RP Apple Pie

[Slate]

There was movement on the sensors. That was all Connor was told when he was woken up from his sleep at three in the morning. They had turned the security system off, then, with the anticipation of having to kill whoever was wandering into their warehouse. After all, Slate was still new to Columbus, and they needed to make sure people knew they were serious.

The body would be sent back to whatever gang it belonged to, along with a note saying that if any more of their people tried to break into their territory again, there’d be far more bodies the next time. That was how they’d handled the Norteños. And so far none of them had come knocking again.

It honestly might have been the cold and heavily armed escort that had really done the trick, but no one had really given Connor credit for that.

This was his warehouse, though. Columbus was his branch, and everything that came with it was his responsibility. Including security alarms being tripped at three in the goddamn morning. He yawned as he walked around the warehouse, checking for any broken locks. Finally, when he’d almost circled the place, he saw it. They had tried to replace the locks in a way that looked right, but it was clearly broken.

He sighed and pulled the nine mil from his pocket, checking that the safety was off. He racked the gun and yanked the chains off the door. Pushing it open, he leveled the gun in front of him and stepped inside.

The warehouse was almost empty. They hadn’t gotten a chance yet to clean it up and start renovations– that was supposed to be that Friday. So it wasn’t hard to spot the dude sitting in the middle of the warehouse, large objects on the ground around him. In the dark, it was hard to make out, but he looked like he was eating. He lowered the gun, sighing dramatically.

“Look man, I know it’s cold outside, but you got to get out of here. This is private property.”​

 

[Wendigo]

The last thing he needed was an interruption.

Not that he wouldn’t mind a third meal in his state. He’d picked up a second body on the way. Buyer, not seller, but the addict had gotten too coked up in a convenient spot for the predator to resist. He was still twitching, high off his ass, possibly even on the verge of an overdose. It’d affect the flavor – but flavor really doesn’t matter when your tongue’s burned to shit.

He was chewing just enough to swallow before taking the next bite. This was the fastest he’d eaten in a long time. No more hunting, no games. Just food. Just survival, energy to heal, consumed faster than his body could fuck itself up with scars, hopefully. Maybe. He hoped so. Scars were a clear sign, a warning label. She’d know. She’d know. She’d –

The door. The footsteps had stopped, and he heard the soft sound of somebody trying the door. The lock was broken. He hadn’t had time to try to pick it. Or hands, really. Putting it back in place had meant setting both bodies down and going back in through a window, but that was okay. It was okay until the chain rattled, and the sound of a gun being racked told him what was going on.

He kept his back to the door, thinking hard about what to do. He couldn’t smell enough to tell the scent, but he did know it wasn’t her, based on the gun. The voice only confirmed that, and there only seemed to be one person based on the sounds. He took a deep breath through his nose and mouth. The voice. The voice was giving him an out.

He wasn’t in any shape to take down someone with a gun. The bullets wouldn’t kill him – maybe, he really didn’t know at this stage – but they’d be a waste of energy, and he’d barely been fast enough to overtake his original prey in the forest. His eyes weren’t fully adjusted, either. The wave of heat had really done a number on his vision. So he was relying on his ears alone, and his ears didn’t tell him nearly as much as he’d like.

He needed to decide. Kill the interloper, or pretend to be a confused hobo. One or the other. Or maybe scare him off? No, that was stupid, he’d just call the cops. Fuck. He sighed, not dramatic, just slow and thoughtful. He didn’t turn to face the door.

“Sorry,” he rasped – his throat was still fucked beyond belief, so his words sounded like a decades-old smoker’s cough. He slowly lowered the kidney, his current project, toward the corpse, listening intently. “I saw the for lease sign – assumed it was empty. Let me just– get my things.”

He reached behind him, as if looking to gather up some of his tools. Maybe this would lure the person inside where he could deal with him more effectively, or maybe it’d be enough to make him go back outside to wait patiently for an ambush. Either worked for him.

