Earlier the same day
The man’s face felt like a brick wall: cold and unmoving. His skin was dry, the texture not human-like at all. Pat had kneeled down next to the odd corpse, scanning for any details he might had missed.
It wasn’t the first and, most likely, not the last dead body he was going to see today. “Dead for around 3 days... his skin feels like stone. He has sand up his throat… just like the other ones before him.”
The 50 year old man’s eyes wandered around the empty eye sockets of the lifeless husk in front of him. The skin had torn open close to the cold hulls of temples, almost as if the person had frowned too much. The forehead looked like little daisies were trying to grow through a side-walk. “How many of these have appeared already? Can you catch me up on the data real quick, Sam?”
It took Sam a moment to catch on to the command, her thoughts wandering as always. Her fingers were clenched against her clipboard, her fingernails dug into printed sheets of paper, notes spread all over them.
A quick movement of her left hand pushed her round glasses back up her nose – an action connected with her insecurity in stressful situations. Without these glasses she would feel unprotected, surrendered to her surroundings.
“Uh… I’m sorry sir,” she stuttered, flipping a couple of pages as her eyes flew over the paper relentlessly. “20 in the last couple of months, 14 in the last two weeks alone. We have little to no evidence to what happened to them and there never were any clues to who or what did it. No fingerprints, no open wounds, nothing at all. Except for the sand of course.”
Pat, who was currently taking samples of the dead man, sighed as he tapped on the ground with one foot in a slowly fastening pattern. “Come on Sammy, you agreed on getting some practical experience. You know how the business works here, think a little bit out of the box.
He sighed, continued, “Also, I told you to call me Pat. Screw all this formal talk bullshit. We are always fully honest, remember?”
She needs to get out of her comfort zone. I can’t put her to any use if she isn’t able to solve things herself, he thought.
The man waved around with a small utensil he had just used to get some skin tissue from the dead body. His voice remained calm, yet sharp: “In fact, you were the one that asked over and over again for the permission to leave the office and help with the actual process instead of just office stuff. Why are you always this diverted from our work? Grow some balls.”
Sam rubbed the palm of her nose while double checking her notes for any useful information. Her voice sounded like usual, rather quiet and lightly stuttering. It seemed impossible to focus right now... she was just too nervous.
“I’m sorry sir… I mean Pat. It’s not the work itself that bothers me. The problem is the oddity of these cases.” She kept turning pages, comparing all of the documents with each other in analytic manner. “Sure, we are a department for extraordinary cases, but corpses that turn into stone with no states of decay is still a little bit too much for me too handle.”
The plain smell of sand filled the young females nostrils, mixed with the unpleasant stench of her working partner: cigarettes and cheap booze. She remembered herself that he was one of the good guys, at least she hoped so. There weren’t many she could call her allies anymore.
“You need to get used to stuff like that if you wanna last out here,” he said and pointed at the dead body. He put a sample – which was more or less a bag filled with dry rubble – inside a side pocket of his clothing.
Fingers stumbled upon a single cigarette. The man fished it out, lit it with his beloved lighter. “Looks like you forgot that one, huh? Can’t let this one get to waste, sorry.”
A long drag followed by a cloud of smoke created a moment of silence in the rather cold winter night. The lights of the city drowned out the most stars on the horizon, yet the side street they were currently standing in was rather dark and dimly lit. Not a single soul except them appeared to be nearby, words lightly echoing from the concrete walls not too far away.
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Pat flicked his fingers to remove some burned down ash off his cigarette, which slowly floated on the cold paved ground. A light breeze blew through the narrow side street, the only direct light source being a barely working street lamp. The lamp emitted a quiet electric humming, silently flickering in the darkness as if to fight for its life.
“You never know what you run across,” Pat continued, “I’ve seen things in and around this city which should better stay hidden from the public eye. People which started falling upwards into the sky, their bodies upside down as if gravity had gotten turned on its head. We once had a case with a deer, roaming around the forest, walking on its hind legs. It imitated human speech and tried to lead people towards cliffs at nighttime.”
