Disclaimer: Insert stylish disclaimer here
A/N: Sorry, Darkmoon, but we submitted the wrong chapter by mistake. This is the correct chapter.
Chapter 3: Tagged
The bodies were swaying gently in the breeze from the blown-out wall, and the blood that dripped from their dangling red fingertips drew loops and whorls on the floor.
There were eight of them in all, hanging by their feet; something had smashed away most of the ceiling and tied the corpses to a joist. They were all bright red, from heel to head.
It was obvious what had been done to them, what the monsters in the night had done, but Tidus had to say it anyway.
"They've been skinned," he said.
Wakka nodded.
"Some of them are Al Bhed, and some of them are Yevonites. An equal-opportunity massacre, that's what we have here."
Tidus stared at Wakka-which was better than staring at the bodies, anyway. "Yevon, Wakka, how can you tell? They don't have their goddamn faces anymore!"
"They don't have the skin, but the eyes are still there. That bunch over there are Al Bhed, green eyes, that bunch over there are Yevonites, no green eyes, and…" Wakka stopped and bent over, puking his brains out.
Tidus looked before he could stop himself, before he could remind that maybe he didn't want to, and he felt a sudden surge of nausea. Sweat dripped down his face, cold sweat despite the heat, and he couldn't make himself move to wipe it away. He couldn't take his eyes off the bloody bodies. He couldn't move his feet either; if he stepped forward, he'd be walking in blood, and he couldn't step back, it felt as if the monsters in the night would get him if he stepped back.
And there were cartridge casings everywhere, and the guns were lying in the blood. The entire room stank of gun smoke and meat. These men hadn't died without a fight.
"Yevon," he said again. "Wakka, who could have done this? It would have taken a regiment of crusaders, but even they wouldn't be viscous enough to skin people!" Tidus turned and saw Wakka tumbling back down the stairs, still trying to empty the contents of his stomach.
Being the only one left in the room, Tidus took it upon himself to investigate. Taking in a deep breath, he stepped forward, trying to ignore the fact that he was walking in a crimson pool of human fluids. The holes in the ceiling and walls were the first thing he wanted to look at.
Most of them were bullet holes, of course-Al Bhed automatic weapons had stitched back and forth across the room in every direction during the fight.
There were three holes, though, that weren't right. He'd noticed them immediately when he'd came up here, but was too distracted by the bodies that he didn't mention them to Wakka; they just weren't right.
For one thing, they were far too big for bullet holes-each was as big as a man's head. Tidus had a pretty good idea of Auron's height, and he figured it would be eye level for Auron, and just above head height for anyone else, including the people who had died here. Nobody was going to be throwing punches from that high up.
If someone had picked up a man, raised him above his head like a wrestler doing an airplane spin, and then rammed him against the wall…
No. These holes punched through the wall. Do that with a man's head, and when you pull him back out, he'll be a bloody mess, and probably dead. The bodies, mangled as they were, hadn't showed that particular sort of injury. Their skulls weren't caved in.
Some kind of weapon? Something like a mace? No. The holes were wrong for that. For one thing…
Tidus stepped back out into the corridor and around into the next room, where the hole came out, and looked at it.
Then he turned and looked at the far wall. There was another hole there; he'd thought, when he'd looked through from the other side, that he'd seen one.
And yes, the two lined up-but the second, smaller hole was below the first one. That meant that whatever had made them had been angled downward.
Tidus strode back to the bigger room, the room where the massacre had taken place. Once again ignoring the bodies, he looked through the opening, judged the angle, tried to guess where the killer had stood, and then estimated the height of whatever had made that hole.
It looked to him as though some son of a shoopuf must have been wearing a cannon on his hat, and had neatly collected the cannonballs when he was done.
He reached out and touched the edge of the hole. It was charred. That wasn't just powder burns or soot; whatever it was that had punched the hole had charred the lath for a good half-inch around the opening. That had been something hot. A bullet wouldn't do that, nor would a cannonball.
Incendiaries of some kind?
But then why was the building still standing?
This was something different, something strange. If the killers had weapons that would punch holes through walls like this, maybe they had other things-perfect camouflage that made them effectively invisible, something that protected them from bullets.
Tidus began to feel something else, as well-something he had felt before, something he'd been feeling off and on for days, but never as strongly as this. It was a prickly feeling of something indefinably wrong, a feeling like something brushing the hairs at the back of his neck.
He remembered that, as a kid, he had wondered what it felt like to be hunted. Right now, he knew exactly how it felt.
