Quagmire

Pete the rocket stomped dismally through the marsh, still holding stubbornly to the last remnants of anger at getting this assignment. Or he tried to stomp, anyway. The muck absorbed each footfall without complaint, although it put up a fight every time he tried to withdraw his foot to take the next step.

The sick squelching sound of his steps was the only sound in the bog other then the thin trickle of random droplets loosing their hold and falling to what passed for ground in the miserable place.

On impulse he looked up, but saw the same thing as always – bare branches decorated with hanging moss and slime reaching upward until they were lost in the white-gray mist. They reminded him of putrid corpses with bone showing though, decorated in rotting finery. He shuddered and kept walking.

Just his luck getting an assignment like this. Looking for fish monsters in the middle of a stinking, dead swamp.

His foot encountered a fleeting resistance in the sludge he was marching, or staggering at any rate, through. He lifted his foot and reached down. He felt something slippery and hard to grasp and pulled it up – only to yell in horror as he saw the half-decayed body of a frog, the same color as the fog, mostly turned to jelly, that his fingers had dug into. He tossed it as far away from him as he could, wiping his hand compulsively on the side of his jeans over and over. He fought the almost overwhelming urge to lean over and retch.

The quagmire absorbed the sound of his howl effortlessly, dulling it into nothing with its thick, ghostly tendrils of fog braced around the decomposing carcasses of trees. His body shuddered again and again, no matter how hard he tried to stop. Thank god his partner wasn't here. He'd never hear the end of it, getting freaked out by a swamp.

The mist seemed to be thickening. He could only see about five feet in front of him now. Reaching his hand up to pull aside a dead, slimy branch that was in his path, the collar of his jacket slipped down and the icy touch of the fog slithered in, like the caress of a skeleton's hand. He yelped, quickly pulling up his collar again.

Goddammit, it was so quiet. The mist seemed to leap up and wrap its tendrils around the noise almost instantly, pulling it down into the muck made partially of mud but with dead plants and animals mixed in, their rotting flesh creating the ooze, pulling the sound down and bringing the sickening silence back. The silence that was only broken by the uneven rhythm of drips and the slurp of the ground against his feet. The ground that gave way like old flesh...

Pete shook his head hard. He had to stop thinking about this. Just keep walking until he found the fish-newt things or came out of the godforsaken hellhole. If he ever came out...

No, they were just saying that to scare me, he thought with grim determination. There's no way this place really is miles long. He nodded to himself in agreement and drove the thoughts and doubts from his mind, all except the little one that kept popping up teasingly, saying tell yourself that, make yourself believe it, but you're only doing that because if you don't get out soon you never will, because you can't afford to be scared of it because you know it's true, because you know that you will never, never find your way out and you're going to die here and your body will rot and maybe years from now someone will stumble on your bones half out of the ooze but probably not even that because no one will ever, ever find it because it's so big and don't you know how much human flesh is in the mire here?

He shuddered yet again and trudged on. They were just trying to scare him. There was no way people had really been getting this assignment for years.

The mist was getting even thicker now. He could only see about three feet ahead, and that was getting hazier by the minute. Or the step, since he had no idea if the mist was getting worse or if he was just going into the thicker part of it. He stumbled over a submerged root and fell, getting some of the muck in his mouth.

This time he did vomit, over and over until there was nothing left at all and he spat in between constantly, because don't you know how much human flesh is in the mire here?

Then he stumbled up, his whole front covered in the smelly black and greenish stuff and walked on.

When he fell a second time, he managed to catch himself with his hands. They sank deep into the slime, touching things that seems a bit more solid then the general ooze, things he didn't even want to think about touching, but they stopped his face about an inch above the 'ground', the soft mud sometimes covered by an inch or less of brackish liquid which might have been considered water at some point in its existence.

When he fell the third time, his fingers touched something soft but much less fluid then the rest of the ground, underneath which was something hard, and below the thin layer of water right where his face almost hit, there was a white thing poking out with two round holes he could see the ground through, and little tiny bits of yellow-gray still stuck to it. He screamed, because don't you know how much human flesh is in the mire here?

When his thoughts came back, after a minute or an hour or a year, he was somewhere else, a foot or a mile away from the skeleton. He had no idea. The quagmire had no landmarks, and the mist prevented him from even seeing two feet in front of his face.

A fact that made it all the more disturbing when the blue-gray thing appeared right in front of him.

It looked like a dead fish. It had a huge head and no neck and appeared to be bipedal. It did not seem to have any arms, only flipper-like with webbed, blunt digits. Its huge, bulging fish eyes were by far the worse, however.

He fell backward and started screaming again. A tiny corner of his mind, momentarily untouched, noted that it must be the monster he had been sent to find. That was the last coherent thought he had for a time.

When his strained mind managed to process the event and Pete again returned to himself, he regretted it. He was being held close to the creature, being carried through the marsh at an alarming rate. Only the understanding that the creature had not done anything to him –yet, whispered the unbanishable thought defiantly – prevented him from sinking back into oblivion.

For an undeterminable time he argued about whether or not to fight his carrier. Before he could make up his mind, the monster stopped.

Grinning grotesquely, it set him back down in the sludge and shoved firmly. An instant later, Pete realized he was up to his upper thighs in the gunk and still sinking. He screamed, thrashed, and struggled with all his might to get out, howling at the top of his lungs the entire time, but the monster vanished back into the mist, and the mist swirled around him, tangling his cries, gagging them and dragging them back down into the muck. Not even his voice would escape.

His churning arms and legs stirred the mire, and a long white stick poked free for a moment. For the third time, his mind shut down as it struggled to process the horror.

He drowned before his mind ever came back.