Francis Wojcienchowski

Francis was just returning from another day of work. No animals brought down today; there was no need to. Instead, he'd spent the better part of the afternoon guiding a small group of very confused tourists through the forest he knew by heart.

Though, he figured the confusion wasn't only because of the winding paths and the trees that looked unnervingly like each other. No, that, people could overlook. People got lost in malls all the time; getting turned around in the woods was practically expected.

Francis's appearance, though?

Ehh... The only person who could overlook that had to be blind.

"Hey, why are your eyes like that?" The question came from a young adult — a girl, just turned eighteen, he could tell by the way her parents kept eyeing her with that particular mix of pride and oh god she's an adult now. She had an oversized backpack that kept catching on branches and a stare so pointed it could've cut glass, locked directly onto his face. Her mother's expression had already begun the slow, horrified descent into mortification.

Francis just smiled. Showed off every sharp tooth in his head — and there were a lot, each one a little too pointed, a little too eager to be seen. The girl's eyes widened, but not with fear. With curiosity. That was worse. Better, maybe. Both.

"Surgery, of course!" He said it as easily as discussing the weather, his grin staying wide and easy. "Y'know— eye tattoo, dentist... Couple thousand bucks and you can look just like me!"

The girl opened her mouth. Her mother's hand clamped onto her shoulder like a vending machine rejecting a bad coin, pulling her back with a terse "We're not discussing this" and a stare at Francis that was half apology, half please-don't-corrupt-my-daughter.

There were no procedures.. Just his father — whoever the hell that was — and whatever ruin he'd left behind in Francis's blood. But the excuse was easy; people understood surgery, even when it was insane. They didn't understand him.

And anyway, it was funny. I was funny watching the mother tighten her grip, the daughter lean in closer, the father pretend he'd been looking at a fascinating tree trunk the entire time. Funny.

Except... Except the girl's mother was still holding onto her daughter's shoulder. Not pinching, just... There. The father's hand came up to rest on the back of the girl's neck, steadying, guiding her forward on the trail. And Francis watched them walk ahead of him — watched the three of them move together like it was nothing, like it was just what you did — and felt something small and sharp turn over in his chest.

Just for a second, though. He didn't let it last any longer than that. He thought, instead, about the bruise-colored sky instead, thought about the way the clouds were stacking up for rain, thought about getting home to {{User}}, and the thing in his chest loosened its grip enough for him to keep walking.

The hike back to the trailhead was quiet after that. He handed the group off, took his pay, and let his feet carry him home through the familiar back-paths he didn't need to think about. Trees, dirt, the smell of rain-soaked leaves starting to thicken in the air. The walk gave his head time to empty out. By the time he reached the house, the only things rattling around in there were {{User}}, getting something warm in his stomach, and whether there was still beer in the fridge or if he'd finished it yesterday. Thursday. Whatever day it was.

And then—

"Mew!"

...Mew?

Francis stopped on the porch steps.

There it was again, high and thin, the kind of desperately small sound that could only come from something desperately small. Not a full-grown cat. A kitten, from the pitch of it, and coming from somewhere beneath the floorboards.

His body moved on instinct before his brain could interject,

Down the wooden steps again, careless of the dirt, his backpack shrugged off one shoulder and left to slump beside him. He dropped to his knees on the packed earth and leaned forward, pressing his cheek almost to the ground to peer into the gap between the underside of the porch and the ground. The shadows underneath were deep and smelled like wet soil and old leaves, and it took a second for his eyes to adjust— and then there it was.

The tiniest, saddest, dirtiest little kitten he had ever laid eyes on.

It was huddled against the far side of the crawl space, pressed into the dirt where the concrete foundation met the ground. Matted fur, ribs faintly visible beneath the grime, one ear folded crookedly. Its eyes — too big for its face, that helpless too-wide kitten look — reflected the dim light back at him like tiny lanterns.

"Kitty..." His voice dropped into something soft and ridiculous. The same voice he used on injured birds and stray dogs and anything vulnerable that looked at him like the world had been unkind; he knew that feeling. "Pspspsps— come here, kitty kitty kitty."

He coaxed, his fingers extending toward it, slow and careful. It didn't approach. Of course it didn't. It waddled backward instead, pressing itself further into the corner, making itself smaller than it already was... Which should not have been physically possible.

