Page 7 of Taken
I’ve never seen anything like them. As they draw closer, I see that they have dark green scales that glint with lighter greens and yellows when the sun hits them. Short horns curling upward like a demon’s sprout from the places you’d find their widow’s peaks and white hair cascades long and straight around their knobby spines. With enormous, thick thighs that branch into legs reminding me of a raptor’s, they have three massive toes on each foot tipped in forty-centimeter-long talons and three massive fingers tipped in claws that are as curved and sharp as the knives the humanish men around me are holding.
These creatures are things of nightmares. No, these are things of nightmares only a demented artist might have dreamed.
As the things arrive five feet in front of me, I let out a blood-curdling shriek, which is quickly silenced when the male with his arm around me claps his hand over my mouth. The nightmare monsters aren’t looking at me, anyway. Not even my screams can distract them. In fact, as soon as they take their next steps, they each launch up into the air, soaring at a distance that no ordinary human could achieve. I watch them blot out the sun above me in awe, arcing down a dozen feet away on my other side.
The moment they land, the arm around my waist lifts me up. The humanish male whirls me around and takes a few loping steps, and I let out another blood-curdling screech as I take in the sight marring the desert’s bleak horizon.
The scaled demons with the wide faces and the shimmery blue-green skin and the dreadful talons and the crazy spikes shooting out of their backs and horns shooting out of their heads are, in fact, not the scariest things out here. Oh no. There’s another monster here ten times the largest demon’s size. Because why the fuck not?
“Pam, what the fuckity fuck!”
But Pam doesn’t answer, or if she does, I don’t hear her. Not when the largest demon releases a horrific screech as he pulls in front of the pack of three demons and meets the twenty-foot-tall angry jellybean monster first.
He draws weapons—short daggers—out of some sort of pocket near his ribs, which is odd since he isn’t wearing a shirt, and slashes at the thing, causing it to open its horrible mouth and let out a horrible roar.
I feel like I should write a children’s book. Yes. That’s what I’ll do as soon as I wake up from this terrible dream to find that I’m back home, in my bed in the refugee bunker city formerly known as Lisbon, listening to bombs and rage turn the world to something uninhabitable.
The jellybean opened up its terrible mouth
And let out a terrible roar.
The demon men cut at its jelly face
And cut and cut some more.
I think I’m onto something.
I tumble over the sand when the male tosses me aside. He sprints off to join the demons, along with the other three humanish males who had, only moments before, been squared off, prepared to fight him. They all charge the jelly monster with their daggers outstretched, but the thing is formidable in the worst way imaginable. Every time it screeches, you feel it in your bones. My vision blurs, my pulse accelerates, I sweat in a gush, and my teeth chatter like I’ve been left out in the cold.
The monster doesn’t have any eyes, or a torso, or arms or legs to speak of, but has these enormous spikes sticking out of its gelatinous pinkish-gray sides that it seems to use to push itself around with. It lunges at the fighters with its five-meter diameter mouth open wide, its tiny, razor-sharp teeth looking horrifying and comically small relative to its size. Its red-and-black mouth is open, looking like it’s been streaked with paint using a free form method, flaps and tags of flesh just loose and rippling like pirate sails on each of its roars.
I can’t figure out what it wants, what is happening, where I am, what it’s doing, until one of the humanish males—the male who’d been holding me—stabs it in the side. It rounds on him, finding him instantly, as if this was the moment it had been waiting for, and then rears up, lifting high, high, higher…before throttling down like a roller coaster passing its zenith and devouring the male whole.
I scream. No, I don’t. I’m too shocked for that. I didn’t harbor any positive feelings towards the dude who damn near broke all my ribs, but I don't think anybody deserves to be eaten bythat.
And the monster doesn’t stop either, but it continues punching towards the earth like it’s trying to worm its way back beneath the surface—and it’s succeeding. It has half of its head—its front jellybean half—and all of its mouth buried in the sand before one of the demons—the largest one—leaps onto its back and stabs it with both of his daggers.
The beast lurches back up, but the demon is unseated. He drags his blades around the creature’s head, swinging off the creature’s back and bringing his blades with him like he’s giving the jellybean a half Colombian necktie. Wait—is that racist? Oh god, I can’t get eaten by a jellybeanandbe a racist.
I wail and watch as the three demons seem to form some sort of plan and attack the creature in waves, in a pattern, each one approaching the jellybean and stabbing lightly before quickly hopping back. The humanish males are too slow though, and one trips when trying to retreat. The jellybean rears its head back up out of the sand and manages to sweep that fighter into his massive maw. I scream for him—for the horror—but the largest demon jumps onto the jellybean’s back again and repeats his Colombian necktie on the other side.
The jellybean tries to shake him off but is too busy fighting off the other two demons and the remaining humanish warrior. In a disgusting show of pink and grey guts, the monster is eventually beheaded by the big demon and dies.
The largest of the demons comes back around the jellybean, so I can see him clearly as he sinks some kind of a weapon attached to his forearm into the monster's side. He starts to dig with his claws in a way that makes my entire stomach pitch. The taste of bile floods my throat. The other demons do the same and, eventually, they’re able to pull out the two humanish males. I’m shocked to see they’re both still breathing.
The humanish male who grabbed and tried to bite me looks injured. I’m not sure how he’s injured exactly, but he is dragging his leg behind him and moaning in pain. Other than that, it’s impossible to tell what’s his blood or not, with all the goop and blood all over him. I do not like the guy, butgross. I shudder despite the heat of the day.
The insides of the creature are mostly grey and pink and oh, how theyreek. Que porra é essa?! When the smell wafts in my direction, I imagine that a Portuguese fishing crew got lost at sea after a major haul, the fish all died, the crew pooped all over the deck, then slit their throats out of solidarity with their fish friends and someone later came along and thought hey, this would sell great at the Centre Pompidou, and bottled that essence.
Something like that.
The two smaller massive demons seem to be bickering among themselves in a harsh language I can’t even pretend I speak. The larger one has stepped away from the group of humanish beings that converges around the two goop-covered males. It takes me a moment to realize between the shouts that they’re laughing, patting each other on the back, cheering and celebrating their victory.
The males—and a few females, this time—release these calls into the sky that remind me of the celebratory whistle my Tunisian friends would make. I never could quite replicate the sound, but this would give them a good run for their money. It makes me smile. It makes me laugh.
The large demon, still about half a football pitch away from me now, jerks. His attention snags on me. His huge, taloned feet sink into the soil, and he starts toward me in a burst that I don’t understand for a second. Then the noises of the world that I’d been blotting out in my effort to concentrate on the battle at hand come rushing back in one choppy shout.
“…Rhen…I believe it may be prudent for you to return to the Sucere Chamber…with haste.”
