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...