The shadow was strangling me to death. I should have been used to such sights by now, but my first emotion was not fear, but confusion. The scholar in me wanted to know how the fuck it was possible. A shadow wasn’t a physical thing but an absence of light, no more able to come alive to attack you than a hole. Of course, I’d seen that too.
In a way, the Shadow-Thing was almost mundane. It had the rough outline of the Faceless One’s body, with just the occasional spike or tentacles hinting at the true nature of the being inhabiting the shadow. Whatever it was, it wasn’t very strong (at least in this dimension), and I was able to keep it from breaking my neck outright. The shadow had enough physical substance for us to grapple.
Deciding that the paradoxical thing choking the life out of me was not something I wanted to try to deal with directly, I fell backward and knocked one of the torch stands over. As planned, the stand landed on the side of the Faceless One’s ornate robes. The flames seemed almost eager to burn the vestments, consuming them as if they were dried paper.
The alien wizard let out a shout of surprise and the Shadow-Thing released its grip, disappearing back into whatever dimension it had been summoned. Any hope of the Faceless One burning to death vanished as it threw its burning attire to the side. It was wearing a white shirt and faded khaki pants, looking almost comical with its inhuman visage.
“You’re starting to irritate me, mutant,” the Faceless One said, speaking in a manner more befitting a human than a monster.
“I have that effect on people.” I wrinkled my brow, sizing it up. “What are you?”
“One of the last true humans,” the figure said. I’d heard few more hateful tones, and all of them had been from the most purity- and genetic-deviance-obsessed members of the Remnant. “My kind are the last of the original strain of mankind. Those the Elder Things modified using the shoggoths to be smarter and more graceful than ape-kind. You and the rest of your misbegotten race of mutants are just the sad droppings of—”
I interrupted it by punching it where its jaw would be. The Faceless One fell backwards, stunned by my abrupt attack. It began speaking a spell, only for me to slam it against a wall, grab a rock off the ground and use it to shatter its right hand. The Faceless One let out a screaming wail from its left hand, right before I brought my rock down upon it as well.
The Faceless One was human, at least enough to be vulnerable to the same sort of violence we were. The Faceless One struggled to continue speaking a spell, but its tongues were crushed and the words came out even more of a garbled mess. Grabbing the figure by its shirt, I threw it over my shoulders and sent it bouncing against the ground. I decided the Faceless One was a man and that I would refer to it as “him” from now on. At least, for as long as it remained on this Earth.
Which hopefully wouldn’t be long.
My assumption of victory proved premature. On the end of the tunnel I’d come through, there was now the sound of a thousand moaning horrors. I remembered August’s admonition not to disrupt a summoning spell, as such beings were likely to turn upon the beings who bound them. The Shadow-Thing had proven the exception to the rule, but the Reanimated were coming to destroy their creator. I didn’t think they would be inclined to show anyone around him much mercy either.
“No,” the Faceless One said, spitting up jagged teeth and blood from its hands. “Not like—”
The Faceless One was cut off by the shambling horde of Reanimated coming around the tunnel and stretching out their arms to grab him. The Faceless One was taken by surprise and didn’t have time to react, falling into their grip. He let out a yelp of surprise as I took a step back and watched the creatures tear into his body.
A pair of women with open holes in their stomachs, leaking innards, tore pieces out of the Faceless One’s arms while a pair of cherubic dead-eyed children tore off his legs. The remainder of the Faceless One’s body was fell upon by a half-dozen Reanimated who each took bites, swallowed, and feasted again. Had I a gun, I would have ended the Faceless One’s suffering, but I was not so equipped. I was also in trouble because while a dozen or so of the Reanimated stayed to devour the soon-to-be bare remains, the rest shuffled around them toward me.
Grabbing the closest torch, I held it in front of me as I backed away. The hopelessness of my situation didn’t take a genius to figure out. I could flee farther into the tunnels, but with no permanent source of light and no guarantee the caverns ever came up again, it would be trading the speedy death of being devoured for the long one of starvation. If there was such a thing as a tracking spell, Mercury did not know it, and none of my other associates would want to bother looking for me.
