Here is the opening scene:
McMurdo Station, Ross Island,
Antarctica, June 1995
The South Pole mid-winter was a world
enveloped in both ice and darkness, and Coaldale hated everything about it.
McMurdo was the largest official bastion
of human settlement in the great white continent, the only location for
hundreds, if not thousands of miles where the lights were on. It was two in the
afternoon, base time, but only stars shone beyond the settlement. US SEALs and
Rangers newly deployed to the ice were being inducted in the temporary
facilities recently commandeered by the US Department of Defense.
One of those Rangers was Captain Byrd
Coaldale. He was late arriving, having been delayed by another briefing, but he
also didn’t care that he was late. His only show of respect was to enter the
building quietly, to sit towards the back where he rubbed his hands together
warming them. Listening to the inducting officer drone on had to be preferable
than enduring the bitter outside cold.
A silent black and white film ran
through a digital projector at the far end of the briefing room. The footage
was circa 1950s. A man in a fur coat with UN insignia stood adjacent to what
resembled a gigantic cucumber with a starfish on its apex and five vine-like appendages
emerging from its mid-section. Then it moved. As Coaldale recovered from his
shock he realized he was staring at a living entity.
It was one of those alien’s everyone in
the Pole had talked of so often since his arrival, spoken of in tones that
painted the creatures in reverence and awe. The projected black and white UN
man played a pipe, although there was no sound with the footage. The monster
presumably responded with piping of its own. Coaldale had thought it some kind
of put up, until this very moment. Like a switch had been turned on inside him
and suddenly he was interested in everything the inducting officer was saying.
“This,” spoke up Robert Lynch, the Navy
SEAL Lieutenant leading the briefing, “is a Pentapod.”
Lynch gave the crowd a moment to let the
words sink in. If the officer was expecting awe, they gave none. They were
silent like corpses.
“Any questions so far?”
No one answered.
Standing half in the light of the
projector and half hidden by it, Lynch pointed to the cucumber shape like he
had seen one every day for a year, and perhaps he had.
“This is project RESOLUTION ZERO archive
footage. The man you are looking at is Colonel Doctor Wingate Peaslee, who was
a legend in our circles. Back then we had limited communications with the
‘Visitors’, as the RZ guys like to refer to them, and Peaslee led much of our
work. The Pentapods taught us a thing or too. Things we really didn’t want to
know…”
Coaldale shuddered and not from the
cold. He had heard all about the Pentapods, read all the reports, but he had
yet to see one in the flesh. Film footage was the next best thing, and had
proved more disturbing than he had expected. The problem was it didn’t look
fake, despite his recently marveling at the digital special effects in the Jurassic Park movie a few years back.
Anything could be doctored, and yet an undefined and very sinister element
captured in the footage made it genuine.
“These days we rarely see the Pentapods,
yet we continue to carry on the tasks they burdened us with all those decades
ago. The Pentapods however,” Lynch emphasized, “are not our problem.”
He changed video files. New footage from
the same era was of an icy desert seen from an airplane. At first Coaldale
didn’t know what he was looking at until he identified men on the ground, tiny
individuals filmed from an airplane high above the fields of Antarctic snow.
They were running, fast and away from a threat Coaldale could not see. He
looked for the pursuer, until he realized his mind wasn’t imaging a hunter much
bigger than the men. When he spotted the amorphous shape the size of a mining
dump truck, all white and tentacles and eyes and mouths that seemed to shift in
and out of a jelly-like consistency, he squirmed. The pulsating shape rolled
over one man crushing him without slowing an iota. It was like watching a
tsunami engulf unsuspecting bathers on a populated beach.
Lynch let the film roll, as one by one
each fleeing man was crushed. They had no hope, but they all ran regardless,
until the very end.
“That,” explained Lynch, “is a
shoggoth.”
A private up the front puked. The acidic
smell quickly filled the room, and he puked again. No one said a word and all
left the young soldier to soak in his mostly digested lunch. The private
quickly excused himself until Lynch told him to sit down. There was more
learning to do.
“This shoggoth was spotted in 1961,” the
inducting officer explained. “It disappeared shortly after this footage was
taken. We haven’t seen another one this big since, but we know they are many
more in the depths of Pentapod City.”
A young Navy officer raised her arm.
“Sir, how do we fight them?”
Lynch laughed unkindly. “You don’t. You
run as fast as you can, and you hope you can run faster than your buddies.”
Coaldale laughed too, understanding the
sick joke he had signed up for. All the men in the footage had run. It proved
only that the advantage of speed was in being crushed last. It would be him
running soon, for it was his mission to lead a team of US Rangers into the
depths of the Pentapod City and map it, and that was where the shoggoths
presumably still existed.
“How did you survive?” Coaldale demanded of Lynch, from the back and in the
shadows.
The SEAL officer was all seriousness
when he said, “I ran the fastest.”
“So the ‘shoggoth’ gave up?”
“No. I was in a team of a hundred men.
Only three of us got away because we ran in the opposite direction, away from
the largest flock of fleeing men.”
Flock.
Coaldale snorted. He knew then why he
had been sent to Antarctica. He was just another sheep being led to the
slaughter.
