You fuck! I fuck you! You don't fuck me! I FUCK YOU!

  And they did. Steve-Lloyd rammed their shaft balls-deep into the dick of the Devil Bug. The two monsters pulled together almost in a loving embrace, as missiles and cannon fire rained down upon them.

  You like that!? Huh?! You like that!?

  As they pulled closer, closer together, a mass of tentacles parted in the upper belly of House Fucker. They pulled away and revealed a huge snarling human face—a face that resembled Steven's father.

  Steven screamed and ground his dick deeper, wrapped his arms around his enemy.

  Lloyd screamed, looking into the face of his old neighbor—a man he always thought of as a giant dick.

  The face of House Fucker shrieked back.

  Above them, a bomber jet cut through the air. Its bay doors opened and its payload dropped, whistling down into the battle.

  Fuck you! Steven's mind blasted. Fuck you! I hate you, Dad! I was never good enough! You were such a fucking dick! A dick about everything! And now I'm fucking YOUR dick! I'm fucking your dick with MY DICK! I HATE YOU!

  Aaaaaaaaarggh! Lloyd cried. Yuh and yuh pop are a bunch of queeeeeeers!

  Miles Away

  On the horizon, a blinding flash turned night to day. Kevin the cameraman and Brian the reporter turned and shielded their eyes. A moment later, a tremendous percussion rattled the ground, followed by a thunderous roar. A strong wind pelted them with bits of dust and granules and almost knocked them from their feet. When the light subsided, they turned back and looked in awe as a mushroom cloud rose above the city.

  “Get the camera on this!”

  “I am, I am!”

  “Holy fuck! Shit fuck damn fuck! We've just nuked the city!” Brian screamed at the camera. “New York City has been nuked! Oh god! We....we can't see the monsters yet! Let's hope this desperate maneuver has stopped them! Dear rocket ship Jesus on shit fire piss ass, all those people! I can't believe it!”

  Kevin zoomed in on the cloud, trying to find signs of the monsters. He focused, unfocused, and focused his lens again. And then, from the pillar of smoke...

  Wings unfurled.

  Two massive bat-like wings of a dark green color.

  Before the Council

  Torches lit the ruins of a courthouse, casting flickering shadows about the cracked walls. Outside, a fiery sky, pockmarked with oily black clouds that sprouted tentacles, gave ruddy light to the horrors below. Unspeakable forms roamed and slithered around the graveyard that was once a city. These things—these terrors—wore the remnants of human clothing, but what spilled out of them was anything but.

  Inside, Brian Allen was handcuffed before a council. These things in robes mocked their once-human form. Rows of eyes and drooling mouths sprouted from leprous flesh. Sickly, wet tendrils looped out from beneath their garbs, and one of them raised a gavel.

  Pow-pow-pow.

  “Brian Allen,” the horror gurgled, “you have been charged with numerous accounts of prohibited language, clearly stated within the guidelines and restrictions of the FCC Moral Decency Act, during a live and public broadcast. How do you plea?”

  Brian swallowed and looked about the room. Somehow he'd still retained his humanity, despite the apocalypse that had followed the events in New York City. He'd retained his being even through the waves of horrors that spilled from the portal within the nuclear ground zero. He retained his good looks and his swell hairdo, even as people were rounded up like cattle, lines and lines of them pulled into monstrous breeding and feeding lairs to be raped, mutated and transformed.

  He'd hidden away like a mouse and made himself small. But it was over now; the things had found him and brought him here to this mockery of a court.

  “Plea?” Brian asked, feeling numb.

  “Is it not true you violated FCC guidelines?” the creature said, leaning forward, almost vomiting the words instead of saying them. “We have video evidence of numerous infractions. You clearly violated moral decency with a string of choice words... on live television, no less. Millions of people witnessed the act, Mr. Allen. Many of them were children. This court is not pleased. So... how do you plea?”

  “Man,” Brian said and shook his head, “fuck you.”

