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Post by Vespyr on Feb 22, 2012 18:28:31 GMT -8
I. Wolves
The winter of 2011 was a season marked by cold blood and terror. Even carrying over into the New Year, murders and massacres and mysterious disappearances were a recurring theme in the newly decimated city of Long Beach. No one in the area really knew exactly how many massacres had taken place—there was no definite beginning or end to the murders—but it was decided early on that there had been one too many. The killings happened in the manner of an unpredictable stream; deaths occurred at times in a mere trickle, and at times in flash floods. Those were the massacres, or so everyone seemed to agree. The difference between murders and massacres was not merely body-count; no one had been keeping count of the bodies. No, the difference between them was apparent by the methods used in each.
Murders happened secretly. Day by day, bodies were discovered in the middle of streets, hanging from lampposts, buried haphazardly in rude tombs of cement, or simply left where they had been slain. No one was aware that a killing had taken place until the body showed up, often dismembered, its skull crushed, most of its teeth missing. Sometimes the bodies never showed up at all and somewhere, hiding amongst the rubble, someone was bereft with thoughts regarding the mysterious disappearance of their acquaintance or loved one who had gone out to the latrine. Those left wondering were spared the gruesome reality of their fellow’s fate. However, knowledge of what the recovered corpses mostly had in common—smashed skulls and missing teeth—gave plenty of material to the imagination. And strangely enough, for all the sickening noise that must have been made by way of smashing victims’ skulls into the pavement, no one in the city ever heard nor saw the predators at work.
It was when the slaughterers did show their faces that all doubt vanished: a massacre was occurring. They would appear unexpectedly, audaciously, sometimes in the middle of a seemingly empty street, wielding weapons made for brutality. They usually appeared in groups of two or three. Their attire, mostly black as the night they commanded, like a league of detached shadows, a separate and superior force of nature. Their grim faces had been burned into the minds of those who had seen them and survived, and haunted these survivors by day, night, and dream.
One was a femme whose gaunt face was as white as her hair, and whose deathly lips were as black as the shadows surrounding her eyes: eyes that glinted malevolent violet in the light of both the fire and the moon. Her teeth were sharp when she smiled—the corners of her lips had a terrifying habit of twitching into a rapacious grin—or her face was otherwise undisturbed, save the unfathomable smoldering in her eyes. When she spoke, her voice was startlingly authoritative, even frighteningly aggressive despite how effortless and aloof she seemed when she gave commands to the others that accompanied her. The other face that was synonymous with fear was that of a young man with long red hair and an eye patch. He was, by far, less supernaturally frightening in appearance than his female compatriot, but he was nonetheless frightening in his intensity, the utter exuberance he had for killing. As if it was a game. He had about him an air of reckless playfulness like that of a young boy wielding a big stick, with the terrifying magnitude of an incensed gorilla wielding a tree trunk. He was almost always smiling—loud and manic—and his voice was to the ears as unsettling and loathsome as the overexcited barking of a rabid Rottweiler. He and the pale girl seemed, by their vastly differing demeanors, to be polar opposites. But how the two got along was the least of humanity’s concerns; those who had seen their faces, if they ever lived to see them again, were concerned only with hiding themselves away. Hoping to god that the screams stayed put on the other side of the street, where an entire apartment building had become a slaughterhouse to the jaws of two voracious wolves—one white, and one red.
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Post by Vespyr on Feb 22, 2012 18:28:51 GMT -8
II. White
Scott lost his wife in the second, or maybe the third of six massacres that swept across Signal Hill in the winter of 2011. When the wolves raided his home, a ground-floor apartment, they had left her entrails strewn across the white carpet. How he, an awkwardly tall middle-aged man with a limp, had managed to escape death was uncertain; Scott only remembered blacking out at some point and waking up later to the overpowering stench of death in his nostrils. There were seven bodies lying around him, and one of them was his wife. The stain where her stomach had lay on the floor and had leaked acid for several hours while Scott was unconscious would never come out of the carpet. As for the rest of the stains, Scott had spent several days scrubbing them out, with help from sympathetic neighbors. Why the man cared so much about the stains in the carpet, they couldn’t fathom. Post-traumatic stress or something like that, they quietly agreed at one point when he left the room.
