Free Fires Rising by Michael Laimo

screamed and clawed, whipped his head back and forth, but was unable to free himself. "Help me, please, help me…"
    One tentacle channeled out of the darkness and latched onto Jyro's bicep. Jyro pointed the penlight's beam on it and saw two amphibious eyes glaring back at him, black and wet and multi-faceted. They blinked and rolled in and out of its mucky body, as if trying to focus on him.
    Jyro screamed and swatted at it.
    The tentacle coiled around his bicep and traveled to the nape of his neck, leaving a cold wet track of sludge on his arm.
    He dropped the penlight and clawed at it, burying his fingernails into its soft pulpy skin. It hissed at him. A chunk of writhing flesh tore away and Jyro watched incredulously as it slithered into the darkness. All the other tentacles started hissing then, as if in their spurt of development had just now formed throats.
    They floated across the floor and curled around their ankles, thighs, wrists, waists, little puckering mouths taking bites out of them.
    Timothy kept on kicking and flailing wildly, although Jyro could see his efforts waning. The tentacles swelled and bulged, pulling the boy across the floor toward the massive bulk.
    Jyro eyeballed the penlight and with his free hand on the floor and snatched it up. The light swam across the wall where the Virgin Mary shadow had been and he noticed that it was gone now—dark water-stains included. He banged on the door and cried out, "Help me!" Again the door shuddered back and forth, but its grain remained impassable.
    He spun and pointed the light past his feet, toward the bulk. He saw a dark trench in its side. A mouth, he thought with sick horror, and at that moment an oily forked tongue slid out and whipped back and forth.  
    Timothy kept on screaming, fingernails scraping madly at the tiles. He jerked his head back and forth. The tentacles drew him closer…closer to the massive flickering tongue and gaping mouth.
    Jyro screamed "NO!" realizing all too suddenly that he too was now being dragged toward the bulk. The bangings on the door went on and on. Ahead, one of Timothy's feet was off the ground. The monstrous black tongue was wrapped around his foot. By accident, the penlight's beam fell upon the rosary, still gripped tightly in Timothy's hand; the boy, out of fear or pain or shock, had forgotten that he still possessed it.
    Oh my God…look!
    It wasn't the rosary itself that gave Jyro the sudden hope that escape was possible; it was the sludge and liquid around it that made him realize they could actually come out of this alive.
    He screamed, "Timothy! The rosary!"
    Timothy, his foot now inches from the bulk's mouth, twisted his neck around and saw the rosary dangling from his hand.
    And around it, eighteen-inches of dry clean floor.
    The waste was unable to come into contact with the rosary.    
    The two former altar boys locked gazes, and it was at this moment they seemed to connect on a deeper, mental level—that in this instant of life or death they came into full understanding of one another, and what needed to be done.
    More tentacles wound down from the ceiling and wrapped themselves around their arms and legs. One closed around the toilet paper dispenser. It yanked it off the wall. The paper roll landed in a puddle of sludge, rolled a few inches before it was snatched up and pulled into the bulk.
    Timothy, eyes suddenly bright and alert in the darkness, assured his grip on the rosary…
    …and in this moment Jyro recalled Timothy's words moments before they entered into the bathroom: Perhaps we can use this to protect us…
    …and lashed it into the gaping mouth of the devouring bulk.
    A sound that rivaled the slaves of Hell ripped through the room, a thousand throats screaming out, deep guttural grunts alongside the high-pitched screeches of women and children in agony. The tentacles whipped away, writhed frantically then turned black and melted into runny sewage that spread across the floor in a deluge