The Harvest Cycle (30 page)

    The entire carrier was shaking, threatening to come apart beneath Bruce’s feet. The winds tore at his body, threatening to toss him over the side. Torrents of water came up over the side of the deck, soaking his synthetic flesh. He had to get below.

    As he fled, he heard the first tremulous rumble from the black clouds above: thunder.

    The unnamable had come. The unimaginable was happening.

    Rain began to pour down. It did nothing to lessen the flames atop the sea, but heralded a new terror. As a thunderclap shook the sky, jagged streaks of lightning stabbed at the Citadel and its neighboring vessels, dancing, crackling along metal before ripping into the sand on the shoreline - leaving trails of smoking glass in their wake.

    A crimson light flashed within the storm clouds. The hellish winds picked up. The entire ocean was a writhing, flailing mess now, and soon the activity in the sky mirrored its chaos.

    Terrible screaming funnels came down and tore at the land. Anything that wasn’t one with the earth was pulled into the sky and spat across the horizon. The ships tossed as the tornadoes converged, each one blood-red and laced with veins of purple lightning.

    High in the boiling heavens - wrapped in a blanket of dark clouds, its very presence altering the atmosphere - seethed a terror of unspeakable dimensions. The amorphous black thing slipped in and out of the massive thunderheads, undulating, expanding, contracting, contorting at mad angles - with every moment it tore down and rebuilt itself from nothing, as if each cursed atom of it was teleporting in and out of Man’s reality, as if the entirety of it could not bear to be still, to be whole, for even a nanosecond. It writhed and shot tentacles through the clouds and stirred new funnels to life, then collapsed into itself, forming a swirling maelstrom of dark flesh. The very light around the thing was unanchored and whipped about, its energy condensing into thick, pulsing arteries of lightning.

    It was a living chaos; a sea of flesh, an ever-erupting eye, the very shroud of Azathoth which kept the great idiot-god in an eternal slumber, lest it awaken and with an infantile cry of complaint destroy all of existence.

    It was Nightmare.

    With invisible tendrils, Nightmare reached down to those humans who slept in shelters and tunnels beneath the earth. Its psychic probes spanning the globe, it looked into the billions of minds which had once been such a precious commodity. No longer could Nightmare subsist on their dreams. It couldn’t simply recycle the ones it had already stolen; it needed fresh dreams, new distractions. Repetition was madness, and Nightmare was already half-mad. Now, it seemed, there was no escape from the spiral. Nightmare and its Legion, would sink into insanity just like the other tiers of Azathoth’s court.

    
So be it.

    
But I’m taking you all with me.

    And Nightmare invaded those slumbering minds and flooded them with emotion, with a feeling of utter despair and hopelessness far beyond the grasp of reason. This unnamable emotion did not exist in Man, nor any other animal, because it contradicted the midbrain’s basest instincts. It was a desire not just for death, but extinction.

    
Throw yourselves into the sea. Join my Harvesters in death. Turn the waters red.

***

    West, still lying in the grass, heard more footsteps - dozens of them, clapping against the road in unison. They made slow, shuffling progress in the direction of the base.
Humans?

    Knowing that they could be more cannibals, or even a ruse by bots, West slowly lifted his head, shielding his eyes to the winds. He peered through the darkness and saw men, women and children in a sluggish procession. They were coming up from manholes in the road.
They couldn’t have been living this close to the cannibals. They must have come from far away...or far below.

    But what in Hell were they doing?

    The wind tugged at him, and he grasped desperately at roots of grass, as if it would keep him from being pulled into the massive funnels crossing the ocean. But something kept him from stark panic: it was the scientific curiosity that had more than once placed him and the woman he loved in harm’s way, a curiosity that overcame even logic, a thirst that had to be sated.

    He wanted to know why the people were walking toward the base. And why the wind wasn’t affecting them at all.

    Lightning crackled overhead. West saw that their faces were blank, expressions as muted as their movements. They might have gone unnoticed for all the chaos around them, were it not for those footfalls.

    West’s gaze turned heavenward. This freak storm was laying waste to the shoreline - why would these people walk
into
it? Were they mad? Or were they curious as he?

    Or were they under some sort of - not a spell, of course, but - hypnosis-

    West found himself rising to his feet, found himself running toward them, and as his mind began to put the pieces together and a terrible theory came to light, he rushed into the midst of the walkers and flailed his arms, shouting “
Hey! Stop! I said stop!
”

    Staring straight ahead, they simply brushed past him and continued onto the base. He threw fists at their eyes; not a single flinch. They were sleepwalking.

    Then, one of them stopped before him. A man. As he grinned at West, a searing pain filled the doctor’s belly.

    Macendale lowered West gently to the ground, holding the knife inside his gut. “You did it, Doc. You got ‘em. They’re all dead, dead and drowned, and now Nightmare has nothing left to lose. Didn’t you ever think of that? Or did you think that, after you offed the Harvesters, their master would just
go away?
”

    West’s face was frozen in anguish. He pushed madly at Macendale’s arms, but the bot held tight. He hooted in West’s face. “Boy, you’re stupid! This is why humanity is doomed, Doc. You’ve evolved beyond reason, evolved into animals that believe in love and God and all sorts of silly bullshit and now, see, you’ve overstayed your welcome in the natural world. So you’ve become a suicidal race!”

    He pulled West out of the road, jostling several sleepwalkers, and laid the doctor in the grass. “Just so happens that Nightmare saw an opportunity to milk you dry before you did the deed. But you put the kibosh on that, didn’t ya? So now it’s happening, the last of the last days, and all that’ll be left in the end are me and cockroaches.”

