bitch, but probably less than letting the thing crawl under my skin or whatever creepy ghost crap it was gonna do if I left it alone. I whipped my hand away to try to hopefully get the twice-dead insect off my damn face, and whipped my coat up to cover my head as its buddies started to swarm. A lot of whipping, in general, but that's to be expected, I think. When a house is trying to eat you, you tend to move fast.
Shuffling footsteps entered the room.
It was following me? Came the inevitable thought. Oh, shit, can they all move room to room now? Are the wasps gonna... and crap, the boar-thing was in the next room and that thing was fast as...!
“Unfaaaaaaaaaaair!” I shouted, ducking my covered head under the swinging hook and running for my life into the next room, really not sure of what to do but run, run, run away.
The wasps totally did follow me into the next room. Harry wasn't playing anymore; every manifestation he had created for his sadistic little game was coming after me, all at once. “Unfair!” I shouted again, just because there was a giant demonic pig in my way, again. And a giant rotting shambling horror with a fucking meathook following far too close behind me, again. And now, all of it was just lovingly punctuated by wasps the size of my thumb! I was at the point where I couldn't think of anything else to say but how unfair all of this was.
But... then inspiration reared its lovely head. I still had one bottle-bomb of dubious origin and four bullets left. I could turn and empty those four bullets into the big hooked thing, and most likely hurt him quite a bit, at which point he or the wasps would probably kill me. I could try to blow him up again, but the first bottle had devoured a whole room full of ghostliness and not finished him off, and I really had no clue if this one would be stronger or weaker. But, that first explosion had given me the lovely lil' reminder that ghostly liquids burned like napalm mixed with... with something else that burned (Still not good at similes when I'm about to die!).
And if all the manifestations were still active, there was a big old room that was gonna fill up with blood as soon as I entered it.
Right through that hole that the Big Evil Pig Thing had so thoughtfully opened up on his first charge.
Hee, hee, hee.
The Doom Pig was, like the other manifestations, not quite up to his old standards. He was so scrawny I could count his bones now, and the thick, blood-matted fur was reduced to a thin, mangy layer of fuzz. The eyes were the same, though, red and crazy. Just the way I liked 'em!
“Ole! Toro, toro!” I said. “That is the right thing to say for a bullfight, right? I mean, that's an important ceremony, I want to get it right.”
I was cut off at this point by the thing just charging me, which I felt was rude. I mean, here I was trying to be politically correct and culturally sensitive, and this spectral horror (which I bet had never even been to any kind of sensitivity classes at all.) just charges right at me! The Hell, pig? Just rude.
What I had been hoping it would do, yes, but still rude.
Rather than try to run away from the thing, or dodge to the side, either of which it would have expected, I did something that I knew would be stupid and risky, unless it worked, in which case it would be cunning and insightful. I ran toward the charging rabid beast, coat still held up over my head and wasps still buzzing around it. I imagine I looked pretty absurd, if we wanna be honest.
But then I jumped over those nasty tusks, hit the beast's back shoulder first, and (I am not making this up!) rolled across the top of it to land on my feet and running for the hole in the wall.
Yeah. I pulled that off.
And I bet now you feel really bad about saying that I looked silly before, huh. Repentant, on account of that awesome thing I just did. You couldn't have done that. You'd have gotten trampled by a giant monster, but me? I keep my cool and just leap right over that fucker and it's the coolest thing ever and... okay, yes. I have no idea how I pulled it off, and I'm amazed it didn't kill me horribly.
Still! Pretty awesome, right?
Realistically, I should have just kept running away. But I had totally just pulled a slick action-movie style acrobatic stunt, and I am nothing if not a person who has always wanted to live in a movie. I had to turn around and give a cool one-liner. There's just some things you need to do.
“Ha! Looks like...” I began.
The charging demon-pig-thing slammed directly into the hook-wielding giant, and the universe made a kind of 'sploit' sound at the impact. The boar creature vanished in a rippling, like it had somehow leaped into a vertical, invisible pond. And the killer, in turn, grew about a foot taller, his exposed skin growing a layer of thick black fur and his hook transmuting into something that looked not entirely unlike bone. He threw back his head and roared, an even more inhuman sound than the ones I'd gotten used to hearing from him.
