Mission 08: Like A Shadow
The air was squalid, unbreathable.
An old sewage pipe pumped out hateful waste into the nearby wash daily, authorized by the mayor three months back. This city loves its ethics, Crow Castle was a damned hellhole in certain parts. Corrupt cops and drug-addicted thugs behind every inner-city corner— what a damned way to spend the time. Here, outside the city limits in the forest southeast, the world was different. A sickening miasma of feces-infested mulch spread across through the bank like cancer, a malignant plague to the land.
Of course, it was filled with recycled trash, the bits and pieces of the things people no longer wanted. Its use had expired, so too had its value. Human's couldn't deal with their consequences. It's in their nature to squander life, to waste potential, as if they knew what to do with it. It wouldn't be long till there wouldn't be even a single living soul left on this planet. Self-destruction was a concept believed in many a young high-schooler, and this girl was no exception. She felt it to be true, though she didn't bother caring. Humanity, to her, was better off dead. She had fled from the city to escape from that very fact, to be with the one who soothed her, the person she cared for more than anyone else.
The forest itself was so dark, but they felt no fear here. The trees and their spindly arms, the rats scampering about, and years-old garbage littered by college fraternity students on the ground.
They came here to get away from the noise, from their religious parents. Here, it didn't matter who they were. The young women ambled together beyond the great pale trees.
Darkness rolled over them quickly, the bloody red sky vanishing behind the mountains. Dark clouds above carried a crushing weight, and up there, the pollution welled so thick you couldn't see the stars.
They liked the stars.
"Think we can make it to Almería?" Her shoulder brushed against her runaway-companion, noticing the broadness and the pride in them.
"Sure we can," the runaway responded, shoulders cocked back for the first time in a while. "We'll just hitch a ride when we get to the road. There's bound to be stars there."
"I hope you're right, it stinks like hell out here."
The duo traveled in the dark wondering where the road was. They were following a regional map loosely, avoiding the hollows and their weeping timbers. It was so ill-lit, the paths were barely illuminated by the old flashlights they'd brought. They knew not to waste the battery life on their phones, each told the other's parents they were sleeping over at a church girl's house. Good excuse for zealots, they like submissive attitudes. One of the two, her name was Marci. She hated her parents more than anything else, and so this was her sweet escape. Jenna didn't care, she was just glad Marci was there.
Besides, her golden hair seemed to shine brighter in the dark.
They were teenaged; Jenna sixteen, Marci eighteen.
An unconventional coupling, but they enjoyed being with one another, it allowed them freedom through the murky waters drawn by their progenitors' repressions. Just a bit further, they could get to the clearing and out to the road. It seemed so far away, usually they'd have hit it by now . . . funny, the world is so different in the dark; all the things that can be seen become mysterious again, they lose their familiarity. And yet, in the daylight, everything falls back into place.
There was a clear smell of moisture. It was going to rain soon. Good thing the shrubs on the branches were thick enough to protect them. Water was an awful thing when you couldn't get dry.
"Are you positive we're going the right way?"
Jenna's question was unsure, she was starting to feel vulnerable in these woods.
"Don't worry, this is the right path." Marci was strong and sure.
They kept searching through the thicket for any kind of sign, such as glistening concrete or street lamps.
Nothing.
Something else they started to notice was that the light of the torch's beam began to grow dimmer and dimmer.
It seemed as though the batteries drained themselves sooner than anticipated.
The drainage was inexplicable, the LED indicator on the side showed a battery with seventy-five percent remaining.
Their fear set in, as heavy as the murkiness around them.
A frigid wind rustled through the trees.
Both stopped in their tracks, the visibility now too low to progress forward any further.
"What's wrong with the light?" she asked.
"I—. . . I don't know," Marci replied.
She shook the flashlight to no effect. It continued to die within the abyss, losing them visibility as they inspected the contraption. It only took mere moments before it had extinguished itself completely. The eldest grabbed her friend by the hand and spun her so they stood back to back. There wasn't anyway in hell she would lose her, not after what they'd come through. Darkness had swallowed them whole, blotting out whatever remained of the tool's glow.
And so it was that they stood there submerged in complete dusk, every waking moment spent inside this strange territory feeling diseased.
Marci could feel Jenna's heartbeat creep faster and faster. It thumped endlessly against her spine, beating a mile a minute, all the adrenaline in the world pumping straight through those valves.
"What's happening?" She whispered to her, "Why's the light gone out?"
A tree branch snapped off in the distance. It broke against the soft ground like a lead pipe.
Both girls head's darted off north, wondering where it came from. These woods were bad enough in the daytime with its jagged trees.
