Kevin Strange's Blog: Strange Sayings - Posts Tagged "excerpt"
McHumans part 5
Last month I said I'd posted my final serialized excerpt from my Bizarro Lovecraftian story from the upcoming STRANGE VS LOVECRAFT anthology. I lied. I'm posting one more that leaves off on a major cliffhanger. Here's parts 1-4 if you need to catch up:
Here's part One
part Two
part Three
and part Four
Now for part 5. You're going to have to buy the anthology to see how this awful shit turns out for Ricky and the gang. ;)
***
Everyone remains quiet as we creep our way through the cyclopean caverns. The only sounds coming from our group are the clomp, clomp, clomp of Karen's twisted right foot as she bounce-limps along, doing her best to keep up with the rest of us, and the ragged breathing of our cross dressing companion, Ty.
He looks worse for the wear. He's pale and pouring sweat. We're all sweating under the hollowed out heads-come-helmets of the Sniffers, but Ty is sweating so badly, it runs from his monster helmet like drool out of the dead beast's mouth. He clutches his swollen arm. Even through the armor, I can see it has continued to swell. The swelling has made its way into his neck, as well. Now it pulses in time with his breathing. Before long, he starts to sway back and forth, clearly in bad shape.
I take a drink from a small bottle I have hidden under my carpace-armor. Karen eyes it, motioning for me to give her a sip.
“You don't want this,” I say, stowing it back under my armor.
She pulls me close, looking over her shoulder at Ty. “He's not gonna make it, we're gonna have to cut him loose.”
She's right, of course. Whatever poison resides in the sniffers' stingers is killing him, but I still feel obligated to mount some kind of protest in his defense. It is, after all, my crazy plan that got him into this mess to begin with. But before I can form even the most half-hearted argument in Ty's favor, we hear noise from around a turn in the corridor just in front of us... or is it behind us? God damn R'lyeh.
“Get back,” Chef hisses. We all freeze, letting the fat cook handle the danger. He pulls out his weird stone with the hand not covered in alien sea monster armor. He creeps forward as the noise around the corner grows louder. It sounds like a pair of children giggling underwater.
Karen and I take defensive posture while Ty quietly vomits behind us. Chef turns to us as if to whisper some sort of command, when suddenly he vanishes. One second he's staring me in the face, the next he's gone. Karen looks at me, puzzled. I run forward as the giggling, gurgling sound gets even louder. Whatever the creatures are, they are almost on top of us.
That's when I see him. Below me. Somehow the corner of the wall and the floor don't meet the way walls and floors are supposed to, and Chef has fallen into a chasm. He picks himself up off the sticky floor, seemingly unhurt, just as the horrors round the bend into full view.
Why do they all have to be so... ugly? These god damn things look like giant cockroaches, but standing upright as tall as a man. They're slightly hunched over, and their backs are covered by a slick, black carapace. Their awful roach legs wave out in front of them, each ending with a patch of thick, black hairs. Down near the bottom of their disgusting bodies is what looks like a huge, barbed penis, at least two foot in length, maybe three. I don't get a chance to look at them for long because the worst part of these roach creatures are the heads.
Their heads are all jittering, twitching mandibles, waving antenna, and huge shiny eyes, the color of rotted blood. Those are their roach heads. They've also got these... baby heads, like, human baby heads jutting up from either side of their roach heads. These heads constantly ooze some kind of clear fluid or mucus out of their baby mouths. They're what are making the awful crying, cooing and gurgling noises.
There are at least ten roach men racing around the bend, but its taking them forever to actually get to us. Fucking dimensions in this place, the angles are all fucked up. I lay down on my belly and reach my exposed hand down toward Chef. He reaches up, but there's too much distance between us.
“Go! Get the fuck outta here!” Chef screams. “You do not want to get caught by those things!”
“What are they?” I ask, disgusted, still trying to will my arm to be just a little longer, as though I'd be able to haul up 350 pounds of cook even if I could reach him. Still, I had to try.
“Berserkers.” Chef says, looking terrified for the first time today. “They're like sentries. They roam these halls eating, fucking and killing anything they come across. Not always in that order.” Chef backs away, pulling out his yellow star stone. “Now, kid. Go, I'm not tellin' you again.”
I stand back up. “We'll hold em off, you find a way out of there,” I say, preparing to engage the roach things as they finally get close enough to smell. I take a deep breath through my nose and wish I hadn't. They smelled like cat piss covered in fish guts after it's been left in the sun all day to rot. It should have made me gag, but by now, I'm used to all these twisted monsters and their shitty smells.
“Like hell!” Chef yells back. You and the crippled girl's gonna hold off ten of those things? You best grab her and run, boy, 'for those monsters fuck you to death!”
“I'm not leaving you-” I start, but Chef blurts out a short chant and points the star-thing at me, knocking me back a dozen feet. I land on my ass, right in front of Karen and Ty, just as the roach creatures reach the corner Chef is stuck in.
My armor is smoking and smells like burned hair and shit, but it's still intact. I'm gasping, trying to catch my breath. My chest feels like I've been shot. Several of the roach monsters are already clamoring into the chasm, trying to get to our big black companion.
“Get up!” Karen yells. “We can't leave him down there. They'll kill him!”
Chef starts hollering and jumping up and down, attracting the attention of all but one of them. He fires off a chant, blasting the head clean off the first roach monster, plastering its companions in thick white goop. Its corpse falls into the weird chasm. Chef blasts two more, each landing on top of the last.
“Come on!” Karen yells.
“Wait, look. He's building a goddamn ramp out of their bodies! He's gonna get out!” My celebration is cut short as the roach-thing not distracted by Chef's yelling reaches us, flailing its hairy legs, and jutting its giant penis.
I jump forward and prepare to attack. A hairy leg slashes at my face. If it weren't for my Sniffer helmet, my head would have been sliced clean off. The hairs covering its multi-segmented legs is razor sharp. My helmet falls away in several pieces. I stumble backward as the big roach charges forward, intent on finishing the job, its baby heads sobbing all the while.
Just as it rears back to attack again, a huge sniffer stinger strikes from the right, outside my peripheral vision, impaling the left baby head and the roach head, while barely missing the baby head on the right, covering me in noxious white roach guts that smell like rotten milk. The blow is enough to cripple the disgusting monster though, as it now hangs limp off Karen's makeshift weapon, its remaining head bawling like a newborn being drown in a wash basin.
The weight of the giant bug is too much for her skinny, atrophied legs. She drops to one knee, threatening to topple over altogether.
“A little help here!” She pants, using all her strength to keep from being crushed by the monster.
I run up to the disgusting thing and try to yank it free from Karen's weapon, but it won't budge. I crawl underneath it and lay on my back, hoping I can push it free with my leg strength.
“Push!” I grunt. But it's no use. The limp creature just hangs there, crushing down on top of us. It must weigh 300 pounds.
“Ricky,” Karen says. She's got a weird look in her eye. “I-I have something to I have to tell you.”
Oh, brother, like I need more of this shit right now. “I know,” I say, breathlessly, still shoving against the dead weight above me. “You're in love with me. Yeah, yeah, I've heard it before. Listen, I hate to break it to ya, babe but-”
“What?” She asks, confused, even sounding a little offended.
I start to speak, when the remaining baby head attached to the paralyzed roach body vomits a torrent of vile, fetid sea water onto my face for my troubles. I choke and gag simultaneously, as I try to blow the rancid water out of my nose. And still, I can't budge the hulking roach's body. That's when I hear Ty cry out from behind us.
