This lodge meets within the battered Sons of Finland hall along Astoria’s deserted waterfront, in the shadows of the ruined Astoria-Megler Bridge. This was once a thriving coastal city of nineteenth-century sea captains’ mansions, twentieth-century fisheries and twenty-first century tourism.
No more. Not a mile out on the bar of the Columbia river loom the unearthly non-Euclidian geometries of one of the cyclopean Risen Cities, strangely angled walls that endlessly glimmer a feeble green while screams echo across the water. Our priestly enemies hunt far and wide, but even under their noses we are scattered and furtive. We never see the stars any more, and little of the sun, for the Old Ones’ emergence and the nuclear attacks of the First Resistance wrapped the Earth in permanent winter that varies only a little by season. A man may walk from Oregon to Washington across the frozen Columbia seven or eight months out of the year.
We are in the old ballroom now, a baker’s dozen of us. That number would once have been deemed unlucky, but Cthulhu and his fellow, rival gods have drained the world of luck.
The doorward drops his cowl. He is newly come among us, and must prove himself. Now I see he is a woman, as she lifts off a crowning mask that has misshapen her head. Beneath she is actually a reasonable- seeming human being, albeit as grubby and hunger-raddled as the rest of us. She slips from her robe as well, unhooks a padded hump, releases bindings on her legs, and stands straight, clad now in only blue jeans and a faded black t-shirt advertising a band called Objekt 775.
This is like looking at a piece of the past. I wonder where her parka is.
Inspired, I slip my cloak free and let it fall, along with my own fatigue coat, until I am clad only in ragged thermal underwear and combat boots. I am barely transformed, my hands overlarge and my fingers overblunt, but the change seems to have stopped there, as can happen with we who resist strongly enough.
Around me, others remove their cowls and hoods and cloaks, until we stand as an array of human and formerly human faces. Some eyes are bulbous and unblinking, others scowl furiously, but we all have the full measure of one another for the first time in years.
Also for the first time in years, as I look at our doorward, I feel stirrings in my groin. A natural woman.
“I am come from the lodge in Crescent City,” she announces. Now her voice is blessedly normal as well. “Bringing news from Mendocino and further south.” There are no lodges in the formerly great cities of the world, because none of those cities remain whole and unpolluted. “A lodge along the Sea of Cortez has made an important discovery. We have found a poison that will harm even the undying priests amid their armors and their spells.”
“Despite the Old Ones’ protection?” I ask.
“Yes.” She smiles at me, and I am erect for the first time in years.
Just as foretold, the Old Ones are stripping the Earth from pole to pole. They are in no hurry, not by human standards — surely they perceive time so differently from us, this past decade may all be a single moment not yet passed to them, one thunderous tick of the clock of the long now.
Strangely, in places of some technology where electricity can still be induced to function, odd corners of the world away from the attention of the priests and their gods, we find that many of our space assets remain in order. Curiously, this is despite the abilities of the Byakhee and Mi-go to traverse the emptiness between planets. The last cosmonauts starved on the ISS seven years ago, and the station has since fallen burning from the sky, but their observations had proved invaluable. Likewise weather and spy satellites, not all of which have yet strayed from their courses or lost their mechanical minds.
The world’s cities were crushed or blasted or sickened, sometimes by human effort in the First Resistance, more often by the Old Ones themselves when they finally stirred from their watery graves. Now great, slow waves of fungal rot progress across the continents like a nightmare tide, swallowing forests and prairies and bottomlands alike. I’ve been as far east as Estes Park, and looked down on the Great Plains being scoured to bedrock. The mountains and coastlines are yet spared, but surely that is only a matter of time.
With this data, and a tenuous network of wanderers and observers, the Second Resistance has our guesses about how many years are left to do something against the priests who focus the lamps of the Old Ones’ eyes like mad projectionists beaming death about the world. That the gods themselves are narcoleptic was perhaps the world’s saving grace, before someone, somewhere, finally succeeded in summoning them to shore in their fullest strength.
We must believe it happened thus, for if they returned only because the stars were right, well, no one can fight the stars.
Even the most optimistic of us do not bet on more than two decades remaining, and the general consensus is less than ten years. The loss of biomass may have started an irreversible decline in the atmospheric oxygen budget. What isn’t killed by the growing fungal tides freezes to death instead. We might win, by freakish luck and blind chance, only to perish as free men instead of slaves.
No, we are not even slaves, for slaves have value. We are but an infestation, an annoyance or perhaps a sport to the priests, less than dust to the Old Ones.
Still, we make our plans, and we gather our data, and we try. What else can we do? The human race is terminal, a cancer patient at full metastasis, every organ riddled with rot, the specter of death crushing a bit more air from every heaving of the lungs.
So I listen to this plan to cultivate an obscure type of jellyfish venom. Surely, like the fungi, it is those jellyfish who far more resemble the Old Ones than the cephalopods and amphibians old Howard Phillips Lovecraft was so fond of citing. This beautiful, as-yet untainted young woman — how? — whose name we will never know and who must have been a child when the end first came, explains how the vial she carries can be cultivated in long, low trays of saltwater, with an admixture of organic nutrients to sustain the jellyfish cells that produce the requisite toxin.
It is Julia Child by way of War of the Worlds. We plot the downfall of humanity’s most vile traitors via kitchen science, and hope to blind the Old Ones back into restless slumber in doing so.
I stay that night in the lodge, for my string of bolt-holes doesn’t begin until about fifteen river miles inland, at Knappa, Oregon. As is our usual practice, most of the others leave. Those far along into the transformation, including Madeleine Gervais, whom I’d known quite well back before the end, are far more nervous about this plan. The girl from Crescent City is unable to tell us how the poison might affect us, only that it has worked on captured priests, who cannot be slain except by extreme violence, followed by reduction and burning of the corpse.
We can make them die unknowing. Oh, the joy that thought brings me. These traitors who have already brought the deaths of billions are beyond any redemption of suffering or vengeance.
Curling in my little nest of borrowed blankets in one of the old basement saunas, I am quite surprised when the girl comes to me. I know her by her footsteps and her scent already.
Her fingers brush my shoulder, the light pressure of them through the fabric of the blanket the first human touch I have felt in almost nine years. We do not hug, or even clasp hands, in the Second Resistance. “I saw that you understood,” she whispers.
The hairs on my neck prickle, as my cock strains like a clothyard shaft. “I do,” I whisper, then immediately curse the echoed meaning of those particular words. I still wear my wedding ring, though my finger has grown around it until the band is almost invisible. Most days I cannot recall the faces of my wife and daughter.
“It is darker here.” She squats back on her heels, shadows against shadow, barely an outline through some stray bit of light elsewhere in the basement. It is enough for me to notice the swing of her right breast beneath the concert t-shirt, and I recall enough of women to know she has done this on purpose.
“Darker than California?”
“Yes.” She shivers slightly. I realize her nipple has stiffened to something pleasingly mouth-filling. “So many of the Old Ones love their cold.”
“They are creatures of space, and night, and the darkest depths.” For no good reason, I add, “Such bright and risen madness in our names.”
That hand touches me again as the breast strains against its enclosing fabric. “Are you lonely?” she asks in a soft, lost voice. I am too taken up in her to wonder at the question, for already I am lifting my blanket to show her just how lonely I am.
