Trigger Warning: Cruelty to Animals (and to Humans)

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With a crash, a toolbox landed in the back of the overworked van hard enough to rattle bolts in their sockets. Rust sifted from craters in the ceiling. The van’s driver, a man named Peterson, dusted off his hands and mopped sweat from his forehead.

“Give me a hand with this?” Peterson nodded at a wooden crate about as long as his leg, sitting crooked on the ground behind the van.

Two mine workers helped Peterson lug the crate into the van. Ominous warnings plastered the outside of the box. Peterson gave it a shove and went to swing the doors closed.

“Shouldn’t you secure that?” one of the workers asked. “Strap it down?”

“Nah, she’ll be right,” Peterson said. “Cheers.”

Peterson slammed the doors. Cicadas shrieked in trees beyond the fences of the mine site. The workers retreated to the air conditioning of their site’s demountable offices to escape the heat as Peterson circled to the front of the van. The engine wound up with a threshing sound and wheels kicked up dust as it pulled around. Behind him, the mine gaped like an open wound on the landscape. Leaking truckloads of iron ore like pus. Apart from the mine, its outbuildings, and the trucks, no sign of civilization showed for a hundred kilometres in any direction this deep in the wilds of rural North Queensland.

Only a single road led in and out of the site, like a shiny black ribbon, which roadtrains used to shuttle ore out of the mine around the clock. Peterson swerved and slammed the accelerator to the floor as he hit the stretch of asphalt. In the back of the van, both the crate he’d picked up and his toolbox slid around and smashed into one another. The impact left a gouge down the side of the wooden crate, marring a sticker with a ‘Radioactive’ symbol. Up front, Peterson punched a button on the van’s old CD player. Sounds of classic Aussie rock filled the cabin over the top of the wheezing air conditioner.

“Oh yeah, got some cheap wine and a three-legged goat!” Peterson roared. “Cheap wine and a three-legged goat, come on!”

The unmarked road, unpainted and rough along the edges but utterly flat and straight, carved through trees and scrub for almost half an hour. Peterson yelled half-understood lyrics and drummed his hands against the wheel. Straight as the road was, he let the van drift back and forth. A road train appeared suddenly on a rise ahead, a hulking Mack truck towing several freight trailers behind it like carriages. With all of its trailers empty it screamed down the empty stretch at over a hundred Ks an hour. Peterson yanked the steering wheel sideways and back onto his side of the road. In the back, the wooden crate slid sideways and slammed against one of the walls. The road train howled past, rattling the frame of the van.

Peterson barely slowed as he took the exit onto the actual freeway. The crate and toolbox smashed together again, like a pair of toy cars being handled by a crash-happy toddler. A split opened along the top edge of the crate where it met the lid. There weren’t a lot of other vehicles on the freeway this far out. Singing and drumming, Peterson slalomed between lanes and his cargo bashed around the back of his van. Landscapes changed rapidly as he got closer to the coast. The sides of the road shifted from trees and scrub to swampier greenery and marshland.

The van wasn’t far outside the town of Bundaninny when a car slipped into the overtaking lane without warning, cutting him off. Peterson hit the brakes, slicing the wheel sideways. In the back, the crate with the radioactive warnings hit the rear wall of the compartment hard enough to topple it onto its side. The lid exploded open. Dry, straw-like packaging spilled along with an elbow-shaped piece of equipment. A gauge used for measuring the iron quotient of detritus dug from the mine with x-rays.

“Fucking dickhead!” Peterson yelled, swerving.

The gauge slid across the floor, along with the toolbox and remains of the crate. It ended up pinioned between the toolbox and wall of the van, cracking it. A lead lined chamber inside the gauge broke open. Among other tiny components, a radioactive capsule no larger than a ten cent piece skipped across the floor.

Small and innocuous as the capsule looked, the instant it was free it began beaming unending waves of beta and gamma radiation. Up front, Peterson chanted the opening chords of AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’, unaware of the potentially deadly cargo bombarding him from behind his seat. Particles of radiation punched through the metal skin of the van like it wasn’t even there, shooting off, invisible, in all directions.

Along with several miniscule screws and other bits of machinery, the radioactive capsule bounced across the back of the van. The toolbox slid away from the wall to reveal one of several holes eaten into the panelling by rust. Luckily for Peterson and any future children he planned on siring, the pellet spun toward one of the holes. Small as it was, it tripped into the tiny crater like a pool ball slipping perfectly into a corner pocket.

Bouncing through the frame, the capsule dropped into open air. It spun into one of the van’s tyres and ricocheted. Unseen by any other drivers, the pea-sized capsule sailed high into the air, past another speeding car, and bounced to a stop by the side of the freeway.  Peterson’s van, with its faded signage, Acca Dacca pouring through the windows, rapidly shrank into the distance.

In spite of the capsule burning hotter than the sunbaked asphalt around it, it was small enough to go completely unnoticed. Hundreds of vehicles passed along the stretch near Bundaninny over the rest of the afternoon but none stopped or slowed long enough to get more than a fleeting blast from the caesium-137. A prickling along the scalp, an itch on the skin, there and gone again just as quickly.

Dusk arrived, and then nightfall. Traffic slowed to almost nothing. Light and sound filtered across distance from the outskirts of Bundaninny but with no cars the freeway was dark and silent. Ditches thick with mud and strands of whispering reeds lined both sides of the road.

From within the swampy reeds, two fat, lumpish, warty creatures emerged. With short and lazy hops, they began to propel themselves across the six lane highway. Cane toads, waddling on four stumpy legs. Black eyes bulged from dark green skin, knobbled with warty growths, oozing with toxic secretions that could be deadly to pets and native animals, even humans. As an introduced species, they mowed through natural habitats and decimated populations of native predators that preyed on the toads to their detriment.

Unhurried, the pair of cane toads made it halfway across the freeway and paused to catch their breath. Skin sacks swelled under their throats as they let out low croaking sounds. Both toads were about fifteen centimetres long and weighed over a kilo each. Their croaks carried a long way in the quiet.