“Ty!” I cough out. “Get this thing off us!”
I look back to see if he hears me. He's just standing there, a few feet away. His eyes are glazed over and he's shivering. He looks like he's got a fever. The swelling in his arm and throat are somehow even worse. His face even looks fat, now.
“Ty!” I yell again. This time I get his attention.
His eyes focus, he looks at me, and opens his mouth to speak. Instead of words, dozens of mice sized sniffers pour from between his lips. He tries to scream, but more and more of the little bugs are fighting their way out his mouth. When his throat constricts, they start to sting him from inside. He drops to his knees. His throat swells to the size of a watermelon right before my eyes. He starts to stab at it with the full sized stinger attached to his arm, to try to let the tiny monsters out so he can breathe. Blood and sniffers rush from the wound. He stuffs his free hand into the gash and pulls out hand fulls of the writhing little beasts. He takes two ragged, wet breaths from the gaping wound before his breath hitches and he freezes, eyes wide.
A moment later he shrieks and his eyeballs roll into the back of his head. He rips at them with his fingers as some unseen force bursts them from their moorings Blood and brains pour from his ears. After his eyeballs are gone, his hands grope at a small crack in his forehead. Little writhing tentacles dart in and out of the crack, fighting their way free. Using the stinger attached to his hand, he tries to bore into the crack, to let the baby monsters out of his skull. He screams all the while.
Finally, after far too many moments, his entire head explodes, sending baby sniffers, brains and gore five feet into the air. Only then does the screaming stop.
As Ty's headless body thumps lifelessly to the floor, I do my best to cover Karen from the rain of bug monsters and gore that splatters over us while still trying to hold up the paralyzed body of the roach-thing threatening to crush us.
In no time I feel the sniffers' little squirming bodies start to crawl through the cracks in my armor. “Get this fucking thing off me!” I scream, redoubling my efforts to push away the roach monster. I'm starting to freak out pretty hard.
The baby sniffers are already crawling up Karen's legs, too. They're all over us. They'll start to sting us any moment, and we'll end up like Ty, too. Karen knows this as well as I do, and that's all the incentive she needs.
I feel the sniffers rooting around on my clothes, under my armor, trying to find exposed skin. Panicking, I start to hyperventilate as I look down and see a little sniffer poke out from my chest plate and make its way up toward my bare neck.
“Come on, come on!” I whine.
Karen glances over and sees the baby sniffer prodding around my neck, slowly crawling up to my face. She curses under he breath. Using her free hand to pull the slack out of the sniffer tendons that hold the armor to her body, she uses her teeth to tear the knots out of the binding. Within seconds she's free of her stinger weapon still lodged in the roach heads. Able to use both hands and put her whole body weight behind her, she's able to topple the monster over, freeing us both just as the baby sniffer pries open my pursed lips with its fore-tentacles and tries to make its way inside.
I bite its head off and climb to my feet, tossing the decapitated little body away before it can sting me. Karen and I both dance out of our armor as fast as we can, knocking little bug monsters off each others' backs as fast as we can, then stomping them flat before they can crawl up our shoes again.
Satisfied that we're bug free, I point at the corner, still infested with giant cockroaches. “We've got to get Chef out of that pit!” We take off running, leaving the paralyzed roach monster to wail as the baby sniffers sting its face over and over until it's so swollen, it can no longer make its hideous noise.
I almost trip over the edge and pitch myself down into the chasm when we run up to it. My brain still can't comprehend the angles in this fucking place. Karen catches me and we both gasp as we look down into the pit and see what lies down there. I finally do throw up, and Karen starts to cry.
Dead roach monsters litter the chasm. Their bodies lay exploded, in all manner of dismemberment. Some still twitch, some still bleed. Cooked white goo, turned a nasty yellow steams up from the floor, covering it as well as most of the surface of the walls. There are enough corpses piled up in the corner for Chef to climb out. Unfortunately, Chef won't be doing any more climbing.
The Berserkers, as he called them, are literally fucking the shit out of him. And then eating it. Chef's stomach is torn open. He's laying on his back. His guts are all messed up and looped out across his wounded belly and chest. There are two Berserkers left alive. The roaches' huge cocks are thrusting in and out of Chef's steaming entrails, their baby heads gurgle-crying the whole time. Worse, when one of Chef's intestines bursts open, the Roaches are use their fore-limbs to scoop up the bloody shit into their jittering, chomping little mouth parts.
I think he's dead at first. Till he lifts his head up and looks at me with his one good eye, the other having presumably been fucked out of his skull.
“Come on,” Karen sobs. “Let's go. Let's just get the fuck out of this awful place.” She grabs me by the arm and tries to pull me away.
“No!” I yank free and start to stumble down the roach corpses.
“Ricky, there's nothing you can do for him, we've got to go before something else tries to kill us.”
“This is all my fault,” I say. The callous prick who so easily dropped an ax into his best friend's head no where to be found. All I can think about is Chef's robust laughter as he stood at the grill station at Mchumans making fun of us white people. Seeing him down in that death pit, his body being so heinously violated... Something inside me snaps.
I'm shaking all over, probably in shock as I try to make my way down the bodies of the dead Berserkers. Chef raises his hand to stop me. He closes his eye and slowly shakes his head at me. “Fuck outta....here... boy. Take that... white girl and... get as far away from R'lyeh as you can. This... ain't no place... for good... people.”
With that, Chef raises his star-thing up to his own face and barks out one final chant, blasting his own head into pink mush.
I stumble up out of the pit, numb. The remaining Berserkers are already pulling their dicks free of Chef's corpse. They'll be on us in moments. Without armor or weapons, Karen and I are defenseless. I can't bring myself to care, the weight of the events inside this monstrous tomb crushing down on top of me, obliterating my ability to think rationally. When I get back up to the floor, Karen stands stiff, looking past me with wide eyes.
I turn to see what she's looking at. Fishbowl stands just a few yards away, the hands of its wet suit clenched into fists. I step in front of Karen, instinctively.
“What-what are you doing up here?” I ask, confused. I take one last swig from my bottle, draining its contents before discarding it onto the stone floor. “You're supposed to be at the banquet with the food...”
With Fishbowl stalking toward me, and Berserkers about to attack from the rear, I'm surprisingly calm, resigned to my fate. I'm ready to die, so it comes as a shock when I hear Karen say, in a small voice from behind me, “I'm sorry, Ricky.”
And that's the last thing I remember. I guess Karen hit me in the head with something and knocked me out, cause the next thing I knew, I was hanging here, upside down, staring at your rotten, ugly fucking face, Mr. Cthulhu...
Here's part One
part Two
part Three
and part Four
Now for part 5. You're going to have to buy the anthology to see how this awful shit turns out for Ricky and the gang. ;)
***
Everyone remains quiet as we creep our way through the cyclopean caverns. The only sounds coming from our group are the clomp, clomp, clomp of Karen's twisted right foot as she bounce-limps along, doing her best to keep up with the rest of us, and the ragged breathing of our cross dressing companion, Ty.
He looks worse for the wear. He's pale and pouring sweat. We're all sweating under the hollowed out heads-come-helmets of the Sniffers, but Ty is sweating so badly, it runs from his monster helmet like drool out of the dead beast's mouth. He clutches his swollen arm. Even through the armor, I can see it has continued to swell. The swelling has made its way into his neck, as well. Now it pulses in time with his breathing. Before long, he starts to sway back and forth, clearly in bad shape.
I take a drink from a small bottle I have hidden under my carpace-armor. Karen eyes it, motioning for me to give her a sip.
