Cultists. There was one scourge greater than any other across the Wastelands, and that was those humans who’d chosen to devote themselves to the Great Old Ones. Not because they were more dangerous than the monsters around us, but because they focused their rage squarely on humanity. Not all the Great Old Ones’ worshipers were evil. The Dunwych, for example, walked the balance between fear and awe with practiced ease. Cultists mistook the Great Old One’s indifference to the Old World’s destruction as deliberate malice and attempted to curry favor by slaughtering their fellow man.
Now we were surrounded by them.
I did not know this group to be cultists because of their attire—robes were just practical desert wear, after all—but by the crystal rods in their hands. I’d last seen them wielded by the Elder Things on a trip to the Dreamlands—a dimension even more chaotic than our own. The weapons could deliver terrible electrical shocks and perform all manner of other, seemingly mystical, feats. No human could acquire them on their own. They had to have been given to madmen.
Our caravan wasn’t composed of fools. They went for their weapons and defensible positions. Everyone in the camp was armed and had ammunition to spare. Even a century later, it wasn’t difficult to find guns in the former United States—not that regular bullets did much against monsters. Hopefully, we’d get in some lucky shots.
On my end, I went for my A19 rifle. It was one of many composite weapons the United States Remnant had constructed in the aftermath of the Rising. A combination of a sniper rifle and an assault weapon, it had seen better days. Still, it was a weapon I knew well and had been trained in the use of. Furthermore, I had a secret weapon—a clip of orihalcum ammunition I’d managed to recover from the wreckage of a crashed Remnant helicopter. Made from a Deep One’s metal harvested from the bottom of the ocean floor, orihalcum could kill the unkillable.
Sometimes.
Lifting the weapon’s crude half-functioning night scope, I gazed out into the darkness. The robed figures were a few dozen yards away now, having somehow traveled farther in the short time than they could have walked (or run). The one at the head of the group, a tall brown-skinned man wearing slightly more ornate robes than the rest, lifted a crystal rod as if to signal the others to do the same.
Snapping a cartridge clip into the chamber, I wasn’t fast enough to fire before the air filled with glowing bolts of light. The bright beams arched through the darkness like mortars before landing on our campsite. Explosions knocked over and killed many of the workers around me, igniting our cargo. The fire burned unnaturally fast, leaving a near-instant ruin of char in its place. Some of the guards I’d befriended—Davidson, Bone-Face, and Hillary—were already dead. I intended to avenge them.
It was Mercury who scored the first kill as she raised a pistol and fired repeatedly into the night. I saw one of her bullets strike a cultist in the chest and send him spiraling to the ground. I switched to automatic fire, gunning down another figure with tentacles for a mouth before switching to a second, and a third. The air filled with staccato bursts. My ears stung, but I ignored the pain, concentrating on taking down as many attackers as possible.
Unfortunately, the battle was lost before it began. More energy bolts sailed our way, adding to the slaughter. I saw a woman, Mavis, fall to the ground with her entire chest burned out like it was kindling. Her eyes stared into the star-filled sky, the orbs glazed over with a primordial terror.
The cultists continued to advance. Their weapons could tear us apart from a distance, but they chose to move closer, enjoying the slaughter. More of the robed figures dropped as the five or six of us remaining relocated behind cover to retaliate. As advanced as their technology was, the cultists weren’t bullet proof, and more of them died every step they took. The problem was, their steps were not normal. Somehow, they were warping space and time, not running, or taking long strides, but seeming to flash ahead, every foot they moved seeming more like a yard.
I kept firing. The cultists ignored the bloody bodies they left behind, proceeding as if not assaulted by a hail of gunfire. Only the brown-skinned man in the lead reacted differently. I targeted his head with my rifle and pulled the trigger. He showed no response at all—it was as if my bullet had passed through him.
“Fuck,” I muttered, focusing on the other cultists, who seemed more vulnerable to my attacks. They were less than thirty feet away now and their numbers had halved, but they still outnumbered us. They probably could have killed us, and I wondered if they planned to drag us back for some sort of ceremony. If so, I vowed to save the last bullet in my gun for myself.
“They’re not slowing down, Booth,” Mercury shouted, scoring her seventh kill. She was having more luck than I was. I noticed that several of the bodies I’d gunned down earlier were getting back up.
“No shit,” I muttered, before shouting, “We need to fall back!”
The other surviving guards didn’t get a chance to respond, as less than ten feet away, the cultists aimed their crystalline weapons and obliterated them. So much for not killing us. Their bodies didn’t get blasted apart as Mavis’s had, but were burned with such heat that they seemed to melt where they stood. Soon, only Mercury and I were left.
“Fuck!” I swore again, this time running backwards as I fired. Mercury did as well. All of the corpses on the ground we’d shot to pieces had risen. I decided to switch to my orihalcum clip but wasn’t sure those would do any good either. How did you fight an opponent who wouldn’t stay dead?
“What was that about us heading back to Kingsport after this?” Mercury baited me. “Funny, I seem to recall the word ‘easy’ for this mission.”
“Not the time!”
