Page 37 of Grimdark Magazine Issue 48

She stiffens when a sound carries through the tunnels.

Everything echoes in the sewers. Even smells bounce off the walls, winding through the maze of tunnels, muddied by air currents that swirl together when river and sewer water meet.

She goes completely still, straining her senses to place the direction and size of the noise. Is it food or danger? She trembles with the effort, torn between hope and dread.

She can be fast, but never for long. She must know what’s coming before it’s close enough to see.

She hopes it’s something warm to eat.

She's cold and hungry. She’s not seen or felt sunlight in so long. Has it been months or years? There’s little sense of time in the sewers, so far beneath the city.

Her hunger is newer, but fiercer. A pit, tearing at her insides.

She has already eaten everything else in the sewers. Her small, quick hands are stiff with scars from rats that violently tried to escape her ravenous hunting. Their deep gouges taught her to move silently, to hide her approach with the air currents, and to break spines with a quick snap of her wrist before any teeth and claws reach her.

There are no rats left now.

She’s tried fishing, but fish are cold and harder for her to eat. She hopes something bigger will wander down into the sewers, a cat perhaps, but Six says that most animals in the city were eaten or rounded up for the lab during the war, and now, even though the war’s over, neither animals nor food have come back.

Still, she likes imagining a cat might appear, even a small mangy one.

Perhaps she would not eat it.

Six coming would be even nicer, but he doesn’t visit much anymore. He says it’s because he can’t find any food to bring.

She wishes she could tell him that he could come without any. That she likes to see him and his grimy boy face. He’s all she has. But the words are locked inside her, and she has no key to let them out.

She waits in the dark, limbs shuddering with hope of food.

She’d been fed well inside her cage.

Bennet, the man, would visit regularly wearing a white coat and saying to his assistant that the subject was still ‘too malnourished’. For weeks, all she did in the clean room was eat and eat. Little meals, day and night. Sometimes they would take her out to weigh and measure like Before, when she’d been taken to visit a doctor.

She never told anyone about Before. Not even Six knows that once she’d lived in a middle level of the city with her parents and food and dolls and pretty dresses. Before the war. Before the fighting in the city got too near and suddenly fire came, roaring louder than the battles as it rushed in from above and below, devouring the stairs and evacuation routes, their neighbours screaming as the flames swallowed them.

Her parents had wrapped her up inside her mother’s favourite velvet curtains and thrown her out a window.

Then she lived in the streets with other children, and if she did not want to be hungry, she had to steal, and so at first, the cage did not seem so terrible because it reminded her of Before, of clean clothes and doctors, and always having enough to eat.

Except in the cage, no one smiled at her or sang any songs, and she thought she was mostly alone until she noticed another cage on the far wall with a monkey-like creature inside. Wizened and small, it barely moved except its eyes, which always followed her.

She would smile and make faces at it, and when the grown-ups with their white coats were gone, she’d sing all the songs she knew.

***

She holds herself so still, her body strains from it, hands growing numb in the icy water. The sounds are coming from downwind, but she’s never heard such footsteps before and she knows that danger can be anything. Even the most ordinary day or the most ordinary man.

She backs away to vanish into the darkest parts of the tunnels, but then hears a muffled baa and a child cursing, and relaxes. It’s Six, and somehow he has a sheep with him.

She moves quickly to meet him.

He’s crashing through the water, wearing only trousers, trying to wrestle an animal as big as he is along the tunnel. His shirt and jacket are tied around the sheep’s flailing head.

Six doesn’t notice her yet, but the sheep does. It suddenly bolts, knocking Six flat. She smells blood as hooves collide with Six’s face.

She springs forward, overcome with the hot thrill of a hunt. Even a simple one. Her stiffness and pain are all forgotten. Six scrambles to his feet, his nose and mouth full of blood as she speeds past, hands outstretched. The sheep is terrified and fast, but it has never known a predator like her.

She catches it by the legs, jerking hard, and it goes tumbling, unable to spring again before she’s closed in, crashing them both into the sewer wall, the momentum stunning it.