“You don't want this,” I say, stowing it back under my armor.
She pulls me close, looking over her shoulder at Ty. “He's not gonna make it, we're gonna have to cut him loose.”
She's right, of course. Whatever poison resides in the sniffers' stingers is killing him, but I still feel obligated to mount some kind of protest in his defense. It is, after all, my crazy plan that got him into this mess to begin with. But before I can form even the most half-hearted argument in Ty's favor, we hear noise from around a turn in the corridor just in front of us... or is it behind us? God damn R'lyeh.
“Get back,” Chef hisses. We all freeze, letting the fat cook handle the danger. He pulls out his weird stone with the hand not covered in alien sea monster armor. He creeps forward as the noise around the corner grows louder. It sounds like a pair of children giggling underwater.
Karen and I take defensive posture while Ty quietly vomits behind us. Chef turns to us as if to whisper some sort of command, when suddenly he vanishes. One second he's staring me in the face, the next he's gone. Karen looks at me, puzzled. I run forward as the giggling, gurgling sound gets even louder. Whatever the creatures are, they are almost on top of us.
That's when I see him. Below me. Somehow the corner of the wall and the floor don't meet the way walls and floors are supposed to, and Chef has fallen into a chasm. He picks himself up off the sticky floor, seemingly unhurt, just as the horrors round the bend into full view.
Why do they all have to be so... ugly? These god damn things look like giant cockroaches, but standing upright as tall as a man. They're slightly hunched over, and their backs are covered by a slick, black carapace. Their awful roach legs wave out in front of them, each ending with a patch of thick, black hairs. Down near the bottom of their disgusting bodies is what looks like a huge, barbed penis, at least two foot in length, maybe three. I don't get a chance to look at them for long because the worst part of these roach creatures are the heads.
Their heads are all jittering, twitching mandibles, waving antenna, and huge shiny eyes, the color of rotted blood. Those are their roach heads. They've also got these... baby heads, like, human baby heads jutting up from either side of their roach heads. These heads constantly ooze some kind of clear fluid or mucus out of their baby mouths. They're what are making the awful crying, cooing and gurgling noises.
There are at least ten roach men racing around the bend, but its taking them forever to actually get to us. Fucking dimensions in this place, the angles are all fucked up. I lay down on my belly and reach my exposed hand down toward Chef. He reaches up, but there's too much distance between us.
“Go! Get the fuck outta here!” Chef screams. “You do not want to get caught by those things!”
“What are they?” I ask, disgusted, still trying to will my arm to be just a little longer, as though I'd be able to haul up 350 pounds of cook even if I could reach him. Still, I had to try.
“Berserkers.” Chef says, looking terrified for the first time today. “They're like sentries. They roam these halls eating, fucking and killing anything they come across. Not always in that order.” Chef backs away, pulling out his yellow star stone. “Now, kid. Go, I'm not tellin' you again.”
I stand back up. “We'll hold em off, you find a way out of there,” I say, preparing to engage the roach things as they finally get close enough to smell. I take a deep breath through my nose and wish I hadn't. They smelled like cat piss covered in fish guts after it's been left in the sun all day to rot. It should have made me gag, but by now, I'm used to all these twisted monsters and their shitty smells.
“Like hell!” Chef yells back. You and the crippled girl's gonna hold off ten of those things? You best grab her and run, boy, 'for those monsters fuck you to death!”
“I'm not leaving you-” I start, but Chef blurts out a short chant and points the star-thing at me, knocking me back a dozen feet. I land on my ass, right in front of Karen and Ty, just as the roach creatures reach the corner Chef is stuck in.
My armor is smoking and smells like burned hair and shit, but it's still intact. I'm gasping, trying to catch my breath. My chest feels like I've been shot. Several of the roach monsters are already clamoring into the chasm, trying to get to our big black companion.
“Get up!” Karen yells. “We can't leave him down there. They'll kill him!”
Chef starts hollering and jumping up and down, attracting the attention of all but one of them. He fires off a chant, blasting the head clean off the first roach monster, plastering its companions in thick white goop. Its corpse falls into the weird chasm. Chef blasts two more, each landing on top of the last.
“Come on!” Karen yells.
“Wait, look. He's building a goddamn ramp out of their bodies! He's gonna get out!” My celebration is cut short as the roach-thing not distracted by Chef's yelling reaches us, flailing its hairy legs, and jutting its giant penis.
I jump forward and prepare to attack. A hairy leg slashes at my face. If it weren't for my Sniffer helmet, my head would have been sliced clean off. The hairs covering its multi-segmented legs is razor sharp. My helmet falls away in several pieces. I stumble backward as the big roach charges forward, intent on finishing the job, its baby heads sobbing all the while.
Just as it rears back to attack again, a huge sniffer stinger strikes from the right, outside my peripheral vision, impaling the left baby head and the roach head, while barely missing the baby head on the right, covering me in noxious white roach guts that smell like rotten milk. The blow is enough to cripple the disgusting monster though, as it now hangs limp off Karen's makeshift weapon, its remaining head bawling like a newborn being drown in a wash basin.
The weight of the giant bug is too much for her skinny, atrophied legs. She drops to one knee, threatening to topple over altogether.
“A little help here!” She pants, using all her strength to keep from being crushed by the monster.
I run up to the disgusting thing and try to yank it free from Karen's weapon, but it won't budge. I crawl underneath it and lay on my back, hoping I can push it free with my leg strength.
“Push!” I grunt. But it's no use. The limp creature just hangs there, crushing down on top of us. It must weigh 300 pounds.
“Ricky,” Karen says. She's got a weird look in her eye. “I-I have something to I have to tell you.”
Oh, brother, like I need more of this shit right now. “I know,” I say, breathlessly, still shoving against the dead weight above me. “You're in love with me. Yeah, yeah, I've heard it before. Listen, I hate to break it to ya, babe but-”
“What?” She asks, confused, even sounding a little offended.
I start to speak, when the remaining baby head attached to the paralyzed roach body vomits a torrent of vile, fetid sea water onto my face for my troubles. I choke and gag simultaneously, as I try to blow the rancid water out of my nose. And still, I can't budge the hulking roach's body. That's when I hear Ty cry out from behind us.
“Ty!” I cough out. “Get this thing off us!”
I look back to see if he hears me. He's just standing there, a few feet away. His eyes are glazed over and he's shivering. He looks like he's got a fever. The swelling in his arm and throat are somehow even worse. His face even looks fat, now.
“Ty!” I yell again. This time I get his attention.
His eyes focus, he looks at me, and opens his mouth to speak. Instead of words, dozens of mice sized sniffers pour from between his lips. He tries to scream, but more and more of the little bugs are fighting their way out his mouth. When his throat constricts, they start to sting him from inside. He drops to his knees. His throat swells to the size of a watermelon right before my eyes. He starts to stab at it with the full sized stinger attached to his arm, to try to let the tiny monsters out so he can breathe. Blood and sniffers rush from the wound. He stuffs his free hand into the gash and pulls out hand fulls of the writhing little beasts. He takes two ragged, wet breaths from the gaping wound before his breath hitches and he freezes, eyes wide.
A moment later he shrieks and his eyeballs roll into the back of his head. He rips at them with his fingers as some unseen force bursts them from their moorings Blood and brains pour from his ears. After his eyeballs are gone, his hands grope at a small crack in his forehead. Little writhing tentacles dart in and out of the crack, fighting their way free. Using the stinger attached to his hand, he tries to bore into the crack, to let the baby monsters out of his skull. He screams all the while.
