Chasing the Moon (32 page)

“Something has gone wrong,” said Zap. “They must have done something to her.”

“Figure that out with your all-seeing eye, did you?” asked Vom.

“Shut up.”

“So what difference does it make?” asked Smorgaz. “Whether she’s alive or dead, we’re still trapped in here until someone lets us out, right?”

“If she’s not dead, then maybe we don’t have to wait for that. Maybe we can get out on our own.”

“Don’t be stupid,” said Vom. “There’s no way out of this box. I’ve tried.”

“You’ve tried when you were mere cosmic flotsam in a cold storage room,” said Zap. “But now, I think this is just a reaction to Diana’s situation. Maybe if we put some effort into it we can open the closet together.”

“Can’t hurt to try,” said Vom.

They pushed, grunting and groaning and straining. They were inexhaustible, but after half an hour they did get bored.

Vom frowned in the dark. “This is a waste of time.”

“We can’t give up,” said Zap.

“Why not?”

“Because Diana wouldn’t give up.”

“Oh, hell.” Vom threw his shoulder into the door. “Let’s do this.”

To his surprise, the door opened. He fell out and onto the floor. Pogo squealed, lapping at Vom’s face with his jagged tongue while West stood in the room, his hand on the closet door’s handle.

“What were you doing back in there?” asked West.

“It’s a bit complicated.” Zap floated out. “Thanks for letting us out.”

West rubbed his face. “Don’t thank me. Thank the dog. Came and got me.”

“Why didn’t Pogo go into the closet?”

“The dog doesn’t belong to this apartment. He belongs to Apartment Two.”

Zap disintegrated the coffee table.

“All right. Back in business. Now let’s go rescue Diana!”

Yipping and hissing, Pogo hopped arounid get bt>

They ran from the apartment and down the hall, pausing at the threshold to the outside universe. From inside the building the flux of the universe was visible as a strange stew of bubbles floating in the air itself. Other worlds could be glimpsed in the glittering spheres. The universe was fraying around the edges. The pressure from all the outside realities might cause the whole thing to collapse, crushing it into nothingness.

“I wouldn’t recommend going out there,” said West. “Without Diana to anchor you and with everything falling apart, there’s no telling what reaction it could cause.”

Fenris roared, and the world shuddered.

“Safest place in the world is right here,” said West. “Whatever happens out there, it’s best to let it run its course.”

“But what about Diana?” asked Vom.

“She might survive it.” West shrugged. “Might not.”

The monsters said nothing.

“So what should we do?” asked Smorgaz.

“Leave it be,” said West. “You’ll only make it worse.”

“But what about Diana?” asked Zap this time.

“She wouldn’t leave us behind,” said Smorgaz. “She’d try to help us.”

“No, she wouldn’t,” said West. “She’d get rid of you the first chance she could.”

The monsters didn’t even argue the point.

“I still like her,” said Vom.

They all agreed on this. They knew she was just another human, and there were billions more out there. Or, if the humans all disappeared tomorrow, something else would be there to fill her warden position.

But they liked her.

“Oh, heck,” said Zap. “What are we even risking? There’s nothing out there that can hurt us. Right?”

They looked to West, who stared back at them inscrutably.

Pogo bound past the threshold. Nothing happened to the hellhound. He turned and shrieked at the others to follow him. Reasonably assured that they were beyond the primordial madness taking place, they followed. They made it only a few steps before succumbing to the strange forces and collapsing to the ground. They burst from their skins, transforming into shapes closer to their true forms.

Vom grew a dozen extra limbs and started shoveling concrete, automobiles, and lampposts into a hundred gullets in a blind devouring hunger. Smorgaz became a great misshapen blob of purple. Dozens of pods burst open as countless clones spawned. Zap crackled with power. His gaze swept across the world, blasting holes in the street.

Pogo remained unchanged because that was his true form.

The mindless horrors turned on each other. Vom bit off one of Zap’s tentacles. Zap responded by burning Vom’s face off. The great immobile lump that was Smorgaz screeched, and his spawn tackled Vom and Zap, clamoring over them. It was only
their focus on each other that kept the block from being reduced to ruins and ash.

Pogo raised his head and shrieked. The other beasts stopped their struggle as the minuscule creature yipped in their direction. Vom, Zap, and Smorgaz turned their attention skyward. They launched themselves into the air and toward the moon god above.

“Well, I’ll be,” said West. “You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?”

Pogo squealed, then ran off down the street.

Sharon had wanted to speak to Calvin one last time, but things were so hectic she didn’t get a chance to exchange more than a few words with him. The hell of it was that the robes, chants, and ceremony all amounted to so much busywork. Nothing the Chosen did had any influence over Fenris. The cult was a parasite clinging to the moon god’s belly.

Calvin sat on his throne. For once he didn’t look bored. The Chosen swayed and sang his praises in nonsense syllables that Greg had given them. She stood beside the throne, phoning it in, fully aware that the creature above didn’t care in the slightest about her degree of enthusiasm.

Some of the more fervent cultists stripped naked and screamed gibberish.
Morons
, she thought.

Greg stood on the other side of the throne. He was silent, relaxed. No need for the show now.

The earth rumbled as the tentacle god-beast drew closer and closer to the moon it had spent countless millennia pursuing. The hapless ordinary people who pursued their lives, blissfully
ignorant of the strangeness of a much vaster universe, remained so. The coming joining was invisible, and would be until it was too late.

Fenris brushed the moon with the tip of his tentacle.

