3 little pork recipes

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crayon sugarsweet and the spooky thing

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gingerbread

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frost flowers, the complete novella

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rest stop: chapter 15

TODD

Todd could do without the dark. He really could. Didn’t anyone who worked for the water department believe in lights? Or signs? Or… something?

It wasn’t that he couldn’t find ways up - they were all over the place. The problem was, to prevent scrap metal thieves from stealing them and selling them to China, the manhole covers were all bolted down.

He had tried standing under one at what sounded like a busy intersection, hanging on to the ladder and shouting, but it was all car traffic; no one could hear him. Even if someone walked by, which they didn’t, they would be past him in two strides and never notice a thing.

So he kept moving in what he thought was a fairly straight line, hoping for an exit. Because there had to be one eventually, right?

Too bad they don’t teach sewer survival skills at the community college, said the voice in his head.

“It’s amazing how little you know about such a common thing,” he agreed.

At least you’ve had ‘An Introduction to Giant Leeches’.

Todd laughed. “You’re right.” Oh my God I’m talking to myself. How long have I been down here?

You’re probably just still in shock. I would be, too, after everything that’s happened. I’m sure you’ll be fine, once we get out of here, maybe spend a little time with a therapist or ten.

Now I’m talking to myself about talking to myself.

“Karyn, I’m sorry!” he said, to no one but her. “I should have been there. I should be there.” What would she have done, when he didn’t show? What must she think?

Nothing that isn’t true.

“She probably called my house. And then the store,” he said, playing it out, step by step. “Work would’ve called my house, too, when they found the store empty. My folks would say I didn’t come home, so they probably watched the video recorders and…”

Someone knew he had been kidnapped. By now, maybe several someones. And he hoped to God that one of them was Karyn. That had to be better than abandoning her, right?

Six of one…

“The first thing I’m going to do when I get out of here is put a cork in you.”

Promises, promises.

CURTIS LANGLEY

On the far north side of town, where Black River was little more than a brook with ambition, there were dozens of family farms. Some grew sugar beets, many grew corn, and one, in particular, raised a few cows for the farmer’s market crowd: CowTown.

Bad joke, thought Curtis for the umpteenth time as he lugged the big bale of alfalfa up to the fence. Joke or not, the lake dwellers would pay half again as much for pasture-fed as they would for grocery store beef. Sure, it was hot, sweaty work, but it beat pumpin’ gas.

Moo!

Holy christ, thought Curtis, did that cow just say moo? He had literally never before in his life ever heard a cow moo. Cattle made all kinds of noises, most of’em farts, but ‘moo’ was a storybook word.

Moooo! said the cow, emphatically. It was over by the pond, and it seemed to be caught up on something. Cows were incredibly stupid. You could give them a basketball, and they’d find some way to break their legs on it. That’s just the way beef was.

Curtis pushed the bale up and over the fence, and the other cows immediately began to wander over. At least they were smart enough to eat. He climbed over the fence before they got in the way and strode toward the pond.

The cow at the water turned and looked at him, its eyes rolling white. That meant pain. Could it have gotten ahold of some barbed wire somewhere and gotten tangled in it? As he got closer, Curtis could see that it was holding one leg up off the ground.

“Hey, there, girl,” said Curtis, looking under the cow to see what it was caught up on. He reached out with one gloved hand to pat her reassuringly on the back.

Something shot around from behind the cow and grabbed his arm. It was like a slimy pink rope, and it pulled him right off his feet and over the cow. He landed hard on his back in the mud at the edge of the pond, and it knocked the wind right out of him.

He looked up, and he could see three or maybe four shiny black diamond-shaped things on the cow’s belly. One of them had hold of his arm. As he watched, it dropped off and used the pink rope to pull itself toward him.

“What the fuck?” Curtis said. He tried to shake it off. The rope was cutting off the circulation in his arm. He reached into his pocket and brought out his flick-knife. He popped the blade and cut the pink ropey thing, then stabbed the thing’s body with it, over and over.

Flap! He turned, and another had dropped off the cow’s belly. He got to his knees, rubbing the injured arm, then got to his feet and staggered toward the fence, keeping an eye on the slimy thing on the ground and the cow, which seemed to be trying to cut him off.

