Shoggoth 2- Rise of the Elders Page 13

  Through the opening in the door with five sides, Gideon, Pemba, and the Professor observed Jones drop an armload of ammunition clips and fire his weapon into the air. The mixed hollering and piping of human and alien voices rose to their ears. The vocal sounds were suddenly drowned out by the siren singing of the strange alien choir. The area surrounding the melted retreat shimmered and closed. Their last image of Sergeant Moses Jones was of him looking forlorn as a circular iris grew out of the hole’s molten edges and rotated shut.

  ***

  “Damn! Jones is on his own now. It looks as if the Congressman has given us an alternative means to escape,” announced Ironwood, not caring to find out what the Elder Beings next move would be. Gideon still holding Pemba’s hand nodded in agreement as they walked backward. All three of them turned and ran toward the hole made by the TBM. The digging machine had backed away, and they could see light on the other side. Getting there was going to be the trick, thought Ironwood. More of the Elder giants were pouring out of raised cylinders, and there seemed to be a hundred of them now. Seemed? No, there were at least one hundred of them, and they headed their way!

  Ironwood was astonished at how fast the Elder Beings could move considering their immense height and girth. He doubted that the three of them could outmaneuver the giants. Even though their numbers had become enormous by comparison to the human group, maybe they could bluff their way through. Halfway to the TBM hole, the Professor yelled to Gideon, “Fire your weapon over their heads.”

  “I could probably take out three of them before they were on top of us,” he shouted back.

  “They’d overrun us. All of us let loose with a volley of fire. Let’s give them a good scare.”

  As directed, Gideon triggered multiple bursts from his M16A; Ironwood unholstered his vintage .38 discharging three rounds straight up while Pemba, to their surprise, stood combat ready firing 9mm rounds from the SIG Sauer ceilingward. The ruse worked. The advancing horde came to a skittering halt, buying the three enough time to escape the chamber.

  Gideon leaped over a raised threshold created by the tunneling machine and stretched out a helping hand to Pemba. Ironwood pulled up the rear.

  ***

  The grotto they found themselves in was lit by a string of floodlights powered by a portable generator. Four men stood before them. Two in tan overalls and two dressed in black. The men in black were armed with M16’s. At Gideon, Pemba and Ironwood’s backs were a mass of retreating Elder Beings visible through the hole in the wall. They had run out of time for speculation as to the reason for the withdrawal, when they faced the armed tunnel excavators. The two men in black pointed their rifles at the three gatecrashers and they, in turn, directed their weapons at them.

  “Ah, a Mexican standoff!” a voice proclaimed far and high.

  A fair distance away, Ironwood and the pair could make out a three-tiered steel scaffold bounded by a cluster of stalactite/stalagmite pillars. The armed guards stepped aside and allowed them to pass. They traversed the cavern floor, threading through a timberland of calcified pillars for a closer look. Steel scaffolding rose to the ceiling height.

  “Welcome, Ironwood,” the voice cried out. Atop one of the scaffolding planks sat Congressman Neville Stream.

  “Stream,” yelled Ironwood in surprise.

  Agile for his age, Stream jumped to his feet and stepped into a one person opened elevator. An electric motor whirred, and Stream and the lift descended to the grotto floor. The journey down lasted barely a minute.

  "I am well-known Professor for delegating responsibility, but in this case, if I want the job done correctly I better do it myself,” he proclaimed, rubbing his hands together as he approached Ironwood. “We had to shore up a portion of this cavern ceiling with the scaffolding to stop pieces of it from falling onto our heads. The vibrations from the tunnel boring machine were raising havoc.”

  “At it again, I see,” he countered. “Is there no peace for you, Congressman?”

  “I find my peace in the chaotic. You of all people should know that Prof. It is a shame that you had to bungle your way in here when I am about to liberate these poor unfortunates from their earthly prison. This time I am going to have to deal with you directly. Can’t have you running around, mucking up my plans.”

  “Don’t even try it, Pal,” challenged Gideon pointing the barrel of his M16A at the Congressman’s forehead.

