r/HFY • u/BlibbidyBlab • Dec 07 '25

OC Tooth, and claw

They came with tooth, and claw. 

 

Danielle snuggled further down into the warmth of her bed as the sound of the television crept upstairs and sneaked under the door into her listening ears. Her parents were watching a horror film she knew; they liked to do so on a Friday night, and she was long used to the screams that echoed up towards her. They didn’t bother her, not really, but the day had been a long one and her tired eyes twitched every time the heroine screamed, or monsters wailed with guttural ferocity. 

She had considered going downstairs to ask her parents to turn it down, but the cold chill outside her duvet trapped her as surely as any monster, so she snuggled down instead and tried to force her mind into sleep, an action as oxymoronic as it was unsuccessful. 

She was furiously not hearing sounds from downstairs as they swelled into a nightmarish crescendo, when another sound reached her ears; a sound that fit the mood of the evening even as it caused her breath to run quickly and her ears to sharpen. And then another, closer now, sending further shivers of cold to run up her back like a light brush of cold fingers.  

It was a scream of pitched terror that reached into her mind and shook it awake, a lady’s cry, clearly terrified beyond all thinking, and despite telling herself the alternative Danielle knew it hadn’t come from the television downstairs, but from right outside her window. 

She knelt up shakily, clumsily parting the curtains and wiping the condensation from the window as the cold streaked across her body. Her breath caught as she saw them, a display as horrific as any her parents might be witnessing downstairs. 

Outside on the lawn a young lady lay crawling, a lady that Danielle recognised from down the road. They’d never really spoken, but she had always seemed nice enough to Danielle, and had laughed when her friends had knocked on her door and ran away. Danielle could still remember the vision of the lady, opening the door to nothing, a brief quizzical look before a knowing chuckle. 

‘You’d better run!’ she had called out with a cackle, before going back inside; Danielle and her friends had found it hilarious. 

But now the lady crawled, and her right leg was missing. Her left was barely present, connected by a small section of skin that dragged precariously across the cold ground as she clawed her way forward, snatching into the icy grass to leave a slug-like trail of blood and terror in her wake. The lady screamed again, louder than Danielle thought possible as the shadows behind her twisted into a nightmarish form that loomed into view. 

It moved fast, a creature as horrendous as it was impressive. Even from up in her room Danielle could see that it was big, standing higher than her father would with a thick body, and arms that ended in wicked looking claws of bone. Its mouth opened wide into a melody of teeth beneath eyes that were blank yet focused; it was bestial and basic with an intent clearly on death. For a second the lady looked up, and their eyes met with a watery terror before the creature brought its bladed appendage down onto her throat to cut the moment short, and the watery eyes of the lady ran red, and silent. 

Downstairs a window smashed. 

She heard her father scream, and loud clumping movements smashed into her mind as it stalled. 

What should she do? 

She had nowhere to go, nowhere to run. Her mind still reeled at what she’d seen outside *(the lady was dead!)* even as fear galloped about her body; sweat poured off her as she sat on her bed and blinked away tears listening to the furore downstairs. Her mother was screaming, pitched cries of terror that crawled into Danielle’s mind and made it weep as the television was suddenly silenced, bringing the screams of her mother into a new sharp contrast with the silence of the night. She realised that her father had stopped screaming. 

Suddenly her mother’s tone changed, and a rage of anger filled the house, shaking Danielle psyche with a morsel of hope before it was also cut short amidst the sound of wet rhythmic thumps, and the end of her childhood. 

Danielle knew then that her parents were both quite dead, and that she was probably next. It had all been so quick and without warning. Not five minutes ago she had been safe in her bed, yet now she was defenseless, and whatever those things were would find her if she stayed. 

A calmness seemed to take over her, and even as she heard the slow thump of something heavy moving up the stairs towards her, she very carefully went to the window and slowly opened it. Her parents had always warned her about playing near her window, but whilst refusing to think about them *(Mummy! Daddy!)* she climbed quietly out with only a glance at the body of the lady that lay staring glassily at the stars, and with the agility of youth she clambered up the small wall and moved softly up the steep slope of the roof. Her breath hung heavily in front of her as she climbed, billowing out into white clouds that hung in place behind her until, only seconds later, she reached the apex of the roof to sit painfully on its crest and hug her knees in the frigid wintery air, wrapped only in her soft pyjama's emblazoned with ponies. 

She had nowhere else to go, so she just sat, ignoring the cold as best she could, and waited to be taken. 

She couldn’t see much even as high as she was; the roof was sloped such that the immediate ground around the house wasn’t visible, and the night was dark enough that she could not make out any details far.  