“Whoa, Bessie,” Curtis said. The cow didn’t pay any attention; it was definitely pushing him toward the pond. Quick as he could, Curtis swung himself up and over the fence. When the cow came for that, he backed away. The slimy thing on the ground seemed to have given up; it was inch-worming toward the pond.

The cow stopped and stared at him.

“What the fuck?” said Curtis.

Moo! the cow said.

“Moo yourself.”

Wait a minute - weren’t there three of… ?

THAT NIGHT IT RAINED

Local weathermen (why did there never seem to be weather women?) predicted afternoon showers, talked knowingly about how long they’d last and compared the number of inches of rain that the county’s residents could expect in comparison to this same time last year. And, in keeping with cherished tradition, they were wrong on all counts.

If it was a shower, then Noah’s Flood was a Slip’N’Slide.

The first night and day were no big deal. Living near the Lakes, you expected weather. The second day, everyone’s yard was a pond, but that had happened before, too. On the third day, the basements of houses at low elevations began to flood.

It wasn’t until day four that monsters began to climb out of toilets all over town.

rest stop: chapters 12 - 14

BILL

“I’ve (hack) really gotta (kaff) quit smokin’,” coughed Bill, drawing the sweet nicotine deep into his bubbling lungs. It was true, of course. What would Maureen do without him? Worse, what if all she remembered of him was of his final years spent dying a slow death from lung cancer, throat cancer, or worse? She drove him crazy, but she deserved better than that.

The rain clouds had walked and talked all around the sky, but so far not a drop had fallen. Unfortunately, not a single fish had taken his bait, either, and he was running dangerously low on beer. There weren’t even any ducks for company.

Maybe he’d have better luck up by the crick mouth.

He reeled in his line, stowed his pole, pulled up the cement block that he used as an anchor, and dropped his oars. The crick was upstream and the current near the highway bridge was a bitch, so it took Bill the better part of an hour to get his boat over to the crick’s entrance.

It didn’t exactly do his lungs any favors. In fact, when he finally got out of the current, he coughed so long and so hard that he wound up in the weeds, retching grey bits of what he hoped wasn’t lung tissue into the brown water.

When it was over, he spat, then spat again to get the taste out of his mouth. That was when he spotted it, nestled in the greenery just at the water’s edge. Something golden.

At first he thought that it was a beer can; it was about the same size and shape, but the ends were rounded and the symbols etched into the side didn’t look like any logo he recognized.

Curious, he leaned over to pluck it from the bottom, but the shift in weight caused the whaler to swing back out into the crick. He had to push the boat back over with one oar, and then he couldn’t see the whatever it was for all the mud that his paddling stirred up.

Bill stuck one oar into the bottom to keep the whaler in place and waited for the mud to settle. It was probably just a thermos or something that fell overboard from one of the pleasure boats that docked along the river, but every once in awhile you came across interesting stuff. His workbench at home held all manner of odds and ends from the old paper mill and other businesses that used to line the river’s banks, including a cow skull from the slaughterhouse that used to exist a stone’s throw from this very crick.

Finally, the water settled enough that he spotted the flash of gold again, and ducked his arm in to grab it. As he lifted it out, it was heavier than he expected, certainly heavier than a lost thermos.

He held it up in the fading light that and studied the markings along its sides. They were embossed into the metal, but if they were words, then they weren’t in English or any other alphabet that he knew. There also didn’t seem to be any way to open the container, or seams of any kind. It was cold to the touch, too - much colder than the water - which again made him think Thermos but, if it had just been dropped recently enough to still be cold, why hadn’t he seen the boat that dropped it? Nothing much larger than his whaler could navigate the crick, it was too narrow.

Pleased with his find and suddenly tired of being on the water, Bill set the gold cannister in the bottom of the whaler and pushed off with an oar. It meant no fish for supper, but he could probably talk Maureen into pizza. He reached into his vest pocket for a stick of gum. Maureen tolerated beer, but it would be best if she didn’t smell the cigarettes on his breath.

In a few moments he was back out in the current, letting it push his little boat back toward the bridge and his Toyota. The golden cannister rolled a bit in the bottom of the boat. He could hardly wait to get it home and fiddle with it.

KARYN

Numb. So this is what that felt like.

