The Happy Snerd Chap. 2 (Patreon)

The thing flowed across the floor with alien grace. Like two bears fused by a hateful, alien god. Long and stout, eight stumpy legs ending in sharp claws and a chubby, almost fluffy exterior. Fatty, perhaps, the greasy filling restrained by a straining, leathery exterior. A short, circular maw was fitted like a pipe to the front of the thing and filled with stout, triangular teeth. No eyes. No visible ears. No visible neck. The fatty flesh bulged out around the ‘head’ of the creature like a hood made of pillows. 

Like a caterpillar made of hate. Mortimer thought. Then, because habit is a terrible thing, he mentally added- I am strong and capable of handling anything that comes my way. I believe in myself and my abilities.

Then common sense kicked in, and fear started etching its way into his bones.

From the way its maw was sweeping around, it was hunting. Mortimer didn’t think he could outrun it. He didn’t even know where he could run to. It was about the height of a bear at the shoulder. Twice that wide. He didn’t know where a vital spot might be. Didn’t matter. Can’t run, can’t hide, must fight.

Mort knew he didn’t have a fighter's heart. He would lead a peaceful life, for choice. But the circumstances didn’t give a damn about what he wanted. He looked around, hoping for a weapon he could use. He found a small rock nearby. He threw it hard and missed. The beast didn’t even glance over. It just kept swinging that tube of teeth, getting closer.

Mortimer glared at the shadows, trying to spot something he could use. He reached down and grabbed a long stick, feeling cold iron. Rebar, ridged, about the diameter of his pinky. There was a pile of them. Could he throw it? He weighed it in his hands. The ends were blunt, the bar was fairly heavy, and it was six feet long. So, no. 

He quickly looked around for a corner he could use, or rubble, or anything to tip the field in his favor. Those eight clawed legs just seemed to crawl over everything. There might be something here he could use, but he didn’t know what it was. And now the beast was on him, and there was no more time. 

Four legs on each side. Bet this thing can’t turn fast. He jolted into motion, making for a clear spot to his right. He didn’t get the timing quite right, but it was good enough. The many legged thing rushed past him before slamming to a halt where he had been standing before. And Mortimer? He screamed like a furious ape, smashing down with his iron rod. 

The iron rod crashed down onto the back of the beast’s head. Cushioned or not, there should be a brain in there, or a spine. See a monster, smash the head. Simple. 

The iron rod bit down into the flesh, sank into the bulging sacks around the mouthpiece and hit… nothing. Whatever was inside wasn’t bone. The flesh rippled and shook, but nothing within those flabby cushions of flesh shattered.

The beast didn’t scream. The only sound was the skittering of its long claws on the bitter cold concrete. The panting of Mortimer’s breath. The scuffle of Walmart-grade loafers and the rasp of cheap khakis as he scrambled to keep to the side of the monster. 

He was wrong about the beast being unable to turn quickly. The first two pairs of legs lifted off the ground as the last two pivoted. Brutal claws clapped down at his face, another pair coming for his gut. Mortimer fell back, swinging wildly with the rebar, batting the claws away. The monster tried to slam down, dropping its bulk on top of him. It missed, and got a whack in the face with the rebar for its trouble.

It missed. I didn’t dodge, it just missed. How? I’m right in front of it.

The thoughts danced at the fringes of his mind, but panic was speaking most loudly. Panic and fury. He whacked at the fleshy thing again, and again, constantly trying to move to its flank. Something was glowing in the monster now, a sickly green-yellow color splashed against the grays and blacks of this nightmare place.

The horror raised up again, and the furious ape in Mortimer went for a stab. It did nothing, the tip of the rod sinking into the beast like a finger into a fat man’s belly button. The beast didn’t like being poked. It swung its claws out again, like they wanted to shred him before eating him. It wasn’t horribly fast, but there was an inevitability to the blows. The weight riding on them. The promise of broken bones jutting out of torn skin. 

