run rabbit 02
Your quarry is somewhere ahead of you, in at most a mile of wooded terrain.. She can run, but if she hides your senses—the senses of a predator—will pick her out.
As you run you picture taking her down, holding her there, lowering your mouth to her breast. You practically pant with anticipation at the thought of blood and flesh between your teeth.
Motion. Everything is in motion. Your belly with its healthy layer of fat advertises your conquered meals by rippling with each pump of your powerful thighs. Your breasts, sports bra notwithstanding, do everything they can to shift and roll across your chest. You’ve hunted like this before when thin and ravenous, but have you done it so well-fed? It’s like your body is trying to give you a massage.
No one has disturbed the dust of the road, you can tell at a glance. She must have run into the fields either side. One is bordered by hawthorn run wild, to your eye untouched, so you jump over the shallow ditch that marks the other side of the road and set off across the grassy field.
You follow the path of necessity, reasoning she won’t have fought her way through any difficult terrain until she feels she’s made some distance. Field and stile give way to a sharp banking. You scramble down it and run in the damp shade of a low cliff, grown over with weeds.
When the path you’re running rises its way back into daylight there are suddenly a hundred options. Left, forward, right; left and forward being a wood of a thousand trunks, dense enough to hide a runner from sight within yards. Right is a track leading down to a stream, and undoubtedly that will eventually find people.
If it were colder your breath would billow out of you in great clouds. As it stands your chest heaves.
God, the chase feels good.
You’ve trained hard recently. You’re in peak physical condition, plus extra resources. Your legs thrum with latent energy, begging to run someone down. Your back and arms wait to wrestle your prey down to the ground and subdue her. Your teeth never needed training. Your upper jaw itches, a sensation that will only be assuaged by the steady, powerful bite into living meat.
Still, it’s all for nothing if you can’t find her. You close your eyes and inhale deeply.
There… She came this way. Fresh scent of human, some sweet perfume, applied generously but hours ago, and then the smell of terrified sweat. She must have been extremely well tied up in the car boot to keep her there for the ninety-minute drive.
You crouch to all fours and place your face so close to the soil that sphagnum moss tickles your nose. A tear. She’s crying as she runs.
She knows how much danger she’s in.
A hundredfold more, now you have her scent.
You set off confidently for the woods.
You hear her before you see her. That rhythmic rustling isn’t the fresh wind, its tired legs dragging through undergrowth. Oak, cherry and more hawthorn grow thick and wild here. You think she probably hasn’t heard or seen you.
Everything smells so earthy and green you can taste it. The sensation is not unpleasant: you merely have a preference for the savory scent of self-salted flesh that cuts through the bouquet like a skewer.
You trot out of sight, catching up slowly but remaining hidden while you breathe deep, replenishing breaths. She seems to be talking to herself.
“… going. Come on, Jules. Just need to keep moving. Just need to… fuck, no, I can’t let her get me too…”
You can smell her terror, loud as a klaxon on the air: sweat and bitter almonds. She is stumbling from tree to tree, low on gas. Her low jeans are stained from scrapes and falls and her strappy white top must have caught on something, to have torn at the flank like that.
Smooth, creamy flesh moves tantalisingly beneath the ruined fabric. Perhaps she is a predator. She certainly looks like she eats well. Her high ponytail falls over broad shoulders, leading to her teasing wide flanks and a bubble butt. Her weight lives mostly around her middle. Watching it away is making your mouth water: you picture the hot melting luxury of her fat pouring down your throat.
“… fucking surprise her, lie in wait, cram her down my—”
“Down your what, pet?”
When you speak she spins around quickly enough she almost topples over. When she meets your eyes she makes a high-pitched whine, half-animal, half a child watching their rollercoaster creep towards the first of many plunges.
“Stay back!”
“Down your what?”
She steps back blindly, unwilling to take her terrified eyes off you but needing to maintain the distance you eat up with long, confident strides. She doesn’t answer your question. “You’re her, then? The one who ate Charlotte?”
“Was that her name? I have such a terrible memory for these things. You all tend to blur together after a while.”
She stumbles. Even taking two steps for every one of yours she’s losing ground. A nettle wraps around her ankle and stings her, but she doesn’t notice.
“We should stick together. We’re on the same side.”
“You’d side with the person your sister died inside?” Closer, closer. There’s no way this padded princess could get away or find rescue now. You lick your lips to moisten them. “I know your mother has been looking for me. Do you expect me to believe she wishes to be allies?”
Jules’s face scrunches up with tears. She’s quite pretty, bearing a smattering of freckles and curly red hair. “Don’t kill me. Take me back home. It’ll be enough to—”
“Why should I fear your little family?” You’re two strides from her now.
She backs into an oak tree and flattens herself against it, unable to go further. A spasm of anger crosses her face. “She’ll make you wish you weren’t born.”
You step close, till your belly squishes against hers. She must be, what, twenty? Maybe only up to eating tweens. She’s certainly done nothing to make you think she might be a threat to you. When you lean forward she cranes her head back, incidentally exposing her neck. “How?”
“Digest you alive,” she spits. “Trap your filthy soul inside her. Maybe make you watch her take your creepy boyfriend from the inside before she burns you both up. You see…” She fixes you with a triumphant smirk that would be a lot more effective if her head weren’t craned back. “She’s a witch.”