 

[Slate]

Connor sighed again and started to walk into the building, intent on helping the man with his things– maybe even taking him to the local shelter he knew of– when he stopped. His eyes had finally adjusted from the light outside the warehouse to the light levels in the room. That was when he saw what was in the room.

There was a broken open body on the ground in front of a ragged and burnt man. There was blood and gore on the burned man’s face, and it was clear now that he was eating the body. Raw. He was eating the body raw. He searched the floor and saw another body, this one wrapped poorly in emergency blankets. There were torn clothes strewn across the floor, and there were two imposing-looking knives closer to the burned man.

The man was reaching behind him, trying to find one of the two knives that lay there on the ground. Connor swallowed back both a scream and potentially throwing up as he looked away for just a moment. Now that he’d noticed the bodies, he could smell the blood in the air. How had he missed that?

He turned back to the man and trained his gun, prepared to take the shot– but then he stopped. “So, you eat people, huh? You a fucked up serial killer or are you a fucked up meta?”

He paced slowly, shuffling across the floor to try and shift himself behind a crate, one of the few that were still present in the room. He was going to need cover if this man ended up being violent. He still hadn’t turned around so it was hard to tell anything about what his course of action might be.​

 

[Wendigo]

The man made up his mind to become the third course. He heard the sigh, heard the shuffling footsteps – and of course, heard the pause. The near-gag, the beginnings of a scream. He turned his head to follow the sound as his fingers found the handle of the heavier butcher’s knife.

“You don’t watch the news very much, do you?” he asked, his raw voice grating into the stillness. He licked his lips, cleaning the blood off, then smiled and felt the scabs split as he started to slowly sway to his feet. “Apparently I’m some kinda bear.”

He made out a vague shape in the dark, in the direction where the prey was walking. A stack of… something. Boxes or crates. Some kind of cover, probably. Away from the door, which was good. He’d be able to make sure they weren’t interrupted again before he took this one down.

He swayed once he made it to a standing position. He was stiff all over, the front of his body badly charred, his muscles sore and tired from a lack of his usual spare energy. He hated to think that a bullet could harm him, but he had to accept it as a possibility. Not that dessert needed to know that.

He turned a bloody smile in the right direction, trying to find his shape in the blurry darkness. The dim light caught the back of his pupils, reflecting them in the otherwise dark room. “Jokes aside, if you pull that trigger, you’ll just piss me off. Wouldn’t recommend that.”

 

[Slate]

The reflective eyes sealed the deal. This was a meta. And a cannibal one at that. And one who had skin peeling in charred strips off his hands and face. His puffy mass of hair looked dry, like it’d been burnt. But the most startling thing was his clouded eyes. They reflected the low light, and Connor couldn’t see his pupils behind the clouds of white.

What the fuck had happened to this man?

The way he was moving made Connor lick his lips. He looked up the stack of crates. He could get up high and then knock several of the boxes over. That would at least slow the man down from getting to him. Well, man was debatable. His face shape and build indicated he might be younger than Connor thought, but between all the burns, there was no way to determine that.

“Then don’t make me pull it, yeah? I’m actually a fairly good shot. I don’t think you’ll walk off a bullet through the head. I find very few things can do that, even metas.” Then, as he spoke, he quickly hopped up on the bottom crate, scaling the staircase until he was four high. He turned and pushed the next stack over, the one he’d climbed up, toward the ground. Even if the man put the stacks back together to get to him, it would take a while. Enough time for Connor to actually test shooting him in the head.

“Why don’t we just talk this out? I can barely see your face, you can just ignore me. Finish up and leave. And I won’t call the cops. Not until you’re long gone. And we never see each other again, yeah?” Connor paused, and an idea came to mind. He smiled a bit as he continued, “Or, maybe, you’d be interested in hearing about my boss? He kind of eats people. He’d like you a lot, I think.”​