Kimberly.
"Jesus fucking Christ! Would put a goddamn lid on—" A man's voice abruptly cut off as a fat and farmer-tanned newcomer with a truly rotund belly that stuck out just below a too-tight shirt swung out of the side of his truck, flashlight in hand.
He hung there for several seconds, leaning out of his vehicle, though whatever angry words had been planned were replaced by a soft and almost disbelieving whisper… "Oh, sweet mother of Mary of God…"
Kimberly jerked, blazing eyes darting and fixating upon the wide-eyed and portly individual who had just shone light upon her; she snarled, her face scrunching with an ugly expression, her tail beginning to sway with menacing intent!
How dare he interrupt her feast!
How dare he!
"Fuck—fucking fuck!" he shrieked! Half rolling and half pushing himself back into the cabin, arms flailing as they slipped from the door, and he swore again, bumbling for the handle as Kimberly rose with deathly intensity. Her form was cast in deep shadows, her eyes now glowing an ominously hideous crimson.
Her mind felt good, absent, but it felt good. She might not have known exactly why she was so upset, but she knew that the responsible party was currently trying to escape!
She lurched forward, a single flap of her wings launching her body toward the door right as it shut in her face!
Kimberly roared! The sound of electronic distortion and a very angry mother bear erupting from her voice box as her talons flared, and she sank her fingers into the dark crevice where the door met the frame and heaved with all her might!
The screeching tear of metal as it was dragged open like a stubborn can dulled all her senses beyond sight and smell! Kimberly wrenching the metal free of its hinges as a terrified man tumbled from within, still trying to hold the doorway shut, even as it was shredded and cast aside!
He crunched against the chrome steps of his trailer, falling head and shoulder first, letting out a sharp yelp of surprise! Then, his heavy frame came to an abrupt halt with a rather unpleasant crack.
He howled and quickly rolled like a ball, though this particular one hadn't bounced, the man clutching his right arm in a clearly miserable amount of pain and momentary amnesia toward what was watching him from above.
"Oh fuck, oh God! My arm! My God's dang arm, freaking—hell, it, it hurts! Wait, wait, fucking—wai—urglgl!"
Blood flew as Kimberly, diving at his neck, ripped the trucker's throat from between her teeth, tearing a bloody chunk of flopping flesh, tendon, and tongue and snapping at it like a dog, swallowing the chewy morsel with a few quick chomps!
The gurgling bubbles that were ballooning from the grisly and jagged hole in her prey's body only worsened as he realized what had happened, still not aware he was already dead.
His body began shivering and convulsing as he tried to suck in air through a shredded windpipe, still within the throes of full panic, but moments before, Kimberly dove back in! This time, she got her teeth around something really important, something that had a delightful sort of resistance!
Her maw crunched against his spinal column before she dragged it free from his body with ripping, popping sounds that rang like music to her ears! Her teeth cracked the long mass of viscera as she swallowed that as well, getting a wonderful taste of the marrow before dipping back down for a little more meat.
There was a flash!
The beam of more lights filled the area around her as another curse filled the air, but moments before, Kimberly felt herself suddenly impacted from behind!
Pain exploded through her vision!
Her mind losing all focus save pure hatred and rage!
She was seeing red!
Everything hurt!
It burned, and it stung, and when she rose, spinning to face her aggressor, a lone man holding something eerily similar to a shotgun was staring at her as though in complete disbelief!
For a moment, brief as it was, they simply watched each other as though both parties were equally confounded by what they saw.
For her part, Kimberly was trying to parse through why some random bystander was aiming a deadly weapon at her! A weapon that had clearly just been fired!
As absurd a prospect as it was, she wasn't stupid! She could smell the gunpowder! Heck, she'd heard it discharge! But as to what he'd actually hit with the thing…
"What on God's green earth are you…" he whispered with shuddering words, the barrel drooping with sheer disbelief before the demon snarled at him, and all of a sudden, the world descended into chaos!
He pumped the action as she sprang, another slug punching into her sternum and shifting her off balance as they both tumbled in differing directions, just managing to avoid collapsing on each other!
Yet, one of her arms still swiped at his side, earning her a delightful grating sensation along her claws and a grunt of pain!
She heard the action move again, though this time, she used her wings to push herself away, the membrane and feathers of the right appendage having a small hole of its flesh vaporized
. Whatever had been there prior simply disappeared as she howled with hatred!
The next shot took her in the shoulder and then the thigh after that!
The trucker was pumping and shooting and pumping and shooting as fast as he was able until, with a final rack, the weapon inevitably clicked.
Kimberly was feverish, and she'd lost focus of exactly where the pain was coming from. Yet, she still got back to her feet, her entire body quivering with rage! The light tinkling taps of metal bouncing against the ground were a telltale sign that the gun hadn't worked.
