“I guess it’s just you and me, kid,” she said, talking to herself for reassurance. “And maybe Tolomato.”
She looked around. “Tolomato, are you here?”
There was no answer.
“Great. He’s gone again. Probably not around because of my rules about dating. Some date, definitely ended on a high note.”
Wiping her hands off on her pants, she got to her knees. “Okay, here goes nothing.”
Trying to favor her injured ankle, Ssabra pushed herself off the floor and slowly got to her feet. As she stood up a wave of pain and nausea washed over her and she almost passed out. Had it not been for the nearby wall she would have fallen over backward.
“Damn, that hurts.” She again put her weight on her injured ankle, biting her lower lip to keep from crying out.
The pain wasn’t as bad the second time, and she was able to move her foot, so the ankle was probably only sprained. Still, it was a bad sprain and extremely painful, and her ankle would soon swell up to where she couldn’t put weight on it. That meant she had to get out of the well while she was still able to stand.
Hobbling over to the opposite wall, Ssabra took the climbing rope in both hands. She stood there holding the rope, hoping the dizziness would soon pass. But the dizziness and nausea refused to leave, and it was all she could do to stay on her feet.
Determined not to remain in the well for another moment, she took a firm grip on the rope. She had been a pretty good rope climber in high school, one of the best in girls’ gym class, but that had been a long time ago. And she hadn’t been injured then. Saying a short prayer for courage and strength, she grabbed the rope tight and pulled herself off the floor.
A burning pain shot like a bullet between her shoulder blades, and she suspected that she might have hurt her back in the fall. But she refused to let go of the rope, or give up. Instead, she slid her hand carefully up the rope and pulled herself even higher.
Hand over hand she went, slowly pulling herself out of the well. Every muscle in her body screamed for her to stop, and her head swam in a sea of dizziness. Three times she had to pause to catch her breath, forcing herself to go on. Finally she was at the top of the well, reaching up with her right hand to grab the lip. She almost screamed in surprise when a hand reached down from above to take hers, pulling her from the well. At first she thought it was Jack, but he wore a brown suit and this hand protruded from a blue sleeve. It wasn’t a uniform, so it probably wasn’t a cop who reached down to help her out of the well.
It didn’t matter who it was that offered a helping hand. Ssabra was close to exhaustion, and she was grateful for any assistance, even if it meant having to explain why she had broken into the restaurant. A night in jail didn’t seem so bad after all the things that had happened to her in the past twenty-four hours.
The man who pulled her from the well was about six feet tall, with a full beard and sandy brown hair. He was dressed in blue jeans, boots, a black shirt, and a faded denim jacket. There was something vaguely familiar about him, but she couldn’t place his face. He might have been someone who had taken one of her tours, or maybe just one of the locals she had seen in passing.
He helped her out the well, but didn’t let go of her hand. Perhaps he was worried she might tumble backward into the opening. Or maybe he could tell that she was hurt and somewhat unsteady on her feet. It was a good thing he didn’t let go of her right away, for another wave of dizziness washed through her and she almost fell flat on her face.
Despite the dizziness, and the pain of her injuries, Ssabra managed to remain standing, carefully balancing most of her weight on her uninjured ankle. She got her thoughts together enough to glance past the man who held her, but there was no one else in the storage room. Jack had either left on his own, or had been escorted out. She couldn’t understand why he would leave her at the bottom of a well, and suspected something bad had happened to him.
“Thank you,” she said, finally finding her voice. “I think I’m okay now, but I may need a doctor. Where’s Jack? What happened to him?”
The man did not release her hand. Instead, he stood looking at her with a half smile on his face. She was just about to say something else, when she noticed a slight rippling beneath his jacket.
That’s odd. There’s something moving under his jacket. A pet perhaps. Something small.
Much to her surprise, a thin black eel suddenly appeared out of the top of the man’s shirt and crawled slowly toward his face.
What the hell is that? A snake? No, not a snake. Much too shiny. It’s an eel. What kind of man carries an eel around under his jacket?