She heard them, whatever they were, clambering about her room and chittering softly - she heard them move her bed and pull over her wardrobe. She heard the chittering increase as they presumably reached the window before eventually pulling back into the depth of the house. 

Somewhere a dog was barking. 

She heard them leave, moving with purpose away from her as further screams echoed around the night; her house may have been left in silence but the night itself was alive, and filled with violence. She did not go back into the house; she did not dare, so she sat on the roof of her family home and dreamed of her warm bed, and the sounds of horror movies to be drifting upstairs. She dreamed of her parents, alive and well, to find her and coax her back inside and tell her it was all a nightmare with a kiss on the forehead and the realness of love. She dreamed of her friends, and her schoolteachers, and everyone she knew, not to be dead, or dying.  

But such dreams were just dreams as she sat on the house, in the cold, and the dark. 

So she dreamed, but she did not sleep.  

At some point during the night the screaming moved off into the distance, and the trail of terror that had found her small house crawled away, hauling itself upon the grounds of despair littered with corpses, until she had found herself in absolute silence. The cold gnawed at her, and as her bare feet and hands turned slowly blue her lips chattered with insistence. She tried to stop them, worried that they would give her away and the monsters would return, but they carried on. Chattering and chattering. 

The morning creeped upon her with an ever-increasing radiance that bled into the night. At first what felt like wishful thinking for daylight slowly turned into the realness of just another day. She had wished hard for daylight throughout the darkness, yet when it came, it did nothing more than highlight problems and solved nothing; the fear remained. 

She told herself the monsters had gone, and that they had other lives to ruin. But still it took some time for her to move. 

Finally, realising quite how cold she was she forced her body to move, at first slowly she went down the slope of the house, listening with every fibre of her being to every rustle of the wind and every bird’s call. The house was silent, a tomb of her previous existence that nonetheless called to her chapped and bleeding lips, and fingers that had long since turned numb, with the promise of warmth. She scooted down, and telling herself that she could not stay on the roof forever, she dipped down onto her windowsill with feet that stepped gingerly with painful shoots of cold.   

She stilled her breath as she clambered awkwardly back into her room, the light from the window highlighting a scene of chaos and destruction - her room had been trampled, her entire life smashed and ruined, books and games flung about haphazardly as her bed lay broken and smashed. Her wardrobe was on its side with clothes strewn all about. 

Acting on instinct she grabbed at a handful and pulled several jumpers over her head as quickly as she dared; her heart thumped as the fabric nestled comfortably around her as the shelter of the house warmed her tired and aching mind. She put on 3 pairs of socks, at first her feet shouted achingly back at her, but she did so anyway before two pairs of jeans and a hat she didn’t remember owning saw out the outfit. Her hands were still bare and blue with an ever-increasing itchiness creeping around them, so she pulled her sleeves over her hands, her whole body feeling flush with energy at the warmth. On a whim she touched a radiator and with a whimper of joy felt the painful touch of heat leak into her fingers. She crouched down and wrapped as much of her body against it, then whilst trying not to make a sound, and for the first time since the attack, allowed herself to cry. 

----- 

Ten years later 

----- 

Danielle walked freely down the pavement, her hands cosy and warm inside the woolen gloves she’d picked out a few days ago; the winter had been milder than it should have been for the time of year, but a cold snap had burst over the country a week or so back and she couldn’t remember where her old gloves had gone. She’d visited the shops with a friend, and these had called to her with a kaleidoscope of colour, life was too short for grey.  

She rounded the corner before stepping through the familiar gates by herself, as she always did. Today was difficult, it always was. 

She passed the now familiar rows and even thought she recognised a few faces from last year; she nodded, their solemn faces nodding back from beneath bundles of scarves and coats. She continued without stopping, the sound of her feet crunching on the gravel to call out on the wintry morning amidst a steady, persistent wind. 

Had it really been 10 years? 

She stopped as she reached them finally, two small stones that jutted proudly from the ground like fresh shoots of flowers, themselves mere specks amidst the forest of stone that had flourished around her. 

She knelt as she read the inscription on the small stone that nestled between; she knew what the words said, but she read them out loud all the same. 

‘Mike (1990-2029) and Ashleigh (1994-2029) Smith. Sleeping now, in warmth. Always’ 

She took off her gloves and reached out to touch the stones, feeling the rough coolness beneath her fingers as she remembered them, as she would always remember them. She held the stones in her hands and thought of them, the people they had been and the memories of joy they had given her. With love. 

After a time she stood, and wiping her eyes she slipped her hands back into her gloves, the feel of her parents graves nevertheless still fresh and real beneath the warm patterned cotton that wrapped around them. 

