Skullhead stood over Ryan, his skin crusted with sores, scant irregular patches of coarse gray fur blowing in the wind. A sickening warmth oozed from his skin in sheets. He'd slipped up the back of the rock outcropping Ryan laid on with a preternatural silence and now he stood at his full height, staring down at the former vigilante with bleeding eyes, his huge skeletal tail whipping like a serpent.
A suffocating stench issued from the beast's hide and it was this, more than anything, that often froze its victims in fear. Skullhead drew in sharp gasps of breath, his head reeling with savage appetite. His stomach growled. His tongue trembled fatly in his mouth.
His lips parted, a guttural bark ripping forth.
He shook his head, momentarily attempting to dislodge the hunger that burned in him like a fever dream. He clawed out for the intelligence to communicate, but it was denied him. Eat, his brain said, kill.
His huge misshapen skull was an architecture of bone knitted with poorly-fitting gray and pink skin, rubbed raw and infested with beetles and worms. He flinched each time one of these parasites worked at a strand of nerve.
Ryan moved then, as Skullhead knew he would. He brought up his weapon and pointed the long barrel at Skullhead's huge plated chest. Blinking his eyes, he pulled the trigger. The chamber explosion was deafening, noise beyond noise, but Skullhead had little time to be angered at this as a. 50 caliber slug ripped through his chest and exploded out his back. Skullhead was thrown from the rocks, an agony that was at once sweet and numbing threading through his chest.
But more than pain, there was rage.
Skullhead scrambled back up the rocks with impossible speed. Ryan brought up his weapon and the beast knocked it from his hands with a single lethal blow. Ryan cowered: crying, whimpering.
Skullhead stood over him. Black blood and bile ran from the hole in his breast. His face was twisted up in a ragged sneer, yellow teeth protruding from the gums like knife blades. He was larger than any man, a giant, his arms longer, his skeletal fingers sharpened stakes. He pressed his face in that of Ryan, enjoying the terror that it produced in the man-making his bladder and bowels void, his eyes roll madly in their sockets. Skullhead licked his cowering face with a spiny tongue, the taste of fear making his loins ache. He drew back his great, bobbing head, lips peeling back inches from slavering jaws that jutted like a steel bear trap.
One fleshless hand gripped Ryan, pulling him up. Skullhead towered over him by more than two feet. With a flick of his wrist, he sent Ryan tumbling through the air. No hurry in eating, a bit of play first.