Writing Practise #1

Delilah heard the familiar snap of a spine as the creature hit the cobblestones and gave a long, thankful breath.

Dead.

Crouching beside the body, her knees cracking slightly, complaining about the sudden change in movement after maintaining a defensive stance for so long. Delilah snorted. She could spend almost an hour fighting but kneeling down? Too far apparently.

But anyway, back to the corpse. A thought that should have been less mundane that it was. A mop of dirty green hair, the roots just growing out brown, almost covered the slight trickle of red, warm but rapidly cooling in the September evening. If Delilah hadn’t seen the death, she wouldn’t have picked up on it, concealed as it was by the slight shine of neon from the bar in one of the next buildings. Delilah grimaced, memories of nights spent trying to lose herself in bars like that flooding back.

The most noticeable part of the corpse was the face, eyes wide open and full of terror, of a primal need to run, and if running was not possible, to kill and fight and maim until they were free. The lips were pulled back into a snarl, bruised and beaten to a red, bloodied mess. Delilah shuddered and quietly gave thanks to any deity that cared about her kind that she hadn’t had to pursue them on the rooftops. There was a reason she hated these missions.

Well, the missions themselves were bad enough, but what came after was the worst. The way your mind would focus on the small things. On the stains on the floor and the marks on the walls and the stale, almost-warm temperature of the air, that lingered in the alleys long after the bodies were gone. That was the worst part; never being able to go back to a place without seeing the glassy eyes and the newly floppy limbs of rapidly cooling bodies. Delilah was limited enough in the places she could go comfortably. Eyes always seemed to follow her and she was never sure what they focused on; the small, curled sigil tattooed onto the back of her neck, the one everyone knew the meaning of on site, or just her herself, dark skin and wild hair. Either way, the number of places she could go comfortable in the city was low and cases simply poisoned and wiped out the few safe spaces she had.

But right now, she needed to call a contact back at the base. She stood up, gritting her teeth to try and get past the fact her knees had past complaining a long while ago and had, by that point, formed a workers' union and were staging a full revolution. Opening her jacket slightly, rubbing the rough material absentmindedly between two calloused fingers, she dropped a hand into the inside pocket, running it against the newly forbidden lighter before finding her phone. Delilah pulled it out, vaguely wondering if it was a bad idea, given how damp the air was, pulled up the only contact on it and pulled it close to her ear.

It took seven rings for her to be granted an answer, three more than normal. Delilah knew because she counted every time she went on an away mission. With baited breath, she waited for the overtly cheerful reply on the other end. A drop of water fell from the sky and she murmured curses under her breath, moving neared to a building on one side to get as much shelter as she could. It felt somehow quieter, the slow buzz of chatter next door, mixed with the slow burning thump of the music’s beat somehow misted over.

“You have reached the Du Bois Home for Anathemas and Abominations. How may I be of assistance?” said the man on the other end of the phone, almost as though he were singing. Delilah shuddered. It wasn’t the right way to say things. He knew there’d be a corpse at the end of the evening, they all did. But he was too casual about it. Far too casual.

“Cut the crap Oz”, she growled, then pausing to spit to the side. Wasn’t your mouth meant to go dry when you were anxious? Then again, it was solts that piece of wisdom referred to. Maybe things were different?

Delilah heard a sigh on the other end of the phone and she knew Oscar was running a hand through his fringe, resting his face on his palm. “Fine”, he said, “What happened? Too early to be over yet, so you fucked up somehow. How?”

Reaching for a cigarette, before remembering she didn’t have any anymore, Delilah growled slightly. The corpse was getting cold and it was only a matter of time before some solt saw it. “Oz, the thing fell off a roof. I didn’t need to pursue or fight. Now call a recovery team over here before some idiot kid comes into the alley to smoke a joint and sees the dead guy.”

For once, he had enough sense not to argue. She heard a few clicks in the background of his end of the phone, guessing they were him typing on a keyboard.

“Right”, he murmured after a long pause, “I got a team heading over to Andras’ ASAP. You’re near there, right?”

“Yeah”, she said, just as the rain started to fall. “In the alley next to it.”

“Got it. They’ll be there soon.”

Before she could say anything, the phone let out an arthropodic screech, screen flashing up ‘Call Ended’ in a bright red, lest she be unable to guess what had happened. Delilah sighed, bundling it away as she pulled her jacket over her body, trying to shelter from the rain a little more. When she got out of this shithole and back to the more familiar shithole of the base, she was going to give Oz a piece of her mind. Or maybe not, given how often she’d done so. It wasn’t like he took any warnings to heart.

It was getting heavier, nearing a downpour now. She tilted her head back, a few strands of hair sticking to her face, and stepped forward. A thousand pebbles of water hit her face and she sighed, the sensation of her eyelids being pounded all too familiar. Briefly, she wondered if the rain would wash away the red on the corpse, before deciding it didn’t matter. It hadn’t been all that noticeable anyway. If somebody walked into the alley now and saw the body, they would see little sign of what happened. All they’d see would be a slightly scruffy person, eyes and mouth wide open, looking for all the world like they’d drowned in the rain.