A second eel appeared from beneath the bottom of his jacket; it slithered down his left leg and over the top of his boot, crawling across the concrete floor toward her.
Jesus, there’s another one.
Ssabra tried to step back, but her hand was still being held. She wanted to stomp on the eel crawling toward her, but then she realized it wasn’t an eel at all. It was a tentacle, and it was attached to the man who held her hand.
No. It can’t be possible.
All at once, she remembered where she had seen the man before. She had seen him in a dark alley, running away after he had attacked, and nearly killed, Detective Colvin. The man she had seen then, and who stood before her now, wasn’t really a man at all. His features were only a disguise, worn by a dark god to walk undetected among humans.
“Oh, dear God. No.”
The Shiru had found her, and she knew what it wanted. Ssabra looked down, horrified to see that the bearded man had an erection.
“No. Please...no.”
And then the Shiru spoke to her, a voice coming from deep within his throat, the way a parrot mimics words, a crackled imitation of human speech. “You are mine, female. You are the two-legs I will breed with.”
She didn’t know if it was the voice that terrified her, its crackling hiss so inhuman and uncaring, or the words that were spoken. Either way, Ssabra suddenly found a little more strength than she had a few moments before, enough to tear her hand free from the Shiru’s grasp.
Ignoring the pain of her injured ankle, she attempted to hobble toward the door. But the Shiru jumped to the right and cut her off, blocking her flight from the room. Ssabra turned and tried to circle the well, hoping to get past the monster from a different direction, but she slipped on a wet spot and her feet went out from under her.
She hit the concrete floor hard enough to cause her teeth to clack together, sending pain shooting through her head. The patch of floor she landed on was wet and slippery, littered with small pieces of fabric. Most of the fabric pieces had once been dark brown in color, but a few of them might have been white. It was hard to tell their original color, because they were now stained crimson. Mixed in with the fabric were tiny pieces of leather, flesh, and bone.
The storeroom had once been clean enough to pass inspection by the local Health Department, but a ten-foot area of floor was now covered with blood and gore. A shudder of revulsion shook through Ssabra as she realized the blood, fabric, bits of flesh, and tiny pieces of bone were all that was left of Jack Colvin. The detective had not been arrested by the police, apprehended by a security guard, or hit over the head by the restaurant’s manager. Nothing as nice as that. Instead he had ended up as the Shiru’s latest victim, his body looking like it had passed through a food processor.
Ssabra pressed her fist against her lips to keep from gagging, and tried to look away from the horror scattered around her. But there was no escaping the nightmare. Turning her head to the right, she was shocked to see Jack’s face. Just his face: no body, no legs, no arms, no head, or even eyes. The detective’s face had been peeled off his skull and stuck to the side of an empty cardboard beer case.
She screamed.
Blackness tried to overcome her, but she fought to stay conscious. If Ssabra passed out, then she could not escape, and she desperately wanted to flee the storeroom. She bit down on her fist, biting
hard enough to draw blood. The pain pushed the blackness back, saved her from unconsciousness. Jack’s face came back into clear focus; it was still looking at her.
No. No. Please God, no. Jack. Sweet, kind Jack. Why didn’t you go down in the well? You might still be alive. She could still taste his kiss upon her lips, which made his death all the more painful.
Ssabra turned and looked across the room. The Shiru still stood between her and the doorway, but it was no longer worried about maintaining its human disguise. As she watched, the bearded man seemed to shimmer and go slightly transparent. And then his flesh began to ripple and stretch, pulling itself apart as it took on a new shape and identity.
She had seen the Shiru in its true identity once before, but that was in a dark alleyway. Now she was witnessing the transformation from man to monster beneath the glow of a hundred-watt lightbulb, the change taking only a few seconds to complete. Once complete, the sight of the Shiru in all its terrifying glory sent her mind reeling and threatened her sanity.
Ssabra screamed again.
