Leeder’s Doll Limb Bouquet Co.

by Varden M. Frias

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
parts: 1, 2, 3

conclusion

Pain erupted from his chest and raced out from the epicenter of the injury, flaring up to every part of his body, pulsing to the pump of his raging blood. He remembered his children for a brief moment before Al came in, took him by the hand, and yanked him up. She hoisted him onto her shoulder and darted for the other side of the warehouse with Sterling in hot pursuit.

His vision blurred, causing him to barely make out the exit door at the end of the warehouse where all the office doors were. Workers beat them to it, crowding the exit as the unlucky person upfront tried to unjam the lock. The worker unlocked the door but in the next second, the avid workers tore him from the door, ripping the sleeve off his uniform just before someone bludgeoned him with a sledgehammer to get through the open doorway.

The exit erupted into a frenzy as the milky-eyed workers tore each other apart into a bloody mess as they tried to get through the door. The door acted as a meat grinder with body-sized saw circles ripping meat and bone, sending blood spraying in crimson arcs and viscera splashing at every angle.

Warren stooped to speak to Al: “The door is hexed, we need to find a way out.”

She nodded and made a sharp turn in another direction. From behind them, the flesh ribbons, clotting blood, and bones all conglomerated into an enormous beast whose head brushed the ceiling. Sterling walked alongside the creature, still in the form of a long-necked insectoid.

Great pinchers burst from his dislocated jaws and snapped together, the echo of their contact slapped the warehouse walls, urging Warren and Al to pick up the pace and dash into a small door that was close enough. They slammed the door shut, closing them in the cold darkness.

Warren wrinkled his nose. “What the hell is that stink?” He felt around and the fingers of his free hand closed around a cold metal rung.

“Smells like a sewer,” Al said as she pulled away into the direction of the metal rungs. He heard her footfalls going lower on something metal. “It’s a ladder, Warren, come on.”

He agreed and followed her down into the black depths.

* * *

“It probably leads to the water treatment center,” her voice echoed, “Either way, it’s a way to get out of here.”

Above them, the door thudded from a full body slam. Bones scraped the metal, causing an eerie shriek. Warren and Al doubled their efforts, quickening their pace as they descended the long stairwell into the ever-increasing darkness.

The metal door shot out from its hinges and slammed into the concrete wall just above them. A rectangle of light was cast onto the wall just above Warren and Al, but the amorphous shape of the meat creature soon eclipsed it.

“Look out!” Warren screamed as the door clattered its way down past them into the abyss. A loud squelch echoed from the doorway, accompanied by the clacking footfalls of Sterling’s insect feet, making his way down the ladder, face up, with a stinger in the rear of its insect abdomen poised to strike Warren through the skull.

Warren jerked to the left, quick enough to avoid a javelin-sized stinger through his head, but slow enough to get jabbed through the tissues and muscle of his clavicle. Poison gushed from the stinger down into Warren’s bloodstream, setting his skin on fire, and releasing a scream from his pained lips.

Sterling drove the stinger deeper into Warren’s clavicle until Warren’s eyes rolled into the back of his head and his grip loosened. He slipped off the ladder and fell.

“Warren!” Al screamed, but he had no way of hearing her as he descended into the black reaches of the infernal catacombs.

Another one of Al’s screams echoed down to him. The light of fire plumed orange, illuminating the conglomerate creature and Sterling made their way closer to Al. Warren blinked and his body slammed on concrete, rendering him immobile. Al’s screams and shrieks echoed their way down to him.

He woke to gesticulating limbs surrounding him. The entanglement of undead workers groaned in agony as it rose taller over him, the gigantic silhouette brushed the ceiling above him. To his other side, Sterling slithered on his neck legs, his body dragging uselessly behind him. His pinchers clicked together, warning of the imminent pain they could bring. Warren remained on the ground, his back in an unbelievable amount of pain.

He groaned and attempted to flip on his stomach to crawl away from the enormous beasts but, as he flipped, one of Sterling’s centipede arms lunged out and drove its spiny tip into his side, puncturing his lung. Warren let loose a wail as the flip completed and he was on his stomach, inching forward, trying to hold onto his wound while crawling forward using his belly as a propeller like a slug.

Sterling hissed and scrambled above Warren and jabbed the other side with the stinger. Warren let out a groan but inched forward, trying to get anything of use from his pocket, when he found a box cutter he used in the past to clip off bits of extra plastic from the doll limbs that came out less than perfect so they wouldn’t go to waste.