You nod slowly, absorbing this new information. Then you hold up your left hand in her field of vision. “Thank you. I can now deal with her.” You visualise, and so it comes to be: red light plays over your fingertips, lengthening the nails into wicked claws. Meanwhile your tendrils creep unnoticed from your back, looping around the tree and around Jules’s hips and arms. She barely flinches, absorbed in the claws’ path down her chest. “Oh…”
“I’m afraid so. Don’t worry. I’ll keep your soul inside me. Just until I take your mother.” From inches away you get to watch her expression change when you slice from sternum to belly-button.
There’s something pure about the pleading agonised eyes of the person you are cutting apart. Please don’t do this, they say. I am coming apart.
It’s almost seductive. Even as she screams you feel an upswell of something like love. It’s hard not to feel gratitude when your lips lower to her throat, find her pulse with your tongue-tip, then pierce her carotid. You accept the generous gift of a mouth spattered with that most precious of fluids. Your throat can barely contain her but she gurgles down in a train of swallows, painting your insides red.
A flicker of annoyance at the screaming in your ear, though. This is meant to be intimate. A cutting claw plunges with medical precision through the chub-hidden bobble of cartilage that is her larynx. With the severing of her vocal chords her scream instantly turns to wind whistling in the trees.
You kiss goodbye the font at her throat, leaving her weakened but still struggling for her life. You leave bloody kisses all down a chest that is revealed with a silk-smooth tearing of cloth, till you’re kneeling before her and the lateral wound you have made.
One long swipe of a lick saves the precious droplets from being wasted. Jules shudders as she hears your stomach rumble, knowing beyond doubt that it is her final destination.
You sigh as you sink your teeth into the cut edge of the slit. You have to push with your arms to get enough leverage but by sitting back and tugging with your teeth your tear out if her a long strip of living, bleeding abdominal muscle. With your tongue and without chewing your work it steadily into your throat and swallow. The small ragged edge of it slips down and tickles the back of your throat, making you sneeze. You excuse yourself but Jules doesnt notice: open-mouthed and eyes rolling, she can focus only on the excruciating pain of being unmade.
Another few strips of girl meat and then you get to the prize. Your outstretched tongue teases a layer of her fat into your mouth. When your lips close around it you suck, drawing a steaming wodge of adipose tissue into your mouth. It snips nearly away under a single bite and you chew the rich morsel while your eyes rove over her captive body.
You want it all.
The vampires’ gift of healing the cut is soon all that’s keeping her alive. You kiss and lick bleeding vessels to close them, thereby safeguarding the precious drink from being spilled from wound after wound on her abdomen and flanks. She has no more fat or muscle on her abdomen, now, just a tangle of intestines you won’t pierce but inspect as if fascinated. You run your fingers through them, admiring their wet sheen and healthy pink colour. Peristalsis is more or less halted due to the agony that sets her hands and legs shaking.
When combing through her innards you discover a treasure. You belch an excuse for the five kilos of Jules you have consumed right into her abdominal cavity. Your tongue is busy dealing with severed edges of vessels. Your claws are cutting free something very special.
When it’s free, you push your face into the hole you have dug, and then down. Blood-smell envelops you and you inadvertently slice into her thighs. You’ll deal with that later. For now your lips seek out and find the fist-sized knurl of her uterus. As you press down, stroking back your hair with one hand to keep from getting too much blood in it, the ovaries fold down alongside the muscular vaginal canal. They pop into your mouth like warm peeled grapes.
You have to twist and tear once your teeth close, but pretty soon her reproductive organs are squeezing whole into the churning pit of your stomach. Your involuntary belch is delicately redirected to the side: it would be in poor taste if her womb caused you to burp out of her ruined pussy.
A hundred thousand immature eggs begin to simmer into chyme inside you.
Hunger stabs at you. She’s delicious: rich like butter, tender as steak, and she won’t stop struggling. Her sobbing, shaking scream is a muted ocean breeze as you tear into her thigh with fangs and claws, swallowing down lumps of flesh it took her life to grow and which will take about a day to pass through your arsehole.
When you almost bite through the femoral vein you decide it’s time she said goodnight. You stand, a little unsteady from the vicious adrenaline pounding through your system, and fix her with a stare in the eyes. Eventually she snaps back from the private hell of her sensory system and stares back with pure, animal fear.
She seems almost relieved when you push your hand up below the bottom of her sternum. A little searching in the hot, wet dark and you find it: the beating core of her life. A dextrous nick from your claws to cut a hole through the pericardium and then it’s there, squirming and pulsing in your hand: her living heart.
You kiss her on the lips and squeeze.
She goes rigid. Her heart fights, sputters, and dies. When she dies your soul pulls in her struggling spirit with violence the equal of anything you have done to her so far. That spirit settles into a special place you open for her even as your physical body devours her face, tongue and eyes. You tear out her stilled heart and swallow it whole.
Your tendrils relax all at once and her body drops to the floor. Bereft of an audience outside yourself you fall to carnality. The noises as you chug down her flesh! Three more limbs are segmented and engulfed, even as the pressure grows painfully inside your stomach. You kneel over her corpse and eat and eat and eat.
When you are done she is raw, empty bones, skull cracked open and larger bones sucked dry of marrow. If the bones were moved there would be no doubt a murder had taken place here, but surprisingly little has spilled on the ground. Almost everything is inside you, instead.