Kevin Strange's Blog: Strange Sayings, page 4

The Humans under the Bed by Kevin Strange Part 3

NOTE: if you're impatient like me, and don't want to wait for two, possibly three more weeks of installments, you can buy THE HUMANS UNDER THE BED in its entirety on Kindle Here or in paperback Here.


THE HUMANS UNDER THE BED was meant for a very prestigious anthology. I can't discuss the details, because to my knowledge, it is still in consideration for said anthology (they accept reprints, which is why you're reading it now, and why it's being included in the STRANGE FUCKING STORIES anthology). At any rate, I was asked to write the weirdest, coolest bizarro novelette I could imagine, and turn it in inside a month's time.

Problem was, I was in the middle of the most grueling tour of my career, going three solid months without a single day off from work and/or the road doing horror cons on the weekends, nearly every weekend, all summer long. So I looked at the calendar and saw that I had a single weekend free three weeks down the road.

I booked a room at a cheap Travel Lodge in Springfield, Illinois, roughly an hour's drive from where I lived at the time. That way, I couldn't just get bored and drive home without considerable hassle. So when the weekend came, I drove up and checked in, only to find that the night clerk, an elderly, soft spoken man, was also a writer. A novelist even. And he loved to write horror stories. He was obsessed with ghosts and told me all about a little dead girl who roamed the hallways and sometimes stared at him from atop the ornate spiral staircase that led up to the rooms.

Needless to say, that was just about the most awesome start to my first ever marathon writing weekend I could have possibly hoped for.

THE HUMANS UNDER THE BED came easy after that. I wrote the entire 13,000 word novelette in about a day and a half, including a complete read through/second draft. It was very odd, sequestered away in a haunted lodge, absolutely no human contact, writing about monsters and twisted metal cyborg humans who talk funny. But at the end of the weekend, after I left the lodge and headed back home, the sense of accomplishment I felt was enormous, more so than any other writing project I'd ever worked on, because it all happened at once. I walked in with nothing, I walked out with a fully fleshed out bizarro novelette, ready for submission (after editor Sean Ferrari fixed my awful grammar, of course).

I haven't done another marathon since, but the urge has been building up inside me. I need to get back to that haunted lodge. I need to chat with the old man ghost writer again. And more than anything, I need to feel that overwhelming sense of accomplishment.

***

This is the third installment of THE HUMANS UNDER THE BED. The story gets really fun at this point, as the kids explore their monster powers, and some human characters are introduced. I had little idea of how I was going to write the humans as antagonists until I wrote right up to this point. I got an idea in my head to use a particular cadence from a particular kids television show right as I was about to write the first human's line. I almost chickened out, as it would certainly add an element of silliness that I wasn't sure the story warranted.

Looking back, however, I couldn't see these weird cyborgs written any other way. Bonus points to anyone who can name the TV show their peculiar way of speaking was lifted from. Here's part 3, gang. Enjoy:

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Crug of the clan Crug was dying, but lucid. He had wished for a glorious death on the battlefield, like he was raised to believe he'd get when his people rose once again to the surface world that was ripped from their grasp by the Evil Things. He never imagined his guts would be infested with tiny Evil, that he'd be held hostage in his own mind while Evil masqueraded as the mighty Crug. If only he could reach up and push the button. The button would put an end to the tiny Evil. Songs would be sung about his heroic death by the Crug clan forever if he could just take back his body from the tiny Evil for one second.

Push the button.

Boom.

***

Dexy and Buxtak crawled out the window. Blood streamed out of the foot-long wound in the human's stomach as Dexy marched it forward, swaying back and forth, still trying to learn how to walk with human legs.

The monster city was in ruins. Acrid smoke billowed up from a thousand scorch marks across its creeping flesh, choking the children, causing their eyes to water and their noses to sting. Neon blood from trench-like gashes turned the green river streets purple and black. All around the little monsters, screams of death, screams of agony and victory assaulted their senses.

The Overmind loomed in the distance. Its all-seeing eyeball still glowed blood-red, a beacon of hope in a sea of apocalyptic chaos. How could it let this happen? How had it not known the human scourge still lurked below the surface?

Dexy and Buxtak looked at each other and gulped. No sooner had they begun to trudge forward toward the Overmind when a warbling voice stopped them in their tracks.

“You there! Stop!”

Dexy turned around to face a group of humans: three regulars and six pieces of a flesh cannon, including two bullets. They'd barely made it out of their house and already they'd been spotted by an assault team.

“What is this monster which is not to be alive doing with you alive?” the leader of the assault team asked. He was a short, stocky human with metal spikes protruding from his bald skull like porcupine quills.

“He is...my prisoner!” Dexy managed. The human's tongue was swelling from trauma and blood loss. Its body was going into shock, making its muscles rigid.

“The law states that we take no prisoners because of that which the law states!” said another short human. This one female with rows of steel rings buried into the flesh of her large breasts.

“I know this one,” a piece of the flesh cannon said. One of the bullets. It walked forward on its hands. “He is Crug from the clan Crug, which I know as Crug from the clan Crug. What is wrong with your body, Crug?”

“I was wounded by this one... in battle with this one?” Dexy said, trying to imitate the peculiar cadence of the human's speech. He began to panic, and as he panicked, his focus wavered.

