His eyes strained to peer down the worn and tattered dark hall way. It was a filthy, shadow coated passageway capped with an olive glow at end. Cluttered with black oblongs shapes and mulled colored breaks along the ground, everything held transfixed under the murky darkness that filled the corridor. Sapped in a growing inky shadows, the hallway stretched the entire length of the old, crumbling building, which the man stood in; the light of the retreating sun to his back and an engulfing darkness before him. The air around the stocky man hung still, like a resting snow globe once shaken, fat globs of dusty chaff lingered, suspended all around the man. A wafting odor of starchy mold settled just under his nose as he edged further into the dimming corridor. Stained carpets clotted with thick dirt, finally turned a colorless brownish black. The flooring peeled and frayed along its right hand side runner. The crusted indoor/outdoor carpet crinkled and grinded with each step, crunched under the rubber soles of the man's dark leather boats.
Sweat droplets collected like dew, beading down his balmy face. As his skin puckered to breathe the heat and humidity of the Georgian sun drained through the building. It was dusk and the midsummer blaze was exhaling its last few moist huffs. A swampy air turned this wooden hovel into a hot box, depleting dampness swallowed everything in the building, whilst it broiled under the slow recoiling sun. Runs of watery sweat trickled down from under the man's large puffy brush of hair. It was a twining mini afro, four or five inches off his scalp, a week or so from another cut to shape up the stubble growing past his manicured hairline.
With each creeping inch he hesitated, second guessed his very presence in the dilapidated structure. Divots and fading rubs spotted the paint along the walls, each gapping showed the soft old gray sheet rock underneath. Aged drywall sat exposed from beneath the red paint, which too had long been victimized by the drain of time. Tentacles of black mold reached across the walls in cancerous ribbons. Clusters and splotches of filth littered the floor. Huddles of even more corrosive figures loitered in bundles. The man imagined what those things could have been. "Things" he thought; lurking off in dark corners. "Fucked up THINGS." Those "things" that over the last few weeks, he had resolved to kill tonight.
The building was an old student housing unit that was foreclosed on years ago. Now it sat in squalor, boarded up, suffocating in its own stale, dust clogged air. The community kitchen was now to his left, the dark section was completely wrapped in inches thick of dust webbings, trapping underneath it, a countless assembly of those things. Monstrous things that stalked the alleyways and drainage ditches for other broken pieces; to feed off them, drag them deep into the pits of the city. Cesspools like this place, forgotten zones where crackheads took on a slow death, with all the other wasted artifacts of first world impoverishment.
It wasn't his first night out dredging the depths of urban decay for vile things, or even his first time alone in an ugly dank place but tonight there was apprehension in the streets. He was onto it; he felt it inching towards him as he left the bar for the corner, the corner for the pay phone and the pay phone to Lowery Street and from Lowery down an overgrown and forgotten road to here. Here is where everyone was speaking of but no one could recall. A nameless place sunk beneath decades of condemning neglect and suffocating vegetation. But it was this blighted patch of lost Atlanta that had drawn the hunter in with each uneasy pause of the locals. He caught how their eyes darted in it's direction when asked if they had known anything about the girls. How their mouths wanted to say the words and their callous hearts softened just for a second. It lured him closer and closer by each amber alert, wanting to be found. He heard of the terror that was 78' and everything there was to Wayne Williams. The name itself fermented a deep loathing in his heart. "On Big Tweet and his baby sister!", Atlanta would never suffer like that again. But that fear was back and growing everyday and like back than the police didn't care to notice. They just wanted the drugs and the dope boys. It was back and it was here, he knew. "Right here."
The red walls around the black man were liken to a child friendly late 80's fast food restaurant, subconsciously urging it's diners to feverously consume, re-buy and devour more "salty grease on a sesame seed bun". But here, in this place there was nothing family friendly. Here the greasy odor that lingered was the nauseating smell of days old smoldering crack cocaine like doughy chalk mixed with salty diarrhea. The deflating tinge left by junkies who had better sense to scurry away well before sunset.
Junkies who ignored the molding death which swallowed all the breathable air. They suffered through the dusky shaft this place seemed to transform into, hoping to escape the soaking southern rain, the winter freezes and the baking red hill heat of Atlanta for a needles worth of liquid joy. This was the forsaken place the middle aged man found himself in, minutes after the sun's light faded away. Tucked in anxiety, his palms clammy, his body taught with spiking adrenaline, a zeal that held to him with a nervous chill, which hummed underneath his skin.
A warm buzzing rolled over his ears from the center of his head. A tingling flush of nerve pulsed out of his skin, caught under his light green flak jacket, the heat coursed into his chest and plumed back up to his head again. Blood pumped through is body, circulating through his arms, out to his pulsating finger tips. Each digit stretched tight around his four pound silver revolver. Its weight laid heavy into his shoulders, four minutes in the putrid den and he had yet to lower the weapon or rest his body from the two handed clinch. He held the fire arm ready to shoot for those minutes and in that time he had yet to take a full breath. Each inhale was a thin, wispy pull. Each release would begin to leave his mouth naturally till it was abruptly constricted, halved by the fear of the unknown before him.