Worse for all involved, the thunderous braying that escaped her lips floored her attacker as he stumbled backward! The sound was like nothing natural within the world, despite its animistic savagery!
The gunman tripped on his own feet while backpedaling away from her! Kimberly's flesh reknitting itself and rejecting the foreign objects within it, even as she stalked toward her next meal.
She didn't leap; she didn't run; she just watched him while taking one step at a time, fingers flexing, her enraged sneer slipping to a much more cruel and anticipatory expression, her instincts well aware of who now held the upper hand.
His jittering and incoherent rambles filled the air, accented by the clicking-clack of fumbled shells. His hand was far too shaky to properly insert more than one from the bunch he'd pulled from his pocket, but when he made to rack it, Kimberly deftly reached out and took control of the weapon's muzzle.
Slowly and with intense care, she dragged it upwards, never looking away from his eyes, placing the warm opening right under his chin while smiling hatefully at him and waiting to see what he might do.
His body shivering as though walking through a blizzard without shoes, the man swallowed once, winced as he looked upon her liberally dripping maw, then closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.
An eruption of gore exploded outward!
Painting the white trailer behind him in a hideously macabre spray of bone, brains, and blood! The contents of his head slapping the metal trailer with an abrupt wet thump!
Streaks of liquidy human were already beading downward by the time she released him, huffing with indignation.
Somehow, while somewhat satisfactory, the end to the duel felt too sudden for her liking. Too hmm… maybe anticlimactic? She wanted more of a fight! Wanted him to get back up and resist her blistering rage! Needed him like a captive tiger needed a scratching post.
Then, she felt a now somewhat familiar tether try to escape somewhere. Some ethereal and unseen thing that she knew was hers, feeling as though it were trying to creep toward the sky! How dare it! As before, her body reached for it, pulling it in and absorbing it as she sighed and whimpered, shaking with ardent joy!
That hit the spot! But maybe… no, no! She couldn't…
She shouldn't!
Reaching down, Kimberly snapped and then twisted one of the dead man's arms, the strength of her hands making the process easy once she stomped on the bicep to stop the damned thing from flopping around! She ripped the arm off a handful of moments later, regarding it with idle curiosity before sinking her teeth into its bloody stump.
Chewy!
And, in all honesty, it was pretty good! But Kimberly was also sort of full. An earnest and modest surprise, given that it hadn't exactly happened before this point.
Curiously, she turned, going back for another quick nibble, eyeing the dead fat man further away but, strangely, not sensing that bizarre something that she'd been after.
Oh well. More's the pity. Yet it didn't irritate her too badly as she was satisfied in a way that was hard to complain about.
The wail of sirens seemed to jumpstart Kimberly's brain as she swapped back into herself, consciousness flowing in like the rising tide. She took one good moment to look around herself, her memories not at all absent, and promptly threw up!
A dubious mixture of thick red chunks and yellow-stained bile exploded in a projectile spray from her lips! It coated the shriveled cadaver a step away in a slimy borg of unidentifiable goop.
She heaved! Great wracking shakes, causing her to nearly stumble forward! Kimberly emptying what was the sum totality of her stomach until she simply had nothing to give!
"Ohhh fuck… ughhhh… uurrrrngnn… ohhhh… that's so gross!"
Kimberly's eyes widened with a groaning misery as she stared at the alienesque and stretchy fluids that looked like they'd come straight from outer space! Perhaps from one such creature that liked to terrorize the crew of ships while crawling through ventilation shafts.
The blaring wail of approaching police only grew louder by the second until, miserable but not wanting to be here, Kimberly leapt to the sky and haphazardly careened sideways like she was drunk!
It took a few good flaps for her to manage a semblance of control, but before long, she was shooting toward the darkened sky while staring down at the yet-illuminated scene below.
What had happened?
What had she done?
And why was there a very convincing voice in her head that was whispering in her ear that everything was perfectly alright?
The police flooded the area within what felt like moments, cruisers bathed in reds and blues and white lights filling the scene and brightening it like the bloody Fourth of July! Which, of course, only made her shy away and bring herself further from well, from her somewhat murderous rampage.
Boy, oh boy, had that gotten out of hand far faster than anyone had likely expected, and in more ways than one. She supposed that, going forward, she should probably avoid trying to feed where so many angry and armed people were sleeping.
Kimberly watched as the world below her became practically frantic with chaotic madness! More and more people leaving their trailers like some jamboree!
"Seriously, were they all in their fucking trucks or what?"
Objectively, she knew she should probably feel something for what she'd done. But again, it was as though that sense of wrongdoing she very much should possess simply wasn't there to submerge her thoughts in a warm and depressing blanket of misery and guilt.
