She whipped around, the scream still ringing in her ears. “Rachel? Rachel?”
The room fell silent. Her legs knocked against tables and chairs in the darkness. “Rachel? Rachel! Where are you? Please! Rachel!” Her stomach lurched and twisted. She abandoned all caution, all discretion, desperate to find her sister. Something soft caught her foot. She stepped back and cast the light from her phone towards the object.
Rachel’s severed face stared up from the floor, her body nowhere to be found.
“You’ve always been a selfish sonuvabitch.”
“Fuck you! You always thought you were better than me!”
“Until now, I was.”
One.
Two.
Three.
The gun exploded, a deafening staccato ripping through the malformed mockery. He felt no remorse. No pity. No regret. The thing writhed and screamed in his brother’s voice, but it stopped being his brother long before the infection, before the parasite took hold. He always knew it would end in blood between them.
He is neither kind nor jolly. Every year he enters the homes of especially unruly children and snatches them up, leaving behind no trace or memory that they had ever existed. By night’s end, with his sack full of naughty children, he slinks back to his lair to gorge himself. When the last child is devoured, bones and all, he falls into a deep sleep for another year, with none of us the wiser.
Until now.
Void Engineer 