Page 38 of Grimdark Magazine Issue 48

She grips hard with every hand, dragging her fangs through wool towards flesh until its belly opens like a split seam.

The exquisite scent of blood and flesh fill her nose. She doesn’t pause, shredding apart the twitching mass of organs before she buries her face, gulping desperately as the sheep’s pulsing heart spurts hot blood down her throat. She feeds until her lungs scream for air, pausing only to gasp before gorging deeper.

The sheep’s organs steam around her, its wool pillowing her head as she eats until her belly can take no more, the blood still streaming from the gaping wound.

She wishes she could save some for later. If she had not been so hungry, perhaps she could have bled the sheep a few times before killing it.

Now full, the rank smell overwhelms her, the stench of organs filling the tunnel. She's covered in it. She pulls clumps of wool from her teeth.

Six’s shirt and jacket are still tied around the sheep's head, soaked in blood and sewer water. She pulls them free and turns to find him huddled beneath a fractured beam of light that filters from a grate high overhead.

He’s ugly like most street children are, stunted and weedy, but she loves his hard, wary face, drinking it in as hungrily as she’d eaten. His eyes dart between the flowing water and the shadows around him. He cannot see well in the sewers, like her.

If she stays in the shadows, he won’t be able to see her at all.

She edges along carefully, watching Six kneel, searching the water with his hands, his face growing pinched with worry. His chin starts trembling even though his face is set with determination.

He’d told her once that getting frozen is even worse than burning: the slow inescapable creep of ice moving deeper until the heart stops and the brain goes still, only to wake to the agony of thawing. That he is more scared of the cold than anything.

Still hidden in shadows, she extends her arm, holding out his clothes, thinking with a thrill that even with the rat scars, her hand looks like ones that any girl might have.

Six looks up and flinches from it, his eyes narrowing as they search the shadows behind her outstretched hand. She shrinks back, but it’s too late. He shudders as he glimpses her, then a look of miserable guilt flashes across his face. His eyes drop down to his clothes, and he wordlessly takes them.

He tries to dress quickly, but his fingers fumble. He huddles against a wall, rubbing at his arms. Unable to stop herself, she creeps from the shadows behind him and wraps her arms tight around his shoulders. He tenses, his eyes darting back, but doesn’t pull away, so she dares draw closer until her chest is pressed against his back as he slowly warms.

She wishes she could say something. She wants to know what the city is like now that the war’s over, if she’d recognise the places he’d describe. He used to tell her more, but now it’s just apologies for not coming back sooner.

She wants to know how he found a sheep. If that means there’s more food now.

When alone, she practices, trying to make her throat form words, but nothing human ever comes out.

“Pretty good find, right?” Six says, nodding towards the sheep carcass.

She nods, holding him closer, hoping that if she can be warm enough for him, he’ll stay. Six’s hand comes up and squeezes her arm, but then his thumb brushes across the thick burn scars that twist across her skin. He snatches his fingers away, going stiff, his eyes darting again, simultaneously seeking and cringing from what he knows is crouched behind him.

He knows what she looks like, but there weren’t so many scars when he saw her outside the sewers. Perhaps that’s why he hid her in a place where there’s no light.

She has only ever glimpsed herself: Bennet’s special project.

The clean room where her cage sat was in the back of the Main Lab where Bennet performed experiments for the war. It was in the Main Lab that he worked.

She was a hobby; saved for his evening leisure.

Bennet had discussed it with his assistant, Stroud, while they removed her from the cage, laying her on one of the metal tables, placing straps and bars at every joint until not even her fingers could twitch, after he’d decided she was “sufficiently healthy.”

He’d chimaerised a variety of animals and several humans before, but even when they survived, they never adjusted to his changes. The ideal subject, he’d realised, had to be resilient enough to survive alteration but still young and malleable enough to adapt afterwards. He’d been told the process was too inefficient for the war effort, but he was determined to prove its future potential.

He began with her face, so that if she wasn’t resilient enough, it would be before he wasted too much of his time. He’d carved hole after hole into her forehead and cheeks before grafting skin and then selecting horrible, malformed animal eyes with long, red nerves dangling from them and inserting each one, asking:

Could she see? Anything? Now? A shadow? Try to move this eye. Was she trying? Really? If she wasn’t really trying, he would remove the nerve block and let her feel it as he spliced and integrated the optic nerves into her brain. Maybe she would try harder then.

She has nine eyes now, though only five work. The others blur, warping her surroundings if she doesn’t try to block them out; her brain struggles constantly to make sense of things not meant for it.

He did other things behind her face and inside her ears. Things that don’t show the way eyes do. She can sense vibrations and distant movement, see clearly in darkness that no normal human can. That’s why she’s so good at hunting. But it hurts. Every new sight and sense exists like a splinter in her head.

***

Six has not come in a long time, so long that she can smell that the world above has warmed.