SHE HERSELF THAT EVIL SPIRIT

Excruciating death even on the microscopic level, Britta laughed, her will could make it so. Her powers soared, transcending all others – so she thought – eclipsing even the most dread mandarins of the cult recruiters in sheer scope and severity. If she wished to avail herself of the destiny that had been made known and available to her then her scythe must be honed to the sharpest imaginable lethality, her harvest must be the very zenith of all horror so that she might rise, forever in darkness.

She looked down, the mass grave laid out before her like a charnel cathedral beneath the open sky, grim and iron-hued. The contents of the mass grave slithered and churned upon itself – the last foul breath before final night of death. Those that had effected the killing gone now, the black-clad shock troopers splattered in the blood of thousands of victims on to their next grisly task, bringing all destruction in their wake and extending the razor-wire authoritarian state apparatus of the organization further and further into the hinterlands of post-nuclear hell.

Britta came later, as the vulture, sometimes even assuming direct imitation of that necrotic archetype, crouching in the crook of a dead tree as she watched the soon to be dead, the black rubber garment of her trademark flapping deathly in the still wind, profane haunches planted upon slowly twisting timber.

“Let their life pass into my own” she hissed now as in times past with suppurating lips, her staring eyes engorged with blood, her flesh livid, fingers trembling as the horrible action of her consciousness brought about deadly yield in fleshly reality.

She could hear it beginning even before it was audible to any other, the collective groan of the dying as the filaments of her gaze reached out to each and every one of them, penetrating as if the fang of a reanimated corpse. Accelerating death, drawing the lifeforce into herself in what began to be seen as shifting bluish mists clearly visible there at the places of genocide during her visitations, moving from the pile of bodies to the predator that watched.

Young acolytes of the commandant’s cult there of their own volition and propelled by dint of their own curiosity, the martial forces again long since passed, would tittle amongst themselves, girlish laughter and references to the bluish apparitions as being due to the presencing of an evil spirit. This heard by her now and on many occasions prior would spur the still girlish laughter of Britta herself, though stifled as to not betray her coordinates to the commandant’s faithful. Oh yes, these killing fields indeed under the jurisdiction of an evil spirit, Britta thought to herself. She herself that very evil spirit. She herself that death. She herself that vampire, psychotic in its gorging upon the blood and suffering of atrocity, in great quantity and profusion. Vicious, she. Deadly, she, bloated in hubris and power upon the accelerant death that she had now managed to effect again and again. As the last light of the setting sun and the last choked breath of the last victim exited, life expired, Britta upon her perch began to glow.

Long now she had walked alone in places forbidden to most – though the peregrinations of the cult recruiters in many cases were spectral and strange the concourse of Britta within the hellish landscapes had taken on a tone altogether singular. Not only was she a walker in the wilderness, she was also to the day entrenched deeply within the goings on of the commandant’s dungeons and all that surrounded them – there partaking of conspiracies as intricate and complex as the corridors of the black cells themselves, there to slake with unbridled ferocity and psychic fury lusts most profound in their obscenity and then to rise, emerging from the earth as it were possessing a constitution even more cloaked in terror, out upon her secret missions once again.