Mike stared. And stared. And stared.

It was a nice place. Under a little tree that will grow someday to big and strong, just like his little girl wouldn't. The organic perfection of smiles and pale squishy cheeks and chubby hands that was his Stacey had been reduced to a simple granite slab with crudely carved letters and numbers.

He dropped a tiny bundle of yellow flowers onto the dirt that was still fresh. Yellow was- had been?- her favorite color.

“It was-” started Lana.

“I don't care,” Mike cut her off. He resisted the lump in his throat, “All I care is that she's gone.” Lana touched a hand to his shoulder in console but he jolted his arm away as if she had struck him with lightning. “Why didn't you tell me?!” he shrieked, staring at her with big pale watery eyes as rivers cut trenches down his cheeks.

Lana couldn't even look at him, and downward was her daughter's grave so she turned her eyes to the sapling instead, “It was so fast. The funeral was three days after she was killed. I had to do all the arrangements myself. Stand there thanking people for giving a damn about my dead child. I almost joined you in Wentworth.” Lana clutched her green leather handbag so tightly that her knuckles bleached white, “I might still go.”

“You should have told me.” His words were tight and rightfully bitter. He pulled his eyes away from the grave marker and meant to glower at her, but something glittering beyond her head caught his attention. It was eyes.

Three small eyes bordered by two larger bulging eyes.

All five staring directly toward Mike from over Lana's shoulder, and were attached to what must have been a face, but with no available nose. It's mouth was entirely indiscernible until it opened impossibly wide and came down to encapsulate Lana's head, like a broken helium balloon, and jaggedly ripped through her body just above the knees. It's mouth dripped an acid green saliva as it swallowed Lana's upper half without chewing. It didn't seem to have any teeth, just a tight clasp and pull. The legs that remained from the ripped body collapsed, innards of bloody red goo splashing and splutting to the ground.

This all happened fairly quickly and so Mike wasn't able to move much, beyond reflexively squishing his eyes closed to avoid his ex-girlfriend's blood spatter. When he regained some sense of lively momentum, Mike didn't scream but instead let out a small pitiful howling type noise of terror. He turned to run the fuck away, but hit a rock with his foot almost immediately and face-planted into the ground.

“Oh shit, my toe,” he mumbled into a clump of dirt and leaves, feeling the burgeoning swell in his large toe, and the silliness of being upset about breaking a toe when his life was in peril.

His mumble was answered with a pitched “Skreeee!” and Mike looked back, wiping dirt-encrusted palms onto his shirt.

The new monster, the one that ate the top half of Lana, had familiar spine-like needles sticking out of the side of it's face.

Meredith had slithered between that Eyeball creature and Mike, which was a surprise. Mike wondered half the time if Meredith could even see him. She was around often enough, but never gave him much of a bother except the occasional side-eye and, even then, he wasn't too certain if she was looking at him or if it just seemed like it. This was the first time that Meredith had acknowledged something like his existence, let alone actively interacted or protected him. Or, maybe she was hungry and this bulge-eyed creature looked a delicacy. Either way, he was thankful.

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The eyeball creature opened its mouth, no real trace that Lana had been in there and quite surprisingly clean for what one might expect of a toothless monster mouth, until it projectile vomited thick strings of glowing green gunk.

Meredith dodged, slithering to one side and the green gunk splatted the ground then disintegrated, leaving singed black char and thin wisps of coal smoke.

Spine needles ejected from Meredith's back, but Mike didn't watch where they went. Instead, he noted the purple spatters and blots on Meredith, which he assumed as blood, and wondered if it hurt her to eject the spine needles. He felt a surprising pang of concern for the creature, until he shook his head and saw the purple dripping from the embedded spine needles on Eyeballs, who was preparing to vomit-attack again.

“Move!” came a harsh shout to Mike's immediate left. A force made contact with his side, propelling him to his face again, in a cloud of dust, as a stream of neon vomit squirted the ground where he had been.

Mike screamed a swear as he felt a sting in three of the fingers on his right hand. Not from pain, but frustration. For the day that was supposed to be the best day ever, it certainly wasn't living up to expectations.

“Stay down,” demanded the force that pushed him aside. And Mike looked up expecting some sort of whip-toting fedora man, or a super buff guy with terrible hair and a chiseled jaw, but instead was stylishly offended by blue plaid and strappy brown dad sandals. With socks.

Mike barely caught the name “JULIAN” printed in black letters on a bright yellow Big Box nametag. Julian's face was more rounded than chiseled and while there was some muscle in his arms, Julian's tummy overhung his belt just enough to know that it did. On the upside, Julian's hair was pretty damn amazing.

Mike's eyes were drawn to Julian's hands, holding what could probably only be described as the largest pizza cutter in the world. The handle was a mix of neon orange and pink, probably rubber, and the blade was circular, jagged and just barely smaller than the circumference of a car tire.

Without another word, or being sure that the sizzling noise where the vomit hit came from the ground instead of bits of Mike's body, Julian took steps forward and slashed at Eyeballs' body. The creature's five bulging eyes began to leak with a purple fluid and exploded with a splash, as it let out a gurgling skreee. Julian sliced it open like a tasty panzerotti and that was the end of it.

Meredith was gone, somewhere dark and misty to tend to her wounds and regrow the disaffected spine needles. Eyeballs' corpse dissolved with a cold fizzle, leaving a greyish foam circle on the ground.

Words swirled around in Mike's brain, words that probably meant to be questions but before they were able to form as a sentence they were crowded out by other words and finally Mike's mouth just blurted in aghast and wonder, “You can see them too?!”

Because for all the blood from the half-corpse of his ex-girlfriend's body and the sudden appearance of a monster as a threat when they generally kept to themselves, the thing that stood foremost in Mike's subconscious was the immediate prospect that he suddenly wasn't alone anymore. This man, this strange man, had popped out of nowhere and was Mike's living breathing sense of perfect validation that the monsters weren't just hallucinations in his head.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Julian said, staring at Mike with big eyes and a shrug, as if nothing had happened. As if Julien wasn't half-covered in purple goo, inches from Mike's wide stare of disbelief, and the bottom half of a corpse. "That's crazy talk, it's just you and me here. See what? Nothing, that's what."

Julian flipped around, stretching his arms and began to quick-walk across the blood slick ground, away. It took Mike a few minutes to regain the ability to move and the ability to think, but by then Julian was gone and Mike had to take a deep breath to not drown in the sudden crush of aloneness. He caught Lana's foot out of the corner of his eye and was instantly reminded that there wasn't much else beyond that foot.

“The hell am I supposed to do with-” is as far he was able to mutter before he dropped to his knees, puking against the grass.