#penance

I, at present, fail to protect mine own. See, my kin by blood plays the horn at many a banquet. He thusly requires time enough to warm his pipes and perfect his art. Accordingly, a great racket echos throughout mine home.

The object of my love is quite tortured. She was asleep naught but a moment ago, and now turns her ears and goes wide eyed with every note. Mine adorable vermin. A victim of sounds which taunt her no matter how she searches for peace.

Feather-light footsteps rushed through an underground parking lot, weaving effortlessly between, over, and at times under the tightly packed cars. It was a graceful dance, careless even, but inside Lucile felt anything but. Her eyes scanned frantically for any means of escape. A maintenance tunnel, a sewer grate, even a ventilation shaft would do. Anything to get away from the slow, methodical, tapping sound of the cane getting ever closer.

The death of Sr. Reyes had been an accident. It still didn’t feel real to Lucile, none of this did. In an instant that greasy old man was disassembled at her feet. Around her a crowd of onlookers stood in shocked silence. An oily liquid clung to her tongue, the sweetest honey and the warmest liquor. She got up to run and pushed through the throng, finding her hands left deep icy gouges where she had forced aside the bystanders. Their screams of pain and the heady aroma of blood bubbling to the surface made Lucile’s mouth ache with the need to bite down and drink her fill.

A dull icy ache still came from where she had dug her teeth into her own arm to suppress her urges. Worse yet was the golf ball sized slug still rattling around in her gut. When she vaulted over a car hood or banged uselessly against the concrete walls the pain got worse, yet nothing came out of the deep dry holes bored into her icy skin. By now, she had completed almost a full lap of the garage with no easy escape in sight, the rhythmic tapping of that cane against the asphalt still an even distance away.

Lucille passed the narrow ramp leading out into the open night and for a moment considered making a break for it. A controlled stream of bullets shot out from the shadows and dashed her hopes, forcing her to leap away for cover over the roof of an ill-fated convertible. Most of the rounds dug small pits in the ground around her feet or shattered the glass of the car as she vaulted over, but a few grazed her legs and tore through her blood-soaked clothes, sending her tumbling down the other side onto the hard pavement below. She could hear a heavy engine spin to life from somewhere beyond the ramp and move closer, the rattling of a dozen machine guns reloading for another volley. More terrifying still was that woman, her cane tapping down the seconds before she caught up. Lucile was a predator now, the pieces of Sr. Reyes still sticking to her teeth confirmed as much, but here with her back to the ground she felt more and more like prey caught in a trap.

A trap was exactly what she had walked into when she had scrambled away from that panicking crowd. She had torn open the stairwell door and flew down the steps, taking no more than two or three bounds to descend each of the eight flights to the ground floor. She had to get away, away from that body and from those nauseatingly delicious witnesses that begged her to kill again. She rocketed out of the stairwell and found the reception area eerily vacant. The only thing between her and the large glass doors that promised the freedom of Vilanova’s wintery night was a lone woman, leaning against the only exit.

A simple face mask and an opaque pair of sunglasses covered the majority of her face, while a long blue coat concealed most of her body save for a single arm bracing against a sturdy wooden cane. She seemed to stare idly at the empty front desk, and even Lucile’s heightened vision couldn’t see past the woman’s dark lenses. She could still smell the pungent odor of warm blood coursing through the woman’s veins, even hear the individual beats of her heart from ten meters away, and her teeth sank into her arm once more to keep the hunger from washing over her.

“Leave. Now,” Lucile growled from around the frozen flesh of forearm, “I don’t want to hurt anyone else, so just step aside.”

“Hurt me? I hardly think something like you could hurt me even if you tried. Do what you must, but I don’t think I’ll be moving a step.”

The woman didn’t so much as turn her head to face Lucile, but she could hear the fabric of her mask rustle as she made a small smirk. It was enough to make a winter storm of animalistic pride well up in Lucile. Her teeth clenched down harder on her arm as she knelt down in a squat, ready to pounce if this foolish woman kept taunting her.

“Oh? Is something the matter? Have I wounded your pride? Normally it takes more than one night for your kind to degenerate into the sniveling, ego-obsessed wretches you are in the depths of your unbeating hearts. Ah, but perhaps you’ve already been… broken in? I’m sure the stench of last night still clings to you, no matter how hard you try to wash it out.”

The woman still refused to even look at Lucile, to even give her the recognition her pain and hunger deserved. Maybe she ought to show the bitch just how it felt to be hurt, just the way she had been. She ripped her fangs out of their fleshy hilt and sprang forward. All pretense was cast aside as her hands stretched out wide like the claws of a pouncing lioness closing in on her prey.

In a blink she was flat on her back, just as she was now on the garage floor, with the smell of gunpowder in the air and a burning hole in her stomach. She felt a terrible nausea mixed in with a hefty jolt of fear as the woman above her brandished a revolver hidden in her jacket pocket, its barrel still smoking. She could still hear the woman’s words echo as if drifting out from the slowly closing crater in her body.

“I have you right where I want you, mein Löwenjunges. Scamper off now, you can still escape through the parking garage. I’ll even give you a head start to keep this hunt interesting.”

And with that, she had been effortlessly corralled into the deathtrap she was in now. If she attempted to move any further ahead, she would be ground up into mincemeat from the machine gun fire. If she tried to return back to the lobby, she’d be running straight into the waiting arms of that woman. If she stayed put, she might as well toss a coin to decide who got the pleasure of putting the first bullet into her skull. With her back to the rim of the shot-up red convertible, she had to think of something. Fast.

