Short story by Laura Diaz de Arce
Mandibles
I was the hunter, when the world was dark. When you could smell the men, the food, the unwashed bodies for miles. It was no challenge to finding them, alone in a wood, hunting their own quarry. Their flesh and sweat teasing our nostrils in the dusk. They were easy prey. My sisters and I would tear at the flesh of men after the hunt, their bodies numb from the poison sting we gave, muscles still tense to the bite. Their blood was hot as it spilled from our mouths, sliding down our necks, breasts and stomachs. When the world was dark we ate well and were satiated. Our bellies never wanted.
Now I am old and we eat carrion. The humans made weapons and worse, they made the light that keeps the dark night away. They made it harder for us to hunt. They hunt us and call us monsters. Where there were men with weapons and skill, they became hunters and we died like prey. My sisters have died. Where there were hundreds, now only four of us remain. We took vengeance when we could, but the thing we prize now is survival. After war after war, the men that are left are often frail. They taste of it. We know how long we can go without feeding; we no longer hunt in the dark. Now we ask the dying to give their bodies. If they accept, we make the feeding painless, the death a peaceful sleep with our sting. The food tastes dry, unsatisfying and sickly. We are hidden, but we have survived.
We have no name for what we are in the human tongue, but we know ourselves. We were given life by the eight-limbed goddess millennia ago. What I was before I do not recall, those memories are the dust that coats a cobweb. I think little of yesterdays, but I mark my time by when we feed. Each hour is a slave to the meal that should follow.
That is what makes today exciting. Today is a feeding day, and it has been seven full moons since we last ate. We can go for longer, but not by much. After work, I shall meet my sisters and we will feed. My belly will cease its aching for a short time. I think of this while climbing onto the bus to work and it makes me smile. A man sitting across from me takes my smile as an invitation and at a stop light he switches his seat next to mine.
He is in his forties, but I look younger than him. My body has always been the bait. He leans over and the smell of cigarettes assaults my senses. Of all the things humans have made, the atom bomb, the tools of men, cigarettes are one of the worst. Spoils the meat. He leans over and puts a hand out, "Mitch Huxby, pleasure." He smiles and his breath is worse than his suit.
People are staring, I take his hand, "Claire." I nod politely and look away, hoping he'll read that I want nothing to do with spoiled meat. Instead, I would rather daydream of what the meal might be tonight. But he is relentless in his chatter. He tells me of his job as a top automobile salesman. A few more stops go by and he is still under the impression that I am interested with no prompting from my end. We hit tenth avenue, and like clockwork, my co-worker Phillip climbs on the bus. We often sit in silence across from one another on mornings when we catch the same car. Today he senses my annoyance and Mitch's growing desperation for my attention.
Phillip engages me in light, office-oriented conversation and it shuts out Mitch entirely. I can tell this irritates Mitch immensely, that this small bespectacled man with thinning hair should command my attention away from him. This Mitch has been to war, I can smell it on him beneath the cigarettes. He is not used to being bested by the small and his fury is palatable.
Our bus makes its stop near the office and we disembark. Before I leave, Mitch harangues me for some way to come calling. Instead I thank him for his company and walk away. He is too much of a bother to risk as prey. But should he track me, let him try to find me. Let him catch me in the dark, where I can sting him. Then I will wash his body of the tobacco, and peel off his skin layer by layer. Perhaps I will sting him with only my right hand, that he will be paralyzed but still feel my nails carve his skin. But I am not that cruel. I am not one to play with my food.
On the short walk to work, Phillip turns to me, "My goodness Claire, I'm sorry that boar was pestering you."
"Well Phillip, thank you for helping." My polite smile pushes my large glasses up. It was rather fortuitous that humans should invent such a thing, my kind have poor day eyesight.
"Oh, no trouble, no trouble at all. You would think that a man would take a hint in this day and age! I mean, it's 1952 for Christ's sakes!" He holds the door open for me as we walk into the building we work in.
"Oh, in my experience, it'll take more than modernity to change men," I say. Phillip looks at me with a mock wound. He isn't bad for a human. His thin frame would make for a paltry meal for my sisters and myself, but he is entertaining and fairly kind. He does not leer at me the way the other men do, but it seems he looks to me with some sense of caution even when we banter. As if he is evaluating a violent creature. I like this, for he is.
