The TV news anchor sounded strange when he said, “We’re getting scattered reports of disturbances throughout the—” then a loud growl and something heavy banging into steel—banging into the dumpster—“sure we’re seeing this right, but—”
“The dogs are in the alley again,” Chef Robert said as he reached for a knife. “They’re going to destroy everyth—eat everything, I mean.”
“It’s okay,” his sous-chef said, “I’ll go—”
The knife entered the sous-chef’s abdomen and sliced his liver cleanly in half. Chef Robert didn’t remember deciding to stab him—he was a good kid, whatever his name was.
“Can you zoom a little closer in on that, maybe?” the TV man asked.
“Shit, Kid,” Chef Robert said over a field reporter’s muffled, staticky reply.
The sous-chef grunted and staggered back a step to the sound of a woman screaming on the TV and the TV man asking, “Are we okay with this going out live?”
The sous-chef winced when the knife slipped out of him. Blood followed in a thin red waterfall over the kid’s clean whites and a sharp, staccato series of gunshots came from the TV—five of them. Chef Robert remembered the sous-chef telling him he took baby aspirin every day because he had a history of heart attacks in his family. Chef Robert also remembered telling him to shut the fuck up and get back to work.
“Fuck, man,” the sous-chef said, looking up at the TV, which sat a little crooked on a shelf above the line. “Something’s going on.”
“Yeah…” Chef Robert replied then stabbed him again. He thrust his arm out straight, aiming for the sous-chef’s throat but ended up jabbing the blade into the kid’s mouth, splitting his tongue in half.
A scream made gravelly by blood in his throat made it hard to hear the TV man say, “—appears to be happening all over the city, but—” Eyes bulging. Bleeding and choking.
“Fuck,” Chef Robert whispered and pulled the knife out of the sous-chef’s mouth. Someone screamed and there was a dull thud like a distant explosion, both from the TV, and a big piece of the sous-chef’s tongue and a couple of teeth came out with the knife. The sous-chef brought his hands up to his mouth and bumped the knife up to his own face—into his eye, so Chef Robert pushed while the TV news anchor stage-whispered, “Oh my God. Is that a…? What is that?” There was almost no resistance but Chef Robert had cut enough meat in his life to know when the point entered the kid’s brain.
The sous-chef fell like a marionette whose strings had been cut—straight to the kitchen floor at the speed of gravity.
“Well…” Chef Robert said, eyes darting between the sous-chef’s jittery death spasms and the blood dripping off the knife, “…shit.”
The dogs in the alley thumped against the wall.
Another scream from the TV behind him startled Chef Robert, so he grabbed the remote off the service counter. “At this point we’ve still received no statement on what appears to be—”
Chef Robert clicked the TV off.
“Fuck,” Chef Robert said—the single syllable exploding from his chest as he threw the TV remote across the cramped kitchen to shatter against the exposed brick wall. No way to get this cleaned up and still prep for lunch, he thought. And if anyone came back from the front of the house—mostly women up there—it would be all screaming, police… and he didn’t want to have to kill everybody. If he did, how could they open?
“Yeah,” he said, stepping back from the growing puddle of blood slowly finding its way to the floor drain. “Shit. This sucks.”
Then a yip and a howling bark from out back and something heavy hit the back door.
Chef Robert gripped the knife tighter in his hand.
“Fucking damn mutts!” he shouted, and stepped over the now still corpse of his sous-chef—the eighth sous-chef he’d had in the restaurant’s first fifteen months. This was the only one he’d murdered. One he fired for stealing toilet paper—who steals toilet paper? The rest quit for various reasons, mostly because they didn’t like him.
Anyway, he thought, fuck them.
He burst out the back door into the alley shouting, “Fucking shit—” but stopped when the smell hit him.
He was ready for the cloying sweet rot of the dumpster and the dog shit that had become a feature in the past few weeks, but this…
It actually hit him, that smell. It hit him in the face, but good.
Then something else hit him in the face and he tried to stab it but his arm wouldn’t move. Whatever hit him held on and started pulling at the skin of his face, forcing it out, away from his skull.
It hurt.
“Stop,” Chef Robert gasped—muffled.
But he couldn’t keep talking when the thing standing in front of him began to laugh. Its mouth, lined in jagged, broken fangs like a shark’s, was the source of the smell—a smell that replaced the air to fill Chef Robert’s lungs with its heavy, humid presence.
Something wrapped around his waist and squeezed him—hard.
“Don’t—” Chef Robert gasped.
He couldn’t hear his own voice over the thunderous roar of the thing barking.
The thing—
A sphere full of eyes—a hundred eyes of every color—a thousand of them. Some rat’s eyes, some dog’s eyes, most human eyes.
And tentacles.
Pressure built in Chef Robert’s head and he screamed as loud as he could. His own knife bit into his thigh, forced into his flesh by the tentacle around his waist, which trapped his arms against his side.
“Don’t…” he squeaked. His voice, forced through a throat pressed tight by fear and pain, sounded like a little girl’s voice. “Don’t eat me… Don’t eat me alive.”
The tentacle around his waist wrapped around him again—another looped over his groin and when he felt one of his testicles burst Chef Robert’s mind shattered into screaming and sobbing and laughing and confusion and regret.
The thing made of eyes and fangs and tentacles and stench was still laughing when it squeezed his head so tightly Chef Robert’s eyes popped out.
Chef Robert could still see through eyes now crossing the short distance between his skull and the thing, spinning to show him lights flashing at the end of the alley and something in the sky that shouldn’t be there and the garbage and sour water in the alley. It hurt when his eyes slammed into the thing’s wet but sticky flesh. The top layer of membrane peeled off his eyes, stuck to the monster’s rough skin and rolling down and around until Chef Robert could see himself—eyeless, bloody, twisted, and broken—in the grasp of more tentacles than he remembered feeling. His brain came out of black-empty eye sockets in clumps of grey and his face malformed as his jaw gave way with a sloppy crack.
The thing stopped laughing.
Chef Robert wanted to say, “No… please…” and he did even though he could see his own head and there was no way sound could come out of that collapsed mess.
His voice was deeper now. Bigger.
He screamed, and that was deeper, too. Bigger still.
And he kept screaming, between bites, at the feel of his own flesh soaked in hot blood and the crunch of his own bones under pulverizing fangs.
And the taste of it.
He tasted good.
“What the fuck!”
Someone at the entrance to the alley.
Chef Robert, savoring the tang of his own guts, the umami thrill of intestine, rolled his eyes into the flashing blue and red lights. He swallowed, and in the monster’s enormous voice asked, “Are you going to arrest me? I didn’t mean to kill him. It was an accident. The restaurant is failing. It’s been stressful and—”
He had to stop to pull his old body’s left arm off and grind through the heavy bones there.
Fatty, he thought. Good…
“The fuck is that?” one of the cops screamed.
The other cop just started shooting.
The bullets hurt, but not too bad.
Chef Robert dropped his own body—it was just the legs left, mostly. As he wrapped a tentacle around each cop, breaking their arms to redirect the guns, Chef Robert was happy he hadn’t had to experience eating his own penis.
But he wasn’t sure he could say the same for the cops.