  “Fuck...me?” the thing laughed. The rest of the court laughed with it. “Fuck me, eh? Bailiff, pull down Mr. Allen's pants. Position his rectum into receiving position.”

  “Fuck me,” it laughed again. “Fuck you, Mr. Allen. Fuck you.”

  “Wait! Wait!” Brian screamed as some horrid fish-thing pushed him to his knees. “Don't I get a lawyer!?”

  The head of the council leaned back. Another creature beside him leaned over and whispered something its ear—or what should've been an ear. Who could tell, Brian thought. The thing looked like Piccasso and Dali got shitfaced drunk and decided to paint a picture with a turd on a canvass made from the leftovers of a fish fry.

  “Well, I suppose you’re right,” the thing said. “Councilor?”

  From behind a table, a lobster-like creature stood up wearing a gray tweed suit. It walked briskly over to the kneeling Brian Allen, looked down on the human with its beady black eyes, and then unzipped it's fly. It produced what appeared to be a mealworm that glistened wet and smelled of ass and dumpsters filled with baby diapers.

  One of its mandibles shot out, pinched Brian's head til his mouth popped open, and then shoved its grotesque cock deep into the man's throat. The lawyer pushed it deeper, til Brian gagged and vomited, and even still, the monster held its dick firm in place.

  The lawyer turned to the council.

  “My client has nothing to say at this time, Your Honor.”

  Nyogtha of the Northern Line

  Adam Millard

  Goodge Street Station, as was its wont on an early Monday morning, swarmed with people. Intolerant commuters shoved indecently past each other in an attempt to board the train currently sitting on the platform, momentarily disremembering that another exactly like it would be along in a few minutes. One would imagine the lack of etiquette—and sheer savagery they afforded—suggested that the workers enjoyed their jobs, when in fact most of them would rather be doing anything other than boarding that train.

  A woman, frail and rheumy and wearing a silken scarf over her head, was almost crushed beneath the melee as the doors to the train swished open and the crowd surged forward. She, unlike these wage-slaves, had no deadline for her destination. Her working days were over; she’d paid her dues and was enjoying life as much as she possibly could with the little benefits the government granted her. Not that money was important to her; she had plenty of it. It was just that the world had become accustomed to leeching, and to decline a pension was tantamount to boasting.

  Stepping aside to allow the suited businessmen a clear run-up to the train, she inhaled and wiped the mirrored sunglasses perched upon her nose as best she could without taking them off. The air was thick with the scent of a thousand perfumes and aftershaves, commingling to create something barbaric. Her eyesight wasn’t what it used to be, and her hearing had gone the same way, but she could smell shit if it drifted beneath her nostrils, and that was what the amalgamated stench reminded her of.

  Shit. Coming soon from Paco Rabanne.

  The commuters fighting for entry through the myriad doors soon realized they would all make it on, although it did nothing to tame them and they proceeded to elbow, nudge, knee, shoulder-barge and—in one instance—head-butt fellow passengers. The head-butted man simply shrugged it off, as if being clobbered in the face by another man’s face was perfectly acceptable, especially at such an ungodly hour on a Monday morning. Later that evening, the man would peer into a mirror at the purple egg formed on his forehead and devise an elaborate ruse in which he would get his revenge on the nutjob who’d clouted him. He would also, once ready to take his revenge tomorrow morning, chicken out. Instead he would locate the head-butter and silently curse the man, who would have no idea how close he had come to receiving his comeuppance.

  The elderly woman shuffled forward, shaking her head with dissent at what she had just witnessed. Animals, she thought, nothing more than primates in suits, and that was being unfair to primates, who she surmised would act in a much better fashion given an Armani two-piece and an Oyster card.

  She boarded the train cautiously. A punk—that’s what they call them, she thought as she looked at his orange-tinged spikes—grimaced at her. The nose-ring dangling from his septum chinked like a cowbell as he moved an inch back to allow her suitable room. She could tell he wasn’t pleased with having to move for an old dear such as she.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” she said, and then—somewhat snidely—added, “It’s a little early for a Halloween party, isn’t it?”

