Ethan’s mind recoiled from the word “beautiful”, though that had been the first to come to him as he watched the witch carve, literally, through the crowd. She moved with fluid grace through the fleeing people like some wild animal through swaying grass. Every step brought her to a fresh victim, every movement of her body supported the savage strokes that never failed to cut. She was clearly naked, save for the glistening red stain that flowed from her hands to the elbow, splattered across her face and chest, and ran in rivulets down her hips to sling in mad sprays from her knees and feet. A trail of red footprints marked her path. She was a dervish of horror spinning through the screaming masses leaving silence in her wake. Her two long knives, unadorned and simply, lethally, shaped gleamed wetly as they separated limb from torso, opened throats, spilled entrails. All the while, Ethan could see flashes of perfect white teeth, bared in joyful laughter at the carnage she’d wrought. Ethan stared, transfixed.
“Jesus Christ,” someone whispered, breaking Ethan’s thrall, “we have to go that way?”
“Yes,” he replied wearily, nodding his head as he spoke the word, “And even if we could just sneak past, would you really want to have that at your back?”
A well-timed scream of pain drove the point home.
Ethan crab-walked a few steps forward to a low stone planter, trying to brace himself and his rifle. He watched through the sight, tracking the witch from barely fifty yards away. A gap had opened in the fleeing throng, a firebreak to her bloody killing. Ethan eased his breathing and prepared to shoot when she crossed the gap. It didn’t even feel strange anymore. A deep thud warped the air, like a far-off sonic boom, and the witch was gone. Only a slowly settling red mist remained where she’d stood.
Ethan froze, icy with terror, every horror-movie-honed instinct in him screaming that the witch was about to appear directly behind him.
An eternity of a heartbeat later he resumed breathing and searched the crowd. On the far side of the gap he found her, already slashing through flesh and bone and hope as people fled what they’d thought was a worse slaughter behind them. Her skin was clean and white as a new burial shroud, though rapidly disappearing beneath a fresh coat of steaming crimson. Apparently when she – blinked? – it left the blood behind. Not the knives, though.
Ethan resumed his track, trying to follow the witch’s path as she popped from victim to victim several more times. Finally, he thought he saw his chance, though bile burned in his throat at what it was going to cost. A man from the crowd had stopped running and faced down the gore-spattered woman, a tire iron making him foolishly brave – or maybe just desperate to do something besides run. He was only twenty yards from the witch, maybe forty from where Ethan crouched in wait. Ethan would never forget the shock on the man’s face as she simply popped through the intervening distance and buried one knife under his sternum and lifted him off his feet by his ribcage. Ethan had settled his point of aim two feet in front of the doomed man, and when the witch appeared, he pressed the trigger. His intent was to take her under her left arm, sending his bullet crashing through her chest and take her heart and both lungs with it. But as she’d thrust with her right hand, she made a balancing move backward with her left. The shot hit her arm instead, shattered bone at the midpoint between shoulder and elbow, but left his target very much alive
And pissed.
“Fuck.” Ethan breathed, rising from his crouch as the witch’s eyes locked onto him.
“What are you doing!?” shouted several of his group at once. Ethan couldn’t spare them the concentration a complete answer would have required, so he replied simply,
“Get away.”
Ethan paced forward as steadily as he could manage and fired again, hoping for a good hit, but mostly to keep her attention. His shot made the long black hair on the left side of her head dance wildly. It must have clipped her ear, too, because the witch howled. Her last victim’s carcass was still suspended from the knife in her right hand. She heaved furiously upward and the blade cleaved through ribs and exploded from the man’s chest at the collarbone. The tip of the knife caught under his chin and simply ripped off his lower jaw. It spun into the air as the rest of the body dropped lifelessly to the street. The witch pointed the dripping blade directly at Ethan and bared her teeth in a look that was nothing like a smile.
A deep thud, sharper this time, Ethan thought, like close thunder, assaulted his ears as the witch disappeared. Ethan immediately released the tension in his legs and toppled over backward as the cloud of blood mist settled toward the ground a hundred feet away. He angled his rifle slightly upward and pressed the trigger. The witch appeared mid-fall, the blade meant for Ethan’s heart just missed his forehead. His bullet found its mark, though, not a microsecond too soon, and pierced her heart at something like 1700 miles per hour. It vaporized four inches of spine on the way out and the witch collapsed.
On top of Ethan.
With his rifle trapped between them.
His tailbone and shoulder blades hit the hard sidewalk in that order, followed closely by the back of his skull. There were several surprised shouts from behind him, reminding Ethan with laughable, if fleeting, irritation that his people hadn’t fled when he’d told them to. The witch was surprisingly heavy and added to the impact. Ethan lie still for a second before it hit him that the bloody monster pinning him to the ground was also a completely nude woman, and that somehow tipped the situation from merely mind-numbingly terrifying to plain inappropriate. He used his hips and the rifle between them and heaved her body off to the side. Natural momentum carried him over and the ended up braced directly above her on his knees and one hand.
At this point the witch’s eyes flicked open and she latched onto Ethan’ shoulder with her still functional right hand. Without hesitation Ethan screamed like one of those goats you see on YouTube.
Blessedly, the witch’s hand was without a long, killing blade but damnit it was full of sharp nails. Nails, like claws, that cut through Ethan’s jacket and dug into the meat of his shoulder. Five points of fiery pain erupted amid fresh screams from somewhere beyond the pounding of his eardrums. The witch pulled herself upward toward him.
“No peace!” she spat, the words flecked with blood and saliva and an odd formality, but Ethan’s mind some where just beyond the reach of rational thought just then. His gut twisted in icy fear, there was no way anything alive could survive a hit like the one he’d delivered and here she was still fucking talking! Ethan fought off a brief wave a nausea that ripped through him, then smashed the woman across the jaw with the broadside of his rifle. The impact freed him of her clutch and he leapt to his feet.
“What in the actual hell was that shit?” he demanded loudly of the four bloodless faces staring back at him.
Awesome, man. So glad to see you’re back updating!