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First appeared in Monstrous

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She pressed the slide of the gun against her forehead, the polished metal remarkably warm. The heat sent a quiver skimming the length of her back and she exhaled an agitated sigh of white. Its existence was brief; the insatiable wind devoured it as soon as it seeped through the mask that covered her lips. Her gloved hand moved the gun past closed eyes and down the ridge of her nose to rest on her stinging cheek. She pressed the weapon against her raw skin, nestling affectionately against the instrument of destruction. Clinging comfortably to all she had left.

Her eyelids lifted, flecks of ice chipping away from the fluttering lashes. They broke the serenity of her pale expression, stark against the void of her face. The pitch of her pupils retreated to pinpricks, leaving two amber irises to stare out into the vacant, howling landscape. Beneath the mask, she frowned. It had been too long already. She was loosing heat far more quickly that she had anticipated, though the fact that she was still empty-handed weighed more heavily on her mind than impending hypothermia.

She stretched to standing, ice and snow cascading from her slim body. A miniature avalanche, the discarded freeze struck holes into the winter land at her feet, and the wind immediately swallowed all traces of the imperfections. Reluctantly, she moved the gun from her face, cradling it in her tiny hands. A near-silent click released the clip into her waiting palm, and her gleaming eyes counted her status.

Five.

She pressed a single, covered fingertip against the body of one of the heated rounds, causing her bullet to steam against the cold air. The white leather of her glove hissed and sputtered as a curl of inky smoke leaked into the sky. It was accompanied by a brief whiff of burning, a mime to the smell of the gun when it fired. The lash of heat was a welcome sensation, and the pain was enough to spark her mind out of false hibernation. She locked the clip back in its home and cocked the gun, ready, lowering it past her hip and nearly behind her back. A sharp and violent shake of her head sent ivory and iced strings of hair scratching at her cheeks, the strands just shy of slicing her skin. She peered around the corner of the snow bank, scanning the horizon. There was only bleakness and empty tundra, the small hill she cowered behind a temporary and lonely landmark. Very soon it would be gone, swallowed by its creator and replaced by something else. Recreated as another monument that was destined to be just as inconsequential and impermanent.

A shadow lumbered through the milling white, moving slowly and purposely in her direction as the wind broke against its massive frame. She smirked, her ploy a perfect one. In a stage void of any scent beside cold, the smell of smoke was a spotlight glaring over her location.

She pressed her back against the wall of snow, the chill prodding at her even with the protection of the winter suit. Thin as a coating of paint, the material forced the heat of her body deep into her core, protecting her from the suck of the tundra. It had limits, however, as all science did. From the outside to the inside, her heat was fading. Her hands were becoming stiff and numb, a sign that the suit’s control was failing. It mattered little; if she was unable to make her shot, there was no reason to live. She was, by all opinions including her own, nameless and lost to the beast she hunted. And until he died, she was nothing.

Though the crunch of snow was a faint noise, her senses were keen and sharp, honed for this specific occasion, and she easily picked the whisper out of the roaring landscape. She forced herself into a state of silent stillness, disappearing into the backdrop effortlessly. The beast was relying only on an unusual smell, with no other point of reference to aid his attack. He was walking blindly now, the scent of smoke gone. The reek of carrion and day-old blood penetrated her senses, causing her throat to violently clench as her saliva became thick enough to choke on.

Coarse alabaster fur swayed with his stride as he emerged from the maelstrom, dense muscles shifting menacingly beneath his hide. The wide barrel of his chest expanded and receded with heaving breath as he approached, his five-yard tail thrashing and cutting the falling white. The stain of his most recent meal left the line of his jaw colored in rust, painting a tale of how unpleasantly his victims perished. He was Jessari, the feared and reviled, greatest predator of the white waste. Three men tall at the shoulder, he defied the laws of nature humans were accustomed to. On the warm and benign Earth, there had been no monsters, only animals.

A cat was a pet, small and docile, a quiet companion. A tiger had once been the largest of non-domestic felines, before it became extinct easily at human hands. In the case of man-eaters, they were few and far between, and quickly remedied by her superior race. A man might fall prey to an animal, but the creature would have no chance when men sought vengeance. At best, a tiger was six hundred pounds and limited to instinct. Jessari, by appearances, weighed over six thousand, and harbored intelligence behind those terrible eyes.

He was a monster. And five decades ago, when they crashed into his kingdom, the tyranny of his existence constructed their perpetual imprisonment. No doubt, what soiled his maw were her dead comrades. An expedition party had vanished a week ago, marking the most recent attempt to contact passing spacecrafts as yet another failure.

