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?”