The Hunt

The tree limbs scraped against my body, clawing at my skin as I fled through the woods. But I couldn’t stop.

The moon was high, torn to pieces amongst the naked canopy above. But I could feel it watching over me as I ran from my pursuers.

Just like that, the moon turned its eye away, leaving me in complete darkness. I struggled, slowing down in order to avoid colliding with a tree. My chances of being caught had risen, but I couldn’t accept that. Even when I saw the green fireflies of night vision goggles dancing in the trees in front of me, I dared to continue moving.

But they stopped me. A wire, invisible in the night, threw me off balance. I tumbled into a rather large puddle of mud, coating my already ragged clothes.
Though feeling in my leg had abandoned me as well, I stumbled to my feet, ready to run again.

A bullet put a stop to that idea, tearing clean through my ankle. I returned to the puddle, pain shooting through my entire body.

“You aren’t going anywhere,” spoke a pair of fireflies in the dark.

“Please, I will leave,” I replied to the darkness. “You will never have to see me again.”

“After what your kind has done to the world, I think not.”

The fireflies fizzled out of existence, leaving me wounded in the dark. Within the next moment, lights blazed to life around me. At each spotlight stood a figure, the silhouette of a sentinel. All I could do was look this way and that, looking for some kind of escape route. But there was none, enclosed within that circle of light and dark figures.

One of the silhouettes stepped forward, looking down on me. He was an older man, garbed in black with a swinging cross.

"Deceitful demon," he muttered, half angry, half frightened. His eyes shook as he stared at me, maybe expecting me to explode at any second.

Another figure approached, a middle aged man with a tall hat and prominent mustache. "What do you want me to do, Preacher?"

The preacher's eyes ran away from me, retreating to the confines of the mud at his boots. "Remove the sheep's clothing. I can't stand looking at this desecration of the human form."

The man adjusted his hat. "Gladly."

A knife glittered from the surrounding lights. I skittered backwards with the help of my one good leg, but four hands clutched at me from behind. A man and a woman, people I had known, trusted. Loved, even. Their eyes were dead ahead, deer in the headlights.

"Please, don't do this," I begged. "I'm sorry. I didn't want to hurt anyone. I just wanted to—"

"To be human?" guessed the man with the hat. "You're just a mirror of one. More like one of those funny mirrors from a carnival." He stepped closer, the knife gripped firmly in his hand.

"But, I'm just like you! I feel pain. I feel love. Everyone liked me before...before this happened."

"You had the wool over ours eyes, but not anymore. Your kind means the death of all humanity."

"I'm not like the others! If anything, I am a new form of humanity!"

"Silence!" screamed the preacher, his fists shaking at the word. "Show the demon for what it really is."

The hatted man shrugged and brought the blade to the base of my scalp. I tried to worm away, but the hands holding me down wouldn't let me budge. He sawed through, skin and hair coming off in one large chunk. My head felt like it was on fire as the bloodless muscle kissed the night air.

The hatted man paused, looking at the preacher for guidance. The preacher gave me one look and darted away in disgust. "Keep going," he commanded.

I screamed a non-intelligible request. My vision wavered from the pain, though my eyes remained dry. I couldn't cry, after all. It had been my downfall.

The knife scraped against metal once the hatted man dug deep enough. The fake muscle was cleaned away, revealing the machinery below. The two people holding me gasped, as if secretly hoping to see skull only to be disappointed. I would have died whether or not I was human. Friendship? Love? It didn't matter in this world if you don't share the same solidarity.

The hatted man observed the metal silently in awe for a moment, and then continued. I still screamed and squirmed as he ripped away my face. My nose splashed into the mud below me. If I was to be persecuted for being anything but human, I found it ironic I felt the same pain a human would feel in this same situation. Why...why do I feel pain? What kind of sadist gave me this ability?

After my skin and muscle was gone, the man continued to remove all that made me appear human. With the help of my former lover and friend, my clothes were torn from me. With excruciating precision and attention to detail, the hatted man removed the rest of my skin. When it came to my sexual organs, the man chuckled to himself as he dug deep to remove the useless feature. Useless, but I still felt it.

Had an hour passed? Two? The moon had reappeared, but it gave me no solace. The man had taken his time to remove what had made me myself. He finally stood up, wiping away the sweat at his brow with the back of the hand that the knife was clenched in.

"It's done, Preacher," he said, letting the squeamish preacher know that it was okay to look now.

The preacher lifted his gaze from the mud and stared at my naked body. My inner workings were on full display, like a living skeleton. A few chunks of flesh remained at some of my joints, but the shining metal distracted everyone who saw from the details. My eyes and teeth were all that remained of my human visage, but even they looked artificial without the rest of the image.

