Peach Cail, a monster of myth that generations of Irish grandmothers had warned their children against, was living the high life.

As a kelpie, a creature literally formed from the raw, sticky tendrils of a seaweed-like creature older than mankind itself, Peach had always been forced to contend with her raw-seafood smell and dead-green color. That required taking victims on dark nights (or those who couldn’t see too well) and only from downwind. She couldn’t count how many times her smell or texture had left the intended victim fleeing and months if not years of wracking hunger pangs.

While in her relaxed form, a pile of quasi-seaweed at the bottom of a brackish estuary in County Kilkenny, Peach would often reflect on the quaint ways of humans as she sucked the marrow from their bleached bones. Another facet or her kelpie nature was that, due to her smell and color and texture and need to retreat to brackish water every so often, she couldn’t take advantage of her victims’ leavings and dress up to go into town. The estuary could be frightfully dull, after all.

Luckily, her human victims had solved the problems for her. Waterproof foundation makeup took care of the dead-green coloration Peach presented to the world when she molded herself into a humanoid shape. Designer perfume expertly masked the raw-seafood smell. Trendy shades obscured the fact that her “eyes” were dead and blank with no pupils. A fine wig was more convincing than any hair she could mold.

That, along with a canny relocation to New York City in a shipment of bog peat, meant that Peach no longer had to worry about boredom or her prey being tipped off by her kelpie nature. Devouring the occasional meal and pawning their stuff meant that all she needed to rejuvenate herself was a quick dip in a saltwater bathtub in a Manhattan apartment.

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There are some things frat boys are not meant to know.

That had always been the excuse given by the sisters of Lambda Qoppa Delta for the strict prohibition on guests, boyfriends, and photography at their annual Spring Fling. They went to an undisclosed location in the wilderness outside of town for a weekend, carrying enough supplies for a grand feast, and returned woozy on Monday.

To Wesley McCall of Phi Qoppa Beta, the isolation and supplies meant only one thing: the Lamb Qops must have been engaging in a salacious, girls-only free-for-all. As such, one year he followed them into the woods.

It was easy enough; he loaned his car to his Lamb Qop girlfriend and it had GPS tracking software installed. With a borrowed Land Rover, not to be confused with the Land Rover he had loaned out, Wes tracked her to a location deep inside Lauryn Ghantt State Forest. The dirt road was blocked off with a chain bearing a stern-looking park ranger warning; Wes cut the lock with bolt cutters and opened it himself. He hadn’t gone to all that trouble to go home without laying eyes (and camera lens) on ribald frolicking Lamb Qops.

To Wes’s surprise, after a time the dirt road turned to well-maintained asphalt, and he came across a parking lot that wouldn’t have been out of place in the suburbs, cunningly laid in and around the lofty pines so as to be all but invisible from the air. He slid his vehicle into an empty space, distinguished from the other Beemers and Land Rovers only by its lack of Lamb Qop bumper stickers. Keeping to the trees, and dressed in neutral tones, Wes continued on foot.

Streams of Lamb Qops dressed in bright colors and bearing coolers were flowing along brick-paved paths to a pine-hemmed hollow. Wes recognized the figure on a raised dais therein as Beryl Sawyer, the Lamb Qop housemother, but he did not recognize the ornate robes she wore or the midnight-black stone from which the dais had been hewn. Unlike the robes that the brothers of Phi Qoppa Beta wore during imitation (and hazing), Sawyer’s robe glistened with an unearthly sheen that gave Wes a headache.

“Sisters of Lambda Qoppa Delta!” cried Sawyer. “We have come together in the spirit of sisterhood to make our offerings in the abode of our patron. Let all among you who would call yourself Lamb Qops display your true colors proudly!”

Wes was delighted to see that the assembled girls immediately began removing their colorful sorority shirts (which formed a uniform so strict and standardized that even the Prussian Imperial Guard would have been envious). But there was something underneath – different shirts, bearing different slogans, in a script so fiendishly twisted that it blurred the edges of Wes’s vision just to behold it. And the colors! They were no hues that existed or could exist in nature, brighter and more pastel while at the same time luminous and ruinous, like holes torn in the fabric of a sane universe.