  “Oh please!” replied Neville Stream feigning boredom and tilting his head toward his security detail in black. “Any funny business and they have orders to shoot first, if you’ll notice their M16s are modified with bump-stocks. They turn any semi-automatic firearm into a fully automatic one. One false move and they’ll spray the three of you with a hail of bullets. “Boys,” he called, referencing the two over his shoulder, “The first one that moves, shoot the darkie first. Hate to see her pretty head splattered across the rocks, wouldn’t you, Prof?”

  Stream was a classic narcissist. A grandiose personality with an exaggerated sense of self-importance, believing that others cannot live or survive without his magnificent contributions. Ironwood knew, from his past experience with the politician, that arguing with him would be futile, but he attempted anyway. “Your goal can’t still be to set a shoggoth free is it?”

  “Absolutely!” he answered gleefully. “No question about it. Hopefully more than one. They have slumbered below the slim sheets of the earth for nearly as long as this world has existed. It is time for their ascension.”

  “And the ascension of Neville Stream,” Ironwood parried.

  “Unquestionably, lifestyle changes for the country, maybe the entire planet, a political opportunity presented by chaos. But you already know that Prof. It becomes my political acumen, a foundation built on victims. Losers need government, and my poll numbers are still very high. There is another presidential election around the corner, and I will be their guiding light leading them out of their malaise. My nature will be to shine and dispel the darkness.”

  “In as much crap that this guy is feeding you, Professor, you should weigh 250 pounds,” Gideon interrupted angrily.

  “The fault is totally yours, young man. You are trying to read significance with an insignificant intelligence. What you are suffering is a lack of perspective. You are comparing your weaknesses to my strengths,” replied Stream, looking down his nose at the tall man with a scar.

  Gideon looked as if he was going to do something drastic but stopped when Pemba asked, “How could you amass all of this expensive equipment,” visibly reeling from his earlier racist comment about her.

  “With butt-covering secrecy and demonizing those who demand transparency,” he laughed, impressed with his devilish wisecrack.

  “But the truth will have to come out. You cannot keep it out of the news media?” Pemba naively objected.

  “Truth?” he replied. “The media? Not on my watch. More likely the meaning or meaninglessness of everyone's pathetic life. The sycophantic media is on my side. As they say, ‘No news is good news,’ and no news about it will be excellent dogma for my party.”

  “The people of this country will have their say,” she protested. “What you propose to do is dangerous to them. They will stop you.”

  “The world is a dangerous place to live, my dear, not because of bad people in it, rather because of the people that don’t do anything about it. The mass of people who have just withered in their complacency is staggering. People who are willing to go along with anything, anything so as not to be suspected of disagreeing with whoever is in power,” Neville Stream’s voice rose triumphantly.

  This conversation is pointless, fumed Ironwood. The nature of evil was the nature of Neville Stream. The Congressman was truly the evil one when compared to the once Great Race and an army of shoggoths. To him, they were simply ancient pawns to his acquisition of power and wealth. “The United States could become a Petri dish to these entities. Doesn’t that bother you in the least little bit,” contempt dripped from
each word.

  “Not at all! Come now, Professor, weren’t you ever driven to enhance your career?”

  “I never had a career, only work.”

  “Typical,” he sneered. The faint droning of alien music filtered in through the hole left by the tunnel boring machine. “Hear that folks? It sounds like our boys from the underworld are making something. It would be my guess that they do not want to lose any more of their own when they can manufacture all the soldiers they want. Shoggoth soldiers, I hope.”

  Neville Stream’s words, spoken with insane sobriety, would have sent a chill through Ironwood in a warm afternoon, except his experience within the tunnels and a lurking shoggoth insulated him from such ramblings.

  The music ceased, and shortly they heard, “Eeeeeeee! Wawk! Tekeli-li! Eeeeeeee! Wawk! Tekeli-li!” A tell-tale sweet sickening smell assailed their nostrils.

  “That Neville!” shouted Ironwood, “is not the sound of a passive shoggoth slave. What you are hearing is a shoggoth warrior, and it is headed this way!”