They heard a strange coughing, as if an old man had roamed nearby, and had stopped to die. It was a flurry of crooked incisions, sounding akin to a blender's broken spin. It was so weak and dry. The fit at once grew both louder and more present, becoming apparent to them that it wasn't too far away, whatever it was, followed shortly afterward by a great hawking, a lung being torn open. Instantly, the sense of predatory fear consumed the two. They weren't alone here.
No one was supposed to be out here but them.
"Wh— Who's there?" Marci spluttered.
. . . Still silence.
Three footsteps came towards them.
"Who's there!?" It came out a command.
There was a sickly growling, a pair of burning red embers opening up within the dark and taking shape. Eyes. They stared upon the girls' innocent souls, unmoving and undistracted.
And so were the schoolgirls. Stiff with anxiety, they stood motionless, realizing suddenly they were prey. Its neck slithered forward, the thing seeming to inspect their supple flesh. The shoulders rolled themselves poised. Gingerly, his foot raised, boot pointed, sterile heel landing first, the extremity planted itself down. Its torso slid forward independent of the legs. The thing squared up its chest to face them, as it did so, its vertebrae slowly uncurling itself to a somewhat proper stance, though still sickly and crippled. The entity peered at the two, its sternum leaning forward, slung down its curved spine. Gliding to their right, the infernal glow of those eyes slowly tempered.
The creature's right hip came forward and it arched its back, lurching up out of its hunched posture. The red faded entirely, revealing senseless dead orbs where irises should have been.
Its bestial features were allayed by a humanistic face, hairless and pale. Beneath a ragged coat lay its flesh exposed, thick blood still painting the withered form. So many layers decayed away that the veins could be seen crawling through his skin, pumping and pumping away metallic fluid, heavy-set from being left so still for so long. Its chin led up the skull to rest behind its shoulders, cocking to the right and towering above them; the beast bared its chest onward, domineering as it drew closer. To the sides rested monstrous, brutish hands accompanied by broad nails at its fingertips. Rolling its fingers, their visitor's lips slowly arched open, revealing a row of perverted teeth, shaped jagged like that of a shark's. Marci shivered, her blood freezing.
She felt it coming on, the urge to scream.
Jenna got there first.
Letting out a shriek so shrill it petrified Marci in place, the girl collapsed to her knees.
Grinning madly, the beast growled in their faces, amused by its prey's submission. A siren of primordial rage bellowed through the woods, drowning out their shrieks.
(*.*.*)
The moon and sun fell. They rose. This cycle continued seven days till the girls were found.
Joggers they were, their hearts scarred by the carnage so severe. Police searched on through the salted soil. The forest was wet that morning. It had been raining the last two days.
Two girls terminated by extraordinary means, run through on the trees above, their bodies left nearly translucent.
The corpses had been stripped of their clothes, leaving behind only their see-through flesh covers. How they'd become this way was anyone's guess. Strictly speaking, it was impossible. Every last drop of blood had been drained from them, either left in small patches across the ground or transported elsewhere, though they didn't know where the bulk of it had gone. It had been collected by the killer, or at the very least, an accomplice. Through the woods were torn fragments of both girls' clothing, scattered around without care. DNA testing would soon resolve this, the killer's sick fingerprints surely left behind on these ill-fated children's possessions.
Out from a Ford Taurus emerged a suit and tie worn by a salt-&-pepper man. He wore a black duster over the the ensemble and from the other door came a much more casual enforcer.
She wore a green tee with jeans and a black-brown leather jacket cut modern. Her feathered hair was light, contrasting his darker pelt.
"Jesus Christ, this is a circus," she grumbled, as she always did.
The man gave a cold blank stare at the crime scene, then dipped his head as he continued marching towards it.
His partner headed off somewhere looking for the first responders. Guess that left him to sort the details of the grisly display. The man fixed his course for the girls, his target just to the left of their tall tree, where they'd been left to rot. It was minuscule, something anyone could have missed, but it was there regardless. A tooth. The thing was jagged, as if sharpened on a wheel constantly. It was coated in calcium and another substance, some kind of corrosive oil. It didn't seem natural, boasting a size larger than any human canine, but it couldn't have been an animal that was responsible for this. Too personal, too stylized, damn near impossible in all respects. Many aspects of the scene made little sense for an investigator's eye, the human element widespread, made obvious by the manner that the bodies had been left in, as they hung limply, ritualistically drained, and impaled to a tree.
Lord knows, it certainly looked awful enough.
He took out gloves and then a pair of tweezers, placing the odd evidence within a containment bag. Once sealed, he passed it on to an onsite-coroner. A small team had been analyzing the bodies for a brief amount of time. They had to use a ladder, and the end result was the decision to transport the corpses to their morgue early for a proper analysis. That being said, the team had managed to wring as many details as they could.
