“Yes, in a minute. Guard change is happening at six-thirty.” Betty plops down before a mirror to fix her hair. “Let me just go change. A patient vomited and got some on my skirt.”
We all make a face and grow increasingly impatient until she is back. When Betty returns to us, fully dressed in a new uniform, we head in the direction of the hospital. The humans are out in force tonight, mulling around from restaurant to bar to hotel. We stick to whatever shadows there are, growing hungrier by the moment; that is, until we reach the feeding ground.
As Betty had promised, we see only a few guards on duty, and none at this ward. A smile from Helen and a glance at Betty's uniform keeps whoever is still here at bay. Betty leads us down the hall to Room 423. There's a solitary bed there, and a man sleeping therein. He is frayed, yellowed, and must be no younger than in his sixties. He must have been in the first great war. I can smell that on him, the gunpowder and gas from that era.
Betty puts a hand on his shoulder to gently wake him. The movement is always … foreign to me. I have seen Betty do it before, and I've seen humans touch one another in that way, but it is not something my kind does naturally.
The man wakes up, startled. But upon seeing my sister, his expression changes to one of warmth. “Betty my girl. Come to keep your promise at last?”
She smiles and runs a hand through his thinning hair, like he is a former lover. “Yes Jeffrey. Just like I promised. Are you sure you still want to go through with it?” Her thumb rubs his temple.
Jeffrey takes her hand with one of his, “Yes, I'm sure. I'm tired and each day is worse than the last. I'm in pain. I want to see Margaret in Heaven, and she never liked me being late you know. You said it'll be painless.”
“Yes.” Betty swallows something down.
“Then it's time I go. I'm just glad it's an angel sending me on my way.” His lips kiss my sister's hand. Betty is not disgusted. Instead she tells him to close his eyes and softly sings some popular tune. Her voice has a pleasant lift to it, as she hums and sings, “This lovely day has flown away, the time has come to part...” She lays a towel over his eyes like a shroud and flexes her hands. Out of her wrists pop her stingers, red-tipped and dripping venom. She cups his face with both hands, thumbs caressing his cheeks, still singing that tune, and her stingers find their mark on either side of his neck.
Within moments he is paralyzed and numb to it all. He can still hear us, but Betty keeps singing to distract him. We disrobe him. As the oldest, Helen has the privilege of drawing first blood. Looking at the withered body, Helen takes the sharpened nail of her index finger and carves a line from the neck to the pelvis, bisecting the body.
The scent of blood hits us and we let our bodies respond without protest. The hunger opens up what is hidden: My teeth elongate, crawling their way out of my gums. My jaw unhinges and from the back of my throat my mandibles unfurl, pushing their way out of my skull. The singular feeling of release is pleasurable.
We can speak our language now, chittering to one another. Human mouths are too fleshy to convey anything with elegance. We each take a section of the body and begin carve into the meal. Betty takes the top right, Helen the top left, Dorothy bottom left, and myself the bottom right. His skin is papery, brittle and sallow, but we are seized with hunger. We take out the intestines, Dorothy's favorite, and she slurps portions up like human spaghetti. Betty tells us not to take the liver, for that is what was killing him. His lungs are small and weak; we eat around the blackened ends. Betty is gifted the heart, which is her favorite. She picks apart each chamber with her fingertips and her mandibles shovel the portions into her mouth.
The evening is finished when we've polished most of the bones. The head is left mostly intact, except for the cheek, which Helen nibbles at. We do not blame her; human cheek is so tender. We tie up what remains in a sheet and make our way to the incinerator now that our bodies are disguised once more. Helen distracts the last orderly as we burn the final traces of our feeding.
Despite having eaten I do not feel full. My sisters head home, but I decide to take a walk in the dark. When the world was young, we feasted on warriors. Now we eat the infirm and it does not fill the stomach. The city has quieted, the streets are emptying. Yet despite the dispersing crowds, I have a feeling of being followed. It has been an hour and I have been wandering near where I work when I smell something familiar. The cigarettes hit my senses first.