Underground, no signal broke through the stone caverns, the miles of ice and snow or the raging hell of the atmosphere. In her mind, the colonists should have been content. The fact that any people had even survived the crash that stranded them on this rock was a damn miracle. Never mind the fact that fifty years later they were thriving, considering the hand they had been dealt. Channels in the stone core of the frozen planet housed an entire ecosystem of plants and creatures, and enough insulation to offer comfort and keep the freeze restricted to the surface. With Jessari’s prowling an ever-present danger, exiting the cave was a dangerous task, even if it was only to gather fresh snow to melt for water just outside the entrance to the underground. To travel out far enough to break past the interference of the stone had proven deadly every time it was attempted.

Too many failures had come over the years under the pursuit of ‘salvation.’ Many friends and members of her community had perished because of that dream, a hope demolished consistently by the monster that shadowed it. She winced at the thought of those murdered, three of which had been precious to her. Her father, her uncle and her twin brother. Her gun hand began to tremble against her hip. But they had not died attempting to set a beacon for rescue; they had fallen under the pressure of fabricated destiny.

The idea had been constructed around her father and uncle—that one of them would liberate the colony’s sad existence. The reason was simple: they looked as she did. Stark, achromic hair and eyes of deep honey. Colors that mimed that of their nemesis, Jessari. Her uncle had embraced such a mission, failing easily when she was still a child. Her father, at least, had waited to die until after she and her brother had been old enough to understand why. And understanding the reason had done nothing to make her hate him less.

She recalled her mother’s screams as she’d begged him to stay. Trying to remind him how none had come close to killing the snow cat. Their arsenal was limited to small firearms. It was the only type of weapon that had been on their craft at the time of the wreck, and what little ammunition they had would never be replenished. Her mother had wailed, telling him their people were not destined to kill the god of this world; how he, Jessari, was the price for their sins. How this life was the repercussion of their trespasses into so many places that were never to be owned. Her father had scoffed in reply, spouting off the names of worlds conquered by humans since breaking from Earth, and how this would be no different.

She looked down at her gun. It had been her father’s. It was recovered when they’d found the smear of blood, which was all that had remained of him. It had also been her mother’s, for the brief moment it rested between her teeth. Parentless, she and her brother had sworn off the wretched notion, despite the protests of the colony. Their people, still locked in the fancy that their liberator was to be one of her blood, dubbed her brother the next chance at an exodus. Young and resentful, they had denied the possibility. In part, the resistance had been due to pain. Not even sixteen, they had lost everything but each other. Huddled in the dark of their empty home, they had made a promise to each other; to live and love, and not give up their identity for anything.

Years passed, and with time the pressure receded. Whatever the reason was, Jessari’s attacks became less frequent. Water gathering parties went months without a sight of the monster, though attempts to set a beacon continued to fail. For the first time since the crash, the colonists were finding complacency, she and her brother among them. Destiny and fate were forgotten to daily living and small successes, such as the birth of new colonists and dropping frequency of untimely deaths. Her brother was left to a normal life, which included marriage. Beneath the surface of the alien world, life was complacent.

When Jessari killed a gathering party that included her brother’s wife, two other adults and a young girl, the colony was devastated. Her brother was shattered, and inconsolable. They’d all believed he’d gone to mourn at his wife’s empty grave until she discovered her family’s gun was missing. She’d waited for days, living on hope, before giving way to hatred the day the gun came into her hands. When she ventured out in the cold, it had taken little effort to find the patch of scarlet snow and the only part of her family Jessari had not devoured.

Now, almost two years later, she had come to test what her people believed. She was the last of her family, last of the beast’s effigy. She saw his eyes, lanterns of fate, dancing in the receding distance. And she took aim.

“Jessari!”

To him it was only a smell, and with it, a promised taste.

The world around him rolled endlessly, colorlessly. Step over laborious step, for centuries, the snow cat had prowled. He had outlived them all, his kind, he knew, but memory was a faulty thing for the beast. Remembrance existed for him, tucked away neatly behind the daily sensations: the cold of the planet, the wind beating relentlessly against his hide, the taste of ice and snow mingled with the remnants of others’ copper on the inside of his lips, the sight of constantly moving terrain that held no constants.

Alone for years now, he had hunted the planet to the verge of extinction, including, by necessity, the cannibalism of his own species. Mouthfuls of meat had become the best of cases, enough to only dull the edge of hunger while never quelling it completely. He was leaner than he once was, the fat stores which kept him warm and alive slowly breaking down. Often he was forced to walk miles before finding something minuscule to devour.

