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Each falling drop of Gabbie’s blood echoed softly throughout the black cavern of the abandoned warehouse. She stood poised in the eerie bioluminescent glow of the monster before her. Clothing ripped, hair snarled and frayed and wounded in multiple places, the aura of a hunted and weary animal surrounded her. Panting, she dashed the sweat from her eyes and eyed the thing in front of her. If God had a sick sense of humor and very little sense of aesthetics, He might have created something like this to terrorize a T-Rex. It was an unholy combining of shark and dinosaur with a bit of the Rancor beast tossed in for good measure. It’s gaping mouth bristled with a never-ending supply of sharp, serrated teeth and it’s misshapen arms and knobly hands were tipped in claws that already glistened with her own blood.

It was stalking her. Playing with her. And every few moments, it would laugh in the voice of a woman whom Gabbie feared more than anyone.

“Worthless little coward… Come play. I’ll gut you and show you your starseed once more before you die.”

It was the laugh that undid her. Gabbie bolted, running deeper into the dark, scrambling and stumbling to get away, her mind full of blind, animal panic. Every muscle ached, her lungs burned and still her blood kept slowly dripping away.

As she ran, she noticed how there was water leaking across the floor. And the further she ran, the deeper it got. When it reached knee depth, she felt uneasy. When it reached her hips, she felt sick to her stomach, but she kept running. Anything to get away from the thing that pursued her. But when the water reached her waist, she stopped, torn and quivering between two terrors. On the one hand, there was the thing with Nealite’s voice following her. On the other, Zombie!Hematite and the shark were waiting for her somewhere in the water. The further she went, the deeper it got. And somehow… somehow, she knew that another step in any direction would send her plunging into water that was considerably deeper than just ‘over her head’.

She heard the laugh, felt the ripples in the water as the monster finally caught up with her and turned slowly to face it. It’s toothed jaws hung in a monstrous parody of a smile and thick, ropy drool clung to its lower lip.

“Coward!”, it hissed at her.

At that point, two things happened. Gabbie took a single step back and the water behind her exploded. Cold, waterlogged and bloated arms seized her from behind. One reached up to put a gray tinged hand over her mouth as the other somehow caught both her wrists and held them tight against her chest. There was a hoarse chuckle and then Hematite’s voice was grating in her ear.

“Awww, relax baby. What’s a little pain, death and dismemberment among friends?”

With that, he pulled her off her feet, into the water and held her there as the monster dove in after them, claws splayed and ready to taste her blood. Hematite’s arms simply tightened around her as she struggled, holding her so that her tender, vulnerable belly was presented as a ready target. And when the claws came slicing through the water, she screamed against Hematite’s hand as they tore through her body, sending blood and fleshy bits dancing off into the waters…

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It was the searing pain through her abdomen that woke Gabbie from her troubled sleep. Sobbing and screaming, she half rolled, half fell out of bed, clutching her belly as if to shove everything back where it belong. Only, she was sprawled, tangled in her sheet on the floor of her room. Her hands and belly unbloodied, unscathed. Shaking and trembling against the fiery pain that still laced through her abdomen, she had the presence of mind to reach for the trash can beside her head and pull it under her face before she began to throw up. Her body shook between heaves and sobs as she shrank away from the frightening pain that had been real enough to jolt her awake.