Along a deserted road, in a deserted stretch of land, a thing screamed. Richard started awake hearing the noise, sitting up from his bedroll. Instantly he could tell it was not a human thing, an animal thing, or even a demon thing. In the last two years he had heard many noises, as he traveled south towards Colorado. The scream was of a thing with more vocal cords, joined in a harmony by other, similar, voices. It was the sort of scream which would come back when you tried to sleep. It haunted that shadowy part of the mind, the part you traversed on the way to sleep.

  Richard pushed out of his tent, and saw descending on the camp, a flock hideous creatures. He was ready to fight, Richard never let his guard down. He slept and lived in with his combat shotgun, and pockets full of shells. Richard had a lot of pockets too. His clothing was a dozen trenchcoats, and jackets layered on top of each other, and heavily patched cargo pants. It made him look like a hobo, but survival was more important than fashion.

  Before it all happened, Richard would have been kindly described as big-boned. Two years of hard living had left him lean and wiry. He had no idea just how thin he had really gotten. The cult didn't stop for baths, so neither did he. It had been a year since he had been naked. Wearing an unknown amount of coats, no one could really tell his size. He still had enough mass to comfortably use his shotgun, and that was all that mattered to him.

  The cult of Terrible Green Iridescent Friday came tearing out of their own tents. The cultists screeched, and began gathering weapons to defend the camp. Kitchen knifes were thrown into the air to try and strike down the monsters, with no care where they would land. The cultist's fanaticism protected them from the terror that the eldritch creatures emitted. Gazing upon the Idol had filled their minds with insanity, and left no room for anything but their duty. The terror froze Richard motionless, the shape of the monsters filled his thoughts.

  He had his own way of dealing with fear, and as Richard stared at the creature, his mind ran circles. The thing was flying in the air, twenty feet up. Its main body was a vulture's head, with a terrible thorny beak, filled with more teeth than it could hold. It leaked some fluid that was noxious just to look at. All of its appendages, to many to count, were squirming brownish tentacles, that looked like rotten wood. How it flew seemed a mystery, and Richard latched onto that.

  “You're so ugly, the way you fly, is the ground runs away,” he muttered to himself. The insult let him break the terror, put the monster in it place, in his mind. He pulled out his trusty shotgun, and filled the air with birdshot. It blew apart the tentacles of one, and it squawked, falling to the ground. Richard surveyed the fight, and saw the vulture-eel things were swarming towards the center of the camp.

  There the terrible Idol the cult worshiped was enshrined, standing in its foul tent. The tent was composed of animal hides, of all shapes and conditions. None of them had been tanned, just crudely stitched together, and supported by bone. The structure was constantly rotting, and took near a day to set up. It was only assembled when they rested for several days, or when the holy Friday was approaching.

  Richard reloaded, and started running towards the shrine, seeing it was being overrun. In the dark he could see the dimly glimmering green eyes of the cultists as they struggled. All the cultist had the same green eyes, and anyone who gazed upon the idol would suffer the same fate. Whatever snapped their minds into kindling, came in through the eyes, and left that sign.

  Before he could reach it he was knocked to the dirt by an impact, as something landed on his back. Tentacles latched onto his coat, and he could feel a beak tearing through his layers. Richard grabbed for the bungee cord around waist, and pulled on it. The two sawed-off shotguns, securely harnessed to his innermost jacket fired. It tore through the half dozen or so coats he was wearing, and he could feel the tentacles relax.

  Quickly he stood up, and stripped off a few coats till there was no more acid burning through them. He ran a hundred meters, and in range of the swarm attacking the shrine, began firing into the creatures. He blocked out the hideous screaming, keeping his mind comfortably blank. After a minute he ran out of shells, and decided the swarm looked to be dispersing. None of the cultist bothered to approach him.

  Richard walked back to his tent. He saw his cat, Snowman, sitting on one of the vulture-eel's, and sniffing it curiously. “Hey, stop that!” He shouted, and nudged the cat off the ugly mess of a corpse with his boot. Snowman was fifeteen years old, and had followed Richard nearly a thousand miles from the cult's origin, down to northern Colorado.