In actuality, Scott was too proud to allow the stains to exist in his perfectly white carpet. Those stains—his wife’s blood and bodily fluids—were an encroachment on his success as a man living in the modern world. He had taken the job with longer hours and higher pay so that he could afford the apartment for he and his wife, and personalize it in a manner that proved his success. His wife had complained that white carpet would stain easily, so Scott paid to have it steam-cleaned every other month. He had asserted his dominance over the white carpet—white, the color of success.
With his wife murdered, his children out of touch in another state, his home ravaged, his job gone, his money worthless, the everlasting whiteness of his carpet was the only remnant of the success Scott had once claimed. And now it was stained. Permanently. Scott would spend hours in the living room, sitting on the couch, drinking wine and staring bitterly at the disgusting blotch on the floor. Someone—someone had taken his pride and shat all over it. Made it meaningless. They killed his wife. They ruined his carpet. They took his pride.
Scott wanted his pride back. And he would get it back.
As the thin man with graying hair sipped his room temperature wine and glared through his horn-rimmed glasses as the offensive stain on the floor, he plotted revenge against the vile wolves that had torn him from his dignity.
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Post by Vespyr on Feb 22, 2012 18:29:05 GMT -8
III. Withdrawal
With Tuvlan unconscious on the operating table, Vespyr hissed a sigh of quiet exasperation and let her eyelids close over the tired violet hues. As she pushed the table across the vast expanse of the empty parking structure one floor at a time, the metal wheels squeaked and the glaring yellow overhead lights stabbed through her eyelids. The annoying sensations prodded certain nerves in the girl’s head that gave her the feeling of a headache, though such a thing would never come to fruition. Not tonight.
Vespyr took a breath of night air, finding herself at the entrance of the garage, on the ground and top floor which was not lit at all. For a few moments she let her deep eyes pan across the faraway depth of dark indigo sky, her hands resting on the cold metal table on either side of Tuvlan’s head. The air that caressed her pale face was as heatless and crisp as the metal and she didn’t notice that she shivered, though she continued to stare, unaffected and silent, at the mysterious beauty far above her.
Tonight… would be nice to admire from a rooftop.
Vespyr aspired to do so as she set forth pushing the table into the mouth of the opposing parking structure, which was an enigma of utter darkness. In the cradling shadows she unstrapped Tuvlan’s body, lifted his limp form into her arms, and carried him by ways to the dingy place where he had last been resting. Soon she was kneeling in the corner of the generator room where she set the sleeping boy gently on the cold ground. Then she rose up, disappeared from the room, and slunk off like an untamed thing into the night.
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Post by Vespyr on Feb 22, 2012 18:29:19 GMT -8
IV. Wanted
A tall shadow detached itself from the mother mass of darkness that impregnated one of the narrow alleys along Willow street, and slid along the moonlit sidewalk, trailing at the footsteps of an equally spectral figure who was all but a shadow herself save the few strands of white hair, stirred by a gust of frigid air, that momentarily escaped the cover of her black hood. From behind, Vespyr was an apparition of purest black who might have been treading on a mirror or on the glasslike surface of a moon pool which the silent soles of her boots neglected to ripple, somehow, for her shadow was as black and as eerily lithe in proportion as herself as it followed her down the empty street. But upon seeing her front, she was more than a mere black stain in the night air. The lower half of her pale face—the upper portion hidden in the shadow of her hood—rested in stark contrast to the blackness that framed it. The whiteness of her skin deepened the black shade of her clothes; the blackness of her clothes brightened the white tint of her skin. The portions of her face and neck not painted in shadow were exposed to the moonlight, highlighted by it, giving a most corpselike luster to a lithe tendon in her neck, to her gaunt jaw, and her expressionless lips; though her lips seemed as black as all else. There was something quite unnaturally undisclosed about her as she walked down the street in unaffected silence, something almost unassuming for all her aloofness.
But she would not have called herself unaware. Her eyes, like amethysts concealed in shadow, were fixed keenly on the windows of the surrounding structures. Most windows were mere empty black squares and thus overlooked, but in some there were unfamiliar faces, half-hidden against the wall or the sill, whose wide eyes peered down to witness the approach of a white face that was familiar to them. Vespyr stared back—quite indifferently, for her motives tonight had no relevance to the murderous acts she was known by—and the frightened faces in the windows thought that she had not seen them. The shadows over her eyes had fooled them. They leaned closer to the windows, beckoning their compatriots from the safety of the shadows behind the broken glass, so that dozens of faces were now glaring anxiously at the lone wolf in the street. Why was she alone? Why did she carry no weapon? What was about to happen?