Todd ran away. She knew it was hard, and scary; nobody knew that better than her. But of all the things that she had thought about, all the possible scenarios that had played out in her mind since the drugstore test confirmed her worst fears, the thought that he might just head for the hills had never entered her mind.

Maybe he just needs more time to take it all in, she thought, and nodded to herself. She was still taking it in, and she had known for longer than he had. But it wasn’t like him not to call or write or… or something. That conscientiousness was part of what had drawn her to him in the first place. He always looked out for her feelings, and treated them as if they were the most precious thing in the world.

So why no word? And where in the world could he have gone?

She had called his house first, hesitating until the afternoon because she kept expecting him to call her first. It was weird talking to his mom; they had been close from the beginning. For a moment, Karyn almost almost came right out and told her, but when she heard that Todd hadn’t come home from work, the words froze on her tongue. It was all she could do to ask Mrs. Armstrong to have him call her when he got home.

“Is anything wrong?” Mrs. Armstrong said, sensing something.

“No,” Karyn lied. “No, just have him call me, please.”

After that, she called the party store, but Todd wasn’t there and they seemed to be either really busy or really angry, so she hung up, the phone dangling in her hand.

Next came Greg, his best friend, whose number she got from the class directory, and when he had no idea where Todd was she made her way through all of the other friends that she knew about, leaving messages everywhere and receiving none in return.

Bit by bit, the day worn on. Dinner with her family was quiet, with her two younger brothers, Joel and Josh, going on and on about how they should be permitted to take the family boat out on the lake by themselves. They were fifteen and sixteen, after all, and all of their friends were doing it.

“Has that argument ever worked in the history of the world?” she said, which earned her glares from both of them, but part of her was glad. She hadn’t been allowed to take the boat out by herself until she was seventeen. At least one rule seemed to hold true from one sibling to the next.

After dinner she took a bath, rather than her usual shower, and spent most of it staring at her still-flat belly.

“That won’t last long,” she told it. She patted it gently, wondering how long it would be before she began to show. Even now, it was weird to think that there was another person in there, a new person, and that she was somehow involved. She wondered if all new mothers felt that way. If so, her mom had never mentioned it.

That was when she realized that she was crying.

Later, after the boys had gone to bed, she knocked on her parents’ bedroom door and, when her father’s deep voice said, “Yes?”, she went in and told them.

Her mother asked if she was sure. Karyn nodded.

“Where is Todd?” said her father. He seemed more upset that Todd wasn’t there than anything.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He didn’t…”

That was when the phone rang. Who would call so late? Her mother picked it up, said “Hello?” and listened for a moment, then held the handset out to Karyn.

”It’s for you.”

Karyn took the handset.

“Who is it?” said her father. “Is it Todd?”

“No,” said her mother. “It’s Valerie - Todd’s mother.”

Karyn put the phone up to her ear. “Hello? Is this Mrs. Armstrong? This is Karyn.”

Karyn listened. She felt sick, but the words coming out of the phone didn’t make any sense, so she asked Todd’s mother to say them again. When she was done, Karyn said, “Yes, I will,” and Todd’s mother hung up. After awhile, the phone beeped at her, so Karyn handed it back to her mother.

She looked at her parents.

“What is it, honey?” her mom said.

“What did she say?” her father said.

“She said Todd’s missing,” said Karyn. “She said the police say he’s… that he was kidnapped at work. They… he…” She fell onto her butt, dropping the phone in the process. Her parents were out of bed in a moment, on their knees with her, but she still couldn’t make the words make sense.

Todd’s mother said a serial killer had taken Todd, and that the police thought that it was likely that Todd was dead, and that she should prepare for the worst. The worst? How could she prepare for the worst? There was no time; it was already here.

HAYDEN

Hayden’s latest test subject was better than any video game, ever. That was what he called the insects and animals that came his way: Test subjects. His first test subjects had been toys, but he soon lost interest in those. They just sat there; they didn’t move or try to get away. When he blew them up or burned them, they were just junk. When you did that with living things, they became… holy. Sacrifices to the great god Science.

Like his fish. The moment he had dumped the leech-thing in the tank with them, the tetras and the guppies headed for the opposite side of the tank. Not that it had helped them.