“... I totally had a pun I was gonna use here,” I said, my one-liner sadly left by the wayside. I know, it's a shame, but in my defense I hadn't seen that one coming. Guess Stanfield was consolidating resources? Well, he was a businessman, when he wasn't being a senseless murderer. He knew how to manage employees. Also kill them. So, he was multi-talented, was the point.
The ghostly creature raised a hand, and the swarming wasps landed on the outstretched limb, vanishing in a ripple like the other manifestation had done. “Oh, hell,” I said.
The ghostly voice laughed, and masked creature drew back its head, opened its mouth, and screamed, the buzzing of angry wasps clearly audible behind the howling fury. The crawling motions beneath its skin grew more frenzied, as if, well... as if a big swarm of wasps was crawling in its veins. No need for similes when it's plainly obvious what is actually happening. Oh, and just for that extra bit of 'My Life Sucks' I've come to expect from these situations, the hook in its hand changed again as well. The curved, razor-edged bone began to drip with a sickly green liquid that I very much suspected was bad for my health, based on the tiny fact it smoked and started to eat a hole through the floor.
“That is my floor, you jackass!” I snapped. “As if the fire damage in the kitchen and the big damn hole in the wall right over there isn't enough, now you're melting the floors? This house was already a fixer-upper!”
Some things are more important than life-and-death, dammit. Do you have any idea how much contractors charge?
A long, black, pustule-covered tongue licked suddenly fur-covered lips, and a scent that made rot seem fresh and clean filled my nostrils. The creature took a step toward me, its motions far more steady than they'd been just a moment before.
“On the other hand,” I said, “I guess it used to be your house, so you should have some say in the decoration.”
See? I can be reasonable.
Oh, and then I turned and ran for my damn life. Which, really, is just one more way of proving that I really can be reasonable.
I felt the hook miss my fleeing back by maybe half an inch, and heard the hiss of the venom beginning to melt through my jacket. Ick. I really was lucky I'd gotten that thing cheap... though not as lucky as I was that it was pretty thick, since acid on one's flesh is not good. I have the scars to prove that one. Ah, well, it would wash off soon enough, I was almost to the big pool of blood.
Was it sad that I was actually looking forward to leaping into a giant pool of blood filled with invisible biting things for the second time in one day?
You know, maybe I really am insane.
Ah, well. I came upon the hole in the wall I'd been sprinting for, a wasp-boar-serial killer-ghost roughly five steps behind me, and took a flying leap. The bloody pool, which had previously been up to my waist, was now roughly an inch deep, causing my face to sink right through it and slam into the wooden floor, sliding along it roughly.
Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. I was seriously getting sick of this stupid fucking house. Maybe I would just take the loss and burn the whole stupid place down. This was the second time in one day that I'd
been covered in a pool of ghost-blood, and you know, I bet that's a cancer risk or something. I mean, sure, what doesn't cause cancer these days, sure, but still.
I rolled to one side, letting the descending hook slam into the floor where my head had been, and reached into my coat for the second bottle-bomb. It was hissing, releasing some kinda weird purple smoke, and I think the bottle itself felt softer than it should have been. For the second time that day, I wondered vaguely if I was about to explode my own face, what with how I didn't actually know most of what was in it.
Meh, probably still better than what Harry was gonna do to me.
I chucked the bottle between the monster's legs; it made a kind of weird glooping noise rather than a thunk, which in my expert opinion was not normal. It looked like it was actually melting, and that seemed like a bad sign. Glass, ideally, should not turn to goo. I decided quickly to get a bit further away from it before I took my shots, and-
The bottle exploded, quite spontaneously, quite earlier than planned, and most noticeably quite before I was nearly as far away from it as I would have preferred. Though there was the benefit there that I was suddenly moved farther away as the blood pool and the ghost in it went up in the same bizarre white flame as the kitchen had before. Fun fact? Turns out that while the whole 'ghostly energy' thing might