Kevin Strange's Blog: Strange Sayings - Posts Tagged "cthulhu"
McHumans *A story excerpt*
Hey Gang, I'm writing a new story for an upcoming Lovecraftian Anthology for StrangeHouse and I wanted to share the first thousand words with you because I think it's a pretty hilarious little tale. I'm excited as hell to put this out early next year. So here we go, the first thousand words of "McHumans":
Synopsis: After Cthulhu awakens and destroys civilization as we know it, humans are used as slaves and food by their new slimy, submerged masters. One such young man, Ricky, works at an undersea fast food joint where he's forced to kill and cook other humans for the Deep Ones to eat. But he has a plan. His restaurant caters to the Big Man himself, and if Ricky's plan works, he could pull off the unthinkable: Killing Cthulhu.
McHumans
by
Kevin Strange
An Excerpt
I'm Ricky. I'm a human being. A slave. Food for my watery masters. How those masters came into power is anybody's guess. All I know is, one day I was jacking off to videos of the pink Power Ranger, and the next, the whole planet was flooded, and giant monsters were dragging those of us lucky (unlucky?) enough not to die in the initial onslaught down into the icy depths below.
They call themselves the Deep Ones. No two of them look exactly the same. They're evil, vile things, but they can talk and think just like you or me. I guess because they're aliens from another dimension—at least that's what people say. But people say all kinds of crazy shit now, and it's not like we have an internet down here or anything to fact check. So you just sort of take people's word for it most of the time. These aliens hate us and want us all dead. Why they hate us so much, I'll never know. But they do. They love to torture us and eat us. They're real sadistic fuckers.
Take my job, for example. I work in one of their subterranean cities beneath the ocean. How these cities existed without our knowledge before the great flood? Another question I can't answer. There's a lot of those now. Questions. And not many answers. We're all too busy surviving...
Oh yeah, my job. I work at a fast food restaurant that specializes in fresh flesh. Fresh human flesh. As in people are butchered here and then we garnish their meat with little pieces of seaweed and coral and shit. As a joke, those of us who work here call it McHumans. And guess who they make kill people? That's right. Me.
Last week I had to kill my buddy Sam. He used to work here, too. In fact, he was the first person I met after I was dragged down into the murky depths. Everybody else that works here told us not to get emotionally attached to anyone cause this sort of shit happens all the time, but we didn't listen. We both liked comic books and death metal. And what else is there to do but talk to each other when you're living in a waterlogged death camp just waiting for your number to come up, anyway?
Three other people work with us on the night shift in the kitchen. Karen, a smokin' hot little redhead who tells the best poop jokes in the joint. She has Cerebral Palsy, or whatever. It's not that bad. It doesn't fuck up her face or the way she talks. Her hands are kind of curled up and one of her legs bows in when she walks. Her spine and neck are curved all funky, but other than that? Top shelf pussy. Sometimes when the others think we're off having a smoke break, I fuck Karen in the walk-in cooler. It's kinda weird, fucking a crippled girl, the whole cooler full of dead bodies, but hey, you take what you can get in this hellhole.
Then there's the huge, fat, black dude we call Chef. You know, like the dude from South Park? Only this Chef isn't all full of inspirational speeches and joy, no this guy is a miserable, hate-filled racist. He's got a gigantic, oily nose that looks like a brown pickle and he's missing one of his front teeth. He's worked here the longest and he says he loves it. Says he couldn't think of a better place to be than in a kitchen chopping up white people all day. But we know he's lying. He was a preacher in Detroit before all this happened. He just puts on the angry black man routine to keep from losing his shit. We all have our ways of dealing with the stress of death and misery hanging over our heads every second of every day.
Like Ty, the final member of our crew. He deals with our living nightmare by dressing up like a woman—wigs, makeup, the whole thing. But the weird part is, he's still got a big brown beard and doesn't talk with an effeminate voice or try to make us call him by a woman's name. No, he just dresses like a chick. He's called a Transvestite. I only know this because my sister used to be in a Rocky Horror troupe. Now my sister's dead.
So anyway, one minute me and Sam are swapping stories about fucking chicks back in our other life while we strip the skin off a pair of arms in the kitchen with the rest of the gang, and then bam! In comes our boss, a really funky looking crab-thing with a huge white spiral shell covered in nasty barnacles. The way his big eyes sit on top of their stalks, Boss Crab, as we call him, always looks like he's surprised or in a state of shock. He has a name, hell, they all have names, but fuck trying to pronounce those multi-syllable, too many consonant things. We have nicknames for all of them.
Well, he storms right up to us, gives us both the once over with a look of astonishment, the whole time his little crab mouth parts moving a mile a minute—his disgustingly long, thin tentacle whiskers waving around, tasting the air, or whatever it is they're used for—when he reaches out with his enormous red claw, grabs poor Sam by the neck, and drags him into the back room. The killing room.
A couple seconds later, Boss Crab screams for us to come back there, too.
Click Here to read part 2!
Synopsis: After Cthulhu awakens and destroys civilization as we know it, humans are used as slaves and food by their new slimy, submerged masters. One such young man, Ricky, works at an undersea fast food joint where he's forced to kill and cook other humans for the Deep Ones to eat. But he has a plan. His restaurant caters to the Big Man himself, and if Ricky's plan works, he could pull off the unthinkable: Killing Cthulhu.
McHumans
by
Kevin Strange
An Excerpt
I'm Ricky. I'm a human being. A slave. Food for my watery masters. How those masters came into power is anybody's guess. All I know is, one day I was jacking off to videos of the pink Power Ranger, and the next, the whole planet was flooded, and giant monsters were dragging those of us lucky (unlucky?) enough not to die in the initial onslaught down into the icy depths below.
