Read Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear for Free Online

not a terrible pain but one that came on so suddenly it made him lose his grasp on the Bloody Mary, which splashed red all over the carpet and wall. It wasn’t the most acute pain he had ever felt—nothing like what had poor Percy screaming as he curled into the fetal position on the floor, palms flat against his temples. Still, even for Martin, it was damned unpleasant.
    It also made him highly dizzy. He pitched forward off the side of the bed and banged his head against the wall, which actually hurt his head more than the sudden onslaught of pain. He could hear Percy moaning desperately, almost screaming, still puking.
    Then, less than sixty seconds after it had started, the torment vanished. Martin regained his equilibrium and Percy regained consciousness, splashed with his own bile but otherwise looking more stunned and weak than having suffered any permanent harm.
    Martin looked at Percy and saw in the man’s expression exactly what must have been on his own face. “What,” Martin said as he forced himself to stand, “in the bloody fuck was that? ”
    Percy peeled himself from the expensive carpet and gradually pulled his body into a standing position as well. (They both ignored the horror of his sweater vest for the moment.) Only then did they notice the apocalyptic cacophony taking place outside and twelve stories down. The assistant went to the window and looked down at West 44th Street, where dozens, perhaps hundreds, of automobile and bus horns sounded in long screams of indignity at the damaged front of every vehicle crunched against the damaged back of the vehicle before it.
    “My god,” Percy said, then winced when he remembered how very little his employer cared for that interjection.
    Martin was used to people claiming the incredible and his obligation to relieve them of their credulity, but he could hear the horns—and now the sirens—himself from the streets below and stood to join his man at the window.
    “My god,” Martin said.
    “Was everyone in the city afflicted at the same time as we?” Percy muttered almost to himself as he stared at the mayhem. Every driver was outside his vehicle, staring at a crushed bonnet accompanied by a smashed boot. It was a good thing traffic never moved very quickly anyway on 44th between Fifth and Sixth Avenues—if this happened on open road, or on the American interstate where 88 kph was considered more of a suggestion than a rule … he shuddered to think. “And now, I gather, they have come out physically unharmed as well?”
    “You know I don’t form hypotheses before I have data,” Martin said, but jocularly and with a pat on Percy’s shoulder, agreeing with his man’s conjecture. “Get on the line to Colbert’s people, please. If we’re not getting bumped, Jimmy and I have a brand-new ‘miraculous’ event to debate.”
    “On it, sir.”
    “Good. Maybe you could go change now, brush your teeth,” Martin said and looked at the splotch near the wall. “I hope tomato juice is easy to get out of wool carpeting.” Not that it mattered—Colbert was footing the bill (and thus the damage liability) for the room, but there was no reason to be an arsehole about it.
    Martin stepped into the bathroom and closed the door. He took a moment to stare at his reflection in the mirror, getting in close to see his own bloodshot eyes, red not from a particularly bad bender (for once) but from his body’s reaction to whatever had just happened—to him, his assistant, and by the looks of it the whole of New York City.
    There was going to be a book in this, he could feel it. Or at the very least, a new lecture tour and hot debates. The unwashed idiots of the United States—not to mention the superstitious in the UK and the rest of the world—were going to attribute this to an angry God. He would be the voice of reason and clarity—if not exactly comfort, depending on the cause of this event—to those with the powers of critical thinking and skeptical