Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 43912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 220(@200wpm)___ 176(@250wpm)___ 146(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 43912 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 220(@200wpm)___ 176(@250wpm)___ 146(@300wpm)
“The fuck is that?”
The question is pointless, because what the fuck that is, is another monster. Not a moth, this time. This time, the thing emerging from the dark, tight space between the containers is a man. Sort of. Just. Maybe.
His eyes are multitudinous. They blink, one after the other at me, each and every one of them annoyed with what they see. His body, much like the moth, is all muscle. He shines bright, with a bright red stripe running down his front. His arms, again, much like the moth’s, are powerful, but instead of having four arms, he has six. It’s a lot of arms. He is also tall, though not quite as tall as Moth.
Neither one of us is happy to see the other. He looks at me as if I am an intruder. I look at him as if he is a monster from the depths of the human psyche.
“What happened to you two? You can’t have been born this way. There’s just no way.”
“Rude,” the spider notes. He’s got a stern, stiff sort of way about him. A don’t fuck with me vibe emanates from him like a physical forcefield, over and above the natural screaming of my senses. “I thought we agreed we weren’t going to eat in the nest.”
“This human can help us. She’s a detective.”
I’m trying to get my brain to work efficiently, but a lot has happened in a very short period of time and staring between the two of them I have to wonder if I am actually having some kind of stress precipitated mental break. If it wasn’t for the fact that there’s a trail of very real bodies, I’d be considering talking to someone.
I am trapped between two very large, very dangerous creatures, with only my baton to protect me. When the spider speaks, I see flashes of very sharp teeth. I clap my hand over my own mouth to stop myself from screaming. I don’t want to show any signs of fear or bring attention here. Either one of those things might trigger these beasts to attack.
“Okay. How many of you are there?” I mumble the question through my hand before moving it away from my mouth. I have to get a grip on something other than a cock.
They don’t answer the question at first. They are having some unspoken conversation with one another, and something in the way the moth’s antennae wriggle makes me think he is telling the spider to be cool. The spider does not look like he wants to be cool, even a little bit.
The moth turns his red eyes to me. They look less hauntingly intense right now. I realize that is because night is starting to surrender to day. We are not at sunrise yet, but the edges of the sky are starting to lighten a fraction.
“I want you to help me. Us. Our kind has managed to stay largely secret for decades, because we do not visit major cities and engage in heinous crimes there.”
“What is your kind, would you say, exactly?” That’s a sensible question. I wish I had a pad and paper so I could take some notes, but I have nothing.
“We call ourselves the Mutated.”
“Mutated. Okay. That makes sense. And, uh, you got any more information on how you came to be… thus?” I gesture my baton up and down the mothman’s body.
“Science did a lot of things in the forties.”
“That’s an understatement, and not very technical.”
“I don’t understand the processes myself. I am not a genetic scientist.”
“Fair.”
“What I do know is that the Manhattan Project was not the only piece of groundbreaking technology that allowed humanity to redefine the bounds of its power.”
“Okay, but you two are forty at most. You weren’t around in the forties.”
“We hatched more recently. That is true.”
“A detective and a mathematician. Aren’t we lucky,” the spider drawls, thoroughly unimpressed. He’s striking me as kind of an asshole. Then again, mothman over here was striking me as a murderer until very recently, so judgements are not easy to make when it comes to these things.
“Hatched,” I say. “As in, from an egg of some kind.”
“We have some human DNA spliced into the DNA of other animals. We are chimera in the strictest sense of the word, though many call us cryptid.”
“You have a preference for names?”
“I already told you my name is Justice. It is my name, and my calling. That is why I have been tasked with hunting down Rage. He is the mothman you are looking for.”
“Rage. Well. I’d call him messy fucking asshole. He leaves absolute carnage in his wake. The bodies we found have traumatized thousands of people.”
“You let thousands of people see them?” The spider cuts in, his voice full of rattly disapproval.
“People like to share pics. They end up on the internet when they’re gross or weird enough. So, probably, tens of thousands of people.”