Mortimer bolted to the side again, but he screwed up pulling back the rebar. It dragged against the soft flesh, tugging at it. The beast fell forward, thick claws landing with a thud and a crack against the concrete. Mortimer kept backing off, the metal rod twisting and dragging at the straining skin of the monster. 

Something ripped. There was a sudden smell of ammonia, of salt and sulfur. Mortimer backed away faster and faster. Fluids were pouring out of the creature, awful liquids pooling on the floor and reeking. Seeping into the concrete. Now there was a noise, a hissing sound, as though the ground itself wanted to recoil from what was being spilled on it. Mortimer kept desperately trying to circle, whaling on the beast with the iron rod. 

Every hit now saw a jet of fluorescent green and yellow bile spilling from the beast. A beast that was thrashing like a mad thing. Stumbling on its eight legs, trying to kill what was killing it. 

Mortimer backed off, then backed off a bit further. Gave the horror a good thirty feet. It was still coming for him. He could see the tooth studded tube jabbing into the air, the shambling steps moving more in his direction than not. But the bags of flesh were deflating. 

Liquid was spilling out, and with it came clumps and lumps he couldn’t identify. Not organs, as he knew of such things. Gelatinous, throbbing things that floated like eggs or fist sized amoeba living in the corrosive bile. 

His back ached. His hands hurt from squeezing so hard. His breath came in ragged, rasping pants. He might be bleeding. An angry ape’s smile slowly spread across his face. The monster was bleeding to death, and fast. It didn’t understand what happened to it. It just kept coming for him, and dying. 

Something fell out of the beast, a throbbing ball of sickly green light. The beast collapsed as soon as the ball hit the floor. It didn't even twitch. 

Mortimer whipped his head around. Had his fight attracted more beasts? There was a distant metallic clanking, but it wasn’t coming any closer. A faint sound of wind. This place was so vast, it might have its own weather. But no more monsters had come. 

Mortimer fell on the floor like a puppet whose show was done. The iron bar clattered on the floor next to him. Mortimer pulled his knees up to his chin and wrapped his skinny arms around his legs and just… hung on. Trying to feel safe. Feeling the hot blood in him leach out into the cold air. He was alright. Some scrapes, and he tore up his hand somehow, but it was shallow and already clotting. He was fine. He was just shaking.

There was a faint rattle from beside him. Mortimer spasmed, his limbs exploding outwards as he scrambled back and away. His eyes jerked around the room, trying to find what was coming for him, and not seeing it. He grabbed the rebar and waved it around him, hunting for any invisible monsters. 

It took several minutes for him to figure out that it was the rebar itself that had made the noise. The awful liquid coating the end of the steel was tugging it back towards the glowing orb. Mortimer looked back towards the monster. The puddle of fluid the ball had been sitting in was being absorbed. The ball was getting brighter and brighter, and the fluids were getting sucked up at an increasing pace. The monster was looking more and more withered, as fluids were ripped away from it.

“Did… getting exposed to air do something? Change some chemistry about the orb so that, instead of keeping the creature alive, it’s now consuming it?” Mort muttered. He hadn’t realized he had spoken aloud. “It’s been a long time since OrgChem, but I’m pretty sure four hundred kilos or whatever of acid shouldn’t fit into a glowing orb the size of a lacrosse ball. Not without some very special equipment and a Nobel review team standing by.”

The glowing orb was indifferent to his questions. It simply consumed. The beast was drained dry- no longer a monster, it had been reduced to a sack of empty leather trash bags. Dumped with the other rubbish in a corner, still reeking of piss and sulfur. Even the smell was quickly vanishing in the enormous coldness of this place. 

The last of the stink seemed stuck to his rebar. Mortimer gently prodded the orb with his rod. It rolled a little, then rolled back. The fluids were cleanly stripped away. The green liquid crawled up, over and around any barriers to flow into the orb. 

