15 Minutes or Les

Frantically, with sorely hitting feet, he ran forward, Aldrins Mackam that is. Terrible claws of silverfish sheen and cruel curves took further tatters from his billowing, bouncing, frayed overjacket. Cold swamp air hung sour about him. Pungently he stirred up more and more of them with his pounding steps on spoiled marshlands. Warning squelches came before a mound of flesh would press up from the thin stew of this swampbottom, rearing up the Gotmoten would pause, letting the bottom-broth run off them like ladled bath water over a senior citizens craggy back, before joining other shambling-loose monstrosities in giving chase. That’s the only time Mackam could see them. When their 7 propelling limbs were freed from entangling vines, thick-grown moss, heavy bunches of dead leaves, decayed animal chunks, logs, and other assorted mire-trapped camouflage they took to the scraggily twisted-limbed trees of the unnamed daylit swamp in which Mackam ran. Small waving could be heard of the branches bouncing in the air after they’d been used as springboards. In the full light, Mackam was nearly snatched again. Instead the hungry hook which carved across his stomach pulled him sideways, causing him to fall. Then they were upon him. In the pale spring light that shafted through white fog Mackam saw a Gomo ontop of him. Its’ face-skin split back with a wretched rough tearing sound to let lines of muscle-fiber come forward. As they gathered in a querulous feeding mass, the Gotmoten sprayed Mackam’s body, dissolving it. Eyes, skin, muscle, ligaments, fat, cartilidge, organs, and bone crackled with violent chemical reactions, liquefying, disturbing the bacterial solution of once-water they ran into. Through pores in their skin the Gotmoten soaked up nutrients to be digested. Before, they were used in the body of a man named Mackam.

Done eating, they return to different lurker hideaways to sleep and wait. Before there had been hundreds of them. With food so scarce, they’d fallen to less than 20 and were continuing to die out. A compassionate human could hope a hunting party’s sent for Mackam so these endangered monsters don’t die out.