He sat on the edge of his bed and watched. The whatever-it-was swam like a snake, stretching out and undulating. It was fast, too, and ruthlessly efficient. The moment a fish was within range of its crazy tongue, it was caught on the end of it and shuddering. The fish would swell up after that, and become almost translucent, and the thing would reel it in and slurp the fish down like a shake through a straw. Then the empty skin would be cast aside and the next fish pursued. It always seemed to be hungry.

Hayden pictured what must have happened to the dog sack, back when it was still a dog. Maybe it had gone to the river to drink, the leech-thing (or whatever it was) had stung it, and been pulled out of the water as the dog died. He wished he had been there to see it.

He Googled every kind of leech, but nothing that he saw looked much like it, except in a very general way. No leech that he saw had a tongue like that, anyway, or that flowery head part, and no one at school had ever mentioned something like this in the river before. Crayfish, ducks, snakes, bluegill, sunfish, muskrats, lampreys, yes, but nothing like this.

Maybe it was like the zebra mussels, something that had come over in one of the big carrier ship’s bilges. Or maybe it was something new. Either way, it was cool as hell. And maybe tomorrow he would catch a frog, something closer to its size, and see who ate who.

The possibilities were almost endless, and summer vacation had barely begun.

rest stop: chapters 9 - 11

KARYN CARPENTER

In her bed in her parents' house, eight miles away, Karyn had a vivid dream. In it, Todd was climbing into a cigar tube. She tried to tell him how silly that was, because cigar tubes only opened on one end.

"So do condoms," he replied, which was true, but what did that have to do with anything?

"If you go in there, I'm not coming in after you," she warned him, but he brushed her aside, now wearing a motorcycle helmet and a jumpsuit Elvis would have envied. As he climbed into the tube, he shrank like Alice, and dwindled away to nothing.

"He's right, you know," said the giant worm at her side. It smiled wickedly. "You've got to go in to get out."

"You're the whole reason we're in this mess," she reminded it, whereupon it climbed into the tube, too, and pulled the cap closed after it.

In her sleep, Karyn moaned and woke herself up. She lay there for a moment, thinking…

this is the last night before they'll know, the last night when everything is still okay

…but that wasn't true, because things had already changed - she had already changed - and they were going to change a lot more in the coming months.

She suddenly felt so lonesome for Todd that she began to cry, muffling her sobs with a pillow, lest her mother hear.

The sun was just above the horizon when she wiped her eyes and got up to pee, the robins already hard at their morning choir practice. No one else was stirring yet, not even her little brothers, and she went back to bed afterward and listened to the house wake up, savoring every sound, counting down the hours and the minutes until Todd arrived and they told her family the secret that would change their lives forever.

BILL HIGGINS

One of the down sides of living in Michigan, thought Bill Higgins as he loaded his fishing gear into his Boston Whaler, is the weather. He had lived in the Thumb all his life, but Lake Huron could still surprise him by throwing up hail one minute and sunshine the next, with temperature swings of as much as forty degrees just to keep you on your toes.

Case in point: this morning.

Oh, it had dawned all things bright and beautiful, the heat already radiating up from the ground as he bent down to get the paper off the porch. But by the time he’d had breakfast and gotten dressed, the wind had shifted to the north, the sky had darkened and the temp had to be mid-fifties now at best.

None of which would keep him from going fishing, of course. Ever since retirement from teaching - science at the middle school, then biology at the high school - not even snow could do that. But it meant an extra six-pack was required (purely for insulation, you understand) and, if it rained, probably no smokes.

“You’re not taking any cigarettes with you, right?” asked his wife Maureen, as she handed him the plastic bag full of sandwiches.

“Woman, didn’t you hear what the doctor said?” he grumbled.

She looked him dead in the eye. “The question is, did you hear what he said? You’ve got to last me.”

“How can I smoke when it’s gonna rain cats and dogs?”

His wife hugged herself against the chill. “Isn’t it supposed to clear up?”

Bill shrugged. He put the bag in the boat, covered it with the all-weather tarp, and tied it down against the rising wind.

Maureen grabbed his hat on each side of his head and pulled him in for a kiss. It was a long one, something else that had changed since retirement.

“Be careful,” she said. “Come home if it gets bad. No sense getting sick over a few sunfish.”

