Eternal

She didn’t know how long she’d been this way. She just sort of…was.
Every now and then, she found refuge of some kind – a gas station here, a motel there. None of them liked to play host to her, but none of them had much choice. She had the money, and if the police did arrive, she was long gone by the time they got there.
And besides, when they did arrive, the police had bigger worries.
For decades now, it had been growing inside her. It had begun, all those winters ago, as a pain in her stomach. She had been there, in her bedroom, hiding from Mama and Justin, who had been at it again. Under the bed, blankets draped around the edges, stuffed elephant clutched tight in her arms. And then it had moved. Twitched. Made a slow, rippling motion, that only sheer fear had stopped from causing her to throw up. And she had known what it wanted, though she hadn’t known why or how.
It had wanted to feed.
Justin had burst down the door, screaming something at Mama about how “this little bitch should learn to earn her keep”. He had yanked back the blankets, kicked away the bed, left her staring up into his vicious, angry face. And as he raised his hand, she had pounced.
It hadn’t helped much, then. It had just been a small thing – a writhing, a pulsing, a screaming sensation in her brain. But by the time Mama had come through the doorway and screamed, Justin had been bleeding onto the floor, and she had been scrabbling desperately at his ruined throat.
That had been all that had happened, then. She had fled into the night, huddled in an alleyway until the stabbing hunger grew too strong and she had torn open a garbage can. Perhaps Mama had called someone, perhaps not. But the house seemed to be all right, at least. And Mama wasn’t hurt. Yet.
After that had begun her new life – her life of hunger, of running, of alternately fostering and loathing the thing in her body. Towns, roads, years, people – all of it had blended together, melded with a hundred similar experiences into the sort of caked blob that was her life. And sure, there had been exceptions, things that had stood out. There had been the time she was on a boat, stealing from a little cramped galley and hiding in a vast, chugging engine room. There had been the time she watched a volcano erupt, vomiting a cloud of smoke into the sky and causing winter in spring. But those didn’t matter, really. All that really mattered was the day-to-day – the feeding of the thing that used her body to support itself.
That thing had grown, in the time since she had left home. It was no longer just a small disturbance, wriggling down there. Now it consumed her, its twitching limbs wrapping around her, its serrated tentacles writhing above her, its dark fluids pumping through her. She kept herself covered when she could, but people noticed the bulges in the coat, or the colors that lurked and glittered in the eyes that peered out from between the bandages. And though she had forgotten about it long ago, they always noticed the smell.
There had been a man, once, who hadn’t minded. His name had been Elliot, and he had been old and kindly, and knew what she was and didn’t care. He let her stay with him, let her eat his ever-dwindling food and sleep on his old, moldering couch. She loved him, and she sincerely believed that he had loved her.
But like everything, the creature had ended it. It had awoken her in the night, insistent, ravenous, desperate to grow some new, horrible organ. She had staggered upright, gasping at the pain in her stomach, stumbled to the wet-smelling refrigerator, and pulled it open with a clatter, grabbing anything that looked edible and forcing it down. Milk, fruit, raw eggs, a week-old jar of jam – it didn’t matter how pleasant or how edible it was, there wasn’t time to do anything more than stuff it desperately into her mouth and swallow.
She had heard him behind her, and her heart had sunk.
Ever so slowly, she had turned around, swallowing a still-wrapped chocolate bar, met his confused, bleary eyes. “…What are you doing?” he had asked, in a mixture of confusion and that fear that even he had never quite driven away.
She knew she had to say it, then. She knew there was no other choice, that if she didn’t, it would do terrible, terrible things.
“Kill me.”
He had understood.
Elliot didn’t have time to get to the gun. It had wanted him, far more than anything in that fridge. And this time it had helped, bladed limbs slicing through flesh, lashing tentacles crushing through bone, until the only person in the world that cared for her was dead on the floor and she was stuffing his corpse into her mouth through tears of rage and sorrow.
She had stood on the hill, watching his house, as the rift of writhing nightmare had opened like a wound in the world before her and left nothing but ruins in its wake.
One day, she would be that. She knew that, with the certainty that told her it had come from the horror that infested her. One day, the thing that devoured her wouldn’t need her anymore, and it would grow into something like that, and take her with it. She didn’t know if she could stop it. She didn’t know if she wanted to. Because as cruel and vicious as it was, the horror was a part of her. She needed it. She wanted it. And she would do as it asked, as long as it took. For it was her.
Category:StalkerShrike
Category:Beings