Chapter 21
21
The rippers hauled the dead-ish human to the base of the Ghoul Lord’s swathe of writhing tentacles. Avidex twirled some thicker wrigglers over the steaming flesh, tasting and sniffing. Blood dribbled from strips and gouges in this creature’s skin surface. The face was relatively unscathed. Though the heart had ceased to beat, the cells of the skin still lived and so did much of the brain and several organs.
It would make a nice snack, though there was an alternative.
To allow time for his primordial thought processes to decide on a path, Avidex kept the body and brain alive, infusing direct energy that bypassed the need for blood and this oxygen these creatures required.
A Ghoul Lord relied on millennia of banked-up instincts sharpened in battle and apocalypse after apocalypse.
The Way of the Ghoul Lord was simple and effective:
Subjugate the dominants.
Kill the aggressives.
Lure them all.
Keep to the upper surface of the planet, for in darkness lies peril.
If they worshipped anything, it was the life-giving light and the radiation. Bathed in distant solar radiation, they had surged slowly from planet to planet across the universe. Even in the depths of space, with no planetary barriers to block it, the radiation found them and nurtured them, and kept them from burning in the darkness. These thousand or hundred-year journeys rarely rewarded fast thinking. They knew their weaknesses. When the need arose for complex thought, trespassing upon the brain of an enslaved species was the simplest way to increase one’s processing power, as well as gain local lore.
More information was needed.
He snagged a nearby human to piggyback onto the fresher brain’s capabilities—spearing a tendril into the head.
His intelligence ascended. Thoughts accelerated.
Why had the attack failed? Why was the female human not here before it, begging for attention, for ravishment before her painful demise? He needed the satisfaction of eating the enemy that had cut it.
This had been a perplexing result. Only two rippers had survived.
Avidex plunged a tip into the brain area of the dying one and encouraged the tendril he’d planted there to emerge. It squirmed out and rejoined the main body mass, spilling the data it had recorded. Then Avidex paused to assimilate.
In the lower levels, where all was dark, the human prey flourished. They used the darkness to their advantage and somehow resisted the Lure when they kept away from the Top. They had reacted quickly to the attack, killing the ghoul guards with their projectile weapons and cutting blades, also using a large creature with teeth and fur to kill many rippers.
The female had never come close to this guard. Seen from a distance, she’d fought efficiently, the same as she had when she severed the tentacle of Avidex.
Nevertheless, some humans had died.
He linked to the fresh human’s brain thoroughly for some time and harvested some curious ideas.
The darkness and lack of Lure were the main problems.
To remain unshielded in the dark would kill Avidex. His tissues would boil away there, for it was anathema to his species. Darkness was poison.
And so, in the interest of making this escaping girl dead, he would need to confront them more closely, wearing a shield the humans would accept. What better shield than a human? Protection from the darkness and a face they’d like.
Two in one, the fresh human brain offered up as the main idea.
Two in one.
A skin suit.
He needed a human skin suit. Like that cockroach guy in the movie.
The dead-ish one seemed to have a certain power among the humans. It had been recognized. The solution was obvious.
Avidex never did anything by halves, except when it involved preserving his own genetic matter. Some of Avidex would go down below to kill humans. Some would stay here. The reunion with himself would be joyous.
In one rapturous flurry of goop, gobbets, and disarticulated vertebrae, of tearing and shucking motions, Avidex tore the dead-ish one’s head from the neck stalk connecting it to the below body, then forced half of his own brain and tentacle flesh inside the fresher human, making the skin bulge here and there.
He wrenched off the fresh head, then squashed the dead-ish human head on top instead.
Watching himself be inside the skin suit and yet also still outside with most of the tentacle swathe was giving him a headache.
A splitting headache. Ha-ha.
The new glued-together human managed a liquid laugh, coughing up a mess of blood afterward. The windpipe was barely abutting onto the other bit of windpipe. And eating? Oy veh now that would be something impossible.
He must go below, post-haste, and kill people and drag the girl back here to himself before this body properly expired and fell apart… kicked the bucket, like a dead cockatoo.
What curious phrases these humans used.
Before Avidex-human left to descend, he made a final effort to look presentable—tucking the shirt in, swiping off the biggest flesh gobbets, rearranging the torn flesh of the neck join with these new foreign fingers.
He could see his fingers below! Skin suits were amazing, he decided. He must do this more often.
Though, as he walked, bits did insist on oozing and spilling and bleeding. Seriously icky.
I should have a name for alternate me. Avi-man? Hu-dex?
Hudex. Yes.
Hudex waved goodbye to the rest of himself, to Avidex, and set off whistling and burbling for the nearest stairs. Undoubtedly, his eyes shone with effervescent white glee. A few rippers scampered at his heels.
With the Lure given to them, up close and personal, the humans below would be duck food.