Horror - Flash

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. Non-Stop from Namibia Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

NON-STOP FROM NAMIBIA

The wife and husband handed their passports and tickets to two separate counters manning the same line of travelers. The husband tried to make the face he’d worn for the passport photo, as if he didn’t look exactly like himself. The wife grimaced and wiggled, clenched her sphincter. Her hand went to her stomach as the procession carried forward through the busy airport, onto the Airlink jet gangway.

They’d saved for five years to afford the Namibian safari and it was wonderful, until the cab came to take them to the airport for their return flight. Those first fingers of pain struck her like a bodily lightning bolt but had dissipated some. A warning, but possibly a false one. Her body was unreliable. She’d lived her life getting used to red herrings that came about with nervousness; and the longer the flight, the more nervous she got.

“All right?”

The warm voice in her ear belonged to her husband. The thought had always eased her tension, if only by a modicum. He was her husband, her man. He belonged to her as she belonged to him, together they leaned like puppy lovers.

“I’m okay…you know me.”

He smiled and patted her arm as they shuffled along the tunnel. “Once we get in the air, you’ll feel better.”

“Probably.”

He patted her again, perhaps condescendingly, but most times he was right. She’d be fine and the worry in her guts was mental. Anxiety and the food she’d eaten, the fluids she’d drank, the collective of it trying to magic together a trouble baby.

“I’ll be fine once we’re in the air,” she said, echoing to reassure him and herself.

They found their spots and as the leather seat cradled her in a tight, semi-uncomfortable hug, she started to feel better. Sitting put gravity a little more on her side. This was going to be okay. She’d felt it before…though, this time was a little worse than normal.

—

“Ooh,” the steward said, pulling a face. “What is it? What’s wrong with her?” He was a small, rotund man in his early thirties with bleached blonde hair and a high voice. He wore the Airlink uniform well.

The husband cradled his wife and she held her stomach, groaning and sweating in pain. “I don’t know, maybe something we ate?” he said. “Thought it was nerves…sometimes she’s anxious.”

“Maybe we should move her to the washroom? She’s freaking out some of the other passengers.”

The husband nodded at the steward’s suggestion.

“Arrgh!” the wife groaned, getting to her feet.

Every waking set of passenger eyes were on her as the trio shuffled through the skinny aisle, moving toward the washroom. They’d been on the overnight flight for four hours already and anything was a welcome distraction, well almost anything. A few made faces not so different from the steward. A couple were outright terrified, as if this one woman’s health was an omen.

“Arrgh!” she howled as she stumbled into the washroom doorframe.

An old woman crossed herself from two rows away. “Lord, save us,” she said. Another woman buried her face in a Tess Gerritsen paperback. A man picked up the brochure on emergency safety from the seatback in front of him.

The husband scooched in behind his wife and the voice of a hooting young man carried from close to the back, deflating much of the tension: “Flying mile high club, eh buddy!”

Many laughed, but not all. The husband shook his head. The door closed and the fan overhead whirred.

“Okay, hun. Do you need to schmoo?” It was the word they’d used with their boys when they were little and it popped up now and then over the last twenty years like the memory of a really good car. “I can turn around…”

“Maybe. Maybe,” the wife said and tipped her face against the wall so she could yank down her slacks and underwear. “Actually, maybe some privacy.” The sweat was really pouring off her, drip, drip, dripping to the rubber floor between her sensible sneakers.

“Okay, I’ll be just out here, if you need me.” The husband slinked away and closed the door behind him, feeling a bit silly for following her in in the first place—it was just that she had him so worried.

Alone, but far from at peace, the wife decided to go for it and pushed like she had when she was giving birth to her firstborn. She clenched and grunted and the pain burned all over until she felt it—whatever it was—move. That motion was the foreplay to impending bliss. Down, down, down, but unlike a baby, this one took a backdoor exit. She tried to imagine what food might’ve caused this and couldn’t. Still, she pushed because better out than in was the most correct saying in the history of dumb fucking sayings.

“Aaarrrgh!”

The bang beneath her was wet, but firm. She gasped in relief, the relenting pain let her heart slow, and the real world came back into focus. Tears spilled and she even laughed a bit, but, oh god, she’d made a very public scene and had nowhere to hide. She grabbed toilet paper, gave a swipe, and checked.

Bright red and lots of it.

Too much red.

The laughter faded and a new worry pervaded her sudden calm.

Something must’ve torn down there, and Christ, what if she got sepsis? Went into septic shock? As a girl on the farm, she and her mother found the neighbors’ missing grandfather behind their barn, wearing a pained death mask upon his lifeless face. Apparently they’d all thought he had the flu and became delirious with fever, none knew about the infection growing within a wound on his leg—later assumed to come from a manure-crusted pitchfork—and what if the same kind of—

“Stop it,” she said.

That stupid terror was unrealistic, like fearing quicksand or lightning striking you through the bay window of your home while you watched a storm. Stupid. She’d have to go to the hospital, get a stitch maybe, but she’d survive.

