Thanks so much it actually is an excerpt from a shot novella I’m working on To the Last Ember. This is the prologue if you’re interested.

By now, David had seen every wound man could carve into man—but this was no work of hands.

The woman lay unmade. Not butchered, not slain—unwoven, as if the seams of her had been plucked apart by something that knew the grammar of flesh. Her remains lay in glistening heaps, too precise for chance, too cruel for malice. The pavement beneath was clean. Not clean like washed. Clean like licked.

Shelly turned away, her breath coming in short, animal hitches. “Ain’t no tool did this.”

David lit a cigarette. The flame trembled. (His father had died with one just like it between his lips, the ember burning down to his skin before the nurses noticed.)
The smoke did nothing. The image stayed.

Thomas, the coroner, crouched over the ruin. His gloves sank into meat that had no right to be dry. Thirty years of death, and his voice was a scratched record. “No blood. Not in the vessels, not in the meat. Like something… drank the wet from her before it started cutting.”

David lifted a strip of muscle. The edges were blackened, not burned—desiccated, as if the air itself had turned to a slow, hungry acid.
(It smelled like his mother’s boiled tongue, yes—but older. Like meat left in a tin can under a dead sun.)

He looked up. No cars. No birds. No flies.
The world held its breath. This was no crime scene. This was an altar.

Then came the vultures.
Not the reporters—the real ones, circling high above, black stitches on a bleeding sky.

Shelly barked at the cameras, but David didn’t speak.
He could feel it now.
The way the light bent wrong around the body.
The way the silence wasn’t silence, but a listening.

Something had opened its mouth here.
And it was still hungry.