    West grabbed Macendale’s jacket and hissed through gritted teeth. “You’re a fluke. A fucking mistake!”

    Macendale never lost his shit-eating grin. “And you aren’t?” Grabbing West’s hair, the bot propped him up, turning the blade in his stomach. Fire erupted through West’s entire lower body. He felt like he was coming apart down there, melting to bloody slag as Macendale gleefully worked the knife. “The difference between you and me is that I
get it
. I’ve studied you, studied the people who
got it
, and I know how to succeed where Man has failed.

    “I’ve already been anointed - did you know I died and was resurrected? Of course you don’t. You probably don’t believe me, Mister Scientist, even as I stand here in the synthetic flesh. Well, it doesn’t matter. You’re all on your way to the Hell you made for yourselves. You’re not my problem.”

    With that, he let West drop to the ground. Pained gasps were heard, and trembling hands crawled over a bloody abdomen in search of the knife, but the human was too weak, and he fell limp, his breathing faint and ragged.

    Macendale danced into the street and ran to the front of the sleepwalkers’ procession, leading them like the Pied Piper of Hamelin down to the glassy beach.

37.

Armageddon Joined

    “It’s Nightmare,” Amanda said, clinging to a pipe as the
Citadel
tossed, every inch of it groaning and shrieking around her and the others. “It’s Nightmare. It’s here.”

    Bruce stumbled into the room, grabbing onto the hatch for support. He’d just gone back up to see the activity outside. “Tornadoes. A dozen of them. Winds approaching four hundred miles per hour. That makes them sixes on the Fujita scale - funnels of this strength only exist in theory...”

    “I’m telling you,” shouted Amanda, “
Nightmare is here!
”

    “What do we do, Mandy?” Yelled Hitch over the screaming of the
Citadel
. She turned to him, mouth open, to respond - but she couldn’t think of one damn thing.

    It really was over.

    Bruce looked into her eyes, then said, “No.”

    He leapt across the room and seized her by the shoulders. “You can’t give up - you’re our only link to it, you understand? You need to stay in there!”

    Amanda shook her head frantically. She was that child again, watching her father borne away by the claws of a monster, and now she faced the monster behind the monster and could scarcely draw a breath.

    “Listen to me,” Bruce said, lowering his voice to as calm and measured a level as the
Citadel
would allow. “Just let me think. There must be something we can do. You and I, you understand?” Again, she shook her head at him.

    “I need to plug in, to put your under, to reach Nightmare.”

    At hearing that, she shoved Bruce away and threw her arms over her head. Hitch moved to hold her and she backpedaled into the far corner of the room, sliding to the floor with a sob.

    “She can’t do it!” Hitch shouted.

    “Yes she can!”

    “She was right - how can we stop gods?”

    The fingers covering Amanda’s eyes parted. She looked at Hitch and Bruce, arguing over her, and she thought of Mike.
If he was here, he’d take control...what would he say? What would he do?

    She reached up to take Hitch’s hand.

    “We have to try.”

    Bruce knelt down beside her.

    “You can handle this?”

    “There’s no other choice. We can’t just sit here and let it happen...not after all this.”

    “I need to plug in, Amanda. But I need more than that - I need you to plug into
me
. Do you understand?”

    She stared quizzically at the bot. He said, “I can’t just be an observer in your mind. I need to be there, where you are. I need to be there to help you. Amanda, our minds aren’t so dissimilar - our thoughts are simply energy, the same energy. I need you to draw me into your mind. And I know you can do it.”

    Hitch’s face reflected Amanda’s confusion. They all sat there, silent, while the ship shuddered and wailed. Looking into Bruce’s eyes, Amanda knew there was nothing there to be seen, but still, there
was
something, wasn’t there, in his gaze - an unwavering confidence. He’d crunched the numbers, weighed the odds, studied the outcomes and he knew he was right. At this moment, with an alien god cutting a dark swath through what remained of civilization, Amanda wasn’t sure she held a personal faith in anything. She certainly had never felt the sense of unequivocal knowledge that governed the bot’s every move - but then, the bot always thought it was right, didn’t it? When Bruce had led the massacre under Gotham he’d believed himself to be right, with that unshakable confidence...

    But then he’d realized he was wrong. A little dog, a
dog
, had shown him that. So then, he was capable of recognizing whether or not he was truly right.

    So, in the center of an Earth-turned-Hell, with her own god nowhere to be found, Amanda Kelly put her faith in a robot.

    “Okay,” she said softly.

    She was still grasping Hitch’s hand. Relinquishing her hold, she gave him her best effort at a smile. He tried himself, but only managed to cry.

    Bruce took her into his arms. “You’ll feel a slight pressure, as before...”

    Hitch knelt on the other side of her. “Remember your favorite song?”

    “Of course.” She smiled a bit more brightly at the thought. Then, as she began to grow drowsy, Amanda whispered the words her father had taught her:

    
Last night I had a pleasant dream, I woke up with a smile,

    
I dreamt that I was back again in dear old Erin’s Isle.

    
I thought I saw Lough Allen’s banks, in the valleys down below,

    
It was my lovely Leitrim, where the Shannon waters flow.

    She’d never seen the Irish county, but singing the song always brought a warmth to her bones, and that, Dad had always said, was lovely Leitrim.

    She imagined herself going there now, and fell asleep with that smile on her lovely face.

***

    
There
is
a God, Amanda. And a Devil. And my power eclipses both.

    
Oh, they wish they could save you. Even the Devil wishes he could save your precious soul! But see, girl, soul and mind are one, and will be nothing after I kill you.

    
Welcome to my nightmare.