“Get up!” Karen yells. “We can't leave him down there. They'll kill him!”

  Chef starts hollering and jumping up and down, attracting the attention of all but one of them. He fires off a chant, blasting the head clean off the first roach monster, plastering its companions in thick white goop. Its corpse falls into the weird chasm. Chef blasts two more, each landing on top of the last.

  “Come on!” Karen yells.

  “Wait, look. He's building a goddamn ramp out of their bodies! He's gonna get out!” My celebration is cut short as the roach-thing not distracted by Chef's yelling reaches us, flailing its hairy legs, and jutting its giant penis.

  I jump forward and prepare to attack. A hairy leg slashes at my face. If it weren't for my sniffer helmet, my head would have been sliced clean off. The hairs covering its multi-segmented legs are razor sharp. My helmet falls away in several pieces. I stumble backward as the big roach charges forward, intent on finishing the job, its baby heads sobbing all the while.

  Just as it rears back to attack again, a huge sniffer stinger strikes from the right, outside my peripheral vision, impaling the left baby head and the roach head, while barely missing the baby head on the right, covering me in noxious white roach guts that smell like rotten milk. The blow is enough to cripple the disgusting monster though, as it now hangs limp off Karen's makeshift weapon, its remaining head bawling like a newborn being drown in a wash basin.

  The weight of the giant bug is too much for her skinny, atrophied legs. She drops to one knee, threatening to topple over altogether.

  “A little help here!” she pants, using all her strength to keep from being crushed by the monster.

  I try to yank it free from Karen's weapon, but it won't budge. I crawl underneath it and lay on my back, hoping I can push it free with my leg strength.

  “Push!” I grunt. But it's no use. The limp creature just hangs there, crushing down on top of us. It must weigh 300 pounds.

  “Ricky,” Karen says. She's got a weird look in her eye. “I-I have something I have to tell you.”

  Oh, brother, like I need more of this shit right now. “I know,” I say, breathlessly, still shoving against the dead weight above me. “You're in love with me. Yeah, yeah, I've heard it before. Listen, I hate to break it to ya, babe, but-”

  “What?” she asks, confused, even sounding a little offended.

  I start to speak, when the remaining baby head attached to the paralyzed roach body vomits a torrent of vile, fetid sea water onto my face for my troubles. I choke and gag simultaneously, as I try to blow the rancid water out of my nose. And still, I can't budge the hulking roach's body. That's when I hear Ty cry out from behind us.

  “Ty!” I cough out. “Get this thing off us!”

  I look back to see if he hears me. He's just standing there, a few feet away. His eyes are glazed over and he's shivering. He looks like he's got a fever. The swelling in his arm and throat are somehow even worse. His face looks fat, now. Obese.

  “Ty!” I yell again. This time I get his attention.

  His eyes focus, he looks at me, and opens his mouth to speak. Instead of words, dozens of mice-sized sniffers pour from between his lips. He tries to scream, but more and more of the little bugs are fighting their way out of his mouth. When his throat constricts, they start to sting him from inside. He drops to his knees. His throat swells to the size of a watermelon right before my eyes. He starts to stab at it with the full-sized stinger attached to his arm, to try to let the tiny monsters out so he can breathe. Blood and sniffers rush from the wound. He stuffs his free hand into the gash and pulls out handfuls of the writhing little beasts. He takes two ragged, wet breaths from the gaping wound before his breath hitches and he freezes, eyes wide.

  A moment later he shrieks and his eyeballs roll into the back of his head. He rips at them with his fingers as some unseen force bursts them from their moorings. Blood and brains pour from his ears. After his eyeballs are gone, his hands grope at a small crack in his forehead. Little writhing tentacles dart in and out of the crack, fighting their way free. Using the stinger attached to his hand, he tries to bore into the crack, to let the baby monsters out of his skull. He screams all the while.

  Finally, after far too many moments, his entire head explodes, sending baby sniffers, brains and gore five feet into the air. Only then does the screaming stop.

  As Ty's headless body thumps lifelessly to the floor, I do my best to cover Karen from the rain of bug monsters and gore that splatters over us while still trying to hold up the paralyzed body of the roach-thing threatening to crush us.