They call themselves the Deep Ones. No two of them look exactly the same. They're evil, vile things, but they can talk and think just like you or me. I guess because they're aliens from another dimension—at least that's what people say. But people say all kinds of crazy shit now, and it's not like we have an internet down here or anything to fact check. So you just sort of take people's word for it most of the time. These aliens hate us and want us all dead. Why they hate us so much, I'll never know. But they do. They love to torture us and eat us. They're real sadistic fuckers.
Take my job, for example. I work in one of their subterranean cities beneath the ocean. How these cities existed without our knowledge before the great flood? Another question I can't answer. There's a lot of those now. Questions. And not many answers. We're all too busy surviving...
Oh yeah, my job. I work at a fast food restaurant that specializes in fresh flesh. Fresh human flesh. As in people are butchered here and then we garnish their meat with little pieces of seaweed and coral and shit. As a joke, those of us who work here call it McHumans. And guess who they make kill people? That's right. Me.
Last week I had to kill my buddy Sam. He used to work here, too. In fact, he was the first person I met after I was dragged down into the murky depths. Everybody else that works here told us not to get emotionally attached to anyone cause this sort of shit happens all the time, but we didn't listen. We both liked comic books and death metal. And what else is there to do but talk to each other when you're living in a waterlogged death camp just waiting for your number to come up, anyway?
Three other people work with us on the night shift in the kitchen. Karen, a smokin' hot little redhead who tells the best poop jokes in the joint. She has Cerebral Palsy, or whatever. It's not that bad. It doesn't fuck up her face or the way she talks. Her hands are kind of curled up and one of her legs bows in when she walks. Her spine and neck are curved all funky, but other than that? Top shelf pussy. Sometimes when the others think we're off having a smoke break, I fuck Karen in the walk-in cooler. It's kinda weird, fucking a crippled girl, the whole cooler full of dead bodies, but hey, you take what you can get in this hellhole.
Then there's the huge, fat, black dude we call Chef. You know, like the dude from South Park? Only this Chef isn't all full of inspirational speeches and joy, no this guy is a miserable, hate-filled racist. He's got a gigantic, oily nose that looks like a brown pickle and he's missing one of his front teeth. He's worked here the longest and he says he loves it. Says he couldn't think of a better place to be than in a kitchen chopping up white people all day. But we know he's lying. He was a preacher in Detroit before all this happened. He just puts on the angry black man routine to keep from losing his shit. We all have our ways of dealing with the stress of death and misery hanging over our heads every second of every day.
Like Ty, the final member of our crew. He deals with our living nightmare by dressing up like a woman—wigs, makeup, the whole thing. But the weird part is, he's still got a big brown beard and doesn't talk with an effeminate voice or try to make us call him by a woman's name. No, he just dresses like a chick. He's called a Transvestite. I only know this because my sister used to be in a Rocky Horror troupe. Now my sister's dead.
So anyway, one minute me and Sam are swapping stories about fucking chicks back in our other life while we strip the skin off a pair of arms in the kitchen with the rest of the gang, and then bam! In comes our boss, a really funky looking crab-thing with a huge white spiral shell covered in nasty barnacles. The way his big eyes sit on top of their stalks, Boss Crab, as we call him, always looks like he's surprised or in a state of shock. He has a name, hell, they all have names, but fuck trying to pronounce those multi-syllable, too many consonant things. We have nicknames for all of them.
Well, he storms right up to us, gives us both the once over with a look of astonishment, the whole time his little crab mouth parts moving a mile a minute—his disgustingly long, thin tentacle whiskers waving around, tasting the air, or whatever it is they're used for—when he reaches out with his enormous red claw, grabs poor Sam by the neck, and drags him into the back room. The killing room.
A couple seconds later, Boss Crab screams for us to come back there, too.
Click Here to read part 2!
McHumans *A story Excerpt* Part 2
If you missed the first one, you can check out the first thousand words of the new Lovecraftian Bizarro tale I'm writing for an upcoming anthology through StrangeHouse Books Right Here
I don't know how many of these I'll do, or if I'll post the whole story here on my blog before it comes out in the antho. I guess that's entirely up to you guys. Do you want to see more? Here's part 2:
The killing room always stinks, no matter how thoroughly we scrub it. There's just a permanent stench attached to it, like a slaughterhouse splashed with copious helpings of guilt and fear. Terror echos off the walls. Or maybe it's just the shit smell that never quite goes away. Everyone shits when they die, and our drain sucks.
The room's too small for all of us to fit, so Chef, Ty and Karen stand just outside the door. Boss Crab looks like he just saw an elephant climb into its own asshole. Sam is on the floor, totally confused. Hovering over him is Boss Crab's right hand man. His “muscle” as he likes to call him. The thing—if it is even a “him”—is called Torgen-something-something-something. We just call him Fishbowl. Boss Crab breathes air, so he's fine running around inside McHumans screaming at us and whatnot. But some of the horrid beasts, like Fishbowl, are strictly water dwellers.
We don't even know what the hell Fishbowl IS. He's all stuffed inside this black suit that looks sort of like one of those deep sea diver contraptions. The body of the suit is always damp and sweaty. It's one big piece with connecting gloves and boots wrapped in rusted chains and covered in rotted seaweed. It even has a diver's helmet on top. Only this helmet is more like a fish bowl. That's why we call him that. Anyway, his helmet-thing, it's completely full of water. Black, fetid water. Vague, horrid shapes swim around in that murky gunk. I can't stare at it too long or I start to think I can see faces forming in the swirling darkness. Creepy shit.
So Fishbowl's got a hold of Sam by the shoulders and Sam's crying cause he knows he's about to die when Boss Crab starts swinging around this fire-ax with his little shriveled hand, yelling in his crab language. Once he sees we're utterly clueless as to what's going on, he switches to English. I hate when he does that. If you've never heard a crab imitate human speech, trust me, you don't want to.
