She didn’t have to use her eyes to see the men in green and yellow hazmat suits standing around the warehouse, trying to stay as much as they could within the shadows, as if that somehow could save them from witnessing what they had helped make happen. She could almost taste the disgust on their faces, hidden behind gas masks.
Instead of feeling ashamed or guilty, she reveled in it.
“Yes,” Mabry said inside her head. He sounded pleased.
Why do you let them live? she asked.
“They’re useful,” Mabry answered. “This is just the beginning, Kate. There is more to be done. Progress. Continuation. Expansion. All of it, to further the evolution of our species.”
You’ll tell me?
“Of course. In time…”
Around her, ghouls hunched over other human forms, the sound of sucking filling the warehouse a hundredfold. She was struck by how much like children the ghouls looked, feeding because their parents provided for them. Mabry was their parent, but of course he couldn’t do it alone. As with all households, it was always easier to have two parents around to shoulder the chores.
She lowered her head back down and bit harder into the girl’s arm, all the way to the bone underneath, and the blood started to flow again. She sighed audibly, loudly with intense pleasure.
Someone in a hazmat suit fidgeted uncomfortably in the darkness, and Kate smiled.