StrangeHouse Books

P.O. Box 592

Wood River, IL
62095

www.strangehousebooks.com

Copyright © 2013 by StrangeHouse Books, LLC

Cover art Copyright © 2013 by Chris Hamer
www.urbnpop.com/

“The Quicken of Ursula Sphinx” © 2013 by W.H Pugmire

“The Curse of the Black Goat” © 2013 by Kyle Noble
“Never Name He Who Is Not To Be Named” © 2013 by Tim J. Finn
“McHumans” © 2013 by Kevin Strange
“Olaus Wormius” © 2013 by Rich Bottles Jr.
“Eat Shit and Die” © 2013 by Frank J. Edler
“The Horror at the Garrsmouth Orgy” © 2013 by Jason Wayne Allen
“Ghost Load” © 2013 by D.F. Noble
“Nyogtha of the Northern Line” © 2013 by Adam Millard
“Vicious Jelly” © 2013 by Craig Mullins
“Chumlord of Westmouth Harbor” © 2013 Jesse Wheeler
 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by
law.
Printed in the USA.
 Table of Contents

Introduction
Kevin Strange
The Quickening of Ursula Sphinx
W.H. Pugmire
The Curse of the Black Goat
Kyle Noble
Never Name He Who Is Not To Be Named
Tim J. Finn
McHumans
Kevin Strange
Olaus Wormius
Rich Bottles Jr.
Eat Shit and Die
Frank J. Edler
The Horror at the Garrsmouth Orgy
Jason Wayne Allen
Ghost Load
D.F. Noble
Nyogtha of the Northern Line
Adam Millard
Vicious Jelly
Craig Mullins
Chumlord of Westmouth Harbor
Jesse Wheeler
 Introduction
Kevin Strange

My first encounter with H.P. Lovecraft was a game changer. I'd grown
up with horror movies and books, having a particular affinity for the 90s
splatterpunks in my teen years. But it was at the relatively late age of 18
that I was formally introduced to the Cthulhu mythos. The indifference of
cosmic alien gods toward the human race was something I had never
encountered in my years of reading and watching horror movies.
The cold, calculated way in which Lovecraft wrote the dingy,
backwoods occult figures, and the cunning scientific minds of his academic
protagonists as they did battle on either side of forces so cosmic that their
very implication could drive men mad left me in awe.
It was with delight that some years later I discovered that Lovecraft
allowed, and even encouraged others to write about his alien gods, his
mythical locations, and his brave, occult fighting heroes.
Brian Lumley's Titus Crow series became a favorite of mine, and the
term Lovecraftian Fiction entered my lexicon. Over the years, I've
consumed a ton of it. From Lovecraft's own contemporaries like Arkham
House founder August Derleth, and Robert Bloch to more modern names
like Jeffrey Thomas and Wilum Pugmire, the latter of which was kind
enough to lend us a beautifully poetic and haunting tale for this anthology.
One thing has remained consistent over nearly 100 years of
Lovecraftian “weird” fiction: An air of pomposity. A literary snobbery. It's
as though one is not allowed inside the Lovecraftian sandbox without the
proper password.
Lovecraftian fiction takes itself extremely seriously, even back in the
age when only pulp magazines saw it worthy enough to be published.
And let's not get it twisted. I love the pomposity, the snobbery, the
feeling of exclusion. No other horror fiction feels like a private clubhouse
as much as Lovecraftian fiction. It's part of the genre's charm and mystery.
But I'm here to crash the party.
 I come from another club, another gang. I come from the Bizarros.
Another, albeit much, much younger gang of horror sub-genre writers. A
group that is almost the polar opposite of exclusive, pompous and snobby.
We're the kids who take in the malcontents, the freaks and weirdos, the
authors other writers just don't understand.
And you know what? We love Lovecraft, too! And we want to play in
the sandbox. We have stories about the Elder Gods, of backwoods weirdos
living on the outskirts of Arkham, who haunt the halls of Miskatonic
University by day and scream wicked chants to unnameable forces in the
dead of night.
This is a collection of Lovecraftian Bizarro stories. Without a doubt
the weirdest Cthulhu Mythos stories you're ever likely to read. Throw out
cannon, don't expect complete and total adherence to the rules set forth by
nearly 100 years worth of brilliant Lovecraftian Fiction.
Anything goes in this book. Don't be surprised if the purist in you gets
a little upset by the direction our authors have taken your beloved Genre.
But give us a little slack, we're still young. We're the new kids on the block,
and we want to tell you our version of Uncle Lovecraft's beautiful
nightmares.
-Kevin Strange 6:46pm 6/24/2013
 Editor's Note

S.T. Joshi, the leading Lovecraft historian, has called Willum Pugmire
the greatest living Lovecraftian writer, and I couldn't agree more. It is
nothing short of a tremendous honor to have him in my collection of
mythos fiction.
Please consider the following story to be a sort of primer for what
comes after. An example of all of the wonder and beauty that is modern
mythos fiction.
Everything after this is all downhill. We bizarros take everything
honorable and pure about Lovecraftian fiction and drag it down into the
unfathomable depths, violently snogging it while it slowly suffocates. Its
dying thought:
How? How could such vile, unwashed beasts do this to the most
sacred form of genre fiction?
We'll show you how. Just keep reading....
 The Quickening of Ursula Sphinx
W.H. Pugmire

“They of the Air, Miss Pelt? Do you mean angels?”

I smiled at the old fool and pretended not to be annoyed at his
stupidity. “Have you not read Ephraim’s second novel, In the Valley of
Shoggoth? He mentions these Outer Ones there, in the third chapter,
wherein his narrator discusses the queer influence of mortal blood upon
cosmic daemons of an alternative dimension.”
“No, no,” came a voice behind me. “They lurk between dimensions,
my dear; quite another thing.” I felt the shadow of his tall frame clothe me,
and conjoined elements of ecstasy and fear caused me to shudder; and when
Ephraim placed his hand onto my shoulder, I lowered my face, so as to kiss
his pallid flesh. “Thank you, Annette, your lips are ever-soft. No, I don’t
think our friend here has ever read any of my books. Literature really isn’t
your thing, is it, Alfred? Our friendship blossomed from other interests.”
The older fellow chortled and winked one of his liquid eyes at me. “I
was one of three that Ephraim helped to escape from the Arkham
sanatorium. Oh, that was an adventure, scuttling hunched over through
those tunnels underneath the asylum, in thick darkness! Oh, you should
write a novel about that!”
Staying silent, I smiled at our host, who had indeed written such a
novel about a similar incident.
“Alfred here never got caught, unlike Schultz and Sunand. Those poor
fellows linger there still, banging their heads on walls and howling at
imagined shadows—unless they got lucky and are now extinct.”
“And you turned yourself in, Ephraim, you silly fool,” the older
gentleman informed us as he licked with a pale tongue at drool that began
to pool at the corner of one mouth.
“I did indeed. There are rare whispers to be garnered in a madhouse—
secret things furtively expressed. I had yet to be fully educated. It was
there, you see, that I learned of ‘They of the Air’ and found the inspiration
for my second book.” He looked at me and smiled. “But you know the
charms of the madhouse, sweet Annette, as can be testified by a perusal of
your fantastic verse.”
 Apparently bored by the direction of our conversation, the older fellow
left us. “It’s a weird idea, Ephraim, beings that cannot take material form
without the aid of human blood. It makes little sense; for if these beings are
beyond our known dimension, beyond cosmic law, surely they pre-date
human existence. The component of our mortal liquid couldn’t possibly
have any significance.”
“Ha ha! You try to make sense of Outside matters with human logic.
There are puzzles that your intellect cannot comprehend. Tell me, dear
Annette, when did Time begin? You see, you cannot. Your paltry human
intellect cannot conceive the beginning or end of existence.”
I looked at the guests that he had invited to his midnight soirée and
thought about what I knew of some of them. “Have we all been locked
away?”
“I beg your pardon?”
I waved my hand to the others who milled about the room. “Have we
all done time for lunacy? Are any of your evening guests slaves to sanity?”
“My dear, what a wicked imagination you have. Ah – but here is our
Living Legend.”
I turned to watch Ursula Sphinx enter the room and tried not to gasp.
Have you ever encountered someone who was so unusual, whose presence
was so commanding, that to have them near you aroused sensations that you
had never experienced? Your little brain, your safe existence, simply hasn’t
prepared you for such an astounding occurrence. She entered, the tall and
lean creature of myth, and I marveled that one so ancient could move with
such grace, unfaltering; for surely she was over a century in age, as her rare
early European films had dated from the Silent Era. Her one “talkie” had
been, for decades, a lost film—until Ephraim’s announcement that he had
located a print, for which he had paid a small fortune. It was because of
that print that we had gathered this evening.
Miss Sphinx strolled to where we stood and offered her hand to
Ephraim. “Have you noticed the stars, Mr. Kant? They are exactly right.”
One aspect of the woman’s legend was the debate as to whether she was
mute. When she began to film talkies, there was a controversy about
whether the voice heard on the soundtrack was her own; and among the
many rumors concerning her was that her voice had been damaged when
her London flat had been bombed during World War II. Hearing that voice
now was an uncanny experience. It was low-toned and whispery, as if her
vocal cords had indeed been ruptured; but it also had an extremely outré
buzzing quality, an undertone that resembled the sibilant sound of an
articulate swarm of flies or bees.
Her fantastic feature remained the quality of her eyes, and I couldn’t
keep from staring at them as they peered about the room and seemed to
latch on to items that especially caught her interest. “Your abode is like the
past touching at my sleeve,” she hummed to our host. And then Miss
Sphinx turned her eyes to mine, and I felt afraid; for there was a hunger in
her look of naked appetite that went beyond unwholesome and seemed
inhuman. I quivered as she stepped nearer to me, as she lifted one ghostly
hand so as to smooth it against my burning cheek. “Ah,” she sighed, a
sound that had more than one level of noise, as if she shared her mouth with
other entities.
“The time is right,” Ephraim informed us, raising his hand to the
ancient woman’s so as to remove it from my face. I watched as he guided
her to a double doorway, but I did not move as all the others followed the
couple into another room. A kind of delirium overwhelmed me for a
moment, a sense of panic that I had not experienced since my first few
months at the sanatorium. I felt the dread that comes from absolutely losing
control. It had been my mental comfort to think of myself as a young
woman who had picked up the shattered pieces of her life and held them
together with potent inner force. It was shocking to feel that force ebb from
me, as I stood alone in the room and touched my hand to my face, to the
place where I could still feel the cold press of the other woman’s flesh.
I entered the strange room that Ephraim Kant had transformed into an
intimate theater and shuffled to the middle seat in the third row. The
novelist had yet to enter the room, but some few others had also found
seats. In the row just before me sat Humphrey Ward, whom I knew slightly
from encounters at the Suicide Club I attended irregularly. I did not speak
to him, but when I noticed Sally Winker some rows behind me, I smiled and
waved and hoped she would not come to join me. Sally’s gossip was
usually amusing, but she had trouble shutting up; it often grew tedious to
listen to her continual babble about the people we had both encountered
when spending time in a state hospital, recovering from attacks of lunacy. I
was happy when another woman, unknown to me, entered the room and sat
next to Sally. Before me, Mr. Ward jerked a little and tried not to make a
noise, and I tried to remember if he suffered from myoclonus. Ursula
Sphinx sat in the front row, and Ephraim stood beside her and watched the
others take their places in the room. Nodding sagely, he sat, and the lights
dimmed.
I watched the flickering image that was thrown onto the smooth,
unblemished surface of a white wall. The film’s set resembled an
overgrown forest and what might have been the remnants of Mayan ruins.
Evidently the film had sound, although its black and white photography
looked extremely primitive. I wondered at the source of muffled pounding
that emanated from the soundtrack, and then I noticed the very unusual
figures that looked like tribal men buried in the earth, with just their heads
and hands showing, hands that beat upon the ground in ritualistic fashion.
Then, from a large crevice in the ruins, a beautiful young woman emerged,
and I knew that it was Miss Sphinx when she was little more than a child. I
watched as the projected young woman held her hands to Heaven and
began to chant; I was astounded that her voice was exactly the same as I
had heard it that evening—a low buzzing tone. I watched as the mouths of
the buried tribesmen parted, as their communicative humming joined hers,
as if in summoning.
And then a spot appeared on the screen, and I thought perhaps the film
had stopped and was melting. All motion on the screen had ceased except
for the grotesque blotch that blurred and altered with expansion. I watched
as Ursula Sphinx rose from her chair and began to speak to the image that
bubbled on the screen, as she raised her arms to it and seemed to name it. I
could hear her buzzing noise in my brain, and I felt an overwhelming ache
to join it. Around me, I could hear others begin to move their mouths with
humming. A woman in my row, three seats from me, raised one arm toward
the screen, twitching her fingers as if she would clutch the unwholesome
error that bubbled and blurred before us; and then her other hand sank its
nails into her arm, raking the flesh until it seeped blood. I trembled as her
blood did not drip onto the floor, but rather floated as a spiraling stream
toward the film’s abused image. The blurred image blossomed with ruddy
color. I was aware of the other streams of blood that sailed over me, toward
the screen and drenching the unfathomable image, which soaked the gore
into it. Humphrey Ward, in front of me, had taken a pocket knife from his
trousers and plunged it into his neck. I liked the way his knife glistened in
the flickering cinematic light, and I took hold of its handle and plucked it
from his slumped figure. But before I could jab the implement into my eye,
Ephraim’s hand caressed mine and her mouth pressed against my ear.
“No no, sweet child. You are far too perfect a poet to become so
quickly extinct. They of the Air will not taste your mortal wine.”
I watched as the wet red blotch unwound a stem of its essence and
touched it to the legendary woman, and I shouted as her figure blackened
and became a part of the unholy horror. Ephraim took hold of my arm and
guided me out of my chair, out of the row in which I had sat, toward the
flickering image on the pale wall. I watched the image of the youthful
Ursula Sphinx, that semi-human priestess, open her mouth, and I thought
that she would buzz again; but instead, she sucked at aether, and the blurred
bloody blotch fell, so as to encase her. I saw that cosmic essence sink into
the texture of the young woman’s flesh, into her ears and nose and mouth.
She stepped out of the screen, toward us. She stopped just before me, her
fantastic eyes shimmering, and with the sweetest buzzing tone, she spoke
my name with a mouth that wore one little stain of gore. Tilting to her, I
kissed the blood from off her mouth.
 The Curse of the Black Goat
Kyle Noble

Chicago Cubs fans are ninety percent scar tissue.

- George F. Will

Fredrick N. Dwight was a god. He stands at the center of the universe,

admiring the best view Earth can provide, and stares out at the Chicago
skyline. A steady October wind sails towards Lake Michigan, ruffling the
thriving green blanket of Japanese Bittersweet and Boston Ivy clinging to
the outfield wall. Fred kicks at the dirt of the pitcher’s mound, dusting off
childhood dreams in a rush of nostalgia.
He was young again, and the urge to run barefooted across the field of
Merion Bluegrass and clover swept over Fred. He would run the bases of
Wrigley Field until his feet bled, stomp his bloody heel onto home plate,
and leave his everlasting mark. He would play every position and smash
every record, set his own, and surpass those as well. The roar of the crowd
would follow him wherever he went, even through the gates of Heaven as
the angels welcomed him into God’s personal Hall of Fame. Jesus was there
too, wearing a Cubs jersey and waiting for Fred to sign his glove.
How could Jesus not be a Cubs fan? That motherfucker never gave up
hope.
There are baseball fans, and then there are Cubs fans.
And then there is Fred, in a league of his own.
Let’s take a look at his highlight reel.

***

Fred was born in southern Illinois, smack-dab in the middle of a

decades-long territorial dispute once known as the Route 66 rivalry. A three
hundred mile battleground divided the cities of Chicago and St. Louis, and
each Spring, when baseball season started, the competition flared up worse
than an infected hemorrhoid.
 This rivalry between the north and the south divided families, turned
brother against brother, and pitted father against son. The peace was
maintained only by the end of the season, when the Cubs went home
empty-handed once again.
On a blistering hot Summer day, the animosity and hatred spilled over
into Fred’s backyard while playing a game of “pickle.”
Freddy’s father stood under the shade of an oak, tossing the ball to his
eldest son, while Freddy ran back and forth, trying to reach the base before
the ball. Freddy didn’t quite remember how the conversation began between
the bases, but the instant he muttered the words, “The Cubs are my favorite.
They’re going to win the World Series,” the trajectory of the baseball
changed flight plans, and instead of crossing overhead, struck Freddy in the
mouth.
Fred was laying flat on his back, crying in the grass before the ball
landed inches away from his head. His vision blurred in and out of focus as
he sat up, tenderly fingering his mashed lips. He probed the inside of his
mouth and found broken shards of teeth and an exposed nerve that stung
with every breath. He looked at his father, expecting a sudden response of
sympathy and guilt, but his old man didn’t budge.
“Ow, Dad! Don’t throw it so hard!” Fred whimpered through his tears
and sputtered chalky bits of broken tooth and crimson saliva.
Instead, Fred found only the tight-lipped expression his father made
when he was building towards anger. Then his father let out a sigh and his
chest sank. Fred’s father shook his head in disappointment and went back
inside the house without a word. Freddy’s older brother turned and spat on
him before following after his father, leaving Fred tear-soaked and
bloodstained in the backyard.
Little did Freddy know that that one statement would send ripples out
across the expanse of his life, and eventually escalate into a division that
will change the fundamental basics of his existence.
When Fred’s mother returned from grocery shopping, a yelling match
commenced and didn’t stop until the season was over and, once again, the
Cubs went home empty-handed. Only then did the harassment from his
family end; but still Freddy refused to take down the memorabilia, and his
parents resolved themselves to calling in the family priest for an
intervention.
 “Freddy, your family has called me here because they’re concerned
about you. They’re worried that you might be setting yourself up for a
lifetime of failure and disappointment. Your family loves you very much,
Freddy. Do you love your family?” Father Iwanicki asked and placed his
hand low on Fred’s back.
“Of course I do,” Freddy said without hesitation.
“But you love the Cubs, too…” Iwanicki rubbed Fred’s back.
“Well, yeah, I guess I do,” Fred answered
“Have you ever thought about not liking the Cubs? They haven’t won
a pennant since ’45 or a World Series since 1908. Some say they’re cursed.
Have you ever thought about playing for another team?”
“What other team?” Fred shifted away from the priest, but Iwanicki
applied pressure and pulled Fred closer towards him on the couch.
“Well,” Father Iwanicki looked at Freddy’s family for confirmation,
“what about the Cardinals? They’re a good team.”
Freddy’s family gave a silent affirmation with a nod of their heads.
“But they’re not the home team. The Cardinals are from Missouri.
We’re from Illinois. The Cubs are from Illinois,” Fred tried to reason with
his family, but they hung their heads and could not bring themselves to look
Freddy in the eye.
“I know, I know,” Father Iwanicki shrugged off the relevance of
geography, “but the Illinois state bird is the Cardinal.”
“And that means what?” Fred slid away from the priest’s firm hand,
uneasy of the tone and logic behind the statement.
“No need to be a smart-aleck,” Father Iwanicki gave Freddy the
infamous smile he used to corral him into the confessional. “We’re just
trying to help you. We know this is a difficult time for you. We’re just
trying to make you feel-”
“Gay? I’m not a faggot. I like the Cubs, not sucking cocks-”
“Freddy!” his mother scolded and clamped her hands over her young
daughter’s ears.
“Okay, okay,” Father Iwanicki waved his hand as if clearing the
hostility out of the air or pushing a fart in another direction. “How about
another sport altogether? How about football? Who’s your favorite football
team, Freddy?” the priest licked his lips with all this talk of full contact.
Freddy felt the eyes of everyone in the room upon him, felt their
judgment and intolerance, felt the priest’s fingers creeping down the back of
his pants, pulling at the elastic band of his underwear, and decided the best
defense is a good offense. Freddy brushed Father Iwanicki’s hand aside and
stood up in the center of the living room.
“Fuck football,” Freddy said as he looked his father in the eyes.
Freddy’s father jumped out of his recliner and drove his fist into
Freddy’s jaw. Freddy swam in and out of consciousness, dribbling fresh
blood and more broken teeth into the palm of his hand.
“Get out of my house, you little bastard! You’re dead to me!” were the
last words his father roared at him.
Within the hour, Freddy sat at a bus terminal with a mouthful of cotton
balls and a brown paper sack filled with the last meal his mother would ever
provide for him.
The bus arrived and drove north towards Chicago and Fred’s destiny.

***

Fast forward to the night of Sunday, April 12th 2009. The bar was
empty, except for a few guys having a pre-game drinking binge in
celebration of the opening home game—the 95th to be played at Wrigley
Field—tomorrow. After a few drinks turned into a few shots, the
conversation inevitably gravitated towards what brought them all together
in the first place: baseball. More precisely, the Chicago Cubs.
They sat in a corner booth, pickling their livers in a deluge of alcohol,
reminiscing over seasons pasts and prospective futures. They bantered back
and forth about the highs and lows, the ups and downs, the good plays and
the bad calls early into the next morning. They forgot about their wives and
spoke only of their children if they played baseball.
“So I told Sara, the next time that little bitch does something to you,
don’t drop the bat. Run right up on that skank and beat her in the fucking
knees,” Kent regaled them with the latest incident from his daughter’s
softball team.
It wasn’t exactly baseball, but it was close enough, and Kent was the
only one at the table who had a daughter. Either way, it made him feel
included in the group and got some chuckles from the guys. Everyone
laughed, except for Fred.
“Hey, what’s the matter Fred?” Ernest elbowed Fred.
 “I’ve just been doing some thinking is all.” Fred watched the amber
beer swish around in the bottle.
“He means drinking.” James laughed at his own joke.
“Oh, yeah. Thinking about what?” Kent asked and waved at the
bartender for another round of beers.
“I’ve been thinking about that fucking goat,” Fred said.
A hush fell over the table as it always did when the topic of the goat
surfaced. It was to be avoided at all cost in the company of Fred, due to his
insistence that the curse was real. It started off jokingly enough, with Fred
supplying ample evidence to support his claim.
His resilience was charming in its own fashion, but when the season
was over and the Cubs did not win the World Series, Fred fell into a deep fit
of erratic depression (the guys called it “post-season menopause”), in which
he would drown himself in beer and choke down slice after slice of deep
dish pizza while immersing himself in research of the season. He would
follow up leads, check and recheck stats and figures, cross-reference dates,
and piece together what Fred genuinely believed to be an authentic, bona
fide conspiracy, at the very least.
At the very worst, Fred’s theory proposed there was truly such a thing
as a curse. He suggested the possibility of a curse was just as likely as a
long stretch of bad luck, but as the years went by, the idea of a curse
seemed more plausible. He started to believe that a hex was placed on the
Cubs franchise. Not all in one day, of course, but slowly, over the
accumulation of decades’ worth of failures. Fred was no longer operating in
the world of fantasy. He had made the curse real for himself. He wanted to
make it real for others, too.
“Fred, I love you buddy, but seriously, it’s just a gimmick,” James
spoke through a mouthful of half-chewed peanuts. “It’s a hoax. Sianis was a
businessman and used it to generate publicity, which equals money. He just
capitalized on a preexisting market. By that time the Cubs hadn’t won a
World Series in almost forty years.”
“That’s what I’m just beginning to figure out; that maybe the curse is
older than people think. Maybe way older.” Fred finished the rest of his
beer with a gulp.
“Shut up and drink that.” Kent put a fresh bottle of beer in front of
Fred. “You’re reading too much into it.”
 “You’re right. I’ve been doing a lot reading here recently,” Fred said
as he skinned the label off of the beer bottle. “Guys, have you ever heard of
a book called the Necronomicon?”
“The what?” they asked in unison.
“The Necronomicon. The Book of the Dead.”

***

“Okay, so we’ve all been led to believe that it started on October 6,

1945. Game four of the World Series. Chicago Cubs versus the Detroit
Tigers at Wrigley Field, when Sianis put the curse on the Cubs after being
thrown out for bringing his stinkin’ ass goat into the ballpark—but that’s not
true at all. That’s just the shit they feed to the spectators, because really
Sianis was only renewing the curse and obscuring the facts, burying the
truth in folk lore.
“Contrary to popular belief, it all began October 14, 1908. Game five
of the World Series. Chicago Cubs win 2-0 over the Detroit Tigers at
Bennett Park. The Cubs went all repeat sex offender on the Tigers’ asses
right in their hometown for the second time in a row. It was an
embarrassment. Hardly anyone watched it. And that’s when these two fucks
from Detroit got butthurt real bad and decided to destroy the Cubs dynasty.
Forever.
“Only two people really know what happened out there, and they’re
both dead. The details are sketchy, but these guys snuck into the stadium
with a can of kerosene and a goat. They summoned an ancient evil god
named Shub Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand
Young-”
“Whoa, Fred. That sounds a little racist.” Ernest checked to see if
anyone was overhearing their conversation.
“Huh?” Fred gave Ernest a look of confusion.
“Black. Niggurath. With a Thousand Young. You see what I’m getting
at?” Ernest kept his voice barely above a whisper, eyes continuing to scan
the bar, just in case.
“No, you asshole. Shub Niggurath is one of the Outer Gods. A
primordial evil that preexists humanity and our concepts of prejudice, you
fuckwit,” Fred explained.
 “Are you making this hokey shit up as you go, Freddy? Sounds pretty
far fucking fetched to me,” James said and belched.
“James, you got one of them new smart phones?” Fred asked.
“Yeah.”
“You got access to the internet?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Then why the fuck did you spend so much money on that phone just
to bother me with your fucking questions? I’m telling you straight up, right
now. You ask me questions, I give you answers, then you dispute me the
entire fucking time. If you don’t believe me, shut the fuck up and Google
that shit,” Fred snapped.
“A little cranky today, aren’t we, Freddy?” James leaned back in his
chair, studying Fred’s tense body language.
“Fucking aye right I am. I’m trying to tell you that there is a way to lift
the curse, and you’re sitting here acting like you could care less about the
Cubs winning the World Series. Who’s side are you on, James?”
“No need to get hostile, Fred,” Ernest cut in. “We’re all Cubs fans
here.”
“Can I finish then? Great. Anyway, the next day the groundskeepers
found their charred bodies on top of home plate. But that’s not all they
found…”
“Let me guess, they found the goat, too. Spooky noises!”
“Not just one goat—one thousand goats. And that’s not all; they also
found this book, this thing called the Necronomicon.”
“Crock of shit,” Kenton grumbled. “Big smelly crock of shit.”
“You know, Kent, for someone who thinks 9/11 was a cover up, I
figured you’d be a little more open-minded about this.”
“That was a fucking cover up and you know it.” Kenton hissed, but
not too loudly—they might be listening. “That was the work of a secret,
clandestine organization hell-bent on the overthrow and destruction of the
United States—like Kennedy was talking about before he got assassinated
—not a bunch of pissed off goat herders grazing their flock out on Wrigley
Field. It’s a little more serious than that. Not just some fucking prank.”
“Well, at least there hasn’t been an attack since then, but the Cubs still
haven’t won a World Series in over-”
“Hey!” a lone customer called to the bartender. “Could you turn that
up? Harry Caray’s on the news.”
 The bartender turns the volume up on the television and all the guys
are watching the screen now.
The giant bronze statue of Harry Caray stands in the background as the
anchorman reports the breaking news. A severed goat’s head was found on
the statue outside of Wrigley stadium by the police. The investigators were
considering the act of animal cruelty a prank, an apparent attempt to break
the curse of the goat. Perhaps it was the work of the same culprit who hung
an entire skinned goat from the statue three years earlier, but the authorities
could only speculate.
“Prank?” Freddy slammed his bottle on the table. “No. More like a
fucking threat. Do you see what’s happening right now? Do you? This is
more than just a coincidence. It’s a sign. This bullshit has got to stop.”
There was a long pause of silence at the table as Ernest, James, and
Kenton gawked at Fred.
Fred had their full attention, and as he talked through the dreary
morning, he set the mood for certain doom. The temperature fluttered in the
mid-thirties with ten mile per hour winds rolling off of Lake Michigan. The
chilly, wet weather added to the ominous tone of failure, and when the
game was postponed for more than an hour, all seemed lost.
“So, you’re suggesting that Sianis didn’t find the goat, but that the
goat found him?” James asked.
“Look at the facts. He immigrates to the U.S. with a couple bucks in
his pocket, sells newspapers and shit just to get by, and after prohibition
ends, he somehow buys a bar with money he doesn’t have. Then one day a
goat falls off the back of a truck and wanders into the bar. He nurses the
goat back to health, and even goes as far as renaming the tavern after the
animal and starts sporting a goatee. His luck begins to change, and by 1938
the goat is in the newspapers. Sianis starts taking it everywhere, places
where it’s obvious goats aren’t allowed, but he doesn’t care. It’s almost as if
he were trying to get someone to fuck with the goat.”
“So what? It was a publicity stunt. The goat was a good luck charm. It
worked,” Kent argued.
“Yeah, it worked real good for Sianis. Too good, if you ask me. What
if the goat was more than just a good luck charm? What if it was a familiar
—you know, something a vampire or a witch keeps around for protection,”
Fred countered.
 “Sianis is a witch? Are we going to need a chupacabra for this?”
Ernest asked with a perplexed expression on his face.
“What? No. It’s a fucking demon! Are you guys even listening to me?”
Fred threw his hands in the air.
“I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.” James shrugged
his shoulders.
“Me neither,” Kent agreed, and they clinked bottles together.
“Fuck me. Let’s try a different approach. Do you guys know Abdul
Alhazred? The dude that owns the grocery store around the block?” Fred
pushed his ball cap back and wiped sweat from his forehead.
“The guy everyone calls the ‘Mad Arab?’” Ernest asked.
“Well, I just call him Al, but yeah, that’s him,” Fred answered,
nodding his head.
“What about him?” James asked.
“I’ve heard he can find you just about anything you want—for the
right price, of course. But rumor has it he’s the go-to guy for shit like this.
He’s got connections to some real sinister underworld types.”
“Shit, Fred. I got connections. Who doesn’t in this town?” Kenton said
and took a sip of beer.
“No. I’m talking some real deep underworld connections. Some fire
and brimstone kind of folks.” Fred lowered his voice as he hinted at the
dark nature of Alhazred’s business.
“Like the 700 Club?” Ernest scratched his chin.
“Think the complete opposite of that.” Fred’s brow darkened.
“Satanists?” Kenton grimaced as he spoke the word
“Sure, close enough. Well, I heard he might be able to help me with
this, so I went to ask him some questions,” Fred answered.
“And when you started talking about demon goats, I bet he thought
you were bat shit crazy,” Kent said, smiling.
“No, actually he was very understanding. He said in order to get rid of
the curse, the demon must be manifested into a physical form and killed,
but we have to do it with a sword. Al was pretty specific. We can’t just use a
gun or something. It has to be a steel blade,” Fred stated the facts.
“I thought gods were immortal,” Ernest said.
“They are, Ernie. We can only kill its physical form, and then the spirit
will be banished back to where it came from.”
“So where did the goat come from?” Kent asked.
 “Do you guys remember the banner the goat was wearing when Sianis
brought it to Wrigley?” Fred paused for an answer.
“Yeah, it said, ‘We got Detroit’s goat,’” Ernie said with a grin of
success for recalling Cubs trivia.
“You are correct, sir. Someone get this man a beer.” Fred patted Ernest
on the shoulder.
“Okay, but how do you summon a demon?” Kent said.
Fred reached inside of his jacket a pulled out a small leather-bound
book. “With this. Al sold me a copy.”
“Hmm.” Kent took the small black book and examined it. “This is the
Necronomicon? I thought it’d be bigger than this.” He turned the book over
and looked at the small face pulled tight over the cover.
“I got it for half price,” Fred said. “That’s the children’s edition.”

***

When the game finally ended, the Cubs won 4-0 over the Rockies.
Everyone laughed and celebrated by having Fred pay for pounds of deep
dish pizzas and gallons of beer. Fred got obnoxiously hammered and
apologized for making a big stupid ass out of himself. Everyone forgave
him—which is a better way of saying they got drunk, forgot about the Black
Goat, and laughed it all away.

***

Fred snaps back to the present moment as a jet leaving O’Hare

International Airport soars overhead. It was a great Autumn night for a
ballgame, one where the wind favored the batter and tested a pitcher’s skill,
but the season was over. It was an even better night to have a few drinks
with some friends—but they were all dead.
No Chicago champions this year. No more friends. Ernest K.
Aspingwall was killed in a hit and run accident walking home from the bar.
Kenton J. Stanfield’s daughter got cancer and died. His wife left soon after,
and he ate all the pills in the medicine cabinet. James Dalton suffered a fate
worse than death—he moved to St. Louis and became a Cardinals fan.
Fred turns away from the view of the city and looks to the rising
stadium tiers full of nothing but vacant bleachers. This was more than just
some ball park, more than just some game. He came here often with his
heart full of hope, and win or lose, there was always something gained.
For Fred, this was a cathedral. Baseball was his religion. This is where
he came to worship, where he went to pray. He was baptized in the rain,
scorched by the burning Summer sun. Heaven was home plate, the
bleachers were pews, the pitcher’s mound a pulpit. Overpriced beer and
jalapeño nachos were substitutes for the body and blood of Christ. The
National Anthem was his Lord’s Prayer. This was a place for celebration,
and in more dire circumstance, sacrifice.
Fred wondered how Ronald Wilson Reagan felt after broadcasting for
the Cubs. Maybe ol’ Ronnie caught wind of the curse and bailed on the
team, ditching the radio broadcasting gig for a bigger and brighter future in
Hollywood, and further on towards the White House. Many players left the
Cubs franchise to go on and become World Series Champions elsewhere.
Many fans gave up on the team and heckled their former heroes, or went
turncoat and quit the game entirely; but they were all cocksuckers and
pussies. Fred rolls the idea around in his head of where life might have
taken him if he would have turned his back on the Cubs and joined the
droves of cocksucking pussies, but he pushed that thought away.
No. There was this and nothing else. There was only one city, and that
was Chicago. There was only one game and that was baseball. One team
and that was the Cubs.
He lets his eyes focus on home plate, visualizes the ball speeding
straight across it, and if a baseball bat were to intercept, let it be dashed to a
thousand splinters.
Fred cups the baseball between the palms of his hand, breathing life
into it. He sighs and expels the air from his lungs. He breathes deep and fills
his chest. Fred winds up for the pitch and slings the ball towards home
plate.
The ball curves to the left and crosses over the batter’s box, striking
the goat in the side of the ribs. The surprise attack startles the animal. It
kicks out and bucks wildly, pulling against the leash staked through home
plate. It wasn’t part of the ceremony, but somehow it felt necessary. The
goat’s agitation subsides, but it keeps its head cocked, eyeing Fred for signs
of further aggression.
After years of intense research, Fred learned and translated the text for
the summoning ritual. It required one Book of the Dead, one blood
sacrifice, one appropriate vessel for manifestation, and four participants to
read aloud the incantation. Unfortunately for Fred, his friends were dead,
and convincing some strangers on the street to join him in a less-than-legal
endeavor was out of the question; but Fred found a loop hole. It was called
a 4-Track recorder and an old boom box radio.
Fred made a mix tape with all of the individual segments of the
ceremony prerecorded, except for one, which he would perform live. He
wasn’t quite sure if his Milli Vanilli idea would work, but he was running
out of time and options.
As for an appropriate vessel to hold the spirit of Shub Niggurath, Fred
located a farmer who was suspicious of his intentions but was willing to sell
the shaggy old ruminant for cheap, as long as Fred promised not to mutilate
it for any Satanic rituals. The problem was that from all indications, Shub
Niggurath was female, and Fred’s goat certainly was not—but he didn’t
think it would make a difference. He made the promise and paid the man.
The blood sacrifice and the Necronomicon were easy enough to come
by. He’d already purchased the Book, and Fred is full of blood.
Fred unsheathes the machete and runs his palm down the sharpened
edge of the blade. He smears his blood across the mouth of the
Necronomicon. The Book immediately changes colors from rotten banana
to freezer-burned beef. A salted slug of a tongue pushes out of the Book’s
mouth, licking up Fred’s blood.
Fred pries the Book open and the smell of rotting meat and sulfur fills
his nostrils. He turns the pages to the rite of summoning and presses the
play button on the boom box. A choir of his own voice drifts out of the
boom box, chanting in arcane tongues. Fred clears his throat and adds his
voice to the mantra.
“Ia! Shub Niggurath! Tuku! Mashsham! Mashti! Barash! Akushu
Baalduru! Dworc Ehtot! Tuoem Ekat! Emagllab! Ehtot! Tuoem Ekat!”
A black void descends upon the stadium and swallows the Chicago
skyline. The dying light of the city slips into blackness as the unified voices
echo throughout the empty ballpark. The stadium lights flicker with
electrical pops and sizzles before bursting in a shower of sparks.
A foreign sky slowly emerges out of the pitch black above the stadium
in a swirl of faintly shimmering green stars and unrecognizable
constellations. The glow of unseen candles illuminates the bleachers and
wilts the grass in the expanding glow.
 The twisting snap of bone and the crunch of plastic and metal crackles
throughout the stadium. The boom box falls silent and Fred reaches out to
check the tape. His hand touches something cold and porous. The ethereal
glow from unknown stars above highlights Fred’s fingers touching a large
black stone. A furry trunk grows out of the top of the black stone, and Fred
looks at the shaft that has sprung up in the middle of the field with curiosity.
He moves his hand up the hairy stalk until his fingers make contact with a
furry set of billiard balls. Fred stops as the new and foreign moons above
him sway, and then blink.
The silvery haze emitted from the moons casts a faint light around the
distorted facial features, and the otherworldly stars highlight the bushy
pelvis from which the fuzzy testicles hang (and Fred’s hand which is
holding the testicles). Something scurries off of the scrotum, up Fred’s arm,
and attaches itself to the side of his face. Fred surmises it was some kind of
tick.
Fred fills his boxers with excrement at the sight of the colossal
abomination staring down at him. The creature stands upright on cast iron
cloven hoofs, amber colored sweat rolling down between its hairy spherical
breasts. It clenches its newly-formed hands around Fred’s boom box and
begins chomping away on the radio.
The goat creature stops chewing and tilts its head to the side, horns
grown to bull-moose dimensions, and rapidly blinks multiple sets of
silvery-grey moons for eyes that gauge Fred’s stupefied paralysis with
winks of amusement. The goat curls its lips up, revealing large square teeth
with bits of the boom box stuck in its foaming gums.
Fred does a double take from the abomination in front of him, to the
home plate, and back to the abomination. The torn leash dangling from
around the beast’s neck is identical to the one he’d tied around the goat’s
neck earlier, and an exhilarating sense of accomplishment struck Fred. It
worked! he thought.
Oh, shit! It worked! came the dreaded realization that he was now face
to face with the Black Goat of the Woods, Shub Niggurath.
The mutant goat kicks out with a cloven hoof and sends Fred tumbling
across the field. With a strangled choking gasp, Fred lifts himself to his
knees, desperately searching for the Book and the blade. Something feels
broken in his chest and he gargles up blood. He crawls away from Shub in a
three-legged dog stance with one hand clasped to his chest and a stubby
brown tail poking out the back of his jeans.
Shub stomps up behind Fred and tears the seat of his pants open with
its teeth, denim and shit flying everywhere. Fred lashes out with a backhand
to Shub’s eyes, rupturing one in a spray of mercury. Shub recoils with a
bleating scream, and Fred lurches back towards the pitcher’s mound,
searching for the blade.
Fred recovers the machete just as Shub’s hoof lands on his spine and
plows Fred’s face into the dirt. Shub grabs Fred from behind and clamps
down on his hips, ramming a thick, spongy tube into Fred’s instinctively-
clenched butt cheeks, but the clenching is no use. The hardening tip of the
sponge begins to grind against his posterior, grating his anus in a Memphis-
style dry rub porking with extra jock itch.
A deformed, half-formed hand with thick padded fingers strokes
Fred’s sweaty hair back. Fred looks up at the hideous face that looms over
him, exhaling putrid steam and raining down flakes of animal dander on his
upturned face. Fred struggles to postpone the moment of penetration, but
Shub yanks Fred backwards and impales him.
What passes for the demon’s penis—a fleshy millipede without an
exoskeleton wearing golf cleats—waltzes into Fred’s rectum, tap-tap-
tapping against his prostate in a race to the finish line.
“Oh my God!” Fred belches out the words after having the first three
feet of his small intestine filled with what could only be described as frosty
pond scum garnished with frog eggs and served with swamp gas.
The bubbling swamp gas creeps through his bowels, into his
esophagus, and exits his mouth with a series of sulfuric, rotten egg burps.
Soapy yellow bubbles float out of Fred’s mouth and hover in front of his
eyes before popping and burning his face with a splash of acid. The stench
is overwhelming, and all he can do is vomit. Fred’s gag reflex triggers and
his digestive tract reverses itself at full speed. Hot puke streams out from
between his clenched teeth as icy foam fills his defiled rectum.
The demon shutters with orgasmic release, and the vibration travels
outward through its penis with a seismic buzzing, shaking Fred to the very
core of his spiritual being. The demon grunts and ejaculates one last splash
of ice cold ooze that glazes Fred’s innards.
“Good boy, Freddy. That’s a good boy. Every drop,” a drowsy
inhuman voice half-speaks, half-bleats in Fred’s ear. Shub pulls Fred’s head
back and spits snotty yellow froth into his face.
A thought occurs to him as partially digested pepperonis and soggy
wads of pizza dough resurface from his stomach, and that was of the frog
eggs, which were currently metamorphosing into tadpoles within his
bowels. The tadpoles swam in all directions, testing the confines of their
new womb, pressing against the sides of his guts.
A second thought rises from the depths of his bowels, and he wonders
how the tadpoles survived while incubating in such frigid temperatures. The
ooze in which they arrived was jacket weather worthy, at the very least. A
healthy human sperm needs somewhere between 95° - 97° F, and since this
is the United States and Fred attended public school as a child, he calculates
the ooze was at least a late January morning after it rained the previous
night.
That being said, it was far too cold for a human sperm—let alone a
tadpole—to fair in such temperatures; and that was because what now
lurked in Freddy’s bowels was neither human nor amphibian. It was a
demon, and demon spunk is cold—but they don’t teach that in community
college.
Fred felt the “tadpoles” transform into fur-lined trout, swimming
upstream towards the back of his throat, and Shub pushing its demon spunk
onward and upward as it began to swivel its pelvis, preparing for a second
inning of sexual intercourse.
Fred bursts into an outright fit of weeping, worsened only by the
demon goat’s mocking imitation of Fred’s shameful tears. Shub bleats and
laughs, pretending to sob and sniffle, then chuckles louder at its own
wickedness. Shub slaps Fred on the ass and brings the world back into
focus with exquisite pain.
It was the ass slap that spoke volumes without saying a word. In
Fred’s mind, it was the consolation prize, the second place souvenir, the
runners-up’s gift, the ‘close, but no cigar’ slap on the ass given to every
batter returning to the dugout after three strikes. It was that same slap laid
upon the Cubs’ asses for years—but this one was different. This one was the
last. It was the one that drove a Cubs fan into a corner with nowhere else to
go but straight to Hell.
Rage pumps through Fred with every thrust of Shub’s cock and turns
the tide of his tears into an ocean of burning hatred. Fred reclaims the
machete and points the tip of the blade down between his legs to where the
demon goat’s melon-sized scrotum dangles. Fred jabs the blade into the
scaly sack. The instant the machete punctures the skin, searing agony
pinches Fred’s insides as the tip of Shub’s cock grabs a mouthful of his
colon. Shub’s cock muscles retract into hooks and attempt to disembowel
Fred on departure.
The sensation of being turned inside out forces Fred’s hand. He buries
the blade into his own stomach to prevent the demon’s cock from ripping
his asshole out. The machete enters just above his bellybutton and cuts into
the demon’s dick. Shub screams and jerks, causing them both excruciating
pain. Fred stabs himself in the guts again, wrenching the blade back and
forth, and severs the demon’s dick.
Shub pushes Fred forward and pulls a stub of a penis from Fred’s ass.
The demon steps back, putting a tourniquet grip around the remaining nub
of its boneless, pulpy flesh tube, sputtering a watery drizzle of unearthly
semen from the open wound that farted smelly little cum bubbles with each
beat of its coal-black demon heart.
Fred holds his hand over the gash in his stomach and pushes, shitting
out a dozen or so tentacle-faced, winged monk fish. With one more push,
out comes Shub’s chattering, mandible-faced dick with a chunk of organ in
its pinchers, leaving Fred’s backdoor ajar and the crisp Fall air wafting over
his shredded bladder.
Fred reaches between his legs and shakes hands with the slick, doughy
texture of the prolapsed meat muffin hanging out of his ass. He fists a good
majority of his guts back inside of himself, and his hand comes away
shellacked with blood, shit, and demon seed.
Fred brings his hand out from between his legs and examines the
squirming maggot clinging to his fingertip, accompanied by the odor of
rotten tuna and yeast infection. The fury and adrenaline push Fred out of the
dirt and to his feet. He circles around the shrieking castrated demon, the
machete in one hand, his guts held in with the other. Fred hacks away at the
demon and lobs off an enormous goat titty.
“Fuck the White Sox! Fuck the Tigers! Fuck the Athletics! Fuck the
Red Sox! Fuck the Yankees. Fuck the Cardinals!” Fred screams and
stumbles behind the beast, slashing through the its thick hide. He grips the
machete with both hands and lets his organs uncoil.
“Fuck you, Shub Niggurath!” Fred bellows.
 The hands of time come rushing to a halt as reality stops to take
notice. The flashbulbs of Heaven spark, each glaring star blinding with
white light, leaving only the players and their actions on the field visible.
All of the heavens in every dimension stand at attention with their breath
held and hands clasped to their mouths. Fred feels their eyes move about
him; not only from the heavens above, but as well from the Hells below.
Fred steps in and swings the flat side of the machete with all of his
strength at the sliced scrotum hanging between the beast’s legs. With a great
swatting sound and a metallic pa-ting!, the scrotum bursts in a spray of
bloody lice and ruby-red pulp, with fat deer ticks clinging to flaps of skin.
The infested scrotal sleeve of scaled flesh and matted hair splits, and its
precious cargo of pale-pink orbs threaded with crimson veins goes spiraling
up, up, and away over centerfield, soars over the ivy-covered walls, and
strikes the scoreboard.
The balls erupt into a blinding supernova that tosses Fred to the
ground. He curls himself into the fetal position as the world vanishes in a
blizzard of pure white light and a deafening whirlwind of sound. A roaring
cheer comes from all directions in a symphony of triumphant jubilation.
They were beautifully divine voices, and they were singing Fred’s name.

***

Fred opens his eyes and stares out at the Chicago skyline. A breeze
flows over his skin and brings with it an exposed, vulnerable feeling he is
not familiar with. He tries to lift himself, but only manages to raise his head
and look down at himself. What he sees he does not like, and he lays back
down in the early morning dew.
The stadium was still standing and the city was just beginning to
wake, which is reassuring. He rolls his head from side to side, but he did
not see the demon, or the goat, or the Book of the Dead.
He did see the police, though, and they did not look happy to see Fred.
They were reluctant to touch him, but kind enough to have Fred airlifted to
a nearby hospital.
As the helicopter rises above Wrigley stadium, the sun begins to crest
over Lake Michigan. The darkness recedes and the shadows retreat. For
Fred, it is not the best view of the city, but it is damn good, and getting
better every second. Above the roar of the engines and the chopping blades
of the helicopter, Fred hears the crowd cheering his name. Before the
helicopter lands, he slips into a coma, where he stays until Spring arrives.

***

“Thomas F. Malone. Agent Thomas F. Malone. Do you mind if I sit?”

he says and sits in the chair next to Fred’s hospital bed.
“You from New York?” Fred asks and turns down the volume on the
television.
“Formerly, but now I’m here in Chicago,” Malone says and smoothes
out the front of his suit.
“Oh yeah? I bet you’re a Yankees fan.”
“I’m not into sports, actually,” Malone replies and clicks open the
latches of his briefcase.
“So, what brings you to the Windy City?” Fred shifts underneath the
thin hospital blankets.
“At this very moment…you, Mr. Stanfield. So, let’s cut to the chase.
Why is Detroit burning to the ground?”

***

Fred stops speaking, waiting for Malone to reply.

