Page 39 of Grimdark Magazine Issue 48

She's so hungry.

She creeps through the sewers, searching for prey until she’s too weak to hunt and can only retreat to a dry tunnel and wait for Six.

She sleeps too deep, her senses failing her, only waking to a scream.

Her head snaps up and she's instantly blinded by torchlight glaring into her eyes. She recoils, skittering back, but there is nowhere to flee.

“Oh fuck!” a man says. “Gods! Fuck! Run!”

The light careens towards her, stunning her with its brightness before vanishing, and there’s only the sounds of boots splashing through the tunnels.

She stumbles forward, following, still half-blinded, pure terror giving her strength to pursue. She's not supposed to be found. Six warned her. The battle chimaeras were hunted down after the war, either killed or taken back to the labs. Any hint of a monster in the sewers and she’ll be next.

She runs the only way she knows how to—the way she hunts.

She catches up, snatching their legs out from under them, tripping the two men easily. They crash into the water, but one is already up. The electric torch swings, blinding her again. She raises her arms to shield her eyes and the metal torch cracks down against bone. Pain bursts through her arm. She screams, shrinking back as the torch swings again, barely missing her, but there’s a crunch as a boot comes down on her hand.

She stops thinking. She reaches out, grasping blindly until she finds a body and with brutal strength, shakes. Just once. There’s a snap and it goes limp, the torch tumbling into the water. The other man shouts, springing up, swinging a large rat cage towards her face.

She rips the cage away and slams him against the wall so hard she hears his skull split.

The tunnel goes still. The torch lies half in water as she crouches between the bodies, cradling her injured arms, eyes slowly adjusting to the painful light.

She looks down, and a horrific monster stares back. Her human eyes are nearly obscured by the three huge, dark eyes set in her forehead and the two sets of beady rodent eyes where her cheekbones once were.

The lower half of her face is worse. Beneath her nose is nothing but rows of curving fangs. No mouth. No lips, no lower jaw, no tongue, only monstrous teeth cover the hole leading down her throat.

She had not been awake when Bennet took her mouth from her. The drugs had been in the food, and she had eaten, not knowing it was the last time she’d ever taste or chew or speak. It’s because she has no mouth that she can only eat live prey, using her lungs to gulp down the blood and slippery guts that pulse out when an animal’s heart is still beating.

She recoils from the monster in the water, only to face her shadow instead, cast stark across the sewer walls.

The shape of her head and shoulders might pass for human if they were not framed by six hideously long and jointed legs grafted along her torso, her own legs removed so she has to crawl across the ground.

The legs are human, but where they should end in a foot they’re instead fused, jointing with arms so that each ends with huge, calloused men’s hands.

In the light, she can see each and every burn scar that twists and distorts her skin so that she scarcely looks made from human parts at all.

She trembles, unable to escape the sight of herself.

Even the most hideous animals have some beauty, but she's a thing of endless horror.

It’s a wonder Six can endure even the risk of glimpsing her.

***

She and Bennet had been in the open area of the clean room, to practice ‘adapting’ to her new legs, with an electric prod as incentive.

She’d felt vibrations through her fingertips, her senses screaming, splintering her brain apart with fear. She lunged forward just as the walls exploded.

A flaming steel beam slammed down into the place she and Bennet had been, and then there was no Bennet, only gore smeared across the shattered floor as flames poured in from the Main Lab.

There in front of her was a yawning hole like a window.

She’d crawled towards the vast city towering beyond, towards the streets she'd known, but as she reached the edge, she knew she could never escape the room, not even with Bennet gone, the cage buried under rubble. Her body was the cage now.

As the flames closed in, she turned back to the room and saw that two eyes still followed her.

She crawled to what remained of Bennet, fingers from many hands dipping into pockets, searching what was left of him until she found the keys.