The Magnums didn’t exactly make way for them, but they didn’t interfere as the two ambled through the maze of bodies.
When Rich and Zoe drew close enough that he didn’t need to raise his voice to be heard, the orator cast a glare at our ninja instructors, before pointing at Homer.
“That one betrayed me.”
Rich and Zoe exhibited no reaction beyond veering Homer’s way. Their faces were calm and relaxed, as if they were just joshing around at Ridgemore High during recess. They drew to either side of our nimble and muscled instructor.
Homer punched Rich square in the nose, hard enough to crunch bone and cartilage, then spun a kick toward the smaller Zoe.
Our classmate with the pleasant face and demeanor, soft, brown curls, and a baby growing in her uterus, didn’t so much asflinch. She struck Homer’s leg so ferociously that his momentum jerked to a halt in midarc, jarring his hip out of socket. Then, she twisted the leg.
Homer cried out.
She’d dislocated his hip.
When she released him, he stumbled backward on his other leg and crumbled to the floor with another cry.
Apprehension was thick in my throat. Homer was a large, strong man. Zoe was petite. How much strength had it required for her to overpower him like that?
I’d only just begun to wonder if there might be more to her when she yanked down her face—her fucking face, yo—much like Fanny had done.
Her fingers clawed at the stripping flesh, digging under it, and yanked the rest of her skin down off her head. It came off clean, including her hair, as if her human skin wasn’t all that different from a high-end costume mask. She left it pooling around her neck like a snood.
But I wasn’t really looking at her neck.
I was staring at that now familiar shiny, glistening, gray flesh.
And the row upon row of vicious, predatory teeth that would be right at home in any good alien flick.
Homer’s intelligent eyes goggled as he scooted back away from her—it, whatever the alien was—only to bump into a Magnum. Four others inched closer, cutting off any route of escape.
Monster-Zoe gnashed her teeth with an insectoid-like clicking. She stalked toward Homer.
His left leg dead weight, hanging loose from the dislodged joint, he scooted back onto a Magnum’s loafer.
Zoe crouched down, scooped up Homer like he was a plaything that weighed a fraction of his densely muscled body, aligned his head with her mouth—and all those incredibly disturbingteeth. Her maw unhinged as it stretched wide enough to accommodate his bulk … and then she began chomping.
Crunch, crunch. Chomp, chomp.
Gore and blood, bone and spit flew.
She fed his body into her mouth with the ease—and grinding—of a pencil driving into a sharpener.
Crunch, monch, monch, chomch.
By the time his shoulders vanished into her throat—into a space physics suggested he wouldn’t fit—his body had ceased its struggles.
I didn’t even have a gulp in me. I gawked, an unsettling tremor starting in my extremities. I might never eat again.
I asked my crew weakly.
If they responded, I didn’t make it out above Monster-Zoe’s chewing. She was like a giant panda chomping down loudly on some bamboo—just as content but with absolutely none of the lovable cuteness.
When Monster-Fanny had swallowed Bobo, she hadn’t chewed.
I didn’t think Homer was coming back out of her in any recognizable form.
A sob, abruptly silenced, sounded over Zoe’s chewing.
