She that hunts in the dark

She hunts in the dark. It is her realm. In it she is queen, empress, death incarnate, and god undisputed.

When she takes someone, all you hear is their scream cut short by the splatter of blood and the snapping of bone. Come morning, you find not but a pink smear where she licked up their fluids. That, and perhaps a shoe. The rest belongs to her.

Darkness is her realm and so we keep to the light.

There were more of us in the beginning. Now, there are only as many as the light can shelter. Enough light to keep the night at bay, to keep her at bay. It usually works.

We hear her pacing beyond our dim courage. Hissing lies, whispering truths. Offering threats and deals and promises. We are safe in the light, but frightened men do frightful things.

We threw Jermey to her. After what she told us he did to that little girl, it was as much as he deserved. Only later did I come to wonder if it was true.

She drove some mad, whispering of their misdeeds, telling secrets she couldn't possibly know. The others she taunted without mercy. Picking at imagined faults. Undermining their resolve. She did neither to me. I was special. She told me as much.

Our conversations began during an unremarkable twilight. She had been silent to me for so long. Morbid curiosity prompted me to speak to the woman in the night. Her voice was gentle, reasonable. Try as I did, I never got an answer on who or what she was. She always guided the conversation back to me. My dreams, my desires, my hopes, my fears. I told her all.

She listened. She was so very good at listening. I poured out my soul and she lapped it up.

There are others like us, other camps. Strongholds of humanity. We talk to one of them over a CB radio we scavenged. They are holed up in a factory in Ohio, hiding from a similar terror. Best we know, the whole world belongs to her kind, whatever the hell she may be.

I lost something in our conversations. Some part of me faltered, as if my soul had turned to smoke and ash. My mind was no longer my own. She told me what to do. And I did it, for her.

In the middle of night, bright bulbs burning, I flipped a switch and invited the night in.

Screams and gunshot. Cries of terror. Shattered bones. Then she found the children.

She savored them.

I listened from a distance as my mistress worked through them, mindful that their shrill cries should distress me. I wondered at that, how she had changed me, how she had made me more. It was nearly dawn before she was through.

She slithered to me in absolute darkness.

"You," she caressed my ear with a voice as sweet as honey. "you too will hunt in the dark."

I felt her kiss, tasted the sweet blood on her lips. She took me, body and soul. She poured in the darkness and I was reborn.