Short Story Saturday: Special Guest Post Paul Skelton with Squiddies

Paul shared this story with me a few weeks ago. He wrote it after reading and being inspired by my short story Remains, which I shared at the beginning of November. Honestly, I'm honored that he was inspired by the story and chose to write one of his own, featuring his own version of the Space Squids.

Without further ado, I give you Squiddies written by Paul Skelton. Enjoy!

SQUIDDIES

Lamont; Michigan; U.S.A.

    ‘They’s white slimy slitherin’ critters, I tell ya,’ Skeet Baker told the disbelieving Sheriff Bellamy. ‘With tentacles like squids a’ got,’ he added helpfully.

    ‘Yeh, ‘n’ they come down in a shiny dome shape craft, what wuz lit up like a Christmas tree. Soon as they wuz a’ slippin’ an’ a’ slidin’ in our direction, it wuz a case a’ jump in the Blazer and we lit outta that yard a’ ours an’ straight here. I tell ya, Sheriff, ya should call out the military,’ Skeet’s son Tyler added.

     ‘There’ll be time enough for that once I’ve assessed the situation,’ the Sheriff answered as he scribbled furiously on his note pad.  ‘Now, how much moonshine you two cow pokes bin imbibin’ tonight, huh?’

    ‘Ain’t touched the ‘shine, Sheriff, plate of Franks n’ beans washed down with Root beer is all we done, right, pa?’

    ‘Tha’s right, Tyler. Now, Sheriff, I’m urgin’ ya, they alien Space Squid things are huge, an’ they can’t be here t’ see ZZ Top rockin’ The Kazbah or pop a Bud Light down at Eezy-Nix, can they?’

    ‘Okay, boys, here’s what we’ll do. I’ll tool us up, call my Dep’ an’ meet up over at your shack. If you’re yankin’ my chain, you’re both in for a stretch in my cooler, gottit?’

    They “gottit” and were soon powering up the North Road in the Sheriff’s Dodge Journey with “Blame It On The Boom Boom” by Black Stone Cherry blasting out of the infotainment system.

    Deputy Frazer was already at where the Baker’s shack once stood ahead of them. The Dodge screeched to a grit kicking halt, slewing a drift as it did so, and three shell shocked men leapt out from the car.

    ‘Jeez-us,’ exclaimed Skeet Baker.

    ‘It’s all . . . slime. Nuthin’ left, just . . . slime,’ Tyler was hyperventilating.

    ‘There’s a dome shaped craft over yonder, behind the bluff. You can just see the top of it shinin’ in the moonlight. It’s too hot to approach beyond, maybe, ten meters, scorched the dirt, it has. No sign of any critters, ‘cept for this slime,’ Deputy Frazer informed them.

    Sheriff Bellamy walked towards a gap in the slime and shone his torch into it.

   ‘Tha’s where our basement wuz, sherf.’ Skeet spat a great wad of chewing tobacco infused saliva as he said this.

    As the Sheriff moved in on the hole to the basement, Deputy Frazer came up beside him and shone his torch into the hole too. As he did so, two huge tentacles shot up through the hole and grabbed the awestruck law enforcement officers. The tentacles wrapped right round them several times, squeezing the breath from their writhing bodies. Then as quickly as they emerged, the limbs withdrew back into the basement, dragging the two men with them with a loud, wet, sucking sound. Skeet and Tyler screamed and turned to run back to the squad car, only it was now invisible, engulfed by a milky-white squid. Frozen to the spot, father and son looked around wildly for a place to retreat to, but time wasn’t on their side, as even longer tentacles slithered from the creature, firmly gripping both men, and lifting them into the air.

* * *

Harpenden; Hertfordshire; United Kingdom.

     James and Kate Lewis were lounging in front of the TV, watching a DVD of the “Wolf Creek” series, season two, in which Mick Taylor had just murdered a safari tour driver and had commandeered the tour bus replete with its occupants. Their seventeen-year-old daughter, Tawny, was “busy” with Brent Henderson in her bedroom. Brent, the local twenty-five-year-old handyman, had accessed her quarters with his ladders. As a handy person, he was respected and trusted, but as someone to leave your daughter alone with, he was not. He was already twice married, with a mistress and somewhere in the region of nine children attributed to him, six of which were illegitimate. Just as Tawny was reaching orgasm, a thunderous, deafening sound drowned out her squeals of pleasure, and Brent looked up to see the ceiling cracking and bulging alarmingly. The tentacles whisked away the two lovers in seconds just as James raced up the stairs in response to thunderous crashing noises. He never got even close to Tawny’s room as the entire upstairs was destroyed, and the tentacles grabbed James. Kate Lewis ran out of the back door to the garden and saw a Space Squid attacking her house and most of all the other houses, including the late Eric Morcombe’s pile. She ran for her life down the considerably large garden and hid in the potting shed. She instinctively knew her husband and daughter were gone but had had the presence of mind to bring her handbag, which contained a decent sized flask of Vodka and a pack of Silk Cut cigarettes. As she swigged some Vodka to calm her nerves and shakily lit a cigarette, she searched out her android cell phone to call the emergency services. There was a “no service” message icon glowing back at her, and then she nearly jumped right out of her housecoat, when a voice spoke out.

    ‘Spare me a fag, love?’ growled Roger Hampton, a fifty-eight-year-old homeless person.

     Kate shrieked, shrank away from Rodger and threw the cigarettes over to him. He produced a lighter and lit himself a cigarette.

