His straw-blonde hair was cut short in the standardized military style— cut weekly precisely at 2:00 pm on Thursdays— but that didn’t stop it from fluttering in the wind, perhaps to match Anya’s rising heartbeat. Clouds had covered the sun as though to illuminate him against the backdrop of a brown city whose bleach-white walls had seen far too many years of disrepair to maintain their intended hue. Some were cracked, but most had stood the test of time. And yet David’s skin reminded her of what once must have been in this city of red-white walls stained by time and abandonment. Disrepaired and forgotten, left to rot with the other denizens of this backwater hole only the finest waste found itself with the mercy of gracing.

But David’s pure blue eyes lit up the sky even as it was covered what must have been the last time before sunset. An endless backdrop of gray had begun to set in several hours ago, but now had finally reached them. Despite the lack of light his eyes sparkled against the drab scenery, and were brilliantly highlighted by the Prussian-Blue coat they all wore. Most were stained, but David’s was not. Anya herself wore a ratty old thing with a skirt that may as well have been at the upper thigh for all the holes below it— as the corps only bothered patching the part strictly necessary to maintain decorum— and it was so full of tiny patches she wasn’t sure if they were from rot or bullet-holes.

So many of her comrades had fallen to get here, but they had always thought “here” would be an opulent palace in the service of the Emperor’s honor-guard. It wasn’t. It was here— a shithole barely noted on the map whose only defining feature was its disproportionately large base with walls that extended far below the surface and whose footprint allegedly dwarfed even the High Palace from below. But she’d never seen that, and perhaps never would.

From just behind the corrugated metal sliding door to the 557th Outlying Post of the Grand Imperial Military, Anya heard David scream.

“Close the doors!”

It took all her meager augmented strength to move them a single inch on the best of days, but today she threw them together five feet at a time, for today she had the privilege of bearing witness to David’s great coronation as a prince of his grand stature deserved. He wasn't of royal blood, of course. The Imperial family was a secretive bunch and she knew they’d never send one of their own to fuck-all nowhere, but for his looks and charm Anya had second-guessed that fact many times in her short few weeks on the base. But as much as those weeks had felt like years for their fullness, and as much as she desperately wanted to wait for him to come inside, even if for no other reason than to bask in one of these brief moments of her superior officer’s presence just a little longer, she knew the door must be closed.

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From behind, David was overshadowed by a body. Two bodies. Three bodies. Five bodies. A hundred contorted bodies mashed together like some outline of a larger corpse composed itself of the haphazardly-strewn and half-rotting masses of others. But none of them were rotting when the smell of iron wafted over her like some all-consuming wall of death to wash out everything else. It was the striking smell of aerosolized meat found only in fresh blood, not rot. It wasn’t a scene of days-old corpses bleached by the sun and bloated by time. There had been no such interval between their living deaths and playdough combination. There was only gore as Anya only just avoided falling to her knees— yet unable to stop trembling like a doe in the woods watching its mother mauled by a tiger or perhaps shot with a five-hundred gage rifle— as the white gleam of bone highlighted itself against brown walls and city streets to flash nearer to David’s neck. But he didn’t scream in fear or agony, he merely commanded Anya as her superior officer:

“Close the goddamn doo—”

But he was not granted the traditional superior’s privilege of finishing the words of a command. Bone flashed against skin and his head floated absent the neck for a brief moment lasting perhaps six hours as Anya fought against the newly-found sensation of a thousand times gravity. Her bones trembled as the quadriceps acted against them, feeling at any time ready to give way, the tendons straining far beyond their capacity. Perhaps her augmentation surgery had been worth something after all, but she knew for all the adrenaline coursing through her veins in this moment screaming a single thought in repeated unison through every molecule of air that could carry sound to her ears that revenge would not be something she could take.

The creature of blood and exposed bone and sinew glistened through every open pore composed of two bodies at an angle with a gap exposed between them. Its endless rivers poured into the brown streets, staining them a much brighter shade. David’s body had fallen to the ground, but did not remain there for long. It was picked up by a thousand tendrils composed of tendons attached to bone needles. Anchored by a bed of fishhooks, David was brought back to the height of his auburn hair atop a bloody mess of a head. The head was reattached and the body of bodies opened to allow him to come inside.

Anya screamed but to no effect. Her lungs felt on the verge of collapse, her legs on the verge of breaking, her arms screamed louder than her voice ever could in an endless chorus of fresh agony. But through it all, the doors closed and the lock fastened to leave her alone with nothing but thoughts perhaps worse than the scene that had unfolded in the second prior.

She continued to scream, but there was only silence.