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  “And I, as well!” Tyson added. “I was there for some six hours, with all of you!” They searched one another’s faces and saw their shocked expressions reflected at them, each almost imperceptibly nodding.

  Except, again, for Bob Nye. He looked less shocked and more befuddled with each new confirmation. Also, he noted in his organized internal way that another of the group hadn’t chimed in, “Ron?” he said to them with a note of distress. “Guys, where’s Ron?”

  It took only seconds for them to find the unmoving figure on the floor around the corner of the lab island from where they had grouped. He always sported a tan from his beloved geological fieldwork, but that had given way to a bluish gray, the color of a corpse. Nye, looking pretty gray himself, knelt and put two fingers against his jugular.

  He looked up at Tyson and shook his head.

  “Son of a bitch,” Sibbald muttered.

  “Damn crap!” Li Clarke cried. “He was dead in the dream!

  “He was bigger than most of us,” Gibson said, trying to apply logic in a world that no longer seemed logical. “I remember we all had the same amount or a reasonable approximation. How could he have too much? I’m not a biologist, but the rest of us are fine.”

  “I am a biologist,” Betty Baker said, “and I can’t understand how fine all of us are, except Ron … oh no, oh lord …”

  “I’m not fine,” Nye said.

  “What? Do you feel sick?” Tyson asked his friend. “Ron’s dead; none of us should ignore any—”

  “No, my body isn’t damaged. I might’ve hit my head on the floor, but that’s not what I mean.” He was staring into space, but then shook himself out of his stupor and met each one of their gazes. “I didn’t have any nightmare. I feel like I was passed out for three minutes, maybe gone for six hours, mind-melding with you guys, not gone at all. Actually … I was dead.”

  Looks of concern and disbelief greeted his words. But not understanding. He could see that they weren’t getting what he was trying to tell them. He swallowed hard, his iconic Adam’s apple bobbing as millions had seen many times on television.

  Tyson said, “So you were dead. Thousands of people ‘die’ on operating tables every year before being revived. Only a handful report ‘near-death experiences,’ and some studies show that these may be the results of impaired oxygen flow to the occipital—”

  “Norm, stop lecturing everybody for five damn seconds,” Sibbald snapped, then said to Nye, “You’re a famous non-deist. So, you died for a minute! What did you expect, a choir of angels?”

  “That’s incredibly insensitive,” Baker said. “Ron Leib is dead dead, forever, on the floor right freaking here.”

  “He was the biggest atheist of any of us, and that’s saying something,” Sibbard said with an admiring nod at the deceased geologist. “If he had subjective experience right now, he’d feel vindicated that there’s maybe no subjective experience after death. Um, hell, you know what I mean.”

  Tyson stood in front of Bob Nye, put his hand on his shoulder and said gently, “You’re alive, buddy. You’re alive, and no God or Devil is waiting for us. You’ve written books about that. We have to get the hell out of Washington, or none of us are even going to be alive for much longer, okay?”

  Nye, who had been looking down at Tyson’s loud planet necktie while its owner spoke, looked at Tyson with a bloodshot expression of alarm. “What? Why? We sniffed the mercury so Cthulhu can’t affect us. That was the conjecture, anyway.”

  “Why? Because there are at least two nuclear bombs about to drop on DC!”

  Nye kept staring into Tyson’s eyes, but now it was a look of confusion, even suspicion. He said as he looked at the others, too, “So you’re all psychic now? You can see the future just because you inhaled Mercury fumes? What is this, a superhero origin story?”

  “It’s not just because of the Mercury,” Baker said. “It’s because of the psionic waves coming from Cthulhu’s herald form. I don’t even know what that is. Wait, why do I know what that is?”

  “Betty, focus,” Tyson said. “But yes, we all know what it is. We all know it from the dream.”

  Nye didn’t need to mention that he did not know it because he was dead, but not dreaming like the others.

  “Sorry, yeah.” She took a second to remember what she had been saying. “Okay ... whatever Cthulhu’s titular form is, it is sending out ‘psionic waves,’ right? Here we’re just defining ‘psionic’ as ‘created by a brain,’ with high-amplitude signals coming from the enormous brain of Cthulhu.”

