Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters (43 page)

“Run!” she gasps.

I run, sliding down her face to land on her shoulder, scrambling toward freedom. I make a leap for a steel beam near the edge of the pit and stick the landing. I turn, shouting, “Get out of there!”

But she loses her grip and vanishes into the ever-narrowing gap. Before I can even call out her name, the crack closes, and she’s gone.

I throw myself onto the broken earth, vainly, foolishly clawing at the rubble, as if I might somehow free her. My tears blot away by vision. I rub my fingers raw for a while, then wipe my eyes. I study the ground, searching for any sign of an opening.

It’s then I discover that the sidewalk I’m sitting on is completely intact.

I look up and find myself surrounded by towering skyscrapers. Through the haze of light cast by the city, I see a single star in the night sky, Venus I think. I rise, and see a dozen people on the street staring at me. I look at my ruined hands and suddenly it all makes sense.

Halo was right! It was only a nightmare, and now we’re awake. I race down the sidewalk, heading for the waterfront, laughing like a maniac. I feel like Scrooge on Christmas morning. All a dream. A dream.

Then I reach the harbor and my laughter dies. I stare across the waters, toward a distant island, where a hundred floodlights illuminate the base of a vanished statue.

Not everyone woke, it seems.

Fallen, fallen, is Babylon the Great.

But she went down fighting.

And she didn’t go down alone.

Dead Men’s Bones

Josh Reynolds

For Clark Ashton Smith and Bert Ira Gordon,

Creators of the Colossal

“Put out that damn light,” a rough voice snarled.

Charles St. Cyprian flinched as a calloused hand flashed out of the wet darkness and slapped the newly-lit cigarette from his lips with stinging force.

“I say, you could have just asked,” he muttered, rubbing his mouth. He glared daggers at the craggy-faced American, who didn’t seem all that worried.

“I was making a point,” the American said. He spoke in the mushy nasal drawl characteristic of many men in the 81
st
Infantry Division. South Carolina, St. Cyprian thought, or North Carolina. It was almost certainly a Carolina of some cardinal description.

It was late in the war, but the Americans had finally gotten involved, after a generation had spent its blood in the mud of the trenches that now stretched from one side of the continent to the other. The war would be done in a year, maybe two, if the word trickling down from the high command could be believed. Then, back in 1914, they’d said that the war would be over by Christmas. Four years later, the guns were still thundering and the wire was still strung.

“And a fine point it was, Sergeant Bass,” Carnacki murmured from where he crouched in the rocks, peering through a set of binoculars. “Take note, Charles. You’ve been at this long enough to know that light is not a chum in these circumstances.”

St. Cyprian made to reply, and then thought better of it. It was two against one, and he was too damn wet to argue. Instead, he shifted slightly, and peered over the escarpment and through the curtain of rain and mist at the foreboding shape of the fortress of Ylourgne. Or, rather, the remains of such; the great craggy pile hadn’t been anything other than a ruinous eyesore since the death of the last of the line of marauding French barons who had built up its cliff-founded walls sometime in the eleventh century. The province of Averoigne was full of such relics, and practically every church, monastery, and nunnery in the region had been planted on top of a druidic ruin or a Gallic fort.

“Bloody Otranto,” he muttered. He looked at Bass. “I say, keep an eye out for giant helmets, what?”

“What?” Bass looked at him.

“Americans,” St. Cyprian said, “No appreciation for the classics.” He sighed in disgust. He couldn’t believe he’d left his warm cot and the warm young woman who had been sharing it with him since he’d made her acquaintance at the cabaret back in Vyones in order to come out into the wet and cold.

“I wouldn’t as call Walpole a classic. Ain’t no Miss Austen, that’s for sure,” Bass said, turning away. The American swiped rainwater out of his face and looked at Carnacki. “We going down there any time soon, or you want to paint you a picture?”

Carnacki put his field-glasses away and looked at Bass and St. Cyprian. “I believe there’s actually a rather smashing rendition of Ylourgne—or perhaps Chateau des Faussesflammes—in the Louvre. Oils, I think,” he said. “In any event, yes. Though frankly, I’d rather level the place from a safe distance.” He pushed himself to his feet. The rain was beginning to slacken. “We should hurry. We can’t count on the weather to keep us unnoticed for much longer, if anyone living is about.”

Bass lunged to his feet and tackled Carnacki to the ground, even as the latter spoke. A moment later, the sound of a bullet striking rock echoed over the escarpment. St. Cyprian drew his Webley from its holster on his hip and pivoted smoothly. He fired, and then took cover. “I’d say we’ve been noticed,” he said, as more bullets struck the rocks around them.