“This little shit thought he was going to break out of here!” Boss Crab says, waving the ax in Sam's face. With his big claw hand, he throws a stack of paper on the ground. “Escape plans! He really thought he could outsmart ME!”
Chef snickers. “Crazy Cracka,” he says under his breath. I scowl at him.
We're fucked. I know what's coming next. I'm so fucking scared I can't feel my feet.
Boss Crab turns the ax on me. “You were in on it, too, weren't you? Explain yourself.”
“I-I don't know what the hell you're talking about, man. I'm not in on anything,” I stammer, totally full of shit. I'm an awful liar, and it's about to get me killed.
Boss Crab raises the ax as if to hit me with it. I flinch back and he continues screaming. “Shut the fuck up, monkey! You think I'm stupid?! You think I don't know what goes on in my own restaurant?!”
“Just tell him, Ricky.” Sam whines. Now my eyes bulge like Boss Crab's. I make a slashing motion with my hand at my neck. He ignores me. “Tell him what we were gonna do and maybe he'll let us live!” Sam's really crying now. Just blubbering like a little bitch. I guess I would be too if I was in his position. If he says anything else, I probably will be.
Boss Crab scuttles around to face Sam. “I know what you two idiots were going to try to do!” He motions his big claw at a pair of scuba tanks sitting on a table in the corner. We have to use them to go from the restaurant back to our slave quarters down in the human district. The only compensation we get for our jobs is oxygen for the tanks. We're literally paid in air.
Boss Crab continues his rant, and I try my best not to shit myself.
“You do realize I only keep enough air in those things for a round trip to and from the slave camp, right?”
Sam breaks down completely at this point. He's all sobbing incoherently, gasping for air between his cries. “H-he put me up to it, boss! I swear! He said we were gonna go back to the surface!”
“What surface??? The whole world is flooded, you fucking retard! Even if you did manage to break out, even if you hid air up your asses, once you got up there, you'd just float to death!”
Boss Crab turns back to me. “Anything to say for yourself, monkey?”
I just put my arms up and shrug, clueless as to what to say next. Finally I stammer out, “Sorry?”
I can't tell if Boss Crab is genuinely surprised at my lack of defense, or if he's just staring at me. Then he thrusts the ax out, not in a killing blow, but with the handle facing me. Totally confused I take it from him. He says, “Not as sorry as your friend, here. You cook a mean brain souffle. Him? He couldn't even burn a brisket to save his life. Kill him.”
“What?” I ask, sure that he's just fucking with me for a second before he snaps my face off with his claw.
“Prove your loyalty to the restaurant. Kill this one so we can get on to the business at hand. Murder your co-conspirator and NEVER try that shit again. Do I make myself clear?”
“Aw, shit,” Karen says from behind Chef.
“That ain't right,” Ty says, walking away from the doorway, back to the kitchen.
I look at them all for a brief second, hoping they have some brilliant plan to keep me from chopping up my best bud. They've got nothin'.
Reluctantly I turn around and prop the ax up on my shoulder. “Sorry Sam, this fuckin' sucks,” I say, with total sincerity, raising the blade above my head.
There I stand in the only shirt I brought down here with me, a faded, ripped up Dio Holy Diver shirt, my curly brown shoulder length hair matted to my pale forehead about to murder my friend, and all I can think is, Damn, I wish I could take his Ozzy shirt before it gets blood all over it.
Sam struggles, mumbling shit I can't understand through his snotty nose and tears. Fishbowl holds him tight.
Chef covers Karen's eyes as the blade comes down, cleaving poor Sam's face open. A wet thunk—sort of like when you cut open a pumpkin—resonates throughout the small killing room. Sam's cries abruptly end as what sits behind his face slowly oozes out onto his shirt.
He slumps over. His body thrashes a few times and then he goes still. At least he didn't suffer. Before I can even register that I've murdered my best friend, Boss Crab snatches the ax away from me and starts yelling again. “Get the fuck back in here, you warm blooded sacks of shit!”
Karen, Chef and Ty had tried to creep away. They sulk back into the doorway as Boss Crab shoves me toward them.
“Listen up!” he says, scooping up a bit of Sam off the floor. “We got a new contract this afternoon. A big one. Pretty much the biggest.” He starts to unscrew the knob sealing Fishbowl's helmet in place. A loud hiss followed by a pop signals the release of the pressurized lid. Boss Crab flips the top open. “Cthulhu his god damn self has requested us to cater a party he's having next week. He wants us to provide the food.” The black, fetid water looks like calm oil slick until Boss Crab dangles bits of Sam over the open container. Then the rancid shit begins to slosh around inside the helmet. Karen dry heaves and covers her mouth as the reek overwhelms us. My eyes start to water and we all put our hands up to cover our mouths.
Little pincer claws, suction cup laced tendrils, and pointy tipped legs that look like they belong on a tarantula burst forth from the brackish ooze, snatching and grabbing at the fresh flesh.
I don't know how many of these I'll do, or if I'll post the whole story here on my blog before it comes out in the antho. I guess that's entirely up to you guys. Do you want to see more? Here's part 2:
The killing room always stinks, no matter how thoroughly we scrub it. There's just a permanent stench attached to it, like a slaughterhouse splashed with copious helpings of guilt and fear. Terror echos off the walls. Or maybe it's just the shit smell that never quite goes away. Everyone shits when they die, and our drain sucks.
The room's too small for all of us to fit, so Chef, Ty and Karen stand just outside the door. Boss Crab looks like he just saw an elephant climb into its own asshole. Sam is on the floor, totally confused. Hovering over him is Boss Crab's right hand man. His “muscle” as he likes to call him. The thing—if it is even a “him”—is called Torgen-something-something-something. We just call him Fishbowl. Boss Crab breathes air, so he's fine running around inside McHumans screaming at us and whatnot. But some of the horrid beasts, like Fishbowl, are strictly water dwellers.