"What have you found?" The man said, stern but humane.
"Not much in the way of sense, I'm afraid," the coroner replied, his voice tinged with a British lilt. "It's very clear that they've been drained of blood, but . . . it's as though something scraped out all the melanin as well from these poor girls. The angle of the impalement and internal bruising seems to suggest that they hit the tree with considerable force. Trajectory of the bloodstains, what little there are, corroborates that finding, but there doesn't seem to be a possible way that could have happened down here. The space is too limiting."
He was right, the tree stood eleven meters high, and both victims had been stuck on large branches only one-point-five meters down from the top.
"They were impaled from a distance?"
"Yes. The level of internal damage seems to correspond with velocity comparable to a car crash," the coroner said, looking up past the ladder he'd used to investigate initially.
"That's impossible. You would need some kind of giant slingshot," the detective said, staring at the distance, "As you said, there's no feasible ground out here."
"Precisely, but you can see the hemorrhaged puncture wounds through their skin, from whatever clots remained in place before the rest of their blood was drained. This, um, rather 'unique' state of death enables us a great degree of visibility without needing to autopsy. It was either some sort of launching-device that was employed or . . . something else," he replied, the man seeming unnerved. It wasn't everyday that a crime scene surprised the old coroner.
The detective remained silent. He stared around at the ground, noticing that while it had been disturbed, no impression remained of any large device. No content, no leftovers . . . There hadn't been any kind of machine used on these people. So, the question remained. The soil had vague tracks all through it, heavy feet had walked this ground last night. The leaves were scattered and scuffled, not at all crushed in visible patterns. A few footprints dotted the landscape, but they led nowhere. The signs of an animal attack returned, with little holes scarring the ground, all roughly the size of a human fist.
He made note of the animalistic scratches across nearby tree trunks and the torn clothes were marked in the same pattern.
"Those marks are the same . . . they're uniform with the ones on their clothing as well. It might be possible that they date to the same night," the detective said. "They look like an animal's work."
"What animal is capable of this?" the coroner replied. "It would have to be large, larger than any indigenous fauna here."
"I'm not saying it was an animal. What else have you found?"
"Skin samples have been deposited under the finger nails, we'll test it at the lab. That's about all the conventional forensics we've found. Otherwise? This is a ghost."
The detective bristled at the news, but he kept himself as professional as possible.
"Unfortunate. I'll call in a hazmat team, let me know as soon as you have anything else. Throw any specialists you have on the blood out here."
The coroner nodded and the detective took his leave. He intended to grab coffee, perhaps come back to the scene refreshed and then put together a portfolio back at the precinct, but unfortunately, his partner was determined to deprive him of any focus.
"Hey dickhead," she called, stepping in front of him.
He sighed to himself, disliking her manner.
"Detective Anselmo," he corrected, then huffed out, "Yes?"
"Detective Dickhead, I got a witness report that some hikers saw two bodies while out jogging, but there's not much else to go on. First responders found two flashlights and a sack of supplies. Both the girl's wallets have nothing missing, no credit cards taken, no scuff marks; cash is still-present, which helps. Officer Briggs ID'ed em' as Jenna Montrose and Marci Stahl, aged 16 and 18 respectively. Don't know why they lugged all this crap out here, this is the kinda place you'd wanna avoid at night. Guess you can't fix stupidity. Looks like a simple case of asking for trouble."
Her partner's upper lip twitched, and he clenched his left fist closed.
"Would you care to refrain from airing your personal opinion and just tell me basic facts about what you've found?" he said.
The woman glared at him, seething indignation.
"Alright, dick. We know so far that both girls attended Xavier Prep, which is a private Roman-Catholic Jesuit high school across town. There isn't much else we've turned up on 'em, nobody's got a clue how the hell they ended up out here, their personal lives we haven't looked into yet, and their parents haven't been notified. Either way, this seems like a nothin'-burger, because I don't see any bodies. Either these hikers must be blind or the coroners already took 'em away, cause there's nothin' but trees and clothes," she said.
At that, he groaned and walked roughly 30 paces to the side.
"Where you goin' Jack?" she asked him, coolly condescending, as only she could be.
He stood still and pointed up at a tree.
From her view she couldn't see what he was referencing.
"Bird-watching? You freak . . ." she muttered the last statement under her breath as his mood worsened.
He remained silent and just kept pointing with a stern look on his face.
Reluctantly, she walked over to him and saw the hanging bodies, finally.
"Oh," she said.
"Yes," he grumbled aloud. "'Oh.'"
To Be Continued