“And that’s how the Chicago Cubs won the World Series?”
“That’s how the Chicago Cubs won the World Series.”
 Never Name He Who Is Not To Be
Named
Tim J. Finn

Julie wiped the sweat from her face before it solidified into an icicle. She
muttered and sawed through the stringy muscles in the naked man's arm.
"Ever-sharp knife that cuts through anything, my fucking freezing ass!"
The sooner Yeogurath allowed her use of the instrument the better. Julie
scowled as the youth's scalp dislodged and dropped on her elbow. She
shrugged it into his lap. Julie grinned when she looked at his crotch and
recalled that his junk appeared shriveled even before Yeogurath drained most
of the fluid from his body. He left just the required liquid in the pain in the ass
arm.
Julie stared into the gaping skull. She marveled at Yeogurath's dexterous use
of his mixed appendages. She hoped her own hands performed even half as
skillful when she gained operating privileges. Julie growled while she cleaved
through bone.
"Give it up already, Marty. Wasn't your golden voice your big deal
anyway?"
His convoluted retelling of his Maine-bound trip for a chance to audition to
be the backup PA announcer for the Portland Sea Dogs dragged out his check-
in for a near-intolerable ten minutes.
The stupid turd thought his bragging impressed her into making her late
night visit. Even her hasty disrobing act failed to halt the constant renditions of
his practice speech. Julie considered explaining the true origin and nature of a
sea dog. She knew those revelations carried the threat of crumbling his puny
mind. The Migo interrogators needed cognizant human brains.
Julie twisted Marty's arm and yanked. Mangled sinew snapped. Julie
tugged the arm through the Hyundai Excel's window. Blood dripped from
Marty's frayed shoulder and stained the car's upholstery. Julie frowned at the
memories of the frenzied cleanup duties required of her before Yeogurath
ingested sufficient fluid needed to rejuvenate a portion of his celestial powers.
Evidence tampering and fabricated eyewitness testimony taxed the skills she
acquired as a runaway. She even used some of her near-forgotten hooker tricks
to soldier through the especially disgusting jobs. A few of the missings’
families persisted in being annoyances, even after the authorities filed the
disappearances in cold storage. A round trip journey to Yuggoth silenced any
continued protests.
Julie turned as a window on the hotel's third floor slid open. The inside
lights silhouetted a crouched shape as it gradually unfolded and stood erect on
the ledge. Two spindly arms that ended in oversized claws sprouted from its
upper body. The creature's elongated neck drooped under the weight of its
elliptical head. A thicket of stubbly antennae undulated in concert across the
curved oval. Hulking wings of textured membrane poked through slits in the
crusted shell that encased its pliant body. The creature tucked its fantail
between its legs and jumped from the windowsill. Julie raised Marty's thumb
and waved the severed arm. The creature circled for several passes before it
alighted in front of her. He stood poised on two dissimilar limbs. His crusted
right leg ended in a clawed foot; his human left sported a wooly cover of
matted hair. The creature relaxed his tail and let it thump on the pavement.
Julie inhaled his pungent mold stench with glee.
“Rock Lobster,” she greeted him. “You got the high-flyers working.”
The creature’s head oscillated as he replied to her in a droned buzz.
“They work only fitfully. I viewed the video recording you brought, so I
am familiar with your reference now. Most amusing, if not altogether
accurate.”
He unbuckled the limbs tucked under his shell. A black human arm
wiggled between the two clawed ones that sprouted from his right flank and
tapered into tiny pincers. Two congenital arms grew from his left side. A hand
supplanted the natural claw on the bottom appendage.
“I know,” Julie said. “That fucking shithead Yellow Clan.”
She patted the back of his shell.
“They have been a hindrance for far too long. So many Migo killed and
others driven into a permanent stasis. When we rule, they will be the most
abused of our slaves. And their canine companions will become their food!”
“Serenity now, baby. You get too hissy-fussy, it makes the assimilation
more of a bitch.”
Julie caressed the Migo’s ridged abdomen. He cooed in response to her
gentle touch.
“I am fortunate you found me when this building’s renovations roused
me. The injuries I sustained during the Vermont attack and the subsequent
battles left me with insufficient strength to achieve a meaningful recovery on
my own.”
“Shit, you did more than right by me. I loved how you offed that
dickhead pimp that dragged me up here. I keep a picture of what you left of
him under my pillow. I have sweet dreams every night with it there.”
Julie pointed Marty’s index finger at his desiccated corpse.
“His brain on its way to Yuggoth?”
The Migo bobbed his ponderous head.
“The steady diet of fresh hominid blood has improved both my recall of
and my ability to utilize the formulas for interdimensional manipulation.
Constant reference to the Necronomicon is no longer required.”
“You showed me a few spells. When do I get another peek at the holy
holy? I want to see what all the fuss is about.”
“Unwise action,” Yeogurath replied. “Exposure to it must be doled with
care. The original author’s existing madness shielded him from corruption.
Your acute cerebrum affords no such protection. Your cunning intelligence
requires we proceed with cautious unction. The Migo need allies of your
caliber, now and after we have nullified the Old Ones.”
“Oh, you’re a honeybun, Rock Lobster.”
Julie nuzzled Yeogurath and goosed his fantail. The Migo nudged her
with his claw.
“Yeah, I know, baby; business first.”
Julie stepped back and Yeogurath shuffled to the Excel. He crossed his
claws over the car in an exaggerated X. The Migo chimed an atonal chant
ending with reverent repetition of a skirled phrase.
“Yuggoth. Yuggoth. Yuggoth!”
A mini black hole swirled around the Excel. Yeogurath separated his
claws. The wormhole collapsed and vanished in a twinkle.
“Sayonara, Marty,” Julie said. “Nobody knows you ever even existed
now. I bet you wish you drove straight through, and not stopped here in goofy
old Arkham.”
She jiggled the detached arm.
“Need to get this on pronto, baby. Even this bum-freezing cold won’t
keep it fresh for too long.”
“You learned the lessons well, sweet one. Although these temperatures
are negligible compared to the voids of space.”
 “I just want to get on with the what after. Not that human hands do
anything for me now, with my fricking fucking past. When you use your stuff,
that’s what horns me up all wet and mushy.”
“The Old Ones have indiscriminately mated with your kind, with
inevitable inferior results. The Migo are more discerning with the fruits of
your planet. Is that not an apt metaphor for your sexual reproduction organs?”
“Well, it ain’t called my cherry for nothing, yuck, yuck, yuck.”
Yeogurath brayed and embraced Julie with his ebony replacement arm.
Julie tugged the replacement limb from her waist and wrapped his crusted
natural one around her hips. Yeogurath nipped her butt with its pincer as they
strolled across the parking lot.

Bill Tivton glared at the brown leaves that clung to the trees lining
Arkham’s outer access road.
“It’s the damn Winter,” he grumbled. “Fall and disintegrate already.”
The tires squealed when he spun around the corner at the end of the
street. Tivton jerked the steering wheel to right himself as the tires bounced
off the caved curbing.
“Christ, first I cuss out the dead foliage, and then almost wrap myself
around it. I’ll be doing that Neanderthal’s work for him.”
The stupid dill weed probably thought his pitiful display qualified him
for an award as an avenging knight on a quest to redeem a wronged maiden’s
honor. Alicia recognized their coupling constituted simple no-strings carnal
encounters, an enthusiastic exploration of the ideas expressed by the assigned
authors in his Literature of the Libertines curriculum. Her muscle-head
brother heard about their after-class research and charged up from East
Bumfuck, Rhode Island to confront him. Tivton received Alicia’s text mere
seconds before her sibling’s rampage through Miskatonic’s faculty housing
brought the buttwipe to his complex. Tivton heard the hog head breaking
down his apartment door as he scurried down the fire escape with his hastily-
packed gym bag. He needed a temporary and inexpensive sanctuary while
Alicia calmed the meatball down with whatever convincing lies her always-
inventive mind devised.
“Just what the doctor ordered.”
Tivton pulled into the freshly-tarred parking lot that fronted a three-story
chalet-shaped building. A canvas tent flapped on the moorings securing it
around the rear half of the structure. Tivton remembered it as a charmless bed
and breakfast prior to the lodge’s acquisition by the ever-expanding Bell
Weather Inn chain. He planned to exit long before the next day’s renovation
work commenced. Tivton noticed a pair of sawhorses barred access to the
newly added rear parking section. He sneered at the implied assumption that
modernizing an Arkham hotel might spark an upswing in its business.
Tivton passed a temporary Welcome sign and entered the Bell Weather.
A flat screen TV dominated a lobby the chain’s advertising might charitably
describe as cozy. A Duraflame-powered fire crackled in its screened center
niche. Several couches and a couple of recliners circled the enclosed blaze. A
carrel tucked in one corner housed an all-in-one PC and wireless printer. Dust
covered the sparse snacks and personal care products stacked in the sagging
metal bookcase jammed against the front desk. The willowy clerk smiled at
Tivton as he entered.
“Welcome to the Arkham Bell Weather Inn. I’m Julie, your cruise
director, and every other damn thing at this time of night. Do you have a
reservation?”
Julie giggled before Tivton replied.
“Yeah, right,” she said. “The management thinks I should always ask
that. Like anybody would come here if they thought about it first.”
“I need a room,” Tivton said. “For, God willing, one night.”
“I don’t hear too many God references around Arkham. What name
would you like to be known under?”
Julie poised her fingers over the keyboard attached to a blinking
monitor.
“Bill, ah, William, or…look, I’m paying cash. No need to create a paper
—or paperless—trail.”
“Customer is always right, especially when it saves me some work.
Anonymity costs the same as regular, Bill William. A nice, even one hundred
dollars; a bargain for any place but here.”
Tivton slid five twenties across the desk. Julie handed him a key card.
“Last guest left in a hurry, so it’s still active under him. Room 222, up
periscope and to the rear. Sleep tight, it won’t be the bed bugs that bite.”
Tivton grabbed the card and rode a creaking elevator to the second floor.
He emptied the gym bag into the half-dresser that supported the room’s
television. Tivton snagged the Essex County Yellow Pages from the
nightstand and sat on the queen-sized bed as he thumbed through it. He
punched a number into his Smartphone.
 “University Pizza, the area’s freshest and finest. Steve speaking.”
“I’d like to make a delivery order.”
“And I’d like to fill it for you. What’s your easing pleasure tonight?”
“A personal pizza, hamburger and mushrooms. A small order of
breadsticks, and a couple of bottles of chocolate milk.”
Steve repeated Tivton’s order.
“To whom and where am I sending it?”
“Bill, at room 222, the Arkham Bell Weather Inn.”
“It’ll be there in twenty minutes, road conditions allowing. Total plus
delivery, tip not included, comes to… Un-huh, mas problemo. A big red flag
just popped up on my trusty screen that says, direct quote, absolutely under
no possible circumstance can we deliver to where you’re at. It’s
countersigned by the company district manager, no less. We can get it set real
quickly for pick up.”
“Forget it,” Tivton told Steve. “And yes, I know it’s not your fault.”
Tivton scanned the phonebook until he spied a half page color ad.
“Chinese, instead of Italian. Maybe there’ll be a good fortune in the
goddamn cookie, at least.”
Tivton ended his long sigh when an Asian male answered his call
halfway through the third ring.
“Panda Chef, delivery or will we be seeing you here?”
“Delivery, for the Bell Weather Inn, room…”
“I am sorry, sir, we do not deliver there.”
“It’s inside the service grid in your Yellow Pages ad. You do understand,
don’t you, the Yellow Pages.”
“We do not deliver there.”
“That’s false advertising, number one, son. You want me to call the
Better Business Bureau, Fu Man?”
The man replied in an unaccented growl.
“We don’t fucking deliver there! If you’re smart you’ll get your ass out
of there while you still have it.”
Tivton flinched and scowled as the man punctuated his comment with a
thumped hang-up. He grabbed the room telephone.
“Why the hell did I ever agree to come teach in this squat diddly shit
town? Jesus Christ. Front desk?”
“Need fresh towels already, Bill William?” Julie answered. “You must
be doing some real heavy up and down action.”
 “I need somebody who delivers food. No one seems to want to come
here, they act like it’s haunted or something. I, ah, can’t really go out to look
for somewhere.”
“You wouldn’t want to go out,” Julie said. “Your nice tight bum might
freeze and break in that cold. We want your stay at the Bell Weather Inn to be
nice and comfy, and yada , yada, blah, blah, bullshit. I’ll fix you up with some
grub, bub.”
“You know some place that’s not in the damn phonebook?”
“That certainly ain’t my book of choice when I want something. Julie is
going to work her magic. As a way of making things up to you, I’ll even
unscramble the naughty channel in your room. Sit back and, well, maybe not
relax everything.”
Tivton lay back on the fluffed pillows and switched on the TV. Two
naked women kissed and licked a third girl’s breast while she fondled their
buttocks. Tivton pressed the mute button.
“I’ll supply my own soundtrack, thank you very much. I hope they don’t
spoil the moment and bring in any male costars.”

Tivton half-dozed as he watched the female trio engage in a frenzied

mutual tongue bath. He started at the five knock rap on his room’s door. Julie
called from the hallway.
“Room service, coming in. Don’t bother getting decent.”
The door swung open and banged against the wall. Julie paraded in with
a steaming pepperoni pizza balanced on her upturned palm. She kicked the
door shut and stuffed her master key card in the pouch sewn into her flowered
skirt. She displayed the pizza with a curling flourish.
“You found someone that delivered?”
“Silly, it’s not delivery. It’s DiGiorno.”
Julie giggled and set the pizza on the corner of the writing desk. She
blew on her hands.
“Hot stuff. The pizza, too. I got what will cool them off, though.”
Julie tugged a bottle of Nestle’s chocolate milk from her pouch. She
cupped its cold plastic and sighed.
“Much better. And a little appetizer.”
She pulled out a half-empty bag of Fritos corn chips.
“You can eat them as is, or, my favorite, all crushed up on the pizza.”
“Either way sounds good,” Tivton said.
 “Wishy-washy, wishy-washy, Bill William. Scoot up a little.”
Julie lifted a rounded portable desk from the dresser’s bottom drawer.
She sashayed it to the bed and hummed while she fitted it over Tivton’s lap.
Her hands brushed his crotch during the adjustment. She leered at Tivton and
retrieved the food.
“Which way, Billay Willay? I like rhyming sometimes, in case you
didn’t notice. I’m not trying to sway you, but I really feel like pulverizing the
little fuckers.”
“Knock yourself out,” Tivton told her. “Them, too, I guess. And it’s just
Bill.”
Julie sat on the bag of chips and ground it with her clenched butt cheeks.
She dusted the pizza with Frito crumbs.
“Don’t worry, I didn’t fart on them or anything.”
Julie fed Tivton a pizza slice. She watched his reaction with her blue-
mascaraed wide eyes.
“Perfect,” Tivton said. “You should go on Top Chef.”
“Yes, I rock.”
Julie raised her arms and formed the touchdown sign.
“Where did you rustle this up? That miserable excuse for a pantry shelf
didn’t have anything that looked even vaguely edible.”
“I raided the employee refrigerator,” Julie answered. “Nobody will raise
a fuss, they all think I’m scary. I know you’re hungrier than that, Bill.”
Julie shoved another slice in Tivton’s mouth. She followed with it with a
swig of chocolate milk. Julie dabbed at Tivton’s chin with her sleeve.
“What about the front desk? I wouldn’t want you to get in any trouble,
taking such good care of me.”
Tivton patted Julie’s arm. She purred and pulled an Android phone from
the pouch. The screen showed a closed circuit view of the Inn’s deserted
lobby.
“It’s hooked into the security cams. And the switchboard, and all the
alarms. Anything happens, somebody calls, I’ll know. But since nothing ever
happens and no one ever calls, de nada.”
Julie fed Tivton the remaining pizza piecemeal, pausing in between
slices to trickle chocolate milk in his mouth. She moved the portable desk to
the writing table.
“I bet you’d like a nice desert to top it all off.”
 “Do you have package of Twinkies in your pouch?” Tivton said.
“Maybe I should call you kangaroo girl.”
Julie giggled. She unlaced her blouse and shrugged it off her shoulders.
She sauntered to the bed and poised herself over Tivton in a hands-on-hips
stance. Julie thrust her bare breasts in Tivton’s face. He blinked as their blue-
dyed nips threatened to pierce his eyes.
“Beats the living shit out of a couple of Twinkies. And they’re more
nutritious.”
Tivton licked his lips.
“No argument here. Ouch, what happened?”
Tivton fingered a swath of crimson bruises crunched in Julie’s pale
mammary. She flinched when he touched the serrated blotches.
“Got tired of my nipple rings,” Julie said. “I had a bitch of a time getting
them out.”
“I’ll be gentle,” Tivton told her.
“Not unless I tell you to, you won’t.”
Julie plunked herself on the bed and kissed Tivton. She forced his lips
apart and licked inside his mouth. Julie retracted her tongue and smacked her
lips.
“Pepperoni, chocolate, and you. Yummy, yummy.”
Tivton grabbed her bare shoulders. Julie jerked free from his grasp and
wagged her index finger at him.
“Whoa, big…”
She clutched Tivton’s crotch and squeezed his burgeoned erection.
“Yeah, big fella. I showed you mine. Shit, I guess I’m still showing
them.”
Julie giggled and jiggled her breasts.
“You show me yours. I’ll do it, don’t get, ha, ha, up. Too late for that.”
Julie tugged Tivton’s polo shirt over his head. She tweaked his nipples
and brushed the curled wisps of hair encircling them. His member tingled
with further arousal when he inhaled her aroma of perfumed mold. Julie
leaned down and blew in Tivton’s bellybutton. His stomach contracted under
the blast of her peppery breath. Julie slurped Tivton’s navel. He gasped
several long, contented sighs. Julie raised her mouth and giggled. Spit tinged
with her smeared blue lipstick dribbled on Tivton’s stomach.
“All your body holes are a g spot,” Julie said. “We can check each
other’s all over, like a contest. Whoever makes the other cum-scream the
loudest wins. Bet I have an advantage. You think so, Bill?”
Tivton half-opened his eyes and nodded.
“Only I have an early class tomorrow. I teach at the University. Right
now I have to show up all the time to honor my contract.”
Julie clamped her lips on Tivton’s and blew a wet raspberry. She pulled
a fountain pen from her pouch and drew on his skin.
“See if you still worry about your precious class once I get through
writing all the things I’m going to do to you. It’s good you don’t have a
shaggy belly. I’m not into the Sasquatch look.”
Julie stopped scribbling when she noticed Tivton’s puzzled and
apprehensive gape. She licked the pen’s nib.
“My own special ink, melted licorice. I’ll be licking it off later. I need to
write that down, too.”
Julie resumed writing. Tivton stared at the skewed words and symbols
she inscribed.
“What’s it supposed to say? I don’t recognize any of it.”
“Oh, it’s real freaking old. You teach at Miskatonic. Heard about the
Necronomicon?”
“Some of the geekier geeks get themselves in a lather whispering about
it. I figured it was one of those pathetic comic book conventions.”
Julie guffawed and rolled off the bed. Tivton smiled an igneous grin at
her response.
“Let me in on the joke, girl. Don’t be rude to a guest.”
Julie stifled her laughter and scrambled to her knees. She etched a
knobbed curlicue on Tivton’s stomach and dotted it with a jabbed period. A
blood droplet beaded on Tivton’s pierced skin. He attempted a muttered
protest. Tivton’s mouth remained closed and his vocal cords locked. His
muscles stiffened and raised his body in a rigid slouch. Julie smirked at him
as she laced up her blouse.
Tivton heard the door open and close. He watched a creature he thought
resembled an oversized lobster as it shambled across the shag carpet and
hovered over the bed. Tivton stared at the crustacean’s mix of human and
clawed appendages. He nearly felt a paralysis-suppressed shudder. The
creature toted a silver cylinder tucked between a hairy black and spiny red
arm. He gripped a tiny silver attaché case in his pincer. Julie leaned on the
crustacean’s outer shell. The antennae on his bobbing head vibrated as he
addressed her in a static drone.
 “Practice has perfected your transcription abilities, sweet one. I sensed
the words’ completion immediately. Their effect on this individual is evident.”
Julie patted Tivton’s cheek.
“No offense, Bill. You’re not as bad as some of the stink bums I used to
do. But I got a fella who really is out of this world.”
Julie licked the crustacean’s leathery neck. He cooed and stroked her
with one of the claws that grew from his upper body.
“Unfortunately, sweet one, removal and transfer must commence.”
The creature set the attaché on the nightstand and snapped it open. He
plucked a silver stylus from the case and presented it to Julie. She clapped
and bounced in place.
“No shit, Yeogurath? I get to do it?”
The creature nodded.
“I told you following the last operation it would be so. Unlike the
hollow assurances of the Old Ones, a Migo promise is honored.”
Julie snatched the stylus and jabbed Tivton’s forehead.
“Ring around the skull, then I lift the top off for the brain disconnect.”
Julie cleaved an oval line around the circumference of Tivton’s head.
Blood trickled from the gash she carved.
“Relax, sweet one,” Yeogurath said. “You will drain an unacceptable
excess of blood.”
Julie slackened her grip as she linked the ends of the incision in a
seamless line. She cinched a handful of Tivton’s hair and yanked. His scalp
and the attached skull cap popped loose. Julie tumbled backwards into
Yeogurath. The Migo steadied her and patted her rump with a pincer.
“You neglected an instruction. A slight tug is sufficient to release it.”
Julie rapped her knuckles against her right temple. She draped Tivton’s
scalp on the headboard and peered in his yawing skull. Yeogurath stroked her
with both a pincer and a hand.
“You have watched me perform the procedure. The brain survives the
disjoin and remains active even when the cranial ties have been severed.”
Julie gulped and reached inside Tivton’s noggin. She closed one eye as
she sliced nerves, capillaries and connective tissue. Tivton’s head wobbled
atop his backbone.
“Cut the remaining tie,” Yeogurath said. “Then a simple lift.”
Julie groped underneath the throbbing brain and squeezed the spinal
cord. Tivton’s brain pinged and bucked. Julie splayed her fingers around it
and held it down.
“A little ninja sound effect to help,” she said. “Eeeee-yah!”
Julie chopped through the spinal cord as she shrieked. She dropped the
stylus and grasped the bottom of Tivton’s brain. Julie hoisted the loosed organ
and frowned.
“Feels all wrinkly, yuck.”
Yeogurath opened the cylinder. Julie plopped in the wiggling brain and
wiped her hands on the bed sheets while he resealed the canister.
“You performed without exception, sweet one. That is technology your
planet’s inhabitants might approximate in a millennium, if they are allowed
to. Move away now and avoid being a collateral in the conveyance
procedures.”
Julie stepped to the window. Yeogurath balanced the cylinder on the
upturned palm of one of the attached human hands.
“Our early time on this planet required we perform manual
transportations to Yuggoth. Activation of the long-dormant celestial pathways
has much accelerated the process.”
The Migo croaked a dozen guttural palindromes. The elevated ceiling’s
plaster split and churned into a maelstrom of flamed stars and swirled comet
dust. The seething hole sucked up the cylinder. The maelstrom collapsed and
imploded. The ceiling smoothed itself and filled in the cracks.
“That mind possesses further race memories that will assist in
determining what methods were employed by your ancestors to successfully
push the Old Ones from your world. I remain incredulous at that
accomplishment, but the evidence is inconvertible. With that information, the
Migo can confront the Old Ones and roust the false gods from their watching
posts. We will banish them to a celestial sphere so distantly beyond the
cosmos, they will expand all their energies simply ensuring their survival. The
Migo will replace them as the ascendant power!”
Julie goosed Yeogurath’s dangling fantail.
“You know what that talk always does to me.”
She shimmied and hip-bumped the Migo’s shell.
“Clean up, then we can get on with the business of getting busy, baby.
But you need your nourishment before it coag… Before it gets thicky and
icky.”
“Coagulation, sweet one. You function well as a watchful caretaker.”
 “Ha, my turn. It’s caregiver. Or is that wrong? Wait a minute. You did
that on purpose. Rock Lobster, you crazy shit.”
She poked the Migo’s shell and giggled.
“I’m rubbing off on you, too. Good one.”
Yeogurath patted her with a pincer.
“You indeed influence me, sweet one. As I require no further
replacements, total exsanguination is now possible.”
Yeogurath plucked a clear tube from the case. He attached it to the stylus
and jabbed Tivton’s jugular. Blood flooded the tube. Yeogurath clamped his
planed mouth around the hollowed pipe and sucked. The Migo’s neck tensed
and contracted as he guzzled plasma.
A pounding blow rocked the room’s door. Julie swore and walked
towards it.
“I’m the fricking desk clerk and this is a private room. Go back to yours
or I’ll throw your ass out.”
The door wobbled under repeated strikes and split apart. Two stocky
men dressed in black jeans and turtlenecks charged the room from the
hallway. Yellow ski masks hid their faces. Latex gloves covered their hands.
Each man grasped a leash attached to the rawhide collar of a German
Shepherd. The dogs growled when they spotted Yeogurath. They lunged the
length of their reins and snarled at the Migo. Julie backed away from the
canines.
“Yellow Clan shit,” she said.
The window shattered behind her. Three Yellow Clan members slid
through the break on climbing ropes attached to the Inn’s roof. One of them
grabbed Julie. He twisted her arms behind her and dragged her to the corner.
The second and third unclipped batons from their belts and pressed buttons on
the handles. Spring-loaded fishing line attached to barbed hooks shot from the
sticks and snared Yeogurath. The Migo shrieked when the commandos pulled
on the batons and ripped chunks from his pink flesh. Thick green sap oozed
from the jagged wounds they tore in his neck and abdomen.
The shepherds strained against their leashes when they smelled
Yeogurath’s blood. One of the dogs stood on his hind legs and foamed at the
mouth. The canine’s handler swore at the drag on his arm.
“We got to let them go, Pratt. They really want a piece of that pus
fungus.”
 “Just making sure they’re good and ready, Sims,” Pratt said. “I love it
when they get real crazy and tear into it.”
Pratt unclipped the leash from his dog’s chain link collar. The shepherd
jumped over the bed and clamped onto one of Yeogurath’s natural arms. The
dog ground his teeth into the crusted skin and held his grip as Yeogurath
flailed the arm and screeched.
“Too hot to trot, Sims? Your turn.”
Sims grabbed at the dog’s collar, missing it twice before he grasped it
and unhitched the links. The shepherd sprinted around the bed and crunched
his sharpened teeth into Yeogurath’s clawed foot. The dog spat cracked shell
on the floor and bit into the exposed flesh. Yeogurath screamed and stomped
his foot. The canine shredded the Migo’s skin and gobbled the bloodied
tatters. His green-tinged drool stained the carpet. Julie started to cry.
“Rock Lobster, no!”
She tugged her arm free and punched the Yellow Clan commando in the
groin with her balled fist. The commando grinned back at her. Julie grabbed
his crotch.
“You cut them off?”
“So we may better serve the Yellow King.”
“You guys are fucked.”
Pratt stared into Tivton’s open skull. “Freshly removed,” he told Sims. “I
can bring it back, with what the Old Ones showed us to do. We might get
some info on Yuggoth.”
Pratt raised his head and chanted a buzzed repetition of rhymes at the
ceiling. A wormhole opened in the plaster. Pratt stretched his arm and caught
the Migo brain-cylinder as it tumbled through the breach. Snapped wires
hung from the double-pronged outlets in its underside. Pratt nodded at the
stylus as he opened the canister. “I’ll put it in, you do the connect and seal.”
Pratt cupped his hands around the damp brain. He maneuvered it from
the cylinder and dipped at the knees to lower the moist organ into Tivton’s
head. Sims reared the stylus across it and reattached the severed connections.
The brain shuddered and a soft glow radiated through its lobes. Sims replaced
the scalp and welded Tivton’s skull together. He rearranged the hair and
smoothed down a couple of pointed cowlicks. Pratt shook his head.
“You prissy bastard. Help Dunn and Boone with the fungus. It’ll take a
few minutes for his systems to kick back in. I hope this one is coherent.”
 Sims unhooked his baton and drilled Yeogurath’s neck with its barb.
Yeogurath whimpered as green ichor leeched down his shelled back.
“No, no, no!” Julie wailed.
The commando wedged her in a taut full nelson.
“Shit. Don’t be mad, Rock Lobster. I peeked at some more stuff in the
holy holy when you were asleep.”
Julie closed her eyes and rasped several rhyming sentences. Yeogurath
jerked his head around to look at her and croaked a response. “Your
transgression is forgiven, sweet one.”
A pink aura surrounded Yeogurath with a pulsating halo. Squiggly
waves radiated from the Migo and tracked the ceiling and walls. Yeogurath
chirped as his body popped and grew in jerky spurts. The Yellow Clan
commandos bore down on their batons and struggled to ground him. Skin
flaked from the transplanted limbs. Yeogurath flexed the glistening new
pincered arms that appeared from the molted human flesh. A reconstituted
claw split the dermis on his foot. The tips of Yeogurath’s wings banged the
ceiling and gouged crevices in it. He roared a buzzing chuckle. Julie danced a
modified cha-cha.
“I did it, I did it, I really fucking did it. Deal with that, Yellow Clan shit:
Uber Rock Lobster!”
Yeogurath shook loose the shepherd biting his foot. The dog yelped
when he poised his foot above the canine. Yeogurath stepped on the shepherd
and ground the animal under his freshly-shelled heel. The Migo laughed at
the bloody tan and black stain he stomped in the carpet.
The second shepherd snarled through his weakened hold on Yeogurath’s
arm. Yeogurath speared the dog’s belly with his pincer and twirled the canine.
Blood and viscera spewed from the animal and splattered the walls.
Yeogurath flicked the shepherd through the broken window. A crash landing
on the back parking lot snapped the dog’s neck and silenced his pained cries.
“What?” Sims said. “You can’t do that to an f’ing dog!”
Yeogurath dragged Dunn and Boone by their baton lines. He picked
them up and snipped their heads with his giant claw. The Migo tipped the
decapitated commandos and drank from their gushing neck stumps.
Yeogurath dropped the blood-drained husks and belched. The burp’s force
shook the room.
“Well, excuuuuuuse me,” he roared.
 Julie giggled. Sims dropped his baton and ran. Yeogurath swatted him
and cleaved the commando. Sims’ disconnected legs sprinted into the hall.
They hobbled two steps towards the elevator before one tripped the other and
they collapsed in a tangled and twitching heap. Sims winced when his torso
thumped on the floor. He gaped as his blood pooled round his spread entrails.
“Pratt!” he whined.
Pratt retreated when Sims grabbed at his legs.
“Lousy cocksucker,” Sims said.
His clutching torso toppled and landed with a muffled thud.
“ Steeee-rike,” Julie said. “You got it going on, Uber Rock. I bet you
even got it over their shit ass lord and master.”
Yeogurath clanked his claw and ignited a shower of sparks. Julie and the
Migo laughed in unison.
“Yeah, I looked in there, too. I know how to get the bastard. Simple as a
pimple.”
Julie murmured a metered chant.
“Shut her up, Rice,” Pratt said. “She’s going to name He Who Is Not To
Be Named!”
Rice cupped his hand over Julie’s mouth. She chomped through his
palm and scraped her teeth on his wrist bone. Rice yowled and dropped to his
knees. Julie eked a skin bit from her incisors. She licked her blood-smeared
lips and giggled.
“Hastur,” she whispered.
The floor quaked. Yellow tendrils snaked through the shag carpet. The
golden vines intertwined and sprouted into a seven-foot stick figure. The
wriggling braids weaved a hooded yellow robe around it. Webbed amphibious
feet extended beyond the robe’s floor-scraping hem. Dripping tentacles
writhed from the sleeves. Smaller versions furled and curled beneath the
textured yellow veil that masked the shape’s countenance. The yellow robed
figure spoke in a sibilant hiss.
“The dreamer was showing me his visions of our future return to
dominance. Who has taken me from these pleasant slumbers?”
Yeogurath loomed over him. The Migo banged his claws and growled.
“Take that, Hastur,” Julie said. “Uber Rock is going kick your elder ass.”
Hastur’s squirming body rippled under the robe. He gurgled a series of
watery chirps.
 “I possess no true sense of humor, but even I find amusement in your
remark.”
The Old One tilted his head and peered up at Yeogurath.
“My corporeal form will not be sullied by engaging in physical contact.
Look instead on the face of your once and future master. All assembled here
shall bear witness to its glorious terribleness.”
“Wordy blowhard,” Julie said.
Hastur’s cephalopod arm reached for his veil. Pratt genuflected and
bowed to the Old One.
“Please, Yellow Majesty. Spare your loyal servants from the sight of
your horrible magnificence.”
“I am here because of your failure to deal adequately with that blight.”
His tentacles spiked towards Yeogurath.
“Share in its torment.”
Hastur peeled the veil. A sallow bioluminescence flared from the robe’s
hood. Pratt unhooked his baton. He thumbed the release button and gagged
when the hook perforated his throat. The barb gored through his neck and
stuck in the wall behind him. Pratt choked on the fish line as it strummed his
tonsils. He shuddered and retched a final breath. The stretched cord held his
body propped in a kneeling stance.
Hastur swiveled and exposed his features to Julie and Rice. The
commando plucked out his eyes through the slits in his ski mask. He mashed
them and wiped the pulpy unguent on his pants. “What the fuck, I can still see
it!” Rice banged his head against the wall until brain fiber leaked from his
cracked forehead. He keeled on the carpet. Julie sneered at Hastur.
“Do your baddest, motherfucker. Uber Rock and the Migo rule!”
She spoke her last couple of words in a strained giggle. Julie’s body
convulsed with involuntary laughter until her stomach heaved and ruptured.
She gawked at her split tummy and watched her innards spill onto the floor.
“Fuck.”
She dropped with a wet splat into the intestinal heap of goop. Yeogurath
howled and rose his claw.
“I sense your cowardly act, while you think my attention diverted,”
Hastur said. “I paraphrase a favored phrase of this planet’s temporary
dwellers. You hurt yourself without doing any possible injury to me. Smite
me, and feel the original hellfire.”
Hastur pivoted and bellowed at Yeogurath.
 “Strike me, slave meat!”
Yeogurath shrieked and swiped the Old One. Hastur combusted into a
massive fireball that engulfed the Bell Weather Inn.

***

MacCready sipped from his insulated travel mug. He sloshed the coffee
around his teeth and savored the mild burn. MacCready watched the bustle as
a squad of firefighters doused the latent embers that still smoldered in the
blackened ruins. The approach of two uniformed officers compelled him into
a quick swallow. The older cop addressed the State Trooper
“We’ve been conferring with Chief Slater, Trooper. Arson’s ruled out, no
suspicious origin, anything like that.”
“Any idea what did do it, Sheriff Abbott? I just need something for my
commander to chew on after the temporary blindness it caused all up and
down the state.”
“I’ll get the horse’s mouth over here. Lisa.”
A woman dressed in soot-stained fire gear slogged across the saturated
yard.
“You explain things better than me,” Abbott said.
“Short and simple. The Bell Weather is doing big time renovations, still
hooked to a small time gas line. Somebody tries cutting corners, probably.
Overload, precautions ignored, kaboom. End of story.”
“That do it for you, Trooper?” Abbott asked.
MacCready’s vigorous nod almost upended his Smokey hat.
“If we find enough of any guests to try and identify, we’ll pass it on. We
still don’t know if there are any unfried records anywhere. Don’t expect too
much.”
“Yeah, the guys at the barracks said that happens a lot in Arkham.”
Paramedics wheeled a stretcher past them. Straps secured its bundled
patient. MacCready blanched when he saw the struggling man’s shiny fire-
skinned face. He looked at the trooper with his remaining bloodshot eyes.
“Yuggoth,” he bleated. “No more, no more. One can stop it. Hast…”
A paramedic injected the man with a disposable syringe. He trembled
and fainted.
“Just keeping him comfortable, all we can do now.”
They loaded the stretcher in their waiting ambulance.
 “Found wandering out back in the new parking lot,” Abbott told
MacCready. “Wearing nothing but his burned-up birthday suit. What the fire
left, hypothermia got. Teaches at the University, I think. We good for now,
Trooper?”
“Right by me, Sheriff. I’ll leave you capable gentlemen to your
business.
MacCready sniffed the smoke that was funneled past them by the wind.
“That’s what I’ve been smelling. Reminds me of some family barbecues
and cooked crab or lobster.”
“Migo,” the deputy said.
“Excuse me, Deputy?”
“My goo-ood. I really like seafood barbecue.”
“Yeah, it’s good. Thanks for the professional courtesy, Chief Slater.”
MacCready returned to his patrol car and drove from the property.
“Damn it, Jim,” Abbott said. “You’ve been around long enough to know
what to keep secret.”
“Hey, it surprised me any of those critters were still around. You want
me to go to the University and tell the special services dean they need another
replacement?”
“I’ll do it. I hope the damn city council approves my retirement pension
soon so I can go somewhere warm and sunny and drink myself and all my
memories of this place’s happy horseshit into oblivion. I just hope nothing
finds a permanent way back into this dimension before I get to do that.”
 McHumans
Kevin Strange

I'm Ricky. I'm a human being. A survivor of the Aqua-pocalypse. A

slave. Food for my watery masters—how those masters came into power is
anybody's guess. All I know is, one day I was jacking off to videos of the
pink Power Ranger, and the next, the whole planet was flooded, and giant
monsters were dragging those of us lucky (unlucky?) enough not to die in
the initial onslaught down into the icy depths below.
They call themselves the Deep Ones, the Old Ones, the Elder Gods,
and all kinds of other things that make them sound super important. No two
of them look exactly the same. They're evil, vile things, but they can talk
and think just like you or me. I guess because they're super intelligent aliens
from another dimension—at least that's what people say. But people say all
kinds of crazy shit now, and it's not like we have an internet down here or
anything to fact check with,o you just sort of take people's word for it most
of the time. These aliens hate us and want us all dead. Why they hate us so
much, I'll never know. But they do. They love to torture and eat us. They're
real sadistic fuckers.
Take my job, for example. I work in one of their subterranean cities
beneath the ocean. How these cities existed without our knowledge before
the great flood? Another question I can't answer. There's a lot of those now.
Questions. And not many answers. We're all too busy surviving...
Oh yeah, my job. I work at a fast food restaurant that specializes in
fresh flesh. Fresh human flesh. As in people are butchered here and then we
garnish their meat with little pieces of seaweed and coral and shit. As a
joke, those of us who work here call it McHumans. And guess who they
make kill people? That's right. Me.
Last week I had to kill my buddy Sam. He used to work here, too. In
fact, he was the first person I met after I was dragged down into the murky
depths. Everybody else that works here told us not to get emotionally
attached to anyone ‘cause this sort of shit happens all the time, but we didn't
listen. We both liked comic books and death metal. And what else is there to
do but talk to each other when you're living in a waterlogged death camp
just waiting for your number to come up, anyway?
 Three other people work with us on the night shift in the kitchen.
Karen, a smokin' hot little redhead who tells the best poop jokes in the joint.
She has cerebral palsy, or multiple sclerosis, or whatever disease fucks up
your body. It's not that bad—it doesn't fuck up her face or the way she talks.
Her hands are kind of curled up and one of her legs doesn't bend and bows
in when she walks. Her spine and neck are curved all funky; but other than
that? Top shelf pussy. Sometimes when the others think we're off having a
smoke break, I fuck Karen in the walk-in cooler. It's kinda weird, fucking a
crippled girl, the whole cooler full of dead bodies—but hey, you take what
you can get in this hellhole. It's all part of life in the Aqua-pocalypse.
Then there's the huge, fat, black dude we call Chef. You know, like the
dude from South Park? Only this Chef isn't all full of inspirational speeches
and joy; no, this guy is a miserable, hate-filled racist. He's got a gigantic,
oily nose that looks like a brown pickle and he's missing one of his front
teeth. He's worked here the longest and he says he loves it. Says he couldn't
think of a better place to be than in a kitchen chopping up white people all
day. But we know he's lying. He was a preacher in Detroit before all this
happened. He just puts on the angry black man routine to keep from losing
his shit. We all have our ways of dealing with the stress of death and misery
hanging over our heads every second of every day.
Like Ty, the final member of our crew. He deals with our living
nightmare by dressing up like a woman—wigs, makeup, the whole thing.
But the weird part is, he's still got a big brown beard and doesn't talk with
an effeminate voice or try to make us call him by a woman's name. No, he
just dresses like a chick. He's called a Transvestite. I only know this because
my sister used to be in a Rocky Horror troupe. Now my sister's dead.
So anyway, one minute me and Sam are swapping stories about
fucking chicks back in our other life while we strip the skin off a pair of
arms in the kitchen with the rest of the gang, and then bam! In comes our
boss, a really funky looking crab-thing with a huge white spiral shell
covered in nasty barnacles. The way his big eyes sit on top of their stalks,
Boss Crab (as we call him) always looks like he's surprised or in a state of
shock. He has a name—hell, they all have names, but fuck trying to
pronounce those multi-syllable, too-many-consonant things. We have
nicknames for all of them.
Well, he storms right up to us, gives us both the once-over with a look
of astonishment, the whole time his little crab mouth parts moving a mile a
minute—his disgustingly long, thin tentacle whiskers waving around,
tasting the air, or whatever it is they're used for—when he reaches out with
his enormous red claw, grabs poor Sam by the neck, and drags him into the
back room. The killing room.
A couple seconds later, Boss Crab screams for us to come back there,
too. The killing room always stinks, no matter how thoroughly we scrub it.
There's just a permanent stench attached to it, like a slaughterhouse
splashed with copious helpings of guilt and fear. The terror is palpable. It
echoes off the walls, giving the room an ominous, sinister air. Or maybe it's
just the shit smell that never quite goes away. Everyone shits when they die,
and our drain sucks.
The room's too small for all of us to fit, so Chef, Ty and Karen stand
just outside the door. Boss Crab has a look on his face like he just saw an
elephant climb into its own asshole. Sam is on the floor, totally confused.
Hovering over him is Boss Crab's right-hand man—his “muscle,” as he
likes to call him. The thing—if it is even a “him”—is called Torgen-
Salaroth-something-something-something. We just call him Fishbowl. Boss
Crab breathes air, so he's fine running around inside McHumans screaming
at us and whatnot. But some of the horrid beasts, like Fishbowl, are strictly
water dwellers.
We don't even know what the hell Fishbowl is. He's all stuffed inside
this black suit that looks sort of like one of those deep sea diver
contraptions. The body of the suit is always damp and sweaty. It's one big
piece with connecting gloves and boots wrapped in rusted chains and
covered in rotted seaweed. It even has a diver's helmet on top—only this
helmet is more like a fish bowl. That's why we call him that. Anyway, his
helmet-thing, it's completely full of water. Black, fetid water. Vague, horrid
shapes swim around in that murky gunk. I can't stare at it too long or I start
to think I can see faces forming in the swirling darkness. Creepy shit.
So Fishbowl's got a hold of Sam by the shoulders, and Sam's crying
‘cause he knows he's about to die, when Boss Crab starts swinging around
this fire-ax with his little shriveled hand, yelling in his crab language. Once
he sees we're utterly clueless as to what's going on, he switches to English. I
hate when he does that. If you've never heard a crab imitate human speech,
trust me, you don't want to.
“This little shit thought he was going to break out of here!” Boss Crab
says, waving the ax in Sam's face. With his big claw hand, he throws a stack
of paper on the ground. “Escape plans! He really thought he could outsmart
ME!”
Chef snickers. “Crazy Cracka,” he says under his breath. I scowl at
him.
We're fucked. I know what's coming next. I'm so fucking scared I can't
feel my feet.
Boss Crab turns the ax on me. “You were in on it, too, weren't you?
Explain yourself.”
“I-I don't know what the hell you're talking about, man. I'm not in on
anything,” I stammer, totally full of shit. I'm an awful liar, and it's about to
get me killed.
Boss Crab raises the ax as if to hit me with it. I flinch back and he
continues screaming. “Shut the fuck up, monkey! You think I'm stupid?!
You think I don't know what goes on in my own restaurant?!”
“Just tell him, Ricky,” Sam whines. Now my eyes bulge like Boss
Crab's. I make a slashing motion with my hand at my neck. He ignores me.
“Tell him what we were gonna do and maybe he'll let us live!” Sam's really
crying now. Just blubbering like a little bitch. I guess I would be too if I was
in his position. If he says anything else, I probably will be.
Boss Crab scuttles around to face Sam. “I know what you two idiots
were going to try to do!” He motions his big claw at a pair of scuba tanks
sitting on a table in the corner. We have to use them to go from the
restaurant back to our slave quarters down in the human district. The only
compensation we get for our jobs is oxygen for the tanks. We're literally
paid in air.
Boss Crab continues his rant, and I try my best not to shit myself.
“You do realize I only keep enough air in those things for a round trip
to and from the slave camp, right?”
Sam breaks down completely at this point. He's all sobbing
incoherently, gasping for air between his cries. “H-he put me up to it, boss!
I swear! He said we were gonna go back to the surface!”
“What surface??? The whole world is flooded, you fucking retard!
Even if you did manage to break out, even if you hid air up your asses, once
you got up there, you'd just float to death!”
Boss Crab turns back to me. “Anything to say for yourself, monkey?”
I just put my arms up and shrug, clueless as to what to say next.
Finally I stammer out, “Sorry?”
 I can't tell if Boss Crab is genuinely surprised at my lack of defense, or
if he's just staring at me. Then he thrusts the ax out, not in a killing blow,
but with the handle facing me. Totally confused, I take it from him. He says,
“Not as sorry as your friend here. You cook a mean brain soufflé. Him? He
couldn't even burn a brisket to save his life. Kill him.”
“What?” I ask, sure that he's just fucking with me for a second before
he snaps my face off with his claw.
“Prove your loyalty to the restaurant. Kill this one so we can get on to
the business at hand. Murder your co-conspirator, and NEVER try that shit
again. Do I make myself clear?”
“Aw, shit,” Karen says from behind Chef.
“That ain't right,” Ty says, walking away from the doorway, back to
the kitchen.
I look at them all for a brief second, hoping they have some brilliant
plan to keep me from chopping up my best bud. They've got nothin'.
Reluctantly, I turn around and prop the ax up on my shoulder. “Sorry
Sam, this fuckin' sucks,” I say with total sincerity, raising the blade above
my head.
There I stand in the only shirt I brought down here with me, a faded,
ripped up Dio Holy Diver shirt, my curly brown shoulder-length hair matted
to my pale forehead, about to murder my friend, and all I can think is,
Damn, I wish I could take his Ozzy shirt before it gets blood all over it.
That's what living down here does to you—makes you callous, uncaring.
That's the only way to survive...
Sam struggles, mumbling shit I can't understand through his snotty
nose and tears. Fishbowl holds him tight.
Chef covers Karen's eyes as the blade comes down, cleaving poor
Sam's face open. A wet thunk—sort of like when you cut open a pumpkin—
resonates throughout the small killing room. Sam's cries abruptly end as
what sits behind his face slowly oozes out onto his shirt.
He slumps over. His body thrashes a few times, and then he goes still.
At least he didn't suffer. Before I can even register that I've murdered my
best friend, Boss Crab snatches the ax away from me and starts yelling
again. “Get the fuck back in here, you warm-blooded sacks of shit!”
Karen, Chef and Ty had tried to creep away. They sulk back into the
doorway as Boss Crab shoves me toward them.
 “Listen up!” he says, scooping up a bit of Sam off the floor. “We got a
new contract this afternoon. A big one. Pretty much the biggest.” He starts
to unscrew the knob sealing Fishbowl's helmet in place. A loud hiss
followed by a pop signals the release of the pressurized lid. Boss Crab flips
the top open. “Cthulhu him goddamn self has requested us to cater a party
he's having next week. He's bringing forth ALL the Old Ones as he prepares
to raise R'lyeh and reclaim the surface of the Earth in his name. He wants us
to provide the food.” The black, fetid water looks like a calm oil slick until
Boss Crab dangles bits of Sam over the open container. Then the rancid shit
begins to slosh around inside the helmet. Karen dry heaves as the reek
overwhelms us. My eyes start to water and we all put our hands up to cover
our mouths.
Little pincer claws, suction cup-laced tendrils, and pointy tipped legs
that look like they belong on a tarantula burst forth from the brackish ooze,
snatching and grabbing at the fresh flesh.
Boss Crab drops the hunk of human meat into the helmet and quickly
snaps it shut before continuing. “So we're gonna have a lot of dirty
vertebrates coming through here this week. I expect my team to be on your
A-game. Do I make myself clear?”
Still in shock, we all nod, and Boss Crab scuttles away with Fishbowl
in tow.

***

That was last week. Now the gang and I stand at the front entrance to
R'lyeh—Cthulhu's great sunken city, the largest kingdom in the underworld
—with handfuls of bags containing all the people we've slaughtered and
cooked over the last week. Behind us, our scuba gear lays discarded on the
rim of a gigantic pressurized moon pool, one of many such pools that the
denizens of R'lyeh use to come and go. See, most of the monsters that now
rule the planet are amphibious, so these sunken cites are habitable to air
breathers. This particular moon pool is about half the size of a freakin’
football field. And it's a good thing, too. The leviathan fish-frog beasts
carrying the rest of the food for Cthulhu's party barely fit through the hole.
Man, this is going to be a massive feast.
Fishbowl steers the lead leviathan out of the moon pool and up the
jaw-bridge type thing we stand in front of, while the other follows close
behind. We step out of the way so the gargantuan things don't crush us.
They remind me of a monitor lizard wearing a fish-head Halloween
costume—the size of a city block.
Twin emerald doors covered in glowing glyphs and runes that ooze a
glowing green goo—rising so high above our heads that I have to lean
backward to see the very tops—open slowly, allowing Fishbowl and the
leviathans to pass into the belly of grand R'lyeh.
“I fucking hate this place,” Ty says, as the rear leviathan stomps into a
spiraling descent across a floor that is sometimes a ceiling, sometimes a
wall, depending on how you set your eyes. R'lyeh is funny like that, what
with the non-Euclidean geometry and all that. Nothing in the sunken city is
quite where you think it should be, relatively speaking.
We step through the entrance.
Ty is wearing a blue wig set in pigtails. He wears a matching blue
sundress with black polka dots. A pair of black and white Converse
sneakers rounds out his outfit.
Chef shifts his bags to his right hand, giving Ty a long, hard look. I
know what's coming. “Cracka, you rob the teenybopper section of the Gap
when shit went down upstairs, or what? I do not understand where you find
those god-awful clothes, man!”
We continue walking. I try to keep my eyes closed so I don't notice
that my feet are where my head should be.
Ty doesn't flinch. He's heard it all before. He looks Chef right in the
eye and says, “They're my daughter's clothes. I grabbed two trash bags full
of them when the rivers flooded over into the cities.”
Chef raises an eyebrow.
“We didn't even make it out of town,” Ty says, stopping, turning his
body to face the burly black man. The rest of us stop, too. “Remember the...
things that burrowed up out of the ground? The things with too many legs
and eyes that squirmed? They took her. They ripped her right off my arm
and dragged her down into those fetid mud pits—pulverized her body into
mush right in front of my eyes. And you know what? Maybe if I didn't have
my fucking hands full of her clothes, I could have saved her. If I'd just
dropped the bags, I could have pulled her free. But I didn't. I lost my
daughter on day 1, and all I have left to show for it is these clothes.”
“Damn,” Chef says, breaking eye contact. “That's fucked up.”
 Before the big bear of a man can say any more, four hideous-looking
things slither their way down the long corridor, right up to us. Down here,
everything looks awful. You just have to get used to it or you won’t survive.
You have to learn to shut off the part of your mind that screams in agony
and begs you to find the nearest hole to crawl into when it sees the fucked
up monsters that live down here.
These particular horrors, believe it or not, are even more stomach-
turning than the normal fish-frog octopoid monsters. These things have
long, slender bodies with six or eight skinny, insect-like legs on either side.
The bodies end in what look like a pair of twin scorpion tails, each tipped
with dagger-like stingers. They skitter along on their bellies, slithering
almost like snakes. Their heads are just a mess of tentacles with long, sharp
hooks on the ends of some, eyeballs on the ends of others. Right in the
center of this cluster of tendrils sits a drooling, multi-segmented mouth,
snapping and undulating.
Karen cries out as one of the scorpion things skitters up to her and
starts grabbing at her bags. She leaps behind me, leaving the thing to squirm
its revolting appendages at me. I hold my bags out of reach as another of
the monsters assaults Ty in the same way, pinning him up against the wall
that was the ceiling last time I looked at it.
“What the fuck is this thing doing?!” he screams, as it plucks his bag
from his hand, ripping it to shreds, dumping its contents on the ground at
his feet. It tears the cooked human meat apart, shoving huge hunks of it into
its writhing mouth.
“Sniffers,” Chef says. “They're here to make sure the food isn't
poisoned. Don't worry, just let ‘em do their thing and-”
The Sniffer goes stiff, shrieks, then vomits up all the meat it's just
consumed and falls over dead.
“I poisoned the food,” I say, as everyone looks at me with wide eyes
and slack jaws.
Before anyone can react, one of the remaining Sniffers lunges itself at
Ty, dragging him down to the ground with its face-feelers. He's screaming
bloody murder as Chef runs forward saying, “Aw, hell!”
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 singe as though they've been caught under a child's magnifying glass.
They die instantly. 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 got it 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 crackas 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
our 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
wrong! Boss Crab undoubtedly told them to expect four slaves to deliver
the food. Without you, they'll be suspicious and blow our plan. Our only
chance is 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, let’s 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 it 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, the big man
starts kicking at another Sniffer. He peels away the entire back carapace of
the beast and slings the armor-plated exoskeleton over his chest like a
bulletproof 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 kill as many of these alien
fish monsters as I can before they send me up to Heaven with my momma.
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 and gets away to tell the big bad octopus man,
we're fucked.”
Ty reluctantly reaches down and starts pulling his own sniffer apart.
“We're already fucked,” he says under his breath.
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 flooded the Earth? 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 stinger weapons at me, when he
cracks a wide smile and belly laughs so loud it echoes down the twisted
corridor.
“No, white boy, we sure didn't, did we?”

