Inhumane

006

PAIGE

The thing about predators and prey, is that there is an ultimate balance. It is imposed by whatever controls things of such matters. Who's to say who or what exactly that is? What we knew is that it was there, and that some of us try to take it into our own weapon-greedy hands. Nature, doesn't stop anyone from imposing, she stocks the hunger for more. It runs in hunters' blood.

The day of the first snow, was the day I crossed over from predator to prey. And also the day I crossed from mechanical to natural. Not technically, as it had taken much convincing.

I laid there, a dying girl, in the accumulating snow. It was painless at first, more startling than anything. The bear had been so oddly soundless, so driven by hunger. His presence righted the hairs on the back of my neck, prickling my skin. When I turned around in a shock, it was only twenty feet away. My mind scrabbled for the survival tactics I had learned when I was small. My breath was puffing out fast and laboured. The only way to protect yourself from a grizzly was to play dead, there was no running from something that could compare to cars on suburban streets. It charged me and I scrambled for anything. Too soon, he knocked me flat on the ground with a big head slammed into the small of my back as I stumbled in vain. My forehead smacked into the large boulder by the stream that I had perched on before I stabbed the Beta. Blood ran down into my left eye. Stars danced before me in my right field of vision. I rolled over, full of confusion, everything was groggy.

The grizzly drug me to the side, a few yards from the freezing water of the slow creek and into a copse of trees. I remember everything was still in motion beneath the solid top layer. I could see it so clearly. The light shimmered over the surface and I thought I saw rainbow hued fish bursting into fireworks then I saw little blue flowers sprout from the surface of the ice. Until I blinked and all I saw after was red, red, red.

I was so out of it, a beast more than five times my size reared above me and roared in victory of a winter kill before early hibernation. I was the prize of the season. My body would sustain it for hard months to come. Nothing came to my head except stagnant, ear ringing, static noise.

The gleam in those black eyes told me this was the end. There was nothing else. Karma.

I didn't close my eyes, not as razor sharp incisors tore through my right thigh, all the way to bone, tearing through muscles and tendons like butter. My lips parted in a silent scream, but no noise escaped, only a puff of air like a ghost. Red poured onto pristine white. My head tipped back hissing as it rubbed against the frozen ground, chest convulsed upward in a heave. No fight left in me.

My favorite parka offered little protection as the hunger crazed bear tore into my chest and belly, the tissue giving way just as the coat had to sharp claws. There was still no noise besides the grunts above me.

My head spun, cheeks felt hot, I was dying. Slowly. Ears stuffed with cotton, similar to my throat.

Did I want to be alive?

Shaking hands curled together on my chest, they were sticky with my life force, slowly growing cold. One of my mittens was gone, but my stocking cap was still firmly on my head. It held my gnarled hair together as the blond strands splayed over the snow, some were darker with blood.

Teeth chattered and smacked, lips dried out, mouth filled with blood as each breath I took was waterlogged and thick. Eyes lulled back and forth, the trees above me swirling together.

And then, everything became clear as day for a single, blissful moment. Everything paused and I felt nothing but numbness, no dying, no suffocation, just a girl... Lying in the snow.

Maybe this was all I got, there was nothing of my previous, loving self left in my veins. I was only a body, bleeding out the evil murderer that I had become.

I tried to see past what others wanted versus what I wanted...

And I couldn't. Not yet.

Instead, color exploded from above, my breath caught as my heart thudded to a slow stopping point, and everything dissolved into pure white.