Prologue: Bird of Prey
The wind gusts forced the trees to sway dangerously in the wind, many of their branches nearly breaking windows of nearby buildings. The small coastal town shook violently in the wind, the boards the structures consisted of nearly flying apart. The women and children hid in the houses while the men tried to secure their supplies. Many of their attempts were quickly disrupted or abandoned due to injuries incurred by the wind.
As the weather quickly worsened, many of the families moved to the local shelter, no longer concerned with the state of their possessions. Hail and sleet rained down on the town, obliterating many of the structures. The wood and mud holding their houses together stood no match to the downward velocity of the natural projectiles.
The sickening crunch of wood surrounded the villagers' safe haven, resembling the sound of a predator devouring bones. The children covered their ears, hiding from the hideous noise, while the parents clung to their children, uncertain of their fate lest the storm worsen furthermore.
Among this chaos and fear, a little girl, no older than 5 years old, listened to her world in wonder. The sounds did not make her afraid, but encouraged her curiosity. The whipping wind that had stung her face did not pain her, but made her question what caused such things. Her world was new. She only saw its beauty.
The storm shelter for the entire town was large, in comparison to the girl. It was about 50 yards long, 12 feet high, 15 yards across and about 10 feet below the surface of the ground. The stairwell used as an entryway was covered in dirt and debris raining from the storm doors that sealed the entrance.
The girl wore a light pink t-shirt, and a pair of oversized coveralls that pulled her long, black hair often. Today, her hair was tied up in a pretty, pink ribbon that dangled onto her neck and tickled her. She'd been having her mom help her cut it when the storm had started. Her tennis shoes were extremely worn down from months of working the fields with her family, earning her meals as everyone else had to. She'd preferred the work of men to the womanly work her family considered normal of a five year old girl.
The storm shelter was an old rum storage from the days where pirates reigned over some of the Costa Rican islands. The smell of well-aged rum still lingered in the air as the families moved farther back into the cellar. While the women huddled in the corner, protecting the children and themselves, the men attempted to feed steel bars through the insides of the doors to ensure they would remain closed.
Once they'd accomplished this task, the men joined their families in the corners, covering them with blankets, feeding them some of the supplies they'd stocked, giving them water, and, some, giving them first aid.
The smell of blood filled the air as one of the men, who'd been injured by a piece of wood becoming lodged in his thigh, attempted to remove the object and stint the bleeding. He was extremely afraid as he began to realize the dire severity of his situation; he'd struck an artery.
No-one noticed his life-and-death struggle except for the little girl. She didn't know what to do or how to handle the situation, but she slowly approached the man and gently placed her hand on his leg to try to put him at ease. She felt his hand grip hers, his blood beginning to congeal on his palm. The puddle of his blood slowly reached for her shoes. He smiled, faintly, at her as she watched the shine disappear from his eyes and he slipped into the darkness of death.
The little girl, somehow, knew he was dead. She slipped her hand from his and wiped the blood from her hand on her coveralls, before walking, slowly, over to her mother. Once her mother saw all the blood, she immediately panicked. She frantically asked the girl where the blood came from and how she could be so calm if she was hurt. The young girl calmly explained that she was not hurt, but that she had tried to help a man who was hurt. She told her mother she thought he was dead. Her mother immediately looked to the body that her daughter pointed at and all the villagers quickly surrounded the body, many attempting some sort of care to try to revive the man, but, to no avail.
As the storm continued, the mourning for the dead man began. The families gathered, painting honorable symbols on him and cleaning him up for burial. They took their time with it, riding out the storm and going through the entire ceremony, despite the lengthy process it was. The storm was nearly completely gone by the time they finished the ceremony and carried the body to the local doctor, who also was a practiced mortician.
The little girl handed the mortician a small piece of paper she'd found in the man's hands, allowing him to discover it was a last will and testament. It was brief and proved useless considering the aftermath of the storm.
Later that evening, the mortician practiced his gruesome art, cleaning the leg wound and filling the corpse with embalming fluid. Once the body was prepared, he began to redress the corpse in an outfit the family had decided upon. As he removed the trousers, however, he noticed a wound other than the hole left by the wood that had pierced his thigh. Upon closer examination, the mortician discovered it was a bite-mark. He cast the bite before clothing the body, and called in a medical examiner from the city. He extracted what he could from the blood of the corpse, which the doctor had preserved to send to the city for use in transfusions.
Upon analyzing the blood, though, it was discovered that it contained a type of nerve-damaging venom that, when DNA was analyzed, matched no living animal on record. The analysis also showed that even if the man hadn't died of severe blood-loss, he would've died from the venom very rapidly, anyway.
The results of inspecting the bite-shaped wound on the man's leg yielded similar results, leaving all of the locals in the region completely dumbfounded by the discovery. Once the research was done, the scientist from the city sent the body back, where it was quickly buried and the families moved on. However, when the scientist submitted a request to investigate the man's death to his superiors using the evidence he'd already found, not only did his request get denied, but the evidence mysteriously disappeared.
