Excerpt: Ex Nihilo

The monster batted the bullet out of the air with its enormous hand, which sprayed blood onto its face. Her pale, taught skin still hurrying to keep up with the sudden growth easily sealed the wound the moment the bullet passed through and she was up and behind him before he even had a chance to register his bullet had connected. As punishment for the flesh wound, she ripped off his head and severed his spinal cord with her teeth. In a flash, she was already on the next soldier, tearing his arms off and using them to club the others to death. Rather than fight or freeze, one soldier thought to run but received his armless comrade in the chest and they both were sent flying into a tree. Pulling her arm back and focusing her anger, Rage coiled back and put her fist through both their chests and into the tree.
Turning back to the final survivor, whom she’d decided she would devour alive, she pounced on him and opened her bloody maw just as he shrieked, “Hideous freak!”
Not noticing she’d stopped, he continued to babble, driven over the brink of sanity, “Bloody whore! Never have I seen anything so repulsive, I hope her people get to see what she became! Fucking gorgon! Freakish mutant! Affront to Jesus, to nature, to God Almighty, to… god.”
“God, what have we done?” he whispered.
Her appetite lost, she broke his spine in several places and watched as the life fled his deranged eyes. Stepping away from his disheveled, impossibly bent corpse, she caught her reflection in the pool of blood forming around her feet. Looking at her misshapen face, her short black hair matter with blood, she decided that she was the Oni after all. Whispering, she wondered, “Am I… an affront to nature?”
Just then, a haunting tune was carried to her by the wind. Perhaps her transformation heightened her senses or perhaps she’d gained new ones altogether, but it didn’t matter. Without hesitation, she lumbered off towards the noise.
A young Native American boy sat in the middle of a clearing by a stream, playing a flute made of bone. He was dressed in the garb of a shaman, although he’d taken his moccasins off to let his feet bathe in the river. An assembly of all sorts of forest animals had encircled him and, although they parted to make room for her, they did not flee from Rage’s presence.
The boy did not acknowledge her until he had finished his song, and even then only in a roundabout way, standing and speaking to the circle of animals around him. “Only in nature can humanity find peace. It is odd how far we have strayed from that simple truth. We burn and kill the Earth as if we are separate when we know at our core that we are not. I fear that things will only get worse from here, what do you think Little Wolf?”
He paused and crouched next to the Wolf who had traveled many miles on a bloody paw just to hear the song up close. It whimpered softly but nuzzled the boy. Moving on, he continued, “Natural beauty is a strange term because of course nature is inherently beautiful. Only the unnatural can be unattractive, and even then it is often partially redeemed by its natural parts. I am a Shaman and I have traveled to many places and seen even more things. In the whole world, the only thing I have found truly ugly is the destruction of nature.”
“Am I ugly?” When Rage spoke it was in a deep, guttural bastardization of her normal speech and she was embarrassed to use it before such a pure being.
The young boy regarded her carefully and spoke simply and without hesitation, “No. You too are beautiful.”
“How— how can you say that?” she asked, a tear running down her deformed cheek. “Am I not hideous? I am the worst of humanity; that which drives people to kill and hurt and rape. I am…”
“I know who you are,” the Shaman nodded, stepping close to her. “The wind brought me your words just as it brought you my song. Everything is connected as every living thing is as I am— Nature.”
“So,” she paused, gathering her thoughts. “Are you… Different? Like me?”
He blinked, confused by her roundabout words. Then he giggled genuinely, looking again the seven years old his body was. Hugging her gigantic torso he replied happily, “You could say that.”
Tears flowing freely now, the Avenger hugged him tightly with hands that were no longer talons. She began to shrink back to her human form as she thought, “I think I might be falling in love with this boy”.
A gun shot sounded in the distance and the wolf growled at their feet. Reflexively, Rage tensed her hand and the claws shot back out into the boy’s back. Piercing his lungs, he was unable to even scream before he died.
The magic broken, the wolf snarled and snatched up a nearby rabbit. Blood splattered everywhere.