The New Flesh

Everyone thought it was just an earthquake...

Eliot was only just holding off the intruding beef people with a large stick. The blasted wall of the sand castle was teeming with the greasy foe, and Eliot knew he wouldn’t last much longer. Surrendering his doorway in a momentary break of the enemy drive, Eliot rushed down the gritty sand hallway on his own beefy legs. He and his comrades, however, were raw beef, exuding a golden hue from years of sand mixing in their red hides. The intruders, on the other hand, were cooked nasty messes. They blew through multiple points of the sand castle at once, and were gaining ground fast.

Eliot caught sight of light down the hall. Suicidal berserkers had lit themselves aflame and were attempting to cook the residents out of the castle, thrashing through masses of soldiers, walls, and air alike. Unfortunately, the coupling of damp air and moisture in the walls seemed to be abolishing the fires with little effort from the defenders.

Surviving the trip to a stable roof, Eliot saw the entire scene. His allies defending their home with the basest of tools available to them: sticks, stones, bits of shell. The enemy boasted superior weaponry, the majority of them swinging long, weathered handles topped with gnarly hooks, caked in rust and grease. Some bore sharpened bones. Still others simply set themselves on fire and ran for a crowd.

And of course, they wielded the Nercobos: a colossal cow carcass that towered stories above the sand castle.

Eliot had never seen a more disgusting object in his life. The Necrobos was pulled toward him on a cart by an army of grease slaves. Hundreds more climbed about the decaying corpse itself, throwing various bits of vulgar and flaming debris towards the castle.

Movement on the staircase. Eliot poised to attack, but some of his own men ascended the stairs. Roger was in the lead, followed by Monty and another raw boy Eliot did not recognize. Behind them was a swinging hook, attached to an attacker around the corner. Monty tore at the ceiling from his elevated position on the staircase, and the ceiling dropped down on anyone in the hallway with the hook bearer. Eliot saw the section of roof fall victim to gravity from his vantage point.

The Necrobos loomed ever nearer. Eliot and his gang retreated further from the hulking corpse, past a toppled tower of muddy sand. Hooks and meaty limbs poked through the wreckage, but the group didn’t stop to identify the victims as friend or foe.

As the last of the standing walls and ceilings dropped, the shadow of the Necrobos passed overhead. Darkness was cast across the gritty rubble, save for the pockets of fire not yet extinguished by the exposed mud strewn about, as well as the glowing eyes of the Necrobos. The real eyes had been plucked out by some scavenger long ago, but ghostly energy still glowed from the sockets. Wretched forms amassed around the necrotic utter and dug their hooks into its taut skin as the monstrosity centered over Eliot’s crew of survivors like a UFO ready for abduction or destruction. The utter maggots screeched with laughter audible hundreds of feet down. They danced. They laughed. They pulled.

And a bombardment of rancid milk surged from the sky above Eliot’s head. The stench alone struck many of the riders clear off the Necrobos. The milk was gelatinous as it fell and exploded into a grotesque concoction resembling chunky chowder with bits of amoebic fat floating about. The mixture dissolved Eliot and his crew in seconds as they simultaneously choked on the thousand year old milk remains.

And only seconds after that, an even larger shadow was cast across Necrobos itself. A tsunami propelled by the earthquake that morning surged forward and tore the shore asunder. The Necrobos was flung across the sandy expanse then ripped back into the sea among assorted beefy debris. The initial force ripped its crispy head clean from its flanks, but the glowing in its eyes remained.

"Battle at Beef Beach"

Copyright: © 2011 Joseph Bouthiette, Jr.

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Joseph Bouthiette, Jr. eats food and poops poop. His work has appeared online at The New Flesh, Staring At the Walls and In Between Altered States.