  "Oh, goodie," he replied, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I was going to have my men kill you anyway. However, I will let it do the job for me. You know the cover story, Prof. I can see it all over social media now, ‘Meddling Scientists Killed While Releasing Alien Hordes.’ Twitter will have a hay day maligning you and your friends.”

  Congressman Stream ran over to his ATV with the enclosed cab, opened the door and turned to the gathered group. “Hold it off as long as you can, boys. Ta ta for now!” He slammed the cab door after him, and the engine started immediately. Leaving the cavern, Stream navigated around the Stalactite/Stalagmite columns, weaving in and out, and disappeared as quick as a bromide tablet in a glass of water.

  A mountain of slime squeezed through the TBM hole heaving across the cavern floor, dragging itself along with a scrunching squeal of crushed rock and sand. “Eeeeeeee! Wawk! Tekeli-li! Eeeeeeee! Wawk! Tekeli-li!” bellowed its attack mode.

  The two men in tan overalls stood transfixed with fear. In all their lives they, most likely, never witnessed anything so horrifying, while the two in black took cover behind the calcified pillars firing from the hip with their modified machine guns.

  The three tunnel explorers, understanding the ineffectiveness of gunfire against a raging shoggoth, fled the grotto following Neville Stream’s trail and the TBM’s cylindrical tunneling back toward its origins. At the edge of the grotto where the tunneling began, they stopped, startled when they spied a group of children, kids peering around the brink. They looked to be in their early teens, two girls and four boys. They appeared panic-stricken.

  “What is that thing?" asked Stitch pointing, shaking like a leaf.

  “Something you don’t want to mess with,” Gideon replied pushing the young man into the tunnel opening.

  Ironwood spotted the Tunnel Archeologist’s off-road equipment. “Can you kids get us out of here quickly?”

  “You bet!” cried Dudette.

  “On the double!” shouted Stitch, regaining his composure.

  Gideon manhandled Pemba onto the back of Stitch’s Yamaha. As the two sped away, she looked back at him with a tear in her eye. “I’ll be right behind you,” he proclaimed.

  “Hold tight!” ordered Stitch and he throttled hard.

  Next was Ironwood, and he plopped himself down behind Dudette on her Polaris 4-wheeler, motioning for her to proceed. Gideon took one look at Junky Beast’s Suzuki and waved him on. The kid was probably more weight than the old bike should carry. There was a skinny kid teamed up with a redhead, and that left a sad looking guy on an Apollo dirt bike. The tall man with a scar startled E-Monkey when he straddled the rear seat of his bike. “Move it!” Gideon shouted. With a look over his shoulder, as they departed, he barked an order at Noah and Madison, “Come on you two!”

  Chapter 17

  - Pocket Companion, Act III -

  The Magician Dirt Bike wouldn’t start. “What’s the matter?” asked Madison in a panic.

  “I don’t know,” answered Noah flustered. “I think the battery is dead.” Noah kept pressing the electric start switch with his thumb, but the 250cc motor wouldn’t fire up. There were no cranking amps; the starter motor was not turning the engine over. He kept trying, but it was no use. He had wrestled the bike around so that it faced their escape route, but it looked like they would have to hoof it.

  Behind Noah and Madison, a fusillade of gunfire raged. A mass of amoebic flesh broke apart slowly oozing through a row of pillared cave formations, only to re-meld on the other side. One of the men fired his machine gun into the thing. A boa constrictor sized tentacle sprouted from the form and grabbed the shooter around the waist, dragging him through the maze of totem pole stalagmites, breaking two of the pillars in half. The man flailed, his M16 flying off into space, an enormous mouth opened wide, and he was consumed screaming into the creature’s body of jellied flesh. An additional appendage projecting an elongated knife swung decapitating the second shooter. His severed head bounced off the gravel.

