Basketball bulges

Being eaten.
No, I do not mean being on the receiving end as someone goes down on you. Sex seems to be popular in fiction these days, if the shitty Fifty Shades of Grey is any indication, and I sorely, desperately wish what I was about to write was all fiction. Then I could sprinkle some gratuitous sex on it, go to a publisher, and hope that it would sell. Then I would be not risking my job altogether sharing this so that strangers on the Internet would at least know of my suffering in having to watch human beings die brutal, bloody deaths to satisfy a desire even more primal than sex and far less pleasurable.
Yes, I’m talking about eating. And about being literally, bona fide eaten. An incredulous notion in modern society, where we live in concrete houses and walk on asphalt streets. Where the animals we encounter are anywhere between little quacking ducks and crotch-high geese. We live free of our early ancestor’s fear of becoming something else’s food. Crocodile, tiger, lion - pick your customer. It, in most cases, starts with the intense pressure of clamp-strong jaws, driving teeth into parts of your body where teeth should not be stabbing into. Depending on how lucky you are, there will likely be hellish pain lasting anywhere from seconds to minutes (that I am willing to bet feels much longer) before death takes you. What happens to your consciousness after that is a popular debate. What happens to your body is not. You get chewed into a consistency similar to hamburger patties in some cases, swallowed whole in others. Different vehicles to the same destination of an acidic stomach. Your useful parts are broken down into a mushy soup. The rest are ejected from the back end.
A shitty way to go, literally and metaphorically. A living human being, full of emotions and dreams and hope, turned into lifeless steak, soup then shit. At least three out of five young men and women whose last days I will recount below went that way. The other two… well, let’s say that it has been three weeks at this time of writing, and I do not have much hope.
The day started with Matthew dropping several paper files in beige covers on my desk. When I opened it and saw a report complete with pictures of grinning people on the first page, I knew right there and then that it was going to be anything but a normal day at work.
“Missing?” I asked, eyebrows raising. It was the single possibility. Police could have pictures on their desks for all kinds of stuff, but not us rangers. Only then did I notice the tight line Matthew’s lips had pressed into.
“Not like that, no.” He shook his head. “None of them got lost. All five came down here from Sydney, stayed at Winston Ward’s place. That’s Ward’s daughter, Madeleine.” His fingers pressed on the picture of a girl at the top of the page. Hair dyed blue and with the brightest smile of the bunch, I noticed. “She and one other, Cathy, their Indigenous guide, are the two still missing.” Matthew pointed next to the picture below Madeleine. Cathy was dark-skinned and had a hiking stick resting above her shoulder, clearly posing for some sort of promotional photo. “And these three, well…”
I took a quick glance at the other photos. Steve Wilson had the build of a runner, wiry and dressed in a tank top to match. Lisa Mooney, blonde with gold-rimmed glasses. Ashley Lo - his curly dark hair tied back into a ponytail. I knew I would not have to pay extra-close attention to their appearance. Two missing.
“I don’t know, man. Kind of wanted your input on it, too.” Matthew shook his head. “Best you see it for yourself. The police could not decide if it was murder or an animal attack, so they requested us. Found all three of them ripped apart. Caught, well, a suspect, I suppose, on their own cam-”
“You kidding? A suspect and they could not decide if it’s an animal attack or not?”
“I know, Tom, watch it for yourself and tell me I’m not crazy. Hells, they didn’t just have the pictures. Caught the damned killings on film, and still can’t decide if he, it - whatever - is man or animal. I will send the footage over in a bit. Some photos are in there, too. Just don’t puke up your breakfast. I’m seriously thinking of going vegan.”
What the fuck?
I frowned. Matthew could not wait for someone to share his hell, I supposed, and quickly retreated back into his office, leaving me alone with the papers.
Here are the facts.
Winston Ward, your typical real estate rich guy, bought some bushland last year next to our park. His plan was straightforward - setting up lavish air-conditioned bungalows amidst the Australian bush, complete with five-star hotel facilities such as private pools and a fine dining restaurant. A luxury retreat amidst trees and shrubs, letting you enjoy the best of nature and avoiding the worst. No insect stings, soaking rains or blistering heat that the normal campers had to suffer. Just a couple of hours drive from Sydney to boot. All well and good, except for the fact that it came alarmingly close to intruding on national park’s land. So Parks and Wildlife Service took notice and kept a close eye on Ward’s project. So far, even though he has not opened his retreat and nothing illegal had been done, Ward became a popular name among us rangers. Just in case.
I certainly did not expect his name - or his family’s name, rather - to come up this way.
It had been Ashley’s idea. An Ecology graduate, he wanted to make a documentary about Aboriginal people’s way of sustainable living among nature. He got his girlfriend, Madeleine Ward, into it, alongside fellow graduates Steve and Lisa. Madeleine easily secured the filming spot with her father. They hired Cathy as the expert for the film, and the five of them occupied two bungalows. Living in the lap of luxury while trying to promote sustainability. Three cameras were installed. Two security cams for each bungalow, expectedly. The third was a camera trap, the kind used on wildlife trails to capture pictures and videos of animals. Likely intended for fun.
As much as I respect the purpose of their never-finished documentary, I find twenty six-year-old Ashley rather hypocritical, and rather gross given how Madeleine only turned eighteen three months ago. But not to speak ill of the dead, I suppose.
I braced myself as I turned the page for the photos, and failed to stop the dry-heave that came up. Three bodies, gnawed clean of flesh. Strands of dark curly hair on the first mangled head identified it as Ashley’s. The skull was smashed open, its insides, empty where a brain had been licked clean, caked with dried blood. Shattered pieces of his bones were strewn over muddy soil, brown rain water filling in troughs where the marrow that had been sucked out. Steve and Lisa was in roughly a familiar state, and I shivered at how disturbingly clean the bones were. Take away the skull that clearly showed the remains to be human, and it could have been a smokehouse’s dump - filled with finished ribs and chicken wings.
And yet, the final photo proved even more unsettling.
It was a still taken from one of the security cameras. At night, judging from the grey filter. It was still bright enough, however, for me to make out the grassy front of a bungalow. Bushes and shrubs lined the far end. A dark figure loomed over them, casting a long shadow.
I shivered once more.
I had walked into the bushes hundreds, if not thousands, of times. I knew how dense they could be - reaching up to your chests in many places. That figure - standing on two legs with long arms drooping at its side - barely had its knees covered by the shrubs. The photo, even though grainy, was clear enough for me to make out a domed head resting upon a neck so thick the figure might as well be said to lack one. Matching broad shoulders held up that neck, deltoids bulging. The… thing, apparently, had little hair as far as I could see.
I did not notice how hard I had clenched my jaws until a cramp-like pain made me grunt. Matthew could not be fucking with me, could he? I had worked with the guy for years. I called the local police station. The woman on the other end confirmed it. Unless a whole station was in on the prank with Matthew - an idea equally impossible as what I was seeing - it seemed like we had won the reverse lottery of missing and dead people cases.
As much as the Internet likes to make fun of its deadly wildlife, most of Australia has no large land predators. Dingoes are pretty much your average dog. The huge crocs live way too far to the north and sharks do not magically appear in the middle of bushlands. Neither looked like some psychopathic, cannibalistic basketball player wearing a shaved-clean, badly proportioned gorilla suit. The police’s best option was us, I could tell, but as far as me and Matthew went, we were equally clueless.
I shook my head and rubbed my temples - for a moment questioning my sense of reality. That was until an alert jabbed into the screen of my desktop. Matthew’s email.
Here is the footage, Tom. Crazy stuff. I got them to send us a scan of Madeleine’s journal, too. Found where those kids were seen last.
An unholy amount of files came in a link he attached.
The rest of my day was spent going through them all. I still know not what to make of what I saw, and I need time to collect myself before I can write of what I have seen on those tapes.
I need a nap. And dinner. But no meat. I agree with Matthew. As much as I loved a nice scotch fillet, I’m probably going vegan for a while.

I'll do my best to recount this, but I admit it's tough to reach back and remember the surprise that came with youthful innocence as you meet your own sexual experiences, and nothing is ever as it was described to be, expected to be, some things are worse, some things are great despite seeming yucky at a glance, and some things just don't matter as much as others said.
Best to describe "virginal me" as someone dedicated to her family's devout Christian faith. Never really questioning the faith itself, I didn't totally get how this stuff would work in a practical way as I started having urges and desires towards boys. And I thought I was just a-waitin' to be some homemaking wife, a baby factory... basically everything that I was told I wanted. I believed that I must want these things too!
I'll say this much - I'd made it to high school around this time, and this was a fairly average age for many women to try sexual things. Won't get more specific than that, just in case. And I became very aware of the sort of 'fresh meat' mentality that makes young girls practically competitive with each other -- you know, the things we'll do to keep a boys interest.
So, sure. I had a few boyfriends. My first real kiss, I remember praying for most of the night because I was afraid I liked it too much, and certainly would become a whore overnight, and what's up with these hormones doin' witchcraft without my permission, anyways?
Anyways, in a tale as old as time, I assume, a new family moves in up the street, I'm immediately crushing on the son of this family, and he seemed older, but not by much. I was wrong on this one, he was 22, but I didn't know that, and it certainly wasn't love, but it was at least lust at first sight. I could fin the sin boling inside of me already. Tried to ignore him.
And by trying to ignore him, I mean I'd get as gussied up as possible to simply take a walk around the block while he played basketball alone and shirtless outside, daydreaming about what I might do if he said hello.
Let's try to speed up to get to the parts that probably matter more to you. Oddly, I don't quite remember how we got formally introduced to each other, but we started spending some time together. We were the only people on this whole block under 30 so it just worked out this way. He (and his family) drank, smoked cigarettes, and some other inhalable things. Before him (and we'll call him "Alan"), I thought those were the direct paths to hell. Watching him consume? It felt grown up, mature, like I was living a taboo just for being nearby and able to smell the smoke and beer breath on him.
Before too long he asked me about guys at my school, I did the bashful "no one really notices me" response which was ultimately true but I also had made many concerted decisions and efforts to not get noticed -- I was seen as a goody two shoes church girl and was the butt of many, many jokes. He asked what types of guys I like, and I told him I didn't know, and that was true. Listed off some virtues like honesty, being funny, attractive, and he gave me a "well, that's me". We talked about the difference in age, I laughed it off knowing he couldn't be serious, but asked him the same in return. I got a pretty different answer from him than mine. His list was quite a bit more shallow, but I figured it just covered the surface. He went on about not believing me, that high school boys were dumb (and they often are), that I'm too pretty to be single -- that one sent me over the moon.
Time blurs a lot of this. What felt like weeks of coming up with excuses to hang out with him between when I got home from school and before my parents came home was probably less than two weeks. I'll just get into some nitty gritty now, this is a bit forward in the story, but I don't see much reason to dwell on the priors.
Alan was almost a foot taller than me. Had longish blonde hair, and had that very nice athletic build from working off the alcohol playing basketball alone in the front yard. I loved watching his hips with each jump.
A specific day where I "accidentally" walked in front of his house on the way to mine, which meant I basically had to walk around the block backwards and undetected after getting off of the bus, he was outside smoking, beer in hand. Motioned me over, I don't recall all that was said, but he was talking about how much it sucked to be single. I told him again I'd never been in anything serious with a guy before. I was invited in, but this was the beginning of something different.
He lived in a converted carport/garage attached to his family's house. Just gray cinderblock walls surrounding the possessions of a man-child with very little ambition. Skull bongs with candle wax dripped all over them, a dusty loveseat, a mattress on the floor, no bedframe. No need for curtains as there were no windows. Just a door that would lead outside, and a door that would lead to the rest of the house, which I'd never seen before. But there we were, alone, and he asked if I wanted to see what he really looks for in a girl. Of course I did! And in no time flat, a few clicks of a remote control, and porn was playing on his dingy TV screen from a DVD player.
I'd seen some porn out of curiosity, and some other exposure, but not exactly a large amount of it. Had a general working knowledge of the most common things one might see, and a mental idea of what sets of genitalia looked like, as well as what they produce/excrete. Does that sound clinical? It should. At the time, most of my sexual knowledge was either general functionality, and a lot of "things women did to land a man but didn't really like doing". One of those things I'd heard even from my own mom was happening on the screen with precious little notice: an impossibly busty woman was blowing someone. Of course I pretended like this was no big deal and I watched porn allllll the time.
He went on to tell me that "any girl of his" would be really into doing that for him whenever he wanted. I'd asked if that had been common for him with ex's. He'd said something like "no, and that's why they are ex's. If I could get blowjobs anytime I wanted, I would literally never want anything else in bed", and there was a laugh, but a bit of seriousness to it as he looked at me and waited for my response. We talked a little more about the intricacies - sometimes it'd be fast like what was happening onscreen, sometimes it'd be really slow so he'd lay back and enjoy...then the money shot happened, conversation ceased as the random busty lady got her face coated. This is why I asked the million dollar question about if he expected to shellac his next girlfriends face with each blowjob. He told me, no. The rationale was that women only did that in porn so you could see that he really finished. HIS girls would swallow it.
Listen, I know how insane this probably sounds, but the idea that you'd ever consume that stuff was just like science fiction to me. Figured that if it tasted half okay, no one would ever have kids, really.
He used the remote, went to yet another POV blowjob scene, kind of groaning in happiness as he'd say things like "yeah, take it girl" or "yeah, you know you love being a dickeater". I hadn't heard him talk like this. Also, my hormones were somehow excited by it all.
I thought about things quickly; my understanding was that blowjobs were a pretty submissive act, but most of the women in my church seemed to submit to their husbands, and since I didn't recall anyone in the 'scare you out of premarital sex' sermons saying that blowjobs counted (because I really was this naive), I started wondering to myself if this was something I'd be okay with doing. Seemed like a direct line from giving Alan head to being his girlfriend.
But next to me, he started rubbing the bulge in his shorts. Over the cloth, but with a thumb tucked inside, like he'd planned to go exploring, but remembered I was in front of him. Even my naive ass knew he was hard. This seemed like a good time to ask him if he wanted me to leave, and he said I shouldn't since we were enjoying "the show" together. I won't pretend my hormones weren't twirling like crazy, but it was also pretty scary to me then. I'd try to stay on topic but ask other questions. One was along the lines of "If you had a girlfriend that did that for you whenever, what else would you expect out of her", and his answer was basically "do what I like in bed, the rest works itself out, and I probably wouldn't care past that". How many times a week? "You mean how many times a day", he'd say with a guffaw.
Mentally, I was weighing things, did I want to be his girlfriend so badly that I'd jump right into the unknown? Did I want to be a girlfriend at all? My hormones said yes to the latter, but weren't immediately sure of the former. I responded with something I don't quite recall, but measured up to "if all you want are blowjobs. I bet I'd be great at being your girlfriend"
He motioned towards his zipper and asked something like " do you mind if I...?", trailing off. I genuinely thought he wanted to excuse himself to rub one out, so I said I didn't mind. It was that fast that he had his dick out, stroking himself, and asked with all the gusto in the world: do I want to try it?
This, I remember like it was yesterday.
I said I'd have to be his girlfriend for that! "Want to be my girlfriend, then?" I'd mentioned I didn't know how to do it. "I'll show you how" That's all it takes? "If you swallow, you're definitely my girlfriend"
This girl didn't have a damn clue how relationships began, were handled, and every old adage I'd ever been told about sex acts that "keep men happy" came flooding into my mind. Maybe this was how you get a real boyfriend? Technically this "isn't sex"? It's like my life flashed before my eyes as he guided my head down. I looked down until I got too close to focus my eyes, seeing his blondish-brown pubic hair while he stroked his cock next to me. With a sigh and more butterflies in my stomach than most forests, I said "where do you want me?" and just that quickly, his hand went away from his cock and just guided my head riiiiiight down to it.
As soon as his cock, damp with precum, touched my lips, I instinctively opened my mouth and let him slide right in. "Showing me how to do it" meant "putting his hand on the back of my head and using my mouth in place of his hand". Beyond the obvious, he actually wasn't too pushy. It felt like a lot at the time. I marveled at how much bigger the head of his cock seemed in my mouth than just looking at it. No idea if he was looking at the screen or looking at me, I heard him cheering me on, quietly: "good girl", "just like that", "move your tongue more... JUST like that" while he kept my head going at a steady pace.
When he said "it always takes me longer to finish when I drink, sorry", I was pretty confused - I realized I didn't know how long these even took on average. He paused at one point to swig from his beer can, letting go of my head, saying "keep going baby". I'd never been called baby. I'd never been called a good girl. My brain and heart loved it, and I started mentally assuming this was now my fiance because I genuinely was that naive.
He was good with direction, yes, but no real moans. I didn't know I was to expect them, but for this reason, I had no metric to decide how long I'd been doing this, how long I should expect to be doing it, or anything. Just... swallow when he's done. I got more into it as my heart got more involved, and showed some initiative by choosing to bob my head faster (I really didn't know my way around a penis back then, so I assumed speed was the key), which got him to say something like "damn baby, you really like this!", when I was thinking "I don't know about that, I just really like YOU", but it instead came out as a muffled "mmhmm" -- because I didn't want him to think I was having a bad time.
In the moment, I didn't know if I was "having a good time". Looking back, I'm fairly sure that I was thinking "I really want him to be my boyfriend and this is how to make that happen", and my faith wasn't really entering my mind much once I felt him push my head. He never went so far as to gag me, but did keep steadily guiding me. Also, in looking back, I'm not sure why I wanted a boyfriend so badly -- the inexplicable desires of a teenage girl, I'd guess?
Back to the situation?
His grip on my head tightened, and I only had a second to think to myself "I must be doing something right" before he shot spurt after spurt after spurt of cum into my unsuspecting mouth. He grunted with each shot, and it was only really as his orgasm subsided that I really started getting anxious about what I'm supposed to be doing. Was I supposed to swallow it and leave? Do I take his dick out of my mouth first and then swallow, or try to do it with him shoved against my tonsils?
That was mostly answered with him pulling my head up, telling me it got really sensitive. He looked happy and almost sleepy. And then... "you going to swallow?"
This might be hard to believe, but I wasn't even thinking about if I liked the taste or not. It was all so new, especially this texture. I nodded that I would, and had to fight making a face as I choked it back, it hit my bitter tastebuds, and I shuddered a bit, and the aftertaste hit me of the saltiest and most bitter concoction I could have ever imagined.
Until I went home, everything that happened for the next few minutes is there in my memory as a blur, but I do recall some very specific things. Most of all, the main question on my mind was "... well, what happens now?" - I'd just done something I'd been told I was supposed to hate doing, but I didn't hate it. I swallowed, which I was told was the worst and it made you a total ho, but I'd only done it the one time, and didn't feel like a total ho. Overall, I was shocked at how much I didn't mind it. Not only did I not mind it, I wasn't opposed to doing it again, and I felt that way immediately. Wasn't sure if this was me weighing if I was ready to do this again, but that's getting way ahead of the story.
When I gulped it down, I sat straight up and looked directly at him, assuredly waiting for some kind of cue about what the hell people do after a blowjob, you've swallowed his cum -- literally everything I knew told me he was supposed to be falling asleep now, and he very much wasn't asleep while he shoved his cock back into his shorts.
What came next was a negotiation that I didn't realize was a negotiation. After I said "how did I do", and he'd told me I did really well, but I'd learn more over time, and the best thing I did was "swallow like a champ". Asking him if most girls did that for him, he'd said "no, and that's why I'm single". Knowing what I know years later, that's arguably true! Just a creative way to put it.
But those questions started pouring out of him as the afterglow subsided, all of which I greeted with the same answer: "If you were my girlfriend you'd do that whenever I said?", "You're gonna swallow every time?", "Would you do it first thing in the morning if I said so?", "You're okay with me not doing that for you, I hate doing that for girls?", "Wow, you really liked that cum, didn't you?" is the last one he asked with a huge grin. I answered yes to all of it -- I didn't see a problem with those things, really. It was only when he talked about me "liking cum" that I was fibbing. I didn't hate it, but I didn't know what to make of it, and again, was mostly surprised that it was nowhere near as bad as I was led to believe it'd be. Besides, I'm getting a boyfriend!
He peck-kissed me after a hug, and led me to his door. Told me to not worry about knocking, to just come in whenever -- that kind of trust bowled me over, I must say. And of course, leaned in and whispered in my ear "but you know we got to keep this secret for now, a lot could happen, you're young..." and in the moment, I agreed. I had my own reasons for thinking that, but they hit me like a sledgehammer as I walked out the door and made my way home.
I wondered exactly why I was so hellbent on him. He had no job. No car. No license. If he had friends, I hadn't seen any of them (but he did, and that's a story for later). Breathed a sigh of relief that I wasn't going to have to explain my brand new dating situation to my parents because we were going to keep it quiet. Also, I panicked that it'd somehow be very obvious to my parents when I got home that I was still a virgin, but had done something sexual. That was silly, and sure, I hid it, but probably because I started hiding myself away from them.
That was a Friday. I was in my bedroom just about to go to sleep, when an inebriated Alan tapped on my window; he wanted me to know that he wanted to be up around 10 AM, so I should probably make plans to go over and "get used to waking" him up that way. I smiled with wild ideas about the fun we'd have together after I woke him up and we got the blowjob situation out of the way. Oh, I was so naïve.
SO naïve. But I agreed, and he told me he was excited to see his good girl in the morning, and I melted.
I'll pick up from here next time.