***

Everyone remains quiet as we creep our way through the cyclopean

caverns. The only sound coming from our group is 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 carapace-
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 a 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 a 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 is their heads.
Their heads are all jittering, twitching mandibles, waving antennae,
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 it’s 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 have to try.
“Berserkers,” Chef says, looking terrified. “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' ya 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 smell
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, 'fore 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 dog 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 buddy.
“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 are 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 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 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
looks fat, now. Obese.
“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 of
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 handfuls 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 her 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 bodyweight 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 other’s 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 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 nowhere 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 is just a few yards away,
the hands of its wetsuit 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...

***

By the look of the seething throng of slaves far below the grand
platform that loomed above Great Cthulhu's banquet hall, every last living
human in the flooded world had been gathered in Deep R'lyeh to witness
the coming of the Old Ones. They'd been herded into a semi-circular area
that resembled the floor of the great Roman Colosseum, except instead of
dirt or sand on the ground, they stood on the same damp, slimy grey stones
that made up the rest of weird R'lyeh.
Madness seethed through the crowd in waves as the alien angles
proved too much for their small human minds to comprehend. Depending
where they stood, or where they cast their eyes, the huge spiraling pillar
upon which Great Cthulhu sat seemed to rise hundreds of feet into the air,
and other times to plunge far below them. But no matter which direction
they looked, the masses of starved, broken, defeated humans saw hideous,
unfathomable beasts in all manner of shapes, sizes, colors and genders.
The monsters towered over the feeble vestige of humanity, perched
atop a huge stone grandstand surrounding Great Cthulhu's spiral pillar,
giving them a marvelous view of the day's events. Slimy grinners, fang-
toothed barkers, many-faced howlers, jittery spinners and hoards of wet
things that defied any sane description jeered at the human slaves standing
below them, and praised the Old Gods far above. Even now, miles overhead
(or down below, depending on the angle) ancient Yog Sothoth shifted
patiently between dimensions, slowly opening the doorways into an
unimaginable number of between places, the places where the Old Ones
dwelt, silently waiting for this moment. Its gargantuan, jellyfish-like body
appeared and disappeared into that beautiful unearthly color that drove sane
men to tear out their eyeballs and jam sharp objects between their ears. It
was a beautiful sight, but not the main attraction.
Soon enough, the jeering monsters and the hysterical humans all
quieted down as the host of the evening's events took center stage in front
of Great Cthulhu's humongous stone throne. All eyes were on the figure as
he raised his hands, commanding the attention of all in attendance.
This figure was, of course, Nyarlathotep, the personification of the Old
Ones and mouthpiece of the Elder Gods.
He stood, in this incarnation, a tall, slender black man. Not dark
skinned, black skinned. He looked like a shadow; a dense, colorless smear
against the light. The only parts of his body not resigned to this inky
blackness were his eyes, which glowed a preternatural white against the
darkness, and the red of his lips and mouth, like a fresh wound, a gash
sliced into his obsidian, featureless face.His voice boomed out, carried by
the weird angles inside the huge, domed, subterranean lair of Cthulhu, the
nightmare amphitheater beneath sunken R'lyeh that served as his banquet
hall. “We've won!” he exclaimed. “The world is ours! Humanity's final
vestiges tremble before us broken and mad.” He gestured to the slave pit,
where the humans stood shamed, covered in filth, dressed in the tattered
remnants of their short reign on planet Earth.
The throng of monsters cheered, whooping and jeering toward the
slave pit.
“And yet!” Nyarlathotep said, motioning for silence from the crowd.
“Even as we stand on this glorious precipice, mere moments before the
return of all the Old Ones, after their precious planet has been annihilated,
flooded, wiped clean of the human scourge, one stands among them who
would defy the might of this world's true leaders!”

***

Ricky spun slowly, hung upside down with his arms tied behind his
back, just above Cthulhu's throne. He hung from a rope fastened to the
clawed tip of one of the hulking beast's dragon-like wings. He was nearly
bored to tears by the shadow creature's pompous speech, almost wishing the
damn thing would shut up and kill him already. After all, with Karen selling
him out to the Deep Ones, he was all but fucked. That wasn't really what he
wanted, though. He had one more trick up his sleeve to kill the monsters
and unplug the drain that would un-flood the world. But it was a long shot.
A very long shot...
Cthulhu looked bored as well. His bulbous, green, whale-like chest
rose up and down, slowly. His many-tentacled head rested on one hand
propped up by his elbow which rested on the arm of his throne. His beady
little black fish eyes were open but unfocused. His enormous wings hung
limp, slowly swaying in time with the gargantuan monster's deep breathing.
For all Ricky knew, the big fucker was sleeping through his “trial”.
Fishbowl stood a few feet away, holding Karen by the arms. Karen, for
her part, looked embarrassed and remorseful—not that any of that mattered
now. The deed was done. She chose monsters over people. A typical
woman, aligned only with what best served to save her ass.
Even Boss Crab was there, standing next to Fishbowl and Karen,
looking surprised by the turn of events. Behind them stood the pair of
hulking Leviathans that had transported all the poisoned food, which now
lay in a heaping pile beside them.
Encircling the entire platform were more than a dozen empty thrones
just as big as the one on which Cthulhu now sat. For the other important
monsters, Ricky guessed. The ones they were going to summon right after
they killed him.
“He thought he could poison our food!” Nyarlathotep continued,
smirking up at Ricky with his crimson slit of a mouth. “Thought he could
prevent the inevitable! But the stars are right, my friends! And our time is
now!”
“This little deceiver,” the shadow figure said, prancing up to Karen.
“This one betrayed her entire race. She didn't just betray them,she was
downright happy about it! The little trooper ran right to her Boss Crab the
moment she got wind of her friend's pathetic scheme to prevent the return
of the Old Ones!”
The contingent of monsters laughed and scoffed, while the enslaved
humans murmured amongst themselves.
Nyarlathotep silenced them. “Should this one live? Should her
betrayal be rewarded?”
Half the crowd of monsters booed, the other half cheered. The humans
stood in silence, malevolent faces worn by all.
“Come now!” the shadow man said, feigning concern. “For her loyalty
to the Deep Ones, shouldn't she be allowed to witness the coming of the
ages? The return of the Gods from the Dark? She did, after all, warn us
about her friend's plot to contaminate all of this…” Nyarlathotep frowned
and paused dramatically. “Wonderful food!”
This time nearly all of the monsters cheered, while the slaves
vocalized their disgust in the form of curses and vile insults hurled at the
redheaded young woman.
She looked up at Ricky with tears flowing freely down her face. “I'm
so, so sorry.”
“She lives!” Nyarlathotep screamed with delight. “For now,” he added
with a smirk.
“What about him!” the shadow figure said, dramatically stabbing a
finger upward at Ricky. “What do we do with the rebel slave who thought
he could poison Great Cthulhu himself?”
 The crowd of undersea aliens booed and hissed, dramatically
condemning the captured man. “Death?” Nyarlathotep asked, as if he didn't
already know the outcome of this silly show. Ricky was being made an
example of, a warning for the few remaining humans never to try a stunt
like this again.
And that's exactly what Ricky had hoped would happen.
A roaring chant of DEATH! DEATH! DEATH! echoed through the
vast banquet chamber. Even jellyfish-like Yog Sothoth seemed to pulse in
time with the deafening taunt. The only horrible figure not screaming
DEATH!at the top of its lungs or gills or whatever means they used to make
sound, was great Cthulhu, who still sat bored on his throne, carelessly
twitching his face tentacles, waiting for the shenanigans to be over.
“Death it is!” the shadow man yelled, pacing back and forth directly
under Ricky. For a split second, the captive considered spitting on the
monster below him, then thought better of it. For his plan to work, Ricky
needed to remain as limp and non-threatening as possible...
'”How do we kill him?” Nyarlathotep asked, in the same nonchalant
tone he might use to inquire about the time of day.
“Come on,” Ricky said under his breath.
“Should we skin him alive and serve him his own cooked flesh?”
The monsters roared in approval.
The shadowy figure was nearly skipping with glee as he ticked off
horrible ways for Ricky to die. “Burn him alive then drown him? Drown
him then burn him?”
Ricky broke out in a cold sweat, this was not what he'd planned for.
“I've got it! Let's cut out his intestines and hang him with them! OR!”
the shadow man said, dramatically holding one finger up in the air. “Cut off
his fingers and toes, then hands and feet, then arms and legs, then cut out
his eyeballs, slice off his tongue, cut off his ears...”
Nyarlathotep continued, hardly pausing for breath, getting more and
more worked up with each sadistic idea. If Ricky didn't put a stop to this
now, he'd never get his chance...
“Hey douchebag!” he yelled when the figure below had finally
stopped talking long enough to receive a standing ovation from the
demoniac creatures in attendance.
Nyarlathotep glanced up at Ricky, bemused smile on his face. “It
seems as though the brave little human finally has something to say.” He
waved the crowd to silence as they began to protest. “No, no, let’s hear him
out. It'll be the last thing he ever says...”
Ricky hesitated, spinning slowly.
“Well?” Nyarlathotep said, becoming annoyed.
“Eat me, you sanctimonious, shit stain looking cunt.”
For a moment, Nyarlathotep stared at his prisoner. His form began to
change shape, seeming to grow in mass. The corners of his arms and legs
bulged out and his head took on feral properties. A low growl formed in his
throat, and suddenly he resembled the shadow of a gigantic bear more than
that of a man. Then, just as suddenly, his form snapped back to that of a tall
thin man.
“Eat you? Eat... YES!” The shadow man jumped up into the air with
excitement as though the revelation was the best idea of the entire evening.
“PERFECT! Eat him! Whatddya say, gang? Should Great Cthulhu eat this
defiant little pest alive to show his fellow monkey men that you do NOT
fuck with the Elder Gods?! Let him stew in the boiling stomach acids of
He-Who-Shall-Herald-Their-Return, clinging to his final moments of life
while we bring forth the supreme rulers of this dimension??”
The ensuing cacophony of supportive cries from the nightmare
contingent was deafening. More than one of the human slaves flung
themselves against the cold, slimy stones until they bashed their own brains
out in order to escape the monstrous jubilation.
“A tribute, then, to the coming of the GRAND MASTERS of this
reality!” Nyarlathotep exclaimed. And finally, Great Cthulhu stirred from
his throne, reached out, and plucked Ricky off the dangling rope with no
more effort or care than yanking a grape from the vine. The enormous
octopoid's face tentacles quivered in anticipation for the bite-sized meal
they were about to receive. The longest of the dozen tendrils licked across
Ricky's face, leaving a wet, drippy smear in its wake.
Ricky took a deep breath and closed his eyes. This had better fucking
work, he said to himself, silently willing his final, desperate plan into
motion. Doubt crept into the young man's mind when he opened his eyes
again, as Cthulhu opened his seemingly fathomless maw, revealing
innumerable smaller tendrils laced with razor sharp teeth running down and
down, further and further into the behemoth creature's gullet. I don't want to
fucking die! Ricky screamed inside his own head. Holy fucking shit, I'm
fucking donezoes!
 “Wait!”
Relief rushed through the captive human, as this momentary reprieve
gained him another precious few seconds of life. He looked down to see
who'd interrupted his impending execution.
Boss Crab stood directly beneath him, looking more astonished than
usual. “You have to tell me,” the unblinking crustacean said. “After
everything, was-was it worth it?”
Ricky glanced around the huge banquet hall. Took in all of the horrific
monsters gathered around to witness his demise. Looked out into the sea of
human faces, each and every one of them in awe that one man could stand
so defiantly against the madness and futility before him. He looked back at
the Great Cthulhu about to swallow him whole, and back down at the small
group standing on the platform with him. He let his gaze linger for an extra
moment on Karen and Fishbowl standing behind Boss Crab, and then he
smiled, setting his sight back on his former boss. “I'll tell ya in a minute.”
“What?!” Boss Crab asked, puzzled.
But then it was too late to ask any more questions. Great Cthulhu
finally spoke,his voice a terrible echoing boom that scattered Ricky's brain
and made it hard for him to focus his thoughts, almost as though a thousand
tiny wasps stung at his consciousness all at once.
“Enough!” the giant beast roared. And with that, he tossed Ricky into
the air, letting his face tentacles grab the tiny human—no more than the size
of a toy truck to the awesome monster—and stuff the captive man into his
expansive throat.
Karen cried out and dropped to her knees. Nyarlathotep let out a
whoop of joy. Boss crab looked stunned by the whole thing. And Fishbowl
stood ever silent, staring straight ahead.
The throng of writhing, chomping, snapping things erupted into the
loudest cheer yet, as Great Cthulhu stood from his throne and raised his
arms into the sky, spreading his dragon-like wings as he did so, their vast
width enough to stretch the entire length of the platform, dwarfing all other
creatures standing below him.
“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh gah'nagl fhtagn!” the impossible
horror screamed.
“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh gah'nagl fhtagn!” his
congregation of monsters responded.
 And so the chant rose to the watery heavens, increasing in pitch and
fervor until even the slaves below were forced to join in, at the threatening
tips of many stingers, claws and slimy wormish appendages. Even Karen,
sobbing hysterically from the floor of Cthulhu's grand platform, eventually
gave in, resigned to her fate, and began to chant the hideous words that
would spell an end to everything.
High above, Yog Sothoth came into greater and greater focus as the
chant continued, pulsing brighter and brighter in that unnamable color of
horror. A spiral of smoky, liquid, solid-like substance descended from the
center of its jelly-like body, splitting off into many smaller tendrils, each
falling until they reached the top of each of the giant thrones encircling
Cthulhu's platform.
Hideous shapes began to form on those thrones and their half-heard
voices joined in with the nightmare chant.
“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh gah'nagl fhtagn!”
“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh gah'nagl fhtagn!”
“Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh gah'nagl fhtagn!”
And then a funny thing happened.
The hulking behemoth towering above the congregation of horrors
stopped chanting. He staggered a few steps, nearly crushing Nyarlathotep
beneath his immense bulk, then clutched his stomach and let out a fart so
long and loud, the entire proceedings ground to an immediate halt. Beady
little fish eyes registering shock, Great Cthulhu opened his mouth to speak
when another stomach cramp doubled him over. This time, putrid, liquidy
pink shit shot out of his asshole, creating a huge puddle at his giant clawed
feet.
The tiny humanoids sharing the platform with him all staggered
backward, trying to avoid the growing puddle of cosmic feces splattered
against the stone floor, and now shared Boss Crab's look of astonishment.
Another stomach spasm forced the gargantuan beast to his hands and
knees, where he began to dry heave into his own shit. A final spasm ended
with Great Cthulhu opening his impossible maw and projectile vomiting a
glut of spew large enough to fill a small landfill, before he collapsed
headfirst into the fetid mixture of shit and puke.
The entire banquet hall fell silent for a tense few moments.
No creature dared to move a muscle, terrified that whatever force had
managed to fell the Great Cthulhu would target them next. And then, each
of the netherworldly tendrils attached to the grand thrones encircling the
platform slowly pulled away, causing the half-formed denizens of
unspeakable dimensions to vanish once again from the Earthly realm.
“NO! Wait!” Nyarlathotep screamed. “Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu
R'lyeh gah'nagl fhtagn!” The shadow man pumped his arms up and down,
encouraging the contingent of monsters to re-join his chant and continue the
ritual. “Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh gah'nagl fhtagn!”
But it was no use. The monsters' eyes were locked on the twitching
form of felled Cthulhu, and the movement from the mountain of puke next
to his head.
A gnarled, acid-eaten human hand thrust up from the noxious sludge.
The crowd of alien beasts gasped in unison as the haggard form of Ricky
pushed itself out of the muck so recently disintegrating his body.
Impossibly, the man stood upright and smiled—or at least he appeared
to smile. Most of the hair on his head had been eaten away, leaving nasty,
yellow exposed areas of his skull where there was not pink, welt-ridden
flesh. One of his eyeballs had glazed over white, the eyelid and most of the
flesh around his orbital bone all but gone. The tip of his nose had melted
away, and both sides of his cheeks lacked all skin, save for two small strips
next to his bruised and swelled lips, giving him the appearance of a sinister,
grinning ghoul.
“No! NOOOO!” Nyarlathotep howled. “How did- How could???” he
stammered in disbelief, darting his shocked eyes back and forth between the
ghoulish man and the fallen god, still spasming on the floor.
“It was easy,” Ricky said, brushing the remainder of gunk off his
shredded flesh with bony, skeletal fingers. His voice was now an octave
lower, having no doubt swallowed some of Great Cthulhu's stomach acid
during his short time in the beast’s stomach, irrevocably damaging his vocal
chords. “I didn't just poison the bodies of the people I was forced to murder
and cook for you cosmic swine. I also poisoned myself.” This time Ricky
did smile. The action tore free the thin line of flesh still connecting his
cheek and lip on the left side, causing his mouth to fall open in a hideous
permanent grin.
Nyarlathotep just stared, mouth agape.
“After Sam and I experimented on a few of Boss Crab's buddies,
figuring out what combination of chemicals your kind is most susceptible
to, I started drinking the poison little by little, building a tolerance to it,
infusing it into my blood stream. You ever seen the movie The Princess
Bride?”
“What?!?”
“Nothing, never mind. Anyway, I've been poisoning myself a little
every day, right up until today. I didn't think it would do anything besides
kill you fucking waterlogged scum, but…” he said, feeling his face and
looking at his skeletal hands. “I don't feel any pain at all. In fact... I
feel...strong! There must have been some kind of chemical reaction between
the poison and Cthulhu's gut acid. That's... unexpected!” The ghoulish man
smiled and laughed again, causing his mouth to open up wider than his
entire ghastly head. “The poison was Sam's idea. He knew we couldn't
escape. Even knew we'd be caught poisoning the food. He knew we couldn't
trust those other people either,” he said, motioning toward Karen. “He was a
smart motherfucker. Smarter than me. But he knew I was stronger. Knew I
could survive. So he chose me to drink the poison, and chose himself to die.
All I had to do was make sure Squiggle-face over there ate me. Hell, that
was the easy part.”
Nyarlathotep recovered from his shock. He began to grow again. Two
new pairs of arms burst out of his midsection. His fingers elongated and
became sharp talons. His head stretched out, his mouth filled with red
daggers. Four new sets of hateful glowing eyes opened up below his
primary pair. His torso grew until he towered over the ghoulish Ricky. “You
will not outwit the Elder Gods!”
“Uh, yeah,” Ricky said, “already have.”
Suddenly, Fishbowl tossed Karen to the ground, reached up and
unlatched the clasp on its diving helmet, freeing the noxious substance
residing inside. Just as suddenly, a deluge of brackish nightmare erupted
from the helmet. It looked like a fire hose had exploded from inside
Fishbowl's suit, only it coiled through the air, waving and turning like a
snake. The amount of hideous eyeball stalks, thin, hairy legs, dripping
tentacles and oozing mouths darting in and out of the thick geyser of black
liquid was nearly incomprehensible.
Nyarlathotep turned to see what was happening behind him too late.
Fishbowl’s chaotic form separated into two halves at its front, creating a
sort of giant pincer claw, and darted forward like a striking snake, splitting
the shadow man's beastly visage cleanly in two at the middle.
Nyarlathotep's severed halves crashed to the stone floor. Weird, nearly
translucent fluid gushed from the open wound of his trunk, while his
orphaned legs twitched, now laying beside his head.
At this point, the mob of creatures lining the stands broke their silence.
They murmured amongst themselves, and some even began to move toward
the banquet hall's exits.
Fishbowl stalked forward—abandoning Karen where she lay, shocked
and astonished on the ground—until its suited form stood shoulder to
shoulder with the deformed, acid-bleached Ricky.
“H-how could... you... betray your own k-kind?” Nyarlathotep
stammered, clear fluid leaking from his fanged mouth.
“Cause she's in love,” Ricky said, ripping the buckles on the front of
the wetsuit open, revealing dozens of tiny, writhing forms latched on to
what appeared to be monstrous nipples lining Fishbowl's humanoid
midsection. Each of the little tentacled beasts bore a human head, the face
of which was an exact copy of Ricky's.
More monsters broke for the exits as the tide of the battle raging on
Cthulhu's throne platform had clearly begun to turn in favor of the enemy.
Now it was the slave contingent's turn to hurl insults at the fleeing beasts,
causing some of the alien sea monsters to turn around and jump into the
slave pit to attack the defenseless humans.
Ricky patted Fishbowl on top of her diver's helmet. “One day, I was
bored at McHumans, so I decided to drag a stepladder over to this big scary
motherfucker and jack off over her open helmet. I figured, what the hell,
what's the worst that could happen? She kills me? Good! I'd be out of this
fucking wet nightmare once and for all. Turns out she liked it, though. So it
became a thing. I'd jack off over her fishbowl head, and she'd tickle my
balls with her gross ass sloppy appendage till I'd bust nuts. She gobbled em
up, and next thing you know, we're in love, and I'm a daddy.”
“R-ridiculous!” Nyarlathotep managed. The flayed ends of his severed
halves had already begun to slowly work their way toward one another. The
shadow man was regaining his strength, putting himself back together.
“Yeah, maybe. But you know what? We beat you.” Ricky lowered his
head to within inches of the wounded being's face. Then he whispered,
through thin, acid-eaten lips, “I know where the plug is.”
Nyarlathotep's eyes widened and he lunged at the man with his huge
clawed hands, but Ricky and Fishbowl were quicker. Ricky sidestepped the
blow, darting behind the creature in the diving suit. Fishbowl's exposed
appendage whipped down, scooping up Nyarlathotep's severed lower half.
The chaotic, writhing appendage threw the dismembered limbs into the air
and, before gravity forced them back down, the appendage transformed
from a menacing claw into a grotesque mouth. It snatched the shadow man's
legs out of the air and gobbled them down.
Screaming out in terror, Nyarlathotep scrambled toward the edge of
the platform, intent on throwing himself down into the slave pit, much more
confident of his chances with the disheveled humans than the monstrosity
before him.
But the gigantic mouth, which housed many legs, feelers, eyeballs,
and tentacles as fangs, swooped down and took the remainder of
Nyarlathotep's body into its disgusting jaws.
“We will never be stopped!” Nyarlathotep cried, feigning bravery,
even as his voice quivered and broke. Even as the stands emptied far below,
removing any chance of a valiant rescue attempt by his fellow monsters,
and high above him, the jellyfish-like body of Yog Sothoth disappeared
from his place near the top of the domed banquet hall, closing the
dimensional rift that would have allowed the Elder Gods’ passage into this
world.
Nyarlthotep had failed his masters.
Trying to maintain his dignity, the shadow man closed his eyes and
sobbed out, “That is not dead which can eternal lie, and-”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ricky interrupted. “And with a chomp and a bite, even
evil fucks like you can die!”
Nyarlathotep's screams of terror were cut short as Fishbowl made
quick work of his mauled body, pulling the whole gory mess back inside
her helmet. The top slammed shut with a loud CLANG!
“Make sure you chew your food,” Ricky said, grinning. “We don't
want him coming back up later.”
With that, the ghoulish man turned around just in time to see Boss
Crab fleeing between the two gargantuan bodies of the Leviathans toward
the spiral staircase that wrapped around the humongous platform and led
down to the slave pit below. Re-opening the top of Fishbowl's helmet,
Ricky stuck his whole arm inside, rooting around for something inside the
impossibly large dimensions of the interior of the cosmic horror's suit.
“Stop him,” Ricky said, pulling out the very same fire ax Boss Crab
had made him use to murder his best friend.
 Boss Crab stumbled down the staircase, frantically looking back over
his shoulders every few steps to see if he was being followed. He made it
around the pillar once, seemingly without notice. Confident he could make
a break for it and lose himself in the chaos of monsters and slaves below, he
took off at a sprint, intent on clearing the last few steps four or five at a
time, when—
WHAM!
—he slammed into something hard, causing him to stumble backward.
Shaking his head to clear it, he looked up to see a titanic wall of scummy,
fetid black water, home to thousands of disgusting, writhing things blocking
his passage.
“Y-you work for me! You can't do this!” Boss Crab screamed, looking
up the vast pillar to the top where Fishbowl stood, helmet open, preventing
her former boss from getting any further. The creature said nothing.
Boss Crab looked off the side of the staircase, but it was impossible to
judge the distance to the floor. He was afraid he'd crack his shell if he
jumped. Hearing something fall and land behind him, the giant crustacean
spun around, just in time to see Ricky raising up out of a crouched position,
having jumped off the platform above.
“Don't look so surprised to see me,” Ricky said, grinning that same
huge sinister new grin of his.
Boss Crab skittered backwards until his shell bumped up against the
wall of gunk created by Fishbowl. He dropped to his knees and clasped his
claws together. “Please, Ricky! Spare me! I-I was good to you, I let you
live! I was just doing what I was told!”
“Yes,” Ricky said, taking the fire ax in both hands.
“Yes? Y-yes what?” the crab sputtered.
“Killing my best friend, seeing my co-workers ripped to shreds by
monsters from an undersea hell. Being eating by a god. It was all worth it,
to see you on your little knees begging for your life after you personally
oversaw the deaths of tens of thousands of people just like me. It was SO
worth it!” With that, Ricky raised the ax over his head, and plunged it down
right between Boss Crabs eye stalks, splitting right through the thick shell,
sinking into the monster's gooey brains. One of his eye stalks sagged to one
side, twitching in such a way that finally made the huge crab look
something other than surprised.
Now he looked dead.
 Back on top of the platform, Karen stood alone.
Fishbowl had her back to the crippled red head, seemingly ignoring
her. The scared girl stumbled around, trying to avoid looking at the gigantic
fallen body of Cthulhu. To do so invoked waves of intense madness that
even her current prone and defenseless state did little to abate.
Taking deep breaths, Karen desperately scanned the platform for any
means of escape. Anywhere to hide, to disappear before...
A noise from the spiral staircase caught her attention. She froze.
Click. Clack. Click. Clack.
The steady beat continued until she saw the hateful head of Ricky
come grinning up the stairs. The noise was that of his exposed toes clicking
against the stone floor, now little more than gnarled stumps of bone jutting
out from his mangled shoes.
“Leave us,” Ricky said.
Without hesitation, the fetid gunk rushed back inside Fishbowl's
helmet. The top slammed shut and the hulking creature stomped away,
busying herself with untying the Leviathans from their post near the empty
thrones.
Ricky walked up to Karen until he hovered directly over her. He said
nothing; only stared at her with that huge whited-out eye bulging from its
haggard socket. The crippled girl tried not to breathe through her nose, and
stifled a gag as the smell of his acid-burned skin wafted toward her.
“Ricky, I-” she began, but the crazed, half-melted man grabbed her
around the throat before she could finish. She cried out in pain as his
skeletal fingertips poked into her flesh, threatening to tear out her jugular.
Ricky yanked the girl off her feet, dragging her, forcing her to stumble
forward toward the platform's edge or have her throat ripped out in the
process. Once there, he threw her to the ground, knelt on one knee and
grabbed her by the hair, pulling her toward the ledge until she teetered half
on, half off the structure.
“Ricky, please!” she begged, vertigo wracking her body from head to
toe as she looked down at the slave pit far below. The people looked like
specks of pepper down there. She reached up and grabbed Ricky's hand,
managing to turn herself around and face her aggressor.
His devil face sneered back at her. She was close enough to see black,
rotting spots along his gum line.
 “Please? Please what, bitch? Please don't kill you? Don't throw you to
those people down there you sold out, just to save your own crippled ass?”
Ricky lifted her face until her nose nearly touched what was left of his.
“You didn't think I'd actually pull it off, did you? You thought I was just
some loser, slaving away at McHumans till my time was up and I got
served as the next meal, didn't you? Betcha feel silly now!” he cackled, as
he shoved her head back down.
In a quiet voice she said, “I saved your life, Ricky. I saved you from
the Berserker. Please don't kill me.”
Ricky smacked her across the mouth. “Why? So we could both live
happily ever after cooking people at McHumans? I don't want you, Karen! I
don't want that life! You chose the monsters! You chose slavery and misery
over hope and freedom!”
Karen stopped crying then, stopped struggling. Her eyes narrowed and
she lifted her head of her own volition, meeting the crazy man eye to eye. “I
did what I had to do, motherfucker. Yeah, to save my own skin. I'm five foot
two and my fucking legs barely work. I don't let that slow me down and I
fucking survived the end of the world. On my own. By myself. If you were
in my shoes, you'd have laid down and died when shit got crazy up there,
when the sky bled, when your neighbors started spontaneously exploding.
“Yeah, I picked a side, and I fucked up, chose wrong. Now I'm gonna
die for it, but you know what? Fuck it. I did what I did. I'd do it again in a
heartbeat, because I do what I have to do to-”
“Survive,” Ricky said, quietly finishing her thought.
He sat back, releasing his hold on her. He offered his hand. Puzzled,
she took it. He stood and pulled her to her feet.
“You're a survivor, Karen. We need survivors.” He nodded toward the
slave pit, where a monster the size of a house with the shape and
consistency of a meatball and half a dozen thick stalks tipped with razor-
sharp mouths terrorized a group of humans in the far corner of the area.
“They need you. What we're about to do now, when we pull the plug and let
the water drain back down to where it came from, it'll be worse than before.
Much worse.”
Fishbowl rode one of the enormous fish-headed beasts over to where
the two humans stood talking, leading the other by its saddle straps. Ricky
climbed the huge, unmounted behemoth, then turned back to face Karen.
“How ‘bout you pick the right side this time?” he said, grinning as he dug
his heels into the fish beast's gills, causing it to leap up and over the
shocked girl, soaring right over the edge of the platform.
The leviathan landed directly on top of the meatball monster—
SPLAT!
—smashing it to bits, covering the terrified slaves in gobs of
gelatinous goop.
Up on the platform, Fishbowl offered Karen her hand. The young
woman took a deep breath and nodded, climbing the leviathan, mounting
the saddle as the gargantuan thing leaped down next to Ricky's fishy steed.
By now, every last monster had fled the banquet hall. Ricky stood on
his saddle, raising his arms up, commanding the attention of the battered
and beaten people standing before him.
“What we're going to do is impossible, but what I just did up there
was, too. We're going to chase down every last one of those monsters and
we're gonna kill them. Then we're gonna pull the plug on this flooded world
and swim back to the surface where we're gonna rebuild civilization so that
my beautiful tentacle babies have a warm, dry place to lay their slimy little
heads at night! And we need each and every one of you to do it! Are you
with me!?!”
The slaves just stared at him, dumbfounded.
“I said, ARE YOU WITH ME!?!”
Suddenly a huge shadow fell over the impromptu rally. All eyes left
Ricky and fixated, horrified over his shoulder. Ricky turned to see the
gigantic form of Cthulhu rise up out of his puddle of shit and puke. The
awesome monster extended his wings and raised his massive clawed arms
into the air. When he spoke, his voice shook the entire hall.
“Ia ia Cthulhu fhtagn!” he screamed.
The slaves began to whimper and whine.
“Ia ia Cthul-” the elder god began again, but stopped midsentence.
When he opened his mouth to chant again, his innards turned inside out and
shot out of his tentacled mouth in a torrent of gore. Great Cthulhu teetered
forward once, and then fell backward off the platform, crashing onto the
stone floor behind the grand pillar towering above the slave pit with a
tremendous thud.
Cthulhu was dead.
The people stood staring, mouths agape, totally unable to process what
had just happened.
 Finally, Karen stood up in her saddle seat, thrust a twisted up little
hand in the air and screamed, “Ia ia, Ricky, Ricky! Ia ia, Ricky Ricky!”
The slaves slowly joined in until the hall echoed with the chants of
praise for their new leader. The man without a face. Humanity's last hope.
Ricky smiled wide and screamed, “Let's go pull us a motherfucking
plug!”
 Olaus Wormius
Rich Bottles Jr.

Of the pleasures and pains of books, much has been written—

specifically in even more books.
It was this very subject that I reluctantly immersed myself in pleasant
conversation at the conclusion of a typical English Literature class on the
Miskatonic University campus in Arkham, Massachusetts one fine Fall day,
as the winds of Autumn collected the vanquished leaves and twirled them
around their once-green hosts just outside the classroom window (which
was in dire need of a good cleansing since the battering of nature’s seasonal
dispatch had almost made the view opaque).
Providing a much clearer perspective from within the classroom that
day was the professor’s enthusiastically presented lesson on the subject of
banned books. Reminded of the familiar phrase of ‘preaching to one’s
choir,’ there were definitely no literary agnostics present in this particular
student congregation that afternoon, everyone completely agreeing with the
instructor’s steadfast position that the banning or burning of books because
of their content was an unforgivable sin against the sacred written word.
It was not until class was dismissed, and the professor had left the
room, that I timidly spoke up, asking a simple question to the remaining
stragglers. “What if a book is truly found to be evil or dangerous?”
My peery colleagues, who were not used to hearing me speak (let
alone disagree with anyone), were taken aback by my queerest of queries
and proceeded to ignore me as they gathered their assorted texts and
pencilry in order to exit the classroom.
“No, really…” I asserted. “If a book were to be proven evil and was a
legitimate threat to society, would you still be against reducing said tome to
ashes?”
“What are you babbling about, Joe? Please give us an example of a so-
called diabolical book that would necessitate being tossed into the fiery pit
of censorship.”
I answered immediately, since the book I had in mind was the
anecdotal antecedent of my peculiar petition. My response prompted the
obligatory mockery and lampoonery from a few of the remaining pupils,
making the expected argument that my particular example was a fictitious
title conjured by a factious freelancer.
But one studious young man refused to participate in the others’
tomfoolery—or else he was just extremely adept at keeping a straight face.
Actually, his name was Tom, but I do not consider that to be a coincidence,
nor do I believe having the name Tom necessarily predisposes one to errant
tomfoolery, as was being displayed at that moment toward my person.
“You may mock our fellow student, Joseph, to your heart’s content on
a number of physical and mental characteristics, but I ask that you please
refrain from laughing at him on this specific subject, because I have first-
hand knowledge that the particular book he mentioned does in fact exist,”
Tom claimed. “I myself have seen a copy at a little-known book boutique in
this very town.”
“Ha!” said one of the wags. “If that is true, Thomas, then you must
provide Joe with said bookseller’s address, so that he may procure said
document and bring it to class tomorrow for our perusal!”

***

Thusly is how I found myself as the last rider on a lonely city bus,
being dropped off at the last bus stop on the outer edge of a long-abandoned
industrial area. “You sure you want off here, kid?” inquired the driver as I
hesitantly exited the bus into the blustery night.
The only moving object, other than my meandering self, that I could
see on any given street was the sight of my bus speeding away, probably
never to return, and leaving me quite alone with nary a goose to chase.
The streetlights were all snuffed out, likely a cost-saving measure by a
city that no longer recognized the area as its own. But haphazardly-placed
security lights mounted on the sides of graffitied factory walls provided
some semblance of illumination on an evening where clandestine cloud
cover blocked even the faintest of cheesy moonbeams.
As I wandered, I wondered why the wonderful owners of these ill-
repaired mills and worn-out warehouses even bothered to protect their lost
investments with exterior lighting and perimeter fencing if there was little
hope of reinhabitation or rehabilitation.
Wave after wave of winter-like winds swept under my outer garment
and swirled around my frail frame, seemingly seeking out the seams of my
clenched cloak in order to whisk away whatever warmth my body coveted
to preserve.
I realized that the streets where I shuffled would be void of all sound
had it not been for the wind whistling through the fence wire and shaking
the razor wire on top. I kept glancing toward the fence tops with each new
howling blast, expecting the metal-on-metal turmoil to rain down sparks
upon my unprotected head.
I was contemplating how the prolific graffiti artists navigated the
barbed barricades (unless their artificial art predated the cyclone chain
enclosures), when I turned a corner and espied a partially-lighted dwelling
at the end of a street ominously marked as “Dead End.”
Could this eminent domain survivor be the bookseller I so desperately
pursued, or would I be wasting my energy walking this thoroughfare, only
to discover a private residence whose dogs may very well hastily pursue me
back up the street?
There were no advertising signs planted in the front yard of the
property or plastered on the front exterior wall of the Victorian-styled
house, but as I climbed the wooden steps of the front porch, I was
confronted with a picture window displaying stacks of books inside. I also
noticed there was a small handwritten “ΦΡΣΝ” sign thumb-tacked to the
front door.
After three failed attempts of turning the knob and pushing into the
door, I wished there was also a “Pull” sign on the door. Eventually, I pulled
open the door and walked into what was either an underused used book
store or a hopeless hoarder’s home. I’d seen better organized book sections
at Goodwill stores—although this place had a similar ungood-willy mold-
like smell.
Every flat surface—whether it be shelf, table or floor—was covered
with piles of passé paperbacks, heaps of haggard hardbacks and towers of
timeworn tomes. Not to mention mounds of moth-eaten magazines.
Shrouded in obscurity behind some huddled masses of humanities,
which were amassed atop a corner countertop, was a white-bearded
spectacled man whom I suspected to perhaps be the oldest human I have
ever encountered in my young lifetime. A black cat hissed at me from above
on a particularly unsteady-looking stack.
“G-good evening, kind sir,” I shuddered and stuttered, believing I
should have shunned the shuttered house.
 “Is there something I can help you with?” asked the man without
getting up from behind the cluttered counter. The cat hissed again.
“Not right now, I believe I’d like to browse for a bit, if that is all right
with you.”
“Suit yourself.” [Hiss]
I had, of course, hoped to find the legendary lexicon on my own
without engaging the ill-mannered merchant, but untrusting eyes seemed to
follow my every move as I maneuvered around the folio-covered floors.
The cat-eye shift was apparently working as scheduled, with the feisty
feline jumping from papered perch to papered perch while I wandered
around the wares.
The old man spoke up after a few minutes, “You looking for porn?”
“Umm, no,” I answered. “No, I’m not looking for pornography.”
After a pause and another hiss from the cat, the man reiterated, “Yes,
you are. You’re looking for porn. You’re one of those boys from the college.
You boys are always looking for porn.”
Frustrated by my failed search and by the fierce inquisition, I
responded, “No sir, I repeat, I am not seeking any type of pornographic
material. The book I desire is called The Necronomicon.”
The cat suddenly squalled, knocking over a stack of books, and
scurried under a cabinet, as a dust cloud formed in the claustrophobic room.
The old man rose to inspect the damage caused by the fallen books. He
crept from around the counter.
“The Necrophiliac?” he coughed.
“What?”
“Did you say you were looking for a book on necrophilia?”
“Necrophilia? No, no, I said the book was called The Necronomicon.
The name is Greek and can be translated as The Book of the Laws of the
Dead, but it’s also been known as The Book of the Names of the Dead, or
simply The Book of the Dead.”
“Like a Kama Sutra for the dead?”
“No, not like a Kama Sutra for the dead. Listen sir, if you have not
heard of The Necronomicon, then I should be taking my leave from your
establishment. I am sorry to have bothered you.”
As I began walking toward the door, the old man returned to his place
behind the counter obscura. When I grabbed the doorknob, I heard him say,
“Actually, I am familiar with that particular title.”
 I was tempted to just continue out the door, never to return to this
unnerving place—especially since I had a long walk back to campus if the
buses had stopped running. I rolled my eyes and bit my lower lip before
turning around.
“You’re familiar with The Necronomicon?”
“Yes, I’m quite familiar with that occult title.”
“Then why, if you don’t mind my asking, did you not express your
familiarity earlier when I first mentioned the book?”
“First of all, I do mind you asking. But if you must know my agenda, I
was not certain that you were astute or well-read enough to really know
what you were requesting.”
“I assure you, sir, I know exactly what I am requesting, and if you
have a copy I should be very interested in purchasing it.”
“Excuse me a moment while I take a quick look in the back room.”
Before leaving his post to enter a door directly behind the counter, I
witnessed the man surreptitiously grab one of those non-descript blank
journal books from a decrepit display on the countertop. I thought at first
that the journal might be his own personal diary, where he kept accounts of
interesting patrons, such as myself, who visit his repository. But such was
not to be the case.
After a few minutes of waiting (during which I checked my
wristwatch numerous times, so I can justly verify that at least three minutes
had indeed expired while I lingered), the old man re-appeared and sat back
down on his stool at the counter. He held up a pinkish book for me to see.
“Is this the title you seek?”
“Are you joking?”
“Excuse me, but I am quite sure this is the book you came here for
today.”
“Sir, you insult my intelligence. What you hold there is one of those
blank journals, which you took from behind the counter and simply wrote
‘Necronomicon’ on the cover with a black marker.”
“It may have the general appearance of one of these blank journals on
the counter, but I assure you it is not. But more importantly, I do not
appreciate some young whippersnapper coming into my emporium and
accusing me of fraud. If that is indeed how you feel, I shall have to ask you
to leave. Good day!”
 I stood flabbergasted by his response and truly did consider running
out the door. His spiteful stare seemed to drill straight through me, causing
my face to heat up and become blushed. Not wanting to appear yellow, I
mustered the courage to ask, “May I inspect it?”
“You want to inspect it, do you?”
“Yes, sir, if that is not a problem, since you seem like a fair
businessman who has his clientele’s best interest at heart.”
“So, first you accuse me of fraud, and now you claim I am a fair
businessman. That is quite fickle, isn’t it? But as far as this particular book
is concerned, if you were really familiar with its content and its legacy, then
you would know that the secretive nature of the text restricts it from being
opened or read, except by its rightful owner.”
“You must take me for a fool, sir.”
“Very well then, if you are no longer interested in acquiring this book,
which you originally claimed to be, and you are no longer interested in
learning the forbidden secrets contained therein, then I have no further time
to waste on a fool’s folly and must request that you leave these premises.”
Catching me off guard with his ultimatum, I quite frankly did not
know what to do or say at that precise moment. I have always been one to
avoid confrontation at all cost, no matter how small, but this difficult old
man was challenging my integrity, at the very least; and was certainly being
rude at the very most. I contemplated the convoluted conversation for a few
seconds, and then I smiled and replied, “Did one of my classmates perhaps
compensate you to orchestrate an elaborate practical prank upon my
person?”
“Do you think they also compensated my cat as a co-conspirator?” he
responded. “Perhaps providing her with some catnip or a feathered string
toy?”
Indeed, I looked down at my right leg to discover the black cat with its
four clawed legs wrapped snuggly around my ankle, preparing to sink its
sharp teeth into my shin. “Aiyee!” I yelped as the feline followed through.
The storekeeper had a hearty laugh at my predicament as I tried
unfurling the furry feu d’enfer from my fibula. I looked toward the cackling
coot for assistance, but my panicked prancing was apparently too precious
to warrant his interceding. I reached down to try to pry open the locked
jaws and got my hand bit as a consequence.
 “Okay, okay!” I begged. “I shall buy the book without further
question!”
The man rang a small bell at the counter and the cat obediently
retreated from its scratching post and scampered away. I limped toward the
counter.
“How much is the book?” I sighed.
“That will be eight dollars and ninety-nine cents, plus tax. Would you
care for a bag?”
“I see that the price you quoted me matches exactly the price on the
cardboard display for the clean journals here on the countertop. That is
quite a coincidence.”
The man glared at me and raised an accusatory brow. I then heard the
cat hiss from some hidden locale.
“Never mind,” I concluded. “Here is a ten dollar bill.”
“Thank you,” the old man snarled as he snatched the sawbuck. “By the
way, all sales are final.”

***

Once the tied brown-paper-bagged book was in my possession, I took

my leave with haste from that horrid place, planning never to return
(especially since all sales were final). Indeed, I could have unwrapped the
parcel in the merchant’s presence and then called him upon revealing the
proof of his charade, but I feared such admonition would only prompt more
hostility on behalf of the old man and his carnivorous cat.
As I rushed up the street, holding the package close to my cloaked
chest, I considered stopping to leaf through the suspected blank pages of the
journal, but I was shocked to discover that all the periphery lighting in the
neighborhood had died out, perhaps from the solar panels not receiving
enough energy on that particularly overcast day. With barely enough
moonlight available to traverse the darkened thoroughfares, I realized I
would have to wait until later to discover what I already knew was in (or
wasn’t in) the book I had purchased.
When I eventually arrived at my dormitory, exhausted from having to
power-walk the distance that the bus had carried me earlier, I had to use my
key to gain entry into the building, and I immediately noticed that the lobby
was quiet, except for a crackling fire that someone had left unattended in
the hearth. I scurried upstairs to my private dorm room.
Kicking my boots off and tossing my coat aside, I headed straight for
the desk upon entering my small but accommodating room. I clicked on the
desk lamp as soon as I was seated and began the task of tearing open the
package.
Much to my shock and awe, I was astonished to discover that the
journal I held in my trembling hands did indeed have words contained
therein. The book contained hand-scrawled, illegible and seemingly foreign
words, but words nonetheless. With the book still open under my burning
and weary eyes, I reached for the switch on the desk lamp, ready to bring
my evening adventure to an anticlimactic close, when the scribbling
suddenly became surmountable to my decipherable psyche.
I had to squint to make sense of it, but I’m certain the opening line
read: Take heed who dares study this primordial prose, for madness and
sorrow are certain to follow.
The next page had a rather disjointed poem, which was even more
difficult to interpret than the cryptic warning. It was written in the same
bizarre long-handed cursive style, but its loops were looser and its curves
were courser.

Such boy was evil,

who orphaned his self,
and cursed his fam’ly,
for lack of their wealth.
At only ten years,
his desires outgrew,
the humbling sal’ries
his parents accrued.
Angered and bitter,
his hatred increased,
till dreamt a wa’fer
disturbing their peace.
Pouring out petrol,
about the abode,
he lit the wood’n
the house did explode.
 Mommy and daddy,
did perish that night,
as he stood list’ning
for cries o’er their plight.

Teardrops dotted the page as I read the final lines of the poem, for the
words reminded me of my own childhood tragedy. I was about the age of
the subject of the prose when a similar house fire destroyed my life as I
knew it at the time. Although I would not coin myself an orphan, since I had
an uncle and aunt to care for me, my parents did indeed die from smoke
inhalation, while my first floor bedroom allowed me quick access/egress to
the fresh air of a new frontier, so to speak. I missed my parents. I cried
myself to sleep that night.
The morning came far too early for my beleaguered brain to
comprehend and it belligerently responded to the alarm clock by awarding
me with a stiff neck and a migraine headache. The sleep that I was able to
achieve was uneasy and restless, being threatened throughout with fierce
dreams of fiery screams.
My English Lit classmates were, of course, anxious to see me that day,
obviously deprived of their predisposition to ridicule me, going on now for
almost the span of twenty-four hours. Starved of scoffing, ravenous for
razzing, taut to taunt, these gentlemen were indeed ready for some close-
fisted chaffing of my person as soon as I entered the room.
“Sorry, boys,” I greeted as I took my seat. “You’ll have to save your
rapacious ribbing for another sucker, because I did not take the bait
yesterday, but instead decided to stay in my dorm room all evening and
studiously study, my ah, studies.”
There was much grumbling and gnashing of retainers from my
cohorts, until the professor arrived and class proceeded without further
incident. Thankfully, the topic of this day was not the subject of that day,
but was a lecture on The Day of the Locust. I also did not dilly dally after
the dissertation, because an hour of oratory on an obscure satirist of the
1930’s did nothing to sooth my still-aching head.
I eventually found solace and some modicum of mellowness to
mollify my agitated angst within the empty catacombs of the campus
library, where nary a student was present as a result of the university’s
omnipotent wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) system, which satisfactorily fed their
Internet-ready personal computers (PCs) and other parentally-purchased
electronic devices (PEDs). I actually preferred the anonymity of the library
computers, especially since software installed on the machines effectively
wiped out the user history upon restart, setting the hard drive back to its
original virgin configuration and not leaving a trace of any activity for that
Internet Protocol address; not that I had anything to hide.
The poem I read the night before was still weighing heavily on my
mind. My childhood guardians, Auntie and Uncley, were never shy about
relating the many positive attributes of my deceased relatives, specifically
my unfortunate parents. But my wards would never discuss the fatal fire
that put me on their doorstep one dreadful winter night. Now I hoped the
World Wide Web would not be so tight-lipped.
I knew the year of the fire and the approximate place of the fire, but
relied on my favorite search engine to fill in the details that my memory
either blocked or never retained in the first place. I found online the
obligatory obituaries, thankful that my survivor’s name was spelled
correctly, but could only find one small article concerning the fire itself,
dated a week after the disaster. The news story was posted as a follow-up to
the original coverage, providing comments from the fire marshal explaining
that his investigation discovered the presence of an accelerant. At the end of
the arson…I mean, article…was the address of a bank account where
donations were being collected for a college fund on my behalf.
“Wha’cha doin’?”
I closed the browser window as soon as I heard the familiar voice
behind me. It was my Asian female friend, Lulu, whom oft times would join
me in my studies in preparation for mid-terms and other critical exams.
However, there were some subjects of my research that should only be
examined by me alone.
“Oh, nothing,” I lied. “I was just surfing the web.”
“For porn?”
“No, not for pornography.”
“Sorry, I just assumed you were, considering how you closed out of it
so… [giggle] prematurely.”
“Very funny. Actually, I was just preparing to return to the sanctity of
my dorm room.”
“Wow, like, I was heading for the dorm too. What a co-inky-dink.”
 If Lulu was expecting an invite to my private room, she was sorely
mistaken. Other times I would have enjoyed her awkwardly-platonic and
unconsummated company, but that afternoon I was more interested in
independently studying the titular contents of the so-called Necronomicon.
“Gimme a call when you’re ready to ‘study’,” she said when we parted
ways inside the dormitory, winking slyly while crooking the middle and
index fingers of both hands to silently communicate the parenthetical
double-entendre meaning of the word “study.”
I anxiously opened the book as soon as I reached the desk, tuning
myself mentally to decipher the next poetic runes that lay before me.

