CHAPTER 1
“There’s innocent blood on your hands. How many federal agents, civilians, and hunters did you kill out there?” the interrogator demanded.
“I lost count.”
The two men sat in a small, brightly lit, white room, separated only by a narrow rectangular table. Franks couldn’t remember how he’d gotten here.
“State your name for the record.”
“Franks.”
“And what position did you hold up until recently?”
“Special Agent of the United States Monster Control Bureau.”
The interrogator was as small and white and unremarkable as the room. “I want you to know that this will be your only opportunity to explain your actions. Your future depends on you being completely forthcoming during this investigation.”
“You expect a confession?”
“I want the truth, Agent Franks.”
“Are you my judge?”
“Your fate is out of my hands. Everything you say here will go straight to the top. He makes the call. Do you understand?”
Franks nodded.
“Start at the beginning. Tell me everything.”
The California Incident
18 Months Ago
20 miles off the California coast
The final ritual had begun.
Another massive wave lifted the fishing boat. Lightning flashed across the sky as it came crashing back down. A mighty blast of water came over the side and knocked a few of the cultists from their feet, but the rest continued chanting and circling around the runes painted on the deck.
Cold water ran through the seams of the crate to soak him, moistening the dried blood on his suit enough to make it pliable again. His crate was about the size of a coffin. If it was swept overboard he’d have to break out, swim to the surface, and try to find the boat as it was being tossed about on thirty-foot waves, and considering that he’d already been shot and repeatedly stabbed tonight, that would be inconvenient.
The rain was coming down in hard sheets. Only suicidal idiots would take a boat out into a storm like this, but after the Monster Control Bureau had interrupted their plot on the mainland, the remaining cultists had been desperate enough to try to perform their big finale right on top of their target audience. Cultists were a particularly annoying type of vermin.
Some of the deck was visible through the air holes punched in the side of the crate. The ship was running dark and the storm clouds were blocking the moon, but none of that mattered to his augmented vision. Once a month the Bureau scientists stuck a needle into his eye and injected a syringe full of burning chemicals, which helped him see better in the dark. Originally developed by DARPA, the vision enhancement serum had driven the original human test subjects so mad with pain that they’d clawed their own eyes out. He found the process mildly uncomfortable. The injections meant he had to replace his eyes every few years, as they inevitably caused ocular cancer, but that was a small price to pay for increased tactical awareness.
He’d counted fifteen cultists so far. They seemed human. Mostly. There were probably more, and somebody had to be in the wheelhouse trying to steer the boat through the storm. They’d formed a circle, and a larger figure moved between them, giving directions to aid in their summoning spell. Franks tried to keep track of that one, but he couldn’t get a good angle through the air holes. There was a brief view of legs ending in goat hooves, and then the demon was out of sight. He caught the stink of sulfur before the storm tore it away.
“Target acquired,” he said, not even knowing if his radio signal would reach through the wood and weather.
“Copy.” Special Agent Myers’ voice was barely discernible through the static. “The USS Cheyenne is shadowing you. Bravo Team is on a Coast Guard cutter heading for your position. ETA ten minutes.”
The waves had taken on a strange rhythm that matched the fevered chanting of the cultists. He had seen enough black magic rituals to know where this was going. They didn’t have ten minutes. “Requesting permission to engage.”
His superior sighed. “Why do you even bother to ask when I know you’re going to anyway?”
“Protocol.”
“Hold on. . . . I’m being told there’s seismic activity directly beneath your position. We’ve got something on satellite. There’s a thermal bloom at the ocean floor. They’ve woken something up . . . Dear Lord! It’s huge. Stop that ritual, Agent Franks. Stop it now!”
Myers’ command was the best thing he’d heard all night. “Yes, sir.”
Someone began bellowing orders, far louder than the cultists’ chanting. “It is time, brothers! The leviathan is coming.” The demon that was providing the cult their black magic intel was his target. Take it out, and these morons wouldn’t be able to boss around a shoggoth, let alone a great sea beast capable of devouring whole cities. “Let there be light so that we may look upon his glory.” Brilliant beams shined through the holes of the crate as the cultists turned on several big spotlights. “Gather the virgin for sacrifice. Hurry, brothers! Spill the virgin’s blood upon the circle with the sacred blade so that the leviathan may witness our devotion.”
During the raid, he’d found a female tied up and drugged, loaded in a crate in the back of a truck. He’d figured she had been meant for something like this. Even though he’d been injured and had used up all his ammo on cultists, Franks knew it was his best chance to find his target, so he’d dumped the girl, taken her place, and then ordered his men to fall back enough to let the cultists escape. Sure enough, a minute later a bunch of losers who stunk of fish and Elder Things had piled in and they’d been on their way to the docks.
