Chapter 36: S#6. Jungle Soma (5)
by fnovelpia
Bob Bojangles stuck his nose into a maggot stew.
He hastily dragged it away from the dining table.
Beyond the dense greenery, figures began to crawl out.
It was a swarm of maggots.
The village was supposed to be a sanctuary that they wouldn’t invade.
The line separating human territory had collapsed pathetically.
Seeing the fat, giant maggots crawling toward the village, my mind went blank.
“Officer Adolf, shoot!”
“There are no bullets!”
We had used them all up in the forest.
Adolf grabbed Bob’s shoulder and shook him.
“Where’s your gun?”
“Burrrrp…”
Bob burped. His flabby belly shook.
His holster was empty. Had he lost his gun again?
The maggots squirmed closer, converging in the middle of the village.
Hundreds were filling the meadow at a glance.
There was no time to just stand there.
“Lily, where’s Nancy?!”
Lily silently pointed to a cabin with its door open.
That’s… Lily’s house. Why is Nancy there?
But I didn’t think long.
Being maggot food out here was not an option.
I grabbed the two officers and Lily and ran to the cabin.
We slammed the door shut and locked it.
Outside, the revolting squirming sound of maggots echoed like an echo.
It was the perfect background music for the gloomy, dark atmosphere inside the house.
Dark shadows lay on the long hallway floor, and the walls were covered with photos.
The subject of the photos was Lily’s younger brother.
A black and white photo. A vivid black and white photo. A color photo. A Polaroid photo.
The boy in the photos stood the same over the years.
From 40 years ago until now – he hadn’t aged or grown at all.
While I was staring at these strange photos, I heard Nancy’s voice.
“Sum…mer…”
At the end of the hallway, in the kitchen.
Lily and Nancy were sitting at the dining table.
Between the two women stood Lily’s younger brother.
His posture was unnatural for a child, more like a villain.
“…It’s time to offer the sacrifice.”
Lily then sprayed something.
It was a concentrated liquid of maggot slime.
Upon contact, our muscles were paralyzed instantly.
Bob, Adolf, and I froze in place.
I realized too late.
That this cabin was, in fact, a wooden puppet of folk horror.
“Lily, you tricked me… That’s not your brother.”
“That’s right. I don’t have a brother.”
Lily smiled slyly.
The sinister young boy approached.
He was a malevolent deity.
“Summer. We don’t worship. We just comply.”
“…”
“To live quietly in this small forest village, we offer the seven deadly sins to the deity. And today, you are the sacrifice.”
The offerings were the Seven Deadly Sins:
Pride.
Greed.
Envy.
Wrath.
Lust.
Gluttony.
Sloth.
I reflected on the sins we had committed.
Adolf Wernitz – Aspired to be the second Goebbels, greed.
Bob Bojangles – No explanation needed, gluttony.
Olivia – Stuck in the village doing nothing, sloth.
Adolf was infuriated.
“Greed! I just wanted the revival and prosperity of the Third Reich!!!”
But what about Nancy and me?
“Summer is pride. Nancy is lust.”
Lily said.
Pride –
I had overestimated my strength.
I thought I could easily escape the forest, seeing the maggots as nothing.
Despite knowing their numbers and the existence of a god, I had not been cautious.
It was my pride.
And Nancy’s sin was lust.
Nancy, a pure and delicate maiden?
I looked towards Nancy in the kitchen. She blushed as if she felt guilty.
Still, there was one more thing I didn’t understand.
“Where are wrath and envy?”
“Hehe, they’ll appear soon.”
Lily stroked the head of the small malevolent deity.
The deity extended a long tongue from its mouth, licking Lily’s body as if it were candy.
-A black and white photo.
-A black and white photo.
-A vivid black and white photo.
-A color photo.
-A Polaroid photo.
Lily smirked lasciviously.
“Summer. We just followed providence. You awoke your own sins.”
“Cut the crap. You said you wouldn’t make sacrifices, right?”
“We didn’t make the sacrifice ourselves. You walked into this cabin on your own. The deity will suck your brains dry. That’s how it absorbs sin.”
“Crazy b*tch, where’s the sense in that…!!”
Through the window, I could see a swarm of maggots.
