Werewolf Skippy came out onto the road.
Having survived a brutal collision, David checked himself for injuries and was surprised to find that he didn't have a wound on him. In fact, he felt pretty damn good. Considering that he had just crashed his car and banged his head on the wheel, he felt incredible.
“Must have got kissed on the arse by a fairy.” David said, noting his good fortune. Smiling, he turned back to the car and his smile vanished. Sitting in the driver's side seat was some fat arse trying to steal his ride.
“Hey, you!” he called out in hopes of scaring off the thief. Then he saw that this particular land whale was wearing his red polo shirt. That was when it clicked. The two legged hippo that was trying to pinch his car was him.
Seeing himself from this angle, David could only shake his head. He wouldn't have called himself handsome; even if he was fit he was just going to be average, but seeing that overweight arsehole with a neck-beard just made him feel sorry for himself. David had tried, oh, he had tried to lose weight, but living so close to a fried chicken restaurant had completely ruined that plan.
The extra-extra-extra large red polo shirt didn't really do much to hide his girth.
He had a sudden thought of the movie Ghost, where Patrick Swayze was looking down at his own corpse, while a hot Demi Moore cried. He really didn't want to do the whole wandering spirit thing looking like he didn't know what a treadmill was. Then again, he guessed that it could have been worse. At least he had died with his clothes on. An afterlife as a naked fat man would have masterfully sucked.
David looked at his busted truck. It was a Toyota. Not being a gearhead, David knew nor had a desire to know things like torque. All that he knew was that his truck was that it looked like a monster car that hunted big stags for fun. He had gotten it for just over $16,000 and up until a while ago it had earned every dollar. He had called it the Beast the moment he saw it.
Not knowing a damn thing about cars, David had made it a point to bring his local mechanic to the second hand dealership where he had bought his truck. After all, he was the one who had to fix it and David was under no delusions that a car was unbreakable. His last car had been working okay until it got to the point that the parts cost more than several months’ rent. He had been pretty bummed when he had to retire his old junk-heap, but the Beast had done its job.
Even now the pick up truck had taken a hit and it still looked about ready to go bushwhacking.
A deep fury filled David, he turned to the prick of a thing that killed him and hurt his car.
Having hit a kangaroo when he was eighteen, he knew from experience that you did not try to stop when you knew a crash was inevitable. Hitting something that was built like a tree was just going to piss it off, so you accelerated and hoped to God your insurance was covered.
This thing though, wasn't a red kangaroo.
The thing was as ugly as sin and David recoiled in horror at the mere sight of it. It looked like a velociraptor and a werewolf had twisted hate sex and this was their unholy baby. It had long shaggy red fur which covered most of its arms and back, and everything that wasn't fur was bright blue snake scales.
David grew fascinated by the ugly bastard’s teeth which twisted at odd angles. Animals didn't have mouths as bad as this thing. Hell, he didn't think Europeans had teeth this bad. They looked like a kid bent a bunch of rusty nails for a laugh and stuck it in a Halloween mask.
Besides the obvious out of body experience, it was that David could smell the horror show. It had that rank odour of an old fridge, specifically when you discovered that the motor had died a week ago. It was a stench that penetrated through Kevlar.
Could the dead smell?
David rolled his eyes at the joke, but this was starting to get on his nerves. How could a ghost have a sense of smell? Then again, how could a ghost see? The lack of eyeballs and brain kind of ruined that.
He again looked at the creature and for some unknown reason knew that this thing was not of this world. It was an odd sensation, like trivial pursuit. Somebody asks a stupid question and suddenly a light bulb goes off in your head. David didn't know how but he knew this creature's name, and also knew that it had been built and not born.
An Ikky Goran. That was the name that popped in the troubleshooter's head when he looked at this creature. Its creator had taken an Ikis, a creature that looked much like a crocodile, and then spliced it with several other mutated monstrosities. This thing had been chopped up and put back together so many times that there was almost nothing of its original form in there.
This thing was a mutated creature from some amateur dungeon that wanted to create a shock trooper. It used pack hunting and ambush tactics. Its teeth were covered in acidic slime, but because of the dumb-arse creator's design, it may have looked terrifying but it couldn't chew or bite in the traditional sense. The only things that it could physically eat were small rodents and insects.
David was all for experimentation, after all, if you stopped doing something because it was insane and bad for the environment, mankind wouldn't have landed on the moon. But this was... he didn't know how best to put it. It was like 70s monster movie bad.
Wait. David stepped back and held his head. Dungeon? As in those things in video games and bad LitRPGs novels on kindle? Just what the fuck was going on?
That's when he heard something in the car moan.
1
1 Chapter Two
David woke up feeling like he had head butted a jumbo jet. Everything felt wrong, his head being his main concern but there was also an acute pain in his arm and back, which made him think something was broken.
Feeling like utter shit, he managed to undo his seatbelt and fell belly first on to the ground.
Who are you? What are you doing in my body? Get the fuck out of it.
Though he did not know why, David felt pissed off for some reason. He had just survived a head-on collision with... His thoughts drifted back to the crash. What had he hit? It hadn't been a person. Or at least he hoped that it wasn't a person, he was too cute to survive prison, or worse, losing his license and using the dreaded public transportation.
“Hello,” David said as he got onto his hands and knees. He wiped away the dried blood and dirt on his face and opened an eye. He was in some sort of cave and he moaned as his head pounded from within his skull.
Feeling weak and drained, he crawled back to the Beast. He looked up at the massive four wheel drive and felt as though he was staring up at an impassable mountain.
Who are you? Somebody shouted in his head.
“David Mascoff,” he answered and looked around for the owner of the voice. But as far as the trouble shooter could see he was the only one here. Was he losing his mind?
The cave itself was not that big, maybe two car parks wide and just as long. The opening was far smaller. Getting the Beast inside the cave had been like threading a needle. The truck's white paint was ruined and it was going to take more than a few dollars to buff the scrapes out.
David groaned as he used the car as a crutch. He definitely needed medical attention as he had barely made it to a standing position before he needed a rest. He was exhausted and he hadn't done anything, yet.
The voice continued to pester him and mumble. Having never had one before, the trouble shooter told himself that it was just the concussion talking. He needed water and a lie down. Crawling back into the cab, David cursed when he saw the glass on his seats, then he double cursed when he saw the huge furry hand sticking out of his windscreen.
No time to linger on that, he needed water.
It took a control that David didn't know that he had, but after a few tries he made it into the back row. Fortunately, the front seats had shielded the back from most of the glass, but there was the odd jagged shard here and there, which was nothing that David couldn't wipe away. He just lay there, panting like