We don't even know what the hell Fishbowl IS. He's all stuffed inside this black suit that looks sort of like one of those deep sea diver contraptions. The body of the suit is always damp and sweaty. It's one big piece with connecting gloves and boots wrapped in rusted chains and covered in rotted seaweed. It even has a diver's helmet on top. Only this helmet is more like a fish bowl. That's why we call him that. Anyway, his helmet-thing, it's completely full of water. Black, fetid water. Vague, horrid shapes swim around in that murky gunk. I can't stare at it too long or I start to think I can see faces forming in the swirling darkness. Creepy shit.
So Fishbowl's got a hold of Sam by the shoulders and Sam's crying cause he knows he's about to die when Boss Crab starts swinging around this fire-ax with his little shriveled hand, yelling in his crab language. Once he sees we're utterly clueless as to what's going on, he switches to English. I hate when he does that. If you've never heard a crab imitate human speech, trust me, you don't want to.
“This little shit thought he was going to break out of here!” Boss Crab says, waving the ax in Sam's face. With his big claw hand, he throws a stack of paper on the ground. “Escape plans! He really thought he could outsmart ME!”
Chef snickers. “Crazy Cracka,” he says under his breath. I scowl at him.
We're fucked. I know what's coming next. I'm so fucking scared I can't feel my feet.
Boss Crab turns the ax on me. “You were in on it, too, weren't you? Explain yourself.”
“I-I don't know what the hell you're talking about, man. I'm not in on anything,” I stammer, totally full of shit. I'm an awful liar, and it's about to get me killed.
Boss Crab raises the ax as if to hit me with it. I flinch back and he continues screaming. “Shut the fuck up, monkey! You think I'm stupid?! You think I don't know what goes on in my own restaurant?!”
“Just tell him, Ricky.” Sam whines. Now my eyes bulge like Boss Crab's. I make a slashing motion with my hand at my neck. He ignores me. “Tell him what we were gonna do and maybe he'll let us live!” Sam's really crying now. Just blubbering like a little bitch. I guess I would be too if I was in his position. If he says anything else, I probably will be.
Boss Crab scuttles around to face Sam. “I know what you two idiots were going to try to do!” He motions his big claw at a pair of scuba tanks sitting on a table in the corner. We have to use them to go from the restaurant back to our slave quarters down in the human district. The only compensation we get for our jobs is oxygen for the tanks. We're literally paid in air.
Boss Crab continues his rant, and I try my best not to shit myself.
“You do realize I only keep enough air in those things for a round trip to and from the slave camp, right?”
Sam breaks down completely at this point. He's all sobbing incoherently, gasping for air between his cries. “H-he put me up to it, boss! I swear! He said we were gonna go back to the surface!”
“What surface??? The whole world is flooded, you fucking retard! Even if you did manage to break out, even if you hid air up your asses, once you got up there, you'd just float to death!”
Boss Crab turns back to me. “Anything to say for yourself, monkey?”
I just put my arms up and shrug, clueless as to what to say next. Finally I stammer out, “Sorry?”
I can't tell if Boss Crab is genuinely surprised at my lack of defense, or if he's just staring at me. Then he thrusts the ax out, not in a killing blow, but with the handle facing me. Totally confused I take it from him. He says, “Not as sorry as your friend, here. You cook a mean brain souffle. Him? He couldn't even burn a brisket to save his life. Kill him.”
“What?” I ask, sure that he's just fucking with me for a second before he snaps my face off with his claw.
“Prove your loyalty to the restaurant. Kill this one so we can get on to the business at hand. Murder your co-conspirator and NEVER try that shit again. Do I make myself clear?”
“Aw, shit,” Karen says from behind Chef.
“That ain't right,” Ty says, walking away from the doorway, back to the kitchen.
I look at them all for a brief second, hoping they have some brilliant plan to keep me from chopping up my best bud. They've got nothin'.
Reluctantly I turn around and prop the ax up on my shoulder. “Sorry Sam, this fuckin' sucks,” I say, with total sincerity, raising the blade above my head.
There I stand in the only shirt I brought down here with me, a faded, ripped up Dio Holy Diver shirt, my curly brown shoulder length hair matted to my pale forehead about to murder my friend, and all I can think is, Damn, I wish I could take his Ozzy shirt before it gets blood all over it.
Sam struggles, mumbling shit I can't understand through his snotty nose and tears. Fishbowl holds him tight.
Chef covers Karen's eyes as the blade comes down, cleaving poor Sam's face open. A wet thunk—sort of like when you cut open a pumpkin—resonates throughout the small killing room. Sam's cries abruptly end as what sits behind his face slowly oozes out onto his shirt.
He slumps over. His body thrashes a few times and then he goes still. At least he didn't suffer. Before I can even register that I've murdered my best friend, Boss Crab snatches the ax away from me and starts yelling again. “Get the fuck back in here, you warm blooded sacks of shit!”
Karen, Chef and Ty had tried to creep away. They sulk back into the doorway as Boss Crab shoves me toward them.
“Listen up!” he says, scooping up a bit of Sam off the floor. “We got a new contract this afternoon. A big one. Pretty much the biggest.” He starts to unscrew the knob sealing Fishbowl's helmet in place. A loud hiss followed by a pop signals the release of the pressurized lid. Boss Crab flips the top open. “Cthulhu his god damn self has requested us to cater a party he's having next week. He wants us to provide the food.” The black, fetid water looks like calm oil slick until Boss Crab dangles bits of Sam over the open container. Then the rancid shit begins to slosh around inside the helmet. Karen dry heaves and covers her mouth as the reek overwhelms us. My eyes start to water and we all put our hands up to cover our mouths.