“Claire!” Mitch's drunk body is in my sights a moment later. He reeks of alcohol on top of the chemical tobacco. He must live nearby, and roams the street for an unsuspecting human to mate with. This is prey. “What is a beautiful woman like you doing out so late?”
“Oh, I was just on my way home.” My stomach growls before I can stop it.
This drunk human drapes his sweaty arm over my shoulder, “Well, what good fortune! Let me take ya home. Wouldn't want a classy little broad such as ya'self being found by some creep.”
My voice lowers “That's very kind of you, Mitch.” This is dangerous, but I am still hungry. For a human to do this, he is just asking to be eaten. The lamb that has led itself to slaughter.
His smell disgusts me. But despite the cheap cologne and even cheaper alcohol, he is still virile enough that the flesh will not be dull to the taste. With every step he gets bolder, with his words and with his hands. This human has made it almost too easy. We near my building and I lure him to a side alley. I wonder if I should lead him up to the apartment and share this bounty with my sisters. But with only a couple of hours of night remaining, my ravenous appetite returned and I do not wish to dirty our home with his scent, I resolve to bring them leftovers.
Mitch pushes me against a wall, his uncoordinated tongue slathering itself on my neck. I take a moment to quell the nausea. As he is distracted, I flex my hands to reveal my stingers, but he pushes my arms to the wall, failing to notice the weapons just above his fingers. Though I am stronger, this takes me by surprise as he slobbers all over my body. No matter, I push back and knock him to the pavement. His hands have skidded and are bleeding, and the scent calls forth my teeth and mandibles. His face doesn't immediately register the danger that he is in. Now that he has seen me, I will not let him live.
The dark may disguise me, but it was Mitch's scent that had distracted me. My ears pick up on the footsteps, hesitant and skilled. There is another. Someone has followed us. This is a fellow predator looking for an opportunity to strike. It has been too many years since I hunted, and especially many more yet I hunted alone. It has been a generation since I was hunted. One drunken human would be a breeze, but a second, fully acute one would be an issue.
Slaughter the closest pig first. Mitch's widened eyes betray his shock, and when men are in shock, they are not thinking about how to survive. Good. I leap on top of him. His hands desperately push at my shoulders, but I take my right hand's stinger and thrust it into his side. I can feel the poison pumping through my veins to the pointed stinger and into him. He becomes paralyzed, but I have a hard time stopping. The feeling of my body working as it was made to do is so stimulating that I make a mistake. I have completely forgotten about the other predator.
The heat hits me first. The other shadow has rigged up some sort of flame contraption. It must be a hunter, now I'm sure. Only a hunter would know how to disguise themselves in scent and sound. Only they would know how live heat makes us ill. The fire lights up the alley and I see his silhouette beyond, but no features. I do the only thing I can, I run.
My sisters are asleep when I get there. The air is thick with the scent of their satiation and I cannot bring myself to ruin their slumber. Tomorrow I will tell them of the hunter and of my narrow escape. No hunter would dare come into a nest with the four of us.
The next morning, I find it hard going through my routines. I had awoken early to see if I could finish what I started with Mitch, but his body is gone. Mitch is a now a loose thread, and that spells danger for us. There are no burning torches or pitchforks yet, h
owever, so we might have some time.
Applying my lipstick takes seven tries. When I remember the fire and the hunter, my sweat glands become alert. I change from one dress to another. The last time we had a hunter on us it was before the electric light, before these cities. The hunter killed three of my sisters before we could kill him. This is a new environment, with new smells. We have become weak and easy prey, and I have led the hunter to our doorstep. It is a heavy weight, but my lips cannot move to tell them yet.
My solace is that a hunter will not attack us in the open, around people. Incidental casualties offer a certain amount of discouragement. We head off to our jobs in opposite directions. I catch the bus, type up the scribbled notes I am given, and return home. On the walk back I am alert, jumping at every shadow, every distinct scent. The hunger does not call to me as much as the fear that the hunter may catch me in a moment of carelessness, that they will pick at and take my body for trophies.
There is a fire at one of the buildings nearby, a decommissioned factory. Chemical-tinted smoke stings my eyes and burns my nostrils as I walk by. Our apartment is downwind, so our sense of smell will all be compromised by it.