  A few of the passengers within earshot snickered. The punk, an upper-class rebel whose birth certificate named him as Cedric Carter-Bowles, grunted something indecipherable. Knowing that his parents would hit the roof if they found out he’d been disrespecting his elders once again, he followed up the grunt with an apology.

  “That’s quite alright, young man,” the geriatric gnome said, satisfied with herself. Next to her, a businessman glanced impatiently at his watch. He clicked his tongue and sighed heavily before roughly straightening his tie. The elderly lady offered him a smile, which he chose not to return. Instead, he glanced once more at the golden monstrosity coiled around his wrist. He was clearly running late and was eager for the train to start moving. The old lady felt no sympathy for him, nor did she envy him. Time was no longer significant to her the way it once had been. What mattered was the remaining years. She had had a long and fruitful life, filled with suffering and delight in equal measure. She had nothing to grumble about, no regrets, nothing she would change given half the chance. And the man nervously stepping from one foot to the next beside her made her realize how fortunate she had been, how lucky she now was.

  Just as the doors were about to shut, three men appeared. They were virtually identical. Her first thought was of clones, genetically-created copies of a single source, but knowing that science hadn’t quite reached that point yet, she pushed the thought away and settled on something a little more plausible.

  Triplets.

  The men embarked the train. The punk sighed, grunted, apologized once again. The lady pushed herself back as far as she could before realizing she could go no further. The men seemed to fit their combined forms into the tiny space, regardless; as if they were liquid, capable of shape-shifting to accommodate their dozen limbs. They had an insect-like quality, what with their slender countenance and pitch-black suits. Spiderlike, almost. But those heads, perching precariously upon spindly stalks which could barely be called necks, were perfectly hairless. If there ever had been hair atop those heads, there was no sign of it now.

  The doors hissed shut and within a second the train pulled away from Goodge Street. Its forward momentum caused everyone on board to lean towards the back of the train. At the back of the train, a tiny man named Paul Jacoby tried desperately to push back on the throng, but it was of no use. His face was smooshed against a window, and even after he’d exited the train at Kennington his face would peer out from the glass for quite some time. One child, a little girl with beautifully plaited pigtails and a face peppered with cutesy freckles, would draw a dick on his head.

  The three men standing in front of the elderly lady began to whisper. Their respective bald heads bobbed and dipped as the train surged onward through the tunnel. The lady cocked her head so that the scarf covering her ears lowered ever-so-slightly. She caught the tail-end of their murmurings.

  “…wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

  As a travelling lady, she liked to think herself well-versed in the multitude of foreign languages she’d chanced upon. Yet, for the life of her, she couldn’t place the language these three baldies were using. It was more a series of throaty clicks and misplaced vowels than any language she had ever encountered.

  Must be some sort of idioglossia, she thought. A language created between the three that could only be understood by them. She’d heard of such things between identical siblings, but never witnessed it first-hand.

  “…ph’nglui mglw’nafh…” the one on the left said.

  “…Cthulhu r’lyeh…” the one in the middle added.

  “…wgah’nagl fhtagn…” the third bald-pated fellow concluded.

  “I say, that’s terribly rude,” the lady interjected. “I mean, would you like it if we started talking in some foreign language? Hmmm? For all we know, you’re terrorists about to set off a device.”

  The passengers around her gasped. “Terrorist” was still one of those taboo words, especially on public transport. The mere utterance of it was apt to get you swamped with bodies or arrested at the next station. Somebody near the front of the train begged to be let off, but since the tubular tin moving at forty-five mph was deep beneath the ground—and equidistant to Tottenham Court Road and Goodge Street—it was highly unlikely the driver would make such an allowance.

  One of the androgynous men turned to face her while the other two remained facing forward. He sneered, curling his lip just enough to make the perplexed old lady wish she’d never opened her mouth. “Mnahn’,” he said. “Mnahn’ gof’nn.” And then he laughed. A sound emanated from deep within him, an incessant drone which suggested he’d skipped the regular breakfast of cereal, toast and sundry jams and opted instead for a hornets’ nest.

