OCT. 2020 REWARD (+Story!) (Patreon)

"Both Feet In The Grave"

Based on characters from DreamWorks Animation Television and World Events Productions' Voltron: Legendary Defender

The light of the planet’s colossal moon, so massive that it looked almost like a second planet, fell upon the headstones rising from the grass and soil with an almost ominous serenity. The eerie atmosphere was accompanied by the constant breeze, almost menacingly cold, carrying brittle orange and yellow leaves that broke away from their source vegetation with the slightest waft. Barren tree branches reached upward like curving claws, as though attempting to seize the stars themselves high overhead.

If not for the sound of the leaves in the wind, it would have seemed almost lifeless. At least that was what the young man still dressed in his artfully torn costume had thought when he stepped into the area, feeling slight discomfort at the sensation of dry alien grass beneath his naked soles.

His dark hair, shoulder-length in the back, held a headband with fake purple Galra ears, and he’d traded his signature red jacket for a black one with light display decorations, white fur trim, and gashes in it suggesting a werewolf attack. Below his equally damaged jeans, he wore a pair of dark blue nylon stirrups, the only protection his otherwise bare feet, decked out with claw-like fake toenails, could afford. It was not, suffice it to say, an outfit viable for active duty as the leader of Voltron.

“Two minutes in and this place is already giving me the creeps…” The microphone hidden in Keith’s jacket collar caught his words and relayed them back to the rest of the team some immeasurable distance away. “Remind me again why you sent me out here on such short notice?”

“We’re just trying to get intel. Get in, figure out what’s been happening, and get out.” Shiro’s voice spoke back through the speaker mounted upon his right ear. “We’ve traced the origin of the distress signal to right around this location. Shouldn’t be too hard, right?”

“It’d better not be.” Keith let out a small sigh. “I don’t want to spend more time here than I need to. As long as we can save someone, though…”

“Of course. But hurry — a place like this probably wouldn’t keep anyone alive for long.”

“Gotcha.”

Keith continued on his way in silence for a few minutes, wincing a little as his bare feet came down upon the grass between each austere plot of dirt, again and again. Headstone after headstone read the same three letters, “RIP”, without any specific inscriptions regarding who had passed away. Curious.

He wasn’t sure what to expect out here. A new kind of Robeast? A Galra ambush? His mother, again? He wasn’t sure. But one thing was for certain: the source of the signal they’d picked up couldn’t have been far.

Just one small suspicion occurred to him all too late — there was no intelligent life for miles around, with the obvious exception of Keith himself. No matter how much he strained his ears — his real ones, not the fakes strapped to his head — he couldn’t hear any of the screams or crying associated with a stranded victim. Or perhaps they were remaining completely silent to avoid detection from the monsters that prowled this grim tract of land… assuming there were any in the first place.

Ten meters, five meters… Two meters… He was now so close to where the signal had come from, and yet… Nothing. Just the graves lying there around him, the trees and moon in the distance, and Keith himself.

“Keith?” Shiro’s voice asked through the microphone. “Do you see anything?”

A chilling breeze picked up, causing the youth to shiver a little. “N-nothing, strangely enough. I… I don’t see anything.”

“Maybe the coordinates of the signal aren’t accurate. Pidge, you calculated everything as precisely as you could, right?”

“I know I did!” Pidge’s voice sounded indignant. “I know the technology of a GPS locator isn’t precise enough to trace a signal to within like, two feet of someone, but I made sure to have our tracker set up to go even further than that!”

“Surely you couldn’t have made a mistake, right?” Lance’s voice was now talking through the speaker. “There’s gotta be someone around where our leader is…”

“Hang on, what’s that?” Shiro started. “I’m sensing something — It’s there. The signal’s right below you! Keith!”

“I know, I’m on it—” Keith was looking into a grave right in front of him, a narrow protruding tree root draped over its headstone. But before he could figure out what to use to dig into the grave, he heard a noise behind him like nails scraping over stone. He turned — and gasped in alarm.

An arm, dead and green and clammy, with some of its flesh missing, had seized onto the headstone he’d been standing in front of. A severed arm.

Keith yelled and stepped backward, but his heels hit the edge of the other grave plot, sending him falling. He fully expected to land hard on his rump, but another surprise was in store. His rear actually fell through the dirt, which swallowed up his lower half as though it were water! No wetness was felt through his pants, but it was like landing in a mud puddle deeper than he was tall. Within an instant, only his upper body and stirrup-clad feet were sticking out of the ground. His back hitting the gravestone with a thump, the wind knocked out of him.

“Keith?!” Shiro began to panic. “What’s going on?!”

