New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (56 page)

It was hard to move slowly, but I knew I had to keep my head. The staircase was long, and the walls were so tight the shotgun could easily cover the narrow gap below. If you wanted a definition of dangerous ground, that would be the bottom of the staircase. If the bloodface was close—his back against the near wall, or standing directly beside the stairwell—he’d have a chance to grab the shotgun barrel before I entered the room.

A sharp clatter on the hardwood floor below. Metallic . . . like a machete. I judged the distance and moved quickly, following the shotgun into the room. And there was the bloodface . . . over by the front door. He’d made it that far, but no further. And it wasn’t gunfire that had brought him down. No. Nothing so simple as a bullet had killed him.

I saw the thing that had done the job, instantly remembering the sounds I’d heard during the night—the scrapes and scrabbles I’d mistaken for nesting birds scratching in the chimney. The far wall of the room was plastered with bits of carved skin, each one of them scarred over with words, and each of those words had been skinned from the thing that had burrowed out of Roy Barnes’ corpse.

That thing crouched in a patch of sunlight by the open door, naked and raw, exposed muscles alive with fresh slashes that wept red as it leaned over the dead bloodface. A clawed hand with long nails like skinning knives danced across a throat slashed to the bone. The demon didn’t look up from its work as it carved the corpse’s flesh with quick, precise strokes. It didn’t seem to notice me at all. It wrote one word on the dead kid’s throat . . . and then another on his face . . . and then it slashed open the bloodface’s shirt and started a third.

I fired the shotgun and the monster bucked backwards. Its skinning knife nails rasped across the doorframe and dug into the wood. The thing’s head snapped up, and it stared at me with a headful of eyes. Thirty eyes, and every one of them was the color of muddy water. They blinked, and their gaze fell everywhere at once—on the dead bloodface and on me, and on the words pasted to the wall.

Red lids blinked again as the thing heaved itself away from the door and started toward me.

Another lid snapped opened on its chin, revealing a black hole.

One suck of air and I knew it was a mouth.

I fired at the first syllable. The thing was blasted back, barking and screaming as it caught the doorframe again, all thirty eyes trained on me now, its splattered chest expanding as it drew another breath through that lidded mouth just as the soldiers outside opened fire with their M4s.

Bullets chopped through flesh. The thing’s lungs collapsed and a single word died on its tongue. Its heart exploded. An instant later, it wasn’t anything more than a corpse spread across a puddle on the living room floor.

“Hey, Old School,” the private said. “Have a drink.”

He tossed me a bottle, and I tipped it back. He was looking over my shotgun. “It’s mean,” he said, “but I don’t know. I like some rock ‘n’ roll when I pull a trigger. All you got with this thing is
rock
.”

“You use it right, it does the job.”

The kid laughed. “Yeah. That’s all that matters, right? Man, you should hear how people talk about this shit back in the Safe Zone. They actually made us watch some lame-ass stuff on the TV before they choppered us out here to the sticks. Scientists talking, ministers talking . . . like we was going to talk these things to death while they was trying to chew on our asses.”

“I met a scientist once,” the sergeant said. “He had some guy’s guts stuck to his face, and he was down on his knees in a lab chewing on a dead janitor’s leg. I put a bullet in his head.”

Laughter went around the circle. I took one last drink and passed the bottle along with it.

“But, you know what?” the private said. “Who gives a shit, anyway? I mean, really?”

“Well,” another kid said. “Some people say you can’t fight something you can’t understand. And maybe it’s that way with these things. I mean, we don’t know where they came from. Not really. We don’t even know what they
are
.”

“Shit, Mendez. Whatever they are, I’ve cleaned their guts off my boots. That’s all I need to know.”

“That works today, Q, but I’m talking long term. As in: What about tomorrow, when we go nose-to-nose with their daddy?”

None of the soldiers said anything for a minute. They were too busy trading uncertain glances.

Then the sergeant smiled and shook his head. “You want to be a philosopher, Private Mendez, you can take the point. You’ll have lots of time to figure out the answers to any questions you might have while you’re up there, and you can share them with the rest of the class if you don’t get eaten before nightfall.”

The men laughed, rummaging in their gear for MREs. The private handed over my shotgun, then shook my hand. “Jamal Quinlan,” he said. “I’m from Detroit.”

“John Dalton. I’m the sheriff around here.”

It was the first time I’d said my own name in five months.

It gave me a funny feeling. I wasn’t sure what it felt like.

Maybe it felt like turning a page.

The sergeant and his men did some mop-up. Mendez took pictures of the lodge, and the bloody words pasted to the living room wall, and that dead thing on the floor. Another private set up some communication equipment and they bounced everything off a satellite so some lieutenant in DC could look at it. I slipped on a headset and talked to him. He wanted to know if I remembered any strangers coming through town back in May, or anything out of the ordinary they might have had with them. Saying
yes
would mean more questions, so I said, “No, sir. I don’t.”