If the script made Wes’s vision blur, the colors threatened to draw the very breath from his lungs and lay him flat upon the pine needles.

“And with your true colors displayed, bring forth your offerings to our patron, the dread lord Rnyugnatlath! Can you feel it, sisters? Star-Spawn of the Infinite Void, the Creeping Conundrum, It Whom Human Tongues Fail, come forth at the call of your faithful on this spot where our offerings to you have lain since the time before time, the world before the world!”

When the first appendage of dread Rnyugnatlath emerged from the howling void on the dais, the ceremony was interrupted by the soul-shattering screams of an interloper in the woods. Wes was found a week later, raving in gibberish, his hair a white shock and his body sunburnt across his face and the palms of his hands. What little remained of his life was spent in the Granath Nulty Asylum.

There are somethings frat boys are not meant to know.

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If I had but known
The secrets of the universe
Were revealed in a beaten
Paperback book

I would have been
Less of a hardcover snob
All these weary long years
In the wilderness

If you find it yourself
You will know the sign
When the words dance
At the roar of distant water

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“It’s not just the egg salad. No, it’s everything…that goddamn egg salad is like a metaphor for our marriage, how you micromanage every little thing, beat me over the head with your daddy and your money and think that I am just going to lie there and take it. You and home and the boys at the agency, all trying to push this old man around because his best years are behind him and he’s an easy target. Well, no more. Do you hear me? No more. You see to your own egg salad, because I am through taking a back seat to you and your complaints, the boys and their schemes. I don’t care if someone dies from eating that stuff…my days of being beholden to you and your egg salad are over, do you hear me? So help me, they are over!”

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The first complaints started trickling in at around 7:00 am: soda pop machines on campus had suddenly stopped accepting cash and student meal plan dollars. This was ignored as a minor inconvenience, though university employees found it somewhat odd that their calls to the machines’ manufacturer wouldn’t go through.

By 7:30, though, the trickle had turned into a river. Students waking up for class had found that their student meal plan dollars were not accepted, and that the registers would not recognize employees’ card swipes for payment in cash. Around this time, too, the IT department started receiving sporadic complaints of a network outage–unusually, all complaints were delivered in person, as people complained that IT’s phones were not accepting incoming calls.

Around 8:15, the local cell phone network collapsed under the strain of thousands of students, staff, and professors using their data plans to try and bypass the internet and telephone outage. Local merchants facing a flood of hungry students unable to purchase food even at campus retail outlets soon found that they were suffering from the same problem: their registers would not accept most transactions and refused logins. Only the smallest mom-and-pop establishments with completely manual cash registers were able to conduct any business, and even then only in cash.

Overwhelmed, the university was forced to cancel classes. The issue clearly caught the administration flatfooted, and by the time they authorized IOUs for food students had fled campus en masse for surrounding towns and several angry groups had raided stores while university employees looked on passively.

At fault? The school’s much-vaunted digital overhaul. Everything from soda pop machines to cash registers was connected to the internet and used remote servers managed by contractors to authenticate and track purchases (even those made in cash) and logon authorized users. No provisions had been made for a campuswide network outage, because such a thing was considered an extremely remote possibility.

So when a backhoe ran over the main fiber-optic pipeline outside of town, it had the unusual effect of completely disabling a system that had wormed its way into every aspect of the university community. That incident only lasted a day, though the company responsible never faced any charges.

But others had been watching and paying close attention to the situation. Next time would be far, far worse.

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EvilCo Annual Employee Evaluation Form

Employee Name: Chris [redacted]
Job Title: Henchman 1
Reviewer: Lord Deathness, Vice-President for Henchmen and Lackeys

General Quality of Work:

Chris [redacted] has performed poorly during the survey period and has not met the standards expected of an EvilCo employee in the Henchman 1 position.

