Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
Mermaid Cull
Monday, October 19th, 2009
‘You cheating bastards! Open the bloody gate now!’
Erickson was standing in the back of his jeep, yelling up at the castle walls through a megaphone. Five mermaid carcasses swung from a purpose-built rail, hung by fat iron hooks through their tail-ends.
Those time-crazy sumbitches holed up in their fortress did not say anything, and made no move to open the enormous gates. He was mad now, madder than a cut snake dipped in warm piss.
‘I took out your mermaids!’ he yelled, the megaphone squealing with distortion. ‘If you folks mean to cheat me on the bounty money, I will bring you pain. Oh yes.’
Someone shot an arrow at him, and with a curse that would have made a sergeant-major crap his dacks, Erickson threw down the megaphone.
‘Enough talk,’ he said, and got behind the minigun, mounted on a swivel behind his seat. He’d stripped it from a junked copter, back when time started to get whacky.
He opened up, and the spinning barrels spat lead kisses across the top of the palisade, biting out chunks of rock and punching right through the stone in one or two places. He took out the offending archer, and a few others who didn’t duck in time.
Erickson gritted his teeth and painted the gates in a figure eight of howling bullets, splitting the wood in dozens of places. The clanging of bullets as they ricocheted against the portcullis showed that he was wasting ammo, and there was no getting through that gate.
Not without a lot more firepower.
‘I’ll get you mongrels!’ he said, no megaphone this time but the shaking of his fist passed the message through loud and clear. He swung forward into the driver’s seat, just in time to see the large arm of a trebuchet swinging up above the castle walls, releasing a chunk of some building that flew at him with uncanny accuracy.
Thankful he’d left the motor running, Erickson jammed the old jeep into gear and floored it, fishtailing through the mud as the enormous block of stone crashed into the spot he’d just been.
A second catapault launched another load of medieval fire-power, and it was only Erickson’s experience as a rally-car driver and an ex-Blackwater operative that saved his arse. Yanking up the hand-brake and spinning the wheel, he launched into a power-slide, narrowly missing a peat-digger’s shack. It exploded into a fountain of shit and stone.
‘I’ll be back for you lot,’ Erickson growled. He thumbed a cassette into the tape-player, and blasted the lonely moors with his AC/DC mix-tape, turned up as loud as it could go. ‘And when I come back, I’m gonna ruin your shit.’
If Ancient Texts are Anything to Go By
Friday, October 16th, 2009
The Black Goat of the Woods, Shub-Niggurath, pranced obscenely through the red-litten clearing, its worshippers copulating frenziedly beneath its myriad udders. Soon, they would seize their obsidian knives and begin to slash at one another in an ecstacy of sanguinary lust. Shub-Niggurath would feast, but would take the best bits home for its Thousand Young. Especially its favorite, Shubbie the 422nd.
The Vermilion Gopher of the Plains, Aug’-Durlett, popped menacingly from one of its myriad holes. A nitid effluent of its malevolence poured forth, blotting out the sun. Traffic on I-70 came to a halt, and there was much rending of metal and spilling of entrails. Aug’-Durlett’s 230 Wives and 1973 Young would eat well tonight in yellow-litten Yah-Squireel.
Hamstur the Unspeakable, Tawny Gerbil of Doom, raced disturbingly upon the shrieking Wheel of Abomination. The slumber of sensitive souls was disrupted across the globe by a myriad ear-piercing squeaks, and even the mighty wizard Fak-bel Knaplung vainly pressed its withered hands to its shockingly hairy organs of audition.
The Ebon Cricket of the Sinister Bamboo Palace, Shrikk the Inaudible, played upon its shockingly malformed limbs a paean of charnel desecration and soul-destroying horror. Dogs throughout east Asia howled in anguish, annoying the just and unjust alike. Yabu Dabi-Tzhoo, Lord of Kay-Na’ein, lept through a foul depiction in stained glass of the Vivisection of the Myriad, and vanished from mortal ken, leaving behind an appalling stench.
Myriads flooded the streets as the Sigil of Unpleasantness, alluded to in the Pleistocene Upchuktic Manuscript, fulminated and was not consumed in the sky above Lichtenstein. Interminable was the wailing and many were the unattractive facial expressions manifested on the green-litten visages of the unhappy Lichtensteiners, for they could feel the fat profits from the tourist trade sublimating from their wallets, retail establishments, and entertainment facilities in the abhorrent effulgence discharged by the Lime-Green Sign.
Much was the inadvertent discharge of bodily fluids and other organic substances as the myriad Calamari of Chaos floated to the surface of the Pacific Ocean, broadcasting their unhallowed and vile thoughts to all within line-of-sight and, after nightfall, those reachable by reflection from the Heaviside layer.
As the human race, insignificant pustule on the acne-scarred backside of Planet Dirt, wailed, moaned, and perished, the Great Old Ones, including Retrievotep, He Who Inexorably Returns, and Nemah-Toad, She Who Burrows Within, began to feed.
And short-lived but heartfelt was the lamentation engendered therefrom.
End