A pair of headlamps appeared down the highway, attached to the growl of an engine. Both the lights and noise grew rapidly, the ute they were attached to going well above the speed limit. Hurtling right over the top of the two cane toads without ever seeing them, one pair of wheels lined up perfectly with one of the toads. The animal evaporated. With a wet pop, flayed skin and splintered bones and pink guts exploded across the asphalt and left a smear several metres long. The ute rocketed onward without slowing. Entrails steamed as the tail lights blinked and disappeared into the night.

The second cane toad failed to react, despite the ute’s undercarriage passing right over the top of it and bits of its companion splattering its side. Croaking, it continued on its way with porky legs thrusting behind it.

The heat of the tiny capsule beside the freeway drew the cane toad’s attention. Somewhere in its tiny brain, it noticed the warmth coming from the radioactive material and mistook it for something edible. Pink tongue bulging, it lunged forward and seized on the capsule. Before it could register any sensation or second thoughts, it had already swallowed.

The cane toad’s black eyes bulged. It let out a strangled noise halfway between a croak and a scream. Smoke wafted out of its bucket of a mouth, blisters already forming on its rubbery lips and the outline of its gullet. Squirming, it hopped and clambered into the nearest ditch.

xXx

Glass shattered and the head of a five-iron hissed through the air, tossing the remains of a beer bottle across rocks at the back of the garden. Behind the house, beyond the yard and the garden, a nature strip sloped into a weedy culvert. Shards and splinters of glass caught the light as they rained into the weeds. Tommo posed with the golf club wrapped in his hands as the shards vanished into the night.

“Woo! It’s a perfect bloody drive, folks!” Tommo shouted. “Cinderella story, this unknown out of nowhere leads the pack.”

Behind Tommo, Muzza giggled and recorded the drive on his phone. On the porch at the back of the house, three others laughed and mock-cheered. All three of them, Pauly, Reese, and Gillers, in their early twenties, swung a golf club idly from one hand and nursed a beer or a can of Woodie in the other. A golf bag belonging to Pauly’s dad lay in the middle of the yard, soaking up the damp grass.

“How you like me now?” Tommo stumbled back to the porch, reaching into the open case for another beer.

Muzza stopped recording and punched a few buttons to upload the video. On the screen, Tommo swung the club into the bottle and smashed it. It caught the sparkling cloud of glass as it fell back to earth.

“Nice one.” Pauly extended his drink to click against the neck of Tommo’s fresh one.

“Yeah, whatever,” Reese said. “Wasn’t even that good.”

Reese, thick through the arms and shoulders, chugged from his can of bourbon and coke. Carrying it over to where Tommo had been standing, he waved around a driver with a bulbous head. Muzza followed like a loyal dog, using his phone to record. Reese set the can down on a rock and raised the driver back behind his shoulder.

“Oi, careful! Don’t break them, ey,” Pauly said.

“Shut the fuck up!” Reese replied.

With a hacking swing, Reese hit the can and sent it flying forward. The last of the bourbon and coke spilled in midair as it spun into the culvert.

“There!” Reese said.

Reese stalked back toward the porch and immediately retrieved another can, snapping it open. Muzza posted the video on his phone while the others drank and swapped stories. Even though they’d graduated three years ago, every weekend it was memories and people from high school that remained the main topic of conversation.

“You remember Ashley? Ashley M? Tits McGee?” Gillers said. “I saw her at the shops the other day. Not only did she have the kid with her, she’s preggers again already.”

“Yeah? How’s she looking?” Tommo asked.

“She looked massive.”

“She’d keep those kids fed, yeah? You know what I mean?” Pauly said.

“Tits?”

“Yeah.”

“What a fucking waste,” Reese said.

Muzza fussed on his phone. “Oi, did you see the thing about this radioactive stuff? It’s been all over the news.”

“What about it?” Pauly asked.

“Some piece of equipment from a mining site up north was being taken away for repairs. It broke open somewhere along the way and they reckon they lost this tiny piece of radioactive shit from inside of it. Like it just fell out of the van. The guy drove right through here, it literally could have gotten lost, like, somewhere on the freeway outside of town. It’s pretty dangerous. They reckon if you were standing next to it, it’d be like getting ten x-rays every hour.”

“You’d know all about x-rays,” Gillers said. “Your dick is so small, you’d need an x-ray to find it.”

“How’s that supposed to work?” Muzza asked over the other’s laughter.

“It doesn’t work, that’s the point.”

“I’m just saying, they’re out looking for this thing but it could’ve gotten lost anywhere within like, hundreds of miles, and it’s really tiny. But if you find it, it could be worth a lot of money?”

“Unlike your dick, which is really tiny but isn’t worth anything,” Tommo jumped in.

“Man, who gives a fuck?” Reese said. “How’s the videos doing? Any reacts? Any chicks want to come over and play with our golf clubs?”

Muzza checked his phone again. “Uh, not really, no.”

“Oi, get this,” Gillers said.

Gillers carried his empty bottle to the back of the yard. Muzza, faithfully, recorded him from behind. Rather than set the bottle down and hit it, Gillers tossed it into the air and slashed at it using his golf club as a sword. The bottle bounced off the shaft without breaking and spun into the darkness.

“Careful!” Pauly said. “My dad’ll fucking lose it if we break any of his clubs!”

“This is fucking shit, fucking boring,” Reese said. “No wonder no one’s reacting to our shit.”

“Well, what else you want to do?” Gillers asked.

“We could sword fight with them?” Muzza wielded his putter in an Errol Flynn motion.

“Like fuck,” Pauly said.

Tommo had a sudden spark of inspiration. A slow, half-drunk smile dawned across his face.

“Oi, I’ve got an idea,” Tommo said.

“Yeah?”

“It’s a bit fucked, but it’s old school. What if we take the golf clubs and go do a bit of cane toad hunting?”

“What do you mean?” Muzza asked.

“I know.” A vicious slash of a grin crossed Reese’s face. “You go find a bunch of cane toads, you hit them with a light or whatever to make them freeze, and then you use a golf club to smack the shit out of them.”

“Oh, man, that does sound fucked,” Pauly said.

