“Where’d you get a gun?” I asked.
“From my car,” said Jim as the Gloc trembled in his unsteady grip. He used his foot to pull the doorstop away and kicked it to the side, through the muck that’d seeped across the floor. I noticed that the slime had grown thicker, just like the goo that still clung to my clothes.
“Jim, no…” I said to stop him from opening the door.
He didn’t listen, and I braced myself for a barrage of tentacles, bullets, blood, and baby-diarrhea discharge. Instead, Jim opened the door to an empty room. He had his pistol held with two hands, his elbows locked as he pointed the gun into the break room. “I don’t see it,” he said and took a daring step forward.
The lights in the break room were turned off. I couldn’t see anything from my vantage several feet behind my boss – correction, former boss.
Jim moved in far enough to reach over and flick on the lights. I expected to see the creature hiding in the corner, ready to lash out in anger at being exposed, but there was nothing to be seen. The room had been trashed, but there was no monster.
“It disappeared,” said Jim.
Nothing had made much sense to me since this all started, but the monster’s vanishing act was an assault on reason that my brain couldn’t accept. “No way,” I muttered as Jim led the way inside. “Be careful. Nothing just vanishes.”
“Is it gone?” asked Tony from the bathroom.
Jim stepped all the way into the break room and said, “Yeah, it’s gone. Come on out.”
“It couldn’t have just disappeared,” I said warily.
“Then where is it, genius?” asked Jim. “For that matter, where’d it come from in the first place? What is it?” He was berating me with questions to make a point of how stupid I was, and how I didn’t know what I was talking about. This was his management style. He was the walking/talking embodiment of a Napoleon complex, and he seemed to take no more pleasure than when he could talk down to someone. “Are you an expert on walking octopus zombies now?”
A slew of emotions ran through my head at that moment. The first was glee, because I no longer worked for this guy, and I could punch him if I wanted to. The second was disappointment, because he had a gun, which ruled out punching him. Next, mixed up in my emotion-milkshake somewhere, was a sense of dread about the oddly missing squid. And my final emotion was abject terror as I watched a tentacle snake its way down from the ceiling to wrap around Jim’s neck.
“Watch out, it’s up…” yelled Tony from the bathroom as he pointed up at the creature above. His warning came far too late. Jim was already dangling like a newly hanged prisoner, thrashing his legs as his cheeks bulged and his pale skin turned purple. He still had his pistol, and aimed it blindly up before pulling the trigger in desperation. The squid reacted by shaking its victim and then spinning him around like a balloon caught in a ceiling fan.
The first gunshot nearly deafened me in the confined space, and caused my ears to ring immediately. By the time Jim pulled the trigger a third time, all I could hear was the deep bass of Otis’s voice as he tried to convince Tony to move.
Otis was desperate to get out of the bathroom. He pushed at Tony, who was frozen in fear, and then grabbed his coworker’s wrist to pull him along. They ducked as Jim kicked and sputtered above.
“Grab his feet,” I said, hoping to save the little guy. “Pull him down.”
Otis and Tony were just as deaf as I was now. Either that, or they both made the decision to ignore me as they rushed past.
It was up to me to save Jim.
I saw the mutated form of a human that’d once been a coworker of mine on the ceiling. Kyle was now a twisted mess of flesh and tentacles. His bloody face was staring down at me, and his mouth gaped wider than looked natural. A tentacle came sliding up from his throat, emerging like a snake from its hole, and lashed around as if I was tripping on acid and staring at a picture of Gene Simmons. Trust me, I’ve been on acid while staring at a KISS poster - It’s an apt analogy.
There was a hole in the ceiling that the squid was partially crawling through, but it looked like its human host couldn’t fit inside, causing the squid to get stuck there until it ambushed Jim. Tentacles had pierced their way through a variety of places on the body, as if the parasite housed within had grown too large to be contained.
Jim dropped the gun and reached for the tentacle that’d wound around his throat. He was struggling to breathe, and tried in vain to pull the slippery appendage away from his skin. The suction cups were affixed to him as if by glue, and his attempt to break free was useless.