Pat put his right hand on Sam’s shoulder, sighed. “There are so many stories of people losing their mind by paranormal activities. People ripped out of their previous life by horrors beyond theyre comprehension. Believe me,” he took another long drag, “if anything about our work here gets made public, all the citizens would freak out.”
“And that’s why it’s our work to make sure they wont find out, I get it. But why do we never find anyone or anything causing all these oddities. I mean,” Sam readjusted her glasses once again, “there must be a reason for all of this stuff, right?”
“There for sure is a greater picture for all of this. Sadly, all we can do for now is pick out as much information as we possibly can.”
Sam’s posture had stiffened. The sheer descriptions of these cases alone made her want to go back to her office, covered behind her comfortably warm and cozy desk, where nothing could hurt her. Maybe, if she asked nicely, Pat would allow her to go back.
No, I can’t keep running away from my past, she thought. I did join the department for a reason, I need to find out what caused my life to break apart.
“There might be a reason for all of these cases, there might not. Sam listen up! There for sure is a reason why I told you all these stories. It’s not the first time you hear about stuff like that. You agreed on this back as you joined, remember? There was no doubt in your eyes back then, so why is there now?”
The man backed up, stretched out his shoulder with circular movements.
“There are reasons why I accepted you to join me. I remember the raw energy in every word you told me after you came inside of my office, tears streaming down your face, as you swore to avenge your family's death. You wanted an answer to all of the questions that got burned inside of your head back that night 5 years ago, right?”
He moved a little bit closer to the young adult, white smoke emitting from his nose. “But we can’t get any informations if you won’t focus on our work. You will have to make a decision, Sammy. Either stay here and stick through all of the shit this city throws at us,” he finished his cigarette and put it out with his sole pressing it against the cold ground beneath their feet, “or you go home and try to move on with your life without ever getting a single answer.”
He held out his hands, gesturing, “Now, tell me Sam,” his cold yet comforting eyes cast upon the young adult like a spell, “How do you decide?”
Sam clenched her left hand, almost as if she tried to rip out her notes. She never let Pats words get too close, especially since he tended to always be a little bit too honest. He usually said things without thinking too much about them, causing problematic situations for him and the people around him.
But this time the old man’s words cut deep inside of Sam’s consciousness. He had put his thumb into an aching wound of her mind. It hurt, but she now knew it had been necessary.
He is right. I need to change.
This time, his honesty was what Sam’s ears needed to hear. He really is right. She couldn’t pretend that sitting around and formatting papers would bring her parents back. Her siblings wouldn’t magically turn alive again and praise her how well she sorted her chef’s folders after the colours of the rainbow. She needed to act, and she needed to do it now.
She flipped over a couple of pages, her movements now more defined than before. “Actually, I’ve got some more informations about the case. I looked through some of the files we got in our database back in the office. I found out that all the deaths surrounding this case happen after a fixed pattern.”
Pat pulled up a single brow, said, “Go on.”
Sam used a red pen to mark some spots on a map, visualizing the positions of the victims. “It’s as if the victims get selected under a strict series of criteria. If we follow these criteria, we should be able to spot the next victims and investigate further from there.”
She could have sworn that Pat’s lips had moved up by an inch for a split second. He crossed his arms, remained silent.
The young adult wiped a single hairline out of her face and behind her ear, cleared her throat.
This is it. I think I got it figured out now.
“I get what you were saying before, thanks for setting my goals straight again. This was the kind of slap in the face that I needed. I will be more confident in my work from now on.”
“Lets get going now,” Sam’s posture relaxed, her speech now being more clear and defined, “we’re going to have a lot of shit to get through after all.”
The words of the female made the rather old man chuckle with his deep, smoky voice. “That’s what I wanted to hear from you Sammy. Now you sound like a hunter again, not the prey.”
A fist playfully hit her shoulder.
Pat rubbed his palms against each other, said, “Let’s get out of this boring ass side street now. We got some stone killer’s ass to kick.”
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