The glowing green ball lay on the floor, seemingly content. Mortimer crouched next to it. There was no stench to it anymore, just the background concrete smell. It looked like lime Jello with an LED buried in it. And somehow, it seemed…

“So delicious. Why do you look so delicious?” Mortimer muttered. He could feel his stomach growing. More than that, it felt like every nerve and cell in his body was starving. Screaming at him to eat whatever this was. 

“I need to run tests. I need to see if it can be safely handled. I need to-” his hand moved without his conscious will. He had already picked it up. It throbbed with a gentle warmth that felt like a lump of fire in this cold, mad place. “It could be anything. It absorbed bug bile. Stuffed itself with alien poison.” Mortimer’s voice almost had a crooning sound to it as he tilted his head back. He opened his mouth as widely as he could and dropped the ball in. 

He wished he could unhinge his jaw. He wanted to swallow the orb like a snake eating an egg. Every fiber of him screamed for it. His teeth pierced the jelly exterior of the ball, and whatever was inside poured down his throat.

Like a cold glass of water on a hot day. Like a friend checking in after you’ve had a rough week. Like just the right song coming on to make you forget about the traffic and why you are in the car in the first place, and just carrying you away on sheer energy and life. It felt like forgiveness. Like someone sat you down and explained every single way in which you hurt others and yourself and then embraced you and promised to never let you go.

How did it taste? He really couldn’t say. He just wanted more. Much, much more. His aches were gone. Even his torn up hand was looking better. He could feel the warmth down in his stomach, slowly flowing out to the rest of him. It felt amazing. He knew this stuff was good for him. 

“What did the doll say? I need to get all the energy I can?” Mortimer muttered. He could go along with that. It didn’t even feel so cold in here anymore. It wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been. 

Time to breathe. Time to really take stock of the situation. Mortimer looked around. The concrete shapes didn’t make any more sense now than they had before. It was like human structures had been stretched, twisted, or generally gotten subtly wrong by some being with no concept of material cost or human scale. Which… alright, disorienting, alien, unpleasant, but he still had a rough idea of how to move around in this space. He wasn’t sure how long that feeling would last for.

Why was there a flight of stairs that stretched longer than a skyscraper was tall? Did it go anywhere important? Actually, why were there dozens of impossibly long staircases, braided around each other like steel cables? How about the symbolic meaning of the statues that jutted up like mushrooms? Or why were there bundles of steel rods scattered around, along with cement brick, broken stone and who knows what else? Was someone actually building all this by hand? Do insane alien landscapes actually have a building code?

He didn’t see any copper pipe. Must have been stolen. He laughed silently. 

Beating the monster didn’t do much, Mortimer remembered. No bones to break or organs to shatter. It was basically a big, oddly shaped leather sack with claws and a mouth of hideous teeth attached to a tube. No point in beating it, he just had to rip it open and let gravity win again. 

Rebar. Rebar bends, if he remembered correctly. Although you probably have to heat it up for that? He’d never worked construction. The iron bar he was using wasn’t too long, but it was still damned heavy. It would be tough to make a good weapon out of it, but not impossible. He couldn’t see a better option and optimism beats pessimism almost every time. 

He chuckled out loud this time. The gray was still pressing down, but somehow, he felt a little spark of ‘okay’ in him. He was prepared to cherish it.

He looked around for any possible heat source. There was none. He’d make do. Mortimer grabbed a piece of metal from the pile. “Is rebar iron or steel? I can’t remember, but steel is just iron with extra carbon. It’s probably fine.” He laid the rebar flat on the ground, with six inches hanging over the edge of a short flight of stairs. 

He looked at it for a minute longer. “Short,” under the circumstances, meant only ten yards horizontally. He didn’t feel like estimating the vertical drop. The little spark of warmth nudged him towards some vague notion of workplace safety.

“I’m going to find a better spot.” 

