Chapter 9
9
Sunlight bathed the gory plain, illuminating the remains of the previous day’s meal. Bones, skulls and gobbets of human flesh lay in steaming piles. So very pretty.
The Ghoul Lord, Avidex, flapped his head sails and glided on many tentacles closer to the edge but stopped short of where the top floor fell into the void. The stump where one tentacle had been cut away seethed under the healing light.
The dark nights when they lay mostly dormant had given rise to a plot, a vague plan, a need for retribution.
Every new planet had its challenges. This one had been sweet until that prey had hurt him.
Avidex contemplated the situation from within the mind of one of their human minions. The creatures from this planet thought through the solutions to puzzles with more local knowledge than they possessed.
Eat, breed, own, kill the threats, bask in the light and heat of a young sun, then travel to new pastures on the solar winds of the universe, or hitch a ride on a passing starship… these were the priorities of his own kind.
The prey that had severed one of Avidex’s limbs was a threat, he decided, looking out through the male human’s eyes at his own, wounded form.
She, for it had been a she, had been delightful, until she had chosen to writhe loose, and stab with the knife. To cut off a limb was punishable by death. Not that she wasn’t going to die anyway.
I will bring her back here and devour her properly this time.
Sampling the strange sexual emotions humans succumbed to when probed was one of his fetishes. This one would be consumed more slowly than usual to allow for the proper appreciation of pain, revenge, sex, and the marvelous taste of blood flavored by fear.
Yes. Oh yes.
When stirred, this guard that he chose to label Pet Human One, or PHO, suggested various methods to catch her. The easiest, the tried methods, would do.
I shall gather a pack of rippers, what humans call stinkers, and four of our possessed humans, and I shall track her down.
This human knew her from before their invasion of Earth. Was he a friend? Avidex was unsure if friend was the correct term. They were… close. She would perhaps hesitate at the sight of a known face, and her fear would be greater when she found herself betrayed.
You are ideal. He laughed and made the human rub his hands together, watching partly through its eyes, partly through the facets of his own large and wondrous eyes.
At Avidex’s command a pack of rippers assembled, showing their eagerness—their plethora of white, spiny limbs jittering as they jostled to be chosen.
To chase, to feed, to kill, to drag the girl back to the top to be tortured and rendered into a pile of blood, bones, and flesh. Yesss.
Good little rippers. He would suck her dry then throw her quivering, whimpering, limbless torso to the rippers to perforate before her death was enacted. A tentacle lost to the void below was no minor matter.
Under instruction, the four humans explored the lean-to where she had survived the years and scraped up her residual molecules into a scent ball. Skin cells, spit, hair, whatever she’d left, even a few droplets of blood.
Feed, my little ones.
While still inside PHO’s mind, Avidex lowered himself and held out the scent ball for the rippers to sniff with their proboscises. After this he very carefully squeezed the stump of the lost tentacle, separating off a squirmy worm of his essence. He fed the worm into PHO’s left nostril, inhaling and feeling the yummy pain as the Avidex-worm wriggled through the septum separating nose from brain. Inside PHO’s brain, Worm curled up.
Now he would have the very best, high-definition recording of her capture.
“Oh, joy of joys.” They made PHO clap his hands. “Go and find her, my children. Go hence!”
Avidex withdrew into his own mind and watched with pleasure as the human bearing Worm, the other three humans, and the scampering rippers, headed toward the edge.
Banzai! Gung ho! Yippee-ki-yay, motherfuckers! Avidex rather liked using the terminology of whatever planet they’d captured.
This would entertain him while they went through the final phase of exterminating the humans and breeding new splendiferously large and fertile queens.