Illustration by Stanton Fink

Written by Leo Gonzales

People have been eating snails since before they left the Cradle of humankind. One snail understood this sad fact, and sought to revenge itself and Snailkind on humanity. One night, long ago, this wrathful gastropod crawled into the mouth of a sleeping man and ate him from the inside out, then did the same to this family, and then, the next nights, did the same t the man’s neighbors. The survivors complained to the village lord. He, in turn laughed in their faces, ceasing only when he was suddenly gobbled up by the snail, now big as an oxcart. 

A hero came along to vanquish LCaracol. When the hero’s sword failed to pierce the creature’s slimy hide, he tore up an oak  tree to use as a club to smash its shell. The hero failed in that, too, instead pounded Carcohl deep into the earth eventually trapping it in a cavern filled with its own slime.

Lou Carcohl’s shell remained intact, eventually becoming a hill forming the heart of the city of Hastingue. The beast still lives, as spelunkers entering Lou Carcohl’s slime-filled tomb are seized and devoured on a routine basis.

(Lou Carcohl, or “the Snail,” is a giant, yet serpentine snail said to live in the caverns underneath the French city of Hastingue.  Allegedly, when the Spanish Army invaded the area, the people of Hastingue hid their treasures in the caves.  After the Spanish forces were finally repelled, people returning to the caves to retrieve the treasure were attacked and eaten by a giant snail who seized them with long, sticky tentacles.)

I

Upon completion of construction during the miserable 1920’s, the Lourdez Building was repeatedly described as “the/a pinnacle of Art Deco,” a “glowing, 70 story torch of (modern) design wrenched out of an Erté piece.” And despite the shared madness of its designers, despite the dusty, corrosive vicissitudes of decades, and despite now being the official headquarters of a manufacturer of offensively vapid junk foods called “Go Eatziik Snax,” the Lourdez Building remained a popular destination for tourists. Mostly the sumptuously furnished lobby and the penthouse gardens.

That day’s afternoon went normally; at 1:15pm, that day’s tour group gathered in the lobby and visited the spot where Imogene Lourdez, neé Hatridge, murdered her husband, Harold Lourdez, in 1942. At 1:25pm, the group toured the lobby museum housing the exquisite collections of antiquities illegally collected by Yakov Lourdez, then a visit to his great grandson Yakov Lourdez III’s office, where both of them mysteriously died from a shared fatal heart attack in 1967.

At 2:37pm, the afternoon toured concluded its trip through the penthouse botanical gardens by coming across one of the higher level managers, a hulking, blonde, pallid-skinned, mostly naked man in leopard spot speedos lying in a chaise lounge as his comely secretary massaged his muscular, yet crème fraîche flesh with what smelled to the tourists present like spicy Italian salad dressing. At 2:45pm, the traumatized, yet delightfully titillated tourists exited a lobby elevator. Just before the elevator doors closed, a tall, bald man in casual business clothes darted past the crown and into the elevator while carrying two bags of lukewarm takeout.

The man escaped from the elevator onto the 47th Floor, one of sixty or so Go Eatziik corporate office labyrinths in that building. He rounded a corner and entered a room.

“Hey Zacharias, here’s your beef chowmein,” Gordon said as he handed his shaggy-haired coworker his takeout carton. Zacharias plunged his chopsticks into his lukewarm noodles and started shovelling it into his sour face. Gordon began the same with his shrimp lo mein as they both sat down at their table in the Go Eatziik company breakroom.

“I don’t know,” Zacharias groused. “Both of us have been here at Go Eatziik for 10 years, hard workers, loyal-”

“Yeah,” Gordon clucked.

“But who gets all of the credit?” Zacharias glowered at a cardboard cutout avatar of the slug-like company mascot in the breakroom corner.

“And the money, don’t forget the money.”

“That wretched glory slug, Max.” Zacharias spat a chunk of gristle onto the floor. Gordon turned his head toward the security camera hidden in the coffee machine. “I mean Manager ‘Employee of The Month for 57 years’ Powell.”

“What can we do about it? We’re his assistants,” Gordon lamented as he handed Zacharias the lone fortune cookie. Gordon tossed his empty carton into the trashcan and left the breakroom.