Dorothy meets me at the base of the stairs. With no clue the hunter is after us, she’s blithely focused on the frivolous. She tells me all about some item at her job, some news about a movie star and other such pointless blather until we get to the front door of the apartment. We smell it before we reach it. Blood. We hold ourselves together long enough to see that the knob has been broken. Our eyes meet, and what needs to be done is left unsaid. We are stepping into a trap. With caution, we push the door open, and the scent of blood hits us, triggering something deep and primal. We cannot deny our nature as our teeth lengthen and mandibles unfold in response. Our stingers are out as we walk inside.
The upper windows are open, bringing in the smoke. It is not enough to blind us, just dull our sight and sense of smell. There is a pot on the rarely used stove, and it is boiling with blood. We urge to taste it, but it could be poisoned. I point this out to Dorothy in our language before she has a chance to plunge a finger in.
A few steps later we see it. Mitch's body has been strung up in a doorway. The body is cut along the veins, and blood is dripping from every laceration, pooling on the floor. The air is thick with the scent of it, but it is also bears other distracting and nauseating scents: cigarettes, peppermint, alcohol, camphor. The hunter has covered his tracks well. At once I am overtaken by the need to tear open the body, but it has been dead too long. The dead make us ill, and the body is a clear trap. We pull down what is left of this man and throw him aside like so much garbage.
Helen walks in, and we quietly talk in our language. She joins Dorothy and myself in front of the doorway. None of us can smell the hunter. Mitch himself was hung above Betty's room, and we decide to violate her trust and enter.
I have seen a great many things. I have seen the sunbaked corpse of a war horse consumed by starving children. I have seen women fling bastard babes at their fathers, who proceeded to lance them for sport. I have seen my sisters beheaded, strung up, quartered, burned. I have seen people do things to bodies that my kind would never do, not for survival, but for joy of it. I have seen them use the living not for food, but for the pleasure of pain.
What I see now haunts me more. Betty was the first victim of the hunter. Her head is placed gingerly on a pillow atop the covers on her bed, golden curls still intact. The hunter has propped her eyes open, but beyond that, he has yanked out her stingers and mandibles and plunged them into the sides of her head, poison and her own blood dripping and staining her hair. Her body has been dismembered, and there are burns on the flesh. This thing tortured my sister before killing her.
Beside her bed above a nightstand, he has nailed her arms to the wall. On that wall she had taped pictures of men, and it takes me a moment to realize that these men were our past meals. Betty has memorialized every man who gave his body to us since she had begun work as a nurse. Never having been in here before now, I did not know, did not care to know how much she felt for them. Her heart, which is now hanging by a rope made of her tendons from the ceiling, had a soft spot for those that sacrificed themselves. She gave them a good death, she provided us with steady meals. And I was ungrateful, complaining of the quality of food.
Betty. The runt. Betty, who was Ester, who was Jane, who was a hundred names before and who was her true name. My littlest sister with the kindest heart. Of any of us, she could have lived with the humans.
I will find this hunter. I will show him pain.
Dorothy's chittering and panic almost distracts us from hearing the sounds of footfalls coming from the direction of her room. We turn and walk in calm predatory steps towards the other end of the apartment. We smell it: the alcohol first, then the smoke. A towel has been soaked in it and stuffed under the front door. We hear another noise and keep moving. Dorothy's door is locked, but Helen pushes it open and we see it is filled with a haze. The bed is on fire, blackened with Dorothy's prize records that have piled on top, melting and causing plastic fumes. It burns our eyes and noses. We do not see him coming with the axe in the midst of the smoke and flame.
Helen screeches in my ear. He has cut off her left arm. The sound of her is deafening, but we must retreat. I pull her and Dorothy out into the slightly cleaner air. The smoke has still blinded us, and we cannot sense the hunter as he stalks us. We pull into the bathroom and try to open the large escape window. It has been nailed shut. We splash water on our faces, and soak hand towels in it. Our mandibles hold them to our faces.