The monster’s head was large and triangular, reminding her of a cockroach or a beetle. It had six black eyes, the same color as its skin, two vertical rows of three eyes each. Beneath the eyes was a large, beaked mouth lined with a double row of teeth. The mouth opened and closed in a constant motion, the teeth clicking and grinding together.
The head was attached to an enormous saggy black body, looking like a clustering of overfilled trash bags. The underside of the Shiru’s body was covered with dozens of tiny, reddish-brown, crablike creatures. These crab creatures scurried around, crawling over each other, feeding on a yellowish pus that oozed from the dark god’s skin in thick droplets.
On the monster’s back were hundreds of pencil-thick hairs that moved about as if alive. There were also several long tubelike appendages sticking from the Shiru’s rear that opened and closed when it exhaled, making a strange woofing-hooting sound.
The Shiru crouched on six large, multijointed legs similar to those of a crustacean. In addition to the six legs, the creature had several dozen long tentacles that whirled about its body in constant motion. The tentacles served as arms and fingers, always touching, feeling, and probing. They also served to feed the Shiru, for each tentacle was tipped with a tiny mouth lined with sharp teeth.
When one of the tentacles came in contact with a piece of flesh, or a droplet of blood, there was a hungry slurping sound as the morsel of food was sucked up by the tiny mouth. And when a tentacle came upon a morsel too big to inhale, it would pick up the piece of food and shove it into the Shiru’s main mouth. The item was then chewed and regurgitated in liquid form, to be sucked up again by the ever-feeding tentacles.
She stared at the Shiru in stark terror, too scared to even move. The creature was so alien to anything she had ever seen that it’s ancestral origin could not possibly be of this earth. Primitive people had looked upon the Shirus as dark gods, creatures to be feared and perhaps worshipped. Ssabra could understand the fear, for she was truly terrified, but she could not understand how someone might come to worship such a beast.
As she sat there, trembling with fear, Ssabra Onih saw the final feature that nearly brought her insanity. Beneath the Shiru’s sagging belly hung a penis as thick as a man’s forearm, and close to two feet in length, mottled gray in color and heavily veined. The penis was fully erect, and pulsed with a rhythmic throb, yellow semen dripping from the tip like mayonnaise gone bad.
Ssabra pushed herself up off the floor, trying desperately to get her good leg under her. She planned on hobbling for the door, but the monster reacted to her movement by scurrying closer to her. No way she could outrun a creature with six legs when she only had one good one.
Realizing that direct flight was not an option, she looked around the room for something to defend herself with. She was hoping to find Jack’s pistol, but the gun was nowhere in sight. She was wondering if the firearm had been shredded and eaten with the rest of the body.
The situation seemed hopeless, then she happened to spot something on the opposite side of the room. Lying there in the shadows was the small wooden casket Jack had pulled from the well. The Shiru hadn’t noticed the casket, or, if he had, then the creature didn’t look upon it as a threat. Maybe the monster was too excited sexually to worry about such things. Not only was the casket there, but its lid had already been pried up and set to the side. The detective must have pried the lid off before lowering the rope back down to her.
Now the problem was getting to the casket without being stopped by the Shiru. The monster was not between her and the casket, but it might move to stop her if she tried to reach it. But maybe the Shiru was only guarding the doorway, blocking her from escaping the room. Maybe it didn’t recognize the threat the casket contained, if it contained anything at all.
Don’t think that. It can’t be empty.
Fearful that any sudden movement might result in an attack, Ssabra started inching slowly toward the casket. She kept her eyes on the Shiru and walked backward. But for every step she took the monster also took a step, maintaining the distance between the two of them.
The Shiru paused when it reached the spot where she had just been sitting, one of the creature’s tentacles reaching out to peel Jack’s face off the beer carton. The face came loose with a wet sucking sound that made Ssabra go cold inside. Peeling it off of the carton, the tentacle stuffed the detective’s face into the Shiru’s beaked mouth. A few moments later the face was regurgitated along with a puddle of digestive fluid, to be sucked up by several of the tentacles.
Straws. It’s drinking Jack’s face with a straw.
