This year I am working on a story called Bob vs. The Alien Slug Monsters. Instead of an outline I have a basic list of plot points I want to cover between meeting Bob and sending him off to fight the king of the slugs. There is more of a cast of characters than an actual outline, so we will see how the story develops. And with that intro we continue with Bob Versus the Alien Slug Monsters…
Day 44: As exposed as he was then, the slugs were now.
As exposed as he was then, the slugs were now. He could see them gathered around the hole in the pavement. There was light and the rumble of stones. He heard a whining drone. He wasn’t entirely certain what it was, and was far enough away that he couldn’t see details.
‘It looks smoother,’ he thought. As he watched the rubble around the hole appeared to flatten out. ‘And I think the hole is getting smaller.’
Bob pulled his head back into the safety of the alleyway. He decided that what the slugs were doing was less important than continuing on. He made his way swiftly back to the alley and continued moving in the directions he saw the slugs take the others.
‘Maybe they are repairing the road like they did the damage at Golden Meadows,’ Bob thought as he moved. It made a bit more sense to him. ‘Repairing one and leaving the other didn’t make much sense.’
Unfortunately it also blew a hole in his isolate Centerville by destroying the roads and bridges out of town theory. ‘Unless they no longer need to isolate the town.’ Bob swallowed hard. That thought made him feel like the slugs were moving forward with some sort of plan. He didn’t know what that plan was, but he suspected it wasn’t a good one.
‘It’s not like they tried to say hi peacefully at first,’ Bob thought. As he moved he wondered about the other buildings. When he and the others first set out this morning, there was smoke rising and clear damage to some of the buildings. Would the slugs try to repair them as well?
Bob thought about the district where the most damage was done. It was more the glass and metal buildings, the newer office buildings, that were hit rather than the older buildings in town. ‘Maybe because they are taller?’ Bob thought.
The buildings he was walking past showed no signs of damage. If they took any they had been repaired. ‘But if they are sending slugs to repair the road, then they might send crews to the damaged buildings.’ It would be something he would have to watch out for.
Bob continued on and had moved to the point where he saw the slugs disappear around the corner with the stretchers of people. From here he would have to be cautious as well as look out for signs of the slugs location. ‘If the slugs are with the stretchers.’
Bob thought of Centerville. They weren’t a major city by any stretch of the imagination. At best they had about twenty thousand people. There might be more, he didn’t know. ‘Maybe thirty,’ he thought. ‘But not all of them live in town.’ While he lived in a now mostly gone subdivision, there were larger subdivisions on the other side of town.
‘The slugs would have had to have taken those people as well since they might have come into town when they woke to find smoke coming from buildings and no cell phone or radio working.’
While not a major city, that was still a lot of people to put on stretchers. ‘They would need a lot of space for that.’ He wasn’t sure where they would all go. ‘There is an arena across town,’ he thought.
Ten til Midnight 