Finally, after far too many moments, his entire head explodes, sending baby sniffers, brains and gore five feet into the air. Only then does the screaming stop.
As Ty's headless body thumps lifelessly to the floor, I do my best to cover Karen from the rain of bug monsters and gore that splatters over us while still trying to hold up the paralyzed body of the roach-thing threatening to crush us.
In no time I feel the sniffers' little squirming bodies start to crawl through the cracks in my armor. “Get this fucking thing off me!” I scream, redoubling my efforts to push away the roach monster. I'm starting to freak out pretty hard.
The baby sniffers are already crawling up Karen's legs, too. They're all over us. They'll start to sting us any moment, and we'll end up like Ty, too. Karen knows this as well as I do, and that's all the incentive she needs.
I feel the sniffers rooting around on my clothes, under my armor, trying to find exposed skin. Panicking, I start to hyperventilate as I look down and see a little sniffer poke out from my chest plate and make its way up toward my bare neck.
“Come on, come on!” I whine.
Karen glances over and sees the baby sniffer prodding around my neck, slowly crawling up to my face. She curses under he breath. Using her free hand to pull the slack out of the sniffer tendons that hold the armor to her body, she uses her teeth to tear the knots out of the binding. Within seconds she's free of her stinger weapon still lodged in the roach heads. Able to use both hands and put her whole body weight behind her, she's able to topple the monster over, freeing us both just as the baby sniffer pries open my pursed lips with its fore-tentacles and tries to make its way inside.
I bite its head off and climb to my feet, tossing the decapitated little body away before it can sting me. Karen and I both dance out of our armor as fast as we can, knocking little bug monsters off each others' backs as fast as we can, then stomping them flat before they can crawl up our shoes again.
Satisfied that we're bug free, I point at the corner, still infested with giant cockroaches. “We've got to get Chef out of that pit!” We take off running, leaving the paralyzed roach monster to wail as the baby sniffers sting its face over and over until it's so swollen, it can no longer make its hideous noise.
I almost trip over the edge and pitch myself down into the chasm when we run up to it. My brain still can't comprehend the angles in this fucking place. Karen catches me and we both gasp as we look down into the pit and see what lies down there. I finally do throw up, and Karen starts to cry.
Dead roach monsters litter the chasm. Their bodies lay exploded, in all manner of dismemberment. Some still twitch, some still bleed. Cooked white goo, turned a nasty yellow steams up from the floor, covering it as well as most of the surface of the walls. There are enough corpses piled up in the corner for Chef to climb out. Unfortunately, Chef won't be doing any more climbing.
The Berserkers, as he called them, are literally fucking the shit out of him. And then eating it. Chef's stomach is torn open. He's laying on his back. His guts are all messed up and looped out across his wounded belly and chest. There are two Berserkers left alive. The roaches' huge cocks are thrusting in and out of Chef's steaming entrails, their baby heads gurgle-crying the whole time. Worse, when one of Chef's intestines bursts open, the Roaches are use their fore-limbs to scoop up the bloody shit into their jittering, chomping little mouth parts.
I think he's dead at first. Till he lifts his head up and looks at me with his one good eye, the other having presumably been fucked out of his skull.
“Come on,” Karen sobs. “Let's go. Let's just get the fuck out of this awful place.” She grabs me by the arm and tries to pull me away.
“No!” I yank free and start to stumble down the roach corpses.
“Ricky, there's nothing you can do for him, we've got to go before something else tries to kill us.”
“This is all my fault,” I say. The callous prick who so easily dropped an ax into his best friend's head no where to be found. All I can think about is Chef's robust laughter as he stood at the grill station at Mchumans making fun of us white people. Seeing him down in that death pit, his body being so heinously violated... Something inside me snaps.
I'm shaking all over, probably in shock as I try to make my way down the bodies of the dead Berserkers. Chef raises his hand to stop me. He closes his eye and slowly shakes his head at me. “Fuck outta....here... boy. Take that... white girl and... get as far away from R'lyeh as you can. This... ain't no place... for good... people.”
With that, Chef raises his star-thing up to his own face and barks out one final chant, blasting his own head into pink mush.
I stumble up out of the pit, numb. The remaining Berserkers are already pulling their dicks free of Chef's corpse. They'll be on us in moments. Without armor or weapons, Karen and I are defenseless. I can't bring myself to care, the weight of the events inside this monstrous tomb crushing down on top of me, obliterating my ability to think rationally. When I get back up to the floor, Karen stands stiff, looking past me with wide eyes.
I turn to see what she's looking at. Fishbowl stands just a few yards away, the hands of its wet suit clenched into fists. I step in front of Karen, instinctively.
“What-what are you doing up here?” I ask, confused. I take one last swig from my bottle, draining its contents before discarding it onto the stone floor. “You're supposed to be at the banquet with the food...”
With Fishbowl stalking toward me, and Berserkers about to attack from the rear, I'm surprisingly calm, resigned to my fate. I'm ready to die, so it comes as a shock when I hear Karen say, in a small voice from behind me, “I'm sorry, Ricky.”
And that's the last thing I remember. I guess Karen hit me in the head with something and knocked me out, cause the next thing I knew, I was hanging here, upside down, staring at your rotten, ugly fucking face, Mr. Cthulhu...
The Humans under the Bed by Kevin Strange Part 1
Gang! It's Halloween and shit! I wanted to do something special for you guys, even though we don't have a new giveaway coming up for quite a while. So, remember what I did with MCHUMANS before the release of STRANGE VS LOVECRAFT? I serialized it here on Goodreads in a series of blogs. Well, I'm going to do that again!
This time, I'm going to share with you guys, for the first time ANYWHERE, a brand new novelette from Kevin Strange called THE HUMANS UNDER THE BED, from the upcoming STRANGE FUCKING STORIES ANTHOLOGY!
Synopsis: 500 years after monsters wiped out the human race, a quiet calm has settled over the population of nightmare creatures that go bump in the night. They work their monster jobs, raise their monster families, tend to their monster homes, and generally enjoy the peace and prosperity of life without their sworn enemies, the human scourge, that so blighted the land for so many centuries.
In fact, the only inhabitants of this new monster world that even still speak of human kind are the children who share hushed secret fairy tales about evil humans coming up from underneath their beds, pulling the little monsters to their deaths. But of course these are just stories. Of course all the awful humans are dead. Or are they?
I can best describe THE HUMANS UNDER THE BED as Monsters, Inc. meets Full Metal Jacket directed by David Cronenberg.
Now, I give you part 1!
------------------------------------
Dexantheon opened his eye. Had he heard what he thought he heard, or was it another nightmare? They'd become so frequent, the terrible dreams of home invasion and violence upon his family, that he didn't immediately jump out of bed when he heard his son's scream.
It wasn't until he heard it again that he leaped from beneath his warm blankets and covered the distance between bedrooms in three loping steps. He swung the door open. Not letting the panic he felt in his wide chest seep into his voice, he said, “Dexy, Willex? You kids OK in here?”
His twins, Dex Jr. and his little girl Willex shared the room. They both had beds situated side by side against the far wall, but inevitably Dexantheon would find Willex curled up next to her brother each morning, snuggled in the crook of his arm.
Now her bed was empty, the covers thrown back. Dexantheon took a cautious step into the room. “Kids?”
Dexy's bed was occupied. A large lump under the covers rose and fell, as though breathing. “You guys alright?” he asked; this time his anxiousness betrayed him and his voice squeaked a bit. Another step and he was beside the bed. Watching the lump, he carefully took hold of the corner of the blanket and held his breath. When he pulled it back, he had to suppress a cry.
