Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear Read Free

last resort was ever taken.
    With that in mind, he made sure the autopilot was disengaged as they—
    “Motherfucking Jesus Christ!” the copilot screamed even as Green could hear what sounded like all 416 passengers shrieking as well. An instant later, Green felt what had made them all cry out, and now he screamed, too. His head felt like something was trying to break out of his skull through his eyes. His hands jerked the wheel violently to the left, his brain unable to allow his eyes to open, the pain was so great. In fact, Green couldn’t feel his hands, so he was unaware that he had thrown the Boeing hard left with just 200 feet between them and the tarmac.
    The plane barreled over onto its side and plunged earthward. By this time, Green, his copilot, his flight crew, and every passenger had already been struck with violent dizziness and vomiting, even unconsciousness; the plane’s spiral toward the ground wasn’t even noticed. Every person on Flight 314 was in too much agony to be conscious of anything but the tremendous, sharp pounding in their heads, in their eyes and ears. The world was shrunk down to three pounds of organ—the brain—which has no pain sensors. Instead, the brain relayed the excruciating signals coming from the eyes before it and the ears on either side, in the sledgehammer throbbing in the back of each person’s skull.
    So no one on the plane realized or felt it when the left wingtip struck the ground and the 777 shattered into uncountable pieces, none larger than a dinner plate. The air traffic controllers didn’t notice either, since they had, to a person, collapsed in agony themselves.
    In the forty-five seconds that it took the attack to relent, more than one hundred airplanes between Mexico City and the Event fell from the sky. Most passengers and pilots died on impact with the ocean or the ground. Those in planes just beginning their approach to the city—500 km or so closer to the Event—died instantly from single destructively painful aneurysms before they crashed. But thousands upon thousands died in the air, as well as millions south of Mexico City dying on the ground as their blood vessels first pulsed, then burst.
    Planes landing in Guatemala, just 700 km farther from the Event than Mexico City, were able to do so despite their pilots’ sudden cluster-level headaches. This was because, although after a few seconds those men and women passed out from the erupting pain, they remained functional enough, long enough, to engage the very automated landing system that Captain Arthur Green had switched off just before the Event.
    Those planes landed in Guatemala and in other nearby airports with the pilots, crew, and passengers all unconscious. The air traffic controllers, too, had been unable to endure the horrifying pain, and they passed out as well. But other than those souls on a couple of airliners that ran into others due to the sudden number of planes on the ground at La Aurora International, everyone lived. Inside the terminal, every human was on the floor or slumped in chairs for the five minutes or so it took for people to come back to consciousness. And, now, to fear.
     
    Papua New Guinea
    9.5°S 147°E, 10780 km from 50°S 100°W
    18 months before the Event
     
    Against the advice of her dissertation committee, Kristen Frommer had devoted much of her doctoral research to tribes in the wilds of Papua New Guinea. Her advisors told her that those heady Margaret Mead days were long gone in this age of television and cheap air travel. With the outside world more of a factor in these people’s lives every year, they said, she had more chance of buying pot in Papua New Guinea than being cooked in one.
    She had never needed to rely on funding to get her through graduate school—she got her trust fund when she turned twenty-one and promptly spent all of it on continuing her academic studies after getting her bachelor’s in anthropology. The money for the flight and stay in New