“The dreamer was showing me his visions of our future return to dominance. Who has taken me from these pleasant slumbers?”

  Yeogurath loomed over him. The Migo banged his claws and growled.

  “Take that, Hastur,” Julie said. “Uber Rock is going kick your elder ass.”

  Hastur’s squirming body rippled under the robe. He gurgled a series of watery chirps.

  “I possess no true sense of humor, but even I find amusement in your remark.”

  The Old One tilted his head and peered up at Yeogurath.

  “My corporeal form will not be sullied by engaging in physical contact. Look instead on the face of your once and future master. All assembled here shall bear witness to its glorious terribleness.”

  “Wordy blowhard,” Julie said.

  Hastur’s cephalopod arm reached for his veil. Pratt genuflected and bowed to the Old One.

  “Please, Yellow Majesty. Spare your loyal servants from the sight of your horrible magnificence.”

  “I am here because of your failure to deal adequately with that blight.”

  His tentacles spiked towards Yeogurath.

  “Share in its torment.”

  Hastur peeled the veil. A sallow bioluminescence flared from the robe’s hood. Pratt unhooked his baton. He thumbed the release button and gagged when the hook perforated his throat. The barb gored through his neck and stuck in the wall behind him. Pratt choked on the fish line as it strummed his tonsils. He shuddered and retched a final breath. The stretched cord held his body propped in a kneeling stance.

  Hastur swiveled and exposed his features to Julie and Rice. The commando plucked out his eyes through the slits in his ski mask. He mashed them and wiped the pulpy unguent on his pants. “What the fuck, I can still see it!” Rice banged his head against the wall until brain fiber leaked from his cracked forehead. He keeled on the carpet. Julie sneered at Hastur.

  “Do your baddest, motherfucker. Uber Rock and the Migo rule!”

  She spoke her last couple of words in a strained giggle. Julie’s body convulsed with involuntary laughter until her stomach heaved and ruptured. She gawked at her split tummy and watched her innards spill onto the floor.

  “Fuck.”

  She dropped with a wet splat into the intestinal heap of goop. Yeogurath howled and rose his claw.

  “I sense your cowardly act, while you think my attention diverted,” Hastur said. “I paraphrase a favored phrase of this planet’s temporary dwellers. You hurt yourself without doing any possible injury to me. Smite me, and feel the original hellfire.”

  Hastur pivoted and bellowed at Yeogurath.

  “Strike me, slave meat!”

  Yeogurath shrieked and swiped the Old One. Hastur combusted into a massive fireball that engulfed the Bell Weather Inn.

  ***

  MacCready sipped from his insulated travel mug. He sloshed the coffee around his teeth and savored the mild burn. MacCready watched the bustle as a squad of firefighters doused the latent embers that still smoldered in the blackened ruins. The approach of two uniformed officers compelled him into a quick swallow. The older cop addressed the State Trooper

  “We’ve been conferring with Chief Slater, Trooper. Arson’s ruled out, no suspicious origin, anything like that.”

  “Any idea what did do it, Sheriff Abbott? I just need something for my commander to chew on after the temporary blindness it caused all up and down the state.”

  “I’ll get the horse’s mouth over here. Lisa.”

  A woman dressed in soot-stained fire gear slogged across the saturated yard.

  “You explain things better than me,” Abbott said.

  “Short and simple. The Bell Weather is doing big time renovations, still hooked to a small time gas line. Somebody tries cutting corners, probably. Overload, precautions ignored, kaboom. End of story.”

  “That do it for you, Trooper?” Abbott asked.

  MacCready’s vigorous nod almost upended his Smokey hat.

  “If we find enough of any guests to try and identify, we’ll pass it on. We still don’t know if there are any unfried records anywhere. Don’t expect too much.”

  “Yeah, the guys at the barracks said that happens a lot in Arkham.”

  Paramedics wheeled a stretcher past them. Straps secured its bundled patient. MacCready blanched when he saw the struggling man’s shiny fire-skinned face. He looked at the trooper with his remaining bloodshot eyes.

  “Yuggoth,” he bleated. “No more, no more. One can stop it. Hast…”

  A paramedic injected the man with a disposable syringe. He trembled and fainted.

