BETTER. Much more clear, though you still might want be a little more obvious about her being the telekinetic when you first mention it, and mention whether it's rare or not, b/c why would her people be afraid to revolt if they can strangle people with their own intestines from a safe distance? 

Feel free to check out my entry, "Hiram Wakes". 

Sancho,

I couldn’t wait to read this one because I became a fan of yours after reading Snacks, and the whimsical, gritty style carried over to this piece and that pleased me.
 

This definitely feels like a part of a much larger piece, but it does work as a stand alone short. I feel it does suffer a bit from all the cramming. You had to unload a lot of exposition and the story didn’t get really exciting until about halfway through when it grabs tight and never lets go.
I might suggest moving the section that explains what a Harbinger's and Trackers are until right after the scene when the Tracker shows up. That way you get into the action sooner.

Then you can give us an Oh, Fuck moment when the Tracker shows up. And your narrative is such that you can be like “Now’s as good a time as any to tell you what a Harbinger is maybe right after he checks the lip and sees the tattoo you can tell us what the tatoo means and what the trackers do. Give us a couple graphs about that and hurry back to the action.
 

But for the most part, I love the pacing.
 

Another nitpick is all the references. You do slip in there that the captured humans bring books and music. You also come back to that later when the Worm explains his cause. The problem is you say this is 5000 years in the future. So even if there is earth music and earth books and movies how does the Harbinger know who Sybil is.  Texas Rapesaw, Thunderdoming. I don't believe this world would have past pop-culture and cinema knowledge from the 20th and 21st centuries. Not to mention your narrator makes these movie references, the Harbinger, and the worm boss. They all have the same voice.
 

So I’d create new pop-culture, which could be difficult. Or explain why the movies they watch and books they read are so old, and how those things survived the WAR that wiped out most of civilization. What year did that happen? If it happened in 2013, drop a hint, even throw many of those references would be lost on anyone born before 1995. And then just let your narrator make all these refrences like he’s a movie buff, and develop other identifiers for your other characters.
 

Other than that, I enjoyed the ride. Great story, and huge thumbs up. Can’t wait to see what you write next.
 

--Jonathan--
 

That was one heck of a bloody mess!  Funny and bloody.  You have a way of taking the violently horrific and turning it into something strangely comedic.  Of all the bizarre stories I've  read in this competition, I think yours is actually the first to actually work within the challenge!  (i.e. I think you nailed all the elements solidly!)

There were a few places where I felt like the narrative style broke down.  For instance, around then end of page six where the Zebroid realizes the trackers are after him.  That transition didn't quite flow right to keep me immersed in the story.  Also, I'd tweak the line on page 10 where he first meets Lucy.  The way he says her name there feels out of character for him, at least to me.

Definitely a fun read!

I think there is a good idea in here. The notion of aliens using Earth creatures in a zoo is a good one.  This is a bit of mish-mash.  The characters seem thrown together in terms of what they look like. The story has a nice noir tone running through it, which is good.  The language seems designed to provoke rather than carry the story forward. There is a chunk of exposition near the start about the history of the Zoo that would be better fed through the story rather than info dumped.  There are a couple of errors here and there – for example when he takes ‘Batboy’ out of the trunk he notices the tattoo he thinks to himself that he is fucked.  In the conversation that follows, Batboy says “you said it yourself, man, you’re fucked”.  He didn’t say it out loud though.  He also manages to hear him talking to himself when locked in the trunk.  There’s good stuff in here, and it goes along at a hell of a pace.  The twists are almost comical as they appear too.

I was initially thrown off by the language, but it's to be expected that that wouldn't be for every reader. I got used to it by the end, and ended up liking the story. The start is great, hooking us in with the line about having the pedophile in the trunk, but then the story loses momentum as we get all that exposition on world building. My preference is for a world where the author knows everything there is to know about the world, but the characters just live in it. Generally, they wouldn't need to tell us much about it unless there was reason for a direct reference. For instance, the protag sees the Tracker and that might start a train of thought about Harbingers, but it's unlikely that that train would be rolling along the track before that. The problem, of course, is that it's a complicated world. There are lots of things that a reader will want explained. But if that explanation doesn't come organically, then, well, the reader is just going to have to be out of luck.

That said, the world is nifty. The animal hybrids are cool, the 'voice' of the piece is good (once I got used to it, that is), and it was a fast read.

--Patrick...

The Human Argument