Page 40 of Grimdark Magazine Issue 48

The creature in the cage watched as she came towards it through the flames but didn’t move when the cage door swung open. It was small and shrivelled, like a dead animal left in the sun.

She wrapped it in her arms because she had no curtains.

The body was little more than twig-like bones and skin, dry as leather. The fire licked across her skin, setting her aflame as she carried it, but she could see the river, the city lights glittering across its surface, and she didn’t let go or stop until she reached the bank, collapsing into the water. The remaining walls of the lab collapsed behind her, leaving nothing but a crater of fiery ruin as if it had been blown apart.

The creature, charred nearly to a crisp in her arms suddenly stirred as they lay in the river, twisting free and gulping at the water, bony hands grasping wildly through the mud, shoving weeds, algae, and snails into its mouth. Soon, the shrivelled monkey-like face began expanding and smoothing and becoming the small weedy face of a boy.

He sat beside her, panting and gulping more water with his hands, devouring anything he could find in the mud as the burns covering him vanished.

“We’ve got to go,” he finally said, reaching out and trying to find a part of her that wasn’t too scorched to touch. “You can’t stay here. Come on. You have to get up.”

It was Six who found the way into the sewers. Six who stole medicine and bandages for her burns. Six caught rats when she was too injured to move, cutting them open and begging her to eat. He’s the only reason she’s alive.

He doesn’t remember anything except the lab. For Six, Before is before she came, when he’d been Bennet’s special hobby.

A perfect subject for vivisections, poison testing, and the study of human regeneration. Bennet had used him over and over for anything he wanted to, as many times as he wanted to, because Six couldn’t die.

Not even if he was left in a cage without food or water for a year.

***

Six is clever, and good at fixing things she can’t, so she crouches in the tunnel beside the two bodies, waiting for him to come back and tell her what they’ll do.

Both men are still alive.

One is moving weakly as he bleeds from his head. The other doesn’t move, but his organs pulse steadily inside him.

She crouches smaller.

Her bones throb where they were struck and crushed. She will not be able to hunt well for a long time now.

She's so hungry. The smell of seeping blood makes her drool, and with no lips to hold it, it slides down her fangs and into the water. She doesn’t realise she’s moved until she sees her hideous face reflected in the man’s wide, terrified eyes, her jointed legs arching behind her.

She's a thing beyond nightmare.

The man’s heart flutters but slows, growing weak and irregular. He’ll be dead soon.

Six might not come for days or weeks. She's so hungry.

She crouches closer, clumsily pushing aside his shirt, drool dripping across his skin as she slits his belly open.

***

Six still hasn’t come when she finishes eating the second man.

While she waits for him, the bodies, which lie only a little way from her hiding place, begin to stink, swelling with rot. She could drag them off so the river will carry them away, but if someone sees the empty cavities of their bellies, they might wonder what killed them.

Six will know what to do.

Hunger is beginning to gnaw again when she senses footsteps approaching. She breathes deeply and goes still, waiting.

The footsteps stumble and she hears—a chicken? There is muttered cursing. It’s Six!

As she waits, her elation fades and dread creeps over her as she begins to wonder how she’ll explain that she didn’t mean to eat the men.

Six passes her blindly, three chickens strung over his shoulder, but she doesn’t move.

“I’m here…” he says, stopping further down the tunnel and holding up his prizes. “I got chickens.”