I’ve had numerous requests from a variety of people who know I occasionally dabble in fiction to post some.  As such, I figured I might as well.  I’ll be serializing a story that’s still in progress but tops out at over 15 pages.  If you don’t want to read it, don’t- I could give two sweet fucks.  If you feel like reading it, have at it.  If you bitch, you’ll only make yourselves look like assholes, because once more you’re whining to a person who doesn’t know or give two fucks about you in a public forum filled with people who likely hate the whiners even more than I.  That said, here’s part one of my Lovecraftian splatterpunk short- The Tunnel.

THE TUNNEL, PART 1

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.

Th-Thump.
This is all Bret’s fault. Fucking guy was on me for weeks to try this new trail in the Appalachians. I had bought a mountain bike the previous summer, and had been reasonably diligent about taking it out, mostly just to get away from work and the city. He always wants to try the next new thing, the more dangerous thing, and I, of course, couldn’t back down when he called me out.
“Quit being a fucking pussy, dude. Just grab your fucking bike and let’s go. This trail is supposed to be brutal, and you haven’t had a decent wreck yet.”  Bret would break Jackie Chan’s balls about being a pussy after jumping off the roof of a three story building if there was a five story building next to it off of which Chan could have leaped.  “While we’re at it, we can grab a drink in some hilljack bar, maybe bang some random farmer’s daughter, and be back in time for church on Sunday.”
Yet another ball-busting tactic. Bret knew that I never go to church. Shit, Bret knew I’d avoid church at all costs. That did not, however, stop him from making out like I was a card-carrying member of the LDS if I told him I wanted to get some sleep on the weekend, rather than hitting every titty bar in the tri-state area.  Knowing the futility of fighting him when he was just going to wear me down in the end with constant impugnations of my manhood, I conceded.
“Alright man. I give. Let’s go.”  Pausing to consider that I’d once more caved to Bret’s heavy-handed verbal tactics, I decided to add a “fucker,” for good measure.  Never hurts to have the last word.
Th-Thump.
We loaded our bikes into the back of his mud-drenched XTerra (he bought into the “extreme sports” billing Nissan gave it, only to find he overpaid for an underpowered SUV) and tore out of my driveway, headed to whatever destination he had in mind. About ten minutes into the drive I fell asleep, not knowing where we were headed, and not really interested. I awoke as the drive turned bumpy, to find us trundling along some backwoods dirt road in the middle of the mountains.
“Dude, is this West Virginia? Where in the hell are we?”  As I asked the question, I looked around at our surroundings- there was no sign of human habitation anywhere. No power lines, no houses, no signs, no empty beer cans heaved out of the back of beat-up local pickups… nothing.

“Yeah, bro. We’re on an old logging road. I heard about this trail from some friends at the rock gym. It’s gonna be brutal! This fucking thing isn’t’t even on the map!”

While he spoke, I noticed the utter straightness of the road, in spite of natural obstacles like steep hills. Bret clearly didn’t notice, as he was having the time of his life, roaring off hillocks and plunging through the occasional creek. I didn’t mention it at the time, because holding onto the dashboard and not putting my face through the windshield was first amongst my priorities.
Th-Thump.
They’re moving in me. I can actually see them under my skin when I lift up my shirt. The bleeding seems to have stopped, which is good, and it looks like I’ve got three of them in me, judging by the scabbed-over spots where they burrowed into my sides. They weren’t very big, only a couple of inches long, but they were fast. I barely had time to react before the first ones were on me, my natural instinct being to basically dance in place, trying to stomp them before they could get to me. There were so many, though. I couldn’t get them all, especially when I was missing a finger, shit-scared, and completely disgusted.  As much as I wanted to defend myself, I didn’t want to touch their long, hard-shelled bodies and couldn’t help but flinch from the sight of their godawful snake heads. 
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