Video monitor technician "Tennessee" Taylor zoomed in. "Okay, y'all. Keep your eyeballs peeled on this."
Blue-uniformed government workers crowded around his swivel seat, peering down at the video screen.
He drawled "Here comes the first monster transport."
A bulky army plane lowered onto the island's clearing. It paused, and wide exit door dropped open. A blobbish, jelly-like creature -- the size of a Buick and with angry, blood red-veined eyes -- slithered onto the sand.
"That's the Crawling Curd," Taylor said. "Number one in today's monster hit parade."
No sooner had the plane lifted off, and the Crawling Curd disappeared into the island's ubiquitous greenery, than a second army plane appeared.
"Wonder who this one's bringing?" a technician wondered.
"I don't know that it matters." Colonel Peterson had stepped up to the crowd. His green uniform stood out. "Just so these monsters are as far from civilization as possible. That was one of our purposes in establishing that freak-show getaway."
Another creature was disembarking onto island sand. This one lurched, hunched over. Its arms were thrust ahead, and its sloping brow nearly obscured its heavily lidded, cold stare.
"El Monstruo! I wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley!"
A hulking and broad-shouldered thing taller than any man, El Monstruo looked as if death were his way of life.
One staffer watching the screen remarked: "They say it has the strength of ten men."
"I suppose that's to be expected," replied the Colonel. "After all, he was sewn together from ten men."
Taylor looked back over his shoulder. "Colonel, y'all want me to maintain monitoring?"
"By all means." Peterson took a pipe from his mouth. "Let's watch the parade."
The planes kept coming. A vampire, the infamous Archduke Leonidis of Budapest, stalked in regal sinisterness. His ebony evening clothes were of the finest design, his bearing that of a nobleman to the manor born.
But despite such disarming outward appearance, the Devil's own evil lurked in the dank recesses of his grotesque spirit.
A howl burst from the next military transport, and out scrambled the Appalachian Wolfbeast: a hirsute, tornadic whirl of yellow fangs and astoundingly lengthy, rip-ready claws.
The patchwork Geek followed, a deranged sideways grin plastered across his pasty half-skeleton face. He wobbled and lunged, lunatic eyes darting from side to side.
The final creature an army plane brought was the mummy Ho-Tap-Tu. He was entirely wrapped in decaying bandages, some of which trailed from his feet as he trudged in unstoppable strangulation quest.
"Are they going to be left there," asked a female technician. "Without any armed oversight?"
Colonel Peterson shook his head. "Not entirely. The researchers want to use them as guinea pigs, so they'll be monitored at all times.
"That's why that specific island was selected for the job," he continued. "It's got a mock city we built on a radiation test site years ago, buildings and all. Our scientists want to gauge any effect the remaining radioactivity might have on the monsters."
Heads bobbed.
"At least they'll make that contribution to mankind," said one of the technical assistants.
"The first thing they're going to do is try to get off the island," Peterson said. "That's where Doctor Omar's defensive shields come in."
A small, baldimg man in a white lab coat had joined them. He wiped his eyeglasses and put them on again before speaking.
"We've erected protective barriers around the entire perimeter. Any detected motion past the approved water demarcation, and reinforced ironesium walls will spring up, immediately repelling any would-be transgressor. A precautionary stratagem most imperative."
As the colonel and the doctor made their exit, "Tennessee" Taylor whispered to a colleague "That is it, last word, and final. This ol' boys just gotta get hisself a dictionary!"
----------
Also on that same island, their presence unknown to the Army scientists who'd selected the monster radiation-testing area, were a Man and a Woman. From their hillside vantage spot, they watched as the motley miscreations arrived. And though they recognized them as monsters to be pitied, monsters to be despised, little did they suspect that gruesome depravity would shatter the idyllic life they'd begun.
The Crawling Curd. El Monstruo. The Appalachian Wolfbeast. They were the first to loom out of the shadows in various, despicable manifestations of vile hideousness.
Archduke Leonidis. The Geek. Ho-Tap-Tu. Their peculiarly outrageous silhouettes were more than enough to strike paralyzing fear into the marrow of any scrambling prey. No man could survive their bloody viciousness.
Oozing poison-slime, lurching doom, hissing and saliva-flinging ferality, sinister menace, berserk unpredictability, and a curse-carrying, centuries-old strangler whose eternal murderous mission had been inscribed in cryptic runic phrasings on his ceremonial Egyptian sarcophagus in ancient days.
Hand in hand, the trembling Man and Woman fled to the shelter of a rock pile.
----------
Year after year, two-star General McCarr had been stuck at that rank. He never quite received promotions. The other generals, he knew, laughed behind his back. "Two-star McCarr," they called him.
Colonel Peterson hurried to the general's office upon being summoned. He found McCarr watching an executive military video monitor.
The general barked over one shoulder. "Peterson, get ready for a shock."
The colonel knew the general's monitor offered unique perspectives unavailable to Taylor's screen, downstairs.
The colonel couldn't believe his eyes. Two people were on that terrible island, hiding behind a rock pile. Their apprehensive attentions were fixed on the monsters.
"A man and a woman! What are they doing there? If the monsters find them --"
"Exactly, Peterson. They'll suffer excruciating tortures we can only imagine." McCarr turned, his round face grim. "The army wants you to leave immediately for the island."
"A rescue mission!"
"Yes. There will be danger, of course."
"Sir, I don't give a hang about anything but completing the mission," Colonel Peterson bit off.
"Spoken like a true soldier! Take such battle and technical personnel as you deem necessary. And bring back those dratted fools!"
----------
Eyes wide with astonishment, the Man and Woman beheld a bizarre procession of inhuman barbarians.
