Little pincer claws, suction cup-laced tendrils, and pointy tipped legs that look like they belong on a tarantula burst forth from the brackish ooze, snatching and grabbing at the fresh flesh.

  Boss Crab drops the hunk of human meat into the helmet and quickly snaps it shut before continuing. “So we're gonna have a lot of dirty vertebrates coming through here this week. I expect my team to be on your A-game. Do I make myself clear?”

  Still in shock, we all nod, and Boss Crab scuttles away with Fishbowl in tow.

  ***

  That was last week. Now the gang and I stand at the front entrance to R'lyeh—Cthulhu's great sunken city, the largest kingdom in the underworld—with handfuls of bags containing all the people we've slaughtered and cooked over the last week. Behind us, our scuba gear lays discarded on the rim of a gigantic pressurized moon pool, one of many such pools that the denizens of R'lyeh use to come and go. See, most of the monsters that now rule the planet are amphibious, so these sunken cites are habitable to air breathers. This particular moon pool is about half the size of a freakin’ football field. And it's a good thing, too. The leviathan fish-frog beasts carrying the rest of the food for Cthulhu's party barely fit through the hole. Man, this is going to be a massive feast.

  Fishbowl steers the lead leviathan out of the moon pool and up the jaw-bridge type thing we stand in front of, while the other follows close behind. We step out of the way so the gargantuan things don't crush us. They remind me of a monitor lizard wearing a fish-head Halloween costume—the size of a city block.

  Twin emerald doors covered in glowing glyphs and runes that ooze a glowing green goo—rising so high above our heads that I have to lean backward to see the very tops—open slowly, allowing Fishbowl and the leviathans to pass into the belly of grand R'lyeh.

  “I fucking hate this place,” Ty says, as the rear leviathan stomps into a spiraling descent across a floor that is sometimes a ceiling, sometimes a wall, depending on how you set your eyes. R'lyeh is funny like that, what with the non-Euclidean geometry and all that. Nothing in the sunken city is quite where you think it should be, relatively speaking.

  We step through the entrance.

  Ty is wearing a blue wig set in pigtails. He wears a matching blue sundress with black polka dots. A pair of black and white Converse sneakers rounds out his outfit.

  Chef shifts his bags to his right hand, giving Ty a long, hard look. I know what's coming. “Cracka, you rob the teenybopper section of the Gap when shit went down upstairs, or what? I do not understand where you find those god-awful clothes, man!”

  We continue walking. I try to keep my eyes closed so I don't notice that my feet are where my head should be.

  Ty doesn't flinch. He's heard it all before. He looks Chef right in the eye and says, “They're my daughter's clothes. I grabbed two trash bags full of them when the rivers flooded over into the cities.”

  Chef raises an eyebrow.

  “We didn't even make it out of town,” Ty says, stopping, turning his body to face the burly black man. The rest of us stop, too. “Remember the... things that burrowed up out of the ground? The things with too many legs and eyes that squirmed? They took her. They ripped her right off my arm and dragged her down into those fetid mud pits—pulverized her body into mush right in front of my eyes. And you know what? Maybe if I didn't have my fucking hands full of her clothes, I could have saved her. If I'd just dropped the bags, I could have pulled her free. But I didn't. I lost my daughter on day 1, and all I have left to show for it is these clothes.”

  “Damn,” Chef says, breaking eye contact. “That's fucked up.”

  Before the big bear of a man can say any more, four hideous-looking things slither their way down the long corridor, right up to us. Down here, everything looks awful. You just have to get used to it or you won’t survive. You have to learn to shut off the part of your mind that screams in agony and begs you to find the nearest hole to crawl into when it sees the fucked up monsters that live down here.

  These particular horrors, believe it or not, are even more stomach-turning than the normal fish-frog octopoid monsters. These things have long, slender bodies with six or eight skinny, insect-like legs on either side. The bodies end in what look like a pair of twin scorpion tails, each tipped with dagger-like stingers. They skitter along on their bellies, slithering almost like snakes. Their heads are just a mess of tentacles with long, sharp hooks on the ends of some, eyeballs on the ends of others. Right in the center of this cluster of tendrils sits a drooling, multi-segmented mouth, snapping and undulating.

