Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Vambi


(Note: This was the result of taking "What do you get when you cross a vampire and a zombie?" and adding the result to the game "Kiss Me, Deer" from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. At an unreasonably early hour of the morning, probably.)

Melanie padded through the forest like a gentle breeze, leaving about as much trace of her passing. Small animals scampered past her, unnoticing and unnoticed, as she sought her next victim. Her senses automatically sifted through the normal stimuli of the woods, checking for anything out of place.
There! Fresh deer tracks, so faint on the winter-hard ground as to be almost invisible. She began to follow them, leaving no tracks of her own. Studying the traces, she smiled; the creature could not be more than half an hour away.
She jerked her head up as a sparrow sang some distance away. With a trace of annoyance, she pursed her lips and responded with a robin's call. Giving a last longing look at her tracks, she turned and crept towards the song.
It wasn't fair! She was a better hunter than Gwen. The two of them were neck-and-neck, with four each. The next target would decide the winner. It should have been hers. But rules were rules, so she obediently ran towards the sparrow with her customary caution, taking care not to alert Gwen's prey.
A swallow sounded, almost in her ear. Marie had arrived. She quickly located her sister's covert and quietly entered. Once the three of them were concealed in the stand of young saplings, she could see the potential victim.
The buck grazed quietly in the adjacent meadow. He was pointed upwind, facing almost directly away from them, but they could see his splendid rack. From time to time he jerked his head up and scanned for danger before returning to his dinner, but failed to see his hunters.
Gwen glided out behind him and began her cautious approach. Once she dropped to the ground a fraction of a second before he looked directly at her. Even knowing where to look, Mel could barely see her sister's carefully patterned dress.
Suddenly Gwen stood up, right at the deer's shoulder. Grabbing his horns, she yelled, "Kiss me, deer!" right in his ear. Mel winced.
Gwen tried to wrestle the buck's head around to face her. He was writhing and lashing out frantically with his front hooves, but for a moment it looked like the girl would win her contest - both of them. Then the deer made a last frantic thrash just as Gwen overcompensated for his last movement, his antlers twisted out of her hands, and with a flash of a white tail he was gone, knocking her to the ground.
Gwen slowly stood up, gave a resigned shrug, and returned to the hunt, brushing past her sisters with a glare that dared them to say anything. Mel held her peace. Time enough to gloat when she had won.
She retraced her steps to the tracks. She found the deer sooner than she had expected; he had taken cover in a little thicket, bedding down comfortably on a layer of leaves. All she could see was a patch of fur on his hindquarters. She found a convenient bush, gave her robin call and waited for her sisters to respond.
Without the slightest sound to warn of their approach, they were simply there. Giving a brusque nod, Mel moved out.
The approach was almost textbook routine. Her prey didn't so much as flick an ear in her direction. She paused by the trees, looking through the screen of leaves to determine the buck's exact position, then with a practiced dart secured his antlers.
As he pulled back in alarm, she said, "Kiss me, deer", in a low, calming voice barely loud enough to reach her witnesses' ears. Then she twisted her target's head around to hers.
All she could do for a moment was stare in horror. Then she snatched her hands away as if they were on fire, and backed out into the clearing, towards the safety of her sisters. The deer followed her out into the sunlight, until they could all see him clearly.
The...thing was a mass of decaying flesh. The hide was falling off in tatters, revealing the wasted muscles underneath. Even as he moved, gruesome bits of flesh were falling off. The eyelids had rotted away, revealing the filmy balls underneath, as had the lips, revealing...
Suddenly all Mel's attention was on the gleaming, razor-sharp, not-at-all decayed fangs set incongruously in the herbivore's mouth. The rotting facial flesh pulled back in a hideous parody of a smile as the thing said quite clearly, "Kiss me? If you insist."
She sat down suddenly as her heel encountered an unexpected hole. She drew in a breath to scream - realizing as she did so that it would be quite pointless; none of them carried weapons - and gagged on the fetid stench of the thing. The mocking smile drew closer as the oddly mellifluous voice said, "Would it be impertinent of me to enquire the name of the one who rather freely seeks this liberty? Yes? Well, I am Vambi, the vampire zombie." She flinched as an almost skeletal foreleg swept towards her in a sort of bow.
"Pleased to make your acquaintance. It has been...a pleasure." She stared, mesmerized by the dripping mouth moving closer, closer. Her last thought before she felt the terrible pain of her throat being ripped out was surprise and, strangely, a sort of resigned amusement at the thing's mocking echo of her own words:
"Kiss me, dear..."

No comments: