Leo Winfield trudged home as the snow fell, coating the streets of Los Angeles in an unusual and almost eerie quiet. Snow in LA was strange, a rare occurrence that always seemed to catch the city off guard. It wasn’t the weather you associated with this place, yet here it was again, as it had been many years ago. He hated it. It reminded him of that day, the day his sister died.
It was eight years ago. Emma was only seventeen years old. His age now.
Leo could see her face, even now. Emma had always been a bit of a troublemaker—reckless, stubborn, and dragging him along on her latest wild idea. But she cared. She always made sure Leo was okay, even if it meant getting into trouble herself. When it snowed for the first time in LA, she pulled him outside, both laughing as if receiving a gift.
They had gone to the park that afternoon, the snow thick on the ground. LA had seen nothing like it, and Emma, being Emma, couldn’t resist. She wanted to enjoy the moment and capture something rare. He remembered the way her eyes had sparkled when she saw the snow like she had discovered a hidden magic in the world.
“I mean, snow in LA, Leo! When’s this gonna happen again?” she had said, grabbing his hand and pulling him toward the park.
The park buzzed with families, children making snowmen and throwing snowballs, everyone relishing the surreal scene. Their experience of snow in LA felt like being in a different world. But something had changed. Screams rang out, piercing through the air. Leo had turned, watching as the crowds started to scatter, running in terror.
And then she pushed him.
“Run!” Emma had shouted, her voice trembling but determined. She stood before him, blocking him from something he couldn’t see yet. He ran, heart pounding, his legs weak with fear, sprinting through the snow-covered park without looking back. He didn’t want to look back.
And then the sounds. The ripping and tearing of flesh, the screams—his sister’s scream. He could still hear it echoing in his mind, could still feel the guilt clawing at him for not doing anything. For running. He hadn’t even seen what killed her. When his parents arrived, they found him crouched by the park entrance, staring into the distance, too terrified to move.
The Cleaners had shown up too late. They always did. Emma was gone, and all that was left of her was a black body bag. He remembered his mother’s loud sobbing, her voice hoarse with grief. Leo had stood there, numb, watching the Cleaners as they dragged the fiend’s corpse away like it was nothing more than garbage.
He yelled at the Cleaners, demanding to know why they hadn’t saved her. And the man in charge—he remembered him well—had looked at him, cold and indifferent, before muttering those words that would stay with Leo forever.
“The world’s a cruel place. In the end, we’re all just meat.”
That’s when Leo realized how expendable human life was. In this cold, unforgiving world, people like him, like Emma, were nothing more than meat to be devoured by monsters. And no one, not even the so-called Cleaners, could protect them.
The walk home felt longer than usual, the streets quieter, more deserted. His parents lived in a rundown neighborhood—not quite Skid Row, but close enough that it felt like it sometimes. The buildings were old, the paint peeling off the walls, the windows cracked and covered in grime. The kind of place where people didn’t ask too many questions and kept their heads down.
Leo had dreams of getting out, taking his parents with him, somewhere far away. Maybe the East Coast. Anywhere that wasn’t this fiend-infested city.
When he reached his house, something felt off. The door was slightly ajar, swaying in the cold wind.
Someone had broken in.
Leo’s heart began to race, and he felt a pit form in his stomach. He glanced toward the garden shed, where his father kept his tools. His instincts told him something was wrong, something far worse than a simple robbery. He made his way to the shed, his breath coming out in shallow gasps, and grabbed the first thing he could—a rusty old crowbar.
It wasn’t much, but it made him feel less helpless.
The door creaked as he pushed it open with his foot. The house was silent, unnervingly so. His eyes darted around the room—overturned furniture, broken dishes, everything in disarray. Then he saw the trail of blood smeared across the floor, leading toward the kitchen.
His hands tightened around the crowbar, his knuckles white. He followed the blood, each step feeling heavier, as though the air itself was thick with dread.
And then, in the kitchen, he found them.
His father lay on the floor, his body still and lifeless, a pool of blood beneath him. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was the thing crouched over his mother’s body. A fiend, hunched and grotesque, feasting on her. Its long, skeletal limbs glistened with blood, its jagged teeth tearing into her flesh with sickening efficiency.
Leo froze, the crowbar slipping from his grasp as his mind struggled to process the horror before him. His father was dead. His mother was being torn apart. And there was nothing he could do. He wanted to scream, to run, to do anything—but his body wouldn’t move. Paralyzed by his own fear, he was trapped.
