The Green Lama: Unbound (The Green Lama Legacy Book 3) Page 13

  “You tryin’to get yourself killed?!” the bearded man whispered harshly, his breath reeking. “If those Deep Ones had seen you, you would’ve been dead in a second!”

  “What the hell are those?” she asked, struggling against the old man’s feral grip. It wasn’t until she saw his pale blue eyes that she recognized him. But it couldn’t be, that wasn’t possible—“Oh dear God. Ken?”

  The old man’s maw of a mouth creaked open. “Jean?” he breathed, a familiar twinkle growing in his pale blue eyes as he looked over her face. But then his gaze went cold and in a blur, he snatched up Jean’s gun and pressed it against her skull. “I’m not going be playing any more of your games, Karl!” he growled, cocking back the hammer.

  “Ken! KEN! Oh, God—God! It’s me Jean!” she pleaded, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Jesus Christ, Ken, it’s Jean! Don’t kill me, Ken! It’s me!”

  Doubt laced Ken’s haggard face. “Prove it.”

  “Look at me, Ken! It’s—”

  “Prove it! How did we meet?”

  Jean furrowed her brow. “Wha—?” she stuttered as Ken shoved the gun harder against her temple. “We were extras! A Night at the Opera. We had to sit next to each other for six hours and I thought—I thought you were cute! And I—I asked you out to drinks!”

  “And when you asked me home, what did I say?”

  “Ken, I…” She looked him in the eyes. “Ken, you made me promise not to say.”

  Tears welled up Ken’s eyes as he removed the gun barrel from Jean’s head. “Oh, God. Jean!” he sighed as he wrapped his arms around her.

  • • •

  “Jesus Christ, Ken, what happened to you?” she asked once the factory was out of sight.

  “What happened to me? Jean, you’ve…” he hesitated. “There was a war, the one they were all worried about. The one Rabbi Brickman warned us about.”

  “A Second Great War? It happened? But I…” she trailed off, her head buzzing. She pinched the bridge of her nose. There was something she wanted to say, something about where she had come from, but she couldn’t connect the dots. The harder she tried, the worse the sensation became.

  “There was nothing great about it,” Ken said bitterly, pulling her out of her reverie. “It was worse than anything we could have—The Nazis, they had something on their side; they didn’t even need allies. They just tore through us like paper dolls.”

  “Wait. When did all this happen?”

  He studied her in disbelief. “Jesus, you really don’t remember any of this.”

  “Ken, I don’t even know how I got here, much less where I was… The last thing I can remember it was nineteen thirty-nine, right after that whole business with von Kultz and the beardless corpse, and I…” she trailed off again, the buzzing in her head growing.

  “Nineteen thirty-nine? The last thing you remember was nineteen thirty-nine,” he reiterated, a statement rather than a question.

  Jean furrowed her brow as she nodded. “Yeah.”

  Ken took a step toward her, facing the ground as he laced and unlaced his fingers, trying to find the best way to break the truth to her. He took a long breath and looked her in the eyes. “Jean… It’s nineteen fifty-nine.”

  “Nineteen fifty-nine?” she gasped, holding her head as she stumbled back.

  “Jean?” Ken exclaimed as he rushed toward her, catching her before she fell.

  She gripped at his ragged collar, desperate for something to ground her.

  She struggled, a flood of questions pouring through her mind. “Where are we?” she finally managed.

  “Where…? Babe, this was Central Park. We’re in New York.”

  “Oh God,” Jean croaked as she fell to her knees and curled over herself, one hand still gripping onto Ken’s collar. It wasn’t possible; none of this could be real. Not this nightmare, not this horror. She looked up at him, her eyes pleading. “What about the Green Lama?”

  Ken’s lips formed a narrow line and Jean could feel her stomach begin to drop, already knowing the answer. “Jean… The Green Lama’s dead.”