“What about over the other side of the freeway, near the golf course?” Tommo said. “Isn’t there a bunch of them near the picnic spot? They get flattened by cars all the time.”

“Yeah, dad says he sees a few on the golf course,” Pauly said.

“We doing this?”

“We’re fucking doing this!” Reese said.

Pauly, Gillers and Muzza didn’t look enthusiastic, but no one spoke up against the idea. Reese could get aggro when he’d been drinking and it was hard to go against him.

“Who’s driving?”

“I’ll do it,” Muzza said. “I’ve only had a couple.”

The five of them carried clubs and beers out to Muzza’s car. Gillers carried a half-empty case in his lap as he jumped into the backseat and Tommo and Pauly crammed in alongside him while Muzza and Reese sat up front.

“Righto, we’ve got the clubs,” Tommo said. “We get pulled over, just tell them we’re headed to the golf course for a quick eighteen holes.”

“When I want a quick eighteen holes, I go to your mum’s place, Muzza,” Reese said.

“What’s that mean?”

“It means she’s got a lot of holes, doesn’t it, cunt?”

Muzza circled out to the main road. A few packs of people their age, give or take a few years, roamed the streets. Little was open in Bundaninny at that time of night other than one single pub and the Maccas. Reese finished his drink and tossed the can out the window. They headed past the freeway, across the overpass, and away from town. Underneath them, a road train roared by and rattled the windows of the much smaller vehicle.

Up on the hill sat the Bundaninny Golf Club. Spotlights painted the outside of the long, white building and the walls out front but it had an abandoned look about it at that time of night. The road circled the golf course but little could be seen of it through the trees. Without lights, the course was an inky sea of blackness. On the other side of the road was a meandering creek and long strings of marshy ground.

“Down here’s the creek,” Tommo said. “Yeah, yeah, pull over in here.”

Muzza steered into an unmarked parking area under a copse of trees. There were no streetlights or artificial lights of any kind. Beyond the parking lot was a grassy slope down to the creek. They stopped and climbed out, carrying their clubs, Gillers carrying the beers.

“We used to come here for picnics,” Tommo said. “Go this way, I used to go, like, looking for cane toads down this way with my cousins.”

The five of them navigated their way down the side of the creek. Thick patches of reeds hemmed them in on a path that barely existed as it was. Listening, they heard water trickling over rocks and the croaking of toads. The air settled, cool and damp, on their skin. Tommo used his five-iron to hack at the plants like a machete.

“It’s fucking dark,” Reese said.

“Use your flashlight,” Tommo replied.

“I don’t have a fucking flashlight!”

“On your phone, I mean.”

The guys took their phones and switched on the lights. Beams bounced across the reeds. Shoes slipped and almost stuck in mud.

“Where the fuck are we going?”

“We’re here, we’re here!”

The path opened up onto a patch of marshy ground covered in weeds and veins of mud. An opening in the treetops allowed moonlight and some stars to peek through. The boys pointed their phone lights at the ground. Dark, humped shapes moved through the mud in hopping motions, croaking and rooting around in the weeds.

“There, look over there,” Tommo said. “Muzza, get your camera.”

Tommo put his beer down for a moment and took his club in both hands. Muzza swept around with the beam of his phone, bringing up the camera on his screen. Reese, Pauly and Gillers hung back on solid ground.

“I don’t know about this, ey,” Pauly said. “Fucking up animals.”

“It’s a public service,” Tommo said. “These things are, what you call it? Invasive. They’re ferals, they fucking eat up everything and kill native animals. People used to do this all the time to knock their numbers down.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Pauly hesitated. “But, like, we’re going to film us doing it and post it? Chicks aren’t going to like it.”

“If anyone gets pissed about it, we’ll say it’s a joke. Like it’s all just edited. But it’ll get people commenting and shit! Come on, Muzz, get over here and use the flashlight.”

Muzza brought his phone around, holding his putter in his other hand. In the beam of his phone’s light, he caught a dark and warty, lumpish shape wriggling in the mud. The cane toad didn’t react as Tommo braced his feet to either side of it.

Tommo felt a sick thrill looking down on the animal. He felt conscious of the eye of Muzza’s camera on him. Up on the bank, Reese shouted encouragement. Tommo could hardly back down now when the whole thing had been his idea. Raising the club above his head, he swung it down and around in a hacking motion. The five-iron smacked perfectly into the neckless region where the cane toad’s head met its body. It wasn’t a big toad, only around the size of Tommo’s fist, and the blow lifted it off the ground and into the air. Rubbery and soft as the toad looked, it was easy to imagine it bouncing off the club like a balloon or a squeaky toy. He both felt and heard something snap inside it, however, as the impact shuddered up the shaft and into his hands. He was pretty sure the toad was struck instantly dead. He hoped it was anyway, rather than just maimed and condemned to a much slower death. He watched it sail into the darkness, glistening in the light of Muzza’s phone, and disappearing. Muzza’s face was unreadable but his camera work looked impeccable.

“Woo, yeah! Alright, that’s alright,” Reese said.

“Yeah, not bad,” Gillers laughed.

Gillers put the case of beers down on the muddy ground. Tossing his empty into the dark, he fetched a fresh one from the box. Muzza fiddled with his phone.

“Should I post it?” Muzza asked.

Tommo hesitated. “Yeah, yeah, of course, do it. Was a great hit.”

“Reception’s not good out here.” Muzza held his phone up to the sky, light still on, as if trying to signal a passing plane.

“They reckon cane toads used to be way bigger,” Gillers said. “My pop told me there was some that used to be, like, the size of dogs.”

“Yeah, right,” Reese scoffed.

“Nah, it’s true! There’s pictures of them, but the big ones all died out. They used to eat, like, birds and cats and shit.”

“Your pop’s full of shit.” Reese stomped across the swampy grass, poking around with his club. “Oi, over here, over here!”

Reese sought out a croaking cane toad, even smaller than the one Tommo had hit. The bulbous head of Pauly’s dad’s driver swung from his grip. Muzza picked his way through the mud. Both Pauly and Gillers looked like they were loosening up.

