It couldn't remember anything but the distant sound of a warm, gentle voice whispering "J". It didn’t understand what the sound meant, but it knew that it referred to them. And so it became its name. Its identity.

Something about the sound made J feel odd. It wasn't the constant desire to hunt something down and tear it apart that plagued J, it was something more gentle. Something warmer. Something nicer. It was puzzling to feel something different, but J soon pushed the feeling away and focused on its burning desire to feed. The burning in its stomach and dryness in its throat demanded blood.

Suddenly J heard loud pops from outside. J heard prey. Something in the distance that was out of place in the silence of the wrecked suburbs.

J dashed off towards the sound, abandoning the scraps of its meal as smaller ones dived towards it, fighting over the last bits of flesh and lapping up the spilled blood on the floor. A couple of other larger ones, around two or three, followed behind J, although not as fast.

J rounded a corner and caught a faint scent. The smell of prey. J could smell its fear and sweat. J followed the scent to the prey who was covered in the smell of acrid fear and adrenaline, one of J’s kind dead at its feet. Its eyes were wide and searching frantically.

There was a strange device in its hands. J didn’t know what it was. What kind of threat was it? So J crouched behind a corner and waited for its window of opportunity.

J heard the sound of its kin approaching. It could hear their loud breathing and rapid footsteps. They were not as fast or sensitive to smells, but they had followed J to the target.

It took a couple of moments for the prey to hear it too. It whirled to face the incoming hunters that emerged from both sides. The device in its hands jolted and J heard the same loud noise as before. A hunter screeched and fell. The prey’s device jolted again and again, shaking its body. And they began to fall one by one before they could reach the prey.

At that moment, J decided to act while the prey was still distracted by its kin who were dying on the ground.

It sank lower to the floor, eyes focused on the prey before it pushed off of the ground and dashed towards the back of its prey. It closed the short distance in the span of a second.

The prey heard him take off and turned to face J, but it wasn’t fast enough. Its eyes widened in fear as J’s hands buried themselves in its throat and J’s full body weight threw it to the floor. The device in its hand jolted twice before J knocked it out of the prey’s hands.

It took a couple of moments, but J felt a pulse of energy enter its body as the prey’s body relaxed and its heart slowed to a stop.

J then dragged the body away to a more secluded area and began to eat. Midway through the meal, it felt pain in its abdomen. J touched its stomach and found blood on its hand when it pulled it away. Not the prey’s blood.

J lifted its shirt and found two bloody holes. It felt the thrill of the hunt leave as the dull throbbing pain in its stomach took over. It was bleeding, but the flow was getting weaker by the second, so J just returned to their meal. When it finished eating the tastiest parts, it left its kill and went back to the scene.

J looked at the bodies of its kin, curious as to why they died.

It saw the holes in the head and chest of its kin. It dug its fingers deep into the wound until it found something akin to a small pebble.

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It pulled the pebble out of the wound and found more in the other wounds. J looked at the similar wounds on its abdomen before a connection was made.

It hissed in pain as it dug its fingers in and searched for another pebble. Its face lit up with almost childish awe when it felt its fingers hit something that wasn’t bone or flesh.

It gingerly pulled the shiny pebble out of its wound, blood flowing out faster. It stared at it for a while, trying to connect it to the wound. How did it get in there? How did it hurt them? Well, J did understand one thing, that the device the prey used before was very dangerous. As J pressed a hand to its wound J came to a conclusion.

The device was fast, but the prey was not.

<><><><><><><><>

Lucas watched in horror through his binoculars on the mall’s rooftop as he saw Ethan fire his gun.

‘That IDIOT. He’s going to draw all the monsters in earshot towards him!’

Lucas was glad he was downwind. Learning that they could smell him was really not fun. Thankfully, he knew enough from his hunting trips to know how to conceal himself from the monsters in the city. Most of them at least. A couple of nearby smaller ones had to be put down with a knife and gritted teeth.

Thankfully, the majority of them weren’t too sensitive to smell or were unable to track it properly. The monsters weren’t too hard to take down with a well-placed trap or bullet, but the problem was that they were usually never alone. Always hunting in groups of at least 3.

A lot of people had been lost during the initial breakout, with many of the survivors being non-combatants.

Lucas saw some of the mutants leave buildings and race towards Ethan. A particular group caught his eye.

It was a group of four with someone familiar to Lucas in the lead. It was James. His body was taller and he had batlike wings on his back. His fingers ended in almost crystalline claws. Even with all those changes and his face twisted by bloodlust, Lucas could still tell it was James.

Lucas had hoped that his closest friend wasn’t one of the monsters and that he survived, but it seemed that his nightmare had come to life. He feared the day he would ever have to fight him. To attack the person who had always been there for him. Through thick and thin. When his dad died and when he‘d been suffering from extreme mood swings.

Lucas knew that if given the choice, he’d never pull the trigger. He could only pray that James would end it fast.

Lucas watched as James crouched just out of Ethan’s field of sight and waited as the other monsters closed in on Ethan.

Ethan was the best marksman in Lucas’s ragtag group of traumatized high schoolers and teachers, but it was barely enough to dispatch the three lumbering monsters. Moving targets were harder to hit compared to stationary targets.

However, when Jared let his guard down, Lucas saw James lunge out and grab him by his throat.

Lucas watched as Jared struggled and screamed, shooting James two times in the abdomen.

James seemed unfazed and simply dragged Jared’s limp body into an alleyway out of Lucas’s sight.

Lucas felt panicked. Usually, the mutants were simple-minded, purely focused on hunting and eating. They only knew how to track and chase, but James seemed to be more cunning. He was able to use tactics, to wait instead of charging mindlessly, which Lucas had seen no mutant do before.

When he saw James come back out of the alley, his face was covered with blood and bits of… whatever. Lucas cringed at the thought of his former friend eating Jared.

Lucas watched in silent shock as he saw James investigate the corpses of the other mutants and pull out the bullets from his body.

Was he...learning?

<><><><><><><><><>

As J entered the school and went back to its nest of assorted jackets in the lost and found, it caught the scent of two prey that had recently left but decided not to look for them. His appetite had already been satiated.

J curled up in a fetal position and fell into a contented sleep. However, he was soon woken up by a blue screen. It was filled with characters and signs that J could not understand.

J stared at the blue screen, fascinated. His claws just seemed to pass through the screen, and it seemed to follow him around as he moved.

J grew tired of the screen and waved it away one would shoo away a fly.

Quickly he fell back to a sleep that was plagued with dreams of disembodied voices and bright laughter.