“Don’t you dare do it!” I shouted, when I got my wits half back together. She decided that she would rather keep kicking and wiggling those freaky tentacles, though. I aimed the shotgun down and let a blast go, the roar of the gun accompanying her head being torn off. All at once, the tentacles retreated within the gaping vertical slit they’d torn through her lightly tanned abdomen. Now, one might wonder why, exactly, I would shoot her head and not her belly, where this monstrosity was making itself evident. The answer to that is obvious.

  Everyone knows that the undead only stay down if you shoot them in the head.

  “You crazy zombie bitch! Stay down! I’m not anyone’s chow tonight, hah!” For a few moments I carried on like that, whooping like I’d won the Ultra Cup.

  “Please, hairless ape, cease your shrieking!” A tinny voice came from the belly of the zombie I’d just confirmed my kill of, and I stiffened in surprise at the interruption.

  “What in tarnation, who the hell are you?” In response, leastaways as far as I could tell, the thing made a noise that was full of blatting wet slapping, vaguely obscene. It set me even further on edge. Muscles in my shoulders grew tight, and I could feel the world growing sharper, more well-defined. If I let myself get carried off by the combat high, I’d find myself acting completely without thought, probably in violent fashion. It was a result of the USAS’ tinkering when I’d joined the marines, and one that wasn’t welcome right then. I turned to a well-worn path of tuning myself down, ridicule and alcohol.

  “Well, that sounded like it ended with a ‘Blart’ so that’s what I’m gonna call you,” I quipped as I backed up toward my truck’s bed, not taking my eyes off the alien varmint. My grasping right hand sought out my cooler, one of the fancy atomic ones that kept working for a few decades, and went with me everywhere on the general principle of “just in case”. Inside it, I felt out the remains of my last six pack, which was calling my name. I snagged a lucky one, cracked it open with a fingernail and took a long enough pull from the fizzling dark brew that half of it found its way into my belly in one gulp. The cool feeling on my sore throat brought me back down to Earth, wearing off the edges of the combat high.

  “Now. You better climb all the way out of there and show yourself before I gun you down.” It vaguely occurred to me that I was likely making first contact with a bona fide extraterrestrial, but that didn’t seem terribly important to me besides the fact that this particular extraterrestrial had erupted out of the toned, flat belly of a gorgeous woman. At any rate, my threat worked, because the tentacles bunched together to get a grip and let… something pull itself out of her eviscerated midsection.

  “I am groveling. Do not kill me.” Its emotionless voice was much clearer now that it was outside the body, though a slightly robotic drone remained as an undertone. I tried to see the source, but it didn’t seem to have a mouth or anything of the like. It must have been using some sort of artificial voice box, but a well-hidden one. “You are clearly a superior combatant, I submit to you, and have no more weapons to use against you. In addition, I have been rendered incapable of fleeing.” In the light of my dim porch bulb its body was cherry red, and I realized with a start that it was almost identical to the squirming mass I’d yanked from my throat less than a half hour ago. One central body, a bit longer than my hand, and several appendages which were two or three times longer. Curiosity and disgust warred within me.

  “What in the sam-hell are you talking about?”

  “Please,” it begged, “I need somewhere warm and wet to live. If my flesh dries out I will perish.” Several tentacles reached out exploratively, and while the ones that touched the gravel of my drive drew back, those which probed into the dewy grass latched on. It began to pull itself onto the grass and towards me. “Let me climb inside you.”

  “What?” My response came automatically, a stuttering misfire of the brain which passed my lips without thought.

  “I beg you, let me climb inside you. I can move through either of your major orifices, it won’t-” I dragged my shotgun up to point directly at the disgusting little creature, which stopped moving towards me at once.

  “Absolutely not.” I said in flat refusal. I tossed the now-emptied beer can over a shoulder towards my fire pit and grabbed another out of the cooler. Only one beer left. What a tragedy. “There is no possible way that I am going to let some alien squid thing sodomize me right on my own front lawn. Or in my house for that matter. Anywhere, really.”

