Magic and Modernity: Chapter Nine.

"What the hell, Errant?" I yelled. "What are you even doing here?"
"You know this thing?" hissed Venice at me.
Errant looked grave. "This is unfortunate, man, it really is. I met you before you found the lab, and I genuinely liked you. Shame I have to kill you now."
I tried very hard not to whine. "What are you doing in there?"
"Dude, this isn't a cartoon. I'm not going to give a final monologue to you just because I'm sure of my victory. I AM sure of my victory, by the way. No, you and your pretty little girlfriend are just going to be ripped apart by a very hungry... Thing. I don't really know what else you'd call it. I'm really sorry about this, man. The Stephen King book was great, and I'll miss that store..." He hesitated. "Bye!" he added chirpily, before turning on his heel and walking away from us.
"You have a terrible taste in friends," Venice said after a while.
"We have almost identical groups of friends."
"Shut up. What do you think he meant by "ripped apart by a Thing"?"
"I should have thought it was fairly self-explanatory. We may be ripped apart by a thing. Let's look for a way out of here before said "Thing" comes."
It was at that point a loud noise, like a bull's snort, came from the dark corridor opposite the lab.
Venice sighed. "You couldn't have kept your mouth shut, could you?"
The "Thing" lumbered out into what little light there was, and we saw that "Thing" was really the only word to describe it. With grey skin, and tiny hands, it was vaguely human-shaped, but the proportions were all wrong. It looked like a bull had had sex with a wrestler, and someone had pumped the resulting child full of steroids. Like the rat we had seen, its shoulders were remarkably broad, and its head was remarkably small. It was also much taller than any normal human, standing at a conservative estimate of nine feet, its head scraping the top of the hallway. It wasn't wearing any clothes, so we could see that it was male (Ahem.), but I couldn't assign it a gender. It would always be an "It." What semblance of humanity the man had had had been taken away from him by the experiments that had been  conducted on him in the lab.
It roared at us and charged, head down like a bull, towards us.
Venice and I swore simultaneously.