He turned; the room was empty. He looked through the hole, and the room on the other side was empty as well.
He stepped slowly away from the wall and turned a full 360 degrees, ending up facing the hole again. He didn't see anything-but the light was poor. And a good hunter always used camouflage. The prey wasn't supposed to see him.
And these hunters may have perfect camouflage.
He started to turn again-and all of a sudden it was there, just at arm's length.
Tidus knew this was the killer, or at least one of the killers, and that he couldn't afford to play nice. He snatched at one of his spare longswords and pulled it from its sheath as he said, "Figured you might show up. I could feel you. Can't say I'm that impress-"
He was talking to distract it, but it wasn't working; he was in the middle of a word, his longsword half-way drawn, when a huge yellowish fist slammed across his jaw and sent him reeling backward.
The longsword flew to one side, and Tidus' mouth filled with blood; the lower teeth on one end suddenly all felt loose. Blood spurted from his nose.
He landed on his hands and knees, facing away from the thing that loomed over him, outlined against the gaping hole in the wall.
"Lucky punch," he said, spitting out the blood in his mouth.
It wasn't human, Ronso, Guado or anything else on Spira. It stood on two legs and was shaped more or less like a man, but it was too big, and too fast. As he knelt, half-dazed for a fraction of a second, he saw its feet in their heavy silver sandals, saw the four toes with their curving black talons. He started to turn and saw the grayish-yellow legs, the gleaming metal greaves, the black netting that covered its body.
It wasn't any gang of outlaws that had done this massacre-it was this, this monster, this hunter, whatever it was.
But it didn't matter what it was, or what it looked like; he had to take it down. This things had attacked him, and it was payback time. It was big, strong, fast, and it had him down, but he had to beat it.
He couldn't afford the time to look at it, not when it was as fast as it was.
Tidus threw his weight forward onto his hands and dove a shoe upward at the thing's belly-and if he fell short and caught it in the crotch, he wouldn't mind that either.
He didn't catch it anywhere. A clawed hand caught him instead. Black talons locked around his ankle before his foot had covered half the distance intended, and the sunlight outside sparkled off jagged-edged blades that projected from the complicated band of gadgetry on the thing's wrist.
Before Tidus could even begin to twist, to struggle, to try to escape, the thing picked him up by that one leg and flung him away.
It moved impossibly fast, but with casual ease and grace, as if this was nothing for it, as if it wasn't even trying.
Then Tidus slammed into the wall and he stopped noticing details; he heard plaster and lath crunch on impact, and for a millisecond or so he hoped that he didn't hear any of his bones breaking.
Then his head snapped back and hit an exposed stud, and he wasn't able to hope anything.
He tried not to pass out, tried to force himself to full alertness. He was on the floor, looking up through a haze, and he saw those yellowish claws reaching for him, that blank thing that wasn't a face looking down at him…
It wasn't a face. It was metal. The thing was wearing some kind of mask.
Then its fingers, or claws, whichever they were, closed in on Tidus' bruised jaw and wrenched his head sideways, exposing his neck, turning his eyes away so that he couldn't see anymore, and Tidus tried to force defiance out through the blood in his throat.
Then something bit into the flesh below his left ear, and Tidus screamed. Not so much at the pain-it hurt like hell, like three hot knives had just punched into his neck-but he could handle the pain. He screamed at the violation. The thing wasn't killing him. It was doing something else.
"What the hell…" he gasped as the thing stood up and stepped back, "did you do…" Tidus' hand closed on a broken two-by-four, and his anger gave him strength.
"… to me!" he shouted as he came up swinging.
The blow caught the creature on the side of its head, and the mask wrenched to one side. It reached up to straighten it, but Tidus was there first, following up his attack.
The crooked mask, or helmet, or whatever is was, was blocking the things vision. It was blinded.
If he could keep it blinded, he might have a chance.
He grabbed for the metal mask and got both thumbs under the edge. The thing reached up and ripped him away, but his grip held, and the mask tore free as well.
Something sparked, and Tidus heard a hiss like escaping gas, but he didn't have time to worry about that; he was falling backward, toward the hole in the wall where the windows had once been.
The mask was in his hands, but he didn't get a chance to look at it. He stumbled backwards, trying to balance himself, when his foot landed on something hard, something that shouldn't have been there something that went out from under him, and as he tumbled backward out the hole in the building's wall he realized that he had dropped over his own dropped longsword.
And then he was out the window and falling, falling headfirst to the street ten stories below.