Night Of The Wereslugs

Blackhawk: When I was seven years old, I stepped out into my back yard to behold a late summer night sky bejeweled with stars. Dazzled, my head tilted back, I took several more steps. At once, something cold and wet and slimy wiggled beneath my little feet; something alien and so utterly vile. I screamed one of those piercing little girl screams---the kind that strips paint, shatters glass, and etches the tiles on the Space Shuttle. The porch light came on and my father came through the sliding screen door to see what was wrong.

     But I already knew.

     On the cement, half trapped beneath my bare foot lay a huge gray-green wriggly thing covered in the most hideous goo I had ever seen in my short life. Revulsion paralyzed me; all I could do was scream.

     ""It can't hurt you," Daddy soothed, a smile in his voice, "It's just a slug."

     Oh, don't mind that disgusting goo-spewing cannibal horror corrupting your young and innocent body with its hideous touch. Right, Dad.

     Just a slug...

     At a mid-October party, Erin Flint, a friend of a friend's ex-girlfriend told me about a beer festival in his home town of Filkin's Grove. According to him it was one of those tiny towns that once a year blocks off its main street, set some doors on a couple of saw horses in front of the old fire station and serves beer all day. It wasn't so much that I liked the idea but it was the mischievous air about him; not malicious but more like how your Dad always threw you his curve ball to see if you could hit it. Basically, he dared me to go---but without saying it in so many words. My best buddy Sandra overheard this and she and her boyfriend, Jake, said they would go with me. Erin reacted with the silent smugness of a sparrow pecking out the eye of a road-killed cat.

     I drove into Filkin's Grove around 4 PM that Friday. It was a picturesque little town overlooking the Wapsipinicon River just inside the eastern Black Hawk County line. The highway into town passed through a lovely grove of ancient gnarled oaks, their boughs bedecked with yellow and rust-red leaves which momentarily made me believe I was touring the Rhone Valley in Provence. As I rounded a bend, Filkin's Grove opened before me. A cardboard sign guided me to the festival parking next to the tiny Lutheran church's graveyard.

     The church was a narrow white limestone thing resembling a pillar of salt. The lot was full, so I toured around until I at last found a spot across the graveyard in front of a Iowa DOT salt truck at a salt shed.

     Soon I was strolling along, letting the little town beguile me with its quaint charm. Though stiflingly tiny containing no more than six or eight streets, the Victorian houses studded with pots of bushy pink and red geraniums were so lovingly maintained that it stunned me with its cuteness. True to Erin Flint's word, the bar was little more than a couple of doors set up on sawhorses set up in front of the old fire station (the new one lay half a mile away). A concession trailer sold bratwursts and hotdogs. The hearty throng laughed and jostled to the strains of a German Üm-pah Band.

     A gray-haired matron handed me a plastic cup of light wheat beer and I settled into waiting for any sign of Sandra and Jake. They had gotten a late start and promised to meet me. A sudden movement behind one of the white lace curtains in the window of the brick building across the street caught my attention. For a moment I thought I saw Erin Flint staring at me. I took a step or two to see better only to see I'd been tricked by a vague reflection in the old window's wrinkled glass. Or so I convinced myself. I took a sip of my beer and saw the polished brass sign next to the front door: Flint Funeral Home.

     I shuddered and grew impatient over Sandra and Jake's lateness. I asked the matron serving beer if there was a phone I could use for a collect call. She gave me a queer startled look then suddenly nodded and ushered me into the back office in the empty firehouse, pausing long enough to fuss with a key ring and unlock the door.

     I dialed Sandra's cell phone and after about eight rings she finally answered. Their car broke a tie-rod in Marion at The French Garrison Restaurant. They weren't going to make it. I was on my own.

     When I hung up, the woman was looking at me and back outside quite furtively.

     "Is something wrong?" I asked.

     She wrung her hands nervously, and mumbled, "This your first time here---at the Beer Fest?"

     I told her yes, and how Erin Flint had invited me and my friends ---who needed to get themselves a more reliable car---to come down.

     Suddenly, she became very fidgety, wringing her hands desperately. Her eyes wide, she looked at me painfully and said, "Er---."

     "Lou!" a man shouted. The office door banged open and a heavy-set balding man barged in. With no explanation, he instantly grew angry, his jowly-face flushing bright red. "Damn it, Lou!" he shouted. "Get your fat old behind out there and sell beer!"

     I stammered I had needed the phone, but he jerked his thumb over his shoulder, "This ain't a phone booth, lady, and I don't care why she let you in here. Out."

     I shrugged my shoulders and walked back out to the street. As I left, he shouted after me, "Hey, did you park over in front of the church?"

     I told him about parking in front of the salt truck and asked if it was a problem. He scratched his jaw in a particularly condescending way and answered "Nope."

     With the sun calling it a day and night's chill embrace pawing at my shoulders, I bought myself a bratwurst drowned in mustard and sat on the funeral home's steps to eat and observe. The crowd had thinned, but about 30 people still remained. There were a few groups of locals but as the evening closed in, these dispersed leaving only three groups of older men talking among themselves, occasionally nodding at or pointing out one of the younger revelers. One of them jerked his thumb at me---the jowly man who ejected me from the fire station. At first I dismissed it as being nothing but old guys chewing the fat. But our encounter chafed my curiosity. And when I noticed that none of these older men were drinking beer, I suddenly got the uncanny feeling something sinister was afoot.

     I decided to head home and made my way past the crowd towards the church . I started across the darkened church yard, the ground feeling spongy and broken underfoot; strangely less firm than what I remembered when I arrived. I crossed over a large family plot and suddenly stumbled as the earth slumped beneath my weight. I quickly regained my footing---and my nerves---and hurried on. Once in my car, I keyed the ignition. Nothing happened. After trying several more times, I got out and opened the hood. By my flashlight's pale beam I discovered that the spark plugs wires were gone.