Throwing the torch at the nearest Reanimated, I made my decision to fight to the death. I was many things, but a craven had never been one of them. In a way, a hopeless battle against a foe like the Reanimated was a blessing. It saved me from the indignity of suicide as well as gave purpose to my final minutes. Better still, it thwarted Nyarlathotep’s prophecy of my destroying humanity to bring back the Eyes of Yog-Sothoth.
Grinning, I grabbed another torch to set more Reanimated on fire. They screeched and let inhuman wails forth, falling back into their fellows, while others moved to tear me limb from limb. I knocked at them with the torch’s metal stand, banging them away while the light dimmed on the other end. That was when a miracle occurred.
Of sorts.
Far from my position, the Faceless One’s decapitated head was lifted by one of the cherubic children devouring his corpse. Holding it tight, the zombie squeezed it into a pulpy goo. The inhuman strength of the Reanimated was less impressive than the aftermath. Every one of the Reanimated, including the ones on fire, stood still. Their arms fell to their sides and almost all collapsed to the ground like puppets whose strings had been cut.
Nine of ten Reanimated were dead again, the source of their magic destroyed. Magic was a complicated discipline, and I wondered how the brain death of the Faceless One had achieved this. Surely, if he’d been the source of their unholy resurrection, he would have dismissed them before they started eating him? Or had he been unable to do so because I’d destroyed his hand-mouths?
My curiosity died when I realized that nine out of ten was not the entirety. Of the thousands of undead creatures there were still hundreds remaining, looking confused and angry among the corpses of their fellows. Whatever hellish force had drawn them back from death to unnatural life held them fast and was not going to let them go.
While their faces were dead and decayed, I could see an all-too-human expression of outrage pass across them. Despite their hostility, they were not mindless, and their anger would soon need a focus. I had no intention of offering myself for that honor. Taking a deep breath, I ran forward and knocked down the closest of the Reanimated before running over it and a hundred other corpses in my bare feet. The Reanimated came out of their trance-like state as I passed, spinning around to grab at me or chasing after me. Many of them fell over their fellows or stumbled, which gave me a bit of an edge. Not much of one, though, as a single misstep could mean the creatures descending upon me like crows on a corpse.
I’d seen many horrible things in my life. So many, it was difficult to say if I’d have been considered a sane man in the Pre-Rising world. More likely, they would have consigned me to a lunatic asylum for any number of ailments ranging from lack of empathy to bursts of homicidal rage. Yet, as ruthless and detached as the world had made me, passing over so many corpses made me sick. The sheer waste of life was staggering, especially when I saw how many children lay among the dead.
Looking down at the horrors was a mistake, as one of the Reanimated had been intelligent enough to hide among the corpses and grab my right leg as I passed. Hitting the ground, face-first, I felt an agonizing tearing and saw a putrescent near-skeletal face biting into my calf while sinking its bony fingertips into my now-exposed flesh. Blood leaked from the wound, crippling me.
Unable to move my leg, I looked across the bodies before me and saw a six-shooter in a nearby corpse’s holster. Virtually every man and woman over the age of sixteen learned to carry a weapon in the Wasteland but it hadn’t done these folks any good. Reaching over, I grabbed it, even as I felt the undead thing chewing on my leg. I turned, aimed, and fired, catching the creature in the head. It dropped, but the pain in my leg didn’t subside. My calf was a bloody mess.
Looking up, I saw a dozen or so of the Reanimated starting to walk at a slow, deliberate pace toward me. Their milky eyes were unfocused and glazed but the expressions on their faces were of pure malicious glee. I had no idea what sort of torments these individuals had undergone or what horrors their living death had inflicted on their minds but I wasn’t about to surrender to them. Even if my injury meant fighting on was futile.
