Thirty-Three Teeth

Freezing

She couldn’t believe how cold it was in that place when the air outside was so hot. Or perhaps it was just a nervous reaction to fear. She felt down the front of her uniform. It was caked in some kind of mud. Some of it was hard. It occurred to her it might have been her own blood. There was no way of telling. There were certainly injuries.

She’d been thrown to the ground and dragged like a sack of black beans and left where she now sat. Her chest, her face, her thighs were bruised and possibly bleeding. There was no light, not a trickle. The treacly blackness, the thin bad-tasting air, and the noises, these were the devils that made her physical health seem unimportant. They slowly added layer by layer to the horror of what she had stumbled upon.

There was nothing she could do but sit with her back against the wall and listen. Back and forth it paced, panting and shuffling and gurgling from its throat. Then there was the smell. She’d been in the morgue long enough to recognize death, but this was more. The blood and the death mingled with the creature’s own stink as if it were a part of it.

She had never feared more for her life. She could never have been more certain that this was her last day, and it was her own stupid fault. Why, she wondered at first, was she still alive when all the others had been killed instantly? But as her mind cleared, the reason became obvious. This was the final day of the solstice when the moon would be at its fullest. The others had been killed over the five days leading up to this night. The beast was waiting for that moon to rise before taking its final sacrifice. In a few hours, she would be just like the other women, except here in this cold black place nobody would ever find her body.