Little pincer claws, suction cup laced tendrils, and pointy tipped legs that look like they belong on a tarantula burst forth from the brackish ooze, snatching and grabbing at the fresh flesh.
McHumans Excerpt part 3 (Lovecraftian horror)
Last month I started writing a new Lovecraftian horror tale for an upcoming StrangeHouse Books anthology called "McHumans". I decided to serialize the tale and post it here, in its entirety over the months leading up to the anthology. Here's part One
and part Two
if you missed them. This is part 3:
Boss Crab drops the hunk of flesh into the helmet and quickly snaps it shut before continuing. “So we're gonna have a lot of dirty vertebrates coming through here this week. I expect my team to be on your A game. Do I make myself clear?”
Still in shock, we all nod and Boss Crab scuttles away with Fishbowl in tow.
***
That was last week. Now the gang and I stand at the front entrance to R'lyeh, Cthulhu's great sunken city, with handfuls of people we cooked. Behind us, our scuba gear lays discarded on the rim of a gigantic, pressurized moon pool, one of many such pools that the denizens of R'lyeh use to come and go. See, most of the monsters that now rule the planet are amphibious, so these sunken cites are habitable to air breathers. This particular one is about half the size of a freakin football field. And it's a good thing, too. The leviathan fish-frog beast carrying the rest of the food for Cthulhu's party barely fits through the hole. Man, this is going to be a massive feast.
Fishbowl steers the leviathan out of the moon pool, and up the jaw-bridge type thing we stand in front of. We step out of the way so the gargantuan thing doesn't crush us. It reminds me of a monitor lizard wearing a fish-head Halloween costume—the size of a city block.
Twin emerald doors covered in glowing glyphs and runes that ooze a glowing green goo—rising so high above our heads, I have to lean backward to see the very tops—open slowly, allowing Fishbowl and the leviathan to pass into the belly of grand R'lyeh.
“I fucking hate this place,” Ty says, as the leviathan stomps into a spiraling decent across a floor that is sometimes a ceiling, sometimes a wall, depending on how you set your eyes. R'lyeh is funny like that, what with the non-euclidean geometry and all that. Nothing in the sunken city is quite where you think it should be, relatively speaking.
We step through the entrance.
Ty is wearing a blue wig set in pigtails. He wears a matching blue sun dress with black polka dots. A pair of black and white converse sneakers rounds out his outfit.
Chef shifts his bags to his right hand, giving Ty a long, hard look. I know what's coming. “Cracka, you rob the teenybopper section of the Gap when shit went down upstairs, or what? I do not understand where you find those godawful clothes, man!”
We continue walking. I try to keep my eyes closed so I don't notice that my feet are where my head should be.
Ty doesn't flinch. He's heard it all before. He looks Chef right in the eye and says, “They're my daughter's clothes. I grabbed two trash bags full of them when the rivers flooded over into the cities.”
Chef raises an eyebrow.
“We didn't even make it out of town,” Ty says, stopping, turning his body to face the burly black man. The rest of us stop, too. “Remember the... things that burrowed up out of the ground? The things with too many legs and eyes that squirmed? They took her. They ripped her right off my arm and dragged her down into those fetid mud pits—pulverized her body into mush right in front of my eyes. And you know what? Maybe if I didn't have my fucking arms full of her clothes, I could have saved her. If I'd just dropped the bags, I could have pulled her free. But I didn't. I lost my daughter on day 1, and all I have left to show for it is these clothes.”
“Damn,” Chef says, breaking eye contact. “That's fucked up.”
Before the big bear of a man can say any more, three hideous looking things slither their way down the long corridor, right up to us. Down here, everything looks awful. You just have to get used to it or you wont survive. You have to learn to shut off the part of your mind that screams in agony and begs you to find the nearest hole to crawl into when it sees the fucked up monsters that live down here.
These particular horrors, believe it or not, are even more stomach turning than the normal fish-frog, octopoid, monsters. These things have long, slender bodies with six or eight skinny, insect-like legs on either side. The bodies end in what look like a pair of twin scorpion tails, each tipped with with dagger-like stingers. Their heads are just a mess of tentacles with long, sharp hooks on the ends of some, eyeballs on the ends of others. Right in the center of this cluster of tendrils sits a drooling, multi-segmented mouth, snapping and undulating.
Karen cries out as one of the scorpion things skitters up to her and starts grabbing at her bags. She leaps behind me, leaving the thing to squirm its revolting appendages at me. I hold my bags out of reach as another of the monsters assaults Ty in the same way, pinning him up against the wall that was the ceiling last time I looked at it.
“What the fuck is this thing doing?!” he screams, as it plucks his bag from his hand, ripping it to shreds, dumping its contents on the ground at his feet. It tears the cooked human meat apart, shoving huge hunks of it into its writhing mouth.
“Sniffers,” Chef says. “They're here to make sure the food isn't poisoned. Don't worry, just let em do their thing and-”
The Sniffer goes stiff, shrieks, then vomits up all the meat it's just consumed and falls over dead.
“I poisoned the food,” I say, as everyone looks at me with wide eyes and slack jaws.
Before anyone can react, one of the two remaining Sniffers lunges itself at Ty, dragging him down to the ground with its face-feelers. He's screaming bloody murder as Chef runs forward saying, “Aw, hell!”
and part Two
if you missed them. This is part 3:
Boss Crab drops the hunk of flesh into the helmet and quickly snaps it shut before continuing. “So we're gonna have a lot of dirty vertebrates coming through here this week. I expect my team to be on your A game. Do I make myself clear?”
Still in shock, we all nod and Boss Crab scuttles away with Fishbowl in tow.