Something vibrated through the soles of Tommo’s feet. From the direction of the creek, he heard something cracking, a large branch or a tree trunk. His grin faltered and he searched the darkness where the noise originated but couldn’t see anything out there. He failed to notice water rippling in the nearest puddles.

“Hey, what was that?” Tommo said.

Tommo felt it again. Concentric circles wrinkled the nearest puddle. The others hadn’t noticed anything out of place. Reese stood over his chosen victim but it kept hopping and moving before he could line up a drive. Muzza scrambled to get a good angle with his phone, moving closer to the creek as Reese turned his back to him.

“Fuck this!” Reese said.

Raising the club straight over his head, Reese adjusted his aim and brought it down like a hammer. The head of the driver squashed the toad into the mud. He laughed and hit it again, wet mud and bits of grass flying off the head.

“Yeah, get into it!”

Reese raised the club and drove it down again and again, burying the toad in the soft soil. The animal started to come apart. Clumps of mud flying from the head of the golf club were replaced by streaks of dark liquid, blood, and small clots of gore.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

The others were all distracted by Reese but Tommo got a sense of movement in the corner of his eye where Muzza was standing. His light suddenly dropped away from Reese. With Pauly and Gillers also pointing their phones at Reese though, it took Tommo a few moments to notice the difference. When he turned in Muzza’s direction, he was gone.

“Hey, Muzza?” Tommo kept turning in place. “Muzz?”

Muzza’s phone lay on the ground with its light and camera pointed at the sky. Water pooled in the footprints he’d left in the mud. Beyond the point where he’d been standing was nothing but darkness. Reese straightened with his dripping club. Pauly and Gillers began to look around as well.

“What’s doing?” Reese said.

“Where’s Muzz gone? Muzz? Muzz!”

“What the fuck?” Pauly said.

Pauly and Gillers made their way across the mud, negotiating around deeper puddles. The two of them raised their lights toward the creek but they didn’t probe very far into the darkness. Reese moved to pick up Muzza’s phone.

“Oi, Muzza, are you fucking with us?” Tommo yelled. “Get real!”

Something snapped and collapsed again, out in the blackness, in the trees. Pauly raised his phone higher and tried to see what had caused it. He moved past the others toward the creek. Suddenly, one leg disappeared from under him. Tommo saw he’d stepped into some kind of hole or puddle, his leg sinking up to the knee and water soaking his jeans.

“Shit!” Pauly struggled to stay upright. “I’m stuck on something!”

Something lashed out of the darkness like a whip. With a wet smack, it struck Pauly under the armpit and wrapped around his upper body. Whatever it was, it wrenched him toward the creek. He dropped his phone and golf club with a frightened shout. The only thing that kept him from being pulled completely into the darkness was his leg getting stuck in the hole he’d stepped into. It twisted and buckled but didn’t pull free right away.

“What the fuck?” Tommo yelped.

Whatever was wrapped around Pauly’s torso was as thick as Tommo’s leg. Slick and wet and bubblegum pink, shaped like some kind of tentacle. A tongue, Tommo realised a moment later. It was a giant tongue. Patches of boils or burns or something covered its slippery surface. Pauly beat at it with his bare hands but with muscular torsion it writhed and adjusted its grip. Another hard yank and Pauly’s leg pulled free, his foot leaving his shoe behind in the mud. His scream vanished into the darkness and ended with a crunch. Stunned, Tommo thought he heard something that sounded like a massive gulp.

“Pauly? Pauly!” Gillers yelled.

“What the fuck was that?” Reese shouted.

A black hillock moved in the darkness. Something that Tommo might have mistaken for a mound of dirt and rock if it stayed still. The movement smashed into treetops, blasting branches out of the way. Whatever was out there landed in the creek and splashed water into the light. Tommo, Reese and Gillers all backed up, feeling the shock of the landing shake the ground underfoot.

“What the fuck? What is that?” Reese said.

“Pauly? Muzz?” Gillers’ voice broke with desperation.

The phone lights being held by Reese and Gillers bounced up and down. The creature, the monster, whatever it was, shambled closer. They saw slashes of it in the beams of weak light, green, warty skin, strange limbs, bulging eyes.

“Run!” Tommo shouted. “Run!”

Tommo turned and ran back toward the wall of reeds. Reese and Gillers followed, stumbling and sliding in the mud. The creature’s tongue lashed out at Gillers but he happened to fall forward in the same moment and it missed, cutting overhead.

Slashing with his golf club, Tommo fought his way back down the path. He ran blind, his phone in his pocket, but somehow he found his way. Reese and Gillers crashed through the reeds behind him. Something boomed after them, giving chase.

After a few long, terrifying moments, Tommo and the other two burst out of the reeds. They wheeled across the parking lot toward Muzza’s car. There was nobody else around, no other cars or people in sight. Tommo tripped and smacked into the side of the car, holding his five-iron in one hand. Reese and Gillers closed in behind him.

“Where are the keys?” Reese said.

“Fuck, Muzz had them!” Gillers said. “Fucking Muzz had them!”

“What do we do?” Reese’s voice sounded small and lost, like a child.

“Just, run! Fucking run!” Tommo said.

The three of them scrambled away from the car, racing across the dirt lot. Behind them, trees broke and crashed to the ground. Reaching the road, the boys took off in the direction of town. Phone lights jittered in Reese and Gillers’ hands.

Tommo’s sneakers slapped against the asphalt. He felt the shock of each footfall through his legs. He was a young man, relatively fit, and terror had completely sobered him, but even so he felt his heart thundering and breath already rasping in his chest. Luckily, the road was almost totally straight and essentially flat because he was running almost blind in front of the other two.

From behind the trio came a hollow smash. Tommo glanced over his shoulder and saw Muzza’s car picked up and launched sideways into the road. Shattered glass glittered in the moonlight. The car landed on its side and then rolled onto its roof before sliding to a stop. The power it took to do something like that, he couldn’t imagine. The black mass of the creature flowed out of the trees and filled the road.

“Fuck!” Tommo yelled.

