A Succubus for Remembrance Excerpts - Hugh the Hero

The holiday back home with the folks has been unsurprisingly chaotic.  I'm still endeavouring to get A Succubus for Remembrance ready for an early November release, although this might slip - I'd rather put out a good book two weeks late than an on-time book filled with embarrassing errors.  In the meantime here's an excerpt from one of the new stories, "Hugh the Hero."  This is the parallel-quel story to "Trent the Traitor."  You'll recognise the opening scene in the excerpt, although this time it's from Hugh's perspective.

* * * *

They paused outside a large ornate door.  Hugh saw a face he recognized walking in the opposite direction with an accompaniment of succubus guards.  One of the lower-ranked infantry grunts.  He’d seen him a few times in the main mess tent at Helmuth.  Weaselly-looking dude.

“Hang in there,” he bellowed.  “Don’t let them break you.  The marines will come.  They’ll bust us all out of this hellhole.”

Hugh truly believed that.  He believed in supreme American military might.  The unusual H-space physics and unorthodox hindig tactics had caught them off guard, but they would find a way to adapt and then they’d flatten this little shitball just as easily as they’d steamrollered over Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and all the other fucktards.

 “Pray to Jesus!” he shouted.  “Keep your faith in...”

Hugh’s words tailed off.  Why wasn’t this guy in chains?  Why did he look more like a VIP with an escort detail than a prisoner with guards?

An awful thought germinated in Hugh’s mind.  The attack on Helmuth had been too easy.  Even with their unorthodox tactics the devils should not have been able to penetrate their outer defenses and surprise them like that.

Unless they’d had inside help.

“You sold us out.”

Rage exploded within Hugh.  This asshole hadn’t just sold out his side, he’d sold out his country, his species, his world, God.  For what, a piece of demonic tail?

“You motherfucker.  You sold us out.  That’s how they got in so easily.  You sold us out for a piece of ass.  You traitorous fuck.  I’ll tear your fucking lungs out.”

Thoughts of waiting patiently for the right opportunity were incinerated in the incandescent blaze of Hugh’s righteous rage.  Right then, at that moment, he cared about nothing other than putting his hands around that fucker’s scrawny throat and squeezing until the asshole’s eyes popped out.

The bubblegum-skinned demon girls giggled and opened the big ornate door.

Hugh tensed his muscular frame to pounce and...

...was suddenly travelling backwards in the opposite direction.  He felt a constriction around his waist and looked down to see pink tentacle as thick as his thigh wrapped around his midriff.  It was fantastically strong.  Hugh was lifted up off the floor and dragged through the open door and down into darkness.  One of the succubi gave him a little wave as she closed the heavy door behind him.

Hugh’s struggling form was dumped onto a floor that was underneath an inch of what he initially thought was water.  The substance was wet, but as he moved his hands through it he realized it was too viscous to be water.  It felt more like warm slime.  The floor didn’t feel much like a floor either.  It yielded beneath his weight and felt more like a trampoline, or the surface to a waterbed.

Unsteadily he got back to his feet, wobbling on the yielding and slippery floor.  Initially the room seemed to be in darkness, but as his eyes accustomed he saw the slime beneath him was mildly phosphorescent.  It wasn’t as bright as the corridor outside, but his eyes were able to adjust and see—

Oh Mary-fucking-mother of God.

Most of the hindigs looked like the typical devil girls of computer games.  Some were weirder—he’d heard of floating jellyfish girls; strange plant hybrids; girls that were half spider; and he’d glimpsed the giant fog puffers that had overwhelmed FOB Helmuth.  The hindig before him was half octopus or squid.  From the waist up she had the voluptuous body of a porn queen.  There was a regal cast to her face as well.  Hugh might have thought it beautiful if it wasn’t for the unnatural bubble-gum hue to her skin, or her yellow eyes.  She didn’t have hair either.  At first he’d thought it contained within a pink sack hanging behind her head.  Then he realized that sack was part of her body.  He watched it swell up and down as if it was breathing.

That part, her upper half, Hugh could just about deal with.  It was her lower half that nearly tore his mind asunder.  His disintegrating sanity tried to tell him it was a ball gown—a giant, elaborate, puffed up ballroom dress, like a princess might wear in a Disney cartoon.  One that was so huge she needed to stand on stilts to wear it.

He wasn’t yet insane enough to be fooled.  It was a ring of pink tentacles, each as thick as his thigh.  They bulged out of her waist and curled down to the ground.  Hugh saw it clearly even though he knew it should not be.

“Welcome,” the demon said in a surprisingly melodious voice.  “I am Enteroctia.”

* * * *

And that's a little more of Hugh's eventual fate revealed.  For the rest you'll have to wait until the new collection comes out next month.

There is also a line in this story that should hit like a slap in the face.  Don't worry, I love you all really... ;)