It was a dread that pulled at his judgment and his thoughts. The wind outside began to moan out, echoing like tormented whispers locked in the walls. Bending wood beams and shifting sounds/lurking lunatics attempting to cloak their approach. Figures darted from the edge of his vision and speckled eyeballs twinkled under shadows, instantaneously shutting close when he focused his sight on them. Even his body was lost in the maze of sweltering heat and brooding fret. Crawling mites coursed right under the surface of his dark skin. Their prong tipped feet pinched his arm hair and forcing them to stand on end. Step by pain staking step, he etched in further. Deeper into the mouth of the house and further away from his window exit, which now stood completely black, consumed under the new night's sky.
Was it the constricted breath or the fright of life or death, waves of anxiety reached his vision, the taste of motor oil seeped into his jaw and that smell, that rancid smell of degradation finally registered in his throat. He attempted to fight off a tugging instant of panic with a quarter gulp of oxygen but his imagination sprang… veering off;
…finishing his sweep of each room. Clearing all the shambled cubicles, each polluted with driftwood tokens from an ocean of passing years. Moppy old cloths sprawled everywhere, decaying personal effects sunk into the floor and trash washed up in each room. Congealed nylon blankets stuck to cemented carpets, laying just feet from withered and warped text books. Bent and charred spoons littered the far corner of the second room, alongside mashed food canisters and a gutted mattress. He envisioned himself tentatively scanning each of the rooms in front of him, all but the last one. The room that stood forebodingly six feet in front of him at the end of the passageway. A green tinted glow cascaded out into the hallway from the room, his mind said "go", his body ... …standing in that entry way, his dark brown skin was covered in a sheen of emerald light. The gloss was seeping out from a strangely suspended light bulb, hanging from a ceiling fan. A mossy hue filtered out underneath a cake of dead gunk, which wrapping itself around the bulb. A malty green growth crept all the way down from out the shadows above the fan. Wet and sticky the moldy fuzz, melded over the still blades of the fan. It oozed in lumps and voids from inside the fixture, slithering all the way down and around the light. Engulfing the entire bulb, it seemly consumed the all whiteness of the dangling bit of light, allowing only a murky greenish brown pigment to shine from under its grime.
The adventurer stood planted, mortified at what he saw in the room, beneath the vile shade. The naked back of a hulking beast, gorging itself on the decaying entrails of it's last victim. It was hunched but four feet from the man, in the room's corner. Its back arched heavily near its shoulders, leaving the convincing impression the beast was headless for a second. Dirty matted gray hair, clumped and tangled run patterned across the length of the creature's body. The monster curled over itself, deceptively compact, its arms and legs tucked under the trunk of its torso, as it grasped a pale little body. The bloated remains of a seemingly beautiful little girl dangled ridgedly from the beast's claws. Her dead gaze peered over the creature's bulbous left shoulder, as her head rocked back and forth, to the reeling thrash of the beast's lapping bites. Her face transfixed in horror, shaped with elegant rounded cheek bones, a narrow poised jaw line, ending at a softly dimpled chin. A model, a junior pageantry finalist, a damsel who never found fame in the news media, looked out to the man in the door way. Her eyes, her eyes were gone like all the others. In their place were blackened sockets, hollowed out. Eyes replaced by gulfs of emptiness, which seemed to pass on indefinitely into a forever dark tomb. The man's lungs shrank as the air in them thinned out, Locked onto the girl's face, he noted how small, beautiful and hopelessly relieved she seemed. His calves calcified and his hands tremored. His bodied stuttered for seconds, trying to jump start itself. The oxygen in his chest seemed to drain from all his pores, as he saw the skin over the girl's collar bone. It was a crusted deep red slab from the deluge of blood that sprang and drained from a gaping tear in the child's neck. A terminal wound that nearly decapitated her. Within the gash; moist innards gelled and tarred brownish crimson by the oxidizing air. Sheering teeth marks lined under her porcelain jaw and around to inches just above her collar bone. The man's ribs burned acidic, each portion of him tearing at his body for a breath but all lasting attention was given to the wound. His examination was possessing, clanging to size and savagery of the bite. "Dear God please..." He thought.
Chunks and bits of skin gristle, sinew and unknown splatter lay caked underneath the girl's carcass. The beast tattered and rent the remaining husk of decomposing flesh. It made a wet sloshing sound, like the sound of a dog eating canned food. It buried its face over and over again, biting, ripping and swallowing, all in continuous jutting yanks and pulls.
