New Title 1

by Millard, Adam

  “I guess they didn’t like the whore much, either,” Red said.

  “Is this her?” Mickey said, scrutinizing the body as if he knew what he was looking for. “How can you be sure?” There was no point, he thought, dragging a body halfway across town only to find out it was useless.

  “That’s the whore’s skirt,” Red said. “And I recognise that tramp-stamp from earlier.” She pointed at a small tattoo on the corpse’s right leg: Hos Before Bros. “Now, if you would be so kind as to grab the legs. I’ll get the…the…erm…this bit here.”

  She was a lot lighter than Mickey had expected, possibly because there was only around sixty percent of her remaining. They managed to sit the body on the horse – once again, Mordecai audibly revolted; once again, to no avail – and climb up, sandwiching it between them.

  Something growled in the shadows just as Red urged Mordecai forwards.

  “Please,” Mickey said, checking across his shoulder for possible tails. “For the love of god, and all that is good and pure, get us back in one piece.” And all the way, he tried not to focus on the armless, headless, stinking corpse grinding back against him, begging him for one last fuck before it was too late.

  *

  “Okay,” Lou said, sand whipping him in the face, even up there on the store roof. He saw the horse through the gaps in buildings, skirting around the town just like Red said they would. “Tell them to get ready!”

  Smalling, who was standing on the ladder, half-in, half-out of the store, ducked his head back in. “They’re coming,” he said. “Await further instruction.”

  “This is soooo fucked up,” Zee said. She was standing by the door with her father. Both looked nervous. Her father shot her a disapproving look, to which she said, “I mean, this is sooooooo darned tooting messed up,” before grinning.

  Up on the roof, Lou peered down into the sea of bloated limbs and tentacles. Slime-slathered bodies ebbed and flowed, a sickening tide that threatened to envelop them all. Lou knew he had only one shot at this…one chance to put things right, to save at least a few lives…

  “Oi! You ugly bastards!” He waved his hands, frantically vying for their attention.

  “MIIIIILLLLLK!” one of them said, which was, he thought, pretty much their entire vocabulary.

  “That’s right!” Lou bellowed. “Milk is on its way, but I need you to come over here. Come on…this way! That’s right! Follow me to the east side of the building! You too, Cthulhu!”

  It was working. The milk-mutants had all spotted the crazed man on the roof, flailing around like a novelty kite. They followed him across the roof, away from the front door.

  “Keep it coming!” Lou said. “You know you want some of Lou’s milk.” He whipped his shirt off and began to tease his nipples. It wasn’t long before a torrent began to spew out of him. It hurt like a sonofabitch, but Lou just bit his lip and did his thing. “Here we go!” he said, squirting his titty-juice into the mass of writhing bodies below. “Yeah, you like that? You like that, you dirty fucking milk-mutants?”

  The lip-smacking emanating from the sea of bodies told him that, yes, they liked it very much.

  “MIIIIILLLLLK!”

  “What do you think this is?” Lou said. “Ginger fucking beer? Come on, drink up. Plenty more where that came from.” He continued to spray the beasts with his milk, avoiding the tentacles and giant arms that lunged for him. One creature tried to climb the exterior wall, but only managed to get halfway before dropping back down into the thirsty throng.

  It’s working! Lou thought. It’s fucking working! Who would have thought it?

  *

  “It’s working!” Smalling informed the rest of the survivors. “They’re taking the bait!”

  Rita Fox exhaled. “Oooh, that is a relief,” she said, which was something of an understatement. To her husband, she said, “Do you think this is going to work? Honestly?” She looked terrified.

  “Honestly?” he said. “I think we have to try. We can’t live in a world where those things exist. I’m pretty sure they won’t let us.” He ran a hand gently down Zee’s arm. “But whatever happens, I want you to know that I love you all dearly.”

  “Love you, too, Daddy,” Zee said.

  “Love you, Roger,” Rita said.

  “Love you all,” said Harkness, before realising it was a family thing and backing out of the conversation quickly.