Lawman
A drop of scarlet fell into the dust.
Hauke ignored the bullet hole in his side and kept reloading. There would be time to bleed later.
He sat in a battered wooden chair under an awning, with one leg draped over its arm, eyes staring intently down the dirt road. A rhythmic metal clicking came from the guns he held as he filled their cylinders with fresh shells. But his eyes never left the road. There was no need; his hands worked without thought.
Beyond the awning, the sky was bare, the town was still, and the planet’s twin suns blazed with fury. Heat shimmered off the hard-packed dirt road running through the center of Aeos, and sweat made tracks down Hauke's face through the dust. Gehenna was technically a moon, though larger than most planets, stark and strange, a waterless desert world of jagged black mountains and sunbaked hardpan on the edge of Alliance space—on the edge of nowhere.
Most who worked at Deepcore's mining facility called the moon The Withered Lands. An apt name Hauke thought, for a place of perpetual sunlight and crushing heat. A place barren of life. No where any but a witling would wish to call home.
He was only here because corporate greed put this lonely settlement on a fringe world otherwise deemed uninhabitable; corporate greed and a ready supply of desperate people - the disillusioned and the displaced, the utterly broken. For most, their lives were a legacy of misery, and they left behind a past they hoped to forget. There was never a shortage of such expendables in a galaxy riddled with crime and war. No one would miss them. No one cared. That's why the outlaws chose this shit hole to put down roots. There were vulnerable people here, a flock of sheep placidly going about their daily lives as the wolves circled, and no Alliance security to protect them. Easy pickings.
Hauke shook his head and slid another round into an empty chamber. Shame, really. These are decent folk. Better than the other sewers he’d policed.
Then he shrugged.
Good people they might be, but it didn't matter. It should, but it didn’t. They were expendable. Everyone was, after a fashion, even Hauke.
Every worker who stepped off a Deepcore transit shuttle into the dust and the heat was undeniably corporate fodder, disposable flesh to be used and discarded like soiled toilet paper. Deepcore made no bones about this practice, nor did they bother with any pretense that their workers on Gehenna were anything but company fodder. Why should they? No one with wealth enough to matter was paying attention. Nobody in the Core gave two shits about a bunch of dregs dying on the Fringe. Who would? Alliance authorities? Funny. The money-made politicians in the halls of power wouldn't waste a bucket of piss on what they deemed rats squabbling for the right to live in society's sewers, filthy beggars and low-born rabble best ignored by their betters. Why waste resources cleaning them out when, given enough time, disease and starvation would do the job for them?
Hauke snapped his pistol's cylinder up into its housing and gave it an experimental spin. The smooth, well-oiled clicking that came forth drew a smile across his sun-roughened face. It was a warm and comforting sound, like a fireplace in winter. If you took care of your guns, they would take care of you.
Hauke favored the classics over the garbage that companies were peddling these days, six shooters from an era lost in time. They were reliable, never overheated or shorted, and were effective on anything that ever walked or crawled in the mud - given the proper ammo. The thunder of their song sent even the most hardened criminals fleeing for cover.
He paused his reloading and studied the brass casing he held. It was a Spartan Arms Blacktip, called shatter rounds on the streets. They were expensive, hard to come by, and highly deadly. And illegal. The speed loaders clipped to the tac-belt circling his waist held the same rounds. Even a Treskori's thick armored hide offered little protection against these babies.
Movement caught the corner of his eye and drew his attention to the north.
A small Dazkani woman darted out of a nearby alleyway and across the street, a lavender-skinned child in tow, rushing for a two-room cabin very much like his own. Her tan robes were trimmed in black and embroidered across the shoulders in her house pattern. Each frantic step revealed flashes of light purple flesh on a muscular thigh where the robes were divided down the side.
His eyes followed her progress.
Then the cabin door slammed shut behind them, and she peered out through its only window with jet black eyes full of fear.
Hauke shook his head. Though he didn't blame the people of Aeos. They were afraid, and for a good reason. Outlaws calling themselves The Reapers, with blade and barrel and cruel ways, had taken by force what little joy these people had found and made each day a misery. Then came Hauke and his revolvers, claiming to be the answer, though they only saw another killer here to sink his teeth into their town.
Eyes watched from windows and doorways across Aeos. He could feel their itch upon his skin, too many eyes and wringing hands awaiting the coming confrontation. If the Reapers won today, they would turn their ire upon the people of Aeos. Things would get ugly. Fast. No wonder they were worried. Hauke was just one man against dozens of killers. He smiled. That almost made it an even fight.
Whatever happens today, he thought, absently running an oilcloth over his gun and his eyes over the town. These people would do well to cut their losses and make for the inner systems far from Deepcore and outlaws and the wild lawlessness of The Outer Fringe. They would live longer and be happier for it.
He took up his second pistol, its nickel finish reflecting sharp flashes of silver in the sunlight.
Brass casings fell at his feet.
Deepcore was supposed to be the shining star of the mining industry, a leader among leaders whose policies demanded quality of life for all its employees and family-first values that resonated down to the lowest janitor. A good PR story, Hauke thought. Tall tells for the gullible and chronically stupid.
Anyone with two brain cells fighting for third place should understand it was all a carefully crafted illusion, a shiny veneer overlaying the odious truth, the plots, the lust for profits, treacherous ways corps did business.
Hauke's fingers moved with practiced grace, and the clicking continued. Red dripped from his side.
How many politicians must have been bought over the years to maintain such an elaborate facade? How many innocent people were stuffed into early graves to protect the dark secrets? His frown deepened. Too many.
In his experience, corruption was a disease that most often began at the top and snaked its way down through long-sitting senators and middling managers, black tendrils of rot coiling through the layers of a midden heap. Parasites, all of them. Getting fat and rich off the blood and tears of ordinary folk who want to live in peace and enjoy what few comforts they can afford.
But Hauke knew there was no such thing on the Fringe. Not on Gehenna. Not for the dregs, anyway. His stomach twisted, and he slowly ran the oilcloth over his second gun. Not in this galaxy.
He lifted his eyes and scanned the area. Aeos was a town built with the cheapest fiberplast factory Prefabs Hauke had ever seen. The kind of flimsy boxlike structures meant only for a temporary settlement, never a permanent city. Some buildings still showed faint traces of the original terracotta red from the factory. But most gleamed bone white in the harsh sunlight, pitted and wind-worn like the skeletal remains of some long-dead titan strewn across the sand. When the town died, like those before it, Deepcore would erect another on the sands that held its corpse. Even Gehenna could not stop profits.
Off to the west, the dark silos and rumbling machinery of the vast mining operation loomed over Aeos like a cruel overlord, uncaring of their suffering and singular in its purpose. Columns of thick black smoke rose from its inner workings to stain the sky, and an endless procession of thick-hulled barges—laden with ore until their sides bulged—strained for orbit. Day and night, the Impervium ore flowed from Gehenna's mines to fatten the pockets of Deepcore's elite back in the heart of the Corporate Alliance. Here was a state-of-the-art operation save three things: no drones, no automated equipment, and no modern conveniences; Aeos was built with shithouse parts. Profits again.
Even the barges were operated by organics, with no autopilot or AI-driven software. The moon's electromagnetic something-or-other interfered with guidance systems, so they did everything the old-fashioned way. And then there was Gehenna's powdery dust. It held magnetic particles that worked their way into the delicate inner guts of electronics and advanced machinery, sparing no circuit or wire. That's why they needed flesh and blood workers to do the job—blood sacrifices laid out upon the corporate altar.
As for Aeos itself, there was little else to it. Flat-roofed cabins with tattered awnings shading tiny porches crowded either side of the road. A few dilapidated parts shops and rundown diners, a large closed-air market beside a cluster of tall water tanks beaded with sweat. A sprawling communications array. A small starport built on a nearby plateau just outside town, made hazy by blowing dust. There were no Sky Towers rising from sprawling cityscapes, or manicured parks to bring beauty to this desolate place. No holographic skyways filled the night skies with the endless glittering lights of air traffic. None of the high-tech glitz and glow he was so accustomed to seeing on even the poorest of Alliance worlds. Aeos was sterile and rundown, abandoned by hope.
But today, that changed.
Hauke glanced at the upper edge of his augmented vision. Twenty past eleven local time, Gehenna time. His jaw muscles tensed, and he climbed to his feet, spinning his pistols into their holsters.
Time to settle an old score.
All was quiet as he stepped out into the dust-blown street, the laughter of children at play gone silent and the hustle and bustle of the little mining town strangely absent. Indeed nothing stirred but the wind, which briefly transformed the approaching outlaw into a grainy silhouette etched into the swirling dust.
Threiner.
The name came to him unbidden, a harsh whisper in his thoughts. A sudden surge of heat rose in his chest, an electric quickening of the heart. This was the culmination of a decades-long search and perhaps some small comfort for an old wound that had never fully healed. He'd come here to take the outlaw back to Ryari Prime to face Alliance justice, alive or maybe dead. It didn't matter.
Behind Threiner, a massive cerulean sphere twice the size of Jupiter filled the sky. Layer upon layer of milky clouds and swirling blue eddies drifted across its surface, vibrant hues muted behind a thin white haze. It rose from behind jagged black peaks that cut across the horizon, and he had to tilt his eyes to take it all in; an immense orb haloed in shimmering silver rings spreading wide across the sky. Hyperion was its name, a titanic gas giant and the largest planet in the A-9 system. A trick of its size, or perhaps Gehenna’s atmosphere, made Hyperion appear close enough for him to touch, as though Hauke could reach out and swirl a finger in the layers.
At last!
A voice rose from the stillness of his mind. A familiar voice. Peace for your father. Peace so that we can sleep. The heat in his chest blazed into a blinding thirst for vengeance, a wildfire out of control. It tried to overwhelm him. He shook with the effort of holding it back, teetering on the edge of sanity. His hands trembled as they inched toward his guns, fingertips brushing aged ivory handles—eager to let them sing.
Why do you fight me? The voice said. He is our enemy. An outlaw. A murderous swine who's earned a thousand deaths. That it should be by your hand can only be seen as justice—a just thing for all his victims.
No…I…
Think. The voice was a silken purr, a whisper of falling gossamer across his skin. It caressed him with seduction. Think of all who cry out from the grave. They cry out for vengeance! Who would hear their silent words? Give them justice. Give them peace. Kill Threiner. Kill him now!
No! Hauke's shout was a silent snarl, teeth bared, face twitching. He would not dishonor his father's memory or his badge. It was unthinkable! He was an Alliance Marshal, a man sworn to justice like his father before him. And justice was what he meant to have. Not murder.
Save your twisted words, brother. I'll not hear them.
The voice retreated like the battering waves of a storm that suddenly lost their fury and fell back into the sea. It took all of his strength to stuff the voice back down into the hollows of his mind, where it waited, lambent eyes in the dark. You will see in time that I know you, even if you do not know yourself. We are the same, brother, the voice whispered.
When Hauke was sure he'd mastered himself, he took a step forward. Then another. Another.
There were forty feet between them when he stopped and angled his body toward the outlaw. "Surrender, Threiner," he raised his voice to carry the distance and over the low moan of the wind. It sounded strange coming from his mask, a slightly electronic resonance. "Lay down your weapon. Now."
Their eyes locked, and the outlaw only scowled.
Threiner was Treskori, so he wore no mask over those hideous reptilian features; his species required none. Their robust systems quickly adapted to nearly any environment, something humans did not share.
Without a mask, Hauke would be light-headed in less than a minute, air drunk, it was called. Nausea would rack his gut a short time later. Things would begin to dim, to shut down, starting with his ability to reason. Walking and talking would become a chore. Then he would collapse in the sand, delirious and confused, lungs gasping in the burning air. Darkness would come shortly after, a soulless void to consume his world. In the end, he would have no strength to call for help or the wits to understand what was happening to him. Not a fate to be envied.
Threiner's slitted black-and-yellow eyes bore into Hauke's, and for a tense moment, they held in a silent struggle. Neither moved or blinked, still as statues. Only the wind gave voice, twining its fingers through Hauke's shoulder-length hair and shifting the dust between his boots. Then Threiner's scaled lips slowly peeled back to reveal serrated teeth in a vile show of contempt. It was meant to frighten him and mock him, the cruel smile of a predator toying with its prey.
Hauke wasn't impressed. He'd seen his like before, many times, and they all bled the same with hot lead in their hearts.
Yet an eight-foot Treskori with the speed of a gazelle was nothing to take lightly, a genuine threat. So Hauke remained cautious in case Threiner decided to rush. The outlaw held a heavy plasma cannon at his side in one massive three-clawed fist, tapping it idly against a thick trunk of a leg. One blast from that cannon would leave a basketball-sized hole in Hauke's chest if it left anything at all.
Threiner glared at him with supreme confidence. In Treskori culture, strength and size were the ultimate deciding factors, especially in battle. Yet even with a Treskori's great strength, that weapon—typically found mounted on assault vehicles—would be slow to wield, slow in a fight where speed mattered. Hauke resisted the urge to smile. Speed kills.
Threiner's eyes narrowed into suspicious slits, following Hauke's eyes down to the plasma cannon, then snapping back up. A sneer that would have frozen helium slowly spread across his face. There was no armor or personal shielding that could defend against that weapon. And Threiner knew it.
Speed kills.
Hauke's hands drifted to the weathered leather holsters belted low on his hips and the nickel-plated revolvers waiting within. Immaculate they were, with quick-draw barrels and feather lite triggers for rapid fire. Their song was blood and death, and he had no doubt they would sing it soon. Engraved In fancy script along each barrel were the pistols' names, Justice and Virtue, exquisite artistry by the hand of a master gunsmith. These rare treasures were passed to him by his father with a lineage tracing to the days of his father's great-grandfather and beyond. A time when outlaws roamed the untamed west, and lawmen hunted them wherever they hid.
Threiner turned his head slowly, deliberately keeping one evil eye on Hauke, and spit a huge gob of green-tinged saliva into the dust, then snapped his glare back into place.
"Be smart, Threiner," Hauke said, though every inch of him hummed on the razor's edge of violence, and every fiber hoped Threiner would twitch that cannon in the wrong direction. "And you might live to see the outside of a prison cell again one day." The mouthpieces back in the Core wanted Threiner brought back alive if possible. Alive was better for the holovids the senators wanted to run. But if Threiner even breathed wrong, Hauke would not hesitate.
"No surrender, human," Threiner's deep hiss was full of malice, and vast musculature rippled across his shirtless bulk. "Pain. Much pain for you." From his great height, Raim Threiner glared down at Hauke as though looking at an insect he meant to crush under his boot—a naturally occurring, ever-present scowl that twisted his ugly face beyond hideous.
Threiner turned his head and spat again. "Pain," he said, scraping the sharp tip of an ebon claw across his throat scales. "All pain for you." Threiner's massive plasma rifle still hung idle at his side, barrel pointed at the ground, unmoving. But his free hand clenched into a fist. Sunlight glittered off thousands of small granular scales covering his skin like viridian glass, and a low growl issued deep within his throat, an ominous rumble that would have sent lesser beings running. But Hauke had seen it all before, and he stood firm, his jaw set, hands poised and ready. Whatever was going to happen would happen. Nothing could change that now.
Abruptly Hauke realized that Threiner was doing his best to hide a nervous edge. And rightly so. Confidence was a necessity if you wished to stay alive in this business. But blind arrogance would get you killed.
Most in his business had heard the tales of the human Lawman with lightning in his hands and ice in his veins. Most believed it was nothing more than a fairy tale, something cooked up by the Badges to keep little outlaws awake at night. Yet something must have clicked in Raim's little lizard brain. Perhaps it was the bullet-riddled bodies of his gang strewn about and already rigid in the sunlight, posing as corpses pose, that made him understand the legendary Lawman now stood before him.
"Surrender," Hauke repeated, his tone hard and flat. The icy look in his eyes said there would be no further chances. His hands hovered over his guns. Sweat stained the crown of his wide-brimmed bolero. Red dripped down his side. A sudden wind rippled folds into his shirt, kicking up a dirty haze. Everything went quiet. He could hear his heart, feel its fire surging down to his fingertips. His eyes narrowed, but he willed himself not to blink.
His hands itched to rip the guns from their holsters and let them sing. It would be so easy. Threiner wouldn't have time to process that Hauke had pulled steel before he died. His hands trembled. But he would give the outlaw a chance to lay down his weapon. He always did.
His father once told him that a man's honor was all he truly possessed. All else could be taken away or destroyed. Material possessions and riches would become someone else's when you died. In time, even your spouse. But your honor, your legacy, was yours to keep forever. This was made all the more important in a galaxy rife with treachery. A man's honor was sacred. His father had believed that, and so did Hauke. He had killed outlaws, true, more than a few: humans, Treskori, even Jasei. If they broke the law, killed, raped, or pillaged across The Alliance, he hunted them down. Most had surrendered peacefully.
For those foolish enough to pull on him, things had always ended badly; this he did not deny. He was ruthless and cunning, as one must be to survive hunting the galaxy's worst. He would not waste time with denials. He would not pretend to be righteous. He had never found a sense of pride or pleasure in the violence. He was a professional. He did not kill for joy. He only killed when given no choice. Even Raim Threiner, his father's killer, deserved his day in court. That was justice. That was how the system worked. He would bring this vile creature back alive if he could. The rest was up to Threiner.
"No surrender, human," Threiner repeated, breaking into Hauke's thoughts and rolling his broad angular head atop an even wider neck. Only seconds had passed since he first spoke. A transverse crest of bony spikes connected by a thin membrane of leathery flesh fanned up across the crown of his skull, rattling and bristling with anger. "Much pleasure to kill you, Marshal scum shit."
His response did not surprise Hauke.
The plasma rifle started up, and Hauke's hands flashed. There was thunder and smoke, time slowed.
Threiner lay on his back when the smoke cleared, slitted eyes staring blindly at Gehenna's twin suns. Four massive holes leaked green down his chest and pooled in the sand. Hauke's pistols roared again, and two more holes erupted in Threiner's head. Better to be sure than pay the price of folly.
Guess the senators weren't going to get their holovid back in the Core. Well, piss on them. Hauke was a lawman, and there were no politicians here.
People emerged from their shacks, peering plaintively up and down the streets. Their eyes were still fearful, but something else kindled behind them.
Hauke turned, gleaming pistols still in hand and lifted his voice to carry.
“People of Aeos,” he scanned their faces, and saw hope dawning where before there was only despair. “Raim is dead. The Reapers are dead. You are free.”

First / Previous
I’m very, very good at telling when someone’s lying to me.
People have lied to me my whole life, so I’ve had some practice.
I’ve only forgiven one lie—the first one I remember. The sky glowed maroon, machine oil odor filled my nostrils, and I huddled below my blankets while Alice squeezed Miss Marvelous and screamed in the bottom bunk.
Mom told us it would be alright.
She lied.
My therapist spent two hours lying to me. He only told me three things that felt true—the Number of Power. When I clammed up, he shoved some chewable pills at me and left. Dad drove us to the hotel twenty minutes later, drinking from a silver bottle.
I’d hidden the pills in my slippers, between my toes. No one saw.
◄▼►
Outside Victoria, British Columbia - May 23, 2043, 12:22 PM
- - - - -
{Stability 6/10}
The dinging sound in my aural aug wakes me up. There’s another weird message, but also a call.
A call. That’s good. Maybe it’s over. I…killed…the thinling. But Alice and Sora wouldn’t call through my aug. They know it heats up during calls. And my phone’s still on mandatory airplane mode.
I pick up.
The man’s voice is almost monotone, perfectly calm, and disgustingly familiar. I’ve heard it before, but I can’t remember where. Was it the principal’s voice? The therapist’s? I know it’s not Dad’s; he’s never monotone and rarely calm. “We’re tracking and inbound on your position. Hold your pos—“
“I’m Claire,” I say suddenly. And the floodgates open. “Claire Pendleton. I’m at West End High, and there were thinnings, but they both merged, and the first one brought a world through and a thinling, but the second one gave me a gun and I hid in the bathroom and used the mirror to stop it and I shot it. I shot it and it’s dead! But I need help. Help, pleasepleaseplease!”
“Subject is verbal.” The voice isn’t speaking to me. He’s talking through my panic, my hysteria. Is he even listening to me? No. No, he’s not. “Subject is a female adolescent, fourteen to sixteen years old. Potentially violent. Description does not match the augs’ owner’s description. Transferring to James.”
“What do you mean? They’re my—“
The line goes dead.
“—augs…” And just like that, I’m alone again. Everything hurts, whether it’s my raw, tender palm, aching throat, or just the phantom pain from the fires that swept across me when I…bonded…with the revolver. But the thinling is dead. I killed it. And if I can kill it, I can get to the shelter. I can blend in with the other students and pretend this hasn’t happened.
I fiddle with my optical aug, trying to pull up the System’s messages again. After a minute of fruitless attempts, I start muttering to myself, and it almost immediately flickers open in my eye. I roll my eyes at how stupid that feels, then start fiddling with it, trying to get a sense of how it all works together. Without the Assistance Functions, though, it’s tough to tell. I know I’ve lost Stability from fighting thinlings and discovering the revolver, but I’m not sure how to get it back.
I’m halfway through trying an equation using Skills, Truths, and Inquiries as variables when my aural aug goes off again. If it’s the calm, monotone man, I’m going to scream. I answer the call. “Hello?”
“Hello, my name is James, and you’re Claire Pendleton, right?” This voice is younger; James can’t be more than my age—maybe a year older. And unlike the first voice’s calm monotone, James has life in his voice. Energy. Ups and downs. He’s a teenager, like Alice or Sora—I’m not sure why he’s on the phone and not an adult. But before he says another word, I know a truth about James. It’s in his tone.
He will lie to me. Maybe he already has.
I won’t forgive his lies, I decide I. But I don’t have any choice but to tolerate them. I take a few breaths, cough, and try to close the floodgates this time. “Yes, Claire Pendleton. Don’t lie to me, James. I’m in trouble, and I need help. Everything’s not going to be alright, and telling me that won’t help.” It comes out angrier than I wanted, but I can’t take that back now.
He’s taken aback, though. I can tell from the silence in my aug for a minute. Then he clears his throat. “I’m building your profile now. Once we have it, my superiors will tell me exactly what I can and can’t tell you. You’re not who we expected from your augments. For now, here’s what you need to know. Your survival is important to us. I’m going to do everything I can to make sure you get to West End High’s safe room in one piece, and in return, you’re going to keep me on the line. Got it?”
“That’s not going to work,” I say. “My aug’s a piece of junk, and it’s already overheating. And I don’t even know who you are! I killed a thinling, and I’ve been through two merges today, and I don’t know anything about you or what you want.”
The panic’s hitting me again. I need to sit down. My feet don’t respond right away as I slowly struggle to stand and walk to the girls’ bathroom. I sit on the toilet in the limbo-dancer stall, the door held open with my foot, and clear my throat. “Who are you?”
“My name is James, and I’m cleared to tell you I’m an Operator for the Supernatural and Hidden Objects Control and Knowledge Service and that you’re currently a person of interest to us.”
I shiver despite my best efforts to keep it together. That’s not a lie—at least not all of it.
◄▼►
My aural aug beeps, letting me know it’s reaching critical heat levels. I already know that, obviously. It’s getting painful to listen to James at all. But I’ve been a person of interest to SHOCKS before.
Just after the burgundy skies, the machine oil and roses, and the metal tang I couldn’t spit out. And the missing wall that let in the warp and made Mom a liar. It wasn’t fun the first time, and it won’t be fun now.
[Patch Installation In Progress]
[Patch Installation Successful]
Before I can complain, James speaks in my ear. It sounds like he’s talking through a walkie-talkie now. “I’ve downloaded a speed limiter patch into your aural and optical augs. It’ll reduce my optics feed quality, and we’ll sound scratchy and staticky, but they should stop overheating. Twenty to thirty-percent drop in heat.”
Sure enough, the heat in my ear drops to a tolerable glow. “You’re in my optic aug, too?” I ask, concerned. SHOCKS hasn’t been my friend in the past; my therapist was SHOCKS, and the last thing I need is the boogeyman in my brain. The Halcyon System riding along is bad enough, but if James sees everything I do, too…
“Yes. I’m piggybacking through both of your augs right now. SHOCKS already has a profile for you, so expect some changes in our interactions over the next two or three minutes as I adjust. Please confirm the following questions: First, is your date of birth June 15, 2029?”
“Yes.” That’s pretty basic, and SHOCKS already knows the answer.
“You’re two months older than me. I won’t be fifteen until August 23,” James says. I’m still waiting for James’s next lie. “Now, I need to ask about something that happened on October 11, 2034. You were—“
“No.”
“I’m sorry, but I—“
“You already know exactly what happened. The truth, according to you guys. I don’t need to tell you anything.” He’s digging into places I won’t go with Sora. How dare he?
“I see.” James’s voice shifts slightly, his accent changing to Oxford English. “What do you know about SHOCKS?”
“You’re the boogeyman.”
“That’s not wrong,” James laughs. Even his laugh has picked up a British-sounding tone. I also feel myself relax as his tone shifts to a businesslike calm. Is the accent a lie? I can’t decide. “Claire, your augs show you in a relatively safe place, but that won’t last. The profile says you don’t trust people. I’m going to ask you to trust me.”
“No.” The word leaves my lips before I realize I’ve said it. “No, I can’t.”
“Claire, you’ve encountered a full-blown reality merge to R-389 and an instant-entry merge with an unknown reality. The rest of Victoria is experiencing merges, and no one else can help you. It’s unlikely you’ll survive the third merge without my help.”
I sit on the toilet seat, turning the revolver over and over in my hands. James still hasn’t lied. He doesn’t think I can handle it here by myself. And neither do I, to be honest. So why did I go from begging the adult to help me to being unsure about James? Because I know he’ll lie to me? Because I’m thinking now instead of panicking? Or is it just because I’m older than him? I narrow my eyes.
He’s right. Unfortunately. I can’t find a way to the shelter. Not without help, and he’s who I’ve got. “I can’t trust you. You’ll lie. You all do. But the shelter’s on the wrong side of the school, and I can’t get there. Give me a way through.”
“Not through, out. You need to break out a window, move past the soccer field, and find the cafeteria. If you go in through those doors, it’s a straight shot to—“
“The office. Got it.” I don’t stand up, but I do let the stall door squeak shut. The bathroom’s perfume-and-cleaning supply smell feels overpowering and oppressive, but it also smells like safety. The thinling couldn’t get me here. I’m half-tempted to stay. But only half. The revolver sits in my lap; I pick it up and hold it in front of my optic aug. “I need to know more about thinlings and this thing.”
“Thinlings? We don’t have anything by that name from R-389. Did you make that up?”
“No. Your emergency system told me their name,” I say, rolling my eyes. I finally hoist myself out of the stall and walk gingerly back into the hallway. I look carefully at the thinling’s remains. “That’s a thinling,” I say.
James goes quiet for a minute. A full minute. While he waits, I fidget with my glasses and rub my thumb against the Revolver’s bullet holder. I’ve decided the Revolver is a thing of power, like the Truth or the number Three. It’s from a merge, yes, but all three let me solve equations I couldn’t before. They’re the best kinds of variables; I can put them anywhere and have a good chance of not screwing up the math. They almost seem bigger than the equations, in fact.
James clears his throat in my ear. “There are some things I can’t tell you, but we have a record of these. 389-T-13/2I.”
I blink. “Sorry, what?”
“That’s its designation. It’s a 389-T-13/2I. That means it’s from Reality 389, it’s the thirteenth type of anomaly we’ve encountered from there, and it’s a Type Two Incomprehensible. Incomprehensibles are weird, but incomprehensibility works both ways with Type Twos like the 389-T-13/2I. It’s a high Anquan-Danger anomaly. Trivial for a trained soldier. Dangerous to you. They don’t tend to have a sense of self, so exposing them to themselves causes problems in their behavior. I see you used a mirror. Good thinking.”
I reevaluate my partnership with James. Even if I can’t trust him, he knows his stuff, and he’s just a voice in my head. I’ll know what he knows—most of it, anyway. There’s no way that’s all the information on 389-T-13/whatevers. And I’m not sure what’s more incomprehensible, the monster I shot or that name. It’d take a computer to keep track of a bunch of codes like that.
“We’re calling it a thinling,” I say. I hear him start to protest and cut him off. “I’m older. What I say goes.”
“That’s incredibly stupid,” James complains in my ear, but I know I’ve got him, so I don’t say anything. After a moment, he relents. “Thinlings, or 389-T-13/2I, are usually the first anomalies through merges to R-389, and they’re easy to deal with. They usually come through in groups, so be ready for more. Now, show me that pistol again.”
“The Revolver,” I say under my breath as I hold it up.
James goes almost silent; a keyboard sound clicks rapidly in my ear, but he doesn’t say anything for a while again. I shift the Revolver in my hands, careful not to hit my cut palm, and wait. It takes almost three minutes. I know because I count the seconds after the silence gets awkward.
“Claire, that object isn’t in our database. We don’t have a single sample on file.” James’s voice has changed. The British accent wavers, and seriousness washes over him, almost identical to the monotone man’s cadence but higher-pitched. “We’re labeling the reality it came from R-573-T. It’s likely the first object we’ve found from it, so it’s important that you don’t use it anymore. We don’t know the possible effects it could have.”
I close my eyes, count to three, and open them again. The Revolver’s off-white barrel almost glows in the twilight hall, and the faint light glints off the brass bullet holder. I wrap my hand around the grip, resting my finger on the trigger guard. “I’m keeping it. What’s the bullet holder called?”
“The cylinder. You need to keep it. Don’t lose it, whatever you do. SHOCKS needs that object.”
I step over the smoldering, stinking remains of the thinling and walk down the hall, the Revolver’s barrel facing the floor. My gut tightens almost painfully as I turn my back to the monster—what if it’s not dead? What if I have to run? But there’s no way it’s getting up. I’m okay.
I return to Mrs. Helquist’s math room. Splinters and sawdust cover the hall’s tiles; I step over them and into the classroom. Shockingly, the door and a few drops of blood on her carpet are the only signs I’d run through here or that the thinling chased me.
Those and the smell rolling in through the shattered window. A warm ground beef and electrical scent that sticks in my nose and makes my stomach heave. I choke back bile and look out the window.
And I see the Truth—that, Revolver or not, James or not, I can’t go out there.
◄▼►
I’m back in the girls’ bathroom, sitting on the toilet seat again. James hasn’t said a word since I turned around. Looking at the soccer field, at what was…out there…I couldn’t. So I’m back here, where it’s safe. Or at least where it’s safer than that. My stomach is lighter now, but I can’t get the taste of used breakfast out of my mouth—or the smell of warm meat out of my nose.
James breaks the silence. “The merge is backward, Claire. We can’t get a recovery and stabilization team into any merged zones near Victoria. You’re effectively inside of R-389 right now, and you’re in possession of an unknown anomalous object. That’s the bad news. The good news is that since you have the object, I was able to negotiate Class Zero clearance for you. Welcome to SHOCKS.”
I ignore him. He’s still not lying, but nothing he’s saying is helpful right now. “We’ll loop around. It’s a long push through the gym, but the second floor doesn’t have fire doors. They never installed them.” I’m not looking forward to traveling through Mr. Roberts’s gym or the lockers, though—not after what happened to everyone left outside. PE was my biggest nightmare all last year, and it’ll probably be worse now.
“Are you sure? The longer it takes to get to the shelter, the worse the merge will get.”
“I’m sure. I can’t.” I push myself to my feet and hold the Revolver. “It’ll be safer inside.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” James says. “R-389’s unreality levels are much higher than R-0’s. The longer this takes, the less stable the world will get.”
“So the whole world’s turning into a thinling?” I ask.
“Can we meet in the middle? How about T-Thirteens?” James asks. “Not the whole world, but it’ll get worse here soon.”
I ponder as I stick my head out into the hall. I’m doubling back toward Mrs. Helquist’s room, but instead of going inside, I’m heading through the Social Studies hall to the gym. If I can get through the basketball court and past the ticket booth on the far side, I can get upstairs. If I can get upstairs, I can find the main stairwell, and if I can find that, I can get to the shelter’s door.
Simple and linear.
Nothing moves in the dim hall. Here and there, white light pours in through the windows; the white, almost fluorescent sun seems to have won its war against the sickly yellow clouds. I hadn’t noticed them from Mrs. Helquist’s window. “Move from classroom door to classroom door. Always check behind you before you move. Keep looking around, and look inside every room you pass. Don’t leave any T-Thirteens behind you. Make sure you have an escape route.”
He’s trying to give me weeks of training in one long, never-ending lecture, but almost everything bounces off my brain like a tennis ball. I move to the first classroom door, look around quickly, then hobble to the next. The whole time, I’m rerunning my equation. If my math is correct, I’ve balanced it—for the most part. But James’s constant talking is a new variable, and I haven’t figured out how to solve it yet.
It also changes the rest of the problem. James is a wealth of information, but I can’t trust him, and whatever Class Zero clearance is, it’s not high-ranking enough to get the truth out of him. He seems genuine in wanting to help me. I just can’t digest everything he’s still saying about tactics, clearing rooms by myself, self-covering, situational awareness, and a million other soldier-sounding sound bites. I give up and set James aside as a variable. I need to solve the gym first.
“Go right,” James says a second after I turn right into the Social Studies hall. I roll my eyes and hold my tongue, darting from door to door. The posters are different here: maps of Canada, a student-made British Columbia flag made from magazine clippings, and timelines. I ignore them, checking rooms, hurrying through the dark sections of the hall, and lingering in the pale lights as long as I can. It takes almost five uneventful, heart-pounding minutes to arrive at the gym’s doors.
Mr. Roberts is inside.
Or maybe it’s something that used to be Mr. Roberts. Or something lying about being Mr. Roberts. Much like the thinling—I refuse to call it a T-Thirteen—his appearance shimmers and changes, but whether his arms bulge like a bodybuilder’s, his legs split into four bone-white insect legs, or his fingers rattle and clatter like chains on the floor, it’s still him—just…different hims. Looking at him makes me feel like I’m spinning or falling—or both.
Either way, he stands under the basketball hoop in his usual place, overseeing an invisible PE class. That’s a problem. The stairs are on the far side. I can see them from here, but I don’t think I can get across the gym without Mr. Roberts seeing me.
My hand’s on the door when James interrupts. “This is a Type Three Incomprehensible, Claire.”
“He’s Mr. Roberts.” Even though it’s not quite my PE teacher, it’s almost right most of the time.
“No, it’s a Type Three Incomprehensible. I’m not sure which classification, but all Incomprehensibles are mind-affecting anomalies. What do you see?”
I describe it, and I can almost hear James shaking his head. He types for a moment. “It’ll get worse the closer you get. I’m overlaying an image over it. Use your aug, close your other eye, and pay attention to the overlay, not what’s behind it. And hurry. I had to disable my patch and overclock your aug.”
“Got it,” I whisper, my hand still on the door. Everything James has told me is the truth, but it’s not the capital-T truth. I won’t find that in what some boy miles away keeps saying in my ear.
I push the door open and run inside.
Mr. Roberts turns and screams/roars. This close, he’s not much different than the thinling. I squeeze my right eye closed, and he fades into the background, replaced by a jet-black cut-out exactly his shape. As the black cut-out starts running toward me, Mr. Roberts’s long fingernails and split legs occasionally weave out from behind the blackness. Those bits give me vertigo.
I level the Revolver and fire. The shot hits the shadowy overlay, which keeps coming. I pull the trigger again, but nothing happens.
“Run, Claire!” James all but screams in my ear. I sprint for the stairs, shoes sticking slightly to the wooden floor. What did I step in that makes them stick? It feels like I’m running through syrup.
I look at Mr. Roberts. He’s closing the gap quickly, and the black overlay seems to be breaking down. His four insect legs propel him toward me across the tar-like basketball court, and his fingernails whip back and forth like chains—chains with spikes on the ends. My aug’s already overheating, a roaring inferno in my skull that doesn’t stop.
The floor gets stickier and stickier until I’m all but swimming through the gym. Mr. Roberts reaches me. The overlay disappears, fading to reveal something that’s both perfectly my PE teacher and something completely alien.
{Skill Learned: Endurance 1}
{Stability 4/10}
My head swims, and my mouth fills with bile again. I throw myself toward the stairwell, and the sticky feeling disappears when I crash into the first step. I scramble up the stairs, away from the thing that isn’t quite Mr. Roberts. Three steps. Four. I trip, roll on the stairs, and look back, both eyes open.
The Mr. Roberts thing screams/roars from below the bottom step. The Revolver’s bullet, the one lined up with the barrel, glows and illuminates his face. And in that moment, just before I scream and turn and crawl up the remaining stairs, I see the Truth.
It’s not him.
But it was.
◄▼►

Hey all – I've about two years ago I locked my back up and collapsed to the floor just bending over to kiss my wife in bed on my way out the door. I couldn't move for a few days, but after about a week off, I was good again.
Last fall, I kept getting injured almost at month intervals – late August (disc golf), early Oct (stood up in the shower wrong), mid Nov (basketball), mid Dec. I put myself in PT in August, but found myself worse. I finally went to the orthopedist and got an MRI in November and really began to lay off my exercise (which was HIIT, Les Mills Core & Pump, lots of spin biking, regular biking) and activity (disc golf, basketball, hiking and walking).
Turned out that I had bulging discs at L3-L4, L4-L5, L5-S1 on my left side – the pain radiates into my glute, but doesn't shoot down my leg.
I started PT in January and was reading McGills books – doing the big 3. I was doing great and ended my round of PT mid-April.
I had added some moderate weights into my diet of exercise, and was running a lot for me – getting up to 6 miles a run two/three times a week. But then I tweaked my back Thursday and have been hobbling around since. Big downgrade in my perspective and attitude. :(
I have come to realize that my back has issues with:

1. Twisting motion (disc golf is bad, basketball is bad, uncontrolled rotation) – I feel nauseated and ill
2. Lifting from a non-neutral position – adding weight while hunching (i.e. picking up my kids that are running away)

I realize that I need to be more continuously proactive about my back – blending PT and personal training. For those going through something similar I have a few questions:

1. Do disc bulges go away with time?
2. Do you have a framework for recovery for 18 - 36 months?
   1. If so, how did you craft a plan with a long time horizon?
3. How did you get a PT and personal trainer to integrate well together?
4. How do you address twisting motions? (Maybe I need to read more of McGill and missed this)

I recently moved back to Illinois from Wisconsin to be with my daughter. She's 10. I've been on T for awhile now, and have had top and hysto. I pass ok. I have a blue Mohawk and a faint 5 o clock mustache shadow and chin hair. We went to the gas station down the street for a soda. I live in Central Illinois, and it's not too horrible here. The one guy that works there likes skirts. We've talked and he's really nice. He had on a black skirt today and boots with painted nails. A construction worker walked in and was staring him down... I already have bad anxiety leaving the house and being around people, so I got really scared. Then the dude starts to stare me and my daughter down. I have a really deep voice and was talking to her. I have on a dead pool riding a unicorn tank top lol. The guy wouldn't stop staring at us with a disgusted look on his face. He actually started walking towards us. I grabbed my kid and said let's go get a drink now. The guy walked away. Then two others came up to the soda machine and were giving me looks. I felt like do I have to lift my shirt and show you. My pecs and fucking stomach hair? I pack everyday for my protection and am wearing basketball shorts so I made sure to make it noticeable I had a bulge there. I really thought I was going to get cornered. Like fucking really? I didn't think a blue Mohawk and Deadpool were unacceptable. People can wear what they like. I hope the worker is ok. He should be able to express himself the way he wants too.