With a driving push, all the man's organs break out and prying open his mouth, quickening a flush of air. Sounding a quick gasp, a hiccup.
Alerted the savage creature whips its snouted face around, lathered in greasy black blood, back towards the man in the door. Its head, its face was unconceivable. Its eyes were hollowed out puss crusted sockets which latched and pulled on the hunter.
Soaking the man in a cavernous fear, his breath was knocked out of him.
With a mesmerizing gaze beaming heavy into his chest, a gripping dread stole the man's heart. Sweat and courage milked from his brow, dripping over his eyes as he stuttered. The monster snarled its grated maw, lifting its tattered lips, revealing rows of gnarling blades. Some teeth like wedges, thick and serrated sloshed with dank rust colored filth and fleshed tarter. The bottom jaw was a mangled field of sharp angles and juts, flooded with juices that drained out from the front and sides of its mouth. The man stands frozen, a washed in swarming blushes of brain farts, blips, deadening shock and terror….paralyzed as the murderous monster released the little girl to clatter upon the floor. A curling vapor twisted the air just above the beast body as it stalked forward. The hunter's vision thinned and tunneled around the beast. Each moment of stillness stretched on agonizingly, his thoughts road out simply as he let go of the dread and anticipation of pain. Numb, his shoulders slumped, his face relaxed as he accepted that the end of his shift had come. He did his "soldiering" as long as he could, won so many battles. And in that moment, he softly exhaled…
Tapping scratches sneaked out beside him, breaking the day dream and pulling the man back the real horror of the crack house and that long dreggy hallway. His feet continued their steady shuffle forward as he attempted to compose himself. Tattering on the exposed floor boards between the carpet and wall, a brawny rat scurried to the only open doorway at the end of the hall. The vermin's dark brown body bubbled and deformed under a hazy green light that bled out from the room. He poised himself again with a few sharp half breaths and tightened his hold around the wet gun grip. The textured grip was now warm and slippery in his moist hands. His stomach wrenched slowly to the left as a strange silence took the house. The sound of his weary breath filled the space around him. Startling he thought, how loud his exhale seemed but he resisted the urge to hold it in. He slowed his next draw in to a whisper. He stood still, reaching out with his ears to picture everything, something, anything that was around him, hidden in the black holes of the old house.
Moaning bends of the structure slowly groaned and stuttered out around him as the wind blew against the abandoned one story building. Struts popped when decade's old wood leaned. Bits of siding tore from the structure. It was poorly constructed for its era and a mystery to how the building hadn't fully collapsed in on itself.
The gritty light from the far end of the hall split the thick darkness around it. A green stream pierced through the slinking shadows that stood ready to ambush. The light reflected off specks of brown particles which swam out of the room, wafting on an unseen breeze of tension, aroused by some "thing" in the room. The bearded man tightened his jaw, grinding his bottom molars against the base of his skull. A scowl formed from his brow as he resolved himself on taking the next few steps to that open doorway. Nervously, he swallowed down the chalky film that had covered the back of his tongue.
Taking a full deep breath, his chest expanded. His mind cooled as he eased out his exhale, pushing out the space around him. His vision brightens and the shades in front of him seemed to shrink. He repeated the ritual. His thoughts cleared and settled on one idea; that all which happened in the last five weeks had brought him to this house.
Ignoring the sweltering heat of the night, the hunter allowed a stilling breath to settle in his lounges, felt the return of his judgments' clarity. Remembering the long nights and half waken days he spent under transient overpasses, peering down gloomy alleyways. Memorizing the names of lost crack babies and the desolate stories of their mothers, each and every one weighed in on him. But he knew that it wasn't just their sad tales that was encumbering but the specter of this beast. It too had cleaved itself to him and laid against each thought. With it came that familiar feeling. Starting as an uncomfortable static tingle resonated after each new set of foot prints or gleaned morsel of info from a beaten confession, till now, a hungry drone pulsating behind his eyes, which were transfixed on that emerald shaft of light, steps before him.
There was something disappearing children in his city and he knew it wasn't a man. The stories of the sounds, cold depressions sweeping past peoples' windows late in the evening, no it was something else. It took him a week to discover it wasn't an undead fiend, one of those ragged things which drug bums to their deaths beneath those underpasses. He thought of nights clotting the flow of horrors from bleeding into his city. He knew the size of those corrupted things, the emptiness of poisonous leaches and the trail of warped wreckage they left behind. No he was convinced, this beast had grown from up out the city. Wading its way through the pits, needles and mire of this urban jungle and then it began to consume. Maybe it was a thing of greed and conceit or a ghostly maw feeding on the hopeless. Whatever the thing, it felt different, withering and grave. It was sordid, monstrous and ugly and he imagined it brooding under that green flickering light. No matter what the hell the creature was, with bullets and a blade, he was going to end it, tonight.