A Tarantula is a Poor Mans Lobster

by coke-line carl

Posted to Stories on 2004-01-31 06:31:00

Port Rachea was quite a dive even in the lowest of standards. What was once a monolithic monument to all combinations of sin and vice has been razed by silent explosions from gravity bombs and fire gas given by the four armed invaders from lands undisclosed. Nothing is known of these beasts besides the fear they exude when their throngs emerge from the shore like vengeful ghosts of Atlantis. No one attempts to follow these creatures back to the ocean for death will surely be their prize. After they pillaged and plundered, leaving trails of seaweed and wet clay, they left the smoldering remains to the surviving occupants, who were not prepared for attack or reconstruction, so they left the buildings as iron skeletons and rotting trash piles and moved on. Just as the Loon had done years ago in California after the acidic tidal waves swallowed the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles like a green blanket thrown over a dying dog. He had heard of the threat of annihilation in a sex dream two days before the abandoned toxin depository 160 miles away from Monterey Bay was reactivated. In the dream he was being straddled by a violet beauty with flowing white hair. She was riding him in a bathtub filled with diamondback rattlesnakes. She fucked him violently, scratching and biting until he couldn’t tell what bite was snake or woman. She would stop every so often and scream out, “Judgement day at Monterey Bay!” The Loon was sewn to his television for two days until he saw the contaminated waves slicing through the streets on the screen.The U. S. government began to throw scorching accusations at every enemy they had for the past 50 years, which was by then just about every breathing biped on the planet. They spent more time and money “defending their freedom” then they have for reparations to the diseased, homeless, and deformed survivors of the attack…but thats another story. One that the Loon did not enjoy dwelling on.


The nightmares would haunt him with intense vividness. He is running through empty streets with green and blue flames eating his back. He looks through store and resteraunt windows for a sign of help but no one…nothing…nowhere, and he was much to scared to look behind him. Flash forward.


Blind panic. The streets are filled with crazed citizens with banshee voices. Everybody is running but no one’s going anywhere. Husbands call for wives. Wives call for daughters. Children call for help. At once everyone begins melting slowly into a teal mush of tissue and pollutants, losing all features. A tall man in a gray overcoat and top hat throws out his arm towards the Loon as he hastily sprints by but the hand splashes into slime at contact with his jacket. Solitary children stand frozen with shock and fear as they melt into crying, shitting piles of liquid flesh. The Loon shares a glance with one boy as his face runs down his body like infected snot but the eyes remain whole and they even grow larger as the skin slips off. Those eyes had to have been real. The Loon is not creative enough to concoct those swirling galaxies of lost life. Where did they come from? The winged men of Whangradas try a vain attempt at fleeing by extending their wings for flight but their wings are already being rendered and fling the death mucus like exploding eggs, searing any skin not yet afflicted by the…wait, by what? Why is this happening? There has to be a reason, and a culprit. The Loon turns around. Flash. He meets an old friend. Nostalgia. ………………. overwhelming sympathy……………………. he’s speaking in faded echoes……………………



“his brains turns weight of the impact the war machine…… time has world is wilting like a short is all time stopped for us all the flower short…… into feathers with the mucous fuel for machine”




Now he is running again. The streets are paved with flesh and the buildings are covered with open sores. He is carrying a leather bag and his sword. Everyone is gone. No sound no remains and no time. Each step he takes he burns a footprint into the skin he is running on. He felt the overpowering urge to get off this flesh street. He turns a sharp right and vaults into a cafe window, showering the tile floor with broken glass. He stands upright and shakes the himself off when he notices the bag is gone. Without even knowing its contents he feels that he must retreive it. He peers back out of the broken window but there is nothing but motionless desert on all sides. He can feel his viscera melting like butter. The pain is unbearable but he needs to find his bag. With primal rage he begins tearing through the cafe. Overturning chairs and tables. Smashing mirrors and shelves until the entire place is demolished in a feral rage of confusion. Steam begins to rise from his mouth. It tastes like burnt meat. He looks down his shirt and discovers red sores rising from his chest. It eats away at his skin and gives way for huge open sores all over his body. A frothy cake of pus forms in the middle of each sore. He touches it with his index finger and the pus instantly turns into complex circuitry. Black holes and wires now cover his being. The Loon falls to his knees and begins bawling like an infant. The battered furniture swirls around him like a junk storm and swallows him whole. Wake up. “the end is around the corner just around the corner”


