A little snippet from the beginning of Kongomato 4

As always with my Kongomato novels the beginning is about naughty people who get theirs in a sudden and painful way. I enjoy it but it's also essential to the story.
    Here's an excerpt of chapter one. I deleted the really bad words as this isn't the place for them. I may change some or all of it as the mood takes me.

‘What the **** are you talking about?’ But he knew. Somehow he knew. His past had finally caught up with him.
    ‘I won't bother with my ID for now. I think this will do.’ A moment later, revealed in the gloom was a gun. It was a far larger gun than his own and its very wide muzzle now pointed unwavering a his midriff.
    ‘Customs?’ he asked without emotion. The man did not smile but his disdain was obvious.
    ‘Homeland.’

    Steele was outraged. He was a thief, yes, he was also a liar, but he was not a goddamn terrorist.
    ‘Are you out of your gourd?’ He would have said more, a lot more but was given no chance as something peculiar happened.
    Steele had seen quite a few deaths in his years, but none as quick, silent and terrifying as this. In one moment Mallory’s eyes stared fully at him, quite sorrowfully in fact, and in the next he felt rather than heard something. It was like the displaced air of a newspaper as someone struck out wildly at a fly, except in this case a winged pest did not fall to the ground. Rather, with a sickening, tearing sound Mallory's head left his shoulder. There was no time to yell, or in his instant and overwhelming terror, to scream, for the other man’s head fell to the deck with a sickening thud.

    A moment later, his gorge threatening to burst from his throat, Steele turned at the new sound, that of a low rasping, almost of sibilant speech somewhere close. In his panic to flee his hand hit something hard enough to snap three of his fingers, but he felt no pain for with a low whine followed by a grating sound deep in the bowels of the ship a sharp draft of frigid air from above billowed down as the cargo hatches began to creak open. But he was given no time to marvel at this, either, for a moment later a bright green light shone directly into his eyes. It was a curious shade of green and quite attractive in their grim surroundings but there was little time to consider this further, for less than a second after that a pain more hideous than he ever could have imagined filled his entire being. Worse, something began to trickle down his face.

    His scream, if could it have been called that, was muted beneath the rasping, snarling roars surrounding him. His fall onto quivering knees was halted by something sharp taking his weight effortlessly and severing his legs below the knees. By now Steele had eased to exist as a functioning human but more as a gibbering agony-filled wreck of insanity.

     With his rapidly disappearing consciousness he missed the howling screech of several more giant bodies writhing past him shrieking in joy, or some other alien emotion, before he felt one more thing, the last sensation he would ever experience as a living being. The teeth which fastened around his skull had to be easily six inches long, but he didn't know or care because his skull was immediately pulverised and a moment later tossed into a gullet which would just have easily accepted his entire body had there been enough room in the cramped cargo area.

    With a squawk or either rage or satisfaction the thing which had destroyed him struggled backwards and with one more howl into the night sky joined it's fifteen or so companions busily flapping away and using the rising wind to hurl them aloft and towards their new home.