The two of us maneuvered through the burning wreckage of the carts and composite cars, firing at the cultists as we went. They were forming a circle around the camp. My head started to ache as I heard the chanting of Azathoth’s name in the back of my head change. No longer was it the sound of his distant court, but instead, seemed far closer and in an eerie language that was not meant to be spoken by a human tongue.
“F’gnarrgaa haaa’ra abagarnaaa cathaaal Yith. F’gnarrgaa haaa’ra abagarnaaa cathaaal Yith. F’gnarrgaa haaa’ra abagarnaaa cathaaal Yith.”
Taking yet another shot, I grimaced, feeling like my head was about to explode. I understood that language. It spoke to memories locked in the fabric of my DNA, or perhaps some spiritual link my consciousness had to the greater universe. Moreover, I knew the word Yith.
Spoken of in Unknown Kults, they were an ancient race which had once inhabited the Earth during the Cretaceous Period. Advanced yet peaceful, they psychically sailed the oceans of time and space, learning about other worlds by seizing the bodies of lesser creatures. They had lived among the dinosaurs before the latter’s extinction and occasionally popped up to record humanity’s dying days in the present. Did the cultists worship the Yithians, or had they simply adapted the word to their use with no understanding of what it meant?
Reaching the end of my clip, I bumped into Mercury as we slipped behind the one composite car undamaged by the cultists’ hellish bolts. A former school bus, the vehicle had carried the largest portion of cargo in the caravan—foodstuffs like grain, rice, and fruits for the people of Arkham. The other goods had been destroyed out of hand, but the cultists had left this one alone. Was it simple robbery? Were they just cattle rustlers and horse thieves? The lives of dozens sacrificed for the price of a few crates and animals? Perhaps. I’d seen people killed for much less.
Behind us, the inferno of three carts that had been pulled by a now-half-melted truck hid us from the cultists now encircling our campsite. I had no doubt they knew where we were, though, and that they could kill us at any time. Indeed, it was strange they hadn’t done so already. They had killed everyone else without hesitation. We were being kept alive for some reason.
Why?
Mercury turned to me, sweat covering her brow, her eyes reflecting the flames around us. The heat was tremendous and it was difficult to breathe. For all the horrible changes I’d undergone, I still needed to breathe, and we’d run out of the battlefield into what was close to a raging inferno. Still, I saw no hopelessness or terror in her face.
Only anger.
“If you have any ideas, now would be a good time to share them.” Mercury’s voice was choked, but I knew she’d rather go down fighting than become a cultist’s pet.
So would I.
I lifted up my ammo clip of orihalcum bullets and switched it out for the one in my A19. “Perhaps these will make a difference.”
“Ia Cthulhu, motherfuckers!” a voice spoke from the doorway of the bus beside us as the drunken figure of Rodriguez Castro stumbled out.
I did a double-take, seeing the wizened old man. Rodriguez was seventy years old if he was a day, but the white-bearded, hunched-over figure seemed more defiant than either of us.
Wearing a brown vest, linen pants, and a moonshine-stained shirt, he was carrying a small carved stone figurine and a revolver. I had not spoken to the man much, but my brief experience with him told me he was a lunatic who’d survived more terrors in the Wasteland than perhaps anyone else in Kingsport.
“Stay in the bus!” Mercury shouted, stunned by his appearance.
“I choose this!” Rodriguez shouted, waddling over to nearest flaming wreck and tossing the stone figure into it. “Die and burn!”
Then he shot himself in the head, And the ground started shaking.
“That was unexpected,” Mercury muttered, blinking rapidly.
I couldn’t quite believe what I’d seen. “Yeah.”
Mercury tugged on my sleeve. The psychic repetition in my head dissolved as I heard rapid discussion in a variety of languages ranging from the alien tongue I’d heard earlier to English. The last voice spoke words of panic and warning, and very suddenly, a sense of terror from our attackers. Whatever their mysterious plan, they had not counted on dealing with what we were now faced with.
A summoning.
Summonings were just one of the black arts mankind had turned to in the wake of the Rising. Ancient and inscrutable creatures had taught us the secrets of drawing them to this dimension through the power of will alone—I suspected this was akin to ringing a dinner bell as far as they were concerned. Controlling such creatures was possible if one were a very powerful psychic or if you were the one who summoned them.
I was not a powerful psychic and Rodriguez was dead.
“I’m not sure which way to run,” I said, clutching my rifle.
The ground beneath us began to crack as the air charged with static electricity. The largest of the cracks expanded while Mercury and I backed away. Like a rift between worlds, the ground beneath us had become a portal to somewhere else.
Mercury sensibly looked away from the manifestation, but I stupidly gazed forward and saw the harrowing sight of an alien world beyond. Its skies were green and storming with metal raindrops while vast glowing clouds hung beneath the planetary rings. A horrendous sickly-green tendril, as luminescent as the clouds of its world, moved up through the portal and planted itself on the surface of our world.
On its native planet, the creature might have been an average or weak member of its species, but Earth was fantastically blessed for fostering weakness even in its present shattered state. Evolution had created life in places where gravity was hundreds of times worse and the air would sear the flesh of men like dry paper when tossed into a fire. Here, this creature would be all but indestructible.