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  He had tried many times to discourage the cat, and leave him behind. He knew the cults destination was no place for a cat. The cult had a habit of hunting down any animal to sacrifice to the idol. Snowman had avoided that, but not because any other cultist cared about him. The damn cat could claw anyone to shreds, if he didn't like them. Once he had sunk he teeth into a cultist's leg, then leapt away just as the man swung down with a hammer. Snowman was the only one who walked away from that, and the cult had no time for someone who shattered their kneecap. No matter what though Snowman was determined to follow Richard to the end.

  Snowman followed Richard to his tent. Outside his tent, Hunter was sitting on a box. Hunter Hunter, was the only member of the T.G.I. Friday cult Richard considered a friend. Formerly Hunter Johnson, the cult gave him the unwieldy surname of Hunter. He had always been strange, and the madness of the cult did not mesh well with what already had been going on in his head. Hunter tended to sing under his breath, and was now singing pieces of that 500 hundred miles song. “Hunter, how are you doing?” Richard asked.

  “Not bad.” He had his rifle, out and sighted on one of the vulture-eel's shooting it. “Shouldn't need to hunt for a while. Priest likes using these sorts of things for sacrifices.”

  “What are you doing outside my tent?”

  “Wouldn't want one of these getting in.” He lowered his gun, and stared at Richard through the scope. “It would get messy.” His aim drifted back up, and shot at another one of the creatures. Richard let out a held breath. He wasn't sure how much Hunter knew. But he was afraid to ask, in case his questions let Hunter put it all together.

  “Looks like the flock is starting to break up. So if you could step aside?” Richard asked. Hunter stepped to the left, but kept Richard awake for quite some time, as he picked off stragglers.

  The next morning Richard was woken by Page with orders from Priest. The monstrosities had gotten into the food supply and fouled it. So he was to range out, and find someone he could rob. That was his purpose in the cult, he was Bandit. In the two years since the cults forgotten origin the number of Bandits, originally a good dozen men, had been reduced to just him. The position was low ranked, but outside the regular command chain, which suited him.

  He wandered around looking for his motorcycle. It was at the edge of camp, and already had the ugly skiff, for carrying loot, attached to it. The skiff made a terrible racket as he drove off away from the camp. As he got farther away from the camp, and the hideous Idol that drew the eye lower, he began to relax. No longer could he feel the tension of the air. It was that aura of tension the Idol emitted that drew the eldritch horrors to the camp. It led them to be attacked every few weeks.

  He was the only person in the camp who was not truly a member of the Terrible Green Iridescent Friday. When the sky had torn open, back when it all began, a terrible glowing green meteor had landed in his small, rural, village. They had gone to look at it, at a loss for what was going on in the world. The meteor was the terrible Idol, and all the village had gone to look.

  Richards eyes had been slowly drawn lower, following the twisted limbs of the Idol. They seemed to form words that couldn't be understood, but could be felt. He was forced by it to look lower, toward the hideous base of it. The base that had driven the other people mad. In their insanity they had run down into the burning crater, and prostrated themselves before the Idol.

  Before his gaze reached the base there was a noise that filled him. His head jerked up, and saw a nuclear mushroom cloud on the face of Cthulhu.

  Then he had woken up a week later, with no memories of the intervening time. Richard woke surrounded by people wearing poorly stitched black robes. He was standing over a dead body, a bloody knife in hand. He had been wearing a robe himself. Everyone congratulated him for killing the dissident they had been sent out to hunt. The cult members had foggy memories of the lost week. They knew they worshiped the Idol, and that they were hunting the last dissident in town. Richard had no memories of the week, not a clue. He inferred that he had been the dissident. Some stroke of luck, him killing another cultist while disguised just as the lost week ended, had caused the misunderstanding.

  By the end of that day he had seen so many atrocities the cult had committed he was stupefied. Even the cult members seemed disturbed by the things they had only shadowy memories of. The nearly a hundred foot high pyramid of corpses, both animal and human, had been the crowning achievement. The Idol sat at the top, and Priest, the leader of cult, marched around it prophetalizing. He was seemingly inured to the stench of the pyramid.

  The truly unsettling part of the scene, after you had grown numb to the sheer gore, was that there wasn't a single fly, worm, or carrion bird. The evil of the Idol kept them away. Richard had decided, among the bodies of his family, and farm animals, to get revenge. Killing the cult members wouldn't be good enough. He would strike at the heart. Destroy any chance of the cult returning.

He would kill their god.