You decide that before might simply have been a lucky escape… this is a long hall, with many critters that could spot you and eat you. You opt to head down the left side of the corridor, hoping to use the fallen rocks and the rusted-out old metal pail for cover.
You get by the rocks easily enough. Beetles scurry away at your approach, apparently too small to want to mess with you; you eye some suspicious-looking light blue moss on the wall and give it a wide berth, and make your way around behind the old upside-down pail. You pause, your eyes open for spider webs, but see nothing, so head through.
You have taken a dozen steps when suddenly you jerk to a halt and cry out, damn near wrenching your right leg out of its socket with the suddenness of it. Before you can even register what’s going on, your left leg, too, gets stuck to the floor.
You blink down. Almost completely transparent and virtually invisible in the shadows here, there’s some kind of gooey ooze. You thrust your toothpick into the nearby ground and heave at your legs, but you’re really, really stuck fast…
Fast, sadly, isn’t the word for what follows. You’re standing there, struggling angrily to get your feet free of this stuff, for several minutes, before you realize that you’re not alone. You notice, suddenly, that gray, icky slugs are oh so slowly rounding the old pail toward you from both sides. The things, about half your size, slide toward you, leaving white, gooey trails behind them… the same stuff as you’re stuck in, just not as stealthy. Apparently what they’re doing now is considered sprinting toward their prey…
As you struggle to free yourself, you vague fear of them grows. You realize that some are sliding down the wall, and you see, seconds later, that some are working their way down the side of the metal pail as well. Though you think you would eventually free your feet, you run out of time…
The slugs are slow, but their timing is impeccable. They all start reaching you at about the same time. You swing and stab with your weapon, poking them and trying to push them back. They stick to the ground too securely for you to get them away, but stabbing them a few times does leave them weakly wiggling and dying…
Slowly a pile of them builds up all around you, and the others have to work their way over the fallen to get to you. Sadly, however, the dead and dying keep oozing their slime, and it starts pooling around your lower legs. Your movements ever more restricted, you have trouble keeping your balance, and fail to slay one coming at you from behind; it touches the back of your thighs and though you stay upright and finally stab it to death, its ooze starts gumming your legs together…
There are so many of them… there’s no end to them! Your panic increases as more and more reach you and your mobility becomes less and less. You struggle valiantly, killing maybe three dozen of them, and leaving probably less than half that as survivors… but in the end, your squirming, wide-eyed, gasping form ends up upright but completely coated in their slime, with only two or three of them actually hanging off you. Your pink toothpick-spear is still held firmly in both your hands, glued into place and useless as a slug finally descends slowly over your face from the top of your head.
Your white-coated form squirms even more powerfully for a minute or two, making muffled sounds. The movement and sounds weaken however, and by the time the three slugs have slid off --- apparently intent on consuming their dead before their prey --- the shapely white figure has stopped moving altogether.
Eventually, a dozen slugs will emerge from behind that pail, their bodies grown extremely fat on their fallen siblings and on shrunken human flesh. All that will remain back there will be a small pink toothpick, planted forlornly into the sticky earth.
