Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there was a knight named Phillip. Sir Phillip, of course. He was brave, strong, among the best of the king’s guard, and handsome enough that the queen paid more attention to him than was strictly necessary, which was why when that strange old seer came bursting in the door at midnight screaming of the prophecy that foretold the doom of the kingdom, the strange and twisted thing that would come rumbling down from the north to set it ablaze, the king turned to him immediately. Before Sir Phillip could so much as say farewell he was given a company of followers and a smiling farewell with many gritted teeth, then booted out the door on his…
Wait…. I’m sorry. Wrong character. I’d forgotten how this one starts. It’s all clear now; my apologies.
Anyways, so Lieutenant Commander Phillip, the best the United Earth’s navy had to offer, was shipped out in command of the Marie, a light cruiser with a twenty-man crew, before the heat exhaust on that strange half-garbled distress beacon had even grown cold. Phillip’s mission was non-specific, being basically “head to the colony that was screaming for help and see what ate them” only with much fancier wording, but for such a vague goal he was firmly prepared as best as could be. His crew were loyal, tough, and well-trained. His weaponry was very impressive and he treated it as life-saving, hazardous tools to be respected rather than genital enhancement.
Unfortunately, his ship was a bit finicky from its recent overhaul, and a rather important part of the engine coughed politely and exploded just as they were performing the manoeuvres to settle nicely into orbit above the colony. After an emergency landing (and an emergency exit, since the ship was calmly blowing itself apart around him), the Lieutenant Commander and the scant armful or so of supplies he’d managed to drag out found themselves face to face with…
…Hmm. That isn’t right either. Ah yes, I recall it now.
So then, there Captain Phillip was: broken and battered ship behind him and already sinking on the rocks of the reef, crew drowned, map to a supposed great secret lost, armed with nothing but a snapped cutlass and a waterlogged, useless pistol, and stuck in a staring competition with a very, very large and mildly surprised crocodile. He was just starting to feel his eyes water when the crocodile forfeited the contest, because it becomes very hard not to blink when someone shoves a harpoon through the back of your skull.
The harpoon belonged to an elderly man who belonged to a name that Phillip found completely unpronounceable because he was missing several well-placed piercings inside his mouth that let him do strange things with his tongue. For his part, Phillip’s name was just about all he could manage in English, but he seemed happy just to see another human. Rudimentary exchanges about sums of fingers and setting suns sketched in the dirt put him at being stuck on the island for something like seven years. And he wasn’t alone, from what he could get across in their sand-scrawlings.
See, it wasn’t that there were no people. Just no humans.
The Captain wasn’t about to buy that on the poorly illustrated say-so of a lonely, very possibly crazy man who’d been stuck on the same island for over half a decade eating unwary crocodiles and very interesting herbs. Luckily, the islander was also a very firm believer in “seeing is believing,” which was why the next thing he did to prove his point was…
Damnit. I was sure I had it that time. Oh yeah – now I remember.
Right. Phil had seen a lot of weird stuff in his years – as a PI, you tended to – but he figured the thing that the mute old homeless man handed him then was the strangest yet. Now, he’d raised a few dogs, shot a few dogs, booted a few alley cats (the nastier ones that spat and hissed and clawed at him), and he figured that pretty much completed his knowledge of animal anatomy. But still, he was pretty sure that no creature he knew of on earth had teeth like the one that lay in the palm of his hand. For one thing, it took the entire palm and part of its brother to hold it comfortably.
It was at this point that Phil decided that his client was not paying him enough for this.
Phil looked at the tooth, looked at the abandoned tenement in front of him, then glanced back over his shoulder at his totalled car. What a lovely place to be stranded in. Even the junkies had abandoned it. He sighed, fruitlessly tried to unjam his pistol, then walked towards the askew doors behind the soft footfalls of the homeless man, patting his pocket for the reassuring prod of his switchblade as he did so.
The lights weren’t working, of course. And his flashlight barely was. Still, it could’ve been worse; the structure itself was reasonably sound. Just empty, creaky, filled with the faint and ever-present drip drop drip of water leaking from ruined pipes. Phil could feel the sweat prickling on his skin, clinging to his neck’s rising hairs in a hapless plea for reassurance. It dripped, crawled, skittered, and then it licked him and he realized it was in fact a cockroach clinging to the back of his head, which he missed, with great force.
By the time Phil had picked himself up from that, the homeless man was nothing more than an invisible set of shuffling feet somewhere down the hall, one that he hurried after as thoughts of that tooth in his pocket danced merrily through his skull. His eyes darted from wall to wall like indecisive houseflies, the floor loomed grossly under his feet, and every one of the thousand cracks in the ceiling promised to contain something unspeakable. Phil was so distracted that he walked straight into the homeless man’s back, almost turning a surprised grunt into a yell while he was at it.
The man shushed him silently, hand across Phil’s mouth, and pointed forwards about two inches past his toes, where the floor ceased to exist. His free hand bumped Phil’s light gently towards the hole, offering vision.