  In no time, I feel the sniffers' little squirming bodies start to crawl through the cracks in my armor. “Get this fucking thing off me!” I scream, redoubling my efforts to push away the roach monster. I'm starting to freak out pretty hard.

  The baby sniffers are already crawling up Karen's legs, too. They're all over us. They'll start to sting us any moment, and we'll end up like Ty, too. Karen knows this as well as I do, and that's all the incentive she needs.

  I feel the sniffers rooting around on my clothes, under my armor, trying to find exposed skin. Panicking, I start to hyperventilate as I look down and see a little sniffer poke out from my chest plate and make its way up toward my bare neck.

  “Come on, come on!” I whine.

  Karen glances over and sees the baby sniffer prodding around my neck, slowly crawling up to my face. She curses under her breath. Using her free hand to pull the slack out of the sniffer tendons that hold the armor to her body, she uses her teeth to tear the knots out of the binding. Within seconds she's free of her stinger weapon still lodged in the roach heads. Able to use both hands and put her whole bodyweight behind her, she's able to topple the monster over, freeing us both just as the baby sniffer pries open my pursed lips with its fore-tentacles and tries to make its way inside.

  I bite its head off and climb to my feet, tossing the decapitated little body away before it can sting me. Karen and I both dance out of our armor as fast as we can, knocking little bug monsters off each other’s backs as fast as we can, then stomping them flat before they can crawl up our shoes again.

  Satisfied that we're bug free, I point at the corner, still infested with giant cockroaches. “We've got to get Chef out of that pit!” We take off running, leaving the paralyzed roach monster to wail as the baby sniffers sting its face over and over until it's so swollen, it can no longer make its hideous noise.

  I almost trip over the edge and pitch myself down into the chasm when we run up to it. My brain still can't comprehend the angles in this fucking place. Karen catches me and we both gasp as we look down into the pit and see what lies down there. I finally do throw up, and Karen starts to cry.

  Dead roach monsters litter the chasm. Their bodies lay exploded, in all manner of dismemberment. Some still twitch, some still bleed. Cooked white goo, turned a nasty yellow, steams up from the floor, covering it as well as most of the surface of the walls. There are enough corpses piled up in the corner for Chef to climb out. Unfortunately, Chef won't be doing any more climbing.

  The Berserkers, as he called them, are literally fucking the shit out of him—and then eating it. Chef's stomach is torn open. He's laying on his back. His guts are all messed up and looped out across his wounded belly and chest. There are two Berserkers left alive. The roaches' huge cocks are thrusting in and out of Chef's steaming entrails, their baby heads gurgle-crying the whole time. Worse, when one of Chef's intestines bursts open, the roaches use their fore-limbs to scoop up the bloody shit into their jittering, chomping little mouth parts.

  I think he's dead at first. Till he lifts his head up and looks at me with his one good eye, the other having presumably been fucked out of his skull.

  “Come on,” Karen sobs. “Let's go. Let's just get the fuck out of this awful place.” She grabs me by the arm and tries to pull me away.

  “No!” I yank free and start to stumble down the roach corpses.

  “Ricky, there's nothing you can do for him, we've got to go before something else tries to kill us.”

  “This is all my fault,” I say,the callous prick who so easily dropped an ax into his best friend's head nowhere to be found. All I can think about is Chef's robust laughter as he stood at the grill station at McHumans making fun of us white people. Seeing him down in that death pit, his body being so heinously violated... something inside me snaps.

  I'm shaking all over—probably in shock—as I try to make my way down the bodies of the dead Berserkers. Chef raises his hand to stop me. He closes his eye and slowly shakes his head at me. “Fuck outta....here... boy. Take that... white girl and... get as far away from R'lyeh as you can. This... ain't no place... for good... people.”

  With that, Chef raises his star-thing up to his own face and barks out one final chant, blasting his own head into pink mush.