Helen uses her remaining arm to staunch the bleeding. I wrap a towel around my oldest sister. I will feed this man's liver to himself.
We open the bathroom door, the hand towels acting as our guard against the smoke. We see him, though half-blinded, at the front door, lighting the towel on fire. Next to him is a large tank apparatus. He stands to look at us. He dares to look me in the eyes. I know those eyes. I know that face and that slim body. Phillip. That little office imp who came by to offer me half of his sandwich at work during lunches. The small man who took an active interest in my life, in my sisters. Who kept a distance, but somehow always had questions. I took him for an almost friend among the beasts in this city. Instead he was a hunter all along.
I will exterminate him.
The fire sets and he puts a mask over his face to hide from the fumes. He has the calm resolve of a predator, but I am filled with rage. I have hunted for a need, to feed a hunger. When we have killed in the last decades, it has been out of necessity and to the willing. My existence has been defined by the hunger or the feed. Now I know only vengeance.
He launches at us, flames brought forth from the tank he has. Dorothy goes towards his left but he catches her skirt with it. She collapses on the floor to put it out. Helen goes to his right while he is focused on Dorothy, but his flames catch her side and almost come at me too.
He whirls towards me and his aim is true, scorching my thigh. But my rage clouds the searing pain. The smoke masks the scent of my own burning flesh as I close in on him.
I look him in the eye and am too quick for him to notice, my right-hand stinger pierces his groin.
He stops. Unable to move or stand, he collapses on the floor. He is paralyzed, a fly affixed to a web. We can see it in his face, the struggle to move. The panic. Eyes that plead with me for the familiarity we had. But this creature mutilated my kin. He hunted our kind. Whatever horrors he feels prepared for, I am sure he does not expect the pain to come.
We fix the apartment of its smoke, and Dorothy keeps the firefighters out, talking them into investigating a downstairs apartment instead. We were lucky they were preoccupied with the fire up the street before here. In that time, Phillip lies still on the floor, watching us perform the mundane. He watches us as we put our sister together to memorialize and mend our wounds. His eyes, still able to turn over just a small bit, are witness to us discarding Mitch and sweepi
ng up ash.
When it has gotten late, we sit on the floor around him. For the first time in my life, we use our skills not just to feed, though we do feed, but to torture as well. We keep him alive for days, picking away at his flesh. Piece by piece, a finger, a leg, a kidney. We taunt him with it, peeling away skin and then dining on it. We humiliate him, rinsing his bowels over his face, slapping him with his own genitals. We will do this until he finally dies. We will do all this and laugh.
I have hunted. I have never been a monster. Until now.
The West Hamberline Bordello Opens at Five
After four o’clock you can see the neon lights of the red district turn on. The lights come on one by one until by seven o'clock they are all lit. Local zoning laws forbid the bordellos from fully opening before three, but that doesn’t stop most from operating during the daytime business hours— they just don’t advertise it.
The red district is a mess of mismatched buildings. The bars and brothels include renovated motels, sleek high-rises, converted residential homes, a gutted grocery store, two warehouses, an odd strip mall and a single anachronistic mansion. That mansion, the West Hamberline Evening House, was the most peculiar of the city’s attractions. On the one hand it was a historical landmark, registered with the preservation society and (formally) appearing on the city’s brochures as a “must see”. On the other, it served the distinctly modern purpose of being an android whorehouse.
Many of the city’s more prudish residents rued the day when Katherine “Kitty” Cross inherited the property from her favorite uncle. A freelance A.I. programmer up to that point, Kitty adopted the alias of Madame Lane when she took over the W.H. (as it was affectionately called by its regulars). Madame Lane was committed to the role, dressing for work in evening gowns or silken kimono-style robes punctuated with elegant stilettos. Her nails were long and impeccable. Her hair was curled and pinned in classic styles, embellished with subtle white streaks to highlight her maturity. Madame Lane was an act, a role that Kitty relished, and she often wondered how authentic the role was when the W.H. was not open and Kitty was sitting in the back room gorging on chips in her sweatpants in front of a computer screen, scratching her crotch nonchalantly.
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