The Skunge Read Free Page B

was came from a garbage-clogged sewer grate.
    Is this hell? Am I in hell? He lay on the cracked and oozing floor of the tunnel, trying in vain to move. It felt like whatever that crazy fucking nurse had given him hadn't yet worn off. Random pulses of white-hot pain sizzled through his nervous system, making his gasp each time.
    screaming, cutting, the thirsty grin of cold steel
    but his mind slipped over it, burying it. He knew he would have to face it someday, but now was not the time.
    Lying here in pain while just above and out of reach, normal life goes on as though you never existed. This is hell.
    He was about to call for help when something moved in the shadows. Mik caught his breath, listening. The only thing he heard was the thunder of blood in his ears. A hot, stinking wave of stench roiled out of the blackness and enveloped him. The stink of a zoo. No more than a dozen feet away, the liquid, somehow putrid sound of something large and moist scraping across the floor. It sounded large, heavy, and close. Worse was that, Mik's brain insisted that it sounded… hungry. Panic flooded his veins with icy fear.
    He bucked frantically, trying to move. His limbs would not respond. He tried to scrabble at the floor of the tunnel, but could feel nothing with his fingertips. He tried to push away from that sound, but could find no purchase on the cement. Finally, he looked down at himself, and screamed.
    Four stumps. They had cut off his arms and legs and left four red-stained scraps of sheet, the ends tied off with heavy rubber tubing. He bit back a scream, and felt something move in his stomach. He thought back to the doctor, his sparkling eyes and glittering syringe.
    Another liquid noise from the shadows. Atavistic fear swallowed Mik's thoughts, and he flailed his foreshortened limbs, consumed by the pre-human urge to flee the great and unknown beast. Finally, he managed to flip himself onto his belly. He heaved his torso up onto the stumps of his arms and legs. Vicious bolts of pain twanged through the stumps like electrical currents. He screamed each time be brought a stump down on the concrete and dragged himself another few inches. A stumped landed squarely on a jagged hook of broken glass and his vision strobed white with agony. Still he moved, fighting forward with the frenzied drive of the survival instinct. Ahead, he saw a tiny swatch of muted daylight. It could be a way out, or only his fevered brain trying to trick him into hope. He humped his body along like a mutant inchworm, sweat dripping down his round face as the unseen thing in the shadows grew louder. To Mik, raised in the city, it sounded like wet garbage bags rustling and snapping in the wind. Shivering bolts of fear shot through him, making him jerk and spasm as he crawled. He threw himself forward, and his chin hit the cement with a crack. He grunted and kept moving. There was more movement in his belly, and sudden, shooting pains. He began to cry, and felt tiny, squirming movements in his—
    Something wrapped around the stump of his right leg. He froze, whimpering, his hair hanging in his eyes. The cords on his neck stuck out like guy wires. The grip tightened, both soft and implacable. With a scream, he lunged again. He left bandages like shed skin as he scrabbled over the shit-stained sewer floor. His stumps sang with pain. Soon they would scream. The barely scabbed flesh of his amputations tore open and left bloody prints. He felt the tips of his bones where they poked through the meat and grated against the cement. He had thought, growing up in the projects, fighting among the rats and garbage and gangs and drugs, that he knew pain. But now he realized that pain transmitted far more widely than a few narrow bands; the agony frequency covered every spectrum.
    All thought was driven from his mind when something brushed against his ass. Something questing, slippery, and sharp. He cried out.
    It entered him, spearing his guts and sending a surprised