  I stumble up out of the pit, numb. The remaining Berserkers are already pulling their dicks free of Chef's corpse. They'll be on us in moments. Without armor or weapons, Karen and I are defenseless. I can't bring myself to care, the weight of the events inside this monstrous tomb crushing down on top of me, obliterating my ability to think rationally. When I get back up to the floor, Karen stands stiff, looking past me with wide eyes.

  I turn to see what she's looking at. Fishbowl is just a few yards away, the hands of its wetsuit clenched into fists. I step in front of Karen, instinctively.

  “What-what are you doing up here?” I ask, confused. I take one last swig from my bottle, draining its contents before discarding it onto the stone floor. “You're supposed to be at the banquet with the food...”

  With Fishbowl stalking toward me, and Berserkers about to attack from the rear, I'm surprisingly calm, resigned to my fate. I'm ready to die, so it comes as a shock when I hear Karen say, in a small voice from behind me, “I'm sorry, Ricky.”

  And that's the last thing I remember. I guess Karen hit me in the head with something and knocked me out, ‘cause the next thing I knew, I was hanging here, upside down, staring at your rotten, ugly fucking face, Mr. Cthulhu...

  ***

  By the look of the seething throng of slaves far below the grand platform that loomed above Great Cthulhu's banquet hall, every last living human in the flooded world had been gathered in Deep R'lyeh to witness the coming of the Old Ones. They'd been herded into a semi-circular area that resembled the floor of the great Roman Colosseum, except instead of dirt or sand on the ground, they stood on the same damp, slimy grey stones that made up the rest of weird R'lyeh.

  Madness seethed through the crowd in waves as the alien angles proved too much for their small human minds to comprehend. Depending where they stood, or where they cast their eyes, the huge spiraling pillar upon which Great Cthulhu sat seemed to rise hundreds of feet into the air, and other times to plunge far below them. But no matter which direction they looked, the masses of starved, broken, defeated humans saw hideous, unfathomable beasts in all manner of shapes, sizes, colors and genders.

  The monsters towered over the feeble vestige of humanity, perched atop a huge stone grandstand surrounding Great Cthulhu's spiral pillar, giving them a marvelous view of the day's events. Slimy grinners, fang-toothed barkers, many-faced howlers, jittery spinners and hoards of wet things that defied any sane description jeered at the human slaves standing below them, and praised the Old Gods far above. Even now, miles overhead (or down below, depending on the angle) ancient Yog Sothoth shifted patiently between dimensions, slowly opening the doorways into an unimaginable number of between places, the places where the Old Ones dwelt, silently waiting for this moment. Its gargantuan, jellyfish-like body appeared and disappeared into that beautiful unearthly color that drove sane men to tear out their eyeballs and jam sharp objects between their ears. It was a beautiful sight, but not the main attraction.

  Soon enough, the jeering monsters and the hysterical humans all quieted down as the host of the evening's events took center stage in front of Great Cthulhu's humongous stone throne. All eyes were on the figure as he raised his hands, commanding the attention of all in attendance.

  This figure was, of course, Nyarlathotep, the personification of the Old Ones and mouthpiece of the Elder Gods.

  He stood, in this incarnation, a tall, slender black man. Not dark skinned, black skinned. He looked like a shadow; a dense, colorless smear against the light. The only parts of his body not resigned to this inky blackness were his eyes, which glowed a preternatural white against the darkness, and the red of his lips and mouth, like a fresh wound, a gash sliced into his obsidian, featureless face.His voice boomed out, carried by the weird angles inside the huge, domed, subterranean lair of Cthulhu, the nightmare amphitheater beneath sunken R'lyeh that served as his banquet hall. “We've won!” he exclaimed. “The world is ours! Humanity's final vestiges tremble before us broken and mad.” He gestured to the slave pit, where the humans stood shamed, covered in filth, dressed in the tattered remnants of their short reign on planet Earth.

  The throng of monsters cheered, whooping and jeering toward the slave pit.

  “And yet!” Nyarlathotep said, motioning for silence from the crowd. “Even as we stand on this glorious precipice, mere moments before the return of all the Old Ones, after their precious planet has been annihilated, flooded, wiped clean of the human scourge, one stands among them who would defy the might of this world's true leaders!”

