The streets were silent.
The lights flickered, the shadows danced, and particles of dust floated lonesomely in the stillness.
Every window was covered - not even a thin slice of light pierced the endless darkness.
It was as if the inhabitants of Queens were holding their breath.
Not the best place to be walking at 11:39 PM.
Jonathan Blake, 17, shivered as he walked through the deserted streets. He knew why they were like this.
Everybody did.
They called them the 'Mad Scientist.'
No one knew who they were, or whether they were a man or a woman.
They did, however, know about the murders.
21 of them, all teenagers aged 13-19. Each discovered exactly 3 days after they had gone missing, each showing signs of a struggle.
But the most mysterious part wasn't how they had gone missing without a trace until 3 days after, or even where they were kept or how they were killed.
No.
No, the most puzzling part was the radioactive traces found in their blood. Each one tied to a different animal.
Joan Smith, 19, one of the later victims - she had traces of radioactive tiger blood in her veins.
Olivia Thomsen, 15 - she showed radioactive snake blood.
Anthony McKenzie, 16 - he had radioactive mouse blood (one of the more odd ones among the animals...)
The list went on.
Doctors had scanned the victims multiple times over, had tried to find correlations between age, gender, height, weight, appearance - anything that linked the victims together so they could start figuring out suspects.
The only similarity was they were teenagers and they each had one clean slice across the throat - that was determined to be the cause of death rather than the new animal blood.
Jonathan jumped once again, yanked out of his thoughts, as a shadow seemed to creep up behind him. He calmed himself, hand on his chest and heart beating sporadically underneath his fingertips. Man, he really shouldn't have turned down his friend's offer to drive him home; however close his house may be to the school, walking anywhere was a danger now.
You're alright. You're fine; there's no one here. The boy thought, clenching his phone tightly in his hand.
That should have been the giveaway.
Smoothly and with no warning, the flicker of a shadow Jonathan had thought he'd seen earlier suddenly appeared next to him, snaking its arms around his neck to choke him and stabbing him with a needle.
It injected him with a liquid that seemed to slither through his veins, possessed with a mind of its own. Within seconds, the teen's limbs grew heavy and he dropped into the arms of the shadow who had attacked him. Jonathan's limbs slackened as he fell into unconsciousness, and the phone he had been carrying with such tightness before slipped out of his grip and clattered to the ground.
Then the shadow and its victim disappeared, with only the phone left as evidence that Jonathan Blake had ever existed.