  Karen cries out as one of the scorpion things skitters up to her and starts grabbing at her bags. She leaps behind me, leaving the thing to squirm its revolting appendages at me. I hold my bags out of reach as another of the monsters assaults Ty in the same way, pinning him up against the wall that was the ceiling last time I looked at it.

  “What the fuck is this thing doing?!” he screams, as it plucks his bag from his hand, ripping it to shreds, dumping its contents on the ground at his feet. It tears the cooked human meat apart, shoving huge hunks of it into its writhing mouth.

  “Sniffers,” Chef says. “They're here to make sure the food isn't poisoned. Don't worry, just let ‘em do their thing and-”

  The Sniffer goes stiff, shrieks, then vomits up all the meat it's just consumed and falls over dead.

  “I poisoned the food,” I say, as everyone looks at me with wide eyes and slack jaws.

  Before anyone can react, one of the remaining Sniffers lunges itself at Ty, dragging him down to the ground with its face-feelers. He's screaming bloody murder as Chef runs forward saying, “Aw, hell!”

  The big man pulls out some sort of five-pointed yellow stone and screams in a language I don't understand, causing the closest Sniffers to wilt and singe as though they've been caught under a child's magnifying glass. They die instantly. He turns on the one pinning Ty to the ground and yells the same weird words at it, killing it as dead as the others, but not before it manages to land a stinger directly into Ty's left shoulder.

  The injured man rolls over and kicks his feet on the ground like an infant throwing a tantrum, screaming through clenched teeth.

  “Just what the fuck kind of bullshit stunt you think you're pullin' here, white boy?” Chef says, turning toward me. “You just signed all our death warrants!”

  I stand my ground, crossing my arms. “You heard Boss Crab. Cthulhu is going to raise the city. All those fucking alien monsters will be here today. This is our chance, man!”

  “Our Chance?!” Chef says, menacing over me, star-thing still clutched in his right hand. “Cracka, you done fucked up. We ain't got no chance. Never did! There ain't no killin' these sons of bitches! You might as well have poisoned us in our sleep. We're all dead already.”

  “Fuck that,” I say, holding my head high. “All we gotta do is make sure all those fuckers eat the food and-”

  “And then what?!” Chef screams, yellow eyes bulging, spittle flying from his mouth. “You kill all the monsters, then you gonna ride a fuckin' seahorse back to yo bitch ass momma's house? There ain't nothin' up there, cracka! You don't know how good you got it down there at Mchuman's. Yo ass is lucky Boss Crab ain't fed you to Fishbowl yet, and you gonna pull some bitch shit like this!” He closes his eyes dramatically and yells at the ceiling that was the floor last time I checked. “Lord help me, this cracka done got my ass killed!”

  “That's not gonna happen,” I say, crossing my arms in defiance. “I've got a plan.”

  Chef opens one eye, looks at me skeptically.

  “I've heard stories—rumors, really—about a plug.”

  “A plug? Aw, that's slave talk, boy! Dumb shit crackas be sayin' to each other in the dark to keep they spirits up. That shit ain't real!”

  “Bullshit,” I say, poking the big man in the chest with my finger. “You don't know that! You don't know shit! You just sit back in that kitchen like a-”

  Chef bats my hand away. “Like a what, white boy? Say it. Say it! Like a good house nigga!”

  “I was gonna say like a bitch. The plug is real. Think about it. It HAS to be real. Where else did all the water come from that flooded the Earth? It didn't just appear outta nowhere. You're talking millions, maybe billions of gallons of sea water. It HAD to come from a vast, planet-wide undersea chasm or cavern. And I have it on good authority that the plug the monsters used to seal it off after they sucked all the water out is right directly beneath our feet, at the bottom of R'lyeh.”

  “Oh my god, kid. Oh my god!” Chef says, laughing hysterically till tears are running down his face. Sobering, he wipes the tears away and looks me directly in the eyes. “We're good as dead, son. You hear me? All because of a fairytale told by dumb crackas in the night. Now if you'll 'scuse me, I'mma head back down to McHuman's and see if I can't convince Boss Crab to bake my big black ass into a nice Filet Mignon before he gets a hold of your ass. I don't wanna be livin' to see what he gone do to you.”