The vomiting had honestly been as much from shock as it had been surprise and a revolution born of a life spent understanding that eating people was wrong! In fact, she actually felt somewhat annoyed that her stomach was empty again.
Not that she felt hungry, but well, she was struggling with quite a handful of bizarre changes at the moment, which she wasn't about to start picking apart.
Best to deal with it all one thing at a time.
Already, there was a small crowd of onlookers emerging from the motel, people in all manner of nightwear, and against what some might see as better judgment given the gunshots, leaving their rooms to personally find out what all the commotion was about. She quickly spied William, who was, like the others, gathering around the building's exterior.
Kimberly, for a moment, wondered if she could manage to sneak back into the hotel before remembering the whole camera thing. With a sigh, and after confirming that she was indeed coated in more than a few already drying layers of blood, Kimberly pulled out her phone from her jogging armband and thanked Lucifer that it somehow had avoided any noteworthy damage.
She sent off a quick message to her BFF.
It was curt, concise, and avoided anything that could be perceived as implicating. Searching for and then messaging him again with an address, which she started flying toward while following her phone's direction.
The mapping function was having an absolute shit fit while trying to determine if she was driving or walking, the tiny green arrow bouncing about with utterly confused jitters that ricocheted about her screen.
Still, once she found the large parking lot of her destination, she returned her phone to its holster. Then landed amidst the barren and dark asphalt of the familiar mega-store, where she abruptly collapsed to her bottom and sighed. Her outfit was ruined regardless, so who cared if it got more dirty?
There were outright holes in her clothes where the bullets had struck her, and there was so much red on her legs that her tights couldn't even be called white anymore!
In effect, she was filthy.
And, following that line of reasoning, knew she absolutely wouldn't be getting in her car wearing what she was! She had cloth seats. And she'd be damned if they got ruined by blood.
When Will eventually pulled in with her familiar little crossover, the only vehicle within sight, she turned on the flashlight function of her cell and waved it around like a flagman hailing an aircraft, watching as her vehicle diverted.
It pulled back around and headed in her direction before eventually creeping up beside her, where Will watched from inside, eyes wide with concern and apprehension, and even a not inconsiderable amount of frustration, though somehow not looking completely surprised, despite it all.
"Kimberly, what the fuck!" he shouted, his voice ensuring to keep to a whispered decibel, clearly coming to the admittedly correct conclusion that she had been responsible for all the commotion.
"I know, I know! I fucked up but—"
"What happened to staying in the hotel room?" he demanded, his face filled with a raw fury equally mixed with pheromones that told her, in no uncertain terms, that he was terrified of her but forcing that particular impulse down. "What happened to letting me help you? You know, like we fucking agreed?"
"Stop yelling, you asshole, and pop the damn trunk for me! I need to get changed."
Will just looked at her like she was some madwoman but still tapped the button on her dash that popped the hatch of her car so she could get at their bags.
Her BFF had clearly figured out rather fast that their stay for the night had been interrupted and doubtless scrambled to get their various things loaded before driving off to meet her.
Kimberly marched around the outside of the vehicle before digging through her suitcase. A pair of jean shorts and her sweater were among the first things she found. Kimberly didn't really bother with underwear as she aggressively stripped out of her clothes, not at all worried about being nude in public.
Oh, how quickly the winds of change worked their magic...
Her efforts were clinical, simply tearing her soaked clothes off, using some random shirt she found to wipe away as much excess detritus as she could. Then, breaking out the baby wipes she always had on hand in preparation for evenings where any of her various orifices might be used during a carnal act of passion.
She hated the smell, but it was far better than being matted by blood. Thankfully, her hair seemed to have been spared from any noteworthy crustation, and before long, she was struggling to squeeze into what had already been tight denim prior to her body's changes, slamming the trunk and slipping into the sweater as she went.
When Kimberly planted her ass in the passenger seat and kicked her now-bare feet up onto the dash, it was with a thunderous glare that William wordlessly shoved the car back into drive and took them back out onto the road.
Neither spoke as Will followed all speed and traffic regulations to the letter, taking them out of the now-dark but still clearly shitty neighborhood before veering onto the first on-ramp in sight.
From there, they flew down the freeway, following signs for Massachusetts along the road's rather sparse traffic. There were still a few other vehicles either being passed or passing them as they drove. The lights and subtle growl of the engine allowed them both a kind of soothing white noise to gather their thoughts and consider the very clear implications behind what had happened.
Kimberly began fidgeting, not because she felt bad for what had happened but rather because Will had been angry with her. Worse, in the back of her mind, she couldn't help but wonder if he... well, remembered what she'd done to him...
