I’m not a rookie, but I still have a lot to learn, we all do I suppose. There’s always something new to learn in the FAC. Word came through the Glowy Door, trouble downtown. That door’s always been a real head-scratcher, but it’s saved our asses one too many times to ignore. It doesn’t give any details though; that’s for us to find out the hard way. Just a whispered location and a rough estimate of the firepower needed. I always take more than it says, just in case. This time I was packing the bleach-gat 9000 and my trusty, rusty breadknife.
Jones drives, slewing our cherry-red Ford Fairlane Thunderbolt through the red-light district orgical traffic with panache. She’s an S-class driver that one, and a surprisingly adept improv comic. Circus Dan checks the database is secure in its harness, stopping occasionally to readjust his safety goggles. They’re recommended issue for every mission, but I don’t like the way they feel, like they’re sucking the air from my eyeballs. Sometimes I use a pair of invisi-frame safety glasses, but I’d left them hanging round the neck of my half-mannequin Tony. Circus Dan’s a nerd though. Does everything by the book. Probably wears FAC issue underwear with his name sewn into the label.
It’s not a glamorous job; it never has been. They won’t make movies out of us. They won’t get Hollywood ass-kicker Kurt Russell to play me, or Tilda Swinton to play Jones, or even the kid from Young Sheldon to play Circus Dan. It’s a pity we don’t know his name. A pity he isn’t famous enough for most of us of to think of him in any way other than, that kid from Young Sheldon. We won’t get the glory but, by hell’s hoary testicles, the only people you want to see when you’re shitting, and the dump rises with sick supernatural powers, is the Faecal Annihilation Corps.
Jones doesn’t need the siren, and Circus Dan always whines about it wrecking his concentration but damn it, it pumps me right up. I set it away, feeling my adrenaline take a great big hit of action-movie amphetamine, locking me in for the fight ahead. Right then and there I feel invincible. Our civilian collateral casualty rate is around 70%.
Jones slides the Thunderbolt round a tight corner into a perfect parallel park. There’s a stench in the air past the Fox-rats and alcoholics. A scent of pure evil and constipation. The first sign things are all kinds of wrong, is the brown liquid bubbling up from the manhole covers. Those covers weigh near two-fifty pounds, and they’re dancing gently, letting the sewage seep out onto the street. The road is our own river Styx made up of turds, fatbergs, and flushable wipes.
The mess keeps the casual observer out of the way, but the standard issue priest-blessed waders let us get right to the point of defecation. We slurp carefully through the mess, looking for something to hone-in on, this time it’s easy. A townhouse across the road has red-tinged mucus running down its windows. I do a double-take at the house number. The filth is leaving it alone for some reason, letting it shine bright and clear. Number two, of course. Even shit has a sense of humour.
As I move to the house, I feel something brush up against my foot. It’s slight and I pass it off as the current moving a turd or two but then it happens again.
“What the hell?” Jones shouts and draws her bleach-gat, aiming it at the ground. She dances on her tiptoes. “Something’s in the soup.”
I draw my own gat and scan for floaters with Circus Dan tapping away furiously on the database. There’s a blip two feet to my right, something surfaces. I spin round and lace it with thick streams of hypochlorite. They land feebly on the decomposed body of a Fox-rat, its grey and orange fur matted and limp. I turn to ask Circus Dan something but he’s looking at the corpse slack-jawed. That’s just basic training mistake numero duo. Don’t be around the poop with an open mouth. I weigh up whether to remind him, or to let him make his own mistakes when he cuts across.
“Decomp shouldn’t have set in like that this early. Something’s eaten it!”
Realisation hits me like loose stool. I put an urgent edge into my voice.
“Poopranhas!”
As if on cue, I feel a nip at my feet and calves, then another. Dan yelps, and Jones swears like a sailor. All the tension and adrenaline I built up on the drive over releases in one go.
“Light ‘em up!”
The bleach-gats spit into the filth, and we stride professionally towards the pavement like a SEAL team. Even Dan does well, diving on the pavement in what he probably thinks is a heroic way, but which just leaves stains on his waders and gloves. I turn back to help Jones but it’s too late. Wriggling turds like fat chocolate caterpillars with vicious corn teeth swarm around her feet and trip her up. She lands face first and the Poopranhas cover her in a violent frenzy, churning the water as she sinks.
I slap the shock out of Circus Dan and hold my right arm vertically in front of me; the traditional FAC salute to a fallen comrade. It’s never easy, but at least she’s not dealing with this shit now. I’ve had enough of it all and kick the door open with an easy roundhouse.
I’ve just enough time to see the cloud heading my way before the flies are on me. They rush over and through for long seconds, invading my ears, my nose, my hair. Tiny legs and even tinier proboscides cover me all over and then are gone as quickly as they arrived, free into the world to eat, fuck, and die. I slam an injector of panacea into my bitten neck, last thing I need is plague. I turn to make sure Circus Dan does the same, but the flies didn’t get him. Academy instinct kicked in and it looks like he jumped into a bush covered in used teepee. Just what I need. A gods-damned mummy.
The house is brown, obviously. A brownstone with walls of peeling 70’s patterned wallpaper that makes me more nauseated than the poop. There’s sludge running from the light fittings leaving snail trails everywhere. Dan and I stuff standard issue cotton-wool nasal inhibitors up our nostrils. It barely helps. From somewhere upstairs I hear screaming. Male screaming, high pitched, raspy, nasty.