Love is a funny thing. It can feel like infatuation at first, but over time it develops and grows, turns into something stronger.
Without love we feel hopeless. Without love we feel empty and sad, as if our life has no meaning.
But when you find true love it is like a life preserver, thrown to you in a violent sea, saving you, as you would have drowned in despair and loneliness without it. A lighthouse with a bright beacon shining in the darkness, showing us the way through the raging ocean and into the safety of the harbor.
Love is a funny thing. But it is also a powerful thing. A thing full of magic and whimsy and so much light that it can blind people who are not used to seeing it.
“What in the FUCK!?” the dark wizard screamed, as the glowing energy of my wand and Brukka’s combined, increasing in brightness until it was as white-hot as a welder’s torch.
I realized we were holding hands, and I never wanted to let go.
The dark wizard reeled backwards and cast a black shield around himself, using his staff. The light began to penetrate it slowly, causing it to become translucent. He looked uncomfortable inside, as if the light were burning his eyes.
“How are we doing this?” I whispered to Brukka.
“I don’t know. But let's keep it up. I think we're beating him. We just need to-”
Suddenly a bolt of dark energy shot out from the wizard’s staff, landing between us and sending us flying in opposite directions. I nearly tumbled off the ledge of the platform where I landed, but several cats quickly grabbed me by my robe and lifted me back up onto solid ground.
“Brukka!” I yelled, seeing her lying on the edge of another floating platform, face-down. She looked to be unconscious, and blood was trickling out from her left ear.
The dark wizard cackled laughter and began to twirl his staff in front of himself like an orchestra conductor. As he did, gray clouds rolled in from all around, booming thunder and raining on us heavily. A moment after the rain began, it became hail - first the size of small pebbles, then the size of golf balls. They grew larger and larger and began pelting me, hitting me in the chest and in the face, on my shoulder and arms. Each strike was so painful it stunned me, breaking me from my thoughts and making it impossible to focus.
“VINES!” I managed to shout, thinking of the first thing that came to mind.
The jungle dimension obliged and enormous vines and other plant life sprouted from the platform all around me, covering my head and blocking most of the hail from striking me.
Some chunks got through, but they were smaller and didn't hurt quite as badly when they pelted the top of my skull.
“Where the fuck is Xavier!?” I asked myself. “That guy always disappears when I need him most. He's worse than Gandalf!”
Now that I was distracted, the dark wizard was focused on Brukka. He began to levitate towards her, effortlessly closing the distance between them and grabbing her wand. It melded into his own staff, making it even larger than before.
He now held the biggest piece of the All World tree that had ever existed, aside from the actual tree itself. With his near-infinite power, he lifted Brukka from the ground with just a thought. He held her up in the air in front of him, as if trying to decide what to do with her.
“Where are you, Xavier!? I need your help!” I called out, causing the Dark Wizard to smile even wider.
“Don’t you get it,” he mocked in a cackling voice. “The so-called Guardian of the Universe is a coward! He ran away the moment he saw what was happening. Ran away, like he always does. That’s the only reason he’s lived so long. For half a millenia he has been running from my power. Living in squalor and despair in that disgusting hovel, trying and failing to raise apprentice after apprentice. Each one more useless than the last! With such dwindling power, as he gives it all away, piece by piece. Only for me to gobble it all up for myself. And now, finally, after all these years, it does not matter where he runs anymore! It will all be empty soon. It will all be dark and empty, and I will decide what rises from the ashes!”
As the Dark Wizard was giving the most long-winded bad guy speech I’d ever heard, I felt a weight settle around my neck. It was strange, and disconcerting at first. I thought it was the dark wizard casting a Darth Vader spell on me. But then my hand reached up and I felt something hanging from a chain around my neck.
The key.
It had been so long I had almost forgotten of its existence. Xavier had told me that one day I would be entrusted with its power, and that day was today.
All at once, it came to me. The puzzle pieces fit together so perfectly, and I realized I had a plan. And somehow I knew it would work. If there was such a thing as fate, this was mine.
“You can turn it all into darkness and abyss, sure. But there is one thing that will remain standing. And you have no power over it. None.”
His smile faltered as I held up the key.
“The All World Tree cannot be destroyed. And it is full of light. I’ve seen it myself.”
He thought about this for a second, then his horrible smile returned. My heart sank as I momentarily faltered, wondering if I’d been wrong about everything. But then he spoke again.
“I suppose I’ll just have to destroy it then, won’t I?” he said, grabbing Brukka’s arm and creating a portal.
I followed suit, and opened a portal back to Earth, using my wand. With a look back over my shoulder at Brukka, being carried by the Dark Wizard, I stepped through the gate.
When I emerged, I was back in the forest near my house. Right where I'd met Brukka and Xavier for the first time.
The woods were quiet, dark and empty. Not even the birds were singing in the trees, as if they knew something terrible was happening.
And as the dark wizard emerged from a nearby portal, I ran.
I ran as fast and hard as my legs would carry me.
I ran towards the All World Tree, knowing that it was my very last hope.
The Dark Wizard had the biggest staff which had ever been created, using pieces of the tree. But that was only a fraction of the power which belonged to the All World Tree. It contained so much strength and energy that it was thrumming with it, reflecting an aura that could be seen clearly by those who possessed magic.
He seemed to realize what I was doing as I was about to reach the tree, and threw Brukka to the forest floor. She screamed in pain, momentarily distracting me, and I looked back to see her clutching her forearm, as if it had been broken with the fall.
My distraction caused me to trip, and I stumbled to the ground, falling flat on my face.
“So close, and yet so far,” the dark wizard laughed, and cast a bolt of dark lightning in my direction.
It struck me in the chest, center mass.
I looked down to see a hole in my midsection, through which I could observe the grass and dry leaves. There wasn’t any blood, just a clean wound with edges burnt black and cauterized.
A second later he was standing over me, looking down at me and shaking his head.
“So disappointing. I was really hoping for a fight. A legendary battle. Something I could tell my great children about, as they prepare themselves to rule over my new multiverse.”
He sniffed, looking around absently.
“A shame. I suppose I’ll just have to-”
He stopped, and I saw his brow knit into confusion.
“What is this… No. No, no, no, no, NO! That’s… That’s impossible.”
I should have realized something was up when I was still able to move and think, with a basketball-sized hole in my chest. But when you’re in the heat of the moment you don’t really consider these things.
Looking down, I saw my organs being stitched back together by some miraculous force. Like the world’s most powerful 3D printer, my lungs and liver became whole again, and then my heart was there amidst a bundle of veins and arteries, stitching themselves together. The black, crusted charcoal which had been the wound edges began to flake away, revealing fresh, clean muscle underneath.
“Whoa,” I managed to say, and felt my hand touching something rough which bulged from the ground.
A root. A root from the All World Tree.
As my body became whole again, I got up on one knee, careful not to remove my hand from the tree’s root.
And then I looked up at the Dark Wizard, and I could see the fear in his eyes as the power of the multiverse blazed in my own gaze.
I wanted to take him out right then and there. I tried to channel that energy into a deadly bolt of lightning, and I lifted a finger gun at him to do just that.
But nothing happened.
I closed my hand into a fist and tried again. Still, nothing.
The Dark Wizard seemed to realize that something was off. He seized on the opportunity, and began to back away.
“Just like your mentor,” he laughed. “So foolish. You don’t even know how to use your own power.”
I hated him so much in that moment. I could feel the power coursing through me. I could feel that I was able to do SOMETHING in that moment to stop him, and yet the finger guns did nothing.
“Vines!” I yelled, needing to stop him somehow. I wanted this man dead so badly. And yet now, of all times, the multiverse was denying me its power.
Nothing happened, yet again.
I looked down at the ground, at the root just beneath me, wondering what the hell it wanted me to do. What did the multiverse want from me? Hadn’t I done everything right? Hadn’t I figured out this puzzle, laid out before me in a million disjointed pieces?
Or, was I still missing something?
Suddenly I felt a warm hand grab mine.
I looked over to see Brukka, holding my hand tightly in her grasp. She was smiling at me, looking at me kindly with those bright purple eyes of hers.
Even through all the pain of her broken wrist, she was smiling.
“What the hell?” she muttered, looking down at her forearm. It was bending back to its correct shape. It was healing itself. Or, rather, the multiverse was healing it, using me as a conduit.
Suddenly Brukka’s eyes lit up.
“That's it!”
“What? What's it?”
“My dad told me something once, back when I was training with him, in the early days. He said that the multiverse was like a rainbow, each universe its own color. But everything combines to make black or white. Like a prism or like mixing paints. You combine them all and that’s what you get.”
I thought about this for a long moment.
“How can they be black and white at the same time? Those are opposites.”
“Anything that causes pain and suffering is on the dark spectrum. Anything that heals is on the light.”
“But what does that mean?” I asked, seeing the Dark Wizard opening a portal and wondering how the hell I was going to stop him.
“How do I explain this? The tree is full of light, right?”
I nodded.
“So, it doesn’t wound people. It only does good. Everything else we’ve been doing has been a perversion of that power. We hacked off the limbs of the tree, thinking we were saving the universe with them, but really we’ve just been giving HIM more power. That’s why the Abyss is thriving right now. We need to restore the tree back to the way it was, before Xavier and all those other sorcerers tried to use it for their own gain!”
This really stunned me, and for a second I wondered if she was trying to trick me again somehow. But then I looked into her eyes and saw the honesty and vulnerability there.
“But…. How are we supposed to protect it if we don’t have magic?”
“It can protect itself, just like it did for billions of years before people came along and tried to interfere. Trust me. I’ve studied both sides of this. I’m the only one who has. And it just clicked for me. It all just made sense. We have to get that staff back from him. And we have to somehow return it to the tree. It’s the only way to heal the multiverse. To make it whole again.”
“Okay…. Assuming you're right about this… How am I gonna do that? My powers aren’t working!”
“That’s because you’re trying to kill him. The tree doesn’t wound people, remember?”
Shit, I realized, she was right.
“SAND!” I called out, making one last-ditch effort to stop the Dark Wizard as he was stepping through the portal. He’d gotten his robes stuck on a shrub, I guess that was why he was taking so long to leave.
A hole in the sky opened up just above the man in his black robes and sand began to pour down on him. It looked as if someone had opened a sewer grate in the fabric of reality, leading to a dimension full of the stuff, and I realized that was essentially what I had done. The portal the dark wizard had created disappeared, as he lost his concentration and began to drift over toward us on a moving sand dune.
“Sand hand,” I said, picturing a giant hand grabbing his staff. Just as I had imagined it, it happened. The staff was snatched out of his hands and landed in my grasp a second later.
“Shit,” the dark wizard said, and I cracked him over the head with it, as hard as I could.
His eyes rolled back into his head, and he fell over, unconscious.
Brukka looked at me, surprised.
“What? He was gonna kill, like, billions of people! He deserved it.”
She thought about this for a few seconds.
“Try trillions. Actually, quintillions of quintillions. So, yeah. I guess bonking him on the head was alright.”
The two of us turned around to face the tree, looking up at it together. I took her hand in mine, and the two of us stepped forward, to finally finish it all.
First Prev Next

Any questions I should go in asking the doctor?
I’m a bit nervous. I really don’t want surgery because I’m scared of the complications and I’ve never had surgery before in my life.
These are my MRI results: L5-S1: Posterior disc bulge with a left subarticular disc protrusion, partially effacing the left subarticular recess, and contacting the traversing left S1 nerve root. No significant canal narrowing. Minimal bilateral foraminal narrowing.
My story: I hurt my back April of 2023 playing basketball with my kids. Went to the docs they gave me some muscle relaxers and pain meds that I did not take. Just slowly walked it out and felt better in about a week.
July 2023 went overseas and my back started hurting. I feel like this was due to my backpack and all the walking we were doing (10+miles)
We come back home and I feel a tightness in my calf that just won’t go away. I go to yoga and try to stretch the muscle out but nothing.
August 2023 - I go on a short plane ride and the leg discomfort is getting worse. I now can’t relax in a lounging chair and getting comfortable is a challenge.
I go to the doc again and she said it’s sciatic. At this point I had no other symptoms but this annoying calf pain and feeling uncomfortable if I tried to recline like in a pool chair. They think it could be a blood clot issue because I had been traveling. They rule it out.
It just continues to get worse - now I’m having cramps in the middle of the night that’s waking me up, I can no longer sit on the couch, I’m walking for hours because I can’t sleep due to the pain. Back to the doctor. It’s September now and I’m getting a referral to physical therapy.
I’m doing the physical therapy exercises and trying to push through the pain. At this point, I’m on gabpentin, meloxicam, and muscles relaxers. I’m training for a 1/2 marathon and again pushing myself through the pain. After a 5 mile run, my toes go numb on the left side. And now I’m worried.
Back to the doctor, who just ups my gabepentin subscription. Says the toes being numb is just a part of sciatic and there’s nothing else I can do.
I buy a new mattress (sleep number - trash 0/10 do not recommend, am returning it and looking for something else) PT says to stop doing yoga as that’s making it worse. I can’t sleep now - I’m up every couple of hours. Back to the doctor. They finally order an MRI in February 2024. Results above. They send me to the pain management clinic for an ESI.
I get one March 1st 2024. I feel great - I can lie on the couch and get up without crying! Woo hoo! The pain management doctors says to do Pilates. So I do. It last all of 2 weeks and I’m back in worse pain than before. I can’t do any of the PT exercises I was doing before like a bridge. I’m so defeated. 😞
Go back to the doc for new meds. Tell them the meds I had been taking aren’t working. They put me on higher dose of ibuprofen and an antidepressant amtriphline for nerve pain. It works for one week.
The pain gets so much worse. Like I’m getting out of bed and I’m screaming - the whole leg is on fire. I’m shaking teeth chattering pain will not go away I can’t walk it out anymore husband gets scared and we go back to the doctor. They give me oral steroids and an acupuncture referral and a surgery referral it’s April 1s 2024.
I starting take the oral steroid taper I go to acupuncture and I’m able to take the pain down from a 10 to a 7.
Since then I’ve done another round of acupuncture and laser regenerative treatment (out of my own pocket which idk if it’s actually doing anything)I’m off all prescription medication - using over the counter aleve tyenol and advil as needed i walk about three miles a day so very slowly and usually with the aid of a walking stick and one mile at a time. But sitting in a car hurts like a mfer it tingles cramps and getting out of bed is such a pain too I usually have to walk and pace before I can pee I can’t really bend down or put on my socks so idk. Should I even entertain surgery if I’m not at a 10 anymore? Ami I getting better? I given up so much of life and when I try to push through I pay for it later like I wanted to watch a movie with my kids and so I tired laying on the floor and I got 1/2 way through cars 2 before I had to get up crying and take a hot shower to calm the nerve. I guess I don’t want to waste this opportunity with the surgical consult.. thanks!

Hey all, I’m 21 and have very recently been diagnosed with L4-L5 sciatica (suspected bulged disc) after stupidly refusing to take a break from working out after early signs showed
I can still walk and even jog decently fine, with occasional sharp and damn near debilitating pain in my lower left back down to my knee.
I was initially prescribed 2-3 weeks of rest but I keep seeing posts outlining multiple year long roads to recovery.
Will I ever be able to work out at the same intensity in the gym? Even when playing sports like basketball I rely MASSIVELY on my explosiveness and athleticism. Will I ever get that back to the fullest extent?

Other than people not really looking at your crotch, as someone with phallo, and a big guy at that, I was surprised to how many pants I didn’t have a massive bulge in, yet alone one, unless you looked really close, with the only exceptions being material like sweatpants or sweatshorts/basketball shorts. I know for the most part it’s about reassurance as well as euphoria, but bulges are really less important than you might think. Short post because I had it in my head yet don’t know how to execute it

The faded, ancient sign for the town seemed to point down a smaller branching corridor to our left. There were no gems or high caverns on this path. It seemed like some ancient civilization had carved the narrow corridor out of the stone itself. A path a few feet wide stretched out in front of us, going totally straight as far as the eye could see.
“Which way?” Bear asked. Stephanie looked excitedly down the path to Bloodstone, population 144,000, at least if I believed the sign.
“Obviously towards the town. We don’t know where this main tunnel leads. It could just go on forever. If there’s a town, there’s people,” she said.
“There’s no goddamned town down here,” I said. “Are you nuts? Who would live down here in the darkness?” She shrugged.
We walked for hours down the carved stone trail to Bloodstone. It went straight the entire way, until it started to open up. The ceiling and walls expanded until, within a few minutes, we found ourselves in an enormous cavern.
There were doors and empty windows carved into the rock. Even the ladders were made from stone. I saw hundreds of these ancient homes, stacked one on top of another. A pale face peeked around the corner, its massive black eyes practically bulging out of its head.
“Hey, wait!” I said as the creature turned and ran away. It looked vaguely human in its general body shape, but extremely pale, hairless and with much larger eyes. I wondered if these were some strange offshoot of the human species, lost souls who had gotten caught down here thousands of years ago and had evolved to survive in these harsh conditions.
It sprinted away, webbed feet slapping hard against the slippery rock trail sloping upwards through the center of these endless carved-out empty houses. Within seconds, I had lost it. It sprinted forwards like a greyhound, far faster than any two-legged creature should be able to run. I heard the wet smacking of its giant webbed feet receding into the distance, saw its long, mutant hands flying back and forth in time with its stride.
A gunshot rang out. I kept running towards where I had seen the creature last. I saw a man in a black kevlar vest and camouflage pants pointing a smoking AR-15 down at the writhing humanoid’s head. An exit wound the size of a grapefruit emerged from the back of its chest. It began to spit bright red blood onto its pale skin, its large, black eyes rolling in pain and terror. The man pulled the trigger again and the back of the humanoid’s skull disintegrated, a waterfall of brain matter and dark blood streaming out beneath it. It started to form a spreading puddle on the cold stone.
“Hey!” I cried out, shocked. “It’s a person!” He looked up suddenly.
I saw he had tanned, almost golden skin and very dark eyes. His face and head looked freshly-shaved. His entire demeanor screamed military or perhaps a hired gun. He pointed the rifle at us.
“Put your hands up,” he said slowly. He had a strange accent that sounded vaguely Caribbean, but I couldn’t place it. We all put our hands up slowly, though I saw Bear’s fingers twitch as if he wanted to go for his pistol. “Where did you come from?”
“Death Valley,” I said. “Of course. Where did you enter?” He paused, looking at us for a long moment.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “What’s your name?” We introduced ourselves. He grunted. “You all need to turn around. My agency is currently doing excavations in this area, and we don’t need civilians running around. It’s bad enough we have these things crawling everywhere.” He pointed to the white, mutated corpse bleeding at his feet, emitting a rank smell of shellfish and coppery blood.
“Is that the Mark of Cain?” Bear asked. “We were told to watch out for something called the Mark of Cain.” The man laughed.
“The Mark of Cain looks nothing like this. Those with the Mark lose all their skin. It just… peels away. Hard bones start to grow over their bodies. They grow black veins throbbing with poison all over the outside of their faces, arms and chests, and their eyes and mouths turn a rotten, sickly shade of green. You will know the Mark of Cain instantly. Their blood is poison, and they are almost impossible to kill. They have regenerative properties from whatever strange chemicals flow through their black blood.
“No, the Mark of Cain is much uglier than these poor idiots. These creatures are just inbred descendants of some long-lost race. We call them the fishmen, for obvious reasons.” Looking at the webbed feet and hands and the slimy, bone-white skin, I could see why they would name them that. They even gave off a fishy, salty odor as if the smell of a faint ocean breeze blew through the passageway.
“What agency do you represent?” I asked. The man paused for a long moment, looking like he was thinking hard about the answer. He opened his mouth.
“Well, it depends who…” he started to say. A resonation began to sound, cutting him off. At first I thought it was an earthquake sending off echoing cacophonous vibrations through the cavern, but as it grew louder, I could hear the shrieking, harmonizing notes of some massive trumpet.
Rocks started to fall all around us, first just small pebbles from cracks in the ceiling and walls and then larger and larger stones. I saw the soldier spin away from us and begin running towards one of the houses carved into the stone. I tried calling him, but I couldn’t even hear myself scream in the din of the deafening trumpets.
With my adrenaline spiking, I motioned for Bear and Stephanie to follow. Without looking back to see if they would, I started sprinting towards the same house the soldier had entered. I did not want to lose the one person who might know what’s going on.
The trumpet cut out as suddenly as it had begun. I heard the heavy thudding of many booted feet behind us. I glanced back quickly and saw dozens more soldiers, all armed with AR-15s and bulletproof vests. They screamed something at the soldier I followed, but my ears rang so loud I could only see their mouths moving as if from a silent movie. I figured it was something along the lines of, “What do we do?!”
But by then the second trumpet blast had sounded. My ears rang as the soldiers’ mouths moved, yet it was as if no sound came out.
Bear, Stephanie and I got inside the carved chamber as the second and much shorter trumpet blast cut off. The last ringing vibrations disappeared down the endless tunnels. For a long moment, nothing happened. The soldiers continued to run towards us, screaming and asking for orders.
I heard a hissing sound, as if a gas main had been cut. A suffocating, chemical smell began to fill the cavern. I took a deep breath and held it. A sense of rising pressure seemed to fill the air.
Then the ground outside the house erupted with fire, like a hydrogen bomb going off. Clear blue flames shot up in the center of the tunnel floor. I heard a whooshing sound as the inferno spread. Long tongues of flame rose, licking the stone walls.
The men stopped in their tracks, their uniforms immediately starting to catch fire, their skin liquifying and falling off in molten drops. Their mouths opened in a silent scream. I could hear the sizzling of their bodies, like bacon grease spitting out of a hot pan.
They danced, jumping from foot to foot, their arms punching at the air. In a matter of seconds, I saw all their clothes disappear into smoking ashes, blowing away from their bodies in the slight wind that blew through the cave. I felt no heat at all standing on the stone floor of the ancient house, but I smelled the burning hair and searing meat of their melting bodies. Within a few more seconds, only blackened skeletons stood there, the grinning skulls still looking in our direction before they collapsed to the smoking stone floor.
The fire disappeared as quickly as it had started. The boiling blue flames seemed to suck back into the earth itself.
Bear and Stephanie looked at our new companion with horrorstruck faces. He did not look nearly as perturbed as I would have thought, seeing his entire company wiped out. He simply shook his head.
“Blackwater keeps sending us rookies,” he said, giving us a half-smile. “They gotta learn somehow, right?”
***
We learned that the man’s name was Agent Garland. He was vague on why he was down there with hired goons. We hadn’t talked for more than a minute when we heard a strange wailing coming through the town. Everyone went deathly quiet immediately. Agent Garland’s eyes went wide and he started breathing fast.
I looked out the threshold, peering to the right, the direction we had come, and seeing nothing but a smooth stone passageway. Stephanie stood on my other side. I heard her gasp.
I turned my head to the left and immediately knew what had scared her. It looked like thousands of black silhouettes slithering and limping and twisting down the road, coming closer and closer to us. I saw pure ebony shadows in the shape of venomous snakes dozens of feet long. Others had two legs and two arms like a man, but their limbs looked as thin as sticks and their bodies stood twenty feet high. Their faces were expressionless, like a black ski mask with no holes for the eyes or mouth.
The wailing grew closer, more insistent. It sounded like a mother broken with grief over the death of her children, a kind of hysterical shrieking that only amplified in the massive cavern. It bounced off the ceiling a dozen stories above our heads, echoing and distorting. Stephanie and Bear screamed behind me. Rivers of sweat ran down my face.
“There was a rule about this,” I yelled, barely hearing myself over the wailing. Stephanie and Bear continued to look at me with wide, staring eyes. Agent Garland simply smiled, waiting. I tried to remember the list of rules. Though this happened years ago, I remember the panic that set in as my mind drew a blank. There was too much stress, too much going on around me. I couldn’t focus or think clearly. I took a deep breath and cleared my mind. In an instant, my subconscious started spitting up pieces of the rules.
I remembered slowly… The rules discussed not looking at the face of Abaddon, getting off the main path if the trumpet sounded, something about the Angel of Death, killing people with the Mark of Cain and… It came to me in a flash. The rules had said something about shadows attacking us through our eyes.
“Close your eyes!” I screamed as loudly as I could. The wailing was right outside the empty stone threshold now. Without looking to see if my friends had heard, I slammed my eyes shut and waited, counting the beats of my thudding heart.
The wailing cut off suddenly. I felt a presence standing directly next to me and heard a low, guttural moaning. Something cold gently caressed my back and arms before rising to my cheek. Soft footsteps fell all around us, a sound as light as tall grass blowing in a breeze. Hissing and a deep, choked gurgling erupted from something behind me. I felt more and more cold tendrils and hands pressing against my skin. A sense of rising pressure surrounded my body. I felt like screaming, my skin crawling. I tried to pull away, but I was surrounded on all sides by the grasping alien hands.
They disappeared all at once with the sound of a massive balloon popping. I heard Bear slowly exhaling behind me. Agent Garland laughed. My heart beat a frenzied, runaway rhythm that pounded in my ears.
“OK, it’s been thirty seconds,” Bear said, sounding out of breath. “You can open your eyes.”
***
We decided to rest and have a meal in the house. The stress of nearly dying twice had done a number on us psychologically. I felt totally drained. I would have liked to lay down and rest. We had traveled for many hours. My feet screamed at me with throbbing blisters and waves of sharp pain.
“So what are you going to do now?” I asked Agent Garland as I pulled out sardines and crackers. I tore into them ravenously, chugging a couple of bottles of Gatorade as I ate. “Can you get us out of here?”
“I’m not really in charge of this mission,” he said without meeting my gaze. He shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. “The main group is down far below us. You would have to ask the commander.”
“What are they doing down there?” Stephanie asked, her curiosity piqued. “Is there something important for national defense?” Agent Garland smiled.
“There’s something important for everything,” he said, a cynical gleam reflecting off his face. “God lives down there. He’s kept locked up by the angels because… well, I shouldn’t be the one who has to tell you this, but God has gone totally insane.
“He gave a large part of his mind to create the universe, and now he’s slowly dying down there, like the serpent eating its own tail. We’re actually in His body right now, walking through these tunnels of the bottomless pit. Those fires and shadow-creatures are like immune cells, trying to kill all trespassers. Only those with the sign of Heaven on their foreheads don’t get targeted.”
“What’s the sign of Heaven?” I asked. He waved his hand at that.
“Nothing you need to worry about, because you won’t be getting it. Only the angels have the sign,” he said. “It’s like a white, pulsing symbol on their foreheads. It kind of looks like a backwards seven with a slashing diagonal line through it. I don’t know what language it is or what it means. The angels are not exactly conducive to talking. They’re more likely to kill you on sight.” Agent Garland got up, stretching and sighing. “Well, this has been fun, but I have to meet up with the main group and report the casualties. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last. But there’s always so much goddamned paperwork.” He pointed his index finger at the still smoldering bones accusingly.
I saw only tiny fragments remaining now. The fine gray ashes blew in the light breeze down the tunnel. The cave not only cremates people, I thought with a hint of hysteria, it even spreads their ashes for them. Almost like a loving family member. I shuddered.
Agent Garland started walking out without a backwards glance. I jumped up.
“Wait!” I said. Bear and Stephanie joined in my chorus of yelling, their hysterical voices rising in a frenzy. “You can’t just leave us here. Do you at least know the way out?”
“The way out,” he responded, still walking away, “is further in. If you find the center, you’ll find the exit. There are many paths in, but only one out. So it is, and so it has always been.” And with that cryptic message, Agent Garland disappeared around the corner. I wondered if I would ever see him again.
***
After a minute of discussion, we decided to follow in Agent Garland’s tracks. We hoped that if he was heading down into the deeper levels, the center where he claimed God lived, that we could simply tag along and get the hell out of this madhouse.
And yet no matter how fast we walked, we couldn’t catch a glimpse of him. I didn’t know if there were secret tunnels somewhere in the thousands of stacked stone houses of Bloodstone, but if there were, we had a snowball’s chance in Hell of just finding one of them randomly.
“This is bullshit,” Bear said gruffly, sweating heavily again. He sulked like an angry child, fingering his holstered gun.
We headed deeper into Bloodstone. It looked like it had once been a marvelous city. It had ancient stone posts where lamps used to burn. In the center of street intersections, beautiful statues of angels loomed over the dead land. The caverns opened up above us more and more. After it had risen hundreds of feet, our flashlights lost sight of it. The headlamps simply would not pierce into the darkness that deeply.
“These look like the statues Michelangelo did,” Stephanie observed, looking at a heavily-muscled angel in a robe ripping open the jaws of a massive serpent. The angel’s stone wings hung out behind it, long projections that dwarfed its body.
But it looked different from the statues of angels I had seen. Its wings looked much more reptilian, like the wings a dragon might have. They had bat-like webbing between the pointed bones that ran out in a graceful curve to spikes. And its eyes had a sheen of cruelty and arrogance that came through even in the carving. I pointed this out to Bear and Stephanie. They looked slightly unnerved by the observation.
“Well, who’s to say that the descriptions of angels done by ancient artists have any relevance to reality?” Stephanie said. “They could look reptilian, or could be made of light, or they could be totally extraterrestrial and incomprehensible. Humans only base observations of life on what they see on Earth, but they can’t comprehend what other forms life could take. Maybe these angels aren’t even from our planet.” I thought about it. What she said made a lot of sense.
“No, there’s no way evolution would make such a similar creature to a human being,” Bear said, speaking for the first time. I jumped slightly. “These angels look like people with wings to a large extent. So either people and angels evolved from a common ancestor, or people were made in the image of angels, or…”
“I’m saying that these statues might not be what the angels actually look like,” Stephanie said.
“Oh, yeah, OK,” Bear said, returning to his sullen state. He continued to keep his hand on the holstered pistol, nervously looking left and right. I felt it too; there was a feeling of being watched.
We continued to walk through the streets of Bloodstone. I caught glimpses of what I assumed were what Agent Garland called the “fishmen”, white, pale faces with large, black eyes. They were extremely fast, and by the time I even glimpsed one out of the corner of my eye, it had gone. But they didn’t bother us. They seemed content with just watching us pass. Maybe they were more afraid of us than we were of them.
We had entered a different part of the city with graceful towers that extended far up into the darkness when we encountered the first creature with the evil deformity called the Mark of Cain.
***
“These remind of the Leaning Tower of Pisa,” Stephanie observed as Bear smoked a cigarette, trailing behind us. I looked up the architecture with admiration. The ground floor of the massive stone tower had dozens of archways leading in, almost like a spider’s compound eyes looking out on the abandoned city.
“These ancient people must have been powerful to build all this,” I said. “Do you think they tunneled it out of…” A soft sound interrupted me, but in the silence, it came out jarring. I heard a choked, gurgling laughter. It was a soft sound that quickly faded to nothing, like a man with a slit throat trying to laugh in his final moments. But I could tell from the way Stephanie and Bear froze that we had all heard it. Bear took out his gun and spun to face the threat.
A tall, twisted figure slid silently out of one of the shadowy archways of a nearby tower. Its head nearly scraped the top of the threshold, a height of nearly ten feet.
As our headlamps illuminated the newcomer, I saw a face straight from the wildest nightmares of a delirium tremens patient. The description Agent Garland had given us of the Mark of Cain paled in comparison to its true horror.
It looked like its face had somehow flipped inside out. It had no skin or eyelids or hair anywhere.
The bony, off-white skeletal plates on its forehead joined with raised cracks running across its scalp like ugly scars. Two eyes shone out with a shade of green that reminded me of putrefying infection and fetid swamps. They glowed with their own inner light.
Dark, twisting veins ran like the slash marks across its entire body, throbbing with each beat of its alien heart. They writhed like fat worms, a rapid, quivering pulse passing through them every few moments. The creature’s strange, green eyes glowed brighter with excitement and bloodlust.
It had no lips, just sharp bones that met in a line. When its mouth was closed, I couldn’t see any sign of it. But as its plated legs sprinted with powerful strides towards us, it opened its mouth in a silent scream. I saw its jaw unhinge like a snake’s, falling down to its chest.
More sickly green light flooded out, illuminating the entire street with its fetid illumination. As it got to within twenty feet of us, I saw that deep cracks ran through the rest of its body, zigzagging in small, tight lines like black stitches.
Bear fired. It rang through the rocky cavern with a blast like a cannon firing. I saw the first bullet smash into the creature’s face. Part of its skeletal face blew apart, the cheek shattering like ceramic. In a frenzy of bullets, Bear pulled the trigger again and again in the space of a second.
The abomination’s kneecaps and shin bones were covered in white, bony plates, almost reminding me of some ancient gladiator’s protective uniform. But the large-caliber bullets of the pistol blew the legs of the creature apart in a flash of bone splinters and black blood. The smell of gunsmoke filled the air. I also noticed a subtler but still somewhat foul stench that reminded me of sulfur and campfire smoke. It emanated from the creature’s body.
With an ear-splitting shriek like a steam whistle exploding, its open green mouth erupted with cyclonic whorls of green light. A piece of the light spun off from the bubbling, frothing mass streaming from its mouth. The piece looked like some sort of floating cloud of ball lightning about the size of a basketball.
It came at us like a cannonball from Hell, blurring through the air. Rippling currents of electricity sizzled and popped as it spun, flying straight at Stephanie’s head. An overwhelming odor of ozone followed it.
Bear sprinted towards Stephanie. I saw it happen as if in slow motion. He tackled Stephanie to the cold stone ground. The ball lightning flew over her head and missed her by mere inches. As she fell, her hair flew up. A flash erupted as the ball lightning touched a lock of it. That part of her hair erupted into blue flames and disappeared without leaving ashes or smoke.
The abomination dragged itself across the ground like a possum with a snapped spine, still emanating its steam-whistle shriek. Its eyes and mouth flashed brighter and the black veins pulsed faster.
A moment later, another ball of green lightning shot out. The way it rolled off the larger mass of light reminded me of how vendors at the carnival swirled cotton candy around a paper cone. It bristled, shivering with its own trembling energy.
Then it flew at me. I stood amazed as it curved through the air, this new death sensation that shone with a cancerous green light.
Part 3
https://www.reddit.com/nosleep/comments/197yapv/i_found_the_bottomless_pit_from_the_book_of/

