It took me a moment to realize what I was seeing. Dead ahead, in the remnants of an intersection where two buildings had collapsed into a heap, there was a vaguely round hole, the size of one of those old VW buses, burrowed into the wreckage.
It wasn't the hole that had caught Doc's attention, but the wasted landscape around it. Rock, concrete and steel was scorched and melted, and everywhere in the blackened landscape, there were hissing puddles of greenish goo. Before I could even open my mouth to recommend a quick withdrawal, there was the sound of grinding movement, and deep within the burrow, something stirred.
The monster emerged from the hole segment by segment, one chitinous section after the next, with a dozen legs each. The first part had two long barbed feelers that tapped at the ground and rocks as it emerged. There were no other features that might identify eyes or mouth, which was somehow more horrifying than massive pincers and glowing multi-faceted eyes would have been. At least, that's what I thought in that moment.
Then the far end emerged and whipped around, and our perceptions realigned; The monstrous centipede had exited its burrow backward, but now the business end was pointed at us, and the rear end no longer seemed quite so creepy as it had. Foremost were a pair of massive, articulated pincers, with thousands of waving, foot-long tendrils covering them. Behind them, we could barely make out a hexagon of smaller mandibles surrounding its mouth, each one literally dripping with venom. Topping the thorny shelled head were a pair of long antennae at least seven feet long, constantly twitching and tapping the landscape around it. Between the antennae and the pincers, where eyes might be on another creature, there was a single, blunt spur, no more than a hand in length.
We stared at the creature in fascinated terror for a moment, reflecting that this really was no longer the world of men.
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