“Prob’ly won’t get any,” he said, and that was true – he hadn’t caught a thing all week. He normally did his fishing in Black River under the I-94 bridge. Maybe it was time to investigate the canals and see if he had any better luck there.

“What time do you think you’ll be home?” asked Maureen, heading for the screen door.

“Late enough for you and the milkman to do your business,” he said. “But probably not to squeeze in the mail man, too.”

“They don’t have milk men anymore,” Maureen reminded him for the umpteenth time. She never got the joke, or maybe she did and didn’t find it funny. Not after thirty years of marriage, anyway.

“I know,” he sighed, climbing into his old Tercel. “I know, I know, I know.”

He pulled the door shut. It squealed in protest.

“I know just how you feel,” he told it.

HAYDEN GREEN

Hayden Green was watching a dog sack.

He had made up the ‘dog sack’ name himself, because that’s what it looked like to him and, being eleven, he tended toward the literal.

The dog sack smelled. Bad.

During summer break, his parents kicked him out of the house when they went to work and didn’t expect him back before dusk, a rare thing in these electronic times. Hayden didn’t mind, even though all the other kids were playing video games at home or at camp or whatever other kids did. He was used to solitude. In fact, he preferred it.

He liked to ride his bike down to the woods near Black River. It was quiet there. Sometimes he brought a banana and a book, sometimes a sandwich, but he always brought his magnifying glass.

Carpenter ants looked like monsters under it, covered with hairs you couldn’t otherwise see. And when he discovered how to focus the light through the lens to burn stuff, he would pretend that he was Superman using his heat vision to burn messages into green leaves or kill the monster ants before they could overrun Metropolis.

Burned ants smelled just like burned popcorn, curiously enough, and they wouldn’t stand still to die - you had to cripple them first. Then, under the blinding light, they would suddenly stop moving, smoke, and pop.

Frogs moved too much, he found, and they died if you tried to stun them with a board, but you could get them to hold a firecracker or a small smoke bomb in their mouths if you were patient enough, a trick that worked with garter snakes, too. He would blow them up or burn them, meticulously inspect the damage, and come back the next day to watch the crows eat whatever was left. It was the circle of life in action.

But he had never seen a dog sack before.

There it lay, at the edge of the river, a bag of skin and fur with a collar where he guessed its neck must have been, but the bag seemed curiously empty. For one thing, it was flat as a pancake. Even if the dog somehow got run over, it was Hayden’s experience that the bones tended to shoot out through the skin. They didn’t magically disappear. And there was obviously no meat in the sack; despite the fact that it reeked, the crows wouldn’t touch it.

What could do that? he wondered. Would Drano do that? He wondered if his parents would let him get a dog.

He hunted around along the bank until he found a good solid stick, and used it to gently poke what was left of the dog. The corpse wasn’t all dried out, like he expected; the skin was supple and gave in an odd way. He got the stick under the edge of the collar and used it to flip the dead animal’s tag so he could see the name. It read Riley.

Something under the skin, or inside it, moved.

Hayden stepped back, stick upraised. There were rats all along the river, living off dead fish and sewage and whatever else they could find, and he had learned that they had no fear of him. He slid the stick under the edge of the dog sack, ready to run, and flipped the skin over.

The back side of the skin was soaking wet, and smelled worse, if that was even possible, but there was no rat. Instead, there was what he first thought was a fist-sized black rock, until it flattened out like a bloodworm, trying to flee to the water.

“Wicked,” said Hayden. He used the stick as a barrier, blocking its path. The front of it reached out and touched his stick, tried to go over it, so he raised the stick and it tried to go under it, so he stopped it from doing that, too.

Suddenly, the end of it squeezed out a long tube capped by something that looked like a flower, black on the outside and pink inside, which waved back and forth like a cobra. When he moved his stick, the flower whipped out and grabbed the stick right out of his hand. For something so small, it had a hell of a grip.

“Fuckin’ wicked,” said Hayden, who stood up and backed away a few steps as it wormed its way back into the water. It had to be some kind of leech, right? Some kind he hadn’t seen before. That meant scientific study was called for, under controlled conditions. If he could catch it and put it in his fish tank at home, he could observe how it hunted and stuff.