A burst of red, white, and yellow flashes and the Loon jumps from slumber. He finds himself curled up in a booth on the passenger car of the train bound for Port Rachea. A brown and beaten leather back pack and his sword which has known his hands for longer than he can remember are under the seat tied together by a cord. The moonlight splashed off the desert surface and through the windows grabbing the floor and dancing slightly to the beat of the rolling train wheels. The car was completely empty save the bench in which The Loon found sparatic slumber. At first the moans and whispers and sounds of dripping, seeping unknown mush coming from the cars infront and behind his did not affect him much.

The freighter was carrying a cargo of infected slaves from the gargantuan metropolis of Vinda, the infamous and perverse city where a great deal of the present wealthy captains of industry and the debatably cultural elite reside. The looming, growing, skypiercing buildings screamed with the brightest lights and signs and broadcast towers that light the sky for twelve hours each day because the smog was so dense it eventually cut the sun right out of the sky. And if that wasn’t enough this boil on the ass of the world was built on a cliff called Miandra mountain, hundreds of miles above the Wandel Sea, near Kap Eiler Rasmussen, about a hundred and twenty five miles east of Oodaaq, the northern most point of land in the world. The gleaming beacon to all that is subscribed to the capitalist notion of progression through monetary gain has been slowly sinking into the recently growing fissures in the mountains outer layer for several years now. When the city was constructed, Miandra was surrounded with the most peculiar clouds that could actually serve as stable support for any object so long as the temperature of the clouds themselves remained constant. This seemed ideal to the planners of the city but the increase pollution over the years has all but decimated the original formations. To keep Vinda from crumbling the city officials decided to “employ” the vast majority of their impoverished population to quarry deep into the mountain in an attempt to find more gaseous support, and thus the Vindan cloud mines were born. They found a nonrenewable amount of the minerals they were searching for and the proper way to restore the foundations of the city without major disruption for now. But lately the miners have begun complaining of strange disgusting symptoms. Most of it undisclosed and rejected as rumor, but here they are, bleeding into the Loon’s ears.


This is a slave shuttle that The Loon boarded in Istanbul on its way to Port Pachea to get the slaves to a clinic there, but why there? The city had been decimated just six months ago and was still in critical condition. The only reason the Loon would even imagine traveling to this hopeless zone was the telegram he had recieved six days ago saying that his company was greatly required at the Port Rachea Hotel and Casino, which is surprisingly still in operation after the building was raided, partially burned, and otherwise looted by the nameless, green, and repulsive swampy creatures from the sea. He had no clue as to the meaning of the gathering or the nature of the poor son of a bitch who would call him to this living nightmare that is about to soak his face with burning memory. Reluctantly curious as he was, as soon as he recieved the message he hopped the first train Istanbul to purchase supplies that he’s afraid he is going to need for this trip. But that was a week ago and the Loon was beginning to shutter at the sonic torture he has been forced to endure. He had lost count of the number of stops they made for mechanical failures, and the engineer’s apprentice who for the first five days would come into his car after dark to give him his bread, cheese, and water. The young soot-encrusted man would then, after donning bright red and orange galoshes painted in sludge and carrying a giant pale filled with some form of dried oatmeal, walk frightfully to the back door of the Loon’s car and into the next one. He could hear the same sounds of puking and crying magnified when the doors opened and closed. When the apprentice returns the first night the Loon asks him who or what was back there, the youth only replied, “No one I hope.” After that he knew that he would get no answers from the boy, and just nodded with the gift of food and devoured it gratefully.


On the sixth day the moon seemed to wink by and was gone in a flash. The Loon could do nothing but shiver in fetal postition under the booth. Somehow he already knew that the boy would not be returning today, tomorrow, or ever again, though he wasn’t completely sure as to why.

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