It’s just for practice.
The mass of liquid oozing trickling down to the pool area smelled like blood, but Detective Hansen had never seen gore that color before. At first glance it had the illusion of red, but a longer look revealed threads of gray, blobs of pallid green, the odd clot of blue; the stuff looked and acted like a silicon-based goop, not anything organic. As long as you ignored the smell.
Yet another meaty whoosh from above interrupted his thoughts. Hansen looked up, hating every second of it. Or as long as you ignore the corpse.
The corpse of the monster — because there was no other damnable word for it, really — was still sprawled along the hotel patio, but it wouldn’t be for long. Every few minutes a piece of it would swell up, go off in a brief flash of flesh and stink, and add more goop to the slowly spreading pile. The first cops to get here reported that it had eight legs, a barbed tail, and a head that was all segmented eyes and serrated teeth; by now it was a filth-blister one-third its size, trying to pop in the warm Florida sun. At this rate, the thing would be a film on the ground by noon.
His partner Terry came back, still wiping his mouth (it was his turn to vomit in a trash can). “What the hell is that thing, Lee?” he asked him. “Where did it come from? Why is it dead?”
Hansen took stock of himself. He was pretty sure he was out of stuff to throw back up, finally. “Great questions, Terry, but not the right one.”
“What’s the right one?”
Hansen hawked, spit out a particularly stubborn bit of bile-flavored snot, and tried to keep breathing through his mouth. “When is somebody going to show up here and cover all this shit up? You and me, we got homicide cases to clear.”