The road seemed to go on and on. Tommo couldn’t see any glimpse of Bundaninny or the freeway ahead. He’d been to the picnic ground dozens of times since he was a kid, maybe hundreds, and yet now he couldn’t remember whether the freeway was a hundred metres or ten kilometres up the road, his brain was going haywire. The ground quivered underfoot. Behind them, the creature was catching up in long, bounding jumps. They couldn’t outrun it. As much as Tommo prayed, no other vehicles appeared on the road ahead of them. Suddenly, he got a glimpse of light through the trees.

“The golf course!” Tommo said. “Go, go!”

Tommo veered toward the trees with Reese and Gillers following. Immediately he tripped and fell in an unseen ditch, burying his legs up to the knees in mud. He clawed his way upright as Reese and Gillers crashed past him. Using their phones, they negotiated through the ranks of trees that ran between the road and the golf course. Tommo followed, feet crunching on dead leaves, grazing himself on a rough tree trunk and nearly blinding himself on a branch.

They emerged into an open space bordered by trees and lit, barely, by moonlight. Low mounds and yawning sandtraps pitched and fell, the golf course made mysterious in the darkness. Spotlights painting its side, the clubhouse was still a long way away. Finding their feet, the three guys took off running in its direction. Phone lights flashed across the greenery.

“Turn the lights off! Turn them off!” Tommo said.

Reese and Gillers wrestled with their phones while running flat out. Both dropped their golf clubs somewhere along the way but Tommo still carried his and his phone rested in his pocket.

“Should I call someone?” Reese shouted. “Should I call the cops?”

“Yeah, sure!” Tommo said.

“What do I tell them? What the fuck is that thing?”

“It fucking killed Pauly and Muzz!” Gillers said.

“I know that, but what the fuck is it?”

Tommo looked over his shoulder every few strides. He started to think they’d actually lost the monster. Suddenly, a tree three to four stories tall fell out of the treeline. Snapping and crackling like gunfire, it dropped to the golf course with a smash. The creature hopped and landed heavily from behind it, and bounded after them. Its movements cratered the ground.

The bulbous mound moved on four hopping legs. Seeing slices of it in the moonlight, Tommo got a better idea of what he was looking at. A cane toad, a giant cane toad, swollen to the size of a bus or one of those oversized RVs. For a moment he wondered if Mother Nature had conjured the monster to punish them for clubbing those other toads. In a flash, he remembered Muzza talking about the radioactive capsule earlier. How it had been lost somewhere near here. Maybe this thing was some kind of radioactive mutant. That was stupid, he thought, insane! Stuff like that didn’t happen in real life. Yet in that moment, it was the only thing that made sense.

“It’s a toad, it’s a fucking cane toad!” Tommo gasped as he ran. “It’s a cane toad and I reckon it ate that nuclear thing! The radioactive thing Muzza was talking about! Fuck, it’s Toadzilla! It’s fucking Toadzilla!”

The ground was pillow soft, the grass lush and well tended. It was much more forgiving than running on the road but that softness slowed them down. They were forced to circle wide of a water feature and weave around slopes and sandtraps. Toadzilla bounded after them in a straight line across the course, leaving craters in the earth behind it.

The three of them happened on another sandtrap built into the side of a low hill. Tommo and Reese split up, avoiding it by moving to either side, but Gillers ploughed right into the middle and tripped onto all fours. He tried to stand but slipped in the loose sand and fell again.

“My ankle, shit! My ankle!” Gillers yelled.

“Gils?” Tommo turned to help before looking at Reese. “Reese?”

“Leave him!” Reese said. “He’s fucked!”

Tommo hesitated but Reese ran on without looking back. Toadzilla closed the distance, the golf course shaking. Turning away, Tommo continued toward the club house and left Gillers behind.

Gillers cried out wordlessly. Glancing over his shoulder, Tommo saw Gillers climbing to the lip of the sandtrap. He couldn’t get one of his legs back under him. Half-buried in shadow, the giant cane toad bounded up behind him. Gillers’ face contorted in misery. With thick, webbed, powerful forelimbs, Toadzilla fell on him. It bashed and battered Gillers into the dirt, flattening him, much like Reese and the cane toad he’d hammered with his driver. Sand and mangled body parts flew into the air.

Terrible as it was, Gillers’ death bought Tommo and Reese some time. Breathing hard, Tommo felt a burst of fresh strength. The two of them found a path winding between the greens and tees which was flatter and easier to run on. Together, they picked up speed toward the lights of the club house.

“Help! Help us, help!” Tommo yelled.

Tommo couldn’t see anyone in or around the clubhouse. He just started shouting and waving his arms in case anyone was watching. Reese did the same, running slightly ahead. They reached the edge of the glow cast by the building’s halogen lamps.

A flashing amber light appeared at the corner of the clubhouse. A golf cart with a strobing light on the roof and two men in dark uniforms riding in the front. As they got closer, Tommo could see the word ‘SECURITY’ across their shirts.  He felt a flush of desperate relief.

“Help!” Tommo shouted.

“What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?” one of the men said.

The golf cart pulled up hard at the edge of a wide outdoor seating area, paved with cobblestones, lined with hedges. The security men jumped out to intercept Tommo and Reese. Both were big men and well muscled, and they didn’t look happy to see the pair running around on the course.

“Help!” Tommo said.

“Help?” the other guard said. “With what?”

Toadzilla sailed out of the darkness and landed hard within the light cast by the clubhouse. The two security guards recoiled, one letting out a short, strangled scream. Tommo, slowing to a stop, got his first really good look at the creature.

Roughly the size of a bus, the giant cane toad wasn’t just massively oversized but horribly deformed. Its hunched body swelled up like a fleshy hot air balloon. The monster’s four legs, if anything, were undersized for its grotesque body but clearly powerful. A couple more newly grown but abortive extra limbs grew out of Toadzilla’s sides. Its flesh was dark olive green and covered in hoary growths just like a normal cane toad. A mouth like a bulldozer blade dominated the front of the creature. Eyes boiled out of its sockets. Three distinct eyeballs crowded the toad’s left eye socket. Extra eyes pushed their way to the surface through the mutant’s skin. It had to be some freak concurrence of the radioactive capsule and some mutation in its DNA that had caused the animal’s genes to go wild the way they had, causing it to grow to such enormous size and start sprouting extra limbs and eyeballs. Tommo had no idea what else could cause such a thing to happen.

