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monster turned its eyes on him after taking one more bite out of the remains of one of Dave’s best friends. Marty G. He knew it was Marty, or what was left of him, because of the tattoo just visible under the runnels of blood covering most of his one remaining arm.
    ‘. . . rd is my shepherd. I am his lamb.’
    The beast snarled slowly at Dave. His conscious mind lurched into action again, racing in a fever to catch up, seeking to impose some sort of meaning, however poor, on the scene before him. The first rational conclusion it reached was . . . big. This fucking thing was big . Marty Grbac had stood six-five in the shower, and his upper arms were the size of Dave’s thighs. This thing probably stood a head taller than that.
    The animal, whatever it was – it looked like some sort of hairless gorilla with a shocking case of full-body herpes – was sitting back on its haunches taking bites out of Grbac’s upper body like a hungry drunk tearing chunks out of a foot-long at Subway. So yeah, it was big.
    Dave’s mind, still frantically cycling through possibilities, latched on to shreds of recognition or analogy. The creature’s eyes were black limpid pools, like a shark’s. It had no snout or nose, just two breathing slits above the open maw of a mouth filled with fangs. Not the neat, dangerous canines of a wild dog but a junkyard pile of broken tusks, jagged scythes, and barbs strung with half-chewed flesh.
    An image came to him, just a flash, of sitting in a cinema with his two boys when they were much younger and he was a better father, with his arms wrapped around them as they burrowed their faces into his chest, terrified by the snarling creatures pouring out of the ground in one of those Lord of the Rings movies. The thing eating Marty Grbac reminded him of one of them. An orc.
    An orc with nuts the size of softballs and a cock like Satan’s own spitting cobra. The nasty fucking thing was fully rigid, too. Like it was getting off on eating Dave’s friend.
    ‘Fuck,’ he breathed out. ‘That’s nasty.’
    The monster snarled again, casually, regarding him with apparent indifference. A terrible sound erupted from the fetid hole of its mouth: a wet, guttural eruption, long and low, like a hippo farting in a mud bath. Dave’s jaw dropped, and his face hung slack with horror as the creature . . . laughed at him. He was certain it was laughing. A snorting, sucking series of barks as it slurped up ribbons of skin like noodle strands. Dave Hooper’s balls crawled up into his body. His much smaller, less scabrous balls. He shuddered with revulsion and the first stuttering paroxysm of fury.
    This fucking thing was drunk on blood and bloated with hot meat. It was eating his friend, laughing at him, and waving its johnson in his face like it fully expected a free hummer. Whatever it was, wherever it had come from, nobody or nothing came onto his rig and got up in his face with that kind of shit. He shook his head almost imperceptibly, a snarl beginning to disfigure his features, answering the creature’s ferocity. For the first time he took in the scene around him. Carnage illuminated by the loading screen of a game on the Xbox. Body parts were scattered about the lounge. Entrails and bloodied chunks of unidentifiable meat festooned the faded brown three-piece lounge. Blood lapped at his boots. As Dave shook his head, muttering ‘No, no, no’ through gritted teeth, he noticed movement to his left and then his right.
    More of them.
    No, that wasn’t right. There were more creatures, but they were smaller than the brutish-looking thing squatting in the middle of the room. There were two, no, three of them. Demonic-looking, but lesser versions of the animal snacking on Marty’s rib cage. They were monstrous baboons whereas it was a gorilla. Its jaw appeared to distend horribly wide as it crunched through bone and sinew, tearing and ripping and shaking free its meal with more snorts and grunts. And that sound, like