The first hot rays of the cruel red sun made their way through the cracks in the stables, and the Hawk's eyes blinked at the unwelcome intrusion of them.
The stench of the Red Eyes filled her nostrils like they did every... well, morning is the only word, but it wasn't quite a real morning. Black World didn't have what you would call a morning, exactly. It had a time in which the bad became worse, and that was what you might call the start of the day.
She looked around the stable at her Red Eyes, disgusting creatures, she thought. She hated them. Each day, she hated them. She couldn't wait until they were all dead.
It wouldn't be long.
He
made her raise them. He hated them also, she thought. Or at least he didn't ever come around them.
He didn't come around
her
much either, though. Her Master probably felt the same way she felt about the Red Eyes, that he couldn't wait until she was killed.
She put that thought out of her mind. Nothing she could do about that. He had enslaved her as thoroughly as he had ever enslaved anyone, there was nothing she could do but obey. If he sent her to die, then die she would. Same as she was going to send the Red Eyes to die. All dumb animals, going to die.
She looked around the stables, long, dark, dirty wood. She looked over her inventory, the stinking buckets, the cans, the stacks and stacks of Styrofoam plates still white in plastic sleeves.
She lowered herself down silently from the rafters.
Her eyes narrowed. There was something green down there.
What was
that?
She knelt down by it, her lips curling up over sharp fangs as she realized what it was.
A cucumber. A single green cucumber, with a single bite taken out of it.
She hissed.
This changes things, she thought.
***
The Hawk pounded on his door. She wasn't sure he would be there. Maybe he had gone back to Earth.
But he hadn't. The door of the cabin opened, and his long face appeared bobbing in the doorway.
"Yes," he asked, emotionlessly.
She held up the cucumber.
"She has been here," the Hawk told him. "She came in the night, while I was asleep. She left this."
His black eyes contorted in his face.
She didn't remember him looking quite like this at first, she thought. Granted, he had transformed her eyes during the process of enslaving her and turning her into his killer. Made her vision better at night, sharper, able to see incredible distances and find prey.
So maybe her eyes looked at him differently or something.
But she didn't think so.
It seemed to her that he was losing himself. His face no longer adhered to the structure of a human face at this point, the jaw was a long, narrow point. Sunken cheeks and high, bony cheek bones with black orbs sunken deep within them. His skin was the color of ash.
"How could she get here," he hissed. "How could she get in where you are without you or the Red Eyes noticing?"
"I don't know," she told him. "But she is sending me a message."
"With a cucumber?" he looked at her skeptically. "What kind of message is that?"
