“Is everyone in place?” my benefactor says.
“For the past thirty minutes.” I try to whisper but the last two words of my sentence come out louder than planned. “What took you so long?”
“I had to make sure everything would go according to plan.”
“There is a slight drawback.” I glance around at the assumed churchgoers. “Awful lot of civilians.”
“Not really.”
I open my mouth to question that and everything morphs into pure chaos.
The parishioners I mentioned? The ones who seem so sad and pitiful? They aren’t parishioners at all.
They rise as one, shedding their brilliant disguises and revealing themselves to be the very prey we thought was hiding in the darkest parts of the old church. Each of them has a different power. The one up front and to my right who looks like a middle-aged Asian woman fires red beams of hot energy from her eyes into the head of one of my people. He barely has time to utter a brief scream before his face melts like wax on the desert floor.
The rest of us are not so easily taken out.
Slim opens fire with his Mac-10 and turns the laser-beam bitch into confetti. My favorite weapon, the automatic shotgun, BOOM-BOOM-BOOM’s into one that thinks it’s an expert gymnast jumping around and bouncing off walls like they’re rubber.
The fighting grows in intensity and ferocity. The space that seemed so wide-open moments before feels confining as the remaining five of us form a circle of protection. The creatures surround us, their eyes filled with hatred. They know who we are—they know who I am.
“Last stand, huh?” Slim says without a trace of fear in his voice. “Happened a little sooner than I expected.”
One of the creatures rips his loose-fitting dress shirt off and throws his head back as sharp protuberances exit his skin and cover his entire body. Another creature walks up to him, thin and sickly looking, and grins in our general direction. Without a word, he takes the porcupine-thing by its shoulders and spins him like a top. “Holy fuck!” one of my guys yells.
What happens next defies description. The spinning porcupine plows into our circle like a runaway bulldozer on a steep incline. I barely jump to the side as my guys are ripped to screaming shreds, their skin coming off them like pieces of discarded tissue paper. Slim gets cut petty bad, but somehow avoids the worst of it, landing hard on a nearby pew.
“Do it!” he yells. “Hurry up!”
I look at him, uncertain. The satchel is still on the floor, ready for a Final Solution move. To my left, the porcupine seems to notice me. Its initial spin has slowed down, making the shots I take easier and much more effective.
Another one takes its place before it even hits the ground, blowing a gust of wind from its wide-open mouth that sends me flying across the room. This serves to bring me closer to the satchel.
“Head for the door!” I yell to Slim.
“Fuck it,” he says. “You head for the door!”
The look in his eyes tells me what he has planned. I shake my head, but another creature picks up one of the pews and tosses it at me with no visible physical effort. Sidestepping it is easy, but the force of impact to the wall behind me causes me to fall forward and strike the floor with my chin. But before I can pass out, someone lifts me to my feet by the seat of my pants. I brace myself for whatever happens next and am shocked by the sound of Slim’s urgent voice telling me to run and not look back.
He waits until I’m able to stand before leaving my side, screaming obscenities and threats at the surrounding creatures I can barely understand due to the ringing in my ears. Groggily, I turn and spare one final glance at him, this skinny, devoted hero, and then submerge my reluctance and run for the door. It is only when one of them tries to block my exit that I realize the gun is still in my hand.
The shots lift the creature off its feet and through the door, providing a neat escape route for me.
I hear Slim cackle and then the massive BOOM that fills the air throws me forward and to the concrete while the church erupts in a mad hail of shrapnel and ripped apart flesh. That’s the last thing I remember until water splashes my face and forces me back to consciousness.
I wake up tied to a post inside some old building that smells like urine and machine oil. My vision is still blurry from the dual assault of explosions earlier, but I can still make out enough of the person standing before me to know her.
“Thank you,” she says.
I frown at her and she laughs.
“Nice work,” another voice says from behind.
I shudder, caught between shock and nausea as the world spins madly on its axis. I refuse to believe what I’m hearing. It must be a trick.
“They’ll be looking for someone to lead them now,” the one in front says.
The one behind lays a hand on my shoulder. “That’s right, Daddy.”
“Your voice,” I croak.
She giggles. “You missed my forehead, silly, and got me in the throat.”
“It was truly astounding,” the other one says. “She burned the bullet out of her body. We created some miracle, eh? You should’ve come back. You would have seen how I heal myself too.”
My head is swimming and I feel like I’m floating off of the ground.
“We’ve been studying this,” she continues. “One parent can’t pass these traits, these powers, on to their children.”
“It takes two!” my daughter says, laughing.
Everything is hazy. She grabs my chin and lifts it until I have no choice but to look into her gleaming eyes. She smiles and forces a kiss. “Our combined DNA can give birth to the new human race.”
I spit in her eye. “Nothing human about you. Either of you!”
She wipes the spit away as the other one comes to stand next to her. “You knew he wouldn’t give in right away.”
Her mother nods sadly. “It’s alright. We don’t need his mind.”
It hits me then; when they healed, they hit upon one hell of a plan. Use the grieving husband and father as a weapon to wipe out the emerging competition, or as much of it as possible, clearing the way for a couple of visionaries to save the day with an army of “new humans.”