***
That was last week. Now the gang and I stand at the front entrance to R'lyeh, Cthulhu's great sunken city, with handfuls of people we cooked. Behind us, our scuba gear lays discarded on the rim of a gigantic, pressurized moon pool, one of many such pools that the denizens of R'lyeh use to come and go. See, most of the monsters that now rule the planet are amphibious, so these sunken cites are habitable to air breathers. This particular one is about half the size of a freakin football field. And it's a good thing, too. The leviathan fish-frog beast carrying the rest of the food for Cthulhu's party barely fits through the hole. Man, this is going to be a massive feast.
Fishbowl steers the leviathan out of the moon pool, and up the jaw-bridge type thing we stand in front of. We step out of the way so the gargantuan thing doesn't crush us. It reminds me of a monitor lizard wearing a fish-head Halloween costume—the size of a city block.
Twin emerald doors covered in glowing glyphs and runes that ooze a glowing green goo—rising so high above our heads, I have to lean backward to see the very tops—open slowly, allowing Fishbowl and the leviathan to pass into the belly of grand R'lyeh.
“I fucking hate this place,” Ty says, as the leviathan stomps into a spiraling decent across a floor that is sometimes a ceiling, sometimes a wall, depending on how you set your eyes. R'lyeh is funny like that, what with the non-euclidean geometry and all that. Nothing in the sunken city is quite where you think it should be, relatively speaking.
We step through the entrance.
Ty is wearing a blue wig set in pigtails. He wears a matching blue sun dress with black polka dots. A pair of black and white converse sneakers rounds out his outfit.
Chef shifts his bags to his right hand, giving Ty a long, hard look. I know what's coming. “Cracka, you rob the teenybopper section of the Gap when shit went down upstairs, or what? I do not understand where you find those godawful clothes, man!”
We continue walking. I try to keep my eyes closed so I don't notice that my feet are where my head should be.
Ty doesn't flinch. He's heard it all before. He looks Chef right in the eye and says, “They're my daughter's clothes. I grabbed two trash bags full of them when the rivers flooded over into the cities.”
Chef raises an eyebrow.
“We didn't even make it out of town,” Ty says, stopping, turning his body to face the burly black man. The rest of us stop, too. “Remember the... things that burrowed up out of the ground? The things with too many legs and eyes that squirmed? They took her. They ripped her right off my arm and dragged her down into those fetid mud pits—pulverized her body into mush right in front of my eyes. And you know what? Maybe if I didn't have my fucking arms full of her clothes, I could have saved her. If I'd just dropped the bags, I could have pulled her free. But I didn't. I lost my daughter on day 1, and all I have left to show for it is these clothes.”
“Damn,” Chef says, breaking eye contact. “That's fucked up.”
Before the big bear of a man can say any more, three hideous looking things slither their way down the long corridor, right up to us. Down here, everything looks awful. You just have to get used to it or you wont survive. You have to learn to shut off the part of your mind that screams in agony and begs you to find the nearest hole to crawl into when it sees the fucked up monsters that live down here.
These particular horrors, believe it or not, are even more stomach turning than the normal fish-frog, octopoid, monsters. These things have long, slender bodies with six or eight skinny, insect-like legs on either side. The bodies end in what look like a pair of twin scorpion tails, each tipped with with dagger-like stingers. Their heads are just a mess of tentacles with long, sharp hooks on the ends of some, eyeballs on the ends of others. Right in the center of this cluster of tendrils sits a drooling, multi-segmented mouth, snapping and undulating.
Karen cries out as one of the scorpion things skitters up to her and starts grabbing at her bags. She leaps behind me, leaving the thing to squirm its revolting appendages at me. I hold my bags out of reach as another of the monsters assaults Ty in the same way, pinning him up against the wall that was the ceiling last time I looked at it.
“What the fuck is this thing doing?!” he screams, as it plucks his bag from his hand, ripping it to shreds, dumping its contents on the ground at his feet. It tears the cooked human meat apart, shoving huge hunks of it into its writhing mouth.
“Sniffers,” Chef says. “They're here to make sure the food isn't poisoned. Don't worry, just let em do their thing and-”
The Sniffer goes stiff, shrieks, then vomits up all the meat it's just consumed and falls over dead.
“I poisoned the food,” I say, as everyone looks at me with wide eyes and slack jaws.
Before anyone can react, one of the two remaining Sniffers lunges itself at Ty, dragging him down to the ground with its face-feelers. He's screaming bloody murder as Chef runs forward saying, “Aw, hell!”
MCHUMANS part 4
I'm writing a story for an upcoming StrangeHouse Books anthology called "McHumans". I decided to serialize the tale and post it here over the months leading up to the anthology. Here's part One
part Two
and part Three
This is the fourth and final part I'll be publishing before STRANGE VS LOVECRAFT comes out in April:
The big man pulls out some sort of five pointed yellow stone and screams in a language I don't understand, causing the closest Sniffers to wilt and burn up as though they've been caught under a child's magnifying glass. He turns on the one pinning Ty to the ground and yells the same weird words at it, killing it as dead as the others, but not before it manages to land a stinger directly into Ty's left shoulder.
The injured man rolls over and kicks his feet on the ground like an infant throwing a tantrum, screaming through clenched teeth.
“Just what the fuck kind of bullshit stunt you think you're pullin' here, white boy?” Chef says, turning toward me. “You just signed all our death warrants!”
I stand my ground, crossing my arms. “You heard Boss Crab. Cthulhu is going to raise the city. All those fucking alien monsters will be here today. This is our chance, man!”
“Our Chance?!” Chef says, menacing over me, star-thing still clutched in his right hand. “Cracka, you done fucked up. We ain't got no chance. Never did! There ain't no killin' these sons of bitches! You might as well have poisoned us in our sleep. We're all dead already.”
