Fear the Abyss: 22 Terrifying Tales of Cosmic Horror (3 page)

My stomach still hurts and it's noticeably distended, but I'm able to leave the bathroom. My only hope is that Dana has vacated the lab, leaving me to cool off with my sweaty vodka. When I enter, Dana isn't there, but five other people are, staring at me like I have a piece of paper sticking out of my cheek—so I suppose their expressions are warranted. Their sleeves are hiked and safety glasses fogged by the 97 degree lab temperature. I immediately parch, but a man with a unibrow stands in the way of my liquor cabinet.

"There's something on your face, fella," he says. I grunt and ask him to move. "No can do. We need all the bench space we can get. We're assembling 6000 primer kits.

Nice "surprise," Regina.

The man's slick arm rubs against me, scraping me with its wiry fur. He apologizes, and I'm about to tell him it's fine when a familiar scent strikes my nostrils. It's Dana—but Dana isn't there. The smell is coming from the bristly man with sweat dripping between the whiteheads along his nose. My stomach tightens as the blood rushes south, making me stiffen with each scented surge. My balls swell and stretch, filling my jeans with aching flesh. I can't tell if the warm fluid rolling down my thigh is blood or semen, but either way, it's not good.

The amount of people in the room doubles, then triples. None of them seems to be doing any real work, just milling around and getting between me and my liquor.

"I just need to get to the cabinet. Just for a second," I say to the group of dripping women now clustered in front of the door, but when they turn, I am pummeled by their scent. More technicians spin to stare at me, blowing sweaty gales of the aroma in my direction. The lab is hazy with the stuff. I'm convinced my dick has split open and is pouring blood down my legs, but when I pull aside my lab coat, I see that the river of blood starts at my belly—at the enormous growth on my belly, more precisely.

"Oh my god, are you okay?" a woman asks. For once, I stiffen from her beauty, not the strange perfume. I would fuck her in a second, but something tells me she wouldn't want the man with a football-sized tumor to stick his dick inside her. The knot looks more like brain than skin, and with each increase of nausea, another vein pops, oozing brown soup down my pants.

People scream at the throbbing mass. I'm afraid, too, but the fear is so much worse when I take in all of the faces: blanched in terror, green in revulsion, their throats burbling with the upward travel of vomit. Against every desire, I start to cry and can't stop. The brown tears burrow through my face, dropping entire panels of skin to the lab floor. I try to dam the flow with my fingers, but the burning liquid causes me to shake my hands in pain, spattering bare arms and faces with molten tears and slivers of soggy skin.

I catch my sloppy reflection in the cabinet and promptly coat the mirror in hot heaves of thick, chocolate vomit. My brain tries to cling to consciousness, to the last few drops of blood that haven't defected to the tumor overcoming my innards, but its grip is weak, and down I go. I could swear my face smashes like a melon when I hit the floor, but I can still smell perfume in the seconds before I black out, so I think my nose is fine.

My nose is not fine. I know it as soon as I wake up. I can't quite see my reflection in the glass of the transfer window, but I see enough to know that my face as I knew it is probably still on the floor in front of my liquor cabinet. What's left wouldn't even make for a passable companion in a peanut butter sandwich.

My vision is fuzzy, but from the chair I'm tied into, I can tell I'm in a lab. I don't recognize it, but there are lots of labs at BioTech I've never seen. As my vision clears, I spot Regina in the entry way, zipping up her sterile suit. I'm surrounded by tanks of Extraction Buffer, each one labeled with my handwriting. What the hell is going on?

"Harvey," Regina says as she enters the lab.

My throat is full of clotted phlegm. I try to cough it up, but it hurts my stomach too badly to clear it. I look down at my belly's new bloody friend and groan. It takes up most of my torso now, but some of the connective tissue has been detached, so it hangs low on my waist.

Before I know what's happening, she's holding a few vials in front of my face and I am pummeled by the familiar smell. The tumor swells, and my erection spews ropey mud.

"What is that smell?" I scream.

"A highly concentrated dose of secretion from—as far as we can tell—the prostate gland of a female Kathonian," she replies.