The left hand of the human twitched; subtly at first, then in jerking spasms, trying to lift itself up. Dexy used the right hand to push it back down into place.

“It looks like glorious death will soon be upon you, who I know as Crug from the clan Crug. Why not take the tiny Evil's head as a trophy to take with you to the great machine beyond which is what awaits you after glorious death?”

Buxtak looked at Dexy, terrified.
“What's happening? I can't see anything!” Willex said, squirming inside the human's empty belly.

“Shut up! I can't concentrate when you're talking to me!” Dexy said, losing more control of the human by the second.
“Ok,” Dexy said. “I'll just- EVIL! EVIL INSIDE ME! I'll just- EVIL! -take this one back into the- EVIL THINGS! -house and kill him in there.”

“No,” the spike-headed human said, his eyes resting on the human's hand, still jerking. “Crug of the clan Crug will kill the tiny Evil here because that is what we've told Crug to do.”

That's when the hand broke free of Dexy's grasp. It touched a series of spots on the spinning gyro embedded in its chest. The gyro stopped spinning and popped open, revealing a button within. The hand touched it and the human exploded.

***

For the second time in a day, Dexy woke up blind. He was sure this time was for real. He blinked and blinked, but all he could see was blackness. He couldn't move, either. Maybe this was death? Didn't seem so glorious.

“DESTROY THE TINY EVIL!”

Nope, not dead. But blind and paralyzed? Might as well be dead.
Then Buxtak climbed off him. Not blind or paralyzed. But when he saw what was happening, he wished he was.

The flesh cannon was forming itself, locking all the pieces in place while the bullet climbed atop the contraption. As if that wasn't bad enough, the ring-breasted human held Willex in her hand, holding her out triumphantly like a trophy. The spike-headed human lay dead on the ground: the blast from Crug of the clan Crug's body had sent shrapnel in all directions, impaling Spike Head in four or five different places, including his face, right between his eyes.

Buxtak was unharmed. He charged the ring-breasted human, tearing Willex from her grasp, tossing her back toward the spot where Dexy lay.

Ring Breasts sunk her metal claws into Buxtak's side as her remaining companion did the same. They dug their feet into the ground as the flesh cannon powered up. They were about to do to Buxtak what they'd done to Big Dex.

“We have to help him, Willex!” Dexy said in a panic.

“We're just kids!” she screamed back. “We can't fight!”

Dexy grabbed his sister by the shoulders and looked her in the eyes. His face was his father's face in that instant. “You know what to do!”

***

Dexy sprinted toward the humans as fast as his little legs could take him. He let out a roar that sounded more akin to a squeak and leaped into the air, landing on the back of Ring Breasts. He stuck out his tongue, letting it part, and jabbed the forked prong right into the top of her head, slicing through bone, piercing her brain.

Instantly, the human went rigid and then let go of her death grip on Buxtak. She reached down and pried her companion—a skinny man with twin blades grafted to his forearms in place of actual hands—off the little monster as well, tossing him to the ground. “Now, Willex!” Dexy screamed with Ring Breast's voice.

“I-I can't,” she stammered. “What if I can't find myself again?”

“Mom does it all the time!”

“Well I haven't done it EVER!” the little fly-girl cried.

There was no more time to argue. The first bullet-man melted into the barrel and the flesh cannon fired its shot. All three monsters were able to jump out of the way just in time, and the blast instead hit the outer wall of their house, turning it to mush, causing the structure to collapse before their eyes.

Dexy—riding atop the ring-breasted human like a horse—and Buxtak climbed to their feet as the second bullet began to screw itself into place.

“Willex!” Dexy screamed. “We can't do it without you!”

“OK!” the fly-girl said. She rose into the air above the dazed human with blades on his forearms. He too climbed to his feet, screamed a warbled war cry and charged Dexy and Buxtak, intent on keeping them away from the flesh cannon long enough for it to fire again.

Willex took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and broke apart.

Blade Arms jumped into the air and struck out in a downward fashion, causing Dexy to pull Ring Breasts' arms up in a defensive posture. The move deflected the blow, but not without severing her right arm at the elbow. She stared at the severed limb—now dangling by a single ligament—in disbelief, drool running from her mouth, unable to so much as scream out from the agonizing pain.

Blade Arms reared back to attack again, when a fly buzzed in front of his face, distracting him. He waved at it annoyingly with a blade arm, but another took its place. Then another, and another. Little flies buzzed all around the metal-human's head until he was completely engulfed in insects.

They didn't stop with his head. Soon, more and more flies swarmed around his arms, his chest and finally his legs, until the human was completely concealed within a thick layer of buzzing, writhing little fly monsters.

“Is this what you wanted?” the flies said in unison, a million little Willex voices speaking at once.

Dexy smiled and roared again, but as he turned to lead the charge toward the flesh cannon, the bullet atop its multi-segmented barrel spun and melted down. The blast was aimed directly at the little monsters.

There was no time to evade.

***

Dexy shut his eyes and prepared to be disintegrated where he stood, his only hope that his body, along with the ring-breasted human, would absorb enough of the impact to spare Willex's life. That's when Buxtak jumped in front of him and, without hesitation, grew to over ten feet tall in the blink of an eye. The giant monster turned and braced himself as the blast met him right in the middle of his back.

