Blood Beast

By Mark MacKenzie

The Uninvited presents...

Blood Beast
a novella by Mark MacKenzie

You are a powerful beast that has awoke from an ancient slumber and now you are very, very hungry..... for human flesh!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pterotype Digital
• Release date: Sep 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9780986845925

Book preview

The Uninvited presents…

Blood Beast

by Mark MacKenzie

Smashwords Edition

Published by Pterotype Digital

www.pterotypedigital.com

Copyright 2011

ISBN: 978-0-9868459-2-5

cover art by John MacKenzie

The Uninvited is a horror anthology magazine highlighting original horror and weird fiction stories and comics from around the globe!

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Part I

The first impact wakes you. There is no surprise, no moment of grogginess as your eyes open in the darkness of the cavern. You know it has been 140 winters since you last awoke and ventured outside. And you know that the concussion which still reverberates in the rock around you is small, sharp and nearby, totally unlike the abrupt shifts of the earth that you have known over the millions of years since you were first spawned, totally unlike the roar of a volcano or the immense slow convulsions that so long ago carried your mother away and changed all you had ever known.

You feel the distant rhythmic impacts, too precise and regular to be a product of the earth around you. These are the actions of an animal and at that knowledge your body is wracked by the need for prey. Your jaws flex with the desire to tear and rend flesh, your stomach, long emptied of your final meal before you returned to hibernation, is pinched and hollow.

Your huge solidly-muscled body rolls off into the black water. The passage to the lake is still clear. Once, thousands of years ago, you woke to find it frozen solid. That time you simply returned to your resting place and shut down again for a future millennium. But now in the open water you stretch out and enjoy the freedom of movement. As before, there is little to be eaten in the lake. You find a sturgeon in the bottom muck and devour it. Not the way it was long ago when the great beasts were plentiful. The prey was large and filling. The sturgeon only puts an edge on your appetite.

The surface of the lake is still and empty. It looks much as it did the last time you were out. The mountains standing up all around it, their slopes thickly covered with trees. Then the prey was meager, a few deer, small and bony, and the soft two-legged ones that paddled on the water in a carved-out tree-trunk. Soft and easy to catch, but inadequate as a meal.

But on the forested slopes there are clearings and obvious trails cut into the trees and your predator’s eye sees movement. Far up on the hillside some huge creature with a bright yellow hide is gnawing at the trees.

Far, far back in time when you were a hatchling first taught by your mother to hunt, the prey was huge and plentiful. You knew it would again be thus. As your mother had once taught you so very long ago, your kind’s greatest asset was not your strength, your speed, your fierce and relentless desire to kill and eat, no matter how considerable these qualities are. It was your ability to outlast. You could sleep for long ages of time. When game was scarce you would sleep, when it was plentiful you would thrive.

The sensors in your body detect the minute vibrations carried down from high on the hillside, transferred through the mountain bedrock to the water of the lake. Your complex brain makes precise and instantaneous calculations. Creatures of great size and weight are on the move. The great beasts have returned. Now is the time to eat your fill again, to delight in blood. You swim for shore in anticipation of the feast.

Your kind does not belong on this world. So your mother had told you. You come from another place under a different sun from the one shining down in the blue sky. There, on