Then something had come from beyond the clouds. He had raised his head, nostrils flaring, fanning in and out at the thought. He recalled the smell when first they came, his saviors. The scent was black, acidic, furious. It streaked part of the sky with night at midday, and screamed for the entire fall. In all his years, the cat had never smelled burning. Never tasted ash in the air. These things were not known to him or his world, their cause and reason a mystery. But that hardly mattered. To him, smoke became the call for him to elude starvation for another day.

Small, fleshy things they were. No hide and no resilience. The first he uncovered had not even moved while he chewed them, grinding easily to pieces beneath the vice of his canines. The scent of their existence, one he remembered above all things, was of helplessness. He gorged himself on their graveyard, cleaning up the bodies and parts between and within the strange, fallen creature they had crawled from. All that remained of it were bones that shone in the sunlight where they had not been dusted in black. He had tried to crack them, open them for marrow, but there was nothing but the taste of mineral and discomfort as they grated against the effort of his bites.

Finding the others was hardly challenging. Their smell dappled his world with bright warmth, rich and vivid against the standard of desolate white. They crawled far below the surface, confining themselves to the few places he could not go. But they always emerged, at one time or another, sometimes after days or weeks or longer, and he always came for them. Their foreign scent was their betrayer, and he never failed to benefit from the treason.

At times his meal was resistant, a trait that had grown in viciousness as the years progressed. They carried pain in sticks, which smelled of their arrival. It stung and punctured enough to cause mild aggravation and inspire speedy resolution.

He tossed his head against the wind, snorting and yawning as he pondered the dim memories. Of all things that stood out in his mind about this prey, it was their odd reactions to defeat. With most creatures he had ever hunted, with the exception of his own kin, terror shadowed his approach. The animals would scatter as falling snow, running to the four corners of the world and leaving their companions to fend for themselves. His current quarry was very different.

Death of their comrades inspired them, at first, to fight. Vigorously and aggressively. They would try to change their roles; to become the predator and name him prey. It failed, inevitably, and their wails, shots of ash and salty eyes never drew victory. And if they did not launch themselves to combat, they collapsed, holding his kill as if it still breathed and muttering noises that he effortlessly silenced.

The smell that touched his nostrils was something close. He paused for the briefest of intervals, tasting the sensation. The very creature he pondered was close. He continued on his path, amber eyes looking to the indistinguishable north. The source was very close. His belly brushed over the snow pack, leaving jagged lines behind his growing momentum. He was not hungry to the point of need, not yet. But instinct knew he could not leave such an opportunity untaken.

Then came the sound, loud against the environment.

“Jessari!”

It was only noise, coming from the faint figure in the tundra. It held no meaning beyond that.

Her scream tore past the wind, and the beast perked to attention, ears standing taut as he stared toward the sound. She was ready, a shot firing clean, the bullet screaming for the beast’s death. It collided but she swore, lowering the gun and taking off in a full sprint. She had missed her target, by a hairline, not hitting his eye but just above it, tearing off most of his left ear instead of killing him. A roar deafened the wind, and her insides curdled at the sound. Missing and wasting bullets were the things that would get her killed.

The ovals of light around her feet hummed, hissing and sputtering as they seared what ice they brushed over. Her boots were created to run on snow her weight should have crushed, skating her across the surface as the monstrous lion drove angels of death through the drifts behind her. She did not look back, eyes locked on the white abyss before her. Jessari was built for this; she was merely a clumsy interloper on his terrain. His speed and agility was unrivaled here, she knew. The gap between them was closing. With his crushing paws large enough to cover her body twice over, they acted not only as weapons but also as the balance and distribution of weight that kept his monstrous body sprinting atop the ocean of snow. There was no hope to outrun him, no chance to survive through flight. It was now and here, the end or a new beginning. She halted abruptly and tapped her boots against one another, disabling the tread.

She plunged like a stone, down through the powder. It swallowed her presence, leaving a tunnel in her wake. The snow around her quaked as the beast bellowed, the apparent loss of his desire spurning rage. Then there was only stillness, and the sound of deep lungs filling and emptying mere feet above her. She squeezed the hilt of the gun, so hard her knuckles creaked in pain. An eddy of white wisped over the edge and dusted her face, as a black nose the size of her head filled the hole, casting her in shadow. The maw opened, the monster tasting her scent across the width of his tongue. Moisture, comprised of melted snow and murky saliva leaked from his mouth, raining toward her and smelling of death. His canines, stained by age and blood, formed two curves the length of her arms that snapped forward to claim her.