  • • •

  The bombed-out remains of the New York Public Library sat silent beneath the ashen sky, the twin lions that once bordered the steps long ago shattered to pieces. She could still remember the first time she had seen it only two— no, twenty two—years ago, not long after she stepped off the S. S. Cathay. It had seemed so monolithic then, glistening white, and now the remains crunched beneath her boots. Leaving the island, Ken told her, wasn’t an option. “The Deep Ones control the waters.” It had taken them nearly four hours to traverse the rubble of the city, keeping to the shadows of ruined buildings and abandoned subways, sometimes stopping for minutes at a time while Ken listened for movement above. Along the way, he had given her a short history of the last twenty years, though he was unable—or more likely unwilling—to give her any real details.

  The War started in the early months of ’39, shortly after Jean had gone missing. The Green Lama had sent Ken, Lieutenant Caraway, and Jethro Dumont looking for her, but things had gone to hell quickly and by the time Ken limped back home both the Lama and Caraway were dead and Dumont was missing.

  “How did it happen? The Lama, how did he die?” Jean asked, her throat tightening, unable to contemplate her life without him.

  Ken shook his head. “Not well. There was this ritual… Karl used the Lama to summon this,” he said, waving his hands over the destruction.

  “You mentioned him before. Who’s Karl?”

  Ken let out sardonic laugh. “Karl Heydrich. Amerikas Führer. If you wanted to blame anyone, it would be him.”

  The War in Europe had lasted less than six months, the German army spreading like a cancer; first Paris, then Moscow, and then finally London, before Asia and Africa were consumed. By 1940 all but America had been conquered, but even then it was only a matter of time.

  Jean placed a hand on his arm. “What about Gary and Evangl? What about your… Benn?” she asked quietly.

  Ken gave her an empty smile. “They took out the best of us. Those that didn’t submit were killed. Most that survived didn’t last long. They started rounding us up. First it was the Jews—just like the Rabbi warned us. But it didn’t stop there… They started grabbing anyone they deemed ‘impure, ’ anyone that didn’t fit into their Master Race.”

  “You mean the Deep Ones. Those bug-eyed things.”

  “They’re only part of the problem,” he said as he knocked on the door to the library.

  “Who’s there?” a voice sounded from within. Jean could see a pair of eyes moving behind a small slit.

  “It’s me, Evan,” Ken said, exasperated. “Open up.”

  The eyes glanced at Jean, then back at Ken. “You got a girl with you.”

  “Glad to know your vision still works. Let us in.”

  Jean heard whispering through the door before Evan spoke again. “Password.”

  “Evan,” Ken sighed, massaging his eyes.

  “It’s your rules, boss,” Evan replied. Jean thought she could even hear him shrug.

  She glanced toward Ken and mouthed with a smile: “Boss?”

  Ken gave her a half-cocked grin that reminded her of the man she once knew. “Which means I can break ’em,” he said to Evan.

  “Rules are rules. Even for you,” Evan said.

  “Yeah, rules are rules.” Ken said, enjoying the repartee. “Muh em-dap in-am mo.”

  “Thanks, boss,” Evan said from within as Jean heard bolts and bars removed from the door. “You get what you needed?”

  “Yeah, in a minute. Jean, you no doubt remember Evan Wayland, formerly Sergeant of New York City’s Special Crime Squad.”

  “Holy Cow!” she exclaimed when she caught sight of the muscular man, recalling the massively obese policeman she once knew. “Moses in a hand basket, Sergeant, you look… You look amazing.”

  “Man’s pushing sixty,” Ken added. “We like to say you can tell how many years he’s been fighti
ng by the size of his biceps. And this,” he said, indicating a shrimpy middle-aged man,” s David Heidelberger, also a former member of the Special Crime Squad.”

  Heidelberger smiled, thrusting a friendly hand forward. “How do you do?”

  Wayland was less charitable, crossing his arms over his powerful chest. “Who’s the broad?” he asked.

  “Jean Farrell,” Ken replied. “Adventurer, part time actress, all around hero.”

  Wayland pursed his lips and raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Thought she was supposed to be dead.”

  “Yeah,” Ken said with an ironic laugh. “So did I.”

  “Well, I’m just happy to be here,” Jean said with a small wave.

  “Hmph,” Wayland grumbled. “You’d be the first.”

  “I bet,” Jean said.

  Ken took her by the arm. “Come inside. I’ll show you around and introduce you to everyone else. Don’t expect anything fancy though,” he said as they moved into the ruins. “We don’t exactly sit still too long.”

