They Come To Feed

Chapter 5

The attack on the Gambusi village had been abrupt. Night and the raging storm had descended upon the little settlement, and with it arrived Those Who Come To Feed. The villagers had been huddled in their huts to escape the storm when suddenly a host of pulpy, writhing, man-sized organisms with tentacles and toothsome mouths came tearing into their homes through the flimsy hide doors of their huts, or smashing through the very walls.
The monsters looked like some sort of travesty of otherworldly evolution, a chimera cobbled together by some insane god of the eternally nighted void. More than anything else they resembled a nightmarish hybrid of tumbleweed and octopus. They were roughly globular, ropy, and wet, with flesh the colour of raw meat. Between their countless wriggling tentacles were short protuberances which terminated in unblinking orb-like eyes, but worst of all were their great snapping mouths, ringed with rows of chitinous teeth that seemed to share in equal parts shark and lamprey.
N'tibi, chieftain of the Gambusi, stood in the midst of the semicircle of huts and canopies holding her staff, a magical artifact blessed by the Loa. She alone remained calm despite the scene of praeternatural terror unfolding around her imperious form.
The wizened but stolid N'tibi shouted commands, directing the defense of the village. Occasionally she would raise her staff, a crack of lightning flashing forth to drive one of the star-beasts from her tribesman. She screamed forth in supplication to her guardian Loa for aid, but she knew, even then, that it was not enough.
The Gambusi fought back to little avail. The creatures seemed nearly unphased by spears and arrows, even fire had little effect on their mucous-coated flesh. N'tibi's staff alone seemed to slow the monsters' attacks.
A tentacled horror crashed through a wattle and daub wall and snapped its gaping maw around a man's arm, shearing through flesh and bone with ease, his death announced by a gurgling scream as the creature dragged him from his hut.
In another hut a fleshy tendril wrapped around a young girl's head while acidic venom oozed from a multitude of mouthlike suckers tearing skin from bone and reducing her face to jelly.
Two tiny children were ripped into pieces by fibrous feelers and devoured on the spot, their attackers indifferent to the fruitless spear thrusts of the children's father.
A man sought refuge in a tree, climbing like a monkey, but the loathsome thing that pursued him half climbed, half leaped after him, dragging him into the jungle.
The battle did not last long. In total, six of the villagers were carried away into the forest by the monsters, to some unknown fate. The morning saw four of the Gambusi lying dead in the village, horribly mutilated, and partially devoured. Another three were grievously injured, tended by their friends and relatives. All of the Gambusi people suffered the less visible wounds of grief and fear. Only old N'tibi seemed impassive, a look of resolve on her haggard face as she caressed M'boto's woolly hair, his body rocked by sobs, as he knelt at N'tibi's side.