The faded, ancient sign for the town seemed to point down a smaller branching corridor to our left. There were no gems or high caverns on this path. It seemed like some ancient civilization had carved the narrow corridor out of the stone itself. A path a few feet wide stretched out in front of us, going totally straight as far as the eye could see.
“Which way?” Bear asked. Stephanie looked excitedly down the path to Bloodstone, population 144,000, at least if I believed the sign.
“Obviously towards the town. We don’t know where this main tunnel leads. It could just go on forever. If there’s a town, there’s people,” she said.
“There’s no goddamned town down here,” I said. “Are you nuts? Who would live down here in the darkness?” She shrugged.
We walked for hours down the carved stone trail to Bloodstone. It went straight the entire way, until it started to open up. The ceiling and walls expanded until, within a few minutes, we found ourselves in an enormous cavern.
There were doors and empty windows carved into the rock. Even the ladders were made from stone. I saw hundreds of these ancient homes, stacked one on top of another. A pale face peeked around the corner, its massive black eyes practically bulging out of its head.
“Hey, wait!” I said as the creature turned and ran away. It looked vaguely human in its general body shape, but extremely pale, hairless and with much larger eyes. I wondered if these were some strange offshoot of the human species, lost souls who had gotten caught down here thousands of years ago and had evolved to survive in these harsh conditions.
It sprinted away, webbed feet slapping hard against the slippery rock trail sloping upwards through the center of these endless carved-out empty houses. Within seconds, I had lost it. It sprinted forwards like a greyhound, far faster than any two-legged creature should be able to run. I heard the wet smacking of its giant webbed feet receding into the distance, saw its long, mutant hands flying back and forth in time with its stride.
A gunshot rang out. I kept running towards where I had seen the creature last. I saw a man in a black kevlar vest and camouflage pants pointing a smoking AR-15 down at the writhing humanoid’s head. An exit wound the size of a grapefruit emerged from the back of its chest. It began to spit bright red blood onto its pale skin, its large, black eyes rolling in pain and terror. The man pulled the trigger again and the back of the humanoid’s skull disintegrated, a waterfall of brain matter and dark blood streaming out beneath it. It started to form a spreading puddle on the cold stone.
“Hey!” I cried out, shocked. “It’s a person!” He looked up suddenly.
I saw he had tanned, almost golden skin and very dark eyes. His face and head looked freshly-shaved. His entire demeanor screamed military or perhaps a hired gun. He pointed the rifle at us.
“Put your hands up,” he said slowly. He had a strange accent that sounded vaguely Caribbean, but I couldn’t place it. We all put our hands up slowly, though I saw Bear’s fingers twitch as if he wanted to go for his pistol. “Where did you come from?”
“Death Valley,” I said. “Of course. Where did you enter?” He paused, looking at us for a long moment.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “What’s your name?” We introduced ourselves. He grunted. “You all need to turn around. My agency is currently doing excavations in this area, and we don’t need civilians running around. It’s bad enough we have these things crawling everywhere.” He pointed to the white, mutated corpse bleeding at his feet, emitting a rank smell of shellfish and coppery blood.
“Is that the Mark of Cain?” Bear asked. “We were told to watch out for something called the Mark of Cain.” The man laughed.
“The Mark of Cain looks nothing like this. Those with the Mark lose all their skin. It just… peels away. Hard bones start to grow over their bodies. They grow black veins throbbing with poison all over the outside of their faces, arms and chests, and their eyes and mouths turn a rotten, sickly shade of green. You will know the Mark of Cain instantly. Their blood is poison, and they are almost impossible to kill. They have regenerative properties from whatever strange chemicals flow through their black blood.
“No, the Mark of Cain is much uglier than these poor idiots. These creatures are just inbred descendants of some long-lost race. We call them the fishmen, for obvious reasons.” Looking at the webbed feet and hands and the slimy, bone-white skin, I could see why they would name them that. They even gave off a fishy, salty odor as if the smell of a faint ocean breeze blew through the passageway.
“What agency do you represent?” I asked. The man paused for a long moment, looking like he was thinking hard about the answer. He opened his mouth.
“Well, it depends who…” he started to say. A resonation began to sound, cutting him off. At first I thought it was an earthquake sending off echoing cacophonous vibrations through the cavern, but as it grew louder, I could hear the shrieking, harmonizing notes of some massive trumpet.
Rocks started to fall all around us, first just small pebbles from cracks in the ceiling and walls and then larger and larger stones. I saw the soldier spin away from us and begin running towards one of the houses carved into the stone. I tried calling him, but I couldn’t even hear myself scream in the din of the deafening trumpets.
With my adrenaline spiking, I motioned for Bear and Stephanie to follow. Without looking back to see if they would, I started sprinting towards the same house the soldier had entered. I did not want to lose the one person who might know what’s going on.
The trumpet cut out as suddenly as it had begun. I heard the heavy thudding of many booted feet behind us. I glanced back quickly and saw dozens more soldiers, all armed with AR-15s and bulletproof vests. They screamed something at the soldier I followed, but my ears rang so loud I could only see their mouths moving as if from a silent movie. I figured it was something along the lines of, “What do we do?!”
But by then the second trumpet blast had sounded. My ears rang as the soldiers’ mouths moved, yet it was as if no sound came out.
Bear, Stephanie and I got inside the carved chamber as the second and much shorter trumpet blast cut off. The last ringing vibrations disappeared down the endless tunnels. For a long moment, nothing happened. The soldiers continued to run towards us, screaming and asking for orders.
I heard a hissing sound, as if a gas main had been cut. A suffocating, chemical smell began to fill the cavern. I took a deep breath and held it. A sense of rising pressure seemed to fill the air.
Then the ground outside the house erupted with fire, like a hydrogen bomb going off. Clear blue flames shot up in the center of the tunnel floor. I heard a whooshing sound as the inferno spread. Long tongues of flame rose, licking the stone walls.
The men stopped in their tracks, their uniforms immediately starting to catch fire, their skin liquifying and falling off in molten drops. Their mouths opened in a silent scream. I could hear the sizzling of their bodies, like bacon grease spitting out of a hot pan.
They danced, jumping from foot to foot, their arms punching at the air. In a matter of seconds, I saw all their clothes disappear into smoking ashes, blowing away from their bodies in the slight wind that blew through the cave. I felt no heat at all standing on the stone floor of the ancient house, but I smelled the burning hair and searing meat of their melting bodies. Within a few more seconds, only blackened skeletons stood there, the grinning skulls still looking in our direction before they collapsed to the smoking stone floor.
The fire disappeared as quickly as it had started. The boiling blue flames seemed to suck back into the earth itself.
Bear and Stephanie looked at our new companion with horrorstruck faces. He did not look nearly as perturbed as I would have thought, seeing his entire company wiped out. He simply shook his head.
“Blackwater keeps sending us rookies,” he said, giving us a half-smile. “They gotta learn somehow, right?”
***
We learned that the man’s name was Agent Garland. He was vague on why he was down there with hired goons. We hadn’t talked for more than a minute when we heard a strange wailing coming through the town. Everyone went deathly quiet immediately. Agent Garland’s eyes went wide and he started breathing fast.
I looked out the threshold, peering to the right, the direction we had come, and seeing nothing but a smooth stone passageway. Stephanie stood on my other side. I heard her gasp.
I turned my head to the left and immediately knew what had scared her. It looked like thousands of black silhouettes slithering and limping and twisting down the road, coming closer and closer to us. I saw pure ebony shadows in the shape of venomous snakes dozens of feet long. Others had two legs and two arms like a man, but their limbs looked as thin as sticks and their bodies stood twenty feet high. Their faces were expressionless, like a black ski mask with no holes for the eyes or mouth.
The wailing grew closer, more insistent. It sounded like a mother broken with grief over the death of her children, a kind of hysterical shrieking that only amplified in the massive cavern. It bounced off the ceiling a dozen stories above our heads, echoing and distorting. Stephanie and Bear screamed behind me. Rivers of sweat ran down my face.
“There was a rule about this,” I yelled, barely hearing myself over the wailing. Stephanie and Bear continued to look at me with wide, staring eyes. Agent Garland simply smiled, waiting. I tried to remember the list of rules. Though this happened years ago, I remember the panic that set in as my mind drew a blank. There was too much stress, too much going on around me. I couldn’t focus or think clearly. I took a deep breath and cleared my mind. In an instant, my subconscious started spitting up pieces of the rules.
I remembered slowly… The rules discussed not looking at the face of Abaddon, getting off the main path if the trumpet sounded, something about the Angel of Death, killing people with the Mark of Cain and… It came to me in a flash. The rules had said something about shadows attacking us through our eyes.
“Close your eyes!” I screamed as loudly as I could. The wailing was right outside the empty stone threshold now. Without looking to see if my friends had heard, I slammed my eyes shut and waited, counting the beats of my thudding heart.
The wailing cut off suddenly. I felt a presence standing directly next to me and heard a low, guttural moaning. Something cold gently caressed my back and arms before rising to my cheek. Soft footsteps fell all around us, a sound as light as tall grass blowing in a breeze. Hissing and a deep, choked gurgling erupted from something behind me. I felt more and more cold tendrils and hands pressing against my skin. A sense of rising pressure surrounded my body. I felt like screaming, my skin crawling. I tried to pull away, but I was surrounded on all sides by the grasping alien hands.
They disappeared all at once with the sound of a massive balloon popping. I heard Bear slowly exhaling behind me. Agent Garland laughed. My heart beat a frenzied, runaway rhythm that pounded in my ears.
“OK, it’s been thirty seconds,” Bear said, sounding out of breath. “You can open your eyes.”
***
We decided to rest and have a meal in the house. The stress of nearly dying twice had done a number on us psychologically. I felt totally drained. I would have liked to lay down and rest. We had traveled for many hours. My feet screamed at me with throbbing blisters and waves of sharp pain.
“So what are you going to do now?” I asked Agent Garland as I pulled out sardines and crackers. I tore into them ravenously, chugging a couple of bottles of Gatorade as I ate. “Can you get us out of here?”
“I’m not really in charge of this mission,” he said without meeting my gaze. He shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. “The main group is down far below us. You would have to ask the commander.”
“What are they doing down there?” Stephanie asked, her curiosity piqued. “Is there something important for national defense?” Agent Garland smiled.
“There’s something important for everything,” he said, a cynical gleam reflecting off his face. “God lives down there. He’s kept locked up by the angels because… well, I shouldn’t be the one who has to tell you this, but God has gone totally insane.
“He gave a large part of his mind to create the universe, and now he’s slowly dying down there, like the serpent eating its own tail. We’re actually in His body right now, walking through these tunnels of the bottomless pit. Those fires and shadow-creatures are like immune cells, trying to kill all trespassers. Only those with the sign of Heaven on their foreheads don’t get targeted.”
“What’s the sign of Heaven?” I asked. He waved his hand at that.
“Nothing you need to worry about, because you won’t be getting it. Only the angels have the sign,” he said. “It’s like a white, pulsing symbol on their foreheads. It kind of looks like a backwards seven with a slashing diagonal line through it. I don’t know what language it is or what it means. The angels are not exactly conducive to talking. They’re more likely to kill you on sight.” Agent Garland got up, stretching and sighing. “Well, this has been fun, but I have to meet up with the main group and report the casualties. It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last. But there’s always so much goddamned paperwork.” He pointed his index finger at the still smoldering bones accusingly.
I saw only tiny fragments remaining now. The fine gray ashes blew in the light breeze down the tunnel. The cave not only cremates people, I thought with a hint of hysteria, it even spreads their ashes for them. Almost like a loving family member. I shuddered.
Agent Garland started walking out without a backwards glance. I jumped up.
“Wait!” I said. Bear and Stephanie joined in my chorus of yelling, their hysterical voices rising in a frenzy. “You can’t just leave us here. Do you at least know the way out?”
“The way out,” he responded, still walking away, “is further in. If you find the center, you’ll find the exit. There are many paths in, but only one out. So it is, and so it has always been.” And with that cryptic message, Agent Garland disappeared around the corner. I wondered if I would ever see him again.
***
After a minute of discussion, we decided to follow in Agent Garland’s tracks. We hoped that if he was heading down into the deeper levels, the center where he claimed God lived, that we could simply tag along and get the hell out of this madhouse.
And yet no matter how fast we walked, we couldn’t catch a glimpse of him. I didn’t know if there were secret tunnels somewhere in the thousands of stacked stone houses of Bloodstone, but if there were, we had a snowball’s chance in Hell of just finding one of them randomly.
“This is bullshit,” Bear said gruffly, sweating heavily again. He sulked like an angry child, fingering his holstered gun.
We headed deeper into Bloodstone. It looked like it had once been a marvelous city. It had ancient stone posts where lamps used to burn. In the center of street intersections, beautiful statues of angels loomed over the dead land. The caverns opened up above us more and more. After it had risen hundreds of feet, our flashlights lost sight of it. The headlamps simply would not pierce into the darkness that deeply.
“These look like the statues Michelangelo did,” Stephanie observed, looking at a heavily-muscled angel in a robe ripping open the jaws of a massive serpent. The angel’s stone wings hung out behind it, long projections that dwarfed its body.
But it looked different from the statues of angels I had seen. Its wings looked much more reptilian, like the wings a dragon might have. They had bat-like webbing between the pointed bones that ran out in a graceful curve to spikes. And its eyes had a sheen of cruelty and arrogance that came through even in the carving. I pointed this out to Bear and Stephanie. They looked slightly unnerved by the observation.
“Well, who’s to say that the descriptions of angels done by ancient artists have any relevance to reality?” Stephanie said. “They could look reptilian, or could be made of light, or they could be totally extraterrestrial and incomprehensible. Humans only base observations of life on what they see on Earth, but they can’t comprehend what other forms life could take. Maybe these angels aren’t even from our planet.” I thought about it. What she said made a lot of sense.
“No, there’s no way evolution would make such a similar creature to a human being,” Bear said, speaking for the first time. I jumped slightly. “These angels look like people with wings to a large extent. So either people and angels evolved from a common ancestor, or people were made in the image of angels, or…”
“I’m saying that these statues might not be what the angels actually look like,” Stephanie said.
“Oh, yeah, OK,” Bear said, returning to his sullen state. He continued to keep his hand on the holstered pistol, nervously looking left and right. I felt it too; there was a feeling of being watched.
We continued to walk through the streets of Bloodstone. I caught glimpses of what I assumed were what Agent Garland called the “fishmen”, white, pale faces with large, black eyes. They were extremely fast, and by the time I even glimpsed one out of the corner of my eye, it had gone. But they didn’t bother us. They seemed content with just watching us pass. Maybe they were more afraid of us than we were of them.
We had entered a different part of the city with graceful towers that extended far up into the darkness when we encountered the first creature with the evil deformity called the Mark of Cain.
***
“These remind of the Leaning Tower of Pisa,” Stephanie observed as Bear smoked a cigarette, trailing behind us. I looked up the architecture with admiration. The ground floor of the massive stone tower had dozens of archways leading in, almost like a spider’s compound eyes looking out on the abandoned city.
“These ancient people must have been powerful to build all this,” I said. “Do you think they tunneled it out of…” A soft sound interrupted me, but in the silence, it came out jarring. I heard a choked, gurgling laughter. It was a soft sound that quickly faded to nothing, like a man with a slit throat trying to laugh in his final moments. But I could tell from the way Stephanie and Bear froze that we had all heard it. Bear took out his gun and spun to face the threat.
A tall, twisted figure slid silently out of one of the shadowy archways of a nearby tower. Its head nearly scraped the top of the threshold, a height of nearly ten feet.
As our headlamps illuminated the newcomer, I saw a face straight from the wildest nightmares of a delirium tremens patient. The description Agent Garland had given us of the Mark of Cain paled in comparison to its true horror.
It looked like its face had somehow flipped inside out. It had no skin or eyelids or hair anywhere.
The bony, off-white skeletal plates on its forehead joined with raised cracks running across its scalp like ugly scars. Two eyes shone out with a shade of green that reminded me of putrefying infection and fetid swamps. They glowed with their own inner light.
Dark, twisting veins ran like the slash marks across its entire body, throbbing with each beat of its alien heart. They writhed like fat worms, a rapid, quivering pulse passing through them every few moments. The creature’s strange, green eyes glowed brighter with excitement and bloodlust.
It had no lips, just sharp bones that met in a line. When its mouth was closed, I couldn’t see any sign of it. But as its plated legs sprinted with powerful strides towards us, it opened its mouth in a silent scream. I saw its jaw unhinge like a snake’s, falling down to its chest.
More sickly green light flooded out, illuminating the entire street with its fetid illumination. As it got to within twenty feet of us, I saw that deep cracks ran through the rest of its body, zigzagging in small, tight lines like black stitches.
Bear fired. It rang through the rocky cavern with a blast like a cannon firing. I saw the first bullet smash into the creature’s face. Part of its skeletal face blew apart, the cheek shattering like ceramic. In a frenzy of bullets, Bear pulled the trigger again and again in the space of a second.
The abomination’s kneecaps and shin bones were covered in white, bony plates, almost reminding me of some ancient gladiator’s protective uniform. But the large-caliber bullets of the pistol blew the legs of the creature apart in a flash of bone splinters and black blood. The smell of gunsmoke filled the air. I also noticed a subtler but still somewhat foul stench that reminded me of sulfur and campfire smoke. It emanated from the creature’s body.
With an ear-splitting shriek like a steam whistle exploding, its open green mouth erupted with cyclonic whorls of green light. A piece of the light spun off from the bubbling, frothing mass streaming from its mouth. The piece looked like some sort of floating cloud of ball lightning about the size of a basketball.
It came at us like a cannonball from Hell, blurring through the air. Rippling currents of electricity sizzled and popped as it spun, flying straight at Stephanie’s head. An overwhelming odor of ozone followed it.
Bear sprinted towards Stephanie. I saw it happen as if in slow motion. He tackled Stephanie to the cold stone ground. The ball lightning flew over her head and missed her by mere inches. As she fell, her hair flew up. A flash erupted as the ball lightning touched a lock of it. That part of her hair erupted into blue flames and disappeared without leaving ashes or smoke.
The abomination dragged itself across the ground like a possum with a snapped spine, still emanating its steam-whistle shriek. Its eyes and mouth flashed brighter and the black veins pulsed faster.
A moment later, another ball of green lightning shot out. The way it rolled off the larger mass of light reminded me of how vendors at the carnival swirled cotton candy around a paper cone. It bristled, shivering with its own trembling energy.
Then it flew at me. I stood amazed as it curved through the air, this new death sensation that shone with a cancerous green light.
Part 3
https://www.reddit.com/nosleep/comments/197yapv/i_found_the_bottomless_pit_from_the_book_of/

I [17F] was with my friend [17F] while she was at basketball practice, I asked her if I could use her phone to entertain myself because I had forgotten mine. Me and her are pretty close and have known each other for a while now, but she’s friends with other people who don’t like me; and she lets me know when they talk poorly of me. A certain feeling was biting at me so I went searched for my name in her texts and found that she was talking about me behind my back to her other friends, and recently too. I’m on the curvier side but not like bulging with fat, but it’s still to the point where I get made fun of for it regularly and have struggled with an eating disorder she is well aware of. Many of the texts I found were of her making fun of my appearance with others and commenting on my size. I screenshotted everything i found, sent it to myself, and deleted the messages from her phone along with deleting the photos from her library and recently deleted so that I could keep the evidence and she wouldn’t know. I talked to her after practice about what I found and told her how much my deep trust in her was now extremely disturbed. she said she was talking about me in this way so that they would believe she didn’t like me and they would tell their unsavory thoughts on me to her so she could fill me in on those behind their backs. Later she said she was sorry that it was all her fault and that we should stay apart because it’s not fair for me to be friends with someone who treated me so horribly. I told her I’m willing to give her a second chance only if she honestly thought she could change. She said that she still wants to talk but maybe not be as close anymore. does going through her texts still make me an asshole if it uncovered something that was going on behind my back ? Am I the asshole ?