Such man was naïve

to’ve ever believed
an opus o’ccult
t’was really conceived.
He searched ev’ry shelf
ev’ry store ev’rywhere
to find the tract and
its secrets to share.
But said book told more
than he cared to know
told book said of crimes
forgot long ago.
Secrets are secrets
when held deep inside
but secrets are truths
that words cannot hide.
Tho’ books can be burned
like a fam’ly scorned
their spirits live on
in tales to be learned.

I stared at the page, expecting the paper to instantly ignite under my

intense focus and rapidly rising rage. Was I reading more into these vicious
verses than I should have? Were the similarities simply a coincidence? I
studied the writing style and the type of ink on the pages, checking the
backs of the pages for indications of indentations, where perhaps a familiar
writing instrument had been impressed.
Was I conning myself? Was I sleep-writing? Did I write these queer
quatrains, perhaps unconsciously—or perhaps conscientiously blocking out
the compositions from my conscious mind so that they would not weigh
heavily on my conscience? Alliteration, annihilation, acceleration... those
were the words that raced through my head like a bullet in a game of
Russian roulette.
Even though I’d always considered books to be the only friends I
could really trust, this book appeared to be mocking me like the false
friends I’ve had to endure throughout my young life. Books had always
kept me company, soothed my troubled mind, taken me places I’d never
been, entertained me, thrilled me and educated me. But not this one… This
book haunted my psyche and disturbed my tranquility. I hated it.
Since spontaneous combustion was not possible through telepathic
means, I decided to take the wretched work downstairs to the lobby and
fling it into the fireplace. I resolutely marched down the steps and crossed
the lobby, but the gauntlet of inevitability sprung up on two sides: no one
had bothered to place a fire in the cold fireplace; and Lulu was sitting in the
lobby all hot and bothered.
“Wha’cha got?”
I looked down at the book in my hand. “Nothing; it’s nothing.”
“Is that porn?”
“No, it’s not pornography.”
“Well, if it’s a textbook, maybe we can study it together. Maybe in
your room?”
“Maybe. I mean, it’s not a text book. Listen, give me some time to sort
some things out, then I’ll give you a call, all right?”
“Sure thing,” she responded from her seat in front of the empty hearth.
“You have my cell, but don’t take too long, ‘cause it’s getting chilly down
here.”
“Okay,” I agreed, getting ready to take my leave and return to the
safety of my room. I turned to walk back toward the staircase, but then I
heard her voice call after me.
“Hey, Joey, do you know anything about starting a fire?”
“What?” I answered, startled by the question.
“Can you build a fire?” she repeated, pointing at the fireplace.
 “Ah, no. No, I do not. I cannot. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
“Don’t forget to call,” she sang.
A few minutes later, I was back in my locked room with that damnable
book still in my hands. Should I throw the book in the trash can and take the
risk of some nosey dumpster-diving garbage-picker finding it? Should I try
tearing out each page and flushing them down the toilet, taking the risk of
clogging up the already condom- and tampon-laden plumbing? Or should I
just quit acting so paranoid?
In my infinite, advanced-for-my-age wisdom, I decided to prove to
myself that my earlier conclusions about the poems were rash and illogical.
I was obviously jumping to conclusions before I had all the facts. Thus, I
went back to my desk and cracked open the book once again.

Such girl is evil,

but hides it quite well,
promising heaven
and giving you hell.
You’ll never please her,
tho’ try as you may,
she’ll never be yours
so watch what you say.
She’ll steal your secrets,
by gaining your trust,
taking advantage
of uncontrolled lust.
Beware of her wiles,
beyond what you see,
because yore weak will
be at her mercy.
Love’r with vengeance,
Uncover her lies,
Leave’r there dying
Under redd’ning eyes.

“No!” I screamed aloud, spraying spittle across the page. I was

determined not to give credence to the wicked words, whether they
portended to foretell my past, my present or my future. I was resolved to
prove the book a fraud; its words spurious and innocuous. I, and I alone,
drive my future, I concluded, and no tattered or untattered text was going to
tell me otherwise.
I would also not allow some scribbled polysyllables to skewer my
perceptions of a person with pure intentions. I knew Lulu to be as pure as
Shakespearian snow that is blown into drifts and is untrodden and clean. I
called her up.

***

“I was starting to think you weren’t gonna call,” Lulu said as soon as I
opened the door.
“Now what would have given you that impression?” I asked, inviting
her into the room with a wave of my hand.
“I don’t know. You’ve just been acting a bit strange lately, if you know
what I mean.”
“No, I don’t know what you mean.”
When Lulu sat down on my bed, I immediately noticed that I had
failed to properly conceal the book under the mattress. The tip of the
hardcover popped out from beneath the covering as soon as she descended
upon the bed. Embarrassed at the unsightly protrusion, I quickly joined her
on the bed and surreptitiously tucked in the offending object for obscurity.
All anatomy study jokes aside, we silently consented to forego the
small talk and get down to vocation. Our mouths were soon occupied in a
more physical form of communication, while our hands were employed in
the undertaking of uncloaking each other. I was suddenly thrust into the role
of jobseeker.
Her unclothed female body parts were a source of arousal for me, and
I explored these areas with great vigor, including her mammary glands and
vaginal region. The playful foreplay maneuvers allowed both of our bodies
to prepare for coital activity, specifically the rigidity of my genitals and the
lubrication of hers. I then inserted my male member into her female
fragment and proceeded to produce the friction that would eventually
culminate in our mutual fulfillment.
After Lulu completed her post-coital cleansing, I took my turn in the
bathroom. As I showered her scent from my skin, I laughed to myself over
how silly I had been to get worked up over the meaningless meanderings of
that mean-spirited missive. My level of contentment at that particular
moment was not even curtailed by the realization that Lulu had selfishly
used both towels to dry her petite body, leaving me to use a couple of small
wash clothes to remove the steamy dampness from my body.
When I opened the bathroom door and walked back into the room
where Lulu was waiting, I was shocked to see her sitting on the bed reading
The Necronomicon. Did our sexual intercourse cause the book to become
dislodged from underneath the mattress?
She looked up at me with a face of bewilderment that went far beyond
what my mere nakedness should have provoked.
“Did you write this sick stuff?” she demanded. “Are you some kind of
psycho or something?”
I was suddenly blinded by rage—but not blind enough that my hands
could not find the tender flesh of her exposed throat. The weight of my
body knocked her flat upon the bed, and I watched unblindly as her
frightened face turned redder and redder while I squeezed the breath from
her trachea. Her blood-streaked eyes jutted out comically from her slanted
lids, like hundred-year-old eggs emerging from a bucket of horse urine.
“You won’t steal my secrets!” I proclaimed.
Only when my clenched hands could no longer feel the pounding
pulse in her neck did I realize what I had done. I slowly peeled my white-
knuckled fingers from around her throttled throat and looked down
solemnly at my hands. “Did these hands do this? Did I do this?” I mumbled
to myself.
I jumped from the bed, almost tripping over the discarded book.
“What am I going to do now?” I asked while pacing the floor.
Even if I could find a way to remove Lulu from my room, how would
I dispose of her body? People had seen us together that evening. People
knew we were friends. Were we friends? What kind of friend strangles you
to death? I was a terrible friend. I was a terrible person. I was a strangler. I
was an unfriendly, terrible, strangler...
Then I saw that damned book on the floor. If that damned book knew
everything about me, everything that I’d done, and everything that I am
going to do, then I thought maybe it could also tell me how to get out of this
sinister situation.
I fell onto the floor and grabbed the book. I rifled through the
remaining pages, trying to find an answer to my affliction. But the rest of
the book was blank; completely empty, all-white pages of absolute
nothingness. I was a fool to think that anything in that baneful book could
in any way be helpful.
When I turned the final page, I saw a small round seal stuck in the
center of the inner back cover. The words on the label read: Olaus “Book”
Wormius – All Sales Are Final!
I began cursing the old man who sold me the book and I pledged to
myself, right then and there, that even if I get sent to prison for the rest of
my life, I will first get the satisfaction of returning this book back to the old
man and receiving a complete and unconditional refund of the full purchase
price, including tax.

***

I stormed from the dormitory, thunder booming beneath my skull cap.

My shadowy soul and muddled mind became instantly acclimated to the
darkened wind-swept streets of Arkham. I cannot say that I remember each
step, each thoroughfare or each block traversed on that fateful cross-town
journey, but I do recall the feeling of fright and dread that rained over me as
I approached the edifice of lost editions.
I found that the windows were darker than on my previous visit, and
there was no “Open” sign on the door. But the door was unlocked. I decided
that the door would also remain unknocked.
I remembered to pull open the door and did so as quietly as I could,
but I was met with an unexpected shock as something scampered betwixt
my boots. I gasped at the brief encounter, and then realized that it must have
been that caterwauling feline. If that beast wanted its freedom, who was I to
stand in its way?
I proceeded through the doorway, feeling around on the inside wall for
a light switch. It didn’t take me long to locate the switch and illuminate the
room full of books. “Old man, are you here?!” I called out.
All remained quiet as I glanced around the room, but then I sensed a
low buzz, which seemed to intensify as I walked closer to the counter. It
was as if all the words in all the books on all the shelves were murmuring to
me simultaneously. I felt the book in my hand become warm to the touch
and I looked down at it, suddenly hearing it speak to me: “Is there
something I can help you with?”
 I quickly dropped The Necronomicon to floor, but continued hearing
the voices from the other books ramble on inside my head, like I was stuck
within some large cafeteria for the criminally insane and I had forgotten to
take my sedatives. “Old man, are you here??!!” I cried out over the
menacing muttering.
I noticed that the small door behind the counter was open, which was
where the old man had temporarily disappeared during my earlier visit. I
walked slowly around the counter and yelled into the darkened void, “Old
man, are you in there???!!!”
I hesitantly walked into the pitch-black room, suddenly getting hit in
the face with a cold metal chain. I instinctively pulled down on the chain,
causing a bare bulb to click on and bathe the room in yellowish light. I was
in a bathroom—an empty bathroom. “Where are you, old man,” I
whispered to myself.
I was preparing to leave when I caught a glimpse of an odd reflection
in the mirror above the sink. I walked closer to the mirror, unable to take
my eyes off the reflection, and realized once and for all my fate. Staring
back at me in the reflection was my face, but I barely recognized myself
behind the world-weary eyes, aged wrinkles and thick gray beard.
I rehearsed, “Is there something I can help you with?”
 Eat Shit and Die
Frank J. Edler

On the outskirts of the New England town of Innsmouth stood a dingy

brick building, encrusted with soot and algae, set in an alcove of trees. A
cracked and warped oak door provided the only visible ingress to the
building. Slits in the brick not wide enough to fit an arm through served as
windows. The square building was only one story tall, but from the center
of the building, a spire shot out to the sky; it had no architectural reason for
being there and gave the building a sense of uneasiness about it. There
were no markings on the building to indicate the nature of the business that
took place inside, but most townsfolk understood the building to be called
The Innsmouth Inn. No light could be seen emanating from the slits in the
early twilight.
A figure cloaked in red velvet and trimmed in gold approached the
building. The robed figure rapped on the door in a manner to indicate they
were tapping out a code. After a moment the mysterious person put an ear
to the door, then knelt down and retrieved a scroll from within their cloak
and slid it under the threshold. The robed figure stood up and the door
opened to allow his entry . It was pitch black inside and no one could be
seen opening the door from within. The robed figure entered, and the door
creaked shut behind them.
Over the next hour, five other people approached the building. All of
them wore the same exact red velvet cloak, and all of them gained entrance
in the same manner. When the final person had entered, candlelight began
to slither out the window slits of the building. In the forest surrounding the
rear of the building, the screech of an owl echoed.

***

The first robed figure to enter stood in the pitch black room. They
sensed the presence of the others as they came in. They could not see the
others in the darkness, nor could they hear their footsteps. The first robed
figure was not expecting the others.
The fifth person entered the room. A candle lit seemingly on its own,
then another and another. Soon the room was bathed in the warm flickering
glow of a ring of candles. The candles encircled an elevated altar in the
center of the room, upon which was a plain wooden chair. Sitting
phlegmatically was a very obese woman clad in a white toga. She was
situated directly under the unorthodox spire of The Innsmouth Inn.
Outside the altar and ring of candles were six chairs also encircling the
altar. The first robed figure and his new cohorts all took a seat. They did
this quietly and without hesitation, as if they had rehearsed this moment
before. They all sat patiently with their hands folded in their lap and
waited. The woman did not look at them nor acknowledge their presence.
From the shadows entered a prophet dressed in a gray suit adorned
with a shocking red string tie. The robed figures all knew who he was: he
was the one who invited them here. He was holding an odd looking
wooden box small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. The lid was
domed with many facets, like the crown of a diamond. Each facet
displayed an odd symbol, and each symbol glowed an eerie green. As he
came closer to the others, they could hear a faint sound coming from the
box; it sounded like Gregorian Monks humming a single sustained note.
The prophet stepped between the robed figures and the ring of candles
and began to walk around the circle of the altar. He looked at each robed
figure as he walked past them, but said nothing until he had made a
complete circuit. With the box palmed in his right hand, he covered the top
of it with is left, and the humming ceased. He began walking around the
circle in the opposite direction.
“You are here because you wish to be here. No one has forced any of
you to come here this evening. We make no judgments as to your need to
be here. You have received your instructions for the ceremony, and they
must be followed to the letter. Now, if you all are prepared with your
offering, we can begin.”
The first robed figure reached into his cloak and felt for the warm
mass encased in a zip lock bag to be certain it was there. The others
appeared to make the same sort of gesture. The first robed figure hoped to
the gods that he was the only one with the type of offering he brought.
Six midgets dressed only in red velvet loin cloths paraded into the
room from the same shadows that had veiled the prophet's entrance. They
chanted ‘hut-hut-hut-hut-hut’ and they marched in on the double. Each held
a plain white roll of toilet paper. They placed the rolls of toilet paper under
each robed figure’s seat, then marched out empty-handed, still repeating
their cadence of ‘hut-hut-hut-hut’.
The prophet nodded and faced the altar. The obese woman had begun
to breathe more heavily. Her chest rose and fell more quickly. She looked
eager, hungry for something. The prophet placed the box down on the altar
and unscrewed the lid off the top. The eerie green glow that illuminated the
symbols inlaid on the lid now bathed the obese woman in a green hue. She
threw her head back in what appeared to be ecstasy. Slowly, her face
oriented itself back on the box; the room was filled with her deep cackling.
The prophet bowed to her and walked off back into the shadows.
The obese woman stood. She belched, and a brown fog erupted from
her mouth. The putrid brown burp cloud floated up into the darkness of the
spire above her. The dark was so black in the spire it nearly had texture.
The burp cloud disappeared into the black soup, and the darkness actually
rippled. A sound that could barely be categorized as a voice belched out,
“Iä... ngai... ygg...” from somewhere and nowhere up inside the spire.
The obese woman smiled and looked upon the robed figures at last.
She turned to face the last robed figure to have entered the building. She
tore off the white toga she was draped in, revealing a black leather bikini.
It covered only where it had to, and barely that much. The rolls of fat that
enveloped the straps and strings of the bikini made it look like even less
than it already was.
“What have you brought as an offering, you insignificant piece of
filth?!” she sneered.
The robed figure stood and removed his hood. He was a very old
man, wrinkled and bald. Liver spots populated his face like a brood of
bugs. He held out his zip lock bag with his right hand. It was overfilled
with doughnuts. The bag was bulging with doughnuts so tightly packed
that the jelly and cream filling of some had squeezed out and oozed around
them. It nearly looked like a bag of digestive organs.
The leather-clad obese woman’s eyes lit up. She let out an orgasmic
moan, her mouth opening wide. Her tongue slithered out like it was an arm
of an octopus, making a sickly wet sound as it unfurled. Her thick, meaty
tongue reached out over the eight-foot span between them and snatched the
bag of doughnuts from the elderly man’s hand like an elephant snatching a
peanut.
 Her oral appendage reeled the bag of doughnuts back in. She took
them directly into her mouth without opening the bag and chewed, like a
cow with a giant wad of cud. She swallowed with a bit of visible effort,
then she started hacking something up. She spit out the bile-coated zip lock
bag back at the elderly man, strands of mucus and bile splattering his face.
His skin began to smolder and the wicked fluids burned into his skin. The
elderly man stood stoic and fought off tears of pain as his skin burned. He
wanted to reach for the roll of toilet paper placed under his chair, but
understood that action would disrupt the ceremony.
The obese lady ignored the elderly man’s suffering and turned to the
next robed figure. She commanded the person to rise and remove their
hood. They did as commanded and revealed herself to be a middle-aged
woman, her long straight auburn hair pulled back tightly in a ponytail. The
obese woman demanded her offering. The woman reached into her cloak
and produced a bag of what appeared to be some sort of food wrapped in
bacon.
The obese woman looked pleased. “Mmm, bacon. I love bacon.
What have you wrapped with it, woman?”
“It’s bacon-wrapped bacon, if you please. Double fried in its own fat,”
she said meekly.
The obese woman’s eyes widened. Her mouth opened and her
tentacle-like tongue slithered out of her mouth once again to retrieve the
bag of bacon-wrapped bacon. Rapidly, she fetched her next offering and
devoured it bag and all once again. She swallowed and her body quivered
in pleasure as she once again proclaimed her love of bacon. The obese
woman then started to grunt until she projected both the plastic bag and
vomit back onto the the middle-aged woman.
The woman stood unmoving just as the elderly man had. She was
covered in the malodorous cocktail of the obese woman’s vomit. Though it
did not burn, it was the foulest odor the woman had ever smelled in her
life. She tried her best not to wrinkle her nose in disgust and forced her
nostrils to become accustomed to the smell as quickly as possible.
The obese woman moved her attentions to the robed figure sitting next
to the middle-aged woman. She was about to command the person to rise
and remove their hood when a snicker escaped from another robed figure
on the other side of the circular altar. The obese woman spun around in a
dramatic ballerina's pirouette. “Did you dare speak out of turn?!” she
boomed. “Do you understand the penalty for disrupting the ceremony, puny
mortal?! Rise and remove your cloak, you corruptible sot!”
The figure rose and threw off their cloak; it was a clown. The clown
stood there snickering in his baggy blue polka dotted pants, oversized
yellow tie with what appeared to be ketchup stains all over it, and of course
a painted on grand smile and cliche bulbous red nose. The green curly hair
wiggled in time with his shoulders and his giggles became more animated.
The obese woman scowled at the clown.
“Lä... ngai... ygg...” she shouted up into the spire. She repeated the
phrase over and over, each time a little louder than the last. With each
successive repetition of the phrase, the thick darkness contained within the
spire began to twist and churn. It worked itself into a cyclone of twisting
darkness when the obese woman’s voice rose to its crescendo.
Several black tentacular arms similar to the obese woman’s tongue
swirled down from the spire. Ungodly moaning spat forth from the twisting
dark maelstrom. The arms reached down to the clown as he continued his
giggles uncontrollably. The jet black tentacles wrapped around his waist
then pulled his ridiculous pants down around his absurdly large red clown
shoes. The clown wasn’t wearing underwear. Another dark tentacle
lowered from the spire and snaked up the clown's sleeve. It produced a pair
of shit-stained red polka dotted boxers. The tentacle whipped the clown in
the face with his own skidmarked underpants and retreated back into the
spire.
The remaining tentacles started to envelop the clown's limbs and
torso. His giggles began to cease as the tentacles constricted. Suddenly the
clown's laughter stopped dead in its tracks as he made a face that looked
like he just sucked on the world’s most sour lemon. The obese woman
began to mock the clown's giggles from the altar.
“What’s the matter, clown? You don’t like to get fucked in the ass?”
Her giggles progressed into downright maniacal laughter.
The tentacles picked the clown up off the floor and hovered him just
above the obese woman situated in the center of the altar. The clown was
exposed for all to witness the sleek black tentacles raping the clown’s hairy
ass. The sight resembled a swarm of eels fighting their way into the guts of
a tiny crevice. The clown was screaming from the torture. Blood began to
sputter out of the tangles of arms battling over entrance into the clowns
anus. Then the tentacles swiftly rose up into the black spire, taking the
clown with it. The clown disappeared entirely when he entered the mouth
of the spire, and the dark storm within it ended abruptly.

***

“I hope a lesson has been learned.” The obese woman said in an

admonishing tone. “Any further interruptions will be met with an even
more unpleasant punishment. Let us proceed.”
The obese woman returned her focus to the robed figure she was
addressing before the interruption. She demanded the figure stand, remove
their hood, and present their offering. The figure did as instructed. Their
hood was removed to reveal a green mohawk coiffed punk rocker, replete
with a smattering of facial piercings. He held out his zip lock bag filled
with raw red meat.
The obese woman’s scowl softened a bit; she seemed pleased.
“Finally, some flesh! But the disturbance has elevated my hunger, and
despite your attempt to ruse, I know you’ve come here today as a tandem.”
She turned to the hooded figure seated next to the punk rocker and
instructed them to do as the others had. The person stood and revealed their
identity to be another punk, a female this time, with spiked red hair, an
assortment of her own facial piercings, and a surgeon’s mask over her
mouth and nose. She offered a bag of brown greasy gravy, so overfilled it
was leaking out and dripping gelatinous slop that landed on the floor with a
wet THWAP with each drop. The obese woman was tickled pink.
Her maw opened up wide once again. This time two tongue tentacles
burst forth from her mouth and retrieved the offerings. She simultaneously
ingested both and swallowed in one gulp. She had been overjoyed with the
offering of red meat and gravy, and displayed her pleasure with a toothy
Cheshire cat grin. She gave a curious look, held up her pointer finger in a
‘give me one second’ gesture, then turned around and bent over, pointing
her ass right in the punks' direction. From somewhere deep within her vile
body, a guttural rumble gurgled. Her ass cheeks swelled like two balloons
being inflated. She reached back with her hands and spread those ass
cheeks, revealing a dark brown whale eye of an asshole, dripping with a
slimy green goo.
The obese woman then let out a fart so repugnant it would have upset
the feelings of an elephant seal. A thick green cloud steamed out of her
asshole and, as her puckered starfish fluttered from the rush of noxious air
escaping it, tiny droplets of wet fecal matter expelled as well. The two
punks were bathed in pieces of wet fart and smelled like the pit of a port-a-
potty to boot. They stood stoically, knowing full well what was good for
them. The green mohawked punk grinned out of one side of his mouth.
The obese woman turned to face the final figure yet to reveal their
identity, the first robed figure to enter The Innsmouth Inn. Before she could
tell the robed figure to rise, the dark in the spire began to ripple and hum.
“Ngai....yrrh....N’Rykeh....yggg e Yaggoth,” it announced down into the
room. The obese woman had craned her neck up and was listening. She
returned her attention to the final robed figure and nodded in contempt. She
had received a message or instruction for the dark in the spire.
“It is time. We must act. The offerings have been made and they are
sufficient. The time has come to receive the gift you have come here for,”
she announced.
The obese woman stripped the leather bikini from her grotesque body.
She looked up into the spire and opened her mouth wide. The dark
maelstrom churned once again. A wind began to whip in the room, but did
not blow out the candles, as they were not disturbed whatsoever by the
winds. The darkness turned and spiraled faster and faster. The hum that
occurred when the darkness came alive began to change into a thunderous
rumble.
The sleek, black tentacles lowered themselves from the swirling
darkness again. They dangled straight down and entered the obese
woman’s mouth, probing deep inside of her. The tentacles began to spasm
and something began to get sucked up the tentacles back into the darkness,
like a tennis balls being sucked through a garden hose. This went on for
several minutes, until the balls of whatever had finally ceased to rise up
through the dark arms.
The darkness in the spire stopped swirling, and instead began to thrum
like a heartbeat. Bigger balls of something began to pump back down
through the tentacles and into the gullet of the obese woman. Globule upon
globule pumped into her body. Her body responded by bloating like a
water balloon being overfilled, only she wasn't getting fatter. Her entire
body grew in size proportionally.
She grew into a nine foot tall behemoth; her girth now took up the
entire altar. The tentacles fled into the dark when they had completed
nurturing her new form. A wicked smile grew on her face. She put her
back to the elderly man and bent over, exposing her massive ass to him.
She spread her ass cheeks wide. What the elderly man saw was not a
cavernous asshole, but something that looked like the underbelly of a
starfish with its arms stuffed into its mouth. This puckered starfish had a
lot of arms, too.
The greenish-gray arms began to dislodge themselves from the grand
maw that served as the obese-woman-turned-giant-monster's anus. The
many arms that now protruded from around the obese monstrosity’s asshole
stuck straight out in a frightening sunburst of rubbery appendages. The
green goo that coated her asshole in its human form now drooled profusely
from the monster's tentacular poop chute. The ass end of the obese
monstrosity seemed now to be the head of the creature; the obese woman’s
head now just a vestigial lump.
It was the most frightening asshole the elderly man had seen in all his
years, and he would know, being a retired proctologist. A bead of sweat
formed on his brow and panic crept into his soul, but he dared not move.
He was promised eternity if he came here tonight. He would ‘be forever,’
the apocryphal prophet had promised him the day the elderly man agreed to
come here. It was a bold promise, one worth standing up to this beastly
creature for eternity. Also, he really liked the red velvet cloak the prophet
handed him to wear.
The tentacles started to reach back into its maw. One by one the arms
retrieved what appeared to be lumps of shit;some smooth, some chunky,
some solid, some flaky, some brown, some black. When all the tentacles
held a lump of crap in its grasp, it began to sling the slop at the elderly
man. They hit off his bald head like slaps and punches to the face. Some
hit with a ‘thwap,’ some hit with a meaty wet smack. The tentacles flung
them hard, and they were leaving marks on the elderly man’s head. He
doubled over and pieces of shit slammed into his gut. One baseball-sized
turd bullseyed him on top of his head, and he went down. The top of his
skull was indented, blood trickled out of his ear, and he did not move again.
The obese monstrosity readjusted his aim to the middle-aged woman.
The woman had come here on the promise of new love to come. The
apocryphal prophet told the divorced mother of two children–whose self-
centered ex-husband had abandoned them in the middle of the night for a
cocktail waitress from Oklahoma that he met via a singles dating app on his
iPhone, the very iPhone she had to work two jobs to afford to pay for so he
could get an edge on a job search he never was on–that she would be
awarded the kind of love that lasts forever if she attended this ceremony
tonight. She really admired the lush velvet robe the prophet handed her.
The middle-aged woman stared into the eye of the sloppy asshole aimed
right at her and had doubts the prophet was being honest with her. She
turned to run as the slimy asshole dilated twice its size and rocketed a piece
of shit the size of a watermelon right at her head.
Obliterate would be the most appropriate word to describe what that
giant piece of projected shit did to that woman’s head. The enormous
oblong fecal rocket shattered, as did its target. It was nearly impossible to
decipher what was shit and what was flesh left lying on the floor above her
headless body.
The final hooded figure sat unmoving, trying not to draw attention to
himself. The punks were the next logical target, anyway. The obese
monstrosity did not stray from that logic. She maneuvered her monumental
anus into position. Both punks were actually snickering;rebels to the end,
those two.
“Bring on the shit!” decried the chick punk. She motioned like a
boxer goading her opponent closer.
“This world has shit on us all our lives!” The guy punk spoke as if he
were giving a sermon. “Your teachers, your lawyers, your politicians, your
police have shit on us since the day we were born! Bring on your shit, Miss
Calamari-ass, because that's why we are here, to get shit on by your god!
Rebels are we!”
“YAR!!” proclaimed the chick punk.
The ass tentacles shot out and captured both punks, lifting them off the
floor. The tentacle ensnaring the chick punk lowered her headfirst toward
the waiting asshole. The spikes of her hair did nothing to slow the passage
of her skull, and a sickening 'POP' came once it was fully inserted.. Many
other tentacles moved in to shove the rest of her body into the asshole. The
chick punk wriggled feebly, but she was no match for the tentacles and was
enveloped whole in moments.
“Hey!” the guy punk called out, “We came here to be shit on! This is
NOT how it’s supposed to go! We got gypped! This is a bunch of shit,
man!”
 “That’s not entirely true,” the punk chick argued through a wall of
flesh. “We did get these bad-assed robes out of the deal. How punk is
that?”
The tentacles squeezed the guy punk hard around the throat and
shoved him headfirst into the asshole as well. They did not attempt to
shove him in any further than his neck. He kicked, clawed, punched, and
flailed to no avail. He suffocated in the asshole.
The tentacles removed his lifeless body and flung it back onto the
floor. The obese monstrosity grunted and growled. The punk chick birthed
out of the asshole covered in sticky, gritty diarrhea. Her dead body was
nothing more than gelatinous guano. The obese monstrosity clenched her
asshole shut, pinching the punk chick in half with her shit-cutter. The torso
slopped on top of the lifeless punk. He was shit on, after all.

***

The final robed figure rose out of their seat. They removed their
hood. He was a dork, the quintessential nerd:his face was lanky, his nose
oversized, and his Adam's Apple was pointed like an arrowhead. His hair
was greasy and mussed up from the hood. He actually wore prescription
steampunk goggles. His overbite was breathtaking.
"We knew you would be trouble." The obese monstrosity actually
spoke these words from its asshole. The voice was high and squeaky,
almost as if a talented child were forming it by means of armpit or cupped
palm farts.
"I have been sent as an agent of my guild, The Brotherhood of
Innsmouth, to end your reign of shitting on this town!" the nerd declared.
He produced his zip lock bag; it was filled with the collective
droppings of The Brotherhood of Innsmouth. The dork did not hesitate to
present the offering, but instead hurled it at the obese monstrosity. The bag
of The Brotherhood of Innsmouth's combined shit struck the obese
monstrosity dead in the brown eye. It splattered and coated the asshole like
a wad of Spackle flung at a wall.
***

Just hours before, The Brotherhood had performed their own

purification rites over the bag that each took a turn crapping into. They
blessed the bag and canted the sacred texts their DM had written up the
night before, just after their weekly D&D guild was victorious in an intense
campaign against a rival guild at the local comic book shop.
The enchanted poo was meant to rid the quiet burg of Innsmouth from
the creature that resided within its darkest recesses. The creature was
revealed to The Brotherhood after a long Saturday night of chugging down
liters upon liters of Mountain Dew and scarfing enough Cheetos to put them
all into a sugar coma aggravated by a carbohydrate overdose. They tapped
the spirit of their Parker Brothers Ouija board while in a nerdy drunken
haze. The spirit told them of the creature in the spire and appointed them
with the quest to remove it.
The Brotherhood figured they had too much sugar-and-caffeine-
infused soda and dismissed the message from the Ouija board; that was,
until the prophet interrupted their D&D tournament at the comic book store
that fateful night. He interrupted an epic battle between The Brotherhood's
band of goblin warriors pitted against their rivals' army of carnivorous
Orcs. He walked up to the table, knocked all their maps, dice, and tokens to
the floor. The prophet slammed down the invitation scroll and told them it
would gain them passage to fight the epic battle they had been appointed to
fight. The prophet told them he was the messenger of the Ouija spirit. The
prophet assured them victory and everlasting affection from the populace.
They would forever be remembered as heroes, not nerds.
The Prophet purchased six red velvet hooded cloaks on his way out of
the comic book store. They were cheap knockoffs from some movie about
a boy wizard that was all the rage at one point in time. The cloaks were
adorned in gold trim and looked important enough. They would be a fine
accoutrement to fool all the rubes who were to be sacrificed.
Milson was chosen by The Brotherhood to go and smite the creature.
The Brotherhood chose him because his D&D character had an enchanted
+5 two-handed sword, and Milson himself had a replica medieval sword his
parents purchased for him from the gift shop in the Cinderella castle at Walt
Disney World when he was twelve years old. Milson accepted the mission
to impress a girl who had no idea Milson even existed. It’s always about a
girl, isn’t it?

***
 The crap plastered to the monstrosity’s asshole began to bubble
outward like a piece of gum. It grew and grew, the walls of the bubble
becoming thin and more opaque, yet smattered with chunks of who-knew-
what. Milson’s smile turned down to a worried frown. The bubble grew so
large that the monstrosity could have been seen as Atlas carrying the weight
of the world on his shoulders, only it would be the monstrosity carrying the
weight of the turd bubble on its ass.
The bubble burst. Shit-shrapnel exploded in all directions. Milson
was coated in the enchanted poo himself now. The enchanted bag of shit
did nothing. Milson was blinded by the pasty feces that now coated him
head to toe. He heard the vile laugh of the obese monstrosity, andhe wet
himself.
“You silly sot. Did you actually believe you and your band of little
lady boys could actually summon the magic you need to cast me away?”
The obese monstrosity spoke out of its asshole, which now resembled the
mouth of a young child who blows a bubble that pops and sticks around
their lips, only with shit instead of bubble gum. “You, young man, have
been duped like the rest. You were brought here not to conquer, but to be
conquered.. You are sacrifices. For centuries I have shit on this town as
I’ve shit on you all here this night.”
“You have not been lied to entirely, however. You and the others' lives
will be remembered forever. This town will memorialize you all. Well,
except for that clown; we are keeping him, he’s a funny guy. They will
build monuments to your loss. Generations will recall the sacrifices you’ve
made tonight, though their reasons may not be quite true. Ahh well, it’s
better to burn out than to fade away. Do you have any final words, young
one?”
“I... I... uhhh” was all Milson managed to stutter out before the obese
monstrosity let loose an onslaught of thick, chunky, foul diarrhea from its
asshole. It spewed and spewed like water from a fire hydrant. Milson was
buried over his head in shit. Encased in a bowel movement the likes of
which had never been expelled in this world, Milson suffocated and died.
The dark in the spire swirled. The black tentacles lowered from the
vortex and ensnared the obese monstrosity. It was hoisted back into the
black of the spire. The swirling black storm stopped. The candles all
snuffed out at once. The bodies on the floor lay still in the dark. All was
calm. A cricket scampered in under the old wooden front door and its chirp
echoed in the chamber.

***

The people of Innsmouth could no longer take the smell. A team was
dispatched out to the old Innsmouth Inn, where the locals said the smell
seemed to be coming from. The building was collapsed, the telltale spire
lay crumbled upon the ruins. The town made arrangements to have the
rubble removed. The uneasy old building’s demise was a welcome relief to
the town. They would be able to condemn the site and build anew.
The grotesque scene they found inside was never mentioned in the
papers. A satanic ritual of some sort had taken place, as best they could
figure. A memorial to their memory was indeed constructed next to the new
building on the site: a community center was built. A space for all the town
to come and commune together. A place the town could all come together
under one roof– not a roof, exactly; a dome. A dome provided the building
with a big open space inside for sports or entertainment or special
ceremonies.
The memorial to the victims stood right out front, a reminder to
everyone that this space was not given up lightly. Lives had to be lost for
the town to carry on.
Up in that dome, a black seed had implanted itself in the darkest
recess. The black seed grew slowly. Over time, the dark will overtake the
light, and the townspeople will commune one final time in this building.
Everyone gets shit on eventually.
 The Horror at the Garrsmouth
Orgy
Jason Wayne Allen

You may disregard this hastily scrawled narrative as nothing more

than the nervous hallucinations of a mad, suicidal, degenerate pervert.
However, the validity of the following can be found at the Garrsmouth Inn,
where my dear wife Aethel lies dead with her lower extremities torn
asunder, and the abominable, batrachian progeny that five shots from a
revolver eventually brought down, and, by reasonable assumption, should
also lie dead.
I consciously saved the last shot for myself.
As I sit on a lip of cyclopean rock in the Catskills, the sun bleeds red
light, birthing a new day over my beloved Providence, and my entire being
is surrounded by the maddening, fetid aroma of…fish! I curse those
damnable creatures of Garrsmouth! I curse myself for being unable to fulfill
my duties as spouse and lover, and as I stand, this vinyl gimp outfit
wrapping me like a second epidermis, I shake my fist to the sky and curse,
most of all, craigslist.com…

***

My name is Peabody Pabody. Astronomer, antiquarian, and expert on

strange cults, I received my Master’s Degree in Astronomy when I was a
mere nineteen years of age. I am most noted as the author of the tome The
Algebraic Theory And Fourth Dimensional Geometry Within The Aether Of
Pluto, which was critically acclaimed by many respected astronomers in the
field and I was given The New Star Award (the highest honor one can
receive as an astronomer) for my effort. I was asked by the President of
Miskatonic University to take a position as a professor.
At the tender age of twenty-two, I flew to Providence, Rhode Island
and called the city of Arkham home. In retrospect, I was still a babe, and
very naïve, but the future was an exciting journey I anticipated with bright-
eyed wonder; but little did I know, my future was about to become a dark,
unsure journey through a black, gaping maw in a mountain of madness.
I had been a professor at Miskatonic for ten years when I first met
Aethel. Oh, Aethel with her red hair, blue eyes, and denim shorts sloppily
cut, the frayed fabric lightly draping over the cutlets of exposed buttocks. I
was in my thirties—Aethal was fifteen years my junior—when I found her
in the university’s library, bent over the glass case that contained some the
world's most forbidden books. I took the opportunity to speak to the young
lady, and when I inquired as to what she was doing, she responded in an
adorable, backwoods phonetic, "I'm lookin' fer a book called Der
Vermass…"
"De Vermis Mysteriis?" I interrupted, sure she'd never pronounce the
dreaded title correctly.
"Yes sir, that's the one granny said ta git." She twisted from side to
side on the ball of her sandled foot. "Can you git it fer me, mister?"
I saw the tops of nubile breasts peeking from the neckline of an also
sloppily cut half-shirt, big blue innocent eyes, and, without question as to
whether this young lady was even a student, took out my keys, unlocked the
glass case, and handed her Ludwig Prinn's forbidden tome. She jumped
onto me, her arms around my neck, her legs wrapped around my waist, and
kissed me on the cheek.
"Thank ya, mister, thank ya so much!"
I stood, mouth agape, dumbfounded, and, until she climbed off of me
and left, oblivious that her gratitude had echoed through Miskatonic's
library, causing the patrons to stare. This was my first intimate contact with
the fairer sex. Being a scholar, I found no poetry in intercourse. Up until
that day, the thought of sexual relations always brought a vague image to
mind of drooling apes rutting in the streets. I smiled at the staring patrons
and immediately left the library, went into a restroom stall, and masturbated
for the first time in my life. My orgasm came quickly; it left me panting
and, like an opiate fiend, wanting more.
Not long after Aethel's visit to Miskatonic's library, an investigation
was launched in search of the whereabouts of the De Vermis Mysteriis.
Witnesses confessed seeing me unlock the glass case, and because the
literature contained in the case is what's considered to be questionable, the
lock mechanism kept records of times it had been unlocked. Before Aethel
came and asked me for the dreaded tome, the case hadn't been opened since
the 1800s, when a boy by the name of Whatley had asked to see the
Necronomicon. All signs pointed to me as the culprit, and my position as a
professor was terminated. My reputation was ruined, but, at the very least, I
was determined to find the book and return it to Miskatonic University's
library, hoping to save my reputation and reassume my position. I cursed
Aethel, and also myself for being so damned stupid.
I had judged by the young lady's degenerate backwoods dialect that
she lived in the Catskill Mountains. Most who spoke with such an awful
drawl resided in one of the many trailers that had sprung up there in recent
years. My first trek into the mountains proved fruitless, as the cloud of
chemicals to make methamphetamine accosted my senses, and I found
myself seven days later in a cave stroking my blistered and flaccid member,
mumbling, and with no idea as to how I'd gotten there. Eventually, I'd made
my way back home and spent seven more days sleeping off a mild addiction
to methamphetamine, or "meth," if you will.
My second trek into the Catskill Mountains, I strapped an oxygen tank
to my back, mask over my nose and mouth, goggles over my eyes, and
wore a rubber rain suit and gloves, in an attempt to avoid exposure to the
fumes that held me in thrall during my first trek. The trailers spread
sporadically throughout the mountains, and luckily there weren't many,
because I had to do a bit of climbing to get to them. I had risked life and
limb climbing a steep precipice of rock where a trailer barely sat, tilting
from a ledge. I knocked at the door, only to have an indescribable terror
rack my being and send me screaming and crying, like a child, into the
mouth of a small cave.
It opened the door; it was hunched over to about my waist and glared
up with huge, hellish eyes, and made slurping sounds from gray tentacles
that hung from its mouth. I spent a few minutes inside the small cave,
regaining my senses, and attempting to discern whether the thing at the
trailer’s door was a Prophet of Cthulhu, or just a simple methamphetamine
addict. I supposed it didn't matter, but finding the young lady with the De
Vermis Mysteriis did, and it looked as though I'd have to be strong of nerve
navigating through the Catskills in my mission to find her.
At the second trailer I came to, I was greeted by a shotgun pressed
against my cheek, held by a shirtless mongoloid with a sloping forehead
and other features indicative of the inbreeding that was rumored to go on
within these mountains. I was briefly chased, but found refuge once again
within the small cave, where I spent until nightfall contemplating
abandoning my task. I had plenty of money in the bank to secure a
comfortable way of life for a few years, and also sales from my book would
provide me with enough to live semi-comfortably until death. By returning
the De Vermis Mysteriis to Miskatonic, I would only be saving my good
name. I determined to do just that and fell asleep in the small cave. I would
awake at first morning's light and find the girl.
In the wee hours, I heard chanting coming from outside the cave. The
chanting vaguely sounded like, "Ia Ia Cthulhu-fhtagn…" I recognized from
the dreaded Necronomicon by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. Though
fearful, curiosity caused me to peek outside the small cave, where I saw
three hooded figures around a pyre where a pig burned and squealed for its
wretched life. One of the figures was a black cat that had been garbed with
a small robe and hood. The feline was licking its paw and cleaning its face.
The voices of the chanters were feminine, so despite the morbidity of the
scene, I decided to step out and greet them, hoping one may be the girl with
the dreaded book.
I stepped out of the cave, and as I walked up to the pyre, a short, stout
hooded figure fell to her knees at my feet with hands raised, bending up and
down in worship.
"I Ah, I Ah, praise Ka-Tu-Loo fer dis blessin'," she repeated in her
Catskills drawl.
"Granny, what are you goin' on about?" This was the girl, this was
Aethel!
"Why, Ka-Tu-Loo's done sent us a spaceman!" She assumed my
raincoat and oxygen mask meant I was a being from another planet sent by
the god Cthulhu. "R'lyeh will rise again, I tell you what!"
The other figure pulled back her hood, shook out her red hair,
confirming she was indeed Aethel, the girl I had been looking for; I was
once again struck dumb by her beauty. I stood frozen. She pulled back my
hood and looked into my eyes.
"Granny, this ain't no spaceman, this here is the fella who gave me the
book at the school," she said. "I thank it is, anyways." She pulled the
oxygen mask over my head, and I'm unsure as to whether it was her beauty
or my inhalation of the chemicals that permeated the mountains, but I felt
sheer euphoria as I looked at the young lady, struck dumb by an
indescribable feeling close to love.
 I cleared my throat to speak and the hooded cat hissed and swiped a
claw threateningly at the air.
"African American Man, be good!" said Granny.
"Ma'am, please pardon my interruption, but I really need the book I
mistakenly gave to you at the university back immediately, please
understand…"
"No," said Aethel.
"Okay," I said.
I turned to walk away on a weary trek back to Arkham, defeated and
horny. "Wait, mister!" said Aethel. "Are you hungry? We gots plenty of dis
pig ta eat."
"Yep," said Granny. "Best ta git while the gittin's good." She had
pulled the roasted swine down from the pyre and was pulling a huge leg
from its charred body.
"I couldn't impose," I said.
"You ain't imposin', we ain't had us a vister in fer ever," said Aethel,
pulling her robe over her head. She was in the same half-shirt and denim
shorts; she arched her back, featured her prominent breasts, and ran her
fingers through her hair. "Come git you some of dis meat."
We sat in a semi-circle and ate, and as we ate I got more comfortable
and regaled the ladies with tales of my success as an astronomer, author,
and talked extensively regarding incantations and lore from forbidden
tomes, such as The Necronomicon and De Vermis Mysteriis. Granny,
Aethel, and even the feline—African American Man—were held rapt with
my speech.
When the sun rose, Granny and African American Man had fallen
asleep, and I went to leave on my lonely trek back to Arkham, where I
intended to masturbate furiously throughout the day. Aethel called me back.
"C'mere," she said, motioning me in a come-hither gesture with her
index finger. "C'mere and lay down by me."
I did, and briefly, quietly, and for the first time, Aethel and I made love
in the dirt next to Granny and African American Man.
From there, I visited Aethel every day, and was eventually asked to
stay and make the Catskill Mountains my new home. I used a good deal of
my savings renovating Granny's trailer into a double-wide, with multiple
big screen televisions and computer technology throughout the home.
Eventually, the cursed time came when the Catskill Mountains were
provided with internet access. I became impotent, and Aethel discovered the
damnable craigslist.com…

***

Eventually, I'd asked Aethel for her hand in marriage. In a quaint,

Pnakotic ceremony presided over by Granny, with the only guest in
attendance being the cat African American Man, Aethel Zadok became
Aethel Pabody. My memories of this time with Aethel are ones of fondness.
Aethel and I would take long walks through the Catskills, breathing the
tainted mountain air, finding ourselves either viciously fighting, or making
love for hours in caves, because Granny forbade the two of us to
consummate our love in her home, going so far as to force us to sleep in
separate quarters—Aethel in a large, newly renovated bedroom, and me
standing in the kitchen cupboard.
These years passed at the speed of thought, and near the end, the years
had not treated me well. I found myself relatively penniless, and either from
prolonged exposure to the chemical cloud that permeated the Catskills or
old age, I was stricken impotent, unable to make love to my wife. My penis
shriveled, and, like the rest of my body, was covered with painful meth-tick
blisters that bled and scabbed like Chicken Pox, causing Aethel to find me
undesirable and sexually frustrated. She began scouring the Casual
Encounters section on craigslist.com where lonely, degenerate perverts
bartered and sold depraved sexual relations, and she assured me her interest
in the website had nothing to do with love, but an inherit need to, as she put
it, "Get some good dick."
I was dozing in the cupboard one evening when the door was flung
open and Aethel pointed her laptop at me, demanding I read an ad that had
been posted on the perverse website.
The ad read thusly:
FEMALES NEEDED FOR ORGY TONIGHT IN
GARRSMOUTH!
We are looking for females ages eighteen to twenty-four to
participate in an orgy of thirty or so well hung young men. We host.
Location near The Garrsmouth Inn on Airway Five in Innsmouth
County, ten minutes passed Arkham. Email
[email protected] with phone number and we will have a
car pick you up. Please be discreet. Thank you.
P.S. No fatties!
"Dear, are you sure you'd like to do this?"
"Yep, I'm sure," she said. "And maybe seein' all those men touchin' me
and fuckin' me and whatnot might give your pecker what it needs ta do it
yerself! Baby, I need some dick. Please!"
Her emphasis on the word "need" and the way she moved her body in
a serpentine motion, caressing her breasts, gliding her hand down to her
nether regions, convinced me this orgy in Garrsmouth might be just the
trick needed to turn our sexually deprived marriage around for the better. I
deserve this bullet for ever letting that thought process for a second. She
sent the email and shortly after received a text message on the new iPhone
3000 I had recently gotten her. I was welcome to come, and after a long
laugh during the conversation in regards to my affliction, was told I could
join in if I could "get it up." She wrote down the directions to the area
where a car was to meet us, and took an hour to get ready. Ethel and I made
our way out of the Catskill Mountains for the first time in our years as
husband and wife, and stood in the chill night air on the Arkham County
Line waiting for the car. I was amazed to see space age, futuristic machines
flying overhead through the starless sky.
"Baby, cars fly now," said Aethel, laughing. "You didn't know that? It
has been a long time since you been out of the mountains, huh?"
She was right, and as I thought, it suddenly dawned on me, being an
antiquarian and scholar, I held an indignation for such modern novelties as
television, radio, and the internet. That night had been my first exposure to
the world outside the Catskill Mountains in a decade or more!
From above, a car in the shape of a fish with a grill of sharp needle
teeth, headlights like two eyes, and large membranous wings like those of a
dragon, loomed overhead for a few seconds and landed inches away from
our feet. The passenger's side window came down mechanically, and the
driver inside, whose facial features resembled that of a Garr fish with vague
hints of humanity, sent a chill down my spine.
"Dear, you're absolutely sure…"
"Yes!" Aethel scolded.
"The lady sits upfront. Fella, you sit in the back," said the driver, his
words gurgled.
 The ride to Garrsmouth was tense and ominous. Opaque plate glass
separated the car, and I heard faint giggles come occasionally from the
driver and passenger seats. Outside, lights twinkled below, and I was briefly
in awe as we passed the immense steeple of Dagon Baptist Church that
kissed the clouds. The car came to a halt and the glass separating the front
and back seats came down mechanically. Aethel had already made her way
inside. "We're here, buddy," said the driver. When I stepped out, I bent and,
with a violent wretch, vomited. The smell of fish was overpowering; the
fetid aroma impregnated the air and pulsed sickeningly. Once the contents
of my stomach and dry heaving halted, I tried breathing through my mouth,
but to no avail. The smell warmed my body, seemed to replace the marrow
in my bones. I remember shaking, I remember a cold sweat, I remember
seeing the glass of the mechanized doors of Dagon Baptist Church, looking
to the sky at a horned wane moon—and that's all I remember, because I
fainted.

