The girl

The creature had been a human girl around ten years old not more than six months ago. Priest
knew this because the Revenant that had replaced whatever the girl had been had yet to mutate
beyond the second stage of its maddening life cycle.

Her skin was pale to the point of a green hue which was visible even across the twenty or so
meters separating them under the intermittent moonlight. The young girl's gaunt body was
covered with a simple white nightgown streaked with dried blood and rotting chunks of gore. Her
bare feet showed the first signs of the elongated claws they would soon become were already
evident. The creature's arms had already begun to lengthen along with her grotesquely long
claws that once were her awkward child fingers. Long, stringy remains of red hair bordered her
face and fell limply down her shoulders. The girl's mouth showed new growths of dark and
impossibly sharp sets of teeth replacing many times over the number of what any human should
naturally have, the edges ripped back almost to the ears, allowing for more than just display of
her newly developed, obscenely large biting capacity. The effect additionally gave the girl, as
well as every other of her kind, the visage of a hellish grin of corruption that mocked the human
forms they brutally confiscated.

Regardless, it was the eyes of the Revenants that mesmerized Priest, filling him with an
incomprehensible dread. Revenant eyes during the second stage of mutation began to fill with
red pigment. The irises already swallowed by cannibalistic pupils that slowly splintered into
several jagged shards, randomly arranged. The addition of color to the restructured organs
marked the first time something with intelligence that he could watch skim sporadically just
beneath the surface of the plasma and oil slicked eyes. Those eyes that filled themselves with
the colors of a bleeding humanity and a bleeding planet vicariously acting as the last parts of
humanity still latched deep with the hosts themselves.

He’d seen Revenants before. But never a child Ghoul.

A crude, demonic manipulation of her feminine voice resulted in a low spine chilling imitation of
laughter. The sound was so horrific and twisted, the soldier would never be able to forget or dull
the sharp clarity of its memory, no matter how many times he had been exposed to it's
dreadfulness. Nights would be coming soon enough during which Priest, alone and cold, would
relive the sound, it never managing to burn through, degrade or fade in clarity and deny him
escape from their haunting.

The Ghoul continued to close in on him, slowly violating the principles of fluid human movement,
now fifteen meters from her prey. Already prepared, Priest centered the glowing red cross hairs
of his optic between her violated eyes laying anchored within her tormented face. Priest didn’t
hesitate to squeeze the trigger.

The head of the Revenant vanished in a cloud of red and black mist and her body had yet to hit
the pavement before her place was seized by two more of her kind racing from the darkness
stretching from behind her