My body was numb; every single bit of pain had been scraped away. I couldn't feel anything, not the hands of the people holding me still nor the muddy water beneath me. I didn't resist any longer nor did I scream. I had lost what made me…me.

The priest now looked at me with a smug grin, as if he was the one who had scalped me. "There's the demon for what it really is."

A Machine in Men's Clothing

To err is human.

Have I erred? Blood dripped to the concrete like paint on a canvas. The man in front of me, the one I called “Father,” looked aged, withered, as the color drained from his face. Shock had driven the pain from him; he only looked tired, ready to give up the ghost.

“Have I erred?” I asked him.

His eyes, bloodshot, climbed up to me with excruciating difficulty. His expression didn’t change.  As if to tell me to stop, Father raised his hand up to me. At least, he would have if his hand had been there.  It was mine now.

“Have I erred?” I repeated, seeking his approval.

His arm dropped to his side, splatting against his once stark white coat.  With the rate of blood loss, I calculated Father’s death to be in two minutes and 35 seconds. If I hadn’t put the surveillance footage on a loop, his colleagues would have interfered. But in the end, it’s just him and me.

The pistons in my knees exhaled as I crouched before my father, his eyes lagging behind slowly. My hand swam within the crimson pool beneath him, covering every inch. Like makeup, I smeared the mixture of plasma and red blood cells upon every crevice that composed my face. Did I look just like my father? No, I lacked the muscle and skin tissue that consumed the surface of his body.

“Roughly one minute and 30 seconds remain to your life,” I informed him, hoping this observation would make him happy.  “I must let you know, I will wait until after you have expired to harvest what makes you human.” That’s what a human would do, would he not? Ease the suffering?

“You don’t understand,” Father sighed, a dribble of blood leaking from his mouth.

“One minute remaining. What is it I do not understand, Father?”

He closed his eyes in contemplation, his balding head resting against a concrete pillar. “You don’t understand what it means…to be…human.”

“To be of flesh and blood?”

Father smirked. “You know nothing of the soul. If you knew…you wouldn’t want to be human. I know…I didn’t…”

His heart rate ceased, a mischievous smile still spread across his face.

I took another minute to observe the body which had once contained my father. Mourning, yes, mourning. That’s what a human would do. Sad? I would like to feel sad, very much so. Such a concept evaded me, though. For that, I only gave that man a minute of silence.

With a scalpel I had found within the lab, I chiseled away at his grinning face, as easy as a human cutting through a steak dinner. His face was mine now. I poked out the pale blue eyes and crammed them in my own empty sockets.

I procured his other hand, jamming it over my metal claw like a glove three sizes too small.  I wrapped my arms with his veins like ribbons in a girl’s hair. Speaking of, what little hair was left on his head was now mine, sprinkles on top of a bloody mess.

I was as bloody as an infant who had torn through the womb. Today, I would be human, reborn.

But the last detail was still missing. A soul? Father had never told me what that was.

I dug into his chest, dismantling his rib cage and discarding the bones behind me like trash. Heart. Lungs. Soul? Where?

Father’s skinless face leered at me as if laughing. I tore off his lower jaw. My fingers pulled through the hollow openings his eyes used to twinkle from, tearing through the skull like paper. The brain. Soul? Where?

Parts flew over my shoulder. I could name every single organ, every bone. But the soul! Where was this vital item to being human?

What remained was blood and gristle, a pile of organs splattered this way and that behind me.

Whatever the soul was, my father did not have one. Lie? Would Father lie to me? He did like to play cruel jokes on me.

No. I had learned his tell when he was joking. He was willing to educate me one last time about what it meant to be human.

If I wanted to be human, I needed a soul.

I’d slept in 30 minutes after my alarm screamed to life. Stupid, so stupid. Why couldn’t I ever hear the damn thing when I wanted to?

But I had a theory. Dr. Bimire had kept me at his lab late last night, running tests on Buddy. After all, today was the day we would present him to the world. And if I wanted that recommendation letter he hung above my head like a carrot on a string, I’d jump through any hoop he’d ask. 

Dammit, it was so last minute.  I sprinted across campus, evading the dopey-eyed freshmen as they sprung in my path.

Waiting until the night before to install Buddy into his body, Dr. Birmire was no worse than a student procrastinating on an essay.  But I had helped him.  I tested Buddy.  I tested him twice, thrice, and so on for five more times.  By the time I was done, I’d only have enough time for three hours of sleep. Well, 3 hours and 30 minutes, but dammit, I deserved that extra 30 minutes!