The soldiers moved north that afternoon. When they were gone, I boxed up food from the pantry and some medical supplies. Then I got a gas can out of the boathouse and dumped it in the living room. I sparked a road flare and tossed it through the doorway on my way out.

The place went up quicker than my house in town. It was older. I carried the box over to the truck, then grabbed that bottle the soldiers had passed around. There were a few swallows left. I carried it down to the dock and looked back just in time to see those birds dart from their nest in the chimney, but I didn’t pay them any mind.

I took the boat out on the lake, and I finished the whiskey, and after a while I came back.

Things are getting better now. It’s quieter than ever around here since the soldiers came through, and I’ve got some time to myself. Sometimes I sit and think about the things that might have happened instead of the things that did. Like that very first day, when I spotted that monster in the Chrysler’s trunk out on County Road 14 and blasted it with the shotgun—the gas tank might have exploded and splattered me all over the road. Or that day down in the dark under the high school football stadium—those rat-spiders could have trapped me in their web and spent a couple months sucking me dry. Or with Roy Barnes—if he’d never seen those books in the backseat of that old sedan, and if he’d never read a word about lesser demons, where would he be right now?

But there’s no sense wondering about things like that, any more than looking for explanations about what happened to Barnes, or me, or anyone else. I might as well ask myself why the thing that crawled out of Barnes looked the way it did or knew what it knew. I could do that and drive myself crazy chasing my own tail, the same way Barnes did with all those
maybe’s
and
what if ‘s.

So I try to look forward. The rules are changing. Soon they’ll be back to the way they used to be. Take that soldier. Private Quinlan. A year from now he’ll be somewhere else, in a place where he won’t do the things he’s doing now. He might even have a hard time believing he ever did them. It won’t be much different with me.

Maybe I’ll have a new house by then. Maybe I’ll take off work early on Friday and push around a shopping cart, toss steaks and a couple of six packs into it. Maybe I’ll even do the things I used to do. Wear a badge. Find a new deputy. Sort things out and take care of trouble. People always need someone who can do that.

To tell the truth, that would be okay with me.

That would be just fine.

Them things liked human sacrifices. Had had ’em ages afore, but lost track o’ the upper world after a time. What they done to the victims it ain’t fer me to say . . .

“The Shadow Over Innsmouth” · H.P. Lovecraft (1936)

• GRINDING ROCK •

Cody Goodfellow

One foot in the green, and one in the black,
Tim Vowles kept telling himself, but the edge of the burn had got away from him. All he could see was black smoke and shadows, and the eye-frying orange and hungry red of the fire all around him.

A flaming jackrabbit bolted past, and Vowles reflexively smashed it with his shovel before he realized he should have chased it. The suffering bastards spread the fire like Roman candles, but they always knew the way out.

A minute ago, he’d been at the end of the twenty-man tool line with the other seasonal volunteer firefighters, cutting a fallback break in the dark, and the crew boss was saying everything was under control. The fire had nowhere to go, the evening breeze was driving it back on itself. But the wind changed and he straggled. When the next tool up shouted to keep his dime, he misunderstood and fell back even further, until the fire cut him off and he ran the wrong way, and now it had him.

The hundred-acre brushfire rallied on this patch of undeveloped land in the center of the city like a rogue cavalry unit, contained, but hardly tamed. It broke his heart, the price the land paid for the stupidity of the people—but mostly, because his own stupidity would probably kill him tonight.

Sweat broke out on his forehead and vaporized in the heat. He tied a dry bandana over his face and tried to get his bearings. To the east, the mountain had been gouged out by the Golden West Concrete quarry, and beyond that lay the Navy golf course and Vowles’s own neighborhood. To the north, the ridge joined Mount Fortuna and the Mission Trails Regional Park. The city firefighters were up there, and helicopters had been dumping water and retardant on the park all afternoon. To the south, only a few hundred yards behind the fire line, the red tile roofs of Tierrasanta, upscale pseudo-villas and palatial townhouses, abutted the wild, tinder-dry brush, like an invitation to hell.

Vowles could see none of it.

He should at least have been able to see the lights of the fire engines or hear the call-outs and chainsaws of the tool line, but he got turned around by gusts of hot wind freighted with smoke so black, so thick, he felt hands shoving him, and now he was alone, with only the dancing dragon-shapes of fire to see by, and maybe the lights of his own house flickering in the smoke and roiling heat-haze like impossibly distant stars.

He barely heard his own shouting over the wind and roaring fire, but he heard the eerie howl of dogs quite clearly indeed, for it came from just behind him. Whirling and stumbling over beds of glowing coals, he fell down as if to beg for his life.

