Cash, of course, had already become a useless commodity. Cthulhu and the rest of his loathsome, wet, leathery entourage leveled Maine in an afternoon, and then settled in for a long stay, laying siege to the whole East Coast. The next week was like a bad B- monster movie, with various militaries throwing everything at them. Some of the lesser creatures were destroyed, but Cthulhu seemed only to devour the energy flung his way. Even the nuclear option failed, although nobody would be living in Baltimore again before 2400 A.D.
Like cockroaches that had lurked in the woodwork, a network of cults uncannily like Beckman’s had emerged across the world, pledging their allegiance to the god. According to stories that he heard later, only some of them survived the contact. “Some people never learn,” Detwiler mused. Granted, the ones who did survive had it better than most everyone else. The arrangement reminded him of trustees in Otisville.
Detwiler lived quite some time in the Beckman house safe. It provided protection against the weather, and the location remained undisturbed. Nobody wanted to come near.
From the remains of the house — notably the basement pantry — he managed to retrieve assorted canned goods and jellies. A plethora of jellies. It seemed that Mrs. Beckman had enjoyed canning jalapeño jelly for all occasions. In Detwiler’s case, “all occasions” meant just that.
He scrounged boxes of crackers, but really missed not having some cream cheese. Somebody, probably Cthulhu, had stepped directly on the refrigerator.
The next weeks, he pulled up various parts of the house, occasionally finding someone’s remains, including Beckman’s. The cigar case and lighter from the suit jacket were about all that survived intact. Finally he came upon the broken seal and other objects from the ceremony.
When the food was about to run out, Detwiler gathered up the remaining supplies and recovered items in a large leather laptop satchel and over a period of months worked his way down the coast and back to the Bronx, or what it had become.
The creatures had taken over. They had marshaled the survivors of Beckman’s inter-dimensional holocaust into an army of slaves to build monuments to the great Cthulhu, with cultists as their overseers. Already the landscape was starting to look like a representation of ancient Egypt, if the Egyptians had ingested a lot of magic mushrooms before constructing their pyramids. He learned to avoid the barrel-shaped guardians with eyes on tentacles and huge bat wings, and subsisted mostly on canned goods while trying to ascertain what use somebody with his skills was in a world turned so upside down.
He came upon people hiding out in underground garages and former basements and shooting each other over who got to sleep on a dirty piece of cardboard. How good it was to see that we’d all settled our differences in the face of a common enemy.
The general opinion was that over a billion people had perished in the first week alone. Nobody knew what was true. It was merely the prevailing rumor. The future for Detwiler narrowed to encompass how to get food, how to survive the night without being shot, and how to stay warm as the weather turned cool. The last thing he expected ever again was to encounter Stipe.
One afternoon as he was creeping through some rubble, Detwiler came to an oddly fashioned tunnel. It wasn’t a sewer tunnel or a subway. It was something that looked freshly carved and weirdly organic, glowing with an eerie rippling phosphorescence, as if the walls within were pulsating, a kind of living formation that produced patterns as he passed by — at least it seemed organic until he came to a wall of immense, roughly rectangular stones. Those appeared to be the foundation for something aboveground. Detwiler suspected that he’d blundered beneath one of the weird temples. He turned to leave, only to find his way blocked by a Twinkie.
As such creations went, this was the granddaddy of Hostess desserts, a slithering brown, granular lump the size of a Clydesdale that only moved when necessary — and very quietly at that. He was trapped, but instead of crushing him or absorbing him or whatever else he expected it to do, the thing let him sidle past, and then herded him back out of the tunnel and up to the surface, where three more joined it, offering him only one course to take. They drove him across a roughly hewn stalagmitic plaza toward one of the many ugly, off-kilter temples. Well, he thought, he’d had a good run, come about as far as anyone could hope in this twisted world. That’s when he heard someone call his name, looked up, and found Stipe striding across the knurled landscape. Stipe, wearing a black suit and white shirt, looking for all the world like a beaming Jehovah’s Witness come to lay on him a copy of The Watchtower; the Twinkie wranglers parted to let Stipe through.
Stipe slapped him on the shoulder, took him by the arm. “Man, I almost didn’t recognize you with the beard. Good to see you. I was sure you’d do okay.”
“Yeah, I was real safe in that safe.”
“Safe in the safe, ha!” Stipe laughed, wiped at his eyes. “That’s a good one. Here, come with me.”
Detwiler eyed the clustered Twinkies.
Stipe insisted, “No, really, it’s okay. They know you’re one of us.”
“Us?”
“You know what I mean. You’re a Beckman.”
“I’ll have nightmares forever.”
“Well, I think maybe I can help with that. You need a bath, John. A shave. Come on.” They walked off across the plaza toward a group of humans, all dressed in much the same garb as Stipe, even the women. Some of them looked to Detwiler a little peculiar, as if maybe their parents had been spadefoot toads. Stipe explained to them that Detwiler was a surviving member of Beckman’s group. The others oohed and aahed as if he was a lost treasure. They welcomed him to New R’lyeh.
Eventually Stipe dragged him off for a tour of the facilities.
“What’s New R’lyeh?” Detwiler pronounced.
“It’s what Cthulhu renamed New York. The parts he’s had rebuilt, anyway.”
“What happened to Old R’lyeh?”
“I think it sank into the Pacific. Anyway, this is where we all are now.”
“Home, sweet ph’nglui.”
Stipe chuckled. “Hey, you remembered some of the words from the ceremony.”
“One or two.”
As they entered through a gaping doorway, Stipe asked, “So, like, what d’you have in the bag?”
“Toothbrush,” replied Detwiler.
“Right.”
The inside of the place was just as rough and knurled. No surface was either exactly horizontal or vertical. The light came from more phosphorescence.
“Lichen,” Stipe explained.
As they walked, something huge, brown, and repulsive flew by. Its stalked eyes turned to observe them. Its leathery wings flapped heavily. Then it shat something green and noxious. “Oh, great. Can we go another way?” Detwiler asked.
“It’s just fhtagn poop.”
“I’d say this whole farkakte setup’s fhtagn.”
“Aw, don’t be like that. We’re gonna score hugely here, man, now that you’re back.”
“No kidding,” Detwiler replied. “How do we define hugely in the universe of flying tentacled beer barrels?”
Stipe explained that Cthulhu’s human followers were already hoarding all kinds of treasures: great works of art, things lifted out of what had been the Met and the MOMA: jewelry, gold, silver, anything that seemed like it might one day represent wealth for a new ruling class.
“Like that cash you made off with.”
Stipe shrugged. “Yeah, that didn’t play out too well. Why I had to rejoin the overseers.”