I’ll need my jar, he thought, trotting back to his bike. My jar and my fish net. Didn’t leeches carry some kind of disease? He would need the rubber gloves that he’d taken from under the sink, too.

Who needed video games when there was science to do?

rest stop: chapters 6 - 8

HARVEY LEE

For the benefit of those who believe in near-death experiences, Harvey Lee Osborne's final moments:

The tire iron was a surprise. He didn't actually feel it, but he felt off-balance, somehow. His breathing stopped. What was left of his heart gave up the ghost.

It was very quiet and very dark.

He felt hot, prickly heat his mama used to call it, as the tenderizer continued to do its work. Normally, prey animals were taken by the head as they drank, the tenderizer going to work immediately on the brain, before the food could fight back. The soft Y tentacles would attach under the chin or high on the throat, gentle as a mother's kiss, and the prey hooks would pump their load into major blood vessels, to let the heart do the work of carrying the tenderizer to the rest of the body.

Harvey Lee's brain dissolved, and the darkness gave way to a bright tunnel, just as he had heard it would on TV. And there was his mama, coming to greet him, a big smile on her face.

Mama! cried Harvey Lee, glad to see her after so long. Now that he was dying, he would finally have her all to himself, just like he had always wanted.

Then Harvey Lee remembered how his mama had died, and what he had done to her afterward.

Her smile spread past her ears as she came to do what he had always known she someday would, lifting her dress so the thing between her legs could eat him, screaming.

CATONINE

It lay curled in on itself in the cool wet, dozing as all predators do, most of the time. Almost two weeks earlier it had been great with food, stretched as tight within its skin as a drumhead left out in the rain. Now, it resembled an empty trash bag. It was mindless in these in-between times, and little more than that at any other time.

It was hermaphroditic, so no part of its life need be wasted on pursuit, acquisition, or defense of a mate. It was also cannibalistic – indeed, it had consumed most of its brood-mates before leaving the egg case – so it had no need of communication or the ability to differentiate among family members.

Nature could be creative, but it could also be conservative. When it found something that worked, it left well enough alone. Sharks had been sharks for more than one hundred million years. Its kind, too, had dined on saurian flesh – digging into burrows and sucking the life from the unborn, or floating just below the surface of the mud around drinking holes to slide prey hooks into the legs of passing herds.

They came for a drink, and learned too late that they were the beverage.

TODD

Todd almost immediately slipped on the puke on his shoes and tore the knees out of his jeans and the skin off his knees hitting the parking lot. He risked a look back toward the car as he got up, saw that it was empty, and put everything he had into sprinting across the asphalt toward the highway, spitting fishflies as he went.

God, it’s dark.

There was no sound except for the cars on the highway, the insects, and his shoes slapping asphalt. Running felt good, felt right. He looked back, but couldn't see anyone following. Maybe they hadn't known he was there.

Maybe they were all dead, too.

He thought of Karyn again, and put on a burst of speed as his feet left the pavement for the grass. The highway was maybe sixty feet away. He could flag down a car or, if no one would stop, run along the road the mile or two to the next exit, and call his folks from the gas station there. What a story he would have to tell.

He risked one more look back. He was just at the edge of the light from the streetlight on the highway, a clear target, and he wanted to be sure no one was going to take a shot at him.

The ground giving way under his feet was completely unexpected, and he went down hard on his belly, the wind knocked out of him, biting his tongue hard enough to taste blood.

Shit! he thought, as he slid backward into the hole. And then panicked as he realized it was a deep hole, ladies and gentlemen, deep enough that his hands disappeared down into it, and he was gone, gone, gone.

He lay in mud and worse. It was dark, except for the little bit of light spilling down into the hole from the highway. The edge of the hole seemed impossibly far away, high above his head.

I'm in a fucking sewer pipe, he thought, and it was true. The pipe was one of the big capacity ceramic jobs, designed to carry rainwater and sewage to the water treatment plant up in Port Huron. Unfortunately, it was cracked and crumbling from age, stress, and earthquakes, for all Todd knew. It was also easily nine feet across, which meant the hole was well above Todd's head when he was standing up, which he intended to do right now, thank you very much.

What the hell is that?