Under the covers were two pint-sized little creatures staring up at him. One was green with reflective, aqua-colored scales, a huge unblinking red eye taking up three quarters of a face already more than half of the ugly little beast's entire body. It was shaped like a Twinkie stood on end: one elongated tube with thin, long arms and feet ending in webbed claws. Razor-sharp teeth lined a mouth that ran nearly all the way around the horrific creature's head, and a long blue tongue wagged out from one side, stretching half the length of its whole body.
The other thing resembled a grotesque fly if it'd been cooked in a microwave and left out in the heat of the sun to spoil. The thing was bluish gray in color, like what a potato might look like if left out in a dark alley in the winter. Its head was all eyes; two big bulbous things with thousands of facets, all red and wet. Four antennae sprouted up from the tiny crown of its head; a head not even half the size of its huge eyes. Its body shape was vaguely humanoid, with three sets of thin arms and one pair of skinny legs, each ending in a lobster-like claw. Two pairs of transparent, slimy wings jutted up off its back and hung down, draping over its thin, emaciated body like a see-through night gown. But its skin was the worst part: it was made up of tiny, pinhead-sized versions of itself. Like the itty bitty things had replicated and multiplied until they had become one larger version of themselves. They were constantly moving, shifting, trading places as they linked together, claw to claw and wing to wing, in tens of thousands of little connections.
But Dexantheon didn't have to suppress a cry because there were little monsters in his child's bed. His children were the monsters in Dexy's bed. And he was a monster, too. A full-grown version of little Dexy—huge and scaly and just as awful looking as his son—and Willex was the spitting image of her mother. No, Dexantheon was startled because there was supposed to be a third monster in the room with his kids: their friend Buxtak, son of Buxtak the Horrible. Buxtak the Titan, the World Eater, the Invincible, The Scourge of the South and Defiler of Nations. He was also Dexantheon's best friend who'd died in the final battle with the humans.
Buxtak Jr. was staying the night, as he did every other weekend while the children's mothers worked night patrol around the monster city. If something happened to her little Buxy, his nine-headed serpentine mother would eat Dexantheon for breakfast...
“What's wrong, Dex? Where's Buxtak?”
Little Dexy looked up at his father, sniveling. His gigantic eye was moist; a tear threatened to drop down onto his enormous blue tongue. “D-daddy. Willex was talking about the humans again! Th-the humans under the bed!”
Dexantheon heard the toilet flush, and the steady clomp, clomp, clomp of Buxtak's fat feet stomping down the hallway. The yellow monster—no older than his children, but nearly as tall as the towering Dexantheon himself—awkwardly waddled into the room.
“Had to pee,” the hulking monster said, his high-pitched voice betraying his youth. He was round and thick with two sets of stubby, antler-like hands, ending in even stubbier fingers tipped with reptile-like eyeballs (just like his mother's) sticking out of the top of a head that never really ended in a neck, just kept rolling on down his bulbous body. His legs were little more than ankles protruding from the base of his egg-shaped body, ending in two enormous feet longer than Dexy and Willex's entire bodies.
Buxtak flopped down on the floor next to Dexy's bed, where a single pillow lay. He was round and pudgy enough already—he didn't need to sleep in a bed to be comfortable.
Dexantheon sighed with relief and sat down on the edge of Dexy's bed, causing the front end to raise up from his hefty bulk. He stroked Dexy on top of his scaly little head. Dexy the fraidy cat. His sister was always tormenting him with stories of the humans.
“There are no such things as humans, Dex. Haven’t been for a long time,” Dexantheon tried to say in the calm, soothing voice that always quieted his son's fears. This time, however, the huge monster was not able to control his voice. It warbled when he mentioned the humans. He hadn't personally seen one in over 500 years.
Not since the Great Purge, when humanity's single most awesome achievement, a self-aware super computer, dubbed itself the Overmind and called up mankind's greatest nightmares with its flesh forges, waging an endless genocidal war on its creators.
Dexantheon was born in one of those forges, fought in that war, personally murdered countless thousands of human beings. He was there when the last living person was skinned alive, quartered, and fed to the Overmind itself.
But lately, there had been talk, rumors and murmurs from the night patrols that weird looking things had been spotted in the hills and mountain ranges just outside the monster city, horrible creatures that looked like hairless monkeys warped and fused with steel and wires. Human technology. The kind of technology that hadn't existed since the Overmind grew itself a nightmarish flesh body and covered the entire world with great, creeping madness.
The monster city was one grand, cyclopian mound of writhing flesh. Tendrils and clawed things, bat wing-like drapes of semi-transparent flesh and doorways laced with fang-filled mouths made up the houses and buildings; phosphorescent giant eyeballs atop slimy, batracian stalks acted as streetlamps; and rivers of bright green slime served as roads, all weaving together into ambulatory mazes of Stygian horror the monsters called home, overseen by the titanic flesh mountain of gibbering, oozing, twitching horror known as the Overmind. Nothing of human civilization remained, and hadn't been seen in half a century.
“Yes huh,” Dexy said, defiantly sitting up in his bed. “Willex said she hears them whispering under her bed at night! Tell him, Wil!”
The little fly creature next to him blushed. She looked embarrassed. She stammered through her explanation. “I-I hear things, Daddy. They... they talk about us when they think we're asleep.”
Buxtak gulped and darted his finger-eyes around the room, as if scanning for humans. “I-is that true, sir? M-maybe I should sleep on the couch...”
Dexantheon sat stunned. His children stared up at him, waiting for an answer, for him to calm their fears and tell them everything would be OK.
He stood slowly and sighed. “Maybe,” he said, scratching his scaly chin with a purple talon. “Maybe you're right. Maybe there are humans under your bed.”
Dexy began to whine. He clutched Willex, another tear forming in his huge eyeball.
Suddenly Dexantheon shot his arm out and grabbed the foot of the bed, lifting it up off the floor, nearly touching it to the ceiling. “Hello?!” he yelled dramatically. “Any humans under there?!” He held his free hand up to the hole in the side of his head that served as an ear. “What's that? You're gonna eat my kids when I go to bed? Don't do that! They're good kids!”
Now all three children were laughing. The lumbering monster dropped the bed, causing his children to pop up into the air before landing back on the mattress made of coiled tentacles. He darted across the room and lifted the other bed. “Any humans under here?!?”
“Stop it, Dad!” Dexy said, his tears now caused by laughter.
Dexantheon charged across the room and swung open the closet door. “Is this where all you humans are hiding?!?”
Now the children's laughter filled the room. Even Buxtak was rolling around on the ground pretending to talk to humans under the bed. Dexantheon smiled. He tucked the children back into bed, kissed them each on the heads, and walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him.
As he crawled back into his own bed, the unease he'd felt earlier almost seemed silly. He turned off the light and laid in the dark for several minutes before turning the bedside lamp on. He peeked under his bed just once to make sure.
***
What woke Dexantheon next was not just the screams of his children; it was the screams of his children followed by an explosion that shook the foundation of their flesh home. Baring his gigantic fangs and flexing his foot-long talons, he galloped the short distance to the kids' room on all fours, ready to tear anything harming his offspring to pieces.
Putrid black smoke hit him as he crossed the threshold into Dexy and Willex's room. The smell of charred flesh assaulted his nostrils. He hoped to the Overmind that it was not the flesh of his children. As the smoke cleared and Dexantheon's eye adjusted to the thick darkness, he saw them. Not his children. There was no sign of the young monsters.