They had encircled the cabin like zealots bowing before an idol.
The swarm suddenly opened their mouths and spewed out something.
It was the villagers.
I thought they had died gloriously in the forest, but here they were, alive from the belly of the maggots.
It reminded me of an episode from the Old Testament.
Jonah, trapped in the belly of a whale, prayed for three days and escaped…
The villagers made a deep, eerie sound as they danced a strange dance.
From the moment they set foot in the village until now.
Everything they had shown was deception.
From the beginning, we were meant to be sacrifices.
I felt a dull thud at the back of my head.
Ignoring warnings and facing a terrible end is a typical cliché of folk horror.
I had momentarily forgotten that this was a world soaked in horror movie clichés.
I was furious.
At my foolish and arrogant self.
And at this godforsaken village.
So angry I couldn’t contain it.
I tried to move, summoning all my strength, but my body wouldn’t respond.
It was the paralysis poison.
I gritted my teeth. Lily clapped her hands in delight.
“You’ve conceived wrath, Summer! Wonderful!!”
Was my sin now pride + wrath?
The little deity then salivated, and spit thick saliva onto Lily’s palm.
Lily inhaled the scent of the spit as if it were divine.
It was a cringe-worthy sight.
“What are you doing?”
“Now it’s the whore’s turn to conceive jealousy following lust.”
“Jealousy…?”
Lily slid closer.
She thrust her palm under my nose, forcing me to smell the saliva.
But it wasn’t a repulsive smell.
It was an indescribably strange scent.
“This is an aphrodisiac.”
An aphrodisiac? What was she plotting?
Lily flung off her white clothes.
Her slick, naked body was revealed.
Even in the terrifying situation of being sacrificed to the deity, my face flushed.
It was my first time seeing a woman’s naked body.
Her breasts were subtle.
Her waist, hips, and legs beautifully outlined.
Lily unbuttoned my shirt.
Then, tracing the muscles with her fingertips, she applied the deity’s saliva.
It felt as hot as a plaster.
Lily’s seductive touch slowly moved downward.
“I expected as much, but you really do have a magnificent body, Summer. I wouldn’t mind carrying such superior seed.”
Lily’s breath was heavy.
The beast-like erotic scene just before the climax is a long-standing tradition in folk horror.
The effect of the aphrodisiac was starting to kick in.
Like coals in a furnace, my body heated up.
I exerted tremendous self-control.
Ignoring Lily’s sticky caresses that now invaded my lower regions, I internally sang the national anthem and bit my lower lip.
However, I couldn’t stop the moans and drool seeping through my teeth.
“Su, Summer…!!!!”
Nancy cried out desperately.
She struggled, but the little deity pinned her shoulders, immobilizing her.
No one could help her.
Adolf and Bob were paralyzed like me, and Olivia sitting beside me yawned as if bored.
Suddenly, Lily, who had closed the distance, gently wrapped her arms around my neck.
“Nancy Strode is starting to conceive jealousy.”
“Urgh…!!!”
“Summer, you seem to be struggling too. Can’t hold on any longer, can you? Please sow your seed in me.”
Just as Lily’s lips were about to meet mine.
“Wait!!!!!!!”
The deity shouted.
Its mouth, which had been licking its lips all along, twisted hideously.
“Stop the ceremony!”
As if it had seen something unbearable, the evil deity closed its eyes.
Lily was flustered.
“Why…?”
“Lily, what is this!!”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“What this woman has conceived is not pure jealousy! This is…!! Urgh bluh…!!!!!!”
The deity gagged.
Nancy was panting with excited breaths.
Her expression was two-thirds frustration and one-third something eerie…
I don’t understand why she was jealous of Lily teasing me in the first place, but I’m even more clueless about the reason for such a reaction…
The deity was throwing a fit.
“What kind of woman did you bring here?!”
The deity’s voice boomed inside the cabin.
Windows shattered. Picture frames in the hallway broke too.
“This junk food is not fit to be a sacrifice!”
The deity’s small body twisted.
Like dough rising in an oven, its skin swelled.
Eventually, the deity shed its human form and turned into a monster.
It had a body covered with six legs and a black shell, resembling a giant fly.