  “There will be no sodomy, I have no carnal intent-”

  “Look,” I interrupted the wriggling pervert again through a mouthful of booze and then swallowed. “how long will you last?”

  “Maybe another three hours.”

  I studied the boneless form. Its flesh was already starting to turn from its earlier cherry red to a lighter pink. I frowned, thinking to myself. Maybe the little creep was telling the truth. I leaned an arm on my pickup, laying the shotgun on its edge to keep it vaguely pointed towards Blart and the girl while I gave a little more attention to the beer in my left hand.

  “And you need any ol’ living thing to climb inside?” I asked after another swig.

  “Any living thing with a large enough digestive tract to hold me, though I’d prefer…”

  My mind began to wander as the creature detailed the particulars of its parasitic nature. The smell of ruptured intestines had wafted over to me with a change in the wind, and it brought me back to a battle in the Middle Eastern sector, a few years back. Getting her buried was climbing further toward the top of my list of priorities by the minute.

  “...thirty of your kilograms or so should do,” Blart finished. I snapped my attention back to the present.

  “Why should I help you? You tried to kill me after one of your friends tried to turn me into his flesh puppet!”

  “I am an enemy combatant and I have surrendered. I am now your prisoner of war. By your own doctrine you are legally required to provide such amenable living conditions as to sustain my life. You are a soldier of the world government on this planet you call dirt-”

  “Earth,” I interjected.

  “Yes, dearth,” it went on. “and so you are subject to those laws and must treat me according to their stipulations.”

  “Prisoner of war?” I couldn’t help but laugh at the idea. Everyone knew there hadn’t been proper PoWs since the mutual liquidation started by the Soviets and Chinese during the Last Wars. “The USAS doesn’t have any active wars, just police actions. Police actions against insurgents who, by the way, have precisely zero rights when captured. We could grind them up into hamburgers and feed them to each other if we wanted. Would be perfectly legal, too.” The last of the second can’s contents had finished running its way down my esophagus, so I tossed it to join the first and pulled my third and final drink out of the cooler.

  “I… appear to have made a miscalculation,” the thing responded. It had made its way back to the girl’s corpse and pulled its rapidly drying mass back inside her ruined abdomen. I couldn’t help but gawk at the bizarre and disgusting sight. “I shall attempt another line of reasoning,” I heard the girl’s stomach say after the schlorping and sucking noises had fallen silent. “If my appeal to your notional greater authority has been unsuccessful, perhaps I can appeal to your more base self interest. If you help me, I can get you wealth beyond your wildest imagination.”

  “I get paid pretty well as-is,” I said to Blart, turning back to look now that its voice was once again partially muffled by the woman’s guts. “More money, more problems. I already have enough problems, and now I’ve got a pervert alien to boot.”

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “I’m not a pervert,” it delivered quickly from its reeking place of cover. I got the feeling that it wanted to shout, but the translator made any would-be exclamation sound flat and monotone. Unimpressed, I took another pull.

  “Either way Blart, I’m not interested in wealth.”

  “How about power? You could be the ruler of this whole planet. You should be the ruler of this planet, it’s in your blood.” I scoffed and shook my head. I might have been amused had it not been for the circumstances leading to the creature’s proposition.

  “Wow, that sounds like a lot of effort. Try again.”

  “I can give you…” the parasite faltered as he thought. “Knowledge! Technology, advancements in chemistry, physics, such scientific revelations that even the greatest of your primitive, backwater ape theorists will be awed!”

  “Do I look like some sort of nerd to you?” I asked. I put down another mouthful of beer and cleared my throat. “And how about you cut the ‘primitive’, and ‘ape’ shit? Some more ‘recognizing your superior being’ and a whole lot less of your pompous blathering will keep you alive a little longer.”

