Call me animal.

[phantastus]

WHO: Heather Mason and Maurice Hutch (OC)
WHERE: Dogtrot, Texas
WHEN: Just easing into spring.
WHAT: What probably would have been a night spent loitering around the drug store and breaking bottles in the alley like generic malcontent youths takes several unexpected turns when a vampire hunter interrupts Maurice while waiting for his friend from up north.
RATING: Probably PG. CW for violence, mild body horror and transformation.




awsum
ill be outside where the rentareel used to be

Maurice had put out the call and now he was in his place, hands in his coat pockets. He hadn't seen his friend for a while now. One thing or another would come up (said things including worrying mothers, various injuries, and plain bad weather) and now that at least the weather had calmed its bad self down, the world was ready to be trampled again.

And what a night for it! It was clear with chilly breezes sneaking around buildings and down alleyways. An orange moon hung low on the horizon and kept the clouds far on the edges of the horizon. It wouldn't rain for two more days. Spring was coming. The tiny green shoots had just barely started poking out of the ground where there was enough actual soil instead of the red clay of Dogtrot. Crispy dead leaves still hung in the corners where the buildings met the sidewalk. Easter candy all but overflowed on super market shelves.

The vampire thought of all the things they would do once Heather got there. They could graffiti the old building marked to be torn down the following week since it was technically not illegal anymore. They could eat pizza at Tod's until they were sick. And DRANKS. And Sega. If Meranda hadn't taken over the sofa for the night. An outlet in her room had blown (or so she said) so she spent a lot of time on the sofa during her WoW raids.

Something interrupted his thoughts. He had lived in Dogtrot for years now and not a lot surprised him. He knew the local vampires, he even knew a local spook or two. He knew the drug addicts and the few homeless and what they sounded like. What he heard on that empty chilly street was none of those things.

"Quack quack!" It was mechanical. Grainy.

Maurice lifted a brow and tugged his phone out wondering if Meranda had passive-aggressively changed the ring on it again.

"Quack quack!"

"The hell...?" It wasn't his phone. Maurice pocketed it and looked all around. The quack came from an alley across the street between a now defunct QUICK CASH and what was going to be a shiny new laundromat. Maurice looked both ways and ventured forward into the gloom.

The garbage can at the end of the alley quacked. Maurice screwed up his face in thought. Broken toy that suddenly came back to life? Stranded cyborge duck?

Up above on the rooftop, a long and lean and very crafty hunter was watching his prey fall for his trap hook, line, and sinker. His father had been a hunter--a normal hunter. Deer, ducks, rams. He had watched him make odd noises to get the attention of the deer. A whistle or a click to make them stop in just the right place. Sometimes to even lure them in.

Humans were the most curious animals that he knew of and though the thing in the alleyway wasn't human (not in the slightest) he had to watch it in fascination and amusement before he made his move.

Maurice peered into the trash. There was an old Talkboy straight from the eighties in the trash quacking away.

"Oh, man, sweet!" It was all his! He reached for it. Something dressed in full army camo descended upon him and drove a thin knife into his shoulder. Maurice screamed like a wildcat and the fight began.

Comments

[foolishwren]

At first Heather picked her way through the brambles with care-- but it soon became apparent that her big dinosaur feet were fairly impervious to the thorns (which didn't reach high enough to poke at any tender spots), so instead she tromped along with a merry crunch crunch crunch.

"... Whoa. Hey Zilla, what's that?"

[toothaches]

The vampire brushed the hair out of his face and squinted ahead.

"Looks like a round feeder..." As they got closer, the structure did not burst into flames or give off any eerie chanting. "Me and my brothers used to climb these when we were kids."

He put out a hand and picked at the rust that had built up on the edges of the thing. He gave it a little shake and instantly regretted it when a shower of small insects from the saplings fell on him. He swore and swatted at his shirt. CATERPILLARS. HORRIBLE BABY CATERPILLARS.

"God!"

[foolishwren]

As the shower of caterpillars descended, Heather at least had the decency to let out a squeak and hop backwards with her giant paws covering her beak. She might be a god, but even gods don't want to wind up covered in tiny squirmy things.