“You can’t,” I mumble. “I won’t.”
My daughter beams down at me, her face beginning to smolder. “You can, and you will.”
I scream then, and try to pull the ropes loose, but my hands are suddenly engulfed in flame and no amount of blowing on them will put out the fire. The pain is enough to clear my head, and it dawns on me what my wife meant when she said they don’t need my mind. They don’t need much from me at all; just my seed.
The rage builds inside me and I try to hurl a string of epithets, but the only thing that comes out is smoke because my tongue catches on fire.
Tentacles and Petticoats
T.W. Garland
The girl looked about twenty-five, but clothed in the garb of a West End whore and caked by a month’s worth of work and grime, she could have been any age. She was out of breath not because she was running, but because the anxiety of being pursued was taking its toll.
She knew she was being followed. She had felt the presence of a destructive force chasing her for weeks. Over the last couple of days, she had become increasingly desperate to find a safe haven. Not an easy task for a girl working the Ratcliffe Highway.
Early in the evening, she had left her usual corner and tried to hide among the movement of the crowds in and out of gin houses and music halls. When this did not work, she left the gas lit streets, hoping the darkness would protect her. Tripping along the maze of uneven cobbled alleys behind and between the main roads of the docks, she found silence and stillness. The comforting odour of fish enveloped her. She tripped again, still not accustomed to the petticoats and stockings of a girl in her position. Her stumbling heels rang out against the uneven cobbles.
She heard something move. A glint in the shadows, the almost inaudible whoosh of a blade before it cut into her abdomen, sl
icing through her muscles.
“Oh, you have done it now” she said, clutching her intestines as they spilled out onto the dirty cobbled streets.
The hunter stepped into the murky light. Her appearance was that of a relatively respectable mid-Victorian woman. She wore a long, but practical Princess gown of dark material with an overskirt of dark red. Her appearance was neat and decent. She would not have been out of place on the streets west of Covent Garden among the middle class and yet would have been able to move freely among the throng in the East End. Except, as she emerged from the shadows, her overskirt was unfastened from the waist up to her fixed white collar to expose a deep black leather corset. Running down the corset to her high waistline was a set of jagged silver ribs. The corset did not seem to end at her waist and ran down into the lengths of her skirt. At the back of her skirt, the bustle was currently deflated, as if it usually had a more substantial shape and had been emptied. At that moment, the most unusual facet of her appearance were two flat broad blades each three feet long that seemed to protrude from her hands.
“Now” the girl said, a couple of spiked tentacles spouting from the wound in her stomach. “You are going to regret that. You have ruined this body, so I am going to ruin yours.”
Watching the girl’s body slump to the floor the hunter could already see the skin across her face stretching and splitting. Her arms sagged, taking on the appearance of seemingly useless appendages and, in the process, revealing the true nature of her being. A sallow and pallid flesh strewn with barbs replaced the painted skin of the prostitute.
“You worthless whore” the girl said, her voice changing, taking on heavier tones that sounded like they were bubbling through water. “I am going to make the last few moments of your life more painful than you can ever imagine.” The girl was delaying, trying to distract the hunter to give her time to transform. Now was the time to strike. The hunter moved forwards, arms twisting into a swing of growing momentum that would remove the ever-growing tentacles. The creature shifted to the left, eluding the hunter’s first strike, but unable to avoid a second swifter movement of the blades. The creature shrieked, its malformed body contorting in pain before splaying its limbs towards the hunter and releasing a stupor inducing vapour. Caught in the face by the unanticipated attack, the hunter staggered and fell towards the wall for support. Still hampered by its changing form, the beast shuffled towards the hunter, the vicious fangs at the centre of its inner row of tentacles exposed for the kill. The hunter, shaken but far from beaten, reached into to her corset and still unable to open to her eyes flung several small daggers in quick succession. The creature realised its mistake even before its attack had failed. Pausing in disbelief, its inner tentacles littered with sharp blades, the beast could only watch as the hunter shook off the effects of the gas.
“You shouldn’t be standing” the creature screamed.
“Sorry to disappoint” the hunter replied, a flick of her wrists converted the single blades of her long knives into two silver fans of razor sharp death. “Let’s see you try that trick again, monster.” Her voice was infused with the knowledge of victory as it emanated from the safety of her silver screens.
The monster cowered in the alley. There was no escape as the hunter advanced. Alternating the fans in front of her face, the hunter created a steady current of air which rendered any further attack of vapours irrelevant. The swift movement of the fans used the thin, sharp edges to slice away at the monster. If an observer had witnessed the hunter’s destruction of the beast, it would have at first seemed that the hunter had no method to her attack. It would have seemed just a frenzied offensive that was carving chunks off the monster and leaving them in a heap in front of her. As the hunter’s movements slowed, it became apparent that there had been a systematic onslaught that left the monster nothing but a pulsating heap of gelatinous tissue.