  “Just keeping him comfortable, all we can do now.”

  They loaded the stretcher in their waiting ambulance.

  “Found wandering out back in the new parking lot,” Abbott told MacCready. “Wearing nothing but his burned-up birthday suit. What the fire left, hypothermia got. Teaches at the University, I think. We good for now, Trooper?”

  “Right by me, Sheriff. I’ll leave you capable gentlemen to your business.

  MacCready sniffed the smoke that was funneled past them by the wind.

  “That’s what I’ve been smelling. Reminds me of some family barbecues and cooked crab or lobster.”

  “Migo,” the deputy said.

  “Excuse me, Deputy?”

  “My goo-ood. I really like seafood barbecue.”

  “Yeah, it’s good. Thanks for the professional courtesy, Chief Slater.”

  MacCready returned to his patrol car and drove from the property.

  “Damn it, Jim,” Abbott said. “You’ve been around long enough to know what to keep secret.”

  “Hey, it surprised me any of those critters were still around. You want me to go to the University and tell the special services dean they need another replacement?”

  “I’ll do it. I hope the damn city council approves my retirement pension soon so I can go somewhere warm and sunny and drink myself and all my memories of this place’s happy horseshit into oblivion. I just hope nothing finds a permanent way back into this dimension before I get to do that.”

  McHumans

  Kevin Strange

  I'm Ricky. I'm a human being. A survivor of the Aqua-pocalypse. A slave. Food for my watery masters—how those masters came into power is anybody's guess. All I know is, one day I was jacking off to videos of the pink Power Ranger, and the next, the whole planet was flooded, and giant monsters were dragging those of us lucky (unlucky?) enough not to die in the initial onslaught down into the icy depths below.

  They call themselves the Deep Ones, the Old Ones, the Elder Gods, and all kinds of other things that make them sound super important. No two of them look exactly the same. They're evil, vile things, but they can talk and think just like you or me. I guess because they're super intelligent aliens from another dimension—at least that's what people say. But people say all kinds of crazy shit now, and it's not like we have an internet down here or anything to fact check with,o you just sort of take people's word for it most of the time. These aliens hate us and want us all dead. Why they hate us so much, I'll never know. But they do. They love to torture and eat us. They're real sadistic fuckers.

  Take my job, for example. I work in one of their subterranean cities beneath the ocean. How these cities existed without our knowledge before the great flood? Another question I can't answer. There's a lot of those now. Questions. And not many answers. We're all too busy surviving...

  Oh yeah, my job. I work at a fast food restaurant that specializes in fresh flesh. Fresh human flesh. As in people are butchered here and then we garnish their meat with little pieces of seaweed and coral and shit. As a joke, those of us who work here call it McHumans. And guess who they make kill people? That's right. Me.

  Last week I had to kill my buddy Sam. He used to work here, too. In fact, he was the first person I met after I was dragged down into the murky depths. Everybody else that works here told us not to get emotionally attached to anyone ‘cause this sort of shit happens all the time, but we didn't listen. We both liked comic books and death metal. And what else is there to do but talk to each other when you're living in a waterlogged death camp just waiting for your number to come up, anyway?

  Three other people work with us on the night shift in the kitchen. Karen, a smokin' hot little redhead who tells the best poop jokes in the joint. She has cerebral palsy, or multiple sclerosis, or whatever disease fucks up your body. It's not that bad—it doesn't fuck up her face or the way she talks. Her hands are kind of curled up and one of her legs doesn't bend and bows in when she walks. Her spine and neck are curved all funky; but other than that? Top shelf pussy. Sometimes when the others think we're off having a smoke break, I fuck Karen in the walk-in cooler. It's kinda weird, fucking a crippled girl, the whole cooler full of dead bodies—but hey, you take what you can get in this hellhole. It's all part of life in the Aqua-pocalypse.

  Then there's the huge, fat, black dude we call Chef. You know, like the dude from South Park? Only this Chef isn't all full of inspirational speeches and joy; no, this guy is a miserable, hate-filled racist. He's got a gigantic, oily nose that looks like a brown pickle and he's missing one of his front teeth. He's worked here the longest and he says he loves it. Says he couldn't think of a better place to be than in a kitchen chopping up white people all day. But we know he's lying. He was a preacher in Detroit before all this happened. He just puts on the angry black man routine to keep from losing his shit. We all have our ways of dealing with the stress of death and misery hanging over our heads every second of every day.

