Julie and the Lizards


Somewhere in the New Mexico desert...


"We're fucked."

"Yeah, I imagine we are."

"You don't think maybe you miscounted?"

"I can count to three."

"Maybe it was hiding?"

"Hiding?"

"God damn it, do you know how fucking fucked we fucking are?"

Mario nodded, but Henry didn't think he knew. Mario wasn't there when they tested the prowess of the lizards by sending a young woman into the feeding area, with eighteen of the fuckers. If they didn't find this lizard and contain it, it would only be a matter of time before both them and their families met a similar fate.

The thing had fed just yesterday, so it would lay its eggs within twenty-four to forty-eight hours. That was how long they had to contain the situation. If it laid eggs inside their facility, the offspring would devour them as slowly and methodically as their kin had the young woman. If it escaped their facility and laid eggs in the wild, it would only be a short while until news of the horrific deaths they inflicted spread, and then Mario and Henry would be liabilities. GCM didn't tolerate liabilities.

And it would lay eggs, of that there could be no doubt. The things were asexual, only needing to feed to reproduce, and they were designed to multiply rapidly.





The alarm sounded and the old man rose like clockwork. It was 6:00 AM, and soon his incredibly stunning fifteen-year-old neighbor would begin her morning run. He already had morning wood, something he had rarely experienced in the twilight of his life, at least until his recent discovery of his neighbor's exercise routine. Now, just the anticipation was enough to get him hard. He went to his window and waited, binoculars at the ready.

It was around 6:12 that the goddess appeared, her soft brown hair pulled back in a pony tail that bounced when she moved, her firm round buttocks scarcely contained by her dark blue volleyball shorts. Her budding and perky breasts were bare, as usual, and her brilliant young face was alight with the sanguinity and vivaciousness of youth. Her belly was smooth and flat, but still soft, which was probably one of her reasons for this early morning routine, although Bill liked the softness to it. Her most radiant feature of all, her playful and mischievous blue eyes, looked across the street and seemed to bore a hole right through him. For a moment he forgot to breathe, but then she looked away and Bill felt his heartbeat even out.

The girl's pale skin appeared to glow with a life of its own in the early morning light, and she began to stretch, contorting her spectacular body in ways that drove Bill mad with lust. He watched until she laid tracks out into the desert and eventually disappeared amidst the dunes and the cacti and the mesquite. Then he returned to bed and began to masturbate.





It was a beautiful June morning, the sun rising early and turning the eastern sky into a masterpiece. The air was temperate and moist with dew, and Julie loved the way it felt against her skin. It was one of the reasons she ran topless, although had she known about her pervy old neighbor she might have reconsidered her lack of attire.

As it was, she had no idea the seventy-three-year-old man who lived across the road was spying on her, nor did she know what awaited her in the desert, so she woke, put on her shorts and high tops, and looked disapprovingly at her soft, flabby belly. "Stupid baby fat," she muttered. She was no longer chubby, but when she outgrew that affliction another had taken its place - she was beautiful.

Beauty was a thing most girls coveted, but Julie often found it less than desirable. All anybody seemed to care about was her appearance. It was as if she no longer held any actual value, aside from being eye candy. Granted nobody bullied her anymore, but everyone's eyes were constantly on her, sizing her up, judging her, undressing her. Not to mention all the awkward advances and unwanted groping she had to endure.

Yet she rose at dawn to run, to eliminate that pesky belly fat that bulged over her waist line when she buttoned up her Levi's, and despite the frown she wore as she criticized her reflection in the mirror, Julie was happy to be alive. In spite of all her problems, life was good and full of promise.

She walked outside and inhaled deeply of the fresh desert air, expanding her modest but shapely bosom, then put her hands on the small of her back and stretched, unwittingly putting on a show for her horny neighbor. Once she felt fully limbered up, she took off.

The first few steps were always the toughest, but she quickly fell into a rhythm and running felt less like work and instead became strangely therapeutic. The air on her face and against her bare, gently bouncing breasts was refreshing, and her mind was free of any of the burdens of the social hierarchy or academic pressures that school imposed. She was free to day dream about the more pleasant aspects of life, such as the prospect of playing varsity basketball in her upcoming sophomore year. It was very plausible. She had been working hard on her handles, running drills up and down her driveway, and going to the park to practice free throws and join in pick up games every chance she got.

