matter should be a trifle for a military veteran of your stature.”
“Are you just buttering me up?” I knew he couldn’t know a thing about my ‘stature’ as a veteran—unless he meant it literally. “Or are you saying that because I’m easily two feet taller than any of you.”
“Feet?” he asked, and stared at where my legs met the water; something got lost in translation there.
“Nevermind. Tell me about your problem?”
“The florgh-bak is a menace to my people.”
“And that is?”
He motioned for me to follow him into one of their buildings. I hadn't realized it earlier, but they were 'constructed' out of a coral. “How do you?”
He made a soft, baby-belching sound, which I assume signaled pride. “We encourage them to grow in certain configurations. Lamps, warmth, food; all go into growing a wall up out of the water.”
He pointed me to a tablet, a shard of an obsidian-like rock with an image carved into it. It looked kind of like an octopus—or at least, a fevered, Lovecraftian nightmare of what an octopus with eighty arms might look like.
He made that breaking his people-in-half-and-sucking-out-the-meat gesture again.
I noticed a localized eclipse—a shadow was cast across me. I turned. One of the urchins had climbed to the top of the wall, and was standing over me with a club. “Crap,” I managed to get out. He jumped down on me. I got my pistol out and fired from the hip. I'm even fairly certain I hit him, but gravity was against me at that point—he was falling on me either way. It was like having a sack of screwdrivers dropped on me.
I woke tied up, with my face half in water. My helmet was cracked, because my mouth was open, and had filled with their terrible water; I was lucky I hadn’t drowned.
I was in an above-water den, a cavern with twelve-foot walls but no ceiling. There were lots of…I’ll be generous and call them ‘keepsakes’ scattered around. I’ve never been that keen on marine biology, so I had no clue what kind of animal might live here—presuming there was some analogous patterns to animals back on earth. But judging from the bric-a-brac, I was in the front room of a humongous sea hoarder. Skeletons and bits of shell lined the ground—and that made me wonder if maybe this wasn’t the front room. What if it was the kitchen? That made too much sense to ignore.
I didn't have much room to move my arms, but I managed to worm my way to the wall, which I used to push myself up off the ground. From there, I found an especially sharp bit of rock jutting out to fray the rope. That got my hands free. I could tell from the way that my face was sticky that it was caked in blood.
I reached for my pistol. I'd managed to get it strapped back in its holster before I passed out—and the urchins didn't take it. Small miracles.
I noticed a pile of animal droppings in one side of the lair. Even without getting any closer, I could make out bits of rope mixed in. So I was meant as a TV dinner, or maybe takeout.
It was at that moment that I heard a horn blow from not far off. “The dinner bell,” I said. Apparently the locals weren't interested in giving me any kind of a chance.
I looked at the wall. It didn't look like there was a purchase for me to climb out. Besides, from the close sound of waves crashing, I was likely in a little island out in the ocean. And I was fairly certain I didn't want to be in the water when the florgh-bak came to the dinner table.
There was one opening in the walls, and it descended into the water, like steps into a flooded basement. I heard something break the water's surface, though at first it was too dark inside to see. Then I could make out a long tentacle wending its way towards me.
I wondered what kinds of senses it might have. Olfactory nerves on the limb? Some kind of heat sensitivity? I didn't know the morphological differences between an octopus and a crawdad—and that was with Earth critters.
Then it touched me, and I smelled it. The closest facsimile was the month I spent at a training camp where none of the amenities worked. Not the showers, not the garbage disposal. But the instructors told us to carry on as usual. We dumped craploads of rotting food into the disposal, but it would never run. It smelled like a month of moldering, wet garbage mixed with the body rot of overworked fighters.
But I told myself, maybe this one wasn't hostile. Maybe this wasn’t the owner, come to claim his sacrifice. Maybe it was just a curious little fella seeing if there was anything interesting in here. I was pretty sure I was just telling myself that to have some kind of distraction from the fact that it was like a person-sized slug brushing up against me. And then the tentacle got to second base; I’ve never felt more like a Japanese schoolgirl in my entire life. And that was about as much as I could handle.
