Children of the Night
by Ogechukwu Emmanuel Samuel
My name is Vraq, and I had never seen a human being on our land until the time before the sun went to sleep.
They came with their flying houses, sailing through the air and onto our lands. With the weapons they came with, we knew we would be beaten, so we slunk into the shadows.
As children of the night, the only thing that could give us away was the white pupils in our black eyes. Not our voices, as we could only speak to each other through our minds. It made me wonder, sometimes, how we survived on earth. We all had pretended to be deaf and, sometimes, dumb.
“Secure the perimeter,” one of the humans said. He appeared to be the leader. “We can’t have anything sneak up on us.”
We watched them, waiting, biding our time, until the sun rose again. They felt safer with the sun over them, and we were hungry, starving. We knew why they had come: we made them come. Earth was not dying, Mars was not the best option, but we had made them believe. Our planet needed replenishing, and what better manure than the human body? What better meat than the human, whose skin was the cleanest of animals that we had ever seen?
They buried their flag on our land and set out to explore it. Humans, they never stay at a place. We followed them, trailing their tracks, biding our time.
Attack!
We heard the words in our minds as a unit. The commander had issued the order. I went after the female I had seen earlier, knocking her down. She fell and turned, a move that let me stare into her soul, summoning it, a sumptuous meal. Nothing happened. At the back of my mind, a warning came. I tried again. She started laughing. All across the creek where we had waylaid them, a sinister laughter pervaded the air.
The Gulaks!
It was a frightening scream, banging about the inside of my head. The Gulaks, master shapeshifters, our predators! The girl under me struck out at me, her hand was done with metamorphosing and had the stingy pines of the Gulaks. I was thrown off her, tumbling over the ground with a force I had never before experienced.
It was a monster that got up from her, the body giving off heat that I felt ten feet away. She was bigger too with her body looking like red, hot burning coal; her face had only one thing, an enormous mouth filled with fangs that wanted to grind my dark skin. She roared, a thunder that clapped along our spines, even more fearsome because it was uniform.
With the prospect of becoming a meal and a prisoner in the mind of a Gulak, I turned and fled. Blending was not an option now. They could see us, they could feel us, and they would never give up till every last one of us is dead.
About the Author
Ogechukwu Samuel is a writer residing in Nigeria. His stories, while being fantastical still center around his realities in the country. His published story on Amazon, A Hundred Tales, is one of such. Also, his story in this collection speaks a truth that he’s struggled to say in many ways. He doesn’t like it very much, but when he’s not summoning his muse to write, he’s on twitter shouting his voice hoarse about the government of his country. He’s still pursuing a degree in English and Literary Studies, and has been in one level for two years, if you would believe it—it’s probably the reason he can’t just shut up on twitter. His stories are an escape.