Adapt (I)
Prologue

TJR Garcia © 2020

The change takes all of one minute and twenty-three seconds.

Such an arbitrary thing, for something so life altering and complicated, to be quantified by something as easy at one, two, three.

The sound of your bones bending and cracking, almost like the moaning of a cable bridge under strain. Or is that you moaning?

My kind has many names but at the root of it all, we are the apex predators, here to curb the population of the only predator that specialized in hunting humans.

Their kind has many names too.

However, all of this is irrelevant to the six-year-old that is happily climbing the sturdy tree behind her house. Her nimble fingers curl around branches some would deem too thin to bare weight. The slight smile that plays on her lips as she continues higher than she ever has before. The breeze rustles the dark leaves, the faint aroma of green pepper corns lacing the air. Her hand replaces purchase on a limb so close to the top that sunlight kisses her fingers, as if to welcome her to the top of the world.

But, as it often does, fate interrupts triumph.

Nothing is quiet like the pain that you feel when the transformation bites into your skin and thrashes its head back and forth like a blood thirsty dog. It is something that you remember for the rest of your life.

Fire engulfs her body. Her spine bows and throws her balance off centre, sending her plummeting to the ground. Her mouth forms a small “o” as a strangled scream escapes her body. The branches batt at her small frame like the flippers in a pin ball machine.

However, all of that is of no consequence when you are being ripped apart on a molecular level. As invisible flames contort her fragile body from the inside, she flails her arms, wrenching at her skin to create an opening that would release the pain out of her. It is frivolous though. The genes that have been lying dormant will not be ignored in their moment of glory.

Without much ceremony, her body collides with the ground. She lays there like a forgotten teddy bear at the park. The impact sends her into unconscious blackness immediately.

When she opens her eyes, she is not laying in the broken heap on the ground in which she had succumbed to blackness. She is standing, tears streaming down her face silently. She is looking down at her hands - a child’s hands. Hands that are splattered with red. Intricate yet random dots of scarlet cover her hands.

The hands hold something that you would hope never to see in a child’s hands. Yet, the sight of it makes you gasp not for the child, but for the beauty of the blade. Carved from a stone so pristine, colour dances of it in a sedition of purple, yellow, red and blue. The blade, so clear you can see the lines and veins of the littles girl’s hands through the other side. Bound around the hilt is what seems to be imperfect windings of leather and wire, a juxtaposition to the outright perfection of the blade.

She stares at it with a sort of longing, the longing which ones feels when one just feels empty. When you are unsure of exactly what you are longing for.

Her mind, not fully understanding what has just happened, realizes that something must be horribly wrong. With tinny, pained movements, she begins to turn to the scene behind her.

Hanging upside down are two figures. From the woman’s sandy-blonde hair drips the blood seeping from the gash in her throat. The man’s warm brown eyes are now glazed and cold, staring straight into the little girl’s eyes.

She does not scream, although she wants to. Instead her feet turn her and with more speed than a six-year-old should have, she races away from the scene, never looking back.