by Amanda Holt
This maddening, burning itch!
“What the fuck?” The youngest let go of my leg in revulsion.
Gary glowered at the youth. “Baby Boy, you useless fucking pussy – what’s the matter with you? Hold on to her!”
“She’s got this black shit on her leg.” The pale teenager told them. “Look! It’s like a scab, or leather or something.”
Jason released both of my wrists at once. “It’s on her hands, too. And her chest. What the – it’s moving!“
“It’s fucking spreading, man!” Baby Boy sounded disgusted, and began to back away.
Even in the dim light I looked down and saw a dark patch of something leather-like plastered against my bare leg from my foot to my groin, spreading up to my abdomen, covering my flat stomach.
At first I thought it was just black top soil from the ground where they had been pinning me.
However, dirt didn’t move of its own accord like this did.
I followed their stares to the patch of darkness that had appeared on the middle of my chest, itching and burning its way across my body.
The itching, the burning was worse where the darkness had appeared and was thickening, covering me with its skin-like coating.
While I was glad for its sudden appearance, its protection of my modesty, its abnormal nature and unknown origin horrified me.
What the hell is it?
What is happening to me?
The young one’s pale face was marked with fear.
He was clambering to his feet, clearly distressed about what he was seeing.
“What’s happening to me?” I asked aloud, fearfully, as though these horrible men might know the answer.
I was as terrified as they were of this strange transformation.
Moreso.
The young one backed even further away as did the fat one, releasing my other leg in the process.
The fingertips of my left hand continued to itch and cramp and it worsened to the point that I whimpered in pain. I watched in horror as the nail beds did begin to darken and grow.
The pain was so intense!
The sight of the change, unbelievable!
Jason released my right hand out of disgust because it, too, had become affected.
Right before my eyes, my fingertips turned dark and gleamed as if I had dipped them in used motor oil. The darkness spread, covering my arms completely with the same black barrier of some organic looking material.
Points formed at the tip of my fingers.
First, as long and narrow as a cat’s claws, then as long as fork tines…and then longer, thicker, more lethal.
In a matter of heartbeats they came to resemble butter knives.
The points continued to increase in length.
I could barely believe my eyes.
What’shappening to me?
Baby Boy made a comment under his breath that sounded a bit like a prayer.
The first of the three to attempt an escape from their fate, he was on his feet and on the run, retreating into the shadows of the park.
The black stuff all but covered me and, thankfully, the painful itching was beginning to subside.
My fingers looked like formidable weapons and the scaled texture of my skin was almost reptilian. I opened and closed my hands in front of me, wondering in awe at what my fingers had become—long black blades with thin, sharp edges.
Well, at least the black stuff wasn’t itching anymore.
And the men…at least the men weren’t touching me anymore.
The Dark Thing covered me in near entirety, save but for my face and hair. It was a second skin unto my own. I felt it creep up my neck as far as my jaw, my hairline, my ears. This entirely alien experience was—strangely enough—beginning to feel somehow natural, somehow right.
Jason, who had been transfixed by the change, now stood and was soon on the run, heading in the direction from which they had come.
The fat man with the tattoos was the last to leave, but he ran as fast as his jiggling folds could accomodate.
They left me alone in the shadows, to the Dark Thing that was spreading its last few inches to cover my entire body, even the soles of my feet still within my shoes.
As their footfalls subsided, I found myself in an unsettling quiet, my situation seeming quite absurd.
Some tough guys they were.
How quickly they had run at the first sign of trouble!
It was then that the fury came over me.
The rage.
The bloodlust.
How dare they attack me—ambush and surround me—me a fucking teenage girl.
How dare they!
How dare they!
They had harbored rape and other violence in their minds.
Now, suddenly, I had revenge in mind.
I no longer felt shaky in the legs or otherwise weak of limb.
I no longer felt like a victim.
As I stood, I felt strong—stronger, perhaps, than I had ever been in my life.
I felt like chasing them down, one by one, and ending their miserable lives.
I felt angry—angrier than I had ever been at anyone for any reason in my entire life.
How dare they try to violate me? How dare they?
How fucking dare they!
I saw the flicker of the fat man’s basketball jersey in the dim light. He was the straggler of the three and nearest me. Without any hesitation, I decided to act on my impulses.
I began to chase him.
I ran with the cold autumn wind in my ears, feeling as though I had never run faster or with more certain footing in my entire life. The shadows of the park seemed of no concern somehow—my night vision was clearer, more accurate than it had been just minutes before.
I could now see in the dark almost as well as I could see along the lit paths.
What’s happening to me?
What is this Dark Thing?
I would, of course, have much time to deliberate over these questions later.
For the moment, I didn’t need questions answered. I needed revenge!
In fact, I wanted to do more than just exact revenge. I wanted…justice.
