Kevin Meeks The Tangle She opened the door.

Or, at least, it might have passed for a door some time ago . Now it was little more than a charred, decrepit old piece of junk that pitiful ly attempted to cover the opening she crawled from. Her robes, torn and ragged, covered her closed circuit suit. What colour they had been before was entirely s ubjective to an onlooker. Perhaps blue or green, or maybe they had always been t hat sickly yellowed brown. As haphazardly as they appeared to be thrown over her emaciated form, she made sure to check herself at any possible interval for any gaps in coverage. Thin, long fingers probed her body for any sign of a leak. Af ter a minute or so she appeared to be satisfied and slowly moved on. Crumbling p illars cast deep shadows over the hills and canyons of rubble that she crawled t hrough. Red-brown sky and sizzling rain beat down on her whenever she moved out from beneath the webs of tangled, rusted girders. Spikes of rebar brushed agains t her hood and threatened to uncover the patchwork suit that was her livelihood. That suit... it was the line between life and death. Were a leak to ever spring in it for more than, say, a minute, her body would seize up and she would die a very painful, unpleasant death. Shed seen it before, back at the nesting dugout. One of her kin had been out for a while, hunting for scraps, or possibly a live kill, and had come back some time later. Blood was seeping into his outer clothi ng, and his face was contorted into a horrid grimace of pain through the clear p lastic visor of his mask. Others of the dugout drew closer, and she watched in f ascinated horror as his body convulsed in shock. The eldest kin parted the young , and with a quick movement, made a quick incision with the blade in his hand. T he others sat back patiently, but she knew what would need to be done. There was no food from this one, and she was ever so hungry. The eldest was frail and slo w, and she was so hungry. Shed made up her mind at that moment. She would wait for the meat to cool. She po unced forward and tore at the suit before the draining body had finished twitchi ng. A sharp wedge of glass cut the flesh easily and she tore at it with such zea l that a good chunk of muscle came off as well. The other younger kin hissed ang rily. This was not the way things were to be done! She knew full well that she w ould have starved had they buried the body, and for a moment some regret passed over her thoughts, but the hunger tore that away in an instant. She quickly wrap ped the meat in a spare cloth from within the folds of her robes and dashed out of the den. Fingers clawed for her, but she was away without much trouble. She h ad always been the quickest of the younger ones. And now... she was still alive. Shed returned to the den a few days after her has ty departure. It was not quite empty, but her family was certainly less well off than she. Gore splattered the walls and floor, and she was able to count every member of her kin. Entrails spewed from suits ripped by desperate claws, and the most recent death, one of the burliest of the young ones, seemed to have been c aused by self-inflicted injuries. Perhaps hed come back from a hunt to find them in this state. Or maybe he had killed them himself in his hunger and has not bee n able to live with the guilt. She felt a sick feeling rising in her throat, but she pushed it down. They were no longer her concern. She had ensured that she w ould at least never stoop to killing her kin, and now she would no longer need t o worry about the opportunity arising. However, these ones were dead, and their meat was as clean as anything that could be found in the Tangle. She set to work immediately.

Her own cloth would not be enough to hold all the meat. She knew that their stoc ks held a white powder that could preserve the flesh for a little longer. The qu ickly-fashioned spear she had kept with her these past days sat neatly behind he r back, and she was able to draw it out silently as she approached the innermost wall of her dugout. For all she knew, it may well be a Crawler that had killed them, not internal strife. It would be best to be prepared in any case. With sev eral steps she was close enough to lift the bloodstained curtain and peer inside the dark room. Concrete blocks and twisted steel panels lined the walls, and ba rely passable shelving had been built with rotting planks of wood. The room appe ared to be devoid of any other living creatures, and none of the smaller spaces within would fit a Crawler. She sidled past some putrefied slabs of meat that re eked enough to slip through her masks filter. She shrank back and snatched the ba g of powder from the shelf. It took some time to cut the suits from the bodies and coat them in the power. T he fire pit directly outside the den was cooking the slabs of meat quickly. The smell was nearly intoxicating, though it had a sickly sweet undertone to it. As each cut finished, she covered it in the powder and wrapped it tightly in cloth. She had barely enough to cover all of the slabs, but when she was finished, a f ine dusting of the powder had been pressed tightly into each slab. Supposedly th is would keep it from spoiling. She managed to fit nearly all of the meat into h er rucksack, and she turned toward the sinking sun. Her work had taken the entir e day, and the Crawlers would be emerging soon. She had run into some others of her kind in the direction the sun sank toward, so she looked back one final time toward what used to be her home. The smell of her cooking would attract predato rs. She would have to move quickly to be far enough away to be relatively safe. Maybe her new kin would have more food...