  Like Ty, the final member of our crew. He deals with our living nightmare by dressing up like a woman—wigs, makeup, the whole thing. But the weird part is, he's still got a big brown beard and doesn't talk with an effeminate voice or try to make us call him by a woman's name. No, he just dresses like a chick. He's called a Transvestite. I only know this because my sister used to be in a Rocky Horror troupe. Now my sister's dead.

  So anyway, one minute me and Sam are swapping stories about fucking chicks back in our other life while we strip the skin off a pair of arms in the kitchen with the rest of the gang, and then bam! In comes our boss, a really funky looking crab-thing with a huge white spiral shell covered in nasty barnacles. The way his big eyes sit on top of their stalks, Boss Crab (as we call him) always looks like he's surprised or in a state of shock. He has a name—hell, they all have names, but fuck trying to pronounce those multi-syllable, too-many-consonant things. We have nicknames for all of them.

  Well, he storms right up to us, gives us both the once-over with a look of astonishment, the whole time his little crab mouth parts moving a mile a minute—his disgustingly long, thin tentacle whiskers waving around, tasting the air, or whatever it is they're used for—when he reaches out with his enormous red claw, grabs poor Sam by the neck, and drags him into the back room. The killing room.

  A couple seconds later, Boss Crab screams for us to come back there, too. The killing room always stinks, no matter how thoroughly we scrub it. There's just a permanent stench attached to it, like a slaughterhouse splashed with copious helpings of guilt and fear. The terror is palpable. It echoes off the walls, giving the room an ominous, sinister air. Or maybe it's just the shit smell that never quite goes away. Everyone shits when they die, and our drain sucks.

  The room's too small for all of us to fit, so Chef, Ty and Karen stand just outside the door. Boss Crab has a look on his face like he just saw an elephant climb into its own asshole. Sam is on the floor, totally confused. Hovering over him is Boss Crab's right-hand man—his “muscle,” as he likes to call him. The thing—if it is even a “him”—is called Torgen-Salaroth-something-something-something. We just call him Fishbowl. Boss Crab breathes air, so he's fine running around inside McHumans screaming at us and whatnot. But some of the horrid beasts, like Fishbowl, are strictly water dwellers.

  We don't even know what the hell Fishbowl is. He's all stuffed inside this black suit that looks sort of like one of those deep sea diver contraptions. The body of the suit is always damp and sweaty. It's one big piece with connecting gloves and boots wrapped in rusted chains and covered in rotted seaweed. It even has a diver's helmet on top—only this helmet is more like a fish bowl. That's why we call him that. Anyway, his helmet-thing, it's completely full of water. Black, fetid water. Vague, horrid shapes swim around in that murky gunk. I can't stare at it too long or I start to think I can see faces forming in the swirling darkness. Creepy shit.

  So Fishbowl's got a hold of Sam by the shoulders, and Sam's crying ‘cause he knows he's about to die, when Boss Crab starts swinging around this fire-ax with his little shriveled hand, yelling in his crab language. Once he sees we're utterly clueless as to what's going on, he switches to English. I hate when he does that. If you've never heard a crab imitate human speech, trust me, you don't want to.

  “This little shit thought he was going to break out of here!” Boss Crab says, waving the ax in Sam's face. With his big claw hand, he throws a stack of paper on the ground. “Escape plans! He really thought he could outsmart ME!”

  Chef snickers. “Crazy Cracka,” he says under his breath. I scowl at him.

  We're fucked. I know what's coming next. I'm so fucking scared I can't feel my feet.

  Boss Crab turns the ax on me. “You were in on it, too, weren't you? Explain yourself.”

  “I-I don't know what the hell you're talking about, man. I'm not in on anything,” I stammer, totally full of shit. I'm an awful liar, and it's about to get me killed.

  Boss Crab raises the ax as if to hit me with it. I flinch back and he continues screaming. “Shut the fuck up, monkey! You think I'm stupid?! You think I don't know what goes on in my own restaurant?!”