Humans. A pair of them.
They were nothing like he remembered them. The soft-bodied creatures that he'd once dismembered and eaten in scores had changed in the five hundred years since he last laid eyes on them. There were two of them standing in front of the ragged, gaping, bleeding hole that should have been his son's bed.
Each one was different, but they shared several unmistakable similarities. Their skin was pale. Pale almost to the point of translucency, having never been exposed to the sun. Blue veins coursed through their mangled flesh, and Dexantheon could almost make out the layers of muscle under their skin. Their heads were caged inside a series of steel bars bolted to the tops of their heads and at the bases of their shoulders. Their eyelids were pinned to their foreheads and cheeks, causing their mouths to pull open in hideous grins that were home to jagged metal serving as teeth.
Their torsos were naked, revealing more twisted metal modifications. There was some sort of circular contraption bolted to the center of their chests. Thick metal spokes radiated out from the circular thing across their chests onto their upper arms, digging trenches in the flesh, seemingly grafted to the bones of their arms. The spokes continued past a pair of steel elbow joints, down the forearms, ending in foot-long metal claws grafted directly onto the flesh of their hands. Similar modifications crisscrossed their legs and feet.
It only took Dexantheon a moment to find out what purpose these modifications served. The circular things on their chests spun, creating a high-pitched hum as it sent gyroscopic energy through their technologically-enhanced limbs. This caused their entire bodies to vibrate and shake. Dexantheon was convinced they were about to shake themselves to pieces, when they struck.
They were faster than any human Dexatheon ever fought during the Purge. Stronger, too—tenfold. The two humans screamed, their voices warbled from the motion of all the metal fused to their bodies. They lunged at him as several more crawled out from the smoking pit in the middle of little Dex's room.
Both humans hit him at the same time, one on each of his tree trunk-sized arms. They wasted no time, slashing, biting and tearing at his nearly indestructible scaled hide. To his surprise, they'd already pierced his skin in the few seconds they'd been wailing away at him, a feat no human had ever achieved in hand to hand combat in the thousands of battles he'd fought during the Purge.
Dexantheon quickly smashed his arms together, squashing the first two humans like bugs. Their shattered and broken limbs hung uselessly in their steel cages, dripping blood and gore as the hulking monster wadded them up and used the whole mess like a baseball bat as the next wave crawled up out of the smoking hole in the floor, warbled their war cry, and charged him.
Three of the metal/flesh hybrids ran at him. Two were females with symbols carved into the sides of their heads, and the other a black-bearded male, huge in his own right. With his modifications, he stood nearly to the top of Dexanthon's chest. The monster swung his corpse-bat, making quick work of the first female, giving the second a chance to leap up onto his arm and scuttle onto his back while the male stepped forward, lifting his right arm, which had been fused with some kind of rectangular mace. Using his left arm as a counterbalance, the male human swung his arm weapon at Dexantheon, forcing the monster to parry using his corpse bat. The force of the blow buckled the steel beams and sent most of the wadded up flesh flying across the room.
With his weapon useless, Dexantheon reached back and pawed at the female, who was using some kind of a blowtorch attached to her head-cage to burn the top of the monster's head. Having been forged in flame and nightmare, the blowtorch did little damage, aside from giving the huge beast a slight headache. Dexantheon's talon hooked the torch's wiring and he flung the female off him like a booger. She landed half-in, half-out of the window in Dexy's room. As she struggled to crawl back into the house, the window's razor-sharp fangs snapped shut, severing the female in half at the waist. She twitched and bled, hanging from the wall, dying slowly.
Now face to face with the bearded human, Dexantheon threw a punch. To his surprise, the big man grabbed it mid-swing. The human swung his mace again, forcing Dexantheon to grab it with his free hand. Now deadlocked, the two muscled giants pushed and pulled on each other in a virtual stalemate; that is, until Dexantheon's long tongue split in two, revealing a two-pronged appendage hidden inside. The appendage struck out like a snake, embedding itself into the bearded human's forehead, causing him to instantly go limp. His mouth hung open and his stretched-open eyes glazed over.
Dexantheon was inside of his mind. The monster saw everything the big man saw: saw his fears, saw his memories, saw his whole short, violent life. And as another score of vibrating, screaming humans flooded out from the hole in his son's floor like a plague of locusts, Dexantheon saw the plan. The twisted, insane plot that these creatures had formed. The war they would now wage against the Overmind and his monster race.
And even as he beat, crushed, and smashed the biomechanical things with ease, he knew. After seeing inside the bearded man's brain, seeing what lay beneath him inside the catacombs underneath the monster city, Dexantheon knew...
…The humans would win the war.
***
Dexy was blind. The blast had knocked him unconscious. His ears rang so loudly, he couldn't hear himself crying. As he regained his wits, he felt an immense pressure on his chest. Finding he could still move his arms, he pushed and the pressure moved. The chaos in his little room came into focus as the pressure—his bed—fell from in front of his face, allowing him to see again.
What he saw was at least ten naked, vibrating, hairless monkeys, encased in a shiny material that he'd never seen before, attacking his daddy. Were these humans? The stories Willex had told him about the beings who once inhabited the Earth didn't describe the savage things crawling all over Big Dex—as his mommy called his daddy—at all.
Willex.
Panic set in as the small monster frantically searched through the rubble for his sister. He pulled a jagged piece of flooring away from the top of a pile and saw an arm partially concealed by more debris. Dexy redoubled his efforts, tossing aside the fragmented remains of his bedroom to fully uncover the limp body of his sister.
Lifting one last big hunk of bone that served as his floor, Dexy freed his sister from the mound of rubble. “Willex!” he screamed. His voice still sounded far off, but the ringing had begun to subside. Dexy began to hyperventilate. She wasn't moving. “Willex!” he screamed again, this time shaking her arm. The little fly-girl stirred, coughing.
Relief surged through the small cyclops monster.
“W-what's happening?”
“Humans!” Dexy said, almost excited by the invasion.
Willex's own eyes bulged. She peeked around the huge pile of rubble separating the little monsters from the battle raging next to their bedroom door.“We have to hide!” she said, pulling pieces of bone around them to conceal their location.
A huge hand shot out from the side of the rubble. Eyeballs on the tips of the fingers blinked dust away. Buxtak shook himself the rest of the way free. He smiled dumbly at the other two monsters. “Hey,” he said, oblivious to the events transpiring directly behind him.
“Don't worry,” Dexy said, smiling back. He pointed at his father. “Daddy will protect us!”
***
Click Here to read part 2
This time, I'm going to share with you guys, for the first time ANYWHERE, a brand new novelette from Kevin Strange called THE HUMANS UNDER THE BED, from the upcoming STRANGE FUCKING STORIES ANTHOLOGY!
Synopsis: 500 years after monsters wiped out the human race, a quiet calm has settled over the population of nightmare creatures that go bump in the night. They work their monster jobs, raise their monster families, tend to their monster homes, and generally enjoy the peace and prosperity of life without their sworn enemies, the human scourge, that so blighted the land for so many centuries.
In fact, the only inhabitants of this new monster world that even still speak of human kind are the children who share hushed secret fairy tales about evil humans coming up from underneath their beds, pulling the little monsters to their deaths. But of course these are just stories. Of course all the awful humans are dead. Or are they?
I can best describe THE HUMANS UNDER THE BED as Monsters, Inc. meets Full Metal Jacket directed by David Cronenberg.
Now, I give you part 1!