It was massive enough to reach the ceiling—a visual straight out of <The Fly.>
It had no wings, but it was hideously grotesque.
It looked like what a giant maggot might turn into after metamorphosis.
“You filthy creatures! Die!!”
The fly-transformed deity advanced.
At that critical moment, Bob Bojangles moved.
Thanks to his accumulated fat, the paralysis poison hadn’t fully spread through his body.
Bob pulled a pistol not from a holster, but from between his ample belly folds.
He pulled the trigger. A gunshot rang out.
The bullet hit the giant fly right in the eye.
“Aaarghh!”
“I haven’t forgotten the duty of a police officer,” Bob said solemnly as he pulled the trigger.
While the first bullet hit its mark, the rest missed, but it was enough to stagger the fly deity.
I seized the moment to move.
The paralysis that had controlled my body was gone.
“Mere mortals…!!!!!!!!”
The fly swung its scythe-like legs.
I slid, dodging the attack.
As I got up, I threw an axe.
Whoosh— the blade cleanly severed one of the fly’s legs.
Taking advantage of the fly deity’s screams of pain, I helped Nancy up.
The fly swung its legs again.
This time, the attack wasn’t aimed at us but at Lily.
A long, thick fly leg struck Lily.
Her upper body was ripped off completely.
Blood and bone fragments scattered.
“My children…!! Kill these filthy humans!!!!”
The fly deity ate the pieces of Lily’s intestines that hung from its leg as it commanded.
Angry maggots burst through the cabin walls.
There was no time left.
We had to escape this madness.
As Adolf, Bob, Nancy, and I were about to flee the cabin, I saw Olivia still sitting idly by.
Too lazy even to run away, despite her life being at stake.
Nancy spoke urgently.
“Olivia, you…!”
“Nancy. I came here a year ago because I wanted to die.”
“……”
“It was a suicide trip. Life was too bothersome.”
“Olivia…”
Nancy said distantly.
“……But why are you still alive? Just die already.”
The kitchen wall crumbled like cardboard.
A maggot emerged through the rising smoke, stretching out its tongue.
The maggot’s tongue snagged Olivia’s leg.
Olivia’s expression suddenly changed.
“Wait… wait…!! I’ve changed my mind…!!”
Olivia was sucked into the maggot’s black hole-like mouth.
“I want to live…! I want to live!!!!”
She struggled pathetically at the last moment.
But she was ultimately swallowed by the maggot.
The fly deity picked up the maggot, put it in its mouth, and crunched it down.
We escaped the cabin.
The fly deity stretched its legs several times trying to catch us, but I kept it at bay with my axe swings.
Although the maggots and villagers were tangled thickly, there was a gap to escape through.
We ran wildly to escape the madness.
When we regained our senses, we were deep in the forest.
The village, now engulfed in bright flames, looked far away.
The villagers and the swarm of maggots around the fly deity seemed like small demons dancing a wicked dance around hellfire.
“The smell of meat burning…”
Bob smacked his lips.
With the swarm in the village, there was no encirclement in the forest.
However, we couldn’t relax yet.
The fly deity was chasing us furiously with the swarm of maggots.
We just ran without looking back.
The maggots sticking close behind reeked of decay.
As we ran, the boundary between the bushes and the path became clearer, and a forest trail emerged.
The pursuing swarm of maggots gradually blurred.
By the time we finally escaped the forest, they had completely disappeared, like a nightmare melting away at the bedside.
We wiped our sweat and gasped for air.
“We made it.”
A wave of relief washed over us.
Nancy hugged me tightly. Bob cheered. Adolf gave a Nazi salute.
But our joy was short-lived.
Something suddenly burst out from the bushes.
It was a long tongue.
It wrapped around Adolf’s waist and yanked him back at incredible speed.
“Aaagh!!!!!”
Just like that, Adolf disappeared into the bushes.
It happened so fast, we couldn’t react.
“…….”
The three of us just stared blankly at the bushes where Adolf had vanished.
No one spoke first.
After a while, as if by unspoken agreement, we cautiously headed to the police car in silence.
“…I’m starving, let’s go get some dinner.”
Bob said as he started the engine in the driver’s seat.
The police car drove off.
The road was peaceful.
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