Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear (16 page)

Tupolev Tu-95 Long-Range Bomber

Altitude 20,000 feet, near Point Nemo

Event + 30 hours

Flying west into the late-afternoon sun, the long-range reconnaissance aircraft known as “The Bear” thundered over Point Nemo. Because its eight sets of turboprop propellers—the Bear was first built in 1956 and had been in service ever since—spun faster than the speed of sound, sonic booms continually rent the air wherever it flew.

For this mission, however, stealth was not a concern. The Russians were not content to let the United States act unilaterally on behalf of the entire world. But the Cold War superpower knew, because this Event had occurred in the Western Hemisphere, that the US would be first at Ground Zero—Water Zero?—with their drones and their satellites. But President Zhikin also knew the Americans were afraid to send manned aircraft into the area.

Russia may no longer have had the military capabilities of the Americans, but it was not
afraid
. Russian strength was at the forefront when the order came down for the Bear to bring its cameras—and its bombs—to the precise location of the anomaly, of this
Kuh-thoo-loo
, the storybook monster the Americans were using as a cover story.

But a cover for what? Russian satellites had detected nothing unusual near Point Nemo, no grouping of ships of any kind, let alone military vessels. Automated long-range radar from Antarctica and other bases had revealed no particular concentration of aircraft until
after
the Event, when the American UAVs had begun canvassing the area.

Still, the seven crew members operating the Bear were there to carry out orders, not to guess at why they were made or even to know what was going on. Those orders this time were to fly to a specific point in the South Pacific, find what was referred to in their orders only as
anomaliya
, an “abnormality,” in the water and then empty its entire bomb bay on that anomalous target. In that bay were eight conventionally armed Kh-101 air launch cruise missiles since Russia, even though it was proud to flex its muscles in this crisis, didn’t want to invite the international derision that dropping a nuclear bomb would undoubtedly invite. Besides, the combined eight Kh-101 missiles were more than enough used in concert to vaporize any target the Bear crew chose.

As they approached Point Nemo, it immediately became clear that the glowing, somehow nebulous object (which looked very much like a sea monster’s head, making the crew laugh even as they shuddered) was the
anomaliya
they had been tasked with bombing shortly before taking off from the heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser
Admiral Flota Sovetskogo Soyuza Kuznetsov
north of Australia.

Still, the pilot asked for confirmation of what he—as well as the bomber’s many video cameras transmitting footage via satellite link to both the
Kuznetsov
and Moscow—saw some 30 miles ahead of the Bear. They could launch the self-guided missiles at any point now once they received confirmation.

The auxiliary pilot confirmed it, as did the navigator. A final confirmation came from their cruiser, which had gotten the word from Moscow. This weird and massive
thing
was in fact what they were being ordered to destroy.

The navigator figured the exact coordinates of the anomaly and called them back to the bombardier crew, who punched in the codes and opened the bomb bay doors. They led a countdown each man on the Bear could hear and use to prepare himself.

“
Pyat
,” the chief bombardier called into his headset.
Five.

“
Galochka
,” the pilot responded.
Check.

“
Chetyre
.”

“
Galochka
.”

“
Tree
.”

“
Gal
—” the pilot started to say, but the navigator keeping track of the anomaly’s coordinates held up the count.

“
Ona dvizhetsya
,” the navigator said almost in a whisper.
It moves.

At that instant, all seven men on board the Tupolev Tu-95 shrieked like they were on fire. The pilot yanked the wheel as hard as possible to turn the Bear around in evasive action from its course toward the anomaly, from that
thing
that had suddenly pierced their hearts with terror and the panicked urge need to
get away
. The pilot didn’t drop the throttle for a second; in fact he throttled
up
as he threw the giant bomber into a 180-degree turn at top velocity.

UYTI!
the pilot’s mind screamed as he put all his weight behind the wheel.
UYTI!

GET AWAY!

It was too much. The powerful turboprops that made the Bear invaluable for its speed worked against it now, momentum shearing off the rear of the aircraft just in front of the bomb bay. The bombardier crew and the Bear’s eight unexploded bombs fell away and out of sight as they spiraled toward the ocean three miles below.

Without the weight of half the aircraft but with its wings and fuel tank still attached, the cockpit and the rest of the bomber to the fore of the bomb bay rocketed up and up, the men unconscious from the loss of pressure until the Bear ran out of fuel and dropped them to their deaths as well, in the icy ocean several hundred miles from Point Nemo.

Before they lost consciousness, however, although each man knew he was about to die, all were grateful to merciful God that their last seconds were spent racing farther and farther away from the
anomaliya
, that unnatural, sanity-shattering abortion rising from the sea.

The crew members of the Tupolev Tu-95 Long-Range Bomber were the first to die from the insanity and panic incurred by exposure to a psionic wave pulsing from a moving Cthulhu. These waves would crest and fall in a chaotic pattern after a few trips around the globe, peaks of intensity eventually reaching almost every spot on Earth. Unlike the spectacular but brief explosion of psionic charge that was the Event, these waves were relentless in their cruel effects.