Calvin’s hand tingled. He peeled away the skin like a candy wrapper. It even made that crinkling noise.

The Chosen’s chant changed, transforming from nonsense into a string of syllables not made for human mouths. They swayed in unison, whispered in a language Calvin had forgotten long ago.

He remembered now.

He glanced at Sharon. He’d regret leaving her behind. The rest of the human race and the small sliver of reality they called home he’d be glad to cast off. He’d miss some things. Movies. Books. Apple pie. Doritos. The feel of a sandy beach between his toes. Toes.

Mostly, he’d miss Sharon.

His flesh fell off. He stood naked, an ebony god of pure intellect. Not his true form. He had no physical form. Even this was just a contrivance forced on him by a universe unable to accept what was happening.

Two crackling bolts lanced from his chest into the sky, connecting with the moon and Fenris. The mind, the body, and the power. Three aspects of a single entity that had been too long divided.

The estate broke free of its boundaries and spread like a green shadow across the face of the city. From there it would devour the world like an invading organism bent on rewriting itself on the fabric of the universe. Humanity would
have screamed in collective terror if not for the fact that everyone within a thousand miles was transformed into piles of moss.

The cultists cast off their cloaks. The hairy, four-armed wolves howled and danced in reckless abandon as their god began his ascent. Except for the beast that had been Sharon. She stood before Calvin, lowered her head, and whimpered.

He felt the final spasm of the universe as Fenris wrapped his tentacles around the moon. And in a moment it would all be over.

“Goodbye, Sharon.”

The moment didn’t come.

Vom plowed into the moon god, knocking him away from his goal. Fenris shrieked as Calvin fell to Earth. False skin wrapped around him. Stifling, rotten, smothering flesh.

He vomited yellow slime onto the stone floor. Being crammed back into mortal flesh, even if only the illusion of such, was uncomfortable. It was like tight shoes he’d gotten used to wearing, and now that they were off he didn’t want them back on.

The cult reverted to halfway-human forms. Calvin used the shredded remains of a discarded robe to cover Sharon’s naked body.

Greg said, “What the hell?”

In the night sky Fenris clashed with only slightly less horrific entities for the future of the moon and the universe by proxy.

Pogo jumped from the bushes and landed before Calvin’s throne. The dog blackened and smoked as the alien magic of
the estate sizzled against his flesh. Calvin recognized a fellow greater eldritch when he saw one.

The dog gasped painfully, turning on the cult and growling. Then he ran into the house, smashing his way through the front door, bounding up the stairs, and finding Diana on the bed.

Pogo lowered his head and cried out mournfully. The roof exploded. The unnatural fog that played havoc with Diana faded. She sat up, shook the cobwebs away. She ached and had a hell of a headache, but she could think again. She could move. As long as Pogo was close enough, casting his own strange aura over her, she was functional.

She forced herself to stand, trudged with heavy steps downstairs and to the alcove where the cult stood. They stood, shocked, at this unbeliever in their midst while their lord above clashed with the monstrous usurpers.

Diana cleared her dry throat.

“We need to talk.”

Fenris, the great tentacled horror, lashed out. A whip of his tendrils batted away Vom and obliterated a dozen Smorgaz clones.

Vom pounced. His countless mouths bit Fenris’s unstable flesh. Bright orange and blue bile sprayed from the wounds. Zap’s bolts blew searing chunks off the moon god. The cloud of Smorgaz spawn dogpiled, covering everything in a squirming mass of purple.

“What are you doing?” asked Greg, though speaking was difficult with the fangs jutting from his jaws. “You’re interfering!”

Diana ignored him and the confused, twisted halfabominations of the cultists around her.

“You can’t do this,” she said to Calvin. “It’s not right.”

“You don’t understand,” he replied.

“I understand. I do, but—”

“Shut up!” Greg growled. “You have no right to speak to him. Our lord only speaks to predator, not prey.”

“Put a sock in it, Greg. If he’s going to destroy my universe, then I think someone on the con side of the argument should get a say.”

The cultists encircled Diana. The flaps circling Pogo’s sucker mouth waggled as he growled. While he was a thing as unstoppable and inconceivable as Fenris, most of his power was spent keeping Diana moving. He wouldn’t be of use for much else.

“You really don’t want to do this,” she said. “You’re still civilized human beings under there somewhere. You have to be.”

A vicious grin crossed Greg’s face. “Kill her.”

“Ah, hell.”

The furious cultists leaped into action, burying Diana beneath a swarm of claws and teeth.

Greg half-laughed, half-bayed at the sight of it.

Calvin stared inscrutably at the savage pack. Its bloodthirsty shrieks rang in his ears.

Above, Fenris shrugged off his opponents. Smorgaz spawn streaked across the atmosphere like meteors of white fire. They struck the tip of South America, disintegrating Argentina. With freshly grown tentacles, Fenris tossed Vom aside into Zap.

The cultists grew hairier, more beastly. Sharon groaned as her body shifted in Calvin’s arms.

He didn’t do anything. Just watched as the battle played out. As Fenris closed in on the moon, the change in his physical
body started again. Before it went very far, though, the cultbeasts started whimpering as Diana threw off her attackers with a flurry of punches and backhands. The claws and teeth of the cult proved unable to harm Diana, and they regenerated from even the most serious injuries to bounce back to actiothe fray. Meanwhile, Diana’s monsters weren’t capable of causing much lasting injury to Fenris, but they were able to push him away from the moon.