There was movement all around the crate, and several men gathered to lift him from the deck. “How many sacrifices did they put in this thing?”
“Maybe she’s a really fat virgin. Come on, guys. One, two, three.” They lifted the crate and stumbled across the slick deck.
The boat groaned. Lightning flashed. Cultists screamed. Some bit of their god had risen from the depths, revealing itself. From the commotion, Franks figured it had to be pretty impressive-looking, but then again, if they weren’t easily impressed, they wouldn’t be cultists to begin with.
“Hurry!” the demon commanded. Franks’ coffin was dropped in the middle of the painted designs. Some of the cultists lost their wits and ran away, their sanity unable to cope with the ancient monstrosity rising up around the boat. There was a new smell in the air, the overpowering stink of rotting fish. “Do not test the great leviathan’s patience!”
Franks closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Both of his heartbeats were slow and deliberate. Someone was unnecessarily working a crowbar into the seams, unaware that Franks had already tugged the lid off earlier to climb inside.
They opened the crate. “That’s our virgin sacrifice?” Two men were looking down at him, both wearing impractical ceremonial robes. Far behind them a wall of spines and tentacles was rising from the ocean. “I thought we were getting a chick, not some big ugly dude.”
“What the—”
Reaching out, Franks grabbed the first cultist by the throat and squeezed, smashing his windpipe flat. Franks caught the other by the hair, and slammed his face through the edge of the crate. That one dropped his crowbar right in Franks’ lap.
Another cultist was standing nearby, with an ornate, jewel-studded dagger. It was the sort of flashy thing that assholes like this loved to sacrifice virgins with. The man turned around, wearing a look of predatory eagerness. That expression turned to shock when he saw Franks getting out of the crate. This was not the tied-up, semiconscious mortal he’d been expecting. This was a slab of hate bundled together with muscle. The cultist dropped the blade and raised his hands to surrender, but it didn’t matter, as Franks embedded the crowbar into his forehead hard enough to make brain matter come out the cultist’s ears.
“An intruder! Seize him!” The demon gave the imperious command, but then it recognized who it was and shrieked in fear. Just about everything from the other side knew his reputation. “Oh shit! It’s Franks! Run!”
He recognized the demon’s type. The physical body was a pathetic alchemical creation, stitched together out of animal parts and old cadavers and held together with magic barely fit to animate a zombie. A body like that was only capable of holding the weakest of the host in the mortal world. Franks sneered. He’d gotten shot in the stomach for this? Stupid imp. He’d been hoping for a good fight at least.
“Help us, O Great Sleeper of the Deep,” the demon begged as the ancient squid god’s bellows shook the sea. “Please save us from Franks.” It seemed the demon was actually more afraid of Franks than he was worried about placating the Elder Thing they’d just woken from its thousand years of slumber.
Good call.
Most of the cultists were still cowering because the ancient monster they’d summoned rising up all around their boat had scared the hell out of them, but those who had been in the circle rushed him. Their efforts would have been amusing if he hadn’t had more important things to do. Franks swung the crowbar in a wide circle, hitting several of them, shattering ribs and limbs. The impact was enough to flip one man over the rail to fall screaming into the ocean. Good luck swimming in those idiotic robes.
Someone grabbed him by the shirt. Franks took him by the wrist, twisted it until it snapped, and then spun and flipped the man into several of his friends, knocking them all down. Another man almost managed to hit him, but Franks merely moved his head out of the way, hooked the man beneath the jaw and pulled. That one only made it a few more steps before collapsing and clutching at the gaping hole where the bottom of his face had been. As he flicked the jawbone off the end of his crowbar, Franks noticed that there were gills flapping on the dying man’s neck. These fools had been intermingling with Deep Ones, and a few appeared to be hybrids. On land, that just made them squishier. Franks confirmed his hypothesis by braining a cultist and noting that the blood that sprayed out was an oily green. That would have to go in his report later, but right now he had to concentrate. One cultist was smart enough to draw a pistol, but Franks hurled the crowbar across the deck and shattered her skull.
Their giant underwater monster might have been impressive, but it wasn’t actively killing them, so the rest of the cultists were paying attention to Franks now. The demon was waving his long misshapen gorilla arms and wailing in the original tongue, beseeching the ancient thing from the deep to do their bidding and to kill Franks and then attack the human cities along the coast. This operation’s primary objective was to keep that from happening. The secondary was to capture this demon for questioning. The tertiary was to kill every cultist who pissed him off. He’d added that one himself.
Franks bent down, picked up the ceremonial dagger—solid—and covered the distance to the demon in a flash. It clawed at him, still screaming for the monster to save them. He slugged the demon in the chest and felt bones explode. “You’re wanted for questioning.” He hadn’t brought cuffs, so Franks caught the demon’s arm, forced it to the deck, and slammed the dagger through its hand and deep into the wood. “Stick around.”
