OC snippets

Polybuis; In which a change cabinet does not store change.

More of the gross foul-smelling guck poured out of the change cabinet as she continued. She didn't let it touch her hands as she worked, carefully avoiding the rotten stuff. She didn't want to think about what kind of supernatural disease she'd contract if she managed to graze the decay-infested mucus leaking out of a haunted arcade machine.

The smell was thick enough to choke on. It stung her eyes and burned her nose. Still, she continued, methodically loosening the panel. She made sure not to let any of the bolts fully unscrew, instead letting them be just loose enough to come undone if the panel was jostled.

Standing (much to the protest of her knees) to admire her handiwork, she gripped the screwdriver tighter in her hand. This was a really, really bad idea.

Ah well. We all die some day.

With a grunt of effort, Beth took a running kick at the side of the arcade machine.

She let out a loud curse as her foot hit metal, reeling back from the pain. If she wasn't so busy trying to stop the throbbing in her foot, she would've noticed the way the door was slightly pushed ajar at her screaming. But she didn't. Instead, she bit her tongue, seething, training her half-lidded gaze at the dent in the brightly painted metal. She stepped back cautiously, waiting.

Suddenly, there was a horrible, horrible sound. What could best be described as the noise of wet meat tearing emanated from the barely-sealed cabinet. There was the rhythmic staccato of scraping bone as something began to push against the half-unscrewed panel.

The change cabinet shifted.

Shuffle shuffle.

Thunk.

The screws loosened as something pushed from inside the cabinet. The awful liquid gushed out of the thing in surges, now tinted red and thick with blood. The scent of the decay was stronger now, sullying the air with its sour stench. Beth squinted and resisted the urge to cough, ignoring the way the smell burned her throat.

Thunk.

Again, the screws loosened, the scraping sound as they pushed their way out from blood-encrusted metal painfully audible against the droning hum-buzz of dim halogen. The screwdriver in Beth's hand was damp with sweat, trapped in her scarred and white-knuckled vice grip.

Thunk.

Two screws came out, falling into the growing pool of mucusy filth pooling at the foot of the arcade machine. They made a small clattering noise as they did so, clinking on dust-covered linoleum. There was again the wet noise of flesh and sinew ripping and the rapping of re-adjusting bone as whatever was in the cabinet prepared to make a final push.

Thunk.

Tink tink.

Clatter.

Scrape.

Scream.

"LESLIE!! NOW!!"

There was a great deal of yelling as Leslie Localine, 15 year old teenager, slammed open the door to the back room of the arcade. She cringed immediately upon entering the room, reeling at the rich smell of iron clawing at her senses. She hacked, rubbing her burning eyes with her sleeve, willing away the urge to vomit.

There, oozing out of the change cabinet in the center of the room towards Beth, was perhaps the most disgusting thing to ever walk the earth. It's body was a slew of half-decayed viscera, skin and cartilage and red and purple sloughed messily onto an incorrect skeletal frame. Leslie could make out a shape that could generously be considered human; A skull, four appendages, a spine. But it was all put together wrong. Every piece of it was too long or too short, like a sheet of printer paper left to dry after being wetted. A mincemeat covered ribcage concealing far too many organs in places they shouldn't have been thrummed gently, cream-colored bone exposed to the open elements. Blood vessels ran along the length of it, pulsating and spurting crimson occasionally onto the linoleum, feeding back to a thick, pulsating heart in what someone might call its stomach.

It left a trail of blood and mucus behind it as it crawled its way out of the change cabinet towards Beth, it's not face distended down at her with a wet, gurgling snarl. It hunched over her, a crude opening with far too many teeth looming over her head. Blood dripped onto her rough-worn sneakers as she hunched backwards in the shadow of this thing, cowering.

Leslie froze. The adrenaline running through her systems was currently doing absolutely nothing other than making her shake like a leaf and doubling the amount of oxygen she was breathing. She clutched the metal bat tight in her hands, watching as the lumbering thing prepared to take a bite out of a woman who seemed oddly calm about a meat creature that lived in a change cabinet chomping on her head.

Then, suddenly, there was a terrible screeching sound and a lot of blood spurting across the room. Beth bolted from her position under the creature as it stumbled backwards, a screwdriver lodged deep in a blood vessel protruding from its 'neck.' It hissed, blood burbling from its disgusting not-mouth as it looked at the two of them. God it was so much worse up close.

Leslie did not exactly think about what she was doing as she ran towards the thing and slammed it in the 'head' as hard as she could with a baseball bat. It was just instinctual. Fight or flight. Kill or be killed. Regardless of how intentional it was or not, the creature yowled a not-quite human scream as whatever it had in place of a brain spilled out of the side of its head with a wet, squelching crack.

Warily, the creature reached out with one of its too-long-to-be-human arms at Leslie. Unaware, it's head still leaking gore, like a child with a blindfold on trying to pin the tail on the donkey. But it was too slow, and again recoiled and lowed in pain as the bloodied bat hit the appendage with a loud, sickening crunch.

It did not take long for the two of them to destroy it. It was surprisingly slow for a meat creature, and apparently wasn't immune to metal baseball bats to the head or screwdriver heads to the throat. By the end of it, the adrenaline had worn off and the two of them were covered in blood and hunched over the beaten corpse of the wretched thing, breathing away the aftershock.

Beth, after a long silence, turned to Leslie.

"So. There are some things I need to tell you about your family..."

~~~
FINALLY ITS DONE !!!!! ITS DONE !!!!!!! I wrote like 70% of this half delirious from lack of sleep in one sitting and almost all of that 70% is not proofread so I will definitely come back and edit this later but. it's done. I'm free !!! The world can read my cringe now!!!! all 5.7k words of it!!!! Yippee!!

If there are any comments or additional trigger warnings you think I should add, tell me!!