Dependability:

Mr. [redacted] has proven to be extremely unreliable. His unit of henchmen were ordered to lay down their lives to delay the Alpha Squad on no less than four separate occasions, and Chris [redacted] has always managed to return alive rather than being born gloriously anew in the EvilCo cloning tanks.

Job Knowledge:
While Chris [redacted] possesses the necessary proficiency in laser weaponry to fire madly at the dastardly Alpha Squad, he refuses to obey the marksmanship principles outlined in the handbook and actually fires his weapon aimed from the shoulder rather than the hip. I have also caught him attempting to blow up Alpha Squad jets in such a way that the pilot cannot parachute to safety, an unforgivable lapse in judgement.

Communication Skills:

Chris [redacted] is unconscionable in questioning the directives of his EvilCo betters. He routinely asserts that our Grand Leader’s plans for global domination are too convoluted to succeed, and is unusually concerned with our revenue stream and how we can afford to throw vast sums of men and treasure at the Grand Leader’s most flamboyant whims.

Achievement of Goals:

None of the goals set out for Chris [redacted] have been met this year. He has consistently failed to obey without question, lay down his life, and play by the long-established rules governing the conflict between EvilCo and Alpha Squad. I’ve even caught him making plans for new and “more successful” evil plots using nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons (or the threat thereof).

Overall:
I am forced to recommend that Chris [redacted] be removed from his Henchman 1 position as soon as is feasible. In accordance with EvilCo’s severance package, he will be given three months’ salary and his brain will be implanted in a Mecha-Horror.

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“When Vicente Mejia died, you inherited his job. You also inherited his deals.” Eldridge Hensley lit a cigarette with the stump of the old, flicking the butt into the dry bed of Sucker Creek. “We paid Mejia to let us land a few planes full of White Widow from Ontario at the airport while your outfit is tearing it down.”

Francisco Garza, supervisor for Norris Construction after the untimely death of that bastard Mejia in an automobile accident, was stone-featured. “For the same price?” he said.

Hensley laughed. “That money’s already been spent. You’re going to do it for free.”

“Considering what will happen if I get sent up the river for that,” Garza said evenly, “you’re going to have to do better than that. Mejia was an asshole and I owe you nothing.”

Hensley toyed with his cigarette. “I’m a big fish in a small pond, Garza,” he said. “I know things. I make it my business. It’s the only way to keep things smooth when some Johnny Law or John Q. Public decides to interfere with my livelihood.”

Garza was silent, expressionless.

“It might be one of my boys found some brake parts going through one of those Norris Construction bins that that two-bit county airport you’re tearing up, looking for scrap,” Hensley drawled. “How was it that Mejia died? Brake failure, wasn’t it?”

“Is that supposed to scare me?” said Garza.

“My boy was wearing gloves, too,” continued Hensley. “It’d be an awful shame if the law dusted them brake parts for prints.”

Turning away, Garza put his back to Hensley.

“Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to let my bird land until the runway’s torn up, and do a damn slow job of that, and you’re going to use your Norris Construction company car to help me move my product. And if you don’t…well, them’s the brakes.” Hensley chuckled softly at his own joke.

The small-time drug lord’s laughter stopped quickly when Garza pressed an old electric cattle prod to Hensley’s ribs and fired it. Sucker Creek was a corruption of the old French Soucher, but in this case it was awfully accurate. There was a shallow grave dug in the fields further back from the road–Garza had come too far, sacrificed too much, to let anything stand in his way.

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I wonder, sometimes, about that little disclaimer you see everywhere in ads for herbal, homeopathic, and other quack medicines: “This statement has not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”

One wonders what the FDA is for, if not to evaluate statements about how quack products can have positive effects beyond a placebo effect. After all, there’s a pretty significant harm if people buy a $20 bottle of snake oil.

But I suppose moreso than that I worry about the sort of person that buys such a product. If all it takes for us to believe that a product works is a spinning computer-animated DNA molecule in a slick TV ad, maybe the FDA doesn’t investigate those claims because there aren’t enough hours in the day.

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