  Whereas the rest of the passengers were happy to let it slide, the old lady folded her arms resolutely across her chest. “See, there you go again,” she said. The man was at least a foot taller than she; she found herself arching her neck to make eye-contact as she reproached him. “This is Great Britain, is it not? We are in London, are we not? I’m pretty sure I saw a large sign outside that said we were.” She glanced around to check that the rest of the passengers were still with her, if they ever had been to begin with. They were looking in all directions; anywhere but towards the strange bald trio and the apparently racist old lady giving them a right earful.

  “Mnahn’ hrii, kadishtu,” the man said.

  “Bless you,” the old lady replied.

  The man grunted; she could see she was going to get nowhere.

  “Maybe you should leave it be,” the Rolex-sporting businessman whispered to the old dear, clearly afraid of what might unravel should the gangly triplets decide to ruck. “This is a free country, and we’d all like to—‘

  The lights went out. It was so sudden that screams literally leapt from throats. Somebody near the front of the train began to pray aloud. A dog began to bark, which made the entire experience all the more unsettling for those who had a phobia of small, whiny animals. Then, the train began to slow. Light flooded in through the windows as the platform appeared. People, once again, began to breathe. For some, the episode would be worthy of a mention upon arrival at work; for others, it was already forgotten, and as the train pulled to a halt and the doors hissed open, people continued to go about their tedious lives relatively unscathed.

  However, the busy commuters failed to notice—upon alighting Tottenham Court Road—the missing triplets, the scarf-wearing old ninny, the punk and the businessman. It was as if the darkness had swallowed them up wholly, leaving nothing behind but a slight tear in the fabric of time and space, which would slowly stitch itself back together as the next horde of humans clambered aboard.

  ***

  It was all very surreal. In the first instance there was only darkness, confused cries, a mangy dog doing its very best to burst eardrums. Something had coiled around her arm, constricted like one of those impossibly large snakes she’d seen in National Geographic documentaries. Then there was silence, and a silvery buzz, like television static pumped directly into her mind. Something very abnormal was happening, but it was all so sudden that she could do nothing to stop it.

  The intolerable thrum inside her head dissipated, leaving her crouched upon a tiled floor, head between her arthritic knees, wondering what the hell had just happened.

  “What just fucking happened?” a voice said. “Is this some kind of joke, ‘cos if it is it’s not funny?”

  She lifted her head to find the businessman—though now he looked a little like a vagrant who had stumbled, somewhat fortunately, across a designer suit—pacing frantically across the deserted platform. The punk was sitting cross-legged on the solitary bench; he looked terrified, which didn’t suit him.

  The businessman glanced around the platform. The battered and rusty sign hanging upon the wall announced the station as KING WILLIAM STREET, which was a new one on him. He threw his hands up and began to pull at the greying hair; the internationally recognized gesture of panic. “This can’t be happening,” he said with a tremulous voice. “No way. This can’t be real. I’ve got a meeting in…” He glanced down at his watch; or would have if it was still there. His eyes widened, his mouth fell open as if his jaw had decided dislocation was a great look for him. “Holy shit! I’ve been robbed!”

  The punk stood, checked for his wallet. Gone, along with his nose-bar and the twenty-two other piercings. He felt lighter, somehow. If it wasn’t for the terrible, ominous sense of impending doom weighing him down, he would have felt like his old self again. Reborn. Like the old Cedric that mother and father approved of, the one who collected beanie babies and drew delightful pictures of unicorns and fruit bowls.

  “No, this has to be some kind of prank,” the businessman opined. He scanned the abandoned platform for clues, any signs that what they were going through was pre-empted. But there was nothing; not even a security camera. “This doesn’t make any fucking sense. We were just on the train. You were about to get yourself into a scuffle with those foreign maniacs.” He jabbed a shaking finger towards the elderly lady, who had picked herself up from the tiles and was in the process of brushing herself down.