“What the fuck is that?” one of the security guards gaped.

Toadzilla’s mouth fell open and its tongue punched out. With a whack, it hit the closest of the two guards. The force of the impact bent him over backward as the slippery, pink muscle wrapped around him, same as they’d seen with Pauly. A split-second later, it reeled him off his feet and into its cavernous mouth. Jaws closed around him with a wet crunch.

Tommo realised how misguided his sense of relief had been at seeing the two men. They couldn’t help him and Reese. They couldn’t even help themselves. He and Reese circled wide of the golf cart and weaved through the seating area toward the nearest set of doors.

Toadzilla lunged forward, the force rippling through its green flesh. It landed almost on top of the second security guard, paralysed by shock. With one webbed foot, it crushed the man into the ground. Its other forelimb hooked the undercarriage of the golf cart and slapped it into the air. Amber light strobing on its roof, it flew toward the second story of the clubhouse like a toy cast aside by an angry child. Tommo and Reese ducked as the cart hit the side of the building overhead and crumpled. Bits and pieces rained down along with the body of the cart, landing with a terrific smash.

Tommo grabbed the handles of the glass doors but, of course, they were locked. Yelling, he rattled them in frustration. The interior looked like some kind of restaurant and bar but it was all shut down for the night and there was no one in sight. Reese hit the doors beside him. Still carrying the five-iron belonging to Pauly’s dad, Tommo pulled it back and swung into the door. A spiderweb fractured the glass but it didn’t collapse. Another couple of swings didn’t make much of a difference.

“Fuck it, run! Run that way!” Tommo said.

The two of them took off across the seating area, circling the broken golf cart lying on its side. The giant cane toad was distracted, peeling the second security guard off the ground and eating him. Tommo and Reese ran past the back of the building and circled around the side.

Toadzilla didn’t move to follow until Tommo and Reese reached the front of the clubhouse. They felt the ground start to rumble again. It wouldn’t let up. For whatever reason, perhaps driven insane or pushed to the brink of starvation by the dramatic changes in its structure, it wouldn’t let them go.

In front of the clubhouse’s main entry was a turning circle covered by an overhang. No cars were parked there at that time of night but three golf carts were lined up just outside the club’s doors.

“There, there! We’ll take one of those!” Tommo said.

“What about keys?” Reese said.

“I don’t know, do they have keys?”

Tommo threw himself into the front of the nearest golf cart. He was relieved to see that it didn’t appear to have an ignition requiring a key, just a large button by the steering column. His hands were shaking so badly he almost couldn’t push it. As soon as did though he felt the cart’s electric motor purr to life.

“Go! Fucking go, fang it!” Reese said.

“Hang on, I’ve got an idea!”

Tommo found a switch that flicked on the headlights. The cart’s other controls looked pretty basic. A handbrake, which he disabled, and a gear stick, two pedals on the ground just like a car. Tommo threw the gear stick into ‘Drive’ then took his golf club and wedged the handle into the cart’s accelerator. It started to trundle forward as Tommo and Reese leapt clear. The golf cart picked up speed, crossing the entryway and starting down the path leading past the face of the clubhouse.

“What the fuck?” Reese said.

“Distraction!” Tommo said. “Come on!”

Tommo leapt into the second golf cart. Its engine switched on just as easily as the first one. Reese climbed into the passenger seat but for a moment the two of them just waited.

The runaway golf cart slid off the path and onto the grass. It bumped and jerked around but Tommo’s golf club stayed where it was, wedged into the accelerator pedal. Toadzilla emerged from around the building. It spotted the cart, still picking up speed, and gave chase.

“Now!” Tommo said.

Tommo stomped the gas pedal and spun the steering wheel, circling the paved area in front of the building’s entrance. They took off in the other direction, heading down through the parking lot. At first, the golf cart was no faster than running but it began to pick up speed as it passed rows and rows of empty parking spaces.

Behind them, Toadzilla caught up to the runaway golf cart and slammed it from the side. Pieces ripped free as it tumbled across the grass. The monster fell on the cart and squashed the frame. It quickly discovered that there were no more people, no more food, inside.

A boom gate crossed the exit to the clubhouse’s parking lot. Even in the cart there was no way to avoid it but it looked pretty flimsy. Tommo kept the accelerator nailed to the floor and the little electric motor whirred. The golf cart had no windshield. The two struts at the front of the frame whacked the boom gate right in front of their faces. It bent back, pushing against the cart, but then broke with a loud snap. The arm of the boom gate tumbled free and fell under the cart’s wheels. Tommo drove right over it and swerved onto the street, picking up speed once again.

“Where are we going?” Reese said.

“Back into town, yeah? We’ve got to get away from that thing, and get to where there’s more people!”

“What if it starts eating everyone when we’ve led it right to them?”

“Fuck them! What are we supposed to do about it? Actually, I know, get your phone out! Ring the cops now!”

“They won’t believe us!”

“They will soon, won’t they?”

Reese fished his phone out of his pocket. Pulling the steering wheel hard to the left, Tommo turned onto the road they’d driven down in the direction of the picnic spot. They headed back toward Bundaninny. From behind them came a tremendous clang. The front of the golf club was surrounded by a low stone wall with metal rails along the top. Toadzilla slammed into the wall and knocked a section of railing into the road. Its huge, dark mass poured over the wall and leapt after them.

“Fuck, it’s coming! It’s coming!” Reese yelled.

“I know, I know!”

Tommo juiced the gas pedal, as if pressing harder could coax more power out of the electric motor when it was already pressed against the floor. There were still no other cars on the road. The golf cart whizzed down the straight and narrow stretch but, unbelievably, Toadzilla started to catch up.

“It’s fucking coming!”

“I know!”

Ahead were the lights of Bundaninny. Tommo could even see the warm glow of the golden arches at the edge of town. Before they reached the town, however, they had to cross the overpass that rode over six lanes of freeway. Streetlamps ran along both sides but the two lane bridge looked very isolated.

