LockJaw

"No dirge shall I upraise,/ But waft the angel on her flight with a pæan of old days!"

Lenore – Edgar Allan Poe.

Chapter one: Darkness at the break of noon.

Under the lightning the wounded world below seemed to huddle in on itself. The damaged buildings, the broken metal spaceships and the corpses strewn among them seemed to shudder together. The angered roiling clouds were shaped demonic and they poured down darkness like a curse. Day blasted back into night.

There had been a war here and what was left was simply storm and injury.

The dry and acrid wind chased across the surface of what had been secret but now lay opened and betrayed. Steel fell from the sky and buried itself in the ground hot and hissing - or else smashed into its likeness with a tortuous concussion.

There had been a war here and what was left was death and wreckage.

…………………………………………

Hunter in the darkness – stealthy and soundless - Hunter in the light – swift and contained.

Sniffing the artificial recycled air of the interior – savouring the scent of blood and skin, the salty tang of fear and violence, animal odours… easy to track, easy to hunt, easy to kill… and the hunter is a killer, moving off real easy now, with a shrug, like a bird into flight.

…………………………………………

Voices –

They will float through a dark place like dust on a hot night – they will catch the ear, play itchy on the mind - and the corridors of Serenity were so very, very dark.

“I don’t murder children.”

“I do.”

Zoe Alleyne heard the voices as she moved through the blackness, as she patrolled. It was typical of Malcolm Reynolds – she thought – not the obsessive playing and replaying of the Operative’s murderous statement… but the just the plain fact that he was doing it here – in the darkened interior of Serenity.

The rest of the crew had at least attempted to make something of their stay in this place, on this moon – to make a show of trying out new, bigger, brighter, more private quarters - but not