Move Under Ground | Page 7

rose behind me and painted the Pacific, red, then gold, then deepest blue. I ate an apple from my rucksack and glanced around, to see if anyone had left behind a purse or a wallet, some identification. I wasn't ready to make like a vulture and pick at these poor souls quite yet.
Hard to notice at first, but the tide was heavier than I expected. Waves pushed up over the rocks, claiming the bodies on the shore. I had to retreat from the jetty and hustle back up the cliff. The waters rose higher than I'd ever seen them, and I looked out to the horizon to see why.
The island was huge, or close, or somehow in a warp of space like a mirage. Miles out to sea but right up against my face in the same instant, I could see the hideous swirls and cut runes on well-worn granite ruins and the whole line of the shore at once. Craggly harbors lined not with boats, but with slick lobster-squid. Thick slabs of stone atop strata of crushed bone, the bedchamber of an Elder God. No gulls circled its beaches, no trees lived there or even stood defiant in petrified death. Even the crumbled doorways had been built for something other than Earthmen. Between me and it, there was only a short boat ride's worth of sea and a trail of white bodies, drifting towards their new dead home.
R'lyeh is risen.
Chapter Two
There was no hideous dreamland between me and the highway anymore, no industrial cacti, nor gearshift branches ratcheting towards me with pincer fingers. Just trees and the bush, still dark after dawn with the stain of hysterical suited mayflies. I put R'lyeh behind me and didn't look back to see if it was still there offshore because, for one, I was afraid that whatever swept up those townspeople would beguile me, and I'd find myself running for the rocks before I even knew what I was doing, and two, because I didn't have to see the shattered island to know that it is risen. I could taste it, like a punch to the face.
I chose the biggest whale of a truck I could find from among the abandoned and spent thirty minutes siphoning more gas from the surrounding vehicles so I could bull out of there with a full tank. The City, yes, San Francisco, I had to get back there and to do that, I rammed through a few dozen idled cars. It was fun, really, and nearly brought a smile to my grim face. Steel against steel, the low roar of my stolen engine (damn, this truck was King Rex in low gear; we put a Packard on its side with a casual nudge), playing the clutch and stick like bop. I didn't look back at the automotive wreckage I left behind either. Let the cops find it, let them go looking for the drivers and find those forlorn bodies in the drink. Let them find the island, closer than Communist Cuba, and call out the Army or the H-bomb or Sea Hunt and gut the Elder God, if they could. I had to find Neal.
I stopped frequently, more frequently than usual. At a rest stop, I fingered the local yokel newspaper. Nothing but wire reports and gardening tips, plus classified ads full of desperate novenas. The shift of the world's axis hadn't reached here yet. The wind was still high, the waitress still slouched and slow and her coffee even slower, the few truckers at the counter still bleary-eyed. Nobody laughed. I asked Millie (she had a horrible plastic tag to that effect, maybe she was really a wisecracker and made up the name to sound authentic) to turn on the radio but she said it blew its tube just before dawn. "It sparked up, and then started smoking. I thought it was Cholly burning the toast at first," she said. Then she launched into some monologue about having to call long distance just to order a vacuum tube because Cholly didn't want to buy a new radio set even though it would be cheaper thanks to some insult that passed between Johnson and Cholly back in '53; it was the sort of thing I'd normally fall in love with but I just wasn't in the mood. Greasy eggs and bacon for me. I broke the yolk with my fork because it resembled an inhuman eye a bit too closely.
I spent an hour nursing a coffee and watching the traffic. All of it was heading south. Me, I rolled north in my dented but still fierce stolen truck after stopping to smear some mud on the plates. The City was farther off than I remembered it, or the old jalopy was slow, or the speedometer a