Plague of Strength

God has abandoned me.

Th-Thump.

My heartbeat is my only companion.

Th-Thump.

That, and the mass of roiling, armor-plated eel-like insects I’m pretty sure are eating my guts right now. I can feel them move, occasionally, but there’s no pain. The pain, which was so intense it felt like I’d been raped with a Roto-rooter going full blast, stopped a few minutes ago. Now the slight clicking sounds of their jaws in my guts and the feeling as their chitinous bodies scrape past my ribs or spine or pelvis are my only companions. That, and my heartbeat.

Th-Thump.

Given the fact that I’m sitting in a pool of blood that’s larger than my torso and seems to have bits of me floating on its surface, I don’t imagine my heart will be my sole source of comfort for long. I wonder how many pints are in the pool of blood I’m sitting in and if the demonic pincer-faced creatures that seem intent on exiting my abdomen through my bellybutton drink blood or just eat guts.   

“Which organ tasted the best?”, I wondered idly.  “Did those fucking things even have tongues?”  I assumed I would find out eventually, but for now the things inside me are too disgusting to contemplate.  I don’t want to throw up again. 

The last time I puked, I got none of what you’d expect- I produced a gout of blood, some yellowish-clear liquid that appeared to be pus, and then started choking as the thing I tried to puke up fought its evil way back into my stomach.

Th-Thump.

Christ, I wish I’d just die already.

Th-Thump.

I guess God’s domain doesn’t extend this far underground. This must be the old stomping grounds of Lovecraft’s Old Ones, or Behemoth and Leviathan from the Bible, or maybe the land Beast in Revelations. Whatever this is, it sucks.

Th-Thump.

I didn’t get here by being curious. Lovecraft couldn’t have imagined the inanity that led to my arrival in this ancient underground city, and I’m an unlikely candidate for unleashing the Apocalypse. I’m a regular American guy, a guy who loves sports and naked chicks, and getting shitfaced on the weekends.  I work a boring nine to five job in a boring office with boring people.  I return home every night to an empty house, throw my shit on the floor, change into shorts, and do whatever the fuck I want.  The consummate bachelor.  Living the dream, as it were. At least until these fucking things got into my guts and a huge monster that would have made the worst shit in HR Geiger’s paintings look like characters in the opening credits to the Care Bears cartoon practically ripped me in half.

Th-Thump.

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about this entire experience is the fact that I have a raging hardon right now. The moment the pain went away, I got hard. Viagra hard.  The kind of hardon where your dick goes kind of numb and cumming’s almost impossible, and after an hour you’re considering slamming your cock in the nightstand drawer to settle it down, but you don’t because you’ll break your fucking nightstand.  It’s totally nonsensical, but having priapism as I am slowly devoured from within is about par for the course today.  

Th-Thump.

Like all little boys, I loved dinosaurs as a kid. I’d spend every afternoon looking through books about dinos, absorbing everything, memorizing their names, and imagining living with them. The one era I hated, though, was the Cambrian. The animals in the Cambrian were too weird even for me, and I loved weird shit. It was in that epoch that I discovered an animal that made me close the book on the Cambrian and eventually dinosaurs in general. It was disgusting- segmented like a millipede, only with these weird fins covering claw-tipped legs running all down its body. Its head was ringed by five eyes, which was creepy enough for me, because asymmetricality is something you don’t often see in nature, but it got worse- the head ended in a snake-like trunk, like a lowercase letter “e”. A lump of eyes perched atop a skull, but instead of a mouth on the underside of the skull, there was a long sinuous neck ending with a with a mouth that looked like a to-scale version of the monster plant in Little Shop of Horrors, crowded impossibly with thousands of needle-like teeth. This is the kind of animal that proves that Mother Nature makes shit so grotesque even Unit 731’s most deranged doctors couldn’t match what’s commonly found at the bottom of the ocean.  Anyway, I’m pretty sure that’s what rattled after me, filling the tunnel with a clacking sound like a roomful of crazed typists, faster than any snake I’ve ever seen, and bored their way into my stomach. 

I caught a couple of them before they got in me, and stomped them into a grey green mush. 

One of them bit off my left pinkie and swallowed it whole as it sailed through the air. When I stomped it, it exploded, and I saw my severed pinkie pop out of its pulped body and arc through the air in slow motion as the quicker ones burrowed right into my belly button.  I can see my pinkie now. I couldn’t get it at first, because it hurt so badly, with those things inside me, eating. It doesn’t hurt so much anymore, except for the occasional stitch in my side, but I’m scared to move. It might start hurting again. I want to jerk off, too, to get rid of this hardon.  One last orgasm’s not too much for me to ask for, it is?  Maybe it is- I’m too scared of what will come out of my dick if I do. What if one of those things slithered out of my cock head? What if I shot nothing but blood? I think I’ll just lay here with my hardon.

Th-Thump.

Opabinia. That’s what they were called. But they only lived in the ocean. And they’re extinct. Supposed to be extinct, anyway.

Jesus, my dick is hard.