But, because she's Heather, it doesn't take her long to start laughing.

And she does.

[toothaches]

Maurice hissed and spat and swore as he brushed the tiny wiggly babies off of him. He dragged his claws through his hair and frowned into the woods.

"I oughta stuff you in this thing and roll you into that gully..." His threat faded out though because he noticed something else. He quickly forgot his insect problems. "Oh, man, Heather, look!"

He pointed through the gloom and there through some trees and behind a tangle of dead bushes was a small wooden house. Its windows were long gone and the door on the other side hung by a lone hinge. Piles of ancient rotting firewood lay all around it as well as bits of metal, glass, and other trash.

Maurice set out at once, determined to be the first one to reach it.

[foolishwren]

Her throat swelled in a croaky chuckle. Those were some big words after getting owned to the point of saying you believed in Spice Girls, Maurice.

"Sure, Zilla. Sure."

But any further gloating was cut short by the vampire's discovery, and she cocked her head to get a better look at the abandoned house.

"... Whoa."

Maurice would get his wish, as she didn't try to get ahead of him as they approached the house. Instead she stalked along behind, curiously.

[toothaches]

Hand on the doorframe, Maurice leaned in curiously. He kept an ear open both for Heather and for anything (like angry possums) that might be inside the old house. The front door opened into what looked like a den or a living room and only a few pieces of furniture were left--an old table, a couch that had already been rendered down to a frame and springs, and what was left of a cabinet. The room was full of dead leaves and dirt.

"I guess we found who left all that garbage..." Maurice sniffed the air. No fresh blood...no dead animals. An old woody sourness hung in the little house though. Something told him that it was moonshine but he'd given up the memory of how to make the stuff years ago. He could no longer recall how it smelled in certain stages.

"Kinda stinks in here..."

[foolishwren]

A faint orange glow fell across the old wooden walls as Heather poked her pointed head in over his, eyes wide and curious.

"Whoof. Yeah. Who d'you think lived all the way out here, anyway? I didn't even see a road."

Whoever it was, they didn't seem to be around anymore, that was for sure.

[toothaches]

"Maybe...there used to be one." Maurice took a few ginger steps into the house. Leaves crunched under his boots. "You know...if this place isn't a haunt for drug dealers or somethin' we could turn this into...man, I don't know. A hide-out!"

He really wanted to say clubhouse but there were only two of them and two wasn't exactly a club.

[foolishwren]

"You think?"

She squeezed partway into the building behind him-- although when she tried to go all the way through the door, the crooks of her wings bumped the frame. She'd have to get down on all fours to get through. ... Or turn back, but she didn't want to dig out those extra clothes so soon.

"It doesn't look like any drug dealers have been around... or like... ghost hobos."

[toothaches]

Maurice shuddered all over.

"Don't even talk about ghost hobos, man." He leaned around another doorway. There were only two other rooms in the house: a bedroom and what looked like a pantry.

"...This place has no toilet. It is old..."

[foolishwren]

"There's probably an outhouse behind it somewhere. Or somewhere that one used to be."

Alessa had some vague, dim memories of houses way on the outskirts of Silent Hill that didn't have any plumbing. Barely any of them had been lived in, though. They were just relics of an older time.

[toothaches]

The vampire walked deeper into the house. Beds in old houses sometimes had money hidden in the mattress! Or they did on old TV shows. He leaned down and started plucking at the springs with his claws but started to notice something.

No shadow over him.

He leaned back around the door frame and grinned at the blackbird.

"What's the matter? Can't fit?"

[foolishwren]

The glowing orange eyes narrowed to slits at him from across the room.

"YOU try being this big and getting through tiny wilderness-hermit doors."

She scooted a little further in, but most of her hindquarters and swishy tail were still on the other side of the doorway.

[toothaches]

"Nobody made you turn into stork-zilla you know! I'm going to find all this hidden hobo money and keep it all for myself!"

He disappeared around the corner again, chuckling darkly to himself. He knelt down onto the floor and peered under the bed. More leaves, stray bits of wood, dirt, a couple of dead mice that were more or less fused to the floor. Nothing that looked like hobo treasure.