The questions were in their eyes. Vespyr read and disregarded them and carried on to find a suitable rooftop to settle on for the night. Just like back then, she thought. I got by with nothing but the night and the rooftops. Things used to be so sweetly simple when love had not existed, or it had been a thing to stab repeatedly—with mad joy—until it was dead. When responsibility was a chain that she had not yet slung around her own neck. When the days lacked purpose, and she was alone. Did she long for those days again? No, but they were nice to reminisce upon from time to time.
The sidewalk ahead of her had become an unsurpassable mess of rubble so Vespyr stepped into the street, which was flatter and strewn with boards of plywood. As she walked across one of the wooden flats she heard a suspicious creak, followed by a loud crack, and the board suddenly split in half beneath her boot, and she was weightless for an instant as she fell. A moment later Vespyr was staring up at the night sky again. Surrounding her, rising ominously into her field of vision and pointing blasphemously at the stars, were sharp poles of metal and wood. They seemed as tall as the sky itself as they towered over her but they seemed to arise from nowhere in particular—except for one which protruded from her stomach.
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Post by Vespyr on Feb 22, 2012 18:29:34 GMT -8
V. Windows
The windows were crammed with faces; so desperate were they to catch a glimpse of the gloriously horrific street scene that some of the visages broke away only to reappear behind another pane of broken glass, next door or the floor above or below, wherever offered the least obstructed view. Despite the fervor of ghastly elation that rippled from one window to the next, apparent on the wide-eyed, jaw-dropping faces, and despite the popular itch to get a closer look at the miraculous and disturbing thing that had just occurred—the schadenfreude that no one could deny themselves—no one had yet dared to step outside. But had some nameless face in the crowd shouted, ‘Cowards!’ among the excited murmurings with a twinge of hope that someone else might step forth so that he would not be the first to make such an audacious move toward the beast, he would have spoken too soon. Moments after this hypothetical hypocrite might have shouted at his coward compatriots to step outside, someone did step out.
An awkwardly tall man with graying hair and horn-rimmed glasses limped through the door of his ground floor apartment. The excited voices died out, the faces in the windows grew still, and they watched the man named Scott as he made his way, at first cautiously, but then recklessly toward the pit of spikes in the street. The unyielding stiffness of his right leg—the cause for his limp—gave him a rather childlike quality as he all but skipped through the minefield of plywood boards, bounding this way and that until he reached the place where the demon girl had fallen through and impaled herself in Scott’s trap. An inhumane grin had spread across the man’s withered face, a visage which in the past few months had been weathered by worry so that he seemed terribly older than his forty-nine years. Such a smile, were it worn several months ago, might have been devilishly handsome. But after the wear and tear that winter had wrought upon him, the wretched grin stretched his cracked lips in such a way that sent wrinkles rippling wearily from the corners of his mouth. Scott seemed, in all his excitement, a bit mad.
He glared gleefully at the white-faced girl caught like a fly in the net of spikes. Her limbs were askew, with one arm dangling below her while the other was caught between two poles that crossed paths. One leg, like the latter of her arms, had fallen upon another crossing of poles and rested limply at a level slightly lower than her torso. The other leg, not so lucky; her right calf had been stuck through by a metal spike, the tip of which protruded three inches from the warped flesh beside her shin-bone. It was one of three of the spikes that had invaded her body. The other two had been beneath her torso as she fell. One of these had been shorter than the other, and failed to thrust its way completely through her chest on impact; its metal tip was embedded just below her shoulder blade. The other, however, a taller wooden pike, had met no bone to halt it as it pierced thickly through the girl’s lower abdomen, surely rupturing at least one vital thing on its way through. The girl had lifted her head for a few moments and stared strangely at the sky while a trickle of blackish fluid dribbled from the corner of her lips. She mouthed words that, from a distance, were incomprehensible to the windowed faces. And then blood came from her lips in a hideous black gush, and her head dropped backward, and she was deathly still.
When Scott limped briskly to the edge of the death pit a few moments later, he saw her eyelids narrowing as though she were drifting off into a placid sleep. In his overexcited state, he took no more than a moment to pause and gawk at the scene before jumping down into the pit with a terrible cackle, and no ladder to get him out again. That particular thought was shoved impatiently to the back of his mind as he wove to and fro between the spikes toward the girl’s body. His pride took precedence over all, and the vehemence with which it burst from his throat—a stream of boastful cackles and several shouts of, “I’ve killed her! I’ve killed the big bad wolf!”—was unparalleled in its volume and magnitude, as a proper finale ought to be. It was the last anyone would ever see of Scott’s pride—and what an audience! The faces in the windows grew more numerous by the moment.