She swiped again and looked at the toilet paper. Just as red. She groaned and cradled her face after dropping the toilet paper beneath her. She’d sit a minute and think. The plane was so nice and quiet but for the constant hum that she hadn’t actually heard anymore since they’d levelled out.

Then, she heard the lapping, felt something touching her torn and sensitive asshole. She popped at the contact, upright and turning to face the awkward little toilet. She gasped, sucking the air in so deeply that the alcohol-based cleaning agent within the bowl made her cough.

What stared back at her was greasy and green. It had bulbous curves to its skull and jaw, two beady eyes, a huge mouth of fangs, and two little ears riding atop its head like devil horns. It had lips painted red with blood, liquid fecal matter and mucus slickened its entire body. A grey tongue dragged out and began cleaning its face with great, sloppy swipes.

Its eyes blinked, one and then the other, horrifically out of time, and the wife felt her knees starting to go and put her hand against the wall behind the toilet. She tried to speak, tried to call for help, but found it all beyond her current abilities.

This was like something from a bad horror film. The disgusting nature of the situation and the demonic critter in the toilet, none of it felt real. She closed her eyes and tried to will this thing away, turn it into something painful and stressing, sure, but in the end mundane. She took a breath and attempted to stand. Then it happened and she couldn’t help herself—this was real, that thing in there and—a new pain boiled and she crumpled into a humanoid puddle on the floor.

 “Aaaarrrrgh!” Her expression was an elongated grimace and her voice the rumble of a monster truck as a second painful ball passed through her asshole. As it had been while delivering children, the first was the most difficult, but unlike delivering children, these things didn’t stop coming. “Aaaaarrrrrgh!”

This was a litter and she was alone in a tiny, airborne can delivering it.

—

Thirty-one minutes after shuffling in, the washroom opened and the wife stumbled out. She slammed the door in her wake, kicking it closed a second time when the latch didn’t grab the first time. Her legs moved like rubber and she had wadded toilet paper, turned pink with blood, rising from the back of her slacks—her shirt partially tucked. She was damp from head to feet. But she was out, away from that nightmare.

The husband looked at her sweaty and tired face. He stood and put out his hands. “Hun, maybe we better go back in and clean you up.”

She shook her head and ducked from his arms, stumbling down the aisle, toward her assigned seat. “There’s monsters! Monsters come out of my bum!” she moaned, loudly.

A couple people laughed, but most whispered to their neighbors. The woman who’d crossed herself earlier had a crucifix pendant in hand, was talking into it while she pressed it to her teeth. The man who’d shouted about the mile high club called out this time, “Must be some meat you got there, buddy!”

The husband turned red and followed his wife, putting his hands on her shoulders to stop her. “Here, hun,” the husband said, directing her to their vacated seats.

She looked at the seat and here was a fresh throb ready to become agony in her backside—she couldn’t sit. Not like this. I may never sit again, she thought.

Everyone stared at the woman when she skittered her husband’s hand and kept on going, moving closer to the front of the plane. She yelled this time. “Monsters! They come out of my bum!”

More people sniggered, but enough did not find that kind of behavior funny, especially not in a tin can flying a million miles from anything, over the Atlantic Ocean. The steward and two of his coworkers tried to corral the woman as she made for the cockpit doors, but she was slick and stank like body odor. None of them wanted to touch her and the steward waved his hands before him, had a visibly disgusted expression upon his face.

“Gloves! Masks!” the steward called. “Hit the seatbelt sign, she might be infectious!”

The trio dispersed, suddenly far too busy to block her, clearing a path to the cockpit door.

“Open up! There’s monsters! There’s monsters!” She banged on the locked door.

Gloves snapped, masks slipped on, and hands grabbed and pinned the disheveled woman. The husband remained by their seats, embarrassed, mortified, disgusted, nervous, lonely—all of the above. Throughout the plane, people were talking loudly, the subject no longer only for whispers, a few even bought into the notion of monsters.

“We’re all gonna die!” the praying woman shouted from her seat near the washrooms.

“Shut up, you wind bag!” the mile high man countered.

The wife began screaming non-words as she dissolved in the hands of the crew as a needle pierced her flesh, through her wet blouse. The husband watched for as long as he could. So ashamed and scared that he needed all the space a plane could offer. He rushed toward the washroom his wife had just vacated.

“Leave that door shut!” said the terrified Christian woman; the crucifix was on her tongue now. “Demons! And devils!”

The husband ignored her and swung open the door. Two-dozen sets of tiny green claws dragged him inside the can.

His screams silenced the passengers.

—

The wife awoke once the sedation wore off. The plane’s interior was a bloodbath. Little green monsters were everywhere, chowing down on body parts. Smacking. Crunching. Lapping.

She looked out the window and saw the lights of Pearson International. The intercom pinged and she awaited the pilot’s fine voice to explain that she’d gone nuts and none of this was real. Instead, she heard more wet smacks and a monstrous language of ra-ras and ga-gunks and chu-chungs and sha-shaks.

She closed her eyes and wondered why they’d left her alone. But wondered only a heartbeat. The answer was obvious.

“Of course they left you alone, you’re their mother,” she said and began laughing—hysterically—as she pondered different names for each of them.

XX