We separate as the elevator doors open. He goes to the clerk office and I go to my typist desk. Work is slow, easy, but my mind is on the upcoming meal. At one point I almost drool on a contract draft. Around lunchtime, Phillip invites me to come out after work with everyone to see a jazz trio and have drinks. I politely decline, I have a family dinner after all. He never acts affronted to my rejections, I suppose after so many it is expected of me.
After work, I head back to the small apartment I share with my sisters. Dorothy and Helen are already home, and we await Betty. These are not our true names, but they work for now. Helen is the oldest, she has a singular poise to her movements that only comes from years of refinement. When we used to hunt, her statuesque figure and deep, seductive voice made wonderful lures. Helen's vanity helped sustain us then, and it does now in new ways. Police ask few questions when they see her elongated eyes peeking out of her Veronica Lake hairdo.
Dorothy, more than any of us, has fallen in love with the artistry of humanity. She even has some she calls friends with whom she cavorts with some evenings. Sometimes she cries when they pass away. She was the one who forced us to get a television, which she is currently sitting in front of, raucously laughing to a program. Dorothy does not like any meal at first, having become too close to the cattle, but we force her to partake. She must eat or she will die. Of all of us, she is the plainest, but at very least she helps us keep up appearances with her knowledge. She has picked our names, hairdos and clothing for us over the last several hundred years.
Betty finally arrives home from her job at the hospital. She is the runt, petite and cherubic, with perfect blonde curls. For years she relied on us, having no stomach for the hunt. The irony is not lost on me that we currently need her to procure the meal. Betty picked up a trade in nursing, thus she is able to locate an appropriate source of food—dying and willing to go quietly. They must be suffering desperately to agree. The meal cannot have family to ask too many questions.
We all tried to be nurses, to make marking a meal easier. But the smell of blood brings out our true nature. Only Betty, with her subdued predatory instinct, can restrain herself. Dorothy may have fallen in love with the concept of humanity, with their toys and inventions and sometimes the people, but Betty actually feels for the humans. Sometimes this disgusts me. Sometimes it brings an ache to my chest.
"Hello gang," Betty says, running to the sink to wash her hands, a smile plastered on her fully made up face.
"Well..." Helen says, looking up from her nail filing. She makes perfect points to them, that are not the fashion but feel more natural, "are we ready to go?"
"Yes, in a minute. Guards are heading out at six-thirty." Betty plops down to 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 ever impatient until she is back. 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.
Like Betty promised, we saw 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 there 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 awakes, startled. But upon seeing my sister, his expression changes to one of warmth. "Betty my girl. Come 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 begins to softly sing 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 then 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 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 carving 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 this need. 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 it 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. Even still, I have a feeling of being followed. It has been an hour and I have wandered 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 a fortune! Let me take ya' home. Wouldn't want a classy little broad such as ya'self being found of 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 its way 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 it will be a few hours until dawn and I am starving, nor do I 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 more since 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 pushing at my shoulders, but I take my right handed 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 too stimulating that I make a prey's mistake. I forget about the other person.
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 had started with Mitch, but his body was gone. Mitch is a now a loose thread, and that spells danger for us. There are no burning torches or pitchforks yet, 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. It makes people vulnerable, there could be casualties. We head off to our jobs in opposite directions. I catch the bus, type up the scribbling words 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 that human will 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 down wind, we will all be compromised by it.
Dorothy meets me at the base of the stairs. She has no idea of the hunter, and is instead focused on the frivolous. She tells me all about some item at her job, some news about a movie star 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 door 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 smell of blood hits us triggering something deep and primal. We cannot deny our nature as our teeth lengthen and mandibles unfold as a 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 is when we see it. Mitch's body strung up in a doorway. The body is cut along the veins, and blood is dripping from every lesion, pooling on the floor. The air is thick with the scent of it, but it is also thick with 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 has walked in, and we quietly talk in our language. She joins Dorothy and I 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 sun-baked corpse of a war horse consumed by starving children. I have seen women fling a bastard babe at their fathers, who proceed 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 sport. I have seen them use the living not for food, but for the pleasure of pain.
What I see then haunts me more. Betty was the first victim of the hunter. Her head is placed gingerly on a pillow in 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 side 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 began 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.
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 noise. There are footsteps coming from her room. We turn and walk in calm predatory steps towards the other end of the apartment. We smell it, the alcohol 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 it is 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 them. 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 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 comes at me too.
He whirls to 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 sweeping 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.