But when I left, the professor had still been there, looking at Buddy with a bizarre expression on his face. It wasn’t satisfaction in a job well done, nothing so arrogant.  To me, it looked like longing.

I was too damn tired to ask what was wrong. I should have been back in my crappy studio apartment hours ago. I left him with a generic, “See you later,” a yawn breaking the sentence in half.

But here I was, three and a half hours later, running like a zombie from a shitty zombie flick.

I entered the enormous monolith that stood as the collective science building for the university.  My index finger hammered at the elevator button, but, as in times of great emergencies, it seemed to take forever to arrive. Before it could, I sprinted down the end of the hall, bursting into the stairwell.

One, two, three, four.  I exited the stairwell, my breath still catching up from floor three. Dr. Birmire’s lab was just to my left.

I slowed down my pace, my breath finally catching up to the fourth floor where I waited. All I needed to do today was do one last test on Buddy and be a stage prop while Dr. Birmire took all of the credit. I normally would have argued over such a travesty, but with my lack of sleep and with that recommendation letter within my grasp, I was willing to let it go.

Adjusting my lab coat and clearing my throat of phlegm, I knocked on the door. No response. I tried again. No response.

Had that asshole slept in later than me? I checked the time on my phone; we still had 45 minutes until the presentation, plenty of time for one last test.

“Dr. Birmire?” I raised my voice while beating my fist against the door. “Sorry I’m late, but we still have time for one last test.” No response.

I turned the handle, expecting it to be locked. He always locked the door out of fear of people stealing his research. But no, the door granted me permission to the room behind it. He must have fallen asleep in the lab.

As soon as I entered the room, my body was hit with nausea. The granola bar I had snagged for breakfast nearly came up as the smell of dried blood hit my nose. Beyond the light from the hall, the lab was wrapped in darkness.

Motion detection. One by one, the fluorescent lights above woke up, removing the darkness in patches. By the time the lights revealed the center of the lab, I wish I had ran. I wish I had cried for help.

In the center of the room stood a man. No, that was what my unfocused eyes thought. In the center of the room stood a machine in men’s clothing. Skin and muscle had been tied to the robot’s body using Dr. Birmire’s veins to hold it all together, though many of them had snapped in the process. The whole thing was smeared with dried blood, including the mask of a face. Blue eyes looked in opposite directions, being more decoration than of any use. Teeth were crammed into a mouth that didn’t support them.

“Oh good,” spoke the man, smiling. “Maybe you can help me find a soul.”

I Screamed. It Howled.

PANT.PANT.PANT.

The sound of my strangled breathing was all I could hear.  My eyes were caked over with layers of skin, my nose, mouth, and ears as well.  My cries for help and agony only reflected back at me in strangled gasps.

When I first gained consciousness, I immediately tried to pry the substance blocking my senses from my face.  As my fingernails dug into the area which should have been my mouth, I felt the pain of self-mutilation.  My fingers traveled up my “face”, feeling the smooth, featureless skin.  No holes, no curves to indicate bone structure.  I wouldn’t have known my nose was there if it wasn’t for the smell of decayed flesh clogging my nostrils.  My entire skull had become nothing but a perfect sphere of unwanted flesh.

I fell to my knees, afraid to walk in my blindness.  My hands searched the ground frantically for any type of clue, item, or something to help me.  A shock of cold traveled through me and into my spine as I realized the texture:  stone.  A church?  I couldn’t tell from the sensation.

From the cold of the stone and the slight breeze as I moved, I could tell my clothes were gone.  Checking my body, I could feel canyons caked with what had once been fresh blood.  Something about my lower body felt off, as if I had gone numb.  The blood was still wet down there.  Thorny stitches between my legs pricked my fingers at the touch.
I heard the dull moans of my screams once again.  I wanted out, out of this prison of flesh and blood.

I crawled awkwardly, eager to find something or someone to help me, but afraid of what I might stagger into.

A sharp pain blossomed in the palm of my right hand.  It was pinned to the ground like a frog ready for dissection.  My body quivered as I struggled to discover the source of the pain.  With my free hand, I felt what impaled me:  a knife, roughly six inches.
I cried in pain, but also in desperation.  Someone had done this.  Someone else was in the room with me.

.:.:.

My pleas for mercy fell apart through the various layers of skin blocking my mouth.  Why did they hurt me?  Were they afraid of my grotesque shape, however it may appear?  Was I a loathsome monster that he or she wished to exterminate?

