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 53: The voice was stilted and the mouth moved as though it was a marionette and not a man.
The voice was stilted and the mouth moved as though it was a marionette and not a man. Bob watched in horrid fascination as they moved their mouths up and down. They seemed to be trying to learn how to speak. He wondered if they were accessing the minds of those they inhabited. ‘I doubt the slugs come from a place where they speak English.’
The first one seemed to have better luck than the second one. He could get words to come out of his mouth, but the tongue appeared to give him problems.
‘The speech is coming to me,’ he said. The word speech sounded as though he was attempting to blow a razzberry with his mouth at the same time he was talking so speech came out sthhhhhprththtcththththth. It took four times longer to say with his tongue flapping. It was oddly more disturbing than laughable to see. A grotesque parody of human speech.
‘Maybe because I saw the slug go into the body,’ Bob thought. After proclaiming that the speech was coming to him, Bob saw the man’s tongue loll out of the side of his mouth, drooling down his lip. It looked as thought eh slug had to work to control the tongue and then when he was finished just ignored it.
The other slug could make no more than vague honking sounds when he tried to control his mouth. The first one seemed to tire of speech and tried to work on moving the body. Although he had gotten the body to sit up, that was the only movement it seemed to control. The hands and arms twitched as the slug tried to get the body to work.
Bob watched, unable to look away. Was this what the slugs were planning? To wear people like disguises? He frowned. If that was the plan they would either need time to get the basics down or they were doomed to failure. Bob thought of how the two slugs looked behind them hoping to not be seen. ‘Maybe these aren’t the best and brightest,’ Bob thought.
Somehow it wasn’t a comforting thought. If the other slugs had better mastery, they could wear people like puppets and depending on how good they were, others might not notice.
‘Maybe that’s why they didn’t take everyone.’ Bob thought. ‘They only need enough people for the number of slugs they have.’ Given they only took a couple of hundred instead of several thousand Bob thought it was his silver lining.
‘Or at least as silver a lining as I am going to get.’
“Hard,” the first one said when he could do nothing but shrug the arms of the body he inhabited, hands flopping about loosely.
The second slug laughed. It was a harsh braying sound. The mouth was wide and the sound seemed to echo up out of the throat. The sound was cut off mid bark, the body gasping and the face turning red. Bob watched the muscles strain and wondered if the body was expelling the slug, if the person was fighting the invasion.
Ten til Midnight 