But a funny thing happened.

Buxtak didn't disintegrate. His flesh didn't melt away. The superheated expulsion of liquid human bounced right off of him and back toward the flesh cannon itself. The spray covered the bodies of the machine, burning their fleshy parts slowly. They howled in agony as the gunk burned through their skin, then muscle, through bone, until finally melting their lungs and vocal chords, putting an abrupt end to their protests.
Dexy and Willex stared at Buxtak in disbelief. The big monster looked more surprised than anyone. “I'm not...dead?” he stammered out, as he shrank back down to his normal size.

“No, big buddy. You're invincible,” Dexy said, beaming with pride.

“What do we do with the humans?” Willex asked, walking the blade-armed man around, swinging his blades through the air.

“We'll kill them, and continue with our plan,” Dexy said. “This time I won't mess it up.”

Tapping the same series of spots Crug pressed in the gyroscopic circle at Ring Breasts' chest, Dexy opened the secret compartment and tore out the self-destruct button, preventing another Crug episode.

“Aw, man. I was just getting good at this! You get to do all the cool stuff!” Willex said.

Suddenly, Blade Arms started to shake. His screams penetrated the thick layer of flies swarming his body. Blood began gushing out from in between the little flies, and then, just as quickly as they'd swarmed him, all the flies darted off his body at once, leaving nothing more than clean white bones and metal exoskeleton in their wake.

The flies had eaten him so quickly, his bones still shook where they stood for a moment longer before collapsing to the ground in a heap.

“Willex?” Dexy said, growing uneasy after she hadn't reformed into her real body after several minutes had gone by. “Sis? Can you hear me?”

Flies buzzed around, but there seemed to be no focus to their flight pattern. Dexy panicked. “Willex! You have to come back! You have to remember who you are!”

“Chill out, little bro,” Willex said, reforming instantly behind him. She burped and rubbed her tummy. “Remind me to eat humans more often. They're tasty!”

***

With Buxtak gaining control of his size, he was able to shrink down small enough so that all three monsters fit snugly inside the stomach of the ring-breasted human—after they'd extracted most of her innards, of course. They trudged along inside Ring Breasts for several miles.
The vast devastation of their beautifully horrific city caused Willex to start crying again.

Flesh cannons ten times the size of those the children had encountered thus far boomed in the distance. Those machines must have required a hundred or more men to construct the bio-mechanical weapons. Explosions rocked the sky, blasting their fellow monsters blessed with flight right out of the air.

The death was nearly palpable. The scent of it—of mutilated corpses both human and monster—created a dampness to the air they breathed. A silent dread grew stronger with every step they took. And still, the Overmind's eye glowed strong as ever.

A rumbling behind them caused the little monsters to stop. What this time? Some new death machine to delay their voyage further?

Worse.

It was the army. The fighting forces of humans were all converging together into one gigantic legion of millions and millions. And they all walked toward the Overmind. This was it. The humans would overtake the Overmind with the sheer vastness of their numbers, like an entire colony of ants overwhelming a bird or lizard.

The gargantuan army marched right past the monsters, paying the bleeding, ring-breasted woman with the huge gash in her stomach and less an arm no mind.
The monsters fell in line and marched along with the humans. They were, after all, headed to the same place.

The Humans under the Bed by Kevin Strange Part 2

The idea for THE HUMANS UNDER THE BED came to me very quickly. I was driving, letting my mind drift off to that place where ideas live, as I often do, and the thought occurred to me to reverse the roles of people and monsters. I often write about monsters as antagonists, be them malevolent or misunderstood.

But I'd never attempted to create monster protagonists whom the reader would have to identify with, root for, and create an emotional connection to. This has been done in kids cartoons like Ahhh!!! Real Monsters, and movies like Monster's Inc. But as adult fiction? Who knows, everything's been done before, but I wanted to give my Kevin Strange spin on it either way.

I broke tradition, normally I won't start a new project until the one I'm working on is finished. But this idea solidified so quickly and furiously in my brain, I had to get it out while it was fresh. So I booked a hotel room and spent three days writing this story from the very first sentence to the last, in one long session.

THE HUMANS UNDER THE BED is my entry in the STRANGE FUCKING STORIES anthology, to be released in January 2014 by StrangeHouse Books, but I'm serializing it here on Goodreads to promote the upcoming anthology. Here's part 1 in case you missed it. Now, I proudly present to you, THE HUMANS UNDER THE BED, part 2:

***

Big Dex deflected a blow from a pair of humans with spinning buzz saws grafted to their chests using the body of the huge bearded man. The saws shot sparks all over the room as they connected with the gyroscope on his chest, causing an awful, high-pitched squealing noise.

Big Dex's tongue was still embedded into the man's forehead. It stretched across the human's head like a fleshy mohawk before it connected back into Big Dex's mouth another five or six feet away. The bearded human's mouth still hung slack as Big Dex controlled his limbs, having gained complete control of his nervous system. The monster crushed faces and stomped bodies into mush even as he controlled the burly man's reflexes, causing him to smash the two buzz saw-wielding humans with his mace arm (his other having already been sliced off, along with one of his legs). His intestines hung freely from a giant gash in his stomach, and he oozed blood from half a dozen different mortal wounds across his body.