I was the hunter, when the world was dark. When you could smell the men, the food, the unwashed bodies for miles. It was no challenge to finding them, alone in a wood, hunting their own quarry. Their flesh and sweat teasing our nostrils in the dusk. They were easy prey. My sisters and I would tear at the flesh of men after the hunt, their bodies numb from the poison sting we gave, muscles still tense to the bite. Their blood was hot as it spilled from our mouths, sliding down our necks, breasts and stomachs. When the world was dark we ate well and were satiated. Our bellies never wanted.
Now I am old and we eat carrion. The humans made weapons and worse, they made the light that keeps the dark night away. They made it harder for us to hunt. They hunt us and call us monsters. Where there were men with weapons and skill, they became hunters and we died like prey. My sisters have died. Where there were hundreds, now only four of us remain. We took vengeance when we could, but the thing we prize now is survival. After war after war, the men that are left are often frail. They taste of it. We know how long we can go without feeding; we no longer hunt in the dark. Now we ask the dying to give their bodies. If they accept, we make the feeding painless, the death a peaceful sleep with our sting. The food tastes dry, unsatisfying and sickly. We are hidden, but we have survived.
We have no name for what we are in the human tongue, but we know ourselves. We were given life by the eight-limbed goddess millennia ago. What I was before I do not recall, those memories are the dust that coats a cobweb. I think little of yesterdays, but I mark my time by when we feed. Each hour is a slave to the meal that should follow.
That is what makes today exciting. Today is a feeding day, and it has been seven full moons since we last ate. We can go for longer, but not by much. After work, I shall meet my sisters and we will feed. My belly will cease its aching for a short time. I think of this while climbing onto the bus to work and it makes me smile. A man sitting across from me takes my smile as an invitation and at a stop light he switches his seat next to mine.
He is in his forties, but I look younger than him. My body has always been the bait. He leans over and the smell of cigarettes assaults my senses. Of all the things humans have made, the atom bomb, the tools of men, cigarettes are one of the worst. Spoils the meat. He leans over and puts a hand out, "Mitch Huxby, pleasure." He smiles and his breath is worse than his suit.
People are staring, I take his hand, "Claire." I nod politely and look away, hoping he'll read that I want nothing to do with spoiled meat. Instead, I would rather daydream of what the meal might be tonight. But he is relentless in his chatter. He tells me of his job as a top automobile salesman. A few more stops go by and he is still under the impression that I am interested with no prompting from my end. We hit tenth avenue, and like clockwork, my co-worker Phillip climbs on the bus. We often sit in silence across from one another on mornings when we catch the same car. Today he senses my annoyance and Mitch's growing desperation for my attention.
Phillip engages me in light, office-oriented conversation and it shuts out Mitch entirely. I can tell this irritates Mitch immensely, that this small bespectacled man with thinning hair should command my attention away from him. This Mitch has been to war, I can smell it on him beneath the cigarettes. He is not used to being bested by the small and his fury is palatable.
Our bus makes its stop near the office and we disembark. Before I leave, Mitch harangues me for some way to come calling. Instead I thank him for his company and walk away. He is too much of a bother to risk as prey. But should he track me, let him try to find me. Let him catch me in the dark, where I can sting him. Then I will wash his body of the tobacco, and peel off his skin layer by layer. Perhaps I will sting him with only my right hand, that he will be paralyzed but still feel my nails carve his skin. But I am not that cruel. I am not one to play with my food.
On the short walk to work, Phillip turns to me, "My goodness Claire, I'm sorry that boar was pestering you."
"Well Phillip, thank you for helping." My polite smile pushes my large glasses up. It was rather fortuitous that humans should invent such a thing, my kind have poor day eyesight.
"Oh, no trouble, no trouble at all. You would think that a man would take a hint in this day and age! I mean, it's 1952 for Christ's sakes!" He holds the door open for me as we walk into the building we work in.
"Oh, in my experience, it'll take more than modernity to change men," I say. Phillip looks at me with a mock wound. He isn't bad for a human. His thin frame would make for a paltry meal for my sisters and myself, but he is entertaining and fairly kind. He does not leer at me the way the other men do, but it seems he looks to me with some sense of caution even when we banter. As if he is evaluating a violent creature. I like this, for he is.
We separate as the elevator doors open. He goes to the clerk office and I go to my typist desk. Work is slow, easy, but my mind is on the upcoming meal. At one point I almost drool on a contract draft. Around lunchtime, Phillip invites me to come out after work with everyone to see a jazz trio and have drinks. I politely decline, I have a family dinner after all. He never acts affronted to my rejections, I suppose after so many it is expected of me.