Ten feet away lay something that looked a little bit like a garbage bag in the murk, except that it was very obviously alive. It was maybe four feet long, and pear-shaped. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, Todd saw that its texture was something like a worm, or maybe a slug. It was a mottled grey-brown, with big black pores that expanded and contracted rhythmically. It was slightly transparent, like a tadpole's belly. Todd could see things moving inside.

He started when the end of it closest to him stretched out, wormlike and tumescent. Like a cartoon cat pushed through a drainpipe, the mouth parts bloomed at the tip like a flower opening.

Oh my God, thought Todd. Is it a leech? He was too shit-scared to move. The four transparent hooks at the corners of the mouth spread wide, the tiny pink tentacles between them fanned out in pulsing waves. The hooks were wicked-looking, each as long as Todd's fingers.

As far as he could see, it didn't have any eyes, but it obviously knew he was there.

Waiting for me to move, he thought. Maybe it can feel the air movement, or it can sense my body heat, like the alien in that movie. Only if that was true, wouldn't it have attacked before now?

Todd lay as flat as he could. He watched it, and waited, and wondered how quickly it could move. He wondered how to stay alive.

The questing mouth parts waved back and forth in the air, stretching up, its photosensitive organ seeking patches of dark against the light from above. Fully extended, it almost touched the top of the pipe.

It paused, mouth parts and tip retracting, then reached out again just above the surface of the mud, sweeping broadly from side to side like a snake, seeking. Something, something there, but no movement, no big shadows.

Very, very slowly, Todd pulled the tire iron toward himself with his left hand. The head (if it had a mouth, it must be the head, right?) ducked down to inspect his hand. He froze again. It was almost touching him. And then it did, delicately brushing the back of his left hand.

The reaction on both sides was instant.

Instantly, gently, the soft cilia wrapped around his hand. They were cool and wet to the touch. Todd saw the preyhooks arch back like the hammer in a pistol, all four of them oozing some kind of clear liquid. He thought of the bag of melted meat in the parking lot, and yanked his hand back, but the tentacles were stronger than they looked, and the tube they were attached to stretched to accommodate his movement.

He wiggled his hand frantically, not wanting it to get a good enough grip that it could bite him, and beat the wet ceramic for the tire iron with his right hand. He closed on it and brought it around in one motion, aiming for the tube, to knock it away. It hit and rebounded as if it had struck a taut rubber band, but the grip only tightened and little jets of fluid squirted from the four fangs.

Where do I hit it? he panicked. Where can I kill it?

Anywhere, anywhere!

Todd swung.

It was not as graceful as the first swing, but it had the advantage of connecting with the sharp end of the crowbar. A tear opened up in the thing's side.

Something spilled out, and it let go of him immediately and recoiled, writhing against the floor of the pipe. It rolled and rolled and, when it was done rolling, it rolled some more.

Todd didn't wait. He ran like hell. The wrong way.

The part of the sewer system that ran alongside the highway and into which Todd ran was the spillway into which feeder tubes from homes, businesses, and rain gutters flowed. Even at noon, it was almost completely black down there, because rain and sewage don't need nightlights.

After running into his first wall, Todd remembered the tiny light on his keychain, intended for nothing more than making sure you got the key in the keyhole. He fished it out, listening for movement, hearing only water.

The light it provided was a mere pinprick, but in the blackness it seemed like a flare. At least it was enough to keep his feet under him and spot branching tunnels. Provided he ran bent over - there wasn't enough light to reach all the way to the floor.

What if there isn't any other way out? he wondered.

Now THERE’S a happy thought, answered the other voice. Are you always this fucking cheerful?

He pointed the light back down the tunnel, but couldn’t see far enough to tell if the thing was following or not. Maybe he had killed it.

Maybe it’s waiting, just beyond the light, and it’ll get you the minute your back’s turned.

Fuck you. Fuck. You.

He turned, staring into the darkness that ran under the road. It had to come out somewhere. Sewer guys needed to get in and out, right? It was just a matter of following a straight line, as straight as the pipes allowed, until he hit an exit point. Because no matter what, he wasn’t going anywhere near that thing again.

The longer I wait, the closer it might be getting, he thought. There was no disagreement from the other voice, much as he’d hoped for it. With a swift and silent prayer to whomever might be listening, he set off into the maze.