  I grab him by his huge arm when he turns to leave. “You can't go, Chef! If these monsters notice you're missing, they'll know something's wrong! Boss Crab undoubtedly told them to expect four slaves to deliver the food. Without you, they'll be suspicious and blow our plan. Our only chance is to act normal and head down to the banquet hall. Please,” I say, begging the big man with my eyes.

  “He's right,” Karen says. The way she looks at me when she says it, I realize in that moment that she's in love with me.

  Great, I think. Just what I need, the crippled girl falling for me right before I make my escape. She'll probably want to come with me back to the surface world once all the water's gone. Too bad for her, I've already got a lover.

  She continues. “If we take off now, they're bound to notice. They'll check the food. They'll know it's poisoned before we can even make it back to McHuman's. Our best shot is with Ricky.” With that, she turns around and starts kicking at one of the sniffers' stingers.

  Ty finally manages to get up off the ground. His arm is at least twice its normal size and the area around the sting has already turned a deep purple. He clutches his arm and, by the look on his face, is in a great deal of pain.

  “You two are out of your minds!” he says, grimacing, not bothering to fix the wig that's fallen half off his head, revealing short brown hair below. “C'mon, Chef, let’s get back to McHuman's. I gotta get this arm looked at.”

  Before he can take a step, a stinger jabs inches from his face. Karen has ripped it free. She wraps the dangling flesh and tendons around her arm, tying it down tight with her teeth and free hand. It's now a weapon the size of her whole arm. “You heard Ricky! If you two leave, and we show up at the banquet hall alone, they'll KNOW something's up! Besides,” she says, poking at his wounded arm with her normal hand, “by the look of that sting, you ain't gonna make it all the way back to McHuman's alive. Best you stick with us. Maybe there's some kind of anti-venom in there we can use to fix up your arm.”

  Ty looks at Chef, expecting him to argue more. Instead, the big man starts kicking at another Sniffer. He peels away the entire back carapace of the beast and slings the armor-plated exoskeleton over his chest like a bulletproof vest. “She's right, lady boy. They both are. If we gone die one way or the other, I guess I'd rather die tryin' to kill as many of these alien fish monsters as I can before they send me up to Heaven with my momma. Y'all best start cuttin' up a sniffer of your own, cause I'm finna wear this whole motha on my fat black ass.”

  “We're gonna need as much of this as we can carry,” Karen says. “If even one monster sees us and gets away to tell the big bad octopus man, we're fucked.”

  Ty reluctantly reaches down and starts pulling his own sniffer apart. “We're already fucked,” he says under his breath.

  We spend the next ten minutes ripping the sniffers to shreds, loading ourselves up with body armor, pincers and stingers for weapons, and the awful looking beasts' heads for helmets, writhing tentacle faces and all.

  “Where'd you get that star-thing anyway, Chef?” I ask, as we tighten up our armor and head off down into the bowels of R'lyeh.

  “You know how those cults all over the world got together and summoned up the monsters that flooded the Earth? Well, I was part of another kind of cult.”

  “What kind was that?” I ask, trying to decide if I'm upside down or right side up as we descend deeper into the sunken stone kingdom of the Elder Gods.

  “The kind that tried to stop this awful shit from happening in the first place.”

  “You didn't do a very good job.”

  Chef stops and glares at me for a long, uncomfortable moment. I'm pretty sure he's about to swing one of his stinger weapons at me, when he cracks a wide smile and belly laughs so loud it echoes down the twisted corridor.

  “No, white boy, we sure didn't, did we?”

  ***

  Everyone remains quiet as we creep our way through the cyclopean caverns. The only sound coming from our group is the clomp, clomp, clomp of Karen's twisted right foot as she bounce-limps along, doing her best to keep up with the rest of us, and the ragged breathing of our cross-dressing companion, Ty.

  He looks worse for the wear. He's pale and pouring sweat. We're all sweating under the hollowed out heads-come-helmets of the sniffers, but Ty is sweating so badly, it runs from his monster helmet like drool out of the dead beast's mouth. He clutches his swollen arm. Even through the armor, I can see it has continued to swell. The swelling has made its way into his neck, as well. Now it pulses in time with his breathing. Before long, he starts to sway back and forth, clearly in bad shape.

