Read Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Online
Authors: Dennis Detwiller
Tags: #H.P. Lovecraft, #Cthulhu Mythos, #Detwiller, #Cthulhu, #Dennis Detwiller, #Delta Green, #Lovecraft
But it had, and to him, just 48 hours before.
Presently Mal leaned in again and pointing at the horizon where the lights had vanished, said, “They’re out into the desert now, out to the old stones to see the Nulla. This is as good a time as any.” Suddenly the aborigine was up and gone, scuttling down the far side of the rise of rocks, nothing more than an afterimage, a shadow slightly darker than the surface he tread upon. Camp rose and trotted after him, trying to keep his gear quiet, but rocks spilled to the ground in his wake. Mal watched him clumsily traverse the rise.
“Gonna have to do better than that, Joe.” He chuckled, his wide mouth split in a smile.
At the base of the rise, on the flatlands of the Gibson Desert in the pitch black of night, Mal started forward at a brisk pace. Joe Camp followed as best he could, just like the last two nights on their walkabout. Like the previous nights no real movement could be discerned from their walking, except in the passing of small objects on the ground close enough to be seen in the dark. The lump of the Tobin Ranges in the distance stubbornly rode the horizon for over an hour before Camp realized abruptly, as the shadow began to loom ahead of them, that they were almost there.
The sharp rise of spiraling, fissured rock was barely visible in the pre-dawn light. The huge, squat surface of the mountain where an hour before Joe Camp had spied lanterns looked insurmountable, impenetrable, totally inhospitable to human life, but it was there now in front of them as big as life and twice as ugly. Mal hunkered down behind a meandering field of boulders and took a drink from his canteen. Camp did the same, and then leveraged himself up onto a foothold on the boulder so he could spy the range above.
He searched the surface of the immense mountain face for about fifteen seconds before he saw it, a crack in its surface, dim light leaking out of the rock like poison from a wound.
“There,” he said, and Mal smiled back at him from the dark. Surprised at his own conviction, Camp found that the nagging questions which had first entered his mind since his rescue now seemed dim and insignificant. He smiled back at Mal and the two began to close the distance to the rock.
Maybe he did have malaria after all.
There was no real way to approach the mountain while under cover. For about a hundred meters in every direction around the rock was just dead space, open ground, and they would be easy pickings if snipers were stationed anywhere nearby. The rock was laden with thousands of possible hiding places for the enemy. Since their arrival at the boulders, the sky had grown in color to a deep purple while the eastern horizon showed the dimmest whispers of indigo blue. The mountain was now a vast black shadow backlit by the growing light of the sky. It would only get lighter, and Mal silently assured Joe with a glance that waiting was not an option. They would go now.
Mal ran for the rocks which marked the edge of the mountain without regard for stealth, and arrived unscathed beneath an outcropping of huge tan spires of stone in less than a minute. Camp followed, his heartbeat pounding in his ears. The two men poked their heads up above the rocks and considered their destination. Up on the black-shadowed face of the mountain a single tiny light shone. Camp and Mal now looked at it intently. It was a cave lit from inside by something like a lantern. Shadows occasionally obscured its glow, as if people were moving about within.
“How many people do you think will be in there?” Camp whispered.
“No people up there except for your friends,” Mal muttered. “All the rest are just the Nulla.”
Joe Camp tried to smile but found a heaviness in his chest made it impossible. The aborigine began a slow climb up the crevice-filled surface of the mountain as the darkness bled away into the Australian dawn. Joe Camp followed like a shadow.
By the time they reached the cave, Joe knew something bad was going to happen. He could feel it hanging in the air like a stench. He shifted his .45 Colt pistol into the front of his belt and checked the slide bolt on the Sten gun. His sweaty hands searched for the best point to grip the unfamiliar submachine gun, but nothing could quiet the murmuring in his mind:
Something bad is going to happen.
Mal stood at the lip of the cave to one side, submachine gun pulled up to his chest, eyes wild and wide. The light in the air was growing. Joe nodded and the aborigine began to skirt slowly around into the entrance of the cave. Joe Camp followed about six feet back and a bit to the right, to keep him clear of his field of fire.
Inside the cave, strange indistinct shadows flowed across the smooth surfaces of rock.
The two men leapt around the corner of the twisting rock passage in unison, and Mal opened fire suddenly, the stubby gun jumping in his hand like an unruly animal, belching blue-white fire. Joe held his breath as his heart began to beat double time in his chest, but held his fire. He wasn’t sure what he was seeing at first, but after the clatter of the noisy submachine gun died, Joe could spy two human forms within the main chamber of the cave.