Maurice carefully pressed his hand down on the mattress and made the old bedframe squeak.

"Hmm...Maybe a bed's too obvious..." And then he thought about where he was and what he was doing. He was down on his hands and knees near a spooky old bed. He remembered the last time he was near a crappy old bed. Maurice felt his unbeating heart drop into his stomach. He fell back on his ass, rolled over, and scrambled back into the main room on his hands and knees looking as if he'd seen a ghost.

[foolishwren]

She let out an irritated chuff but didn't holler after him.

He could keep the hidden hobo money, it was probably covered in syphilis or something.

Instead she focused on slowly wriggling further in. She had worked her hips past the frame when he came scrambling back in.

"--What? What'd you find? ... Was it ghost hobos doin' it?"

[toothaches]

Maurice scrambled onward but caught himself between the birdbeast's ankles before falling flat on his stomach.

He puffed his hair out of his face and grunted. He almost wished it was ghost hobos doin it. "No, just memories...there's nothin' cool here. Besides us, I mean."

[foolishwren]

"... All right, memory man."

Letting out a grunt of her own, she finished worming her way in through the door and dusted herself off with her overlarge hands.

"Well if there's nothing cool here, all this was fairly anticlimactic."

[toothaches]

Maurice let out an ugly snort. "You want something climactic? Go crawl under that bed and get sucked down into crayon and dustbunny warrior Hell. I am not in the mood to play Borrowers."

He clambered out into the open and stood up again, re-checking his backpack and making sure none of the zippers caught on anything.

[foolishwren]

"I'll pass."

Still, it seemed weird that there would be NOTHING out here.

Just in case Maurice managed to miss something in his FRAIDYCAT FIT, Heather started to shuffle around, the tips of her wingfeathers dragging on the floor behind her.

[toothaches]

Maurice wrung his hands together as Heather finally fit inside the house.

There wasn't a lot of room for a bird abomination like Heather to move around. Things creaked and bugs crept through the debris. Spiderwebs caught in her feathers and fur. There were a couple of sealed metal tins thrown in one corner. They were the size of a man's palm, circular, and whatever paint or labels they'd had were long gone thanks to rust.

There were beams near the roof that were a little too small to be called rafters but two things rested on them--a mason jar filled with what looked like dirt and a key that looked like it belonged to some kind of vehicle.

"Heather...Heather, come out. Let's keep exploring, there's nothing here."

[foolishwren]

"Hang on, will ya? It's gonna take me like three whole minutes just to turn arou-- OW!"

In standing up straighter, there was a thunk as she bumped her head on those 'rafters' hard, jostling the jar and sending it down to the floor.

[toothaches]

The jar smashed. Glass scattered across the floor with the leaves and twigs and the carcasses of old bugs. The dirt that had been in the jar plumed in the small space, revealing what had also been in the jar.

Teeth.

Flat teeth, sharp teeth, hollow teeth, teeth with holes, gold teeth, black teeth...


Maurice's face appeared around the door frame. "If you die in there I'm not coming in after you!"

[foolishwren]

Clamping her hands down over her head, Heather gave it a heavy shake, wincing.

"Ow, what the hell, who put those there..."

Blinking, she withdrew one hand and looked at the big heavy claws to see if there was any blood--... and then past them, down at the floor.

And stopped.

".... Uh... Zilla?"

[toothaches]

"What?" Maurice went back on his own word and took a careful step inside. In the dim light he saw the teeth. "Oh, gross."

The teeth began to move.

"Oh, God!"

They quivered and suddenly, all at once, as if yanked by some powerful magnet, stood on their ends and began to slowly turn, drilling themselves into the ground.

"Hey, Heather, how about we, uh, GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE?"

[foolishwren]

Heather's lamplike eyes grew from slits to perfect circles in the gloom.

"Shit!"

She had no reservations about complying with the vampire's suggestion-- but as she awkwardly scrambled on all fours to get through the door, the unsurprising once again occurred.

"--Zilla! Zilla, I'm stuck!"

Heather, you are a giant monster now. GET CREATIVE.