So, lacking anything better to do, she fussed over her hair like a woman possessed.
She combed it with her fingers for entire minutes, tied it into a quick pony. Then, flipping open the small mirror under the visor, she began meticulously winding her lengthy silver strands into as tight an updo as she could manage, jamming one of the various pens she always took from her office, usually by accident, and using it to help hold the tenuous bundle of hair in a messy bun.
"Do you prefer it up or down?" she passively asked, turning her face this way and that while seeking out any missed smudges of blood or dirt to rub them away with her thumb, seeming as though she were touching up her makeup.
"Are you serious, Kim?" Will demanded, his voice immediately rising to an incredulous pitch as she chose to ignore his clear displeasure, instead flipping the visor closed before staring at him with pointed expectation.
"Up or down?"
"No! No, you know what? I am not letting you gloss over this shit or pretend that all you did was get into some fight with someone at the bar! Do you even have any idea how fucking insane this all is?"
"Pfft! Please, you don't even know what happened!"
"I know that I woke up to screams and gunshots, the latter of which sounded like they were trying to put down a fucking elephant with buckshot!"
"Not actually that far off, honestly…"
"Oh hohohohoh, no, we're not playing word games, Kim! I fucking saw the holes in your clothes. Someone was shooting at you, and given how many freaking cops lit up the place, I'm gonna guess there's at least one dead body lying out there that you caused!"
"More like three, but it really wasn't my fault! The first one paid me—"
"Paid you?" Will laughed, his words as manic and insensate as a yet-sane individual could be, his knuckles whitening on the steering wheel until the leather creaked with his grip.
"Yeah, I was pretending to be a hooker so I could get something to eat. It would have only resulted in one death but, nooo, everyone started freaking out, and maybe I got a little spooked!"
"You're not a fucking animal, Kim! People who get spooked don't murder everyone around them unless there's something extremely cracked in their heads!"
"He shot first! And the fact you're not asking me if I'm okay is really sort of upsetting!"
William winced at that, glancing sidelong at his best friend, who looked beyond just a little disheveled. But even then, the mess seemed almost artistic on her stunning features, and just like that, Will deflated. His head banged against the seat before he seemed to switch gears entirely.
"So obviously you're fine, but those holes clearly meant you took a few rounds, so what happened?"
"It hurt like a fucking bitch is what happened! But they also sort of just fell out, and I may also have light superpowers…"
"Well, demons aren't exactly known for the ease with which you can get rid of them, so not crazy so far as everything else goes. And ugh, sorry for yelling. I'm stressed."
"Apology accepted and also, hair up or down?"
"Up!" Will groaned, scoffing with a tiny disbelieving smile. "The hell does it matter anyway?"
"Because you're the only one in the world whose opinion I currently care about. And seeing as I seem to have lost some of my self-control, remorse, and general morals, I'm looking for some input as to what you prefer, as my mind is currently wondering why I should give two shits about anyone beyond those I care about.
It's genuinely messing with my sense of self! I mean, why bother trying to keep myself looking good if every human I see isn't my peer but instead an extremely tasty source of nutrition? I mean, I wouldn't get all dressed up heading to a farm to go look at pigs so…"
"Mmmmmmm-kay. We clearly seem to be already spiraling toward nihilism far faster than well, fuck it, who cares. Kimmie," he intoned, reaching out to take one of her hands and squeeze it, the sensation immediately serving as a calming ripple that rolled across her psyche in a way that rapidly released her tension. "This thing that's happening to you is big. Clearly bigger than either of us is giving it credit, so why don't we call your parents?
It's at least another ten hours of driving before we even get back to our state, let alone your parents' place. Do you really think leaving a literal trail of dead bodies is the best play? I mean, if she's a succubus, too, couldn't she just fly out here and meet us?"
Kimberly had to give Will this; he was ride-or-die with her all the way to hell itself...
It was immediately endearing and attractive. The demon felt a flutter in her chest that she pointedly ignored, if for no greater reason than an underlying sense of concern over what she might do to him if chasing the feeling.
Instead, Kimberly gave her BFF and his suggestion a degree of serious consideration. "Obviously, she can't really fly during the day," she began with slight hesitation, trying to briefly work out the distances involved versus the time it would take.
While fast, Kimberly wasn't quite freeway fast, at least not at the speeds that most motorists drove. Sure, she could make a B-line without needing to worry about roadwork, traffic, or the winding weave of interstate travel, but even then…
"What if she just drives? I mean, that's at least cutting our travel time in half…"
"Okay that one's fair. But it's like two in the morning! I don't even know if she's going to answer!" Kimberly paused, saw the look that Will was giving her, and promptly gave in.
He was terrified. And if calling her mother would help with that, then why not?