She was remade with spite. The first of her kind, her humanity stripped away and pumped full of poison and depravity in a laboratory. She was pushed to the brink of death, but pale hands, thorny and unkind, kept her from tipping over the edge.
Death had become her.
She searched for a familiar face in the darkness and cried when she could not find it. Once a giver of life, now a breeder of death. Carnage was now her only child. The one she had borne had succumbed to the venom, would never feel sunlight on her face again.
Death would have been kinder.
Blood trailed in her wake like the veil of death’s bride. She was as new as America, a reincarnation of its greatest evils, comfortable in corporeal sin.
Death would kneel to her.
She took the name of the doctor who had taken her life and drained him of his blood. She liked the way the V name rolled off her tongue, sharp like vengeance. But her spite remained. She was a victim to the curiosity of the New World, which ground out mercy and reason. They bred beasts with their tools and made monsters out of men, then left the illness of ignorance to fester, century after century.
First there were multiple beasts, but their numbers dwindled in just a few days once they showed their strength. The colonists put their guns to the mouths of the beasts or burned them at stakes, claiming to eliminate original evil with them. Only she remained, sticking to the shadows, never to be found. As colonists hunted her, they spread stories that spun into folklore the longer she evaded them.
For years she hid and became a myth, but she never forgot the taste of human blood.
Eventually, she grew ravenous.
A pit of hunger opened within her as the New World folded into steady colonies. The Revolution left bodies behind, but they only satiated her for so long. She wanted new blood. The Civil War unleashed new traumas, and she nursed the victims of more physicians who tore women’s bodies apart. Her venom spread and new beasts arose. She was no savior, but instead a mother who sought an end to her anger and pain. As the years passed, she and other reapers learned to control their hunger to avoid a second gruesome death at the hands of fearful humans.
After the Great War, the world clung to debauchery while soldiers returned home empty and politicians grappled with solutions for the universal suffering. People scrambled for distractions from the chaos, lighting their houses up with parties, spilling illicit liquor into open throats, all while jazz rose like a spiritual symphony around them. Thrill seekers flowed into cities, and corruption reared its ugly head. Gangsters fed the greedy hands in New York, but the hunger for more never ceased. They celebrated being alive despite the devastation that surrounded them.
The mother reaper watched, her hands curling into fists. A promise of violence spilled from her lips like blood.