Big Dex figured he could get a few more good kills out of the big man before he'd have to discard him and stab into the mind of another lunatic human. As much fun as he was having felling scores of these savages, he couldn't shake the feeling of dread from the revelations made inside the human's mind. He needed to find his children, and he needed to get them to safety. That's all that mattered.

That's when the machine crawled out of the ground.

It was actually five humans, but they each had machine parts grafted onto their already-modified bodies. A pair of them had their left and right arms removed, respectively. In their place were what looked like cannon barrels cut in half down the center. Another pair was missing either leg in much the same fashion, while the fifth had no lower body at all, just a cylindrical piece of technology grafted onto its trunk that resembled the base of a lightbulb.

The bizarre people began to lock these various pieces into place while servos spun and lights all across the weird machine blinked on and off. The legless human climbed up the half-formed machine and screwed itself into a round opening at the top, completing the unusual piece of machinery.

Big Dex already knew what it was: a weapon. A flesh cannon powerful enough to destroy any monster caught between its crosshairs.

The Overmind had created its monsters to eradicate humans. It made them immune to human weaponry. Guns, bullets, rockets, bombs, were all useless against the hoards of terror. These humans had developed new technology. Big Dex knew because the bearded man knew. He saw the memories of countless millions of experiments over hundreds of years as the beings dwelling below the monster city turned their very bodies into weapons capable of killing monsters.

Big Dex braced himself, grabbing the bearded man around the waist to use as a shield while extracting his tongue from his forehead at the same time. Lights along the sides of the machine all lit up green, and the human screwed into the top of it began to spin. Smoke wafted up off the man's body as he screamed, spun faster and faster, and then, without warning, melted down into the barrel, skin, bones, and all, leaving the metal exoskeleton to fall, discarded off to the side of the machine.

A blast of molten flesh exploded from the barrel. Big Dex ducked behind the bearded man as best he could. The screaming, flailing man, now finally back in control of his own body but held fast by the monster's huge claw, took almost all of the supercharged blast, turning him into a red smear across the monster's scaly chest. Big Dex howled in pain as he looked down to find that his enormous claw had been disintegrated in the blast. The heat of the fleshy plasma had cauterized his mangled stump instantly.
Another legless torso crawled from the hole in the floor.

Ammo, Big Dex thought. They're using their bodies as ammo. And if he didn't act soon, he'd be joining his bearded friend as a splatter on his son's bedroom wall.

But the crazed, vibrating things were relentless. Worse, they didn't seem to give shit number one about their own lives. It was as though they enjoyed sacrificing themselves in droves if it meant the death of even a single monster.
Big Dex couldn't let that happen. He had to find the children.

Before the monster could move, another dozen humans swarmed around his legs, digging their claws and teeth into his scaly flesh, while still others clamped down around his feet at the floor, trying to hold him in place as the next “bullet” screwed itself into the man-machine.

***

Seeing his daddy's hand melted off in the blink of an eye wiped the smile right off Dexy's face. He tried to scream, but Willex put her hand over his mouth.

“Don't,” she whispered. “If they can do that to Dad, what do you think they'll do to us?”

Dexy began to cry again.

Big Dex roared. He kicked the humans clinging to his legs like ticks against the wall, smashing them dead, only to have even more fling themselves onto his body. He cracked skulls and bit clean through exoskeletons, but the droves of animalistic humans proved to be too much for him.

The human bullet atop the flesh cannon spun and the lights along its sides turned green as Big Dex was pulled to the floor by at least fifteen naked, vibrating humans. As the bullet-man spun and melted, Dexy broke free of Willex's grasp and screamed out “Daddy!” just as the flesh cannon fired. Buxtak threw his bulk on top of the smaller monster to keep him from running directly into the bio-blast.

Big Dex's eye met with his son's just as the flesh bullet hit him, pulverizing the huge monster's body, along with those of the humans pinning him to the ground.
The sound of the blast muffled Dexy's cry. The humans—those few remaining alive—shuffled back into the pit from whence they came. The flesh cannon disassembled itself, joining the others in the hole in the floor. After only a moment, the bedroom was quiet once again.

“Daddy!” Dexy screamed again. He pulled himself out from under the larger monster's body and ran to where his father lay. Big Dex was crumpled in a heap, his back to his son. When Dexy rolled him over, the little monster gasped and fell on his butt. Half his father's face, his entire arm and most of his chest were just... gone. Black, burnt flesh was all that remained. Big Dex's eye was open and unfocused, glazed over. Lifeless.

Then the hulking beast coughed and shuddered. His eye focused. “Dexy,” he slurred.

“D-daddy...” the little creature said, voice hitching in his throat. He'd never had a reason to think his father anything but indestructible, a superhero. Seeing him prone and mangled was too much.

“C-come closer, Dexy.” The wounded monster pushed himself—with some difficulty—up onto his elbow and turned his body to face his son.
Dexy did as instructed, his little eye darting to his father's wounds and then back to his face, as though ashamed to look at what the humans had done to his beloved parent.

“I have to...show you... Then you have...to find your...mom and show her. Understand?”

“Sh-show me what?”