I grabbed Jim’s legs and pulled. The creature lashed out at me with one of its free tentacles, but I was able to duck away. I lowered myself so that I was nearly laying on the floor as I pulled at Jim’s legs, but the monster’s grip was too tight. It was pulling him up further, and I saw a mouth emerge from the chest of the slaughtered man dangling from the hole in the ceiling. The creature opened its mouth, and it looked like…
All right, everyone. There’s really no way of being couth in accurately describing this thing’s mouth. But before I do, I want to assure all the women out there that I’m a big fan of vaginas. I’ve never once thought the private parts of a woman looked anything like the gaping, gnashing mouth of a demonic squid set upon transforming meat into soup. But here’s the truth: The mouths on these creatures look like a wide-open vagina with a hundred shark teeth in it. There, I said it. Vagina dentata in the flesh.
The gun was within reach, but I left it there. I should’ve grabbed it and fired whatever was left in the magazine, but instead I continued to try and pull Jim down. It was a fruitless effort. The creature was far stronger than me, and it easily hoisted Jim up into its maw. Within seconds, hot blood was pouring on me like someone was trying to make a human smoothie in an upside down blender.
“Dave, come on,” said Otis, although his voice barely registered as more than a throbbing bass behind the ringing in my ears. I could also hear Beaver barking, and saw that Otis had grabbed the dog’s harness to keep it from running in.
I let go of Jim’s legs and rolled over so that I could crawl out of the room as the beast’s tentacles whipped down at me. Unlike an octopus, these creatures had appendages of varying sizes. Some of them were thick and covered in suction cups, similar to an octopus, but others were long and skinny with barbs at the tips that could be used to hook its prey, tethering it as the stronger tentacles came in to wrap around the victim. Those thin tentacles snapped at me like whips, and tore at my clothes as I rolled onto my stomach and crawled away.
I didn’t grab the gun. I thought about it, but decided to leave it behind in favor of escaping as quickly as possible. Truth be told, I don’t have a great history with guns. It’s not something I like to talk about. You’ll have to trust that I’ve got my reasons. Damn good reasons. Maybe one day, when I’m not fighting for my life, I’ll tell that story. This isn’t that day.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Tony as he waited near the loading door. Otis and I were covered in blood and other body fluids I’d prefer not to think about, but Tony looked impeccably clean. That didn’t surprise me. Tony always looked and smelled like he was going on a date. He was a portly Mexican guy who must’ve spent a fortune on sunglasses and sneakers, because I rarely saw him wearing the same pair twice. And despite how often we chastised him for it, he consistently wore way too much cologne.
As we were running to catch up with Tony, Otis looked me over. He put his arm on my shoulder, and then pulled at my hoodie as if looking for something. “Are you hurt?” he asked. “Did that thing get you?”
“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”
We got outside and were headed to the parking lot. I thought we were in the clear, but Otis continued his query. “You sure it didn’t get you? Like, cut you or anything? You didn’t swallow any of that slime, did you?”
“No, man, I’m good,” I said. Otis and I had always gotten along, but it wasn’t like we wer
e best friends. His intense concern for my safety felt awkward.
Tony clicked his key fob and the alarm on his white Ford F-150 chirped. Tony owned a nicer vehicle than any of his coworkers, which was another part of his materialistic charm that so many of us found galling. The truck had an extended cab, but I knew the back seat would be cramped, which is why I made sure to say, “Shotgun.”
Otis grabbed my shoulder and pulled me hard enough to force me to face him as he said, “Hey, wait.”
“Jeeze, dude,” I said as I pulled away from his grasp. “Don’t get pissy. I called shotgun fair and square.”
“You get in the back,” said Otis as he pointed at the bed of the truck.
“What?” I asked. “Why?”
“Because I don’t know for sure if one of those things got you or not. I’m not chancing nothing, bro. Get in the back or you’re not coming.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked, truly perplexed.
“You might be infected.”
“Infected?” I asked. “Are you serious? They’re not zombies. They’re like… They’re…”
“They’re what?” asked Otis. He didn’t wait for an answer, “I’ll tell you what they are. They’re goddamn squid-zombies or something, and I don’t know how they infect people, but you’re covered in their nasty-ass goo. No way I’m letting you in the truck like that.”
“It’s on you too,” I said and pointed at him.
