Frank's mind had gone through horrible, ghastly, shockingly abominable ordeals, having been twisted, tormented, persecuted, agonized among thousands of other inssufficient words to describe the sheer distress the man was undergoing. The horrible force responsible for his torment, out of no fathomable reason, dumped Frank into an abandoned, aged version of his home, trapping him alone with a group of cold, inhuman killers.

"Take up defensive positions. The Commander wants us to use this building as a trap for the operative. Keep quiet."

With a jolt of horror, Frank realized why he was able to hear every transmission that the hunters were sending. The infernal, hellish radio, choked with static and incoherent noise, was playing out the distorted voices of the murderers with rather disturbing aural clarity. That was why they seemed to gain on Frank's room, and the civilian felt truly helpless. The Sledgehammer he was gripping fearfully would only stun one of the soldiers at best, leaving Frank to be shredded and and mulched up by a hail of cold bullets. He needed to do something else.

He stuck his foot out, and the floorboards creaked painfully loud. There was no mistaking it, the killers definitely heard it, and they began to sprint towards Frank's trap. There was unmistakable sadistic glee in their demonic voices, as the radio crackled with infuriating exuberance.

The floor. I need to hide.

Without a second thought, Frank ripped off a rotten plank, surprised to find that he actually pulled off a sizable hole into a secret spot. It may have been a primitive version of a trap door, and it may have been a gateway into another terrible portal, but it seemed like the only place for him to go. He leaped into the darkness below, smashing his jaw painfully against the floor. The space beneath the floor was rather cramped, yet it was surprisingly roomy enough for Frank to slowly crawl through. He covered the hole with the plank, hoping that the commotion had concealed his escape, and prayed.

"Come on, fucker-where did you go??"

He was encapsulated in darkness, yet he could see dark shapes moving about through miniscule gaps beneath him. The floor creaked with ancient decay all around him, and he felt the unpleasant sensation of spiders crawling around him. He had to cover his mouth in order to cover his whimpers.

The light in his room shone above him, yet Frank could see other lights flashing down in other spots from the crawlspace. There were dozens of black shapes littering the floor, causing his vision to be sadly limited. It seemed that the crawlspace allowed free access

"There's nothing here, sir, False Alarm"

"Roger that, take defensive positions and wait for my signal. Operative inbound in approximately one minute"

This mysterious operative raised some bizarre questions for Frank. He thought back to the brief news report that the demonic force controlling Frank's fate delighted in giving him. The terrorists who were now roaming around inches above the terrified civilian had apparently shot down a helicopter containing rescue-workers and special forces operatives. In addition, there was a Police blockade of the district, with the civilians having been evacuated.

Makes sense, I can remember Mark's team having a blockade at the entrance to the district. But that 'Live' Report claimed that the Helicopter crew was still alive, slaughtering dozens of the terrorists. This doesn't sound good....

He crawled on, breathing in stale, motionless air that hadn't seen the sky for decades, and felt cobwebs collect around his face. He blinked constantly, salty tears falling down from the sheer pain, and it was an extremely taxing effort to keep himself from screaming. He moved down, finally settling down beneath a room that seemed to be empty.

It seemed as if his arduous journey had taken forever, yet in another timescale, it had merely taken a gruelling minute. He knew this because the annihilation of the terrorists began at the hands of the notorious 'Operative.'

It began with a bang. He heard a sickening crack, sounding as if bones were being twisted and broken with ease, and the sound of a body hitting the floor with a loud flop. Then, everything went to hell. He heard the crack of an explosion in another room, instantly maiming everyone inside the room closest to Frank, and droplets of crimson fluid flowed down into the crawlspace beside Frank. He closed his eyes, and listened to the catastrophes.

CONTACT!!"

"WHAT THE FUCK DO I-AAAAAAGGGHHHH!!!!!"

"HE'S TOO FAST!!!!!"

"WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT??!!"

"SHUT THE-NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!"

"TAKE COVER!!"

"WHICH WAY??!! Aughugghhhhh!!!!

"NEED REINFORCEMENTS!!"

"HE WIPED OUT THE WHOLE-UNNNGGGHHH!!!!"

The battle raged on with unparalleled wrath, compressing the hateful devatation and massacres of human warfare into a small, cramped Apartment Building in an abandoned industrial district in the United States of America. Explosions rocked the floor, shaking Frank down and smacking him down. With a terribly loud crash, the floorboards above Frank gave in and he had the sensation of being entombed. He was dying....