“If you have chance before you die” the hunter said leaning over the dying body of the creature. “Tell them all, Violet Reincastle sent you back to hell and is coming after the rest.” The creature let out an appalling shriek as Violet converted her silver fans back into single blades and thrust them deep into the creature’s body. The mass of horrible flesh shuddered and quivered for a moment. Violet slowly withdrew her blades. The beast liquefied, leaving only a viscous puddle of brown sludge.
“That was different” Violet said to herself, wiping her blades and reinserting them back into her corset and down into the material of her skirt. She relaxed her hands around the mushroom shaped handles and slid her hands out of the leather gauntlets which fitted neatly in the bustle at the back of her dress. Acting as holster for her gauntlets and blades, the bustle was once again filled out and the skirt resumed its hard, starched appearance of respectability. She ran her hands down her corset checking her remaining knives and then fastened the dark folds of her dress concealing her remaining ribs of silver daggers. The appearance of a reputable Victorian woman was re-established.
There was nothing more in the murky darkness. Violet returned to her carriage which began to move back through Whitechapel to Spitalfields.
The hunt always took her through Spitalfields to Whitechapel and along the Thames. It was the most heavily used section of the ten-mile stretch of prostitution, so an obvious section of the city to find these creatures. At least for now, so the professor said.
Violet wondered why the beast couldn’t surface in a comfortable bordello. She knew the answer to her own question, but always loved the word bordello. Ever since her mother first cast her out onto the streets, she had aspired to the luxury of the word. Some nights, merely the repetition of the word in the harsh darkness of the night had kept her going, had prompted her to approach the next gentleman who walked passed. But that was before. Before the night the monster choose her.
The night had been trapped in a dirty brown fog. Violet could remember the putrid smell of burning that hung petulantly in the air and the soot that choked the back of her throat. She had been thankful it had stopped raining. There was never anything in the rain, no gentlemen, no money, just cold, wet waiting. They would not let her back to her room without a paying gentleman or the money from one. She could still feel the cold cling of her clothes from the previous night’s rain as she took a gentleman for three-penny upright down a narrow passageway between a gin shop and doss house. The gentleman dropped the coins in her hand. After their business was concluded, he was afraid or embarrassed to touch her, it did not matter which. He left before she had time to readjust her petticoat. Just about to return to the gas lit streets, she heard some chit crying in the darkness and paused. In that moment of vulnerability, she was lost. The only memory between that moment and what must have been a couple of days later, was a feeling of dreary wetness enclose her in its grasp.
The professor attributed the gaps in Violet’s memory to the hideously traumatic experience. He always connected it to the terrible dreams that followed.
After her abduction, the next memory Violet could recall was finding herself naked by the river, in the mud of the Thames at low tide. The moon exposed to her the hideous appearance of the creature who had taken her. The professor had described it as a malformed squid that had summoned the audacity to walk on land and decided spikes were the best defence against the jibes of more elegant creatures.
Had the professor not arrived, she would have been left like so many of the other women she had seen over the last couple of years. Used and discarded, unrecognizably human. Suffering years of malnutrition and maltreatment in a single hour and left as bloated bunters floating in the Thames. No way to know who they were or what happened to them. Nothing but a pauper’s grave for them. Fished out of the river by a Peeler who had no reason to do anything but resent the very existence of the lowest levels of prostitutes, who through misadventure or self-slaughter found their way to a watery grave. No concern, no interest, no justice.
The professor had saved her, torn away the beast’s malicious tentacles, sever
ed its tendrils of destruction that were sucking the life from her.
The professor’s silver blades had saved her, not because he deemed her or any of the other whores worth saving, but because weakened and transforming, the beast was vulnerable. Vulnerable, but no less malicious.
Once the connection to Violet was severed, the beast lashed out at the professor. One of the worst ones he had seen, the Professor would later tell Violet. It was different from the rest, even in an early stage of development it was aware of its imminent destruction and the need to destroy the threat to future generations. Its attacks were perpetrated by limbs that were less tentacles, and more long claws, that impaled the professor’s spinal column with a ferocious suddenness.
The professor later marvelled at the creature’s hereditary defence mechanism. A defence system that far exceeded that of the human desire to protect its young. A discovery the professor considered of valuable interest, even though it left him without the use of his legs or his right arm. And so, covered in mud, blood and mucus with terrible wounds around her stomach and thighs, Violet had rescued the professor, the man who had followed her into the darkness knowing full well what would happen to her.
After all she had seen and all she had suffered, the professor couldn’t let Violet go. In fact, he needed Violet more than he ever needed anyone.
Violet had been lucky. The professor had never before encountered a survivor. When he severed the connection, he told her, it had attempted to completely disengage. Had it not, it would have continued siphoning her fluids through its dismembered limbs. Her blood and life force, a pulped form of her internal organs forced through the greasy pipes of its tendrils. She was lucky, but luck left her terribly sacred and malformed. As she had dragged the crushed body of the professor back to his carriage, she held her own hideously distorted body together.
Months later, neither Violet nor the professor had healed. The professor knew he would never walk again and witnessed Violet’s growing hysteria that he attributed to the terror that she had witnessed and the continuing torment of her physical deformity.
Both Barrels of Monster Hunter Legends (Legends of the Monster Hunter Book 1) Page 45