------------------------------------
Dexantheon opened his eye. Had he heard what he thought he heard, or was it another nightmare? They'd become so frequent, the terrible dreams of home invasion and violence upon his family, that he didn't immediately jump out of bed when he heard his son's scream.
It wasn't until he heard it again that he leaped from beneath his warm blankets and covered the distance between bedrooms in three loping steps. He swung the door open. Not letting the panic he felt in his wide chest seep into his voice, he said, “Dexy, Willex? You kids OK in here?”
His twins, Dex Jr. and his little girl Willex shared the room. They both had beds situated side by side against the far wall, but inevitably Dexantheon would find Willex curled up next to her brother each morning, snuggled in the crook of his arm.
Now her bed was empty, the covers thrown back. Dexantheon took a cautious step into the room. “Kids?”
Dexy's bed was occupied. A large lump under the covers rose and fell, as though breathing. “You guys alright?” he asked; this time his anxiousness betrayed him and his voice squeaked a bit. Another step and he was beside the bed. Watching the lump, he carefully took hold of the corner of the blanket and held his breath. When he pulled it back, he had to suppress a cry.
Under the covers were two pint-sized little creatures staring up at him. One was green with reflective, aqua-colored scales, a huge unblinking red eye taking up three quarters of a face already more than half of the ugly little beast's entire body. It was shaped like a Twinkie stood on end: one elongated tube with thin, long arms and feet ending in webbed claws. Razor-sharp teeth lined a mouth that ran nearly all the way around the horrific creature's head, and a long blue tongue wagged out from one side, stretching half the length of its whole body.
The other thing resembled a grotesque fly if it'd been cooked in a microwave and left out in the heat of the sun to spoil. The thing was bluish gray in color, like what a potato might look like if left out in a dark alley in the winter. Its head was all eyes; two big bulbous things with thousands of facets, all red and wet. Four antennae sprouted up from the tiny crown of its head; a head not even half the size of its huge eyes. Its body shape was vaguely humanoid, with three sets of thin arms and one pair of skinny legs, each ending in a lobster-like claw. Two pairs of transparent, slimy wings jutted up off its back and hung down, draping over its thin, emaciated body like a see-through night gown. But its skin was the worst part: it was made up of tiny, pinhead-sized versions of itself. Like the itty bitty things had replicated and multiplied until they had become one larger version of themselves. They were constantly moving, shifting, trading places as they linked together, claw to claw and wing to wing, in tens of thousands of little connections.
But Dexantheon didn't have to suppress a cry because there were little monsters in his child's bed. His children were the monsters in Dexy's bed. And he was a monster, too. A full-grown version of little Dexy—huge and scaly and just as awful looking as his son—and Willex was the spitting image of her mother. No, Dexantheon was startled because there was supposed to be a third monster in the room with his kids: their friend Buxtak, son of Buxtak the Horrible. Buxtak the Titan, the World Eater, the Invincible, The Scourge of the South and Defiler of Nations. He was also Dexantheon's best friend who'd died in the final battle with the humans.
Buxtak Jr. was staying the night, as he did every other weekend while the children's mothers worked night patrol around the monster city. If something happened to her little Buxy, his nine-headed serpentine mother would eat Dexantheon for breakfast...
“What's wrong, Dex? Where's Buxtak?”
Little Dexy looked up at his father, sniveling. His gigantic eye was moist; a tear threatened to drop down onto his enormous blue tongue. “D-daddy. Willex was talking about the humans again! Th-the humans under the bed!”
Dexantheon heard the toilet flush, and the steady clomp, clomp, clomp of Buxtak's fat feet stomping down the hallway. The yellow monster—no older than his children, but nearly as tall as the towering Dexantheon himself—awkwardly waddled into the room.
“Had to pee,” the hulking monster said, his high-pitched voice betraying his youth. He was round and thick with two sets of stubby, antler-like hands, ending in even stubbier fingers tipped with reptile-like eyeballs (just like his mother's) sticking out of the top of a head that never really ended in a neck, just kept rolling on down his bulbous body. His legs were little more than ankles protruding from the base of his egg-shaped body, ending in two enormous feet longer than Dexy and Willex's entire bodies.
Buxtak flopped down on the floor next to Dexy's bed, where a single pillow lay. He was round and pudgy enough already—he didn't need to sleep in a bed to be comfortable.
Dexantheon sighed with relief and sat down on the edge of Dexy's bed, causing the front end to raise up from his hefty bulk. He stroked Dexy on top of his scaly little head. Dexy the fraidy cat. His sister was always tormenting him with stories of the humans.
“There are no such things as humans, Dex. Haven’t been for a long time,” Dexantheon tried to say in the calm, soothing voice that always quieted his son's fears. This time, however, the huge monster was not able to control his voice. It warbled when he mentioned the humans. He hadn't personally seen one in over 500 years.
Not since the Great Purge, when humanity's single most awesome achievement, a self-aware super computer, dubbed itself the Overmind and called up mankind's greatest nightmares with its flesh forges, waging an endless genocidal war on its creators.
Dexantheon was born in one of those forges, fought in that war, personally murdered countless thousands of human beings. He was there when the last living person was skinned alive, quartered, and fed to the Overmind itself.
But lately, there had been talk, rumors and murmurs from the night patrols that weird looking things had been spotted in the hills and mountain ranges just outside the monster city, horrible creatures that looked like hairless monkeys warped and fused with steel and wires. Human technology. The kind of technology that hadn't existed since the Overmind grew itself a nightmarish flesh body and covered the entire world with great, creeping madness.
The monster city was one grand, cyclopian mound of writhing flesh. Tendrils and clawed things, bat wing-like drapes of semi-transparent flesh and doorways laced with fang-filled mouths made up the houses and buildings; phosphorescent giant eyeballs atop slimy, batracian stalks acted as streetlamps; and rivers of bright green slime served as roads, all weaving together into ambulatory mazes of Stygian horror the monsters called home, overseen by the titanic flesh mountain of gibbering, oozing, twitching horror known as the Overmind. Nothing of human civilization remained, and hadn't been seen in half a century.
“Yes huh,” Dexy said, defiantly sitting up in his bed. “Willex said she hears them whispering under her bed at night! Tell him, Wil!”
The little fly creature next to him blushed. She looked embarrassed. She stammered through her explanation. “I-I hear things, Daddy. They... they talk about us when they think we're asleep.”
Buxtak gulped and darted his finger-eyes around the room, as if scanning for humans. “I-is that true, sir? M-maybe I should sleep on the couch...”
Dexantheon sat stunned. His children stared up at him, waiting for an answer, for him to calm their fears and tell them everything would be OK.
He stood slowly and sighed. “Maybe,” he said, scratching his scaly chin with a purple talon. “Maybe you're right. Maybe there are humans under your bed.”
Dexy began to whine. He clutched Willex, another tear forming in his huge eyeball.
Suddenly Dexantheon shot his arm out and grabbed the foot of the bed, lifting it up off the floor, nearly touching it to the ceiling. “Hello?!” he yelled dramatically. “Any humans under there?!” He held his free hand up to the hole in the side of his head that served as an ear. “What's that? You're gonna eat my kids when I go to bed? Don't do that! They're good kids!”
Now all three children were laughing. The lumbering monster dropped the bed, causing his children to pop up into the air before landing back on the mattress made of coiled tentacles. He darted across the room and lifted the other bed. “Any humans under here?!?”
“Stop it, Dad!” Dexy said, his tears now caused by laughter.
Dexantheon charged across the room and swung open the closet door. “Is this where all you humans are hiding?!?”