“We have a hostage in a moving vehicle,” the dispatcher told the team. Our commander, James Maplin, did not look happy. “The suspects allegedly have access to fully-automatic rifles.”
“Fuck,” James said. His gaze scanned over me and the others, his killer’s eyes looking as hard as stone. “Are they parked?”
“The current suspect location is in a Walmart parking lot,” the soft female voice responded. “They are not moving at this time. There are many civilians in the area, however.”
“This just keeps getting worse,” I muttered. My partner, Sergeant Motes, narrowed his dark eyes and pursed his thin lips. He ran a hand over his shaved head, his tattooed muscles bulging.
“We could surround it with unmarked police cars,” Sergeant Motes said. “Disable the vehicle so that it can’t move in any direction at all. One unmarked car smashes into the front while three smash into the back at the same moment. Then we can all run out and smoke the fuckers- hopefully before they kill the hostage.”
“Simple enough,” I said sarcastically, smiling. The rest of the team kept their faces stony and blank. Commander Maplin looked displeased with the idea.
“That would mean our officers would be exposed to their own cross-fire,” he said icily. “And the civilians in the area would also be susceptible to getting shot.” I shrugged.
“He’s right, though,” I said. “It’s the best idea we have. We can’t use snipers, because if one misses, we would then be at a massive disadvantage. The shooter would have plenty of time to speed out of there and murder the hostage as he went.
“Disabling the vehicle has worked before. We could have four police officers hit it at the exact same moment. We just have to be quick about it. Once the unmarked cars smash into the suspect vehicle, we only have a matter of seconds to take out the gunman.”
“Gunmen,” Commander Maplin said. “There’s two of them.”
“This just gets better and better,” I muttered.
***
The plan was simple: we would all drive in unmarked, inconspicuous cars. No one was going in with cherries blaring on this one. I would be driving a black pick-up truck, and my job was to smash directly into the front of the car.
Sergeant Motes would attack the rear driver’s side. Two other team members would hit the center of the back and the rear passenger’s side. This would make it impossible for the driver to escape, but it would also give him a one to two-second advantage while we all bailed out of our own vehicles and opened fire. I didn’t like it, but there was no other way to get the hostage out that we could see.
Right before we were to execute the mission, I found myself driving slowly down the street in the truck. I saw the target vehicle, a dark blue SUV with tinted windows. The front of the suspect’s vehicle faced a sidewalk and a couple-inch high dividers which I would have to tear through to get to them. I swore. The tinted windows would make this even more impossible. It would be an absolute miracle if the hostage escaped without getting shot.
I had my M4A1 rifle slung around my shoulder and my Glock 20 around my waist. I felt waves of adrenaline pounding through my body. It almost felt unreal, like some video game. All the colors of the world seemed overly saturated and bright. I saw my hands trembling as I gripped the wheel.
“Now!” Commander Maplin cried into the radio. “Disable the vehicle!” I pressed the accelerator down and, with my seatbelt tightly hugging my chest, prepared to smash headfirst into the blue SUV.
***
I went over the divider with a loud bang that would have woken the dead. Time seemed to slow down as I looked through the front windshield, trying to take a snapshot of what I saw in my mind. In the driver’s seat, a tall, black man sat with an automatic rifle in his hands.
A black woman with wide, insane eyes sat in the backseat, peering around the edge of it, her mouth an O of surprise, her fingers tightly gripping another rifle. In the passenger’s seat, I saw a little blonde boy with a face like a statue. He didn’t seem scared or surprised in the slightest. In fact, I could have sworn he was grinning.
The truck gave a sudden burst of speed, the engine whining. Behind the blue SUV, I saw three more cars speeding towards impact at the same time, each of them only a few feet away. We all hit it at the same time. There was a tortured screaming of metal and an explosion of glass. I felt myself thrown forward. From inside the suspect vehicle, the shooters started shouting something.
Breathing hard, I pushed open the door and fell out into the freezing winter air. At that moment, gunshots erupted all around me. The smell of gunsmoke and gasoline hung thick in the air. Bullets cracked into the pavement with their hypersonic shrieking. I raised my rifle and pointed at where I knew the driver was. Without hesitation, I opened fire, emptying the magazine. The high-caliber rifle bullets ate their way through the SUV’s frame as easily as if it were cardboard.
***
“I’m shot!” I heard a man scream from the back of the group of crashed cars. The cacophony of gunshots made the world sound like it was exploding all around us. I saw Sergeant Motes run around the vehicles, using them as cover. He was crouched, his dark eyes frantic and searching.
The woman in the backseat had opened fire with an automatic rifle. She was shooting out of the back window, just spraying bullets everywhere. They burst from the gun with a sound like an industrial sewing machine. Behind the cars, I saw a SWAT officer dragging himself away from the scene as a river of blood followed behind him. He looked like a racoon who had just been hit by a car.
Sergeant Motes immediately started shooting through the SUV’s door at the woman. The first shot hit her in the neck. I saw a sphere of blood explode from her mutilated throat as she dropped her rifle and fell back. Her eyes rolled up in her head as she choked on her own blood.
The man in the driver’s seat had turned his attention to the police behind him, trying to shoot Sergeant Motes. Not having time to reload, I dropped my rifle and pulled out my Glock. Shooting through the driver’s side window, I hit him in the chest and shoulder. He jerked back with every shot, his eyes wild and filled with an animal panic. He looked at the hostage in the passenger’s seat, the little boy with the strange eyes and grinning mouth. The shooter kept his rifle held tightly in his hands. With the last of his dying energy, he raised it towards the hostage. At that moment, I shot through the window, hitting the shooter in the right shoulder. With a spray of blood, the rifle fell from his limp hands.
“Don’t… let him go…” the shooter cried as he vomited a stream of blood. The shooter kept his attention fully fixed on the boy as if he were an object of meditation, not looking back at me. But at that moment, the boy flung the door open and scurried out of the car with his head down.
“You don’t… understand… please, stop…” he kept insisting. Spitting blood, the shooter tried to rise. His right arm hung at his side, limp and side. He tried to grab the rifle with his working left hand and aim it at the boy.
“Drop the gun!” I screamed. His head ratcheted towards me, and I opened fire. Another three shots entered his chest, opening up holes the size of quarters up and down his torso.
“Drop the gun!” I repeated. The shooter started wailing. He made gurgling, pleading sounds, like some sort of torture victim from the Dark Ages. He spit blood constantly, and I saw gaping holes all over his body. He tried to raise his head once more. Sergeant Motes screamed next to me.
“Drop the gun, fucker!” he shrieked. I aimed at the center of the shooter’s forehead. Our eyes met for a brief moment, and then I pulled the trigger.
His head jerked back as a bullet pierced his right eye and blew a chunk out of the back of his head. Pieces of bone and a bloody wad of mutilated brains sprayed the inside of the car. Like a puppet with its strings cut, the shooter collapsed and went still.
***
“Where’s our victim?! Where’s the goddamned victim?!” Sergeant Motes yelled from nearby. I jumped, looking around frantically. Where was the victim? Everything had happened so fast. It had seemed like the entire planet was exploding into chaos for a few seconds. I had glimpsed the little boy running during the firefight, but I didn’t know if he had gotten hit by the relentless spray of bullets or not.
“There!” I cried, pointing a few hundred feet away to the far side of the parking lot. The boy, who looked no older than five or six, was huddled in a ball between two cars, silently rocking back and forth. He looked totally shell-shocked, his face a blank mask of nothingness. Yet his dark, almost black, eyes seemed to be staring in our direction. In fact, it looked like he was staring directly at me.
I sprinted over in the boy’s direction. Customers had taken cover behind their cars all over the parking lot, though, in reality, a car would be unlikely to stop a high-caliber rifle bullet anyway. One woman slunk out, crouched over, her fat face pale and covered in sweat.
“Is it safe?” she asked. I glanced over at her.
“Yes, the gunmen are dead,” I answered, annoyed. I looked back at where the victim was. But the boy was gone.
***
One officer had been severely injured in the shooting. Two pedestrians were injured by bullets, but were in stable condition. Both of the kidnappers were gone, smoked by dozens of gunshot wounds, but the hostage was gone, too. He had simply vanished.
A Lifestar helicopter came and took the SWAT officer to the hospital, where he required immediate life-saving surgery due to a round that pierced his kidney and liver and clipped his spine. It seems unlikely he will ever return to work.
It was a strange situation, and we would learn more about it in the days to come. From what Commander Maplin told me later on, the boy had been kidnapped from some religious group who lived deep in the mountains a couple hours away. They apparently were a strange bunch who worshiped angels and tried to control and summon demons.
We had no motive for why they chose that boy or that religious group. It seemed totally random at the time. But even stranger, the two suspects hadn’t even had a criminal record. Neither of them had so much as a traffic ticket- at least before they had tried kidnapping and murdering a child.
***
For the next week, I kept thinking about that strange, grinning child. I wondered where he had gone. I had so many questions about the case, like everyone else, but it seemed like there were no answers to be had. Perhaps it would simply become an eternal mystery, just like the cases of the Zodiac and Jack the Ripper had.
When we got the call that there was an active hostage situation at the church at the edge of town, I had no idea that I would see that boy again. I would have many of my questions answered, whether I wanted it or not.
***
I saw the church from a distance, surrounded by a grove of dead evergreens whose bare branches reached upwards towards the sky, as if in prayer to a dead god. Sergeant Motes and five other team members sat next to me in full SWAT gear. The bullet-proof van rolled forward with its powerful engine whining like a hornet. Night had come early, as it always did on these cold winter days.
“This is… strange,” one of the team members, a muscular Asian guy with a shaved head named Dan said. He was sitting to my left and Sergeant Motes to my right.
“It’s fucking weird,” Sergeant Motes said, his dark eyes scanning the church. We slowly pulled into the far edge of the parking lot, behind a thick stone cemetery wall that would hopefully prevent bullets from passing through. But we hadn’t gotten a call about any shootings here.
We had been told by Commander Maplin that someone had made a call from a church built in the 1800s. A young woman had told the 911 operator, in a panicked tone, that they were all being held hostage inside the church, that they were holed up in the rectory and had barricaded the door. She started rambling about how the kidnappers had faces like birds. I assumed she was talking about the masks they were wearing.
She had said they were trying to break down the doors and would certainly kill them. Then the call had gotten cut off suddenly.
“We’re going in hot,” Sergeant Motes said. Everyone looked excited, their eyes gleaming. Dan had a shotgun in his hands for breaching the doors, if necessary. He would go first. With excitement and no small sense of panic, we ran out of the armored truck. The thick wall dividing the cemetery and the church was solid stone, and a sniper would be unable to see through it. The wall led to a gate that opened only fifteen feet or so from the front door. That was the part I was worried about, running across that no man’s land. And, of course, the breaching.
We sprinted across the no man’s land, glancing constantly around for signs of movement. In the stained glass windows of the church, pale shapes flittered, but I couldn’t make them out through the distortion and the darkness. Within the church, it looked as if all the lights were off. Only the bloody flickering of candlelight shone through the windows.
Dan fired a breaching round at the locked church door with a boom like thunder. He leaned back and kicked it open. It crashed against the wall and we all ran in together with our rifles raised, ready to begin shooting.
But the nave was empty. I glanced around, seeing hundreds of lit candles flickering all along the walls. The church was a wasteland of destruction. Someone had filled the holy water font with blood instead of water. Jesus hung on his crucifix in front of the church, but the psychos holding this place hostage had nailed another body on top of his- an old woman, by the looks of her. She had been stripped naked. In deep, slicing letters, someone had written across her skin, “VICTIM OF THE DISEASE”. Her dead eyes still stared straight ahead, sightless and terrified. Her blue lips hung open in a silent scream.
But even stranger, she had great, purple welts all over her body. They reminded me of pictures I had seen of victims of the Black Death, the buboes of pus and dead tissue that formed and often burst in the dying.
Trails of blood swerved their way down the nave and towards the rectory. From the back, we heard muffled screams of terror. Without speaking a word, Sergeant Motes motioned us forward. Dan held his breaching shotgun at the ready as we got to the locked rectory door.
***
“Oh God, please, no!” someone shrieked on the other side of the door. Dan blew apart the lock and smashed into it with his shoulder. On the other side, we found a scene from a nightmare.
There were what looked like three men in black robes facing a pile of naked bodies. The bodies all had those same purplish-black buboes covering their pale flesh. In the middle of them, I saw the boy, the victim who had disappeared from the hostage rescue a week ago. But he looked different now. His eyes were black, and his face had started to drip and change. His nose had stretched out and become almost bird-like, and his flesh had started to harden into something pale and dead.
The other men turned. To my horror, I saw they had the final version of the transformed faces. Their faces had morphed into something bird-like and skeletal, as if their flesh had become living plague doctor masks. A smell like mummified bodies and septic shock radiated off of them.
“You are a victim of the spreading sickness,” one hissed through its pale beak as its black robes fluttered around its body. “I am the cure.” Their eyes, too, were black. Tiny, sharp fangs lined their mouths, like the teeth of some prehistoric dinosaur.
In horror, we only stood there for a long moment, until another scream shattered its way through the room. In the pile of corpses, I saw a little girl. She was covered in blood, trying to crawl out of the bottom. All across her neck and arms, the black buboes rose like flowering tumors.
“Help me!” she cried. “Get me out of here! They killed Mommy and Daddy!” We all opened fire at once at that point. The strange men in their black robes moved like shadows, however, strafing at superhuman speeds towards us. I saw a few bullets pierce their torsos, their arms and legs, but no blood came out. It was like their insides were made of dust.
In a blur, they oozed forward. At one moment, they were twenty feet away, then they were right there. Bony, skeletal hands raised all around me. I saw Dan trying to backpedal away from one who had him by the throat. Dan’s face had turned red with suffocation. He held the breach shotgun to the creature’s chest and pulled the trigger.
The plague doctor’s chest exploded, an exit wound the size of a basketball ripping its way out of his dusty, dead body. He dropped Dan, who immediately sucked in a breath of air. To my horror, though, I saw black buboes rising all over Dan’s neck.
The little boy skittered forward, his bird-like mouth giving a wail like a hungry infant. As the blood of my comrades soaked the floor all around me and the screams of the dying rang out like church bells, I turned and ran.
I glanced back, seeing the little boy only feet behind me. Sergeant Motes was fighting one of the plague doctors. I saw others laying on the ground, their heads twisted around 180 degrees or their necks snapped. They all showed signs of the spreading black buboes.
I turned and shot at the little boy, hitting him in the leg. His wailing increased to an ear-splitting cacophony as he went sprawling, his kneecap exploding in a shower of blood and bones. He kept trying to drag himself forward towards me, gnashing his strange mouth and sharp little teeth. I sprinted through the nave and past the font of blood. Without looking back, I got to the armored van and told the driver to get us the fuck out of there.
I ended up being the only survivor, and when I told my story, people looked at me as if I were totally insane. All of the body cameras had apparently stopped working when we entered the rectory, simply fizzing out in a wave of static and white noise.
***
By the time reinforcements arrived, the plague doctors and the boy were gone. They found only a church filled with horrors. Men in hazmat suits had to go in and clean up the bodies, which were all apparently contaminated by an especially virulent form of plague.
When investigators went to the compound in the woods where the religious group supposedly was, they found the place abandoned. It looked like they had all just left in the middle of the night, leaving everything behind. At first, it seemed we would never find any answers to our questions.
But as police searched through the homes of the shooters who had taken the boy hostage, they found a diary. It seemed to be written by a psychotic person, someone who believed that a cult in the woods was impregnating women with demons. They claimed they were members of a secret group that exterminated these demons wherever they found them.
In hindsight, after what I went through, perhaps it wasn’t so psychotic after all.

“We have a hostage in a moving vehicle,” the dispatcher told the team. Our commander, James Maplin, did not look happy. “The suspects allegedly have access to fully-automatic rifles.”
“Fuck,” James said. His gaze scanned over me and the others, his killer’s eyes looking as hard as stone. “Are they parked?”
“The current suspect location is in a Walmart parking lot,” the soft female voice responded. “They are not moving at this time. There are many civilians in the area, however.”
“This just keeps getting worse,” I muttered. My partner, Sergeant Motes, narrowed his dark eyes and pursed his thin lips. He ran a hand over his shaved head, his tattooed muscles bulging.
“We could surround it with unmarked police cars,” Sergeant Motes said. “Disable the vehicle so that it can’t move in any direction at all. One unmarked car smashes into the front while three smash into the back at the same moment. Then we can all run out and smoke the fuckers- hopefully before they kill the hostage.”
“Simple enough,” I said sarcastically, smiling. The rest of the team kept their faces stony and blank. Commander Maplin looked displeased with the idea.
“That would mean our officers would be exposed to their own cross-fire,” he said icily. “And the civilians in the area would also be susceptible to getting shot.” I shrugged.
“He’s right, though,” I said. “It’s the best idea we have. We can’t use snipers, because if one misses, we would then be at a massive disadvantage. The shooter would have plenty of time to speed out of there and murder the hostage as he went.
“Disabling the vehicle has worked before. We could have four police officers hit it at the exact same moment. We just have to be quick about it. Once the unmarked cars smash into the suspect vehicle, we only have a matter of seconds to take out the gunman.”
“Gunmen,” Commander Maplin said. “There’s two of them.”
“This just gets better and better,” I muttered.
***
The plan was simple: we would all drive in unmarked, inconspicuous cars. No one was going in with cherries blaring on this one. I would be driving a black pick-up truck, and my job was to smash directly into the front of the car.
Sergeant Motes would attack the rear driver’s side. Two other team members would hit the center of the back and the rear passenger’s side. This would make it impossible for the driver to escape, but it would also give him a one to two-second advantage while we all bailed out of our own vehicles and opened fire. I didn’t like it, but there was no other way to get the hostage out that we could see.
Right before we were to execute the mission, I found myself driving slowly down the street in the truck. I saw the target vehicle, a dark blue SUV with tinted windows. The front of the suspect’s vehicle faced a sidewalk and a couple-inch high dividers which I would have to tear through to get to them. I swore. The tinted windows would make this even more impossible. It would be an absolute miracle if the hostage escaped without getting shot.
I had my M4A1 rifle slung around my shoulder and my Glock 20 around my waist. I felt waves of adrenaline pounding through my body. It almost felt unreal, like some video game. All the colors of the world seemed overly saturated and bright. I saw my hands trembling as I gripped the wheel.
“Now!” Commander Maplin cried into the radio. “Disable the vehicle!” I pressed the accelerator down and, with my seatbelt tightly hugging my chest, prepared to smash headfirst into the blue SUV.
***
I went over the divider with a loud bang that would have woken the dead. Time seemed to slow down as I looked through the front windshield, trying to take a snapshot of what I saw in my mind. In the driver’s seat, a tall, black man sat with an automatic rifle in his hands.
A black woman with wide, insane eyes sat in the backseat, peering around the edge of it, her mouth an O of surprise, her fingers tightly gripping another rifle. In the passenger’s seat, I saw a little blonde boy with a face like a statue. He didn’t seem scared or surprised in the slightest. In fact, I could have sworn he was grinning.
The truck gave a sudden burst of speed, the engine whining. Behind the blue SUV, I saw three more cars speeding towards impact at the same time, each of them only a few feet away. We all hit it at the same time. There was a tortured screaming of metal and an explosion of glass. I felt myself thrown forward. From inside the suspect vehicle, the shooters started shouting something.
Breathing hard, I pushed open the door and fell out into the freezing winter air. At that moment, gunshots erupted all around me. The smell of gunsmoke and gasoline hung thick in the air. Bullets cracked into the pavement with their hypersonic shrieking. I raised my rifle and pointed at where I knew the driver was. Without hesitation, I opened fire, emptying the magazine. The high-caliber rifle bullets ate their way through the SUV’s frame as easily as if it were cardboard.
***
“I’m shot!” I heard a man scream from the back of the group of crashed cars. The cacophony of gunshots made the world sound like it was exploding all around us. I saw Sergeant Motes run around the vehicles, using them as cover. He was crouched, his dark eyes frantic and searching.
The woman in the backseat had opened fire with an automatic rifle. She was shooting out of the back window, just spraying bullets everywhere. They burst from the gun with a sound like an industrial sewing machine. Behind the cars, I saw a SWAT officer dragging himself away from the scene as a river of blood followed behind him. He looked like a racoon who had just been hit by a car.
Sergeant Motes immediately started shooting through the SUV’s door at the woman. The first shot hit her in the neck. I saw a sphere of blood explode from her mutilated throat as she dropped her rifle and fell back. Her eyes rolled up in her head as she choked on her own blood.
The man in the driver’s seat had turned his attention to the police behind him, trying to shoot Sergeant Motes. Not having time to reload, I dropped my rifle and pulled out my Glock. Shooting through the driver’s side window, I hit him in the chest and shoulder. He jerked back with every shot, his eyes wild and filled with an animal panic. He looked at the hostage in the passenger’s seat, the little boy with the strange eyes and grinning mouth. The shooter kept his rifle held tightly in his hands. With the last of his dying energy, he raised it towards the hostage. At that moment, I shot through the window, hitting the shooter in the right shoulder. With a spray of blood, the rifle fell from his limp hands.
“Don’t… let him go…” the shooter cried as he vomited a stream of blood. The shooter kept his attention fully fixed on the boy as if he were an object of meditation, not looking back at me. But at that moment, the boy flung the door open and scurried out of the car with his head down.
“You don’t… understand… please, stop…” he kept insisting. Spitting blood, the shooter tried to rise. His right arm hung at his side, limp and side. He tried to grab the rifle with his working left hand and aim it at the boy.
“Drop the gun!” I screamed. His head ratcheted towards me, and I opened fire. Another three shots entered his chest, opening up holes the size of quarters up and down his torso.
“Drop the gun!” I repeated. The shooter started wailing. He made gurgling, pleading sounds, like some sort of torture victim from the Dark Ages. He spit blood constantly, and I saw gaping holes all over his body. He tried to raise his head once more. Sergeant Motes screamed next to me.
“Drop the gun, fucker!” he shrieked. I aimed at the center of the shooter’s forehead. Our eyes met for a brief moment, and then I pulled the trigger.
His head jerked back as a bullet pierced his right eye and blew a chunk out of the back of his head. Pieces of bone and a bloody wad of mutilated brains sprayed the inside of the car. Like a puppet with its strings cut, the shooter collapsed and went still.
***
“Where’s our victim?! Where’s the goddamned victim?!” Sergeant Motes yelled from nearby. I jumped, looking around frantically. Where was the victim? Everything had happened so fast. It had seemed like the entire planet was exploding into chaos for a few seconds. I had glimpsed the little boy running during the firefight, but I didn’t know if he had gotten hit by the relentless spray of bullets or not.
“There!” I cried, pointing a few hundred feet away to the far side of the parking lot. The boy, who looked no older than five or six, was huddled in a ball between two cars, silently rocking back and forth. He looked totally shell-shocked, his face a blank mask of nothingness. Yet his dark, almost black, eyes seemed to be staring in our direction. In fact, it looked like he was staring directly at me.
I sprinted over in the boy’s direction. Customers had taken cover behind their cars all over the parking lot, though, in reality, a car would be unlikely to stop a high-caliber rifle bullet anyway. One woman slunk out, crouched over, her fat face pale and covered in sweat.
“Is it safe?” she asked. I glanced over at her.
“Yes, the gunmen are dead,” I answered, annoyed. I looked back at where the victim was. But the boy was gone.
***
One officer had been severely injured in the shooting. Two pedestrians were injured by bullets, but were in stable condition. Both of the kidnappers were gone, smoked by dozens of gunshot wounds, but the hostage was gone, too. He had simply vanished.
A Lifestar helicopter came and took the SWAT officer to the hospital, where he required immediate life-saving surgery due to a round that pierced his kidney and liver and clipped his spine. It seems unlikely he will ever return to work.
It was a strange situation, and we would learn more about it in the days to come. From what Commander Maplin told me later on, the boy had been kidnapped from some religious group who lived deep in the mountains a couple hours away. They apparently were a strange bunch who worshiped angels and tried to control and summon demons.
We had no motive for why they chose that boy or that religious group. It seemed totally random at the time. But even stranger, the two suspects hadn’t even had a criminal record. Neither of them had so much as a traffic ticket- at least before they had tried kidnapping and murdering a child.
***
For the next week, I kept thinking about that strange, grinning child. I wondered where he had gone. I had so many questions about the case, like everyone else, but it seemed like there were no answers to be had. Perhaps it would simply become an eternal mystery, just like the cases of the Zodiac and Jack the Ripper had.
When we got the call that there was an active hostage situation at the church at the edge of town, I had no idea that I would see that boy again. I would have many of my questions answered, whether I wanted it or not.
***
I saw the church from a distance, surrounded by a grove of dead evergreens whose bare branches reached upwards towards the sky, as if in prayer to a dead god. Sergeant Motes and five other team members sat next to me in full SWAT gear. The bullet-proof van rolled forward with its powerful engine whining like a hornet. Night had come early, as it always did on these cold winter days.
“This is… strange,” one of the team members, a muscular Asian guy with a shaved head named Dan said. He was sitting to my left and Sergeant Motes to my right.
“It’s fucking weird,” Sergeant Motes said, his dark eyes scanning the church. We slowly pulled into the far edge of the parking lot, behind a thick stone cemetery wall that would hopefully prevent bullets from passing through. But we hadn’t gotten a call about any shootings here.
We had been told by Commander Maplin that someone had made a call from a church built in the 1800s. A young woman had told the 911 operator, in a panicked tone, that they were all being held hostage inside the church, that they were holed up in the rectory and had barricaded the door. She started rambling about how the kidnappers had faces like birds. I assumed she was talking about the masks they were wearing.
She had said they were trying to break down the doors and would certainly kill them. Then the call had gotten cut off suddenly.
“We’re going in hot,” Sergeant Motes said. Everyone looked excited, their eyes gleaming. Dan had a shotgun in his hands for breaching the doors, if necessary. He would go first. With excitement and no small sense of panic, we ran out of the armored truck. The thick wall dividing the cemetery and the church was solid stone, and a sniper would be unable to see through it. The wall led to a gate that opened only fifteen feet or so from the front door. That was the part I was worried about, running across that no man’s land. And, of course, the breaching.
We sprinted across the no man’s land, glancing constantly around for signs of movement. In the stained glass windows of the church, pale shapes flittered, but I couldn’t make them out through the distortion and the darkness. Within the church, it looked as if all the lights were off. Only the bloody flickering of candlelight shone through the windows.
Dan fired a breaching round at the locked church door with a boom like thunder. He leaned back and kicked it open. It crashed against the wall and we all ran in together with our rifles raised, ready to begin shooting.
But the nave was empty. I glanced around, seeing hundreds of lit candles flickering all along the walls. The church was a wasteland of destruction. Someone had filled the holy water font with blood instead of water. Jesus hung on his crucifix in front of the church, but the psychos holding this place hostage had nailed another body on top of his- an old woman, by the looks of her. She had been stripped naked. In deep, slicing letters, someone had written across her skin, “VICTIM OF THE DISEASE”. Her dead eyes still stared straight ahead, sightless and terrified. Her blue lips hung open in a silent scream.
But even stranger, she had great, purple welts all over her body. They reminded me of pictures I had seen of victims of the Black Death, the buboes of pus and dead tissue that formed and often burst in the dying.
Trails of blood swerved their way down the nave and towards the rectory. From the back, we heard muffled screams of terror. Without speaking a word, Sergeant Motes motioned us forward. Dan held his breaching shotgun at the ready as we got to the locked rectory door.
***
“Oh God, please, no!” someone shrieked on the other side of the door. Dan blew apart the lock and smashed into it with his shoulder. On the other side, we found a scene from a nightmare.
There were what looked like three men in black robes facing a pile of naked bodies. The bodies all had those same purplish-black buboes covering their pale flesh. In the middle of them, I saw the boy, the victim who had disappeared from the hostage rescue a week ago. But he looked different now. His eyes were black, and his face had started to drip and change. His nose had stretched out and become almost bird-like, and his flesh had started to harden into something pale and dead.
The other men turned. To my horror, I saw they had the final version of the transformed faces. Their faces had morphed into something bird-like and skeletal, as if their flesh had become living plague doctor masks. A smell like mummified bodies and septic shock radiated off of them.
“You are a victim of the spreading sickness,” one hissed through its pale beak as its black robes fluttered around its body. “I am the cure.” Their eyes, too, were black. Tiny, sharp fangs lined their mouths, like the teeth of some prehistoric dinosaur.
In horror, we only stood there for a long moment, until another scream shattered its way through the room. In the pile of corpses, I saw a little girl. She was covered in blood, trying to crawl out of the bottom. All across her neck and arms, the black buboes rose like flowering tumors.
“Help me!” she cried. “Get me out of here! They killed Mommy and Daddy!” We all opened fire at once at that point. The strange men in their black robes moved like shadows, however, strafing at superhuman speeds towards us. I saw a few bullets pierce their torsos, their arms and legs, but no blood came out. It was like their insides were made of dust.
In a blur, they oozed forward. At one moment, they were twenty feet away, then they were right there. Bony, skeletal hands raised all around me. I saw Dan trying to backpedal away from one who had him by the throat. Dan’s face had turned red with suffocation. He held the breach shotgun to the creature’s chest and pulled the trigger.
The plague doctor’s chest exploded, an exit wound the size of a basketball ripping its way out of his dusty, dead body. He dropped Dan, who immediately sucked in a breath of air. To my horror, though, I saw black buboes rising all over Dan’s neck.
The little boy skittered forward, his bird-like mouth giving a wail like a hungry infant. As the blood of my comrades soaked the floor all around me and the screams of the dying rang out like church bells, I turned and ran.
I glanced back, seeing the little boy only feet behind me. Sergeant Motes was fighting one of the plague doctors. I saw others laying on the ground, their heads twisted around 180 degrees or their necks snapped. They all showed signs of the spreading black buboes.
I turned and shot at the little boy, hitting him in the leg. His wailing increased to an ear-splitting cacophony as he went sprawling, his kneecap exploding in a shower of blood and bones. He kept trying to drag himself forward towards me, gnashing his strange mouth and sharp little teeth. I sprinted through the nave and past the font of blood. Without looking back, I got to the armored van and told the driver to get us the fuck out of there.
I ended up being the only survivor, and when I told my story, people looked at me as if I were totally insane. All of the body cameras had apparently stopped working when we entered the rectory, simply fizzing out in a wave of static and white noise.
***
By the time reinforcements arrived, the plague doctors and the boy were gone. They found only a church filled with horrors. Men in hazmat suits had to go in and clean up the bodies, which were all apparently contaminated by an especially virulent form of plague.
When investigators went to the compound in the woods where the religious group supposedly was, they found the place abandoned. It looked like they had all just left in the middle of the night, leaving everything behind. At first, it seemed we would never find any answers to our questions.
But as police searched through the homes of the shooters who had taken the boy hostage, they found a diary. It seemed to be written by a psychotic person, someone who believed that a cult in the woods was impregnating women with demons. They claimed they were members of a secret group that exterminated these demons wherever they found them.
In hindsight, after what I went through, perhaps it wasn’t so psychotic after all.