Warren opened the box cutter and just as Sterling moved in for another stinging stab, Warren plunged it into Sterling’s eye. The centipede creature flung back, enraged by the surprise attack, giving Warren enough time to wriggle out of the creature’s grasp and move toward a safe haven.

He made a few shuffling, painful paces when the beast hovered over him. He glanced back, finding that Al had joined the writhing mass as the meaty head dragged the huge mass behind her. Her milky eyes glowed in the darkness as she trudged toward him, butane torch in one hand with a canteen of what was most likely whiskey in the other.

“Disobedience comes with a price, Warren,” came her gurgling voice as she lifted the canteen to her lips and wet her whistle.

“It ain’t a right way to live, Al. Snap out of it!” Warren struggled to keep moving. In the distance, he found a dull glow of three lines and blinked, realizing it was a door leading to the outside.

Al lit the butane and spat the whiskey out of the canteen so it produced a long-range inferno that morphed into a fire creature dragon type creature that roared and plumed into a flaming cyclone rushing headlong for Warren.

He ducked, hoping to miss the flames and singe just the top of his clothes, but no such luck. The cylinder of flames engulfed him, burning through the layers of his flesh, wrapping around him like a second skin and burning down to his neurons, forcing him to scream and shriek as he rolled on the floor to kill the flames.

Warren shrieked, rolling around on the floor, his vision fading as the pain fatigued him. Suddenly, a massive clap erupted. The door in the back of the catacomb he was in slammed open with a short figure coming through with a large gun. In his pain, he found he could not recognize the figure running straight for him, the tiny footsteps drowned out by the clang of bullets ringing in the air and smashing the meat beast and Sterling into thousands of flesh slivers.

He took the opportunity to drag himself to the sewage water in front of him and dive in down to his shoulders and splash around in the water and linger while the water cooled and soothed his burnt flesh.

* * *

His consciousness slipped away like sand through a sieve as the flames receded from his body and once again drifted off into a stupor. He recognized the receptionist Maggz in the haze as she pulled him from the water and laid him out on the concrete.

“We gotta get moving, the Big Boss is going to come out of his egg once he knows what we’ve been up to. Now, come on!”

Warren decided not to question her and crawled to his knees, screaming when his burst clothing and flesh stuck to each other and new blood squirted out. They both stopped when a thundering growl echoed and rumbled below them like thunder.

“I always knew there was somethin’ wrong with this place,” Maggz snarled. Her brown teeth clenched the last inch of a cigarette as she gripped the assault rifle into the powerful grip of her knobby fingers.

Warren choked out a wad of blood and, as the cooling soothing sensation of the water left him, the burning sensation of having the first layer of his flesh seared off crept up on him like entering a nightmare. He screamed and groaned, aching for a drop of aloe vera which Maggz tossed his way after a quick rummage through her fanny pack. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”

“Rub it on ya sores, now let’s get down to the bottom of this. It ain’t just Sterling, there’s somethin’ else wrong here, I can feel it in these old lady bones of mine.”

Warren begrudgingly slathered aloe vera on his bumpy, gnarled flesh, taking great care to not let his fingers slip into the open wounds but inevitably a finger slid and stuck into an open gap where a burned part of his flesh opened up into a hole. He screamed, cursed, and flung back. She tossed him a case of bandages.

“What else do you have in there, the kitchen sink?”

“If I was you, I wouldn’t be shootin’ the hand that feeds. Now, come along.”

After he bandaged himself up, the two of them trekked away from the water and slowly came into the other part of the underground that bent downwards and made a smooth incline, both of them headed for something in the distance that was glowing a pale blue.

Warren squinted as they walked further down the incline that vaguely reminded him of an underground parking lot with a vaulted ceiling. It was the basement, that much was clear, however, what stood several hundred feet into the air, perplexed him. Chains gleamed the dull grayish-blue light emanating from the goliath in the center of the warehouse basement. Warren followed the chains coming from the walls of the basement to the giant in the center that had a porous rocky texture. It reminded him of lava rock.

They crept up to the behemoth, taking great care not to make a sound despite the pain radiating from Warren’s whole body that had been cast into flames not very long ago.

A voice startled them both. “The God of Toil knows you have offered yourselves as a sacrifice.”

Warren flinched, glancing around, then found a small reptilian emerge from the darkness in front of them. The reptilian had emerald scales with gold patterns spiraling down the bare arms emerging from a shimmering tunic.