Yet another god in a world ruled by them.
My apathy toward death dulled my reflexes and left me staring at the creature in admiration while it rose to its full height. The glowing-green creature was several long tentacles stretching from a single body that resembled a half-melted wax candle possessed of a single enormous maw. Hundreds of glowing orbs of blackish light were buried into the side of its rock-like carapace, and above its head there was a nimbus of colorless energy swirling around its central stalk.
Mercury, thankfully, wasn’t as entranced by the monster’s sudden appearance as I was. Grabbing my A19, she aimed the weapon and began firing into the surface of the horrible, yet majestic abomination before us. Black orbs and pockets of its flesh exploded from the orihalcum bullet strikes. The creature thrashed and hissed under the fire, feeling the sting of the mysterious metal.
“Yeah!” Mercury shouted, keeping her finger pressed on the trigger.
Right until the clip ran out.
“Fuck,” Mercury hissed.
I pushed Mercury out of the way before she could do the same and found myself wrapped in the crushing vise of the alien monstrosity’s tentacle. As the creature’s carapace burned, its body heat felt like a hot iron pressed against my skin. It seared away my clothes where it touched, and with the slightest squeeze, it could have bisected my body like burning metal through cheese. The pain was immeasurable, erasing rational thought.
I cried out, the sound an incomprehensible roar. Inexplicably, I found my golden side-knife, a gift from my ex-wife Martha, in my right hand. A weapon of the Deep Ones, it was made of orihalcum and woven with spells far above those any human wizard could inscribe. Animal instinct took over and I jammed the weapon into the monster’s tentacles.
While appearing to be made of gold, which would have made the blade malleable, the weapon sliced through the creature’s carapace and I began carving it away to the flesh underneath. Orihalcum was a gold-like substance that tore other-dimensional creatures apart like fire and tinder. Black acidic ichor bubbled forth from the wound underneath, melting away my sleeve and revealing the chitin-covered black arm beneath.
I laughed insanely, stabbing my black arm deeper into the creature’s tentacle and pulling out a yellow set of tubes. The creature let forth an ear-piercing multi-pitch wail from a dozen holes that opened across its central stalk. The tubes I held burst when I squeezed them, causing more of the black ichor to pour out onto my mutated hand.
The creature dropped me on the ground, thrashing its tentacles in every direction. Hideous burning scars raked across my chest, but I felt no pain. Were I a normal man, I’d have been dead or screaming in agony, but instead the sensation felt like a baroque echo of pain. I threw up a greenish black substance on the ground.
“Ib’in ack thuhl kargrba zach ign Cthulhu!” I heard Mercury mangle and spit out the guttural language of the Deep Ones. I recognized the spell she was casting, one of the many described in the ritual section of the Necronomicon.
“Mercury!” I shouted, calling for her to stop. The forces the spell harvested were enough to tear most human hosts apart. I’d seen hybrids of the Deep One, regular humans, and ghouls ripped to shreds for attempting to invoke Great Cthulhu’s power.
Much to my surprise, the creature behind me stopped thrashing and began to sweat sulfurous ooze from dozens of holes across its body. The crack it had emerged from began to seal behind it and the creature attempted to flee through it, half of its vile body sinking back down into the alien world from which it had emerged.
“Ib’in ack thuhl kargrba zach ign Hastur!” Mercury screamed, raising her hands high in the air. “Ib’in ack thuhl kargrba zach ign Shub-Niggurath! KATHALL!”
The creature slipped into the last of the crack before it sealed over, disappearing from our world forever. I did not know if it feared the power of Cthulhu being channeled through Mercury’s invocations, the equivalent of a rocket launcher held by mice, or whether it had been forced back into its realm by her will alone.
Either way, she’d saved us.
Rushing to her side, I reached for her with my inhuman clawed hand. Mercury shuddered away from it and I hid it behind my back. Lifting my human hand instead, I said, “You banished it.”
“I did.” Mercury coughed, clearly shaken. “Yay me. Now we just have to deal with a horde of rampaging cultists.”
I looked over my shoulder and saw that all of the fires had gone out and we were surrounded by the dozens of gray-robed cultists who had left their circle to approach us. They’d done so silently. I hadn’t picked up on them—which was impossible.
“Oh, ha ha,” Mercury said. “Very funny, gods I don’t believe in.”
The brown-skinned cultist from earlier stood at the front. He was close enough now that I could get a better look at his features. The man was tall, as tall as me, with a handsome face and short, dark hair. A pair of wire-frame spectacles sat on the bridge of his nose and there was intelligence behind his eyes.
There was also a sense of contempt, as if I was not worth his attention. Then again, from his perspective I was a mutant who’d just gotten into a fistfight with a creature from another world. Not exactly someone you wanted to invite to a dinner party. The figure had a crystal rod aimed at my chest.
The man spoke in a calm, soothing tone. “I am Professor Harvey Armitage. Mister Booth, Ms. Halsey, we need your help.”