Дэвид Уоллес - Island of Fog and Death

The slender figure of the Servator faded away, as did the armchair Peri was sitting in. The white fog and white light faded to black and she felt growing pressure round her abdomen and her limbs. Black tentacles edged with sharp bladed spines began to materialise, and Peri began to scream as the returning agony blazed through her.

The pain that ripped through Peri was excruciating, all but indescribable. The creature’s black tentacles were wrapped around her neck, her abdomen and her leg. The knife-blade spines were digging deeper into her flesh as its muscles contracted and wrenched at her. She could feel air leaking from punctured lungs, blood flooding from ruptured arteries and her own screams fade into nothing as her larynx collapsed. There was a snapping sound and she could no longer feel the agony below her waist. Another snap and for a fraction of a second she glimpsed her torso being carried away into the darkness towards the creature’s mouth before, mercifully, blackness took her.

The others watched, horrified, as Peri came apart and the monster pulled the pieces back behind the iron doors.

“Ooh!” Tash was audible in each of their heads. “Another one down! Wonder who’s going to be next, eh, Gus? So come on, opposable thumbs isn’t much to ask for, now, is it?”

The big dog sat with its head cocked to one side, and Troy could have sworn it was smiling. With a yell of outrage, he levelled his assault rifle at it and squeezed the trigger. The bullets passed through leaving the dog unharmed. “Now that might have made you feel a little better,” said Tash inside his mind, “But it really didn’t do anything for me. And the door’s about to open really wide. What should we do, eh, Gus?”

Gus fiddled with the ring on his finger, and bowed his head.

“That’s it!” yelled the dog into their heads. “I can feel it working!”

All around the dog, tiny spheres of energy hovered, sparked, repelled and attracted each other in a random dance. The randomness of the dance rapidly diminished. Tiny energy packets, attracting each other, were forming larger parcels, and these in turn were overcoming repulsive forces to grow, dance more slowly, and merge into something greater. The pungent smell of ozone filled the cave. A low rumble became audible and the ground trembled. There was a sudden sharp rise in pitch, culminating in an unnatural scream, and the luminescent blobs of energy abruptly coalesced into a large glowing sphere, which blew outwards with a loud crack. The dog was gone. In the centre of a blackened patch staining the cave floor, there stood a human figure.

“Gus! This is fantastic!” Tash’s voice was audible now, as well as inside their heads, and the four humans blinked, disoriented and astonished. “Wow! Look at me! I’m a girl!”

Steve, Troy and Amanda gaped. The figure was a woman, naked but for a dog collar, skin the colour of olives, her small breasts tipped by brown areolae and nipples, dark-eyed, her black hair standing out from her head and crackling with static.

Amanda hesitantly whispered, “Peri? You changed Tash into Peri ?”

Gus was shocked. He muttered, “It wasn’t me – really, it wasn’t.”

“Yah!” the figure replied excitedly. “It’s me! Tash! Hey Gus, look what I can do!”

The woman reached up to grasp the dog collar, which she unclipped and dramatically tossed onto the ground at Gus’s feet.

“See? Opposable thumbs, Gus, opposable thumbs! Fuck you and fuck your magic collar! Now you know why nobody else was ever dumb enough to give me opposable thumbs! I’ll be going soon, Gus, but before I do, just let me…” She ran her hands over the skin of her new body, and gave a whimper as they brushed over her nipples.

“Ooh, Amanda, how do you manage to leave your tits alone? Boys, you don’t know what you’re missing! This is amazing! I could do this all day. In fact, I think I will!” She tugged on her nipples, giving them a squeeze and rolling them in her fingers. “Ooh, yes, yes, yes! What other erogenous zones do we have…?”

Suddenly a voice crashed like thunder into each of their minds: “TAKE YOUR STINKING PAWS OFF ME, YOU DAMNED DIRTY DOG!”

Tash guiltily dropped her hands to her sides, and looked even more dumbfounded than the others. “Peri?” she said, aloud, hesitantly.

“Yes, Peri,” she replied to herself. Or more correctly, Peri replied to Tash. She looked around. “If anyone’s confused right now, let me just say, me too!”

Her eye fell on the dog collar at Gus’s feet, and she realised that she knew what the Servator’s hints had meant. She really did have what she needed.

The iron door creaked as something pushed from the other side. “Okay,” said Peri. “I guess it’s finished eating me, and it’s looking for dessert, so I vote we take care of business. I want a flash-bang in that door to distract it, Troy. Stand by with another one, just in case. Gus – you’ve got the controller for the collar, right? Get ready to shape something small and helpless.”

“But how…” began Amanda.

Peri smiled an enigmatic smile, and replied, “ How is unimportant. Stand by the door, we go on a three count, right?”

Peri closed her eyes, and synchronised herself with her own heartbeat. She reached out, feeling with her mind for the faint ribbon of time streaming by. Ah! There it was. She gently closed her mind around it, like a fist, letting it slip through her fingers.

“Three,” she said.

She tightened her mind’s grip on the ribbon, slowing it just a little, becoming accustomed to the force it exerted, before squeezing a little harder, slowing time a little more relative to her pulse.

“Two.”

She picked up the dog collar. From the way Gus’s eyes tried to follow her movement – slowly – she realised her motion had been a blur to him. She grabbed time’s ribbon and clamped down with her mind, hard.

“One.”

It seemed to take a very long time for the iron door to start moving, and Troy’s flash-bang to float slowly through the gap. She closed her eyes and clamped her hands over her ears, and waited for the detonation. When she felt the rumble, she launched herself in through the door, and opened her eyes.

Peri realised that she could see in the dark this time. A large shape was retreating into the depths of the cave, and she threw herself into the middle of the mass of tentacles with the dog collar in one hand. The creature was moving absurdly slowly, or rather, she corrected herself, it was moving quickly but she was moving unbelievably fast. She saw movement in her peripheral vision, and ducked under one swinging tentacle and hurdled over another. She seized a third in one hand, and deftly slipped the collar over its end and tried to push it along its length. The collar snagged on the first spine it came to, and as Peri tried to force it over, something – yet another tentacle – crashed into her back and sent her flying across the cave and into the rusty iron wall. She cried out with pain as spines punctured her back and then was silenced as all the air whooshed out of her with the impact against the cave wall. She distinctly heard several ribs break. She sagged, gasping for breath, and felt blood running across her skin from multiple lacerations. Another dark shape was flying towards her face – another tentacle. She tucked her limbs in, wincing with the pain, and rolled across the cave floor out of the way. She felt the spines whip through her hair and scratch the top of her head as she scrambled past the creature’s groping tentacles. She looked up, in time to see something catch the light as it flew towards the back of the cave – the collar had flown off.