Greyhound

1.

Harriet Winters sat in her office alone. She was not like the other directors here; she was quiet, smart, and very opinionated. She had a small office at the end of the hall, with just one window that over looked the entire headquarters, and a normal brown door that had her name written on the front. She was very different; she didn't want power of glory, she wanted to help the world, and want nothing in return. All she asked for was that she lived in peace, and that her son got a good education, and a good life. She had dark skin, and short brown hair that sat in short, tiny ringlets on her head. She had large owl-like brown eyes, which made her seem a bit like an owl due to the way she stared at people, and her eyelids drooped ever-so slightly.
Dylan Small, her deputy director, more or less lived in the under ground space of the ECLIPSE headquarters. Although he did have a big part in ECLIPSE and what they do, his main work was with psychology, and helping patients recover from different disorders, such as post traumatic stress disorders. He was very young for his job, 25 –soon turning 26 – and yet he was the best person for it. He had light brown hair, which was swept to the side of his face in a wavy kind of way. He too had brown eyes, but instead of being owl-like they were softer, more friendlier. He had a small nose, and a prominent jawline that made him seem younger than he actually was.
Due to him spending so much time in the underground facilities, it was a shock to see him standing in her office doorway. He wore black skinny jeans, wedding shoes, and a light blue office shirt which had the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Dylan leaned against the door frame and stared at Harriet patiently while she finished writing some paperwork.
Harriet didn't need to glance at the door to see who was there. Just by the way he stood patiently and didn't ask her for her time indicated who it was already. The two had a steady friendship; she dealt with reporters asking for Dylan, and he dealt with anybody who needed Harriet to do something that didn't really matter to the aim of ECLIPSE. He also respected her privacy, and she never went into his office unless it was important.
"What do you want?" She mumbled, grabbing a yellow highlighter from the pot next to her. He grinned wildly, before stepping into her room and taking a seat opposite her. "I picked out the final candidates for the mission." He dropped the file on her desk, and she stared at it for a second, before continuing to highlight words on the paper.
"I thought that was my job." She asked.
"You and the other directors had picked out 27. It was a tough call, each candidate was worthy of the position." He replied. "It was then my choice to analyse them physically and mentally before calling the final few." She dropped the highlighter and picked up the file before her. On the cover of the brown paper said: CONFIDENTIAL. Opening the file to the first page, was the name: CLARKE, ZANDRA.
"Zandra was always going to be our first choice. She's strong, quick, a good shooter and fighter, and she's also a born leader." Dylan commented, and Harriet read through her file. "Zandra was my choice." Harriet replied. She flipped to the next page, which read: KIRA.
"A witch. A telepathic one, too. She can control other people, and she also has the ability to manipulate dark energy and shadows." Dylan said. The two pictures showed two people; one with long brown hair and green eyes, her skin fairly tanned with a small mole just below her nose. The second picture showed the same girl, however she had dark blue hair, black eyes, and her face was covered in dark blue thorns. "That's Kira when she absorbs the dark matter."
"I'm not too keen on this one," Harriet said, taking a closer look at the pictures. "She's a bit of a rebel, I see?"
"Back home she did cause one or two accidents. She holds a hatred for people in her home town, so when she discovered her powers, she took the opportunity to cause chaos." Dylan replied.
For the next half hour, the two sat undisturbed looking at the photos of the candidates Dylan had chosen. Tana the Cyborg. Jason the Smoke Mimic. Isaac the Beast. Some Harriet approved, like Tana and Alfie, whilst others she didn't seem to pleased with like Ryan the Runner and her son, Otto the Freak.
"I guess we have our candidates then," Harriet smiled simply, typing up the candidates into her computer. Dylan nodded quietly, looking down at a separate file in his hands. "What's wrong?"
It took him a moment to build up the courage to ask. "Actually,there's one more person I want to put forward." He dropped the file in front of her, and Harriet looked at it skeptically.
"Who?"Her eyes flicked upwards at Dylan, who crossed his fingers under the table.
"Um...Grace Annora." He said promptly, looking at the file quickly.
"Greyhound?"Harriet sounded shocked. "She's a liability." Dylan's body tensed. Harriet opened the file, and saw another two photos. One was of a girl with long curly black hair, light pale skin that made her seem dead, and grey eyes that stared at the camera. Her lips were slightly parted, and her nostrils were flared, almost as if she'd been breathing heavily. The other photo, however, was something more disturbing. The same girl, however, her face been bandaged tightly,and only her eyes were on show. The eyes, which were grey in the other photo were now heavily bloodshot, and were a reddish-brown colour. The pupils had dilated massively, so there was barely any iris left, and around the eyes were a deep red, as if she'd been crying. Her thin and frail hands gripped the bandages surrounding her head tightly, as if she were trying to rip them from her skull. The picture disturbed Harriet, seeing the girl in the photo looking so...so mad.
"She looks unstable." Harriet said finally, closing the file so that she didn't have to look at the mad girl before her. "I don't think it's-".
"It is." Dylan interrupted. "The first photo is recent, the second was straight after her physical recovery. In my opinion, I think she's improved."
"Dylan, have you considered what the others would think to her? They wouldn't be able to trust her, not in the state she's in. She'd be useless in battle..."
"She trusts me." Dylan sighed. "She's...learning. To control it. She's not right in the head, in all honesty. But put her out in the field, I really think she could do some damage."
