Just Desserts

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Their blood was like a cross between egg nog and hollandaise sauce.

Their skin was like bacon jerky. Their internal organs tasted like pecan pie filling with veins of peppermint running through them. Their muscles tasted of tarragon and blueberries. When they died, a wave of acid coursed through their brains, turning it into a tangy orange slurry. Their bodies, obsidian licorice toeclaws to grape-flavored head crests, were delicious.

Appearance-wise, they looked like rooster-faced cactus lobsters with too many white eyes and huge octopuses growing out of their backs.

With so many appendages, they had no right side up. They walked on claws or snaked along on tentacles as they deemed necessary, head always rotated to look forward.

At night, their bioluminescence made them look like mutant Christmas trees. They couldn’t turn it off. Worst camouflage ever.

They looked like HR Giger had Lovecraft over for a drunk drawing contest and Tesla had lit it up.

They were only around five feet tall but they were fierce warriors with complicated weaponry and wildly intricate martial arts.

Their death rituals were strict. Bodies were buried in the ground, water, or space but they were not to be disturbed. They would awaken during a rapture-like moment far in the future, it was said, unless they’d been interfered with.

Well, we were locked in a contest of extinction because they were delicious. We were devils incarnate to them. Our side hardly had to supply us with rations. The enemy was like a buffet to us.

Imagine a stinky pinkish monkey that ate all your dead. Now imagine lots of them, snacking on your comrade’s brains and moaning with pleasure like it was dessert.

There was no room for diplomacy. It was a fight to the death.

And we were winning.