“We have a hostage in a moving vehicle,” the dispatcher told the team. Our commander, James Maplin, did not look happy. “The suspects allegedly have access to fully-automatic rifles.”
“Fuck,” James said. His gaze scanned over me and the others, his killer’s eyes looking as hard as stone. “Are they parked?”
“The current suspect location is in a Walmart parking lot,” the soft female voice responded. “They are not moving at this time. There are many civilians in the area, however.”
“This just keeps getting worse,” I muttered. My partner, Sergeant Motes, narrowed his dark eyes and pursed his thin lips. He ran a hand over his shaved head, his tattooed muscles bulging.
“We could surround it with unmarked police cars,” Sergeant Motes said. “Disable the vehicle so that it can’t move in any direction at all. One unmarked car smashes into the front while three smash into the back at the same moment. Then we can all run out and smoke the fuckers- hopefully before they kill the hostage.”
“Simple enough,” I said sarcastically, smiling. The rest of the team kept their faces stony and blank. Commander Maplin looked displeased with the idea.
“That would mean our officers would be exposed to their own cross-fire,” he said icily. “And the civilians in the area would also be susceptible to getting shot.” I shrugged.
“He’s right, though,” I said. “It’s the best idea we have. We can’t use snipers, because if one misses, we would then be at a massive disadvantage. The shooter would have plenty of time to speed out of there and murder the hostage as he went.
“Disabling the vehicle has worked before. We could have four police officers hit it at the exact same moment. We just have to be quick about it. Once the unmarked cars smash into the suspect vehicle, we only have a matter of seconds to take out the gunman.”
“Gunmen,” Commander Maplin said. “There’s two of them.”
“This just gets better and better,” I muttered.
***
The plan was simple: we would all drive in unmarked, inconspicuous cars. No one was going in with cherries blaring on this one. I would be driving a black pick-up truck, and my job was to smash directly into the front of the car.
Sergeant Motes would attack the rear driver’s side. Two other team members would hit the center of the back and the rear passenger’s side. This would make it impossible for the driver to escape, but it would also give him a one to two-second advantage while we all bailed out of our own vehicles and opened fire. I didn’t like it, but there was no other way to get the hostage out that we could see.
Right before we were to execute the mission, I found myself driving slowly down the street in the truck. I saw the target vehicle, a dark blue SUV with tinted windows. The front of the suspect’s vehicle faced a sidewalk and a couple-inch high dividers which I would have to tear through to get to them. I swore. The tinted windows would make this even more impossible. It would be an absolute miracle if the hostage escaped without getting shot.
I had my M4A1 rifle slung around my shoulder and my Glock 20 around my waist. I felt waves of adrenaline pounding through my body. It almost felt unreal, like some video game. All the colors of the world seemed overly saturated and bright. I saw my hands trembling as I gripped the wheel.
“Now!” Commander Maplin cried into the radio. “Disable the vehicle!” I pressed the accelerator down and, with my seatbelt tightly hugging my chest, prepared to smash headfirst into the blue SUV.
***
I went over the divider with a loud bang that would have woken the dead. Time seemed to slow down as I looked through the front windshield, trying to take a snapshot of what I saw in my mind. In the driver’s seat, a tall, black man sat with an automatic rifle in his hands.
A black woman with wide, insane eyes sat in the backseat, peering around the edge of it, her mouth an O of surprise, her fingers tightly gripping another rifle. In the passenger’s seat, I saw a little blonde boy with a face like a statue. He didn’t seem scared or surprised in the slightest. In fact, I could have sworn he was grinning.
The truck gave a sudden burst of speed, the engine whining. Behind the blue SUV, I saw three more cars speeding towards impact at the same time, each of them only a few feet away. We all hit it at the same time. There was a tortured screaming of metal and an explosion of glass. I felt myself thrown forward. From inside the suspect vehicle, the shooters started shouting something.
Breathing hard, I pushed open the door and fell out into the freezing winter air. At that moment, gunshots erupted all around me. The smell of gunsmoke and gasoline hung thick in the air. Bullets cracked into the pavement with their hypersonic shrieking. I raised my rifle and pointed at where I knew the driver was. Without hesitation, I opened fire, emptying the magazine. The high-caliber rifle bullets ate their way through the SUV’s frame as easily as if it were cardboard.
***
“I’m shot!” I heard a man scream from the back of the group of crashed cars. The cacophony of gunshots made the world sound like it was exploding all around us. I saw Sergeant Motes run around the vehicles, using them as cover. He was crouched, his dark eyes frantic and searching.
The woman in the backseat had opened fire with an automatic rifle. She was shooting out of the back window, just spraying bullets everywhere. They burst from the gun with a sound like an industrial sewing machine. Behind the cars, I saw a SWAT officer dragging himself away from the scene as a river of blood followed behind him. He looked like a racoon who had just been hit by a car.
Sergeant Motes immediately started shooting through the SUV’s door at the woman. The first shot hit her in the neck. I saw a sphere of blood explode from her mutilated throat as she dropped her rifle and fell back. Her eyes rolled up in her head as she choked on her own blood.
The man in the driver’s seat had turned his attention to the police behind him, trying to shoot Sergeant Motes. Not having time to reload, I dropped my rifle and pulled out my Glock. Shooting through the driver’s side window, I hit him in the chest and shoulder. He jerked back with every shot, his eyes wild and filled with an animal panic. He looked at the hostage in the passenger’s seat, the little boy with the strange eyes and grinning mouth. The shooter kept his rifle held tightly in his hands. With the last of his dying energy, he raised it towards the hostage. At that moment, I shot through the window, hitting the shooter in the right shoulder. With a spray of blood, the rifle fell from his limp hands.
“Don’t… let him go…” the shooter cried as he vomited a stream of blood. The shooter kept his attention fully fixed on the boy as if he were an object of meditation, not looking back at me. But at that moment, the boy flung the door open and scurried out of the car with his head down.
“You don’t… understand… please, stop…” he kept insisting. Spitting blood, the shooter tried to rise. His right arm hung at his side, limp and side. He tried to grab the rifle with his working left hand and aim it at the boy.
“Drop the gun!” I screamed. His head ratcheted towards me, and I opened fire. Another three shots entered his chest, opening up holes the size of quarters up and down his torso.
“Drop the gun!” I repeated. The shooter started wailing. He made gurgling, pleading sounds, like some sort of torture victim from the Dark Ages. He spit blood constantly, and I saw gaping holes all over his body. He tried to raise his head once more. Sergeant Motes screamed next to me.
“Drop the gun, fucker!” he shrieked. I aimed at the center of the shooter’s forehead. Our eyes met for a brief moment, and then I pulled the trigger.
His head jerked back as a bullet pierced his right eye and blew a chunk out of the back of his head. Pieces of bone and a bloody wad of mutilated brains sprayed the inside of the car. Like a puppet with its strings cut, the shooter collapsed and went still.
***
“Where’s our victim?! Where’s the goddamned victim?!” Sergeant Motes yelled from nearby. I jumped, looking around frantically. Where was the victim? Everything had happened so fast. It had seemed like the entire planet was exploding into chaos for a few seconds. I had glimpsed the little boy running during the firefight, but I didn’t know if he had gotten hit by the relentless spray of bullets or not.
“There!” I cried, pointing a few hundred feet away to the far side of the parking lot. The boy, who looked no older than five or six, was huddled in a ball between two cars, silently rocking back and forth. He looked totally shell-shocked, his face a blank mask of nothingness. Yet his dark, almost black, eyes seemed to be staring in our direction. In fact, it looked like he was staring directly at me.
I sprinted over in the boy’s direction. Customers had taken cover behind their cars all over the parking lot, though, in reality, a car would be unlikely to stop a high-caliber rifle bullet anyway. One woman slunk out, crouched over, her fat face pale and covered in sweat.
“Is it safe?” she asked. I glanced over at her.
“Yes, the gunmen are dead,” I answered, annoyed. I looked back at where the victim was. But the boy was gone.
***
One officer had been severely injured in the shooting. Two pedestrians were injured by bullets, but were in stable condition. Both of the kidnappers were gone, smoked by dozens of gunshot wounds, but the hostage was gone, too. He had simply vanished.
A Lifestar helicopter came and took the SWAT officer to the hospital, where he required immediate life-saving surgery due to a round that pierced his kidney and liver and clipped his spine. It seems unlikely he will ever return to work.
It was a strange situation, and we would learn more about it in the days to come. From what Commander Maplin told me later on, the boy had been kidnapped from some religious group who lived deep in the mountains a couple hours away. They apparently were a strange bunch who worshiped angels and tried to control and summon demons.
We had no motive for why they chose that boy or that religious group. It seemed totally random at the time. But even stranger, the two suspects hadn’t even had a criminal record. Neither of them had so much as a traffic ticket- at least before they had tried kidnapping and murdering a child.
***
For the next week, I kept thinking about that strange, grinning child. I wondered where he had gone. I had so many questions about the case, like everyone else, but it seemed like there were no answers to be had. Perhaps it would simply become an eternal mystery, just like the cases of the Zodiac and Jack the Ripper had.
When we got the call that there was an active hostage situation at the church at the edge of town, I had no idea that I would see that boy again. I would have many of my questions answered, whether I wanted it or not.
***
I saw the church from a distance, surrounded by a grove of dead evergreens whose bare branches reached upwards towards the sky, as if in prayer to a dead god. Sergeant Motes and five other team members sat next to me in full SWAT gear. The bullet-proof van rolled forward with its powerful engine whining like a hornet. Night had come early, as it always did on these cold winter days.
“This is… strange,” one of the team members, a muscular Asian guy with a shaved head named Dan said. He was sitting to my left and Sergeant Motes to my right.
“It’s fucking weird,” Sergeant Motes said, his dark eyes scanning the church. We slowly pulled into the far edge of the parking lot, behind a thick stone cemetery wall that would hopefully prevent bullets from passing through. But we hadn’t gotten a call about any shootings here.
We had been told by Commander Maplin that someone had made a call from a church built in the 1800s. A young woman had told the 911 operator, in a panicked tone, that they were all being held hostage inside the church, that they were holed up in the rectory and had barricaded the door. She started rambling about how the kidnappers had faces like birds. I assumed she was talking about the masks they were wearing.
She had said they were trying to break down the doors and would certainly kill them. Then the call had gotten cut off suddenly.
“We’re going in hot,” Sergeant Motes said. Everyone looked excited, their eyes gleaming. Dan had a shotgun in his hands for breaching the doors, if necessary. He would go first. With excitement and no small sense of panic, we ran out of the armored truck. The thick wall dividing the cemetery and the church was solid stone, and a sniper would be unable to see through it. The wall led to a gate that opened only fifteen feet or so from the front door. That was the part I was worried about, running across that no man’s land. And, of course, the breaching.
We sprinted across the no man’s land, glancing constantly around for signs of movement. In the stained glass windows of the church, pale shapes flittered, but I couldn’t make them out through the distortion and the darkness. Within the church, it looked as if all the lights were off. Only the bloody flickering of candlelight shone through the windows.
Dan fired a breaching round at the locked church door with a boom like thunder. He leaned back and kicked it open. It crashed against the wall and we all ran in together with our rifles raised, ready to begin shooting.
But the nave was empty. I glanced around, seeing hundreds of lit candles flickering all along the walls. The church was a wasteland of destruction. Someone had filled the holy water font with blood instead of water. Jesus hung on his crucifix in front of the church, but the psychos holding this place hostage had nailed another body on top of his- an old woman, by the looks of her. She had been stripped naked. In deep, slicing letters, someone had written across her skin, “VICTIM OF THE DISEASE”. Her dead eyes still stared straight ahead, sightless and terrified. Her blue lips hung open in a silent scream.
But even stranger, she had great, purple welts all over her body. They reminded me of pictures I had seen of victims of the Black Death, the buboes of pus and dead tissue that formed and often burst in the dying.
Trails of blood swerved their way down the nave and towards the rectory. From the back, we heard muffled screams of terror. Without speaking a word, Sergeant Motes motioned us forward. Dan held his breaching shotgun at the ready as we got to the locked rectory door.
***
“Oh God, please, no!” someone shrieked on the other side of the door. Dan blew apart the lock and smashed into it with his shoulder. On the other side, we found a scene from a nightmare.
There were what looked like three men in black robes facing a pile of naked bodies. The bodies all had those same purplish-black buboes covering their pale flesh. In the middle of them, I saw the boy, the victim who had disappeared from the hostage rescue a week ago. But he looked different now. His eyes were black, and his face had started to drip and change. His nose had stretched out and become almost bird-like, and his flesh had started to harden into something pale and dead.
The other men turned. To my horror, I saw they had the final version of the transformed faces. Their faces had morphed into something bird-like and skeletal, as if their flesh had become living plague doctor masks. A smell like mummified bodies and septic shock radiated off of them.
“You are a victim of the spreading sickness,” one hissed through its pale beak as its black robes fluttered around its body. “I am the cure.” Their eyes, too, were black. Tiny, sharp fangs lined their mouths, like the teeth of some prehistoric dinosaur.
In horror, we only stood there for a long moment, until another scream shattered its way through the room. In the pile of corpses, I saw a little girl. She was covered in blood, trying to crawl out of the bottom. All across her neck and arms, the black buboes rose like flowering tumors.
“Help me!” she cried. “Get me out of here! They killed Mommy and Daddy!” We all opened fire at once at that point. The strange men in their black robes moved like shadows, however, strafing at superhuman speeds towards us. I saw a few bullets pierce their torsos, their arms and legs, but no blood came out. It was like their insides were made of dust.
In a blur, they oozed forward. At one moment, they were twenty feet away, then they were right there. Bony, skeletal hands raised all around me. I saw Dan trying to backpedal away from one who had him by the throat. Dan’s face had turned red with suffocation. He held the breach shotgun to the creature’s chest and pulled the trigger.
The plague doctor’s chest exploded, an exit wound the size of a basketball ripping its way out of his dusty, dead body. He dropped Dan, who immediately sucked in a breath of air. To my horror, though, I saw black buboes rising all over Dan’s neck.
The little boy skittered forward, his bird-like mouth giving a wail like a hungry infant. As the blood of my comrades soaked the floor all around me and the screams of the dying rang out like church bells, I turned and ran.
I glanced back, seeing the little boy only feet behind me. Sergeant Motes was fighting one of the plague doctors. I saw others laying on the ground, their heads twisted around 180 degrees or their necks snapped. They all showed signs of the spreading black buboes.
I turned and shot at the little boy, hitting him in the leg. His wailing increased to an ear-splitting cacophony as he went sprawling, his kneecap exploding in a shower of blood and bones. He kept trying to drag himself forward towards me, gnashing his strange mouth and sharp little teeth. I sprinted through the nave and past the font of blood. Without looking back, I got to the armored van and told the driver to get us the fuck out of there.
I ended up being the only survivor, and when I told my story, people looked at me as if I were totally insane. All of the body cameras had apparently stopped working when we entered the rectory, simply fizzing out in a wave of static and white noise.
***
By the time reinforcements arrived, the plague doctors and the boy were gone. They found only a church filled with horrors. Men in hazmat suits had to go in and clean up the bodies, which were all apparently contaminated by an especially virulent form of plague.
When investigators went to the compound in the woods where the religious group supposedly was, they found the place abandoned. It looked like they had all just left in the middle of the night, leaving everything behind. At first, it seemed we would never find any answers to our questions.
But as police searched through the homes of the shooters who had taken the boy hostage, they found a diary. It seemed to be written by a psychotic person, someone who believed that a cult in the woods was impregnating women with demons. They claimed they were members of a secret group that exterminated these demons wherever they found them.
In hindsight, after what I went through, perhaps it wasn’t so psychotic after all.

“We have a hostage in a moving vehicle,” the dispatcher told the team. Our commander, James Maplin, did not look happy. “The suspects allegedly have access to fully-automatic rifles.”
“Fuck,” James said. His gaze scanned over me and the others, his killer’s eyes looking as hard as stone. “Are they parked?”
“The current suspect location is in a Walmart parking lot,” the soft female voice responded. “They are not moving at this time. There are many civilians in the area, however.”
“This just keeps getting worse,” I muttered. My partner, Sergeant Motes, narrowed his dark eyes and pursed his thin lips. He ran a hand over his shaved head, his tattooed muscles bulging.
“We could surround it with unmarked police cars,” Sergeant Motes said. “Disable the vehicle so that it can’t move in any direction at all. One unmarked car smashes into the front while three smash into the back at the same moment. Then we can all run out and smoke the fuckers- hopefully before they kill the hostage.”
“Simple enough,” I said sarcastically, smiling. The rest of the team kept their faces stony and blank. Commander Maplin looked displeased with the idea.
“That would mean our officers would be exposed to their own cross-fire,” he said icily. “And the civilians in the area would also be susceptible to getting shot.” I shrugged.
“He’s right, though,” I said. “It’s the best idea we have. We can’t use snipers, because if one misses, we would then be at a massive disadvantage. The shooter would have plenty of time to speed out of there and murder the hostage as he went.
“Disabling the vehicle has worked before. We could have four police officers hit it at the exact same moment. We just have to be quick about it. Once the unmarked cars smash into the suspect vehicle, we only have a matter of seconds to take out the gunman.”
“Gunmen,” Commander Maplin said. “There’s two of them.”
“This just gets better and better,” I muttered.
***
The plan was simple: we would all drive in unmarked, inconspicuous cars. No one was going in with cherries blaring on this one. I would be driving a black pick-up truck, and my job was to smash directly into the front of the car.
Sergeant Motes would attack the rear driver’s side. Two other team members would hit the center of the back and the rear passenger’s side. This would make it impossible for the driver to escape, but it would also give him a one to two-second advantage while we all bailed out of our own vehicles and opened fire. I didn’t like it, but there was no other way to get the hostage out that we could see.
Right before we were to execute the mission, I found myself driving slowly down the street in the truck. I saw the target vehicle, a dark blue SUV with tinted windows. The front of the suspect’s vehicle faced a sidewalk and a couple-inch high dividers which I would have to tear through to get to them. I swore. The tinted windows would make this even more impossible. It would be an absolute miracle if the hostage escaped without getting shot.
I had my M4A1 rifle slung around my shoulder and my Glock 20 around my waist. I felt waves of adrenaline pounding through my body. It almost felt unreal, like some video game. All the colors of the world seemed overly saturated and bright. I saw my hands trembling as I gripped the wheel.
“Now!” Commander Maplin cried into the radio. “Disable the vehicle!” I pressed the accelerator down and, with my seatbelt tightly hugging my chest, prepared to smash headfirst into the blue SUV.
***
I went over the divider with a loud bang that would have woken the dead. Time seemed to slow down as I looked through the front windshield, trying to take a snapshot of what I saw in my mind. In the driver’s seat, a tall, black man sat with an automatic rifle in his hands.
A black woman with wide, insane eyes sat in the backseat, peering around the edge of it, her mouth an O of surprise, her fingers tightly gripping another rifle. In the passenger’s seat, I saw a little blonde boy with a face like a statue. He didn’t seem scared or surprised in the slightest. In fact, I could have sworn he was grinning.
The truck gave a sudden burst of speed, the engine whining. Behind the blue SUV, I saw three more cars speeding towards impact at the same time, each of them only a few feet away. We all hit it at the same time. There was a tortured screaming of metal and an explosion of glass. I felt myself thrown forward. From inside the suspect vehicle, the shooters started shouting something.
Breathing hard, I pushed open the door and fell out into the freezing winter air. At that moment, gunshots erupted all around me. The smell of gunsmoke and gasoline hung thick in the air. Bullets cracked into the pavement with their hypersonic shrieking. I raised my rifle and pointed at where I knew the driver was. Without hesitation, I opened fire, emptying the magazine. The high-caliber rifle bullets ate their way through the SUV’s frame as easily as if it were cardboard.
***
“I’m shot!” I heard a man scream from the back of the group of crashed cars. The cacophony of gunshots made the world sound like it was exploding all around us. I saw Sergeant Motes run around the vehicles, using them as cover. He was crouched, his dark eyes frantic and searching.
The woman in the backseat had opened fire with an automatic rifle. She was shooting out of the back window, just spraying bullets everywhere. They burst from the gun with a sound like an industrial sewing machine. Behind the cars, I saw a SWAT officer dragging himself away from the scene as a river of blood followed behind him. He looked like a racoon who had just been hit by a car.
Sergeant Motes immediately started shooting through the SUV’s door at the woman. The first shot hit her in the neck. I saw a sphere of blood explode from her mutilated throat as she dropped her rifle and fell back. Her eyes rolled up in her head as she choked on her own blood.
The man in the driver’s seat had turned his attention to the police behind him, trying to shoot Sergeant Motes. Not having time to reload, I dropped my rifle and pulled out my Glock. Shooting through the driver’s side window, I hit him in the chest and shoulder. He jerked back with every shot, his eyes wild and filled with an animal panic. He looked at the hostage in the passenger’s seat, the little boy with the strange eyes and grinning mouth. The shooter kept his rifle held tightly in his hands. With the last of his dying energy, he raised it towards the hostage. At that moment, I shot through the window, hitting the shooter in the right shoulder. With a spray of blood, the rifle fell from his limp hands.
“Don’t… let him go…” the shooter cried as he vomited a stream of blood. The shooter kept his attention fully fixed on the boy as if he were an object of meditation, not looking back at me. But at that moment, the boy flung the door open and scurried out of the car with his head down.
“You don’t… understand… please, stop…” he kept insisting. Spitting blood, the shooter tried to rise. His right arm hung at his side, limp and side. He tried to grab the rifle with his working left hand and aim it at the boy.
“Drop the gun!” I screamed. His head ratcheted towards me, and I opened fire. Another three shots entered his chest, opening up holes the size of quarters up and down his torso.
“Drop the gun!” I repeated. The shooter started wailing. He made gurgling, pleading sounds, like some sort of torture victim from the Dark Ages. He spit blood constantly, and I saw gaping holes all over his body. He tried to raise his head once more. Sergeant Motes screamed next to me.
“Drop the gun, fucker!” he shrieked. I aimed at the center of the shooter’s forehead. Our eyes met for a brief moment, and then I pulled the trigger.
His head jerked back as a bullet pierced his right eye and blew a chunk out of the back of his head. Pieces of bone and a bloody wad of mutilated brains sprayed the inside of the car. Like a puppet with its strings cut, the shooter collapsed and went still.
***
“Where’s our victim?! Where’s the goddamned victim?!” Sergeant Motes yelled from nearby. I jumped, looking around frantically. Where was the victim? Everything had happened so fast. It had seemed like the entire planet was exploding into chaos for a few seconds. I had glimpsed the little boy running during the firefight, but I didn’t know if he had gotten hit by the relentless spray of bullets or not.
“There!” I cried, pointing a few hundred feet away to the far side of the parking lot. The boy, who looked no older than five or six, was huddled in a ball between two cars, silently rocking back and forth. He looked totally shell-shocked, his face a blank mask of nothingness. Yet his dark, almost black, eyes seemed to be staring in our direction. In fact, it looked like he was staring directly at me.
I sprinted over in the boy’s direction. Customers had taken cover behind their cars all over the parking lot, though, in reality, a car would be unlikely to stop a high-caliber rifle bullet anyway. One woman slunk out, crouched over, her fat face pale and covered in sweat.
“Is it safe?” she asked. I glanced over at her.
“Yes, the gunmen are dead,” I answered, annoyed. I looked back at where the victim was. But the boy was gone.
***
One officer had been severely injured in the shooting. Two pedestrians were injured by bullets, but were in stable condition. Both of the kidnappers were gone, smoked by dozens of gunshot wounds, but the hostage was gone, too. He had simply vanished.
A Lifestar helicopter came and took the SWAT officer to the hospital, where he required immediate life-saving surgery due to a round that pierced his kidney and liver and clipped his spine. It seems unlikely he will ever return to work.
It was a strange situation, and we would learn more about it in the days to come. From what Commander Maplin told me later on, the boy had been kidnapped from some religious group who lived deep in the mountains a couple hours away. They apparently were a strange bunch who worshiped angels and tried to control and summon demons.
We had no motive for why they chose that boy or that religious group. It seemed totally random at the time. But even stranger, the two suspects hadn’t even had a criminal record. Neither of them had so much as a traffic ticket- at least before they had tried kidnapping and murdering a child.
***
For the next week, I kept thinking about that strange, grinning child. I wondered where he had gone. I had so many questions about the case, like everyone else, but it seemed like there were no answers to be had. Perhaps it would simply become an eternal mystery, just like the cases of the Zodiac and Jack the Ripper had.
When we got the call that there was an active hostage situation at the church at the edge of town, I had no idea that I would see that boy again. I would have many of my questions answered, whether I wanted it or not.
***
I saw the church from a distance, surrounded by a grove of dead evergreens whose bare branches reached upwards towards the sky, as if in prayer to a dead god. Sergeant Motes and five other team members sat next to me in full SWAT gear. The bullet-proof van rolled forward with its powerful engine whining like a hornet. Night had come early, as it always did on these cold winter days.
“This is… strange,” one of the team members, a muscular Asian guy with a shaved head named Dan said. He was sitting to my left and Sergeant Motes to my right.
“It’s fucking weird,” Sergeant Motes said, his dark eyes scanning the church. We slowly pulled into the far edge of the parking lot, behind a thick stone cemetery wall that would hopefully prevent bullets from passing through. But we hadn’t gotten a call about any shootings here.
We had been told by Commander Maplin that someone had made a call from a church built in the 1800s. A young woman had told the 911 operator, in a panicked tone, that they were all being held hostage inside the church, that they were holed up in the rectory and had barricaded the door. She started rambling about how the kidnappers had faces like birds. I assumed she was talking about the masks they were wearing.
She had said they were trying to break down the doors and would certainly kill them. Then the call had gotten cut off suddenly.
“We’re going in hot,” Sergeant Motes said. Everyone looked excited, their eyes gleaming. Dan had a shotgun in his hands for breaching the doors, if necessary. He would go first. With excitement and no small sense of panic, we ran out of the armored truck. The thick wall dividing the cemetery and the church was solid stone, and a sniper would be unable to see through it. The wall led to a gate that opened only fifteen feet or so from the front door. That was the part I was worried about, running across that no man’s land. And, of course, the breaching.
We sprinted across the no man’s land, glancing constantly around for signs of movement. In the stained glass windows of the church, pale shapes flittered, but I couldn’t make them out through the distortion and the darkness. Within the church, it looked as if all the lights were off. Only the bloody flickering of candlelight shone through the windows.
Dan fired a breaching round at the locked church door with a boom like thunder. He leaned back and kicked it open. It crashed against the wall and we all ran in together with our rifles raised, ready to begin shooting.
But the nave was empty. I glanced around, seeing hundreds of lit candles flickering all along the walls. The church was a wasteland of destruction. Someone had filled the holy water font with blood instead of water. Jesus hung on his crucifix in front of the church, but the psychos holding this place hostage had nailed another body on top of his- an old woman, by the looks of her. She had been stripped naked. In deep, slicing letters, someone had written across her skin, “VICTIM OF THE DISEASE”. Her dead eyes still stared straight ahead, sightless and terrified. Her blue lips hung open in a silent scream.
But even stranger, she had great, purple welts all over her body. They reminded me of pictures I had seen of victims of the Black Death, the buboes of pus and dead tissue that formed and often burst in the dying.
Trails of blood swerved their way down the nave and towards the rectory. From the back, we heard muffled screams of terror. Without speaking a word, Sergeant Motes motioned us forward. Dan held his breaching shotgun at the ready as we got to the locked rectory door.
***
“Oh God, please, no!” someone shrieked on the other side of the door. Dan blew apart the lock and smashed into it with his shoulder. On the other side, we found a scene from a nightmare.
There were what looked like three men in black robes facing a pile of naked bodies. The bodies all had those same purplish-black buboes covering their pale flesh. In the middle of them, I saw the boy, the victim who had disappeared from the hostage rescue a week ago. But he looked different now. His eyes were black, and his face had started to drip and change. His nose had stretched out and become almost bird-like, and his flesh had started to harden into something pale and dead.
The other men turned. To my horror, I saw they had the final version of the transformed faces. Their faces had morphed into something bird-like and skeletal, as if their flesh had become living plague doctor masks. A smell like mummified bodies and septic shock radiated off of them.
“You are a victim of the spreading sickness,” one hissed through its pale beak as its black robes fluttered around its body. “I am the cure.” Their eyes, too, were black. Tiny, sharp fangs lined their mouths, like the teeth of some prehistoric dinosaur.
In horror, we only stood there for a long moment, until another scream shattered its way through the room. In the pile of corpses, I saw a little girl. She was covered in blood, trying to crawl out of the bottom. All across her neck and arms, the black buboes rose like flowering tumors.
“Help me!” she cried. “Get me out of here! They killed Mommy and Daddy!” We all opened fire at once at that point. The strange men in their black robes moved like shadows, however, strafing at superhuman speeds towards us. I saw a few bullets pierce their torsos, their arms and legs, but no blood came out. It was like their insides were made of dust.
In a blur, they oozed forward. At one moment, they were twenty feet away, then they were right there. Bony, skeletal hands raised all around me. I saw Dan trying to backpedal away from one who had him by the throat. Dan’s face had turned red with suffocation. He held the breach shotgun to the creature’s chest and pulled the trigger.
The plague doctor’s chest exploded, an exit wound the size of a basketball ripping its way out of his dusty, dead body. He dropped Dan, who immediately sucked in a breath of air. To my horror, though, I saw black buboes rising all over Dan’s neck.
The little boy skittered forward, his bird-like mouth giving a wail like a hungry infant. As the blood of my comrades soaked the floor all around me and the screams of the dying rang out like church bells, I turned and ran.
I glanced back, seeing the little boy only feet behind me. Sergeant Motes was fighting one of the plague doctors. I saw others laying on the ground, their heads twisted around 180 degrees or their necks snapped. They all showed signs of the spreading black buboes.
I turned and shot at the little boy, hitting him in the leg. His wailing increased to an ear-splitting cacophony as he went sprawling, his kneecap exploding in a shower of blood and bones. He kept trying to drag himself forward towards me, gnashing his strange mouth and sharp little teeth. I sprinted through the nave and past the font of blood. Without looking back, I got to the armored van and told the driver to get us the fuck out of there.
I ended up being the only survivor, and when I told my story, people looked at me as if I were totally insane. All of the body cameras had apparently stopped working when we entered the rectory, simply fizzing out in a wave of static and white noise.
***
By the time reinforcements arrived, the plague doctors and the boy were gone. They found only a church filled with horrors. Men in hazmat suits had to go in and clean up the bodies, which were all apparently contaminated by an especially virulent form of plague.
When investigators went to the compound in the woods where the religious group supposedly was, they found the place abandoned. It looked like they had all just left in the middle of the night, leaving everything behind. At first, it seemed we would never find any answers to our questions.
But as police searched through the homes of the shooters who had taken the boy hostage, they found a diary. It seemed to be written by a psychotic person, someone who believed that a cult in the woods was impregnating women with demons. They claimed they were members of a secret group that exterminated these demons wherever they found them.
In hindsight, after what I went through, perhaps it wasn’t so psychotic after all.

