Eater is my current WIP about an entity so old it spans Big Bang iterations stumbling upon Earth and finding it delicious.
This project has deep roots in both horror and SF, shamelessly pilfering from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (film and book), Salem’s Lot, the entire George A. Romero oeuvre, the incomparable Slither, and many other sources that a lifetime of genre consumption has burned into my DNA.
Here’s a sample:
Deckard drove down County 7 toward Metzger’s Pond. He took the turnoff and bounced and jostled his way up the deeply rutted road to the Loomis house. It was weirdly quiet; usually this part of the Oval Valley backwoods was a cacaphony of hoots, grunts, howls, and whistles. As he approached the front door he was assailed with a rich melange of odors: rotting meat, excrement, something sharp, alkaline, and alien.
Dot Loomis no longer resembled anything that had ever been human. A fleshy distended sac filled half the living room, its surface alive with wriggling motion. Her tiny head appeared propped on top of the thing as if it would fall off any second. Tyrannosaur-like arms worried at the diminished pile of packaged meats, shoving gobbets into a new mouth that had opened in what might have been called her chest. Three cylindrical rolls of flesh extruded from the main body, ending in scaly basketball-sized knobs. The <Mothers>.
The Dot-thing made gurgling, grunting noises, punctuated by high-pitched moans that sounded like they were coming from the bottom of a deep well.
As Deckard entered the room, a possum crawled up the mountain of flesh to the gaping mouth, paused for a moment, and crawled in. There was a grinding and a crunching beneath the gelatinous flesh. Fresh blood dribbled from the side of the mouth. Deckard saw other animals scattered about the room, waiting. A bobcat, chin resting on its curled paws. A pair of raccoons cleaning themselves. Somebody’s Collie Shepard, tags dangling from a leather collar.
A thin seam of blood appeared along the length of the distended sac of flesh. It widened. Sheets of blood oozed from the wound. A tiny millipede crawled from the wound, wriggling. Then another. Then six more. Then, as if a set of floodgates opened, hundreds, thousands of the creatures poured forth from what remained of Dot Loomis. She cried out once, a high-pitched piteous sound, then the only sound in the room was a wet, slippery rustling as thousands of <Soldiers>, a living carpet, flowed out of the Loomis house and into the woods, looking for hosts.