“I don’t know!” Keith struggled a little, trying to escape, but the dirt seemed to have solidified, as though made from concrete. There was no getting out, not for Keith anyway. He tried to push himself free with his arms, but no use — he was well and truly trapped.

The severed arm, missing everything from just below the shoulder, clambered ever closer with the wriggling movement of its rotten fingers like a grotesque spider.

“Shiro? SHIRO!” Now it was Keith’s turn to sound apprehensive. “You have my location, right?!”

“We do! You’re not in trouble, are you?!”

“Does getting stuck in a grave count as trouble?!” Keith scrunched his feet, pressing his back to the gravestone as the hand drew closer… and closer… and then…

And then it buried itself into the ground, disappearing within a few seconds. For a few moments, all was silent as the grave. Keith sighed in relief, thinking it was going to be okay for a split second.

His hope was, needless to say, short-lived.

The hand burst out of the ground right next to his chest. It suddenly grabbed at his collar, causing him to yell out and try to grab at it, but then he felt two narrow serpentine things wrapping around his wrists, pulling them back. His arms were now tied behind the headstone, and there was nothing he could do to stop the fiend from crawling up his chest. To his immense horror, it pulled the little speaker from his ear even while Shiro was yelling through it.

“Sit tight, Keith! Backup is on the way! We’re coming to get—”

The hand clenched tight. Keith let out a silent scream of anguish as the device was crushed to splinters of plastic and wire. There was no way he’d be able to hear him now.

Could this possibly get any worse?

Then two more hands burst out of the ground, just in front of his feet, and another popped up right next to his torso. They closed in, the boy fully expecting a gruesome death an instant before they made contact.

What he hadn’t expected, however, was the hands beginning to poke and prod at his underarms and the soles of his feet with their fingers of bone and overgrown nails.

“AAAAH! Ahahhaha w-what’s going ohohon?!”

Squirming about in his trapped position, Keith struggled to pull himself free, but nothing came of it as the undead hands seemed to sense his sudden laughter. Within moments, it seemed they had realized that they had a very sensitive target at their mercy. So why didn’t they start attacking him again?

The answer came to him a second later, as a bunch of wriggling, creeping things emerged from the grass in front of the grave plot, green eyes aglow. Single-eyed centipedes with long wiggling antennae, not unlike the Robeasts he’d faced before that were many times bigger, were now scuttling towards him and his firmly stuck feet!

“No… NO! G-get away!” Keith yelled. But whatever pleas he could let out, they fell on a complete absence of comprehension. The fiendish bugs closed in, and within moments they were beginning to scuttle up and down his tender soles, slipping into the stirrups to get at the skin beneath.

“EEHEHEHEHE HEHEHEHEH! NOT THEHEHEHERE! HEHEHAHAHAHA SHIRO, HEHEHEEEEELP!” Keith couldn’t believe he was being reduced to crying for salvation, but here he was. He wiggled his feet around, trying to shake the bugs off, but it was no use, their many, many legs offering excellent purchase as their pointed tips poked and scritched upon so much of his tender sole skin. One of them even went as far as winding its way between his wiggling toes — the action of which sent him into new fits of hysterics — and the other circled around to trace its way along the top of his other foot.

And then the zombie hands descended again, wiggling their fingertips into the hollows of his pits and scraping lightly along the skin the bugs weren’t attacking at the moment.

He would swear his laughter could be heard for miles around, but no other being came to find him. “EEEEP! I CAHAHAN’T TAHAHAKE IT! GET OHOHOHOFF! HEHEHEHEHE NONONONO PLEHEHEHEHEASE!!”

But no matter what, no matter how hard he tried to escape, there was nothing he could do. The roots and the soil had him in their unbreaking grip, and the deft movement of the cadaver hands and the alien bugs alike drained him of his strength in his helpless mirth. It was true torture, the likes of which he had never experienced before… all started by a signal which, he was quite sure now, had come from a source that was never in any danger to begin with. Rather, it was likely using the signal as a lure to put those attracted by it in danger.

Irony is a cruel, cruel thing, he would realize only much later.

As it was, he was now being overcome by an onslaught of ticklish agony, worse than any torture at the hands of any sentient enemy. The only good thing to come from this, even though he absolutely refused to admit it, was that his microphone was still on, meaning that the rest of the Paladins would still be able to trace the coordinates of his response feed… and were no doubt hearing every laugh coming from him at this very moment.

Keith was quite sure Lance would never let him forget this for the rest of his days. For now, though, all he could do was watch and laugh as the torment continued, and pray that the rest of Voltron would be able to rescue him in time…

Happy Halloween, everyone!

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The following is included in this reward:

• High-resolution artwork
• An additional version lacking the Patreon watermark and with a different signature
• A TIFF file version with all layers

-Skaea