Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear (28 page)

Event + 39 hours

Once they got past the demolition derby that was the DC Beltway, the crew and passengers of the M1 Abrams Heavy Battle Tank saw pretty smooth sailing as they traveled south, putting sixty miles between themselves and Washington. They’d have to refuel in a few more hours, but doing what the madman wanted was a top priority, even if they didn’t have anywhere better to go anyway.

Mitchum and Doucette knew that with not enough people manning the utilities and supply logistics systems for food and other necessities, things were going to turn very ugly for the world’s survivors of Cthulhu’s attack, and quick. They had MREs as well as 3,000-calorie nutrition bars in the tank, enough for five people. They had four, including Martin Storch, who was slowly coming awake to see the situation he had somehow gotten into, with a gun trained on him and two booze-drenched soldiers crushing cars underneath them at a breathtaking rate of speed.

Oh, booze!
Martin thought, and pulled the Johnnie Walker red out of his voluminous jacket pocket. It was unbroken. Another miracle. Cthulhu be praised. He opened it and took a big swig. It wasn’t in the same league as Black Label, but it would do just fine.

“May I ask,” he said to Horan Marmalado, “why you are pointing a gun at me?”

“You support the false prophet.”

“I do? That seems damned unwise.”

“You want President Hampton to kill people as sacrifices.”

“That is not true. She killed my best friend. If she is a prophet, I’ll take the loss.” He snickered at his own wit and took another swig.

Horan hesitated and said cautiously, “Do you support the true prophet, then?”

“I assume you are referring to yourself?”

“
I
am the prophet of the Old One.”

“That’s what I said. No, I’m a big believer in whatever you are preaching. My goodness, yes,” Martin said and took another large gulp of the Scotch whiskey. “
Ïa! Ïa! Cthulhu fthagn!
Right?”

Amazed, Horan put the Beretta back into its holster. “You
do
believe!”

“You have no idea.”

Horan moved toward the front and gave Sergeant Mitchum the gun and holster. “Thank you for letting me use this,” he said.

“Uh, sure,” Mitchum said, snatching it away quickly and exchanging yet another look of
What the fuck is going on?
with his tank commander. “Glad to be of service.”

“So, O Prophet, what’s our plan?” Martin asked, the warm alcohol haze slightly soothing the throbbing in his head, where the Army spade had made contact with it.

“Plan?” Horan said. “The
plan
is that we go to Great Cthulhu and—”

He was cut off by the loudest sound he had ever heard, and
he was
inside
a tank.
A few seconds later, the 74 tons of M1 Abrams was shoved from behind as if a giant’s hand had spanked it in the ass and it got so hot inside that it hurt to touch the bulkheads. “Staff Sergeant!
Deuce!
” Mitchell yelled, sweat already running into his eyes after thirty seconds, too stunned even to use his friend’s name. “Jesus, what’s happening out there?”

Doucette checked the aft camera monitor and said with a mouth numb with shock, “I think they just nuked DC, man. There’s a mushroom cloud going a thousand feet in the air.”

“Great Cthulhu calls us south,” said Horan Marmalado in an airy, ecstatic voice. “He is saving us—saving
me
—for a greater purpose.”

Another miracle
, Martin thought with a smirk.
This is getting to be a habit with you, Big Green
.

Then a cacophonic blast even louder than the first erupted, rendering everyone inside the tank momentarily deaf with tinnitus and made the outer bulkheads too hot to touch, Doucette looked at his monitor again.

Mitchum said, “What, did they nuke it
twice?
”

Pale and suddenly dry of mouth, Doucette could only nod his head.

Mitchum looked back to the crazy man and the drunken writer, then turned to watch a second mushroom cloud bloom on the monitor. “What now, man?”

“We keep going south. We got a prophet on board who just got us out of DC in the nick of time. If he can’t keep us safe, then there ain’t no safety to keep.”

30 miles from Washington DC, altitude 800 feet

Event + 39 hours

Major General Jack Patterson, head of the National Security Agency, did not accompany the new President, military and policy chiefs, and odd members of Congress down into the subterranean bunker of the UDCC. He and his closest advisors as well as Marine Major Kevin Berry, all of them self-hypnotized against the psionic waves, got to an NSA helicopter two blocks from the White House and lifted off with one of his men at the controls. Patterson examined a hand-held electronic device and called to the pilot, “South! Get down close to US 1, Federal Highway.”

“Why south?” Berry asked against the loud chopper rotors and the wind, knowing he would probably not get an answer and was on the helicopter only by the sheerest luck.

Surprising him, Patterson turned the electronic gadget so Berry could see the red blip over a map of southern DC. The red blip was, in fact, on Federal Highway.

“What is that?”

“It’s Judith Hampton. We put a chip in our commanders-in-chief like you do a new puppy, and for the same reason! We’re going to pick her up and get her the hell out of Dodge.”

“But she’s not the President anymore!”

Patterson laughed at Berry’s naïveté. “Son, we’re sworn to protect our ex-Presidents, too. She’s exposed and in a lot of danger running down the street at midnight.”

“But she killed that guy, live on the Internet!”

“I don’t have to explain
anything
I do to you, son. Besides, you’re the one that got her started on all this Cthulhu business. You’re the one who drove her crazy!”

That may have been the reason Berry didn’t to see her again, especially after he came to see she was right after all. “Except she’s not crazy, right? OPERATION FATCHANCE—it’s all true.”

“It’s all true
and
President Hampton may be crazy. But that doesn’t—” Patterson cut himself off and pointed out a spot on the ground to the pilot, Fisk, who swooped them down. One of his men slid the helicopter door open the instant they touched the ground and called out, “Madam President!”