When he woke up, it was silent. The stench of death hung in the air, and the walls of the apartment building were destroyed, covered with gory evidence of the brutal battle that had happened moments ago. The chaotic violence he had been an unwilling witness to was just as horrific as the torments that the poor writer had suffered. The sheer, unnatural, monstrous annihilation of the assailants by the nameless "Operative" made Frank feel even lonelier and more vulnerable, seeing as there were threats far more bloodthirsty and inscrutable than mere monsters. This sort of cruelty was difference, a cold, clinical, human-yet-inhumane detached form of killing. There was no pleasure or satisfaction derived from the ignoble slaughter of the terrorists, no sense of duty or justice. It seemed as if they were killed for the sake of killing.

The lights in the building were mostly destroyed, yet there was the warmth and crackling of fire spread throughout the wreckage of the residential building. The fires gave a ghoulish, terrifying visage of the maimed bodies, the remains of the massacre created by the mysterious operative. It is absolutely, completely impossible to describe the tiniest amount of pure, detached evil that had gone into every droplet of blood spilled by the intruders, and the massacre, the sheer crushing extermination of the soldiers, made Franks mind go blank with shock. The scene was terrible, absolutely awful, the sheer amount of pain and death spread all around him was mind-breaking.

Rivers of blood covered the walls and ceiling entirely, and mangled limbs and mushed up innards carpeted the floor. A very insufficient way to describe the pure destruction of the scene was to imagine a small village of people being fed through a grinder, mulched up through a giant blender, and the bloodied remains used to redecorate the Apartment Building Frank was in. No, that was a pathetic example, the most depraved thoughts Frank could possibly conceive of the evil power's doing simply did not compare to the sheer impetuosity of the ruins he had seen here.

He walked out. There was no danger from the terrorists, any more. The memory of the Tall Man flashed briefly through Frank's mind, yet the violence seemed too much even to be the eldritch horror's handiwork. The tormented, dangerous girl whose menacing presence hung in the air was forgotten. The only thing he feared now was the "operative."

Nothing to be afraid of, but FEAR Itself. Well, FEAR has found a way to make itself real. The Grim Reaper had come to take the lives of those killers, yet he did not save me. He merely did not see me.

August 24th 2045

Frank "Rowdy" Betters

Ah hell, I think we've stumbled on a real badass now. I don't know where he came from, he just showed up one morning holding a letter from some 'good samaritan' about him being transferred to my unit. I have no idea why, this guy is way too over-qualified and competent to work with Ice-queen Jin and meat-head Spen.

His reflexes are completely off the charts, I've never seen anything so goddamn fast as this bastard before. He literally ran 5 circles around me, caught a fly like a Kung Fu master, took out my pen and held it a millionth of an inch in front of my goddamn eyes, and did all this in the time it took for me to blink.

His aim's fucking amazing too, he managed to empty out our entire Pistol stock in half a minute, and every fucking shot was right between the eyes. Really, I'm disturbed as to what the hell those jokers think they are about him, he's too goddamn unreal.

Spen didn't like him much though. He came up to me an hour ago and said that there was something off about him. For one thing, he's way too average looking. Six feet tall, dark-brown hair, average build, nothing interesting. Except for his eyes. There's something odd about him, something that doesn't ring true. It's like he's looking right through you, and it really creeps me out.

I have the feeling something big's going to happen real soon. I replaced Spen with the transfer as the new Point Man, as I'm desperate for SOMEONE to make our unit look worthwhile. After all, if the existence of your unit had been created by a superstitious, incompetent military colonel, it's hard to be taken seriously...

The ancient, rusted walls of the apartment building were a little quagmire to Frank, as he was sure that he had been here before, the whole place reeked of a terrible case of déjà vu. It definitely looked like Frank's home, two boring, bleak decades into the future. Blood trails led everywhere, pointing to dark holes in the wall, to shadowy corners of the ruined corridors, and to piles of dismembered, sliced up limbs. Frank numbly went on, noticing that the doorway at the end of the dark corridor was bathed in an unnaturally orange light.

As he reached the doorway, the sensation of his head being split open with a rusty chainsaw poured into his head, forcing him to lean against the wall and bear the pain. As his mind cleared, he saw that he was in the middle of chaos. There was a colossal inferno to the right side of the entrance, blocking off any bad foolish thoughts of escape in that direction. Dozens of people, dead people, littered the streets like broken pieces of trash, their faces and bodies mutilated beyond recognition. All of them were ordinary people with loving families, just like Frank.

The air was covered with thick, choking ash, and it made Frank's lungs feel as if they were being buried alive. The skies were a bleak, dark grayish brown, and immeasurably massive clouds swirled menacingly across the sky, giving an unnatural, bleak, apocalyptic light to the massacre that Frank was experiencing. Flashes of 'colors', brighter than white, struck across the sky, making it painful to even gaze up. So Frank looked down.

