Michael Langlois - Bad Radio

Five black tentacles emerged from his gaping mouth, spread outward across his face: across cheeks, eyes, and forehead, and at the center, a gaping, trumpeting hole occupying the same space as the mouth it was emerging from. The flesh of this maw also trembled, but any sound it may have made was lost in the din.

As if an answer was all that was sought, the unimaginable sound cut off like a switch. I pulled my hands away from my head as I realized that I had been clutching my ears like everyone else, and was surprised to see that there was no blood on them.

Even so, the new silence roared in my ears and things still seemed soundless to me. My body felt numb and buzzy, like I had just stepped off of a rollercoaster, and I could feel my hair settle back onto my head.

Everyone but me was on the ground, still curled up and clutching their ears, including Chuck and Anne. The Mother was no longer screaming, having summoned her offspring, but she was still enraged at my interference. The tentacles blurred into motion like cracking whips and snatched a man off the ground. She shoved him into her mouth with inward curling tentacles and the toothed walls convulsed on him. And then he was gone.

The guard ran ponderously towards me. The tentacles protruding from his mouth did not retreat back inside, but instead flailed at the air, grasping and twisting in my direction.

There was no time to draw my pistol, even had I wanted to do so. I had only my steel baton and my anger, but that was enough for me.

I swung downward in a short, vicious arc intended to pulp the guard’s head, but he jerked aside and my baton ended up coming down on his shoulder. The impact was solid. I felt it all the way up my arm, but it didn’t seem to faze him.

A toothed tentacle raked across my face like a wet rubber strap with broken glass embedded in it, and a ham fist drove into my chest like a sledgehammer.

I don’t recall crossing the space between the guard and the parked car I slammed into. One second I was upright, and the next I was sitting on my ass against the crushed door of a Honda.

By the time my eyes focused, he was nearly on top of me again, so I reached one hand up over my head and groped until I found the side mirror. I snapped it off of the car just in time to smash it into his face, glass and plastic shards exploding outward from the impact. The guard lurched back, both hands instinctively coming up, only to get tangled in the thrashing, bloody tentacles coming out of his face.

I stumbled away from the car while trying to figure out if the pain in my ribcage meant splintered bone fragments were already shredding my lungs, or if I was just bruised to hell and back, when it dawned on me that the first guard by the lake wasn’t bashing my skull in.

A quick look around revealed why. The first guard was too busy holding a captive over his head to be worried about beating me into hamburger. The Mother had the tip of each tentacle holding the captive’s head steady, as a maggot-filled tube joined her mouth with his. It spasmed as a long shadow passed through it into the man, distending his throat briefly.

I looked away in revulsion and discovered something else. Anne and Chuck were gone.

Fear touched me as I felt events wheeling out of control. Piotr had driven off, waving and smiling, and I had no idea where he went. The thing that I had come to the quarry to kill had turned out to be a building-sized monster that could swallow me whole.

Not to mention that the biggest bag I had ever seen was trying to beat me to death, and doing a pretty good job of it. And to top things off, my friends were missing and could be in serious trouble.

I used to be good at this. When my squad was in trouble it was my job to instantly come up with a plan that was clear and simple and effective. And I always did. It was my gift the way that Henry soaked up knowledge and the way Patrick could sense the supernatural. It was why I was the leader, even though I was a good deal younger than everyone else.

But time and events had changed all of that. Now rage clouded my mind when I needed it most. That was just one more victory that Piotr had over me, one more weakness for him to exploit. If I let him. If you were to ask my father, he would tell you that I was the most intractable, unreasonable, pig-headed son of a bitch he’d ever met. And he’d say it with pride. I dug in and forced the world into focus.

My top priority was finding Anne and Chuck, but I needed to be alive for that. This fight had to end. The bag trying to kill me had recovered from being force-fed a car mirror and was heading towards me again.

I held my ground while it bore down on me and hit it at the last second with an uppercut to the jaw as hard as I could. I kept the baton in my fist as I swung, giving me the advantage of the old “roll of quarters” effect.

My fist connected just underneath the bag’s chin with enough force to flip over a car. The impact drove his teeth clean through the extended tentacles and shattered his jaw.

Black blood erupted from the bag’s mouth as it went rigid with shock. I could see its throat bulge and warp as the worm thrashed and twisted in pain.

It was stunned and it was close to me. Game over. I took the baton in both hands, wound up, and swung for the fences with everything I had. The headless corpse fell to the ground.

Nearby, a diesel engine roared to life. The prison bus lurched forward with a painful grinding of gears. Through the windshield I could see an insanely grinning Chuck behind the wheel. Anne stood right next to him, white-knuckled and swaying as she clutched the safety bar next to him. They were alive. The tightness in my chest that I hadn’t been aware of relaxed and let me breathe.

The bus missed the group of captives on the ground by inches as Chuck swerved closer to the edge of the quarry in order to avoid them.

The armored bag watched the bus bear down on it, unable or unwilling to drop the captive he was holding over his head.

There was a sickening thud as the bag disappeared under the bumper, only to encounter the forty-two-inch-tall, foot-wide bus tire coming up behind it. The captive flew over the hood and smashed into the windshield, caving it in.

The impact tore the pale tube out of his throat. That must have been fairly painful for the Mother as well, as she jerked up and back, spilling clear mucus swimming with tiny worms from the torn off end of the tube.

As soon as the bus made contact with the bag, Chuck locked up the brakes, throwing up a cloud of white dust and slamming the bus to a halt between the Mother and the captives. Trapped between the locked wheel of an eighteen-ton bus and the stony ground of the quarry, the bag simply peeled apart like rotten fruit.

Enraged, the Mother wrapped one massive tentacle across the front of the bus, crushing it. The sounds of shattering glass accompanied the squeal of tires as the Mother began to drag the entire bus into the lake.

I raced for the bus as it slid towards the water. The front wheels slipped off of the quarry and the bus chassis dropped onto the ground, scraping and grinding on the rocky ledge.

I arrived just as the back of the bus rose up over my head. The rear emergency door popped open and Anne looked out at me, clutching the bottom edge of the door as the floor of the bus tilted towards the sky.

She held my gaze as she rose into the air. Seconds later, the nose hit the water with a booming splash. The entire bus plunged vertically into the lake.

I dove into the water as the rear of the bus slipped out of sight. Faint light filtered down past the surface of the cold water, just enough to paint everything with wavering ripples of silver and shadow.