  The sound of a galloping horse got nearer, and nearer, and…

  *

  “They’re not going to open up!” Mickey said, clinging to the decaying corpse for dear life. “I don’t think they’ve seen us.”

  Red pointed Mordecai toward the shut door. “YAH!” Off to her right, she saw the mutant horde. They were fixated by the figure up on the roof – Lou – and the milk pumping from his hairy breasts. He’d kept his part of the deal; that was something, at least.

  “I’m telling you,” Mickey said. “They’re not going to—”

  “They will!” Red screeched back over her shoulder. She hoped she was right, for hitting a door at forty miles per hour would not be a pleasant way to end the night.

  Mickey closed his eyes. If this was how he was going to die, he didn’t want to see any of it. At least he was wearing underwear for once. It would have been terribly embarrassing to go out naked.

  Come on, come on, come on, Red thought. “COME ON!” she squealed. “OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!”

  Just then, when Mordecai was twenty feet away and had decided that he, too, would close his eyes, the door opened. Red sighed and tapped Mordecai on the back of the head. “Open your eyes and steer us at that door,” she said. “And whatever you do, don’t look right.”

  Mordecai looked right, saw the fleshy tangle of limbs lurching toward them, and said, “Herfff!” by which time they were back inside the store. The horse slammed into the back wall, unsettling several shelves and sending jars of tacks and screws clattering to the floor. Surprisingly, it remained on its feet, unlike Mickey, who had once again toppled off and lay on his back next to the half-chewed hooker.

  Roger and Zee secured the door once again, but those things knew, now, that there were people inside. Whatever happened next, it needed to happen fast.

  Red climbed down from the dazed horse and dragged the remains of the whore toward the tarpaulin by its broken ankle. On the tarp, the milk was beginning to congeal. It was a lot thicker now than it had been, thanks to the tremendous heat, and now resembled a giant omelette more than anything else. Those bastards would have to eat it, not drink it, not that it mattered.

  Smalling climbed down the ladder and was followed shortly after by Lou. The store owner’s nipples looked like slices of salami. “Thank god that worked,” he said, sighing audibly. “I tried to keep them busy, but they must have seen you coming. Once they spotted you, I couldn’t get them back.”

  “It’s okay,” Red said. “We made it. That’s all that matters.”

  “I don’t think I can watch this,” Rita said, gagging at the sight of the mangled hooker. Roger pulled her away to one corner, to where his wife couldn’t see or hear what was happening from across the room. The kids – Clint and Tom – had slept through the entire thing, which was amazing, since it usually only took a middle-of-the-night fart to wake them both.

  Lou handed Smalling and Harkness rusty saw-blades he’d found in one of the racks. “They’re not much,” he said, “but they should cut through that.” He pointed to the corpse. “I might sit this one out, if you don’t mind. Cutting people up has never really been my forte.”

  “Who am I?” Zee said, gripping her machete in both hands. “Jack the Ripper?” She’d heard a few things about the infamous London slasher, stories here and there that might have been made up, for all she knew.

  “Let’s do this,” said Red, circling the half-dismembered corpse as if it might suddenly get up and start a fight. “And whatever you do, don’t get any in your mouth.”

  *

  “It looks like a b
lancmange,” Zee said of the pink pile sitting atop the tarpaulin. There were a few bones visible, but as a group they had decided it wouldn’t make much of a difference. The mutants wanted one thing, and only one thing.

  The milk-cum-omelette. It might be pink, but it still smelt the same. Those fuckers were going to lap it up like yesterday’s leftovers.

  “It looks disgusting,” said Rita. “And you’ve all got red on you.”

  “So what now?” Smalling said as the door rattled in its frame. The mutants were eager to get in; growing increasingly impatient. “How are we going to get this outside?”

  “He’s right,” Roger said. “It’s not like we can just drag it out there. We’ll be dead before we get three feet.”

  They were in quite a predicament, inasmuch as they had the C-4 but were shit out of fuses.

  “Shit!” Mickey said, kicking the floor. “Well this is just great. We risked our lives to get that fucking body, and for what? Now it’s just going to sit there, rotting in the milk, which is already rotting. What we have there is a rotting pile of milk-corpse.”