***

I awoke peering through the slits of a gimp mask. Aethel was

suspended upside-down on a wheel that displayed a bas-relief of an inverted
star surrounded by hieroglyphs that I immediately recognized as a Pnakotic
pinnacle. Her head, arms, and legs were restrained to each point, and her
nude body glistened with the seed that ran down from her nether regions, as
the Garrsmouthians, one after the other, climbed atop, humped rapidly at a
rabbit’s pace, and jumped down, letting its next abominable brother have its
turn with my wife. Their heads were identical to Garr fish, with prominent
needle-like teeth and fins on the top and sides of their brown and scaly
batrachian heads. Their eyes were large and ebon, and their bodies simian.
Muffled screams came from the ball gag lodged in my beloved's
mouth. I struggled but was held firm by a large, ominous Garrsmouthian in
a red robe. The brute held both my thin wrists above my head in but a single
fist. The gimp costume and mask they'd adorned me with was skintight,
which made breathing difficult. I let go muffled screams of reassurance to
Aethel through the zippered mouth, but I was powerless to do anything
except simply watch this horrific display.
Aethel's belly moved up and down in exasperation, and at first I
thought it may be a simple trick of light, or perhaps a skewed perspective
on my part, but on closer inspection, I could see that Aethel's belly was
getting bigger! The Garrsmouthians were inseminating her, and the
abominable seed was growing at a rapid rate. A black insanity enveloped
me, lunacy took hold, and I simply howled with laughter at the ridiculous
futility of it all.
The chants from the congregation of Dagon Baptist Church became
deafening gibberish. My laughter screamed as the volume increased,
gradually getting louder and all-consuming. Suddenly, the report from a
shotgun echoed through the church, silencing the madness. My arms were
freed, and the robed brute holding me collapsed to the floor.
"You som' bitches let my grandbaby down!" said Granny, who fired
another shot into the air from a double-barreled twelve gauge. By Granny's
side was African American Man, the gun-wielding mongoloid that had once
chased me into a cave, and the abomination with tentacles coughing out of
its mouth. All of this makeshift cavalry were wearing black robes with
hoods over their heads, and were all holding firearms—with the exception
of African American Man, of course. Granny must have checked Aethel's
laptop; after all the years of staying in the mountains, I assume Granny's
curiosity was raised when we'd suddenly left.
I wrenched off the gimp mask and ran toward Aethel, but was blocked
by a group of four Garrsmouthians, who hissed and jawed like gasping fish
inches from my face, but only temporarily, as I was pelted and briefly
blinded when their pulpy heads exploded as buck shot sprayed around me.
"Hurry, slim," said Granny. "Git her an' get out! We'll take care of these
heathens!" I briefly thanked whatever gods-that-be that Granny and the rest
of the cavalry didn't accidently shoot me. I hurried over to Aethel and
untied the restraints that bound her. She fell into my arms and we both
collapsed to the floor. Aethel was much too heavy to simply carry, so I
draped her arm across my shoulders and helped her stumble out of the
church. All around was the deafening sound of firearms exploding, and
before we made it into the streets, Granny handed me a small revolver.
When we'd made it into the streets, I unclasped the ball gag from
Aethel's mouth, and she let go a bone-chilling scream. "It hurts so bad!" she
cried. Whatever they'd inseminated her with was moving around in her now
very pregnant stomach. "Dear, the nearest place is the Garrsmouth Inn. Can
you make it? It's just a little further up the street," I said. "Hold on!"
 Although Aethel was frantically screaming—and nude—the young
Garr-faced fellow behind the counter didn't look away from the television
screen for a second as he handed us the key to the room.
As we made it into the dingy quarters, Aethel collapsed to the floor,
her eyes rolled into the back of her head, her jaw clenched tight from
convulsions, and she flopped and heaved her entire body like…a fish! Tiny
risings came from under the skin of her belly. I looked on, dumbfounded
and stricken with terror.
Then she stopped seizing and lay unconscious, flat on her back. Aethel
was dead.
The risings beneath the skin of her belly got higher, and then I saw the
demoniac face of the progeny, with prominent needle-teeth and bulbous
eyes, pushing its way through a thin membrane of skin. Upon its exit, it
split Aethel's lower extremities in half, exposing ropes of entrails, and I
could but simply stand in terrified awe with my mouth agape as it loomed
over me and growled.
Suddenly I remembered that the revolver Granny had given me was in
my right hand, and I fired a shot into it, but only wounded it. I fired another
shot, and another, but the bullets only seemed to anger it. It came even
closer, pinning me against the wall, and I fired one last shot into its hideous
head, causing it to fall to the floor. I stood over the beast and noticed its
chest no longer rose, and decided against firing a final shot to ensure its
demise. Instead, I decided to make my way back to the Catskill Mountains
and use the final bullet on myself.

***

The fight between Granny and the Garrsmouthians must have

triggered the alignment of the stars. As I've been penning this narrative, the
sky has blackened, and from my vantage point on this lip of rock atop the
Catskill Mountains, I see the silhouette of a humanoid giant with an
octopus-head and large dragon wings, which could only mean that Cthulhu
has risen!
Before madness fully consumes me, I'll end this by assuring you, dear
reader, that I am in control of all of my faculties, and so, with the final
ellipses, I will put Granny's revolver beneath my chin, sending myself into
oblivion…
 Ghost Load
D.F. Noble

Steven Crane held back tears in the stall of a bathroom. He was inside
a funeral home, and down the hall, the body of his father lay in a dark
mahogany casket.
And Steven-
He was receiving one of the fiercest blowjobs of his life.
This is pretty fucked up, Steven thought.
On her knees before him was an older woman. Not terribly old, but at
least ten years his elder. She was forty-something, with big, pouty lips, red
hair and very large, very firm breasts. Steven thought they must be fake, but
at the moment he didn't really care.
Her name was Melody Swift—and her last name was fairly accurate.
She was very fast. Steven had caught sight of her at the beginning of the
funeral. Sure, she was older than him, but she was stunning, curvaceous,
and wasn't shy about giving him the eye. She reminded him of Dr. Quinn:
Medicine Woman.
A very short conversation after the service and Steven found out she
had worked at the college with his father. She wasn't close with his dad, but
she respected him, and felt she needed to pay her respects to the man.
Pay respects to his son as well, apparently.
Her mouth worked expertly, slow and sensual at first, hardening his
member to its full strength, til eventually gobs of spit layered his shaft.
When her mouth and tongue dipped down to lick his balls, flickering just a
hair's width from his anus, Steven's hands shot out against the stalls to
steady himself.
His legs were mush, and he knew for certain he was about to cum.
Ah god, this is so fucked up. I'm going to hell. I'm going-
Melody worked his throbbing cock, hand twisting and lips licking,
sucking in perfect form, and then she dipped down, her mouth disappearing
under his balls. Her eyes locked with his, then her tongue shot straight into
Steven's quivering ass.
“Fuck, I'm gonna-” was all Steven could say before Melody popped up
and clamped her lips around the tip of his dick. His body stiffened,
preparing to launch, and with a moan, Steven Crane shot spurt after spurt
into Melody's amazing mouth.
She looked up at him, and he down at her. A smile spread across her
face and she spit his cum back onto his cock, then licked it back up, making
Steven shiver uncontrollably.
Before he could even fathom why, Steven felt something wet on his
face. His trembling hand wiped the moisture away, and he realized in his
afterglow that he had begun to cry, despite his best efforts not to.
“Ah, honey,” Melody said, “too soon?”
“Wha- what?”
She stood up, slipped her dress back up over her large breasts and
wiped one of his tears away. She licked that finger, and said, “I'd like to
think it was my skills that brought you to tears...”
“Ah god,” Steven said, scrunching his face as if it would stop
whatever flood was coming. “What am I doing?”
To make things worse, she leaned over, kissed his forehead. “It's
perfectly natural. Your father is dead, Steven. You shouldn't be...so stiff.”
With that, Melody grinned and walked out of the bathroom and his
life. His eyes watched her physique, but in his head, a movie played.
Playing catch with his dad, taking the training wheels off his bike, fishing
and drinking his first beer, all these things spinning around the fact that...
That he'd just cum in the mouth of a total stranger not fifty yards from
his father's corpse.
I'm a terrible son, he thought and secretly hoped there wasn't an
afterlife (or a God, for that matter). Hoped that nothing unseen had just
witnessed this act.
He shivered, thinking about his father's ghost watching him in that
stall. His father would have his arms crossed, and that cold look of disdain
on his face that he wore so frequently.
And then the walls broke down.
Steven Crane wept.

***

“Steven boy,” Lloyd Billington called out from his truck. The old
man's pickup slowed to a stop beside Steven Crane's Explorer, crunching
gravel in the long driveway that led up to the old country house. Lloyd's
weathered face was topped with a green ball cap almost too big for his long,
thin skull and his New Englander drawl reminded Steven Crane much of his
father. “How was the funeral?”
Steven stopped beside his car, and gave Lloyd a blank look. “What do
you want, Lloyd?”
The old man's jaw cranked once, twice and he spit a brown loogie of
chewing tobacco down to the gravel. “Ain't no foolin' yuh is tha boy?”
Lloyd said, and tipped his hat back, revealing his liver-spotted dome. “No
secret me and yuh Pa didn't see eye to eye much... he took me as a bumpkin
dirt farmer, and I took him to be a snobby, know-it-all egghead.”
Lloyd paused, spat and said, “Guess we was 'both right 'bout each
other, ah-yuh.”
Steven sighed. He was too tired to beat around the bush. It'd been a
long drive back to New England, an even longer day with the lawyer. He
figured the funeral would lift some of the burden, put a finality to the whole
ordeal, but no, it felt like just another weight. He scratched his neck and just
laid it out to Lloyd. “Can you just get to the point? Not trying to be rude,
Lloyd, but it's been a long, long fucking day, I want a beer, and I want to go
to sleep.”
“Ain't nothin' wrong with that,” Lloyd said. “Reason I came over is,
there's uh big section of my fence down, and I got a bunch of heifers
missing. Yuh ain't happen to see any of 'em have yuh?”
“Nope.”
Lloyd shook his head and pulled his ball cap down. “Just ain't right. I
tell yuh, it's been awful weird around here, ah-yuh. Awful weird. First,
damn chickens start disappearing. Couple of 'em here and there. Next a
couple sheep, and now damn cows up and gone. Like poof, they up and
swallowed by thin air or something.”
“If I see anything, I'll let you know,” Steven said, and turned to walk
up to the old house—his father's house, now his house by default, by
inheritance.
Behind him, Lloyd spoke up again. “I know yuh ain't wantin' to be
bothered, but I tell yuh, I always thought you'd follow in yuh Pa's
footsteps.”
Steven stopped and turned back to the old man.
“The day I heard you joined the marines, I tell yuh, I had myself a
huge grin and toasted yuh.”
 “Why's that, Lloyd?”
“Oh, well... just proud of yuh for servin' yuh country, son,” Lloyd said
then smiled. “And the thought of your liberal, bleeding heart Pa throwin' a
fit brought me a good chuckle.”
Lloyd then pulled up his shirt sleeve and revealed a faded tattoo.
“Semper Fi,” he said.
Steven nodded and grinned despite himself. “Semper Fi.”
Lloyd put his truck back into drive, and before pulling away said,
“Yuh get the time, stop on by and have a beer. Yuh staying long?”
Steven looked back at the old house, then back at the old man. “I just
might do that, Lloyd. And yeah... I'm gonna renovate a bit before I sell the
place.”
“Maybe think about staying, ah-yuh. Home is home, son.”
“Maybe, Lloyd. Maybe.”
Lloyd tipped his hat, and with that continued on down the driveway, a
late sun gleaming off a truck as worn as the man himself.

Four Days Later

Steven woke to what at first he thought was a high-pitched scream. He

jolted up in bed and reached for a rifle that wasn't there. Pushing thoughts
back in his mind—images of Iraq and Afghanistan—he got out of bed,
straining his ears.
The sound that followed next wasn't a scream, but sounded like...
Chanting? What the-
Steven went to the bedroom window and slid it up. Fuckin' hippies
having a damn drum circle out in the woods or something?
Before he could really pinpoint the location, the sound ended as
abruptly as it had started. Steven lingered for a few moments, staring out
the window into the dense timber behind the house, looking for signs of
movement, or kids with dreads to come stumbling out with booze, bongos
and pot smoke trailing them. Nothing came, so he closed the window, took
a piss and then returned to bed. Drifting off moments later, Steven
remembered something Lloyd had said.
Just ain't right. I tell yuh it's been awful weird around here, ah-yuh.
Awful weird.
 Two Weeks Later

It was a bittersweet day for Steven. The finishing touches on the old
house, the house he grew up in, were almost done. It was a shame and it
hurt somewhere in his heart that his father had passed in order for him to
acquire the place, but renovating it and restoring it to its former glory was
all part of the healing process.
He found himself on a ladder on the second floor with a paintbrush,
cautiously applying the last bit of paint around the edge of a ceiling fan
(should've painted this first before I put the damn fan back on, Steven
thought), when a curious sound caught his attention.
At first, it was just that: a sound. A thump-thump-thump in the
distance. But within a matter of seconds, those dull thumps grew louder and
began shaking his ladder. Steven could feel that something heavy was
behind him, and for a moment he wondered what could be causing it.
The word elephant crossed his mind just as a window exploded to his
right. Steven's head jerked in the opposite direction as the rest of his body
clamped to the ladder.
He saw nothing.
Then something wet, something squishy yet somehow solid, hit him
hard enough to send him flying across the room. With a crunch, Steven's
body crumpled against the wall opposite the window and slid down to the
floor. He couldn't breathe, and in the next second, as a terrible thrashing and
crunching sound filled the world, as the window frame shook, cracked and
crumbled inwards, taking chunks of the wall with it, Steven thought this:
Fuck. Tornado.
Fighting shock, Steven tried to stand, and again some invisible object
slammed into him, into his chest and pushed him back against the wall.
Instinctively, his hands came up in a knee-jerk reaction to protect himself,
and where there should be nothing, he found something solid in his grip.
It was slick, fleshy feeling, and yet entirely unseen. His hands slid
away from it, wet and slimy. For one second it was there, and the next it
pulled back.
What the fuck?
Trying to catch his breath, Steven slid down and scampered away.
Behind him the invisible object slammed back into the wall where Steven
had just sat. It crumpled the drywall, splintered a stud, then pulled back like
the fist of some giant ghost and rammed again, making almost a perfect
circle beside the previous hole.
Steven held his ribs with one arm and propped himself up on the other,
head twisting back and forth from the window to the damage being wrought
on the far side of the room. He was utterly confused, his brain could simply
not grasp what was happening. He knew that some cylindrical shape was
thrusting in and out of the window, but his mind just could not wrap around
it.
As dust filled the air, accompanied by the sounds of thumping and
splintering wood, Steven Crane figured he was going to die. There was a
sense of claustrophobia as his lungs would not gather air and his mouth
opened and closed, opened and closed.
Black rimmed his vision, his body began to shake.
Then, mercifully, a raspy breath came to him. Pain radiated across his
chest, but the air gave him energy, and as Steven rose to his feet to flee,
another powerful force enveloped him.
Curiosity.
His eyes locked onto a paint-sprayer in the corner and he found
himself stumbling towards it. Lifting the tool up and turning to the thing
before him—the thing destroying his house, his father's house—Steven
thought:
Invisible, eh?
He then filled the air with eggshell white interior paint.
An image came to life: a veiny, ribbed tubular thing that pulsed and
throbbed. Steven sidestepped, depressing the sprayer's trigger, starting from
the window where it entered, down to the wall where it continued to ram.
This living tube, easily the width of a beer keg, ended with a domed and
sloped tip. The more paint Steven applied, the more excited it seemed to
become. Then two things happened simultaneously:
Steven thought, It's giant dick...
And then the thing exploded a torrent of warm jism.
The strength of the blast hit the wall, splattered back in streaming
trails that whipped across Steven's body and face hard enough to send him
stumbling back as if from a slap. An eerie groaning and the creaking of
wood filled the air, as something heavy leaned on the house from the
outside, literally shifting the structure upwards a bit. On a sudden new
incline, being whipped with a seemingly neverending fire hose-like jet of
ammonia-smelling monster dick cum, Steven tumbled head over heels out
of the door and down the hall.
He caught himself on the banister of the stairs, and, panicking, he
managed to snake his way down the shifting, twisting structure to the first
floor with the paint sprayer held tightly in his hand. As debris and ceiling
tiles fell from above, Steven spat the acrid fluid from his mouth, wiped his
face and shambled out the front door.
There's a giant dick, Steven thought, fucking my house.
A GIANT DICK! FUCKING! MY! HOUSE!
Crazed with rage, Steven made his way around the side of his home.
The siding was crushed and torn, the window dimpled and destroyed, and
the house itself was rooted up from the foundation by almost a foot.
But there was nothing there.
A quick glance showed him there were massive tracks (footprints,
thought Steven) in the earth of his yard, and even as he raised the sprayer,
he questioned if he wanted to see what thing could possibly have a dick that
size.
There was a sound—a panting sound; the sound of a large man taking
a breath after jogging or sex, and, disregarding all caution, Steven released
a mist of white into the air. At first it clung to nothing. A moment later, it
caressed something that resembled a tree trunk. He started there,
concentrating the spray until the stream of white could no longer reach.
Whatever the trunk-like object was, it was far taller than Steven could
reach. At his feet, he saw the appendage was stuck deep in the dirt—the
reason for the tracks. Looking about the yard, noticing the dozen-or-so
other similar indents, he realized this thing—however impossible it might
be—must have many legs.
Even as a shudder ran through his body, Steven moved forward, a
steady mist of white leading the way. Soon after, the paint began to cling to
what must be the underbelly of the thing.
It was massive, and reminded Steven of the shell of a crustacean, or
the ass end of a spider.
A part of his mind told him to run then.
Another part streamed a line of curses.
Then something hissed through the air, and Steven turned. The paint
was still on full-blast and sputtering and revealed what looked like an
octopus tentacle swinging in an arc towards him.
 Shit.
The tentacle slapped across him, exploded the paint sprayer and sent
Steven cartwheeling some distance across the yard. He landed with a grunt
and slid through the grass on his back, stars swimming in his vision. Steven
let out a groan and lifted his head to gaze at the beast one last time before it
certainly killed him.
The explosion of white paint had managed to cover a good portion of
the monstrosity in a thin layer, making it not so much visible, but opaque
and see-through.
His breath caught in his chest.
From what he could tell, the monster was as tall as the two story
house. It's body was sectional, like that of a bug, with a sharp and ridged
exoskeleton from which ungodly goat-like eyes roamed and blinked.
Numerous tentacles whipped about its core, and its legs were that of a crab.
Beneath the main husk, however, hung two Geo Metro-sized human
testicles, attached to a now-limp and slouching cock.
Gritting his teeth and gathering his strength, Steven stood in defiance.
The thing looked as if it was using the tentacles to wipe the paint from its
eyes, and that made Steven happy. He looked down, picked up a rock from
the landscaping, a decent fist-sized lobber, and even though he ached, even
though he should be running for dear life, he bounced forward two steps
and threw the rock as hard as he could.
He watched it sail over and smack the beast in its giant balls, heard the
thing groan in pain and dip down closer to the ground, tentacles wrapping
around and protecting the bulbous sack.
“Hey!” Steven yelled, picking up another rock. “Stop fucking my
house! Stop it!”
He threw another rock, watched it bounce off one of the huge ungodly
eyes, listened to the thing grunt and chirp and hiss.
“You get!” he yelled. “Get! Go on! Get!”
The translucent beast turned and faced him, its giant dick tearing up a
tract of grass (which fueled Steven's rage even more so)—although, one
could argue about it facing him, since it seemingly didn't have a face.
Steven picked up another stone, threw it at the cock. “I said get! Get
the fuck outta here!”
It hissed at him, the sound of a thousand chainsaws, the sound of a
train made of chainsaws, hot on the tracks making a delivery of revving
chainsaws to Chainsaw City in Dentist Drill County. It was terrible, the
sound, and Steven's hands reached for his ears.
His eyes felt like they were about to pop, like wasps were burrowing
into his brain. Steven screamed and fell to his knees, praying for a quick
death.
Through squinted, tear-filled eyes, he watched the thing stomp
towards him. It would be just a moment, and he would be dead. He was
certain of that. As the tentacles of the horror reached out, time began to
slow.
This is it, Steven thought. I'm sorry, Dad. Hope I can say that to you
when this is over. I'm sorry about the house, about joining the Marines. I'm
sorry about that blowjob at your funeral. I'm-
And then came a voice.
It cut the air, cut through the terrible hissing of the beast.
Steven turned on his knees, moving dreamlike, and saw a figure in
dark robes standing at the tree line. Both of the figure's hands were held
high, and the cowl obscured the face. The words emitting from the mystery
figure were not understood by Steven. It was a dialect he'd never heard, but
he did understand one thing: the words held power. Immense power.
The dark figure stepped forward, chanting. Each step the figure took,
the more the beast shrank back, as if somehow the monster was afraid; or
perhaps the words could hurt or wound it.
Time moved slowly. Time was thick, the air like water, but Steven
tried to stand, realizing the figure in the hood and robe was making its way
to him.
His knees gave out, and Steven collapsed back to the earth. He felt as
if he couldn't breathe, as if some invisible weight or all of gravity wanted to
condense on this single spot. The hissing sound of the monster retreated,
and he did his best to lift his head to watch it flee, or perhaps puff away into
a wisp of smoke like a bad magician's trick.
A look of relief spread across Steven's face as the thing slipped into
the trees, shaking leaves and breaking branches as it fled. He turned his
heavy head to the robed figure walking towards him and could barely hear
his own voice when the hood was pulled back.
“Melody?!” Steven croaked, jaw dropping.
Her fire-red hair fell about her shoulders, and she seemed to float
overto him rather than walk. He was struck again by her beauty—which
now seemed utterly alien—and a sense of dread grew up from the pit of his
stomach.
“Melody,” he tried to say, “what are you doing here? What the fuck
was that thing?”
But all that came out was-
Muuuh nuh nuh nhuh, muuh nuh muh nuh
-and slobber from his slack and hanging jaw.
Her hand reached out to him and her lips peeled back in a pleasing
smile, but her eyes were black empty pits. Terror seized Steven.
This is just too much! I would gladly take a bullet, or a bomb, and die
somewhere hot and sandy, die anywhere, anyhow besides this. At least I
could understand that, but this? THIS? Oh God in Heaven, please help me!
As if on cue, there came a sudden, sharp crack.
I know that sound from somewhere…
Melody pitched forward, her eyes suddenly normal and her face slack.
She landed in a thump just an arm's length from him, face first and
unconscious. Behind her, a figure was lowering the butt stock of a shotgun,
the very shotgun that had just butt-stroked Melody, and pointed the barrel
down at her back.
It was Lloyd.
Lloyd Billington.
He tipped his hat to Steven, who was submersed in shock and
disbelief, and then hocked a brown loogie of chewing tobacco onto
Melody's robe.
“Yuh alright, boy?” Lloyd asked.
Steven moaned, and then promptly fainted.

***

Steven awoke and immediately began screaming. He couldn't see, he

did not know where he was, and all that was in him was unspeakable,
indescribable terror. He heard footsteps then, and a familiar voice.
“Stop yuh screaming. I'm coming, I'm coming,” he heard Lloyd's
voice echo out from somewhere in the darkness. There came the creak of a
door opening, and then the old man hit a light switch.
I must be at Lloyd's, Steven thought. Oh god, what a nightmare. Oh
god, what the hell? Did I come over drinking and-
 “Yuh okay to walk, boy?” Lloyd asked, standing in the door way. His
face was weathered, tired. His trademark green ball cap was pushed up high
on his brow, which glistened with sweat.
Steven swallowed, looked about the room, and took a deep breath.
“Yeah, I think so,” Steven replied and rubbed his eyes. “Listen, Lloyd... I'm
sorry I-”
“Yuh ain't got nothin' to be sorry about,” Lloyd said. “Now come on if
yuh able, I got that witch tied up in the other room.”
The comment was a hard slap. The witch? Does he mean... Melody?
What the fuck is happening? Is this real? Was that thing...real?
“Yuh comin' or not?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Steven said, sat up and realized he was naked. “Lloyd,
where are my clothes?”
Lloyd turned back from the doorway. “Got some fresh ones on that
chair for yuh. Had to clean yuh up. Yuh was all covered in some sticky,
downright nasty shit. We about the same size, I reckon. The clothes should
fit. When yuh done, meet me in the kitchen.”
Lloyd's footsteps echoed away from the room and Steven began to
dress himself. He wasn't happy that Lloyd had set out a pair of bib overalls,
socks and a pair of boots, but it was better than being naked. Before he left,
he got a look at himself in the mirror atop Lloyd's dresser.
I look like I've been in a redneck car wreck, Steven thought and
stepped out.

***

Steven saw Lloyd through the kitchen doorway drinking a can of

Budweiser. He stepped in, questions ready to jump off his tongue when he
saw her. Melody was completely nude, arms and legs tied to a chair next to
the fridge. A balled-up dirty sock was stuck in her mouth. She looked at
Steven and started mumbling.
Lloyd popped open a beer and appeared at Steven's side. “Here, have
somethin' to drink.”
Steven took the beer, drank most of it in two gulps without taking his
eyes off the naked woman, and then burped. He took a deep breath and
stepped forward, reaching for the sock in her mouth.
Lloyd's hand flashed out and grasped Steven's wrist.
 “I wouldn't do that if I was yuh.”
“Why's that?”
“She might start castin' spells, boy,” Lloyd said, grave as a tombstone.
“Can't be too careful.”
Steven nodded, finished his beer, sat the empty can on the table and
rubbed his eyes again. He took a deep breath, looked at her, to Lloyd, and
then back to her again. Then he yelled, “What the fuck is happening here!?”
“I'll tell yuh what's happenin' here,” Lloyd said. “This bitch is a
damned devil worshippin' summoner, summonin' up hellspawn, and they
been eatin' up all my livestock, then came and destroyed yuh house, boy.
That's what's happenin'!”
Lloyd turned and spat onto Melody's face. She mumbled something in
return and strained against her bonds.
“Stop it! Just stop a damn second!” Steven huffed. Lloyd and Melody
turned their eyes to him. “I need to ask her. Okay, Lloyd? I need to ask her
without you spitting on her and god knows what. Somehow she scared that
thing off, I remember. She was talking in that language and-
“See!” Lloyd barked. “Spells, I tell yuh! She's a witch if there ever
was one!”
Mmmmh mmmh mmh, Melody mumbled and shook her head.
“Okay, okay,” Steven said, putting both his hands up. “Just... just
everybody calm down a second... and goddammit, why is she naked,
Lloyd?”
Lloyd cocked an eyebrow up at him. “Had to frisk her, dammit. Don't
look at me like that. She mighta had weapons on her. Maybe a wand or
somethin'.”
“You call the cops?”
Lloyd scoffed. “And tell 'em what? I got a naked, big-tittied witch tied
up in my kitchen? That I saved the neighbor from a half-invisible crab
octopus with the biggest dick yuh ever saw? Come on now, don't be daft.”
Steven swallowed hard, and lowered his voice. “So you saw... you saw
it, too?”
“Yup,” Lloyd said, and breathed hard out his nose. “Craziest damn
thing I ever saw in a long time, and I've been around a long time. I've been
all over this world and I ain't never, not once, not ever, saw a damned thing
like that.”
 Lloyd held Steven's gaze for a moment longer, and then something
unspoken passed between them. They both turned to the naked woman. She
instantly began mumbling through the dirty sock.
“How 'bout we have another beer, Lloyd,” Steven said, “and figure out
what we do from here?”
“Now yuh thinkin',” he said, walked over to the fridge and pulled out
two cans. He passed one to Steven and they popped the tabs one after
another, clinked their cans together, and both took long pulls from their
drinks, standing side by side, eyes not leaving the witch.
Steven guzzled the drink til he felt like his eyes would water, caught
his breath and wiped his mouth. “Lloyd,” he said.
“Yuh?”
“First, I want to thank you for saving my ass. Second, I want to thank
you for the beer.”
Lloyd nodded, and took another drink. “Took yuh long enough, but...
under the circumstances, I guess we'll have to pass on the manners, ayuh,”
“So, here's what I'm thinking.”
“Shoot.”
“I say we take that sock out of her mouth-” Steven started, and
Melody began to mumble and nod her head yes.
“Ah no,” Lloyd shook his head, walked over to the kitchen counter
and grabbed the shotgun. He turned and pointed the 12-gauge at her. “Yuh
take that gag outta her and I'm gonna blow her head clean off.”
Melody mumbled some more and shook her head no.
“Listen, listen,” Steven said, “we need to ask her some questions, she
had some kind of power over the thing, and we need to know if it's going to
come back or not. But you have to let me take the gag out.”
“And what if she starts casting a spell?”
“Then butt-stroke her again. Jesus, man! You don't have to shoot her.”
Lloyd pursed his lips together and thought about it. “Nah, too
dangerous,” he replied. “I say we take her ass out to the hogs, blow her
brains out and forget this ever happened.”
Steven scratched the back of his head. “Wait, okay. Melody, if you
promise not to cast any spells or talk in that... that language thing you did
back there—if you promise... Will you tell us what's going on?”
Her eyes went wide and excited. She nodded her head.
That's when Lloyd turned the gun on Steven.
 “Whoa, whoa!” Steven cried out, backed up and threw up his hands.
“What the fuck, Lloyd?!”
Lloyd squinted his eyes and kept the bead on him. “Now yuh wait just
a goddamn second, boy. How the hell yuh know her name?”
“I met her, man! Stop pointing that damn gun at me!”
“Ah, so yuh already met her? Yuh ever plan on tellin' me that, or not?
'Cause yuh already under her spell, ain't yuh, boy?!”
“Jesus Christ!” Steven yelled. “Listen to me! She was at my dad's
funeral. That's how I met her! She worked with my dad!”
“And I'm just supposed to believe yuh?”
“Lloyd, I swear it's the truth. I was outside trying to fight that thing. If
I was under a spell, why the hell would I be doing that?”
Steven noticed Lloyd's finger tighten on the trigger. Just a little twitch
and he knew the 12-gauge could blow a hole straight through him at this
distance;maybe even cut him in half. Sweat gathered on his forehead, his
heart pounded in his chest. He watched the old man's face, but the man
could've been a poker pro. There was no sign of emotion, just cold hard
calculation.
Fuck, he's going to shoot me. Feed us both to the hogs. Fuck, fuck,
fuck.
Then the tension eased a little.
“Hell if I know,” Lloyd said, gun steady. “Maybe yuh a sacrifice or
something. I'm not exactly an expert on witchy voodoo, case yuh didn't
notice.”
“Okay,” Steven said, chest rising and falling rapidly. “We can do it
your way. I don't want to get shot. I just want some answers, that's all. I just
wanna know what the fuck happened here. All I want, swear to god. But if
you just want to kill her, then fine. I won't stop you. Drop her right now if
you want.”
Lloyd's eyes were slits. His face scrunched up.
Fuck, Steven thought. Here it comes.
Then Lloyd lowered the gun from Steven and leveled it on Melody.
“Go on ahead and take that gag out, but yuh listen close, witch…” Lloyd
growled. “Yuh start in on any of that funny language yuh was speakin' right
'fore I stroked yuh, I will kill the shit outta yuh, yuh hear?”
She nodded.
 “Go on, boy,” Lloyd said, “take that sock out her mouth. Wouldn't
mind some answers myself. And remember, no funny talk.”
Steven sighed and stepped up to Melody. Her eyes looked up and met
his, and part of him yearned for her. Tied up like she was, naked as she was,
hair wild and red like a prairie fire... Damn, does she look good, he thought.
Then he remembered her right before he fainted. How her eyes had not just
gone black, but disappeared altogether. How her voice was not a woman's,
but something old, something ancient. He shivered.
His hand reached out and stopped at the sock. “Don't make us kill
you.”
She mumbled something in the affirmative. Steven took one last look
at Lloyd and then pulled the sock free.
Melody immediately wretched, and drool seeped from her mouth
down onto her bare legs. After a brief coughing fit, she looked up at the two
men and asked to have her mouth wiped clean. Steven used a paper towel,
then told her, “Start talking. What the fuck was that thing?”
She swallowed, and said, “I'll try to explain it as simply as I can. And
please, Lloyd, you can put down the gun. I understand you're frightened,
but I mean neither of you any harm. If it wasn't for my intervention, Steven
would be dead.”
“I ain't scared of shit, witch,” Lloyd said, “and I like this gun right
where it is. Now explain yuhself.”
“Could I have a glass of water, please?”
Lloyd scoffed, “The United States doesn't negotiate with witches.”
Melody raised one of her eyebrows, “I think you mean terrorists.”
“Yup, we don't negotiate with them neither.”
“I see,” she said. “Okay then... the creature you saw is a sort of
hybrid... part of it is human and the other part...”
“What?” Steven asked. “Part what? Spit it out!”
“Part alien. I guess you could call them alien,” Melody said.
Steven and Lloyd looked at each other, then back at Melody.
“You mean like little gray men?” Lloyd asked. “Same ones probing
folks' asses and mutilatin' cows?”
“Not quite,” Melody said. “These things are not extraterrestrial but
extra-dimensiona-”
Lloyd stepped in close and put the barrel to her head, tightened his
finger on the trigger.
 “Whoa!” Steven cried out. “Hold up, Lloyd, that's English. Not a
spell.”
“Certain?”
“Certain.”
“Hmmph,” Lloyd said. “Go on with yuh yarn then, witch.”
Melody nodded and started again. “These things, they exist outside of
reality. Now, imagine the universe like a bubble—these things exist outside
of it. They're ancient, beyond time in any way we can conceive of it, and
they're the farthest thing from being human, completely and utterly foreign
in every sense. Until a few months ago, I didn't even believe in them.”
“So why are they here?”
Melody closed her eyes for a moment and sighed. “We summoned
one.”
“What did I tell yuh?” Lloyd huffed. “Witchy summoner summonin'
demons from hell. Didn't I tell yuh?”
“Wait, wait,” Steven said. “What do you mean, we?”
“This may be hard to take, Steven,” Melody said, “but... we, as in your
father and a few other members of the college.”
“Don't you fuckin' lie to me,” Steven hissed. “Don't you drag his name
into this.”
“I'm sorry, but it's the truth. Your father came across a book at the
college, and between him and a few others, they began... tampering with it.
I was brought in because they needed a female to perform a ritual. You have
to understand that I thought it was a joke. I thought it was a bunch of
perverted old men trying to have a gangbang. Frankly, I went along with it
because I was bored.”
“A witch and a tramp,” Lloyd said and spat on the floor.
Steven crossed his arms. If it wasn't for witnessing the creature with
his own eyes, he would've shrugged the story off. But now…now his father
was involved. His dead father.“You expect me to believe my dad was trying
to summon ancient aliens? For what reason, huh?”
“What other reason is there?” Melody asked. “Power, I presume.”
“I don't believe you.”
“You don't have much choice,” Melody replied. “Out of the circle, I'm
the only survivor. I think some kind of madness took your father first,
Steven. It was quick.”
“Dad died of a stroke,” Steven said.
 Melody went on without acknowledging him. “Paul was next. After
the creature was born, he shot himself. Then it was just Edward and myself.
Things were happening so fast, spiraling out of control. And the damned
thing grew so fast, we lost control over it. We'd been keeping it in a cage on
your father's property, but it escaped. Started feeding.”
“My livestock, eh?”
“Yes,” she confirmed. “Then it... ate Edward. We'd been trying to track
it, coming back every night and trying to use the Binding Words on it, but
we barely understood the thing in the first place. Your father was the one
who really grasped how to work the spe-.... incantations.”
Steven laughed. “Aliens... controlled by magic spells? Are you fucking
kidding me?”
“How else do you explain that thing then?”
Silence filled the room. Steven sighed and finished his beer. What a
fucking trip this turned out to be...
“It's the truth,” Melody said. “And we have to stop it before...”
“Before what?” Lloyd asked.
“Before it keeps growing, before it's completely unstoppable. Some of
the old texts say they can grow to the size of a city. This particular one, this
hybrid of Yog-Sothoth-”
“Watch it,” Lloyd growled, motioning with his shotgun.
Melody swallowed, and nodded. She continued, “This thing, its main
objective is to facilitate a doorway, a portal of sorts, so that the Old Ones
can seep into our world.”
Steven raised an eyebrow. “That thing is gonna build a.... portal
machine?”
Melody shook her head. “No, these things do not need machines. Their
power is beyond that. That thing out there will be bring others in, and it will
do it by carnage, by destruction. And by breeding...”
“What the fuck is that thing going to breed with?” Steven scoffed.
Melody sighed. “Did any of… did any of its seed… its fluids… get
into your orifices?”
Steven's heart sank down to his gut. A memory flashed through his
head:that giant dick spitting come into his house like a fire hydrant. Him
worming his way down the stairs, spitting it out.
When Steven looked up, Lloyd and Melody were both staring at him.
“Well, boy?”
 “Oh god,” he said and sat down at the table. Body shaking, eyes
watering, he suddenly began to feel nauseous, as if about to puke. “What...
what's going to happen to me?”
Melody's voice softened. “I'm sorry, Steven. I really am. I had no idea,
believe me. A few months ago I just taught classic literature. I thought this
was all a joke-”
“A FUCKING JOKE!?” Steven roared, then shot up from the table
and hovered over the woman. “You fucking cunt! What's going to happen to
me!?”
Melody's face went cold, hard. She didn't blink or look away, but
instead held his fiery gaze. “The transformation will happen quickly. It will
corrupt your thoughts first, and the flesh soon after. It's only a matter of
hours before, maybe minutes now-”
Steven screamed and then lashed out with a punch. His fist connected
with a hard clack on her jaw and Melody tumbled sideways in the chair and
landed on the floor.
“You fucking bitch!” he screamed, and kicked her in the stomach. The
air went out of her with an oof and Steven, in a mad rage, ripped a chair leg
off. He cracked her across the arm with it, corrected his aim and bashed her
in the side of the head. Wood splintered, shards flew. Blood began to mingle
in the red of her hair.
“You fucking killed me!” Steven screamed, striking her head and face.
“You fucking whore-bitch! Cunt! You fucking killed me!”
Steven howled, raised the chair leg above his head with both hands
like a ceremonial dagger, then drove it into the side of Melody's head with a
sickly crunch. Her mouth popped open. One of her eyes burst.
“You fucking killed me,” he wept. Chest heaving, he sank to the floor
beside her twitching corpse. “You fucking killed me. You bitch, you
fucking-”
Lloyd, still with his weathered poker face, raised the shotgun and
leveled it on Steven's head.
Steven saw the shadow, and turned. Covered in blood, eyes wet with
tears, he whimpered, “Wait, Lloyd, wait-”
The blast exploded Steven's skull in a violent, gory spray. Everything
above his bottom jaw was torn apart and splattered the kitchen with bits of
blood, bone, and brain matter. His corpse then slumped over onto Melody's
and leaked its contents upon her firm bosom and lay there, twitching as
well.
Dripping with blood and lowering his smoking 12-gauge, Lloyd
looked down at the mess. He realized then that he'd shot a hole not just
through Steven, but through his fridge door as well. “Ah dammit,” Lloyd
said, and then pumped another slug into the chamber.
For good measure, he blew Melody's head apart as well.

***

Lloyd let the ringing in his ears fade and enjoyed a beer and a cigar
he'd been keeping for whatever special occasion came about—this was
special enough of an occasion, with a giant monster running amok in the
woods and two headless corpses in his kitchen.
He said a silent prayer for Steven, and prayed to God-Jesus the witch
spent the rest of eternity getting buggered by demons in the dark pits of
hell.
Lloyd walked out onto his porch and sat in his rocker and watched the
fields, the sky and the sun for awhile. Here shortly, he was going to have to
chop up the corpses for safety’s sake, dig a deep hole with his backhoe, and
set the remains on fire before covering them up, hopefully putting an end to
the whole affair.
Maybe tomorrow, Lloyd thought, I'll go have myself a monster hunt.

That night

Lloyd woke to a crash somewhere on the first floor of his house. He

shot up, covered in sweat, put his green ball cap on and grabbed his shotgun
from beside the bed. Dressed only in his boxers, a white tank top and the
aforementioned hat, Lloyd stalked to his bedroom door, thinking, What
now, for pete’s sake?
He opened the door with a creak, stepped into the hallway and flipped
on a light. He might have screamed given the chance, for at the bottom of
the stairs lurked something beyond hideous—an abomination. Covered in
mud, were the blackened remains of what must have been Steven and
Melody. Except somehow their torsos were now bound together, almost like
how a kid may melt his army men on a hot light bulb. A terrible mouth
sporting broken ribs for teeth, with gleaming, wriggling, wet intestines just
beyond, yawned open. The severed limbs had somehow fused into the odd
lumpy body of the thing, with four legs, and four arms sprouting out
haphazardly. Somehow the thing pulsed. The body throbbed and swelled
like a heart—or a smoker's lung. Pulling in air to scream, Lloyd raised his
shotgun,but rope-like intestines shot from the creature's maw, wrapped
around Lloyd's neck and his ankles, and pulled him down the steps. The gun
did go off, but damaged nothing but the ceiling.
Oh God-Jesus! Lloyd had time to think just before bony, splintered
teeth punctured his body in a dozen places. Lloyd managed one short bark
of a scream and felt his innards rip, felt something inside him crunch, and
then...
All was black.

Sometime Later

In the darkness, a name was called.

Lloyd... Lloyd...Can you hear me? Wake up.
Through a fog, Lloyd's mind gathered.
Ayuh, I'm up, I'm up. Who's calling?
It's Steven...
Nuh, that can't be right. I blew yuh brains out, boy.
I know... you're a fucking dick, Lloyd.
Wuhn't nuthin' personal now...
Yeah, yeah. Can you see anything?
Nuh, can't see shit. What in God's name is goin' on here?
I think we've been... absorbed into this...creature. Well... my old body.
Ayuh, I reckon yuh right, boy. I saw yuh remains all misshapen at
the bottom of my steps with parts of the big titty witch and... ah God
Dammit! We dead, ain't we?
I don't know. Kinda. Can you feel anything? I mean, can you move?
I don't know. Let me.... I think I'm moving my arms around. Yeah, I
can feel I got arms. Yuh see me waving?
Nope, I can't see shit. Probably cuz you blew my fucking head apart...
Fucker.
Listen, I told yuh it wuhn't personal. That big titty witch said you
was gonna transform—and at least she wuhn't lying about that… Wait.
That big titty witch in here? Hey, Witch! Witch! Yuh in here?
I don't think she is. I can't feel her. I think whatever got inside me
absorbed my mind before you killed me;or was in the process of absorbing
me already. I think we're just using her body parts.
Well ain't this a fuckin' pickle...What do yuh reckon we do now?
Why don't you try and see if you can open your eyes?
One second- Shit! We're in the woods! Ah god! Would yuh look at
me!? Sweet Jesus, everything below my belt is your monster-ass body!
God almighty, that's the queerest fuckin' thing!
I know! I can see now! I'm seeing through your eyes!
Jesus Christ, get me offa this thing!
Calm down, dammit. I am that thing. Well, I think. Fuck, I don't know.
Somehow we're stuck together.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
Cool it, dammit! What are you doing up there?
I'm trying... to rip... myself offa... yuh monster ass!
Well stop it!
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh! Argh! Ugh! Fuck!
Dammit, Lloyd! Stop!
Boy, walk us back to the farm so I can get my circular saw and cut
us apart.
I'm not doing that...
And why the hell not?!
Well, for one, you blew my fucking head off. For two, if I lose you up
top, I can't see shit!
Oh, would yuh come off it! Wait...did yuh come back and kill me on
purpose just so yuh could see?
No, I don't remember any of that.
Boy, don't lie to me!
I'm fucking serious, old man! I just came to not too long after you
were.. absorbed.
Ate, boy. Yuh ate my ass end up. And now I'm riding yuh, stuck up
here like them damned squirrels on water skis, yuh sumbitch! Now turn
us around so I can cut myself offa yuh!
You old coot, don't you get it? You can't. You can't cut yourself off. All
your damn guts will fall out and you'll die. Who knows if you even got any
guts anymore to begin with! Probably full of those goddamn tentacles
anyway! So. Calm. The. Fuck. Down!
Then all went black again.
Hey... what... Dammit, Lloyd. Open your eyes. I can't see shit.
Nope. Fuck yuh.Lloyd, would you stop acting like a fucking child and
open your eyes?
Ain't talkin' to yuh. Nope. Monsters aren't real. This is just my blood
pressure medicine acting up and the queerest fucking dream I ever had.
I'm gonna wake up in 3...2...1...
...
You old fuck. Would you Please open your eyes?!
Soon as you take me back to th- Hey goddammit, what's that on my
face. Yuh doin' that?
Open your eyes and find out.
Lloyd opened his eyes and caught sight of a massive veined tentacle
with a dick head at the end rubbing itself on his face. He batted it away. It
came right back and smacked him across the lips.
Yuh a right sick fuck! Stop that! Dammit! Steven! Get yuh dick
outta my face! Stop it! Boy, I said STOP!
The penis tentacle—dictacle—pulled away and swayed back and forth
in front of Lloyd's upper body like a cobra, then it slithered back away
underneath the monstrous lower half.
Now listen for a minute, okay? Somehow, we still have our minds, our
thoughts. We can control this thing we've become. I don't know how, but
that means we have a chance.
What yuh talking about?
I mean, we can make things right. I can feel the... the Other... It's like
we're connected somehow. I can track it, and that means we have to stop it.
But to do that, we're gonna have to work together, old man. We have to stop
that thing before it opens the portal. We have to try. So... what do you say?
That thing's big as a goddamn house. How the hell yuh think we're
gonna stop it, eh? We're a right jumbled fuckin' mess, in case yuh haven't
noticed.
I know... that's why we have to feed...
I don't like where yuh going with this...
You still have plenty of livestock left...
Ah, goddammit...
 So... what do you say? Partners?
I suppose we can start with the hogs, then. But I'm telling yuh right
now, I ain't about to eat a pig raw, yuh here? I'm still a damn person,
Steven. I may be half a person with a monster for a lower half, but I will
not be eating anything raw—especially a damned dirty hog. Yuh can use
that damned demon mouth of yuhs to take care of that.
So... you're saying you're in?
Ain't got much of choice do I?
That's the spirit, Lloyd. Semper Fi! Hoo-ah! Let's go kick some
demon-alien ass!
Oh, shut up.

***

Lloyd sat atop the monstrous half of his new partnership with his arms
crossed. He wasn't all that happy with the situation, especially since all of
his livestock were currently being devoured one by one by the hideous
thing Steven had become.
By the time they'd chomped through all the hogs, they'd grown at least
five feet taller. Lloyd remained his same size. Everything above his waist
was human, but the creature beneath was solidifying, morphing with each
new kill.
Even as Steven used his horrid mouth to chew and thrash, he shared
his thoughts clearly with Lloyd, who was now feeling like some bizarre hat.
I think I can control the mutation. Can you look down and see if I've
fused these arms and legs together?
Lean over a bit... Ayuh, yuh got two legs, two arms now. Almost like
a person. Almost. 'Cept for that butt-ugly mouth where yuh chest should
be.
Good, good. It's working. Which way to the cows?... Lloyd?... Lloyd?
Dammit... they're out in the pasture. Come on, this way. Might as
well get it over with.
What's in that barn over there?
Just an old mare... Now wait. Yuh leave that horse alone. I have a
fondness for that horse. Just ain't an animal, that's a personal friend of
mine, yuh hear?
Alright, alright. Cool it, I was just ask-
 Steven's train of telepathic thought was interrupted by the barking of a
dog. The Steve-Lloyd beast turned to it, found it growling and yapping by a
tool shed not far from the pig pen where they were standing.
Can I eat that dog?
Ah hell, why not? Damn mutt belongs to that peckerwood Robins
down the road. Fuckin' things always over here harassing my chickens-
Before Lloyd could finish his thought, a tentacle—which not too long
ago was part of Steven’s (or Melody's) lower intestine—shot out like a
whip, wrapped around the dog's neck and drug it back to the gnashing maw
in a matter of a second. Several wet crunches and a few yelps later, Steve-
Lloyd felt their power grow a fraction.
Now that I think about it, that peckerwood Robins got some heifers of his
own. Bunch of sheep, too.
Good, we'll start there next...
Under a starry New England sky, the Steve-Lloyd beast moved from
farm to farm, a darkened hulk of a shape, resembling a nightmare version of
a man with a body of another man atop its brutish figure. It gobbled up
everything in reach: the cows, sheep, horses, pigs and chickens, and every
yapping dog and hissing cat the land had to offer.
Lloyd began to feel as if he were a tank commander, riding fearlessly
into battle atop his Panzer, and by dawn, they had easily grown to four
stories tall. They were standing amongst the timber, Lloyd looking out over
the treetops at the rising sun, when a thought occurred to him.
I figure we oughta lay low in the daylight. People see us stomping
around, we may just get the National Guard crawling all over us.
Yeah, you're probably-
What?
Look!
At what?
When I raise the tentacles up into the light!
I don't see nothing...
Exactly! The sunlight makes us invisible!
Well, I'll be...

