CW: blood, gore, extreme violence, everyday sexism
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"Smile, love!"
He was hanging, as is the way, from the passenger side of
his best friend's car, as it sat stopped at the traffic light. She, or rather,
the creature he had assumed was a she, was standing by the roadside as if
waiting to cross, head dipped and gazing fixedly at the ground. At his shout,
it lifted its head, and its unblinking stare caught him full on. The face split
into an unnaturally large, rictus parody of a grin, unveiling rows of too
small, too sharp teeth. Suddenly less sure of himself, he stammered out a
feeble, "Wh-what's the matter wi-" before the lights changed and they
drove off.
He slunk back into his seat and said to his friend,
"That was weird." But before he could elaborate, his friend glanced
in the rear-view mirror and swore, "She's fucking chasing us! Why'd you
always have to say something?" Turning round, he could see that the
creature was indeed running towards them, down the middle of the road,
completely ignoring all the other traffic braking, horns honking, drivers
cursing. His friend sped up, missing their turning to stay on the main road
longer and put some distance between themselves and this crazed being.
Impossibly, it was gaining on them.
"What the hell? How is she doing that?" the driver
asked, glancing repeatedly between the mirror and the road ahead as he swerved
to overtake the cars that were sticking to the speed limit.
"I don't think that's a she," he replied quietly.
He watched the creature's dogged pursuit in the wing mirror he'd repositioned,
slunk down in his seat. The horrific grin was visible even from this distance
and grew ever larger as the creature grew closer.
"Oh shit!"
They'd ran a red light, turning a corner too fast and his
friend had to slam on the brakes to avoid crashing into stationary traffic.
While the driver collected himself, he urged "Get on with it, go that
way," pointing through the oncoming cars at a car park some distance ahead.
"I can't go that way, are you crazy?"
But it was too late. While they weren't watching the
creature had caught up with them, and the first they knew about it was when it
landed heavily on the roof of the car.
"Oh shit," his friend said again, and desperately
started manoeuvring the car to escape the traffic jam, but stopped when the
creature's grinning face appeared in the windscreen in front of them.
The windscreen glass shattered as one arm punched straight
through it, and the creature, hanging from the car roof with unnatural
flexibility, reached straight through and pulled him from the passenger street
onto the bonnet. It jumped down on top of him, cutting short his screams with a
second punch that tore through his flesh into his chest. Its hand re-emerged
from his torso, dripping in viscera, and the creature mashed the bloody,
unidentifiable, organ into its gaping open mouth.
All the while his friend looked on, unable to hear anything
above the sound of his own screaming.
The creature feasted until his friend finally stopped being
able to make a sound, his throat red raw, tears streaming down his cheeks,
pressed into his seat as far away from the thing as he could make himself. It
turned and looked at him unblinkingly, jaw still stretched wide, blood smeared
across its face. In a broken, inhuman voice that sounded like nails on a
blackboard it said,
"Smile."
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