For hours, it seemed, he was walking through a hellish scene of death and destruction, following an endless trail of bodies in every ghoulish position of death. The Operative, Mark Saunders, Escaping the District, the Reality Shifts, The goddamn Tall Man himself, all of them swirled through his mind, poking out into his vision and taunting him with their appearance, their apparitions taunting his insanity. This rather indifferent, cold attitude, combined with the fact that he could only see an inch ahead of him, was an excuse for why Frank bumped into a young man.

He was a tall, pale man, with a deathly white face and a grin that appeared to be wider than his face. His dazzlingly bizarre eyes were hollowed out and shadowed, and a gaping, bloody bullet hole lay straight in the middle of his forehead. Despite the way he carried himself, the young man's narrowed, pointed face showed that he had aged prematurely. Most disturbingly, there was dried, sticky liquid, HUMAN blood, splattered all over the man's mouth, and he grinned at Frank exposing his well-filed, reddish teeth. Frank had come face-to-face with a goddamn cannibal.

The Cannibal wore a rather expensive looking military jacket, and to Frank, he looked as if he were a rogue soldier. A shadowy figure beside the Cannibal came into view, and Frank gaped in pure shock. It was extremely hazy and terrible to see through all the smoke and dust, and there seemed to be pools of distortion striking across the sky, wreaking hell on Frank's eyes. Suddenly, there was a flash, and Frank realized that suddenly, his vision was clearer than ever, that countless centillions of different shades, hues, and colors rushed into his vision.

The shadowy figure appeared to be some sort of secret military operative, dressed in some rather high-tech looking armor, and any skin was completely covered by his suit. A black balaclava, and some evil-red glasses, concealed any sign of identification for the man. The soldier hovered silently behind the cannibal, his head ducked in some sort of unholy prayer, and the Cannibal licked his lips calmly.

"Ah, I see there's an audience for our new performance. Do you understand, lowlife, why your pathetic little abode had to be destroyed? My mother was tortured, she was abused by a cruel, indifferent world, and you know what? I was a victim as well. I never had the loving caress of a mother, only the cold, harsh metal of a scientific instrument. I never had the family, only the thoughts of hundreds of mindless strangers. You, on the other hand, have had everything you could ever have wanted, you pathetic freak, you never lifted a finger to help her!!"

Frank was furious. He was tired of everything. He was tired of being a plaything for an unfathomably cruel monster. He was tired of being kept in the dark. He was tired of having been forced away from his family and thrown into his dump by an uncaring government. He was tired of experiencing hate and death. And yet, despite all this suffering, all this pain, Frank hadn't gone the path of the cannibal before him

but now, he knew. Frank Elwood knew who the cannibalistic freak in front of him was. Frank knew what had caused the thousands of dead men, women and innocent children in this hallucination. This was a test of forgiveness, wasn't it? Well, Frank had no sympathy. And that was why he dived onto the cannibal, and smashed his face into the floor.

He was consumed by hate and fury, and he was blindly relishing the pain, the suffering he was causing. For every little second of terrible suffering, of indescribable torture, Frank paid it back infinitely, roaring and ripping into the body with an uncontrollable rage. The man's terrible screams and cries for mercy became a pleasant background song, and before long, it was over. The body of the man was mutilated beyond recognition, the head destroyed.

"Frankie?"

Frank got up, and stared down the little girl that was standing behind him. She was a cruel, evil looking child, who definitely was hiding something, but Frank was way beyond the point of caring about anything anymore. With an insane cry, he picked up the knife that the Cannibal was holding, and madly slashed the air, not knowing or caring that the girl had dissolved into a harmless pile of ashes.

Yes? What is it? Just a few more minutes, mum, I haven't even packed yet.

He was standing in a beautiful green meadow, surrounded by hundreds of pale stone slabs. There was a stone in front of him, the words unreadable and garbled, yet Frank knew that it was the grave of the most important people in his world. He hung his head in a moment of silence, and blankly, realized that he was alone. Mother was dead.

He opened his eyes tearfully, and realized that he was back again, in his room, pondering what the hell to do. He opened the drawers tearfully, searching desperately, and found the old 1923 Magnum .6000, a gift from his gun-loving, racist uncle whom Frank had despised. There was only one bullet in the chamber, but it was enough.

Time to decide.

He gave the barrel of the gun a good flip, and then placed it to his temple, trembling terribly. And then, he pulled the trigger, hoping to release himself.

Nothing. There was nothing. Frank grinned, and then threw away the worthless piece of crap, knowing that it was proof of his doom. He couldn't kill himself, but he wasn't going to let himself be destroyed in such a way. No. He would grin and bear it, bear it until even the devil himself would scream, and he'd give the finger to pain itself.