"And what proof do you have of this?" Harriet questioned.
Dylan took a deep breath before he continued. "She killed 2 body guards last week. They tried to sedate her, but when she saw the needle she freaked, attacked them and snapped their necks in seconds." Harriet sat staring at the boy before him. She knew he had a point – Grace, or 'Gray' she had been told to call her – was insane, but she was probably the best fighter they had. But would it mean putting the other candidates in danger?
"I'll consider it." Harriet said finally. Dylan took a sigh of relief."I'll stop by tomorrow to assess her and then make a decision." Dylan nodded, and stood up, preparing to leave. Just as he was leaving, Harriet stopped him in his tracks. "I'm warning you,Dylan. If I don't think she can handle it, she won't make the cut. If she does, and then in the field she breaks down, we're not responsible for her. She's on her own. Do you understand?" Dylan nodded, before leaving Harriet alone in her office once again.
---
A million miles away, days and months before the meeting had even occurred, lie a weak and dying, Boggs. He had short brown hair that was slicked back,a pointy nose, dark eyes, and tattoos all over his muscular and cold chest. He sat huddled in a corner of the abandoned airport where he more or less lived. It was dark here; the last time any electrical light had lit up the place was when ECLIPSE attacked. They had blown the fuse and all the electricity was gone. He nor Eliza, his sidekick, could fix the damage they caused.
As he sat shivering in a corner, his right wrapped in two of his T-shirts, blooding gently oozing from the injection holes, he began to silently sob. Boggs, however messed up in the head he was, didn't want to die. He was a bad person, no doubt about it, but his biggest fear was dying, and he sure to god didn't want to die here, in this rotting, cold place. Not here, where no one could find him.
"It's not working, is it?" A voice said to him, echoing all over the empty halls. He looked around the quiet place, but saw no one there. Of course, he knew who it was, but didn't want to speak to them.
"Go away Eliza." Boggs moaned to the empty space. After a few moments of silence, a cloud of black smoke started to form several feet in front of him. The smoke began to morph into a human – a girl. The smoke eventually formed her physical features; pale skin, black eyes and lips, deep red hair that was so long it hung down at her waist.She had a large fringe, and on top of her hair she wore a large black rose crown that that was covered in metallic thorns. Her hands -which looked as if she'd dipped them into black paint due to the black stopping half way down her wrist - had long, talon-like fingernails that she gently traced the air with. She wore a long,black dress that half a thick fury collar, and underneath she had thick army boots which stopped just under the knee.
"Boggs, your weak." Her voice echoed loudly off of the walls. Eliza floated a few inches off of the ground, and the bottom of her silk dress disappeared into small clouds of smoke, only to reform again seconds later. "Look at you."
Boggs spat weakly at her. "I know." Eliza scoffed and eventually dropped to the floor elegantly. "Why don't you just leave me here?"
Eliza rolled her eyes. "Because I'll have no purpose if I leave. Besides, I want to know if it works."
"The information we got from the girl was wrong. She was different from what we'd imagined." Boggs croaked. "It wasn't an adrenaline pump I found, it was poison." Boggs removed the T-shirts from his arm to see that his arm had lost a lot of colour, and the veins had turns black and stuck out of his skin. Tiny little holes danced about his arm, the holes oozing at black blood at rapid speed. "Death is inevitable, but that doesn't make me fear it any less. Especially not now."
Eliza looked down at Boggs with sympathy. Sitting down next to him, making sure to keep her distance from him. "I don't think your dying..."Eliza whispered, looking at the veins on his arm. They had slowly begun to pulsate, the blackness in them slowly moving up his arms and neck, the liquid moving up towards his head. The veins bulged on his face, causing Boggs to scream in pain. His hands gripped his head in agony, trying to scratch the pain away. Eliza could only stare in horror as he slowly transformed.
"Boggs– Boggs! Don't scratch them!" She shouted, as she slowly backed away from him. He rolled over a few times, ending with him lying on his back, wriggling in pain. He slammed the solid concrete beneath with clenched fists, doing anything to make it seem bearable. After seemed like hours, Boggs skin, like his veins, soon started to turn black.
"Boggs, your skin..." Eliza breathed, but she could barely be heard over Boggs cries. Starting at his legs, his skin turned black, the skin looking like leather. He eventually managed to stop screaming, as whatever it was slowly took over his body. All he could was lie there, slightly fidgeting from time to time as the blackness took over. When it had fully covered his body, his mouth started to almost cave in on it self, the lips became jagged and pursed, almost like blunt teeth, and his cheeks were almost completely hollow. The teeth became parallel to one another, almost like they were sewn together.
After a few minutes of a dead silence, Boggs' eyes snapped open, and instead of there being two dark green ones, were two, solid white eyeballs.
"Boggs...?" Eliza murmured, staring at the creation before her. She stood up, and backed away so that she was out of reach from it.
Boggs sat, and then stood up, and looked around. His veins, which you could barely see due to the leathery colour of the skin, bulged. Tiny drops of blood dripped from his fingers, and he took deep heavy breaths in and out, as if he'd been running.
And after moments of a dead silence, Boggs screamed, a mixture of an ear piercing sound and a booming roar echoing along the airport. And seconds following his inhuman sound, the roof of the broken building collapsed, trapping Boggs inside.
---
PHOTO 1: Dylan Small
PHOTO 2: Gray