  ***

  Ricky spun slowly, hung upside down with his arms tied behind his back, just above Cthulhu's throne. He hung from a rope fastened to the clawed tip of one of the hulking beast's dragon-like wings. He was nearly bored to tears by the shadow creature's pompous speech, almost wishing the damn thing would shut up and kill him already. After all, with Karen selling him out to the Deep Ones, he was all but fucked. That wasn't really what he wanted, though. He had one more trick up his sleeve to kill the monsters and unplug the drain that would un-flood the world. But it was a long shot. A very long shot...

  Cthulhu looked bored as well. His bulbous, green, whale-like chest rose up and down, slowly. His many-tentacled head rested on one hand propped up by his elbow which rested on the arm of his throne. His beady little black fish eyes were open but unfocused. His enormous wings hung limp, slowly swaying in time with the gargantuan monster's deep breathing. For all Ricky knew, the big fucker was sleeping through his “trial”.

  Fishbowl stood a few feet away, holding Karen by the arms. Karen, for her part, looked embarrassed and remorseful—not that any of that mattered now. The deed was done. She chose monsters over people. A typical woman, aligned only with what best served to save her ass.

  Even Boss Crab was there, standing next to Fishbowl and Karen, looking surprised by the turn of events. Behind them stood the pair of hulking Leviathans that had transported all the poisoned food, which now lay in a heaping pile beside them.

  Encircling the entire platform were more than a dozen empty thrones just as big as the one on which Cthulhu now sat. For the other important monsters, Ricky guessed. The ones they were going to summon right after they killed him.

  “He thought he could poison our food!” Nyarlathotep continued, smirking up at Ricky with his crimson slit of a mouth. “Thought he could prevent the inevitable! But the stars are right, my friends! And our time is now!”

  “This little deceiver,” the shadow figure said, prancing up to Karen. “This one betrayed her entire race. She didn't just betray them,she was downright happy about it! The little trooper ran right to her Boss Crab the moment she got wind of her friend's pathetic scheme to prevent the return of the Old Ones!”

  The contingent of monsters laughed and scoffed, while the enslaved humans murmured amongst themselves.

  Nyarlathotep silenced them. “Should this one live? Should her betrayal be rewarded?”

  Half the crowd of monsters booed, the other half cheered. The humans stood in silence, malevolent faces worn by all.

  “Come now!” the shadow man said, feigning concern. “For her loyalty to the Deep Ones, shouldn't she be allowed to witness the coming of the ages? The return of the Gods from the Dark? She did, after all, warn us about her friend's plot to contaminate all of this…” Nyarlathotep frowned and paused dramatically. “Wonderful food!”

  This time nearly all of the monsters cheered, while the slaves vocalized their disgust in the form of curses and vile insults hurled at the redheaded young woman.

  She looked up at Ricky with tears flowing freely down her face. “I'm so, so sorry.”

  “She lives!” Nyarlathotep screamed with delight. “For now,” he added with a smirk.

  “What about him!” the shadow figure said, dramatically stabbing a finger upward at Ricky. “What do we do with the rebel slave who thought he could poison Great Cthulhu himself?”

  The crowd of undersea aliens booed and hissed, dramatically condemning the captured man. “Death?” Nyarlathotep asked, as if he didn't already know the outcome of this silly show. Ricky was being made an example of, a warning for the few remaining humans never to try a stunt like this again.

  And that's exactly what Ricky had hoped would happen.

  A roaring chant of DEATH! DEATH! DEATH! echoed through the vast banquet chamber. Even jellyfish-like Yog Sothoth seemed to pulse in time with the deafening taunt. The only horrible figure not screaming DEATH!at the top of its lungs or gills or whatever means they used to make sound, was great Cthulhu, who still sat bored on his throne, carelessly twitching his face tentacles, waiting for the shenanigans to be over.

  “Death it is!” the shadow man yelled, pacing back and forth directly under Ricky. For a split second, the captive considered spitting on the monster below him, then thought better of it. For his plan to work, Ricky needed to remain as limp and non-threatening as possible...