Fang gang

Fang Gang

Chapter 1

The foreboding shadows of looming trees swept across her face as she stepped briskly up the slight slope to the park. The lamps lining the street turned the muddy puddles of that day's rain into golden pools. Ahead the moon shown like a spotlight on three figures lingering in the park.

She stepped onto the sea of sand, began to make her way over to a swing, her feet sinking like those of peter the fisherman in the ocean of sediment. The seat of the swing seemed to cradle and rock her like a mother, as the sound of creaking chains lulled her to sleep.

Then, it seemed as if she was underwater, for the more she tried to breathe, the fainter she became. There was a sharp pain in her wrist, that drug itself up her arm. A hot and sticky fluid began to trickle over her palm, and off her fingertips.

She awoke to the soft feel of flannel sheets, and a soft mattress. Under her head was a pillow that smelled enticingly of lavender. She rolled over and took a deep breath of the case. As if on cue of the scent of lavender, it seemed as though a greater force gripped her hand, without her even realizing it and she reached under her pillow. Slowly she drew a candy cane, whiter than the first silently fallen snow, with a single blood red stripe. She licked her lips, and suddenly she could taste blood, sweet, warm blood, dribbling into her mouth. But some dripped. A single drop splashed onto the candy cane, and she watched as another bloody stripe curled sinisterly around it. Then a sliver of shining blood began to meander ever so slowly up her arm. It twined around her thin, now pail limb, until it spelled out, in gleaming bloody letters: "fang gang". Again she watched as the blood slithered up her shoulder and back to her lips. The words were gone, for now, and a new feeling lurked in a dark corner of her mind, sensing the dawning of a new life.

A life she'd been hungering for, more than the blood that now stained her lips. It was a life of chance, success, hunger, fulfillment, passion, drive, and fate. But the sun was dawning, and with the rising sun, came the need to sleep. She needed it, lots of it, if she was going to hunt.