The buzzing grew louder. Something slammed against the wall as hard as a mortar round.
A man halfway up the stair turned to look out the window. He screamed and backed away—too late. A third shock rattled the structure. The glass shook out of its portal. A shape, black and oily, wriggled through the window and fell on the screaming man.
A few of the men moved to help him, but they were roped in with their comrades. All watched in horror as the man was dragged out through the narrow aperture, wrapped in tentacles.
There followed one moment of stunned silence. In that silence, the wails of their fellow haunted every soldier in that darkened theater. A grisly cracking sound stopped the entreaties short.
The buzzing began again; only this time it was inside the tower. Susan looked up to see two of the wasp-like shapes circling the walls of the chamber.
Susan saw men pulling frantically at their safety ropes. The blinded attendants were at a loss what to do. They had been prepared to execute men driven mad by the sight of the nether-realities beyond these portals. They were unprepared for an insurrection.
Shots were fired. She felt a round zizz past her ear. The blind executioners were over-powered. The bulkhead crews released themselves from their tethers. They moved toward the doors, even as the creatures overhead began plucking victims from the crowd.
The man in the wheelchair tried to explain; the final sacrifice had yet to be made. Azathoth’s attendants—loathsome as they might be—were as fleeting as the Daemon Sultan’s attentions.
He appealed to their patriotism, then their intellect. In the end, he motioned his attendants forward. They pulled machine guns down on the crowd.
“No allowance will be made for desertion!” screamed the cripple.
This, she figured, was a good time to be leaving.
Machine-gun fire opened up behind her as she reached the door. She looked up as the crowd pushed her through. Things on the castle walls were waiting for the crowd to step out. She heard the burr of chitinous wings. She felt the whisper of air as something descended on her.
She ducked. A black appendage coiled about the waist of a man running along beside her. He disappeared into the night air. His screams dwindled away into the sky.
Then, as his head dropped to the ground beside her, Susan became aware of a subtle roaring sound. It was barely more audible than the surf, but it carried an insistent cadence.
She remembered the three hundred human sacrifices being assembled in the amphitheater nearby—three hundred missing patients from the Agnes Dei Catholic Hospital? Whatever, Das Unternehmen succeeded or failed in those mobile gas chambers.
Charley might be there.
She started for the road. Something the size of a Tiger tank gleamed in the rising moonlight. She thought to hitch a ride. She called out to the driver in German. It started around as she approached, and something was wrong in the way it moved. No vehicle travels sideways. She moved back and the shape followed her across the road.
A half-track came up over the rise, on its way to the amphitheater. A moist, gelatinous hide was revealed in thin slices by the headlight beams. Susan recognized the bellow of the creature from Faulkenberg Reservoir. It made sense. Azathoth was near; no doubt Azathoth had brought it.
She backed away into darkness.
A German soldier inside the half-track fired his machine gun through the forward gun slit. He succeeded in gaining the creature’s attention.
Oily tentacles flexed and coiled from beneath the translucent carapace. One of them followed the gunfire right into the half-track’s armored cab. A moment’s screams, and the tentacles withdrew, wrapped tightly around an MP-38 machine gun, and the arm of the man who had fired it.
Susan realized she was not going to hurt this creature with her pistol. She leapt down the slope as a tentacle slashed at the ground where she had stood.
Momentum and fear carried her on down the embankment toward the silver dome of the observatory. The thing came on behind her. A tentacle passed through her ankles. She skipped over it, turned, and fired blindly into the black mass looming up behind her.
A second tentacle coiled back like a scorpion’s stinger. She ducked as it whizzed by her head. It reared to strike again, just as Susan reached the observatory’s backdoor entrance.
She shouldered her way inside, slammed the door behind her. A great, moist rubbing sound passed along the corrugated steel wall. She spread her arms against the doorjambs to hold the creature out.
The door shoved twice. The second shove let in something tough and wiry that felt around the corner for her. She stomped at it. A tentacle coiled about her ankle. She pulled out Berghoff’s luger and severed it in seven shots. The bloody stump slithered outside.
A scream rattled every screw in the observatory’s metal frame. She braced herself for an explosion through the walls. But Susan got lucky; sudden rifle fire from the road slugged at the walls to either side of her.