“Your observational skills are as tip-top as ever, Charles,” Carnacki said as he struggled out from under Bass and drew his own revolver. “Sergeant, you didn’t happen to see where that first shot came from, did you?”

“Up thataway,” Bass said, crawling towards his rifle where it lay stacked against a rock.
He grabbed it, rolled onto his back and swung the rifle up. “Bastards are sneaky.”

“The enemy, by definition, is sneaky,” St. Cyprian muttered. “When he’s on our side, he’s just cunning.” He took a guess and fired. The enemy replied, with interest. St. Cyprian hunkered down and pressed his hands to his ears. “Thomas, I must say that this isn’t what I signed up for. I was hoping for a nice bit of rest and relaxation in Vyones!”

“One does what one must, Charles. Now show some pluck,” Carnacki said. He peered up at the slope above them, and fired several times.

“Pluck, he says,” St. Cyprian muttered, “easy for him to say.”

Carnacki knew all about pluck. Before the Great Powers had slouched into war, Thomas Carnacki, late of Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, currently afforded the rank of captain in His Majesty’s armed forces, had served in the capacity of the Royal Occultist of the British Empire. To the public at large he had merely been ‘the Ghost-Finder’, whose adventures had decorated the pages of
The Idler
, even as those of the Great Detective had appeared in
The Strand
in the decade prior to the War. But his days as ‘the Ghost-Finder’ were done and only the grinding, grisly monotony of his duties as Royal Occultist remained.

Formed during the reign of Elizabeth the First, the office of Royal Occultist (or the Queen’s Conjurer, as it had been known) had started with the diligent amateur Dr. John Dee, and passed through a succession of hands since. The list was a long one, weaving in and out of the margins of British history, and culminating, for the moment, in one Thomas Carnacki and his erstwhile assistant-cum-apprentice, Charles St. Cyprian.

During more peaceful times, it was the remit of the Royal Occultist and his assistant to investigate the strange and the sinister, anything that might threaten the peace of the Empire. In war, that remit was not much changed, though its scope was extended. Weird worms of all sorts struggled to the surface after a rain of artillery. And sometimes, it wasn’t worms at all, but bodies which got up and danced away.

Such was the case now, in the disputed province of Averoigne, where the American Expeditionary Force’s dead, as well as everyone else’s, had begun to get up and walk away, trailing their various bits and viscera. The field hospitals in Vyones, Les Hiboux ,and Ximes were emptied, mass graves overturned, and even those caught on the wire tore themselves free to follow whatever silent, siren call had brought them to their feet. Hundreds of thousands of dead men, from both sides of the line, had stumbled, crawled, squirmed, and staggered into the crags and cliffs that clustered about the northern edge of the province. The dead were flooding north, as if fleeing the German spring offensive.

The Americans had been frantic, convinced as they were that it was some new German weapon. When Haig had dispatched Carnacki and St. Cyprian to investigate, Pershing had, in a display of bellicose one-upmanship, introduced Sergeant Bass into the mix, insisting that, since many of the dead were American, an American ought to investigate. Neither Haig nor Pershing had bothered to get a French opinion on the matter.

Bass had some small reputation among the doughboys for being a bit of a backwoods conjurer, or so Pershing had said. They said that Bass had carved his name on a bullet and wore it about his neck, so that he had nothing to fear from enemy snipers, and that he whispered at night to the dead men caught in the wire, as if to comfort them. Despite the stories, the taciturn sergeant had not claimed to be anything other than what he was—perpetually annoyed at his new duties, mostly, St. Cyprian had found.

Together, the three men had followed the eerie trail of shed flesh and sloughed off body parts that marked the route the dead had taken into the mountains. They’d seen emptied village churchyards and lonely graves, long-since ruptured from within.

Something—someone—was calling the dead. He could feel it, in the pit of his belly and in the back of his skull. It was like an itch he couldn’t scratch, as if someone had given a tuning fork a great big
thwack
and pressed it to his ear. St. Cyprian was psychic; indeed, that was one of the reasons Carnacki had chosen him to be his assistant. If he sensed something, if it was affecting him this badly, then it was dangerous indeed.

That grisly trail led them up into the crags where Ylourgne sagged. They’d seen no lights, and heard nothing save the constant crash of rainwater in the valley below. Now, they heard plenty—the steady ricocheting of bullets biting rock, and the sound of men moving all around. Voices as well, engaged in harsh, Teutonic conversation.