"A what?"

Regina grabs a pipette aid and sticks a 50mL tip into the nozzle. She pushes the trigger and the pipette hums. She sucks up a heavy dose of Extraction Buffer and advances on me. The tip presses against my face, scraping through the slop as it draws closer to my cornea. She dispenses the buffer into my eye, sending burning liquid throughout my skull. The buffer eats through the meat in the socket, making it easier for Regina to slip in and start digging under my eyeball. The humming and sucking drown out my screams, which continue after the tip pops the eyeball out onto my lap. My jeans sizzle beneath the lump of tissue until she knocks it to the floor, squishes it under her protective boot, and goes to work on the other eye.

Once my eyeballs are gone and the sockets stripped by the buffer, the oozing stops completely. But I can still see Regina. She nods to the other suited technicians in the room and is handed a clean scalpel.

"I am sorry about this, Harv. You were just too obvious," she says.

"About what?"

"You can still see, can't you?"

"...Yes. How?"

"Because your vision isn't like ours, not even when you're impersonating one of us," she replies. "This was your first mission, wasn't it? From what I've seen, your people should spend more time training their spies. This whole 'If I don't remember I'm an alien I'll fit in better with the humans' thing just isn't working well for them."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

Regina pokes my tumor. It has gotten so massive I feel like the tail-end is tickling my uvula.

"Come in," she says into an intercom, and a few seconds later, Dana appears at the door. She dons a protective suit like the others, but hers is transparent, giving me a clear view of her clumsy nudity. My stomach swells in disgust, but when Regina pours a vial's pungent contents over Dana's suit, pain cracks through my crotch. The tumor grows by the second, spurting its fluid across the lab floor.

"You're the first we've tried this on, Harvey. Aggravation always works, but the mix of desire and revulsion is even more successful. I knew what you were the moment you set foot in BioTech. That's why I had Dana follow you after work. To tempt and repulse you—and to weaken you with alcohol," Regina says. "Now we just have to remove the bladder and we can send you on your way. You have no idea how many humans this disgusting growth will help. We've been experimenting with what we call the 'Duplex Bladder' for years, but yours—My God, Harvey—I could cure cancer."

I feel like I'm going to pass out, like my mind is a knot forged from frayed threads. But one shining thought breaks through the tangle of puking and fucking and sounds my desire as clear as a bell.

Alcohol.

God, what I wouldn't give for a drink right now. Just one bottle, one frosted monolith filled with heaven that pours like hellish oil.

"A drink," I whisper as Regina and the techs start to pull the mass out of my belly. "One last drink."

"Don't be so dramatic, Harv. There's plenty of time for that when we're through. Although, I doubt you'll want a drink once you're back in your real form."

I'm tired of questioning every cryptic thing she says, so I scream instead. A technician's scalpel jumps to my throat, pressing my courage as Regina's eyes latch onto my cavernous sockets.

"We have no problem killing you," she says. "The rest of your organs are pretty useless, but I'm sure we could find someone who wants them. We could market them as dog chow, shark chum—Oh, I know. I bet the fellas at Area 51 wouldn't mind a few pounds of your flesh."

I shut up and the scalpels resume their talent, slicing and freeing the tumor from my stomach. It takes one of the techs to hold the brunt of the mass and the other to slowly extract the spongy tail that has snaked through my organs and up my throat. This feeling of being emptied is like none I've ever known. I start to have the same thought about the buzzing pain in my limbs, but when pain turns to pleasure, I realize I have felt it before. When the tumor is gone, my physical form starts to change. Every sensation is suddenly different, yet familiar. My morphing body slides out of its restraints, out of the chair, and onto the floor where my legs can fully unfurl. The tile is cold against each of my forty-eight feet, filling me with chills of memory.

Everything comes back:  landing on Earth, my mission to infiltrate BioTech, the warnings to avoid intoxicants. Another warning, too: "Your mind will be hard to hold onto," the Captain had said. "Once you're in human form, you'll forget who you really are, but you will remember when needed."

Regina's right. Our training is subpar. No wonder our turnover is so high. The humans are smarter than us. But Regina was wrong about one thing: I'm back in my real form and I still want a drink.

