Dead Sea

The fog was not fog now, it was flesh, blubbery radiant flesh that was pink and yellow veined by squirming purple arteries that pulsed and undulated like tentacles. It was a huge mass of radioactive smog that was flesh that was smog that was misting, dripping flesh that was alive, alive, alive, filling the sky and swallowing the world with a mouth that was a black, seeking nebula. Yes, the Dead Sea was an incubator and the fog was a placenta that was sheering now with a ripping sound, with an eruption of slime that was not slime but colors, vibrant and violent auras of colors that filled Greenberg’s mind with a rumbling white noise. For he was seeing colors that he had never seen before, smelling them and tasting them, feeling them ignite him with a freezing/burning wind that was blowing from the malignant irradiated wastes and radioactive bone heaps beyond the edges of the known universe.

He screamed then.

Screamed his mind to quivering jelly and vomited out his guts in white-hot coils.

The Fog-Devil was birthed in a nuclear fallout of blistering ice and radioactive fire and frost and acid, an effusion of strontium-90 and radium and unstable cellular anti-matter. Greenberg saw it, was allowed to see it coming at him in a boiling flux of nerve gas and chlorine mist, methane and supercharged split atoms of hydrogen… a slithering, worming multi-dimensional obscenity. Yes, a breath of living cosmic darkness, a translucent and larval incandescence, a primal chaos of decaying cadaveric gulfs. It became a bile of screaming fungal pigments and an immense, electric wraith skeletoned by a neural network of synapses flapping with fleshy rags infused by an incinerating moonlight. Maybe it was a million writhing and eyeless alien graveworms pissing jets of color and dissolving into a noxious atomic steam. And maybe it was a cauldron of smoldering entrails and maybe it was a sentient plexus of mewling plasma, a creeping and hissing thermonuclear afterbirth born in some searing anti-world of radionuclides and plutonium.

Yes, maybe it was all these things and none of them.

A living furnace of shadow-matter that had come to devour the world, the universe, something that was pulling gravity inside-out and collapsing time-space in its wake.

Greenberg saw what his mind told him was a vast, living, breathing honeycomb descending on him, fluttering and blurring, unable to hold its shape or form. It was blown with noxious clouds of searing, scalding vapors and incremating heat. And his last true sensory impression was of… eyes.

What his disintegrating brain told him were eyes… colossal, luminous-red globular orbs leering from nests of wiry tentacles like whips or eyelashes. Eyes that were steaming like melting reactor cores, burning holes through the dimensional fabric and turning Greenberg’s brain to hot, bubbling mud.

Eyes, eyes, eyes… a million eyes, a billion eyes staring out from a slime of protoplasmic mist.

Eyes that destroy, eyes that devour, eyes that violate and consume and burn, burn, burn, oh dear Christ the burning burning burning static breath…

Eyes that were black holes and quasars and the ravening charnel wastes of dead-end space. Depthless crystalline eyes that burned with a green smoke, chromatic graveyards and diseased moons that washed him down in cosmic rays and gamma rays and phosphorescent streams of cremating atoms that found his mind and gnawed the meat from it and sucked its blood and vacuumed-free its marrow and gnawed its charred bones.

Yes, it found Greenberg and Greenberg pleased it, filled it, satisfied its relentless and voracious appetite. He was burnt offerings beneath the fission of its nuclear winter breath.

Greenberg’s flesh became bubbling wax.

His bones liquified like melted candlesticks.

His skull became a boiling, steaming pot of cold, white radioactive jelly.

And even as his mind was stripped to bone and his muscles and nerve endings and anatomy became running tallow, he felt his hand jerk the cord.

Heard from some distant room, the noose drop over the Fog-Devil, that extradimen-sional abomination, that distortion out of space, out of time.

32

“Okay,” George was saying, “veer to the left, to the left…”

Menhaus jerked the wheel and they went too far, the needle of the compass swinging far to the right and almost stopping George’s heart with it. But without being told, he brought the boat back until the needle was pointing straight up, attracted by an unknown magnetic influence.

“Hold it there now,” George said. “We’re moving straight at whatever it is…”

Behind them, far, far behind them there was a rumbling sound like thunder. A deafening hollow boom. The fog behind them was lit with a flickering green light.

They knew what it was.

The anti-matter bomb. The collision of dimensions, the big bang.

Seconds now, mere seconds before that shockwave found them, atomized them into mist.