Not only for me, but also for every other woman or girl they had assaulted. From the way that they had worked in sync as a pack, it was apparent they had done this to a woman before.
So help me, it would be their last time if I had anything to do with it.
I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it exactly, but by God, I’d see them dead.
The night air was cold against my unprotected face, but I ignored it as I chased down the brutes that had attacked me.
I gained distance on the fat man quickly, besting his uncoordinated paces with long strides of my own. My limbs felt augmented with a feeling, almost of invincibility, as my muscles worked in harmony to catch up to him.
Closing in on the fat man with only a few paces behind him, I jumped onto his back, forcing him to the ground with my momentum. He grunted as we fell to the wet gravel of the path, me on his back, him on his fat stomach.
Instinctively, I buried the strange claws that had formed at my fingertips deep into his throat. The talons were so sharp it was like slicing a hot knife through butter.
I tore the flesh of his throat to the point I nearly severed his head with the blow.
With my newly enhanced night vision, I saw the wide arcs of warm blood washing the ground, soaking the dead autumn leaves with each fresh spurt. His blood looked almost black in the
darkness of the night and from the warm liquid came wisps of steam that rose skyward in the cool night air.
With his throat ripped, I knew he was a dead—or dying–man.
Somehow, I knew that I had done the right thing.
Sudden and unexpected, I had the strangest vision—a collage of images of the women that he had attacked in the past, racing through my mind like leaves scattered by a windstorm.
How many women had there been?
From the vi
sions that swept through my mind, there were too many to count.
Some raped, some just murdered in cold blood—others raped and murdered.
More than twenty victims for sure.
There were even men and children among them.
I held my hands up before my eyes, marvelling at the dark red blood that glistened on the sharp edges of my new fingers. The blood, strangely enough, began to disappear, and somehow, I knew where it was going.
It was seeping into me, feeding the Dark Thing, the strange exoskeleton that covered me, making it—and me—even stronger.
I found it disturbing that I didn’t feel the slightest amount of remorse. I had just killed a man and I didn’t feel remorse. I found that odd. I thought that I should have cared enough to want to stop with the blood or at most, the death of one criminal.
Nevertheless, thinking of his many victims, something drove me on to pursue his companions.
It felt like a deep-seeded urge of some sort.
A calling.
Yes, it was a calling for the blood of these evil men that drove me on.
That and my fury is what drove me on.
My unchecked rage…
It seemed as though I could even smell them.
Intuitively, I seemed to know what direction my other two assailants were heading in. It wasn’t just a hunch or an educated guess. Rather, it was something of an intense gut feeling, coming from somewhere primitive and dark inside of me.
Suddenly, I trusted my instincts as I had never trusted them before. In a moment, I was on my feet and on the run again, a huntress, fueled by the need for evil blood, drawn by its scent.
By its signature...
I veered left, heading in the direction my newfound instincts lead me.
Can I hear him runningor am I just imagining things?
No! It was heavy breathing that I heard…and footsteps.
The footsteps of a guilty man.
The tall black man.
Jason.
I saw him crossing a lit path a hundred yards in front of me. He slowed his gait and turned his head toward me as though sensing danger. His eyes widened as he realized that I was pursuing him. They looked like twin white orbs beckoning me to the kill.
Yes, I was following him.
Hunting him.
The fearful expression on his face made him look as though he were seeing a ghost, but it was he, not I, who would be dead.
“Holy fuck!” Jason yelled in terror. “Jesus fucking holy fuck!”
I tackled the tall man, but as we fell, my momentum carried us to the side. As we hit the damp and unforgiving ground, he had a clear advantage and was atop me in an instant, straddling me, pulling back a fist to strike at me.
His advantage didn’t last long.
In a swift assault, I buried the nine inches of my newly extended fingers knuckle deep into his belly. He froze mid swing, too shocked to follow through.
I left my hands there, buried deep in his soft center, letting my second skin feed from him, from the blood that pulsed from his bowels in a steady deluge.
“You crazy bitch,” Jason swore, trying desperately to pull my hands out of his bloodied belly, but to no avail.
We both knew I had won.
He was a dead man talking shit.
This was his last show of bravado before his curtains closed for good.
As the Dark Thing that covered me fed greedily from him, images of his victims filled my head, much as they had with his fat accomplice. The images were like flashes from the scenes of a movie, inside the recesses of my mind.
I sat up, and with strength now superior to his, pushed him off me as he fell to the ground, clutching his abdomen.
“It troubles me to think of how many more girls there might have been,” I told him. “If I - that is, we - hadn’t stopped you tonight.” I said we, treating this mysterious Dark Thing as a second entity.
I couldn’t have done these things, exacted justice without it.
Wherever it had come from, whatever it was, one thing was for certain.
It was deadly.
A pool of dark blood was forming around the fallen man and his breathing all but stopped. He was finished.