He left the demon thrashing and clutching at the dagger in a futile attempt to pull it free, but when Franks stuck a blade into something, he did so with authority, and the demon wasn’t strong enough to pull the blade free.
Something needed to be done before the cult got their wits together enough to actually get the big monster to do their bidding. In Franks’ experience, the best way to keep somebody from accomplishing something was just to kill them.
The thing which had been sleeping beneath the ocean was directly under them, and it seemed angry about being woken up. A tentacle as big around as their boat broke the surface, whipped through the rain and spotlight beams and then came crashing back down only twenty yards off their port side. Franks snarled. He had no patience for eldritch horrors. They think they’re so tough . . . The Navy had an attack submarine a few miles away. He’d show them tough. He keyed his radio as he walked toward the dropped pistol. “Come in, Command.”
“What’s your situation, Franks?” Myers asked, sounding a little flustered, but the boss always got that way when he was watching some supernatural world-altering event unfold over a satellite feed.
“Situation under control.” The cultists were going for their weapons. A cultist standing in the wheelhouse door started shooting at him with an AR-15. Franks calmly bent over, snatched up the dropped handgun, an old GI 1911, lifted it as he ran, and put a single round through the window. The glass shattered and the shooter went down. Several others were retrieving their weapons, so Franks methodically went about gunning them down as bullets flew past him. He took cover behind some metal storage boxes. “Requesting torpedo fire on the big one.”
He couldn’t hear Myers’ response through the static. It would have to do. He leaned around the corner, shot another cultist in the mouth, and put his last round through another man’s heart. Franks dropped the empty gun and was moving as they fired uselessly through the sheet metal. Franks was huge by human standards, but he moved faster than almost any mortal on Earth. He cleared the edge of the wheelhouse, caught a cultist from behind, snapped his neck, shoved the paralyzed man into the next so that he fired his shotgun uselessly into the air. Franks punched that one in the face, breaking nose, jaw, and several teeth, took his shotgun away, and hurled them both over the side. He spun the shotgun around, shouldered it, pumped a round into the chamber, and blew half of another cultist’s head off. He aimed at another, but could tell by the feel as he worked the Remington’s action that the weapon was empty, most of its rounds already having been fired at him. Franks dropped the shotgun and ducked as the rest of the ship began shooting at him again.
Looking back, Franks realized that the demon was so scared of being captured by him that it was actually gnawing through its own arm in an attempt to escape. Franks moved quickly. He found a long pole with a hook on the end and used that to reach up and shove one of the spotlights out of alignment, temporarily blinding the cultists shooting at him. Then he speared an old man through the guts with the pole, clotheslined another cultist hard enough to kill him instantly, and got back to his prisoner just as the demon finished chewing its arm off.
It began scrambling away, but he easily caught it. “You can’t do this, Franks! You’re a traitor to the host. You’ll pay for this!” it shrieked as he dragged it back to where he pinned it the first time.
The demon scratched and bit at him, annoying Franks. When he reached the ceremonial dagger, he tugged it from the wood. The severed claw slid off the end of the steel. He forced the demon’s head against the deck and stabbed it through the face, pinning it just as hard as before. It squealed and thrashed, but at least it couldn’t talk anymore. The stupid imp wouldn’t be chewing its way out of that.
Franks went back to killing cultists. Some of the fools were trying to communicate with the leviathan but it took a human years of effort to master the original tongue, and their demon translator was occupied. The old language was very difficult for the mortal mind to comprehend it, let alone speak well, but one cultist, apparently their leader, was giving it his best effort. He had spread his arms wide and was screaming up at the creature. “Great Sleeper of the Depths, forgive us as we trouble your rest. Humbly we request our enemies gone by devouring!”
A tree-sized tentacle paused over their boat, and fifty eyes opened up along its length to study the cultist in his wind-whipped robes. Franks found another gun and angled for a shot on the cult leader. He had to admit he was impressed; for a mortal the cultist was doing really well, up until the part where he screwed it up. “Our lives are food for you!”
The leviathan was happy to oblige. Thousands of spines erupted from the tentacle as it descended. Cultists screamed as they were pierced, encircled, and lifted into the air to be shoved into giant pulsing mouths.
Primary objective completed. The monster wasn’t going to fling itself at the civilian population now, but Franks still needed to secure his prisoner for interrogation before the leviathan sank the fishing boat. A female hybrid attacked him, fish eyes bulging beneath her cowl, fat frog lips smacking as she tried to bite him in the face. Franks merely kicked her in the stomach, launching her back, and before she hit the deck, a tentacle snatched her up, lifted her to one of the monster’s snapping beaks, and popped the hybrid in to be chewed.