Mortimer eventually settled for laying the iron rod on a couple of long bits of shin high concrete that had broken off something else. He gingerly stood on top of the rod just before the six inch overhang. Right foot planted solidly on the concrete and metal, the other gently leaning on the overhang. 

“Now… will you bend, or snap? Let's find out together. No wire either. Guess that must have been stolen with the copper pipe.”

He leaned on it. It snapped. 

“First time unlucky?”

He tried it four more times. Each snapped. 

“God damn it.” It must be iron. Or maybe the wrong grade of steel or… he didn’t know. Not his field. He studied Biology before the MBA. Mortimer picked up the rod he had used to kill the beast. He checked the end of it for corrosion, and found nothing. It wasn’t even etched. Didn’t even knock the patina of rust off it. 

Super iron that is massively corrosion resistant but also extremely brittle? Sure. You know what? Sure. I’m pretty sure there is half a skyscraper acting as a bridge way above me, so we can’t call this the actual weirdest thing. Not even top five.

He laughed silently. Maybe he could put an edge on it, at least. He leaned down on the rebar and scraped it against the concrete floor. It wouldn’t be a very sharp edge, but anything was better than nothing. He checked how much came off with the scrape. 

Well. He got a little of the rust off. Technically, that’s progress.

Mortimer heaved a big sigh, and leaned harder on the rebar. If it snapped, he would just consider the whole idea cursed and give up.

He almost screamed when the iron rod bent at a wide angle. He touched the bend. It was surprisingly solid and rigid. He tried bending it some more, but there was no effect until he really put effort into it. Then he was able to slowly bend the iron rod ninety degrees. The hook wound up being longer than he wanted, and it still didn’t have an edge to it. 

It would do anyhow. He was armed with a weapon that would work. Hook and twist. He started laughing, quietly, then louder. “Rip and tear! Rip and tear, then eat the goodies inside until the job is done!”

How long has it been since he played video games? He used to love playing them. It must be years now. The little spark bobbed merrily inside him.

Mortimer swung the rebar hook up onto his shoulder. It was still uncomfortably long and heavy, but that was fine. It felt a little lighter than before. A change of mindset doing some of the heavy lifting. 

He looked around the irrational labyrinth of concrete, hoping for an obvious direction to travel in. There was nothing. Or rather, there was so much that he couldn’t imagine finding anything, let alone delicious alien bugs. The grand staircase on the other side of the central void was out. Not a nightmare worm thing anywhere on it. And it looked like it was an awful long way away.

In the distance, there was a rhythmic clack of metal. Mortimer shrugged and started walking towards it. His footsteps led him to a long corridor that looked partially filled with rubble. There was light on the other end of it, though. Dim, but there. He could get through the passage. It would just take some climbing and crawling. 

“Beats the I-70.” He got to crawling. The concrete was odd, in that it seemed to be quite normal. It should be odd. It should be something alien. ‘Normal’ was out of place. He just gutted a giant squishy monster and ate its jelly core. Alien should be the minimum standard. But it wasn’t alien, it was normal. He was just fighting in what looked like a normal jobsite! Why else would there be piles of rebar and rubble everywhere?

Mortimer knew his thoughts were twisting and repeating like a snake orgy in his head. These were not the thought patterns of someone who was doing well mentally. Which seemed appropriate, given everything. The little spark could only light so much.

He made his way to the end of the corridor, only to be met by three more corridors. One swept horizontally to the right, the other up and right, and the last went down and left. The corridors were quite clean. Despite the lack of a light source, he could still dimly see how they went. The last two were dim and empty. The first had a tiny speck of green shining through the gloom at the very end of what he could see.

Prey. He smiled. He’d never been hunting in his life. Mortimer gently bounced the rebar on his shoulder. This was all completely crazy. He should be terrified. He was terrified. But his hunger was greater. The little spark in him could be nurtured into a bonfire. He walked into the darkness eager to kill.