Chasing Cthulhu (Urf Oomons #2)

Peach is barking like crazy at something. As usual. But I have such a terrible headache right now, I wish she would stop.

“Peach!” I try to yell at her, but it comes out as a scratchy croak and talking hurts my head more.

I go to get up so I can get her, but the bed moves, and I flip over out of it, hitting my hip and elbow on…gravel? Why am I out by the driveway?

Must’ve fallen asleep in the hammock. Groggily, I look around.

No.

There’s that truck those two guys drove up in. They grabbed me and—I don’t know. But the inside of my mouth feels all dry and tastes like someone shoved a ball of cotton candy in there and then dissolved it with hand sanitizer. Gross.

Something happened. Those guys did something, but I can’t remember. And where the hell are they? Their truck is right there. Why knock me out just to leave me here in this hammock?

This is a new level to the harassment I’ve had to deal with this past year. There’s been threatening emails, phone calls, doxing (that’s when someone finds your personal information like address, phone number, legal name and make it public) and swatting. The swatting was particularly bad. It’s a kind of prank where someone calls in an anonymous tip to have a swat team bust into your home in full gear. This is the first time these Men’s Rights guys have actually shown up and harmed me.

What can I do about this? Is there some place I could move to be safe from them? Do I have to hire bodyguards?

And what the hell is Peach barking at?

She’s probably harassing some poor squirrel or something. I swear that dog causes no end of trouble.

Squinting and shading my eyes because the sun is exacerbating my headache, I shuffle carefully over to my pup. I’m all woozy, obviously an aftereffect of whatever those assholes used to knock me out. I keep listing a little to the side and tripping over my own feet, but I finally make it over to Peach and—

Hole. Eee. Shit.

There is something a lot bigger than a squirrel and Peach is attacking it, biting the heck out of it, and snarling and just being so very dumb. That thing that she has a hold of is huge and monstrous. My brain won’t even deal with it, it’s that terrifying. I want to run, but I can’t just leave Peach.

The creature is backing up and kind of shrinking away from me. It’s hard to keep track of it because the color of its skin keeps changing. It blends in well with its camouflage, but not perfectly. It’s trying to disappear even as it shrinks away but Peach has no trouble keeping ahold of it. For a terrible Lovecraftian horror, it’s acting scared. But Peach follows and she has bitten it so hard that she’s drawing blood and the blood is a blue-purple. Slowly, the giant beast lifts a leg—no, a tentacle—up into the air and Peach is hanging from it, still biting and snarling. It extends the tentacle and my dog forward until I can reach over and snatch her away.

That’s when I see that Peach is hurt. She has a big cut over her eye and her fur is all matted with blood and sand.

“What did you do to my dog?” I yell at the monster, my anger making me just as dumb as Peach, “she’s just a little dog, you big jerk.”

The thing continues moving away from me, holding up human-like hands with long black talons. Its eyes big and yellow with vertical slits are wide in alarm.

“You get the hell out of here!” I yell some more, waving an arm at it and stomping my foot. And it does. It starts backing up, creeping toward the shore. Now that I can see it in the light, it is the strangest thing.

Okay, picture Ursula from the Little Mermaid, with an octopus bottom and human top, but all gray, with a bald head and ruffled ears. Also huge, not curvaceous like Ursula, but strong-looking. Like Ursula’s giant, bald, fit cousin. With long-ass claws on its fingers and a kind of flat bump for a nose. And yellow eyes with vertically slit pupils.

So weird.

As it slips into the water, I recall the sea creature I had been trying to get a video of. It was this thing! The whole time I was kayaking in that cove there was a giant tentacle monster lurking under there, concealing itself so well that I couldn’t tell what it looked like at all.

I stand there staring at the water where the monster has just disappeared. The water is calm, with no ripples at all. Nothing to give away that that enormous terrifying creature is below the surface.

This has been the weirdest frickin day of my life.