Cautiously, inchingly, Phil crept forwards. He peered down into that dank pit, that yawning, strangely moist void beneath him, as the warm air tumbled by his face, looked by the feeble glow of the flashlight, and saw something that was physically incapable of looking back at him, yet somehow knew he was there. It stood on two stocky stumps that might’ve once been legs, a mass of breathing sores in a tattered ruin that could’ve once been a shirt and jacket.
Phil’s hand slipped to his tiny, insignificant switchbla…
No, no, NO. That wasn’t it at all. What happened was…hmm… wait, did I have it right in the first place?
Well, as Sir Phillip looked down that blackened canyon and drew his sword, the lurking reptile at the bottom raised that lidless skull of its – you couldn’t call it a head – and gave a creaking, croaking cry that made the distant birds grow silent. Bile flowed from its throat and spilled onto the rocks, burning where it touched, and the slushy, haggard beat of its heart made the knight’s skin crawl. At his side, the silent lantern maiden stepped back, even her calmness rebuked by its presence. He really wished his horse hadn’t thrown a shoe. And that his followers hadn’t been killed by brigands. And that the king hadn’t been quite so stingy and selfish about his wife’s affections.
The dragon lurched to its paws, tail dripping over softening stone, and began to stumble drunkenly towards Sir Phillip. He raised his…..argh, damnit!
Lieutenant Commander Phillip raised his broken, beaten rifle to chest-height, cradling it against the bulky and dented chestplate of his environmental suit. At its tip, the tungsten bayonet hovered, barely giving so much as a twitch as his nerves locked down in a harmonious blend of discipline and heart-wriggling fear.
The emaciated, coral-bodied thing at his side crept backwards, buzzing warnings to escape, to leave well enough alone. He ignored it. Deranged or not, an overgrown, mentally handicapped offspring of it or not, the shale-sided monster in front of him had killed and consumed an entire colony. Maybe it had been because it was provoked, maybe it hadn’t, but it was definitely not something he could leave lying around.
Besides, there was no way in hell that he was going to try and hole up in the colony’s ruins and wait for rescue with that thing still walking around out here.
The alien loomed overhead, five tons of surly, ambient cliffside on a spider’s legs with a wasp’s instinct for mindless anger, and then….all wrong!
And then Captain Phillip darted backwards as the not-quite-an-ape came crashing down, hot breath wheezing in his face, angry eyes burning a trail through his heart, hands big enough to crush his limbs like stalks of wheat groping where he’d just stood. He came back in fast and cursing, half-cutlass striking, being seized and oh damnit the thing was right in his face, meaty grips encasing his sides and preparing to crush ribs. The man with the incredible piercings swore something impossible for any other man to say and spun to the beast’s other side, harpoon darting out like a serpent oh not at all!
Phillip watched as the homeless man’s crude shank buried itself in the shuffling, stumbling thing’s side, heard the dull scream that sounded all-too-human, felt the floor shudder under its weight as it fell to its knees, arm’s flailing, and sent him careening off into its depths. Too slow to be real, too fast to stop, even as his own arms continued on their inevitable course. Not inevitable, not at all, ARGH!
So the lantern maiden fell as the bile seared her face, without a sound, as Sir Phillip’s blade – no!
Lieutenant Commander Phillip’s bayonet – not at all!
Captain Phillip’s snapped cutlass – definitely not!
Phillip Macguire, freelance PI’s switchblade – of course not!
Damnit, what WAS it? This is the important bit too. Was it Sheriff Phillip? Private Phil? Maybe it was a murder mystery, was that it? No, no, no….oh.
Oh dear.
Erm, ah, my mistake. Obvious in hindsight, just rather, uh, embarrassingly so. Right then.
So, Captain Phoebe Macquire’s combat knife reached down through the gigantic, rubbery mantle and deep into the braincase of the squid. It spasmed and thrashed in midwater, beak gnashing and biting in a cloud of its own leaking vital fluids and ink, but she had other things on her mind as she rushed to the side of the old pearl-diver, bobbing limply in the red-and-black current.
She checked his pulse as she pumped them both towards the surface of the Pacific, lungs starting to burn in a fiery deep red ache as the aqualung dribbled away its final dregs of air. There was something there, but whether or not it was his stubborn refusal to die or her own reluctance to accept that the thing had managed to send one more person to join the rest of her submersible’s crew at the bottom of the sea she wasn’t quite sure yet. The sunlight grew brighter as the slime and blood streamed down and away from her, a small streak still delicately trickling from the blade of her knife.
The beach was very warm under her feet as she staggered onto it, wrenching the scuba gear from her back. The old man was deposited somewhat more gently, and this time her anxious finger felt something move that was definitely more than just hope as it lay against his neck.
As Phoebe began CPR, she stared out past the old man’s body and over the waves of the South Pacific. They were once again serenely blue.
…Wait, come to think of it, was that supposed to be the Pacific or the Atlantic? Oh, damnit.