  “So, she’s supposed to have been dead fer twenty years?” Heidelberger asked Wayland once the others were out of earshot.

  Wayland shrugged. “Apparently.”

  “Boss’s takin’ it pretty well.”

  “After all we’ve seen?” Wayland said as he locked up the door. “Dead broad comin’ back to life ain’t that big a thing.”

  The interior of the Library had fared little better than the exterior. Stone rubble and the charred remains of countless books filled the Rose Main Reading Room; the golden ceiling cracked open, letting in angled pillars of light that cut across the small encampments littering the once majestic space.

  “How many of you are there?” Jean asked as they moved through the rubble. She could feel the survivors’ eyes on her, their dull expressions hiding distrust, anger, and resignation.

  “Thirty. We were forty,” Ken whispered, as if the space were still used for its function. “Lot of us are broken families. Parents without children, children without parents. Tom lost most of his family back in the early days of the war,” he said indicating a young Hispanic man cleaning his gun.

  “Grew up fighting, the poor kid. He and his brother Joe, they’re probably our two best fighters. Saw him once kill a Deep One with his bare hands.”

  “You keep talking about the Deep Ones, but you still haven’t told me what they are.”

  Ken stopped short and firmed his lips. After a moment he faced Jean and said: “I should probably take you to Valco.”

  • • •

  “I’m afraid there isn’t much I can really tell…” Doctor Harrison Valco began as he cleaned his glasses with a grimy rag. Like Ken and Jean, Valco had worked with the Green Lama back in the day, and was by far the oldest person in the encampment, probably pushing seventy by her guess. And though he seemed worn down by the world, he still retained a small glimmer of hope in the back of his eyes, as if he was waiting for someone to jump down from the rafters and make it all go away.

  “Humor me, Doc,” Jean said, crossing her arms as she leaned up against the rotted wooden table in Valco’s makeshift lab. “I’ve been away for a while.”

  Valco hesitated. He glanced at Ken, who nodded in reassurance. Satisfied, Valco continued. “Well, for starters despite their bipedal anatomy they are not in any sense of the word ‘human.’”

  “I’ve seen ’em up close. I figured as much.”

  Valco turned to Ken, a small smirk pulling at his cheeks. “She’s snippier than I remember.”

  “That’s why we loved—” Ken cut himself short and turned to Jean. “Excuse me. That’s why we love her.”

  Jean gave Ken a nod and a sad smile.

  Valco cleared his throat. “Far as we can tell, from the few specimens we’ve been able to examine, they evolved from fish—or some distant relative thereof—but have more in common with frogs or other amphibians. Their bite is toxic thanks to poison in their saliva; it can kill a grown man within hours of injection. Their bulbous eyes, while generally poor in the air are vastly superior underwater and can cover well over a hundred-and-eighty-degrees of sight. Much like frogs, they mate—”

  “Yeah. Thanks,” Jean cut in. “Really don’t need to know about their mating habits. What I want to know is why the hell they’re out there dressed like Nazis.”

  “She really doesn’t know?” Valco asked Ken.

  “She really doesn’t know.”

  “All right, look, guys,” Jean cut in,” ll the enigmatic statements and looks were cute for about a minute. Just tell me what happened and what we’re gonna do about it.”

  Ken held up a finger. “One word,” he said before raising two more,” hree syllables.”

  “Why do I get the sense I already know the answer to this one…?” Jean sighed.

  “Cthulhu.”

  • • •

  Ken shifted uncomfortably in his seat as he began. “It’s been a while since

  I’ve talked about this with anyone, so you’ll have to bear with me.”

  “Take your time, I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

  “Ain’t that the truth?” Ken said with a sardonic laugh. He scratched at his bearded cheek. “You remember what the Rabbi told us when he found the Second Jade Tablet? The statue grown like coral, ‘Cthulhu waits’?”

  Jean nodded. “Like it was only a few months ago.”