     "Bastard!" I said aloud, knowing the heavy-set jowly man had done it. All at once, I heard a strange groan coming from the nearby churchyard. I took out my trusty pepper-spray canister and decided that if it was the jowly man that I'd make him give back my spark plugs. But when I got near the spot from where the groan came, I found no one. Then, something hideous squished beneath my foot. I shone my flashlight at the ground. Shining there like a gossamer nightmare was a chewed skull coated in thick sticky mucus strands.

     I gasped, wrestling with an impulse to try stealing the spark plug leads from another car. But the bizarre slumped graves and soft, fresh earth of the church yard coupled with the sinister behavior of the old men told me Filkin's Grove hid some unholy secret terror...a terror I didn't want to discover in a graveyard...at night...alone.

     I decided to get amongst other people. I rushed to the fire station.

     But the street party had disappeared! Only littered plastic beer cups, several abandoned kegs, and the lone concessions trailer remained. In the dim light of the antique gas street lamps, the darkened fire station's quaint bell tower took on a brooding if not positively evil appearance.

     My pepper spray at the ready, I quietly walked up the street towards the trailer, craning to see some glint of a lighted house nearby. All was dark. The further up the street I walked the more fearful I grew and I kept to the light in order to see anything that might come after me. As I approached the steps to the Flint Funeral Home I discovered disgusting silvery paths cris-crossing each other over brick-paved street. Nearly a yard wide, several of them converged in a thick tangle next to the concessions trailer.

     What I saw next staggered me against the trailer in horror. The splintered remains of three human skeletons lay beneath the slimy mass; the pink frayed flesh still clinging to the bones. I gasped for air trying to fight the impulse to scream and succeeded only in throwing up all over the side of the trailer. As I leaned there, sighing and spitting, I heard the hollow crunch of a plastic beer cup beneath some horrid bulk.

     I whirled about, my pepper spray already held out ready. A tall shadow lurched a few feet before me, the light of the street lamp just behind it so that I couldn't see what I faced. I didn't care. I sprayed what I hoped was its eyes.

     But it kept coming, shambling as if to embrace me. I dove over the narrow counter into the dark trailer, hotdog buns and a mustard bottle falling on top of me. I got to my feet just in time to duck as the thing lunged between the popcorn and soft drink machines. It stuck fast there, its foul white lamprey-like mouth flexing hungrily. I snatched up the mustard bottle and squirted it into that hideous maw. The thing shook grotesquely, rocking the trailer, and knocking cups, plates and packets of napkins down on top of me. Suddenly it started gagging hideously. And as I looked up it spewed thick mucusy goo all over me. I screamed. The monstrosity gave one more mighty heave and pulled itself out from between the machines.

     Quaking, I at last saw the thing clearly. And I screamed with the same shrill disgust as when I was seven years old. A man-sized slug wretched loudly on the pavement before me. Broad dark gray-green stripes gleamed on its slime-exuding back. Two withered arms flailed impotently about its light gray chest. The face strained and writhed. Its eyeballs jutted out several inches from their sockets on thick veined stalks, the lamprey-like mouth slathering. Not only was it once human but I recognized its hellish distorted face as Erin Flint.

     Undulating its flanks in a sickening way, it slunk into the firehouse, the door squealing as it vanished in otherwise perfect nightmarish silence.

     I moved quickly and quietly to a window and peered inside. Twenty of the horrid things slurped from beer kegs torn open across the top. About the floor in heaps lay more goo-draped bones.

     Disgust and rage tightened my gut into a ball of lead. From what I'd seen I could only make one terrible conclusion: some people in Filkin's Grove by night turned into giant wereslugs that tore into graves to feast on the corpses inside! But who could blame the townsfolk for wanting to hide such a disgusting unholy secret.

     I knew exactly what I had to do.

     The DOT truck handled sluggishly as I drove it out past the church and into downtown. I'd already taken the few brief moments to figure out the spreader controls and had set the hopper to spray as much as possible once I got the truck into position.

     When I reached the fire station, I swung the truck across the street to line the back end with garage doors for the fire station. I threw the spreader lever then stomped the gas and went roaring backwards. The plexiglas garage doors burst apart as the truck's bed slammed through. The spreader howled angrily as it flung bucket-loads of rock salt out 50 feet onto to ghastly silent monsters inside. Standing on in the doorway of the cab, I grinned at their disgusting frothing as the salt leeched the life from their corrupt, bloated bodies. In minutes it was over. I shut down the spreader and surveyed the carcasses before me. They had turned pale gray---almost ashen. Their flesh shriveled around their mouths and faces---almost making them look human again.

     "What have you done!" a voice demanded angrily. I looked up to confront the jowly man.

     "Saved your town!" I snapped angrily, climbing down from the cab.

     "Damn meddling fool!" he shouted back. "Don't you know this town's been cursed!"

     "What do you think I just destroyed?" I retorted, "Wide lapels?"

     He rolled his eyes, "For seventy-five years the Filkin's Grove Beer Fest brought their kind in. The balance was perfect. Life here was beginning to improve...but now you've wiped all that out!"

     "What the hell are you talking about!" I screamed. "You should be thanking me for getting rid of those wereslugs! Damn it, one of them tried to kill me! You're acting like they were some sort of God-send."

     "Follow me," he snapped.

     I followed him down the street a little ways until we came to the road leading to the church. He pointed at the cemetery in the distant churchyard. Faintly, I discerned movement among the stones. One shadow rose from the ground. Then another. And another. The chilling realization shot through me. I had made a very bad mistake!

     "Yes," the man rasped. "They kept the zombies down!"