Over the pounding of my heartbeat in my ears, I could hear the footfalls of my third attacker, the young one.
He wasn’t far away.
And…he had stopped running.
The fool wouldn’t even see me coming.
He must have felt safe in the street beyond the park, comforted by the lights and the people nearby. I rose from the side of his fallen companion and ran after Baby Boy, catching up to him with an uncanny, almost unfaltering sprint.
I had never run so fast in my life as the Dark Thing helped me to make efficient use of my legs, arms, heart, lungs, conducting them like a symphony of anatomical instruments: blood, tendon, joints, and muscle.
Baby Boy was in a dark alley, a few hundred yards away, his back turned toward me.
Then he was a car’s length away…then an arm’s length.
He must have heard me coming because he turned to face me as I took the last few steps, closing in the distance between us.
Before I even saw his pale expression again, I lashed out at him clumsily, hungry for more bloodshed as my long unnatural new talons glanced off his neck, drawing blood in a shallow wound.
This time, it was not a finishing blow.
“Did you really believe your actions would go unpunished?” I asked, furious with him, wanting to tear him to pieces, now that I had the ability.
He clutched his neck with his hand, trying to staunch the blood flow. Crimson poured between his fingers as he backed away from me, young eyes wide with fear.
“Please don’t hurt me!” He cried.
Looking at my right hand, I willed my claws to grow shorter and was pleased to see that the second skin seemed to respond to my wishes.
My fingernails were again as long as fork tines, then cat’s claws…then much like my own fingers.
“Your victims…did they beg for mercy?” I asked him, my smile one of pure menace. “Did their pleas fall on deaf ears?”
Two long slender spikes of the glistening black organic material were now, at my will, growing from the back of my hands, like scalpels at first, then as long as bread knives.
They looked like features found on a carnivorous insect and I knew they would be as sharp as razors since I willed them to be that way.
I seemed able to transform through my willpower, through imagination alone.
The Dark Thing seemed content to respond to my silent commands…
“Tell me,” I demanded, “Did they beg for their lives just as you’re doing now?”
I willed the weapon of my left hand to grow strong and hard as I punched into the flesh of his shoulder, burrowing deep with the jagged spike, pinning him against the brick wall.
“Did they?” I demanded.
A scream of agony was his only answer.
I was pleased.
As I twisted the spikes, torturing him, his shrieks of torment were like so much music…
So much sweet, sweeping music.
The Dark Thing, sustained by my victim’s anguish, fed greedily on his readily available blood.
Images of his past conquests flooded my mind and I was surprised to see that, despite his young age, he had scores of victims.
Even more victims than the other two who had fallen this night by my hand.
“Please…God…don’t…” His young face streaked with tears and his terrified eyes, he begged me not to kill him.
I thought of his young age and then I thought of my own.
Who was the greater evil at this point—him or me?
I had killed two killers tonight.
I was about to kill another.
For all that he had done, to me – to countless others – did he deserve to die?
I felt so.
At the very core of my soul, there was a sense that it w
as the right thing to do.
There was no point in prolonging this drama.
His screams might have drawn the attention of Good Samaritans who may have called the police.
With the further outpouring of his blood came the knowledge of his crimes and those terrible secrets filled me with fury.
It was shocking. Baby Boy was only a few years older than I was, yet so many innocents had died at his hands.
So many.
“All of the things that you have done…they’re beyond evil.” I seethed, twisting the blade of my hand in his shoulder.
He howled with pain. “Please…”
“End of the show, fucker. It’s curtains for you.”
I pulled my left hand out of his shoulder and, crossing the two blades under his chin, much like a lethal pair of scissors, I drew my forearms apart and up cutting deep through his neck, turning him into a human Pez dispenser.
His remaining blood washed over me, covering my chest, my arms, feeding the Dark Thing whose hunger for the blood of the wicked seemed to know no limit, no boundaries on this, the night of its birth.
The young thug’s body fell against me and I let it drop to the concrete, unimpeded.
I didn’t care who found this vermin first—the rats or the cops—it made no difference to me.
My work was done.
I had done my part, had exacted revenge and answered the call of the Dark Thing—the call for the blood of the guilty.
Justice was served.
And it wouldn’t be for the last time.
Reaper II: Neophyte
Amanda M. Holt
-1-
Shortly after the incident with the three men in the park, I came to decide that in a city as unforgiving as ours, it was time to start using my newfound abilities to affect change wherever I could.
I had bested three men, had been transformed from victim to avenger to victor in a matter of minutes. I knew that there were men out there just as vile as they were, men who were monsters with human faces.
I was certain that I was given this Dark Thing for a reason.
As with all things in Creation, this power had a purpose.
A destiny.
Exactly what that purpose was remained a great mystery to me, but it was a mystery that I intended to seek out with every resource that a fifteen year old had at her disposal.