Over the years, a large radiation mass had solidified amid the weeds and undergrowth. A throbbing pile of death. Its unseen power acted as a ferocious magnetic impellent, drawing into unstable transformative force the grisliest, most ghoulish monsters the world had ever known.
Then:
It was too horrible a sight to watch, but somehow impossible to turn away from. The Man and Woman could only stare open-mouthed, stomachs turning and terrified thoughts cascading, as the radiated monsters merged with one another in the unspeakable genesis of the greatest, strangest hybrid of awfulness man had ever seen.
Finally, once all had blended, it reared back and roared its rage at all things decent. It stood nearly 20 feet high. Every muscle rippled beneath a leathery hide.
Here and there, scattered amid rancid husks and tusks, were parts of the contributory monsters' yowling faces. In wretched combination, they had found power far more stupendous than anything each could ever have boasted in isolation.
The Man and Woman could only gape, awestruck, their minds reeling at the implications for mankind.
Still gripping one another in shocked disgust at the newly born abomination, the two whirled at the sound of military vehicles cresting the nearby hill.
Colonel Peterson leapt from the lead vehicle. "What the devil is that thing?"
"Back home, we'd call it a Wampus Haunt!"
The colonel spun. "Taylor, you were brought along for technical monitoring, not homespun narration!"
The Man found his voice. "It was individual monsters. They somehow merged!"
"I'll deal with the two of you, after this is over," Peterson told the Man and Woman. "And you'd better have a blasted good reason for being here!"
The Wampus Haunt bellowed in ear-shattering fury, Its crazed eyes reflected in staggering unnaturalness a multiplied monstrousness too bone-chilling to even contemplate.
Peterson put two and two together. "Of course! It must be the radiation!" He scowled. "Once again, scientists causing trouble with their blamed curiosity! And we have to pick up the pieces!"
"Colonel?" A soldier had approached. "I'm Sergeant Dawes, sir. Want us to blast that thing?"
"My gut says yeah, " Peterson snapped. "And I put a lot of stock in my gut's opinions! Dawes, I want every rifle trained on that thing. You boys give it all you've got, when I give the order!"
Sergeant Dawes snapped his salute and ran back to the vehicles.
Colonel Peterson waited until Dawes and the other soldiers had lined up in firing formation.
"FIRE!"
A tremendous volley of army-certified ammunition with enough combined killing capability to flatten a regiment hit the Wampus Haunt dead on. But far from obliterated, the creature seemed only annoyed.
"What does it take to kill that thing," Taylor yelled. "An in-cant at the midnight crossroads?"
Peterson saw Dawes running toward the Wampus Haunt, an explosive device in his hands. "Dawes! Don't be a fool! Get back with your men!"
Dawes had intended to hurl the explosive into the creature's ghastly face. But he never got the chance. He'd gotten within feet of the Wampus Haunt, when a bizarre force emanating from within the creature locked the sergeant in its beam. And in a flash, the heroic Dawes had been sucked into the Wampus Haunt.
"Colonel Peterson! Did you see that?" Taylor cried.
But the colonel knew better that to indulge emotion when the moment called for cunning. "If those rifles can't do the trick, we'll give 'im the sonar-blaster! Let's see him withstand that!"
A soldier ran up. "Colonel? We got company!" He pointed back to the hill.
Doctor Omar would later call it a Cyclopsodic Spider. But in that moment, Colonel Peterson just saw a new danger with its own ugly face.
The Cyclopsodic Spider had been roused by the battle. It was a fat, waddling beast with eight long, thin legs ending in points, a hate-filled goggle eye in the center of its face, jagged teeth extending from a severe slash-mouth, and an odiferous, matted hair-mass as black as the worst nightmare Hell can produce.
But the worst was yet to come. Swinging about to face the fearsome Wampus Haunt, the Cyclopsodic Spider opened wide its mouth and spewed an orange-and-blue flame-stream that encircled the roaring, thrashing Wampus Haunt in a ball of wicked fire.
Leaping out of the flames around it, the creature whose being combined six monsters of shuddering atrocity grabbed hold of the Cyclopsodic Spider. It began dragging it to a cliff.
"Colonel! That thing's gonna throw that other thing off'n the cliff!"
Peterson snapped "I can see that for myself, Taylor!" A thought struck him. He looked to the grass. "But, he's going to go over with it. Why would he want to --"
He looked back up. "Of course! It's Dawes! He's still fighting the Wampus Haunt's evil spirit from the inside!"
Peterson's mind reeled and rocked at the age-old struggle between Good and Evil he knew to be surging within the hideous Wampus Haunt. He prayed Good would carry the day.
The grappling monstrosities strained against one another in deadly earnest, rolling and crashing, their fetid hides bloodied and their every stomp shaking the ground.
Colonel Peterson, Taylor, and the rest could only stare, flabbergasted, as the Wampus Haunt and the Cyclopsodic Spider flailed and smashed in hysterical death-match.
And when the battling behemoths did indeed go over the cliff, all ran to gape at the splintered limbs, hide scraps, and fire bursts that were all that remained of the two.
The colonel took off his hat. Taylor and the other soldiers followed his lead.
Dawes had been a true hero.
----------
Peterson watched the vehicles head back to the lagoon for amphibious transport back to the base, then turned to the Man and Woman. "Okay, let's hear your story. You two were in great peril on this island. It's a military property. What are you even doing here?"
The Woman looked to the Man. He spoke. "We think mankind has really made a mess of things, with what they call 'advanced civilization.' We came here to start over, to begin a whole new world."
The Woman looked down. "I suppose you think we're silly."
"I'm pretty sure no one asked you." Peterson said. He appraised the Man and Woman. "No, I wouldn't say you're silly. To tell the truth, sometimes I feel like throwing the whole thing away, too."
He looked to the cliff. "But then, I remember the good man can do."
Copyright © 2019 David Charles Larson
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