Eric Brown: The Kraken Rises

Get up! a voice in the back of his head ordered him to keep moving.

As Andrews made to stand up, a series of horrifying guttural snarls reached his ears. These were accompanied by the ominous sound of shuffling footsteps. His shadows had caught up to him. They were close. So very close.

There in the darkness, Andrews’ pursuers surrounded him, collapsing on top of him in a messy heap, hissing and biting, covering him in sickly salivate, Andrews did something then he hadn’t done since he was a very young child – he pissed his pants. In seconds, a warm stream of urine left his urethra, the liquid seeping through the fabric of his pants and spilling over the floor around him.

Up ahead, the man and woman he had escorted to safety listened as he screamed, crying out as the lumbering mass of inhuman things – the vile spectres of men and women he had been assigned to protect – ate him alive. Wrenching limbs free and biting off portions of flesh to dine on, the horde of monsters mercilessly eviscerated the young man. Andrews was a week shy of his twenty-third birthday.