Anne had assumed it was just a rat. She had seen far too many people cower in fear at the specter of a fattened city rodent and assumed Searchlight's population would react much the same. Prior to the crash from above, she had opened her senses in hopes to search out the offending creature and shoo it out a back door.
Before the horror hit the ground, she could smell it.
Annie gagged. She actually gagged. She was no stranger to the smell of death, but this... this...
In her early days with the Philly PD, Annie had accompanied a fellow uniform on a well-being check, knowing well what the outcome was most likely to be but not realizing how it would affect her. The woman had been dead for day, sitting on a bathtub full of water that had once been scented with wild honeysuckle but now only reeked of death. The city had been in the middle of a heat wave and the woman's apartment had been shut tight; the smell is what had prompted the call. It was unlike anything Annie had ever encountered. The air was thick with flies and the rancid odor of a corpse quietly putrefying in a swampy tub of blackened water.
She had run out the door and vomited, her partner at the time laughing merrily at her reaction. She'd never encountered anything quite so bad since, until now; her enhanced senses made it all the worse. She gagged and slapped a hand over her nose and mouth, stumbling backwards and away from the source of the awful odor.
The creature -- the only word that served to describe something that wasn't either human or animal -- had fallen from the popcorn ceiling tiles and was already advancing on thick yellow claws skittering across the tile floor from three of its feet. To her horror, Annie could see that the right forearm wasn't clawed at all; rather, it looked almost like some gangly human arm. Its jaw jutted out low from beneath a porcine nose and its eyes, large, round, and entirely mismatched, were yellowed and sickly. Fangs that seemed more like tusks hung from its cracked and peeling lips, patches of fur in shades of brown and black covering its mottled grey skin in a random pattern, with bits and pieces of flesh and fur falling as it moved.
From behind the counter came another scuttling noise.
"Jesus Christ, how many are there?!" Annie spat out.