The Pack

The Pack was a Necromorph form that hunted in overwhelming numbers, encountered during the outbreak on the Sprawl. Built from the recombined bodies of adolescent children, its members acted not as individuals but as a single predatory whole.

Origin and form#

The Pack was made from intact, largely undamaged adolescent corpses, and the limited extent of its mutation set it apart from most Necromorph forms. Each member still showed signs of how it had died, with torn open abdominal wounds and desiccated, colorless skin. The recombination concentrated on the hands and arms: the fingers were reinforced and lengthened into stiff bony claws for slashing and stabbing, the wrists strengthened, and the shoulder blades pushed outward from the rib cage to make room for dense new muscle. These changes let the Pack tear victims limb from limb.

The disfigurement of the face had stopped before it was complete. The soft tissue of the lips and nose had sloughed away, the lower jaw was overstuffed with peg-like protrusions, the upper jaw held a disordered row of fangs, and the eyes had atrophied into their sockets. The rest of the body was left largely unchanged, and for reasons that were never understood this left the creatures extremely vulnerable to injury. A single low caliber round could dismember a Pack member or cut it in half at the torso, a sign of a badly stressed skeleton and connective structure.

Behavior#

It was not entirely correct to say the Pack was made up of individuals. Its members acted as a predatory gestalt, each one working with those around it to form a greater whole, and only rarely were they ever encountered alone. Perhaps because of their fragility, they hunted by overwhelming their prey with numbers and sheer aggression rather than strength.

Moving fast and shrieking constantly, sections of the Pack kept their cohesion through auditory cues, rushing into an area and sweeping over their victims in a storm of violence from all sides. They were notorious for keeping the childlike vocals of the bodies they were made from, screaming at their prey in a way that sowed disorientation and panic. The combination of their cries and their relentless clawing made them among the most unnerving Necromorphs encountered on the Sprawl.

Later forms#

In the conflict on Tau Volantis, the swarming role once filled by the Pack was taken instead by the Feeders, blind creatures that shared the Pack's fragility and overwhelming tactics while differing in shape, being taller and thinner. The Pack itself reappeared in a later incident, returning with a more skeletal appearance stripped of much of its muscle and skin. The origin of these later swarms was never established, and it was speculated that they may not have been made from human children at all, but from the alien remains native to Tau Volantis.