  “Well, what we didn’t know at the time was that Cthulhu wasn’t going to be waiting around much longer. See, what no one knew then was that these stars were aligning and when they did, they raised the sunken city R’lyeh down in the South Pacific, just north of Antarctica. Honestly it still sounds like a whole lot of hocus pocus mumbo jumbo, if I hadn’t seen it all myself… Anyways, while we were looking for you, Karl and his Nazi buddies were looking for the Third Jade Tablet.”

  “Aw, crap,” Jean groaned, massaging her eyes,” here are three of them?”

  “Oh, it gets better. Karl was in league with the Deep Ones. Together they found the Third Tablet and this blade-thing the Lama called a phurba. The Germans called it the Shard. They used these to open the gates of R’lyeh, sacrificing good people to do so—including Caraway.” Ken let out a painful sigh. “Stupid bastard. He tried to save the girl and he just… They drained him like a cow in a slaughterhouse. God, I can still remember the sound of his blood, like a broken faucet.” He wiped the tears off his cheeks.

  “Me and the Green Lama followed the Nazis to R’lyeh. The Lama thought—well, he hoped we could stop them before they raised Cthulhu. What we didn’t know then—Goddammit, we were idiots!” he cursed, slamming his hand against the table. “There was so much we could’ve done if only we had known what the hell was going on.”

  Jean shook her head. She needed a drink, but the barrels had gone dry twenty years ago. “Shoulda, coulda, woulda.”

  “We thought they were going to basically, y’know, open the doors for the bastard, let him out, go Sieg Heil and let him go wild, but we didn’t—” Ken cut himself short. “They wanted us to follow them. They had everything except the key to awakening Cthulhu, and that was the Green Lama.

  “The city was full of Nazis, Deep Ones, and these horrors…The Lama thought we could fight our way through, but there was no way. The Tulku, he put up a damn good fight, but they overpowered him, dragged him up to the altar, and—”

  Jean held up her hand, cutting Ken short. “That’s enough. I don’t need to hear anymore,” she breathed.

  They sat in silence until Jean cleared her throat and asked,” o, what do you guys have planned for the factory?”

  Valco’s eyebrow shot up. “How did you—?”

  “I’m not stupid, Doc. Coincidental as it was, I know Ken wasn’t hanging around the death factory looking for yours truly, and he definitely wasn’t sightseeing. He was scouting for something, and whatever that something is, I want in.”

  Ken bit back a smile, realizing, not for the first time, how much he had missed his best friend. “Besides
blowing it up?”

  Jean nodded. “Besides blowing it up,” she said with a smirk.

  “Show her the map,” Ken said to Valco with a beckoning gesture.

  Valco reached into a small cupboard and brought out a large rolled fabric. “Apologies for the crudity,” he said as he unrolled the map on the table,” t’s been nearly nineteen years since they produced paper.”

  Drawn in charcoal, the layout of the factory was surprisingly detailed, showing the number of entrances, the breakdown of the rooms and floors, as well as guard and “prisoner” in-take schedules.

  “Looks like you’ve been planning this for a while.”

  “Too long, if you ask me,” Ken replied, eyeing Valco.

  “The Lama never went in without a solid plan,” alco said as he looked over the map, feeling Ken’s stare.

  “That’s a lie and you know it,” Jean commented.

  Ken cleared his throat. “Either way, we know the factory is primarily used as a, um…” he hesitated, stealing a glance at Jean before continuing. “As a crematorium, but we have reason to believe that Nazi officials use it as a base from time to time and we think Karl is there with the Third Tablet.”

  “You’re telling me the Third Tablet is here?” Jean asked, tapping the map. “Now?”

  “We think so,” Valco said, nodding hesitantly. “The troop buildup in recent weeks, the abnormal climate, the subtle changes in the city’s ambient magnetics. It must be here.”

  “If we can break in and if we can grab it”—Ken licked his chapped lips—“we can use it to turn the tide.”

  “It’s a long shot at best,” Valco said with a skeptical shrug.

  Jean cracked a sardonic smirk. “Long shot’s all we ever get, Doc.”

  Valco and Ken laid out their plan, which was as simple as it was suicidal.

  “So,” she summarized, “we’re going to bust in through the back door, shoot everything that moves until we get what we need, and try and make our way out.”

  “Essentially, yes,” Valco replied.