***
 Over the next week, Steve-Lloyd tracked the beast—who Steven
cleverly named “House Fucker”—in a southern direction. Lloyd sensed
nothing of the creature's presence, but Steven was convinced he could feel
the thing. He described it like some magnetic pull, and even believed at
times that he could hear some strange voice at the edge of his mind calling
to him.
Lloyd couldn't tell if any of those things were true, but there had to be
something to it. Wherever they went, they found the telltale signs: tracks,
large footprints, trees broken off and snapped, houses with giant holes in
them or ones completely flattened.
The thing was getting bigger.
And so were they.
Steve-Lloyd estimated their height at some-eight stories. Their body
resembled something closer to a man now, more defined with each animal
eaten, and bent by Steven's will. The mouth in the stomach-chest area was
almost wide enough to eat an entire school bus if they so desired; not in one
bite, it would take some chewing, but Steve-Lloyd had become quite
powerful.
Their footsteps could be felt if you were nearby. If they were moving
fast, you could hear them for quite a ways coming. By day, they moved
nonstop, tracing the path of destruction House Fucker had left—being
unseen in the daylight was a huge benefit. But by nightfall, they had to be
careful. They stuck to wooded areas, crawled through places on their belly
if they had to. It was a hassle, all the while trying to feed and grow their
size for the inevitable showdown looming ahead.
Local news channels were having a heyday with what were first
thought of as freak storms. A track of woods and a farmhouse destroyed, as
if a single straight line of wind had blown through the trees and pinpointed
a house. But when people—mostly farmers, at first—began taking pictures
of the giant footsteps left in the dirt, it became a circus.
People believe bad weather. People don't necessarily take well to the
thought of giants roaming the land eating up their cattle. It was 2013 after
all, not the dark ages. No one really believed in dragons and sea monsters
anymore… Well, not everyone.
The internet buzzed with alien conspiracies, cattle abduction and
mutilation, of secret government weapons being tested. Wilder theories
talked of a giant Bigfoot, a literal King Kong. For once, they were much
closer to the truth any would dare to imagine.
And soon, it became clear to Steve-Lloyd the magnitude of their task.
Stepping through the woods, some-twelve stories tall, they could see
helicopters buzzing plumes of smoke ahead of them. It was daytime, and
they were invisible, but they still approached the scene cautiously.
A few more steps and they could see it through Lloyd's eyes atop their
ungodly body. A suburban town lie in ruin, as if a nuke had gone off, as if a
tornado had swept through and stripped all the buildings down to the
concrete foundations they sat upon.
News vans and 'copters circled the devastation. Rescue workers
scoured the rubble.
If Steve-Lloyd could have been listening to the news reports, they
would have heard the survivor testimonies.
“We thought it was an earthquake at first.”
“There was this series of loud thuds that shook the house, and they
kept coming closer and closer.”
“Then there was this sound, it was so horrible.”
“Like a freight train coming. I thought, Oh God, a tornado.”
“Like the loudest weed-eater you ever heard.”
“And we were running to the basement, and I saw out the window...
the neighbors’ house just exploded.”
“And that's when our roof just came off.”
“I saw people just being sucked up into the air.”
“It just didn't make any sense. It wasn't even that windy. Just broad
daylight, and everything was just being smashed left and right.”
“And that sound, that god-awful sound. Like cicadas, millions of
them.”
Steve-Lloyd watched only for awhile before they gave the scene a
wide berth. They trekked along in silence for some time, keeping their
thoughts to themselves. When they cleared a mountain, they stopped at the
peak for a moment, staring off to the horizon.
Is that...
New York... Yup.
...We have to stop this thing, Lloyd.
Let's hope it's the last thing we do. I'm not much for being a
monster.
 ***

New York grew closer—maybe no more than two days away at their
current pace. Steven talked incessantly about the beast. Said it was trying to
talk to him, felt as if it wanted him to join it. He talked about seeing visions.
Visions of a wasted earth, of cities in ruins, people being bred like cattle,
snacks and play things for unimaginable monsters. Visions of behemoths
coming out of the sea, roaming the land and devouring everything natural,
replacing it with something utterly alien, something wickedly evil and
bereft of kindness, devoid of any human virtue. Nightmares come to life.
The city was close. It was all but impossible not to be noticed, even
when they were invisible in the daylight. Time was running out, and they
had little of it to prepare, to grow, to become stronger. Farm country was far
behind them, and Steve-Lloyd grew desperate.
If Steven was right, the beast would take the city the next night.
It was as if it was waiting for them to arrive. Like it wanted to play.
So they moved, disregarding stealth. They snatched tractor-trailers full
of food from freeways, plucked the drivers from their rides and placed them
on the road screaming mad and scared to death as they watched their trucks
being crunched away by some unseen mouth above them. They ate the
entire contents of a Little Debbie snack-cake factory—just peeled off the
roof with two mighty hands and a collection of tentacles and went to town.
After, they tromped down the street to a cola factory and washed down all
the sugar with even more.
Helicopters buzzed everywhere. There was something big happening,
everyone could see that, but they just didn't know what. Many were already
fleeing the city. The National Guard was on alert, military jets zipped by
higher up, waiting, watching.
The entire world had it eyes focused on New York City.

Dusk

It's almost time. Soon as the sun goes down... the whole world is going
to see us.
At least I don't look half-bad. Wish I could say the same for yuh,
Steven. What's yuh plan, anyway? How yuh plan on stopping this thing?
 I figure I'll rip it limb from limb, starting with its dick.
Helluva plan there. Any idea where that thing is?
It's close, just waiting... It wants the world to see it. It wants the world
to know. It's not afraid.
Well, it should be. Ain't nuthin' scarier than a U.S. Marine.
Especially a Godzilla-sized Marine with a dick that could smash half of
Rhode Island... Hey, do me a favor.
What's that?
Grab me that flag over there.
A tentacle zipped out, plucked a flagpole off the side of a building,
and, guided by Lloyd's eyes and Steven's will, they stabbed the pole into
odd flesh beside Lloyd's body.
Now, that's a sight. Maybe they'll know we’re the good guys when
the shit hits the fan.
I really doubt that. Oh man, I'm all kinds of jittery. Like right before-
Fuck! Here it comes, Lloyd! I can feel it!
Where!? I don't see it!

***

A pub full of New Yorkers sat watching a flat screen TV. Random
conversations jumped around as the booze flowed. Was it another terrorist
attack coming? Al Qaeda? Aliens? Tensions were high as the local news ran
a report on all the strange events that seemed to be leading up to once place:
New York City.
Then the regular news feed abruptly switched, and the words
BREAKING NEWS flashed across the TV.
“This is Tom Laney, your local eye in the sky for News Channel Four.
We are currently above the New York Harbor area, and below us seems to
be some sort of disturbance in the water. Something massive is bubbling up
down there, and with the city on high alert-
“Wait! Something's coming up out of the bay! Holy shit! What is that
thing? Put the lights on it! Lights! Now!”
The patrons of the bar watched in awe, in horror, as a massive sea
monster rose up, up, up, and kept rising. The core of its body was like a
centipede, with hundreds of giant insectoid legs sprouting from its sides. Its
underbelly was a mess of writhing tentacles, and giant goat-like eyes
covered it's hide, all of them focusing on the light coming from the
helicopter above.
It looked up to the helicopter, and New York City looked back at it.
Continuing to rise from the depths, a gigantic human cock popped up
from the water. It was uncircumcised and really gross.
Patrons of the pub, their mouths dropped open. Mugs and bottles fell
from their hands and crashed on the floor. A woman began screaming.
“Are you seeing this!?” Tom Laney, eye in the sky shrieked, his voice
cracking.
The giant bug crashed through the water towards the Statue of Liberty.
It paused, seemed to eye the structure, then stabbed two of its massive
spiderlike appendages through the chest of Lady Liberty,t and thrust its
huge cock into her crotch. It pierced through, exploded out her rear with a
spray of dust and rubble, and then she cracked, and began to crumble. A few
thrusts later and Lady Liberty was but a jagged ruin, arms falling off, head
rolling on the ground, and a giant Godzilla-like monster raging above it.
It seemed to be angry, its lover not being able to keep up with it.
The screen shifted and another anchor came into view, sitting behind a
desk and holding a finger to his ear. “Tom, this is Chad. Yes we are seeing
this. We're getting reports of something spotted on the other side of the city.
We're cutting to that image now-”
The anchor, Chad, disappeared, and another helicopter view slid in
beside Tom Laney's. This one showed Steve-Lloyd. A spotlight from the
chopper pinpointed Lloyd's upper half atop the monstrous human-like
figure.
“Bob Brighthart, here. I'm a few miles from downtown New York, and
we have just caught sight of a second creature. If my eyes are correct, there
seems to be a...to be a man stuck on top of this giant... this giant man-thing.
There's an American flag stuck upright beside him... and... and I do believe
he's saluting us. Is that right? Yes. He's saluting us. I'm trying to cover the
thing’s body with our camera, but... this thing is massive! Almost twenty
stories tall and... oh god... I don't know if that's appropriate.”
The camera scanned down the front of Steve-Lloyd, and New York
City and the world caught sight of the second largest dick in the world.
“The...the man-thing is on the move. It does not appear to be hostile.
I'm trying to zoom up on the man riding on top. He... he appears to a senior
citizen. If I'm correct, he's wearing a green baseball cap. He's still saluting
me. Wait... he's motioning us to come closer.”
“Bob, I don't know if that's a great idea!” Chad said off camera.
Tom Laney burst in, “The bug monster is making its way up the bay!
It's heading for the city! This is unbelievable. I cannot believe my eyes!”
“I'm going to approach the old man and see... see if we can't talk to
him.”
“Bob! Stay back, retain your distance from the creature. Tom, keep
your feed on the bug, we have word that military jets are scrambling to that
area. ”
“He's trying to say something! I can't hear him!”
Bob Brighthart leveled his chopper as close to the old man as he
could. Lloyd desperately tried to hold on to his hat, and made a phone hand
gesture with his other hand.
“I am now going to engage in a conversation. He appears to asking me
to call him. Are you seeing this?”
“I am,” Chad said. “I... I just... can't believe it.”

***

Steven, we need a cell phone or something! There, down on the

street! See that kid!
On it!
On the street below the lumbering figure of Steve-Lloyd, people ran to
and fro in panic. Steven was doing his best to try to avoid them, tiptoeing
his way around swerving cars. It was inevitable that some wrecked—into
each other, into buildings, into running people—but standing there amongst
the chaos, a teenage boy was capturing the entire event on his smart phone.
Steven whipped a tentacle down at lightning speed, wrapped it around
the teen and pulled him up through the air until he was face to face with
Lloyd.
“Oh shit, man,” the teen said, still recording.“You... you gonna kill me
now?”
Lloyd reached over and snatched the phone from the kid and shook his
head. “Yuh got some balls on yuh, boy. That or yuh dumb as it gets. We
gonna set yuh down and yuh get to runnin', hear? Get the hell outta the city,
as fast as yuh can.”
 “Yeah, sure man,” the kid said, looking around and down at the street
below. “Can I have my phone back when you're-”
Steven didn't let him finish. He laid the kid back on the sidewalk and
trotted away.

***

“The man-thing has acquired a phone,” said Bob Brighthart, still

hovering nearby with the helicopter. “I'm going to use the on-board speaker
to give him my number.”
Bob flipped a switch on the chopper and his voice boomed out over
the chop-chop-chop of his propeller. “THIS IS BOB BRIGHTHART
FROM CHANNEL FOUR NEWS. PLEASE CALL THIS NUMBER SO
WE CAN SPEAK.”
Bob then rattled off his cell number. He watched the old man fiddle
with the phone for a moment, and then Bob's cell phone buzzed in his
pocket.
“Bob Brighthart here-”
“Goddamn touch screen phones,” Lloyd mumbled. “Hello? That yuh
in the chopper? Bob is it?”
“Yes, can you please tell us what's-”
“We on TV?”
“Yes, can you tell-”
“Alright now, listen close,” Lloyd said. “We ain't got a lot of time
here, so I'm gonna make this quick. My name's Lloyd Billington, the other
part... this big monster part... is the remains of a man named Steven Crane.
We are both former U.S. Marines and we are here to save this city. Now,
have yuh seen another monster?”
“Yes, Lloyd,” Bob answered, “we have. It was spotted coming out of
the New York Harbor. It's heading to the downtown area as we speak.
How...uh..how is this all happening? I mean-”
“Shut up a damn second, Bob,” Lloyd said. “Can yuh lead us to it?
The less we stomp around the better.”
“Yes I can, Lloyd, But we need some answers. Can you please tell-”
“Dammit! Get to leadin', Bob. Yuh just point the way and I'll explain
as we go. Get on it! Come on! Alright, good! Good!”
 Steve-Lloyd began moving down the street while Bob Brighthart led
the way with his chopper.
“First off,” Lloyd started, “the whole damn city needs to evacuate.
Fast as possible. Get the hell outta here. Shit’s gonna be real bad in a few
minutes. Second, we need the military down here like no tomorrow, hear? I
mean bring everything! Whatever the hell we got, we gotta bring it hard,
and bring it fast! If we can't bring this thing down, it's over. I mean the
whole world is done for. Yuh hear? This is it! The big one! I'm talking
tanks, jets, artillery—hell, get some nukes out here on the double. Make
sure the President is seeing this! It's no joke! This creature plans on
bringing more monsters like it; and guess what, they are not friendlies.
They have to be stopped! Yuh hearing this? We still on TV?”
“Yes, Lloyd,” Bob answered, “you're live. Now, can you tell us how
this happened? This is all pretty unbelievable. Can we get some-”
“Yuh damn right it's unbelievable!” Lloyd yelled. “And I'll tell yuh
what happened! Bunch of damn liberal eggheads messing around with shit
that ain't need to be messed with! Yuh start taking God outta the
government, outta the schools, letting queers marry each other, don't even
make kids say the pledge of allegiance! Jesus H. Christ, what did yuh think
was gonna happen?”
Steven's voice broke into Lloyd's skull then. Dammit, Lloyd. Shut the
fuck up with that shit. This isn't the time. We're not on talk radio!
Lloyd went on unperturbed. “Washington's full of a buncha lying,
scheming, cheating, no-good, yelluh, thieving ass weasels. And they'd more
than likely sell their countrymen into slavery than have the goddamn
backbone to stand up and do what's right. Yuh gotta bunch of college
professors teaching Marxism, and all kinds of nonsense like... Christopher
Columbus sold children as sex slaves? Bunch of goddamn nonsense!”
SHUT THE FUCK UP, LLOYD!
“Then there's the damn liberal media, making fine young American
girls act likes sluts and dress like common street trash. This new music is
just offensive. It's stupid, and repetitive. Yuh glorify money, greed fame and
criminals, and corrupt anything that has any moral fiber, and guess what's
happened?!”
OH MY FUCKING GOD, LLOYD!
Lloyd took a breath, and the whole nation—the whole world—raised
their eyebrows.
 “DEMONS!” Lloyd yelled. “Goddamned giant ass demon-alien
monsters, here to destroy this God-forsaken world! So if yuh hearin' this,
yuh better get prepared! Pull up yuh boot straps! We got some demon ass to
kick! Send in the big guns! Hoo-ah! Yuh hear that?! That's right, Devil Bug!
America's coming to whup that ass! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! HOOOOO-
AAAAAH!”
Lloyd threw the phone out and raised both his hands up, made Victory
“V's” with his fingers. The whole world watched, stunned.

***

The Devil Bug, a hybrid offspring of Yog-Sothoth, stepped onto the

shore. Colossus behemoth that it was—easily as tall as many of the
skyscrapers—it lumbered towards the city, tendrils coiling out. It's
spiderlike legs came down, crashing liking thunder, splitting the earth
wherever they hit.
Below, people fled in panic, looking back over their shoulders. Each
step from the beast rattled the ground under their feet. People fell and were
trampled. Cars jammed the streets like veins clogged with cholesterol. And
as the terrible chainsaw-like dentist’s drill noise rose from the monstrosity,
so too did the screams of humanity.

***

John Womack stepped out of an elevator with a couple, Derrick and

Natalie, in tow. If he made this deal, he'd be in the clear. His cocaine
addiction had flared up last month and had left him with quite a bit of debt
and a dealer who refused to take checks and wrings necks leaving pretty
provocative voicemails. He was trying his best to play it cool, but inside his
suit, his skin crawled and was slick with sweat.
“It's really a beautiful place,” John said, pulling the keys to the
apartment from his pocket. “The view looks right out over 5th Avenue. And
come New Years, you can literally watch the ball drop without leaving the
confines. Very impressive, especially if you're keen on hosting parties or-”
John swung the door open and let the couple in. They managed to
make it a few steps into the apartment, stopped, and gasped.
Oh god, please not a rat, please, John thought.
 He walked in behind them and came to a halt. “Is that…is that a
dick?” he asked out loud.
Outside the window, an enormous cock swayed by. For a moment,
John wondered if it was part of a float in a parade or something, and then a
tentacle wrapped around the base, and began to jerk the thing off.
In a trance, the three people moved closer to the window. From their
angle they could only see so much of the creature, but at the base of the
cock swirled a mass of tentacles, almost like pubic hair, that swooned like
seaweed in the tide.
The giant dong came to a halt, but this only increased the action of the
tentacle. It stroked and stroked and stroked til-
“Oh god, it's going to cum!” said Natalie.
And that it did.
A torrent of monster jizz frothed out from the tip and rained down onto
th
5 Avenue like a tsunami of goo. The first drops hit like giant water
balloons, exploding on contact, totally enveloping cars and people.
It only escalated.
John and the couple watched as people the size of ants fled from the
flash flood. Rolling waves of sticky white swallowed them up, pulled cars
and debris with it, rolling them end over end in a spooge deluge.
John Womack's jaw hung open.
Beside him, Derrick—the hopeful buyer—nudged him with his elbow.
When John turned to look, the guy said, “So much for the view, eh?”

***

Oh, god... There it is!

Steve-Lloyd paused as they caught sight of the gargantuan beast a
dozen or so blocks away. It towered above the buildings, impossibly huge.
Off to their right, Bob Brighthart could be heard over the speaker on his
helicopter cursing in disbelief.
Jesus... I don't think we're big enough...
There's no time for that! Let's go!
Steve-Lloyd broke into a run, massive feet crunching through the city
street. There was no time for caution, and people caught beneath had only a
second to scream before they were smashed flat. Each footstep shattered
windows, broke water and gas lines, shook bricks from buildings. As they
ran, Lloyd looked down from his perch and noticed their huge tentacle dick
was stiff as a rock.
Seeing his own erection through Lloyd's eyes, Steven said-
It's a War Boner, Lloyd. Stop looking at it. Keep your eyes on House
Fucker!
A moment later, they came around the corner to 5th avenue. The street
was flooded with monster spunk almost a story high, and Steven felt his
own monster stomach turn sour as the bug-cum squished between his huge
toes. Ahead of them, House Fucker was ramming his cock in and out of a
skyscraper. Tentacles and spider legs wrapped around the top of the
building, holding its tilting and crumbling frame in place as the giant thrust
away.
Two more pumps from the beast and the building was split in two. The
Devil Bug, House Fucker, seemed to bend over and look down
disappointed, and then tossed the upper half of the ruined structure through
the air, where it exploded into a gray-brownish cloud of debris with another
building.
What do we do now!?
Steven replied by sending tentacles out of his chest cavity of a mouth.
He picked up cars and a city bus and dropped them into his big brutish
monster hands. Steven took two quick steps forward, and pitched the city
bus through the air.
Lloyd watched it tumble til the bus became smaller and smaller and-
It smashed into House Fucker’s big ass monster balls and exploded.
Lloyd's hands shot up, and he cheered.
Good fuckin' shot, Stevey!
Down the street, The Devil Bug, House Fucker, bent over in pain. Its
terrible voice reached a crescendo so high that almost every window in
downtown New York shattered.
Before it could recover, Steven threw another car, and another, each
aiming for House Fucker’s massive nuts. His tentacles reached down into
the cum-flooded street, plucking cars up to constantly feed Steven's monster
hand. Other tentacles pulled up streetlights and snapped off their ends to
make jagged edges and stabbing weapons.
House Fucker roared, caught sight of some of the flying objects and
batted away a few of them with its own tentacles. Some of the cars smashed
into its hard crustacean-like shell, some bounced off the shaft of its huge
dick, and two more managed to smash into House Fucker's sack. It cried out
each time, stumbled and then lumbered forward.
Oh, he sees us now! Keep pelting his sack!
Steven sent more tentacles out, reaching for anything he could throw,
but the beast was easily twice their size. When it caught up to them, Steven
had no idea how they were going to stand toe-to-toe with it.
Then he got an idea.
Lloyd felt Steven begin to dip down. What are you doing!? It's
coming!
We don't have a choice, Lloyd! I have to feed!
Feed!? On what? Wait, oh God! Nooooooooooooo!
Steve-Lloyd's body dropped down as if to do pushups, and Lloyd
wretched and screamed as he felt Steven's monster half began to slurp up
gallons and gallons of seed.
Lloyd screamed unintelligibly, partly in disgust, but partly because
something almost electrical buzzed through their monster being. Their body
swelled with each gulp. Veins surged with power, muscles bulged and
doubled then tripled in mass
It's working!
I'll never forgive yuh for this!
Ah shut up, it's not that bad! Kinda like swallowing snot...
Oh God, shut the hell up-
Shit! Here it comes!
House Fucker shook the earth and rushed forward. Its spidery legs
stabbed into buildings, into the street, and ripped chunks away as it drug
itself forward. It neared Steve-Lloyd and two giant tentacles shot out like
spears towards them and nearly pinned them to the ground. But Steve-
Lloyd was fast; they shot back from their pushup position and landed with a
quacking thud on their feet.
The Devil Bug hissed, retracted its tentacles and wrapped them around
its cocked and furiously began beating off.
Shit! Watch it! I think he's aiming for me!
Steve-Lloyd leapt over to the next street and ducked behind a building
as a stream of jizz cut through the air a second behind them. The semen-
beam hit the structure with enough force that it severed the building like a
high-pressure power washer. Then, as the top of the building begin to teeter
and fall, Steve-Lloyd grabbed it, and with both hands tossed it like a
medicine ball back at House Fucker.
The monster hissed, and with one of its huge spider legs, swiped
through it in an explosion of dust and chunks of concrete. It went right back
to jerking its huge dick at them and hissing.
We have to plug it up!
With what!?
Use one of them light posts you ripped off! Stab it in the pee-hole!
That's not going to work! It's too small!
Then what!?
Steve-Lloyd ducked behind another building, dodging another semen-
beam, and rubble exploded over them. They jumped back up running.
There! We use that!
Ahead of them stood the Empire State Building, its spire reaching up
and touching the sky.

Miles away

“As you can see behind me,” said a reporter to his cameraman, and to
the rest of a dumbfounded nation, “there are two giant monsters with...
dongs bigger than NASA rockets... um... sword-fighting through New York
City!”
“Can you say dong on TV?” asked the cameraman.
“Fuck if I know, Kevin!”
“You definitely can't say that.”
“Say what!?”
Kevin pulled his face out from behind the camera and looked at Brian
Allen, the reporter. “You know, the... the ‘F’ word.”
“There are monsters fighting with their dicks, Kevin! And you're
concerned about me saying fuck!?”
“I'm not,” the cameraman Kevin replied nonchalantly, and returned
back to filming. “The FCC probably is, though.”
“Fuck the FCC!”
Kevin shrugged. “You're probably going to regret saying that.”

The White House

 “We have to do something about these…I can't believe I'm saying
this…” growled a general to the president, “these goddamn monsters, sir!
ASAP!”
An adviser shook some papers across the room. “Your poll numbers
are slipping each minute these things run amok unchecked, sir!”
“You're right, completely right,” sighed the president. He looked at the
video feed that tormented him. Those terrible, grotesque creatures
rampaging, destroying a city, and all the while doing it completely pants-
less.
He felt his blood begin to boil, and knew then what he had to do.
The president slammed his fist onto his desk. “I know what we have to
do!”
“Nuke them, sir?!”
“No!”
“Diplomacy?”
“What?! No!”
“Then what!?”
“We need helicopters. Helicopters with big black cloth rectangles to
censor those... those giant... wieners.”
The room fell silent.
The adviser spoke up, “Uh, why don't we just have the stations black
them out? Edit them out, or blur them?”
The president turned a set of fiery eyes on the man. “And how does
that help all the poor, defenseless children that are seeing those things first
hand!?”
“Sir, with all due respect, there are Godzilla-sized creatures destroying
New York City! Kids seeing a big ass monster dick is the least of our
worries!”
“You're wrong about that!” retorted the president. “We're talking about
moral decency, the protection of our children! Now get me those goddamn
choppers!”

Back in action

Steve-Lloyd leapt through the air, reaching for the spire atop the
Empire State Building, the way an outfielder dives for a pop fly. A stream
of cum blasted past them on their left. Lloyd ducked and held onto his hat
the best he could. The beast must've known that Lloyd was the eyes for the
operation, because all of its cock-snot attacks were being aimed at him.
With a great wrenching sound, followed by an audible snap, Steve-
Lloyd's monstrous hand ripped the spire free mid-flight. Their dive
followed its course, and their body plummeted forward. Steven used his
other giant hand to cup and protect Lloyd as they crushed a building, slid
through it, and then rolled onto their feet in a crouching position.
They stood, and turned to meet the Devil Bug, spawn of Yog-Sothoth.
Time seemed to slow. This next moment would be critical, for even
after all their feasting, and the cum guzzling back on 5th Avenue, the Devil
Bug still outmatched them in sheer size. Two of its tentacles were now
working in conjunction to milk its titanic johnson, preparing for another
blast. Lloyd took it all in: the Devil Bug—half centipede, half spider, with a
mix of tentacle and uncircumcised sausage—jerking away and hissing in
the midst of smoky ruins. To the right, military jets scorched the air on the
horizon; and to the left, a V-formation of massive Chinook helicopters
chopped a path to them.
Steve-Lloyd's massive humanoid figure lurched forward, spire in
hand, raised like a spear above its head.
He'll blast us 'fore we get to 'em!
I know...I'm counting on it!
Steve-Lloyd sprinted towards their enemy, their chest-mouth wide
open, mouth tentacles swirling, swirling.
The hiss of House Fucker reached a crescendo; it arched its back.
Lloyd screamed seeing the spray erupt and come hurtling to him.
AAAAAH JEEEESUUUS!
And then Steve-Lloyd leapt, moving its chest-mouth to receive the
blast of hot fluid while simultaneously protecting Lloyd with its free hand.
The world watched, gagging with Steve-Lloyd, as they sailed through
the air, taking a steady stream of baby gravy right in their mouth piece, and
they came down...
...and down..
...and Steve-Lloyd stabbed the spire into the spurting tip of House
Fucker's penile weapon. They landed hard on flat feet and shook the ground
so violently that several nearby buildings collapsed. House Fucker
screeched in pain and thrashed out with one of its legs, cutting deep into the
blackened mutated flesh just above Steve-Lloyd's chest-mouth. Green blood
oozed out of them like tapioca pudding gone bad, but Steve-Lloyd returned
the favor and snapped off the spire in the Devil Bug's cock.
It was a melee now: tentacles swiping, insectoid legs stabbing at them.
Steve-Lloyd blocked attacks with their own tendrils, dropped down on a
knee and socked House Fucker in the sack with a one-two combo that made
their enemy's dick spurt green blood swirled with white cum.
Choppers incoming! Looks like they got somethin-
Lloyd squinted, wondering what weapon the two massive helicopters
could be carrying in tandem. Cables hung from both of the aircrafts, and
attached to the cables was a black tube. Before he could even guess what it
was, the thing unfurled into a giant black rectangle.
Another set of choppers behind them uncoiled the same kind of
contraption.
What the hell? What are they doing?
Steven ripped off a spider leg from House Fucker, stabbed it back into
one of the horror's massive roaming eyes, and found himself being stabbed
by another leg in his stomach. The Devil Bug shot a group of tentacles up to
Lloyd's position, and Steven had to juke his massive body to the right,
sweep arm the attack, and counter with a toe-kick to the Devil Bug's balls,
while breaking off the leg that ground into their torso.
Yuh gotta be shittin' me! I tell 'em to bring weapons and look at this
shit! They're trying to block our dicks out! Trying to censor us!
They're cock-blocking us!?

The White House

“Operation Cock Block is a success!” roared the president. His hands

clenched together in prayer, he stood before a massive flat screen TV that
showed all the major media network feeds. They all worked together; with
the aid of the humongous black cloths hanging from the helicopters, no one
could see a bare-skinned penis anywhere on American television.
“It will be remembered,” said the president, “that even in the face of
terror and destruction, I did what could be done—what had to be done—to
protect the moral decency of my country.”
 Behind the president, the general nodded, and the rest of the room
nodded with him. They reached their hands inside their jackets.
“I shall be greater than Lincoln, and Reagan, and Obama. History will
know of my prudence, know that I was-”
-His cabinet members, the general, and even the secret service pulled
pistols from their holsters and aimed them at the president-
“-a man of great integrity and faith. That my moral compass could not
be tested,” rambled the president. His speech abruptly ended as the giant
insect-like bug swiped the helicopters out of the air. The black cloths fell
away and revealed the huge flopping cocks of the beasts.
“Goddammit!” the president cursed, and slammed his fist upon a table.
He turned to face the room and had enough time to make a big dumb face
before gunfire erupted.
A bullet tore through his cheek, another zipped between his lips and
shattered his front teeth, another blew off his jaw, several more powered
through his forehead and opened up the back of his skull like a flower.
Blood and bone and brains and bullets hit the TV, and before his body could
hit the ground, both his rambling and the news behind him went black and
died.
The general lowered his pistol, stepped past the twitching corpse and
picked up a red phone.
“There's been a change of plans, gentlemen.”

***

The giants circled each other, tentacles slapping back and forth,
tangling in knots. Atop the monolithic figure of his former neighbor, Lloyd
peered down as they swayed through the melee. The city around them lay in
ruins. Smoky, dusty clouds rose up from the rubble and devastation. They'd
carved a circle of flattened destruction in downtown New York City. The
buildings that were still erect acted as almost a boxing ring, or a gathering
of spectators around them.
Keep focused on House Fucker, Lloyd! I have to see!
But three approaching jets to their left had caught Lloyd's attention.
By the time he figured out they were F-14's, they were already deploying an
array of missiles. He saw contrails blaze a path towards the battle.
Incoming!
 Shit!
Steven barely had enough time to cup his hand over Lloyd before
explosions ripped into their shoulder and torso. The night sky lit up.
Molten-hot fire and pain rocked them, but did little damage. As the flames
whipped up in a cloud of blackened smoke, several missiles detonated
across the inner belly and back of The Devil Bug, seemingly with no effect.
House Fucker screeched it's terrible sound and tried its best to pull
Steve-Lloyd closer with its tendrils and appendages. Steve-Lloyd fought
tooth and nail to attack its cock and balls without being dragged too close.
The jets dipped back around and opened up with their cannon fire.
Twenty-millimeter machine gun rounds pelted both Steve-Lloyd's and
House Fucker's hide, and one of the pilots, tempting fate, concentrated his
fire into a large blinking eye the size of a football field on the Devil Bug's
side.
Lloyd cheered when he saw the eye dimple and ooze greenish blood.
He cheered louder when the eye popped and House Fucker shrieked in pain.
Get his ass! Get some! Get some!
Then the Devil Bug swatted the jet from the sky in a fiery eruption. A
second later, something large whistled over Steve-Lloyd's shoulder, the
whoosh that came with it pulled off Lloyd's hat and then exploded in front
of them, tearing off one of the smaller spiderlike legs of the Devil Bug.
Fuck! Lloyd screamed as the fireball almost engulfed him. He leaned
back, shielding his eyes with his hands, and turned atop Steven in the
direction of the shot.
Navy's here! Cannons at our back! Move! Move! Put the bug in the
line of fire before they blow my ass up!
On it!
Another shell whistled past them and hit House Fucker in the
midsection. Streams of green blood and chunks of tentacles erupted from
the blast, but House Fucker moved forward, thrusting its cock towards them
and trying to wrap them up in a monstrous bear-hug.
This thing isn't trying to kill us! It's trying to fuck us, Steven!
Steven batted away the Devil Bug's dick.
I noticed!
Fuck it then!
You mean give up?!
No! I mean FUCK IT! Fuck it back!
 Another shell came in from the warships in the harbor; this one hit
Steve-Lloyd under the right arm and blew a crater of blackened flesh and
mutated muscle out.
Fuck that hurts!
Keep moving, boy! Flank his ass! I see bombers coming! We're
running out of time!
Steven slapped the Devil Bug's dick away and dove to his left, rolled
on his side and came up with an upper cut to House Fucker's testicles. To
his surprise, one of the sacks exploded like million cans of silly string.
KA-BOOM! BOOM!
Two more shells rocked into House Fucker's back. It leaned forward,
tentacles clasping its balls. It cried out— in pain or anger, they couldn't tell.
The jets circled back and pounded a trail of sizzling cannon rounds across
Steve-Lloyd's back and over the swirling mass of tentacles that made up the
Demon Bug's inner belly.
Lloyd glimpsed down almost thirty stories, saw tanks rolling down
streets that were not completely destroyed, and then looked up and saw a
line of Apache helicopters releasing Hellfire missile after Hellfire missile.
Whatever you're gonna do, Stevey, you better make it count! They're
coming down on us!
Through Lloyd's eyes, Steven took in the sights. He didn't know if he
could kill the beast before him, but what he did know was a rising sense of
anger, and desperation.
You! You fuck!
Steven grabbed House Fucker's dick, and to his surprise, the thing
didn't back away; instead, it pushed forward, as if it enjoyed his grasp.
You ruined my life! You sick fuck! You wanna fuck me!? Huh!? How
'bout I fuck you! Fuck me!? NO! FUCK YOU!
Lloyd cringed when he saw what Steven was doing. Two giant
blackened monster hands seized the cock of House Fucker and squeezed it,
squeezed it hard. Its pee-hole flared open and dripped gobs of white and
green. Then Steven took their cock and shoved the head of it into the head
of House Fucker's dick.
You fuck! I fuck you! You don't fuck me! I FUCK YOU!
And they did. Steve-Lloyd rammed their shaft balls-deep into the dick
of the Devil Bug. The two monsters pulled together almost in a loving
embrace, as missiles and cannon fire rained down upon them.
 You like that!? Huh?! You like that!?
As they pulled closer, closer together, a mass of tentacles parted in the
upper belly of House Fucker. They pulled away and revealed a huge
snarling human face—a face that resembled Steven's father.
Steven screamed and ground his dick deeper, wrapped his arms around
his enemy.
Lloyd screamed, looking into the face of his old neighbor—a man he
always thought of as a giant dick.
The face of House Fucker shrieked back.
Above them, a bomber jet cut through the air. Its bay doors opened
and its payload dropped, whistling down into the battle.
Fuck you! Steven's mind blasted. Fuck you! I hate you, Dad! I was
never good enough! You were such a fucking dick! A dick about everything!
And now I'm fucking YOUR dick! I'm fucking your dick with MY DICK! I
HATE YOU!
Aaaaaaaaarggh! Lloyd cried. Yuh and yuh pop are a bunch of
queeeeeeers!

Miles Away

On the horizon, a blinding flash turned night to day. Kevin the

cameraman and Brian the reporter turned and shielded their eyes. A moment
later, a tremendous percussion rattled the ground, followed by a thunderous
roar. A strong wind pelted them with bits of dust and granules and almost
knocked them from their feet. When the light subsided, they turned back
and looked in awe as a mushroom cloud rose above the city.
“Get the camera on this!”
“I am, I am!”
“Holy fuck! Shit fuck damn fuck! We've just nuked the city!” Brian
screamed at the camera. “New York City has been nuked! Oh god! We....we
can't see the monsters yet! Let's hope this desperate maneuver has stopped
them! Dear rocket ship Jesus on shit fire piss ass, all those people! I can't
believe it!”
Kevin zoomed in on the cloud, trying to find signs of the monsters. He
focused, unfocused, and focused his lens again. And then, from the pillar of
smoke...
Wings unfurled.
 Two massive bat-like wings of a dark green color.

Before the Council

Torches lit the ruins of a courthouse, casting flickering shadows about

the cracked walls. Outside, a fiery sky, pockmarked with oily black clouds
that sprouted tentacles, gave ruddy light to the horrors below. Unspeakable
forms roamed and slithered around the graveyard that was once a city.
These things—these terrors—wore the remnants of human clothing, but
what spilled out of them was anything but.
Inside, Brian Allen was handcuffed before a council. These things in
robes mocked their once-human form. Rows of eyes and drooling mouths
sprouted from leprous flesh. Sickly, wet tendrils looped out from beneath
their garbs, and one of them raised a gavel.
Pow-pow-pow.
“Brian Allen,” the horror gurgled, “you have been charged with
numerous accounts of prohibited language, clearly stated within the
guidelines and restrictions of the FCC Moral Decency Act, during a live and
public broadcast. How do you plea?”
Brian swallowed and looked about the room. Somehow he'd still
retained his humanity, despite the apocalypse that had followed the events
in New York City. He'd retained his being even through the waves of
horrors that spilled from the portal within the nuclear ground zero. He
retained his good looks and his swell hairdo, even as people were rounded
up like cattle, lines and lines of them pulled into monstrous breeding and
feeding lairs to be raped, mutated and transformed.
He'd hidden away like a mouse and made himself small. But it was
over now; the things had found him and brought him here to this mockery
of a court.
“Plea?” Brian asked, feeling numb.
“Is it not true you violated FCC guidelines?” the creature said, leaning
forward, almost vomiting the words instead of saying them. “We have video
evidence of numerous infractions. You clearly violated moral decency with
a string of choice words... on live television, no less. Millions of people
witnessed the act, Mr. Allen. Many of them were children. This court is not
pleased. So... how do you plea?”
“Man,” Brian said and shook his head, “fuck you.”
 “Fuck...me?” the thing laughed. The rest of the court laughed with it.
“Fuck me, eh? Bailiff, pull down Mr. Allen's pants. Position his rectum into
receiving position.”
“Fuck me,” it laughed again. “Fuck you, Mr. Allen. Fuck you.”
“Wait! Wait!” Brian screamed as some horrid fish-thing pushed him to
his knees. “Don't I get a lawyer!?”
The head of the council leaned back. Another creature beside him
leaned over and whispered something its ear—or what should've been an
ear. Who could tell, Brian thought. The thing looked like Piccasso and Dali
got shitfaced drunk and decided to paint a picture with a turd on a canvass
made from the leftovers of a fish fry.
“Well, I suppose you’re right,” the thing said. “Councilor?”
From behind a table, a lobster-like creature stood up wearing a gray
tweed suit. It walked briskly over to the kneeling Brian Allen, looked down
on the human with its beady black eyes, and then unzipped it's fly. It
produced what appeared to be a mealworm that glistened wet and smelled
of ass and dumpsters filled with baby diapers.
One of its mandibles shot out, pinched Brian's head til his mouth
popped open, and then shoved its grotesque cock deep into the man's throat.
The lawyer pushed it deeper, til Brian gagged and vomited, and even still,
the monster held its dick firm in place.
The lawyer turned to the council.
“My client has nothing to say at this time, Your Honor.”
 Nyogtha of the Northern Line
Adam Millard

Goodge Street Station, as was its wont on an early Monday morning,

swarmed with people. Intolerant commuters shoved indecently past each
other in an attempt to board the train currently sitting on the platform,
momentarily disremembering that another exactly like it would be along in
a few minutes. One would imagine the lack of etiquette—and sheer
savagery they afforded—suggested that the workers enjoyed their jobs,
when in fact most of them would rather be doing anything other than
boarding that train.
A woman, frail and rheumy and wearing a silken scarf over her head,
was almost crushed beneath the melee as the doors to the train swished
open and the crowd surged forward. She, unlike these wage-slaves, had no
deadline for her destination. Her working days were over; she’d paid her
dues and was enjoying life as much as she possibly could with the little
benefits the government granted her. Not that money was important to her;
she had plenty of it. It was just that the world had become accustomed to
leeching, and to decline a pension was tantamount to boasting.
Stepping aside to allow the suited businessmen a clear run-up to the
train, she inhaled and wiped the mirrored sunglasses perched upon her nose
as best she could without taking them off. The air was thick with the scent
of a thousand perfumes and aftershaves, commingling to create something
barbaric. Her eyesight wasn’t what it used to be, and her hearing had gone
the same way, but she could smell shit if it drifted beneath her nostrils, and
that was what the amalgamated stench reminded her of.
Shit. Coming soon from Paco Rabanne.
The commuters fighting for entry through the myriad doors soon
realized they would all make it on, although it did nothing to tame them and
they proceeded to elbow, nudge, knee, shoulder-barge and—in one instance
—head-butt fellow passengers. The head-butted man simply shrugged it off,
as if being clobbered in the face by another man’s face was perfectly
acceptable, especially at such an ungodly hour on a Monday morning. Later
that evening, the man would peer into a mirror at the purple egg formed on
his forehead and devise an elaborate ruse in which he would get his revenge
on the nutjob who’d clouted him. He would also, once ready to take his
revenge tomorrow morning, chicken out. Instead he would locate the head-
butter and silently curse the man, who would have no idea how close he had
come to receiving his comeuppance.
The elderly woman shuffled forward, shaking her head with dissent at
what she had just witnessed. Animals, she thought, nothing more than
primates in suits, and that was being unfair to primates, who she surmised
would act in a much better fashion given an Armani two-piece and an
Oyster card.
She boarded the train cautiously. A punk—that’s what they call them,
she thought as she looked at his orange-tinged spikes—grimaced at her. The
nose-ring dangling from his septum chinked like a cowbell as he moved an
inch back to allow her suitable room. She could tell he wasn’t pleased with
having to move for an old dear such as she.
“I’m terribly sorry,” she said, and then—somewhat snidely—added,
“It’s a little early for a Halloween party, isn’t it?”
A few of the passengers within earshot snickered. The punk, an upper-
class rebel whose birth certificate named him as Cedric Carter-Bowles,
grunted something indecipherable. Knowing that his parents would hit the
roof if they found out he’d been disrespecting his elders once again, he
followed up the grunt with an apology.
“That’s quite alright, young man,” the geriatric gnome said, satisfied
with herself. Next to her, a businessman glanced impatiently at his watch.
He clicked his tongue and sighed heavily before roughly straightening his
tie. The elderly lady offered him a smile, which he chose not to return.
Instead, he glanced once more at the golden monstrosity coiled around his
wrist. He was clearly running late and was eager for the train to start
moving. The old lady felt no sympathy for him, nor did she envy him. Time
was no longer significant to her the way it once had been. What mattered
was the remaining years. She had had a long and fruitful life, filled with
suffering and delight in equal measure. She had nothing to grumble about,
no regrets, nothing she would change given half the chance. And the man
nervously stepping from one foot to the next beside her made her realize
how fortunate she had been, how lucky she now was.
Just as the doors were about to shut, three men appeared. They were
virtually identical. Her first thought was of clones, genetically-created
copies of a single source, but knowing that science hadn’t quite reached that
point yet, she pushed the thought away and settled on something a little
more plausible.
Triplets.
The men embarked the train. The punk sighed, grunted, apologized
once again. The lady pushed herself back as far as she could before
realizing she could go no further. The men seemed to fit their combined
forms into the tiny space, regardless; as if they were liquid, capable of
shape-shifting to accommodate their dozen limbs. They had an insect-like
quality, what with their slender countenance and pitch-black suits.
Spiderlike, almost. But those heads, perching precariously upon spindly
stalks which could barely be called necks, were perfectly hairless. If there
ever had been hair atop those heads, there was no sign of it now.
The doors hissed shut and within a second the train pulled away from
Goodge Street. Its forward momentum caused everyone on board to lean
towards the back of the train. At the back of the train, a tiny man named
Paul Jacoby tried desperately to push back on the throng, but it was of no
use. His face was smooshed against a window, and even after he’d exited
the train at Kennington his face would peer out from the glass for quite
some time. One child, a little girl with beautifully plaited pigtails and a face
peppered with cutesy freckles, would draw a dick on his head.
The three men standing in front of the elderly lady began to whisper.
Their respective bald heads bobbed and dipped as the train surged onward
through the tunnel. The lady cocked her head so that the scarf covering her
ears lowered ever-so-slightly. She caught the tail-end of their murmurings.
“…wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
As a travelling lady, she liked to think herself well-versed in the
multitude of foreign languages she’d chanced upon. Yet, for the life of her,
she couldn’t place the language these three baldies were using. It was more
a series of throaty clicks and misplaced vowels than any language she had
ever encountered.
Must be some sort of idioglossia, she thought. A language created
between the three that could only be understood by them. She’d heard of
such things between identical siblings, but never witnessed it first-hand.
“…ph’nglui mglw’nafh…” the one on the left said.
“…Cthulhu r’lyeh…” the one in the middle added.
“…wgah’nagl fhtagn…” the third bald-pated fellow concluded.
 “I say, that’s terribly rude,” the lady interjected. “I mean, would you
like it if we started talking in some foreign language? Hmmm? For all we
know, you’re terrorists about to set off a device.”
The passengers around her gasped. “Terrorist” was still one of those
taboo words, especially on public transport. The mere utterance of it was
apt to get you swamped with bodies or arrested at the next station.
Somebody near the front of the train begged to be let off, but since the
tubular tin moving at forty-five mph was deep beneath the ground—and
equidistant to Tottenham Court Road and Goodge Street—it was highly
unlikely the driver would make such an allowance.
One of the androgynous men turned to face her while the other two
remained facing forward. He sneered, curling his lip just enough to make
the perplexed old lady wish she’d never opened her mouth. “Mnahn’,” he
said. “Mnahn’ gof’nn.” And then he laughed. A sound emanated from deep
within him, an incessant drone which suggested he’d skipped the regular
breakfast of cereal, toast and sundry jams and opted instead for a hornets’
nest.
Whereas the rest of the passengers were happy to let it slide, the old
lady folded her arms resolutely across her chest. “See, there you go again,”
she said. The man was at least a foot taller than she; she found herself
arching her neck to make eye-contact as she reproached him. “This is Great
Britain, is it not? We are in London, are we not? I’m pretty sure I saw a
large sign outside that said we were.” She glanced around to check that the
rest of the passengers were still with her, if they ever had been to begin
with. They were looking in all directions; anywhere but towards the strange
bald trio and the apparently racist old lady giving them a right earful.
“Mnahn’ hrii, kadishtu,” the man said.
“Bless you,” the old lady replied.
The man grunted; she could see she was going to get nowhere.
“Maybe you should leave it be,” the Rolex-sporting businessman
whispered to the old dear, clearly afraid of what might unravel should the
gangly triplets decide to ruck. “This is a free country, and we’d all like to
—‘
The lights went out. It was so sudden that screams literally leapt from
throats. Somebody near the front of the train began to pray aloud. A dog
began to bark, which made the entire experience all the more unsettling for
those who had a phobia of small, whiny animals. Then, the train began to
slow. Light flooded in through the windows as the platform appeared.
People, once again, began to breathe. For some, the episode would be
worthy of a mention upon arrival at work; for others, it was already
forgotten, and as the train pulled to a halt and the doors hissed open, people
continued to go about their tedious lives relatively unscathed.
However, the busy commuters failed to notice—upon alighting
Tottenham Court Road—the missing triplets, the scarf-wearing old ninny,
the punk and the businessman. It was as if the darkness had swallowed
them up wholly, leaving nothing behind but a slight tear in the fabric of
time and space, which would slowly stitch itself back together as the next
horde of humans clambered aboard.

