This story so far resides here: //ofourmaker.com/2023/10/17/adolphus-search-and-rescue

(A very disturbing point – reader discretion is strongly advised.)

Moses stood above his mate, like an angel in a dark suit. She crawled nearer to him slowly, no longer weeping, but neither did she wipe her tear-stained face. He smiled, though he shook with the exertion of straightening his still crooked back.

“My mate, I give you your name: it is ‘Beauty’.”

Her face showed no sign.

“I want no name,” she said.

She stretched out her arms to him. Gibbsen gave another warning cry: he saw the cold, deliberate look in her very human eyes. Moses willingly bent to embrace her – until she sank her teeth into his neck.

His grief-stricken wail was horrible to hear, though quickly broken. The woman twisted her head like a tearing fish, bit again, attacked the wound with her fingers. She moaned in despair at the lack of her claws, and whipped her mate’s head against one of the bars as if he was no more than a rag doll.

The report of a gun stunned Gibbsen’s brain and set his ears ringing. Gareth was there, and at a look from his shaded eyes both locks unfastened. He strode through the doors, his dark robe billowing. With a kick he flung the woman aside onto the floor, where she twitched, and blinked in the blood that gushed from the bullet hole between her eyes.

Gareth holstered his smoking revolver and crouched low, staring into Moses’ eye, less than an inch from his face.

Then he stood slowly, and called to Number One. After she crept timidly in from somewhere near, he beckoned to her.

“You must say goodbye to your brother now.”

“Moses?”

The only sound then was of her bare feet on the concrete, and her breathing; both quickened at the first glimpse, and became constricted with tears. Before she reached her brother she had to cling to the bars as she went. Beside his body she sank to the polluted ground, gathered his bloodied and broken head into her lap, tried to meet his blank eyes, and tried over and over to call his name through the shaken weight of her weeping. He was dead. Her brother was dead.

Dr. Kilver came in, and leaned on the cage. He spoke in a low, drawn voice,

“Gareth, why did you let her see this?”

“Because, Doctor, she will learn the hard way what her brother has learned the hardest way: not all humans are good.”

To be continued.

#DailyCreatedOOM #WrittenOOM #AdolphusSearchAndRescue 2023/11/12