Chapter 1: The Tentacle Father
Three years after being reborn into this wasteland—where food was scarce, animals had mutated, and human civilization was barely holding on—Alice Wentworth finally ate her first piece of meat.
Roasted meat, at that.
And the source of that meat? Her father’s tentacles.
In a tiny partitioned room made of wooden planks and plastic sheets, three-year-old Alice sat on a small child’s stool, a gift from a kind neighbor. Her wide eyes stared curiously at the tall man working busily at the makeshift stove.
This man was her father, Marcus. But he had already turned into a monster covered in tentacles.
Those crimson tentacles danced wildly in the air, licking the ceiling, the foam-plastic walls, and every object in the room. Sticky fluid coated the entire space.
Inside her head, Alice had given him a new, fitting name: The Tentacle Father.
The Tentacle Father was cooking for her. He grabbed one of the flailing tentacles from behind his back, slammed it onto the cutting board, and with a single chop of his knife—THUNK!—severed it.
The finest ingredients always required the simplest preparation.
Wash it. Cut it. Build a fire.
Sizzle... sizzle...
The meat crackled over the charcoal, glistening with rendered fat. He brought it to Alice.
Marcus blinked his vertically slit pupils, speaking in a mechanical, stilted voice. “Alice. Eat.”
It had been thirteen years since the apocalypse. The survivors had long forgotten what uncontaminated fresh meat tasted like.
Let alone a human toddler who had survived on the colony’s rationed nutrient paste—sweet mush and salty mush, and nothing else.
Little Alice held the plastic bowl her father offered her. Tears of joy didn’t fall from her eyes—hunger did.
She hesitated for only half a second before burying her entire face in the bowl and devouring everything.
In a monster’s world, things were different from a human’s. In Marcus’s eyes, his child glowed with colorful, beautiful bubbles of light because the food made her happy.
The tentacles hidden inside his body shot out all at once, trembling with excitement.
Alice’s eyes bulged in terror for a moment—but then she stuck out her tiny tongue and licked the remaining meat grease from the corner of her lips.
Behind her father, crimson tentacles flailed wildly. Their tips were lined with sharp teeth, each one wrapped around a bloodshot eyeball.
But who cared?
She got to eat.
For the first time in her life, Alice Wentworth felt full.
She was three years old. She couldn’t control her body well. Full meant sleepy. Sleepy meant yawns.
She glanced at the Tentacle Father still hanging from the ceiling. He wasn’t speaking, but inside her head, his excited voice echoed: “Alice! Alice! Alice!”
Her eyelids drooped. She ignored his calls, kicked off her patched-up plastic sandals, and climbed onto the bed with her small, dirty feet. She hugged the pillow stuffed with dry grass and fell asleep.
She dreamed.
In the dream, her irresponsible father had taken the month’s child nutrition ration and left her behind, running out the door.
Then, covered in blood, he was dumped back by the Arena’s thugs.
He lay motionless on the ground. Little Alice stood beside him. The man—six-foot-four of him—seemed to grow impossibly large, as if he might fill the entire room.
A tiny, pointed thing—tentacle or something else, she couldn’t tell—burst from his heart, piercing through his worn gray undershirt. It rose, thin and crimson, right in front of Alice’s eyes.
The tip bloomed open. A ring of tiny, spiked teeth flared out. In the center, an eyeball the size of a marble—red and white, veined like cracked glass—spun wildly, staring at her.
Then, countless more crimson tentacles erupted from his body. His human form disappeared.
His head was swallowed inside a writhing mass of toothed tentacles. His arms and legs twisted at grotesque angles, lost somewhere in the flesh.
The red mass spread like an overflowing tide, covering every inch of the room in seconds.
Alice was cornered.
She looked up. The entire ceiling was a churning sea of crimson, heavy with an indescribable stench of raw meat and decay.
She screamed. She was terrified. She wanted to wake up. She shouted: Dad! Dad!
But the roasted meat from that afternoon sat heavy in her stomach, and she couldn’t break free.
Then, something wrapped around her trembling little body completely.
It felt like being back in her mother’s womb—warm, safe, secure.
The nightmare faded. She slept peacefully.
Night passed. The sky paled with dawn.
Alice woke up feeling good. Before opening her eyes, she yawned contentedly and stretched.
She rolled over, pushed herself up on messy hair, and crawled to her feet.
All she saw was red.
Countless writhing tentacles wrapped around her small body. When she moved, they moved, maintaining their cocoon with impossible gentleness.
From the outside, Alice wasn’t visible at all.
Only a mass of crimson, indescribable flesh, bulging against the walls and pressing into the ceiling, crammed into the tiny room that could barely contain it.
Squeezed into a deformed cube, it almost looked pitiful.
Alice wondered if she was still dreaming.
She closed her eyes and lay back down peacefully.
She opened them again.
A crimson flower of flesh, bigger than her head, was hissing right at her, its mouth full of teeth.
Alice shook her head hard, trying to wake up. She attempted a smile, showing a few tiny white teeth, trying to appear friendly.
The thing tilted its head in confusion. Slowly, it pulled back.
The writhing tentacles receded. The red faded from Alice’s vision. They coalesced back into Marcus.
No.
The Tentacle Father.
Her irresponsible, broke, biological father was dead and gone.
This was something else entirely.