Zacharias slurped up the last of his noodles, then chucked the empty carton into the trash, too. He picked up his fortune cookie. In a fit of pique, he crushed the cookie in his fist. In the little pile of crumbs he left on the table, the fortune read “Listen to your friend; he’s very wise. Your lucky numbers are 5 2 32 17” Zacharias left, trailing after Gordon.

That afternoon saw the hulkingly suave Manager Powell, his two dutiful assistants, and his latest, lovely, young secretary, Livia, hosting some Go Eatziik executives about a new line of macha snacks. Or rather, that afternoon saw Zacharias boring t he attending executives with a tedious slide presentation, with Gordon serving them subpar snacks their company was notorious for. Their overgrown boss, in the meanwhile, did very little beyond playing kissyface with the lovely, young secretary half his alleged age planted firmly in his massive lap.

“And so, this success of Go Eatziik’s new macha snacks, or ‘Macha 5,’ is guaranteed since we’re using Triple Yumyum’s macha flavor formula,” Zacharias droned.

A walrus-faced executive spat out his half-eaten green cookie.

“We have one of Triple Yumyum’s trademarked formulas?” Walrus-face growled. The other executive froze Gordon in place with a searing glower. Zacharias nervously ran his fingers through his dark, shaggy hair in the vain hopes of manually jumpstarting his brain. “So when are we getting sued?” Walrus-faced asked. Gordon scratched his shaved scalp as he shot a pleading look back at Zacharias.

“We, um, aren’t going to be, um, suuuuued..” Zacharias stammered.

“That’s right, P.B.,” Max reassured. Both executives smiled as Max restored his golden, kissyface-damaged hair to its perfect, Elvis-coif state. “Triple Yumyum is letting us use their macha formula as a courtesy.”

“How did you do that, Powell?” the other executive asked. “Triple Yumyum is so tightlipped and spy-proof.”

Max took a hearty swig of the macha almond milk swill as the lovely Livia giggled.

“It was nothing. I just spoke with Rory the CEO, talked to him like a sensible audit, schmoozed him a little, and voila!”

Walrus-face and the other executive sat there, happily dumbfounded like a pair of astonished 1st graders at a magic act.

“Powell, you continue being a godsend to Go Eatziik!” the two executives gushed in unison.

Zacharias glowered while everyone was distracted by his superior’s victory grin. He forced himself to fake a neutral smile as he watched the two executives pour themselves a laughing toast with the macha fudge coffee creamer.

“Schmooze, frame and blackmail Rory for murder,” Max mumbled into Livia’s flawless lily neck. “Tomato, toemawtoe.”

Gordon strode over to Manager Powell and patted him on the back for this job well done again (and for saving his butt once again, too).

Another presentation successfully concluded, and another subpar line of Go Eatziik snacks greenlit. Max Powell went over to the company gym to celebrate with some weightlifting at the benchpress. To Zacharias’ eternal aggravation, it was Gordon’s turn to spot Manager Powell, and it was Zacharias’ turn to blot Max. It was the very worst part of his job; as much as Zacharias despised his supervisor for bossing him around, and for stealing credit, and for showing off like some sort of giant, sweaty teenage footballer, blotting Max’s warm, and goey, and sticky, and smelly sweat was a torment straight out of hell. There Max went against, grunting and klinking like some enormous, slimy monkey. Gordon hovered around his boss as though he were a balding magpie nursing an eagle-sized cuckoo chick in a skintight tanktop. 

“Ay, there!” the magpie squawked. Zacharias quickly blotted his cuckoo chick’s moist pect cleavage. Grunt. Klink. Blot. And on the cycle went for 2 Stygian hours. Then Max finally klanked the weights one last time, shot his two faithful assistants his winning smile, and snatched the sweat-drenched towel out of Zacharias’ hand as he got up from the bench. He draped the towel over his head, then effortlessly ripped off his tanktop. Zacharias cringed in shameful envy at his boss’ swollen, glistening, pulsating muscles. Max met up with his secretary as he ambled towards the showers.

“I’m gonna wash up and head out,” Max said as Livia played with his shorts. “You guys get the Trakhanov Report ready for tomorrow’s meeting, ‘kay?”