Ssabra nearly passed out from the sight of Jack Colvin’s face being eaten, but she stayed on her feet and used the moment to move next to the casket. Looking down into the open box, she almost shouted with joy when she saw the yellowed skeleton of a hideously deformed child. The head of the offspring was long and triangular, and there were four eye sockets instead of the normal two. The skeleton also had an extra set of arms and legs, as well as a few other bony protuberances that definitely were not human.
The offspring had apparently been born without feet, the leg bones ending in points where the ankles should have been. Deciding that the pointed leg bones would make the best weapons, Ssabra reached down and broke off two of the offspring’s legs just below the knees. She slipped one of the bones through her belt, wearing it like a sword; the other she kept clutched tightly in her right hand.
She should have felt better now that she was armed, but the leg bones looked mighty puny when compared to the size of the Shiru. Nor did she know if the bones really possessed some kind of magical quality that could kill the monster. But the bones were all she had, the only protection against a fate far worse than death.
“Tolomato, where are you?” The chief had been absent throughout her ordeal.
“Looks like I’m on my own.” She stepped back from the casket and looked across the room. The Shiru had finished slurping up the remains of Jack’s face, and was now back to watching her. How long would it be before the monster made his move? Lover boy was obviously growing more sexually agitated by the minute, the throbbing of his penis becoming more pronounced.
Maybe the Shiru was working itself up to a sexual frenzy. Or perhaps it wanted to take its sweet time about things in order to make the moment last. One thing for sure, Ssabra wasn’t going to stick around to see what was about to happen. She was going to get the hell out of there, or she was going to die trying.
Looking for an opening move, something to put the monster off guard, she grabbed the offspring’s skull and threw it at the Shiru. The skull hit the dark god square in the head, causing it to scurry back a couple of steps.
It was the break she was hoping for. When the Shiru stepped back it moved farther away from the door. It also stepped into the center of the blood and gore that had once been Jack Colvin. The tentacles might be delighted with the opportunity to feed some more, bu
t the slippery floor would provide a less that perfect footing for the monster.
No sooner had she thrown the skull than Ssabra started hobbling toward the doorway. The exit was less than twenty feet away, but her injured ankle was already starting to swell and she could barely stand to put her weight fully upon it. It was all she could do to walk, let alone run.
There was a loud hissing, woofing-hooting noise as the Shiru realized what she was doing and started after her. Even on the slippery concrete floor, the monster was surefooted and could move a lot faster than she could. The race was on, but even with a head start the advantage was not hers.
She reached the doorway a few feet ahead of the Shiru, but her lead was worthless because she had not taken into consideration the reach of the monster’s tentacles. As she tried to flee from the storeroom, one of the tentacles grabbed her around the waist and jerked her back into the room. Two more tentacles grabbed her legs, ripping her pants off of her as easily as someone would peel the skin from a banana.
She was down to panties, shoes, socks, and shirt, and had a feeling she wouldn’t have those articles of clothing for much longer. A few more tentacles had already wrapped themselves around her legs, mouths sniffing at the edges of her cotton underwear and probing up under her shirt. She was disgusted by the touch of the tentacles, her skin breaking out in goosebumps, but she was even more sickened by what those tentacles were attached to.
Instead of trying to pull away, Ssabra turned and lunged toward the Shiru, intent on driving the leg bone she held deep into the monster’s body. She almost made it, but another one of the tentacles shot out and grabbed the bone, tearing it from her grasp.
Unarmed, she screamed and struggled, but her efforts were futile. She was a helpless fly trapped in a sticky web, and the spider was coming closer for the kill. She screamed again as she was pushed to the floor, the monster crawling over the top of her.
Ssabra heard the sound of fabric ripping, and felt the clothing being torn from her body. She was completely naked now, except for her shoes and socks, unable to struggle against the tentacles that held her legs and waist. She would have beat at the monster with her fists, but she could not bring herself to touch its pus-covered underside. Nor did she want to touch any of the crab creatures that scurried around beneath the Shiru like bloated ticks.
Breed Page 26
