The metal was warm to the touch. He could feel something stirring just on the other side, vibrating the gate with the same subtle but fundamental rhythm he'd heard in the ocean.
Storch tried to pry it open, forcing his fingertips into anything that looked like a crack until blood made his fingers too slick to get traction.
Think. No, want it, but don't think. Let it happen. Your body will know what to do.
Except it didn't.
"Ubbo-Sathla," Storch whispered. "Mana Yood Sushai. Magna Mater. Tiamat. Gaia. Maasauu. Geb. Abhoth."
Nothing stirred below.
Something hacked into him just above his kidneys. It felt like an axe. He tried to roll, and another axe sank into his upper arm. Turning his head, he saw only a flurry of razor-sharp, chitinous knives rising and falling, cleaving and hacking his helpless, exhausted body.
It was something like an insect, something like a jellyfish that walked on telescoping, radially symmetrical legs, something like the fearsome gulper fish that lived miles beneath the ocean surface. Bit by bit, it chopped at him and sucked up the debris into a cluster of gnashing maws. He raised an arm to fend it off, but a wicked stinger jabbed him, and almost immediately, a cyst raised on his forearm and burst, spilling out blood and blue, glowing caviar.
Storch struggled to get out from under it, but it moved too fast, impaling his legs. Storch caught one of its scythe-claws and tore it out of its socket, turned it on the creature, but it was no use. The blade clattered off its hard shell without making a dent.
It explained a lot, in the end, to know he was meant to fail. It was a stupid mistake, the one he'd made again and again, to come here. Trusting in something bigger than himself. Pray to God, and a dumb fucking bug comes instead—
There was a deafening report, and the predator was swatted out of the air by a brilliant flash and a concussion that left Storch thinking they'd both been struck by lightning.
That's what blaspheming gets you
, his father's words came to him over the ringing of all the bells.
Someone stood over him. At this point, it didn't matter who it was, but he still was surprised to see it was Dyson.
He and Dr. Teeth appeared to have come to some sort of mutual understanding, a posture of live and let live gone horribly awry. The giant nematode had grown faster than ever on the rich foodstuffs between Dyson's ears. It looked like a great, gray, slimy anaconda, winding in and out of Dyson's eye socket and ears and countless weeping holes in his neck and chest. The endless snarl twisted and went into one hole, spilled out of another, but Dyson didn't seem to mind. He regarded Storch blankly with his remaining eye. In his feverishly shaking talons, he held the tank killer.
"My war is forever," he growled, saluted, and disappeared into the jungle.
Storch couldn't get up off the gate. He was too weak to fight or to pray, anymore, too weak to do anything but lie there and wait for whatever was going to happen.
He'd been a fool not to believe them when they told him the worst, and then, in the end, he'd been the biggest fool of all to believe that there was a higher authority, even a blind, mindless womb, to call to. They were all alone in the dark with the monsters, and it was the monsters' world all along, we just lived on it, but not for much longer, and that, at least, was a relief.
Somewhere in the jungle, Dyson shouted and fired the tank killer again and again. The ground shook, spore-pouches burst and showered Storch with luminous fairy-dust. The air shivered with his triumphant roar.
Storch called out again, his voice a strangled wheeze he could barely hear in his own head. Streams of sweat and rivulets of blood from his countless wounds rained down and pooled on the barrier, seeping through invisible cracks and disappearing.
This was stupid. God damn it.
Goddamn you, God—
Something groaned, deep down in the earth.
Oh, you like that?
he thought.
Fine, you're God. You made us all in nobody's image, and then deserted us, so I guess that makes you the Almighty. You're the one, God damn you, you're God. If you're down there, if you're the author of us all, then come up and fix this.
All those other stupid names, all those invocations and shit that Armitage fed him, had done nothing. Now, he gave it the name by which he had loved and feared and believed in life, though it seemed like a symptom of his father's craziness. He gave it his anger, his pain, his hate, his blood and sweat. Bleeding and shouting curses into a hole in the ground, he gave it worship.
The gate bulged under him and burst open.