“He’s right,” said Tony from inside the cab of the truck. He had the passenger side window rolled down, and I heard him hit the automatic locks. “Both of you get in back. And hurry up or I’m leaving your asses.”
I grudgingly got into the back of the truck, followed by Otis and Beaver. Otis saw me glaring at him and said, “Don’t look at me like that. You stay over there as far from me as you can get.” He went to sit near the back window of the cab, and pointed at the opposite corner where he wanted me to sit.
The squid screeched from the warehouse, earning both our attention and pausing any animosity between us. I could see the creature lingering in the dark, away from the bright sunlight creeping in through the door.
Beaver came to sit beside me, and I rubbed his neck as I promised that everything was going to be all right. He looked up at me with his tongue out, and I swear he was smiling. It was as if none of this really bothered him in the least. I started to brush off some of the liquid that clung to the dog’s fur. I wiped it off myself as well. It felt like I’d jumped into a pool of Jell-O and was dealing with the messy repercussions. The longer the goo stayed on me, the thicker and harder it got. I felt like I’d won first place in a bukake contest and had been waiting for hours to get hosed off.
“Did you get Jim’s gun?” asked Otis.
“No, I didn’t see it,” I lied.
Tony drove away from the warehouse, and the wind noise killed the possibility of a conversation between Otis and I as we sat on opposite corners of the truck’s bed. There was a toolbox tied down with bungie cords near Otis, and he opened it in search of a weapon. He decided on a clawed hammer, and then looked at me as if studying my demeanor. I must’ve passed his visual squid-zombie test, because he slid a flathead screwdriver over to me.
He screamed out, “Just in case,” and pointed at the screw driver. He continued, “You know, if we get attacked or something.”
As I picked up the screwdriver I thought to myself, ‘Oh, it’s in case we get attacked. I thought you were worried we might stumble into a construction emergency that needed a pair of deft hands and proper tools.’
I’ll admit my annoyance with Otis was unfounded. Neither of us had any idea what was going on, or why folks had started sprouting tentacles and gnoshing on people’s faces. For all I knew, he was right, and the parasites got transferred to new hosts through the brown, worm-ridden liquid that I’d been sliding through at the gas station less than an hour earlier. I continued to try and clean the goo off before it hardened like cement.
Tony drove the opposite direction of the gas station, which I was thankful for. At least until I considered that he might be headed to his apartment. That was the last place I needed to be at the moment.
Tony and I met a year ago when I was dating his sister. My relationship with her didn’t end well, but Tony and I managed to stay in touch. He was the reason I got the job at the warehouse.
About a month ago, Tony’ sister moved in with him because her boyfriend hit her. Now, to be fair, I’d put damn good money on the actual chain of events going something like this: Her boyfriend hit her, and then she proceeded to beat him to within an inch of his life until he had to call the cops for help, prompting her to flee to avoid getting arrested. And if I knew Gabriella, she’d already cooked up a vicious revenge plot that would have her ex-boyfriend running scared for years. Her anger was the type of thing that inspired hellish, bloodthirsty beasts of legend. Do you really think Medusa was a creature of pure imagination? Hell no. That old story was cooked up by some poor husband who saw the dead-eyed stare of a furious woman like Gabriella Hernandez. I know all about it. And despite my aversion to domestic abuse, I still feel bad for whatever poor, dumb bastard earned Gabby’s wrath.
I thought about asking Tony to pull over and let me out now before I got pulled into Gabby’s black hole orbit. I imagined myself as the captain of a doomed spaceship circling the vortex of a black hole, fully aware that every fiber of my being was about to be shredded and torn apart until all that was left was a faint memory of my existence, and pitiful moans from sad friends about how I never stood a chance. Am I being dramatic? Yes. Is this hyperbole? Not really.
Something fell from the sky and thudded on the road. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. We passed whatever it was, and I turned to get a better look. Otis had seen it too, and stood to look over me.
“What the hell was that?” I asked as I looked at the black, quivering shape on the road behind us. It looked like a black balloon with feet and… was that feathers?
I didn’t have to wait long to solve the mystery. Another bird-bomb fell from the sky and pounded into the center of the truck bed, causing both Otis and I to scream out in shock and terror as we grasped our tools like we were scared children in a dark bedroom clutching teddy bears.