The fiend raised its head, its hollow eyes locking onto Leo’s. For a brief moment, everything was still, the world narrowing down to the space between them. And then, in an instant, the creature lunged at him, faster than he could react.
It knocked him to the ground, its weight crushing him as it bit into his neck. Pain, sharp and blinding, shot through his body as the fiend tore into his flesh. His vision blurred, and dark spots formed in the corners of his eyes as the life drained out of him.
“This is it”, he thought. “I’m going to die. Just like her.”
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There was no point in fighting. No point in struggling. The universe had decided his fate. He was meat, just like his parents, just like Emma. And now he would die in this cold, uncaring world.
But then, something strange happened.
The pain began to fade, replaced by an overwhelming sense of cold. Everything around him became blurry, distant, like a dream. The world seemed to shift, the edges of reality bending and warping.
It was snowing.
He was in the park again; the snow falling gently around him, blanketing the ground in white. And there, standing in front of him, was Emma. She was smiling, her eyes bright, and she held out a jacket to him.
“Put this on, Leo. You’ll catch a cold,” she said softly, her voice warm and comforting.
He took the jacket from her and put it on, zipping it up as she handed him a slice of pepperoni pizza, his favorite. He took a bite, savoring the familiar taste, but when he looked back at her, something was wrong.
She wasn’t there anymore.
Instead, he saw himself—his own dead body lying on the kitchen floor. The fiend crouched over it, gnashing its teeth. The jacket he had just put on wasn’t a jacket at all—it was his own pale, cold skin. His hands were no longer his—they were long and bony, with sharp claws dripping with blood. His teeth felt wrong, jagged, and sharp, and his body felt foreign, monstrous.
He wasn’t human anymore.
The hunger hit him next—deep, primal, gnawing at his insides. He wanted to take another bite of the pizza, but it wasn’t a pizza anymore. It was his own corpse.
He stumbled backward, the memories of a thousand lives flooding his mind. Memories that weren’t his. A trip to Washington D.C., flying in an airplane, working a 9-to-5 job, scrounging for scraps in the sewers—none of it made sense. It was like the thoughts of different people were crashing into his mind all at once, a cacophony of voices, experiences, and lives that didn’t belong to him.
He bent over, retching, his claws scraping against the kitchen floor as he vomited everything the fiend had eaten—his guts spilling out in a gruesome mix of blood and half-digested meat. The stench was unbearable, burning his nostrils, but worse was the sheer wrongness of it all. It wasn’t just food. It was him—his body, his mind, his memories unraveling like loose threads.
Crawling on all fours, Leo dragged himself through the house, his mind barely holding together as the voices swirled around him. He climbed the stairs, each step a Herculean effort, until he reached the bathroom. His claws fumbled with the door, and he collapsed inside, slamming it shut behind him.
He turned on the faucet, filling the bathtub with cold water, not caring about anything except the desperate need to quiet the chaos in his head. He slid into the tub, the freezing water shocking his system, but it helped. It helped him focus.
As the water rose around him, soaking his pale, bony limbs, the noise in his head slowly began to fade. The memories—those alien, intrusive memories—finally began to ebb, receding like the tide. His mind started to reform itself, piecing back together, though not quite the same as before.
Leo stared at the water spout, watching the distorted reflection of his face. It was hard to make out clearly in the curve of the metal, but he could see enough to know it wasn’t the face he used to know. His skin was pale, almost translucent, and his eyes… they looked empty, hollow.
He blinked, exhaustion washing over him, his mind finally quiet after the storm. Blood tinged the water in the tub pink, and he felt the cold seeping into his bones, but he didn’t care. He felt… disconnected. Tired.
As he closed his eyes, drifting into unconsciousness, a single question echoed in his mind.
“Who am I?”
Leo woke to the soft hum of the water heater, the bathroom still bathed in the cold ceiling light. He looked up at the clock on the wall, 8:49 PM. He slowly sat up in the now-lukewarm bath, his muscles stiff and sore. Everything felt numb and distant like he was still trapped in a dream. For a brief moment, he wondered if any of it had been real—the blood, the fiend, the transformation. But the cold, empty feeling in his chest told him otherwise.
He stepped out of the bath, his movements sluggish, his claws scraping against the tiled floor. He caught a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror this time, and there was no distortion. His reflection stared back at him, but it wasn’t Leo Winfield. It wasn’t even human.