Storch was thrown against a tree. The soft meat of the trunk gave way beneath him, and he rolled back, almost falling over the edge into the pit he'd opened. Weak, more than halfway dead, he craned his neck and peered over the edge and down into the shaft.
For just a moment, there was only the darkness, a limitless, tangible shadow that went down to the heart of the world. Then he heard it coming. His body lurched back and somehow found its feet, carried him far from the sound that rolled up out of the shaft, growing louder by the second as something rose up to the opening.
Storch broke out of the trees and into the clearing. Keyes still stood before the shattered Elder tower. Its enormous compound body now resembled a crude, colossal image of the proto-crinoid thing it had devoured. Monstrous wings battered the air, and its wriggling eye-stalks swiveled to take in its domain. Its deafening ululations fell off at once as the sound of the Unbegotten Source grew louder and louder, filling the cavern of Eden with the roar of a wave approaching through a narrow cataract. Storch could feel it coming in the subtle shift of pressure in the cavern, and turned and ran back up the flattened track to the gate to the outside world.
It came.
Storch froze. Even if it meant his death, he could not take another step or turn away from what came up behind him, not until he'd witnessed it with his own eyes.
A geyser of glowing, opalescent foam erupted out of the hole. Wherever it touched, the trees burst. The mounting gusher spawned roving packs of cunning tsunami waves, rolling out in all directions and engulfing all in their path. Seething black clouds of life boiled up into the air, but the wave reached up and swallowed them. It spilled into the clearing, racing across the open ground like mercury across glass. A thrusting wave of it flanked Keyes, sweeping away the path to the exit. The colossal Shoggoth beat its enormous wings and lifted itself up on its pseudopods and tried to wade across the deluge. The flood turned and converged on it with savage prescience, lapping at its boneless limbs and undermining the earth it stood upon.
Storch was helpless to move, even when the waves seemed to notice him and approached, poised and glowing with blind, molecular lust. Its vitality was almost a voice in Storch's brain, the one word of the Unbegotten Source. It wanted to fuck him to death and make the world over with demigod monsters, a million rolling genetic dice sure, someday, to give the Great Womb what it longed for.
It shimmered and shifted in the blue spore-light, and Storch was able to see that it was anything but a homogenous fluid. The worst part of it was that it was exactly what it looked like. The fluid was alive with quivering, questing things like bullets, like fetal fish—sperm.
Keyes toppled and fell into the flood. Wherever it touched the Shoggoth, the fluid went berserk, seeming to tear into its flesh and bear off chunks of it, but it was not destruction. It was generation on a scale and at a rate that defied all biology. The wriggling, churning inhabitants of the fluid leapt out of the flood at Keyes like spawn-mad salmon, and bored in. Keyes's mountainous flesh exploded with cysts not unlike the one the predator-bug had tried to put into Storch, but each of these ruptured almost instantly, every single cell a zygote, a fertile womb. Keyes was completely obscured by the rising tide of divine semen and newborn life that erupted forth and commenced the cycle all over again. With a speed and ferocity that shamed the most aggressive breeders of Eden, the chimerical sons and daughters of the Unbegotten Source rampaged across Keyes's paralyzed mass, eating and killing and raping each other, laying eggs and dying, evolving before Storch's eyes into every conceivable variation on the theme of a living creature, into monstrous, obscene and magnificent combinations of traits reptilian, avian, amphibian, bacterial, piscine, insectoid, mammalian and much that was impossible to classify.
And from out of the conflagration came a deafening shriek of wordless rage and betrayal that burst the air asunder and jammed the needle-shards of it deep into Storch's brain. Two hundred fifty million years of brooding, fifty years of scheming, all its ruthless machinations to save the world from itself, had come to this. With agonizing slowness, it subsided to a piteous howl and finally, as the very flesh that gave voice to the cry was consumed or impregnated, died out among the cacophony of its abominable larval offspring.