  “Just tell him, Ricky,” Sam whines. Now my eyes bulge like Boss Crab's. I make a slashing motion with my hand at my neck. He ignores me. “Tell him what we were gonna do and maybe he'll let us live!” Sam's really crying now. Just blubbering like a little bitch. I guess I would be too if I was in his position. If he says anything else, I probably will be.

  Boss Crab scuttles around to face Sam. “I know what you two idiots were going to try to do!” He motions his big claw at a pair of scuba tanks sitting on a table in the corner. We have to use them to go from the restaurant back to our slave quarters down in the human district. The only compensation we get for our jobs is oxygen for the tanks. We're literally paid in air.

  Boss Crab continues his rant, and I try my best not to shit myself.

  “You do realize I only keep enough air in those things for a round trip to and from the slave camp, right?”

  Sam breaks down completely at this point. He's all sobbing incoherently, gasping for air between his cries. “H-he put me up to it, boss! I swear! He said we were gonna go back to the surface!”

  “What surface??? The whole world is flooded, you fucking retard! Even if you did manage to break out, even if you hid air up your asses, once you got up there, you'd just float to death!”

  Boss Crab turns back to me. “Anything to say for yourself, monkey?”

  I just put my arms up and shrug, clueless as to what to say next. Finally I stammer out, “Sorry?”

  I can't tell if Boss Crab is genuinely surprised at my lack of defense, or if he's just staring at me. Then he thrusts the ax out, not in a killing blow, but with the handle facing me. Totally confused, I take it from him. He says, “Not as sorry as your friend here. You cook a mean brain soufflé. Him? He couldn't even burn a brisket to save his life. Kill him.”

  “What?” I ask, sure that he's just fucking with me for a second before he snaps my face off with his claw.

  “Prove your loyalty to the restaurant. Kill this one so we can get on to the business at hand. Murder your co-conspirator, and NEVER try that shit again. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Aw, shit,” Karen says from behind Chef.

  “That ain't right,” Ty says, walking away from the doorway, back to the kitchen.

  I look at them all for a brief second, hoping they have some brilliant plan to keep me from chopping up my best bud. They've got nothin'.

  Reluctantly, I turn around and prop the ax up on my shoulder. “Sorry Sam, this fuckin' sucks,” I say with total sincerity, raising the blade above my head.

  There I stand in the only shirt I brought down here with me, a faded, ripped up Dio Holy Diver shirt, my curly brown shoulder-length hair matted to my pale forehead, about to murder my friend, and all I can think is, Damn, I wish I could take his Ozzy shirt before it gets blood all over it. That's what living down here does to you—makes you callous, uncaring. That's the only way to survive...

  Sam struggles, mumbling shit I can't understand through his snotty nose and tears. Fishbowl holds him tight.

  Chef covers Karen's eyes as the blade comes down, cleaving poor Sam's face open. A wet thunk—sort of like when you cut open a pumpkin—resonates throughout the small killing room. Sam's cries abruptly end as what sits behind his face slowly oozes out onto his shirt.

  He slumps over. His body thrashes a few times, and then he goes still. At least he didn't suffer. Before I can even register that I've murdered my best friend, Boss Crab snatches the ax away from me and starts yelling again. “Get the fuck back in here, you warm-blooded sacks of shit!”

  Karen, Chef and Ty had tried to creep away. They sulk back into the doorway as Boss Crab shoves me toward them.

  “Listen up!” he says, scooping up a bit of Sam off the floor. “We got a new contract this afternoon. A big one. Pretty much the biggest.” He starts to unscrew the knob sealing Fishbowl's helmet in place. A loud hiss followed by a pop signals the release of the pressurized lid. Boss Crab flips the top open. “Cthulhu him goddamn self has requested us to cater a party he's having next week. He's bringing forth ALL the Old Ones as he prepares to raise R'lyeh and reclaim the surface of the Earth in his name. He wants us to provide the food.” The black, fetid water looks like a calm oil slick until Boss Crab dangles bits of Sam over the open container. Then the rancid shit begins to slosh around inside the helmet. Karen dry heaves as the reek overwhelms us. My eyes start to water and we all put our hands up to cover our mouths.