I wished I’d brought along something with a little more…oomph, a rifle, or a shotgun, rather than a little pistol. How Drew managed to stay alive this long with just a pistol I couldn’t guess—oh wait, it was because I was constantly saving his stupid ass with my rifle.
I shot the tentacle in what looked like maybe the most sensitive spot, a sucker that resembled a sphincter.
The immense creature tried to rise up out of the water, squalling, but only managed to brain itself on the doorway. It was too large to come in that way, and either too heavy or too stupid to try to come over the top.
That seemed to piss it off, and it shoved several more tentacles through as it crammed as much of its face as possible inside. It flailed psychotically. I rolled under the first tentacle's swing and managed to dive over the next, but the third caught me across the torso and knocked me into the rock wall. My gun took the brunt of it, and I knew from the sound it made that it was cracked.
But the creature wasn't done; it wrapped its nearest tentacle around my leg and pulled me upside-down into the air. I aimed at its eye, and pulled the trigger, but nothing happened.
It brought me up to its face and looked at me with one big eye. I still had hold of the gun, and I felt along the handle. Sure enough, there was a fracture. I pulled apart the plastic handle. Stupidly, they were designed to crack at the slightest pressure, but it took everything I had to even widen the hole.
The creature handed me off to another limb, and turned so that another eye a third of the way around it could stare unblinking at me. I imagined there was at least one more eye behind, but I think it found whatever it was looking for, and turned over, exposing its underside.
Its mouth was on its undercarriage, and I couldn't see more than the one hole. So it was a one-size-fits-all entrance. Food went in, waste came out, and, I suspected, maybe even babies fit that way—along with whatever constituted an octopenis.
I'm sure one of the SciDiv staff would have been wet over it, but I was more concerned with the fact that I was being lowered slowly into an anus with multiple rows of teeth—like a shark mouth, but only if the shark's mouth was also its butt. And now that I'd seen a florgh-bak’s hindparts up close, I was officially insulted.
It touched my butt, and tried to separate the cheeks enough to break through. Was it looking for an orifice? I really needed to shoot it before it found its way to my mouth.
I fumbled with my gun. If I dropped it from where I was, dangling fifteen feet upside-down over a woodchipper of a cephalopod, I was going to be fisted up a giant squid mouthbutt—possibly after it got to third base with me—or worse.
I managed to jab two fingers inside the handle of my pistol. The wiring was frayed, but my fingers were sweaty. I hoped maybe enough had oozed through my glove to use it as a conductor, so I could get enough of a connection for one more shot.
I took aim, trying to compensate for the swaying of the thing's tentacles. I needed to hit it through the mouth, and hope it kept its brain in close proximity. I took a deep breath, and let it out slow, and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. “Fuck,” I said.
I felt suction along my hip as it pulled at the edges of my clothes. The thing was literally trying to figure out how to get into my pants.
&nb
sp; I looked at my fingers. Miraculously, they were the one part of me that was dry—at least on the outside. I looked at the tentacle holding me in the air; it was slimy, but I wasn't sure whether or not it would be conductive.
I swore. My cracked helmet meant I'd been sucking down the planet's carcinogenic air for hours, anyway. I tore my helmet off and let it fall.
The splash excited the monster, and several tentacles slapped against the water, trying to find what had made the noise. It turned over to be able to see what had made the noise.
I spit on my fingertips, and shoved the moistened digits back up my gun. “Better work this time,” I told it. “I don't think we've got any more time for foreplay.”
The florgh-bak shook me around violently. I didn't want to wait and see how long before it either bashed me against the rocks, or tried to tear me apart. I steadied my aim at its eye and fired.
My pistol exploded in my hands. Electricity arced through my arms, and one last blast shot out of the barrel. The creature dropped me into the water. It wasn't deep enough to completely break my fall, but it stopped me from breaking my ankle as I landed.
The florgh-bak was definitely dead. A wriggling mass of what looked like worms the circumference of my wrist dribbled out of the gunshot wound; either the florgh-bak was riddled with parasites, or they were brains. I spent a moment looking for my helmet, but I knew