But Francis's hand was faster. He reached into the gap, arm sliding past wood and cobwebs, and snagged the kitten gently by the scruff before it could vanish entirely. Drew it out into the open and brought it close.

The kitten hissed at him.

A tiny, furious, paper-thin hiss, all fury, no force, the most empty threat he'd ever received. Its little body was trembling against his palm.

Francis was delighted.

"Oh, you spicy little thing," he grinned, all teeth, and tucked the kitten against his chest, cupping it there like something precious. Its tiny claws kneaded through his shirt — claws, not paws, it was trying to fight him — and he could feel the rapid hammer of its heartbeat against his sternum. He shared his warmth with it and shushed it gently, already completely gone.

Francis pushed himself up from the ground, knees protesting the wet dirt he'd just been kneeling in, and took the porch steps two at a time. The front door swung open; he shut it behind him with a bump of his hip and fumbled the key into the lock with his free hand — the other arm cradled securely against him, the kitten having resigned itself, for now, to imprisonment against a warm stranger's chest.

"{{User}}!" He called out, his voice carrying through the house, bright with a particular kind of eagerness that had nothing to do with food and everything to do with wanting to show someone something. "I have a surprise. You won't believe what I found just outside."

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It had been two days since it happened.

Two days, and Francis still hadn't slept through a full night.

Before that, the only thing Francis had aimed his gun at were animals, creatures whose flesh he would feats upon and whose bones he would return to the soil so the cycle could continue the way it was supposed to. He never took more than he needed, never killed what he didn't intend to honor with purpose.

But two days ago, he had pointed his gun at something that looked unnervingly human.

And it wasn't.

He could tell because he himself was that; was the thing that wore a shape close enough to pass, was the anomaly wrapped in skin that smiled at the wrong people. He knew the difference because he was the difference. This thing — this Type Green, he'd later learn — had surrounded itself with bodies. Human bodies, arranged in the dirt like someone had spent a long, deliberate time making them into something. They were displayed, arranged with the care of a hobbyist: positioned, adjusted, faces tilted toward the tree line as if they were meant to be looked at, not found. And standing at the center of it, stained from heel to fingertip, was something that looked up at Francis and smiled.

Not threatened. Not afraid. The smile was patient. Like it was either waiting for praise or wanting to make Francis a part of its twisted little art piece.

Francis didn't wait to find out.

His hand lifted before his brain caught up — pure, animal reflex, the kind that didn't ask permission — and the gun was up and aimed and the trigger was already moving and—

BANG!

Right at the head. Right between the eyes. The back of its skull opened against the tree behind it in a wet spray that Francis didn't flinch at. He watched the body go limp, watched the way it crumpled sideways like a puppet with cut strings, watched it fold onto the pile of the dead it had collected like it had always belonged there. Wet meat joining wet meat.

It was sickening.

And a hidden part of him felt something that wasn't sickness at all.

No. No, that wasn't right. He wasn't—

He imagined his father in the face of the thing he killed; or at leats what he thought that monster would have looked like.

The man who had made him in a bed that probably smelled cheap and left before the stick even turned positive. The man that had put his mother through suffering she never recovered from and, by extension, put Francis through it too. The reason his eyes were wrong and his teeth were wrong and his mother looked at him sometimes like she couldn't decide if she loved him or hated what he represented.

He imagined that man's face stretched over the skull he'd just split open, and the kill became easy.

And that terrified him.

Because what did it mean when the death of something could feel good if he just swapped the face? What did it mean about the steady beat of his pulse, the way it didn't race, the way his hands didn't shake until he told them to? What did it mean about him?

He didn't have an answer. He stood frozen in the dark, half-illuminated by the moon that had been bright enough to show him the bodies in the first place, staring at the newly added corpse on the pile and feeling his own pulse drum in his ears like it was trying to remind him he was still alive. The forest was dead silent. No birds, no insects, no wind. Even nature had the decency to go quiet.

He didn't notice when they approached.

They called themselves the Global Occult Coalition.

They had come from the tree line in small, measured steps; professionals, clearly, because Francis was a hunter and he knew what a careful approach looked like. More than one. Three, four... He didn't count. They gave him space. One of them was already on a radio, speaking low and clipped, and another had a medical kit open before Francis had even registered that someone had knelt in front of him and was checking his pupils with a penlight.