And so she ran, her mind ambling from one pleasantry to the next, until twenty minutes into her run and a little over two miles into the desert, Julie encountered her first genetically engineered lizard. The thing was little more than five inches long, with a short stubby tail and an oversized head, and it scurried up her leg with surprising quickness. She had barely enough time to register its presence before it sunk its long, hook-like claws into her soft tummy and took a bite out of her. A quiet little shriek escaped her lips and she grabbed the thing and ripped it off her. The long hooking claws ripped her skin, and a tiny strip of raw meat lay bare to the left of her navel where it bit her, blood trickling down.

"Jesus fucking Christ," she whispered as she flung the horrid creature back into the desert. She was wondering what kind of shots she was going to need now to guard against disease when another of the fuckers scurried up her leg, and another. She managed to pluck one up before it took hold in her, and she squeezed it between her fingers, meaning to kill the thing. It was like squeezing a scaly coin purse, and as far as Julie could tell the little monster was unhurt. She dropped it when its cohort took another bite out of her belly, drawing a pained squawk from her. Looking down she was alarmed to see there were now three of them clinging to her midriff, chomping away, and two more were climbing her legs to join them. The ground seemed to have come alive, as at least a dozen more swarmed to her.

She noted that they ran on their hind legs, almost like miniature dinosaurs, but God they were so fast. She sprinted at top speed while plucking another of the bastards off her belly and tossing it mindlessly aside, but the fucking things were faster than she was. There were now four of them on her midsection, ripping her to shreds, and in no time three more were scurrying up her thighs to join the fray. She kicked at one of them and saw it tumble into a cactus before picking itself up to rejoin the chase as if nothing had happened. She stomped on another and it didn't even seem to notice. Meanwhile there were several tiny chunks of meat being torn from her tummy, and a steady flow of blood was beginning to spring from the wounds.

It began to sink in that she would not be able to outrun them, and fighting them off was almost equally unlikely, so she would need to get help. The problem with that was she was more than two miles from home and any semblance of civilization. "I'm going to die," she muttered to herself, but the thought was too horrific to entertain, so she stopped running and turned around. The lizards were all congregating on her abdomen, as if they understood Julie wanted to be thinner and they were here to accommodate that wish. She counted at least twelve of them on her belly, and she began peeling them off as quickly as she could. It seemed as soon as she removed one another took its place, but she plucked them off just the same, and she began to run again, this time back in the direction from whence she came.

It was much more difficult to run with her stomach being savaged by over a dozen miniature monsters, but Julie was nothing if not tenacious. Gritting her teeth, she managed to continue at a decent clip for nearly five minutes, but when she pulled away a lizard and a rope of slippery pink guts came with it, she stumbled. She caught her balance at the last second, avoiding a complete spill, and when she straightened out she now had a loop of intestines dangling between her knees, with a lizard swinging from the end like Tarzan.

Unwilling to forfeit any part of her innards, figuring they would be necessary to keep her alive, Julie entered a bizarre sort of tug-o-war. With one hand gripping her slippery guts, she grabbed Tarzan with her other hand and began to pull. When she finally succeeded in separating the lizard from her digestive tract, the exposed bowels had attracted two newcomers. As they pulled her viscera in two new directions, several more mouths latched on, and Julie could see it was a lost cause.

Instead of fighting for her dwindling entrails, she went back to just picking as many of the beasts off her stomach as she could. Her thighs were painted red with gore, and her shoes were spattered with blood. The sheer agony of having her belly slowly devoured by so many tiny mouths was more than she could bear, but she couldn't stop. If she stopped she was finished. Her gait had slowed to little more than a stagger, but she pressed forward.

With each pained step, a lizard was culled from her abdomen and another took its place, and her hopelessness grew. She wondered how much farther it was to her home and the main road, and if she could make it that far. She wondered if these things would have their fill of her and leave her before they had done irreparable damage. As the next few harrowing minutes passed, she increasingly thought the answer to these questions was 'no'. Each yard felt like a mile, and she wasn't sure how much distance she had covered, or how much time had passed, before another of the things breached her abdominal wall, but she was sure it was not nearly as long or as far as it seemed.