A pack of coyotes regarded him from a low rise that put them eye to yellow eye, tongues dangling, pelts black with soot. They howled again, and Vowles could hear other packs all down the canyon below picking up the demented, gibbering lament, and even neighborhood dogs joined in. His own Irish setter, Rusty, chained out in the backyard less than a mile from here, was probably adding his voice to the song of the pack that was about to eat his master.

And then, in mid-howl, they leapt at him. He ran screaming from the pack and into the heart of the fire.

He flew over the blasted moonscape, diving blindly through curtains of smoke and thorny blazing brush whipping at his face, but the pack gained on him and flanked to his right. To his left, where he thought the trucks had to be, pillars of flame lashed at the night, cutting off any hope of escape.

The ridge got steeper, studded with ash-dusted rocks and exploding barrel cacti, but a hollow opened up before him, an island of dense brush that the fire had miraculously passed over, so he ducked into it. The pack loped along the edge, then stopped and sat above him like a row of judges. They whined, but did not follow.

Flames paced the far rim, licking at the gutted carcass of a widowmaker tree. To linger here invited the fire to circle back and eat him alive, so Vowles ran until he stumbled upon a huge slab of granite.

He recognized it as one of the pitted grinding rocks scattered throughout the area, where local Mission Indians once made edible meal from oak acorns. The ancient bowls and gutters were furred with lichen and filled with beer bottle glass, and there were bodies laid out on the rock.

A vaguely human shape crouched over them, like another gnarled, lightning-blasted tree. Vowles walked around it, wiping the ash from his eyes, but he did not react at all when the shape uncurled itself to reach for the sky, and he heard it speak.

“
Ai ch’ich ah N’Kai naguatl!
” The guttural croak cut through the roar of the fire and the keening of the coyotes, creating a bubble of suffocating silence, which trapped Vowles like a fly in amber. “
Ai ch’ich iä Ubbo-Sathla ai shu-t’at ai’ul!
”

The leaden words hung in the air, heavier than the smoke. The speaker slammed some metal object into the stone, ringing it like a dull, gigantic bell, and beckoned to him. He only wanted to run, but his legs wouldn’t move.

Coughing, hacking out strings of liquid smoke, the man on the rock asked, “Is it contained yet?”

The clear, comprehensible question broke the spell, and brought his panic rushing back. “Does it look contained to you? What the hell are you doing out here?”

“I’m waiting, but I think it’s too late. We can’t wait any longer . . . ”

The wind peeled away the seething clouds of smoke, but Vowles could make out no features of the cloaked figure propped on a wooden staff. The bodies laid out before him were painfully visible in the moonlight, the whiteness of their bare skin glowing like cold fire. A man and a woman lay entwined, naked and motionless on the granite altar. Seconds passed before he saw the tidal rise and fall of their chests. Asleep and pleasantly dreaming, as if they’d come out here to ball under the stars, and nodded off in the middle of a brushfire.

“What did you do to them? Get away from there!” Vowles charged man on the grinding rock, but the air was thick as Vaseline, and the hooded figure drove the iron-shod end of the staff into his shoulder before he saw it coming, and drove him to his knees.

“I’m saving them,” said the faceless man. “Touch me, and the fire will get us all.”

Vowles threw himself against the staff, but he got no closer. “We have to get out of here.”

“It will not come,” the old man said, “while the fire burns.”
Old
, Vowles knew, for in the voice, he heard the same exhaustion that dogged his father’s voice, right before his last stroke. “And it must. This must be done.”

“Wake them up, damn it! We can carry them out—”

“They’re not going anywhere, and neither are we.”

“Then we’ll die! What the hell is wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong,” the old man clucked, and hacked out a bitter laugh. “I know the score, that’s what’s wrong with me. Did you think all of this was free? The land demands a sacrifice.”

Vowles had no weapons. He dropped his shovel when he ran from the coyotes, which still sat and watched from the rim of the hollow. He was a part-time firefighter and a finish carpenter in the off-season, and they had never trained him to talk down psychos at Safety Academy. “Hey, mister, I don’t want—”

“You don’t want anyone to get hurt. Neither do I. Tomorrow, a major earthquake, at least a seven-point-seven, will
not
destroy most of San Diego and Orange County. Tens of thousands of people will
not
die, and millions will
not
lose their homes. Because of this . . . ”

“You’re trying to stop the Big One?” Vowles said the words with the skeptical unease of all native Californians shared for the prophecy that, one fine day, California would face the judgment of the angry gods of plate tectonics, and slide into the sea. “There’s no fault line within fifty miles of here.”

“Not the Big One, but an age of Big Ones. The first cracks in the egg under our feet. It doesn’t belong to us, nor do we belong to it.”

Vowles still wasn’t getting any closer. Pushing at the gelid air, he demanded, “Are you making this happen?”

“Does an antenna make music? There is power here, and it wants to be released.