The crow that’d fallen between us was twice the size it should’ve been. Its belly was distended, and growing as we watched. Its feet kicked uselessly, and its wings flapped madly, but with no effect other than to cause it to bounce a little.
Otis pounded his fist against the window as he yelled, “Stop the truck.”
Tony hit the brakes, but I didn’t wait for the truck to come to a full stop before I climbed over the tailgate. I had one leg over when the truck came to a screeching halt. Momentum would’ve sent me tumbling back into the bed if not for the vice-like grip my thighs had on the backend, as if I was on a bull in a rodeo.
The stop caused the bird to roll safely away from me, but right at Otis as if he was the biggest, blackest bowling ball pin you’ve ever seen. He hopped around while screaming in a register a man his size shouldn’t be able to reach. I got out and opened the truck’s tailgate before yelling, “Kick it out.”
“What?”
“Kick the fucking thing out of the truck,” I said.
He did as I told him, and we both expected the bird to shoot out of the bed like an over-inflated soccer ball. Unfortunately, the exact opposite happened. That bird-bomb popped like a water balloon, sending a gush of fetid, wormy juice all over Otis’s leg. He let out a series of choice words as Tony opened the small hatch in the back window so he could ask what was going on.
He was midsentence, staring back at us, when I saw his eyes grow wide. His question caught in his throat before he turned around and hit the gas again.
I barely had time to look behind me before the truck’s wheels squealed on the asphalt. There was a semi headed our way with a driver whose face had sprouted a mess of writhing tentacles.
I grabbed o
nto the back of the opened tailgate just as the truck started moving. I hooked my fingers in the gap between the bed and the tailgate, and tried to jump in, but Tony’s truck was already moving. I fell, but managed to hold on as my feet dragged on the road behind us.
Beaver was barking madly, and I caught a glimpse of small tentacles lashing out at both the dog and Otis from the corpse of the exploded bird. The tentacle was suffering now that it was exposed to sunlight. It was ballooning up with pus-filled sacs that kept popping like bubble wrap.
With an errant semi behind me and a miniature, bird-sized monster in the truck’s bed, I was somehow safer where I was, latched to the back of the truck with the soles of my boots being chewed apart as I skitched along the road.
When I was a kid growing up in North America’s frozen tundra (also known as Minnesota), I remember doing this with a friend whose father was a good deal less than responsible. We would find an icy road, and then my friend’s dad would drive while we hung onto the rear bumper for dear life, our shoes sliding along the ice at speeds that would’ve sent my overprotective grandmother into fits. Who knew that ill-advised life experience would turn out to be useful?
Otis started to whack at the squid-bird with the hammer, but the creature seemed unfazed by the assault. The squishy body that emerged from within the now slaughtered bird suffered no damage from Otis’s assault. It was like trying to bash apart a sponge. The creature wrapped its tentacles around the head of the hammer and started to crawl up towards Otis’s arm. He screamed in a manner similar to how I react when I catch sight of a spider within twenty yards of my personal space. Otis flung the hammer out over the top of my head, and I looked back to watch as the tool and the creature bounced along the road behind us.
The semi chasing us veered slowly off course, over the sidewalk, and down into a park where it crashed into a tree. The windshield shattered, and I saw tentacles flailing out as the creature within screeched. It was great to see that one of the dangers facing me had been taken care of, but that still left me in a precarious position on the back of Tony’s truck.
The juicy remnants of the bird-bomb rolled down the slats in the bed of the truck and splashed me in the face. This was, without question, the nastiest experience of my life. Allow me a second to try and put this in perspective.
Have you ever heard about how those big, corporate pig farms have lakes of pig shit on their property that are so toxic and nauseating that people can’t stand to live within a few miles of them? Well, I heard a story once about how two drunk guys were driving along a road near one of those lakes and lost control of their car. They sped right through the fence and straight into one of those pig shit ponds where they drowned. The choking horror of their final minutes, as their truck slowly sank in the quagmire of pig turds, would score a ten out of ten on the scale of awful human experiences. I had to be clocking in at a solid nine on the back of that truck as the wormy, squid-demon goo splashed all over my face.