  “This is getting circular,” Sibbald scoffed.

  “Whatever, Len. The point is that these waves are also truly ‘psionic’ in that they affect other brains. They don’t affect the mentally ill, why we took the mercury in the first place, or the intoxicated. That’s because their brain chemistry is different from that of the billions of people who were killed or driven mad by those waves since Cthulhu rose.”

  Tyson, still with his hand on Nye’s shoulder, said, “Your conclusions today, please.” He never talked that way to anyone, except a back-and-forth with smartass Bob Nye, but they were all snapping at one another under the stress of the world ending.

  “Okay, here you go: Norm, the ‘just enough’ insanity thing worked. We all injured our brains just enough to avoid the bad mojo from Cthulhu. I just realized that since I’m back, I don’t sense that horrible static somewhere deep in my psyche, as I’ve had since the Event.”

  “The holy crap,” Li Clarke said again, visibly realizing she didn’t feel it anymore, either.

  “But something else happened, too,” Baker continued. “I know this sounds nuts, but the mercury coupled with the psionic energy has made us … what Len said: we’re psychic. Clairvoyant.”

  “Jesus,” Molly Gibson said.

  Len closed his eyes and shook his head, unable to credit what he was hearing.

  Even gentle Norm Tyson said, “I think somebody’s brain got a little more injured than the rest of them.”

  “Come on,” Baker said in an almost exasperated tone. “I’m building a tentative theory on the information and experiences we have on hand. I believe there is something behind the veil; our minds are connected somehow, and we saw, or at least dreamed the near future. Based on this—admittedly anecdotal—evidence, we need to get the hell out of Dodge before those nukes destroy the city.”

  Tyson, Gibson, Sibbald, and Clarke exchanged glances that were at once questions, wry comments, deadly serious comments, and, finally, agreement.

  “Most everybody in Washington’s dead already, in non-psychic reality,” Tyson said. “It’s not like staying here is going to do anything for us that would balance leaving and not taking a chance of being blasted to smithereens. I got the keys to the Department’s black SUV, seats ten. Let’s go.”

  The five scientists who were not Bob Nye nodded to one another. Before Tyson moved to leave, Bob Nye said, “There is nothing behind the veil.”

  Chapter 2:

  Shoggoths

  St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City, USA

  41° N 74° W, 14540 km from the South Pole

  Rising + 6 hours

  It’s a sign; Archbishop James Morley thought, a message from the Lord to the faithful.

  Twelve hours had passed since one Chinese, and one Russian missile had released their hellfire over New York, Washington DC, Moscow, and Beijing. But, by the grace of God, St. Patrick’s Cathedral remained standing, although its stained-glass windows were but shards on the floor, and it was packed with worshipers. Most were shell-shocked by the risen Cthulhu from the sea even before everything had been blasted to smoking rubble. Some were in a kind of religious fugue state, counting their rosaries and chanting prayers over and over.

  All were afraid. From anxiety to full-blown terror, a miasma of fear filled the nave of St. Patrick’s. But Morley knew the fear was unfounded because they were alive. God had spared all those and, in the burning city, perhaps only those who took shel
ter within His church between the rise of the monster and the nuclear attack.

  Following the blasts, no additional souls had come to seek refuge, and he would have thought the whole world destroyed if not for the shortwave messages repeating over and over from the robust, apparently still-powered transmitters of the Emergency Broadcast System. The message changed each hour or so, and that meant someone was alive to keep the EBS going.

  It occurred to him that he had no idea where the signal came from, if it really was from the EBS, or whether what it reported was accurate. No matter the answers, however, the message repeated, over and over, after that horrible three-beep alert sound:

  THIS IS THE UNITED STATES EMERGENCY BROADCAST SYSTEM ... CENTRAL NEW YORK CITY AND WASHINGTON DC HAVE BEEN CONFIRMED DESTROYED IN NUCLEAR ATTACK … BEIJING AND MOSCOW ALSO ARE REPORTED BY CIVILIAN GLOBAL SHORTWAVE NETWORK AS DESTROYED DURING MASSIVE NUCLEAR BOMBARDMENT OF THE SOUTH POLE ... NORTH AMERICAN CITIES OUTSIDE OF NEW YORK AND WASHINGTON ARE REPORTEDLY UNAFFECTED.

