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Behemoth
Chapter 1
The Girl Scout camp was full of laughter and voices in the late afternoon. The thick California pine forest could not muffle the excitement, nor could it shade all of the early Fall sunshine streaming between dusty shadows of the tall trees. The girls and their leaders were preparing for dinner and camp fires began sending up streams of smoke, the aroma heralding delicious outdoor cooking to come.
One fair haired girl still on the outskirts of camp and oblivious to the call for suppertime was crouched down in the thick leafy forest floor looking at pine cones, when she noticed the shadows of the trees swaying in the evening breeze. Something was different. Then she singled it out: one long vertical shadow was not like the others of the trees, it was devoid of branches, a slender stalk with a bulb shape at the top. And it was swaying far more than from just the wind. She turned around. And froze in mortal terror.
Looming stories above her, taller than the pines was a vast gaping mouth, a snails mouth, but not a snail's size, a cavern full of rows of stalagmites and stalactites of teeth, and above the mouth, two antennae, scanning in opposite directions, that is until the girl finally screamed.
The mighty head lowered upon the child as she ran, she could smell it now, untold oceans of slimy secretions eager to digest. She could hear the thunderous cracks of timber as hundreds year old trees were crushed in an instant under the tons of slug, then were muffled as the creature's swath covered everything.
She could see the camp now, and everyone in it. They now saw the behemoth, and began screaming, while others stood still, killed in the mind before the body. The little girl recognized the camp as doomed and following instinct ran to the left. She found some car sized boulders and lodged herself in between them, watching in fright as the monster oozed towards the camp.
When it began eating the first victims she shut her eyes.
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