It took Zacharias 45 minutes of furious scrubbing in a scalding hot shower, and maybe peeling off a layer and a half of skin to finally scour himself clean of the stench and feel of Max’s awful sweat. Another six hours after that saw Zacharias and Gordon crammed into their shared, crate-like cubicle, putting together the Trackhanov Report as per their boss’ orders. Upon losing a game of rock-paper-scissors, Zacharias left their cubicle to get take-out. And as Zacharias made his way to the parking complex, his lurid little detour through the company gym let him know that his boss and his secretary were still furiously making out in the showers since that afternoon.

Zacharias sat in his car, on Level B of the parking complex, stewing in negative emotions he falsely identified as “disgust.” Fifteen minutes into his latest brooding saw him struggle to fish out his smartphone to text Gordon. 

“Hey, Gordon, the diner’s having kitchen problems, and I’m not feeling well. Can you finish the report without me?” he texted.

“Sure, but u’ll owe me.”

“Absolutely, thanks!”

Half an hour later found Zacharias unlocking the front door of his apartment. Zacharias liked to think his apartment was “spartan.” Others preferred the more accurate assessment of “squalid,” noting Zacharias’ judicious, or perhaps ludicrous, use of pilfered supermarket crates as furniture. He sloughed off his clothing as he made his way to his bedroom. Upon reaching his ratty, moth-eaten mattress, clad in his ratty, moth-eaten boxers, he flopped face-down, figuring he’d turn off the lights in the morning.

Zacharias found himself in his Mister Universe dream again. He always forgot why he hated his Mister Universe dreams. After all, he always got a fantastic kick flaunting how masculinely superior his skinny, yet flabby, no, his powerfully wiry physique was compared to those of those blobby, lowbrow bodybuilders. He also loved to show off how talented he was in his Mister Universe dreams, too, given how he was the world’s greatest concert pianist and the world’s greatest baker. At least, in this dream, he was. And then came the master of ceremonies, no, Zacharias’ main competitor, Maximillian Q. Langley Powell. Now that Max showed up, there was nothing Zacharias could do, not even baking a 10-course brownie souffle while simultaneously playing all of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on a church organ, that could possibly top the way Max could woo the judges, even the ones on the Supreme Court, with his sickeningly saccharine smile, or with how he flaunted his titanic muscles by flexing out of his shimmering, three piece tuxedo.

Damn him.

Damn Max to hell and back.

II

“Yo, Zack!” Gordon hissed. Gordon was frustrated that his shaggy headed coworker was zoning out yet again at yet another meeting that could cost them both of their jobs yet again. “Zacky, you’re on!” Gordon hissed again, this time pinching his zoned out coworker’s lips to make a desperately impromptu fish face.

“Right, right, the Trackhanov Report,” Zacharias grumbled as he begrudgingly came back to life. He shuffled Gordon’s lovingly assembled papers into a stack, only for it to be immediately snatched up by a big, infuriatingly familiar, sweaty, ring-bedecked hand.

“Keep cool, my buddies,” Manager Powell said with a smiling wink. “I owe you two guys big time.”

Manager Powell stepped behind the modest podium of that dinky, dingy, and crowded, hellishly off white meeting room. Max surveyed that meeting room, drinking up the rapt attention the assembled executives and upper management were focusing on him while paying minimal attention to either Gordon going limp with relief, or Zacharias retreating into yet another childish sulk. Max quickly skimmed through his assistants’ report. The stage was set, and Max casually chucked the Trakhanov Report over his broad shoulder, launching, instead, into a rambling, joke-plagued monologue that may or may not have been about Siberak Trakhanov. 

In mid-sulk, Zacharias noticed something different about the mini-skirted tuchas bobbing back and forth and up and down behind Manager Powell. He realized Max hired a new secretary, and this new girl was picking up Livia’s slack in picking up the strewn Trackhanov Report. Zacharias flared his nostrils as he sarcastically wondered what happened to Livia.

“Her boobs must’ve shrunk in the wash,” he muttered.

“Ay, that’s a good one, Zack, my boy!” Max boomed, sincerely thrilled his peon was paying attention to him. Apparently taking Max’s cue, everyone, the executives, upper management, Max’s urging, politely applauded. Zacharias, wholly unaccustomed to large scale attention, blushed mahogany.

Thus, the Trukhanov Reported ended as a success through Max Powell’s intervention, as usual, and Zacharias and Gordon by the skin of their teeth through Max Powell’s intervention , as usual. Just in time for lunch. 

