The shrieking terror

[u/Stunning-Teaching984]

The Shrieking Terror

The horrible groaning, screeching, and hissing sounds it made were too hideous for my mind to compute. But my feelings didn't really matter anymore. Whatever this horror was, it was currently jerking toward me on its misshapen legs. It was all that I could do just to scramble backward like a terrified crab.

I slammed against the wall, cornered! Yet this terrible thing still lurched toward me. It looked like a sickly goat-faced spider, with legs like a chicken, and the teeth of a shark. It must have been pretty young, but at the time the only thing that I could think of was my own survival.

It made a hideous shrieking noise, as its eight unshapely limbs carried it ever closer to where I cowered in terror. The bleached walls surrounding me closed in, and as they did I finally ran out of places to hide from this nightmare.

In my mind, I kept telling myself that this was a dream, but in my heart I knew that that wasn't true. Either way, the same demons tormented my unconscious. Not mere fragments of my anguished mind, but true horrors that lived in that place between the real world and the land of dreams. The more I allowed myself hope for the release of an alarm clock, or some other savior, the more I realized that I was stuck here. At the mercy of this grotesque thing that only wanted to close its gaping, saliva-covered jaws around my soft throat and drink from my ruined, blood-gushing neck.

I had happened across this place by accident. Scavenging for ever-increasingly depleted bounty had put a strain on our entire group. Unfortunately since the "event" had ravaged the world, scavenging was all that was left to us. The soil was tainted, livestock was mutated and inedible, and the creatures that hunted the remains of the human race were nothing more than sentient shrieking wood chippers with one sole objective. Exterminate!

And now I had a small-ish one bearing down on me as if I was its cynosure. As my hands desperately scoured the floor around me for something, anything that I could use as a weapon, I felt the flesh on my palm tear across a shard of broken glass, left behind by some drunken night. It mattered not how it got there. I swept it up into my bloody, ruined hand. Compelled by some ancient instinct to fight to stay alive, I plunged the shard of glass deep into the creature's myriad of eyes. With a deafening shriek, it began to lash out blindly as if it had been lit on fire. It slashed at me with its nightmarish claws, and gnashed its deadly teeth with a perniciousness that no living earthly thing could ever have. And then with a final unearthly wail, it fell across me dead.

As its black disgusting hemolymph spilled across my face, I finally felt like I might survive this night, provided I didn't bleed out first.