As he watched, Bass rose to one knee and fired his rifle. With steady, precise movements, he ejected the spent cartridge and reloaded. “We’re pinned down,” he said. “They’re above us and coming up behind.” He turned and fired. “Ten, maybe fifteen of ‘em,” he said, dropping down onto his back to reload. “They might have passed us on by if that damn cigarette hadn’t warned them they were right on top of us,” he added, glaring at St. Cyprian.

“Hardly my fault,” St. Cyprian said, “I couldn’t hear anything over that blasted rain.”

“Germans, by the sounds of them,” Carnacki said. He sat behind his rock, staring at Ylourgne below, and rubbing his cheek with the barrel of his Webley. “They must have been here since Cambrai. I wonder why? Living Germans and hordes of walking corpses do not for a common sight make in these crags.”

“Does it really matter?” St. Cyprian said. He caught sight of several coal-scuttle helmets bobbing along just behind cover. He made to fire, when Carnacki stopped him.

“Actually Charles, I rather think it does. Weapons down, gentlemen,” Carnacki said.

“What now?” Bass said.

“I say, you can’t be serious,” St. Cyprian said.

“As a Yorkshireman,” Carnacki said. He tossed his pistol aside and stood, his hands raised over his head. “We need to get into Ylourgne, why not do it with an armed escort, what?”

“Is he crazy?” Bass asked, looking at St. Cyprian.

“Sadly, no,” St. Cyprian said. He tossed his pistol out into the open and stood, hands out. “Unless you happen to be bulletproof, I’d do as he says, Sergeant.”

Bass hesitated, but only for a moment. Then, with a disgusted sigh, he tossed his rifle aside. The men who came to collect them a moment later had the hard-edged, roughhewn look of German
stosstruppen—
the sorts of soldiers who had, months earlier, pierced the Allied lines at Cambrai with distressing ease. He wondered if these were from the same lot. They were searched briskly, their weapons collected, and then, with all due haste and efficiency, escorted down from the escarpment and into the ruin of Ylourgne.

The route down was arduous, and even in the relative cool after a rain, it was hot going. The moat that had once diverted a tail of the Isoile to curl about the ruin’s lower reaches was now long since filled by rock and soil, washed down from the high passes by centuries of rain. The drawbridge was reduced to moldering fragments, but the collapsed stones of the once-proud barbican did well enough as a path inside. The main structure of the fortress was covered in thick tarpaulin and netting, so as to prevent any light from escaping, and the doors had been blocked and sealed. Men wearing concealing cloaks and mud-tarps patrolled the battlements and camouflaged machine gun positions had been set up in the gatehouse and the crumbled remains of what had once been a chapel.

They were led into the main building through a side door, which was protected by a heavy blanket, and guarded by a third machine gun crew. No one spoke, or even looked at them.

Once they were inside, St. Cyprian couldn’t restrain a curse from slipping his lips. The entire structure had been gutted, and hollowed out into a single cavernous space, now occupied by what appeared to be a massive alembic, surrounded by dozens of levels of scaffolding, that connected to the stone walls at various points. The alembic stretched far below the crude floor they stood on, well into the bowels of the ancient fortress, and rose up to scrape the uppermost curve of the high tower above.

Inside the alembic was a thick fluid, the color of urine and as thick as blood. Even so, St. Cyprian thought he could see something within it, something massive. But it was not that vague and undefined shape which startled him. Instead, it was the congregation of broken corpses which occupied every spare space, and descended the scaffolding in a slow moving queue towards the lowest point of the alembic. Armed men, wearing gasmasks and butcher’s aprons, herded the staggering, shuffling corpses along, and when one fell, it was heaved over the side of the scaffolding, to men waiting below with gaff-hooks and chains, who would drag it into the darkness. Someone had lit a fire down there, and St. Cyprian could see the reddish glow of the flames reflected on the damp stones.

There was a strange smell on the air. It wasn’t just the charnel odor of the corpses, but something else—a raw, hot scent, like a pan left too long over a fire. A glance at Bass and Carnacki told him that they smelled it as well.

“Smells like a hog roast,” Bass muttered.

“It’s coming from that strange contraption,” Carnacki said, nodding towards the alembic. “And speaking of contraptions...”

They had been led up onto a wide viewing platform, through the sea of corpses, where a heavy table had been set up, and on top of it, a strange mechanical device sat, surrounded by five heavy glass bell-jars. In each jar there was a human head floating suspended in fluid. St. Cyprian clutched at his head as they were escorted close to the contraption and its gory companions. The ache that had allowed him to trail the corpses had grown suddenly worse, and, unprepared for it as he was, it staggered him. Pain rattled along his spine and across his nerve endings, and he would have fallen had Bass not caught him.