Cthulhu's Reign

and yerba de manso for sore throats. Even before the Rising weather was hot in Texas by April, and smart people didn’t work at midday. He woke up Mamacita. “I am going to Tony’s today. I will bring you some tomatoes and a little oregano, OK?”

“You are a good boy, Juan.”

“I’m Nat, not Juan.”

“Be careful, Juan, bring us some chicken from that place on Goliad Street.”

He kissed Mama’s brown forehead. The light went out a little each day. He remembered the line from that poem from Mrs. Phillips’s class, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Poetry made sense these days; history, not so much.

At the edge of the village stood walls made of galvanized iron and plywood. Two men were watching the road. Doublesign had been a tiny town, hence its name. “The sign that says Entering and the sign that says Leaving are on the same pole.” It was a couple of miles to the fields. He drove. As long as they could get gas out of the tanks, they wouldn’t walk. It made for too easy a target. The guards were Father Murphy, with a gray crewcut and a stained priest’s collar, and Nick Flores, a light brown man with a big gold tooth. Nick had a 512 tat and a People’s Nation star. They drank out of thermoses, rifles by their sides.

They got off their lawn chairs and began to swing the gate open. Father Murphy waved him over. Nat rolled down his window.

“Natividad Moreno — just the hombre I needed to see.” The father’s Irish accent had not died away after twenty years in Texas. Nor had his potbelly shrunk in the last three years. He was the only fat man left in Doublesign.

“What can I do for you, Father?” asked Nat.

“You can do something for our little town.” The father’s gray eyes were about to shoot out the guilt trip ray that only priests, nuns, and mothers can use. It could turn Nat into a teenager, into someone half his age.

“I do a lot for our little town. No one else makes the run into Austin since the flying things came.”

“You are a brave man, Nat. That’s why I thought of you. I need you to bring me something powerful. In Comesee there is a used bookstore. Eligio Mondragon told me that it has a curandero’s Bible. It has some of his charms and recipes written in it. As our supply of medicine runs out, we need to know about osha and Alamo tea. Some of the charms may be helpful against things.”

“Why don’t you go get it?” asked Nat. He knew the answer: the priest was important and he was some peon, but he wondered how the priest would say it.

“Because I am afraid,” said Father Murphy.

“You think I am not?” asked Nat. “Fear and bravery are not enemies. But isn’t the book of a curandero taking from you used to call the ‘other side’?”

“I am not making rash judgments these days. If I thought I could get the leprechauns to help us, I would be calling for them.”

“Why is Eligio remembering this now? Wouldn’t this have been a good thing last year or the year before?”

“Psychology is not my forte.”

“I am not going to risk my life for a book.”

“If you bring me the book, I will make your life much sweeter.”

“How?”

“Nat, I will allow Stephanie back into the church. I will let her stay there during the days, be in the storm shelter when needed. Your mother will not have to watch her during the day.”

This had been the first good news in so long that it almost puzzled Nat, as though he had lost his hearing and was suddenly greeted by the cry of a mourning dove.

He tried hard not to let his voice break, “You would do this for us?”

“The book is important.”

Jesus’ old Chevy Custom 10 dated from the Reagan Administration. It had belonged to Dr. Chainey, who ran the cancer clinic. Nat could’ve got a new pickup after the Dying in Austin, but he didn’t like to steal from the dead. Comesee lay twenty miles to the south. No one drove there because it lacked large grocery stores to loot — besides, as a small town, it might still have people.

The sun looked like the sun today, which Nat always felt was a good sign. He left on FM 1193. The first three miles held no surprises. About four miles on he saw one of the webbing cities. Roaches, the kind called palmetto bugs in Texas, had increased in size after the Rising. They were about as big as his fist and their shiny black carapaces were marked with bright green angular signs. They built cities. On the last day CNN had been on the air, there had been some remarks about them as the “Great Race.” Nat couldn’t see anything great about oversized bugs. People knew that they weren’t a thing of nature because their web cities were illuminated at night. The city took up the better part of what used to be a cotton field, so Nat knew it was at least forty acres in size.

He couldn’t see any of the bugs, which made him feel better. One time a couple of them flew into town and seemed to be checking everything out. Mr. Franks had run inside his house and grabbed a bottle of Raid and ran after them spraying the air. They stopped and sort of hovered. The poison seemed to do no harm, but after thirty seconds Mr. Franks just sank to the ground. His skin showed angry red blotches in the shape of the angular designs on the bugs’ wings. He never came to and passed a few hours later. Now when a bug flew by, people ran indoors.

As he continued south, the sky changed from blue to the color of lead. Comesee had been a little anglo town. In the old days (which seemed so far gone), it survived by its junktique stores that sold to the Austin tourists on weekends. Nat hadn’t thought about the town since the Rising, even though it was just a few miles away. Since then you just assumed anything that could be bad was. The billboards still welcomed folks in the name of the Lions. Historic Denton’s BBQ still promised the best Elgin sausages and brisket. Even the Dairy Queen was up ahead nine blocks on the left. A few burned-out cars were on the highway, but the passage into town looked clear. Nat glanced at the pair of loaded Glock 37s on his passenger seat. Bullets worked against most things. If it didn’t hurt your eyes to look at it, generally bullets would hit it. He slowed down as he came into town, waiting for either for signs of humans or of the Change.

It was the latter.

The Chevy dealership was covered with gray mucus. Nat could see angular things of metal that jerked inside. He gave it wide berth and drove on into the center of town the corner of 2^nd and Main. Calabazas — what do they call them — jack-o-lanterns stood in front of every business on Main. It was spring, no time for fresh pumpkins. At least it was spring back in Doublesign. Father Murphy said he had to look for Two Guys from Texas Books. Time was pretty leaky these days.

There it was. Middle of the block between to the karate place and Hickerson’s Video and Game Rental, it had big plate glass windows. It wasn’t covered in slime; it looked normal. Maybe there was a healing book inside. He hated getting out of the truck. Nothing swooped or buzzed or squelched. The air smelled clean and hot. He left the motor running. He walked to the door. It was dark inside; faded reds and pinks dominated the window display. The Rising had happened in February, and many places still commemorated a faded Valentine’s, when earth’s old lovers had come back. The door was locked. He got a cinderblock out of the back of the pickup and smashed the glass. All of the jack-o-lanterns had rolled closer to him while his attention had been elsewhere. Reality was melting; he would have to be quick. Dr. MacLeod had explained to them that the “Otherness” had to seep in through “liminal” things. Nat thought that “liminal” meant scary. He kicked two of them away from the door, grabbed a flashlight and went in, careful not to slip on the broken glass. The store didn’t smell right — it didn’t have that acid tang of Tia Rebecca’s yellowing romances. It stank of fire and copper, but the books looked OK.

There it was. The Bible. It sat on a shelf beneath diet books, with other Bibles and Books of Mormon and old Methodist hymnals. But it was big and black with gold lettering Biblia Santa. It had a nice heft in his hands, but as he picked it up something laughed in his head. Voices in the head weren’t unusual, but they made him miserable. Outside the shop, the jack-o-lanterns weren’t round or orange any more. They were becoming one of those clear snot-looking things that seemed to have rusty machinery and mercury inside. They were dumb but fast. He grabbed some paperback novels and flung them on to the street. The snot-thing formed several eyes that focused on the books and squelched off in their direction. Swallowing hard, he ran toward it,