And still the nacreous waves rolled out across the devastated biosphere, raping all in their path as they did in ancient Greece, and the Amazon, and every other place on the earth where gods once walked. If the Elders were the authors of evolution, the Unbegotten Source was the author of all the freaks, mutants, gods and monsters of every body of mythological lore. From holes such as the one he'd opened, this tide of rebirth had flowed all over the world before the Old Ones arrived from the stars, touching any living thing they came across with the quickening fire of new life.
The things born of Keyes's flesh moved too fast to be seen and died faster than they could be described, but there were always more. No one bore the slightest resemblance to any other, yet they mated and bred and battled until there was nothing remotely like Keyes left. Successive waves of births erupted out of the black protoplasm and ravaged each other and the hapless denizens of Eden, themselves only a few paces ahead of the onrushing wave.
For just an eye-blink, he thought he saw a loping, cursing shadow that might have been Lt. Dyson running across the semen-sea like a Jesus lizard, but a wave blotted him out, if he was ever there at all.
Storch turned and ran. The blue glow behind him was blotted out by the shadow and rumble of the greedy tide coming for him. Legs and arms pumping, he lost ground with every step. He could hear Its children over his shoulder, splashing and leaping on the crest of the wave. Insects and spore-clouds obscured the way, stinging, gumming his eyes shut, but he didn't stop or even slow down, because if he hesitated, he was sure the wave would bring him down and rape him to nothingness.
The floor shuddered and rolled. The roof of the cavern settled, dropping curtains of rock and fungi jungle into the deluge. The black mouth of the exit lay only a hundred yards ahead, but even if the waves didn't get him, the ceiling was about to collapse.
Faultlines slipped, tides turned ugly, and fluctuations in the magnetic and radiation belts around the earth played havoc with all airborne communications, as the globe quivered in the throes of a divine orgasm.
Deep in the semi-molten core of the earth, the mother-mass of Ubbo-Sathla stirred from Its billion-year sleep and awakened to the fertile presence of the Keyes-Shoggoth, miles above itself, anchored to the floor of the Central Pacific Basin. Its appetite whetted by Storch's sacrifice and the rape of Eden, the blind, divine lust of the Unbegotten Source caught fire at the prospect of the living island. Up through fissures and volcanic vents in the ocean floor the invincible seed percolated and squirted a sea of gametes into the island's soft, fertile center.
In the amphitheatre, Stella tried to run from the embattled Shoggoth, but her legs were made of water. She crumpled on the concrete steps and hid her face from the leviathan coming for her. She pressed her hands to her ears to block out its cries and the sound of helicopters, and the sound of her own blood becoming a thunderous tocsin to shake the dead out of their graves. That she was going to die here, with something inside her yet unborn, she did not doubt, nor did she fear it. If only it had lived, she thought, even if she never lived to see it, then what she and Storch had become and endured would not have been in vain.
A helicopter passed overhead. With an ear-splitting howl, the Shoggoth lashed out and swatted it out of the sky. She heard it spin off through the air, shattered rotors slicing up rows of seats as it pinwheeled down the amphitheatre and exploded in the orchestra pit.
Cold, stinging mist kissed her face and started to burn. When she opened her eyes, she saw only liquid emerald clouds where it had stood. Another pair of helicopters swooped and darted around the colossus like the biplanes in
King Kong
, crop-dusting it with the same lysing agent the Mission had used on the Idaho colony.
It had reduced the others to slag, but she survived because Storch had given her something that rendered her immune, as it purged her of the alien mind that trapped her in herself. She knew now, that for whatever reason, he had saved her. Call it love or lust or breeding instinct, that made them do what they did later, but he had come into the prison she had dug for herself and saved her, when no instinct should have made him lift a finger. Nature had thrust them together, rubbed them against each other to make what she carried within her for its own inscrutable purposes, but he had given her life as much as Keogh, and freedom.
I loved him
, she thought, because it was safe to admit it, now that he was dead, and she dying. But the thing inside her wasn't.
She reached out for the broken back of a seat and dragged herself to her feet. Her head felt like a half-full helium balloon, bobbing fit to float away, because she hadn't breathed since the cloud settled on her. She stumbled up the stairs, clinging to the rail and trying to see something beyond her outstretched hands.