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 82: He looked into his bag to check the contents.
He looked into his bag to check the contents. Despite the slugs he took out, there was still plenty of salt in the bag. He didn’t know how the slug command structure worked, but he suspected that the slug with the crown gave the orders.
‘So taking out the king makes sense,’ Bob thought. ‘At least more sense than going into the suburbs and knocking on doors to see if there are any slugs at home.’
As Bob sat in the bushes trying to figure out his next steps, he heard the sound of an approaching disk. Bob blinked. It sounded like it was moving fast. He reached into his back of salt even as he scrambled to his feet.
The disk raced past him through the opening between the parking lots before he could do much more than get into a standing position. Bob tripped on an exposed root and stumbled out of his cover. He blinked as the king of the slugs turned to him. Bob saw him lift his hands and braced for gun fire. Instead he found that in one hand the slug held his scepter and in the other hand the bowling trophy. He raced forward as though deciding to beat Bob to death with both of them.
He yelled in a guttural voice as he closed the distance and Bob grabbed two fist fulls of salt and hurled them at the slug king as soon as he was near enough. The salt caught the light spraying out tiny little lights of its own like glitter. The salt hit the slug full on. The guttural battle cry became a high pitched shriek as the salt started to melt him.
Melting or not the disk was still barreling towards him at full speed. Bob threw himself to the side, scraping off a fair bit of skin as he connected with the asphalt. The slug king zoomed past him and bob heard breaking glass. He looked over his shoulder and realized the floating disk collided with the big glass window in the front of the restaurant.
Despite the pain in his abraded skin Bob scrambled to his feet in case the slug came back. There was no sound from the inside of the restaurant. Hearing a sound behind him, Bob spun around. He expected the rest of the dispersed slug army to come rushing at him now that he was out in the open. They didn’t.
Instead he saw people begin to wake, sitting up on their stretchers and wondering what happened to them. Bob made his way quickly through the maze of stretchers, finding Enid, Eddie and Lucille. Enid blinked at him as she sat up.
‘What happened?” she asked. As she sat up glittering salt crystals dropped from her body. She frowned. Towards the front of the parking lot a woman screamed. Bob looked over and saw it was the woman coated with melted slug goo.
“You can tell me later,” Enid said. “Let’s just go home. You look exhausted.”
Bob nodded. “Home seems like a good idea.”
Bob looked around the parking lot as he helped first Enid and then Lucille off of their stretchers. Eddie slipped off on his own, but returned a few minutes later driving one of the activities vans.
“The lots on the other side,” Eddie said. Bob nodded, more than willing to let someone else take charge of things for a while. He and Eddie gathered the residents for the retirement community and loaded them onto the van. Once dropped off he would drive the three of them back home. Clean up and sorting out the aftermath was definitely someone else’s job. As they boarded the bus, Bob sincerely hoped that there were no contingency slug armies waiting in the suburbs. Bob sat down on one of the seats and felt the bag of salt hit him. He gripped the handle hard and knew that on his next shopping trip, he would be stocking up.
‘Just in case.’
Ten til Midnight 