The Revenant was not something Jacko wanted to dwell on. It USED to be human, but now its limbs were replaced with barbed whips and chains, blades replacing its hands. Two night-vision cameras stared blankly out from where eyes once lived. Tubes slithered down its mouth, connected to a respirator strapped to its stomach. It used to be human. Then it had died, and then been reborn.

He wheeled the cart onto which the Revenant was strapped through the door, setting it down. It had been easy enough to disconnect the alarm system, even by moonlight, and the door had come off cleanly and without noise. It was a house picked at random, as Jacko didn’t care who the Revenant killed, just so long as it made the papers. The public would soon see the evil that modern science was doing. With each released Revenant his mission was getting more publicity. Machines were starting to be viewed with suspicion, and soon they would be evicted. Jacko grinned, the image pleasing him.

The flashing light of the respirator failed to do any more than cast deeper shadows into the room, and Jacko got in a position to run as soon as the activation switch was flipped on the Revenant. He curled an index finger around it, and flipped the switch. Before the Revenant’s first banshee’s howl echoed through the streets outside, Jacko was running. Jumping behind a dumpster in the alley across the street, he swung his rifle back from over his shoulder, gripping it tightly. The screams would start any minute, but would only be eclipsed by the bestial wail of the Revenant as it slaughtered the screamers. Jacko allowed himself a morbid chuckle as he saw the lights in the nearby houses flick on, the inhabitants rushing to barricade their doors.

Any minute now…

The Revenant’s scream stopped. No, not ‘stopped’, it was cut off, like a power-out in the middle of an opera on the wireless. The lights in the house hadn’t even been turned on. He squinted.

A figure was walking out of the house. It looked like it was wearing a coat, or a cloak, and it had something on its back.

Impossible! Could it have turned off the Revenant? As he watched it walk away, Jacko shook his head, trying to calm himself down. Of course not! The switch was tiny! You couldn’t turn off something trying to kill you at 100km/h, could you?
Not unless you killed it first.
Jacko scrambled up. Something had gone wrong, and when something goes wrong with a Revenant you don’t want to be around when it happens-

He skidded to a halt. At the mouth of the alleyway, barring his exit, he saw the figure, framed in the dim half-light of the gibbous moon above the sky’s ashen clouds. A bundle dropped from the figure’s arms to the floor in front of it. There was a sound like a pig being slapped with a bucket of spanners. Jacko’s face contorted in horror.

There, before him, was what remained of the Revenant. A mangled conglomeration of meat, metal and bone. Blood was already collecting in a puddle around it.
“I found a monster.” The figure stated. Its voice rasped, as if its vocal chords were made of coiled wire.
Jacko stepped back, but behind him he could hear people gathering in the street; no doubt they’d be armed. He’d almost forgotten about the rifle he gripped in his hands. The figure was walking towards him. To his horror, the figure’s back was unfolding into four extra spindly arms, and the blades and claws on the end of each glinted in the dull moonlight. Wires hung off of them like cobwebs.
They were all slick with blood.
“Remember when you were young, and monsters only hid under the bed?” The figure continued in its strange monotone.
Jacko’s breath came in short gasps, and a sudden warm sensation down his leg told him that he’d wet himself. Still the figure came.
“There’s a reason monsters always hide under the bed.” The figure stated again.
Jacko’s eyes were drawn from the clawed appendages sprouting from its back to what he could only assume were its real arms. Even they ended in a flower of reddened blades. The figure was reaching toward Jacko, like a spider claiming its netted prize.
“The reason” The figure rasped, “Is ME. ”
Just like his Revenant, Jacko’s screams were quickly ended, but the sounds of his death continued in quick, gruesome staccatos.