***

It was all very surreal. In the first instance there was only darkness,
confused cries, a mangy dog doing its very best to burst eardrums.
Something had coiled around her arm, constricted like one of those
impossibly large snakes she’d seen in National Geographic documentaries.
Then there was silence, and a silvery buzz, like television static pumped
directly into her mind. Something very abnormal was happening, but it was
all so sudden that she could do nothing to stop it.
The intolerable thrum inside her head dissipated, leaving her crouched
upon a tiled floor, head between her arthritic knees, wondering what the hell
had just happened.
“What just fucking happened?” a voice said. “Is this some kind of
joke, ‘cos if it is it’s not funny?”
She lifted her head to find the businessman—though now he looked a
little like a vagrant who had stumbled, somewhat fortunately, across a
designer suit—pacing frantically across the deserted platform. The punk
was sitting cross-legged on the solitary bench; he looked terrified, which
didn’t suit him.
The businessman glanced around the platform. The battered and rusty
sign hanging upon the wall announced the station as KING WILLIAM
STREET, which was a new one on him. He threw his hands up and began to
pull at the greying hair; the internationally recognized gesture of panic.
“This can’t be happening,” he said with a tremulous voice. “No way. This
can’t be real. I’ve got a meeting in…” He glanced down at his watch; or
would have if it was still there. His eyes widened, his mouth fell open as if
his jaw had decided dislocation was a great look for him. “Holy shit! I’ve
been robbed!”
The punk stood, checked for his wallet. Gone, along with his nose-bar
and the twenty-two other piercings. He felt lighter, somehow. If it wasn’t
for the terrible, ominous sense of impending doom weighing him down, he
would have felt like his old self again. Reborn. Like the old Cedric that
mother and father approved of, the one who collected beanie babies and
drew delightful pictures of unicorns and fruit bowls.
“No, this has to be some kind of prank,” the businessman opined. He
scanned the abandoned platform for clues, any signs that what they were
going through was pre-empted. But there was nothing; not even a security
camera. “This doesn’t make any fucking sense. We were just on the train.
You were about to get yourself into a scuffle with those foreign maniacs.”
He jabbed a shaking finger towards the elderly lady, who had picked herself
up from the tiles and was in the process of brushing herself down.
“Yeah,” the punk said, suddenly growing a pair. “You were being
incredibly rude to those men. Then everything went dark.”
“Are you seriously suggesting that my being rude somehow resulted
in…this?” She gestured to the empty platform.
The businessman jabbed his accusatory finger at her. “He’s right. The
first rule of subway travel is not talking to strangers. You broke the rule,
lady, and now we’re in some…some sort of purgatory.”
She couldn’t help it, but a giggle escaped her. She’d heard some things
in her incredibly long life, but this was a statement worthy of note. “That’s
priceless, that is,” she said, pulling her head-covering around and tying a
fresh bow. “So what you’re saying is that by reprimanding those men for
their insolence, we’ve been shifted sideways through time and space and
placed in some sort of holding cell for the obnoxious?”
When she put it like that, the man realized how insane it sounded.
“Well, I don’t fucking know, do I? One minute we were on the train, the
next…the next we’re on King William Street…is that even a station? I don’t
think so.”
“It used to be,” she said, pacing casually across the platform. “It
closed a long time ago, from what I can remember.”
“Well, colour me impressed,” the businessman sneered. “What are
you, a history teacher?”
 She didn’t deem his question worthy of a response and decided to
ignore it. “What’s fascinating,” she said, “is that the three of us are here.”
“Yeah, why me?” the punk asked, though he could barely be called a
punk now. He was a preppy with spiked hair and a leather jacket.
“We were the three closest to those men,” she continued. “The men
speaking in tongues.” It was the only way she could describe it.
“Something grabbed me when it all went dark,” the businessman said.
“I felt it. Wrapped around my throat like a giant dick, only cold and wet.”
“Yeah,” the punk said, as if the businessman’s recollection had
suddenly ignited memories of his own ordeal. “I thought something was
crawling on me, and then I passed out. At least, I thought I did.”
The old lady smiled, though if you were to ask her why, she wouldn’t
be able to tell you. “Those three men weren’t men at all,” she said, nodding
her head as if the words passing her lips made any sort of sense.
“I don’t believe in ghosts, lady,” the businessman said, shuddering—
which was a contradictive reaction, considering his words. He glanced
across his shoulder, suddenly aware of their surroundings and the
impossible manner in which they had arrived at them.
“I’m not saying they were ghosts,” she said. “But I don’t think they
were human, either.”
“Oh, great,” the punk sighed. “Demonic triplets. All we need now is a
spider-clown and my nightmares are complete.”
Something rumbled overhead, followed quickly by the screeching of
brakes. The echoes travelled along the tunnel on either side of the platform.
It was genuinely unnerving, like a thousand voices groaning and hissing all
at once. The punk didn’t make a big deal of it, but he suddenly felt the urge
to urinate.
“We’re beneath the other stations,” the businessman said, staring
fixedly on a spider-web crack in the ceiling. “Which means that we’re still
in the real world. We just need to get back up there.”
The punk was already on it, checking for doors, windows, anything he
could fit through or throw himself at. The lady and the businessman
watched as he frantically searched the platform, neither wanting to
interrupt, neither willing to tell him that his searching was fruitless.
It was clear there was no way out. The one door to the platform had
been welded shut, perhaps years ago. The steps to the left of the platform
led up to a solid brick wall, as if the architect had been drunk at the time of
its creation. The place was sealed tighter than a gnat’s chuff. The tunnel
running through the station was cordoned off with orange bollards and
neon-yellow tape. It was like a crime scene.
“Nothing!” the punk breathlessly announced as he returned to the
platform. “Whatever this place is, there’s no way in or out.”
“Then how the fuck did we end up here?” the businessman said,
tugging at his tie as if he’d suddenly discovered it was a salamander. After a
few seconds of failed tugging, he gave up and tore it off completely. He was
beginning to ooze sweat; a thin film of panic and despair coated him. The
old lady wouldn’t have pegged him as a claustrophobic. Maybe he was in
the closet about it. The thought tickled her insides.
“We were teleported here by those fucking men,” the punk said.
“That’s the only way to explain it.”
“Not men,” the lady corrected. “I knew it the moment they stepped on
board.”
“Well, you should have stuck one of your gnarly, old feet out and
waited for the doors to shut in their faces,” the businessman snapped. “We
wouldn’t be in this mess if you had.”
The lady sighed. “Yes, well, it’s too late now. We need to figure out
how to get out of this place.”
“I know this might seem rude,” the punk said, which usually meant
that what followed would be exactly that, “but would you mind taking those
glasses off? All I can see is two of me, bobbing around. It really is
distracting.”
The woman thought about it—even went as far as lifting a hand to
oblige—then said, “I’m afraid I can’t. Cataracts.”
“Look, can we forget about the old lady’s optical affliction just for a
minute,” the businessman somewhat unceremoniously interjected. “She’ll
be telling us about her piles next, and we don’t have time to…”
That was where he stopped. His eyes bulged from their sockets,
threatening to drop out and roll along the platform. His mouth quivered as
he fought to find the words that would not come. He lifted his hand and
pointed across the station. The punk and the old lady turned to see what had
spooked the businessman so effectively.
Standing beside a single stanchion, the trio of spiderlike men gazed
towards them. There was something in their eyes—those infinite whirlpools
that had seen universes implode and civilizations fall—which suggested
they weren’t here to ask the time or discuss economic growth in the banking
sector.
“This can’t be good,” the businessman said.
And it wasn’t. A sudden torrent of wind whipped through the station;
ancient dust and brown paper whorled up into the air, creating a grotesque
miasma. Rats squealed—where the hell did the rats come from?—as they
were forced to join the ever-expanding tornado of debris. The triplets took a
step forward, away from the stanchion holding up the Northern Line in its
entirety. As they touched, they began to merge, a liquefied mess replacing
what had only a moment before been limbs. Their heads distorted, melting
into the singular, cyclopean ichor. It was, the old lady thought, really quite
revolting.
“We’re gonna die down here!” the punk screamed as he threw himself
down onto the tracks. A rat slapped him in the face as it whizzed through
the air to join its brethren. The tornado of rodents and century-old litter was
now circling the expanding blackness. Occasionally, a rat would fall out of
orbit and dissolve amongst the mass. Such was life…
“What the hell is it?” the businessmen yelled, though it was barely
audible over the tumultuous din of the cosmic anomaly.
The old lady didn’t know. Why would she? Why would this fool even
ask her opinion?
The viscous blob rushed suddenly forward, scooping up the punk from
the tracks. As it washed over him, flesh peeled and burned. The thing was
consuming him, but there was no way it was doing it raw. The punk’s skin
charred and bubbled for a moment, and then he was gone. As the floating
ichor rose up into the station’s atmosphere, the old lady glanced down to
where the boy had been a moment ago. A carbonized outline of the punk
was all that remained; his orange Mohawk hair floated up, luminous
porcupine quills, and joined the tempest.
The lady staggered back, trying to distance herself from the
approaching form. This was not how she had expected to die. A simple
stroke would have been quite acceptable. At a push, she would have
envisaged a nasty fall—perhaps when the gritters failed to suitably take care
of the small avenue in which she lived, as was usually the case—resulting
in a fractured hip, six weeks in a hospital and a nasty bout of MRSA, which
would certainly do the job.
 Being swallowed by an inter-dimensional deity was something one
could never seriously entertain, at least not in this particular part of London.
“It’s getting biggerrrrrrrrrr!” the businessman astutely pointed out as
he forced himself back into the platform’s central stanchion. The old lady
was grateful he’d chosen that moment to speak, for the ichorous mass
suddenly turned to him, forgetting, for the time being, she was present.
“Oh God, no!” the man screeched.
The darkness moved towards him; as it did, the businessman’s suit
tore from his body, leaving him standing against the bollard in nothing but a
pair of Superman briefs. The Armani two-piece did three laps of the form
before being sucked into the obsidian conflagration. The man appeared
more shocked at losing his favorite suit than he was by the malevolent
being.
Overhead, a train soared through its tunnel. Passengers going about
their daily grind were blissfully unaware of the terror unfolding beneath
them. The cowering lady wondered how often this occurred, how many
innocent souls this aberrant demon had enveloped. Missing person reports
that remained unsolved suddenly made sense; the cases involving city-
dwellers failing to reach their destinations had been solved. You could close
the book on hundreds of London citizens’ mysterious disappearances. It was
just a pity that nobody would ever know the truth.
The businessman screamed as the mass of swirling rodents began to
pick flesh from his naked torso. Bits of him flapped loosely as they feasted.
The blood floated from him the way it would from a suicidal astronaut—in
one solid, crimson globule. His screams turned to gurgles; his gurgles
turned to inaudible whimpers as his lips were chewed away. The rats were
making a right old meal of him, and as the meaty chunks were stripped
from him, the tarry being sucked them in. The colossus had expanded
exponentially. As the blood and flesh disappeared into it, it sighed and
groaned as if in pleasure.
It was quite possibly the most disgusting thing the old lady had ever
seen, and she had dined with the royal family…
As the thing swallowed the final morsels of the businessman, his
Superman briefs flew across the platform and landed in the old lady’s lap.
Disgusted, she hooked a trembling finger into the leg-hole and flipped them
away, shuddering at the sticky texture.
 The thing turned on her. It had no eyes, not to speak of, but she could
feel its stare boring into her, delving into her thoughts and plucking from
them the things that terrified her the most.
It paused. Rodents fell from its orbit and scurried down onto the tracks
and into the dark tunnels. Their distended bellies prevented them from
making a hasty exit, though they did their best with what they had to work
with.
The old lady clambered to her feet. She was tired, sapped of energy
and barely able to stand, but she knew she couldn’t just sit there and let the
thing engulf her the way it had the punk and the businessman.
More rats toppled from the rotating miasma as the darkness
contemplated its next move.
The lady grinned. Her teeth were not as clean as they once had been,
but they were still all her own. “You weren’t expecting me, were you?” she
asked. Despite feeling her age—which was closer to three-hundred than it
was to two-fifty—she knew she had the upper-hand. The thing knew she
had the upper-hand. The thing also knew that she knew she had the upper-
hand, which was why more and more bloodthirsty rodents dropped from the
air and scuttled off into the tunnels.
“You’re an abomination,” she said. “You should be damned ashamed
of yourself, feeding off these innocents like this. It wasn’t like this in my
day. Noooo. We had to keep a low profile, try not to piss off the…” she
poked a skeletal finger upwards. “Things have changed around here, that’s
for sure. That Lovecraft fellow has a lot to bloody answer for.”
The creature growled; though it was an uncertain noise, as if it was not
quite sure how the rest of the day would pan out.
“That’s right,” she said, stepping tentatively towards the floating
blackness. “You’re one of his, aren’t you? One of old HP’s? I should have
bleedin’ well known it. Where are your tentacles? Huh? Don’t tell me he
forgot to give you tentacles? What, so he spent all that time and effort on
Cthulhu and made you a giant ball of black? No wonder you’re angry.”
The Nyogtha snarled, for that was its name. Now that it considered it,
Cthulhu had a ring to it. It rolled off the tongue…Cthooo-looo. Not like its
own name. Nyogtha sounded like something you ate with cheese and
pickles at Christmastime. It was ridiculous.
“So while he’s out there, living it up in R’lyeh, you’re in London
feasting on these poor saps? I must say, seems a little unbalanced to me.
Talk about favouritism.”
The old lady was really starting to grate, but there was something
about her that prevented it from attacking, something it’d seen inside her
mind that told it, “No, best not…”
“Well, I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure,” she said, “but it hasn’t. So
if you could just put me back up there, you savage little git, and I’ll forget
we ever had this little meeting.” She straightened her glasses, which had
slightly skewed on the bridge of her nose.
The silence that followed was fairly uncomfortable; more distressing
than watching a man stripped to his underpants get eaten by floating rats,
she surmised.
She knew, in that moment, that the creature had made a decision. As
the orbiting rats and dust gathered speed once again, she sighed. “But you
read my mind,” she said. “You know what I’m capable of.”
The low thrum became a deafening groan once again. The time for
talking was over. The Nyogtha meant business, and despite what it had seen
inside her, what it had witnessed inside that fucked up head of hers, it was
pretty sure that she was an old lady now, incapable of things she had once
so easily managed.
“Fine,” she said, whipping her glasses off to reveal two silvery orbs.
The Nyogtha lunged across the platform towards her, leaking mice and rats
—and somehow a possum—as it went. Passing the central stanchion, it was
relatively confident of reaching the old bag in time. It hadn’t counted on her
preternatural speed.
Her hand was a blur as she unpeeled the silken scarf from her head.
The Nyogtha managed another foot before freezing.
Snakes. Hundreds of coiling, writhing snakes sat atop her head where
one would usually find a nice, tight beehive or a plaited bun.
There came a crackling sound as the black ichor began to solidify in
mid-air. Even the rats turned to stone, and as they did they landed on the
platform tiles, shattering into millions of rocky shards. It was a shame, for
this Gorgon had a particular affiliation with animals that was rarely seen.
The floating ichor tried to outmaneuver the stone creeping up from its
bottom. It spilled out over the top, like the remnants of toothpaste from a
fast-emptying tube, only to find itself hardening along with the rest of it.
It groaned, moaned, hissed and said, “Fhtagn…” before gravity finally
won and it toppled over the side of the platform and onto the abandoned
tracks. She expected it to break up, the way the rats had, and so was slightly
disappointed when it rolled onto its side in one piece the way an elephant
might snuggle in for a nap.
“Well, that wasn’t part of my plan for today,” she said as she covered
her serpentine hair and tied the scarf securely. She pushed the mirrored
shades onto the bridge of her nose and sighed.
“Well, something to tell the grandkids, I suppose,” she said as she
stepped down onto the solidified Nyogtha and then onto the tracks. Rats
raced away into the darkness, either scared of her—which was
understandable since she’d just made paperweights of their siblings—or
willing her to follow.
“After you,” she said, ducking under the bright yellow cordoning tape
and stepping into the darkness of the eastbound tunnel. She hoped it wasn’t
too far to the exit. She wasn’t as young as she used to be.
 Vicious Jelly
Craig Mullins

The pre-cosmic clusterfuck El Camino rode like a tank, but Herbert West
was proud of it anyway. He had gone to great pains to overhaul the vehicle
to withstand what the new world would throw at them. Manhole covers had
been welded over the wheel wells, and corrugated steel, with narrow slits
for sighting and shooting, over the windows. Herbert had even fashioned a
rudimentary cow-catcher out of a large green highway sign that read
“Arkham, Massachusetts 100 miles” for the front end. The bed of the car
was piled high with corpses and equipment…but mostly corpses. The tarp
that had covered them had blown away miles ago.
While driving through one of the many small towns that littered the
scarred landscape, they had encountered a Cancer Demon that had popped
in front of the car, and then was plowed up and over the roof—which
caused both West and Jehovah to duck—and into the bed of the car. It was
the first time Herbert had ever seen a Cancer Demon die; it twitched for
miles.
Jehovah was curled up on the floor in a blanket West had removed
from a corpse in one of the random houses they had searched. He stood,
stretched and hopped up into the seat.
“This might be the best road we’ve traveled so far,” he said.
“This is no road, Jehovah. This is what remains of the mighty
Mississippi River,” Herbert replied.
Jehovah looked out the window at the bone-white riverbed. It
stretched a mile or more wide and went on for as far as he could see. Up
ahead he saw something that made him pause: the skeletons and carcasses
of locomotive-sized catfish.
“I see,” is all Jehovah could say.
West dodged one of the catfish corpses, its head the only thing sticking
out of the dried mud. It looked to be large enough to swallow the car and its
occupants whole. At one point, West actually swerved into the exposed
ribcage of one of the fish and proved the point.
“Believe it or not, Jehovah, the fish probably lurked within the
Mississippi River waters before the change,” West said. “Strange things
lurked these lands even before all of this happened.” He used his left arm to
wave it in a sweeping arc towards the land outside his window.
Jehovah said something in reply, but it fell on deaf ears, as West saw
what looked like a living catfish in the shadows at the river’s edge; only this
one was walking on elephantine legs. He kept this to himself, and they kept
moving forward.
“We will need to get fuel soon,” he said to no one in particular.
The El Camino ran on several different fuels (another of West’s
modifications), so re-fueling usually wasn’t a problem, but they did seem to
be in the middle of nowhere, so he started to slow down to conserve fuel.
West was looking for a bridge or a break in the tree line at the river’s
edge, somewhere, anywhere that might indicate a road or a way out of the
river, when Jehovah said, “West…what…the…fuck…is…”
West looked ahead, but it was too late. A mass of writhing tendrils,
pulsating spheres, bulbous eyes and distorted faces stretched from one side
of the river to the other, and so high that it blocked the sky.
The last thing Herbert saw before the cow-catcher punctured the side
of the creature was a mass of tentacles—some tipped with blinking eyes—
speeding towards the car.
And then they were inside the belly of the beast.
It was hard for West to get a bearing on what was going on through the
window slits, but from what he could see, the creature was a balloon filled
with a viscous jelly, and they were now floating in it.
The rush of jelly towards the hole they rent in the creature’s side
almost pushed them back out, but the speed at which the car was moving
gave them the momentum to continue forward.
“Fascinating; we are actually inside the creature, floating through a sea
of protoplasm,” West said, his eyes wide. “I wish I could see more…or
better yet, get a sample.”
“A sample? That’s what you’re thinking about right now? A sample?!
Don’t open the fucking door, Herbert!” Jehovah replied.
“I understand our situation, Jehovah,” he said, “but that doesn’t keep
one from being inquisitive.”
There was no sensation of up or down, as far as they could tell. No left
or right. The car just floated, the jelly pushing on all sides of the car, the
metal groaning. The windows were holding so far, but that worried West.
 “Now that, I didn’t expect,” West said as the face of the dead Cancer
Demon filled his window. He could see that other things had left the bed of
the El Camino as well: bodies, body parts and equipment in equal measure.
“What’s going on?” Jehovah asked. “I can’t see a goddamned thing.”
Like a Great White Shark pushing through a diver’s cage, a hideous
creature smashed into the front window of the car. The slightly wider
opening in the steel afforded them an unfortunate look at the creature’s
continence. Mostly teeth and eyes, the creature was long, slender and
powerful, rotating fins propelling it through the jelly.
“What the hell is that thing?” Jehovah said for both of them.
The creature turned, whipped its tail and darted towards a cadaver
floating nearby; it’s gnashing teeth made short work of it.
“If I had to guess, I’d say that this creature lacks the necessary organs
to survive, and these…these floaters have formed a symbiotic relationship
with it. They eat, and then emit waste, which sustains the creature,” West
replied. “But that is just a theory.”
Something large hit Jehovah’s side of the car, causing him to return to
his bed on the floor, and a noticeable shift in the cars direction could be felt.
Through the window, West could see many more of the floating
abominations amassing. Shapes and sizes varied, but most were long, eel-
like beasts with long teeth and large eyes.
“It’s almost like they can smell the bodies, Jehovah. Like a shark.” He
continued, “Have you ever heard the term, ‘feeding frenzy?’”
Then it happened.
The car was getting hit from all sides, the creatures darting in and out,
grabbing bodies out of the bed of the car, pushing it in different directions.
Jehovah was noticeably shaken, but West was in a scientific stupor,
oblivious to the possibilities.
“What if the car turns over, Herbert? What if they crack one of the
windows and that jelly shit gets in? West, are you listening to me? West?!”
Jehovah was pissed now.
“Yes, Jehovah. Those things are possible, but at the moment, we seem
safe enough; and honestly, I have no idea what to do,” he replied. “I don’t
even know where we are. Has the larger creature moved on, taking us with
it? We’ve been floating in here for some time now, and we’ve yet to run
into the edge of the beast. Our biggest issue may be that we could run out of
oxygen before we escape.”
 Another round of hits, and the car was really starting to spin out of
control. Herbert found himself with his back against the side window and
Jehovah on his chest. Another hit righted the car, but even West, it seemed,
had had enough.
Another face smashed itself against the front window, its eyes rolling,
its mouth gapping. The smooth, slippery skin of the creature was an
iridescent purple, ridges of luminous fins running down its side.
“We need to figure a way out of here,” West said. He checked to see
that the car was still running. It wasn’t. The jelly seemed to have smothered
the engine, either through the compartment or through the muffler.
“If I can just get the car running, maybe we can use the tires’ rotation
as twin propellers to move us forward,” West continued.
Another creature—this one green and encased in a pearlescent shell—
was also ramming the window. Behind them, West could see others; some
with limbs, others with what appeared to be “boney wheels” that sliced
through the jelly.
“You must admit, Jehovah, this is an amazing, self-contained
ecosystem of creatures we are witnessing,” he said.
“Fuck that,” was all Jehovah could muster.
The biggest creature yet, fully fifty feet in length, came into view, and
the others scattered. West could no longer see any bodies or parts floating in
the immediate area, and a quick look behind him showed that the car’s bed
was empty. The creature, which looked like a tapeworm with “cupped” sails
just behind its head, was pushing its bulk forward by using those cups to
displace the jelly. It moved at a slower pace than its brethren, but it would
be there, and soon.
“Can you see anything indicating our position, Jehovah? Think of this
as being underwater; look towards the ‘light.’ That thing looks big enough
to eat the car, and I don’t think we should stick around to find out if it is,”
he said.
“I see light everywhere, Herbert,” Jehovah replied. “Light from the
creatures, light from the…the fucking jelly is glowing.”
The creature continued its slow dig towards them, displacing so much
protoplasm that the car was actually sinking towards the bottom of the
leviathan. With a thud, they bottomed out, and Herbert turned the key one
more time. The engine whined, caught, and rumbled to life. Herbert hit the
gas, and the contact patches on the tires grabbed and pushed forward; they
slowly inched along, but forward they went, and soon they were under the
slow-to-react creature above them. Several of the smaller beasts had
returned and were now the bigger threat, in that they could move quicker
and were already upon them. One of them slammed into the back of the car,
propelling it forward, but threatening to give it lift, which would render the
tires useless. West hit the brakes and slammed it in reverse, smashing the
creature’s face into the tailgate and sending it streaking into the jelly.
The larger creature was making its way downward, and the suction
was pulling the car up.
West gunned it and it surged forward towards their unknown
destination. More of the smaller creatures were entering the fray, and the
larger one slowed to engage them. West took this opportunity to move away
from the battle, but a hit to the roof told him that they hadn’t been forgotten.
“West, slime! West! We’ve got slime in the car!” Jehovah exclaimed as
he jumped up and down in the passenger seat.
That last hit to the roof had broken the seal to the rear window and
tiny tendrils of jelly were oozing into the cabin. West turned, looked, but
didn’t reply as the tendrils reached out for him. He continued to give the car
gas, and the car continued to push on…but on to where, he couldn’t tell.
They were both thrown forward as the big creature arrived and
slammed its toothy maw into the back of the car. It was fully big enough to
eat them and the car whole, but its mouth wouldn’t open wide enough to get
them in, so it continued to ram into the car, threatening to tear it apart.
In the cab, the leaking had worsened, and Jehovah crawled into the
floor to distance himself from the slime.
“Do something, Herbert!” Jehovah said. “Get us the hell out of here!”
“I’m working on it, Jehovah. Patience, my friend,” West replied, but it
was obvious that he was worried.
“Herbert, look up ahead! I can see something through the jelly!”
Jehovah returned.
West looked, and sure enough, he could see the riverbed. The larger
creature, in its attempt to break into the car, had actually pushed them to
safety. If they could only make it a little further…
Again, the car bottomed out, and again, West gunned it. This time the
tires grabbed big chunks of ground and pushed them forward, the cow-
catcher rupturing the outer wall of the creature and spilling the car and the
viscous jelly onto the sun-cracked ground.
 Both West and Jehovah looked behind them and saw that the large
beast was reacting to their escape by mutating and sending tentacles of jelly
in all directions, attempting to capture and pull them back towards it. In the
opening that they had made, the large floater and several smaller ones had
spilled out, and it was obvious that the air around them was doing all
manner of harm. Their bodies convulsed and shriveled, drying up and
turning to dust before blowing away in the atomic wind.
Even before the floaters perished, the hole in the side of the beast was
repairing itself, closing up and containing all but a little of the escaped
protoplasm. Other floaters could be seen pushing themselves against the
outer skin, causing random faces and blinking eyes to be seen from the
outside.
The reaching tendrils grabbed and lifted the car, shaking it and its
contents, then threw it down to the ground. West gave it gas, but it was
dead.
“Out! Now!” he yelled, and opened the driver’s side door.
Jehovah beat him out and they both exited just before the car was
again lifted, and this time dropped right into the ever-changing mass of
spheres, eyes and tendrils.
Herbert turned, watched the car sink, and then looked ahead as they
traveled down the smoothest road in the new world…
 Chumlord of Westmouth Harbor
Jesse Wheeler

I killed that fish-eyed whore outta self defense. She was no common
streetwalkin' lady of the night; the wretched creature I picked up that night
and snuffed out in the front seat of my El Camino was far from human.
Bitch was a fuckin' predator of the sea, shore-bound and bloodthirsty. She's
the reason I got this fucking hook for a hand now.
Even got me demoted from bait processor to quality inspector at the
fishery, and I was one helluva bait processor; I could cut and gut a half-ton
of fresh fish before they'd stop flappin' and gaspin' for air. Nobody at the
Westmouth Harbor Fishery could wield a pair of fillet knives like Roy
Castor. Down at the plant they all used to call me “The Castor Baiter” (I'm
sure they meant Castorbator). That's some Harbor-Worker humor for ya'.
They don't call me that anymore, on account of my missing jerk-off hand.
In fact, the boys down at the plant hardly even speak to me anymore; not
after I nearly opened up Bryan Reno's neck with my hook after pinning him
to a wall when he made a comment about my missing 'Castorbating arm'.
That outburst almost got me fired.
This fucking hook is also the primary reason I'm out here at this late
hour, cruising Westharbor Blvd., looking for fish-faced whores. The one
that took my hand wasn't the only one of her kind. There are more of them,
just like her, and according to some of the local fishermen, they make for
one helluva batch of chum.
When I slaughtered and processed the fish-faced whore that took my
hand, she rendered over 200 pounds of the finest chum Westmouth Harbor
has ever seen. The fishery is seeing more fresh product than the entire west
coast has seen in years. Ain't a doubt in my mind that it's because my secret
blend of bait out there in the water.
I don't use my own vessel for fishing anymore. It's become my
floating bait processing facility. I use my El Camino for my fishing these
days. I call it The Drowning Machine. For catching and killing the sea-
creature whores roaming Westharbor Blvd. They sure as shit ain't human-
whores, I learned that on the night I lost my hand to one of them. Still got
the best of her, though. As I watched her salmon-green eyes bulge from her
clobbered skull like a sea-plucked fish suffocating on the planks of a pier
under the midday sun, I realized that she was not your average hooker. Or
human. Even her blood had a tangy fresh fish smell. As a part-time
commercial fisherman for over twenty years, I know what a dying fish's
drying eyes look like: exactly like that whore's eyes did while I bludgeoned
her to death in the front seat of my El Camino.
I spotted her while waiting for a light to turn green at an intersection
along Sunset and Westharbor Blvd. Sure, she was a bit skanky, with her
trashy black skirt, tube top, pink fishnets, and bright pink wig, a look that
screamed, “Cheap!” For a guy of my monetary means, cheap is perfect.
Plus, she was slim and on the lanky side; just my type.
The closer my El Camino got to her, the more about her appearance
struck me as odd. I don't know if it was her knee-high go-go boots, but her
feet looked far too large for the rest of her slender figure, like the boots
were a few sizes too big…or her feet were abnormally cartoonish.
It was raining pretty heavily that night, and I wasn't expecting to find
any action. I spotted her standing right out there in the rain next to a cherry-
red Lincoln Town Car with fully tinted windows and gold rims. As I passed
by, I could see the custom license plate: INN$MOUTH. The dollar sign
(and what I assume is a blowjob reference) on the plate signaled to me:
Pimp. This was confirmed when I saw three more colorful ladies exit the
Lincoln to join their pink-haired co-worker on the rainy sidewalk.
They all wore brightly colored slutty outfits, matching pink wigs, and
large-framed Jackie Onassis shades. Making out much of their faces was
impossible with the short, bobby-banged wigs and large shades concealing
most of their features. Each of them seemed to have the same
disproportionately large feet, long, slender legs, and abnormally long
forearms. I figured I may be looking at a group of transsexual hookers for a
moment as I circled the block for another pass.
When I made it back onto Westharbor Blvd., the group of pink-haired
hookers had dispersed, and the red Lincoln had driven off. I could see two
of the hookers had posted up in front of a liquor store on the corner. One of
the two gazed straight up at the falling rain and opened her mouth to drink it
in. It was strange. Bitch must be thirsty, I figured. Probably all dry-mouthed
from the meth in her system.
The third hooker was already bent at the waist with her head in the
passenger window of a white sedan parked at the mouth of a dark alley
between two shops, haggling her first trick of the night.
 I found it kinda cruel that their pimp had them pulling tricks out there,
in this weather. They were dressed like hookers on the Vegas Strip on a hot
night in July. Pimp must have ‘em all strung out on amphetamines, I
figured, having them work so readily on a night like this. True, seedy
capitalism.
Nearing 1am, on a rainy October night, less than a mile from the
shore, being dressed like whores must have been torture for these ladies.
Though, none of them seemed bothered by the downpour. They seemed
comfortable in their soaking wigs and skimpy outfits.
Driving down Westharbor just under 20mph, I spotted the pink-haired
hooker I had originally seen standing by the red Lincoln. Zebra-striped
purse in hand, she was marching in my direction, to her post on the opposite
corner. The rain had soaked her wig and left her gumdrop-sized nipples
visible from under her pink tube top. She was fairly flat-chested, which
again lead me to think I was dealing with a potential shemale prostitute. I
was so damn horny though, I didn't care. I just needed a solid blow job, and
she looked cheap.
I slowed to a stop alongside her and honked abruptly.
She was quick to trot over to the passenger side door of the El
Camino. I reached over and unlocked it. Before saying a word, she was
already in my passenger seat, soaking wet and filling the cab with the
pungent smells of rain and the seaside.
Motioning at the road ahead, she said, "Drive to somewhere dark."
When she spoke, her voice had a rattling-gurgle quality to it. I figured her
for sick. Or possibly her throat was suffering from some semen-contracted
infection. Not a pleasant thought, considering I was looking for a blow job.
Better strap on a rubber for this one and make it quick, I thought, gazing at
her freakishly plump lips and small, sloping nose. I might just go for a
handy, I then considered. Her mouth also seemed much wider than it
should. The tiny clusters of barnacle-like pustules gathering in the corners
of her mouth weren't a comforting sight, either. I figured it best at that point
that she leave her giant sunglasses on.
Just go with a handy.
She shifted in her seat to face me. "50 dollar suck. 20 dollar hand. 100
for all you want."
I drove the El Camino into a rather shady apartment complex a few
blocks up the way and parked in an empty space between a black pickup
and an Astro Van. Unfortunately, the glow from the adjacent Jack In The
Box parking lot offered a bit more light in the cab of the Camino than I
wanted.
"How about a quick handjob?" I offered, pulling a twenty dollar bill
from my wallet, trying not to look at her heinous face.
She took the twenty, quickly crammed it into her zebra purse, and set
it down on the floor between her legs.
Before I had my wallet stuffed back into my pocket, she crawled over
the center console and began unzipping my pants. At that point, I wasn't at
all hard. The overall sogginess and stink of her was too overwhelming. I'm
used to hookers dry and leaving my ride smelling like perfume and
cigarettes, not seaweed and wet leather.
I closed my eyes, dropped my head back, and let her go to work. After
some delicate stroking, she managed to get me up. It took some imagination
work on my part, and only breathing through my mouth to get me there. I
was about to cum, when she dropped her face into my lap and started
sucking.
I hollered, "Whoa! What're you..." But I found her reticent,
deepthroating action left me at a loss for words. Stricken beyond the fear of
orally transmitted STD's by how her tongue seemed to twirl the entirety of
my shaft, I let her continue. There was a sticky, plucking quality to her
tongue that was beyond explanation. Unlike anything I'd ever experienced.
And I was in no position to complain or question. She was suddenly giving
me the best blow job I'd ever received; a Blowjob so supreme, it felt
unnatural. With my cock knocking at her tonsils, she managed to slurp one
of my balls halfway into her mouth as she went to work on the base of my
shaft. As her tongue swept the wing of my scrotum, I felt a separate tongue
begin to lap at my asshole. Then another. I would'a figured the slick, sticky
tickle as her fingers, but with both her hands on my right thigh, the
sensation made no sense. Where's that tickle coming from? I wondered,
confused, still in the escalating grips of absolute arousal.
Does she have three tongues? I pondered, half-hypnotized by the
overall sexual intensity of her mouth on my dick and the gloriously foreign
sensation of her tongue teasing my anus. It was good in a wet-dream kinda
way, but after a few seconds of that, it just got too weird.
I decided to pull on her wig. Strangely, at that moment, I was more
curious about her actual hair color more than the unearthly head she was
giving me.
After lifting the side of her wig, I realized just how inhuman she
actually was. Behind her ear, there was a column of three inch-long slices.
When I saw them flap open sequentially, the glistening red fibers became
visible beneath each slit. Gills, I realized in horror. She has fucking gills!
Next to each set of gills, there was a stout, tubular, winking orifice that I
immediately recognized as a series of fleshy siphon valves, similar to what
an octopus uses to help propel itself through the water.
In a panic, I grabbed her by the shoulder and hastily lifted her face
from my lap. Her wig landed on the dash and her shades toppled from her
face, but she held fast. Her head didn't get far, due to the set of squid-like
tentacles jetting from her mouth, still attached snuggly to my shaft,
scrotum, and anus. She drew blood, and I still have the scars on my cock
and balls to prove it.
With her wig missing, she was cue-ball bald. Her pale scalp was
webbed with purple veins. With her shades missing, her eyes were
abhorrently large, too far apart, and froglike. Black, hourglass pupils dilated
within the iris of each plum-sized eyeball as I struggled to force her as far
away from my cock as possible. I don't remember shrieking, but I'm pretty
sure I did as I clenched her tentacles in both my hands and twisted to
release their tiny piercing suction cups from my crotch and asshole. Her jaw
dropped, dislocating from the rest of her skull like a python preparing to
slurp down a jungle rat. As her maw expanded, I noticed the spiraling rows
of pointy, serrated teeth lacing the inside of her mouth. She let out a screech
as I wrung her tentacles like a wet rag, and she released them from me.
With my left hand free, I quickly found my right hand was still
restrained. Like an agitated fistful of constricting garden snakes, her
tentacles had wrapped around my right wrist and forearm, latching onto my
skin. Hundreds of suction cups along the undersides of each tendril fastened
to my flesh, drawing more of my blood as the tiny hooks within each micro-
cup punctured, rooting into my skin from wrist to elbow. In the blink of an
eye, her head lurched forward as her tentacles simultaneously pulled my
entire fist into her gaping mouth. It felt like jamming my fist into a giant
pencil sharpener. The bitch jerked her head back and forth like a dog on a
chew toy. Her jaws had the clamp and razor-ferocity of a pit bull-sized
piranha.
 With my hand engulfed in her saw-toothed maw, I could feel her
tentacle tongues prying my fingers apart, pulling them down her throat,
splitting the webbing between knuckles, and rending thumb-meat as she
gnawed. Every tendon and bone in my hand cracked and snapped under her
bite. Yanking my fist free was impossible. I could feel my hand disintegrate
and detach inside her mouth with each passing millisecond.
I reached with my left hand under the driver seat and pulled out my
lug wrench. Leverage wasn't on my side, being cramped behind the steering
wheel, and my right hand being ground to bits. But I still managed to bring
the wrench across the side of her skull hard enough to break open her scalp.
The blow caused her to bite down on my forearm harder, breaking more
bone and severing vessels. I brought the wrench back and took it to the side
of her sloped head, shattering her right ocular socket. Her bulging eye
ruptured, splattering my face with transparent ooze. The tentacles in her
mouth retracted down her throat as her body seized, and I was able to yank
my mangled hand free from her jaws. It wasn’t much of a hand at all
anymore; nothing more than a frayed, drooping mess of tendon and pink
bone fragments from mid-forearm to the tip of my only remaining finger.
The sight was gruesome and all too real. The pain and anger I felt was
dizzying. If I stared at my mauled arm much longer, I would have gone into
shock.
She trembled and made 'cacking' sounds in the passenger seat. Her
gills and valves were leaking blood and flapping sporadically. Her
remaining eyeball swiveled blindly like a dashboard compass on a bumpy
road. She was literally flopping like a fish.
In a rage, I reared the wrench back and went in for another swing. The
entire right side of her skull caved from the blow. Her blood smelled like
fresh fish blood. I removed her tube top and fastened it tightly around my
bicep as a tourniquet. Along her ribs were more sets of gills. These were
much larger than the ones along her neck, and had thicker red fibers
swelling from beneath each flap. What the hell is she? I wondered as I
tightened the tube top around my arm to slow the bleeding.
I removed my jacket and used it to wipe her splattered bits from the
windows and most of the interior. Careful not to draw any attention, I drove
out of the apartment complex. Shifting gears with my left hand was
difficult, but I managed.
 I feared that hellish shriek she let out may have raised some curious
tenants. Still raining hard, there weren't likely to be any. The coast looked
clear as I pulled back onto Westharbor Blvd.
Pulling into the closest, darkest alley I could find, I then decided to
haul the whore's corpse into the bed of the El Camino. I rolled her up
snugly inside a painting tarp, careful to not get too much of her blood on the
fabric. Amongst my tackle box, tool chest, and chum buckets, she was well
hidden…but still leaking.
Back in the driver seat, the overall stink in my car was nauseating. My
car smelled like the processing floor at the fishery on a hot day. The
overwhelming smell combined with all the blood I'd lost had me on the
verge of fainting. Despite the rain, I cracked the window.
I could feel my brain growing colder. Medical attention! And fast!
Rushing to the hospital, I nearly blacked out twice. Stumbling up to
the reception area, I was quickly rushed off to the emergency room by two
nurses that saw the gruesome condition of my right arm. When asked by the
doctor what had happened, I explained that it was a shark attack; a fishing
accident. After briefly inspecting the wounds, he bought the story.
Medicare covered the amputation surgery and prosthetic.
I stayed in the hospital for eight days before I was attached with this
prosthetic hook and released. It was custom-molded to the stump just
below my elbow. A nylon harness attached it to both my shoulders. I
adjusted to how it worked pretty quickly. Opening and closing the set of
steel prongs was easy to manage with the slightest of shoulder or elbow
movements. During my entire stay at the hospital, I worried about the
corpse of that fish-headed whore under the plastic tarp, leaking in the bed of
my El Camino. I dreaded a set of police officers walking into the room and
questioning me about the dead thing under the tarp in the bed of my car.
What would I tell them? How would I explain? Would they charge me with
murder, even though the bitch wasn't human? My mind raced with these
concerns. Without the morphine drip, I wouldn't have slept a wink.
Thankfully it rained throughout my hospital stay, and it was the middle
of winter; the cold air kept her from getting all soupy. Parked amongst the
other patient's vehicles, my ride looked like nothing more than an active
fisherman's beat up El Camino with a tarp covering his supplies.
Amazingly, I was in the clear. If it were summertime, she would'a started
getting gamey real quick. The stink of rotting fish emulsifying under that
tarp in the midday sun for eight days would surely draw the attention of
hospital maintenance workers.
Back in the driver seat, the stink of fish still emanated from the
whore's leftover skull leakings that stained the carped and dried in the
cracks of my leather seats.
With my new hook, shifting gears was still a pain in the ass.
Before anything, I gotta get rid of this body, I thought. I decided to
drive down to the docks and take this Cunt-Fish's corpse for a little trip on
my boat; dump the bitch's body into the sea.
Hauling her onto my vessel, The Chum Dumpster, wasn't difficult. She
was a dainty girl...fish-creature-thing…no more than 110 pounds. Though
she was still leaking from her cracked skull, the tarp I wrapped her in made
for a fairly inconspicuous boarding. Plus with the poor weather and choppy
seas, nobody was out and about to witness me and the bloody tarp mummy,
anyhow. The entire harbor was vacant, aside from a few grizzled fishermen
scattered throughout the docks, but they were too busy prepping rods and
loading their vessels with fishing supplies to notice me. Either for sport or
for food, the desperate fools were out to make a catch. Poor bastards. I
thought. In this weather? In these barren waters?
These waters haven't seen any real fishing for over ten years. Most of
the seafood that comes into Westmouth Harbor is freighted in from Japan.
Nobody really knows why the fishing in Westmouth Harbor has grown so
scant over the past decade. I'm assuming it's environmental.
Once I got the fish-whore's corpse on deck, I decided to set sail. A
good two miles from the harbor I dropped anchor and unrolled her corpse
from the tarp. I figured it would be best to chop her into pieces. After
unfolding the tarp, a waft of her fishy smell hit me.
Then it struck me: Turn the bitch into bait. Hell, she smells like fish,
might make for some prime chum, I thought. Plus, what better way to
dispose of a body than to turn it into fish food?
I hauled her below deck where I had a baiting station, equipped with a
sink and a steel cutting table with a drainage reservoir for collecting blood.
The table wasn't large enough to handle a fish of her size. I removed her
clothes and boots. When I got a look at her bare feet, I saw why her boots
were so large. Her feet practically resembled a pair of scuba diving flippers.
A venous membrane connected each of her three pencil-thin toes.
 Above my baiting station, a rack of blades was organized from fillet
knife to cleaver. I grabbed the cleaver, then started by disemboweling her
and plopping her innards into buckets. Her intestines, liver, and wads of
unidentifiable offal filled two five-gallon buckets to the brim. From my
knowledge of fish anatomy, her insides were quite similar, just
proportionately larger. I split her sternum with three solid whacks of the
cleaver and opened up her ribcage with surprising ease. Her exposed lungs
were porous and carpeted with bright red vessels. They were excessively
long and ran the entire length of both sides of her torso. Water-lungs.
It took me nearly two hours to dismember her entirely and strip as
much from her bones as I could. Even her bones had a brittle cartilage
transparency that was much like fish bones (which would also explain why
she was so light). Easy to hack through. By the time I was through dicing,
chopping, and peeling, not much was left of her but a crimson stack of wet
bones. I had filled six five-gallon buckets with her…enough chum to last a
busy fisherman for weeks.
I gathered her bones in the tarp, hauled them topside, and tossed them
overboard. Then I brought up the first bucket of fish-whore chum and
dumped it into the sea as well. I returned below deck for the next bucket,
when something struck the hull of my vessel; then something else hit from
the opposite end. Soon the underside of my boat was being hammered from
all sides, like hundreds of fists pounding the belly of the boat.
Baffled and concerned, I ran back topside and peered over the side of
The Chum Dumpster. My boat was being swarmed by fish. All kinds.
There were, bass, barracuda, carp, and even a few snappers roiling the
choppy waters surrounding my vessel. The waters smacked and splashed
with the pattering flurry of eager sea life. I even spotted a few shark fins
amongst the crimson slick of whore chum.
I hadn't seen anything like this in all my years as a commercial
fisherman. Apparently the bucket of fish-whore chum I tossed overboard
had roused a feeding frenzy unlike any I'd ever witnessed. As I watched the
swarm of fish increase in numbers around the dissipating chum slick,
hundreds of gulping mouths and flapping flanks swarmed to suck up the
floating gore. Schools of smaller fish bounced over the surface like falling
hail on concrete, trying to get their fill.
Incredible.
 This batch of chum worked like none other. Almost immediately after
dumping the bucket into the water, the feeding frenzy erupted. I could make
a fortune selling this stuff to all the local fishermen if it causes this kind of
frenzy. The fish were going insane over the stuff.
I decided to hold on to the remaining five buckets of my new chum
and head back to the harbor.
Once docked, I encountered a crew of commercial fishermen loading
their boat with supplies.
"You fellas want some free bait?" I hollered across the dock. "I'm a bit
overstocked and could unload one or two of these buckets."
"Why not?" a bearded man in a yellow rain poncho replied.
That day, those fishermen netted nearly three hundred pounds of fish
off my chum bucket; a record catch in Westharbor's recent history. I had
quickly become popular down at the harbor for my special blend of bait.
"Got anymore of that primo chum?" I would hear.
"100 bucks a bucket," I would reply.
The rest is history.
And that's how I got into the business of making chum outta these
fish-headed whores.

***

I returned to work at the Westmouth Harbor Fishery the following

week. Business was booming. We were seeing a three hundred percent
increase in local fish intake. Eventually, I was even promoted back to my
original position as bait processor, after I made a custom removable fillet-
knife attachment for my hook (among other modifications, such as
sharpened prongs and a slot for a folding straight razor). My hook hand had
become a body modification rather than a burden. I found that I could still
process bait like the best in the business. I was back in my element, cutting,
gutting, and grinding fish into bait.
The Castor Baiter has returned. Better than ever.

"Hey, Roy," Bill Lockwell, the manager of the fishery, said, patrolling
the processing line. "The word around the harbor, is that you got a special
blend of bait that's been driving them fish ape-shit."
 "Yessir," I replied, scooping a wad of guts from a split carp.
"Well," Bill slapped me on the shoulder, "What you puttin' in the
stuff?"
"Kinda my own secret recipe."
"Top secret, huh?" He smirked curiously. "You got the chum market
cornered, eh?"
"Yeah. I reckon so," I answered dryly, focused on processing the bait
line.
"Well, whatever it is you're puttin' in that chum of yours...keep it up.
We haven't seen a boom in business like this in over ten years, and I have a
feeling that it's all cuz of that special mix of yours."
"I believe so as well, sir."
He gave me another friendly pat on the shoulder. "Keep it up, Roy."
"I sure will, Mr. Lockwell."
He leaned in close. "Call me Bill." He then returned to his office.

***

So here I am, on a rainy Friday night, nearly one month after losing
my hand to that fish-headed cunt, currently trolling Westharbor Blvd in my
newly-dubbed “Drowning Machine,” looking to bag and process another
fish-faced fuckwhore.
Unlike my first run-in with one of them, this time I'm ready. I packed
the inner left pocket of my duster with a hatchet-hammer, fresh from Home
Depot; in the right pocket, my trusty cleaver. Both handles were at the ready
for quick draw…well, as quick as I could draw with my left hand, anyways.
Again, the thought of losing my good hand to that fish-headed cunt drove
me to grind my teeth until one of my molars cracked.
Fuck it. Hand's gone for good. No use lamenting over it now. I must
focus back on my current arsenal.
Earlier this afternoon, I spent a good half-hour filing the prongs of my
hook to needle-sharp points. I then fastened a razor-sharp fillet knife to the
custom slot I attached to the fiberglass wrist. The finest upgrade to my
prosthetic arm is the mounted Powerhead I welded to a steel brace that I
fitted below the wrist of my hook-arm. It's basically a steel tube the size of
a road flare, consisting of a firing pin and a simple trigger system. It fires a
single .357 Magnum round. Used for killing sharks, gators, and fish-headed
whores from who-knows-where.
Yes, I was ready for blood, ready to hook one of these fish-eyed
hookers and hawk her remains off to oblivious fishermen as mere bait;
make a few extra hundred bucks off a twenty dollar mutant-whore.
For a Friday night, the streets were fairly busy with traffic. There
wasn’t much foot traffic along the sidewalks due to the downpour. After
hunting these bitches for weeks now, I found that they only come out when
it's raining.
I spotted a few streetwalkers keeping dry under the dimly-lit eves of
liquor stores and vacant shops, but just your standard hookers, dressed in
normal sized heels and appropriate slut-gear. None of them resembled the
lanky, large-footed, fish-faced whores I was looking for. No trashy pink
wigs. No ridiculous Jackie Onassis shades. Just standard, human whores:
miserable, cold, wet, out to pull tricks on a rainy Friday night.
Poor things, I thought briefly.
I almost scratched my plans of bagging a fish-face to pick up one of
these legitimate ladies-of-the-night for a warm ride in my Camino and a dry
hand job.
I was about to pull into a secluded alley and park between a liquor
store and Chinese restaurant to proposition a blowjob from a gaggle of
spicy Latinas dressed for a Whore-War. Four of them, all gathered near a
dumpster behind a Rite Aid. My attention shifted from the working ladies
when I saw the red Lincoln with the INN$MOUTH plates cruising the
street ahead of me.
I'll snub the Latinas for now, I guess. Instead, I'll track this asshole in
the Lincoln, see where the fucker leads me; no doubt to where his fish-
faced whores would be. They might even be in the back of the Lincoln.
Hard to tell from my distance. I stayed a good two car-lengths from his rear
bumper, cruising along Westharbor Blvd.
He circled the block twice. I followed at a reasonable distance.
I trailed him for two more blocks before I came to a stop behind him at
a red light. It was hard to make out much of the passengers because of the
tinted windows, but there was definitely movement in the backseat.
Eventually the Lincoln headed west towards the harbor. The driver
pulled into a vacant lot near the Westmouth Pier. I parked across the lot and
killed my headlights, but left the engine running. The Lincoln's lights cut
off and the trunk popped open. After a few moments, the driver side door
swung open.
I watched from my rearview mirror as the Lincoln's suspension rocked
and the gargantuan pimp stepped out. Whoa! The sight of the black giant
sent a jolt of adrenaline through me. He was huge, and I quickly had my
doubts about taking him on with hooks and blades. Even the single .357
round from my Powerhead wouldn't bring him down, unless I nailed him in
the head or heart. It was difficult to prepare for a gamble like that. Just one
round in the chamber. If I miss, I'm fucked.
The man was a monster. He had to weigh at least 400 pounds, mostly
muscle, and stood at well over 6 feet tall. He wore a red bowler cap and
vest, covered in red sequins that shimmered under the parking lot lights.
Like the pink-haired whores, he also wore ridiculously large-framed
sunglasses that concealed his eyes and much of his face. I'm sure this guy is
just as unnatural and grotesque as that fish-faced whore I chopped into
chum.
He removed his bowler cap, revealing his dark, glistening, bald head.
He gazed up at the falling rain and opened his mouth wide. Like a coy fish's
gaping lips opening and closing at the surface of a pond, he seemed to be
breathing in the rain. His neck was a series of jiggling folds as he gulped. It
was hard to make out his ears, but they looked small and flat against his
scalp. I'm sure he also has gills running up and down both sides of his
corpulent, crumpled neck.
His gaze settled on my parked car across the lot.
Is he looking at me? I wondered. It was hard to tell behind those
shades he has on.
Shit, he knows I followed him, I thought, ready to put the Camino in
drive and take off. He was definitely looking in my direction.
Both rear passenger doors of the Lincoln opened, and out stepped
three pink-haired fish-heads, dressed in their trashy work clothes. Fishnets,
short skirts, tight tops, and those large clown-shoe go-go boots. Upon
exiting the Lincoln, they all stared in my direction as well.
Uh, oh. The jig is up. They know I followed them here.
The pimp finally turned his gaze from where I was parked to the three
fish-heads. He said something to them I couldn't make out, and lumbered to
the open trunk at the rear of the Lincoln. Watching closely in my rearview, I
saw him pull what looked like a harpoon gun from the trunk, loaded with a
harpoon long enough to snare a full-sized mako shark.
The hookers were still staring in my direction.
His shaded gaze shifted back to where I was parked, staring for a bit
too long before ushering the three fish-heads towards the pier as he
followed. He glanced back over his other shoulder at me once more as he
marched behind the whores, harpoon gun in hand.
What…or who…is he gonna use that harpoon on? I wondered.
Nobody would be wandering the pier at this hour, in this weather. The
whole beach appeared vacant. Aside from one or two passing cars, traffic
along the streets was pretty scant. Whatever these mutant sex criminals
were up to, they had the whole beach to themselves.
All things considered, I had them to myself; no witnesses to the
quadruple-mutant-homicide that was brewing in my head. I hadn’t expected
to take on the entire gaggle, along with their pimp. My plan for the evening
was to just bag one fish-headed hooker.
I felt my plans were quickly changing as I sat behind the wheel of The
Drowning Machine. After all, these fuckers are responsible for my missing
arm. And how many other desperate, horny johns had fallen victim to these
gilled whores? How many cash-paying men out for a quickie had been
mutilated or murdered by these street-walking sea-tramps?
For an instant, I questioned the idea of human creation. Evolution,
religion, whatever. If there is a God up there responsible for the creation of
all the creatures that walk, swim, and fly the boundaries of the Earth, I'm
damn sure that he didn't make these things. Human/fish hybrids? If
anything, the existence of these fish-headed whores has reinforced my
belief that I have no fucking clue as to what's going on in this world.
What I do know, is that this is my town. My harbor. My workplace.
Westmouth Harbor; this is where I grew up. Where I was raised by a
loving family. Where I became the best damn bait processor on the west
coast. These fucking mutants don't belong here. Not on my turf. They
belong in the tides; diced into chum and sloshing about the rolling currents,
their remains enticing the appetites of tuna, carp, sharks, marlins, and
barracudas.
Yet still, I couldn't help but feel a clump of concern about how well
Westmouth Harbor's new surge of abundant sea life would fare after wiping
out my chum-source.
 Fuck it. Life here on dry land was fine before fish-whore chum. Life
here on the shore of Westmouth will be fine without it.
After double-checking the fillet knife and Powerhead on my sharpened
hook-arm, I pulled the keys from the The Drowning Machine's ignition and
stepped out into the rain.