The ground shook. Tommo glanced over his shoulder and saw Toadzilla barreling up the road, between the trees, behind them. He swerved as if to throw it off but all that did was kill some of their speed. The giant cane toad filled the road and its monstrous tongue lashed out of its mouth. The tongue caught the back of the speeding golf cart’s frame. Wrapping around the rear struts, it wrenched the cart backward onto just two wheels for a moment. With a bang, the roof ripped free. The cart fell back onto all four wheels, rubber screaming, and twisted sideways. Tommo ducked and barely avoided being clipped. Toadzilla’s tongue reeled the roof and bits of broken struts back into its mouth. It bit down with a crunch but then spat out the mangled roof, sending it clattering to the side of the road.

“Shit!” Reese yelled.

“Hold on!”

Tommo twisted the wheel, wringing the accelerator. They picked up speed toward the freeway overpass. With another ground shaking hop, Toadzilla surged up behind them. Tommo felt it slam into the back of the cart.

The golf cart catapulted into the air. Reaching the overpass, Tommo and Reese were thrown forward. For a moment, everything went weightless. Tommo’s hands were torn free from the steering wheel and he was launched out of his seat. He fell, twisting, through the air. Asphalt rushed up to greet him. Across the street, the cart came down on its side, Reese still inside, and went spinning and scraping across the road throwing sparks.

Tommo landed on his shoulder. His shirt tore, hot pain lancing from the impact. He flipped and tumbled end over end toward the side of the overpass. He wound up laying on his stomach sucking bits of grit off the road.

After a few seconds, Tommo pushed himself upright. He had a few scrapes and bruises, radiating pain, but found himself surprisingly okay. With a boom, Toadzilla landed at the foot of the overpass. It hopped toward the golf cart. Reese was pinned under the small vehicle, his legs trapped. Seeing the toad, he started screaming and tried to get away. In desperation, he tore the pads of his fingers on the asphalt as he tried to claw himself free.

“Help! Help me!” Reese screamed. “Tommo, help me!”

Toadzilla gripped the golf cart with its forelimbs and hauled it aside. Reese let out a fresh scream, his mangled legs suddenly exposed. One of its webbed feet hammered down on his spine, ending his cries with a horrifying snap. Blood sprayed out of Reese’s open mouth and he spasmed as Toadzilla peeled him off the road, stuffing him into its waiting mouth.

Tommo felt paralysed for several long moments. As his eyes drank in every detail, he thought the giant cane toad might actually still be growing. A couple of warty patches on its back inflated. One of the limp and useless extra limbs on its side quivered with fresh strength. Where would it end? Twisting, he looked for some kind of escape. The closest buildings in Bundaninny were too far away to run to. He’d never make it, especially with Toadzilla growing bigger and more powerful with every passing second. In fact, standing on the middle of the overpass, he was totally exposed. There was virtually nowhere for him to go except, perhaps, straight down. Almost two stories under the overpass were the six lanes of freeway.

Breaking free of his shock, Tommo spun on the nearest railing. Down the centre of the six lanes was a nature strip filled with grass and scrub. That might at least help soften his fall more than solid asphalt. The lanes in both directions were mostly empty but from where he stood he could see several kilometres down the freeway. In the distance, hurtling toward them, were a pair of headlights. He could tell from the size and positioning of them that they belonged to a large truck. It gave Tommo an idea of how to maybe deal with Toadzilla before it got any bigger. He could be a hero.

Tommo turned on the giant cane toad. “Hey! Hey, you want me?”

Shifting its huge bulk, the giant toad swivelled toward him. Multiple, crazed eyes rolled in their sockets. Huge, rubbery lips peeled open.

“Then come and get me!”

Spinning back on the railing, Tommo felt a burst of regret. Jumping off the overpass was insane, if he landed wrong he could die just as surely as letting the toad get him. He pushed through it, he hadn’t given himself much of a choice. The darkness made it easier, he couldn’t see where he was going to land even with the nearby streetlights so he could at least imagine dark, forgiving water instead of solid ground. As he braced a foot and launched himself over, Toadzilla’s fat tongue whipped toward him. It slapped against the railing, missing, as he fell.

Tommo tried to go limp. He’d heard tensing up caused injuries to be worse in a fall, and if you went limp you could roll with it. Feet first, he crashed into some dry scrub to one side of the nature strip. It didn’t do much to slow him down. His right foot made contact with the ground first and he both heard and felt the bone snap. His shin slid apart into at least two pieces, a jagged edge knifing through muscle. The impact pitched him forward and he crashed head first into scrub, cutting his face and outstretched arms on branches.

Laying on his stomach again, Tommo screamed. He hadn’t been as lucky in his second landing and shock did little to lessen the pain. Torn nerve endings screeched. The leg spasmed of its own accord, grinding bits of bone together. For a few moments, he felt his head swimming and realised he was on the verge of passing out. Part of him, the largest part, was tempted to just let it happen. To rest, to rest, to let the pain go away. If he did that though, he was dead. Toadzilla would find him and eat him like it had eaten Reese, and Gillers, and Pauly and Muzza. Clawing at the grass in front of him, he fought his way back to consciousness.

“Got to move,” Tommo said. “Do the thing, come on.”

The truck headlights were a long way off but getting closer with every passing second. Tommo got his left leg under him. Dragging his shattered right leg, he half-hopped, half-crawled free of the shadow of the overpass. He had to get onto the road. He had to get himself right in front of the truck.

Determined, Tommo reached the road and hopped to the centre of the middle lane. He turned and saw the dark bulk of Toadzilla looking down at him from the overpass, backlit by streetlamps. Multiple eyes, like those of a spider, gleamed in the blackness.

“Come on!” Tommo screamed, his voice raw. “Come and get me!”

Launching off its back legs, Toadzilla hopped across the railing and jumped free of the overpass. In spite of his broken right leg, Tommo had to scramble not to be crushed. He tripped and fell, flailing. The beast loomed over him, hungry and insane, radioactive, still growing and mutating in front of his eyes.