Circus Dan’s goggles have a pencil torch which stabs a pitiful beam up to the landing. I prefer a laser pointer as it looks cooler but again, no goggles for me. The carpet is shag, the absolute worst for wet stains, for this mess, it’s somehow worse. I sidle upwards, my brain thinking vaguely of that scene in Home Alone with the paint cans, and the barbell, though that might have been the second one. The screaming turns to an audible bubble, whoever that is, is losing the battle, perhaps they’ve already lost. For Jones, we wouldn’t lose the war.
The guy’s a gym-rat. Two-hundred and some pounds of protein shakes and creatine powder. Probably juiced too. If you’ve never seen a fully formed protein-shit, then you’re lucky.
During training I was dropped naked into a sewer somewhere about ten miles from base. Had to make my own way back underground armed with only the things people flushed. Made it six miles with a skin-coating of reconstituted animal fat and a pair of alligator skin moccasins. Must have been under a Planet Fitness or something at mile seven but it started raining protein shits from the wall pipes. They slammed into me like torpedoes. I’ve still got the scars. One hit me straight on the crown and I lost a good few minutes to a stupor. Would’ve been dead if it weren’t for some fat-loaded steatorrhea. That stuff works like smelling salts. Thank gods for the Keto diet.
Why is a protein loaded faeces bad for business today? Well Poop Demons take the qualities of the turds they use to come into being. Diarrhoea Demons are fast and sloppy, Pellet Demons are small and numerous and so on.
Towering over this throne-bound gym-rat was a black-brown sticky rhino of a Demon, a full Golgotha-type. Chitinous plates of unnatural armour, corn horns from the shoulders and head, and fists the size of truck wheels. How this monster had come out of the gym-rat’s ass I have no idea, but the screaming made sense. It’s covered in a thin sheen of blood, and I try not to imagine the state of his exploded rectum.
Both Dan and I shot first, without checking the database. The bleach-gats barely making a sizzle on this thing’s bulbous body. The full bottle-cartridge might as well have been Windowlene for all the good it did. The gym-rat’s mouth lolled, and a thick strand of saliva bubbled out and onto his exposed thighs.
“Sorry kid,” I yell and back out the room, Dan close behind. I toss in a Clorox grenade at the thing’s head and shut the door. Collateral damage is expected in this line of work, targets be damned. There’s a squelching pop, and then we fall flat on our backsides as the Demon turns the door into pine splinters that pepper us like shrapnel.
Things were going south, fast. Bleach-gat had no effect, grenades were a no-go, only one thing left.
“Let’s rock!”
I jump at it holding my breadknife, so the blade stabs down into its bulk. It sinks in an inch and stops fast. The Demon begins to buck like a rodeo bull, and I hold on for dear life as it smashes around the landing, into the other upstairs rooms, crashing into wardrobes, light fittings and bellowing like an angry moose.
I see Circus Dan sit-up dazed and holding the broken bits of the Database as if they were a medium-hard jigsaw-puzzle.
“Dan! Dan, throw me your knife brother. Throw it to me!”
Dan either doesn’t hear me or can’t understand. He begins to sway a little, sitting cross-legged like a toddler playing with his Duplo.
I try to steer the Demon as much as I can, half-thinking if I get it outside then I could call in an airstrike or something. Send one of the Corps A-10s down to fill it full of caustic-soda rotary hell. I remember we’re upstairs only after I turn the Demon towards the windows and like an angry elephant it smashes straight through and down twelve feet of fetid air to the pavement.
I land on top of it and feel my jaw crack on its carapace like an uppercut from butterbean himself. I taste blood and spit the end of my tongue on the pavement, crawling off the beast and taking stock of my rapidly dwindling options. My radio is smashed, circuit boards and batteries falling from my uniform shoulder. The backup is in the car, but to be honest, I’m not too clear where that is. The fall had knocked me silly, and I wasn’t too clear where I was, or what exactly I’d be radioing for.
Circus Dan shouts something from back in the house and I roll over facing the sky. Half the upstairs wall is gone, and Dan is leaning out, peering into the chaos below, cupping his hands over his mouth. I saw him form words but couldn’t make sense of it. I wave at him insensibly and giggle a little, just a little. He waves back and falls forward into the toilet paper bushes. Looks like I have to do everything myself.
The Demon bellows wetly and throws a mailbox in my general direction. I catch a bit of it, feeling my left leg go dead. Dan’s breadknife, rusty and ergonomically gripped is lying on the ground a short way away. I drag myself one elbow at a time towards it. Whatever I do with it wouldn’t do any good but when they found my body they’d know I died a warrior’s death.
I was six inches (by my count) from the knife when I hear a FAC battle cry, loud and fierce. Jones is stood on the roof of the Thunderbolt with a little laser pointer in one hand and a radio in the other. The beam leads straight to the Demon, and I can hear a double ramjet overhead going VTOL. She looks amazing for someone covered head to toe in liquid shit, though I suppose anyone would look amazing back from the dead.
The Demon roars and goes to charge towards Jones but stops short. It reaches out stupidly, confused as to why it can’t move, its hands leaving shit stains on the clear, tempered glass of a FAC demolition tank. It looks up at the downwash of the transport hovering over it in time to see a few hundred gallons of saltwater splash into its prison. I see a few greyish blobs joining the water and then the Demon really starts to squeal.
Specially bred Scatophagus, voracious shit-eating fish, devour the demon one mouthful at a time. It tries in vain to fight the little spotted suckers, marshalling its power and the flood retreats into the sewers leaving a few flopping poopranhas behind. I’ll leave them for the cleanup crew. It’s too late for the demon; the water turns black-brown and the thrashing stops as the fish eat their fill.
Jones comes over to see to my wounds, but I wave her off to go check on Circus Dan. He’s probably got a concussion. I’d love to hear about her harrowing escape in the mission debrief but first, I need a long shower, and a shot of something strong, maybe bleach.