Back at the perennially semi-empty Go Eatziik breakroom, Gordon was busy preparing himself a meal of coffee, mostly creamer. Zacharias, meanwhile, was prowling through the breakroom refrigerator, hunting for snacks out of other unknowing coworkers’ lunches. Gordon downed his third cup when Zacharias finally sat down.

“Wooo, ain’t Max a lifesaver?” Gordon finally said.

“If you’re gonna brownnose the glory slug, at least do it when he’s here.” Zacharias then loudly sucked the creme-filling out of a chocolate snackcake for emphasis.

“Dood,” Gordon harumhed, pointing back to the spy-cam coffee machine. Zacharias chucked his creme-free snackcake at it with a soft splat.

“Now we can speak freely, Mr Shumway.”

Gordon sighed as he got up from their table.

“Max ain’t going anywhere for a long time, Zack. And if we don’t want to go anywhere, either, we have to make nice with him, as we’re gonna be stuck with him for a long while.”

“Mmmhmmm…” Zacharias squelched an urge to roll his eyes as Gordon exited the breakroom.

“I’ll meet you back at the cubicle,” Gordon said as he entered the hallway.

Sitting among Zacharias’ prizes was another lone fortune cookie. His ire raised once more, he snatched it up, crushing it in his fist like some brittle-shelled cockroach. Five minutes of making sure that cookie was powdered, he finally unclenched his fist and saw the fortune cookie fortune. The offending slip of paper read “Don’t follow through with this. Your lucky numbers are 0”

Zacharias flushed mahogany again. He flipped the table as he stormed into the hall.

“I need to see Max Powell!” Zacharias shouted as he banged his fists on the secretary’s desk. “Immediately!”

“Big Buffy Bigbottom, I mean Manager Powell can not be seen,” Bigbottom’s new secretary stated.

“I don’t have time for this crap, Livia,” Zacharias shouted.

“I’m Miriam.”

“Miriam, Lulu, Livia, Poopsy, Agnes McCuddlestein, I don’t care!” And with that, Zacharias opened Powell’s office door with a banging slap of his hand. “Listen here, you-”

Zacharias and Miriam stood there in Max’s posh, cloyingly humid, houseplant jungle office. A quick scan of the dense foliage suggested that is owner recently abandoned the room, or was hiding inside of an elephant trap. 

“I tried to tell you, Mr. Forneas: Manager Powell just left for a very important appointment.”

Zacharias found it difficult to focus on Miriam’s blathering while also listening to the hypnotic interplay of Maxi’s indoor rainforest river blurbing mingling with his weird, spa salon style muzak going on. 

“An appointment where, Miriam?” Zacharias coolly demanded.

“Hippies told me not to say,” Miriam solemnly swore. Zacharias strode over to Max’s polished, teak-and-walnut desk. He spied a half-opened drawer.

“That’s ‘HIPPA,’ you giant-boobed boob!” he corrected while slamming that drawer shut.

“Can you please leave Manager Bigbottom’s, er Powell’s office, Mr Forneas? I really don’t want to report you to secretary.”

“Fine, fine, fine,” he growled as he stomped out.  “And it’s ‘security.’”

As luck would have it, Zacharias spotted his boss in the office parking complex, getting into a Ferrari (of course, had the company gym not been miraculously closed for repairs, he probably would have missed Powell). Not wanting his prey to elude him once again, Zacharias hopped into his Volkswagen Insect and followed his boss out of the parking complex.

Had Zacharias been twenty years younger, or heck, even five years younger, he would have been tickled incoherent to be a participant in a car chase, let alone be the instigator of one. But that was then, and this was now, as he had been following his boss’ fancy car down the highway out of town for hours. Within the speed limit, of course. The last thing Zacharias Forneas needed right now was police in his audience. 

The two Go Eatziik employees had been driving for 6 hours, and an hour and a half passed the reservoir, the dry scrubland foothills evolved into damp, mountain pine forest.

“Where is bloody Glory Slug’s ‘very important appointment?’” Zacharias growled. “Sasquatch Town?” He just remembered he could have turned on the radio all this blasted time. It didn’t matter anyhow: he was too aggravated to bother listening to music, anyhow.