After work, I head back to the small apartment I share with my sisters. Dorothy and Helen are already home, and we await Betty. These are not our true names, but they work for now. Helen is the oldest, she has a singular poise to her movements that only comes from years of refinement. When we used to hunt, her statuesque figure and deep, seductive voice made wonderful lures. Helen's vanity helped sustain us then, and it does now in new ways. Police ask few questions when they see her elongated eyes peeking out of her Veronica Lake hairdo.
Dorothy, more than any of us, has fallen in love with the artistry of humanity. She even has some she calls friends with whom she cavorts with some evenings. Sometimes she cries when they pass away. She was the one who forced us to get a television, which she is currently sitting in front of, raucously laughing to a program. Dorothy does not like any meal at first, having become too close to the cattle, but we force her to partake. She must eat or she will die. Of all of us, she is the plainest, but at very least she helps us keep up appearances with her knowledge. She has picked our names, hairdos and clothing for us over the last several hundred years.
Betty finally arrives home from her job at the hospital. She is the runt, petite and cherubic, with perfect blonde curls. For years she relied on us, having no stomach for the hunt. The irony is not lost on me that we currently need her to procure the meal. Betty picked up a trade in nursing, thus she is able to locate an appropriate source of food—dying and willing to go quietly. They must be suffering desperately to agree. The meal cannot have family to ask too many questions.
We all tried to be nurses, to make marking a meal easier. But the smell of blood brings out our true nature. Only Betty, with her subdued predatory instinct, can restrain herself. Dorothy may have fallen in love with the concept of humanity, with their toys and inventions and sometimes the people, but Betty actually feels for the humans. Sometimes this disgusts me. Sometimes it brings an ache to my chest.
"Hello gang," Betty says, running to the sink to wash her hands, a smile plastered on her fully made up face.
"Well..." Helen says, looking up from her nail filing. She makes perfect points to them, that are not the fashion but feel more natural, "are we ready to go?"
"Yes, in a minute. Guards are heading out at six-thirty." Betty plops down to 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 ever impatient until she is back. 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.
Like Betty promised, we saw 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 there 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 awakes, startled. But upon seeing my sister, his expression changes to one of warmth. "Betty my girl. Come 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 begins to softly sing 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 then 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 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 carving 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 this need. 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 it 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. Even still, I have a feeling of being followed. It has been an hour and I have wandered 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 a fortune! Let me take ya' home. Wouldn't want a classy little broad such as ya'self being found of 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 its way 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 it will be a few hours until dawn and I am starving, nor do I 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 more since 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 pushing at my shoulders, but I take my right handed 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 too stimulating that I make a prey's mistake. I forget about the other person.
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 had started with Mitch, but his body was gone. Mitch is a now a loose thread, and that spells danger for us. There are no burning torches or pitchforks yet, 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. It makes people vulnerable, there could be casualties. We head off to our jobs in opposite directions. I catch the bus, type up the scribbling words 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 that human will 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 down wind, we will all be compromised by it.
Dorothy meets me at the base of the stairs. She has no idea of the hunter, and is instead focused on the frivolous. She tells me all about some item at her job, some news about a movie star 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 door 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 smell of blood hits us triggering something deep and primal. We cannot deny our nature as our teeth lengthen and mandibles unfold as a 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 is when we see it. Mitch's body strung up in a doorway. The body is cut along the veins, and blood is dripping from every lesion, pooling on the floor. The air is thick with the scent of it, but it is also thick with 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 has walked in, and we quietly talk in our language. She joins Dorothy and I 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 sun-baked corpse of a war horse consumed by starving children. I have seen women fling a bastard babe at their fathers, who proceed 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 sport. I have seen them use the living not for food, but for the pleasure of pain.
What I see then haunts me more. Betty was the first victim of the hunter. Her head is placed gingerly on a pillow in 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 side 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 began 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.
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 noise. There are footsteps coming from her room. We turn and walk in calm predatory steps towards the other end of the apartment. We smell it, the alcohol 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 it is 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 them. 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 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 comes at me too.
He whirls to 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 sweeping 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.
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Laura Diaz de Arce has not developed a taste for human flesh (it's much too stringy) but she is pretty good at breaking a few eggs and making them. She's been published in Tragedy Queens by Clash Media and had work featured in Enchanted Conversations. She's a founder of Smoking Mirror Press and has book, Monstrosity, coming July 2018. You can find her pedantic complaints about TV shows on Twitter @QuetaAuthor.
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