I scuttle across the floor, winding around the technician's shaking legs. With a few lunges and squeezes, I could crush the life out of them, but killing them wouldn't put the venilist (Duplex Bladder, to them) back in my body. I couldn't care less about that anyway right now. I smell liquor. My liquor. My flask—in Regina's pocket. Planting myself on my back twenty-four legs, I lift up my thin body to beg like a dog.

"Oh, you've got it bad," she laughs. She steps into the vestibule, unzips her suit, and removes my flask from her pocket. She passes it to a tech, who pours it into a weigh boat and sets it in front of me.

I step into the pool of vodka and absorb all I can through my toes. That way, it hits every inch of my cylindrical body. The liquor is nearly gone when Regina reenters the room. My body flushes with intoxication as she bends to my level, too proud of her success to bother with her hood. Something about the way she smiles angers me. She's won, and she knows it. That smug, pockmarked bitch. I can't stand what she did to me:  the revulsion, the desire, the addiction. I'm a Kathonian, shardammit. I've had xetarge that makes human pussy looked like potted meat.

I swell again, this time on my own terms. The fear in Regina and the techs is sudden and beautiful, and, once again, I remember my strength.

A breast presses against the lab door, spreading across the glass like putty against a newspaper. Dana is still naked, beating against the pane as I transform into the monster that will destroy them all. But when I catch of glimpse of her gnarled forest of an armpit, I lurch in disgust. A tech pierces my primary gills with a 50mL pipette tip, causing blood to spray from the slits. The humans scream when it hits their suits, but the loudest is Regina, who gets a faceful of the stuff. I'm about to tell her to shut up; my blood isn't poisonous. But the sight of her fingers sliding beneath her skin gives me pause. The blood coagulates on her face, and when she tries to rub it away, the face goes with it, sloughing to the floor with wet slaps. I expect her to be no more than a mess of gooey muscle, and apparently, so does she, because when she uncovers her face and beholds her reflection, she gasps in joy. Her wrinkles are gone, her scars just bad memories. Her face is as smooth as a baby's…but how? To my knowledge, Kathonian blood has never had that effect on human skin.

I step on the weigh boat and the last drop of Zelko is absorbed. Regina stares at me ravenously, as if my blood is her Kathonian perfume. But unlike the perfume's effect on me, my blood doesn't make her want to tear off her clothes. It makes her want to tear me to shreds: thick, profitable shreds.

"It's the alcohol," she whispers. "It changed you. I tell you, Harv, we've done hundreds of tests on the usefulness of your blood and never found a thing. But this!" She looks again at her perfect face. "It's a miracle!"

I notice the techs grabbing glassware with no intention of scientific use. I start to puff up again, raising my defenses, but a burning pinch beside my gills deflates me.  I hear Regina say, "Sorry, Harv," as my legs start to shake and crumple beneath my weight.

A graduated cylinder crashes down on me; I find it unnecessary due to the tranquilizer Regina deployed into my bloodsacs.

My body is giving out, but I have energy enough to growl at her, baring my pincers. She jumps back, bumping the lab bench and knocking a vial of the perfume to the floor. The smell is overwhelming, even more than the tranquilizer. If I were still human, my sudden erection probably would've knocked a few other things off the bench, too. But as Regina and the technicians approach with their weapons, I grin for the gift of being a Kathonian again.

My lust hits its peak and, with a screech, I cum harder than ever before. The reproductive darts fire from my laneer ducts, discharging my webbing all over the lab, while the darts themselves penetrate whatever stands nearest.

The scalpel falls first, followed by the graduated cylinders brandished by the techs. By the time my assailants hit the floor, it's covered in shards of glass and wasted genetic material. Not that they care. Even if the hits hadn't been fatal, the darts are poisonous enough to a human in minutes.

A gasp calls my attention to the door where Dana still stands, gawking at me through the glass. Brown Lightning is in clear view, but not for long. Too petrified to move, she weeps as I rip the door off its hinges. When the sense to run finally strikes her, the air flow system won't allow her to open the door to the hall.