The creature had burrowed particularly deep in her, only its bottom half visible, protruding obscenely from her tummy, so Julie grabbed it by its tail and pulled. It was a horribly unpleasant feeling as her small intestines shifted and uncoiled as another glistening rope was pulled free into the sunlight, trailing from the jaws of this vile creature coated with her blood. This time she decided not to bother fighting for her spilled guts and just released the lizard, letting it dangle amidst its still famished brethren. She watched with a rather peculiar detachment as the loop of viscera was slowly ingested, and continued to pick the lizards who were more interested in her flesh off, one by one, and continued to take her lumbering steps forward.

A quick glance at the horizon revealed that her home and the highway were still nowhere in sight, and she was likely more than a mile from any hope of a reprieve. "Please stop," she whimpered to the lizards gorging themselves on her midriff, as if these beasts could care or understand her wish to live. She noted that one of the things had opted for the tougher, yet previously untouched meat of her right thigh, and another had made its way to the fatty meat of her left buttock, but the rest seemed content with continuing to battle for her tender belly. "Oh God, I don't want to die," she murmured forlornly.

Her will to live drove her forward, even though she understood now that nothing short of a miracle would save her. Her hands continued to pluck away the lizards, whose resolve had not slowed. Not one of them had given up on the feast. Nearly ten minutes and two hundred yards later Julie's entrails were spilled in earnest, a veritable smorgasbord of tasty pink sausage links bursting free, slopping against Julie's blood-soaked thighs. She sighed quietly and sunk to her knees, as the strength went out of her.

"No," she whispered, realizing that this was it. She was lost. The damnable lizards went to work gobbling up their prize with unrelenting eagerness, and Julie's soft plump buttocks came to rest in the dirt. Crushing grief and despair came with the knowledge that she would never stand again, and there was nothing left for her to do but sit and watch these things eat.

It occurred to her that someone could drive down this deserted and abandoned dirt road, at this exact moment, and that person might somehow be able to fight these things off and rush Julie to a hospital, and that thought helped her keep her sanity as she saw her innards ripped apart, but when a pair of these horrid creatures pulled something plump and shiny from deep within her tummy, even that crazy idea no longer held water. Her stomach, a most decidedly vital organ, was torn to pieces and consumed by half a dozen lizards, right before her eyes. The process took more than a couple minutes to unfold, but Julie watched it all in unmitigated horror.

Next came her liver and what might have been one of her kidneys, cleaved from their rightful places inside her abdominal cavity and drug through the mess of savaged intestines still strewn about her lap. Julie dug her fingers into the ground, gripped the dirt tightly, gnashed her teeth together, and bore it as best she could. After a few more minutes of this hell, she lost the strength to remain upright and her shoulders slowly lowered to the ground. Her legs remained bent at the knees, her heels beneath her butt cheeks, stretching what remained of her belly taught, and providing her killers a clear, unobstructed path to their meal.

Julie stared up at the morning sky, amazed at the beauty and the blueness of it. It was a tranquil morning, a truly lovely morning, and a wonderful time to be alive, which made it all the more horrible to be dying. As she lay on her back, contemplating the vastness of eternity and the finality of death, she heard the hum of an approaching car engine, and somehow found the strength to lift her head enough to see her neighbor's truck rumbling towards her down the deserted road. It was the ultimate insult. A miraculous rescue when it was too late for a rescue.

The stupid old man clamored out of his truck and gawked at her. "What are these things?" he asked, although it was unclear if he was asking her or himself. Julie was unable to answer, either way. She simply tilted her head to look at him, and felt a great deal of hate and envy that this stupid man had lived to the age that he had, while she was lying there dying at the age of fifteen. There was no justice in the world.

The man apparently had no interest in rescuing her anyway, as he only stood and watched as she slowly died. She felt the awful pain begin to subside, and her sight began to fail. No! No, not yet! I'm not ready! She understood she would never be ready, but it didn't matter. She died there, alone in the desert, her short fifteen years of life amounting to nothing more in the end than sustenance for a bunch of freakish lizards.