    ‘I’m not going to hurt you, love,’ he puffed, in a surprisingly gentle growl. ‘I’m just an old fool on the scrap heap of life, dossing in here mainly to avoid those things out there. I call them Squiddies, and they won’t get us in here because they can’t stand Creosote, and this shed is treated with it. How do I know that, you may well ask? Well, firstly, I can smell it, and secondly, I remember seeing that Henderson chap applying it for you in the summer. Then he, er, applied himself to your daughter, so to speak, right atop that fertiliser bag you’re sitting on.’

    ‘Good God,’ she gasped as Rodger wheezed out a chesty cackle.

    ‘You don’t remember me, though, do you? No? Well, I was your family GP in the nineties, when you got the measles because your mother declined the jabs. I was a pretty good doctor back in the day—family, nice house, brand new Lexus on the drive and, sadly, a gambling habit. By the millennium, I’d lost the lot and ended up adrift. I remember you of course, dear sweet child you were, Katey. Well, here we are, better look out for each other.’

     ‘Gosh, yes I do remember you. Doctor Hampton, isn’t it? Crumbs. How do you know about those squid things may I ask?’

     ‘Well, I can tell you that the first batch arrived six weeks ago, incognito. The craft is submerged in Stanborough Lakes over at Welwyn Garden city. I saw it sliding under the water, steam rising from it and a hideous hissing sound when I was up there fishing up. I decided to pack up and get away, as did some other anglers, but then my float went under and the rod twitched, so I reeled it in. I’d caught a baby one, and it was a feisty thing with sixteen tentacles. Interestingly, none of its limbs had suckers on them, just the most clingy, sticky slime I’ve ever encountered.’

    ‘Crumbs, er, where is it now?’ Kate enquired.

    ‘Aha, don’t worry dear, it’s safely out of the way. I ate it. Anyway, the Squiddies are here to collect human specimens for research purposes. They will be discarding people of authority, such as leaders, chiefs and politicians. Yes, they’re using volcanoes to dump them in.’

    ‘Really?’ Kate now sounded sceptical. ‘You know this, or did you dream it, Doctor?’

    ‘Oh, my dear Katey, I fully understand why you would doubt what I say, just look at my shabby appearance. The baby one I caught was like an open book full of information. Yes, I found that I had a telepathic link with it. It, of course, being the operative word. You see, these Space Squid things are genderless, sexless, hermaphrodites, much like slugs and snails. Yes, indeed, I would classify them as a type of mollusc, in actual fact,’ Rodger Henderson concluded.

    ‘Oh, Doctor,’ Katey blushed. ‘You might be a bit scruffy, but you look okay to me, really. You’re still quite handsome.’

    ‘Oho, am I? Well, I always had a shine for you, especially when you were in your teens. Yes, some of my exploratory examinations went a little further than perhaps they should have, particularly when you thought you were pregnant at fifteen. Yes, I remember that very well.’

    ‘Did you fancy me, Doctor?’

    ‘Let’s be clear here, I possess an addictive personality, hence the gambling addiction. My obsession with teenage girls was much the same sort of complaint, and, being a Doctor, I had easy access. I rarely wanted sex with my girly patients, just to touch, fondle and arouse them, whilst arousing myself of course.’ He paused. ‘Fact is though, in your case, yes I did desire full intercourse.’

   ‘Do you desire some fun now?’ Kate surprised herself.

   ‘Well, I can still raise an eyebrow, and you’re what? Thirty-eightish? Yes, why not?’

   Kate removed her house coat and teased off her knickers from underneath her flimsy nighty, whilst Rodger fumbled around inside his loose-fitting tracksuit bottoms. As Kate Lewis leaned back on the fertiliser bag, parting her legs as she did so, a white slimy tentacle extended from Rodgers nether regions and entered her vagina. The initial feeling of ecstasy soon turned to discomfort and then agony, as the tentacle explored further into Kate’s body.

    ‘Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t have had the squid after all,’ Doctor Rodger Henderson told himself as he strolled out of the potting shed and across the Lewis’ vast lawn toward a hovering space vessel.

* * *

All Aboard The Squiddie Express.

     ‘Aha, here’s Doctor Henderson himself, folkingtons,’ a jovial Melvin Cartwrirght announced to the motley group sat cross legged on the floor in front of him.

    ‘Aha, greetings, mugwumps. Before we start the one to one consultations, I’ll take any questions you may have. Just raise your hand. Yes, you sir, er, Bellamy isn’t it?’

    ‘Sure is, limey, just exactly, where are we?’

    ‘Inside the main cargo hold of the XC5555 unit, which is a space craft. It has a hemispherical drive unit capable of thirty billion horsepower, which runs on Creosote, a centric gravity simulation unit and an air conditioning system specifically designed for us humans. We are guests of the Rambastical Alien Elite, or “RAE” for short, a colony of Space Squid from the planet M075zz731A. We’re approximately seventy thousand miles from Earth, heading towards Pluto. But, of course, there’s no windows here, so you could actually be in a warehouse at Maylands Avenue in Hemel Hempstead in England. You decide.’

     ‘Why?’ James Lewis spoke up.

     ‘You didn’t raise your hand, Lewis,’ the Doctor scolded him, ‘but I will answer your question anyway since everyone will be wondering the same thing. This is a holiday of sorts, in which some of you will breed, be medically examined, experimented upon or eaten. Your fate largely depends on your intellect and level of co-operation. By the way, Lewis, I’ve had your wife in the potting shed. Yes, waited years to do her and fill her with slime. Feel co-operative do you, James?’

* * *

THE UNTIMELY END