“This is… a surprise,” Shin whispered.

Mugs nodded but kept his eyes on a doorway etched into the side of a small alcove near the back. He walked slowly, the rugs muffling his footsteps but almost tripping him with their irregular placement.

The next room was larger, and almost equally as crowded. Full of odd pieces of furniture, a wood stove hunched in the corner and stacks of pots piled in buckets and on the stove. Various pieces of ornate metal, shaped for statues, moldings, railings, were scattered against the walls. It was a veritable hoarder’s home, Mugs noted.

There were two darkened halls that led to adjacent rooms. Mugs looked at Shin and they acknowledged each other silently before splitting up, Shin disappearing down the right hall, Mugs creeping through the left. Gun at the ready, he neared the next room and, taking a breath, entered slowly.

Mugs was unsure what he was expecting. The place seemed wrong… unnatural. An eerie underground bunker full of collected junk, and the aura of something truly awful. Somebody had to live here. Somebody who took the boy. And living in the Wastes. Whoever it could be was dangerous. So when Mugs entered the next room he didn’t know what to expect. And yet it struck him with a solid punch to the gut.

The boy was lying face-up on a stone slab carved from the stone floor, and it was immediately apparent to Mugs that he was plain dead.

His eyeballs had been removed, his jaw broken wide open and the tongue severed. Every tooth appeared to have been pulled from their sockets, and the nose and ears had been sheared off with a dull blade. His chest was torn open, as if by a wild animal, the ribs cracked and pulled out, to reveal that several organs were missing.

It was a quick glance that got him that far. Mugs looked away, out of disgust and shame, and perhaps a little bit of fear. He was ashamed of himself and awash with guilt, but I was the fear of realization that was the most important, for he knew exactly what it was that dwelled in this hideaway.

“Cannibals,” he whispered, feeling sick. Only once before had he seen one and though it was already a corpse the mere sight had troubled him. An Imperial captain had ridden back into town atop a wearily jittered steed with its mangled body wrapped in canvas, and the bodies of three of his half a dozen men sent to kill the creature on three just as fatigued horses. He had dropped the monster’s corpse in the deep, hoof-trodden mud and shouted for a guardsman to haul it away. The first one that arrived went pale at the sight and stood frozen, mouth agape, before the smell forced him into a hasty retreat to vomit in some bushes. Mugs had approached cautiously, along with some other poor civilian folk whose curiosity weighed more heavily than their fear. Some gasped and another retched, but Mugs was used to the smell of rot and necrosis. And it was not the smell that made him turn away but the sight. It was a thing not many men could stomach.

Here he was in the lair of a similar monster. For they were monsters and not men nor women any longer. Rumors were as common as rain, but he had no reason not to believe the academic that had been hired by the Loyalists to take upon research. That dead cannibal was not alone, but rather part of a pack, and it was his duty to study its remains so that the Emperor’s men could slay the rest. “Extraordinary” was the word he used. They were primitively lethal. Sinewy build, hardened claws that appeared to be mutations of the fingernail structure. Humanoid form. At one point they were humans, but that is not what General Osaki told his motley group of weathered soldiers and fresh conscripts. “Demons,” he growled in his native tongue, “unfit to walk this earth! They steal our babes from their cribs and make stew of them! Filth! We shall cast them from our land!” And like that they rode away on their mounts. Never to be seen again.