Wasting Hounds
Thirsty tongues licking at cracked lips, dry, dry, so very dry. Pain, terrible pain, wounds scabrous and sticky; ignoring it, eyes trained forward so as to avoid the blinding hot sun directly overhead. Limbs touching sand, crawling, slithering, stalking forwards. Hungering.
They see, with their black insect eyes so cold and so purposeful nothing in them but sharp naked need, they see their prey and they move forward across the coarse ground. They are almost invisible; only the heavy, lumbering urgency they project, which they cannot and will not conceal, betrays them, for it is so focused so thick it can be felt like electricity in the air before a storm or a thrown spear moments before it hits, gliding through air suddenly like syrup so slow so very slow, you can see every detail every scratch on its tip, yet all too fast all too fast to ever evade.
And like that they fall on their quarry.
Their jaws distend and dislocate teeth bending reaching out and meeting and rending at flesh emaciated limbs suddenly full of fibrous vigour striking clawing grasping and bringing down. They can smell every vein see every bone and feel every soft spot precise and ravening sink in filthy claws irregular and serrated yet they cut like glass slash arteries find and puncture the windpipe and the spine, and even if they didn't their touch poisons the blood dirty and dusty and black. They tear through flesh almost like something sensual and it ends in a yelp of pain and surprise and then nothing but wet sounds. They do not snap at each other they squabble over morsels no more than a flood does.
They are lean and athirst, the wasting hounds, and for a moment, they are satisfied. Lazily they lick and clean their wounds.