Oh, his prey’s Ferrari just turned to the right. He turned to the right. He turned to the right, too, and found himself driving in the dirt, or rather, humus and mud parking lot of Piker’s Ghost Forest Campground (according to the mouldering sign dangling overhead in the treebranches, at least).  Zacharias stopped his car the moment Powell parked his. He hopped out of his car to stomp over to the still closed Ferrari. 

“Listen here, you cheap, chiseling, bully bastard son of-” The Ferrari door opened. Zacharias paused his stream of expletives as he watched Max Powell, who appeared to be swollen to twice the size he was that morning, and wearing a painfully small suit, struggle to get out of his Ferrari. A minute of leg-waggling, and Powell’s swollen, slimy foot burst out of his leather shoe as he finally planted it into the muddy ground. As Powell began to pull himself free of his car, Zacharias studied the worrisomely overstrained, slime-leaking seams in his boss’ pant leg. 

“Listen, Zack,” Manager Powell began, his voice three octaves lower than it was at the Trackhanov meeting.

“Don’t call me ‘Zack.’”

“Listen, Zacharias, at the meeting, it was just a joke, I’m sorry.” The seams of Powell’s jacket began popping open, making Zacharias think of a worn-out, overstuffed couch stuffed with slime.

“You’re absolutely right, you’re gonna be sorry, you fat slug!” Zacharias brandished the goldplated revolver he stole out of Powell’s desk drawer, pointing it squarely at the center of Powell’s sweat-drenched shirt. Powell’s shirt then suddenly tore open by itself to reveal two giant, slime-glistening pectorals, n, four giant pects, no; five giant pectorals, now all in a slimy column. No, Max Powell’s shirt shredded apart to reveal a great, and massive chest overflowing with slimy, squirming muscles all rhythmically undulating in unison. Zacharias cocked the revolver to keep himself from being mesmerized, and, more importantly, to keep his anger from precipitating completely into mindless fright. 

“Just calm down, Zacharias,” Max urged in a deep, soothing growl, his voice eight octaves deeper than 45 seconds ago.

“What, what are you?”

“Listen, Zzzacharias, if you go home, and forget today, I’ll give you a five-thousand percent pay increase, and I’ll give you your own office and sssssssssecrrrrrrger…”

“Wwhat are you?” Zacharias watched as Max’s suit slowly peeled away from his boss’ growing, swelling body in slime-soaked ribbons. Max grew eight feet tall, then twelve feet tall, now twenty feet tall, a massive, mountain-like torso overflowing with writhing muscles. Zacharias hoped what he saw writhing in Max’s body were muscles. He thought his boss now looked like a giant cartoon bodybuilder now, a towering, inverted pyramid of sweaty, no slimy muscles resting n a pair of tiny, kneeling, maybe squatting, barely bigger than a pair of trashcans. Max rested one of his sequoia trunk arms onto his Ferrari inadvertently crushing it.

“IiiIi like yi,” Max stammered. Zacharias looked up to see his boss’ still-human, still-human-sized face struggling to keep from being swallowed up in the slithering folds of his broad, broad shoulder muscles, “Dn wn yi nk mmm miskd fifty rrrrrrrr…” A pair of long tentacles sprouted forth from the apex of that now-headless air of impossibly wide shoulders. The big, inverted pyramid of power that used to be Zacharias’ boss flexed and shuffled his great chest of power as he stretched himself into a great lozenge of power. Zacharias skittered out of the way as the great lozenge of power came crashing down onto his great belly of power, splashing his would-be murderer with mud and slime. Zacharias made a beeline towards his car just as Max’s great, staring eyestalks erupted from his great slug’s head. By the time Zacharias was twelve paces away from his car, Max pooped out a forty foot long tail. The moment Zacharias opened his car door, a tooth-studded, rabid python, no, a long, long tooth-studded tongue slapped the door of its hinges. Zacharias carefully turned around to face the giant, giant-armed, slug-dragon-thing that used to be, and still kind of was his boss, Maximilian Q. Langley Powell. And as Zacharias gawked at his boss’ glistening, seemingly emotionless snail’s head, it dawned on him; he was meeting Go Eatziik’s mascot face to face. And then Max-slug emoted, or rather, parted his curtain-like cleft lips to reveal a drooling sea filled with shimmering waves of finger-sized, finger-shaped teeth. Zacharias bolted into the forest, narrowly avoiding contact with his boss’ twenty-foot long tongue.

