Page 101 of A Shade Too Far
Human bones were scattered carelessly in the dirt: a tangle of femurs here, a pyramid of rib cages over there, a scalp with some hair close enough to kick. They crunched underfoot, the noise only muffled by the demon’s slurping as it sucked down another piece of its poor victim.
“The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie,” I murmured, reciting another passage from “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” while tracking the maggot scouts’ progress. “Where’s this eyeball?”
“Not sure.”
A quivering ball of maggots rolled close to Naveen’s foot and he knocked them away with his staff. They ricocheted into the wall with a wet splat, turning into the same translucent slime that the human arm had been coated in. Oh, gross.
The demon stilled, the air charging with a wild electricity that lifted the tiny hairs on my body.
I swallowed and raised my scythe.
Naveen readied his weapon.
The slug demon swelled, black lines mottling over its body, and the top of its head flipped open, revealing an enormous reflective Cyclops’s eye, which swiveled toward us.
We had our target. Now to get it.
The maggots rose like a cresting wave, hanging suspended in midair for a hot second, then exploded outward.
We were engulfed. The scouts leeched on to me with tiny stinging suckers, secreting a sticky slime that made it difficult to move. No matter how many I knocked off, more took their places.
The bones underfoot turned slimy and slippery, making each step treacherous. I was terrified that if I fell, I’d be wrapped in slime like a fly in a spider’s web and never get up.
My mouth was tightly closed, my eyes barely open enough to see. I felt like I was in a recreation of the locust plague from Pharaoh’s time, except not as friendly.
Where’s your Moses now, eh?
A knot of maggots wriggled against my scalp. I shuddered, smothering a scream and frantically brushing the sentient fat-bots off. A handful climbed over my shoes, attempting to glue my feet to the floor with their slimy secretion.
I lifted my legs high, prancing like a show horse, and skidded on the slime underfoot. Barely keeping my balance, I smacked the scythe against my leg to knock more maggots off as I fought another onslaught of tiny foes, my arms and shoulders aching. “Naveen!”
“Bit busy,” came the strained answer.
Inch by hard-won inch, I slid over tiny corpses, making my way forward to the main demon. While Naveen was silent, the intermittent flashes of his staff slicing through the air assured me he was still in fighting form.
At long last, I finished the maggots off and hurried to help Naveen with the demon, the two of us attacking it in tandem.
My chest heaving and my calves screaming from standing on tiptoe, I hacked off one of the demon’s arms, tossing the bloody chunk on the ground.
The demon whacked Naveen with its other arm, sending the man staggering.
In retaliation, I tore out a hefty piece from its upper half, and it tumbled over.
Naveen stabbed his staff through its middle, and while the demon convulsed, he worked his light staff like a lever to pry the eye out for Chester.
Finally, the slug demon fell still, but my relief was short-lived, because the second Naveen had extracted the foot-long eye, the cavern rumbled, bits of the ceiling crumbling to the ground.
The ground roiled and bucked, flinging both of us into a wall.
“Fuck!” Naveen rubbed his shoulder, his fallen staff zipping back into his hand like Thor’s hammer. “That’s it.” He slammed the staff into a jagged crack.
Light shot out…
And the cavern exploded, expelling us back into the basement of Chester’s store. My arm hung at a funny angle, my puffy eyes stung, and bits of rock were matted in my hair.
“What. The. Fuck!” I cradled my poor shoulder, wishing I could telekinetically make Naveen’s head explode.
“You’re not dead. You’re welcome.” Naveen leaned on his light staff like a crutch, his ankle twisted at an angle that was painful to behold.