Big Dex's tongue split. The forked appendage snaked out. He took hold of it and jammed the end into Dexy's neck.
Then, in that moment, the young monster knew that the humans had their eyes pinned open to keep them from shutting them in the face of the monster race's absolute horror. Knew that the factory which produced the gyroscopic modifications grafted to every human being on the planet lay deep, deep underground and spanned, impossibly, the entire length of the continent. And knew just how many scores of billions of humans were down there building machine bodies and flesh weapons, their only purpose to eradicate the monsters from the face of the Earth or die trying.
Dexy knew everything.

***

When Willex and Buxtak finally chanced a glance around the corner of the rubble, Big Dex was dead. Dexy stood alone, his back to his fallen father.

The little fly-girl buzzed through the air, while the lumbering Buxtak trailed behind her. “I-is he…?”

“Yes,” Dexy said. A scowl adorned his features. He no longer looked like an innocent, scared child. He was calm. Focused. He very much resembled his father in that moment, as though some part of the ages-old monster had transferred into his young son when he opened his mind to his boy. “He's dead. They killed him. And they're out there now, killing everyone else we've ever known. Everyone we love. And they won't stop until they kill every last one of us, or die trying.”

Tears flowed down his sister's face. Her little mandible parts, constantly moving like an ecosystem all their own, licked the liquid all away as she knelt over the body of her dead father. Buxtak put his big hands on her tiny shoulders. “I'm so sorry, Willex.”

Dexy turned to face the other two young monsters. “We have to go. Mom needs to know what she's up against. She needs to know how many of these things there really are. What they plan to do.”

Willex wiped her tears away, only for more to stream down her face. “How do you know what they plan to do?”

“Daddy showed me.”

Buxtak stomped over to the window. Outside, the screams of dying monsters filled the air. As far as the big thing could see, humans slaughtered monsters. “If he couldn't fight them, what chance do we have out there? How do we even know where your mom is?”

“We have to try. Dad thinks Mom and the rest of the night patrol will make their last stand at the base of the Overmind. That's where we're going.”

“Buxtak's right,” Willex said. “We're just kids. If we go outside now, we won't last a minute. Any one of those... things could kill us without effort.”

“You're right,” Dexy conceded.

Buxtak rejoined the smaller creatures by their fallen father. “Best we hide and wait this out.”

“If we wait this out,” Dexy said, turning his attention to the human corpses littered about the room, “there won't be a world for us left out there.” He studied each of them intently before moving on to the next. “But you're right about one thing.” He stopped above one of the humans. Its neck was bent sideways. Its eyes were vacant. When Dexy poked its exposed pupil, the thing let out a cry, but did not move. It was paralyzed from the neck down.

“We do have to hide.”

***

“You're crazy,” Willex said. She hovered over her little brother, all six arms crossed in protest. “This will never work. You're going to get us killed, Dexy!”

The little monster was busy. He was using one of his sharp claws to carefully slice open the human's midsection at the stomach. “We're dead either way, sis.”
The human looked down in horror, screaming gibberish as Dexy peeled back its belly, exposing its vital organs. “Shut him up, will you? If they hear him, they'll swarm back in here and we'll be done for.”

Buxtak had been staring into the chasm in the middle of the bedroom floor. It was vast. The sounds of human screams and machinery echoed off the deep walls. He plodded over to Dexy and put one of his gigantic hands over the human's mouth, muffling his protests as the cyclops monster extracted his stomach and most of his intestines, discarding them onto the floor.

“Won't be needing those anymore, will you?” Dexy said, smirking.

After Dexy pulled out several more handfuls of guts, the human stopped screaming. It was pale and sweaty. It continued to jibber, but did so quietly now. It would die soon. Dexy just hoped it would hold out long enough...

“Ok, get him to his feet,” Dexy instructed.

Taking the human by the shoulders, Buxtak lifted it up and held it in place.

“I don't understand,” Willex said.

“Watch and learn, sis. This is gonna be awesome!” Dexy rubbed his hands together, and then crawled up into the human's flayed open stomach.

Willex watched, disgusted but fascinated. Nothing happened for a few moments, and then suddenly, the human's hand twitched. The thing looked down in horror as it flexed its fingers.

“Ok, now let go,” Dexy yelled from the human's guts, his voice muffled but excited.

Buxtak released his grip on the thing's shoulders. It slumped and fell forward, but at the last second caught itself, steadied and stood upright. It whipped back around to face the young monsters. “This is awesome!” the human said. Its speech was slurred and barely discernible. Blood oozed from its mouth and nose. Even though it smiled, its eyes were still filled with recognition and horror. It was not in control.

Dexy was. Curled up inside the empty guts of the dying human, Dexy had fished his pronged tongue up to the point where the human's neck had broken, and tapped into its spinal cord. He now operated the human's entire nervous system with his own mind.

They now had the perfect cover.

***

“I can't fit in there!” Buxtak said.
Willex poked her head outside the human stomach. Bits of intestine fell out and hit the bone floor with a soft splat. “You can change your size, silly!”

“I've never done that before!” Buxtak said, all ten of his eyeballs wide with fear atop the antler-like hands on his head. “My mom told me never to try that.”
“Why not?” the fly-girl asked.

“I don't know. She never said why. She just said not to meddle with things I wasn't smart enough to understand.”

“Concentrate,” Dexy said, speaking through the human's mouth. “I know you can do it.”