***

Apparently they had shrugged the presence of my El Camino in the

parking lot off as a non-threat. Good for me. Bad for them.
I waited until they made it halfway across the pier before I stealthily
darted across the lot, tactfully making my way to the beach, where I can
stalk them undetected from the unlit shadows of the high tide shoreline on a
moonless, stormy night.
I crept closer to the pier, treading with a werewolf-hunched gait along
the hiss of the breaking waves. When I was about thirty yards from the
support pylons, the pimp and his three fish-heads had nearly reached the
end of the pier. They disappeared behind the idle Ferris Wheel, still
unaware of my presence. Hopefully.
I needed to get the jump on these fuckers; especially that mammoth-
mutant in red sequined pimp gear. He's only got one shot with that harpoon
gun. I only have one round in my Powerhead. Kinda gave me an edge…I'd
take the .357 round over a harpoon any day.
With the sound of falling rain and crashing waves, I didn't have to take
my time clambering up the wooden steps connecting to the mouth of the
pier. Once I made it up to the top planks of the pier, I scanned ahead of me.
There they were, gathered at the end of the pier. The pimp had his arms
outstretched towards the sky, his right hand still clutching the harpoon gun.
The trio of pink-haired whores stood side by side at his back, arms stretched
and staring skyward as well.
I kept a sharp eye on their backs as I approached. With my left hand, I
ensured the fillet knife was secure to my prosthetic, and the Powerhead was
loaded and ready to fire. I then removed the hatchet-hammer from the left
inside pocket of my trenchcoat and gripped it tightly as I moved in on them.
 First I'll get in close and use the Powerhead round to take out the
pimp, I plotted. Then I’ll take my blades to those fish-heads. Hack ‘em up
real good and toss ‘em over the pier's edge. Chum up the water's of
Westmouth one last time. Draw in one last surge of sea life for tomorrow’s
fishermen.
I got nearly halfway across the pier and halted when the black waters
beyond the coastline erupted. Through the rainy darkness beyond the pier, a
four-story pillar of white water blasted from the sea's surface. There was a
ground-shaking rumble that cracked the wooden planks under my feet. The
pier groaned and popped as it rocked from side to side. An intense hiss
filled the air as the towering geyser dissipated into the wind. A salty mist
swept over the entire pier.
Water surged the shore. Over the side of the pier, the entire beach for a
quarter-mile became engulfed by the miniature tidal wave.
From where I watched, crouched behind the gate of the Ferris Wheel,
the pimp and the fish-heads hadn't moved an inch. They remained with their
arms out and heads tilted back, as if welcoming a hug from God.
Something massive was moving in the darkness beyond the pier,
nearly impossible to make out, being so dark itself. What little light there
was from the lights along the pier, I could make out its general dome-like
peak, which reached well over four stories high. Scant threads of light
washed over its many protrusions and ridges at either side of the dome.
The sight of this monstrous black thing looming in the choppy waters
no more than five hundred feet away had me wanting to run for my life.
The pimp and his trio remained with their arms spread, unfazed by the
gargantuan creature.
Just as I turned to make a break for shore, the waters beyond the pier
groaned menacingly. The displaced seawater had reached the streets, and
had even submerged The Drowning Machine all the way up to the
windows.
As the displaced water slowly rolled back, I saw bodies scattered in its
foamy wake. Bald, naked bodies washed ashore by the small tidal wave.
They squirmed and pawed at the ground as they struggled to their large feet.
More fish-faced whores, I realized. At least a hundred of them scattered
along the shoreline and streets of Westmouth Harbor, all getting to their feet
and heading for the pier.
 Sure I was armed, but I was in no way prepared for an army of naked
mutant whores, a giant pimp with a harpoon gun, and whatever that black
mountain of horror was out there in the water.
I made it off that pier damn quick, but not before swiping off half a
whore's head on the way with my hatchet-hammer.
The army of naked fish-heads screeched in unison.
I heard the pink-haired trio on the pier howl, and I was sure that the
pimp would be giving chase. I looked back as I ran and saw the hefty
mutant burling across the pier, harpoon gun at the ready. He wasn't moving
fast and I had a good lead on him, but he was still closing ground. I made it
to the Drowning Machine with time to spare.
The interior was soaked from the wave. Fucker better start. Better not
be flooded. The driver seat squelched under my ass as I fired up the engine
on the third stroke.
Across the parking lot, the red sequins pimp was still charging. He
took aim with the harpoon gun and fired into my left rear tire. With a bang,
my tire flopped and the back rim kicked sparks across the wet concrete.
I sped for the parking lot entrance, aiming to nail the pimp on my way
out. I spun the wheel, lining him up with the middle of the front grill. With
my shredded rear tire, I swerved out of control, banking into two naked
fish-heads, splattering one of their heads across the windshield. I nailed one
of the straggling pink-haired sluts before I made it onto Westmouth Harbor
Ave.
I couldn't see the looming dark thing out in the water with all the rain
pelting my windows. I wonder if the thing can come on land, I pondered.
The damn military would have to get involved. What the fuck was that
thing?
All the naked fish-head skanks washed up after it appeared. The pimp
and his trio summoned that thing, somehow. Ultimately, summoning more
Hoes From The Deep.
Heading home on a flat tire, I realized how busy I was gonna be from
now on, hunting these mutant sea-cunts from a deep sea world I never plan
on understanding.
Yessir. Roy Castor's sole purpose now is to send them all back home.
One bucket of chum at a time.
 About the Authors

W.H. Pugmire The Quickening of Ursula Sphinx

Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire has been an obsessed H. P. Lovecraft fanboy since
1973, at which time he began to correspond and hang-out with the surviving
members of the Lovecraft Circle . Inspired by his friendship with Robert
Bloch when he was a Mormon missionary in Ireland, Pugmire began to
experiment with writing horror fiction and made a first sale to SPACE &
TIME. Originally devoted to writing for the small press horror journals, he
now concentrates on writing collections of weird fiction. His most recent
books are ENCOUNTERS WITH ENOCH COFFIN (Dark Regions Press)
and BOHEMIANS OF SESQUA VALLEY (Arcane Wisdom Press.)

Kevin Strange McHumans

Kevin Strange makes shit up for a living. It's his job to take the cool ass
stories out of his twisted brain piece, and get them into yours without going
broke in the process. He's sort of like a mother Pterodactyl. But instead of
newly hatched little dinosaurs, he flings books and movies out of his nest.
Some catch wind and fly majestically forth to eat, fuck, and kill their way
through this fucked up world, while others simply splat on the ground
below. Food for the insects. Yeah. That's what he does. Every fucking day
of his life.

D. F. Noble Ghost Load

Don Noble was born in Alton, Illinois. He is the slightly older, fatter brother
of Kyle Noble and does most of his writing in a metal shed. Thinking about
it now, Don wonders if the shed acts as a kind of gigantic tin foil hat.

Rich Bottles Jr. Olaus Wormius

After an unillustrious print journalism career in southwestern Pennsylvania,
Rich Bottles Jr. moved to West Virginia at the age of 32 to pursue a career
in technical writing. He spends his free time visiting and hiking at the many
state parks in the Mountain State, which is also where he develops the
concepts for his novels. He is producing a trilogy of WV-themed
"humorrorotica" and is currently working on a bizarro novel set in the
vicinity of the West Virginia State Penitentiary. His previous novels include
"Lumberjacked" and "Hellhole West Virginia." He was also a co-editor and
contributor to the infamous anthology "The Big Book of Bizarro." His only
regret in life is that his out-of-state secondary school education prohibited
him from earning West Virginia's prestigious Golden Horseshoe Award.

Jesse Wheeler Chumlord of Westmouth Harbor

Jesse Wheeler spewed from his mother's infertile womb in the October of
1979. Just in time to grow up during the gruesome horror wave of rancid
splatter flicks that were generated in the mid to late 80's. His father made
the fruitful mistake of showing him John Carpenter's THE THING at the
age of 9. Then exposing him to the heroics of, Jason Voorhees, Leatherface,
Micheal Myers, and Dr. Giggles.
At the partially withered age of 29, Jesse finally discovered Jack Ketchum's
OFFSEASON, Richard Laymon's ENDLESS NIGHT, and Edward Lee's
THE BIGHEAD; He found out that a much much richer world of horror
needed to be explored with words.
He's been writing ever since.

Tim J. Finn Never Name He Who is not to be Named

Tim J. Finn (no relation to musician Tim Finn) is a member of the New
England Horror Writers and the Horror Society, an alumni of Grinnell
College and a devoted and diehard fan of the awesome Darian Caine and
the amazing Ruby LaRocca. (I'll give them copies of this anthology, for
sure.) He has worked as a radio disc jockey, short order cook, office temp,
busboy and copywriter. In his job as receptionist at a leading environmental
engineering firm, he answers phones and greets visitors in a sickeningly
sweet that threatens to bring on sugar shock. His writing appears in a
number of horror, bizarro and splatter punk anthologies, all available at
bookstore or e-reader near you.

Kyle Noble The Curse of the Black Goat

Kyle Noble was born 10,000 leagues under the poverty line. Horribly
malformed at birth, kidnapped, and returned to the loving arms of the state
by his kidnappers out of disgust, he was enrolled into the secret
organization simply known as the W.A.N.D. He became a covert double
agent Manchurian prostitute.

Craig Mullins Vicious Jelly

Craig Mullins should have been born a cephalopod, as the extra arms would
have aided in the amount of projects he juggles. Primarily known for being
the founder/webmaster of the long running H.P. Lovecraft film site/blog,
Unfilmable.com (a torch he has since passed on), Craig has also written and
directed two Lovecraft inspired short films, Read Me a Story (co-directed
with Bret Mix) and the award winning Tomb with a View. As a writer, Craig
Mullins has a small, but growing body of work that includes short stories in
the StrangeHouse Books anthologies "Strange Sex" and "Strange Versus
Lovecraft", and the forthcoming Atrophied Gangster Press anthology "Fifty
Secret Tales of the Whispering Gash: a Queefrotica"… Current projects
include a print magazine titled "Re-Animated States of America", featuring
stories by Craig and Andrew Ozkenel and artwork by Andrew Ozkenel,
scheduled for release in 2013, and follow-up stories set in the "Fuck or
Feast" (from the "Strange Sex" anthology) universe… Craig is also an
amateur Fortean, and lives in Glenpool, Oklahoma with his wife Amie and
their two children…

Jason Wayne Allen The Horror at the Garrsmouth Orgy

Jason Wayne Allen has published stories in various horror, bizarro, and
transgressive fiction publications and anthologies, appearing digitally as
well as in print. He is currently working on many different projects.
Jason Wayne is Southern by the disgrace of some dark god, but currently
resides in the Midwest.
Adam Millard Nyogtha of the Northern Line
Adam Millard is the author of thirteen novels and more than a hundred
short stories, which can be found in various collections and anthologies.
Probably best known for his post-apocalyptic fiction, Adam also writes
fantasy/horror for children. He created the character Peter Crombie,
Teenage Zombie just so he had something decent to read to his son at
bedtime. Adam also writes Bizarro fiction for several publishers, who enjoy
his tales of flesh-eating clown-beetles and rabies-infected derrieres so much
that they keep printing them. His “Dead” series has been the filling in a
Stephen King/Bram Stoker sandwich on Amazon’s bestsellers chart, and the
translation rights have recently sold to German publisher, Voodoo Press.
Adam also writes for This Is Horror, whose columnists include Shaun
Hutson, Simon Bestwick and Simon Marshall-Jones. Adam lives in the
post-apocalyptic landscape known as Wolverhampton, England, with his
wife, Zoe, and son, Phoenix.

Frank Edler Eat Shit and Die

Frank J Edler resides in New Jersey where he attempts to write. His other
work can be found in Tim Baker's UNFINISHED BUSINESS. He is co-
host of the wildly popular BOOKS, BEER AND BULLSHIT podcast. His
antics can be heard at
http://booksbeerbullshit.podbean.com and the companion blog at
booksbeerblogshit.blogspot.com.
 Grownups
Must
Die
The new novel from
the author of
Scary Fucking Stories

D.F. Noble
Coming soon
from StrangeHouseBooks.com
 Chapter Zero
The Rift

A big blue sky stretched out forever, with painted cotton clouds,
cumulus, towering like smoky castles that diluted a harsh summer sun. It
was noon, July, and hot like an oven. A couple houses, just their roofs,
jetted up out of the overgrowth. Five straight years of people not mowing
their yards and the old world was already being swallowed up by the Wilds.
Morning Glory and Ivy vines grew up over the walls of what was once
someone’s home. What was maybe once a place kids would watch cartoons,
and moms and dads would have come home and watched the game or a
soap, was now just a shell, a den for feral dogs and coyotes.
It had been awhile since Red Crow and Blood Wolf had been this way,
but it was summer again, and the grownups were migrating. A bloody and
beaten Roadie had shown up at the edge of Tree Top, saying his caravan
had been overrun; that a big pack—one of the biggest he’d seen in a year or
two—had attacked their group.
He was the only one to make it out. Said there were dozens of Biggers,
just swept right over them.
Red Crow and Blood Wolf, bored with village life in Tree Top, were
more than eager to go and scout it out. They geared up and set out the very
next day, even though Owl had bickered with them relentlessly, saying they
needed more warriors for a Nest that size. And while Owl was the Keeper,
Tree Top’s wise man, Red Crow was the War Chief. He and Blood Wolf had
fought side by side since the First Day, and they took orders from no one;
although, when Owl made sense, they would occasionally listen.
For now, there was the Hunt, and they had a spring in their step.
Through the tall grass they walked, heading to a ghost town the Roadie had
said they’d stopped in to make camp. Two days out and Red and Blood
hadn’t seen squat but wildlife and old husks of dead cars and houses. They
were beginning to think the Roadie was full of shit, and was more than
likely an escaped thief that had screwed over another nearby tribe. The kid
probably made the whole thing up to seek refuge there at Tree Top;
wouldn’t be the first time.
“Fuckin’ Roadie,” Blood Wolf grumbled. “If we don’t find this Nest,
I’m gonna have his ass with a thorn bush.”
Red Crow nodded. “At least we’re not running a plow. Maybe you
should thank him for the vacation.”
“Thank his ass with my boot.”

***

“Footprints here.”
Blood Wolf looked over Red’s shoulder. The tall grass had been
broken and trampled, and Red was right: there in the dirt were big barefoot
tracks.
“Biggers,” Blood asked, “or kids?”
Red Crow stood, simply said, “Aye, Biggers.”

***

Red and Blood followed the trail with their weapons drawn: Red Crow
with an arrow notched on his bow, and Blood Wolf with his spear ready, his
broadsword swinging close by on his hip.
The Roadie hadn’t been lying.
The trail took them into the cracked streets of Brighton. In The Before,
this trip would have been a thirty-minute drive from their hometown; but
now, working cars were rare, as was the gas they ran on. Now, it was a hard
day’s walk or a couple day’s hike if you took your time. In The Before, this
was just another little country town, with a couple gas stations, a few bars
and churches—like the dozen others that pockmarked the Wilds. It was
taken now, by saplings and weeds. It was a graveyard, a memory of The
Before.
They followed the tracks through the broken streets. Grass higher than
their heads, their ears were perked for the slightest sound, the slightest
indication of danger. The footprints grew, more and more numbers, which
meant a decent sized pack had been through here. Their guards up, they
followed till the prints led them to the outskirts of town.

***

Peeking between leaves and branches, Red Crow and Blood Wolf laid
wide eyes upon the horror before them. The grownups—Bigs, Biggers,
Muties or a dozen other names survivors had labeled them with—they
thought of as mindless crazies, for the day The Meek had inherited the
earth, and the strange static signal had come, the adults had torn their own
eyes out, raked open their faces with their fingernails and turned against
their offspring. What had once been their parents and elders, had become
vicious insane killers and eaters of children.
The first years were bloody, unforgiving, ruthless times. Few had
survived the onslaught of the first day. Something dark, something wicked
had gotten into the minds of the grownups, hollowed them out, and turned
them into savage, mindless animals. Red Crow and Blood Wolf were mere
children then, children with different names, of a different time. Even now,
growing into their late teens, the First Day was still a mystery. Some
believed it to be the work of the devil, others believed an alien force was at
hand, and various other conspiracies that all amounted to sundried dog crap.
There were no answers, only mystery, only survival. Leave the philosophy
to the Keepers like Owl and his pupils. Leave the dirty work to Red Crow,
Blood Wolf, and their warriors.
Grownups were known to use rudimentary tools. Anything they could
swing, cut or stab with, they would use. But most tools—most importantly,
guns—were useless to them. So looking through the dense overgrowth into
a den of the Bigs and seeing this…
The Change had many names. Some tribes called it The Fall, or The
Static, but the name didn’t matter; what mattered is what It did, and what It
did was change the fate of the world. One afternoon, a day like any other, a
signal—some type of frequency—went out, worming and swirling from
phones, radios, computers and TVs. Adults not even close to any of these,
the signal somehow found them as well. It was like a dog whistle that only
grownups could hear, and when it came, they were caught like flies in a
web.
 Their names were not Red Crow and Blood Wolf then. The old names
did not matter. That world is dead. Its buildings are gravestones, its
technology mere trinkets, its weapons powerful relics. A new world was
born, a brutal and vicious world where all culture and etiquette were
abandoned so man could survive.
The Great Reset Button had been pushed, and now the world belonged
to the wood, and to the wild, and to the children of the earth, the inheritors,
The Meek.

***

Blood Wolf spoke just under a whisper, keeping a low tone, since it
seemed the Bigs had impeccable hearing or some extrasensory power that
allowed them to find and mutilate children. “What the fuck are they doing?”
Red Crow—tall and thin, his hair long and obsidian with red feathers
knotted into several braids—wondered the same thing. Red and Blood were
both seventeen, both wore face paint (red marks etched across their young
faces), and while they were from the same clan, their garb varied greatly.
While Red preferred lightweight clothing and armor that allowed him to
sneak and move and climb freely, Blood wore heavier. Red preferred
finesse, accuracy, cleverness to his kill, while Blood was battle hungry. He
preferred his work up close and personal.
They both wore khaki camouflage pants and low-level Kevlar vests
(looted from the bodies of police officers gone insane), but that was it as far
as similarity. Red carried a bow and a quiver; this he used for when silence
and stealth were absolutely necessary. Years of practice had made him a
crack shot, but they both carried pistols for those moments when they were
surrounded by Grownups or a hostile tribe of kids. A hatchet and Kukri
blade, his hand-to-hand weapons, hung from his belt.
Red kept his gear to a minimum; the less weight, the faster he could
run or climb a tree. In a pouch from his belt, Red carried a length of strong
hemp rope with a heavy iron grappling hook bound at one end. This tool he
had come to respect, for there had been times, when surrounded by eyeless
monstrous adults, he could climb up, unleash the weight and swing it down,
bashing skulls till bodies piled up below him. It served well for climbing as
well, and with much practice, he had learned to scale old buildings and trees
with it.
 Blood Wolf, his brother in arms, was slightly shorter, but what he
lacked in height, he doubled in muscle. He was not short by any means, but
most kids looked short next to Red, who was an easy six-foot and still
growing. Blood excelled in hand to hand combat. He was vicious, merciless
and enjoyed having his enemies fall at his feet by either spear or axe or
sword. He wore a steel helmet, which had been fashioned to have a
sleekness like that of a wolf. The design had been pulled from a magazine
they’d found that specialized in Masquerade parties, and Sun Bear—Tree
Top’s hardy and round-faced Smith—had spent months perfecting it.
Besides Blood’s two-handed broadsword, the helm was his favorite
possession. It had been painted black, and the muzzle, which rested down
by Blood’s chin, had been splattered red, to give credence to his name and
his persona. He wore football shoulder pads that had been colored black and
had spikes drilled into them, as well as leather bracers with steel plates that
were also spiked. Beneath that, a leather jerkin was tightly bound around
his bulletproof vest and had been treated to give it a muscled chest and
torso look, much like Greek and Roman armor.
Blood Wolf was a tank, a meat grinder, strong like a bull, and
ferocious as a jungle cat. He carried a spear with him as well. It was a First
Attack weapon, and could be thrown with lethal effect. It was a simple long
steel rod that had been shaved down to a fine point at the end and bound in
black electrical tape and leather. He could use it as a staff or short-ranged
javelin, and it had seen as much blood as his sword. Various knives hung
from his belt, but hardly saw battle. They were there just in case.
They both carried revolvers in holsters that hung on their hips on belts
that were as integral as their weapons (they carried everything from spare
bullets, to flint and steel, to canteens and various other essentials for long
trips into the Wilds). After trial and error, the revolvers were found to be
best suited for them, for they rarely jammed, and while one couldn’t fire the
capacity of a fifteen round 9mm automatic, there was one assurance: when
you pulled the trigger, it fired.
Through the foliage, they peered. There was a nest of Bigs before
them, but not like a nest they’d ever seen. The Bigs were migratory, like
birds—in the summer months they roamed, eating anything that moved like
a plague of locusts; in the fall, they moved south to warmer climates. It was
Summer now; life was slow at home, at Tree Top. But out in the Wilds,
there was the Hunt, and Red Crow and Blood Wolf craved these months.
 The Bigs, most of them were nude, and so covered in filth and dirt that
one could hardly tell they were actually naked. Somehow, a few of them
still retained tattered fragments of their clothing, clothing that was now five
years old. A typical nest or den would have a group of a dozen strong, but
again, this nest was far from typical. From Red Crow’s count, there were
over twenty. In the early years, there would be herds of them, moving in
waves, but as time passed, and as huge lots of them began to die off, the
larger groups slowly dwindled and became smaller and smaller packs. The
grownups, not only devouring any animal life they could catch, and
children, also fed on each other. When a Big was too weak or too crippled
to hunt, the others simply tore into it and devoured it. Only a severed head
would remain, for they would gnaw even the bones. You could hear them
feeding if you were close enough or the wind was just right—that crunch
like celery, or the snapping of twigs, that was bone being broken down in
powerful jaws.
Their empty eye sockets had grown over with scabs and scars, leaving
only dark pits. They were a horrid sight, and smelled just as bad as they
looked, but something was odd. It was apparent that the nest had been here
for some time, for the skulls, which were usually discarded in mounds, were
now piled up neatly.
It was a pyramid. In a clearing of grass nestled between the trees, this
formation of skulls reached almost to the tree tops. This was new. Bigs
didn’t build. Bigs ate and shat and pissed and killed. When they were tired,
they slept in a huddled mass, and the only time they used tools was to
murder. But now apparently they were constructing precise mounds of
human remains.
Red Crow quietly opened a pouch in his tactical vest and withdrew a
small digital video camera. It was a trinket from The Before, but the
Keeper, Owl, had implored Red to use it to document life out in the Wild.
Owl was what you would call a wise man, even though he was a year
younger than Red and Blood. He had been an honor roll student in their
school, back when the world was seemingly normal. In that first year, as
Tree Top slowly formed, he had become a crucial member of their clan.
While Red and Blood focused on the ways of combat and battle and trained
incessantly at the Hunt, Owl studied agriculture, architecture, the old
technologies. Inside the grounds of Tree Top, Owl had shown them how to
build greenhouses, how to keep and sustain gardens, how to extract
medicines from plants. He had them acquire solar panels, windmill parts,
generators and batteries, and all sorts of tech that most would look at as
garbage. Owl utilized every resource, left no stone unturned, and while he
could be an anal retentive prick, he had respect. Without him, Tree Top
would be just another shithole patchwork clubhouse; but with him, they had
clean drinking water, electricity and a steady surplus of food.
Blood would often joke that the only time Owl would get a boner was
when they brought him a new book. Yet, Red understood him. Owl was the
factor that bound their clan together and what had made them flourish in a
world where most tribes and clans were starving to death and turning to
cannibalism or even eating the Bigs. So, when Owl wanted something, Red
made it a point that he got it.
Just like the video he was taking now. Owl was going to, in the words
of Blood Wolf, “knock lamps over with a big ol’ woody.” The Bigs mulled
about; some of them were feeding on the remains of carcasses, others
simply stood and turned their faces to the sun. One in particular, feeding on
the corpse of what had to be a small boy, carried the remaining skull to the
pyramid, as if he were going to place it there amongst the other
disembodied heads.
As he focused on this particular Big, something caught Red’s eye. As
it approached the pyramid, some of the heads…some of them opened their
mouths, their facial expressions twisted.
“What the fuck?” gasped Blood Wolf beside him. “You see that!?”
“Shhhhhhh!” hushed Red Crow. Owl was definitely going to want to
see this. His boner would be taller than the water tower that stood in the
center of Tree Top itself. As the Big carrying the head of the child neared
the pyramid, many more of the mouths began to open.
Sudden electricity filled the air. Red and Blood both felt the hairs on
their arms and necks begin to stiffen and stand on end. And then, a sound
that hadn’t been heard since the first day emitted from the pyramid—that
dentist drill sound—echoed out from the mouths of the disembodied heads.
Red Crow’s eyes went wide, for a terrible thought began to dawn on
him.
He and Blood were seventeen years old. On the day of The Change,
that static sound had taken all the adults, and as far as they knew, not a
single soul above the age of twenty was immune to it. Red had not feared in
a long time, but he feared then.
 A burning sensation, like there was an electric prod at the base of his
brain, seared him for a second, and his palm shot to his forehead. The Big
carrying the head to the pyramid stopped in its tracks. Its head jerked right
to where Red and Blood hid in the brush, and Red’s heart seized in terror.
A voice, deep and static and baritone, as if thunder could speak, tore
through his mind. It did not come from the Big’s mouth. Red knew then that
whatever was in the body of the adults used them like puppets; the body
was just a host to something strange and powerful and alien.
The words, the voice, they said then…
I
See
YOU!
And hell broke loose.

***

“Red!”
Someone was calling his name, and someone was screaming. Red
Crow’s eyes were locked onto the Big carrying the head, the Big that now
strode forward through the clearing, with his kind falling in rank behind
him.
“Red!” It was Blood, shaking him, pulling him backwards through the
brush. “Snap out of it! Goddammit, stop screaming!”
What the… Red Crow thought, aware now it was his voice he’d been
hearing. What the hell?
A thought that was quickly followed by, Oh shit!
Red Crow leapt to his feet just as Blood Wolf was snapping down the
faceplate of his helmet. “Fall back!” he yelled to Blood. “I’ll stagger them!”
“You fucking better!” Blood quipped and drew his sword. Red Crow
turned then, and realized he was still holding the camera. He shoved it into
his pocket—that hideous static sound still swelling in the air—and
simultaneously pulled his bow up and plucked an arrow from his quiver.
Just as he notched the arrow and drew the feathers back to the corner of his
right eye, the Big—the severed head firmly in its grasp—emerged through
the brush.
Red Crow got one good look at the Big. Its mouth opened wide,
revealing decayed and gnarled teeth, sharp and jagged as broken glass. Its
body was pockmarked with scars and boils beneath the layer of filth it
wore, and scraggly, long, matted hair covered its jaws and head. It had been
a man once, but now it was a thin, wraith-like ghoul. A thinly veiled
skeleton with leathery flesh.
It lifted the head it held—as in a grim warning or triumph, Red didn’t
know.
He fired on reflex then, aiming his weapon was just a backdrop in his
mind and his actions.
Thhhhwap!
The arrow covered the short distance in a fraction of a second and
buried itself in the monstrosity’s skull. Before the thing could take another
step and fall lifeless to the ground, Red was notching another arrow.
“Here they come!” roared Blood Wolf beside him.
The bushes rumbled, as if high winds were rustling them, but the
illusion broke as bodies piled through. The grownups burst from the tree
line, not quite running, but more power-walking in that weird way, as if
something occasionally shocked them, as if they’d all developed a twitch,
or borrowed their bodies for the weekend and were just learning how to use
them.
Another arrow whistled out—not at the closest one, but at a Big mid-
distance from Red Crow. Red was an excellent shot, but now was not the
time for precision shooting; they would be overwhelmed quickly if they did
not fight tactically. His next shot sank into a Big’s chest, and while the Bigs
did not quite feel pain (or rather, ignored it), they were still human bodies.
A shot to the heart, and a straight on headshot would stop them dead, but
glancing blows and gut shots only slowed them. They would die eventually
of the wound, if it was fatal, but to drop them quick, you had to know the
sweet spots. For five years, Red Crow studied those sweet spots, and the
Big who found an arrow in its chest took two faltering steps and keeled
over.
Some of the Bigs would close in, but Blood Wolf protected his flank.
This was not their first battle. Although the unexpected pyramid and the
signal had cost them an advantage, they had faced worse odds, greater
numbers.
Three Bigs, in various states of filth, rushed in to Red Crow’s right.
They growled inhumanly, as if their voices were gargling the static of a bad
radio. Two of them carried rusted knives, and the other, a piece of rebar.
Blood Wolf roared beside Red Crow and leapt into the fray, first throwing
his heavy javelin into the chest of the nearest Big, while preparing a
sweeping blow with his broadsword. The javelin, made of heavy steel, bit
through its chest, cracked ribs and punctured a lung till it stabbed through
the Big’s shoulder blade.
With a grunt, the Big was knocked from its feet. It spun and hit the
ground as Blood Wolf moved forward with his sword, cleaving the next Big
across the face. The heavy blade didn’t so much cut through the skull as it
did smash it, for the edge of his blade gave it just enough to split the skin
before it exploded the jaw, then the teeth and roof of the mouth.
Dark red fluid, almost black, shot from the Big’s ruined head and hung
in the air, suspended, as time slowed. To the normal eye, Blood Wolf was
but a blur, but high on adrenaline, Red Crow caught from his peripheral the
fluid action of his brother in arms. With blinding speed, Blood Wolf
channeled the momentum of his swing, looped the blade around with two
hands and buried the broadsword down into the third Big’s collarbone,
biting deep into its chest. The Big had been at a fast-paced power-walk, but
the blow was staggering, and the kinetic energy forced it to the ground. All
this action took place in a matter of two seconds, as that was the frightening
physical power of Blood Wolf.
The blade, sunken deep, had to be wrenched from the dying Big at
Blood Wolf’s feet. As Blood placed a foot on its side and yanked his blade
free, Red Crow loosed an arrow into the mouth of a Big trying to rush in.
Shattering teeth, the arrow ripped through its skull and the thing toppled
over, floundering like a fish, throwing up leaves and dirt as it skidded
towards them.
Reaching for another arrow, Red Crow realized the Wild had come
alive with movement. Bigs were literally coming out of the woodwork, and
a quick glance behind him let Red know this wasn’t just a pack of twenty or
so grownups;this was a horde of them. Dozens were piling towards them,
power-walking in that jerky, broken robot feel they had.
Beside him, Blood Wolf tore through another Big, severing a leg with
one swipe, and then decapitating a Bigger woman behind it. They were
losing ground quickly, any advantage had been lost. This would be a fight
to the tooth and nail.
“Blood!” Red Crow yelled, planting another arrow in the heart of a
Big. “Fall back!”
 Blood Wolf opened another Big’s stomach, spilling guts. The thing
stabbed back at him with an old butcher knife, but with Blood’s Armor, it
only slid off. “I got this!” Blood roared, and smashed his foe’s head with the
hilt of his massive sword.
“We’re surrounded! Fall back!”
Blood Wolf did a turnabout, taking in his surroundings as he pushed
his wolf-like visor up. Bigs were everywhere—behind them, to their sides,
as if they knew to encircle them. “Fuck!” he spat, and retrieved his spear
from a corpse with a terrible wet schlurp.
“I’ll cover you,” Red yelled as they backtracked. “Climb a tree!”
Blood thrust his spear into a Big with one hand, then bashed it in the
face with the other. “You know I hate climbing trees!”
“For fuck’s sake, Blood!” Red knew they would waste precious time
while Blood Wolf tried to climb up, so he zipped another arrow into the
growing crowd and retreated. Red slung his bow over his shoulder, and like
a chimp, leapt, grabbed a branch and swung himself up. He turned and
offered a hand to Blood, who had just sheathed his sword, and they locked
hands. Bracing himself with a leg and his free hand wrapped around the
thick branch, he helped pull the heavily-armored Blood Wolf up until his
war mate could climb himself.
From there, they scaled higher, till there was safe distance between
themselves and the reach of the Bigs and their shabby weapons.
Breathing heavy, Blood Wolf turned to Red Crow—who was
unwinding the rope with the heavy hooked end from the pouch on his belt
—and asked, “What happened back there?”
Red shot him an annoyed glance. “Later, Blood. Later.”
Below them, dozens of adults swarmed around the base of the tree like
dirty unwashed human piranhas. One of them was beginning to climb up,
but Red Crow whipped the weighted hook down and bashed him about the
head, and with a sickly crunch, the Big fell back into the crowd and was
trampled by his own kind.
“Well,” Blood Wolf said, finding a sitting position in a nook between
branches, “I just want you to know if we die today, it's entirely your fault.”
“Save it,” Red Crow said, and sent the hook down again, lacerating
another Big trying to climb the tree. “We’re not dying today.”
Red knew something had happened back there when that static came
from the heads in the pyramid, and when he heard that voice searing into
his mind. There was a moment, just a fraction of a second, where he was
sure he was going to lose his mind, and that the static was going to get
inside and eat his sanity from the inside out, much like termites do to wood.
Red had been screaming and didn’t even know it, and a pain he could not
quite describe, as if some electrical current was ripping his mind out
through his face, had almost taken him; almost.
Red knew what Owl was going to think when they got back, for it had
been something Owl had been speculating on for some time. The Bigs were
evolving, only Owl didn’t have the evidence to prove it. But he had
evidence now, evidence that sat in a pocket in Red Crow’s vest.
Red also knew what it meant, and he buried himself in the action, in
this moment, trapped in a tree and fighting for his life, for what it meant
was terrifying. Somehow, the Bigs were trying to bring the Static back, that
Signal that had changed them, they were summoning it again, but not with
radios and TVs and computers and cell phones. They were channeling it
through the severed heads of their own kind.
If they bring back the Signal, Red thought, smashing open skulls
below him, then all of us, the ones old enough…old enough like me and
Blood and Owl. We’ll change… we’ll claw our eyes out and turn on the
young.
We have to get back…
We have to tell Owl…
But first, we have to burn that fucking pyramid.

***

The sun had set by the time Red and Blood had culled the horde of
Bigs. Their muscles ached and their hands and bodies were chafed with the
task, for the pack had been high in numbers. Almost forty were dead, by the
quick body count they did while sitting in the tree. It was dark then, and it
was never smart to travel at night in the Wild anyway. It was even less
smart to do it while next to a large nest of murderous psycho adults who
didn’t need eyes to find you in the dark.
So they did what they’d done numerous times: they tethered
themselves to the tree with an extra length of rope they carried with them. It
was a safety precaution, because the last thing they wanted to do was wake
up with branches rushing past them on their way to a blind date with the
hard earth.
“You got any rounds left?”
That was Blood, making small talk as usual. He was canine in more
ways than one. Where a dog would circle and circle a spot till it was finally
comfortable enough to rest, Blood did the same, only with words.
“Didn’t use my gun,” Red replied, staring at stars through the leaves.
He lay in a fork of branches, making himself as cozy as possible.
Blood chuckled, “I know. If we did it your way, you’d still be beating
them to death with your rope.”
Red sighed, but smiled. Much like a dog, once Blood locked his jaws
on something, you’d damn near have to kill him to make him let go. “It
works,” Red replied. “Saves on ammo.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Blood asked the question.
Red knew it had been coming, he was just waiting for it. They’d been
friends since middle school and there wasn’t much that they didn’t know
about each other.
“You gonna tell me what happened back there at the skulls or what?”
Red thought for a second, then decided that he would come clean.
“The Static,” Red Crow said, his voice going grave. “I heard it.”
“Well duh, numb nuts,” Blood retorted. “I heard it, too.”
“No,” Red Crow said. “I heard it, like it burned in my head. There was
a voice in it, Dean.”
They didn’t use their old names much, and when they did, it was
serious. Those moments when they slipped back into The Before, when
they were just kids, playing video games and dreaming about girls and what
they’d do with their Summers. Before they had become killers, warriors…
“What do you mean there was a voice in it? What’d it say?” Blood's
voice was thinly masked. There was concern just underneath his let-live,
let-die attitude.
“I see you.”
“What?”
“That’s what it said. It said, I see you.”
There was a long pause.
“That’s creepy as fuck, Jake. Stop fucking with me.”
Red Crow, once a boy by the name of Jake Warren, replied back to his
friend. “I’m not, Dean. I swear it. If…if you wouldn’t have shook me out of
it…I don’t think…”
“Dude, shut up,” Blood, once Dean Raims, growled.
“Listen to me,” Red Crow said. “I was right there, right about to go
crazy. You saved my ass, Dean.” They locked eyes then, just for a second,
the whites of their eyes a soft florescent in the moonlight.
“Whatever, fucker,” Blood snorted, and looked away. “I was right
there too. If you heard it, I woulda heard it.”
“Yeah, I’m older than you, though.”
“By three months!”
Red Crow pulled some jerky from his pouch, tore a piece off and
handed it to his friend. “Maybe that’s all it takes,” said Red.

***

Red Crow woke at dawn, the rays of the sun cutting through the gaps
in the leaves. A sound, wet and ripping, and the gnashing of teeth came
from below. Looking down, Red saw the source of it. There was a pack of
feral dogs enjoying the buffet of Bigger flesh.
“Blood,” Red said. “Blood, wake up.”
“Fuck off.”
“The pyramid,” Red said, and shook him. “Come on. We gotta take
care of it.”
“Ugh.” Blood yawned and stretched. He gave Red a weary look, a
look that could have said I could eat your face right now or give me a
Mountain Dew or I’ll eat your face right now. Blood untethered himself
from the tree trunk and saw the dogs below.
“Hey,” Blood said with grit in his voice, “close your mouth’s when
you chew, you’re fucking disgusting.”
Most of the dogs only shot him an unconcerned glance, but one of
them, some mutt with shaggy, matted hair, growled at him.
Blood Wolf growled back, ripped a twig off the tree and threw it at the
dog. It missed completely and the dog snorted at Blood, then went back to
the intestines it was feeding on.
“Fucker,” Blood Wolf spat.
The boys made their way down to the lower, thicker branches, walked
a far as they could, and then dropped down amongst the corpses. Dead
Biggers lie everywhere around the base of the tree, making it rough to
traverse since every other step was a limb or eviscerated torso and split
skull. It was a rank smell, and rot had not even set in yet. Just the odor of
Bigs was bad enough, but when you cut them open, it was like chopping
into a bag full of turds.
Several yards and the ground began to clear up. Red plucked arrows—
the ones that weren’t broken or snapped—from the corpses around him,
while Blood Wolf had to roll a couple corpses over to retrieve his spear,
which was now coated with gunk and filmy gore. Grimacing, Blood wiped
his weapon clean off in the grass. The pack of dogs paid Red and Blood no
mind as they went. Since a gourmet had been left for them, only something
interfering with their meal would have distracted the pack.
“So how do we do this?” asked Blood, as they tromped to the clearing
which held the pyramid.
“Burn it, I figure.”
“Oh joy,” Blood said as they stepped through the tree line.
The gruesome structure sat ahead, and the heads seemed absolutely
lifeless. Red wondered if they would come to life, static spilling from their
chomping mouths, if him and Blood got close enough.
Apparently Blood was thinking the same thing. “Swear to god,” Blood
said, lowering the face plate of his mask, “if they start talking when we get
close… I’m gonna shit my pants. Just poop everywhere.”
Red nodded. He didn’t want to admit it, but he was nervous. What if
that static did come again, would he be vulnerable?
“Let’s try something first,” Red said and drew an arrow. He pulled a
bandana from his belt, and looped it tight around the tip, tying it off with its
own corners. From a pocket in his tactical vest he retrieved a small
container of lighter fluid and soaked the cloth.
Red notched the arrow and asked, “Gotta light?”
Blood grinned. “For you honey buns, always!”
Blood lit the arrow with a Zippo, and it instantly caught. Red took aim
—the target didn’t need much, since it was close and was damn near the
size of a house. The flaming arrow streaked out and sunk with force into the
cheek of a bodiless head halfway up the pyramid. It was enough force to
rock the head away from the stack, and as the fire caught, crackling the
half-rotten skin like a dried log, the head tumbled down, but stopped short.
Something—a black cord of some kind—had been poked through the
back of the skull, and there behind the growing flames and the empty spot
where the head had sat, was a reflection of glass.
“What the…” Blood Wolf mumbled. “It’s a fucking TV screen…”
He was right. The entirety of the pyramid did not seem to be made
purely of decapitated heads, only the outer shell of the thing seemed to be.
The boys moved closer with cautious steps, some superstitious fear
bubbling up in them. This was far removed, above and beyond more strange
than what they had come to expect from the Bigs.
Closer, and the face of the pyramid came alive with movement. Jaws
began to open, and the hairs on the boys’ arms and necks began to rise.
“The static!” Red yelled, and backed away. “Blood! Get away from
it!”
Instead, Blood howled and rushed forward, his sword above his head.
“Blood! Stop!”
The sound started low, just a tickle in the ears of Red Crow. His eyes
began to itch just as Blood Wolf collided with the pyramid. Thrashing with
his sword, splitting open skulls and knocking them away, each swipe
revealed computers, TV screens, and coils of cords and wires, all of them
punctured through the back of skulls or slithered up through the open necks.
For a moment, the static flared up, reaching a crescendo, this
chattering symphony of locust-like throbbing that brought Red Crow to his
knees. Pressure, like a volcano, rose up in his nasal passages, and Red’s
hands shot up to his face.
The voice, that terrible electric alien voice…
I SEE YOU!
I SEE-
Then the sound stopped, just cut short like a plug had been pulled.
Before Red Crow toppled over, he saw Blood Wolf atop the pyramid, his
helmet gleaming in the sun, wrenching free a skull with a thick bundle of
cables sprouting from its neck, hanging loose and frayed from where they
had been severed. A trail had been cut up the side of the structure, a
gruesome path of crushed bone and pinkish mush of brain matter where
Blood had blazed to the summit, wreaking havoc and destruction with his
broadsword.
Blood Wolf cried out and held the skull up to the sky, his voice like the
roar of a lion or some primal beast. The war cry echoed out, and as Red
Crow felt himself slip into darkness, he was positive the Wilds roared back
with Blood Wolf. The bugs and frogs and birds and the feral pack of dogs,
all joining their voices together into a powerful chorus.
And Red, falling forward on his knees, splayed out. His mind, like a
stone, fell into emptiness. The world disappeared, and for a second—or for
an eternity—he disappeared with it. A void consumed him, darkness for
eons and eons. Blacker than black, devoid of anything, light or memory or
emotion.

***

An eternity later, there came specks of light.

What? Where is this? Where am I?
Red Crow felt immense speed and those specks became stars, and
galaxies and distantly, Red Crow felt as if he were traveling through space
and time and...
He heard a voice...
Not evil.
Something familiar... an old man's voice that he couldn't pin down.
How long has it been? I...I remember...I remember being human...I
am...I am...I am Jake...I am Red Crow...
Through darkness he fell, surrounded by stars that sang their own
histories, that sang of their hearts and minds. Through nebulae and the folds
of space he traveled. He felt no body, nothing human, but instead he felt
like a comet, a star zipping at the speed of light. Distant memories invaded
his mind.
A flickering orange light lay ahead, and it was warm.
He moved towards it. He wanted its warmth, wanted to find this
familiar voice...
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 “Scary Fucking Stories”
D.F. Noble
Just beyond the small bandwidth of light our nervous systems can filter, there are worlds, there is life
in the dark. Those moments where you swear something is watching you. Those moments you swore
someone has called your name, but you find yourself alone... You are more than happy to tell your
children of angels, but you speak in hushed tones of demons. From the Dark, I bring you... Scary
Fucking Stories. With amazing cover art done by Gabriel Wyse!
 “Beer Run of the Dead”
D.F. Noble
An epic drunk romp through the wasteland of a zombie apocalypse, Beer Run of the Dead is the first
book in a series sure to wet your whistle. Follow Kip, Rock and Steady, as they struggle to survive
and stay completely shit faced in the face of certain undead doom. These three unlikely heroes hold
the key to humanity's salvation, but will they succeed being inebriated as they are? Not everyone who
saves the world is a rocket scientist, a super hero, or a handsome actor turned politician. Sometimes
people who save the world... they're fucking idiots.

“Baby Fever” Kyle Noble

Baby Fever begins as a love triangle. Ryan finds himself in a sex shop, purchasing a dildo for a girl
he's sleeping with. Unfortunately, this girl also has a boy friend. While Ryan struggles internally on
spending money on a Valentine's Day gift for a girl he considers to be a whore- a girl he also may be
in love with- something strange begins to happen. Sirens go off across the city. Cars begin wrecking
out in the street. The old lady at the cash register loses her mind and starts to rape one of the porno
shops patrons. As the men struggle to survive, Ryan, driven by the unknown forces of love (or
something else?) starts out across the city to find the woman he loves in a maddening, mind twisting,
ball busting romp of apocalyptic woman on man rape fest from hell.
 “Vampire Guts in Nuke Town”
Kevin Strange
Guts is a bad motherfucker in a bad, bad world. 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
Nuke Town!

“Robamapocalypse”
Kevin Strange
In a dystopian future where Barack Obama is lord and emperor of the only city left on earth after the
zombie apocalypse, one young man must fight his way through a tournament pitting zombie against
remote controlled zombie if he hopes to stop the evil, half-cyborg dictator from destroying Steel City
and the rest of the fabled Obamamerica beyond. Time traveling terrorists, giant robot zombies made
of zombies, and Barack Obama like you've never seen him before are but a few of the twists and
turns that make Robamapocalypse one of the weirdest, most action packed bizarro stories you'll ever
lay your unsuspecting eyeballs on.
This election year, Barack Obama is a giant fucking robot.
 “Cannibal Fat Camp”
Mark Scioneaux
David C. Hayes
Miles Landish can’t help himself. He eats and eats and eats and eats just to fill an empty, gaping, hole
in his self esteem. Nothing ever seems to fill that hole, even the five star meals Miles' wealthy
parents make possible. So, as a last resort, Miles attends Camp Tum Tum, a weight control camp for
spoiled teens. What happens there is only hinted at in high social circles, but the truth must be told.
Facing starvation, the campers at Tum Tum make a decision that very few human beings have made.
That decision turns Camp Tum Tum into... Cannibal Fat Camp!

“Tales of Questionable Taste”

John Bruni
For fans of the bizarre, the weird, the strange, StrangeHouse Books brings you a whirlwind of
eighteen tales sure to amuse, confuse, horrify and leave you questioning your lack of taste. From the
warped synapses of John Bruni come stories of the destruction of earth, via a humongous totally nude
man in space, a portal to another dimension inside of an office worker's desk, a sordid love affair
between two nefarious euthanasia enthusiasts, and many other yarns that span from psychological
terror, to comedy, to downright disgusting!
 “Zombie! Zombie! Brain Bang!”
WHAT IF... zombies were the worst customers to ever enter a fast food
restaurant? WHAT IF... the only thing saving you from a zombie horde is a
suit of cute little babies? WHAT IF... you traveled through time to see a
great pair of tits but ended up kicking off the zombie apocalypse? WHAT
IF... all those dead pets came back with a hunger for human flesh? Twelve
of the most bizzare zombie stories you'll ever read, all jam packed into one
delicious, ultra-violent book, Zombie! Zombie! Brain Bang! is guaranteed
to suck out your brains and chomp on your guts while you scream with
delight.

“Strange Versus Lovecraft”

What happens when a group of the rowdiest authors of cult horror fiction take
on one of the most iconic figures in the entire genre? STRANGE VERSUS
LOVECRAFT features eleven of the absolute weirdest short stories set in
the Cthulhu mythos you’re ever likely to read. From fish-mouthed
prostitutes to undersea fast food restaurants and the house raping spawn of
Yog-Sothoth, you’ve never read Lovecraft done quite like this. Next
generation authors Kevin Strange, D.F. Noble, Jason Wayne Allen, and
Jesse wheeler lead this shambling pack of pervert writers toward untold
lows as they defile the sacred name of H.P. Lovecraft in this loving send up
to the man who brought tentacles into the main stream.

“Grownups Must Die”

D.F. Noble
On a day like any other, a strange signal permeates the Earth, a static that
drives every adult into madness. They rip their eyes from their sockets, their
voices cry out in harmony with the crazed sound, and then they turn on the
children…
Grownups Must Die is the introduction to a new saga from the author of
Scary Fucking Stories and Beer Run of the Dead, a dark tale of survival,
violence, and defining one’s self in a time of peril and insanity. We
introduce a boy named Jake Warren, who even before The Static finds
himself immersed in a world of violence. What begins as a tragic act of
self-defense against bullies, leads Jake and his friends into a new and
terrifying reality.
 “The Last Gig on Planet Earth and Other Strange Stories”
Kevin Strange
Kevin Strange's fiction has been described as bleak, hopeless, bizarre, and
always unpredictable. This is Strange at his most nihilistic. The Last Gig on
Planet Earth collects seven tales full of suspense, of dread, of that side of
human nature that most pretend does not exist. Strange sets his spotlight
directly in its gnarled face and demands it reveal its most twisted secrets.
This collection is sure to leave you repeating, “this is only fiction, this is
only fiction, please let this only be fiction...”