Reaper I: The Beginning (3 page)

 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’s
happening 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 visions 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 running
or 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.