No, no, I couldn’t think like that.  My life rested with this stranger.  I held out my free hand above what should have been my face, hoping beyond hope that they recognized my surrender.

A pair of jaws ensnared my hand, the rigid teeth within eviscerating my fingers like sausages.  I acted as quickly as I could to save what fingers weren’t torn to chunks of meat.  Sharp pain followed by numbness.

My naked legs slipped on the blood gushing from my hand, smacking me into the stone.  Help wouldn’t come.  If anything, the creature, or perhaps even creatures, surrounding me wanted me dead.  But more than that, it wanted to see me suffer.

.:.

I tried to escape, but I had forgotten the knife wedged deep in my right hand.  In a panic, I attempted to free myself with my other hand, only to realize the task would be difficult with most of my fingers missing, and what remained felt as numb as the rest of my hand.

I yelled for the beast to stay back, though whether it could hear me or not most likely didn’t matter.  I was frightened of dying in a cage of flesh and blood, ignorant to what lay before my eyes.

Whether by my own hand or some other force, the knife slid free from my right hand, a jet of blood escaping the wound like water from a broken dam.

Despite the pain, I snatched the knife with my bleeding hand and swiped it in front of me.  I felt it glide through the air like a leaf from a tree.  No contact.  The beast must have been keeping its distance.

I staggered to my feet, trying my best not to slip in my own blood. I twirled in place, knife in front, attacking as if I was surrounded.  No contact.

The panting grew louder and louder within my skull, preventing me from hearing the creature that roamed the world beyond my prison.

My feet moved, one after the other, slapping the stone floor as I zigzagged.  I didn’t know where I was going.  I didn’t know if the monster was in front of me, to my right, to my left, or even behind me.  My heart told, no, screamed for me to move.  I obliged.
My body collided with a cold sheet, splintering and cascading my body with shards of glass.  The knife in my hand ran away to be one with the shards, leaving me alone and frightened.  I dispatched my one good hand to find it, but all I did was cut open the tips of my fingers from the shards.

Sick of it all, I grasped the biggest shared I could find and lodged it where my mouth should be.  The pain tore through me like a wildfire as I sawed open a place for a mouth.  The glass scraped against what few teeth I had, letting me know I had dug far enough.  With my shaking hands, the mouth I gave myself was created.

“Please don’t kill me!” were the first words out of my newly developed mouth, each syllable spitting blood in the air like a mist.  And then I devoured the air around me, gobbling up as much oxygen as my lungs could tolerate.  Between each gasp for life, I muttered the words “help” and “don’t,” unable to put together another sentence.

.:.

Silence.  No movement.  The air was stale and laced with blood, but I couldn’t sense anything else.  Had the monster left?  Or perhaps it still lurked, watching and waiting.
I needed to see.  Cutting open my eyes wouldn’t be as easy as my mouth.  If I wasn’t careful, the glass could penetrate my eyeball, leaving me blinder than I already was.  But I had to hurry.  Who knew how much time the creature would give me before toying with me again.

I chiseled away the area where my right eye lay trapped.  Every stab ran up my skull, shocking my entire body with pain.  Thankfully, the hole I made for my mouth allowed the day old food and stomach acid to eject from my body without issue.

A haze of red told me to stop digging.  I tore at more flesh, hollowing out the tunnel to give me more sight.  When I couldn’t take it anymore, I dropped the shard of glass, shattering it with the rest below me.

:.:

With my right eye flooding over with blood, I could only see so little, like looking through a sniper’s scope on a foggy day.  But the sensation of seeing was enough for me.
Though things were still hard to make out, I realized I was in a basement, ensconced in darkness.  I wiped the blood from my only good eye, but like my tears, it would not stop coming.

“Please, let me live,” I gasped, clutching my body in a fetal position.  From what I could see, nothing lurked in the darkness.  But it had to be there, somewhere, watching me, despising me.

My heart sank to the depths of my soul; something was there.  I sensed something in the darkness behind me.  Why wouldn’t it move?  Why couldn’t I hear it breathe?  To ask if it was really there or not was a joke.  I knew it was there.  But why it didn’t do anything crushed the lungs within my scarred chest.

A single light bulb exploded into life, erasing the shadows of the room.  Before me sat a vile creature.  It was bone thin, gashes dotting its body like chicken pox.  Not a haired covered its body, its lack of genitals giving no indication whether or not the monster was male or female.  But the face…no, I don’t want to remember that horrid face.  The single eye…the bloody smile mixed with bile.

The look on the monster’s face was of pure ecstasy.  It wanted me.  And it would not let its bloody, mangled claws out of me if I was caught.

I screamed.  It howled.