farther from Washington than New York was.

No,
Martin decided.
He
was the expert they needed. There was nothing to know about Cthulhu and the other Old Ones, not to mention the Elder Things and the Outer Gods, that he didn’t know better and more completely than any of his rivals.

He paused.
Who sounds insane now?

“Martin.”

“Hmm, what?” he snapped out of his daydream to see Jimmy Morley staring at him.

“I said, What are we going to do now?”

“I’d say get your hands on all the sacramental wine and nonsacramental whiskey you can find and get thee to your diocese. This is a time for pilgrimage, and it doesn’t matter if you have answers or not.
Nobody
has any answers right now”—
except me
, he thought and shut that bullshit away immediately—“but you’re the man the people need to ask.”

“Of course, of course,” the archbishop said, and Martin could see the abashed, even ashamed, way he was looking down at his nonclerical clothing. “I have tried to abandon my flock when they most need me.”

“Just change your shirt and put on the big hat and I bet all will be forgiven.”

“You give good counsel, Marty. Thank you.”

He patted Morley on the arm and got out his cell phone. “You take care of your business, and now I’ll take care of mine,” he said, and called to the retreating Morley, “Good thing there’s no God!” The archbishop laughed and waved Martin’s ribbing away, and Martin laughed as he called the White House Communications Office. Surely the President would be permitted to send a chopper to New York to get him. He was, after all, the most likely available—or maybe even surviving—expert on the works of H.P Lovecraft left in the world.

The Office of the Vice President of the United States

Eisenhower Executive Office Building

Event + 25 hours

Vice President Algernon Steele sat in his plush chair in the conference room, his chin resting on his hands, which formed a steeple with their fingers. His staff knew that this was his “deep thinking” state, and they knew not to interrupt him with anything while he was arrayed in such a way.

Besides, some of the aides in the room thought, the Vice President didn’t need to be asked a damned thing after they all watched the President’s implosion at her news conference in the West Wing, not a block away from where they all sat or stood right then. The wall-sized screen had just shown a direct feed of Judith Hampton’s unprecedented mental breakdown—cursing at reporters,
on camera!
Blaming
space aliens
for a state-sponsored terrorist attack, for Chrissake!—and Algernon Steele was still staring at the screen even though an aide had cut the feed at Steele’s command.

They all remained where they were and looked to the stone-faced Vice President for instruction or comment or anything at all. No papers were shuffled, no texts were even glanced at, no one moved a muscle except perhaps to catch a glimpse from another staff member saying about the press conference just with his or her eyes:
What the fuck was THAT?

Finally, after what seemed an endless two minutes, the Vice President lowered his hands and cleared his throat. Every eye, every ear was completely attuned to what he would have to say, even if it was just “Get out” (which some were hoping for, frankly).

Steele said, still staring at the screen, “Get the Chief Justice on the phone. I have some questions for him. And a suggestion.”

Interstate 95, 15 miles south of New York City
Event + 25 hours

The two most eminent scholars in the world on H.P. Lovecraft, his work, his worldview, and his bestiary of monsters sat in a late-model Chevrolet Impala, having recently attended a small academic conference on Lovecraft in the writer’s hometown of Providence. They had been making good time when the Event slammed their eyes shut and started them screaming along with every other motorist on the road.

Twenty-four hours later, remaining in the driver’s seat was Sunand Tryambak Joshi, author and/or editor of more than 200 books, many of them on H.P. Lovecraft and his Mythos. In the passenger seat was Robert McNair Price, the holder of doctoral degrees in Systematic Theology and New Testament Studies and who had written more about the spiritual implications of Lovecraft’s worldview than most had ever even read. Joshi was unconscious, having passed out from the unbearable pain of two broken femurs. Price was alive and almost uninjured, but he was trapped in the car by the vehicle that had smashed into them during the Event and forced them into the ditch between the northbound and southbound lanes, the impact of which had broken both of his longtime friend’s legs. His mobility held to three or four inches on each side and in front, Price had been unable to find either of their cell phones, even as he could hear each one ringing almost nonstop. He couldn’t move to get out of the back or even through the shattered windshield due to his large size and Joshi’s injuries. By the time of the President’s press conference, the car’s battery was dead. Desperation and dehydration had set in hours earlier.

The interstate was filled with cars like theirs, with dying people like them, as far as Price could see in either direction. Even if he had been able to find his cell, there was no telling where they were exactly, and no way anyone could reach them even if rescue teams made them their first priority. They may have been amused if they knew that Cthulhu, their object of study and analysis for so long, had directly caused their demise … but probably not.

The cars, trucks, and every other vehicle that had been traveling at the moment of the Event on that packed stretch of Interstate 95 pumping drivers out of New York City like an aorta were all motionless now, crashed, many burning, some containing the dying but most containing the dead. Orange Marmalade had walked all night and all day down the shoulder of the interstate, smiling as he looked upon the begging and hysterical people trapped in their cars. They would not be alive for long, not like him. He was going south. He was going to the new Master of Earth, to sit by His side.

He walked by the hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of once-southbound cars, giggling as he took in the carnage and the misery. People were so silly as they died! He felt a special connection to one late-model Impala, with its swarthy gentleman driver and obese but distinguished-looking passenger, the first unconscious and the second hanging on to life by a thread. He felt sad that they were doomed. Orange Marmalade felt that he could have had a conversation with them about the new Master.

Oh, well
, he said to himself with a smile, and kept walking.

Several hours later, some twenty-six hours after the Event, for the first time in reality and not just in his own mind, Martin Storch really was the greatest living H.P. Lovecraft scholar on the planet. The President’s team agreed—he was also the only one they could reach—and by the time S.T. Joshi and Robert Price had breathed their last, a helicopter carrying Martin and his assistant, Percy, was landing on the front lawn of the White House.

Nellis AFB

Event + 27 hours

A veritable fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles now swarmed the skies over the anomaly, drones with every conceivable kind of sensor collecting a wealth of data that would take the thirty-airman team assigned to each individual drone hours, if not days, to parse. That future analysis notwithstanding, every UAV reported the same vital piece of information at exactly the same time.

The anomaly—the head of Cthulhu, some new impossible island in the Pacific, whatever it was in reality—had risen farther out of the water now, the “tentacles” swinging above the surface from the bulbous “head” that almost every Chair Force member had stopped thinking of with quotation marks around them.

And the head was
moving
.

And as the anomaly—no, as
Cthulhu
, no sense in pretending now among the drone operators—moved, the effect was much like the creation of an electrical field when a magnet is moved past a coil of copper wire. But the field created by Cthulhu’s movement wasn’t electric or magnetic. It was a
psionic field
—an emanation like nothing in human science—and in seconds it enveloped the world, weakly at first but increasing in strength as the Old One increased His speed.

When the exact vector along which Cthulhu traveled was calculated to be toward the center of Antarctica, not toward populated areas, the majors and colonels monitoring their staff’s monitoring of the anomaly breathed a collective sigh of relief.

But after a few moments the psionic wave reached them, and everything went to hell all over again.