“Fuck that,” I say, holding my head high. “All we gotta do, is make sure all those fuckers eat the food and-”
“And then what?!” Chef screams, yellow eyes bulging, spittle flying from his mouth. “You kill all the monsters then you gonna ride a fuckin' seahorse back to yo bitch ass momma's house? There ain't nothin' up there, cracka! You don't know how good you gotta down there at Mchuman's. Yo ass is lucky Boss Crab ain't fed you to fishbowl yet, and you gonna pull some bitch shit like this!” He closes his eyes dramatically and yells at the ceiling that was the floor last time I checked. “Lord help me, this cracka done got my ass killed!”
“That's not gonna happen,” I say, crossing my arms in defiance. “I've got a plan.”
Chef opens one eye, looks at me skeptically.
“I've heard stories, rumors, really, about a plug.”
“A plug? Aw, that's slave talk, boy! Dumb shit cracka's be sayin' to each other in the dark to keep they spirits up. That shit ain't real!”
“Bullshit,” I say, poking the big man in the chest with my finger. “You don't know that! You don't know shit! You just sit back in that kitchen like a-”
Chef bats my hand away. “Like a what, white boy? Say it. Say it! Like a good house nigga!”
“I was gonna say like a bitch. The plug is real. Think about it. It HAS to be real. Where else did all the water come from that flooded the Earth? It didn't just appear outta nowhere. You're talking millions, maybe billions of gallons of sea water. It HAD to come from a vast, planet-wide undersea chasm or cavern. And I have it on good authority that the plug the monsters used to seal it off after they sucked all the water out is right directly beneath out feet, at the bottom of R'lyeh.”
“Oh my god, kid. Oh my god!” Chef says laughing hysterically till tears are running down his face. Sobering, he wipes the tears away and looks me directly in the eyes. “We're good as dead, son. You hear me? All because of a fairytale told by dumb crackas in the night. Now if you'll 'scuse me, I'mma head back down to Mchuman's and see if I can't convince Boss Crab to bake my big black ass into a nice Filet Mignon before he gets a hold of your ass. I don't wanna be livin' to see what he gone do to you.”
I grab him by his huge arm when he turns to leave. “You can't go, Chef! If these monsters notice you're missing, they'll know something's up! Our only chance it to act normal and head down to the banquet hall. Please,” I say, begging the big man with my eyes.
“He's right,” Karen says. The way she looks at me when she says it, I realize in that moment that she's in love with me.
Great, I think. Just what I need, the crippled girl falling for me right before I make my escape. She'll probably want to come with me back to the surface world once all the water's gone. Too bad for her, I've already got a lover.
She continues. “If we take off now, they're bound to notice. They'll check the food. They'll know it's poisoned before we can even make it back to Mchuman's. Our best shot is with Ricky.” With that, she turns around and starts kicking at one of the sniffers' stingers.
Ty finally manages to get up off the ground. His arm is at least twice its normal size and the area around the sting has already turned a deep purple. He clutches his arm and, by the look on his face, is in a great deal of pain.
“You two are out of your minds!” he says, grimacing, not bothering to fix the wig that's fallen half off his head, revealing short brown hair below. “C'mon, Chef, lets get back to Mchuman's, I gotta get this arm looked at.”
Before he can take a step, a stinger jabs inches from his face. Karen has ripped it free. She wraps the dangling flesh and tendons around her arm, tying it down tight with her teeth and free hand. It's now a weapon the size of her whole arm. “You heard Ricky! If you two leave, and we show up at the banquet hall alone, they'll KNOW something's up! Besides,” she says, poking at his wounded arm with her normal hand, “by the look of that sting, you ain't gonna make all the way back to Mchuman's alive. Best you stick with us. Maybe there's some kind of anti-venom in there we can use to fix up your arm.”
Ty looks at Chef expecting him to argue more. Instead he starts kicking at another other Sniffer. He peels away the entire back carapace of the beast and slings the armor plated exoskeleton over his chest like a bullet proof vest. “She's right, lady boy. They both are. If we gone die one way or the other, I guess I'd rather die tryin' to shove one of these big ass stingers up Cthulhu's ass. Y'all best start cuttin' up a sniffer of your own, cause I'm finna wear this whole motha on my fat black ass.”
“We're gonna need as much of this as we can carry,” Karen says, “If even one monster sees us along the way and gets away to tell the big bad octopus man, we're fucked.”
We spend the next ten minutes ripping the sniffers to shreds, loading ourselves up with body armor, pincers and stingers for weapons, and the awful looking beasts' heads for helmets, writhing tentacle faces and all.
“Where'd you get that star-thing anyway, Chef?” I ask, as we tighten up our armor and head off down into the bowels of R'lyeh.
“You know how those cults all over the world got together and summoned up the monsters that sunk our world? Well, I was part of another kind of cult.”
“What kind was that?” I ask, trying to decide if I'm upside down or right side up as we descend deeper into the sunken stone kingdom of the Elder Gods.
“The kind that tried to stop this awful shit from happening in the first place.”
“You didn't do a very good job.”
Chef stops and glares at me for a long, uncomfortable moment. I'm pretty sure he's about to swing one of his big ass stingers at me when he cracks a wide smile and belly laughs so lound it echos down the twisted corridor.
“No, white boy, we sure didn't, did we?”
part Two
and part Three
This is the fourth and final part I'll be publishing before STRANGE VS LOVECRAFT comes out in April:
The big man pulls out some sort of five pointed yellow stone and screams in a language I don't understand, causing the closest Sniffers to wilt and burn up as though they've been caught under a child's magnifying glass. He turns on the one pinning Ty to the ground and yells the same weird words at it, killing it as dead as the others, but not before it manages to land a stinger directly into Ty's left shoulder.
The injured man rolls over and kicks his feet on the ground like an infant throwing a tantrum, screaming through clenched teeth.
“Just what the fuck kind of bullshit stunt you think you're pullin' here, white boy?” Chef says, turning toward me. “You just signed all our death warrants!”