She fired. The result was a cascade of wet heat accompanied by a howl that shook her to the core.

This was true pain.

His bellow threatened to break the sky. Heat and blood sprayed from his nose and mouth and bathed the ground in vibrant red. The sensation of scent was suddenly torn away and demolished after being saturated in acrid smoke. Immediately, his existence was fractured and, somehow, diminished.

It was no longer about eating; it was about killing.

This was about hate.

Red dampened the hole around her, steam winding excitedly up and away into the light. She dared a smile under her mask at the smell of fresh blood, but the expression faltered as quickly as it touched her lips. A single swipe of a massive paw, claws reaching, enraged, shattered her icy cavern and sent her sprawling sky born.

She flew, a tangle of limbs, and crashed hard against a snow bank. Winded, she forced the pain aside, fumbling to her feet and glancing franticly over her shoulder. He was racing, already, his snout a bloodied wreck. It mattered little, however, his sense of smell was no longer needed; she was the crimson flag on a colorless field of battle, anointed with the success of pulling first blood.

She was sinking as she tried to run, the snow breaking apart and dragging her in. With a grunt, she drove her feet together, and the metal sensors on her boots touched and activated. With two steps she was free, staggering and falling sideways as Jessari lunged for the kill.

The pure force of his mass flying by sent her soaring backwards, but her weapon, through everything, never left her hand. Two shots fired as she was cast back to the snow, accompanied by her own cry of hate. One soared high, nipping the beast’s fur and sending strands free to be consumed by the tundra.

The other was true, into his side and between two ribs. She knew she’d hit her mark by the bubbles that popped immediately from the wound, and the cry of drowning pain that followed.

She rolled with her sloppy landing, her boots cutting ice and sending snowflakes dancing. Hurt pounded the length of her spine, as her lungs strained to recapture the air that was lost. Her head orbited, vision spotted in gray haze and black. Color flared in the distance, beyond the crimson and white sea. Amber, seething with hate. Amber, just as the mirror she had stared into for as many years as she had lived. It was the only clarity in the storm.

She squeezed the trigger as she collapsed forward, spending her last bullet. The snow cushioned her fall this time, cradling her body instead of breaking her against it. She closed her eyes, pressing her forehead to the cold ground, trying to find air between adrenaline and agony. Waiting for the jaws to close around her head and end it. But there was only the sound of the lifeless wind and a sudden stillness that was as misplaced in this world as her kind.

With hesitation, she craned her neck upwards, squinting in the mist as her vision settled back to normal. She ripped the mask off her face and inhaled deeply, the icy sting of the sub-zero air rushing down her throat and into her lungs reassuring her that she was indeed alive. She pressed her feet together, silencing the hum of her boots as she cautiously pulled herself to her knees.

In a heap, Jessari lay wasted, mere inches away from her.

It was only a few breaths, a drop of time. The flash of the attack, and then half of his sight was taken. It was strange, the pain suddenly gone as the giant cat crumpled weakly against the snow. He inhaled deeply, tasting copper on the back of his tongue, warm and misplaced. Now all his sensations were slipping, scattering to the horizons and the wind he had stood against for so long. Even the cold seemed distant.

So this was to be hunted. This was death.

Had he possessed the inclination or the understanding of all its irony, the creature may have smiled or perhaps even laughed.

Instead, he simply died.

With a careful motion, she rested the empty gun on her thigh and peeled off a glove. She extended a trembling hand, touching a patch of fur that remained white on the devil’s cheek. A colorless orb stared vacantly her way, the other lost to her perfect aim. To her surprise, the fur was fine and silken, and lingered with fading warmth. She traced the line of his jaw with the curiosity of a child, then ran a finger over the arch of a once dangerous canine.

There was no smile now, only grim satisfaction as she damped her fingers in scarlet. With care, she drew a line on her own forehead, his blood so hot it scorched her chilled skin.

Her amber gaze lingered on the conquered, claiming the identity that was to be her own. Her name, she had cast aside, when the hunt became her legacy. At one time, she had missed it. No longer. She whispered her words to the dead monster, her heart thundering in her chest.

“I am Jessari.”

She was everything the name had come to stand for.

And nothing of the animal at her feet.

E. Anderson has been telling stories all her life. Her love of prose has carried her through a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and a promising career as a journalist. Raised in Delaware, she now lives and works in Washington state. “Savage” is her first published work of fiction.