She looked out over the hood and saw an opportunity. Halfway between her and the jacketed woman was a shuttered garage door that led to the lower level of the parking lot. Her brain had overlooked it as she ran by. The lower level had been off limits for over a year while the management dealt with a severe flooding issue. Construction workers came in from time to time to dig out parts of the wall and replace long stretches of rusting pipework. If she could just make it there she might be able to find an escape route –some temporary passageway into the neighboring building or even a forgotten drainage pipe would do– or at least buy herself some time to figure out a better plan.

There was still one glaring issue. Even the few seconds it took for her to poke out the top of her head and scan the driveway was enough time for the woman to stop, line up, and fire another shot of her handcannon. The round ripped through the car’s engine block and narrowly missed Lucile, instead crumbling the tire of the truck behind her like an empty soda can. A few lugnuts dislodged by the impact rolled and sparkled within the flashing yellow light of the truck’s alarm system, and Lucile had an idea.

She burst out from her cover to a torrent of bullets zipping past her head. She danced between them, her hearing telling her the click of every bullet entering its chamber before it was even fired. Her eyes were deadset on her quarry: the unflinching statue of a woman leveling her revolver at Lucile’s head.

The patter of the bullets acted like a rhythmic beat to the death-dance Lucile found herself in. The stream of lead came from either side of her and, like a funnel, forced her to dodge closer and closer to the center of the hunter’s sights. The woman hardly needed to aim, just to brace against the hefty wooden cane supporting her and hold the gigantic revolver dead in place. 

There was one thing Lucile had at her advantage, however. The slugs the woman used were massive, and her gleaming revolver suitably oversized as well, but even still she could see that there was only one round left in the three-holed cylinder. It would only fire when the hunter was absolutely sure it would hit its mark, when Lucile had no more room to dodge. By then, when Lucile was caught between the two deadly currents of machine gun fire on either side, her head perfectly lined up for a skull-shattering slug to the brain, there would be no more than two meters between her and the woman. Her timing had to be perfect, her concentration had to be unbreakable.

She bounded from side to side and weaved under the errant bullets that threatened to catch her off guard, making sure to never move in a straight line or else give her hunter an early shot. She gritted her teeth and imagined herself still kneeling before that bloody mess in the hallway. Blood boiled within her as she remembered the taste and the hunger that drove her to lap up every drop that came from his broken, shredded body. Jaws clenching, molars grinding, her lips turning up in a snarl, she recalled how easy it was to break through his bones and suckle at the yellow-red marrow within. She knew what she had to do, if only her body was able.

At last she had no more room to dance, and took one final step forward, her eyes deadset on the barrel.

The hammer struck down and the slug spiralled forth. 

Time seemed to slow and Lucile opened her jaws and bit down, catching the bullet dead still between her teeth. It hit like a charging bull, and she felt her teeth shift and crack as her neck snapped back with the force. Her entire body skidded backwards along the pavement but her legs braced her against toppling over. She had weathered the bull’s charge, and now it was time to strike back.

She repaid the hunter’s volley with a single lugnut thrown with the force of a speeding arrow that pierced through and splintered the woman’s cane. Her hunter fell backwards and dropped her gun as Lucile spat out the captured lead.

“I figured out your trick. You need that cane to stabilize yourself for those shots, not just to walk. Try to reload and the next one’s going straight through your neck instead.”

From behind, more bullets zinged through the air around her. She jumped for the garage door and jammed both hands under the heavy sheetmetal. The door was designed to be strong enough to keep reckless drivers out and tight enough to keep the flood waters in, but for Lucile it was nothing more than a minor obstacle. She threw the door open and felt a satisfied rush as it crumpled against the concrete roof. The cool empty darkness of the lower level stretched out before her. She heard nothing within, save for the occasional drip of water leaking out of burst pipes, and smelled nought but the heavy stench of black mold.

She took one step into the shadow and saw a light shine in the darkness. Her left leg gave way. Not knowing what had happened she tried to pick herself up, when again she collapsed onto her right shoulder. Try as hard as she could, she couldn’t find the strength to push back up. When she looked down, she saw nothing but a mangled stump where her arm used to be.

“Well now, mein Löwenjunges,” came the woman’s voice from behind, “you gave us quite an exciting chase. Unfortunately, the hunt is now over, and you are mine. Turn and face me.”

The pain from her leg, and the empty space where her other arm used to be, was maddening. Lucile clutched the remaining lugnut in her left hand and flung it at the woman’s voice as she flopped onto her back. The chunk of metal clinked uselessly against the ground. In horror, Lucile held her hand up to the face. Two fingers dangled limply next to a shard of splintered bone. The bitter taste of gun oil gagged her screams before they could echo through the garage.

“I do hope that was the last of your desperate, impotent resistance. Try that again and you will finally get to see what ten grams of shotgun shell tastes like, what without those pretty teeth in the way. I hear the lead is actually quite sweet.”

Lucile could hear the soft twitching of muscle as another grin crept along behind the woman’s dirtied mask. Two men, each dressed in matching civilian clothes but touting discrete submachine guns, flanked the crouching woman at either side. They seemed to look jittery, as if they were just as scared of the madwoman between them as Lucile was. She could do nothing but pray as a dozen more entered the edges of her blurry vision while tears of pain, terror, and frustration melted off of her glacial eyes.