𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐃 𝐋𝐈𝐕𝐄 | CARL GRIMES [TWD]

2 | eaten & gone

— CHAPTER TWO —
eaten & gone
[ 3896 words ]

Sylvie stalks, ducks, aims; she is silent as a wraith and almost as dead.

In line with her eye, a white rabbit investigates the forest's underbelly with a twitch of its pink nose. It teeths a patch of fescue grass, ears flicked back. She raises the rifle by an inch and squeezes her eyes shut. Shoots. Leaves of crows shriek and tremble, fluttering up and scattering across the sky, gray with morning. The bullet howls in her ears, despairing. A wail echoes through the forest.

Bait for the dead, Sylvie thinks, but she'd be thankful for their attention.

She cracks open one eye, then the other. Already a skin eater is bent over the rabbit, gnawing eagerly at its slope of pale stomach. No doubt it had been watching, waiting. Understanding. Nimble in her step, Sylvie stalks closer. When she is at it's back — a gnarled, greyish plane purpled with bruises — she unsheathes the machete and spears it through the concave centre of its spine. It snarls. She yanks out the blade, now bleeding rotten guts, and kicks it onto its back. Keeping a foot on its knee, she pushes the sharper edge of her machete against its mouth. Rabbit intestines snagged between its black teeth leak onto the silver.

At last, Sylvie steps back. It lunges forwards. Sylvie plunges the machete through its chest and skewers the skin eater against the soil. It flails its half-chewed arms, drools brown blood, but it can't move.

She can.

She lowers her face against its own. She is so close she can map every tear and fissure that sockets its rough flesh. It bites at air, rapid and desperate, but not her. She bites air too. She wants to put her nose in its mouth, sink her whole face into it, to know what it is like to be eaten and gone. It's breath is in her nose, warm rot and the metallic tinge of blood. Jaws snap. Glazed white eyes at once blank and frenzied. It would be so easy...

Against her own mind, she twists the machete out of the mud. A cavity splits open its chest, just like hers. Again, it pounces. She spears its skull.

Then its chest.

Sylvie carves vertically into its stomach. She wrenches out its guts. She breathes through her nose. She slathers herself in death. She doesn't blink.

Appropriately bloodied, she grasps the rabbit by its hind paws and lifts up a drooping pouch of fat — he's male. Every movement gentle, she splays him on his back and traces the contours of the bitemark in his flesh. It cuts through the right side of his abdomen, but she manages to slice around it. Once done, she holds him up to the sunlight. His stomach still oozes blood and guts. She slings him over her shoulder, already grimed, and slips deftly into a pack of skin eaters, beginning the trek back to the camp.