Now the children's laughter filled the room. Even Buxtak was rolling around on the ground pretending to talk to humans under the bed. Dexantheon smiled. He tucked the children back into bed, kissed them each on the heads, and walked out of the room, shutting the door behind him.
As he crawled back into his own bed, the unease he'd felt earlier almost seemed silly. He turned off the light and laid in the dark for several minutes before turning the bedside lamp on. He peeked under his bed just once to make sure.
***
What woke Dexantheon next was not just the screams of his children; it was the screams of his children followed by an explosion that shook the foundation of their flesh home. Baring his gigantic fangs and flexing his foot-long talons, he galloped the short distance to the kids' room on all fours, ready to tear anything harming his offspring to pieces.
Putrid black smoke hit him as he crossed the threshold into Dexy and Willex's room. The smell of charred flesh assaulted his nostrils. He hoped to the Overmind that it was not the flesh of his children. As the smoke cleared and Dexantheon's eye adjusted to the thick darkness, he saw them. Not his children. There was no sign of the young monsters.
Humans. A pair of them.
They were nothing like he remembered them. The soft-bodied creatures that he'd once dismembered and eaten in scores had changed in the five hundred years since he last laid eyes on them. There were two of them standing in front of the ragged, gaping, bleeding hole that should have been his son's bed.
Each one was different, but they shared several unmistakable similarities. Their skin was pale. Pale almost to the point of translucency, having never been exposed to the sun. Blue veins coursed through their mangled flesh, and Dexantheon could almost make out the layers of muscle under their skin. Their heads were caged inside a series of steel bars bolted to the tops of their heads and at the bases of their shoulders. Their eyelids were pinned to their foreheads and cheeks, causing their mouths to pull open in hideous grins that were home to jagged metal serving as teeth.
Their torsos were naked, revealing more twisted metal modifications. There was some sort of circular contraption bolted to the center of their chests. Thick metal spokes radiated out from the circular thing across their chests onto their upper arms, digging trenches in the flesh, seemingly grafted to the bones of their arms. The spokes continued past a pair of steel elbow joints, down the forearms, ending in foot-long metal claws grafted directly onto the flesh of their hands. Similar modifications crisscrossed their legs and feet.
It only took Dexantheon a moment to find out what purpose these modifications served. The circular things on their chests spun, creating a high-pitched hum as it sent gyroscopic energy through their technologically-enhanced limbs. This caused their entire bodies to vibrate and shake. Dexantheon was convinced they were about to shake themselves to pieces, when they struck.
They were faster than any human Dexatheon ever fought during the Purge. Stronger, too—tenfold. The two humans screamed, their voices warbled from the motion of all the metal fused to their bodies. They lunged at him as several more crawled out from the smoking pit in the middle of little Dex's room.
Both humans hit him at the same time, one on each of his tree trunk-sized arms. They wasted no time, slashing, biting and tearing at his nearly indestructible scaled hide. To his surprise, they'd already pierced his skin in the few seconds they'd been wailing away at him, a feat no human had ever achieved in hand to hand combat in the thousands of battles he'd fought during the Purge.
Dexantheon quickly smashed his arms together, squashing the first two humans like bugs. Their shattered and broken limbs hung uselessly in their steel cages, dripping blood and gore as the hulking monster wadded them up and used the whole mess like a baseball bat as the next wave crawled up out of the smoking hole in the floor, warbled their war cry, and charged him.
Three of the metal/flesh hybrids ran at him. Two were females with symbols carved into the sides of their heads, and the other a black-bearded male, huge in his own right. With his modifications, he stood nearly to the top of Dexanthon's chest. The monster swung his corpse-bat, making quick work of the first female, giving the second a chance to leap up onto his arm and scuttle onto his back while the male stepped forward, lifting his right arm, which had been fused with some kind of rectangular mace. Using his left arm as a counterbalance, the male human swung his arm weapon at Dexantheon, forcing the monster to parry using his corpse bat. The force of the blow buckled the steel beams and sent most of the wadded up flesh flying across the room.
With his weapon useless, Dexantheon reached back and pawed at the female, who was using some kind of a blowtorch attached to her head-cage to burn the top of the monster's head. Having been forged in flame and nightmare, the blowtorch did little damage, aside from giving the huge beast a slight headache. Dexantheon's talon hooked the torch's wiring and he flung the female off him like a booger. She landed half-in, half-out of the window in Dexy's room. As she struggled to crawl back into the house, the window's razor-sharp fangs snapped shut, severing the female in half at the waist. She twitched and bled, hanging from the wall, dying slowly.
Now face to face with the bearded human, Dexantheon threw a punch. To his surprise, the big man grabbed it mid-swing. The human swung his mace again, forcing Dexantheon to grab it with his free hand. Now deadlocked, the two muscled giants pushed and pulled on each other in a virtual stalemate; that is, until Dexantheon's long tongue split in two, revealing a two-pronged appendage hidden inside. The appendage struck out like a snake, embedding itself into the bearded human's forehead, causing him to instantly go limp. His mouth hung open and his stretched-open eyes glazed over.
Dexantheon was inside of his mind. The monster saw everything the big man saw: saw his fears, saw his memories, saw his whole short, violent life. And as another score of vibrating, screaming humans flooded out from the hole in his son's floor like a plague of locusts, Dexantheon saw the plan. The twisted, insane plot that these creatures had formed. The war they would now wage against the Overmind and his monster race.
And even as he beat, crushed, and smashed the biomechanical things with ease, he knew. After seeing inside the bearded man's brain, seeing what lay beneath him inside the catacombs underneath the monster city, Dexantheon knew...
…The humans would win the war.
***
Dexy was blind. The blast had knocked him unconscious. His ears rang so loudly, he couldn't hear himself crying. As he regained his wits, he felt an immense pressure on his chest. Finding he could still move his arms, he pushed and the pressure moved. The chaos in his little room came into focus as the pressure—his bed—fell from in front of his face, allowing him to see again.
What he saw was at least ten naked, vibrating, hairless monkeys, encased in a shiny material that he'd never seen before, attacking his daddy. Were these humans? The stories Willex had told him about the beings who once inhabited the Earth didn't describe the savage things crawling all over Big Dex—as his mommy called his daddy—at all.
Willex.
Panic set in as the small monster frantically searched through the rubble for his sister. He pulled a jagged piece of flooring away from the top of a pile and saw an arm partially concealed by more debris. Dexy redoubled his efforts, tossing aside the fragmented remains of his bedroom to fully uncover the limp body of his sister.
Lifting one last big hunk of bone that served as his floor, Dexy freed his sister from the mound of rubble. “Willex!” he screamed. His voice still sounded far off, but the ringing had begun to subside. Dexy began to hyperventilate. She wasn't moving. “Willex!” he screamed again, this time shaking her arm. The little fly-girl stirred, coughing.
Relief surged through the small cyclops monster.
“W-what's happening?”
“Humans!” Dexy said, almost excited by the invasion.
Willex's own eyes bulged. She peeked around the huge pile of rubble separating the little monsters from the battle raging next to their bedroom door.“We have to hide!” she said, pulling pieces of bone around them to conceal their location.
A huge hand shot out from the side of the rubble. Eyeballs on the tips of the fingers blinked dust away. Buxtak shook himself the rest of the way free. He smiled dumbly at the other two monsters. “Hey,” he said, oblivious to the events transpiring directly behind him.
“Don't worry,” Dexy said, smiling back. He pointed at his father. “Daddy will protect us!”
***
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Strange Sayings
Pontifications of one Kevin Strange, cult film director come Hardcore-Bizarro author.
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