The Cable Munchers

Some time after midnight last evening, as I was contemplating watching yet another episode of my latest time wasting obsession, the cable feed itself froze and then died altogether, replaced by a bouncing apology in its absence.  I then noticed that my modem had fewer lights on than usual, so I knew that it was a total outage.  I was concerned about an online auction that I had bid on and had intended to rise early the next morning to monitor.  Would this all be resolved in time?

As I busied myself with this and that throughout the rest of the evening, I kept looking back to those lights to see if the problem had gone away but they never changed, and since it was late enough to call it quits, I did.

What I did not know was that out in the dark, cold, dampness of the evening many glistening globules were about, munching away at all of the cable all about the town.  These near formless masses were a greenish gray, slimy, and looked somewhat like pulsing brains.  Across the eons of time they had arisen from their unfathomable depths beneath the earth every handful of centuries, almost always failing to find something to feast on, so that they would usually simply dry up and be blown or washed away by the weather.  But this one time they had found something to nourish them, something to give them the sustenance to live beyond the night.

When I rose early this morning I saw that the status of my connection had not changed as the modem lights remained the same.  It was on a whim that I happened to look out my front door to see multitudes of the now massive blobs.  They were everywhere and the size of buses.  One had partially crushed the back end of my car.  Another had apparently crashed through the roof of my neighbors' house.  I couldn't understand why the air was not full of screams and chaos but then I saw that most people were just standing around, stunned and silent.

I wonder if my bid held up.