“WHAT THE HELL is that?”
Daniel jumped away from the bed rail. His elbow caught the IV pole, knocking it to the floor with a crash and a clatter. The tubes connecting to the man on the bed stretched and pulled and ripped out. They thwhipped up and around, the sharp silvery needles at their ends slicing the air in a razor-sharp arc.
The air in front of my eyes.
I jerked back, fast enough for the needles to miss, not fast enough to avoid the noxious liquid that slung across my face.
I immediately rubbed my sleeve on it, my skin already crawling with the thought of the little black shapes swimming in the green fluid.
Nyarlathotep looked down at us from across the bed, his voice lashing quickly. “Be more careful, minion. You draw attention to us.” Magick tingled in my stomach from the power behind his words.
Attention from whom?
Daniel dropped to his knees, ignoring the puddle of fluid we had been standing in, now soaking into the legs of his jeans. “Forgive me, Master.”
“Take your feet and make yourself useful.”
Daniel stood, pulling himself up on the bed rails. “What can I do?”
The Man in Black waved the knife over the chest of the man in the bed. “Hold him.”
Daniel put his hands on the man’s shoulders, pinning him against the mattress. The tumor’s eye blinked and rolled, the size of a grapefruit with an egg-yolk iris and a pupil black as an eclipse. Clear aqueous fluid gathered in the corners of folded lids, weeping out with every blink to run and chase down the lumps and pustules that formed the tumor’s mass. Waving fibrils ringed around it like eyelashes.
The Man in Black drove his left hand down into the cavity, fingers digging deep into the mass.
He leaned back, pulling. The mass lifted with a wet sucking sound, separating from the walls of its birthing chamber. Nyarlathotep’s right hand flashed, red lightning, hacking with the knife. He drove it underneath the thing, the blade slashing through the tendrils anchoring it with a squelch. More dark, brackish fluid gurgled out of them, filling the cavity like dirty dishwater in a used pot. He hacked and slashed until every tendril was severed, spattering himself with sloshing liquid.
Seconds stretched to minutes and felt as if they had stretched to hours by the time he finished. When the last tether had been cut the man on the bed slumped, spindly limbs falling loose beside him. His breathing stopped mid-inhale, dying stillborn in lungs that no longer worked.
“You killed him.”
The Man in Black didn’t look up at me. “I told you he was dead before we arrived.” He waved the knife at the machines around us. “None of these measures were taken to keep him alive.” With a jerk of his shoulder he lifted the thing free from its place inside the man. “They were meant to preserve this.”
The mass throbbed, wriggling in his grip. Fluid dripped off it, splashing into the puddle inside the empty shell of the man.
Ploop!
Ploop!
Pah-loop!
Realization dawned on me. “Wait. Are you saying that each of these people has one of those things growing inside them?”
He stepped away, coat swirling around his legs. “They will be different pieces of the whole, but yes, they all have something similar incubating in their bodies.”
“Can we save them?”
His dark, impassive face stared down at me. “We can only save your world.” The knife swept around in his red right hand, indicating the rest of the beds. “These souls are lost.”
“You don’t sound upset.”
He shrugged, holding the tumor with its blinking, rolling eye casually in his hand. “Your kind die, Acolyte. You are fragile, delicate, easily broken, and the entire universe is set against you. The only reason you haven’t been snuffed from existence itself is your species’s tenacious ability to cling to the merest flicker of life wherever you find it.”
“You make that sound like a bad thing.”
“Not bad. Merely annoying at times.”
“Why do you keep trying then? Why are you doing all of this if it’s futile?”
He shook his head. “I never called your existence futile. Weak as you are, your kind succeeded in locking mine on the other side of the universe. Your ancestors survived the Deluge in a boat made of gopher wood and pitch built by a drunkard who had never seen the ocean! You have walked away from the seduction of nuclear annihilation and conquered the edge of space outside your world.”
He shook the tumor, droplets of fluid spattering the already-wet floor. Leaning over, his voice shifted, rising an octave as he held the tumor like an illustration. “Your kind constantly fouls the plans of beings such as this, a creature so terrible you should wither before it like flowers in a furnace. You fight and you fuck and you carry on with your little lives like a virus the universe cannot shake. You are the purest example of chaos I have found in unspeakable eons.” The smile that parted his face was so white it was a shock, gleaming jaggedly under his hawkish nose. His voice held the fervent rasp of a believer. “I am the Crawling Chaos. I claim you as my own, and none will have you but me.”
Daniel fell to his knees, hands in the air, his face beatific.
The conviction of the chaos god echoed over the rhythmic pulse of machinery. I stared at him, looked into those sinister black eyes, and in that moment I had only one thought.
This is our savior?
We are totally screwed.
That’s when the overhead lights flickered then flared, breaking my stare and crucifying my eyesight.