Izen reached out a hand to stop Idec from running after the group of humans as they had felled pails of what looked like green and blue and white colored slime into their path. Idec stopped abruptly and waited for Izen's instruction. Idec was the more unpleasant of the two of them, as Izen usually reasoned. You didn't spend eternity with someone and not figure out how many of their sloppy, vacuous ways exasperated you to no end—turns out, in Idec's case, all of them. But Idec did yield to his lead when on a temporary landed visit and besides, he still had that smell on him, of the freshly slaughtered, and it turned Izen's reason into a woozy fog of hunger pains and need. Izen simply pointed up and the two of them easily climbed the racks and slipped into the darkness above.
Down below the scattered and scared humans congregated behind a thin, wooden gate that came down from the ceiling with the push of a button and seemed to lock them on the other side away from the rest of the warehouse. The dock was just behind another locked gate and the door to the outside was only a few steps away. But they weren't completely sealed off, there was another door that lead into a maintenance room, off to the side. Shut away from the rest of the warehouse, only a single florescent bulb lit the end of the room by the dock and the rest slowly fell away into shadows.
“Kelly, put the gun down.”
“Yeah.”
Izen and Idec dropped silently into the maintenance room. Idec followed Izen's every step. The two creatures moved towards the erratic voices of their prey in the next room, the group finding more and more ways to distract themselves into acting irrationally. Izen knew the pattern. It was always they same when they found intelligent life—it was always screaming and arguing and the struggle for leadership, guidance, someone they didn't mind following straight into death's reptilian embrace. In all of the many long and meticulous years that Izen and his fellows had been on trip, Izen had become more and more annoyed with that story line. They no longer tried to reason with them, or turn them, or find any of it at all sentimental. No, now they just ate them up and got back on the ship, and moved on for the next thousand year rotation. Izen wanted nothing more than to end their little problem solving charade.
“Kels...”
Finally. Izen dug his finger nails into the thin, pale neck of the girl in the ridiculous costume. He felt his fingers rip through her flesh and grapple with the cords in her neck. She smelled so rich. She was so warm as she spilled out onto his hand and along his thin and lengthy arm. The others stood and stared and Izen forgot about them as he leaned forward and took his first bite.
He had been so, terribly hungry.
“Fuck! RUN!” Linh shouted above the sounds of Kelly's screams. Pathik rushed forward and grabbed hold of the gun and Linh and him bolted to the other side of the annex towards the dock. Pathik gripped hold of Levi's upper arm as they ran, not wanting to lose him again. But Brad and Maggie panicked and ran off in the other direction—just past Kelly as she shrank to the floor and the creature bent over her devouring her from her neck to her torso to the guts and mess inside of her.
“Brad! Mags!” Levi called after them both as Pathik dragged him forward. Linh threw open the dock gate with her hands and the over powering brightness and cold of the day came at once flooding into the annex. Linh, Pathik, and Levi jumped from the top of the dock on to the cement drive way below and ran out of the warehouse, leaving all of it behind them.
Brad and Maggie didn't slow until they were clear across the next room and shut in total darkness. The room was full of odds and ends and opened up into the warehouse proper with a set of swinging double doors. There was a long path down to the other end of the racks but then the front office and the door out to the parking lot was there. They slipped along the edge of the wall tried to quiet their breathing. Brad looked behind him and saw the faint light from outside and whispered to Maggie.
“Mags!” He wanted to pull her back to the annex and the dock where he sincerely hoped Levi and the other two were waiting for them. But that meant passing by Kelly once more. They could still hear the slopping sounds of her being eaten. Brad closed his eyes and wished the sounds away. A set of metal and tools rattled to the floor. “Mags, the dock!”
“Shhh!” Maggie held up her hand to stop Brad from trying to pull her back and she listened for the clamoring she had just heard not to far away from them. “The other one is still in here.” Maggie dragged her hand along the wall and felt for anything—the swinging doors, a weapon, a light switch. Brad caught his breath in his throat and jumped slightly at the crunching sound of bone. Maggie's fingers brushed over a switch and she flipped it. The fluttering florescent bulbs trickled on and slowly filled the room with light. Brad and Maggie stood flat against the wall and the maintenance room came into view. Several pails of paints were stacked here and there, with one old and rusted desk holding several more. The rest of the room was strewn with half finished projects, old cabinets, and rows and rows of various tools and hand machines. Off in the corner was a large mixer for paints. But in front of them, grinning and bouncing on his knees was a monster.
“Alien Vampire, not monster.” Idec said with a chuckle, devolving into one of his usual coughing fits. A bit of phlegm fell to the floor with a splat. Idec wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Maggie reached forward and grabbed the first thing she could find, which happened to be a replacement piece for the mixer, a long and thick metal bar that stirred the paints as they mixed in various colors. She held it up like a baseball bat and stepped towards Idec. Brad's eyes went wide as he watched her, and his gaze kept darting to the doorway back into the annex and the open dock beyond.
Idec froze where he was as he watched Maggie step slowly and purposefully towards him. He hadn't seen her before, among the others, or he hadn't paid attention. She was striking, tall and vicious. Her dark hair had fallen out of its wrap and fell across her face. His laughter faded away and Idec remembered, from a place very long ago, what it was like to feel warm.
She lit up that part of him hidden away, that part of him from before he was such a ravenous monster—mutated into what they were now, killers and eaters and mindless travelers—that part of him that was, in a way, romantic.
“Alien vampire my fucking ass.”
Brad turned and bolted straight across the room into the annex. He blurred past Kelly's...remains and flew at the dock where the others had just been about to turn back in to retrieve them. He jumped and pushed Levi and Pathik back out into the daylight. Above them all a space ship hovered, still as if it was suspended in the air.
“Where's Maggie!?”
Brad looked back at the warehouse for a moment and then turned his back on it.
“She's dead.”
To be continued...here.
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