Tiny Horror

Deke scrambled over the shifting piles of trash, his hands clawing at a steel-plated window that offered no grip. The knife was gone now, buried beneath a fresh avalanche of refuse as the Mother’s weight redistributed the hoard. He was a rat in a box. The multitude of eyes followed is movement. Her many arms swept the air, the fingers ending in blunt, powerful hooks that tasted the scent of his sweat. Every time he moved, the mountain of garbage and bone shifted. She moved with a terrible inevitability, pulling her immense weight across the room like a gargantuan tick. Deke backed into the corner, empty-handed and trembling, realizing that in a room this full of her, there was nowhere left for him to hide.

She caught him by the throat. The strength in her spindly arms was absolute, a cold, wet power that rendered his struggles pathetic. He tried to scream, his mouth tearing open in a silent rictus of terror, but her grip crushed the sound against his vertebrae before it could leave his throat. She pinned him against the wall, her obsidian eyes reflecting the beam of the flashlight he had dropped. The light lay on a pile of ribs, its beam cutting sideways through the dust, illuminating the Mother’s shivering underside.

A vertical, multi-layered ring of razor-sharp teeth opened beneath her many chins. She didn't bite. She harvested. With a sudden, bone-snapping jerk, she ripped Deke’s left arm from the socket. The sound was a wet pop that echoed in the room, followed by the hot, heavy splash of blood against the trash.

She began to feed, the rhythmic grinding of her teeth the only sound in the house. She chewed with a slow, mechanical grace, watching Deke as his life drained into the garbage below. On the floor, the industrial flashlight Elias had given him finally flickered and died, leaving the scavenger to finish his final transaction in the absolute dark.

The tale continues...