  “You’re- but-” the alien stuttered, with that fuzzy undertone rising in volume during its indecision. I shook the can a little, sloshing its half-depleted contents about in its general direction. “What sort of prim- the value of the knowledge on off-”

  “If you don’t come up with something I actually want by the time I am finished with this, I’m gonna shoot you and bury you with the girl you rode in on,” I delivered my ultimatum. The sun would be up soon, and I’d need to be on-base shortly after. I didn’t have time to go back and forth with a talking, overly horny plate of calamari from space.

  “I could…” The extraterrestrial seemed to be scraping the bottom of the barrel, because it took a good long time to figure out its next offer. I was gracious enough to drink slowly. When it had perhaps a sip’s worth of time left, it finally spoke up, speaking rapidly. “I could give you your leg back. If we go back to my ship I can engineer a course of nanites which will regenerate your limb.” I looked down and contemplated the metal prosthetic. I’d been walking on it for nearly three years and it had served more or less as well as the original. Better in some ways, in fact, as it was never sore, blistered, or tired. Still, regeneration did offer another interesting possibility…

  “How about my left nut?”

  “You desire… a leftward single-seeded, hard shelled fruit?”

  “No, my left testicle, dumbass. It got blown off in the Indo-Sector. I wouldn’t mind having my leg back, but what I really want is my nut.”

  “Fine! The briefing said that you degenerates were repulsively obsessed with your genitals and copulation, but I wasn’t quite convinced until now.”

  “One more smart remark,” I growled with menace, brandishing the shotgun at the squid. “And you can keep my nut.”

  “I don’t have your-” the alien began, but paused and thought better of its comment upon seeing the business end of a twelve gauge and then went on. “Fine, we have a deal.”

  “Okay,” I said, lowering the weapon and starting toward the cab of the truck. “I gotta run into town. You just stick right there. I’ll be back… when I get back”

  “No, you can’t leave me here,” it pleaded, but I did so anyway despite its continued whining. I wasn’t overly concerned about the needy little butt-squid. Being on its own might do it some good- maybe it could find some other tired drunk to climb inside. My truck started up with a roar that drowned out its voice and I drove off, careful not to hit what remained of the dead girl. The rim of the horizon was beginning to glow with the creeping sun. It was going to be a long day.

  - - -

  An hour or so later I was standing behind Dale’s Pet Shop. With one foot I turned over a rock and stooped to retrieve Dale’s hidden key before rising to insert it into the back door’s knob. One turn of the knob and the door came open silently, on well-oiled hinges. Dale and I went way back. He’d been my brother’s best friend back in the day, and though my brother had fallen in love in the South American theater and taken our Ma with him to stay in what used to be Chile, Dale and I had stayed friends. Even so, I still felt slightly bad for what I was about to do as I walked up and down the aisles, keeping an eye out for a suitable animal.

  The birds he had, though pretty, were all too small. I moved on to the next group of animals, a bunch of cats. While adorable, they, too, were all not much bigger than the squid himself. Frowning, I kept on with my circuitous route around the pet shop. Rats and gerbils were too small, Dale was fresh out of ferrets, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I were to take one of his dogs and jam a squid up its butt. Finally, I came to the last group of animals. They were in a big pen that took up nearly a quarter of the store’s floorspace, sleeping, save one of them that stared at me with beady, hateful eyes. They were pot-belly pigs, and of course, the only one awake was Jibbly.

  Now, a lot of people, when they hear “pot-bellied pigs”, think to themselves about something along the lines of a little miniature dog-sized critter. Don’t get me wrong, they’re little pigs, but only in comparison to a normal pig. A pot-bellied pig will still grow to be nearly a hundred pounds on average, and can get up to twice that or more. Dale had eight of them, and was asking for a few hundred bucks each. They were a favorite for pets around these parts, and they’d probably go pretty quickly. All except for Jibbly.

