Bioluminescence shone from within, revealing greenish stone blocks of an incomprehensible age. Matt’s face went slack with dread, and he beheld visions that were never meant for human eyes. There were great carven statues of weird shape and form; the geometry of R’lyeh was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart. Everything Matt could see was gigantic, towering and colossal, insanely so. And then, the pale light of the hidden city was shadowed as something vast made its way to the stone gates.

Matt remembered more of the secret language of The Book of the Dead, or whatever people had called it over the millennia, and he whispered the words:

“That is not dead which can eternal lie – and with strange eons, even death may die.”

Massive things like monstrous hands gripped the gates, and pushed them wide. Matt got slowly to his feet, pointing.

“Behold, Xastur.”

Chapter 28

The world was at war, and Decker led them all.

Rows of big howitzers, tanks, and mobile rocket launchers ringed the far edges of the park in a circle of steel and fire. Eric Ford had worked overtime on the munitions and the front lines were fully armed with hardened salt shells that they loosed in a constant barrage into the seething masses of Shoggoths.

Like a wound bursting open to spill its infection onto the skin, the site of Cthulhu’s rise was a many-miles-wide lump that had broken open to spill bloated monstrosities across the Earth’s surface in wave after wave. The soldiers, Decker hoped, didn’t realize that at one time the creatures they fought so hard were once their fellow human beings.

Countless Shoggoth ran, crawled and slid on slimy pads toward the soldiers. For each hundred that were turned to lifeless jelly, more simply boiled to the surface to take their place. And in among the Shoggoth, other huge monstrosities came to fight, feed, and throw themselves at the lines of humanity.

Soldiers scrambled about, firing at anything that moved, but still, many of the creatures made it through.

Huge towering spiders, centipedes as long as trains ending in vicious scorpion stings or suckering mouths, and ambling towers of pustulant flesh bulging with sightless eyes also fell among the troops, simply toppling forward onto the men like mighty redwood tree trunks, squashing them flat and then absorbing their bodies.

General Decker stood in his command center, watching the mayhem. High overhead surveillance planes circled delivering him multiple spectrums of his battle – none of them was promising. The plane passed over the ground-zero crater once more and he felt his stomach lurch. The thing, “Cthulhu” they were all calling it now, had finally riven the earth. Mile-long fissures were unzipping as it broke free. Decker didn’t feel fear. Instead his stomach knotted with frustration that he couldn’t simply stamp it out with all the traditional firepower he had.

“We’ve got fucking lasers, EMP devices, microwave weapons, rail guns and a hundred other ways to mete out death to our fellow man, and we’re fighting these things with salt. Taking them out one by one. Fuck it.” He brought his fist down on the desk so hard everything jumped an inch. “Well, we aren’t finished yet.” He turned. “Ready those heavy thermobarics. Let’s see it choke down a few hundred two-thousand-pound exothermic blasts.”