I helped Evelyn to her feet, and we ran together. She cried out for Johnny, but I wouldn’t let her look back. The black cloud was bearing down on us, blotting out the stars and moon. I smelled the stink of the ocean rolling over the desert…the smell of dead and rotted marine life.
I grabbed a satchel of gear from the overturned jeep, and we took off into the desert. The Flyers must have forgot us after awhile. They had a big enough feast back on the highway.
As the sun came up, red and bloated in the purple sky…it had never looked right since the Big Waves…we came into Pahrump. The tiny town was deserted, and corpses littered the streets. We saw they had been gnawed up pretty good, probably by the Flyers…or something just as bad. There wasn’t a single living soul there. But we did find a good supply of canned food, bottled water, a gun shop full of ammo and a few rifles, and some other odds-and-ends.
It was Evelyn who told me about the old silver mine on the edge of town. She was a Nevada girl before she married Johnny.
“Maybe we can hide there…in the mine tunnels,” she said. “Maybe they won’t go underground. Those mines are pretty deep. We’ll be safe down there, Joe.”
I didn’t believe we would, but I looked into her big, blue eyes, crystalline with tears shed for her dead husband, for her dead relatives in San Joaquin… for the whole damn world gone to Hell.
“Yeah.” I lied to her. “We’ll be safe down there. Good idea.”
We loaded wheelbarrows with provisions, water, guns, blankets, and I picked up an old ham radio from the gun store. I didn’t expect it to work, but it was something. Something to pin our hopes on. When the world is ending, you’ll take anything you can get.
Evelyn was five months along when we moved into the mine. We weren’t exactly comfortable down there in the belly of the cool earth, but it was as close as we were going to get. Even a blanket laid over hard stones feels good when you’re half dead from exhaustion and worry. She tended the wound on my face, and I told her hopeful lies to settle her nerves. I said this would all blow over and things would be back to normal in a few months. I didn’t believe a word of it. Maybe she did, or at least she wanted to.
I started playing with the radio, hooking it up to a portable battery and listening to the static. I scanned every frequency, every day for weeks, but there was nothing out there. Nothing at all. I imagined all those ham radio geeks lying dead in their basements, or their bones in the bellies of nameless beasts, their radios crushed to splinters or lying in forgotten barns covered with dust.
Slowly, the months crept by. It turned out Evelyn was right. We were safe underground. Her belly grew bigger, and she stopped moving around so much. I started mentally preparing myself to deliver the baby, something I had never done before. But I’d seen so much blood and suffering, first in the war, now at the end of the world, that I knew it wouldn’t matter. How hard could it be to pull this little bugger out of his momma’s belly? She would do most of the work.
“I’m gonna name him Johnny,” she said. “Like his father.”
I smiled as if it mattered. The kid had no future in a world like this. I cleaned my .45 and contemplated putting us both out of our misery. Why go on living? What was the point? We’d both be better off dead. I loaded a clip into the chamber and tucked the gun behind my belt buckle. I went over to sit by her on the makeshift bed we’d been sharing. I had never touched her sexually, but we’d hold hands in the dead of night. It brought some measure of comfort…more for her than for me, I told myself.
The baby was kicking today, and she was excited. I lowered the flame in our lantern and told her to get some sleep. I might sneak out later and hunt a hare for dinner, I told her. I always said that, but I’d never found any living game outside in the three months we’d been there. Still, sometimes I’d sneak out between the rolling black clouds and scavenge, or look for signs of life. I knew I was kidding myself, and I was tired of it.
She would nod off soon and I would end her life painlessly, one clean shot through her skull and another to finish off the unborn child.
Then one last round through the roof of my mouth and right into my brain pan.
All this suffering would be over for us. The baby would never know a world of crawling Biters and hungry Flyers. It was the right thing to do, I told myself, my mind made up.
But Evelyn…she stopped me without ever knowing my plan.
She looked up at me with those big, blue eyes, her dark lids heavy, and she raised her head a bit.
She kissed me, damn her.
She kissed me like she loved me, and I took her into my arms. We lay there for awhile, then fell to sleep. After that I knew I could never kill her. Not even to spare her the pain of living in this dying world.
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.