The voices of the damned were filling my head.
"Lieutenant. Do you hear that?" I wondered.
"Mm? No ma'am. I don't hear anything."
"I see."
"Is something wrong?"
"A pack of ghouls, due west from here."
"Ghouls, huh?"
"Let's take a look."
With little time to spare, we re-positioned ourselves atop a building that had the overlay of the town's commercial district. All-the-while this unnatural fog began setting in - hampering visibility.
"A marketplace..." I observed past the horizon.
"Piles of em', captain...meters high too." The lieutenant observed, through his binoculars.
The township's population, now decaying cadavers, were piled on top of one another in endless rows of carrion.
The ghouls came to collect their daily stipend from the looks of things.
Voracious creatures...some far to eager to sink their fangs into human flesh. They seemingly were euphoric at the selection presented before them. You could tell this was a feast they don't typically have the luxury of partaking in: so they were making the most of it.
Energetically biting into severed limbs.
Dipping their crimsoned beaks in shattered thoracic cages.
Plucking out an eye-ball or two, and meticulously swallowing them whole while appreciating the taste it left in their gullets.
Some played around with the remains: bones neatly picked clean became play things - the skulls, in particular, made for great sport amongst the young.
Others still, far more hedonistic, would fight off their cohorts in an effort to hoard as much as they could. Or perhaps they were competing over the choice cuts?
And then there was-
"That one..." The lieutenant, too, was quick to notice.
Though seemingly vile to witness, most of the creatures here perform on instinct, and instinct alone. They who eat flesh, do so, for survival. It's to fill one of the baser needs. In other words, though primitive and barbaric, I see no cruelty in what they're doing. It's in their nature.
But that one...
Worlds apart from the rest, this particular fiend was syphoning blood from the cadavers. Vials were adorning his belt: Some filled, others empty, yet.
This one was voracious but in a far different sense. It did not partake in flesh, instead, likened themselves a craftsmen in the way they went about skinning the cadavers, pulling braids of hair from the cadavers, and cutting off fingers and toes from the cadavers.
"An abnormal..." The lieutenant remarked.
"We found our mark."