“We have a hostage in a moving vehicle,” the dispatcher told the team. Our commander, James Maplin, did not look happy. “The suspects allegedly have access to fully-automatic rifles.”
“Fuck,” James said. His gaze scanned over me and the others, his killer’s eyes looking as hard as stone. “Are they parked?”
“The current suspect location is in a Walmart parking lot,” the soft female voice responded. “They are not moving at this time. There are many civilians in the area, however.”
“This just keeps getting worse,” I muttered. My partner, Sergeant Motes, narrowed his dark eyes and pursed his thin lips. He ran a hand over his shaved head, his tattooed muscles bulging.
“We could surround it with unmarked police cars,” Sergeant Motes said. “Disable the vehicle so that it can’t move in any direction at all. One unmarked car smashes into the front while three smash into the back at the same moment. Then we can all run out and smoke the fuckers- hopefully before they kill the hostage.”
“Simple enough,” I said sarcastically, smiling. The rest of the team kept their faces stony and blank. Commander Maplin looked displeased with the idea.
“That would mean our officers would be exposed to their own cross-fire,” he said icily. “And the civilians in the area would also be susceptible to getting shot.” I shrugged.
“He’s right, though,” I said. “It’s the best idea we have. We can’t use snipers, because if one misses, we would then be at a massive disadvantage. The shooter would have plenty of time to speed out of there and murder the hostage as he went.
“Disabling the vehicle has worked before. We could have four police officers hit it at the exact same moment. We just have to be quick about it. Once the unmarked cars smash into the suspect vehicle, we only have a matter of seconds to take out the gunman.”
“Gunmen,” Commander Maplin said. “There’s two of them.”
“This just gets better and better,” I muttered.
***
The plan was simple: we would all drive in unmarked, inconspicuous cars. No one was going in with cherries blaring on this one. I would be driving a black pick-up truck, and my job was to smash directly into the front of the car.
Sergeant Motes would attack the rear driver’s side. Two other team members would hit the center of the back and the rear passenger’s side. This would make it impossible for the driver to escape, but it would also give him a one to two-second advantage while we all bailed out of our own vehicles and opened fire. I didn’t like it, but there was no other way to get the hostage out that we could see.
Right before we were to execute the mission, I found myself driving slowly down the street in the truck. I saw the target vehicle, a dark blue SUV with tinted windows. The front of the suspect’s vehicle faced a sidewalk and a couple-inch high dividers which I would have to tear through to get to them. I swore. The tinted windows would make this even more impossible. It would be an absolute miracle if the hostage escaped without getting shot.
I had my M4A1 rifle slung around my shoulder and my Glock 20 around my waist. I felt waves of adrenaline pounding through my body. It almost felt unreal, like some video game. All the colors of the world seemed overly saturated and bright. I saw my hands trembling as I gripped the wheel.
“Now!” Commander Maplin cried into the radio. “Disable the vehicle!” I pressed the accelerator down and, with my seatbelt tightly hugging my chest, prepared to smash headfirst into the blue SUV.
***
I went over the divider with a loud bang that would have woken the dead. Time seemed to slow down as I looked through the front windshield, trying to take a snapshot of what I saw in my mind. In the driver’s seat, a tall, black man sat with an automatic rifle in his hands.
A black woman with wide, insane eyes sat in the backseat, peering around the edge of it, her mouth an O of surprise, her fingers tightly gripping another rifle. In the passenger’s seat, I saw a little blonde boy with a face like a statue. He didn’t seem scared or surprised in the slightest. In fact, I could have sworn he was grinning.
The truck gave a sudden burst of speed, the engine whining. Behind the blue SUV, I saw three more cars speeding towards impact at the same time, each of them only a few feet away. We all hit it at the same time. There was a tortured screaming of metal and an explosion of glass. I felt myself thrown forward. From inside the suspect vehicle, the shooters started shouting something.
Breathing hard, I pushed open the door and fell out into the freezing winter air. At that moment, gunshots erupted all around me. The smell of gunsmoke and gasoline hung thick in the air. Bullets cracked into the pavement with their hypersonic shrieking. I raised my rifle and pointed at where I knew the driver was. Without hesitation, I opened fire, emptying the magazine. The high-caliber rifle bullets ate their way through the SUV’s frame as easily as if it were cardboard.
***
“I’m shot!” I heard a man scream from the back of the group of crashed cars. The cacophony of gunshots made the world sound like it was exploding all around us. I saw Sergeant Motes run around the vehicles, using them as cover. He was crouched, his dark eyes frantic and searching.
The woman in the backseat had opened fire with an automatic rifle. She was shooting out of the back window, just spraying bullets everywhere. They burst from the gun with a sound like an industrial sewing machine. Behind the cars, I saw a SWAT officer dragging himself away from the scene as a river of blood followed behind him. He looked like a racoon who had just been hit by a car.
Sergeant Motes immediately started shooting through the SUV’s door at the woman. The first shot hit her in the neck. I saw a sphere of blood explode from her mutilated throat as she dropped her rifle and fell back. Her eyes rolled up in her head as she choked on her own blood.
The man in the driver’s seat had turned his attention to the police behind him, trying to shoot Sergeant Motes. Not having time to reload, I dropped my rifle and pulled out my Glock. Shooting through the driver’s side window, I hit him in the chest and shoulder. He jerked back with every shot, his eyes wild and filled with an animal panic. He looked at the hostage in the passenger’s seat, the little boy with the strange eyes and grinning mouth. The shooter kept his rifle held tightly in his hands. With the last of his dying energy, he raised it towards the hostage. At that moment, I shot through the window, hitting the shooter in the right shoulder. With a spray of blood, the rifle fell from his limp hands.
“Don’t… let him go…” the shooter cried as he vomited a stream of blood. The shooter kept his attention fully fixed on the boy as if he were an object of meditation, not looking back at me. But at that moment, the boy flung the door open and scurried out of the car with his head down.
“You don’t… understand… please, stop…” he kept insisting. Spitting blood, the shooter tried to rise. His right arm hung at his side, limp and side. He tried to grab the rifle with his working left hand and aim it at the boy.
“Drop the gun!” I screamed. His head ratcheted towards me, and I opened fire. Another three shots entered his chest, opening up holes the size of quarters up and down his torso.
“Drop the gun!” I repeated. The shooter started wailing. He made gurgling, pleading sounds, like some sort of torture victim from the Dark Ages. He spit blood constantly, and I saw gaping holes all over his body. He tried to raise his head once more. Sergeant Motes screamed next to me.
“Drop the gun, fucker!” he shrieked. I aimed at the center of the shooter’s forehead. Our eyes met for a brief moment, and then I pulled the trigger.
His head jerked back as a bullet pierced his right eye and blew a chunk out of the back of his head. Pieces of bone and a bloody wad of mutilated brains sprayed the inside of the car. Like a puppet with its strings cut, the shooter collapsed and went still.
***
“Where’s our victim?! Where’s the goddamned victim?!” Sergeant Motes yelled from nearby. I jumped, looking around frantically. Where was the victim? Everything had happened so fast. It had seemed like the entire planet was exploding into chaos for a few seconds. I had glimpsed the little boy running during the firefight, but I didn’t know if he had gotten hit by the relentless spray of bullets or not.
“There!” I cried, pointing a few hundred feet away to the far side of the parking lot. The boy, who looked no older than five or six, was huddled in a ball between two cars, silently rocking back and forth. He looked totally shell-shocked, his face a blank mask of nothingness. Yet his dark, almost black, eyes seemed to be staring in our direction. In fact, it looked like he was staring directly at me.
I sprinted over in the boy’s direction. Customers had taken cover behind their cars all over the parking lot, though, in reality, a car would be unlikely to stop a high-caliber rifle bullet anyway. One woman slunk out, crouched over, her fat face pale and covered in sweat.
“Is it safe?” she asked. I glanced over at her.
“Yes, the gunmen are dead,” I answered, annoyed. I looked back at where the victim was. But the boy was gone.
***
One officer had been severely injured in the shooting. Two pedestrians were injured by bullets, but were in stable condition. Both of the kidnappers were gone, smoked by dozens of gunshot wounds, but the hostage was gone, too. He had simply vanished.
A Lifestar helicopter came and took the SWAT officer to the hospital, where he required immediate life-saving surgery due to a round that pierced his kidney and liver and clipped his spine. It seems unlikely he will ever return to work.
It was a strange situation, and we would learn more about it in the days to come. From what Commander Maplin told me later on, the boy had been kidnapped from some religious group who lived deep in the mountains a couple hours away. They apparently were a strange bunch who worshiped angels and tried to control and summon demons.
We had no motive for why they chose that boy or that religious group. It seemed totally random at the time. But even stranger, the two suspects hadn’t even had a criminal record. Neither of them had so much as a traffic ticket- at least before they had tried kidnapping and murdering a child.
***
For the next week, I kept thinking about that strange, grinning child. I wondered where he had gone. I had so many questions about the case, like everyone else, but it seemed like there were no answers to be had. Perhaps it would simply become an eternal mystery, just like the cases of the Zodiac and Jack the Ripper had.
When we got the call that there was an active hostage situation at the church at the edge of town, I had no idea that I would see that boy again. I would have many of my questions answered, whether I wanted it or not.
***
I saw the church from a distance, surrounded by a grove of dead evergreens whose bare branches reached upwards towards the sky, as if in prayer to a dead god. Sergeant Motes and five other team members sat next to me in full SWAT gear. The bullet-proof van rolled forward with its powerful engine whining like a hornet. Night had come early, as it always did on these cold winter days.
“This is… strange,” one of the team members, a muscular Asian guy with a shaved head named Dan said. He was sitting to my left and Sergeant Motes to my right.
“It’s fucking weird,” Sergeant Motes said, his dark eyes scanning the church. We slowly pulled into the far edge of the parking lot, behind a thick stone cemetery wall that would hopefully prevent bullets from passing through. But we hadn’t gotten a call about any shootings here.
We had been told by Commander Maplin that someone had made a call from a church built in the 1800s. A young woman had told the 911 operator, in a panicked tone, that they were all being held hostage inside the church, that they were holed up in the rectory and had barricaded the door. She started rambling about how the kidnappers had faces like birds. I assumed she was talking about the masks they were wearing.
She had said they were trying to break down the doors and would certainly kill them. Then the call had gotten cut off suddenly.
“We’re going in hot,” Sergeant Motes said. Everyone looked excited, their eyes gleaming. Dan had a shotgun in his hands for breaching the doors, if necessary. He would go first. With excitement and no small sense of panic, we ran out of the armored truck. The thick wall dividing the cemetery and the church was solid stone, and a sniper would be unable to see through it. The wall led to a gate that opened only fifteen feet or so from the front door. That was the part I was worried about, running across that no man’s land. And, of course, the breaching.
We sprinted across the no man’s land, glancing constantly around for signs of movement. In the stained glass windows of the church, pale shapes flittered, but I couldn’t make them out through the distortion and the darkness. Within the church, it looked as if all the lights were off. Only the bloody flickering of candlelight shone through the windows.
Dan fired a breaching round at the locked church door with a boom like thunder. He leaned back and kicked it open. It crashed against the wall and we all ran in together with our rifles raised, ready to begin shooting.
But the nave was empty. I glanced around, seeing hundreds of lit candles flickering all along the walls. The church was a wasteland of destruction. Someone had filled the holy water font with blood instead of water. Jesus hung on his crucifix in front of the church, but the psychos holding this place hostage had nailed another body on top of his- an old woman, by the looks of her. She had been stripped naked. In deep, slicing letters, someone had written across her skin, “VICTIM OF THE DISEASE”. Her dead eyes still stared straight ahead, sightless and terrified. Her blue lips hung open in a silent scream.
But even stranger, she had great, purple welts all over her body. They reminded me of pictures I had seen of victims of the Black Death, the buboes of pus and dead tissue that formed and often burst in the dying.
Trails of blood swerved their way down the nave and towards the rectory. From the back, we heard muffled screams of terror. Without speaking a word, Sergeant Motes motioned us forward. Dan held his breaching shotgun at the ready as we got to the locked rectory door.
***
“Oh God, please, no!” someone shrieked on the other side of the door. Dan blew apart the lock and smashed into it with his shoulder. On the other side, we found a scene from a nightmare.
There were what looked like three men in black robes facing a pile of naked bodies. The bodies all had those same purplish-black buboes covering their pale flesh. In the middle of them, I saw the boy, the victim who had disappeared from the hostage rescue a week ago. But he looked different now. His eyes were black, and his face had started to drip and change. His nose had stretched out and become almost bird-like, and his flesh had started to harden into something pale and dead.
The other men turned. To my horror, I saw they had the final version of the transformed faces. Their faces had morphed into something bird-like and skeletal, as if their flesh had become living plague doctor masks. A smell like mummified bodies and septic shock radiated off of them.
“You are a victim of the spreading sickness,” one hissed through its pale beak as its black robes fluttered around its body. “I am the cure.” Their eyes, too, were black. Tiny, sharp fangs lined their mouths, like the teeth of some prehistoric dinosaur.
In horror, we only stood there for a long moment, until another scream shattered its way through the room. In the pile of corpses, I saw a little girl. She was covered in blood, trying to crawl out of the bottom. All across her neck and arms, the black buboes rose like flowering tumors.
“Help me!” she cried. “Get me out of here! They killed Mommy and Daddy!” We all opened fire at once at that point. The strange men in their black robes moved like shadows, however, strafing at superhuman speeds towards us. I saw a few bullets pierce their torsos, their arms and legs, but no blood came out. It was like their insides were made of dust.
In a blur, they oozed forward. At one moment, they were twenty feet away, then they were right there. Bony, skeletal hands raised all around me. I saw Dan trying to backpedal away from one who had him by the throat. Dan’s face had turned red with suffocation. He held the breach shotgun to the creature’s chest and pulled the trigger.
The plague doctor’s chest exploded, an exit wound the size of a basketball ripping its way out of his dusty, dead body. He dropped Dan, who immediately sucked in a breath of air. To my horror, though, I saw black buboes rising all over Dan’s neck.
The little boy skittered forward, his bird-like mouth giving a wail like a hungry infant. As the blood of my comrades soaked the floor all around me and the screams of the dying rang out like church bells, I turned and ran.
I glanced back, seeing the little boy only feet behind me. Sergeant Motes was fighting one of the plague doctors. I saw others laying on the ground, their heads twisted around 180 degrees or their necks snapped. They all showed signs of the spreading black buboes.
I turned and shot at the little boy, hitting him in the leg. His wailing increased to an ear-splitting cacophony as he went sprawling, his kneecap exploding in a shower of blood and bones. He kept trying to drag himself forward towards me, gnashing his strange mouth and sharp little teeth. I sprinted through the nave and past the font of blood. Without looking back, I got to the armored van and told the driver to get us the fuck out of there.
I ended up being the only survivor, and when I told my story, people looked at me as if I were totally insane. All of the body cameras had apparently stopped working when we entered the rectory, simply fizzing out in a wave of static and white noise.
***
By the time reinforcements arrived, the plague doctors and the boy were gone. They found only a church filled with horrors. Men in hazmat suits had to go in and clean up the bodies, which were all apparently contaminated by an especially virulent form of plague.
When investigators went to the compound in the woods where the religious group supposedly was, they found the place abandoned. It looked like they had all just left in the middle of the night, leaving everything behind. At first, it seemed we would never find any answers to our questions.
But as police searched through the homes of the shooters who had taken the boy hostage, they found a diary. It seemed to be written by a psychotic person, someone who believed that a cult in the woods was impregnating women with demons. They claimed they were members of a secret group that exterminated these demons wherever they found them.
In hindsight, after what I went through, perhaps it wasn’t so psychotic after all.

“We have a hostage in a moving vehicle,” the dispatcher told the team. Our commander, James Maplin, did not look happy. “The suspects allegedly have access to fully-automatic rifles.”
“Fuck,” James said. His gaze scanned over me and the others, his killer’s eyes looking as hard as stone. “Are they parked?”
“The current suspect location is in a Walmart parking lot,” the soft female voice responded. “They are not moving at this time. There are many civilians in the area, however.”
“This just keeps getting worse,” I muttered. My partner, Sergeant Motes, narrowed his dark eyes and pursed his thin lips. He ran a hand over his shaved head, his tattooed muscles bulging.
“We could surround it with unmarked police cars,” Sergeant Motes said. “Disable the vehicle so that it can’t move in any direction at all. One unmarked car smashes into the front while three smash into the back at the same moment. Then we can all run out and smoke the fuckers- hopefully before they kill the hostage.”
“Simple enough,” I said sarcastically, smiling. The rest of the team kept their faces stony and blank. Commander Maplin looked displeased with the idea.
“That would mean our officers would be exposed to their own cross-fire,” he said icily. “And the civilians in the area would also be susceptible to getting shot.” I shrugged.
“He’s right, though,” I said. “It’s the best idea we have. We can’t use snipers, because if one misses, we would then be at a massive disadvantage. The shooter would have plenty of time to speed out of there and murder the hostage as he went.
“Disabling the vehicle has worked before. We could have four police officers hit it at the exact same moment. We just have to be quick about it. Once the unmarked cars smash into the suspect vehicle, we only have a matter of seconds to take out the gunman.”
“Gunmen,” Commander Maplin said. “There’s two of them.”
“This just gets better and better,” I muttered.
***
The plan was simple: we would all drive in unmarked, inconspicuous cars. No one was going in with cherries blaring on this one. I would be driving a black pick-up truck, and my job was to smash directly into the front of the car.
Sergeant Motes would attack the rear driver’s side. Two other team members would hit the center of the back and the rear passenger’s side. This would make it impossible for the driver to escape, but it would also give him a one to two-second advantage while we all bailed out of our own vehicles and opened fire. I didn’t like it, but there was no other way to get the hostage out that we could see.
Right before we were to execute the mission, I found myself driving slowly down the street in the truck. I saw the target vehicle, a dark blue SUV with tinted windows. The front of the suspect’s vehicle faced a sidewalk and a couple-inch high dividers which I would have to tear through to get to them. I swore. The tinted windows would make this even more impossible. It would be an absolute miracle if the hostage escaped without getting shot.
I had my M4A1 rifle slung around my shoulder and my Glock 20 around my waist. I felt waves of adrenaline pounding through my body. It almost felt unreal, like some video game. All the colors of the world seemed overly saturated and bright. I saw my hands trembling as I gripped the wheel.
“Now!” Commander Maplin cried into the radio. “Disable the vehicle!” I pressed the accelerator down and, with my seatbelt tightly hugging my chest, prepared to smash headfirst into the blue SUV.
***
I went over the divider with a loud bang that would have woken the dead. Time seemed to slow down as I looked through the front windshield, trying to take a snapshot of what I saw in my mind. In the driver’s seat, a tall, black man sat with an automatic rifle in his hands.
A black woman with wide, insane eyes sat in the backseat, peering around the edge of it, her mouth an O of surprise, her fingers tightly gripping another rifle. In the passenger’s seat, I saw a little blonde boy with a face like a statue. He didn’t seem scared or surprised in the slightest. In fact, I could have sworn he was grinning.
The truck gave a sudden burst of speed, the engine whining. Behind the blue SUV, I saw three more cars speeding towards impact at the same time, each of them only a few feet away. We all hit it at the same time. There was a tortured screaming of metal and an explosion of glass. I felt myself thrown forward. From inside the suspect vehicle, the shooters started shouting something.
Breathing hard, I pushed open the door and fell out into the freezing winter air. At that moment, gunshots erupted all around me. The smell of gunsmoke and gasoline hung thick in the air. Bullets cracked into the pavement with their hypersonic shrieking. I raised my rifle and pointed at where I knew the driver was. Without hesitation, I opened fire, emptying the magazine. The high-caliber rifle bullets ate their way through the SUV’s frame as easily as if it were cardboard.
***
“I’m shot!” I heard a man scream from the back of the group of crashed cars. The cacophony of gunshots made the world sound like it was exploding all around us. I saw Sergeant Motes run around the vehicles, using them as cover. He was crouched, his dark eyes frantic and searching.
The woman in the backseat had opened fire with an automatic rifle. She was shooting out of the back window, just spraying bullets everywhere. They burst from the gun with a sound like an industrial sewing machine. Behind the cars, I saw a SWAT officer dragging himself away from the scene as a river of blood followed behind him. He looked like a racoon who had just been hit by a car.
Sergeant Motes immediately started shooting through the SUV’s door at the woman. The first shot hit her in the neck. I saw a sphere of blood explode from her mutilated throat as she dropped her rifle and fell back. Her eyes rolled up in her head as she choked on her own blood.
The man in the driver’s seat had turned his attention to the police behind him, trying to shoot Sergeant Motes. Not having time to reload, I dropped my rifle and pulled out my Glock. Shooting through the driver’s side window, I hit him in the chest and shoulder. He jerked back with every shot, his eyes wild and filled with an animal panic. He looked at the hostage in the passenger’s seat, the little boy with the strange eyes and grinning mouth. The shooter kept his rifle held tightly in his hands. With the last of his dying energy, he raised it towards the hostage. At that moment, I shot through the window, hitting the shooter in the right shoulder. With a spray of blood, the rifle fell from his limp hands.
“Don’t… let him go…” the shooter cried as he vomited a stream of blood. The shooter kept his attention fully fixed on the boy as if he were an object of meditation, not looking back at me. But at that moment, the boy flung the door open and scurried out of the car with his head down.
“You don’t… understand… please, stop…” he kept insisting. Spitting blood, the shooter tried to rise. His right arm hung at his side, limp and side. He tried to grab the rifle with his working left hand and aim it at the boy.
“Drop the gun!” I screamed. His head ratcheted towards me, and I opened fire. Another three shots entered his chest, opening up holes the size of quarters up and down his torso.
“Drop the gun!” I repeated. The shooter started wailing. He made gurgling, pleading sounds, like some sort of torture victim from the Dark Ages. He spit blood constantly, and I saw gaping holes all over his body. He tried to raise his head once more. Sergeant Motes screamed next to me.
“Drop the gun, fucker!” he shrieked. I aimed at the center of the shooter’s forehead. Our eyes met for a brief moment, and then I pulled the trigger.
His head jerked back as a bullet pierced his right eye and blew a chunk out of the back of his head. Pieces of bone and a bloody wad of mutilated brains sprayed the inside of the car. Like a puppet with its strings cut, the shooter collapsed and went still.
***
“Where’s our victim?! Where’s the goddamned victim?!” Sergeant Motes yelled from nearby. I jumped, looking around frantically. Where was the victim? Everything had happened so fast. It had seemed like the entire planet was exploding into chaos for a few seconds. I had glimpsed the little boy running during the firefight, but I didn’t know if he had gotten hit by the relentless spray of bullets or not.
“There!” I cried, pointing a few hundred feet away to the far side of the parking lot. The boy, who looked no older than five or six, was huddled in a ball between two cars, silently rocking back and forth. He looked totally shell-shocked, his face a blank mask of nothingness. Yet his dark, almost black, eyes seemed to be staring in our direction. In fact, it looked like he was staring directly at me.
I sprinted over in the boy’s direction. Customers had taken cover behind their cars all over the parking lot, though, in reality, a car would be unlikely to stop a high-caliber rifle bullet anyway. One woman slunk out, crouched over, her fat face pale and covered in sweat.
“Is it safe?” she asked. I glanced over at her.
“Yes, the gunmen are dead,” I answered, annoyed. I looked back at where the victim was. But the boy was gone.
***
One officer had been severely injured in the shooting. Two pedestrians were injured by bullets, but were in stable condition. Both of the kidnappers were gone, smoked by dozens of gunshot wounds, but the hostage was gone, too. He had simply vanished.
A Lifestar helicopter came and took the SWAT officer to the hospital, where he required immediate life-saving surgery due to a round that pierced his kidney and liver and clipped his spine. It seems unlikely he will ever return to work.
It was a strange situation, and we would learn more about it in the days to come. From what Commander Maplin told me later on, the boy had been kidnapped from some religious group who lived deep in the mountains a couple hours away. They apparently were a strange bunch who worshiped angels and tried to control and summon demons.
We had no motive for why they chose that boy or that religious group. It seemed totally random at the time. But even stranger, the two suspects hadn’t even had a criminal record. Neither of them had so much as a traffic ticket- at least before they had tried kidnapping and murdering a child.
***
For the next week, I kept thinking about that strange, grinning child. I wondered where he had gone. I had so many questions about the case, like everyone else, but it seemed like there were no answers to be had. Perhaps it would simply become an eternal mystery, just like the cases of the Zodiac and Jack the Ripper had.
When we got the call that there was an active hostage situation at the church at the edge of town, I had no idea that I would see that boy again. I would have many of my questions answered, whether I wanted it or not.
***
I saw the church from a distance, surrounded by a grove of dead evergreens whose bare branches reached upwards towards the sky, as if in prayer to a dead god. Sergeant Motes and five other team members sat next to me in full SWAT gear. The bullet-proof van rolled forward with its powerful engine whining like a hornet. Night had come early, as it always did on these cold winter days.
“This is… strange,” one of the team members, a muscular Asian guy with a shaved head named Dan said. He was sitting to my left and Sergeant Motes to my right.
“It’s fucking weird,” Sergeant Motes said, his dark eyes scanning the church. We slowly pulled into the far edge of the parking lot, behind a thick stone cemetery wall that would hopefully prevent bullets from passing through. But we hadn’t gotten a call about any shootings here.
We had been told by Commander Maplin that someone had made a call from a church built in the 1800s. A young woman had told the 911 operator, in a panicked tone, that they were all being held hostage inside the church, that they were holed up in the rectory and had barricaded the door. She started rambling about how the kidnappers had faces like birds. I assumed she was talking about the masks they were wearing.
She had said they were trying to break down the doors and would certainly kill them. Then the call had gotten cut off suddenly.
“We’re going in hot,” Sergeant Motes said. Everyone looked excited, their eyes gleaming. Dan had a shotgun in his hands for breaching the doors, if necessary. He would go first. With excitement and no small sense of panic, we ran out of the armored truck. The thick wall dividing the cemetery and the church was solid stone, and a sniper would be unable to see through it. The wall led to a gate that opened only fifteen feet or so from the front door. That was the part I was worried about, running across that no man’s land. And, of course, the breaching.
We sprinted across the no man’s land, glancing constantly around for signs of movement. In the stained glass windows of the church, pale shapes flittered, but I couldn’t make them out through the distortion and the darkness. Within the church, it looked as if all the lights were off. Only the bloody flickering of candlelight shone through the windows.
Dan fired a breaching round at the locked church door with a boom like thunder. He leaned back and kicked it open. It crashed against the wall and we all ran in together with our rifles raised, ready to begin shooting.
But the nave was empty. I glanced around, seeing hundreds of lit candles flickering all along the walls. The church was a wasteland of destruction. Someone had filled the holy water font with blood instead of water. Jesus hung on his crucifix in front of the church, but the psychos holding this place hostage had nailed another body on top of his- an old woman, by the looks of her. She had been stripped naked. In deep, slicing letters, someone had written across her skin, “VICTIM OF THE DISEASE”. Her dead eyes still stared straight ahead, sightless and terrified. Her blue lips hung open in a silent scream.
But even stranger, she had great, purple welts all over her body. They reminded me of pictures I had seen of victims of the Black Death, the buboes of pus and dead tissue that formed and often burst in the dying.
Trails of blood swerved their way down the nave and towards the rectory. From the back, we heard muffled screams of terror. Without speaking a word, Sergeant Motes motioned us forward. Dan held his breaching shotgun at the ready as we got to the locked rectory door.
***
“Oh God, please, no!” someone shrieked on the other side of the door. Dan blew apart the lock and smashed into it with his shoulder. On the other side, we found a scene from a nightmare.
There were what looked like three men in black robes facing a pile of naked bodies. The bodies all had those same purplish-black buboes covering their pale flesh. In the middle of them, I saw the boy, the victim who had disappeared from the hostage rescue a week ago. But he looked different now. His eyes were black, and his face had started to drip and change. His nose had stretched out and become almost bird-like, and his flesh had started to harden into something pale and dead.
The other men turned. To my horror, I saw they had the final version of the transformed faces. Their faces had morphed into something bird-like and skeletal, as if their flesh had become living plague doctor masks. A smell like mummified bodies and septic shock radiated off of them.
“You are a victim of the spreading sickness,” one hissed through its pale beak as its black robes fluttered around its body. “I am the cure.” Their eyes, too, were black. Tiny, sharp fangs lined their mouths, like the teeth of some prehistoric dinosaur.
In horror, we only stood there for a long moment, until another scream shattered its way through the room. In the pile of corpses, I saw a little girl. She was covered in blood, trying to crawl out of the bottom. All across her neck and arms, the black buboes rose like flowering tumors.
“Help me!” she cried. “Get me out of here! They killed Mommy and Daddy!” We all opened fire at once at that point. The strange men in their black robes moved like shadows, however, strafing at superhuman speeds towards us. I saw a few bullets pierce their torsos, their arms and legs, but no blood came out. It was like their insides were made of dust.
In a blur, they oozed forward. At one moment, they were twenty feet away, then they were right there. Bony, skeletal hands raised all around me. I saw Dan trying to backpedal away from one who had him by the throat. Dan’s face had turned red with suffocation. He held the breach shotgun to the creature’s chest and pulled the trigger.
The plague doctor’s chest exploded, an exit wound the size of a basketball ripping its way out of his dusty, dead body. He dropped Dan, who immediately sucked in a breath of air. To my horror, though, I saw black buboes rising all over Dan’s neck.
The little boy skittered forward, his bird-like mouth giving a wail like a hungry infant. As the blood of my comrades soaked the floor all around me and the screams of the dying rang out like church bells, I turned and ran.
I glanced back, seeing the little boy only feet behind me. Sergeant Motes was fighting one of the plague doctors. I saw others laying on the ground, their heads twisted around 180 degrees or their necks snapped. They all showed signs of the spreading black buboes.
I turned and shot at the little boy, hitting him in the leg. His wailing increased to an ear-splitting cacophony as he went sprawling, his kneecap exploding in a shower of blood and bones. He kept trying to drag himself forward towards me, gnashing his strange mouth and sharp little teeth. I sprinted through the nave and past the font of blood. Without looking back, I got to the armored van and told the driver to get us the fuck out of there.
I ended up being the only survivor, and when I told my story, people looked at me as if I were totally insane. All of the body cameras had apparently stopped working when we entered the rectory, simply fizzing out in a wave of static and white noise.
***
By the time reinforcements arrived, the plague doctors and the boy were gone. They found only a church filled with horrors. Men in hazmat suits had to go in and clean up the bodies, which were all apparently contaminated by an especially virulent form of plague.
When investigators went to the compound in the woods where the religious group supposedly was, they found the place abandoned. It looked like they had all just left in the middle of the night, leaving everything behind. At first, it seemed we would never find any answers to our questions.
But as police searched through the homes of the shooters who had taken the boy hostage, they found a diary. It seemed to be written by a psychotic person, someone who believed that a cult in the woods was impregnating women with demons. They claimed they were members of a secret group that exterminated these demons wherever they found them.
In hindsight, after what I went through, perhaps it wasn’t so psychotic after all.

