Again I heard the voice of the bearded priest in the back of my mind: “Avenge us! Avenge us!” I ignored it.
I spoke the word that the hermit had whispered to me in the waking world.
I spoke the secret name of the Lord of Endings.
“Nyarlathotep…” I laid my sword at his feet and bent to kiss the bloody floor.
He spoke to me then, in words that no living ears could ever hear.
At last, the gateway opens, said the Lord.
“Give me the strength I need to do what must be done,” I begged, weeping before him. The dancers swirled about me like a flock of restless spirits. They were so beautiful, their feet stained in the blood of the chained and dying men.
You shall have it, said the Lord.
I bowed low, offering my life to him.
I awoke back in my tiny room, a terrible taste in my mouth. The stone vial lay empty beside my cot and sweat drenched my body. I stood, filled with a dizzying strength. I wretched violently, spewing sickness from the pit of my stomach.
I vomited forth a black puddle of viscous liquid. It spread across the unclean floor of my room. Again I puked, unleashing more of the noxious stuff. And again, as if I were going to spill my guts across the floor. Eventually the wretching subsided. The pool of black slime bubbled and swirled before me. It rose, taking the shape of a dark-skinned man. He smiled at me, no longer eyeless, and I praised him once more with his secret name.
His caress sent electricity running across my skin.
I found for him a fresh robe and a white turban. As he dressed I sent word to my brothers. When it got dark, they came and took him away, showing him a deep respect that came unbidden into their hearts. They took him into the desert, where he could begin his duties as their new leader.
Early the next morning I carefully strapped to my body the explosives my brothers had left for me. Then I prayed, not to the Great God, but to the Lord of Endings, using his secret name. I asked him to provide my brothers with the great strength he had given to me.
I put on a long coat to hide the explosives upon my chest. I walked down the street to the hospital where the pale devils, the invaders, constantly stand guard. I saw one of their large, green trucks there, so I knew there would be many of them inside at this hour.
I walked into the waiting room and took my place among the wounded and ill. In the corners, pale faces stared at me from beneath desert-brown helmets. Piercing blue eyes that should never have looked upon our sands. I noticed a live newscast playing on the television.
A man wearing my own white turban spoke loudly on the screen. He spoke of striking against the invaders, of liberating our homeland from the pale devils. Of our Holy Crusade against the infidels.
Through the glare of the television screen, his glittering eyes stared directly at me. He was the Lord of Endings, and he announced his presence to the world. He had come to lead our struggle. Now the waking world would know his power as the dream-world already had.
I watched his entire speech, sitting alone in a crowded hospital.
Now it is time.
I stand and pull the pin on the device strapped to my chest. As the hospital turns to flame around me and the screams of the dying fill the air, I whisper his name one last time.
Nyarlathotep.
This Is How the World Ends
They always said the world would end in fire.
Mushroom clouds, atomic holocaust, the pits of Hell opening up and vomiting flame across a world of sin, corruption, and greed. The world would be a cinder, and Christ would come down from the clouds to lift the faithful skyward.
I used to believe those things. My daddy taught me the Bible, and Revelations was his favorite chapter. He believed in the wrath of God, and he feared the fires of Hell.
But the world wasn’t burned away by righteous fires. There was no great conflagration.
The world didn’t burn.
It drowned.
One thing the Bible did get right: the sea did turn to blood.
The coastal cities were the first to go. Two years ago the first of the Big Waves hit. The newscasters called them “mega-tsunamis.” Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle, San Francisco…so many sandcastles flattened and drowned. Watery graves for millions. New York, Miami, even Chicago when the Great Lakes leapt out of their holes like mad giants. A single day and all the major cities…gone.
After the tsunamis came the real terror. The waves washed terrible things onto the land…things that had never seen the light of day. Fanged, biting, hungry things. They fed on the bodies of the drowned, laid their eggs in the gnawed bodies. Billions of them…the seas ran red along the new coastlines. Survivors from Frisco fled inland, carrying tales of something even worse than the vicious Biters. Something colossal…some called it the Devil himself. It took the fallen skyscrapers as its nesting ground, ruling a kingdom of red waters.
I heard similar tales from western and eastern refugees. They fled inland, away from the stench of brine and blood, and the drifting islands of bloated bodies.
The military tried fighting back, but there were too many of those things claiming the coast. That’s when the plague started. It floated across the land in great, black clouds, like dust storms during the Depression. Those who breathed the stuff didn’t die…they changed. They grew gills, and fangs, and writhed like snakes, spitting venom. Feeding on each other. Soon there weren’t any more soldiers.
I heard they tried nuking Manhattan, where something big as the moon crawled out of the ocean. The missiles didn’t fire. Something shorted out all the technology, every computer on the continent…probably the planet…every piece of electronic equipment…all dead. Air Force jets fell out of the sky like dead birds. Somebody called it an electromagnetic pulse. As if the rules of the universe had shifted. In a flash, the modern world was done.
There was nothing to do but run. Hide.
Hordes of the Biters took to roaming the plains, the hills, the valleys and mountains. Those poor souls that didn’t get taken by the rolling clouds eventually got rooted out by the Biters, or the worm-things that followed them around. Big, saw-toothed bastards, like leeches the size of semi-truck trailers. I saw one of the Biter hordes hit Bakersfield, saw a school bus full of refugees swallowed whole by one of those worms. Still see that in my nightmares sometimes…the faces of those kids…sound of their screams.
Whiskey helps, when I can get it.
About fifty of us from farms in the San Joaquin Valley had banded together, loaded up with guns, ammo, and canned food from Lloyd Talbert’s bomb shelter, and headed east in a convoy of old pick-ups and decommissioned Army jeeps. We figured out that the black clouds usually preceded the Biters, so we stayed one step ahead of them. We tried to pick up some relatives in Bakersfield, or we would have avoided it altogether. Barely made it out of there, and we lost twelve good men in the process. Nobody got rescued.
It had rained for two months straight in California, nonstop ever since the Big Waves. Farther inland we went, the less rain we got. We figured out that the Biters liked the wet…they hated the dry lands, so we went on into Nevada. Thought we’d find kindred souls in Vegas.
That was a mistake.
Sin City had been smashed flat by something terrible that came out of Yucca Mountain, where they buried all that nuclear waste. We couldn’t tell what it was, but we saw it slithering through hills of rubble, rooting up corpses like a hog sniffing for truffles. We watched it for awhile from a high ridge, until it raised itself up and howled at the moon. Its head was larger than a stadium, and it split open like a purple orchid lined with bloody fangs. What grew along the bulk of its shapeless body I can only call…tentacles. Looked like something from a B-movie filmed in Hell. It was the Beast That Ate Vegas.