  That was a relief. Maybe that meant help would be coming soon.

  CONTINUITY-OF-GOVERNMENT PROTOCOLS HAVE BEEN ENACTED. THE C.O.G. INTERIM GOVERNMENT REMINDS ALL SURVIVING CITIZENS FIND SOURCES OF INTOXICANTS AND CONSUME THEM AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. CTHULHU IS BELIEVED DESTROYED, BUT CITIZENS SHOULD REMAIN IMPAIRED UNTIL THIS IS CONFIRMED.

  Morley wanted very much to remain as intoxicated as possible, but his Church came first: he kept his flock sloshed before he had another tipple. He had been able to call in favors from some good Catholic barkeeps and liquor store owners, doing what his friend Martin Storch had strongly recommended at the outset of all this insanity: get as much booze as you can. Martin, he sincerely prayed that the atheist in his friend would be defeated by the need for God right now and that the dear man was still alive, somewhere, had also instructed him to keep as much booze as possible in his system. He made sure he was just the other side of tipsy since his strength was not only being tested but called upon for others in this unprecedented, otherworldly cosmic storm.

  THE EMERGENCY BROADCAST SYSTEM WILL UPDATE INFORMATION FROM NATIONAL GUARD, FEMA, AND C.O.G. SHORTWAVE BANDS. CITIZENS ARE INSTRUCTED TO TRY NOT TO THINK. IF THINKING IS UNAVOIDABLE, CITIZENS SHOULD CONSUME MORE INTOXICANTS UNTIL RATIONAL THOUGHT IS IMPOSSIBLE.

  REMAIN ON THIS FREQUENCY FOR FURTHER INFORMATION AND INSTRUCTIONS.

  The three blaring tones followed, after which the message repeated. The familiar computer voice of EBS, so Morley didn’t know if the sender was intoxicated. Thus computer generated, or not. He hoped, for the sake of the human sending the transmission, if there was one, and for all those listening that he was just drunk enough to remain alive but not so drunk that he couldn’t type updates for the broadcast.

  Now, the Archbishop stood at an oblong pulpit with steps at each end, the golden ambo of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, wearing what he used to joke was his “full parade regalia,” every sash and doo-dad gleaming, his shiny jewel-encrusted miter turning light from the gray skies into a sparkling ode to joy. There had been smoking incense from a swinging thurible carried solemnly by the senior altar server, who was resplendent in white. A choir of six, looking as immaculate as Mary’s conception, filled the ears of the assembled survivors, and they calmed the group.

  God is within the building, Morley thought, and if He isn’t, all of this should make it feel like He is, anyway.

  He collected everyone’s attention and spoke to them from the golden pulpit: “The Lord has offered us a great challenge. He has placed this congregation into the middle of hell on Earth, and now it is up to us to make it a Heaven. There is a reason each of you came to this house of the one true God last night for His protection against the false god Cthulhu.”

  The assembled didn’t feel very inspired by this, he could see, but he had to deliver this homily, had to strengthen the faith of every person in the church, whether someone there was a parishioner or not.

  “We have lost family members, friends, and neighbors last night as the touch of Satan himself scorched our homes and swept them away. All of us are frightened, and I am frightened, too,” he said, and this admission seemed to calm the assemblage. “However, the Lord has spared us, first from Cthulhu’s evil effects and now from nuclear attack. We must offer thanks to God all the rest of our days. We can do that by accepting what has happened and then doing everything we can to help one another and every other spared soul we encounter.”

  Morley paused, unable to guess what response the packed-in faithful might have to what he was about to say. But God was with him, and he would fulfill his sworn clerical duty: he would be as a conduit for His grace.

  “I have good news. Not as good as the news about Christ, but very good,” he said with a smile and allowed five seconds or so of excited murmuring throughout the nave before continuing. “The emergency radio network reports that the nuclear attack devastated New York City, Washington DC, Beijing, and Moscow—but no other cities as yet. The world has not ended. God isn’t quite ready to let it go.”

  The relief that washed over every face in the church was visible and palpable.