  Jibbly had been in Dale’s pet shop for a few years now. He was massive, didn’t like baths, and behaved in a downright rude fashion. His coarse fur was mottled black and white, and just as sure as everyone in town knew him, they also knew that Dale would never get rid of him. For Dale’s part, he’d continuously lowered the price until simply asking his increasingly unlikely customers to cover the cost of shots and paperwork, a measly hundred dollars. By now he was probably no more than a month or two from making Jibbly into bacon bits and short ribs. I pulled a couple crisp hundreds out of my pocket and left them on the counter with a few twenties alongside, then grabbed a handful of pig feed.

  Ill-tempered and rude though he normally was, Jibbly’s demeanor changed and his beady eyes tracked my hands intensely as soon as they were full of food. He was smart enough to know that he had to be a good little piggy if he wanted chow, and greedy enough to keep quiet about it so his fellows wouldn’t find out. I moved over to his cage, unlatched it, and gestured for him to follow me. Dutifully, he did, and I led him out of the store. I had to give him a taste of the pig feed to keep him following me, and finally I spread some out on the floorboard of my truck to get him to hop in. The little bastard hopped his front legs up and began chowing down on the bits of the little pile he could reach, so I went behind him, grabbed his fat ass and heaved him into the truck. He turned to nip at me, but I slammed the door before he could manage it.

  Looking at him through the window of my pickup, I felt some kind of way about it. His temperament notwithstanding I had to admit that the little guy was cute. Though I’d done my share of nefarious deeds, taking charge of any animal just for it to be violated in this way seemed somehow worse, but I dismissed these momentary sympathies and told myself that in the end every sodomite squid, ornery pig, and one-legged drunk had a part to play. Without another thought I banished these inconsequential worries and got in, threw the truck into drive and hurried home before anyone could uncover my big bacon heist while it was still in the making.

  - - -

  Forty minutes later, I pulled back into my lot. The sun was well and truly starting its journey across the sky, a finger’s width above the horizon. Jibbly of course had pissed on the floorboard of my truck, which admittedly helped me to feel vindicated in what I was about to subject him to. I hopped out and slammed the door shut behind me, neglecting to shut the truck down in my hurry to get Jibbly out before he relieved himself again.

  “C’mere,” I barked once I’d crossed over to the other side of the truck and opened the door. Jibbly stared out at me with glossy, porcine eyes, clearly content to stay exactly where he was, and I groaned. I’d given him the rest of his pig feed after he’d nipped my thigh to keep him busy, and so I didn’t have anything else to bribe him with. I went inside and grabbed the oldest still seemingly edible thing in my refrigerator, a plate of miniature pulled pork sandwiches I’d nabbed some weeks ago from the mess on base.

  For a long moment I stared at the plate’s contents in contemplation, then shrugged. If coaxing a domesticated animal to commit cannibalism was the worst thing I did that day, I’d kiss my uncle. I unwrapped the plastic cover and tossed it into my garbage can as I walked out and carried the tray warily down the driveway, giving the corpse a wide berth. Finally, I placed the tray strategically next to the girl’s body. Jibbly watched from the truck and I could see in his eyes that he knew I wanted him to get out, but stubborn as ever, he’d decided to stay. I grabbed one of the sandwiches and took a big bite. Perhaps “still edible” was going a bit far for the sandwiches, but I thought of the president and intimated an “mmm” noise so as to not let Jibbly know what I actually thought of the poor quality pulled pork.

  Jibbly, true to his nature, let out a little hork and hopped out of the truck in a dash to the tray of sandwiches. If it bothered him at all that he might have been eating his near cousin he did not show it, and I wasn’t about to make any attempt to chane his mind. His backside was to the girl’s open guts, and just seconds into his pigging out, Blart’s tentacles whipped forth and latched onto his flank. Out of an inexplicable urge to give either Jibbly or the horny extraterrestrial some privacy, I’m honestly still not sure to this day, I turned around.

  Jibbly shrieked and began running around like… well, like a foot long squid was forcing its way past his sphincter. I went and found my garden hose and another beer. Sipping and thinking over the chaos of the morning, I sprayed out the inside of my truck’s cab while Jibbly became acquainted with someone who was as much a pain in the ass as he was.

  - - -