  “Calm down,” Red said, moving across the room. She had an idea. Whether it would work, or not, was another matter. “If we can tie the four corners of this thing together, we can make a sack, right?”

  “What, like Santa Claus?” Zee said. She was old enough to know that Santa wasn’t real, but she was also old enough to know that milk-mutants had no right to exist, either.

  “Exactly,” Red said. “It’ll be big, but it should fit through the skylight. We get it up onto the roof and we can just tip it out over the edge.”

  Lou clapped his hands together enthusiastically. “That’s the spirit, girl,” he said. “See, I knew you had it in you.”

  “Well, what are we waiting for?” said Zee, grabbing onto one corner of the tarp, and also something that looked a little like a milky giblet. “Let’s send those things back to whatever hell they came from.”

  “Amen!” said Lou.

  “Fuck yeah!” Harkness exclaimed.

  “Kill those cunts!” said little Clint Fox, who had woken up and was punching the air with two tiny fists.

  *

  “It’s heavier than it looks,” Mickey said, getting underneath the sack and pushing it inch by inch up the ladder. Everyone else was up on the roof, pulling as hard as they could. And still they struggled.

  “Just a little bit more,” Lou called down, though his voice was muted by the giant sack of curdled milk and guts wedged in the skylight. Only a little was seeping out, and that was up by the opening, not through any unfortunate holes in the tarp.

  Something thunked! against the front of the store, something big and heavy and not at all human. Mickey wobbled unsteadily on the ladder, fearing, for a moment, that the whole thing was going to give under the weight of both him and the sack of milk-mutant pesticide.

  “They’re getting a little feisty out there!” Mickey called up. “Can we hurry this up?”

  The sack lifted a couple of inches before stopping again. “Shit!” said a voice. Mickey thought it belonged to the father – Roger Fox.

  “What?” Mickey said. “What do you mean, ‘shit’?”

  There were mutterings, almost inaudible over the din of the agitated milk-mutants, and then Lou said, “We think it’s stuck!”

  Mickey groaned. “Think?” he said, “or know?” He had a feeling he knew which it would be.

  “Don’t worry,” Lou said. “We’ll think of something. Just don’t move.”

  A long, thick tentacle punctured the door. On the end of it, six hands began feeling around the room, grabbing at anything that could be grabbed at.

  “Pull this thing out of here!” Mickey screamed. He had never screamed before, and he wasn’t sure whether it suited him. It was bad enough that he was wearing a pair of big panties…

  “What’s happening down there!?” Red said. “Are you okay!?”

  “Just get me out of here fast!” Mickey yelled. He was certain a yell fitted him better than a scream. “There’s a…a fucking tentacle in here, and it’s looking for…”

  The many-handed tentacle must have heard Mickey’s voice, for it shot across the room at preternatural speed and stopped just short of him. No, please, no! Please just go the fuck away!

  The tentacle moved this way and that, like a snake about to pounce upon a lame rodent. The fingers on each of the hands wiggled back and forth. One hand was flipping Mickey the bird.

  And then it attacked. Hands were under his arms, tickling him, the way a playful grandfather tickled his daughter’s firstborn. “Fuck off!” Mickey screamed, for a yell didn’t seem to be enough. “Stop tickling…!”

  He lowered his arms for just a second, but that was all it took. The sack shifted above him, and then its momentum did the rest.

  The last thing Mickey heard as he hit the floor, the sack landing on top of him with a meaty, sickening thud, was the front door buckle and splinter, and then a cacophony of cries, all moaning the same single word.

  “MIIIIIIIIILLLLLLLLK!”

  35

  “Shit!” Lou said, stepping away from the skylight. “I thought you were holding onto it!”

  Red looked incredulous. “I thought you were!”

  Lou shook his head. “I think that’s where we went wrong.”

  “You don’t say.” Red stomped across the roof and glanced down over the side. “They’re fucking in there, Lou! They’re in the store!”

  “But Mickey…” Zee said, trailing off. Rita pulled her daughter in to a tight embrace. Zee hadn’t been comforted like that since she was a kid, and in that moment, she wanted to be free of it.