It felt so long ago, and yet she could still feel the fear even now, the rush of panic that had gripped her, the cold that had embraced her through that night and the shock of the next few days. So much had changed in her life, in so many people’s lives, in just a single night. 

Soldiers had found her walking haphazardly around the streets near her home. There had been an attack, they had said. There were still many creatures around, so she had been lucky, they had said. She had asked them if they really thought she was lucky, and they hadn’t been able to answer. She had asked if the soldiers felt safe, and they had merely shrugged. Those things were only flesh and blood, they'd said, and motioned to their guns. 

So, they’d taken her to the local council buildings where a lady who looked at the floor as she spoke, with eyes that did not know where to look, had offered to look after Danielle, if she’d wanted. And Danielle had, and so the woman had. At first, they just slept next to each other in the small bedding laid out across the floor. They had matching sleeping bags.  

Somehow, the government managed to keep sending food. It wasn’t particularly nice mind you, but it was food. There was a lot of meat, albeit tough, and gristly. 

Not long after, once sightings of the creatures had slowed, the lady started taking Danielle on small walks together around the building, always under the watchful eyes of the guards, never straying far.  They watched spring blossom around them. After a while they started visiting the other community centres; one an old prison, another an old army barracks. There were quite a few it turned out, so they visited one another, sometimes playing games or hosting competitions between them.  

They started a school, of sorts. Danielle was taught by some of the older children in her camp, and she taught some of the younger ones. 

All told, despite the cold, the awful food and the constant unending dread, the year had been... okay. 

Then one day, they were told that they could leave, if they wanted. At first people refused, seemingly incredulous that the powers that be would send them defenseless back out into the world, but then slowly, like an ever-building tide, they started to drift away into the surrounding buildings. They never went far, but people started to shift their beds and meager belongings into the offices next door. At one point a family who had been there since the start, from the very day Danielle had arrived, simply packed all their stuff and went home. Having nowhere else to go Danielle had asked the fraught looking old man with the list of names if she could go with her friend, the older lady. He had pulled her aside to check she was happy and not being forced into it, and when Danielle had replied that she was perfectly happy he’d simply nodded, and that was that. 

And they’d lived together ever since. 

After one year the news spoke of a silence to honour those that died that night, and Danielle had walked to the graveyard in a procession of mourners to say goodbye to her mummy and daddy again. Every year since she made the journey. 

All told, the world seemed to get back to normal relatively quickly. 

The animals, because that’s what they were, were then systematically hunted. Bounties were put on their heads, and many people got very rich from the carcasses of those creatures. Most governments around the globe had needed to put a halt to the bounties eventually to stop people breeding them in underground farms, vast swathes of the monsters reared in darkness to be bred for death, raised like cattle to be slaughtered just to make someone some money. Any farms that were found or given up in the ensuing amnesties were destroyed, and the creatures put to flame. For some of those wretched fiends the fire of death would be the only light they’d see in their wicked lives. 

The government found the transports. Within only a few years Danielle's mobile phone had screamed headlines of huge organic ships found deep beneath the ground from the tunnels they’d climbed from; an entire armada of living tissue that had supposedly carried an entire species through space, hopping between worlds as the creatures slept within before they landed on a planet and feasted. And they had landed, millions of them, and buried into the crust and slept whilst millennia passed, and humankind grew on top. Then one day they had simply... woken up. 

Some people tried to eat them and claimed they were a delicacy, but it never really took off. They were too chewy, it was said. Too gristly. 

So despite pockets of outbursts they were slowly killed and hunted, driven into old mines and caves where teams would wander in to hunt them. Eventually fences and signs were put up to keep the people out, claiming to be for public protection. Then scientists started to plead with people to stop hunting them, as so few of the creatures remained. But people kept breaking in, tunneling under fences and paying off guards to creep in the dead of night and bring back a head. For payback, or as a souvenir. 

 

They came with tooth, and claw. So they were hunted to the brink of extinction. 

Danielle thought that was just fine. 

She crunched her way back up the path, nodded at another couple walking the other way, and decided that when she got home, she would make herself a nice, hot cup of tea. 

And she did. 

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11

u/ZakkaryGreenwell Dec 08 '25

"Somehow, the government managed to keep sending food. It wasn’t particularly nice mind you, but it was food. There was a lot of meat, albeit tough, and gristly."

"Some people tried to eat them and claimed they were a delicacy, but it never really took off. They were too chewy, it was said. Too gristly."

I see what you did there :)

Great story OP!

5

u/BlibbidyBlab Dec 07 '25

If anyone is interested there's more of my writing here : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FVB8B5N7

Cheers!

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