Light from the oncoming headlamps reached them. Tommo looked around and saw that they didn’t belong to just any truck but instead one of the road trains bearing down with three massive trailers loaded full of iron ore from the mine to the north. Combined, it must have weighed more than a hundred tonnes. The bellow of an air horn echoed down the freeway. The driver must have had no idea what he was looking at. Even if his reaction speeds had been superhuman, however, there was no way the truck could stop.

Tommo couldn’t jump or run or roll out of the way, there wasn’t time. Throwing his arms over his head, he dropped into the road, made himself as flat as possible, and prayed. Brakes screamed, mixing with the sound of the horn into a wall of noise that tore the world in two.

The nose of the road train passed over Tommo as he slipped right between the front wheels, the front bumper missing him by centimetres. Shrieking brakes pierced his skull. He couldn’t hear his own screams amidst the noise beneath the truck.

The road train slammed the giant cane toad like a sledgehammer smacking a watermelon. Hit by more than one hundred tonnes travelling at close to a hundred kilometres per hour, Toadzilla simply exploded. The truck’s cabin was flattened but the road train carved through the animal almost without slowing. Chunks of flesh, blood and guts and warped bits of bone, and other, unrecognisable things, splashed and sprayed both sides of the road.

Under the truck, the brakes kept screaming. Enormous tyres tore across the asphalt to either side of Tommo. He could sense the huge, heavily loaded trailers swaying as they passed over him. All it would take would be one of them sliding inward a fraction more and they’d roll right over the top of him and smash him flat. A little more one way or the other and he’d be killed instantly, or, perhaps worse, he’d be cut in half but wouldn’t die right away. Instead, half of him would be turned into something that looked like a used tube of toothpaste and he’d die much slower and in unimaginable agony like some piece of unlucky roadkill.

Then, just as suddenly, the tail of the last trailer shot by and Tommo was free. The shrieking brakes retreated, travelling under and past the overpass. Cool air wafted down on top of him.

Stiffly, after what could have been seconds, or minutes, or hours, Tommo began to sit up. The road train managed to come to a complete stop a couple of hundred metres down the road without jackknifing. No other vehicles had appeared. By the light of the streetlamps on the overpass, he could see layers and layers of gore to either side of the freeway.

Shock and adrenaline numbed the pain in Tommo’s broken leg. He climbed onto his good leg and started hopping toward the truck. He had to make sure. He had to know that it was really, truly over. The giant mutant had to be dead.

Tommo’s eyes fell on something amidst the biological refuse. A golf club, a putter, the shaft a little bent and covered in blood and slime. It must have been the one Muzza was carrying when he was eaten. Struggling to bend, he picked it up and used it as a cane to help him continue in the direction of the road train.

The amount of roadkill was inconceivable. Passing under the overpass and out the other side, Tommo started laughing. There was no way Toadzilla could still be alive. Entrails and bits of flesh trailed the sides of the freeway for hundreds of metres, so mashed up it was unrecognisable. Glistening, dripping, and puddling on the sides of the road. Some of it actually looked like it was still moving. Vaguely, he remembered the radioactive pellet that Muzza told them about and he stopped laughing. Presumably, if it was really responsible for creating Toadzilla, it was mixed up in this mess somewhere. He wondered if he should be getting himself as far away from there as possible.

The road train had wound up blocking most of its half of the freeway. The truck’s cabin was completely demolished and draped in a monstrous cloak of greasy, green flesh. Unbelievably, however, the driver’s door burst open and, somehow alive, the driver staggered out of the cabin. Tommo let out another bark of amazed laughter.

“What the fuck?” the driver said.

Suddenly, backlit by the light from the truck’s cab, Tommo saw something swarm the driver. Cat-sized creatures of some kind, it looked like a dozen or more. They came out of nowhere and slithered up the driver’s legs, latching to his arms and his sides. The weight of them dragged him down almost instantly. Thrashing on the road, the man started screaming.

With his broken leg, Tommo was too far away to run over and help even if he’d wanted to. He leaned onto the slimy putter and just stared. After a few moments, he remembered the quivering bits of flesh he’d seen down the sides of the road that looked like they were moving. It wasn’t just inertia, they were alive. Remembering the phone in his pocket, Tommo grabbed it. The screen had a fresh crack dividing the screen but it still worked. Hands shaking, he managed to swipe open the control panel and turn on the flashlight.

Horrific little monsters, even more deformed than Toadzilla, wriggled free from the guts and gore lining the sides of the road. Tadpoles, Tommo realised as he turned the cold light of the flashlight on them. The cane toad that would become Toadzilla must have been pregnant when it, she, ate the radioactive capsule. Dozens of young had hatched and been growing inside her, and had survived being sprayed down the sides of the freeway as their mother was flattened. Most still had their tails and black, bulbous bodies but as they mutated they’d already started to grow legs and adult features. Too many legs, too many eyes. Tentacles and spikes and too many mouths with far too many teeth.

Tommo didn’t even try to run when a handful of the mutant tadpoles snaked toward him. He was knocked onto his back and started screaming as one of them latched onto his broken leg. Wet, slippery bodies wriggled all over him. Fanged mouths began biting and boring into his flesh.

A female cane toad could lay as many as thirty-five thousand eggs in a single clutch. Many thousands of those that had hatched inside of Toadzilla had been cannibalised by their brothers and sisters while still in the womb, however hundreds upon hundreds of live young now squirmed free from their mother’s remains. Some of them feasted on the bodies of Tommo and the truck driver. Others filled their starving bellies with the smorgasbord of ruptured flesh down the sides of the freeway before slinking away. One by one, or in pairs, or scores, they slipped into the weeds to become Australia’s newest invasive species.

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Sean: Australian readers will probably remember the incident that inspired this one, when a radioactive capsule pretty much like the one described in the story was lost from a mining truck in Western Australia. They actually managed to find the thing so it’s not out there turning some unlucky wildlife into mutant, man-eating freaks. I moved the setting from Western Australia to Queensland for obvious reasons, you won’t find many cane toads in Western Australia, as prolific as they are as an invasive species, although according to the research that’s out there that’s only a matter of time.

This story was inspired by the 'Froghemoth' of Dungeons & Dragons, for more short stories check out my website: seanebritten.com