Michael Langlois - Bad Radio

I saw the moment of impact very clearly. Piotr didn’t jolt or rock back. There was no bloody wound. Instead, I saw the crushed bullet fragments drop to the ground between his feet. A thin, light-gray smoke hovered at his breast, and then seemed to uncurl and slide into his body out of sight.

All eyes snapped to the ridgeline while the report was still echoing around the quarry, and Piotr smiled his confident, chilling smile.

“Abraham!” shouted Piotr from the quarry. His voice was deep and smooth and carried easily, barely diminished by the wind and distance. “While I applaud the gesture, you know that’s not how this ends. An impersonal bullet fired by someone else? Not very satisfying, is it?”

The overpowering urge to slam my baton into Piotr’s skull returned, but I fought it down before I lost control and charged down the hill. He was taunting me, trying to goad me into attacking him. If I gave in, Anne and Chuck would be down the hill right behind me, and we’d all be torn apart by Piotr’s bags.

Five minutes ago, each of us had been prepared to make that sacrifice. But after seeing that shotgun slug drop harmlessly at Piotr’s feet? Now it seemed futile.

Self-control won out and I regained my composure. Gravel trickled down the face of the hill where I had kicked it loose by taking two or three involuntary steps.

Piotr’s smile slipped as he saw me master myself. His voice sounded angry now, less smug. “I’ve waited all this time for you to be ready, prepared every step of your journey-” Now it was his turn to fight for calm. “That’s fine. It won’t be long now. We’re drawn together by a higher purpose, you and I. Trust in that. Our time is coming. You just need another push.”

All but one of his guards had entered the van, taking the rejected prisoners with them. Piotr pointed at the one that remained by the water, and it turned to look at him. Some unseen communication passed between them for the briefest of moments, and then Piotr smiled at me and jumped into the van and slammed the door.

The last guard reached down and effortlessly picked up two of the dozen or more captives at his feet. He dangled them by their upper arms over the dark water of the quarry lake.

I drew my baton and broke into a run. Maybe I didn’t know how kill Piotr just yet, but that didn’t mean I had to stand by while his pet bag murdered all those captives.

The guard slammed the first two men together. Bones cracked audibly under the impact, and then there was a splash as he let them drop into the water. The entire surface of the lake shuddered.

Instinct slowed me as the entire surface of the lake began to heave, slopping water over the edge of the quarry and over the feet of the bag standing there.

The van’s engine roared to life.

The bag spread his arms wide and threw his head back as the surface of the lake exploded.

I heard but didn’t see the van leave, as my eyes were fixed in horror on the thing that was emerging from the churning water.

A fleshy mass as large around as a hundred-year-old oak tree heaved skyward out of the lake. Water and wriggling things sluiced down its body in a hissing, plopping cascade as it reached a height of fifty feet or more.

Initially it appeared to be a thick column which tapered to a blunt point that swayed slowly back and forth in the air high above us. Its skin was rubbery, black, and warty in long strips and patches. In those sections hung drooping sacks, also black, but occasionally shading to gray as they stretched tight under internal pressure. Some of the sacks had burst and hung limp and ragged.

Can something be so horrifyingly wrong and alien that it was hard for the eye to make sense of its lines and features, but at the same time seem completely familiar? A feeling of instant recognition hit me, like glimpsing a friend just as he turns a corner, mixed with stunned confusion as I tried to understand what I was seeing. It was like the instinctive part of me knew exactly what I was looking at, even if the rest of me didn’t.

As I watched, the tip drooped down towards the captives gathered there at the edge of the quarry, pointing like a vast, grotesque finger.

It loomed closer to the knot of men who had been selected as good candidates, and who were on the ground, shouting and struggling against the plastic zip ties that bound their wrists and ankles.

The tip hovered a few feet from the closest man and then in a grotesque spasm, split open into five equal wedges, peeling back a third of its length and revealing corpse-like purplish maroon flesh on the inside, which was studded with thousands of long, thin backwards-pointing teeth.

Men screamed as the smell of rotting meat and oily musk rolled over them, and the wedges began to flex and writhe out of sync with each other. Now that it was fully revealed to me, a second sense of familiarity hit me, this time originating with my own experience. The head resembled one of the large worms that every bag carried in its belly, at least as far as the tentacles went, but on a gargantuan scale.

Only a few seconds had passed since the thing had surfaced. All of the tentacle tips drifted towards one of the helpless men, triggering another round of hoarse screaming, which snapped me out of my stupor.

I bolted forward and put myself between the man and the creature. Don’t ask me why I thought that would be a good plan, it just felt right. I stood my ground with the five thick tentacle tips pointing directly at my face.

They halted and hung in the air, hesitating for long seconds before each of the tentacles resumed their independent questing. I had hoped that the creature would react to me in the same way that the smaller one had done when attacking Leon, and it looked like I was right. I didn’t care to dwell on why that was. It turned from me and fixated on another man, one several feet to my right.

Since it had worked once before, I stepped quickly to the side to place myself once more between the monster and its victim.

Again it hesitated, then darted around me to try to get at the man. I reached down and yanked him away by the arm, sending him tumbling into several other captives. The tips of the massive tentacles dug shallow furrows in the stony ground next to me as the Mother struck where he had been. It jerked back, rearing high into the air.

Enraged, the tentacles snapped open as wide as they could go, revealing a gaping maw at the juncture where they grew out from the creature’s body. An enormous, awful bellow erupted from the creature, making the bruised-looking inner flesh around the maw vibrate and ripple and the water running down its sides stand up in shockwave patterns.

The sound was vast and deafening, but it wasn’t the volume that was so fearful, but the deep, resonant frequency. The vast majority of the sound must have been below the threshold of human hearing, but it could be felt as a punishing wave of pulsing vibration. The gravel around my feet danced and jittered under the assault.

The mouths of everyone around me were open, screaming into the maelstrom with their hands clapped over their ears and the skin on their faces and arms rippling.

I might have been screaming, too, I don’t know. All of the glass windows in the cars became silver dust trembling in the air, framed by rounded squares of painted metal.

Something pinwheeled into my peripheral vision, and I turned. I saw a crumpled piece of sheet metal skid across the ground, soundless against the endless onslaught, and recognized it as the remains of a folding bus door. One of the huge armored bags erupted from the bus.

His arms were flung wide, fingers splayed rigidly out, and his head was tilted back, pointing his face at the sky. His throat was stretched and swollen, with the skin bunching into purpling fleshy bands.