Tony ran over something. It could’ve been a speed bump or a body for all I knew, but the resulting bounce nearly caused me to lose my grip. My feet left the ground for a second, and at that same instant Tony braked enough that I was vaulted forward about a foot. When I came back down, my chest was on the tailgate and my legs were up in the air as I desperately tried to find something to hold onto.
I heard the unmistakable sound of a car accident. There were screeching tires, honks, and then the crunch of metal and shattering glass. My perception of reality was all twisted up, and I assumed that we were the ones in the wreck as I felt myself sliding forward through the truck’s bed. Time slowed to a crawl, and I fully expected to die as I slid across the slick bed towards Otis and Beaver. It might’ve been an ignoble death, but at least I wouldn’t drown in a pig shit pond.
As it turned out, we weren’t the ones getting in an accident. Tony had stopped to avoid a collision that occurred at the intersection ahead, which resulted in me yet again sliding my way through squid goo. This was a pastime I was becoming far too proficient in.
This time Otis, who was similarly covered in the slime, was more sympathetic as he helped me up and asked, “You all right.”
“Hell no. Look at me,” I said as I swiped my hand across my face to clean off the gelatinous muck that clung to my skin. It was chunky, and reminded me of the time I had an upset stomach and Gabby convinced me to drink aloe juice, which was an event that happened exactly once, because I prefer to live my life free of snot-flavored drinks as much as possible. And as if the consistency of the squid-juice wasn’t bad enough, it was also swimming with tiny, reddish worms that looked like thinner versions of maggots. I could feel them squiggling around on my skin, and if that thought sends a shiver down your spine and an uncomfortable churn in your gut, then you’re starting to get an inkling of an idea about how I was feeling.
“We’re in trouble,” said Otis.
“What now?” I asked, pretty much ready for whatever he could possibly say. As far as I was concerned, an anthropomorphized Empire State building with a party hat and bagpipes could be terrorizing Main Street and I would’ve chalked it up as just one more screwed up occurrence to add to an already insane day.
“Look.” He pointed out over the top of the truck’s cab.
A large cloud passed over us, stealing the sun’s intense light, as if providing an ominous warning of storms ahead. The air stank of burning rubber from the sudden stops of the cars ahead.
I looked over the top of Tony’s truck, sighed, and said, “Well, that’s not good.”
Ahead of us, in the center of the intersection, amid the wrecked cars, was the largest squid-monster I’d seen yet. A white sedan had collided with a jeep, leaving the sedan mangled and the jeep on its side. The windshield of the sedan was broken, and the occupant had been partially ejected. The driver was a corpulent woman whose girth stopped her from being completely thrown from the vehicle. Her lower half was still intact, dangling over the steering wheel. Her upper half had split, revealing a squid creature easily three times as large as any I’d seen yet. This was also the first chance I had to see one of these creatures fully exposed as it slithered out of the woman’s carcass. The shade from the cloud above kept the creature out of direct light, but I could still see it in its entirety.
Until now, I’d only seen part of these monstrosities, and assumed they looked like a squid or an octopus. I was wrong.
I watched as the creature pulled itself free, slick with the blood of its dead host. It had far more than eight tentacles, some as thin as strands of spaghetti that snapped at the air as the larger ones did the hard work of grasping and pulling its body along. I saw a multitude of black eyes. The cluster of eyes began to move around independently as the creature continued to pull away from the wreckage. I’d assumed that the creature’s eyes were similar to a fly’s, but I saw that each black orb was connected to a long strand, and moved independently. The creature would pull the eyes in to form larger orbs, but could separate them if it needed to move through a tighter space.
Next came a long, flat sheet of purple membrane that looked thin at first, but puffed up as it exited the corpse. I got a brief glimpse of a pinkish, pulsating organ that was exposed for only a second before the purple membrane covered it. There were strands of what looked like pink hair connecting the organ and the corpse the creature was leaving behind. The strands snapped off as the creature pulled free of the body.
“What was that red thing?” asked Otis as he gawked at the monster. He was just as stunned as I was.
“Was it part of her, or part of it?” I asked, uncertain what I’d seen. “Was that its brain?”
Otis didn’t have a chance to voice his opinion, because Tony decided it was time to get out of there by any means necessary. He yelled back at us from the truck’s cab, “Hold onto something. It’s about to get bumpy!”
4 – It Gets Bumpy