His body was taller, stretched out unnaturally, his skin so pale it almost glowed under the harsh bathroom light. His hands stretched out, sharp claws at the tips of his fingers, and his face—almost skeletal, with a mouth full of jagged teeth. His eyes, once dark and full of life, were now a dull, almost lifeless gray.
He was a fiend.
The realization hit him like a punch to the gut, and for a moment, he couldn’t breathe. He was the thing he hated. The thing that had taken Emma from him. The thing that had just killed his parents.
He remembered it in vivid detail this time. Ripping his father’s throat out, mauling on his own mother. He wanted to deny it. He wanted to force that memory out of his mind. That wasn’t him. That couldn’t have been him. He wasn’t a killer. He wasn’t a monster.
Desperately, Leo tried to cling to his own identity, to ground himself in something real, something he knew. He attempted to repeat his name like a mantra, yet he could only voice out growls from his deep vocal chords. However, he still maintained the memories of his past, “Leo Winfield. Seventeen. Eastman High. My parents are Gloria and Marcus. My sister is Emma.” But then, a foreign memory crept in. “Soccer? I like soccer… but I’ve never played it. Melissa? I’ve never heard of her.”
The memories were wrong. They weren’t his. They were the fiend’s—or maybe they were the memories of other people the fiend had consumed. The lines between him and the creature, between his life and the lives of others, were fraying at the edges, bleeding into each other.
His mind was becoming a battleground. Every thought felt like a war between what he remembered and what the fiend had absorbed.
“Who am I?” He thought again, this time with a sense of dread clawing at his insides.
Leo stumbled back, clutching his head as the memories surged forward again—images of rats, dark forests, piles of corpses. The fiend had lived for so long, consumed so many lives, that its memories were flooding his mind, threatening to erase him, to overwrite who he was with the identities of its other victims.
He fell to his knees, shaking. The hunger gnawed at him, making it harder to resist. The fiend’s mind wanted to take over, wanted to devour everything that made him Leo. And yet, he felt a strange sort of control. A feeling that he wasn’t just becoming the fiend—he was assimilating it, merging with it.
But he wasn’t ready to give in to the hunger. He was still alive, and if he was alive, there had to be a reason. He couldn’t just let himself revert to the mindless beast that had torn his parents apart. The thought terrified him, the idea of losing himself completely, of becoming the very thing he had always feared. No—he needed to be in control. His life, his choices—whatever he had become—there had to be more to it than just feeding on flesh. He wasn’t ready to surrender to the darkness inside him, not yet.
Leo walked down the stairs, each step heavier than the last, the silence in the house almost suffocating. His claws scraped softly against the wooden floor, the sound barely registering in his mind. The air was thick with a metallic scent, and the sight that greeted him made his stomach churn.
His father’s body lay there, his throat torn open, the pool of blood beneath him now dark and congealed. His mother’s form was barely recognizable—mangled, twisted, torn apart by something monstrous. Her limbs were bent at unnatural angles, and her face… he couldn’t even look at her face.
But what haunted him most was his own corpse. It lay sprawled on the floor next to them, with eyes wide open, staring up at the ceiling in shock and terror. It was like his own dead body was looking back at him as if it still held the last remnants of his fear.
A shiver ran through him. It wasn’t fear—at least, not entirely. It was the stark realization of what he had become. The fiend inside him had devoured them. It had feasted on their bodies, ripped them apart like they were nothing more than prey.
“There’s nothing to mourn,” he thought to himself, his thoughts cold and detached. “They were just meat. That’s all we ever were.”
There was no sadness, no grief left to feel. He stared at them, at his father’s lifeless eyes, his mother’s disfigured form, and his own empty shell. The world had already stripped away any pretense of normalcy, of humanity.
With shaking hands, Leo grabbed a jacket from the coat rack. It was too large for his new, gaunt body, yet too short for his frame. But as he pulled it over his skeletal form, it gave him some fleeting comfort. A small piece of the past, of something that felt remotely human.
The wind greeted him as he stepped outside, cold and biting at his skin. Snowflakes drifted down in gentle spirals, covering the street in a pristine blanket of white. The world outside was so quiet, so peaceful, in stark contrast to the horror he had just witnessed.
It felt like the beginning of something else.
“Who am I?”
He didn’t have the answer yet, but he was going to find out.