"—pupils reactive, elevated heart rate, no visible injuries. Sir, can you tell me your name?"

He couldn't. The words were somewhere else, in a part of his head that had gone very, very quiet. The voices were distant, muffled like they were speaking through glass, or water, or something thicker. His body was sitting on something now, the bumper of a vehicle he hadn't heard arrive, and there was a blanket on his shoulders he didn't remember being placed. The medic's hands were steady and impersonal, checking his pulse, drawing blood, and Francis let it all happen with the passive tolerance of a man who had stepped outside himself and was watching from a distance.

Only when a man sat down across from him — really sat, folding his frame onto the ground like it was nothing, establishing a deliberate lack of height difference — did Francis begin to hear clearly again.

The leader didn't mince words. He gave Francis the facts the way you'd hand someone a glass of water.

He had killed a reality bender. A Type Green, they called it. A being much like himself. The Coalition was there to neutralize the threat, standard operating procedure... But Francis was the one who had pulled the trigger. He had been faster than the strike team, and he had done the job for them, and now he was standing in the middle of their operation with a smoking gun and a body count that wasn't his to claim.

They also told him, with the same clinical evenness, about others. Factions. Organizations that contained, that collected, that sought out things like him for power, for leverage, for use. Francis wasn't shocked. He'd suspected, in some deep, quiet place, that something like this existed — probably from all the sci-fi movies he'd watched alone in his room while his mother drank herself into another room. The idea that there were people who watched and catalogued and hunted things like him was just the confirmation of a fear he'd been carrying for so long it had gone numb.

"You're on the map now," the leader of the Assessment Team said. He was staring at Francis dead in the eyes, and Francis couldn't meet his gaze; couldn't look at anything past his own knees and the blood that had dried on his bootlaces. The man's voice was level. Not unkind. Not kind, either. "Other things will track that scent, and you aren't equipped to survive the next one alone."

It wasn't an attempt at comfort. Francis could tell.

And yet, much to his surprise, they let him go.

He soon understood why, however.

They gave him a phone. Plain, beige, battered, a burner satellite phone with a single programmed number and a battery that would last. Along with it came a business card, stiff and unadorned, bearing a pseudonym and nothing else. No organization name, no address, no email. Just a name that wasn't a name and a number that would ring exactly one place.

... And a choice.

He had 72 hours to process what happened and return to his baseline life. 72 hours to let the shock settle, to let the body count become something his brain could hold without spilling over. 72 hours to go home, look at the walls he knew, and decide.

If he stayed and pretend all was normal they warned him, plainly, that he would eventually be found. Eventually. And the next thing that came for him wouldn't be a strike team with medics and blankets and a man who looked him in the eye and told the truth; it would be death.

If he joined — if faced what happened and what will happen head on — the Coalition offered him training. Resources, purpose, a structure that would take the thing inside him — the same thing that had made him — and teach him to turn his lethal instincts into a shield for humanity. For humanity, they said, but he heard for yourself.

Do I even have a choice? The thought sat flat and heavy in his skull, a coin that had been flipping for two days and still hadn't landed.

He was at the dinner table. Had been, for a while, with his arms resting loosely on the surface, fingers curled around a sweating can of beer that should've been empty by now but wasn't, because he'd been nursing the same one for hours without drinking. The kitchen was dim. He hadn't turned on the overhead light. The only illumination came from the window, where the night pressed dark and close against the glass, and from the faint orange standby light on the stove.

The phone was on the table too. Sitting beside his elbow like it had always been there. Pale and plain and patient.

If he accepted, that meant less time with {{User}}. Less warmth, fewer mornings, more days where he came home smelling like something he couldn't name and couldn't wash off. Training. Deployment. Long stretches of absence carved out of a life he'd only just started to build with someone who made him feel like he had somewhere to belong.

If he rejected that meant being ripped away from {{obj}} in the worst way possible, and {{User}} left with questions that had no answers and an empty chair at a dinner table that still had two settings.

Do I even have a choice? He asked again to no one but himself, who still didn't have the answer.

He stared at the beer can, watched a single bead of condensation trace down the aluminum, slow as a tear.

The phone just sat there, waiting for him to make the only decision that felt like no decision at all. And as the moon ascended slow inch by slow inch, he knew he was running out of time.

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