Scary Monsters

Yet another flash fiction for Chuck over at Terrible Minds. I thought, everyone’s is gonna try and invent a scary monster. I don’t think I can do that…so then I thought, nah on second thought I’ll wait to the end…      

      “It was on us in a flash…we never stood a chance. It moved like lightning; we weren’t expecting much trouble. We never even saw it coming. We went in through the sewers, long after night had fallen. Covert infiltration, standard operating procedure…we should’ve been better prepared. It was like lightning, a sudden flash of jet black fur. It slammed its claws into Jenkins and Pereira, we only realised what happened when we heard their gurgling, they were choking on their own blood…so fast. Like lightning. It growled as we turned with a deep, terrifying thunder.”

            “There were twelve of us. It was like a game to the beast. It had been born to kill. The perfect predator. It moved like it was made of water, fluid and elastic. Fangs the length of your frakkin arm…we managed to find an access tunnel. Only three of us made it inside.”        

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The three survivors huddled together in the narrow passage carved from the walls of that vast, flood-lit chamber. The light cast their shadows long in the tunnel behind them. It was a dead end, and the beast was lurking, somewhere beyond their only exit. They were trapped, barely thirty paces from the still twitching remains of their comrades.

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“We’re never gonna to make it, man…we’re never gonna frakkin make it!” Oswald, always the coward; he was on the verge of breaking down completely. Oswald the hysterical, jabbering mess. We were going to have to make a break for it. I grabbed Quade, dragged him towards the entrance. The beast was still out there, its deeply rumbling call a constant reminder that it need only wait, the crunch of bones as it feasted a divination of our own eventual fate.”

“I whispered my plan to Quade as we looked out the tunnel’s mouth, “Oswald is going to flip out soon man…but we can survive. Use him as a distraction, run in separate directions. Try to find the pipe down to the sewers…” We glanced up at him, shaking in the corner, muttering to himself. Could the monster hear him? Was that why it waited? He looked up, caught Quade and I watching him. He fixed his already dead eyes on me, “Game over man. Game over…” Quade took his arms. Me, I took his legs. “It’s going to be alright Os,” I told him, trying to stay calm. Trying to be believable. He must’ve sensed the tension in the air, the understanding we had reached. It was like he knew what we were going to do. His screams echoed out of the tunnel, silencing the creature outside. We could see its face now, eyes emerald green as it spotted us, half of…someone hanging from its jaws. Like scimitars they were, those teeth, bright red and wet with blood. It saw Os struggling, saw him break out from our grasp. He ran straight out into the room.”

“Quade and I split up, hugging the walls. Quade was next…I just got lucky. It wanted him, not Os in his delirium…then, it happened. I don’t know what it was…”

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“Mr Tibbles, what have you done?” She walks into the room, voice filled with disgust as she looks down at the bloodbath, “You are a very naughty cat, aren’t you Mr Tibbles?” She bends down, catches sight of a mouse scurrying along the skirting board. She shrieks, startling the guilty looking cat, exposed in his depraved sport. She picks him up, still scolding, looking for the dustpan and broom.

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“Whatever it was, it saved me sir.” The mouse gave his debriefing slowly, remembering still fresh horrors. “But the others…why couldn’t they be saved? Why didn’t it arrive sooner?”

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The girl sets her traps, steel-springed death awaiting their victim. The mice will never return. They will remember. The blood-stains will never quite wash out of the linoleum floor.

Anyway, so then I thought, who says the story needs to be from a human’s point of view? And then I thought, who’s to say WHAT a monster is? One man’s hero is another’s monster etc…