REALLY? By Douglas Waltz

Samuel staggered down the main street of town. His favorite watering hole had forcibly ejected him fifteen minutes ago and he had been left to his own devices. He could go home, but driving was out of the question. Most of his cash had been whittled away at the bar so a cab was definitely out of the question. He decided to walk.
An all night coffee shop took the rest of his poor excuse for money in exchange for a cup of familiar, caffeinated warmth. He sipped in gingerly as he continued through he early morning hours to his apratment.
It was as he went under the viaduct that cruved to the left and took him closer to home that he heard the noise.
"Psst!" Came the urgent whipser.
Samuel turned around and looked and saw nothing. Maybe he had imagined the whole thing. Then he heard it again.
"Psst!"
This time he was able to focus on an individual coming out of the shadows under the bridge. A tall, pale figure with an incredibly wide smile dressed in a long, flowing, black coat. The shadows seemed to carress him as he walked forward.
Samuel panicked at first, but the smile was disarming and he relaxed. The figure glided up to him smiled and said;
"Guess what?"
Samuel shook his head.
"The world is going to end in fifteen seconds."
Samuel thought about that for about ten seconds, looked to see if the person was kidding and said;
"Really?"

ODDS AND ENDS

It twitched. The tendons and muscles tightened in a rapid set of spasms. But it was held fast to its concrete moorings by hundreds of pounds of iron chains. Still, it shuddered, seized, and spat bleats of anger and pent-up fury. It slumped ever so slightly as it dangled, loose enough to prevent it from rending its limbs from their sockets, and let out a slow, guttural mewl. Suddenly, and with the brute force of ten elephants, it lurched forward, struggling mightily against the chains that had held it for so very long, and listened quite intently as rock grinded against rock at the base of its restraints.

The doctor remained stolid and nonplussed as he gathered his instruments on the wheeled cart before him. He unrolled his pouch, extracted a scalpel: razor sharp and fresh, and set it next to the other bits of medical and scientific odds and ends. As he unfurled his roll further, he slid free two different hypodermic needles and set them along side the other tools of his diabolical trade. From his pocket he produced two vials, each containing a slightly different shade of a jade liquid, and inserted each needle into its respective receptacle. Finally, as the instruments were finally all laid out before him, he eyed the one most brutal: an extractor built onto a cruel saw.

It gasped because it knew; it had memories, somehow, of each piece in the doctors demonic arsenal, and it coughed in fear. It panted, canine-like, and readied for another lunge. This would be the freeing moment, it had to be, for it knew that what lie mere moments ahead was to be its final and ultimate undoing. With an inhaled breath and a tightening of its sinuous musculature, it arced its back and flung itself forth against the maddening prison. In a cacophony of exploding cement and shattering rock the sunken bolts gave way. It was finally free, it was finally loose.

The doctor froze in a moment of complete panic. His man, his creation, was loosed! With little more than a second to react, he produced the first syringe and plunged it deep into the flank of the livid beast. But to no avail. Its adrenaline was coursing through it like minuscule rocket fire. As the doctor reached for the second shot of the far more potent liquid, he felt his entire head engulfed in one massive fist. A split second later, The doctor felt what was to be his last feeling: his face was brought down on his odds and ends table, right atop the wicked extractor. The deafening sound of blinded darkness overfilled his dying senses.

I DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE

I had to run home and write this as soon as I could; something is going on out there and I really don't know what they are. I say 'they', but I guess what it is could be 'its' rather than 'they', but you get the idea. Anyway, right around eleven this morning, this really powdery like ash stuff started falling from the sky. I'd never seen anything like it outside of California when my wife and I were on our Honeymoon and the forest fires were ripping through the trees back in '99. It looked then like really light snowflakes and they were all over the place. This was so similar to that that I almost chalked it up to a fire somewhere, but Michigan just doesn't get them that much... especially not around here. At any rate, I went outside to check it out, and when the little fluffs landed on you they almost stung! It felt just like a little bug nipping you! It definitely made me want to wipe the things off right away. I brushed off the rest and went back inside. We looked out the front window that faces the road and thousands of the whitish-gray flakes were landing all over the place. As soon as they hit something solid, or maybe just not human, they popped open with a puff of maybe smoke or something, and flipped over. Worst of all was how they looked after 'exploding': like little crabs; stone crabs maybe, but without the big fat claw... just two littler ones. They started scrambling all over the cars, the sidewalk, the parking lot... shit, we could hear them scratching at the roof! No one wanted to go out to investigate, for obvious reasons, but it was apparent that they could be relatively easily smashed, as the passing, honking traffic was splattering them all over the road! They didn't look like they had blood, per se, just a bunch of green ichor that erupted a blast of some kind of foul green gas. Anyway, after about fifteen minutes of them pouring down from the sky, the rain stopped. Well, getting to the car wasn't exactly a simple task as no one wanted to get any one of them on themselves, so, we grabbed the snow shovel and just cleared a path. I jumped in the car, kicked two out that had climbed in the open window... I think I got them all, though I thought maybe one had gotten into my soc--- -