Tentacles were striking everywhere. The monster could have simply crushed the boat, but it seemed to be enjoying the snacks first. But the boat was nearly depopulated. Franks did not want to be chewed, nor did he want to spend the time sawing his way out of a giant monster’s guts. It was time for extraction.
There was a white flash far beneath the surface. An explosion rocked the fishing boat. The leviathan screamed in frequencies that deafened whales. Either Franks’ message had gotten through or the captain of the attack submarine had seen the giant monster on his sonar screen and made the call himself. A circle of water a hundred yards across erupted upward as the second torpedo hit the leviathan.
A black, glistening bulk the size of a three-story building hit the fishing boat, and the vessel went sideways. The few remaining cultists were hurled into the sea. Franks fell, but caught himself on some machinery. Then, annoyed by this turn of events, began crawling toward his prisoner, who was dangling by its face over the churning water. “Bravo Team, this is Franks. Look for me in the wreckage.”
The boat righted temporarily, but its back was broken, and they were sinking fast. Franks reached the demon, and pulled the dagger free. It sprung up and clawed at him, but Franks blocked the arm and slugged the demon in its punctured mouth, sending it crashing back down. He loomed over it. “Who sent you?”
“Traitor,” the demon gasped. “You’re a traitor to the host.”
Franks kicked the imp in the face. Fat droplets of glowing blood flew up into the rain. Even animated bodies felt pain, but considering the imp had just gnawed its own arm off in an attempt to escape it had a respectable pain threshold. Torture would take too long. The boat was going down. Explosions were ripping through the ocean as more torpedoes struck the thrashing monster. There was no time for games. “Talk or I’ll send you back to Hell.” It would take a thousand years for a shit stain like this to find its way back out of the void.
“Please, no,” it hissed. Franks didn’t answer, but the demon looked him in the eyes, saw what was waiting there, then experienced an involuntary shiver. “Fine, fine.” It dipped its remaining hand into the puddle of glowing blood, and with one claw drew a complicated symbol on the wood. The demon didn’t need to explain. They both knew exactly who that stood for.
Franks scowled at the design. Another related event . . . Already the rain was washing the mark away, but it was unmistakable. This would be going in his report. His superiors wouldn’t be happy.
One of the smaller tentacles approached, bristling with eyes and thorns, looking for one last snack before it fled back to the deep. Franks looked up nonchalantly, saw the massive blob of flesh, and immediately slugged one big fist into a soft eyeball. Pus squirted out and the tentacle retreated.
“That’s right, Franks. All those years buried deep, but he’s awake, and he’s gathering his army. The end is beginning, and you picked the wrong side, brother. Don’t leave me out here. I can help you. Let me go and I’ll tell you everything I know.”
Never trust a demon. The fishing vessel was listing badly, but it looked like the main body of the leviathan was coming back around to swallow them whole. Franks took the demon’s other hand, shoved it against the deck, and slammed the dagger through its palm. The imp screamed. “Chew fast.” Franks began walking away.
“Wait. I’ve got more information! I’ve got something you’re going to want to hear. Let me go,” the demon begged. Franks got to the edge. A fifty-foot tentacle swept by and tore the wheelhouse completely off the boat. The mouth that was lifting out of the sea now was big enough to engulf the whole boat. It was time to go for a swim. “This is personal, Franks! Your old enemy has found a way back to Earth.”
Franks paused. He looked back at the imp. “Who?”
“Kurst!”
It was not often that something shook Franks. He started back toward the demon.
“He’s found a new body that can hold him. He’ll be coming for you. Let me go and I’ll—”
This tentacle was as big around as a bus, and when it landed on the fishing boat, everything simply came apart. They were being lifted by the ancient beast as torpedoes exploded beneath them. Franks stumbled across the splintering beams, but the imp was gone. A row of suckers had slurped the demon’s remains off the deck, leaving nothing but a mass of hamburger and bubbling acid.
Kurst . . . Either the imp has been toying with him out of spite, or that was very bad news.
Franks snarled in frustration and leapt over the side. The ocean rushed up to meet him.
* * *
“No, Agent Franks, I said to start at the beginning.”
Franks folded his gigantic arms. His broad shoulders seemed to fill the small room. “No.”
Normally people would shrink before Franks’ withering gaze, but the interrogator didn’t so much as flinch. “That’s not a request. It’s in our vital interest to know the whole story. Everything’s on the table now or we’re done here. I don’t think you realize the mess you’ve made. This is your last chance. He needs to decide which side you’re really on.”
The whole story had never been told. Franks didn’t even know if he could.
“Well? What’s it going to be? I know your usual answer would be classified, but that really doesn’t apply here now, does it?”
“I’m not much for talking.”
“Then it sounds like I’m in for a treat, because if you don’t tell me your whole life story right now then the deal is off.”
Franks exhaled. “Take notes. I don’t like to repeat myself.”