“Fuck you,” I said, shooting another of the creatures coming down the tunnel in the head. I shot a second, missed my third shot, and killed another. Aiming my gun, I pulled the trigger to find the revolver was now empty. The remaining eight or nine Reanimated were but ten yards away now and growing closer every second. I could hear others coming up behind me as well, descending upon me in all directions.
Tossing the useless revolver aside, I frantically searched for yet another gun in the charnel pit around me. I saw nothing but again grabbed the torch stand I’d dropped. The light had gone out, but the stand was still heavy and made of iron. I lost it when the Reanimated descended upon me, each trying to tear another chunk out of my body.
I lost all sense of myself, smashing heads and knocking away bodies with a manic glee. I stopped swinging with my left arm altogether and used solely my right, decapitating Reanimated one after another before bisecting yet another. Heads continued to moan and wail blasphemies even detached from their bodies, my deranged will crushing them after I lost sight of more mobile targets. A single one, his lower half missing, crawled up toward my groin to bite my femoral artery before I brought down the end of the torch stand on top of its head.
I blinked, seeing almost a dozen more corpses added to the pile. The bloody carnage was impossible, yet there it was. I’d lost myself in such rage only a few times before. The first had been when I’d found myself assaulted by Remnant traitor and quisling Peter Goodhill. No, wait, that wasn’t right. No, the first time I’d ever lost myself to the bloodthirsty rage was facing down a shoggoth to protect Jessica. A creature less like a monster and more like a living lake of murderous fury. I’d killed that, too.
Looking around the charnel pit surrounding me, I saw my bloody leg continued to bleed, and I started crawling toward the other end of the tunnel. It was possible, even likely, that my fellows had abandoned me. I shouted at the top of my lungs for them, possibly attracting more of the Reanimated, but I wasn’t going to die here. I decided, in that moment, to live. No matter the cost, whether I became a monster or not.
I would live.
As I crawled over body after body, the stench was overpowering. In addition to the smell of the early onset of decay, a few older corpses aside, many of the dead had lost control of their bowels when they’d died the first time. The Faceless Ones hadn’t bothered to clean up their creatures before sending them to kill us. There was no way to describe what it was like to have to move over the fallen Reanimated, inch by horrible inch.
I passed over the corpses of little girls, teenagers, a pregnant woman, a boy of four, and old men. It was like a scene from hell, threatening what little remained of my sanity. This was what the Great Old Ones had done to the world. I started laughing after screaming for help for the fifth time, unable to quite wrap my head about what I was going to do if my friends left me. I pondered making deals with the unthinkable.
Looking up, I saw a single Reanimated blocking the tunnel passage that led to my associates. I could see the light of our campsite beyond. This Reanimated was different from the others. First of all, it was headless. Wearing the tattered remnants of a Pre-Rising military uniform that looked like it had been old when the world ended, it held its own mummified head in its hands.
“I am the Major,” the figure said, its voice like a baritone from Azathoth’s eternal symphony. “I speak for the Dead.”
“I am alive,” I said, continuing crawling.
“Yes,” the figure said. “Why, though? Death is the fate of humanity and it is a blessed release from the horrors beyond. The Dark consumes all and provides peace for the mistake of nature we call consciousness. Gh’targh Gh’targh Oroarchan. The Unimaginable Horror shall consume this world and bring peace to the universe.”
“Oroarchan can kiss my ass.” I was surprised the Great Old One who destroyed the Kastro’vaal was the same as the Unimaginable Horror.
The figure let out an amused chuckle. “I see the future for you, John. A dead world, every single being on it destroyed, and you left to inherit the empty graveyard this world will become.”
“That’s my past.”
The Major didn’t answer and faded away, revealing itself to be nothing more than a psychic projection.
Or I was hallucinating. I couldn’t tell which. I was getting a lot of that lately.
I was about ready to pass out when I saw someone most unexpected looking down at me. Thom crouched down and stared at me.
“Yep, he’s still alive.”
“It doesn’t work that way!” Mercury shouted.
“Back the hell off, Thom!” Jessica added.
I laughed, then fell unconscious.