I stand my ground, crossing my arms. “You heard Boss Crab. Cthulhu is going to raise the city. All those fucking alien monsters will be here today. This is our chance, man!”
“Our Chance?!” Chef says, menacing over me, star-thing still clutched in his right hand. “Cracka, you done fucked up. We ain't got no chance. Never did! There ain't no killin' these sons of bitches! You might as well have poisoned us in our sleep. We're all dead already.”
“Fuck that,” I say, holding my head high. “All we gotta do, is make sure all those fuckers eat the food and-”
“And then what?!” Chef screams, yellow eyes bulging, spittle flying from his mouth. “You kill all the monsters then you gonna ride a fuckin' seahorse back to yo bitch ass momma's house? There ain't nothin' up there, cracka! You don't know how good you gotta down there at Mchuman's. Yo ass is lucky Boss Crab ain't fed you to fishbowl yet, and you gonna pull some bitch shit like this!” He closes his eyes dramatically and yells at the ceiling that was the floor last time I checked. “Lord help me, this cracka done got my ass killed!”
“That's not gonna happen,” I say, crossing my arms in defiance. “I've got a plan.”
Chef opens one eye, looks at me skeptically.
“I've heard stories, rumors, really, about a plug.”
“A plug? Aw, that's slave talk, boy! Dumb shit cracka's be sayin' to each other in the dark to keep they spirits up. That shit ain't real!”
“Bullshit,” I say, poking the big man in the chest with my finger. “You don't know that! You don't know shit! You just sit back in that kitchen like a-”
Chef bats my hand away. “Like a what, white boy? Say it. Say it! Like a good house nigga!”
“I was gonna say like a bitch. The plug is real. Think about it. It HAS to be real. Where else did all the water come from that flooded the Earth? It didn't just appear outta nowhere. You're talking millions, maybe billions of gallons of sea water. It HAD to come from a vast, planet-wide undersea chasm or cavern. And I have it on good authority that the plug the monsters used to seal it off after they sucked all the water out is right directly beneath out feet, at the bottom of R'lyeh.”
“Oh my god, kid. Oh my god!” Chef says laughing hysterically till tears are running down his face. Sobering, he wipes the tears away and looks me directly in the eyes. “We're good as dead, son. You hear me? All because of a fairytale told by dumb crackas in the night. Now if you'll 'scuse me, I'mma head back down to Mchuman's and see if I can't convince Boss Crab to bake my big black ass into a nice Filet Mignon before he gets a hold of your ass. I don't wanna be livin' to see what he gone do to you.”
I grab him by his huge arm when he turns to leave. “You can't go, Chef! If these monsters notice you're missing, they'll know something's up! Our only chance it to act normal and head down to the banquet hall. Please,” I say, begging the big man with my eyes.
“He's right,” Karen says. The way she looks at me when she says it, I realize in that moment that she's in love with me.
Great, I think. Just what I need, the crippled girl falling for me right before I make my escape. She'll probably want to come with me back to the surface world once all the water's gone. Too bad for her, I've already got a lover.
She continues. “If we take off now, they're bound to notice. They'll check the food. They'll know it's poisoned before we can even make it back to Mchuman's. Our best shot is with Ricky.” With that, she turns around and starts kicking at one of the sniffers' stingers.
Ty finally manages to get up off the ground. His arm is at least twice its normal size and the area around the sting has already turned a deep purple. He clutches his arm and, by the look on his face, is in a great deal of pain.
“You two are out of your minds!” he says, grimacing, not bothering to fix the wig that's fallen half off his head, revealing short brown hair below. “C'mon, Chef, lets get back to Mchuman's, I gotta get this arm looked at.”
Before he can take a step, a stinger jabs inches from his face. Karen has ripped it free. She wraps the dangling flesh and tendons around her arm, tying it down tight with her teeth and free hand. It's now a weapon the size of her whole arm. “You heard Ricky! If you two leave, and we show up at the banquet hall alone, they'll KNOW something's up! Besides,” she says, poking at his wounded arm with her normal hand, “by the look of that sting, you ain't gonna make all the way back to Mchuman's alive. Best you stick with us. Maybe there's some kind of anti-venom in there we can use to fix up your arm.”
Ty looks at Chef expecting him to argue more. Instead he starts kicking at another other Sniffer. He peels away the entire back carapace of the beast and slings the armor plated exoskeleton over his chest like a bullet proof vest. “She's right, lady boy. They both are. If we gone die one way or the other, I guess I'd rather die tryin' to shove one of these big ass stingers up Cthulhu's ass. Y'all best start cuttin' up a sniffer of your own, cause I'm finna wear this whole motha on my fat black ass.”
“We're gonna need as much of this as we can carry,” Karen says, “If even one monster sees us along the way and gets away to tell the big bad octopus man, we're fucked.”
We spend the next ten minutes ripping the sniffers to shreds, loading ourselves up with body armor, pincers and stingers for weapons, and the awful looking beasts' heads for helmets, writhing tentacle faces and all.
“Where'd you get that star-thing anyway, Chef?” I ask, as we tighten up our armor and head off down into the bowels of R'lyeh.
“You know how those cults all over the world got together and summoned up the monsters that sunk our world? Well, I was part of another kind of cult.”
“What kind was that?” I ask, trying to decide if I'm upside down or right side up as we descend deeper into the sunken stone kingdom of the Elder Gods.
“The kind that tried to stop this awful shit from happening in the first place.”
“You didn't do a very good job.”
Chef stops and glares at me for a long, uncomfortable moment. I'm pretty sure he's about to swing one of his big ass stingers at me when he cracks a wide smile and belly laughs so lound it echos down the twisted corridor.
“No, white boy, we sure didn't, did we?”
Strange Sayings
Pontifications of one Kevin Strange, cult film director come Hardcore-Bizarro author.
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