  “However, that information doesn’t tell us anything about Cthulhu. Is it still alive, or destroyed by a nuclear missile? Will it still rain down suffering on everyone it reaches? Will it destroy what’s left of humanity?” He could see the old worry rise again in the congregation and quickly headed it off, “I say no. I think the reign of this demon who tried to unseat God from His throne is over. We are safe. We are blessed. We need not fear monsters anymore.”

  Just as he finished his comforting homily, a shriek—joined by another, then a third—exploded from a back corner of the nave, and in seconds everyone was screaming in mind-scrambling terror, the wave of panic moving through the church like a tsunami.

  Over the previous thirty hours, Archbishop Morley had witnessed the horror wrought by the thing called Cthulhu and the greatest city in the world turned to rubble by nuclear bombs. But what he saw now, he couldn’t make sense of it at first, and when he did, shock and horror so strong he couldn’t feel his arms or legs made him stumble and fall on his backside, knocking over two red altar candles and bringing a dozen flickering glass votives down with him. One fell to the pooled base of velvet altar drapery and set it alight.

  Morley didn’t notice the small flame, as he had already gained his feet and risen to stare at the back of the nave in open-mouthed stupefaction: Things were squeezing out of the corners of the room. Miasmic-green, translucent things full of ... God, help us ... They were bubbling with eyes.

  Within each creature’s green translucence, eyeballs grew, churned to the surface, and fell back again to disintegrate. The eyeballs were of different sizes, different colors, with differently shaped lenses. Some had irises and pupils like humans, others bore vertical slits like a lizard’s; still others were triangular; and yet others had no lenses at all, white as a cue ball, the vestigial eyeball of some now-blind species.

  Once excreted through the angles of the church, there were dozens now, in front of Morley, behind him, oozing in from the edges of blown-out windows, the things expanded to their full size. They were as big as bulldozers and just as slow in their unstoppable crawl.

  But they didn’t require speed. The monsters, which now surrounded the screaming congregants, pushed them down, Lord in Heaven, that was Mrs. Rebecca Allred! And rolling over them like an enormous mucous mass. Only then would the giant slug-like thing stop in its forward progress.

  Archbishop Morley felt the heat coming close from the flames consuming the altar and spread to lick at the base of a wooden display ten feet behind him. But he couldn’t register anything at the moment, not joy nor pain, because the monster sitting atop the generous donor Gordon White, whom it had just knocked down and rolled over, pulled him up and into itself.

  Everyone could still see their fellow parishioner through the thing’s aspic-translucent green innards. And Gordon could see them because he wasn’t dead. The horror on t
heir faces was second only to the terrified agony on Gordon’s face as his body started dissolving into invisibility. The pain must have been unbearable, but within two minutes, the man and everything he was wearing had been entirely digested.

  Or almost all: his eyeballs remained.

  The two lidless spheres drifted apart within the still-churning bag of semisolid gel but were each whisked away by a jet stream of forming and dissolving eyes and stared at the churchgoers in front of the creature who were paralyzed by terror. Others fainted to the floor nearby.

  It was very simple for it to slide on top of the next victim and start ingesting again.

  Morley could see this happening everywhere in his church, slug monsters absorbing screaming people, making more scream at loved ones spasming in unconscious torture as they dissolved, and it was only now that he noticed the intense heat, blistering the back of his neck, and knocking the miter from his head with a gust of superheated air.

  Shouting in pain and shock, the Archbishop turned towards the source of the heat and saw what it was. The brown wood of the thirty-foot-tall crucifix was ablaze, the white alabaster Christ seeming to hover in the flames of the conflagration.

  He looked behind him: the giant things were everywhere in the nave. He looked to each side and saw the monsters consuming a choir boy to the left and one containing what was left of Father Igo on the right. Then he turned again to face the fifteen-foot-high Jesus now engulfed in flames that traveled up the cross to the ceiling and immediately spreading there. Everyone would die, including himself, he could see that plainly; there was nothing he could do to help anyone.

  Except pray.

  Enduring the third-degree burns from kneeling just ten feet from the flames, Archbishop James Morley folded his hands in supplication and said through gritted teeth, “O, Lord, please—”

  With an enormous creak and splintering of wood, the towering spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral were wrenched from their moorings by the rising heat, falling into the blazing infernal below.