Buxtak sighed. He closed his eyes, balled his hands into fists and strained.
Nothing happened.

“Try again,” Dexy said.
Buxtak stomped around in place, cleared his throat and repeated. Again, nothing happened.

“Oh, brother,” Willex said. “This is a stupid idea.”

Buxtak hung his head in defeat. “Just leave me, guys. I'll stay here till the humans are gone. You don't need me anyway. I'm useless.”

“You're not useless,” Dexy said, grinning madly. “You're the key to my whole plan!”
The big monster looked confused. “How?”

“Don't worry about it. Look, I've got an idea,” Dexy said. He steered the human body over to the mess of steel and flesh that had been people before Big Dex got a hold of them. He rooted around in the pile for several moments before extracting a loop of twisted metal.

“Perfect!”

Dexy wrapped the metal loop around Buxtak's hands. “Now you're our prisoner.”

Buxtak smiled. He wanted to believe their plan would work. Wanted to trust in his little buddy. But inside, he knew they were all doomed.

Click here for part 3

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!

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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

New Kevin Strange collection! $2.99 for one week only!

Kevin Strange's new short story collection THE LAST GIG ON PLANET EARTH AND OTHER STRANGE STORIES hits Amazon Kindle (and paperback) today! For one week only, this collection of short horrific fiction is on sale for just $2.99. After this week, the Kindle price goes up to $4.95. Don't miss out on this deal!

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Get this mind blowing collection right here: http://www.amazon.com/Planet-Earth-St...

Robamapocalypse FREE all week long on Kindle!

Hey, gang! Kevin Strange here from StrangeHouse Books. Recently my 2012 novel ROBAMAPOCALYPSE was added to the preliminary ballot for this year's Wonderland Book Award. (here)

I'd love for you guys to vote for it and help me land my first nomination ever. But of course I wouldn't expect you to do so without reading the book. To that end, ROBAMAPOCALYPSE will be FREE on Kindle all week long! Pick it up right here
and if you like it, please consider voting at BizarroCentral.com! :D

Robamapocalypse

Why Bizarro?

A lot of authors are obsessed with realism, even when they write fiction, which is, essentially, the art of making shit up for a living. Many authors do meticulous research or draw inspiration from backgrounds that allow them to write socially or scientifically accurate fiction.
My question? Why the fuck are you trying to be accurate about telling made up stories? Because your readers demand that a book about the FBI be as true to the real FBI as possible? Ok, that's fair, I guess. But why don't those readers just read true crime magazines or the newspaper? They are, after all, going in to this thing understanding that the story they're about to read is completely fictional, totally made up. A big ole lie.
Cult author Chuck Palahniuk makes a living describing unusual jobs or hobbies in meticulous detail. He spends more time researching for his books than actually writing them.

Why?

Why not make shit up, since, you know, you're already making shit up. Who gives a shit if there REALLY was a cult that employed all of their members as housekeepers? I certainly don't give a shit, and would never base my enjoyment of entertainment on the historical accuracy of housekeeping.
Telling me about some obscure explosion in Russia that ACTUALLY HAPPENED, MAN! Isn't going to sway me one way or the other about your Russian alien 6 book saga. Either it's going to be cool or it's going to be a piece of shit. The anecdote about the real explosion is trivial at best, and at worst leaves me wondering why you chose to take a fact and turn it into bullshit in your book. Why not write an essay about the actual events if they intrigued you so much?

Let's not even get started on the ridiculous scientific accuracy of something like Star Trek or someone like Isaac Asimov.

That's why I love Bizarro. In Bizarro fiction, authors who make shit up for a living, reaaallly fucking make shit up for a living. Almost all Bizarro fiction takes place in some weird post apocalyptic world or alternate universe where nobody gives a shit about its plausibility or the accuracy of its inhabitants' physiology. Everything from the environment to the characters to the plots have a type of hyper creativity that makes Tom Clancy's stringent adherence to realistic gun play seem almost satirically obnoxious.

Seriously, I want to put 7 bullets from a 6 shot revolver in my brain pan every time I hear someone complain about reloading guns on THE WALKING DEAD. It's a TV show about zombies! You're willing to accept the living dead, but not that a character may have reloaded his weapon OFF SCREEN???
Fuck that shit. Give me Carlton Mellick's TUMOR FRUIT featuring a planet called Barack with acid oceans and homicidal aliens, or MP Johnson's floating psychic ham in PORK KNUCKLES MALLONE.

With Bizarro, I can make up a giant Robot Barack Obama to fight a giant zombie made of zombies built by a guy from the future but piloted by his present self who doesn't have a clue how to operate it. With Bizarro I can create a biological virtual reality using the hallucination causing blood of pig-frogs used by a nest of nuclear mutated vampires. I don't need to have seen an obscure newspaper article about frogs raining from the sky for that shit to be cool.

Why Bizarro? Because with Bizarro, my readers have no expectation that I'll limit myself to what is scientifically possible on Earth, or that my story will even take place on Earth, or anything remotely resembling Earth.
Why Bizarro? Because fuck reality. I see reality every time I step outside my door or turn on the evening news. Don't give me half-assed fiction. I like my asses big and full. Give me full assed fiction. Give me Bizarro.

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...