Zacharias ran and ran through that murky pine forest, a cubicle jockey-cum-frightened rabbit desperately fleeing from the worst hellhound, er, slug-dragoon ever loosed upon the world. And then Zacharias saw salvation about 300 feet to his left.

The Merton hunting party was a riotous success. Sheldon Merton and his friends were dowsing themselves with self-praised and fancy beer as they laughed and dressed the two mule deer bucks and three whitetail does they shot that afternoon. Their merriment came to a screeching halt when a screeching yuppieman came running through their camp. When the screaming yuppie reached halfway across the campsite, the flew screaming backwards straight into the yawning mouth of a giant snail or a slug the size of a tanker truck. Sheldon and his hunting buddies took aim at the hellworm to avenge their momentary guest, and fired. And fired, and fired, and fired, unloading everything they had in order to make that monster thrash and dance. By the time Max finished squishing the last of his folksy assailants, a series of painful poppings made him spit out a skinless corpse. Zacharias Forneas’s skinless corpse. Who was still armed with his now-hot antique revolver. As Max wrapped his serpentine tongue around his flunkey’s corpse to swallow his wayward meal again, that still-living corpse raised its arm, and fired Max’s revolver into the gaping spiracle two, three, four times. And then Maximillian Q. Langley Powell, Favorite Manager, Go Eatziik Food’s Employee Of The Month for 57 years straight, cannibal, and part-time giant slug monster, deflated like a collapsing circus tent filled with slime. Even as Max’s corpse began rapidly dissolving into vile-smelling goo, his serpentine tongue continued wrapping itself around Zacharias’ skinless body like some self-knitting, undead vest.

Zacharias didn’t waste any time with surveying the slime-washed carnage while he dance-shambled through the wreckage of Picker’s Ghost Forest Campground. Of course, it was hard to survey anything when all of one’s skin and sensory orgarns were chewed off less than ten minutes ago. But, by the time Zacharias managed to successfully grope his way to his car, his eyes and ears grew back enough to make him feel comfortable enough to drive again. By the time he fitted his dismembered car door into his passenger seat, his nose was beginning to grow back. He buckled up, turned on his car radio in anticipation of his ears eventually growing back, and drove off. He hoped that, when his skin grew back, he wouldn’t stick to the upholstery.

Business at Piker’s Ghost Gas had been very grim that week. Some fancy, schmancy hunting party caravan full of gun-toting, wooly yuppybillies came by the other day, and only bought between them six gallons of gas and a length of jerky. It was enough to make the attendant, Earl, spit more frequently. Earl had seen a lot of horrible things in his horrible forty years of life, especially while touring Syria, Iraq, Serbia, Somalia, ‘nam, and Korea; no, wait, those last two were Earl’s father’s tour. But still, Earl took grim satisfaction in that his 20 odd year in the graveyard shift at Ghost Gas was nowhere near as ghastly or as frightening as his 20 even years while on duty. A blood and mud spattered Volkswagen pulled up to the self-serve pump. Earl’s bubblegum pink skin blanched cotton-colored as he watched a blood-covered skeleton man come out of the car to pump gas.. Earl fell off his stool and went catatonic when he witnessed that same bloody skeleton man enter the gas station mini-mart to place one-hundred dollars in bloody five-dollar bills onto his counter.

The drive back into town was uneventful and soothing once Zacharias’ ears grew back enough to let him listen to his car radio. The drive to the hospital was equally pleasantly bland, at least until a hospital security guard started yelling at Zacharias when the guard saw him park in the handicapped parking. The security guard stopped yelling when he saw a skinless man get out of that muddy, battered car. The walk from the parking lot to the ER waiting room was drafty and cold. Feeling was coming back into his body apparently. Upon entering the ER waiting room, Zacharias got in line to see the front desk. 

“Aaaaan theeeeerz ahwaez aw lien,” Zacharias croaked. He realized he had lips again just as everyone else in line noticed what just entered. The other patients in line got out of the bloody, kind of skinless man’s way. The nurse at the front desk craned her neck to see what was going on.

“Sir,” the nurse politely called.” “Sir? Are you sure you want ER services, or would you prefer the burn ward two doors to your left?”

The skinless man shrugged his skinless shoulders, then turned around to waddle back through the automatic doors.