The world outside her eyes was tinged with pinkish-grey, her vision tainted with decay. It seemed to her it had been stained by the outflow of blood from that first twitching, screaming body she'd dug her teeth into.
Her clothes were in bloodstained tatters, her memories too. She remembered flashes of who she once was, and even her memories of her current half-life were patchy, half-remembered flashes of pure horror.
Her hair, already ash-blonde, was grave-bleached to a ghostly white, hanging over her eyes. She wished she could fade away as easily as its colour, just stop being, but she stayed on this planet, which obstinantly refused to let her leave.
Sometimes she caught glimpses of herself in the dark windows of the city, in shards of mirror, in the wide-open eyes of the dead, and the sight repulsed her. She had been beautiful once, big dark eyes, perfect porcelain skin, full lips. Now she sickened herself, with grey skin hanging loose, lips drawn in towards her mouth, eyes glowing an obscene yellow. Her nails that she had once kept so carefully polished and manicured were curved claws now, brown with old blood.
She was more grotesque than any nightmare. The word surfaced in her half-conscious mind from time to time. Nightmare. She wondered if this might be a nightmare, but she never slept, so it couldn't be, could it?
She longed to die. Really die. Or to forget, like everyone else, forget that she was ever alive, ever beautiful, ever loved. Forget life had ever been anything except this daily horrorshow, the gnawing hunger, the carnage, the lumbering half-dead. She was one of them. More than anything, she hated that.
So she cried.
She cried for the things she remembered, and for the things she didn't, ignoring the emptiness clawing at her disgusting belly, wailing and whimpering into the echoing darkness. She cried, shutting out the monstrous world that surrounded her now, colourless hair blocking it from her tainted eyes, the heels of her bloody hands doing nothing to stem the tears.
She cried because she wanted to live, and because she wanted to die, and most of all she cried because she sickened herself to the core, and there was nothing left to do but cry.
She sat alone in the darkness, hearing nothing but her own sobs echoing around the building. It didn't matter if they heard her, they'd done their worst, and she was one of them now. She could wail and cry to her heart's content, lost in her private misery in a world that didn't care. Her crying erased time, made the hours flow with the minutes into nothingness.
Then it came.
The heavy tread of a boot beside her made her look up without thinking; they didn't wear boots. They didn't breathe, either, the harsh panting breath of a man coming down from an adrenaline boost. She met the eyes of the breather, for a moment forgetting what she was. And he saw her.
Fuck, he saw her.
His eyes widened, and she remembered she wasn't human any more. She remembered the monster she'd become.
She screamed in rage and horror. Why did he have to look? Why did he have to see her, hideous, dead, colourless, bloody? She couldn't bear it! She tried to shout NO, tried to shout DON'T LOOK AT ME, but could only muster a wordless screech of rage that went beyond humiliation, beyond pain, turned her sorrow outwards. She just needed him to stop looking, to unsee it, she couldn't bear to be seen like this!
Flying at him, claws outstretched, stop looking, just go away, just be gone, just leave me alone, she tore the air with her screams, lashing out blindly at him. She barely noticed the bullets puncturing her back, her legs, her arms, she just felt that relentless rage and the need to erase forever what he had seen, to remain invisible in her ugliness and wrongness.
Warm blood gushed over her hands and wrists, spattering her arms. She pinned him to the ground, ripping at his throat, at his eyes, at his heart, just forget, just forget, just go, just be away, why did you look, why did you see me in all my horror, this isn't me, it's not me, this isn't how I look, don't look!
It took long moments of violence before she realised he was already gone. She stared down at her handiwork through the pink-grey mist. Bloody, casting grisly reflections on the walls from the pools of blood around him, yet his open, glazed eyes still stared up at her. Dimly, she heard shouting, screams, gunshots, and he was still seeing her.
What she had done made her gorge rise, made the tears come again, confirmed again what she was. She let out a wail and ran from the terrible evidence of her obscenity, hands clamped over her horrible, horrible face.
When the bullet pierced the back of her head, for a split second, under her hands, she smiled, and some of her old beauty slipped in behind the mask of dead flesh.
Then sweet oblivion claimed her, took away her memories of happiness and her memories of horror.
She didn't need to cry any more.