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 56: His breath steadied.
His breath steadied. No one was chasing him. From what he saw of the two slugs behavior, they were sneaking out and doing things they shouldn’t have been doing. ‘Still what they were doing got people killed,’ he thought. Realizing the dumpster was where the slugs disposed of the bodies, Bob found himself with a morbid desire to look inside.
He didn’t like the thought of people being thrown out like trash. He wasn’t certain what he would do, but he had to look. Bob climbed up the side of the dumpster, using the metal ridges as foot holds. He peered into the open dumpster and nearly felt his heart stop at the sight. He expected to see the two dead men on top of restaurant garbage bags. He braced himself for the sight of bodies next to wilted lettuce and the refuse of scraped plates. He had not been prepared for the dumpster to be filled with dead bodies.
Bob saw blankly staring eyes, limbs bent and tangled. There were more than he could count. Bob swallowed hard and slipped back down the side of the dumpster.
He recalled the slugs saying that the body was defective. He wondered how many defective human there were in town. Had the slugs been trying on various people and then watching them die just to see which ones they could use? From the number of dead in the dumpster it would seem so.
Bob looked around the dumpster at the rows upon rows of people laid out in sleep on the stretchers. If the slugs kept testing the bodies, How many of them wouldn’t wake up?
It wasn’t something he wanted to think about.
‘There will be less dead if there are fewer slugs,’ he thought darkly. Bob gripped the salt container and wondered how many his container could take out. He suspected he would run out before the slugs were gone. ‘But restaurants use salt,’ he thought. In fact he was certain restaurants used a lot of salt.
‘They would have containers of it,’ he thought. Bob looked around. There were several nearby restaurants. If he could figure out how to get in he could restock when he ran out.
‘I’d have to catch the slugs on their own.’
Bob’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of one of the disks. The sound was louder than the two he took out. ‘I guess I’ll see if that means there are more or if these two really were in stealth mode.’
Bob reached in to his bag and armed himself with salt. He saw two slugs approach. They appeared to be on their own. Unlike the two he dealt with, they didn’t look behind themselves and seemed to radiate less of a stealthy air. ‘Officials to check on things,’ Bob guessed. He didn’t know if it was some sort of routine patrol or if the sound was heard. ‘Maybe someone noticed the other two were missing,’ he thought.
It didn’t matter and he had no way of determining. Bob watched the slugs spot the two empty stretchers. They looked around and Bob shifted so the dumpster blocked him from sight. Deeper in the alleyway, Bob heard the two floating disks run into each other with a metallic clang.
Ten til Midnight 