  I take a drink from a small bottle I have hidden under my carapace-armor. Karen eyes it, motioning for me to give her a sip.

  “You don't want this,” I say, stowing it back under my armor.

  She pulls me close, looking over her shoulder at Ty. “He's not gonna make it, we're gonna have to cut him loose.”

  She's right, of course. Whatever poison resides in the sniffers' stingers is killing him, but I still feel obligated to mount some kind of protest in his defense. It is, after all, my crazy plan that got him into this mess to begin with. But before I can form even the most half-hearted argument in Ty's favor, we hear a noise from around a turn in the corridor just in front of us... or is it behind us? God damn R'lyeh.

  “Get back,” Chef hisses. We all freeze, letting the fat cook handle the danger. He pulls out his weird stone with the hand not covered in alien sea monster armor. He creeps forward as the noise around the corner grows louder. It sounds like a pair of children giggling underwater.

  Karen and I take a defensive posture while Ty quietly vomits behind us. Chef turns to us as if to whisper some sort of command, when suddenly he vanishes. One second he's staring me in the face, the next he's gone. Karen looks at me, puzzled. I run forward as the giggling, gurgling sound gets even louder. Whatever the creatures are, they are almost on top of us.

  That's when I see him. Below me. Somehow the corner of the wall and the floor don't meet the way walls and floors are supposed to, and Chef has fallen into a chasm. He picks himself up off the sticky floor, seemingly unhurt, just as the horrors round the bend into full view.

  Why do they all have to be so... ugly? These god damn things look like giant cockroaches, but standing upright as tall as a man. They're slightly hunched over, and their backs are covered by a slick, black carapace. Their awful roach legs wave out in front of them, each ending with a patch of thick, black hairs. Down near the bottom of their disgusting bodies is what looks like a huge, barbed penis, at least two foot in length, maybe three. I don't get a chance to look at them for long because the worst part of these roach creatures is their heads.

  Their heads are all jittering, twitching mandibles, waving antennae, and huge shiny eyes, the color of rotted blood. Those are their roach heads. They've also got these... baby heads, like, human baby heads jutting up from either side of their roach heads. These heads constantly ooze some kind of clear fluid or mucus out of their baby mouths. They're what are making the awful crying, cooing and gurgling noises.

  There are at least ten roach men racing around the bend, but it’s taking them forever to actually get to us. Fucking dimensions in this place, the angles are all fucked up. I lay down on my belly and reach my exposed hand down toward Chef. He reaches up, but there's too much distance between us.

  “Go! Get the fuck outta here!” Chef screams. “You do not want to get caught by those things!”

  “What are they?” I ask, disgusted, still trying to will my arm to be just a little longer, as though I'd be able to haul up 350 pounds of cook even if I could reach him. Still, I have to try.

  “Berserkers,” Chef says, looking terrified. “They're like sentries. They roam these halls eating, fucking and killing anything they come across. Not always in that order.” Chef backs away, pulling out his yellow star stone. “Now, kid. Go. I'm not tellin' ya again.”

  I stand back up. “We'll hold ‘em off, you find a way out of there,” I say, preparing to engage the roach things as they finally get close enough to smell. I take a deep breath through my nose and wish I hadn't. They smell like cat piss covered in fish guts after it's been left in the sun all day to rot. It should have made me gag, but by now, I'm used to all these twisted monsters and their shitty smells.

  “Like hell!” Chef yells back. “You and the crippled girl's gonna hold off ten of those things? You best grab her and run, boy, 'fore those monsters fuck you to death!”

  “I'm not leaving you-” I start, but Chef blurts out a short chant and points the star-thing at me, knocking me back a dozen feet. I land on my ass, right in front of Karen and Ty, just as the roach creatures reach the corner Chef is stuck in.

  My armor is smoking and smells like burned hair and dog shit, but it's still intact. I'm gasping, trying to catch my breath. My chest feels like I've been shot. Several of the roach monsters are already clamoring into the chasm, trying to get to our big black buddy.