New book: VAMPIRE GUTS IN NUKE TOWN

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"Guts is a bad motherfucker in a bad, bad world. The government nuked the sky seven years ago to combat a super fast spreading virus that turns humans into blood thirsty, ravenous killing machines that look more like giant, mutated bats than people. The new sky kills these "vampires" instantly, but at a cost. The entire planet is slammed with mega-high doses of radiation every time the sun comes up, completely changing life on earth as we know it, and completely decimating what little civilization there is left.

In Nuke Town, Guts wakes up in a strange motel with no memory of how he got there. A brother and sister duo are the only two humans in sight, but are they friend or foe? As the paranoia sets in, and Guts begins to understand the true implications of a nest of sophisticated, mutated vampires, he must use all the cunning and skills that his years in the wasteland have taught him if he hopes to survive the horror that awaits him in ... VAMPIRE GUTS IN NUKETOWN!"

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MCHUMANS part 4

I'm writing a story for an upcoming StrangeHouse Books anthology called "McHumans". I decided to serialize the tale and post it here over the months leading up to the anthology. Here's part One
part Two
and part Three
This is the fourth and final part I'll be publishing before STRANGE VS LOVECRAFT comes out in April:

The big man pulls out some sort of five pointed yellow stone and screams in a language I don't understand, causing the closest Sniffers to wilt and burn up as though they've been caught under a child's magnifying glass. He turns on the one pinning Ty to the ground and yells the same weird words at it, killing it as dead as the others, but not before it manages to land a stinger directly into Ty's left shoulder.
The injured man rolls over and kicks his feet on the ground like an infant throwing a tantrum, screaming through clenched teeth.
“Just what the fuck kind of bullshit stunt you think you're pullin' here, white boy?” Chef says, turning toward me. “You just signed all our death warrants!”
I stand my ground, crossing my arms. “You heard Boss Crab. Cthulhu is going to raise the city. All those fucking alien monsters will be here today. This is our chance, man!”
“Our Chance?!” Chef says, menacing over me, star-thing still clutched in his right hand. “Cracka, you done fucked up. We ain't got no chance. Never did! There ain't no killin' these sons of bitches! You might as well have poisoned us in our sleep. We're all dead already.”
“Fuck that,” I say, holding my head high. “All we gotta do, is make sure all those fuckers eat the food and-”
“And then what?!” Chef screams, yellow eyes bulging, spittle flying from his mouth. “You kill all the monsters then you gonna ride a fuckin' seahorse back to yo bitch ass momma's house? There ain't nothin' up there, cracka! You don't know how good you gotta down there at Mchuman's. Yo ass is lucky Boss Crab ain't fed you to fishbowl yet, and you gonna pull some bitch shit like this!” He closes his eyes dramatically and yells at the ceiling that was the floor last time I checked. “Lord help me, this cracka done got my ass killed!”
“That's not gonna happen,” I say, crossing my arms in defiance. “I've got a plan.”
Chef opens one eye, looks at me skeptically.
“I've heard stories, rumors, really, about a plug.”
“A plug? Aw, that's slave talk, boy! Dumb shit cracka's be sayin' to each other in the dark to keep they spirits up. That shit ain't real!”
“Bullshit,” I say, poking the big man in the chest with my finger. “You don't know that! You don't know shit! You just sit back in that kitchen like a-”
Chef bats my hand away. “Like a what, white boy? Say it. Say it! Like a good house nigga!”
“I was gonna say like a bitch. The plug is real. Think about it. It HAS to be real. Where else did all the water come from that flooded the Earth? It didn't just appear outta nowhere. You're talking millions, maybe billions of gallons of sea water. It HAD to come from a vast, planet-wide undersea chasm or cavern. And I have it on good authority that the plug the monsters used to seal it off after they sucked all the water out is right directly beneath out feet, at the bottom of R'lyeh.”
“Oh my god, kid. Oh my god!” Chef says laughing hysterically till tears are running down his face. Sobering, he wipes the tears away and looks me directly in the eyes. “We're good as dead, son. You hear me? All because of a fairytale told by dumb crackas in the night. Now if you'll 'scuse me, I'mma head back down to Mchuman's and see if I can't convince Boss Crab to bake my big black ass into a nice Filet Mignon before he gets a hold of your ass. I don't wanna be livin' to see what he gone do to you.”
I grab him by his huge arm when he turns to leave. “You can't go, Chef! If these monsters notice you're missing, they'll know something's up! Our only chance it to act normal and head down to the banquet hall. Please,” I say, begging the big man with my eyes.
“He's right,” Karen says. The way she looks at me when she says it, I realize in that moment that she's in love with me.
Great, I think. Just what I need, the crippled girl falling for me right before I make my escape. She'll probably want to come with me back to the surface world once all the water's gone. Too bad for her, I've already got a lover.
She continues. “If we take off now, they're bound to notice. They'll check the food. They'll know it's poisoned before we can even make it back to Mchuman's. Our best shot is with Ricky.” With that, she turns around and starts kicking at one of the sniffers' stingers.
Ty finally manages to get up off the ground. His arm is at least twice its normal size and the area around the sting has already turned a deep purple. He clutches his arm and, by the look on his face, is in a great deal of pain.
“You two are out of your minds!” he says, grimacing, not bothering to fix the wig that's fallen half off his head, revealing short brown hair below. “C'mon, Chef, lets get back to Mchuman's, I gotta get this arm looked at.”
Before he can take a step, a stinger jabs inches from his face. Karen has ripped it free. She wraps the dangling flesh and tendons around her arm, tying it down tight with her teeth and free hand. It's now a weapon the size of her whole arm. “You heard Ricky! If you two leave, and we show up at the banquet hall alone, they'll KNOW something's up! Besides,” she says, poking at his wounded arm with her normal hand, “by the look of that sting, you ain't gonna make all the way back to Mchuman's alive. Best you stick with us. Maybe there's some kind of anti-venom in there we can use to fix up your arm.”
Ty looks at Chef expecting him to argue more. Instead he starts kicking at another other Sniffer. He peels away the entire back carapace of the beast and slings the armor plated exoskeleton over his chest like a bullet proof vest. “She's right, lady boy. They both are. If we gone die one way or the other, I guess I'd rather die tryin' to shove one of these big ass stingers up Cthulhu's ass. Y'all best start cuttin' up a sniffer of your own, cause I'm finna wear this whole motha on my fat black ass.”
“We're gonna need as much of this as we can carry,” Karen says, “If even one monster sees us along the way and gets away to tell the big bad octopus man, we're fucked.”
We spend the next ten minutes ripping the sniffers to shreds, loading ourselves up with body armor, pincers and stingers for weapons, and the awful looking beasts' heads for helmets, writhing tentacle faces and all.
“Where'd you get that star-thing anyway, Chef?” I ask, as we tighten up our armor and head off down into the bowels of R'lyeh.
“You know how those cults all over the world got together and summoned up the monsters that sunk our world? Well, I was part of another kind of cult.”
“What kind was that?” I ask, trying to decide if I'm upside down or right side up as we descend deeper into the sunken stone kingdom of the Elder Gods.
“The kind that tried to stop this awful shit from happening in the first place.”
“You didn't do a very good job.”
Chef stops and glares at me for a long, uncomfortable moment. I'm pretty sure he's about to swing one of his big ass stingers at me when he cracks a wide smile and belly laughs so lound it echos down the twisted corridor.
“No, white boy, we sure didn't, did we?”

