The Last Float

I knew things weren't right when I walked out of the backroom to pay at the front counter.

A creature resembling a blackened tree-trunk had several of its waving tentacles wrapped around the reception girl's neck. There was a loud, sucking pop as it wrenched her head free from her spine.
Blood gushed everywhere when her head bounced across the floor.

Time slowed.

I stopped moving, half-in, half-out of the doorway leading to the tanks. I took in the creature, the dead girl as her body dropped, and the scene out the front window of the floatation center.
People ran screaming along the street. Cars zoomed and swerved; horns blared and tires screeched as they tried to avoid running down the town's folk, while a multitude of black tree-trunks chased the terrified citizens.

One of the creatures outside caught a boy. It wrapped its long coils around the kid's body, lifted him into the air and tore him into thousands of scattering pieces.

So much for the harmonious state I'd managed to reach after an hour of floating.

"Oi! There's enuver one," the tree-trunk at the reception counter said.

Another tree-trunk moved out from behind the one who spoke and headed towards me. Thousands of little root shoots acted like legs that allowed it to shuffle across the room at an alarming pace.

I retreated and slammed the backroom door.

They weren't supposed to find me here, on this backwater planet.

Who'd think to look here? On this obscure world. Well, the Garb, obviously: A semi- sentient race that took their jobs as bounty hunters a little too seriously for my liking. Hired muscle for The Boss. They'd managed to track me down
to Earth-and now everyone on the planet was doomed.

There was no lock on the backroom door. I couldn't keep leaning against it until the Garb smashed it down. I had to find the back exit.

On the back wall, past the dozen rooms containing floatation booths, was the 'staff only' door.

It wasn't locked when I turned the handle.

Five seconds was all I needed to know this wasn't the back exit to the place. There wasn't even a window above the shelves of cleaning products.

The only exit was out past reception.

I thought my lousy luck had changed. Three years on Earth in this human body and I'd managed to put The Boss and my debts behind me. I'd really thought I'd given him the slip. Now after things were going so well, his goons show.

Black or white? Sounds simple. Fifty-fifty chance. I took a chance on black and lost. And that meant paying back more than I had. I bailed and ended up here. I'd been a little too cocky thinking they'd never track me down.

At the other end of the room the Garb started hammering on the backroom door. It wouldn't take long before it broke.

Time to hide.

A female opened her floatation room door and looked out to see what was going on.

"What's that noise?" she asked, when she noticed me standing near the back. "Don't they realize I need quiet to meditate?"

"I don't think they care about that," I said.

"Well, I will remind them."

She stepped out of the small room dressed in her white robe and stamped towards the door leading to reception.

"I wouldn't do that," I said. "It's not who you think it is."

Her answer was to give me the finger.

She opened the door and went to point that same finger in the face of the belligerent noisemaker, but screamed instead.

The Garb lashed out and wrapped six or seven of its tentacles around her face. Immediately her screams ceased, smothered by oily coils.

My name is Opock Therral, and in my natural form I could have easily escaped this predicament. That was one of the trade-offs in inhabiting the human Richard Bell. In seeking camouflage by absorbing him and taking his form, I also now had his limitations of the corporeal form: I bleed, I bruise, and I could certainly die. I was still harder to kill than a human, but it wasn't impossible.

The female clawed at the Garb; a futile attempt to remove the crushing tentacles. It forced her to her knees, chuckling loudly in a deep baritone that echoed from its trunk. Her head exploded like a grape. Pink matter sprayed the door.
I'd seen enough. My floatation room was on my left and still unlocked, so I ducked inside.

With no where else to go I locked the door and climbed inside the floatation tank. I closed the hatch and sat back in the warm salted water.

So, this was the end. A thousand years of living, seeing hundreds of worlds, and it all came down to this.

I didn't have much to show for it.

There's a saying on my world: the end of life is only the beginning of a brand new journey. I wondered if that was really true.

I guess I was about to find out.

The noise was muffled by the tank's insulation, but I still heard the Garb smashing my wooden door to pieces.

The steel shell of the tank would take longer to breach, maybe another five minutes after that.

My CD still played in the machine below the reception counter, filling the inside of the tank with my favorite music I'd listen to while floating.

A pity I had no volume switch. I would have loved to drown in its sounds.

I lay down and immersed myself in the warm buoyant waters.

With my eyes closed, I let a resigned smile creep across my face when the last track faded and 'Don't fear the Reaper' started up.

The tank began to shake and rattle under the Garb's blows. I knew my time was short, but I took a deep breath and was determined to sing along for as long as I could.