Maggz lifted her gun. In turn, the reptilian waved his hand using two fingers, causing the assault rifle to disintegrate into a pile of black dust in her hands. Warren watched as the dust fell to Maggz’s feet and listened to the gasp flee her crumpled lips.

“I’m afraid there is nothing you can do against the God of Toil. You see, with your mutinous behavior, you’ve done nothing but endanger yourselves to his hunger.”

The reptilian spoke with an eerie calmness. Behind him, Warren registered another rumbling snarl emitted from the God of Toil, the great hulking rock in the middle of the room. In the overwhelming darkness, the god was difficult to make out, but there was no such way to tell if the god could sprout limbs to eat him.

Warren shifted his weight onto the other side of his body which caused his bandages to shift and peel back a patch of dead skin. He winced, but caught himself as the reptilian snapped its red eyes at him.

“Well what if we don’t want to? What if I just had one simple wish to go home and see my family? That’s all I ever wanted from the start. That’s all any of us here at the Leeder’s Doll Limb factory ever wanted,” Warren paused to catch his breath as the heat from his argumentative tone emboldened him. Maggz said nothing, but he saw her mouth the word “don’t” from the corner of his eye and pressed on in spite of her warning.

He instead set his sights on the reptilian in front of him who only looked back with eyes just as angry.

“That’s all we ever wanted and you took it from us.”

The reptilian’s jaw clenched. He grunted, then shifted. “If you resist, it will only make matters worse for you.”

Warren looked at the creature in the back of the warehouse basement. A silvery cloud of condensation plumed from one of the many pores of the Great God of Toil. He looked back to the reptilian, then in the next minute, he said. “If it’s a sacrifice your god wants, it’s a sacrifice he’s going to get.”

Without warning, he lunged for the reptilian’s throat and plunged what remained of his thumbs into the creature’s neck where the Adam’s apple bobbed up and down in horror.

Maggz jumped in to help and sprayed a round of bullets into the reptilian’s backside until the reptilian lay limp. “Come on, let’s drag him and get the hell out of here!”

The silvery light from the god burned into a deep hue of crimson and flooded the basement with its livid glow as the two raced to drag the dead reptilian up to the god’s massive side. A giant pore opened, emitting hot gas that blew in Warren’s face and shredded off his clothes and another layer of his already burned skin. It did the same to Maggz.

“Throw him in!” Warren screamed. The two of them used the last bit of their strength to toss the reptilian into the opening pore and watched it close down over the reptilian’s body and crunch down on bone. The red light burned brighter and angrier as the god released a dull roar that throttled the ground below their feet.

Warren scrambled away from the now closed pore, grabbing hold of Maggz but yanked her arm out of the socket in the process. He looked down to find her immobile, the blood pooling out of her arm immediately dried on contact with the acrid air steaming from the god’s pores. He sniffed the air, then caught himself and held his breath.

* * *

With the rest of his strength, he limped his way back through the catacombs, passing by the conglomerate body of workers with Al’s lifeless body on the top of the pile, rotting. Sterling lay strewn nearby. He struggled his way up the metal ladder, clumps of flesh falling off. He crawled his way across the main warehouse and made it to the door of the empty building which was left just ajar for him to slither through like a slug with a trail of blood following him. He inched across the desolate dirt parking lot. Pebbles and sand lodged into his soft, sensitive burned flesh.

The moment his fingers brushed the electric barbed wire over the fence, the jolt sent rippling through his body should have killed him, but instead embued him with a second life. The electricity sparked through his veins, reigniting what was once dead tissue, skin, and bones into supple flesh and able hands. He rose to his feet, the anguish washed away along with the gore, and left him staring at his arms and hands repaired as if nothing had ever happened.

A smile spread across his features. He choked up with relief and joy and rushed back to his truck. He got in and floored the gas, ready to mow down the fence, when the gate opened on its own. He killed the engine. Hordes of workers dressed in fresh, clean uniforms strolled through the gate. He fumbled for the door, but it locked by itself, and the window stuck in place when he tried to roll it down.

“Go back! It’s not safe here!” he screamed, but stopped himself when he saw Sterling approach from the back of the workers. Sterling was as immaculate and slick as he had been when Warren first saw him. He grinned at Warren as he walked up to the truck’s driver side. The window rolled down on its own.

“You better come along inside, Warren. It’s time to go to work.”