A globe of scintillating crystal lit the room from the floor like some sort of huge, baroque lantern. The strange crystal drew the eye, and Joe Camp found himself wondering at the bizarre play of light within the sphere. The shadows which crawled across the cave were produced by the odd, pulsing light of the that shone through the faceted surface of the glass. Joe pulled his gaze away from the globe and scanned the cave. The two human forms in its center remained deathly still, like mannequins.
“Sorry, jumpy,” Mal said, his voice resounding in the cave like an echo.
The two men within the cave, the men Mal had fired at—one plain-clothed and the other dressed in an American Army officer’s uniform—looked... wrong. Not the men themselves, but their circumstances. They hung in the air like a snapshot, like they had been caught in time and frozen. The thinner of the two, the one who wore plain clothes, was caught in eternal mid-stride, with one leg ready to fall to the ground, leaning forward in a position no one could hold naturally for more than a second. The other man, in the army uniform (Camp could spy the first three letters on his name tag: P-E-A), leaned forward as well, as if he had been shoved. He was turned as if he was heading for the back of the cave when whatever happened had happened. The two hung frozen, and the fusillade of bullets that the aborigine had fired at them had apparently vanished, leaving the two strange men untouched.
“God,” was all that Camp could squeeze out. All the air seemed to have left him.
Mal never even hesitated. He trotted forward into the “room,” unconcerned that the impossible was occurring in front of him, and began searching among the rocks on the floor. The cave was not large, a little more than fifty square feet, covered in debris, boulders and roughly hewn walls. A stack of tin cans covered in dried filth lay in the corner, along with various bizarre artifacts: a shattered camera, portions of what looked like a carburator freshly lathered in oil, and strange grey, hinged boxes. It looked like more than a dozen men had made their home here for some time. The smell of the cave was pungent, rich with human waste.
Now only the two frozen men remained. Camp could still not bring himself to look directly at them. His eyes strained to find something else to focus on.
The wall beyond the men was fashioned from immense, time-worn blocks of sandstone, each as large as a car. Only three of the huge blocks were visible, but the edges of more bled into the cave walls, as if the cave itself had congealed around the blocks. As if the crafted stones were older than the mountain. Camp wandered into the room, submachine gun forgotten in his numb hands, and goggled at the two men stuck in time. His mind searched for purchase on new, terrible realities.
As Joe approached them, he could feel something like the pressure of deep water squeezing down on his face and in his skull. Tiny pebbles hung in the still air before his eyes, in a complex geometric pattern which reminded Joe of stars hanging in the void of space. These tiny beads, slightly shiny, floated several inches from the two men, like magic. Joe’s mind reeled as he suddenly realized that the pebbles were Mal’s bullets. The bullets had been frozen by whatever power had immobilized the two men. Joe lifted his hand, still five feet away from the frozen, portly man in the army uniform, and reached for one of the bullets as it hung in the air. He felt his hand slow as his fingers slipped closer to the round. The tips of his fingers began to tingle and then grow numb as he forced his hand into air as thick as jelly. Mal looked up from his task, distracted:
“Don’t go near them, Joe,” Mal warned, his voice full of confidence.
“What? Oh, yes.” Joe stepped back, his mind blank, and followed Mal’s eyes to a small, radio-like device the aborigine was fiddling with.
The box that contained it was the broken casing of a radio, as far as Joe could tell—it even had the Phillips brand name stamped into it—and a complex arrangement of mirrors had been fitted on top a bed of carefully strung wires, which were soldered to various metal plates embedded in the case. A tiny sliver of perfect red light wound its way through the maze of mirrors on the device, like a filament of fire. The entire contraption emitted a soft, nearly inaudible hum. Mal leaned in, squatting on his knees, to consider the back of the device. His hands traced connections on the machine without touching it.
“What is...that?” Joe Camp sputtered. A feeling rose in his mind like an all-encompassing denial. The facts which his senses were delivering to him were repelled by something deeper than reason, something primal inside which told him that everything he could sense here was wrong. This was not real. It could not be.
“One of the Nulla’s tricks,” Mal responded, lost in thought.
Camp had no reply. It was obvious the aborigine had seen such a device before, or at least had heard of such a thing. To Joe Camp it was completely alien. He had never seen the type of light that the device emitted produced by any human device, much less by one the size of a radio. A slow, crawling sensation like dread dropped into his gut when he realized that it was most likely what kept the two men suspended in air.
“How?” Camp whispered.
