The Starving Beast

This is the next chapter in The ShambElla Saga, and things are getting serious. Table of contents:

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The Starving Beast

Ella was about five goons down the ladder when the earth shook and a fissure opened beside the smiling rock.

Colt grabbed Siris and jumped back. The bottom goon climbed up and hugged Ella tighter to the ladder so she wouldn’t be thrown off.

Sam felt the bridge buckle beneath him. He crouched down with the rifle to his chest. One side of the bridge heaved up and tore the old rusty rails apart, but the bridge held.

When the world stopped shaking, he cautiously rose to peek over the rail.

What he saw climbing out of the newly created abyss was a creature unlike any he’d ever seen.

His mind was not equipped to perceive it.

The angles were all wrong. Its form would not stay fixed.

The only comprehensible feature was a vast maw of sharp teeth rapidly gyrating around each other, but even this didn’t make sense.

The best way he could describe it would be to say that it was like a glitch with a mouth, a mistake, an amalgamation of random pieces that don’t fit struggling to hold themselves together around a vast emptiness; just a stomach inside a blob with a series of buzzsaws rotating around inside a sucker waiting to masticate whatever was stupid enough to stand before it.

He thought: insatiable hunger incarnate.

It was coming for Ella.

He fired round after round right down the gullet, but it did not slow or even seem to affect the monster at all.

The goon holding Ella patted her on the shoulder and pointed its finger to the sky.

Climb!

As she scrambled up the goon fell into a backward dive into the Beast’s mouth.

This arrested its momentum. It stopped, coughing and choking, and this gave Ella time to clamber over the rail. The other five goons, one by one, dived backwards to join their fellow.

The Beast raged, thrashing against the sides of the pit, unleashing what sounded like a chorus of screams, some human, some animal, some indescribable screeches that pierced not just the ear but the mind.

The Beast rose again, but far slower. It did not climb, but oozed over the side of the opening, then laid twisting and turning, unleashing its choked screams as it spit out random bones.

Colt cautioned Siris to stay back, and jumped to the aid of its compatriots, submerging itself into the gooey glitch rather than the mouth. This increased the fury of the Beast’s howls.

“Ella!” Sam yelled over the din, “Into the EYEGOONS! Now!”

Hands shaking, Ella pulled out the device. The screen was already lit, and the minute she laid eyes on it, she was thrust from one chaotic scene into another.

To Sam’s great dismay, she disappeared, while the EYEGOONS remained behind, falling the few inches from where she was crouched to land in the dirt.

“Ella!” he yelled, but she was gone.

On the ground, the random bones the Beast spit out were reconstituting themselves. As each goon reformed, it jumped back into the Beast’s mouth to choke the monster all over again. The gooey glitch writhed in agony, and Sam could see Colt’s telltale blue shirt resurface at different points in the mess before diving back in.

If a skull could have a look of grim determination, Sam was sure Colt was staring holes into the freak who kept trying, and failing, to eat his friends.

The Beast crashed into the trees, trying desperately to escape the goons, but only succeeded in taking them with it.

Sam picked up and pocketed the EYEGOONS, then yelled down at Siris: “Stay there, buddy! I’ll find a way down!”

Siris, terrified by the Beast, but also angry, yelled back: “I won’t run, Sam! I won’t run! We gotta save ‘em!”

Sam hoped they could.

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