Blood Hunt

Chapter 1 - Flesh Eaters

Dylan glanced over his shoulder at the thickening clouds. A threatening dark green color, they appeared almost surreal as his tall, muscular figure ran along the center strip of an abandoned stretch of road. Husks of corn, accompanied by dead shrubs and assorted pieces of metal, lay abandoned in the ditches on either side of the cement. The cracked, fading stripes of yellow paint in the center glowed an eerie luminescent yellow under the swirling clouds. Dylan walked along, and as the road curved through a thicket of trees, a white farmhouse became visible in the distance. Picking up his pace, Dylan started running.

Dylan reached the farmhouse just as the sky split open with a splitting crack and flash of lighting. Rain poured down from the green clouds, and in the distance, Dylan heard the echo of sirens that sent a chill down his spine. He knew that the tornado warnings weren't intended to keep the farm community safe. They were intended to keep them inside and in their storm shelters where they couldn't see the convoy of black vehicles making their way down the road towards the farmhouse. Frantically, Dylan smashed open a window to the decrepit building, and climbed inside.

Instantly, the smell hit Dylan's nostrils. Avoiding letting his eyes drift to the corners of the room, where he knew bodies lay, Dylan kicked the door open to the hall and ran upstairs. He knew what he was looking for, and when he found it he would need to run as if his life depended on it, because it did. The Elites were already furious with him, because he had gone on a tangent and tried to release crucial information relevant to their plans. With this new information, he could shake the very foundation on which their organization stood on. Turning the corner, Dylan found himself in the kitchen of the farmhouse. Spotting a dark blue laptop sitting open on the counter, he grabbed it, crammed it into a plastic bag to deter water, and dashed towards the exit.

The Elites, a shadow organization of over 500 heads, shared one common goal - eliminate homosexual individuals. Dylan had joined their ranks two years before when he thought they were actually an advertising firm - what they wanted people to believe. Working there as a teenager, filing reports of which held contents he never bothered (and wasn't allowed) to look through, Dylan discovered he was gay. Embracing his sexuality, he went on a string of hookups. But one day when he was filing a report, he saw a name he was familiar with. He had looked inside to find something shocking.

"Pierce Donovan, 17. Died by self-inflicted gunshot wound to cranium. Acquaintance also found dead. Special tactics squadron entered hotel room to search for homosexual propaganda, met hostility. One operative killed by this individual."

Dylan had hooked up with Pierce just days ago at that point, and he was shocked and confused to find this information. He had searched through the rest of the confidential reports he was supposed to be storing, and found information such as The Elite's plan to leave anti-gay messages in media and shows, and their plans to eliminate "homosexual propaganda" by assassinating drag queen icons and making the incidents look like accidents. That day, Dylan had quit his job and posted everything he had found on his Instagram. The day after that, he had seen an unfamiliar black sedan pull into his driveway, and an unfamiliar, tall man emerge holding a tranquilizer gun and a camera. Not wanting to know what was about to happen to him, Dylan had escaped through the back window with his phone and wallet, and fled the area. More concerningly than the group's plans to eliminate gay people, however, Dylan felt like there was another presence working against him too. Sometimes when he walked along empty stretches of road, he would hear vaguely human noises call out from thin air. Every time he heard these, he would find himself in a troublesome situation. And on his way to the farmhouse, he had heard these noises in abundance.

Dylan thudded down the hall as he heard the crunching of tires against gravel. Headlights shone in the windows of the farmhouse through the pouring rain, and Dylan ran to the end of the hall where he had entered. Ducking into the corpse room, he flew towards the window and was about to jump through when a burst of movement in the corner of the room caught his eye and made him stop. He looked back at the corpse that had seemingly moved and was horrified by what he saw.

The corpse had originally been a large caucasian male, but now it was now red because the blood coming from the mouth covered their entire face and also, inexplicably, their arms. Stiff as a board, lying face upwards with different limbs at different angles, the corpse glared at the ceiling with dead eyes that seemed to cave in on themselves. But that is not what horrified Dylan. From underneath the corpse, Dylan could see writhing, black tentacle-shaped appendages slowly grappling towards him. He heard the tearing of flesh and from the side of the corpse emerged something horrible- a mass of undescribable matter, with horrible black beady eyes, a mouth with rotten needles for teeth, and bizarre sideways mandibles knawing at thin air. The rest of the tentacles emerged from the area where the corpse lay and Dylan saw they were attached to the creature. It let out a terrible, vaguely human scream that sent chills through Dylan. In fear, he dropped the laptop, turned towards the window, and jumped through. He ran as hard as he could into the trees by the farmhouse and kept running through the woods until they turned into fields. He kept running through the corn until his legs were caked with mud, burning and sore. He continued to stagger through the corn until he reached another house. As the tornado sirens died out, he staggered around to a neglected trailer near the barn, wrenched open the rusty door, and collapsed in the musty darkness and warmth.

His mind was racing. What was that creature? Why had it been living in that poor man's corpse? Dylan knew that the people in that house had been killed by The Elites. The laptop, he knew after scanning their records, held crucial information of a former member, likely the man from which the creature had emerged. Apparently the man had defected after he uncovered finer details of their plan, and to keep him silenced, they had killed him and his family. But what was that creature doing there? Why had they left it with him? Dylan racked his brain for answers when it hit him. The creature was there to guard the laptop. The Elites couldn't have taken it back because it could be tracked by GPS by anyone who wanted to, so they had left their twisted surprise to keep track of it instead. Dylan now knew what it had been doing at that house. And he knew with a certain smugness that the creature probably didn't know the people that were there to collect Dylan were it's allies- it probably attacked them too. Dylan thought about the noise it had made and shuddered. He felt like he had heard that noise before, but he didn't want to think about it too much so he shoved the thought from his mind. That would be a problem for another day. As he drifted off to sleep, a name for the creature popped into his head.

Flesh Eater.