  The entire building beneath rattled and creaked as more and more milk-mutants forced their way in. Their guttural moans elicited whimpers and gooseflesh from the ‘haveners nervously waiting on the roof.

  “We’re fucked!” Harkness said. “I mean, that’s it. We might as well just jump to our deaths right now. It’ll be much nicer than what those things will do to us when they get up here.”

  “They won’t get up here,” Lou said. “They don’t know we’re here, so if we all just settle d…”

  Suddenly, a huge hand punched up through the skylight and firmly attached itself to the rooftop. Another followed, and then a third. Lou scrambled to safety. His nipples had started to leak again, proving that when it rained, it poured…

  “Holy shit!” said Roger Fox, pulling his family backwards across the rooftop. “This isn’t happening! This can’t be happening!”

  The rest of the creature came through, dragging itself forward, a giant bubble of flesh with three arms, four legs and more eyes than the rooftop survivors combined. It was massive – like three creatures in one – and Lou was perplexed as to how it had got through the tiny square in the roof in the first place. We struggled with a small sack of gore-milk, he thought.

  “Everyone behind me,” Red said, stepping into the centre of the roof. Her sword gleamed as the moonlight bounced from it. The creature looked momentarily confused, as if it had not anticipated much of a battle. “You want me?” Red told it. “Come and fucking get me.”

  The beast growled, tensed up like a steroid-using bodybuilder, and leapt into the air.

  Red swung the sword, knowing that she was dead either way; that the sheer weight of the thing would kill her as it came down on top of her. Well, at least she’d tried…and at least she’d outlived El Oscuro. For a brief time, she had been the leader of Los Pendejos…but that was only because there was no-one left to compete for the crown. Still, it was nice while it lasted.

  The creature was still roaring as its bowels gave way, and then the whole thing exploded. Limbs flew off in all direction; eyes darted through the air – a squelchy ball-bearing bomb gone off a tad too soon. Red dove for cover, just missing a hurtling arm as it whipped past her. The stench was unbearable, but in that moment she would have snorted shit direct from a pig’s anus if it meant living to fight another day.
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  Once the dust (meat, innards, milk-blood, detached limbs) settled, Red slipped and slid her way to her feet. The roof was an absolute mess with body-parts and viscera, but she had never been happier to see so much gore.

  “What just happened?” Smalling said as he peeled a strip of charred meat from his bald head.

  Harkness finished vomiting over at the corner of the rooftop before turning. “Do I have any of it on me? Is it on me? Is it?” He spun around; it was almost balletic.

  Lou wiped gore from his forehead. “It must have eaten the mixture,” he said. “It must have eaten the fucking whore-milk cocktail! That’s why it exploded!” His mouth fell open, but he was clearly smiling.

  Just then, something down on the street roared plaintively. Then came the pop, and milky blood shot into view before raining back down.

  “Come on!” Red said, rushing toward the roof’s edge.

  They lined up just in time to see the horde pushing its way from the building below. There must have been a hundred of them, all puking up from whatever constituted a mouth, all limping groggily away, but not too far before…

  Pop!

  Pop!

  Pop!Pop!Pop!

  “I don’t believe it,” Zee said, watching as the milk-mutants exploded on the street below. “It worked! They must have all had some!”

  “Couldn’t resist Lou’s Milk,” Lou said, smiling. “Look at that one down there. It’s going to…”

  Pop!

  “Told you.”

  And so they stood, watching as the things…the creatures that had once been tax-paying citizens of Oilhaven…detonated, decorating the town in frothy white goo and so much baggy flesh. It would take one hell of an operation to get the place cleaned up again, but at least they had the opportunity.

  A chance at a fresh start, without taxes and mining, without Kellerman’s bully-boy tactics. Lou didn’t know what he was going to do about his little problem, but it was only truly a problem if people drank the stuff. Maybe there was another use for it. Lou had noticed some clean spots down in the store where it had made contact. Maybe it was good for cleaning with…maybe, just maybe, there was a business in it after all. All in all, Oilhaven had potential, and with a little TLC…