The eyes in the faces grew wider and their glimmering excitement turned all at once into a piercing sort of terror.
The girl was not dead. Someone had seen her dangling arm twitch. Everyone saw them both jolt upward, clawing viciously at the sky. Someone shrieked as they gripped the bloody wooden pole on which her lower torso was impaled, and one hand swarming over the other, the girl dragged herself to the top, grabbed two poles that rose on either side of her, and heaved her body off of the fatal spike. Her right leg was dislodged with a violent kick. She twisted her agile body midair and was suddenly perched among the poles, or on top of them, or something as improbable as that. No one really knew what was happening. There was an epidemic of horror in the air: many of the faces turned away from the windows to hide from the terrible nightmare vision or to retch on the floor.
Scott, during all of this, had frozen where he stood, no more than three feet away from the dead girl. The dead girl who was not dead. The undead thing that was perched like a human spider between the spikes, baring its fangs and snarling grotesquely at him, glowering with its ebony-black eyes. Scott’s right leg trembled and his knee buckled beneath him, but the black-eyed thing had latched its wolfish teeth to his throat before he had even hit the ground.
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Post by Vespyr on Feb 22, 2012 23:48:49 GMT -8
VI. Wake
Vespyr’s skull was imbued with deafening screams and the color red. Bloody crimson and sanguinary scarlet writhed in violent turmoil and made a mess of her vision. The grisly hues bled and splattered across her eyes while something warm and pungent slicked over her tongue and into her throat. Her gnashing teeth were pulverizing something fleshy and raw. Then her jaw snapped shut, crushed something more solid—like a pipe— and suddenly the cacophony of human shrieking died off, leaving Vespyr in silence with the gruesome colors and the intense flavor of something metallic and bittersweet.
The sudden void of sound provoked her to keep utterly still. She listened; nothing stirred her eardrums but her own fast-paced heartbeat. She stared; the violent red hues settled into stagnant contours and were now quite lifeless. The offensive noises and the threatening motions of this thing, whatever it was in all its infernal redness, had been obliterated.
The femme promptly lifted her angular head, peered at her surroundings, and found her sight to be filled with scintillating darkness and skewed vertical lines. The shadows were illuminated as they passed through the wide black lenses of her eyes, so that the night glowed faintly and nothing was hidden from her. The moon was as bright, and thus, as loathsome as the sun. Light glared down at the girl and forced her to scramble backward into the corner of her confinement. There she would remain, crouched, breathing rapidly, staring, keeping absolutely still for several hours while the static image of her surroundings sunk deep into the pitch-black pits of her eyes: shadows, lines, and a patch of red; faint highlights that rose up from the ground and trailed along the lines on their skewed vertical tracks toward the sky; a reddish thing that lay limply on the ground several paces away; tall sticks silhouetted in the bright moonlight against a backdrop of stars; a mangled body on the floor of what appeared to be a pit.
At some point or another, as the dawn was beginning to break, Vespyr realized that the sticks were spears. The pit was a trap. She had fallen into it. But who..? The body on the ground in front of her was barely recognizable from the chest up, for much of his face and neck had been devoured. Vespyr’s deathly white visage was bloodstained, with her jaw painted crimson like a savage’s war paint. Her eyes glinted with the subtlest tinge of violet as they flicked suddenly to focus on the mutilated body, breaking her trancelike stare. Her gaze flicked again to the tips of the spears that rose high above her head. Slowly, she dragged her hand up from the ground and felt absentmindedly along her abdomen. Her cold fingertips came across a gaping hole in the fabric of her shirt, but there was no wound beneath it.
The sun rose. Vespyr drifted out of the primitive, uncharted realms and into her consciousness, and then promptly into a deep sleep. Unbeknownst to her, quiet footsteps had begun to stream past on the broken asphalt above; an exodus was occurring as she slept. By six o’clock that morning, every refugee who had witnessed or heard the news—that their worst fear had been killed, only to defy death, for it was too evil to die—every soul that still clung to hope had fled from that land. The windows were devoid of faces. The decimated apartment buildings were empty. The silence that hung in the misty morning air was heavy with a sense of shock and devastation. At midday, long after the sun had burned the white fog away, Vespyr crawled out from the pit, pulled her black hood over up, and walked home undaunted.
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