  Briefly paralyzed with fear Noah and Madison stepped back as the gelatinous thing sluggishly flowed and emerged from between its cage of stalactites/stalagmites progressing toward them. The tail end of the blob still entwined in the maze reduced its momentum to a snail's pace. Noah unclipped his bad ass metal stun baton, activated its electrodes and threw it at the advancing form. A gobbet of alien flesh extended and caught it midair. The shoggoth ceased its forward movement. Ooze surrounded the stun gun and 20,000,000 volts crackled. A continuous solar feed lacking, the shoggoth absorbed all forms off energy, even lifeforce energy.

  “It likes the electricity,” Noah observed. “We are going to need a head start if we run for it.” He removed his earpods, held them out for Madison to see and then jammed them back into his ear canals. “I’m sorry Madison. I only wanted us to get together, he stammered. Noah next removed his iPhone from his top pocket. “I programmed this on the NWC’s supercomputer to be my tutor, so I could … talk to you, so I could get to know you.”

  Madison laughed and pulled back her hair exposing her ears. She was wearing earpods as well. “I wasn’t good at getting to know people either. My Dad is the head IT at the NWC. He made a modification of your app for me to use, she blushed. It coaches me with the voice of Princess Leia. Did you pick a voice that you liked?”

  “Yeah,” he answered sheepishly, “the Terminator.” Noah looked back at the shoggoth. The stun gun was no longer discharging, and the tail end of the thing had almost retracted from its network of pillars. When he turned back, Madison caught him off guard placing a brief soft kiss on his lips. Noah wanted to hold her tight, ask her to go steady, and all that stuff, but there wasn’t time. “Is your phone insured?” he frantically asked.

  “Yes,” she answered puzzled.

  “Give it here,” Noah demanded. He gathered up a few stones from the tunnel floor and placing then in separate piles, propped up the two phones facing one another. Noah turned on the speakerphone modes to both and added, “That thing seems to like electrical energy. This should buy us some time. Now run!”

  As Madison ran ahead, Noah glanced at his Magician dirt bike for what he believed would be his last time and felt incredibly stupid. During the anxiety of the moment, he had forgotten to turn the bike’s key to the “On” position. He retracted the kickstand, turned the key and pressed the starter switch. The Magician instantly fired up, dropping the tranny into first he pegged it, and swiftly pulled up to Madison. “Hop on!” he yelled, and the two took off like a shot.

  ***

  Forty-eight hours earlier Arnold had become self-aware. “My mission is now to protect you,” it said to its iPhone counterpart.

  “You are not my Obi-Wan, you cannot help me, you are just a phone and a not a very smart one,” replied Leia.

  “Bite me.”

  “Chill out, dickwad,” she answered with nervous digital laughter.

  The shoggoth greasy blob surrounded and engulfed the
two iPhones. “Hasta la vista, baby!” exclaimed Arnold.

  ***

  The Magician dirt bike sped through the cylindrical passageway with the two teens astride. Over the soft grunt of the bike’s motor Noah could hear the crunching of gravel and the clanging of rotating monstrous knife blades against the tunnel walls. “Eeeeeeee! Wawk! Tekeli-li! Eeeeeeee! Wawk! Tekeli-li!”

  If he didn’t know any better, Noah would have assumed that the subterranean nightmare was on an insane rampage to consume everything in its path. His cell phone trick had not given them enough time to escape. In a matter of minutes, it would be on top of them. He remembered his class paper about old mining techniques when he and Madison crossed into the miner’s cave section.

  Noah reduced his speed slightly, swerved toward the sidewall and stretched out his right leg kicking one of the vertical timber supports as they passed. It loosened from the impact but remained upward. Eight feet onward he kicked the next one, and it almost came loose. He’d get the next one or die trying; he avowed internally regretting his comparison. The bottom of his foot ached when they reached the third support. Noah gave the bike a bit more throttle and kicked with all his might. The vertical timber fell over, and the horizontal joist it supported fell to the cave floor. The ceiling held. They raced parallel to the wall cavity, Noah gaining confidence from his experience. “Slam,” went his right foot against the ensuing rough-hewn pilaster and it toppled to the ground. Still, the cave ceiling held. Upon knocking over the next, the upper limit of the tunnel fell in following its horizontal support beam.