How?
was all his brain could manage in response to the impossibilities before him. Everything Joe Camp thought he had learned—in school, in life, in the war—collapsed silently in his mind like a house of cards.
“What the hell is going on here?!” Joe Camp screamed, spittle flying from his lips. He raised the submachine gun and faced the little aborigine. His finger came dangerously close to depressing the trigger out of sheer reflex, but something in his mind suddenly dropped away and the Sten gun clattered to the floor. He stumbled backwards, tears streaming. Mal watched silently as Joe’s hands covered his face, rubbing up and down his eyes like he was trying to wipe away the things he had seen in the cave. He stumbled to the far wall, and there Joe Camp collapsed in the corner.
“Take it easy, Joe. Take it easy,” Mal said.
“Something bad is going to happen,” Camp whimpered.
It the vaulted silence of the cave, it sounded like a prayer.
Long before the ambush, John Smith knew it had somehow been located by the council’s agents. It felt the peculiar sensation of a stutter in time, a vague discontinuity in reality, like the skipping of a record, which marked the passage of minds from ancient earth to the present day. This was its first warning that its plan had been compromised. This sensation was unusual enough in itself, but when Smith felt it occur more than twelve times in a single day, as he trudged through the jungle with the humans towards Thule, it understood the severity of its situation. For the first time it understood the newfound resolve of the council, which was usually hesitant to engage in such brash acts.
This meant that likely Smith’s plan had already eradicated the future, leaving a black void past the point when the ward would be compromised. Soon enough, it would prove the council’s fears correct.
It was rare to risk Great Race agents in human forms in large numbers. Usually such tasks were handled by the human cult, the Motion, which the Race had fostered throughout human history. Smith did not panic. It knew the agents of the council could not possibly be tracking the human shell it currently inhabited, and it had discarded any exotic items which could be pinpointed by the powerful science of the Great Race. This was a lesson it had learned long ago and a weakness it had learned to exploit against the agents of the council, who often relied upon it. Smith had nothing of Pnakotus on its shell. That left only the humans with which it was traveling. The council had somehow learned to track one of those human companions.
Or one of the council was one of its human companions.
John Smith had remained guarded from that point onward, ready for decisive action at any moment. It had not suffered through so much in this uncivilized age to fail now.
At the first sign of disturbance, when one of the humans had detected the approach of unknown entities, Smith had left the group for the first time. Silently it crept off to the south, skirting the area of dispute by more than a mile while the sounds of the ambush played out distantly behind it, echoing beneath the vault of the canopy. The thunderous cracks of the lightning guns and the stuttering, ineffectual pops of human weapons were suddenly lost in one colossal explosion, a circumstance which Smith had not planned but which pleased it greatly. The weapon of choice of the Great Race had reacted violently with the explosive compound the humans had carried, removing the humans and the council’s agents alike in one cleansing eruption.
Smith would now have to disable the ward itself. But this was no great matter.
Smith did not look back. It hurried forward through the lush jungle towards the grey city.
Thule.
When it arrived, it knew that its time here had almost ended.
Although Smith did not realize it, tears poured from its shell’s eyes as it wandered the abandoned streets. It stumbled, nearly blind, to the center of the necropolis, searching for its goal. A city of Stonehenge-like rock structures built in the scale of skyscrapers, laid out in vast, ever-tightening concentric circles.
Only something of such grand size could keep the jungle at bay. The vast spires of grey rock, reared over two million years before, still remained untouched by harsh nature, which laid a quiet, constant and tireless siege to it on all sides. It was a testament to the hubris of Smith’s race, the greatest project the Great Race had undertaken and its greatest secret, more vast that the library at Pnakotus or any of its millions of other forays into time. The place called Thule was the ward which kept the Great Race’s only true enemy at bay, and which allowed a future into which they would construct an escape from that enemy’s unavoidable release.
When the whistling horrors had risen up and consumed their world, the Great Race had fled to a future assured by their constant diligence, by visitation and alteration of history. A distant future free from the terrors of their most feared enemy—the insubstantial, immaterial, cancerous polyps they had imprisoned beneath the earth when they had first arrived here from the star of their origin. But in the interim, between the destruction of Pnakotus and the age of man, when the polyps roamed free upon the Earth, unchallenged and supreme, what had become of them? No mind of Pnakotus thought to ask such questions. Neither had Smith, until he discovered the secret buried in the sands of Australia.