A disheveled and dirty Judith Hampton stared at them in disbelief.

The two NSA agents hopped out and guided her into the helicopter, which immediately took to the skies again.

“Madam President? Judy? Are you all right?” Patterson asked as solicitously as he had ever asked anyone anything.

Hampton took a huge gulp from the water bottle one of the men handed to her. “South. We need to go all the way south.”

“That’s what we’re doing, okay? We’re putting Washington behind us, look.”

She glanced at the lights falling away, and collapsed in exhaustion against the bulkhead. “I shouldn’t have quit, Jack. I could’ve helped—”

“We’ll get it all sorted out, Judy,” Patterson interrupted.

“No—I could’ve helped bring so many more people to Cthulhu. I am His prophet, and I had the biggest bully pulpit in the world. We must go see Him ourselves, Jack.”

Oh, good Christ
.
Patterson was grateful that he had his mouth as locked down as the NSA itself.

“How far can helicopters go without stopping?”

“Not quite that far. But don’t worry—this is a fast machine. We’ll find a safe place and—”

WHOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMP

An unholy blast of white-hot air pushed the chopper forward so hard that they all thought they’d lose a rotor of even the whole tail of the aircraft, then yanked it backwards as the vacuum created by the nuke collapsed. But being thirty miles from DC already, they were able to maintain altitude and keep the machine intact. Then the sound reached them, and every one of them of them screamed, General or President, Major or NSA staff member. The only way they knew they were still alive and flying was the fact that they could hear their own screams. After a few minutes, Hampton had passed out from exhaustion and Berry was unconscious as well.

Patterson inched forward and spoke into his helmet microphone, “Fisk, Find a clear patch and touch down somewhere in the Smoky Mountains Park. We need to rest where no one is looking for us or the President. We all need to rest while we figure out what we’re supposed to do next with our magical prophet here.”

“Has she gone crazy, sir?”

“I’m afraid not, Fisk.
Very
afraid not.”

US 1, aka “Federal Highway,” south of Alexandria, VA

Event + 39 hours

The five scientists looped their arms together and made a circle … or not:
This is like a five-molecule Cyclopentane ring!
Tyson thought, but that was quickly met with
How about we just call it a pentagon?
from Sibbald, the irony of such a shape name being lost on none of the government scientists. They each faced outward, the better to keep their new psion-detecting sense covering all 360 degrees around them. They could sense living humans; they could sense Cthulhu far away; they could read one another’s minds—in fact, they were starting to feel like one mind with five different voices—and they could feel tactile sensations and smell and taste.

But they were all utterly blind and deaf. Their polygonal shape made for awkward movement (although they each got the hang of walking sideways or backwards pretty quickly) but it kept them a coherent unit when one member would bump up against a ruined car or feel the ground fall away into a ditch and be able to stop the group almost immediately.

They went south, walking as a ring, using the presence of other humans—not that there were a lot of them, and what there were usually were not moving at all, probably close to death—to keep themselves moving in the right direction. It was extremely slow-going, but each member of the ring was dazzled by their second sight that they were well occupied in just taking it all—

Holy!—shit!—tā māde!—Jesus!—AIEEEEEEEEE
the voices in their heads all screamed in unison, their lungs and throats and mouths screaming with them as what felt like a giant blowtorch burning every inch of exposed skin into blisters. Their arms unlooped and they fell to the scorching ground and screamed anew.

Seconds later they were lifted by the force of a hurricane wind and slammed into crashed cars, swept along the broiling asphalt, or thrown against a tree. Seconds after that, the enormous power of the wind lifted them again and threw them in the opposite direction, although by that point the scientists were so beaten up they barely noticed.

Burned to the second degree, arms dislocated, bones broken, the former Cyclopentane ring’s human molecules were scattered over several hundred square feet. Even if they had been able to see or hear one another, not all of them would have been able to move to join their fellows.

Then it happened
again
, and every one of them died except for the one who had gotten caught in the fork of a tree by the first blast and was shielded by the tree—now smoking and shredded on the side opposite from what couldn’t have been anything other than two nuclear blasts.

Betty Baker couldn’t see. She couldn’t hear. All she could feel was serious burns over her exposed flesh. All she could smell or taste was smoke and burning metal. And now the only living humans she could sense were to the south, far to the south.

She couldn’t hear the thoughts of her fellow psychonauts or whatever the hell they were supposed to be. She called to them in her mind:
Norm? Molly? Li? Len?

We are here, Betty
sounded in her mind, one voice that included the frequencies of all her colleague’s mental voices.

Here?
“Betty” thought.
Where is here? Why can’t I feel your presence like I can all the other living humans?

All of us are dead but one
, the combined voice thought.
We are dead but dreaming.

Dreaming?

It is hard to explain. None of us will understand until we explain it.

What?
“Betty” thought, sounding even to herself tremulous and frightened beyond anything she had ever known.
This is some trick of a damaged brain.

Nǐ néng míngbái wǒmen zài shuō shénme?
It was definitely Chinese-sounding phonemes, even though the conglomeration of mental voices was made up of more than just Li Clarke’s.

I can make up gibberish fake Chinese as well as anyone,
“Betty” thought.
I’m a cognitive scientist, remember? I don’t—

The next words were recognizable as Molly Gibson’s, but her voice was only part of the whole.
We are a resonant standing wave in your mind. The five of us, because of the madness we induced and the presence of the enormously strong psionic wave from Cthulhu, remain in a sympathetic vibration. When we think, you hear our voices mixed. When you think back at us, we hear your voice mixed with the rest.