Mo’Lock stepped up to the desk with his bundle and laid it on the desktop. It was pretty big, for a small bundle, about the size of two soccer balls stacked, inside a canvas sack. The sack was tied off with some thick cord.

Then the ghoul untied it and revealed the contents.

I shot up from my desk.

“AAAAAGGHH, what is that thing? Get it the fuck off my desk!”

Mo’Lock held up his hand. “Relax. It’s only a baby.”

“A baby what?!”

The ghoul explained in calm detail how he had come to possess the creature. The story was strange, but it made sense and I believed him. I’d heard stranger.

The way the ghoul told it, he was crawling around in the sewers with some of his ghoul buddies doing god knows what and they came across this big brown humanoid hippo-looking creature that had been injured. Turned out the creature’s wounds were fatal, and after giving birth to the thing on my desk, the big creature died. Mo’Lock took the baby.

“We couldn’t just leave it there,” the ghoul said, wrapping up his story.

I looked at the thing on my desk. “Sure you could’ve. You just didn’t.”

I studied the small creature on my desk while I drank from the pot of coffee. It was around three and a half feet long, dark brown in spots, but mostly a light gray-green. It was bulky looking and its hide looked pretty tough, like rhino skin or maybe crocodile. Its mouth was wide and when it opened, I could see double rows of tiny but sharp-as-shit teeth. Its nose was nothing more than two punctures above wide lips and the eyes were the same except bigger and completely red with small black pin-sized pupils.

Mo’Lock told me how big the dead mother had been and I could only imagine how large this little shit was going to be.

“It’s grown since this morning,” Mo’Lock said.

Great.

I stared at the thing a little more. It kept moving its mouth over and over. Open close, open close. I looked at Mo’Lock. “I think it’s hungry.”

“What do you think it eats?” he asked.

“I don’t even know what it is. How the fuck am I supposed to know what it eats?”

I was a bit frazzled. It had been peaceful lately and I wasn’t really in the mood for anything like this. I’m not the goddamn Humane Society, for Christ’s sake. What was I supposed to do? Then again, I thought, it was probably better that I deal with the creature before it got bigger.

Knowing my luck, it would probably come after me when it was as big as a house.

“I think I have a plan,” I said.

Mo’Lock lit up. “Yeah?”

“Let’s kill it.”

“Cal!” exclaimed the ghoul. He looked really upset at the suggestion.