“The Indians believed that on the day of creation, they were born out of the womb of the earth, but there were spirits in the land, those left behind.

“They are older than the world, but still unborn. They dream life into the world. They long to awaken and shake us off, but they may be tamed—”

The old man knelt before the naked bodies, crabbed hands basking in the residual heat of their embrace. “This is their wedding night.”

Way out of his depth, Vowles tried to keep the man talking, “But why does anyone have to get hurt?”

“California was an Eden, once—the people who lived here for ten thousand years never had to invent clothes or weapons or agriculture, but they knew the price. A tribe of shamans lived in this valley. They stole babies from the Kumeyaay bands to raise as their own, and every generation, they sacrificed a man and a woman, and they lived in paradise until the white men came.

“Nobody remembers,” the old man wheezed. “Nobody understands what has to be done . . . But some of us have been called . . . We dream, and we remember—”

Vowles picked up a rock and cocked it behind his head. “Don’t you touch them!”

“
I
won’t,” the old man said.

Beneath his feet, Vowles felt the ground crumble and run like an hourglass draining.

He threw the rock, watched it hang in the air as the ground itself reared up under his feet and tossed him aside. The arrested rock floated over a yawning hole in the earth.

Vowles rolled and jumped back against the wall of the hollow, his hands scratching for another rock.

“I wouldn’t look, if I were you,” the old man shouted.

Vowles looked.

Something bubbled up out of the hole and exploded into the night sky, a column of rampant, liquid blackness against the fiery horizon. Even as it grew, it shivered with feverish desperation to take on a coherent shape. Crude attempts at eyes and mouths bloomed and dissolved all over it, whole faces popping out and then eating themselves in a shape-shifting totem pole of molten tar.

The human imperative to make order of chaos lured Vowles into staring, trying to make sense of it. Though it tried to mimic the men and the coyotes and the widowmaker tree and all the shapes that thrived and died on the earth, the black, unborn thing was made of the living earth itself. And it was clearly not even a
thing
, but the tiniest extremity of something unfathomably vast, like the egg tooth of a hatchling, cracking out of its shell.

Breaking like a wave over the grinding rock, the living earth undulated and churned, and when it rolled back, the bride and groom were gone. As it receded, the black tar grew arms and legs and torsos and wistfully caressed itself, melting male and female forms achieving oneness as it slithered out of sight.

The ground shuddered, settled and sank. Vowles clawed at the wall of the hollow, kicked at sand sifting into the collapsing chasm. Cold sweat broke out all over his body as every knotted muscle in him abruptly gave out. Unnoticed, his bladder voided down his trembling leg and pooled in the depression where the long-ago thrown rock fell at his feet.

The old man climbed down from the boulder, slowly, groaning, clinging for support to his staff.

Vowles rushed him again, no rock needed, his fists would do. “What the hell was that? You knew it was coming, didn’t you? What was it . . . that . . . ate them—”

“I can’t say if they’re dead, or whether they’re not better off, down there.” The old man took a step up the trail, seeming to shrivel and sicken, as he retreated from the rock. “That is where we came from, after all . . . ”

Vowles jumped after the old man, arms out to tackle him. A coyote hit him across his left shoulder and drove him to the ground. The pack closed in on him, yellow eyes lambent in the guttering firelight, whining under some invisible yoke as they herded him back until the old man climbed painfully out of the hollow.

“You won’t get away with this—”

“No, son, I don’t think I will.” The old man threw back his hood. Shadows blotted his face, brittle and black and crumbling away from his skull when he moved. The face beneath the mask of ashes shone hideously in the moonlight, the sickly glitter of exposed, broiled muscle and charred bone. One eye fastened on Vowles, while the other was a burst, weeping sac.

“Your kids go to school with my grandkids,” the old man said. “We shop at the same supermarket, we rent movies from the same Blockbuster. In twenty years, when this has to be done again, praise God, I won’t have to see it. But
you
 . . . if you love this land—”

He vanished. The coyotes howled, and then they, too, were gone.

Vowles ran all the way to the firebreak, shattering blurred panes of orange and black like he was leaping through stained-glass windows. He ran faster and more frantically than when he was being chased, because the sweat and urine soaking him turned to live steam and scalded him inside his Nomex safety gear.

Firefighters rushed him with blankets, wrestled him onto a gurney in the back of an ambulance, and cut off his clothes. He kept telling them he was fine, he felt great, he wanted to go home. They had to sedate him to make him see the blisters, like the yolks of hundreds of fried eggs, all over his body.

They let Dana take him home after two, and he watched the rebroadcast of the eleven o’clock news in bed with a beer and a handful of prescription Motrin. He thought he saw himself among the tiny, desperate ants toiling on the ridge shot by the news chopper. The fire was ninety percent contained, but the cause was still unknown and chalked up to an act of God.