Louisiana Bayou

Event + 30 hours

The cult leader, chieftain, whatever Howard was to these unfortunately malformed (
degenerate
)
Tulu
worshipers, he was not
of
them, that much was obvious to Kristen Frommer. He spoke the speech of a modern American. His “worship group,” however, was made up of loincloth-wearing primitives who, even though they could say a few words of English through their malformed mouths, seemed to have been dropped into the Louisiana swamps straight from the “fish people” tribe of Papua New Guinea. (Which made sense, she supposed, since they shared the word
Tulu
. They also seemed much more comfortable chanting the consonant-garbled language—”R’lyehian”—during their unceasing prostrations and praising of the weird octopus-god statue on the altar.

Howard and Kristen had been discussing, arguing even, about the nature of the sacrifice needed for her to join their clan, tribe, cult, for an hour or more.

“You just believe, really
believe
, that
Tulu
is a god who has come back to claim Earth as His own,” Howard said, and repeated this sentiment a dozen different ways during their long … negotiation? That’s what it felt like to Kristen, anyway.

She stated her side to Howard, from many different angles, but they all boiled down to “I can’t just
believe
. I see that it’s had results for you and your … people, but how do I know that has anything to do with your
Tulu?
Christians and Muslims could be making the same claims about
their
God.”

But they weren’t, Kristen knew from the television coverage. Every cleric of any mainstream religion brought onto the news or talk shows explicitly pushed back against the idea that the object of their faith would ever do something like this. Theirs were gods of mercy, they insisted, not gods of terror. Even the Old Testament Yahweh, known for his anger and terrible retribution when things didn’t go his way, was defended by rabbis and Jewish theologians as at least having a method to his (
madness
) destruction.

“The time to believe is coming very, very soon, Kristen. Soon it will be too late for you, and you are essential to spreading the word about
Tulu
, how to worship Him, how to be spared as He takes what was His so many millions of years ago.”

“Too late?”

Howard took a deep breath and let it out slowly, the way Kristen did sometimes with especially dense students. “I had to go through this very process myself, years ago. When I met them ten years ago, it was because I was doing researches into medicinal plant life reported in the literature as being common in this area. It was held to have seemingly magical healing properties, but then, so did aspirin back in the day.”

“Are you a medicine man or something? Their witch doctor?”

“Ha!” Howard barked. “I have a medical degree, but at the time I was working for a major pharmaceutical concern, trying to get them new raw material to work with. I was a doctor who didn’t do much healing … back then.”

Kristen nodded, but at what she wasn’t sure.

“Anyway, so I traveled here, following paths just barely visible through the swamp vegetation, and in a cluster
just
poking out from the green water I found exactly what the earlier explorers had written about,
Argemone
albiflora
Hornem, otherwise known as the bluestem pricklypoppy. I carefully dug out the roots and put the plants in my moisture-regulated sample bag. I looked around for more, but didn’t find any more right away. That was all right, since the sample I had would be enough to start work on analyzing and synthesizing its active ingredients.

“That’s when I heard the screaming.
Human
screaming, coming from very close by. I guess my Hippocratic Oath kicked in, because I immediately left off the search for more of the pricklypoppy and waded around a cluster of trees. And there they were, this
Tulu
-worshiping group of what looked like inbred Pacific Islanders, although all of them had surely been born here in the States.”

Kristen wondered how urgent the need for her to
believe
immediately could have been considering the length of Howard’s story. But she shut that away and refocused on what the man was saying.

“One of their number’s young men—his name was Sinamoi—had slipped on a stump and fallen into a mud hole, where his momentum pushed him forward and made his femur snap like a tree branch. It was a horrible injury out here where there was no Western medicine. His leg would grow gangrenous and he would most likely die.”

“But you were there.”

“Exactly. Without a thought to my corporate masters, I fished the supposedly magical pain-killing plant out of my bag and gestured that he needed to ingest it right away. He did and fell into a deep sleep where no pain, apparently, could reach him. I set his leg and formed a makeshift cast from leaves and whatnot. When Sinamoi awoke, he was still in some pain, but a lot less. I gave him the rest of the plant to chew as he needed it. We became fast friends and when he told me—in broken English, hand gestures, and pointing at the idol—of their faith, it just clicked with me. It wasn’t until later that I learned the tribe was panicked about losing Sinamoi, since he had been designated ‘the keeper of secrets’ when he was just a little boy.”

“I fell into
Tulu
worship
hard
. I let my apartment in Long Island go, let my furniture rot, let my relatives have my stuff. I wasn’t married and didn’t have any kids. So I stayed here and learned from this boy and his tribe.”

“That’s really interesting, Howard, but, um … what does it have to do with
Tulu?
And wouldn’t the tribe already know the medicinal value of plants they had lived among for decades, maybe centuries?”

“Their time was spent in worship of this tentacled, alien-looking god through the odd icon that sits even now upon their altar. They did little else except eat and sleep and copulate, always dedicating their actions to Him. They don’t care about anything else, except enjoying one another’s fellowship.”

“Okay, so they were (
ignorant
) unsophisticated to Western eyes and thought you had performed a miracle with the plant. So how did
you
become one of them, let alone their leader? Did they perform miracles for you as well?”

Howard smiled. “Actually, they did. Some of them spoke enough English that we were able to form a pidgin much like Tok Pisin after being together for a few weeks—”

“A few
weeks?
”

“I know, I know. We were of one mind, and they chose me to be the keeper of secrets after Sinamoi. I just left all of that American crap behind. I was declared missing, I assume, even dead after the requisite seven years, but by that time I was not just a fellow
Tulu
worshiper, but the chief of the tribe because of my ability to communicate with the outside world, something that will be needed when He rises.”