The otherworldly polyps, so alien and abnormal, bred in an equally unnatural manner. It happened every four hundred million years. Gathering in an orgy of semi-solid fluid exchange, the species itself became a seething biological reactor, spewing forth new offspring to further infest the globe of the earth. They would remain in this state for hundreds of millions of years, depending on obscure celestial cycles which affected organs peculiar to their form.
The Great Race had gained this knowledge early in its time on earth, during the first great subjugation wars which led to the imprisonment of the polyps. Few knew that the polyps were subdued so easily only because many were still locked within this orgy when the Great Race arrived. These polyps, lost in some instinctual rhapsody, were easily moved underground and posed no threat while in this state. Those few that were motile and conscious were much more difficult to defeat, but the vast numbers of the Great Race proved enough to quash their initial attempts at counterattack.
All the polyps were imprisoned beneath the earth.
Even in the midst of victory, though, the members of the Great Race knew that their defeat would eventually occur. Their power to travel through time established this grim fact even before the last polyp was placed beneath the ground. The day would come when the polyps would break free of the wards of alien science the Great Race had laid to lock them within the earth. There was no way to stop the polyps, and the Great Race did not try to stop them; they understood even then that the only advantage they possessed, their ability to travel through time, was their only hope at survival.
In those eons when the polyps crawled about on the surface of the earth unchecked, after the fall of Pnakotus, no native species flourished aboveground or in the open air. The polyps ruled the dark globe and erected seamless black towers to their strange immaterial gods, and waited for the time when they could breed enough young to leave and infect other worlds and other planes.
During one of their reproductive phases, native advanced life began to flourish upon the Earth. The first creature of significant intelligence, with a brain capacity sufficient to support the mind of a member of the Great Race, was a strange and early species of ape. Native to Africa, these great apes evolved about four million years before the modern human era. It was discovered by agents of the Great Race inhabiting their clumsy forms that near the birthplace of this newly evolved race the polyps had taken to their reproductive dance in the jungles.
The polyps’ only weakness was to be exploited.
Hundreds of agents of the Great Race jumped forward in time to inhabit many members of that species of ape and to turn its natural evolution to the whim of the council. Many of the Great Race’s greatest minds were lost in the transference, as the brains of the ape creatures were tiny compared even to that of humanity. Few survived the transfer back when their task was completed. Those that did were little more than shadows of what they once were. These advanced minds ruled the primitive ape-people like gods.
Over two million years of evolution and endless toil in the primordial jungles of Africa, this odd species of ape, ruled by the agents of the Great Race, constructed the grey city, Thule, using the science of ancient Pnakotus. In the process, the agents of the Great Race taught the apes the arts of science and speech, and the first whispers of the belief in gods and magic began to stir among them. But the construction of the city was always the focus, for the city was in fact a device to keep the polyps in their reproductive state—a massive ward to fold the polyps into an unbreakable and infertile Mobius loop of reproduction. Within the center of the ward the polyps remained, locked in eternal orgy, never reproducing, never tiring, never leaving.
Entombed.
At the end of this great age, with the completion of the ward, the polyps were imprisoned. The remnants of the ape culture continued to develop amidst the city, slowly spreading out into the world, transforming by evolution into many different forms, one of which would prove to be the dominant species for some time in the future. The ancestral knowledge of something greater than their beginnings remained with their descendants, genetic memories of lost cities of birth; Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, Thule. Their antecedents, the ape-things, remained in the wilds of Africa, jealously guarding their grey city in the depths of the jungle. From this great, secret endeavor a new future rich with life unfolded upon the earth like an ever-increasing wave, erasing the black expanse of a polyp-ruled world which had once stood in its stead. This new future was free to be traveled by the Great Race and molded to the council’s whim, abused by the council for their own, undeserved preservation.
But no more.
John Smith was here now, in the city which had started mankind on the path of civilization and which would end the rule of the Great Race which had exploited and plundered time itself. Smith lowered its bag to the ground and retrieved its notes in the clear light of the wonderful sun. A sun which would soon shine upon a naked, dead globe, barren of natural life and form—except for the seamless black towers and the haunting cries of the great enemy, the polyps. Without humanity to scar the world with atomic weapons, the future to which the Great Race had escaped would cease to exist.
Before him the limitless streets of Thule sprawled, carving the earth into distinct, mathematical sigils the size of city blocks, which wove a spell of eternal bliss on those cancerous things from outside. The ritual to free them would take some time, but nothing was left in the world to stop it now. Time itself was drawing to a close around John Smith and every single thing in the world, silently, like a shroud. The wave of life which Pnakotus had freed had come to its crest and would soon collapse into an everlasting tide of chaos.