Two weeks later she went into labor. I had the towels and the boiling water, and even some painkillers I’d looted from a burned-out drug store in Pahrump. She started screaming, and I could see the baby pressing outward from inside her belly.
She screamed, and I coached her to breathe, breathe, breathe. She pushed, and she screamed. A gout of blood and placenta flowed out of her, and I knew something was wrong. Her screams reached a higher pitch, and she called out for Jesus, for her mommy and daddy, for poor old Johnny.
I fell back when her stomach burst like a ripe melon, a gnarled claw protruding like a dead tree branch. She writhed like a snake, and her wailing was a white noise in my ears as the thing inside her ripped its way out. It slithered across her splayed abdomen, and she fainted. I couldn’t move…I stared at Johnny Colton’s baby, my mouth hanging open, my heart a hunk of lead in my chest. The stench of the deep ocean filled the cavern, overpowering the human odors of blood and afterbirth.
Its head was a bulbous thing…emerald and coated with bloody slime. Two lidless eyes bulged like black stones, but it had no other face to speak of. A mass of quivering tendrils writhed below the eyes, headless snake-things dripping with gore and mucous. It crawled out of Evelyn’s body, and I knew she was dead. Nobody could lose that much blood and still be alive. She was a hollow shell. Her vacant eyes stared at the tunnel’s rough ceiling. I remember thinking it was a good thing she didn’t live to see this thing that had grown inside her.
It hopped from her corpse in a splash of dark fluids, walking on its clawed arms and feet. Two more appendages grew from its hunched little back, and as they spread I heard a crackling sound like stretching leather. They looked like the wings of a big bat, though far too small to carry this thing with its melon-like head and bloated stomach. It had to weigh at least twenty-five, thirty pounds, I was sure.
It looked at me for a timeless moment, then turned to explore its dead mother’s body with those twitching facial tentacles. I heard a horrible sucking sound as it lapped up Evelyn’s blood like mother’s milk, and then the cracking of bones as its tendrils encircled and squeezed her body into pulp. Already it looked somehow larger.
The sound of her bones snapping broke my trance, and I leapt for a sawed-off shotgun I kept near the blankets. It turned to face me again, as if it knew I was about to put an end to it. The big, black eyes narrowed in their sockets, and the remnants of its own afterbirth sluiced from its hidden squid-mouth. It stared down the twin barrels of my gun, and I swear it spoke.
Even though it was only minutes old, it hissed at me, a single word I had never heard before, but somehow sounded familiar. Maybe I’d heard it in a nightmare.
Cthulhu, it whispered before I blew its head off.
I’ve heard that word for months now. Every time I close my eyes.
Sometimes I dream of New York, or Los Angeles, or even London. I see the great landmarks of the world that was…the towers that once conquered the sky…I see them tilted and crumbling and fallen into the sea, and a mass of cold-blooded amphibian things swirling about them like maggots on a decaying corpse.
I see Evelyn Colton’s baby, too, or something like it. It stands above those ruined cities, wings spread like thunderheads, singing a wild song of triumph and murder. It squats like a colossal ape on the skeleton of the Empire State Building as if it were no more than a fallen log in some world-sized swamp.
I see its children, spreading across the globe, filling the low places with brackish seawater, turning the high places into wastelands. A billion-billion monsters spew from the angry seas, screaming its name beneath the bloody moon.
Cthulhu.
Flocks of Colton-babies fly down from the cold stars, soaring around their god like masses of buzzing flies.
That’s what it is, I come to understand…it’s their god.
It’s the god of this new world.
It’s been a year now since I buried Evelyn. Her grave sits in one of the mine’s westernmost tunnels, marked with a cross I took from the husk of an old church.
I listen to the endless static on the ham radio every day. Found a little generator in the ruined town, and I’ve been siphoning gasoline from an abandoned filling station to power it. The static fills my ears, and sometimes it even drowns out the echoes of Evelyn’s wailing as that thing tore itself out of her. Sometimes I broadcast, not giving away my location, but hoping someone — anyone — will answer. I feel like those SETI scientists who used to beam radio messages out into space, into the darkness of infinity, on the off chance that someone out there is listening.
But there’s only static.
It rains all the time now, up there. I can’t even go topside anymore because strange things move through the rain clouds, and the puddles breed miniature terrors.
The world is still drowning.
The stink of oceanic brine rolls down into the tunnels of the mine.
I tune the dials of the ham radio, call out a few more S.O.S. messages.
The.45 sits on the blanket before me. I stare at it, gleaming with silver promise.
Evelyn isn’t here to stop me this time. One quick, clean shot, and I won’t smell the ocean stench any more, won’t have the dreams anymore, won’t hear the static. The unbroken, white static.
My bottled water is running out. I can’t drink the rain, but I know sooner or later I’ll have to. I don’t want to think what it will do to me. But thirst is a demon no man can outrun for long. I sit staring at the gun, listening to the radio static, making my decision.
I pick up the.45 and slide the barrel into my mouth. It tastes cold and bitter. Static fills my ears. I fix my thumb so that it’s resting on the trigger. I say a silent prayer, and think of my daddy’s face.
Something breaks the static.
A momentary glitch in the wall of white noise. I blink, my lips wrapped around the gun. I pull it from my mouth and fiddle with the nobs. There it is again! A one-second break in the static…a voice!
I turn the volume up, wait a few moments, then pick up the mic, dropping the pistol.
“Hello!” I say, my voice hoarse like sand on stone. “Hello! Is anybody there?”
White noise static…then a pause, followed by a single word, ringing clear as day from the dusty speaker, thick as mud.
Cthulhu.
I drop the mic. Something twists in my gut, and I step back from the radio like it’s another monstrosity burst from Evelyn Colton’s belly.
Again it speaks to me, a voice oozing out of the cold ocean depths.
Cthulhu.
The word sinks into me like a knife, a smooth incision…a length of cold metal between the eyes would be no less effective. The pain is a spike of understanding. I bend over, my hand hovering between the silver-plated pistol and the radio mic. I grab the mic, not the gun, and raise it to my lips.
I stare into the darkness at the back of the cavern and sigh out my reply.
“Cthulhu…”
I drop it to the floor and kick over the little table where the radio sits. It crashes against the stone, spilling the lantern. Flaming oil ignites the blankets, and the cavern fills with noxious smoke. I turn my back on it and walk toward the smell of briny rain, my throat dry as bone.
As I come up out of the silver mine for the last time, the storm rages, winged things soar between the clouds, and I hear a chorus of howling and screeching punctuated by thunder. Thirst consumes me.
I open my mouth to the black skies and drink the oily rain. It flows down my throat like nectar, quenching my terrible thirst in the most satisfying way. It sits cool and comforting in my belly, and I drink down more of it.