“We have a hostage in a moving vehicle,” the dispatcher told the team. Our commander, James Maplin, did not look happy. “The suspects allegedly have access to fully-automatic rifles.”
“Fuck,” James said. His gaze scanned over me and the others, his killer’s eyes looking as hard as stone. “Are they parked?”
“The current suspect location is in a Walmart parking lot,” the soft female voice responded. “They are not moving at this time. There are many civilians in the area, however.”
“This just keeps getting worse,” I muttered. My partner, Sergeant Motes, narrowed his dark eyes and pursed his thin lips. He ran a hand over his shaved head, his tattooed muscles bulging.
“We could surround it with unmarked police cars,” Sergeant Motes said. “Disable the vehicle so that it can’t move in any direction at all. One unmarked car smashes into the front while three smash into the back at the same moment. Then we can all run out and smoke the fuckers- hopefully before they kill the hostage.”
“Simple enough,” I said sarcastically, smiling. The rest of the team kept their faces stony and blank. Commander Maplin looked displeased with the idea.
“That would mean our officers would be exposed to their own cross-fire,” he said icily. “And the civilians in the area would also be susceptible to getting shot.” I shrugged.
“He’s right, though,” I said. “It’s the best idea we have. We can’t use snipers, because if one misses, we would then be at a massive disadvantage. The shooter would have plenty of time to speed out of there and murder the hostage as he went.
“Disabling the vehicle has worked before. We could have four police officers hit it at the exact same moment. We just have to be quick about it. Once the unmarked cars smash into the suspect vehicle, we only have a matter of seconds to take out the gunman.”
“Gunmen,” Commander Maplin said. “There’s two of them.”
“This just gets better and better,” I muttered.
***
The plan was simple: we would all drive in unmarked, inconspicuous cars. No one was going in with cherries blaring on this one. I would be driving a black pick-up truck, and my job was to smash directly into the front of the car.
Sergeant Motes would attack the rear driver’s side. Two other team members would hit the center of the back and the rear passenger’s side. This would make it impossible for the driver to escape, but it would also give him a one to two-second advantage while we all bailed out of our own vehicles and opened fire. I didn’t like it, but there was no other way to get the hostage out that we could see.
Right before we were to execute the mission, I found myself driving slowly down the street in the truck. I saw the target vehicle, a dark blue SUV with tinted windows. The front of the suspect’s vehicle faced a sidewalk and a couple-inch high dividers which I would have to tear through to get to them. I swore. The tinted windows would make this even more impossible. It would be an absolute miracle if the hostage escaped without getting shot.
I had my M4A1 rifle slung around my shoulder and my Glock 20 around my waist. I felt waves of adrenaline pounding through my body. It almost felt unreal, like some video game. All the colors of the world seemed overly saturated and bright. I saw my hands trembling as I gripped the wheel.
“Now!” Commander Maplin cried into the radio. “Disable the vehicle!” I pressed the accelerator down and, with my seatbelt tightly hugging my chest, prepared to smash headfirst into the blue SUV.
***
I went over the divider with a loud bang that would have woken the dead. Time seemed to slow down as I looked through the front windshield, trying to take a snapshot of what I saw in my mind. In the driver’s seat, a tall, black man sat with an automatic rifle in his hands.
A black woman with wide, insane eyes sat in the backseat, peering around the edge of it, her mouth an O of surprise, her fingers tightly gripping another rifle. In the passenger’s seat, I saw a little blonde boy with a face like a statue. He didn’t seem scared or surprised in the slightest. In fact, I could have sworn he was grinning.
The truck gave a sudden burst of speed, the engine whining. Behind the blue SUV, I saw three more cars speeding towards impact at the same time, each of them only a few feet away. We all hit it at the same time. There was a tortured screaming of metal and an explosion of glass. I felt myself thrown forward. From inside the suspect vehicle, the shooters started shouting something.
Breathing hard, I pushed open the door and fell out into the freezing winter air. At that moment, gunshots erupted all around me. The smell of gunsmoke and gasoline hung thick in the air. Bullets cracked into the pavement with their hypersonic shrieking. I raised my rifle and pointed at where I knew the driver was. Without hesitation, I opened fire, emptying the magazine. The high-caliber rifle bullets ate their way through the SUV’s frame as easily as if it were cardboard.
***
“I’m shot!” I heard a man scream from the back of the group of crashed cars. The cacophony of gunshots made the world sound like it was exploding all around us. I saw Sergeant Motes run around the vehicles, using them as cover. He was crouched, his dark eyes frantic and searching.
The woman in the backseat had opened fire with an automatic rifle. She was shooting out of the back window, just spraying bullets everywhere. They burst from the gun with a sound like an industrial sewing machine. Behind the cars, I saw a SWAT officer dragging himself away from the scene as a river of blood followed behind him. He looked like a racoon who had just been hit by a car.
Sergeant Motes immediately started shooting through the SUV’s door at the woman. The first shot hit her in the neck. I saw a sphere of blood explode from her mutilated throat as she dropped her rifle and fell back. Her eyes rolled up in her head as she choked on her own blood.
The man in the driver’s seat had turned his attention to the police behind him, trying to shoot Sergeant Motes. Not having time to reload, I dropped my rifle and pulled out my Glock. Shooting through the driver’s side window, I hit him in the chest and shoulder. He jerked back with every shot, his eyes wild and filled with an animal panic. He looked at the hostage in the passenger’s seat, the little boy with the strange eyes and grinning mouth. The shooter kept his rifle held tightly in his hands. With the last of his dying energy, he raised it towards the hostage. At that moment, I shot through the window, hitting the shooter in the right shoulder. With a spray of blood, the rifle fell from his limp hands.
“Don’t… let him go…” the shooter cried as he vomited a stream of blood. The shooter kept his attention fully fixed on the boy as if he were an object of meditation, not looking back at me. But at that moment, the boy flung the door open and scurried out of the car with his head down.
“You don’t… understand… please, stop…” he kept insisting. Spitting blood, the shooter tried to rise. His right arm hung at his side, limp and side. He tried to grab the rifle with his working left hand and aim it at the boy.
“Drop the gun!” I screamed. His head ratcheted towards me, and I opened fire. Another three shots entered his chest, opening up holes the size of quarters up and down his torso.
“Drop the gun!” I repeated. The shooter started wailing. He made gurgling, pleading sounds, like some sort of torture victim from the Dark Ages. He spit blood constantly, and I saw gaping holes all over his body. He tried to raise his head once more. Sergeant Motes screamed next to me.
“Drop the gun, fucker!” he shrieked. I aimed at the center of the shooter’s forehead. Our eyes met for a brief moment, and then I pulled the trigger.
His head jerked back as a bullet pierced his right eye and blew a chunk out of the back of his head. Pieces of bone and a bloody wad of mutilated brains sprayed the inside of the car. Like a puppet with its strings cut, the shooter collapsed and went still.
***
“Where’s our victim?! Where’s the goddamned victim?!” Sergeant Motes yelled from nearby. I jumped, looking around frantically. Where was the victim? Everything had happened so fast. It had seemed like the entire planet was exploding into chaos for a few seconds. I had glimpsed the little boy running during the firefight, but I didn’t know if he had gotten hit by the relentless spray of bullets or not.
“There!” I cried, pointing a few hundred feet away to the far side of the parking lot. The boy, who looked no older than five or six, was huddled in a ball between two cars, silently rocking back and forth. He looked totally shell-shocked, his face a blank mask of nothingness. Yet his dark, almost black, eyes seemed to be staring in our direction. In fact, it looked like he was staring directly at me.
I sprinted over in the boy’s direction. Customers had taken cover behind their cars all over the parking lot, though, in reality, a car would be unlikely to stop a high-caliber rifle bullet anyway. One woman slunk out, crouched over, her fat face pale and covered in sweat.
“Is it safe?” she asked. I glanced over at her.
“Yes, the gunmen are dead,” I answered, annoyed. I looked back at where the victim was. But the boy was gone.
***
One officer had been severely injured in the shooting. Two pedestrians were injured by bullets, but were in stable condition. Both of the kidnappers were gone, smoked by dozens of gunshot wounds, but the hostage was gone, too. He had simply vanished.
A Lifestar helicopter came and took the SWAT officer to the hospital, where he required immediate life-saving surgery due to a round that pierced his kidney and liver and clipped his spine. It seems unlikely he will ever return to work.
It was a strange situation, and we would learn more about it in the days to come. From what Commander Maplin told me later on, the boy had been kidnapped from some religious group who lived deep in the mountains a couple hours away. They apparently were a strange bunch who worshiped angels and tried to control and summon demons.
We had no motive for why they chose that boy or that religious group. It seemed totally random at the time. But even stranger, the two suspects hadn’t even had a criminal record. Neither of them had so much as a traffic ticket- at least before they had tried kidnapping and murdering a child.
***
For the next week, I kept thinking about that strange, grinning child. I wondered where he had gone. I had so many questions about the case, like everyone else, but it seemed like there were no answers to be had. Perhaps it would simply become an eternal mystery, just like the cases of the Zodiac and Jack the Ripper had.
When we got the call that there was an active hostage situation at the church at the edge of town, I had no idea that I would see that boy again. I would have many of my questions answered, whether I wanted it or not.
***
I saw the church from a distance, surrounded by a grove of dead evergreens whose bare branches reached upwards towards the sky, as if in prayer to a dead god. Sergeant Motes and five other team members sat next to me in full SWAT gear. The bullet-proof van rolled forward with its powerful engine whining like a hornet. Night had come early, as it always did on these cold winter days.
“This is… strange,” one of the team members, a muscular Asian guy with a shaved head named Dan said. He was sitting to my left and Sergeant Motes to my right.
“It’s fucking weird,” Sergeant Motes said, his dark eyes scanning the church. We slowly pulled into the far edge of the parking lot, behind a thick stone cemetery wall that would hopefully prevent bullets from passing through. But we hadn’t gotten a call about any shootings here.
We had been told by Commander Maplin that someone had made a call from a church built in the 1800s. A young woman had told the 911 operator, in a panicked tone, that they were all being held hostage inside the church, that they were holed up in the rectory and had barricaded the door. She started rambling about how the kidnappers had faces like birds. I assumed she was talking about the masks they were wearing.
She had said they were trying to break down the doors and would certainly kill them. Then the call had gotten cut off suddenly.
“We’re going in hot,” Sergeant Motes said. Everyone looked excited, their eyes gleaming. Dan had a shotgun in his hands for breaching the doors, if necessary. He would go first. With excitement and no small sense of panic, we ran out of the armored truck. The thick wall dividing the cemetery and the church was solid stone, and a sniper would be unable to see through it. The wall led to a gate that opened only fifteen feet or so from the front door. That was the part I was worried about, running across that no man’s land. And, of course, the breaching.
We sprinted across the no man’s land, glancing constantly around for signs of movement. In the stained glass windows of the church, pale shapes flittered, but I couldn’t make them out through the distortion and the darkness. Within the church, it looked as if all the lights were off. Only the bloody flickering of candlelight shone through the windows.
Dan fired a breaching round at the locked church door with a boom like thunder. He leaned back and kicked it open. It crashed against the wall and we all ran in together with our rifles raised, ready to begin shooting.
But the nave was empty. I glanced around, seeing hundreds of lit candles flickering all along the walls. The church was a wasteland of destruction. Someone had filled the holy water font with blood instead of water. Jesus hung on his crucifix in front of the church, but the psychos holding this place hostage had nailed another body on top of his- an old woman, by the looks of her. She had been stripped naked. In deep, slicing letters, someone had written across her skin, “VICTIM OF THE DISEASE”. Her dead eyes still stared straight ahead, sightless and terrified. Her blue lips hung open in a silent scream.
But even stranger, she had great, purple welts all over her body. They reminded me of pictures I had seen of victims of the Black Death, the buboes of pus and dead tissue that formed and often burst in the dying.
Trails of blood swerved their way down the nave and towards the rectory. From the back, we heard muffled screams of terror. Without speaking a word, Sergeant Motes motioned us forward. Dan held his breaching shotgun at the ready as we got to the locked rectory door.
***
“Oh God, please, no!” someone shrieked on the other side of the door. Dan blew apart the lock and smashed into it with his shoulder. On the other side, we found a scene from a nightmare.
There were what looked like three men in black robes facing a pile of naked bodies. The bodies all had those same purplish-black buboes covering their pale flesh. In the middle of them, I saw the boy, the victim who had disappeared from the hostage rescue a week ago. But he looked different now. His eyes were black, and his face had started to drip and change. His nose had stretched out and become almost bird-like, and his flesh had started to harden into something pale and dead.
The other men turned. To my horror, I saw they had the final version of the transformed faces. Their faces had morphed into something bird-like and skeletal, as if their flesh had become living plague doctor masks. A smell like mummified bodies and septic shock radiated off of them.
“You are a victim of the spreading sickness,” one hissed through its pale beak as its black robes fluttered around its body. “I am the cure.” Their eyes, too, were black. Tiny, sharp fangs lined their mouths, like the teeth of some prehistoric dinosaur.
In horror, we only stood there for a long moment, until another scream shattered its way through the room. In the pile of corpses, I saw a little girl. She was covered in blood, trying to crawl out of the bottom. All across her neck and arms, the black buboes rose like flowering tumors.
“Help me!” she cried. “Get me out of here! They killed Mommy and Daddy!” We all opened fire at once at that point. The strange men in their black robes moved like shadows, however, strafing at superhuman speeds towards us. I saw a few bullets pierce their torsos, their arms and legs, but no blood came out. It was like their insides were made of dust.
In a blur, they oozed forward. At one moment, they were twenty feet away, then they were right there. Bony, skeletal hands raised all around me. I saw Dan trying to backpedal away from one who had him by the throat. Dan’s face had turned red with suffocation. He held the breach shotgun to the creature’s chest and pulled the trigger.
The plague doctor’s chest exploded, an exit wound the size of a basketball ripping its way out of his dusty, dead body. He dropped Dan, who immediately sucked in a breath of air. To my horror, though, I saw black buboes rising all over Dan’s neck.
The little boy skittered forward, his bird-like mouth giving a wail like a hungry infant. As the blood of my comrades soaked the floor all around me and the screams of the dying rang out like church bells, I turned and ran.
I glanced back, seeing the little boy only feet behind me. Sergeant Motes was fighting one of the plague doctors. I saw others laying on the ground, their heads twisted around 180 degrees or their necks snapped. They all showed signs of the spreading black buboes.
I turned and shot at the little boy, hitting him in the leg. His wailing increased to an ear-splitting cacophony as he went sprawling, his kneecap exploding in a shower of blood and bones. He kept trying to drag himself forward towards me, gnashing his strange mouth and sharp little teeth. I sprinted through the nave and past the font of blood. Without looking back, I got to the armored van and told the driver to get us the fuck out of there.
I ended up being the only survivor, and when I told my story, people looked at me as if I were totally insane. All of the body cameras had apparently stopped working when we entered the rectory, simply fizzing out in a wave of static and white noise.
***
By the time reinforcements arrived, the plague doctors and the boy were gone. They found only a church filled with horrors. Men in hazmat suits had to go in and clean up the bodies, which were all apparently contaminated by an especially virulent form of plague.
When investigators went to the compound in the woods where the religious group supposedly was, they found the place abandoned. It looked like they had all just left in the middle of the night, leaving everything behind. At first, it seemed we would never find any answers to our questions.
But as police searched through the homes of the shooters who had taken the boy hostage, they found a diary. It seemed to be written by a psychotic person, someone who believed that a cult in the woods was impregnating women with demons. They claimed they were members of a secret group that exterminated these demons wherever they found them.
In hindsight, after what I went through, perhaps it wasn’t so psychotic after all.

“We have a hostage in a moving vehicle,” the dispatcher told the team. Our commander, James Maplin, did not look happy. “The suspects allegedly have access to fully-automatic rifles.”
“Fuck,” James said. His gaze scanned over me and the others, his killer’s eyes looking as hard as stone. “Are they parked?”
“The current suspect location is in a Walmart parking lot,” the soft female voice responded. “They are not moving at this time. There are many civilians in the area, however.”
“This just keeps getting worse,” I muttered. My partner, Sergeant Motes, narrowed his dark eyes and pursed his thin lips. He ran a hand over his shaved head, his tattooed muscles bulging.
“We could surround it with unmarked police cars,” Sergeant Motes said. “Disable the vehicle so that it can’t move in any direction at all. One unmarked car smashes into the front while three smash into the back at the same moment. Then we can all run out and smoke the fuckers- hopefully before they kill the hostage.”
“Simple enough,” I said sarcastically, smiling. The rest of the team kept their faces stony and blank. Commander Maplin looked displeased with the idea.
“That would mean our officers would be exposed to their own cross-fire,” he said icily. “And the civilians in the area would also be susceptible to getting shot.” I shrugged.
“He’s right, though,” I said. “It’s the best idea we have. We can’t use snipers, because if one misses, we would then be at a massive disadvantage. The shooter would have plenty of time to speed out of there and murder the hostage as he went.
“Disabling the vehicle has worked before. We could have four police officers hit it at the exact same moment. We just have to be quick about it. Once the unmarked cars smash into the suspect vehicle, we only have a matter of seconds to take out the gunman.”
“Gunmen,” Commander Maplin said. “There’s two of them.”
“This just gets better and better,” I muttered.
***
The plan was simple: we would all drive in unmarked, inconspicuous cars. No one was going in with cherries blaring on this one. I would be driving a black pick-up truck, and my job was to smash directly into the front of the car.
Sergeant Motes would attack the rear driver’s side. Two other team members would hit the center of the back and the rear passenger’s side. This would make it impossible for the driver to escape, but it would also give him a one to two-second advantage while we all bailed out of our own vehicles and opened fire. I didn’t like it, but there was no other way to get the hostage out that we could see.
Right before we were to execute the mission, I found myself driving slowly down the street in the truck. I saw the target vehicle, a dark blue SUV with tinted windows. The front of the suspect’s vehicle faced a sidewalk and a couple-inch high dividers which I would have to tear through to get to them. I swore. The tinted windows would make this even more impossible. It would be an absolute miracle if the hostage escaped without getting shot.
I had my M4A1 rifle slung around my shoulder and my Glock 20 around my waist. I felt waves of adrenaline pounding through my body. It almost felt unreal, like some video game. All the colors of the world seemed overly saturated and bright. I saw my hands trembling as I gripped the wheel.
“Now!” Commander Maplin cried into the radio. “Disable the vehicle!” I pressed the accelerator down and, with my seatbelt tightly hugging my chest, prepared to smash headfirst into the blue SUV.
***
I went over the divider with a loud bang that would have woken the dead. Time seemed to slow down as I looked through the front windshield, trying to take a snapshot of what I saw in my mind. In the driver’s seat, a tall, black man sat with an automatic rifle in his hands.
A black woman with wide, insane eyes sat in the backseat, peering around the edge of it, her mouth an O of surprise, her fingers tightly gripping another rifle. In the passenger’s seat, I saw a little blonde boy with a face like a statue. He didn’t seem scared or surprised in the slightest. In fact, I could have sworn he was grinning.
The truck gave a sudden burst of speed, the engine whining. Behind the blue SUV, I saw three more cars speeding towards impact at the same time, each of them only a few feet away. We all hit it at the same time. There was a tortured screaming of metal and an explosion of glass. I felt myself thrown forward. From inside the suspect vehicle, the shooters started shouting something.
Breathing hard, I pushed open the door and fell out into the freezing winter air. At that moment, gunshots erupted all around me. The smell of gunsmoke and gasoline hung thick in the air. Bullets cracked into the pavement with their hypersonic shrieking. I raised my rifle and pointed at where I knew the driver was. Without hesitation, I opened fire, emptying the magazine. The high-caliber rifle bullets ate their way through the SUV’s frame as easily as if it were cardboard.
***
“I’m shot!” I heard a man scream from the back of the group of crashed cars. The cacophony of gunshots made the world sound like it was exploding all around us. I saw Sergeant Motes run around the vehicles, using them as cover. He was crouched, his dark eyes frantic and searching.
The woman in the backseat had opened fire with an automatic rifle. She was shooting out of the back window, just spraying bullets everywhere. They burst from the gun with a sound like an industrial sewing machine. Behind the cars, I saw a SWAT officer dragging himself away from the scene as a river of blood followed behind him. He looked like a racoon who had just been hit by a car.
Sergeant Motes immediately started shooting through the SUV’s door at the woman. The first shot hit her in the neck. I saw a sphere of blood explode from her mutilated throat as she dropped her rifle and fell back. Her eyes rolled up in her head as she choked on her own blood.
The man in the driver’s seat had turned his attention to the police behind him, trying to shoot Sergeant Motes. Not having time to reload, I dropped my rifle and pulled out my Glock. Shooting through the driver’s side window, I hit him in the chest and shoulder. He jerked back with every shot, his eyes wild and filled with an animal panic. He looked at the hostage in the passenger’s seat, the little boy with the strange eyes and grinning mouth. The shooter kept his rifle held tightly in his hands. With the last of his dying energy, he raised it towards the hostage. At that moment, I shot through the window, hitting the shooter in the right shoulder. With a spray of blood, the rifle fell from his limp hands.
“Don’t… let him go…” the shooter cried as he vomited a stream of blood. The shooter kept his attention fully fixed on the boy as if he were an object of meditation, not looking back at me. But at that moment, the boy flung the door open and scurried out of the car with his head down.
“You don’t… understand… please, stop…” he kept insisting. Spitting blood, the shooter tried to rise. His right arm hung at his side, limp and side. He tried to grab the rifle with his working left hand and aim it at the boy.
“Drop the gun!” I screamed. His head ratcheted towards me, and I opened fire. Another three shots entered his chest, opening up holes the size of quarters up and down his torso.
“Drop the gun!” I repeated. The shooter started wailing. He made gurgling, pleading sounds, like some sort of torture victim from the Dark Ages. He spit blood constantly, and I saw gaping holes all over his body. He tried to raise his head once more. Sergeant Motes screamed next to me.
“Drop the gun, fucker!” he shrieked. I aimed at the center of the shooter’s forehead. Our eyes met for a brief moment, and then I pulled the trigger.
His head jerked back as a bullet pierced his right eye and blew a chunk out of the back of his head. Pieces of bone and a bloody wad of mutilated brains sprayed the inside of the car. Like a puppet with its strings cut, the shooter collapsed and went still.
***
“Where’s our victim?! Where’s the goddamned victim?!” Sergeant Motes yelled from nearby. I jumped, looking around frantically. Where was the victim? Everything had happened so fast. It had seemed like the entire planet was exploding into chaos for a few seconds. I had glimpsed the little boy running during the firefight, but I didn’t know if he had gotten hit by the relentless spray of bullets or not.
“There!” I cried, pointing a few hundred feet away to the far side of the parking lot. The boy, who looked no older than five or six, was huddled in a ball between two cars, silently rocking back and forth. He looked totally shell-shocked, his face a blank mask of nothingness. Yet his dark, almost black, eyes seemed to be staring in our direction. In fact, it looked like he was staring directly at me.
I sprinted over in the boy’s direction. Customers had taken cover behind their cars all over the parking lot, though, in reality, a car would be unlikely to stop a high-caliber rifle bullet anyway. One woman slunk out, crouched over, her fat face pale and covered in sweat.
“Is it safe?” she asked. I glanced over at her.
“Yes, the gunmen are dead,” I answered, annoyed. I looked back at where the victim was. But the boy was gone.
***
One officer had been severely injured in the shooting. Two pedestrians were injured by bullets, but were in stable condition. Both of the kidnappers were gone, smoked by dozens of gunshot wounds, but the hostage was gone, too. He had simply vanished.
A Lifestar helicopter came and took the SWAT officer to the hospital, where he required immediate life-saving surgery due to a round that pierced his kidney and liver and clipped his spine. It seems unlikely he will ever return to work.
It was a strange situation, and we would learn more about it in the days to come. From what Commander Maplin told me later on, the boy had been kidnapped from some religious group who lived deep in the mountains a couple hours away. They apparently were a strange bunch who worshiped angels and tried to control and summon demons.
We had no motive for why they chose that boy or that religious group. It seemed totally random at the time. But even stranger, the two suspects hadn’t even had a criminal record. Neither of them had so much as a traffic ticket- at least before they had tried kidnapping and murdering a child.
***
For the next week, I kept thinking about that strange, grinning child. I wondered where he had gone. I had so many questions about the case, like everyone else, but it seemed like there were no answers to be had. Perhaps it would simply become an eternal mystery, just like the cases of the Zodiac and Jack the Ripper had.
When we got the call that there was an active hostage situation at the church at the edge of town, I had no idea that I would see that boy again. I would have many of my questions answered, whether I wanted it or not.
***
I saw the church from a distance, surrounded by a grove of dead evergreens whose bare branches reached upwards towards the sky, as if in prayer to a dead god. Sergeant Motes and five other team members sat next to me in full SWAT gear. The bullet-proof van rolled forward with its powerful engine whining like a hornet. Night had come early, as it always did on these cold winter days.
“This is… strange,” one of the team members, a muscular Asian guy with a shaved head named Dan said. He was sitting to my left and Sergeant Motes to my right.
“It’s fucking weird,” Sergeant Motes said, his dark eyes scanning the church. We slowly pulled into the far edge of the parking lot, behind a thick stone cemetery wall that would hopefully prevent bullets from passing through. But we hadn’t gotten a call about any shootings here.
We had been told by Commander Maplin that someone had made a call from a church built in the 1800s. A young woman had told the 911 operator, in a panicked tone, that they were all being held hostage inside the church, that they were holed up in the rectory and had barricaded the door. She started rambling about how the kidnappers had faces like birds. I assumed she was talking about the masks they were wearing.
She had said they were trying to break down the doors and would certainly kill them. Then the call had gotten cut off suddenly.
“We’re going in hot,” Sergeant Motes said. Everyone looked excited, their eyes gleaming. Dan had a shotgun in his hands for breaching the doors, if necessary. He would go first. With excitement and no small sense of panic, we ran out of the armored truck. The thick wall dividing the cemetery and the church was solid stone, and a sniper would be unable to see through it. The wall led to a gate that opened only fifteen feet or so from the front door. That was the part I was worried about, running across that no man’s land. And, of course, the breaching.
We sprinted across the no man’s land, glancing constantly around for signs of movement. In the stained glass windows of the church, pale shapes flittered, but I couldn’t make them out through the distortion and the darkness. Within the church, it looked as if all the lights were off. Only the bloody flickering of candlelight shone through the windows.
Dan fired a breaching round at the locked church door with a boom like thunder. He leaned back and kicked it open. It crashed against the wall and we all ran in together with our rifles raised, ready to begin shooting.
But the nave was empty. I glanced around, seeing hundreds of lit candles flickering all along the walls. The church was a wasteland of destruction. Someone had filled the holy water font with blood instead of water. Jesus hung on his crucifix in front of the church, but the psychos holding this place hostage had nailed another body on top of his- an old woman, by the looks of her. She had been stripped naked. In deep, slicing letters, someone had written across her skin, “VICTIM OF THE DISEASE”. Her dead eyes still stared straight ahead, sightless and terrified. Her blue lips hung open in a silent scream.
But even stranger, she had great, purple welts all over her body. They reminded me of pictures I had seen of victims of the Black Death, the buboes of pus and dead tissue that formed and often burst in the dying.
Trails of blood swerved their way down the nave and towards the rectory. From the back, we heard muffled screams of terror. Without speaking a word, Sergeant Motes motioned us forward. Dan held his breaching shotgun at the ready as we got to the locked rectory door.
***
“Oh God, please, no!” someone shrieked on the other side of the door. Dan blew apart the lock and smashed into it with his shoulder. On the other side, we found a scene from a nightmare.
There were what looked like three men in black robes facing a pile of naked bodies. The bodies all had those same purplish-black buboes covering their pale flesh. In the middle of them, I saw the boy, the victim who had disappeared from the hostage rescue a week ago. But he looked different now. His eyes were black, and his face had started to drip and change. His nose had stretched out and become almost bird-like, and his flesh had started to harden into something pale and dead.
The other men turned. To my horror, I saw they had the final version of the transformed faces. Their faces had morphed into something bird-like and skeletal, as if their flesh had become living plague doctor masks. A smell like mummified bodies and septic shock radiated off of them.
“You are a victim of the spreading sickness,” one hissed through its pale beak as its black robes fluttered around its body. “I am the cure.” Their eyes, too, were black. Tiny, sharp fangs lined their mouths, like the teeth of some prehistoric dinosaur.
In horror, we only stood there for a long moment, until another scream shattered its way through the room. In the pile of corpses, I saw a little girl. She was covered in blood, trying to crawl out of the bottom. All across her neck and arms, the black buboes rose like flowering tumors.
“Help me!” she cried. “Get me out of here! They killed Mommy and Daddy!” We all opened fire at once at that point. The strange men in their black robes moved like shadows, however, strafing at superhuman speeds towards us. I saw a few bullets pierce their torsos, their arms and legs, but no blood came out. It was like their insides were made of dust.
In a blur, they oozed forward. At one moment, they were twenty feet away, then they were right there. Bony, skeletal hands raised all around me. I saw Dan trying to backpedal away from one who had him by the throat. Dan’s face had turned red with suffocation. He held the breach shotgun to the creature’s chest and pulled the trigger.
The plague doctor’s chest exploded, an exit wound the size of a basketball ripping its way out of his dusty, dead body. He dropped Dan, who immediately sucked in a breath of air. To my horror, though, I saw black buboes rising all over Dan’s neck.
The little boy skittered forward, his bird-like mouth giving a wail like a hungry infant. As the blood of my comrades soaked the floor all around me and the screams of the dying rang out like church bells, I turned and ran.
I glanced back, seeing the little boy only feet behind me. Sergeant Motes was fighting one of the plague doctors. I saw others laying on the ground, their heads twisted around 180 degrees or their necks snapped. They all showed signs of the spreading black buboes.
I turned and shot at the little boy, hitting him in the leg. His wailing increased to an ear-splitting cacophony as he went sprawling, his kneecap exploding in a shower of blood and bones. He kept trying to drag himself forward towards me, gnashing his strange mouth and sharp little teeth. I sprinted through the nave and past the font of blood. Without looking back, I got to the armored van and told the driver to get us the fuck out of there.
I ended up being the only survivor, and when I told my story, people looked at me as if I were totally insane. All of the body cameras had apparently stopped working when we entered the rectory, simply fizzing out in a wave of static and white noise.
***
By the time reinforcements arrived, the plague doctors and the boy were gone. They found only a church filled with horrors. Men in hazmat suits had to go in and clean up the bodies, which were all apparently contaminated by an especially virulent form of plague.
When investigators went to the compound in the woods where the religious group supposedly was, they found the place abandoned. It looked like they had all just left in the middle of the night, leaving everything behind. At first, it seemed we would never find any answers to our questions.
But as police searched through the homes of the shooters who had taken the boy hostage, they found a diary. It seemed to be written by a psychotic person, someone who believed that a cult in the woods was impregnating women with demons. They claimed they were members of a secret group that exterminated these demons wherever they found them.
In hindsight, after what I went through, perhaps it wasn’t so psychotic after all.