My name is Kevin Strange

My name is Kevin Strange. I'm a director, a producer, an actor, a film editor, an author. I've written, produced, directed, and starred in more than a dozen feature and short films. I created a production company in 2005 called Hack Movies with no money, no skill and no professional help whatsoever. By 2010 I produced and directed 7 films that saw DVD release, only one of which was ever picked up by a legitimate distributor in a very limited release.

In 2012 I created a publishing house called Strangehouse Books with no money, no skill and no professional help. By 2013 I've overseen the publication of 6 full length books with another dozen to be released before the end of the year. This includes the editing, formatting, typesetting and graphic presentation including the layout, design and commission of art for each and every book.

Not a single one of these movies or books was created to exploit a trend, cash in on a fad, or enter a hot market. In nearly a decade of devoting the majority of my time and effort to the creation of art, I have never ever made a single dime.

I've felt like a god, usually right after a project has been completed and all of the pieces have fallen into place, when my vision has finally come to fruition and is ready for its audience to see it. I've had moments of crushing doubt that made me want to quit and regret every second I've spent doing this. I've felt like nothing, zero, a loser, a bum, an overgrown child, a helpless man-baby. Usually after a project has been released and fails to capture the attention of the millions of fans I know it deserves.

I'm a 5 time college dropout. On paper I don't have the skills to even operate a forklift. I work jobs far below my intellectual level, am managed by kids barely more than half my age without a tenth of the management and organizational skills I possess. I've never once made over 30 thousand dollars in a single year, sometimes not even that much in two years. I've lived with family and friends until they resented me. I've lost more friends than I can count due to my controlling nature and unwillingness to choose human loyalty over my art.

My parents either don't know or don't care what I do with my life. My high school friends think I'm a child who refuses to grow up. I don't own a home. I've never owned a car younger than 15 years old. I'm 33 years old this year and if I get sick with something serious like cancer, I will die. Guaranteed. The number of people in my life that would actually be at my side if this were to happen are few enough in number to count on one hand. Truth be told, that number might be zero.

Yet, I have never compromised my artistic vision, no matter how many people pressured me to do so. I have no children, But I have no debt. Not a single solitary penny of it. I will never be a commercial artist. I will probably never have any money. I will almost assuredly die scared and alone. But every single one my creations was brought into this world with no filter, no compromise, no fear of social stigma. Love them or hate them, they are REAL art, the way art should be produced.

Should I never make another film or write another book, I've left my mark on this world. My identity, my hopes, my dreams, my fears, my passion, my lust, all lay within the contents of those dvds and between the pages of those books for as long as there are content devices to view movies and read books. I will live on and maybe one day enough people will see my movies and read my books that all of this will have been worth it. Maybe enough already have. What's the difference between affecting and inspiring one person or one million people. Is there a difference?

Even if I make another dozen movies and write another 50 books, I will never change my process, filter my beliefs, change my attitude or bow down to a corporate master for the sake of trends or fads. Money, fame, professional accolades, nor societal pressure will ever take precedence over the pure, unfiltered creation of my art, no matter the consequence. My name is Kevin Strange, and this is my life.