They collectively made their way to the threshold of the great twisting halls, the bowels of the renovated station that had once been a labyrinthe of storage spaces and dizzying walkway intersections. The floor here was something like waxed marble, and the men’s footsteps echoed resoundingly through the empty corridors. Under ordinary circumstances, it might have been fitting to split up and cover more ground, but Wilcox wasn’t about to fan out and throw caution to the wind without understanding how it was that the perp was able to evade and ambush them so effectively. Beyond that, it was easy enough to get lost in the halls, and radio signals weren’t always reliable here.
They wandered aimlessly without a lead for some time until they happened upon a few more splotches of blood. These were fresh enough that Dean realized they were probably the remnants of his own blood, dripping from the killer’s steel claws as he slinked about the halls. Cold fury died in his throat before he let himself vent, but Lester noticed the twitch in his eye and the way his fists balled up.
“Remember, we’re in cramped quarters,” Wilcox whispered to his fellow officers. “If it comes down to it, don’t just start blasting willy-nilly, last thing we need is a few friendly fire shots.”
“You shouldn’t have brought me.” Forest said; he was still sweating profusely in cold terror, and his fingers quivered around the grip of his gun.
He was visibly the weak link, even a child could surmise that much now. Whether Forest had meant to imply that he didn’t trust himself not to lose it and start shooting at everything that moved at the slightest provocation, Wilcox didn’t pass comment and didn’t care to know. He didn’t want to picture one of his best men like that.
The drops of blood continued to string them along through the halls, taking lefts and rights at random. At last, they came to one of the disused storage spaces in a dead-end hall. A heavy steel shutter was pulled down to the walkway, but there was no lock holding it in place.
“I thought they dispensed with these doors when they converted the building into a station?” Lester asked.
“They did. They were supposed to, anyway.” Wilcox held his chin.
“Looks like they missed a spot.” Dean said. He put a hand to the shutter. “I’m opening it. Be prepared.”
The other three stood at the ready, guns poised. Dean gave a countdown signal with his free hand - 3, 2, 1 - and then threw the shutter upward. He drew his own gun on the inside of the storage unit within that same moment, reflexes overclocked on mixed adrenaline and vengefulness.
All four men instantly drew back, gaping in horror. Inside the unit they found not the killer, having boxed himself into a corner like a child pulling the blanket up over their eyes from the boogeyman and hoping for the best, but the grisly remains of the Chief who had perished in the bathroom. His face was flayed open, his jaw broken in half at the middle and splayed out like mandibles. His throat was slashed open and his tongue pulled through the neckhole like an obscene necktie. Both arms were split open, along with the legs, and all four limbs were twisted in horrible contortions like a condemned man broken on the wheel in the Middle Ages. Shards of bone were shattered and poked through the flesh of the limbs like quills in random places. He had been disemboweled too, his stomach and torso nothing more than an empty cavity yawning at them. The Chief’s own ripped out veins and arteries were tangled around his corpse like confetti. Countless streaks of those four parallel slash wounds marked the whole of his mutilated body everywhere else.
“Dear God…” Wilcox went pale.
The killer evidently didn’t like the Chief very much in particular, judging from the special attention that was paid to carving him up. Wilcox and the others could only hope that most of the disfigurements were inflicted post mortem. Merely looking at the sack of meat scarecrow who had once been their boss, it was impossible to tell that the Chief had once been a living man, or that they had been cracking jokes about his constipation issues just handfuls of minutes ago.
“How did he get here?” Dean spoke dryly.
Wilcox felt ice go down his spine. How did the Chief get here? Wilcox and Lester had both investigated the scene of both the Chief’s and Randal’s gory deaths. The Chief had been murdered in the bathroom, and it was there that his body was left. There was no way anyone should have been able to drag his body all the way across the station and into the back halls with the men merely a dozen feet from the task at any given time. Even if someone could have managed it, the blood trail hadn’t picked up till well into the maze-like halls. With so many open, mortal wounds, anyone manhandling the Chief like dragging a sack of potatoes would have had more than a little blood on them. There weren’t any shutters left, there couldn’t have been.
Wilcox considered for a moment that he might be having a particularly vivid bad dream. Even more than the impossibility of everything he had witnessed here tonight, the fact that he had already felt a cold dread clinging to him when he was merely doing his office work in the reception area would support the idea that this was nothing more than a nightmare. There was comfort in that thought, and that comfort scared Wilcox back into lucidity. He couldn’t afford to assume there was no danger. A man who loses his focus loses his life in their line of work. Besides, Wilcox had always figured that nightmares had their purpose too. He didn’t gel with the idea that they and dreams in general were subconscious backwash and unsorted files that the sleeping brain sorted through and tried to make sense of, that was too purposeless and chock-full of psychobabble for his liking. Nightmares were no different than any other scary situation for him - they were simulations. Training exercises.
“Everyone, b-” Wilcox began.
But whether this was nightmare or reality, Wilcox was not in control.
The lights began flickering again. They heard a low, terrified moan leak out of Forest’s throat. The man was at his limit. Then a sound like a thunderclap overhead blew out the lights and plunged them all into darkness. Forest’s mind was flooded with the imagery of Dean’s story about Alcatraz and Cell 14D. He imagined glowing red eyes in the dark, staring back at him and belonging to some hateful creature full of killing spite. He heard his own name whispered to him in a raspy sheet of whistling air.
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Forest ran.
“Forest, damn you! We have to stick together!” Wilcox roared, taking off after him.
He heard Dean and Lester quickly move to keep up with him after getting over their own momentary shocks. They were trying to keep their heads together as best anyone could under the circumstances - good boys.
But Forest was preternaturally fast in the grip of sheer terror, and Wilcox was no spring chicken anymore. His high school football days were well behind him. For some reason, he briefly smelled fresh cut grass, like on the field, and envisioned a draped lemonade stand table that the cheerleader team had set up on one of the hotter days back during the summer games. One of them had been his first love. He thought of this as his heels slipped out from under him on something, and he was falling backward into the dark. The back of his head struck hard floor, and stars exploded into his vision. Half-conscious, he lay there clutching at his head. In his daze, he could make out the red hair and girlish dimples of his high school sweetheart. Like the idea that he was in a nightmare, this vision too was deadly in its false comfort. He forgot where he was, and how old he was. Not long, but long enough.
Dean and Lester should have tripped over him, but they didn’t. It sounded like Wilcox had fallen far away from them, and they heard only his muffled grunt and the sound of his head smacking the ground itself through the echoes reverberating through the guts of the station. Dean skid to a stop, leaning on a wall, and tried to think rationally as Wilcox would have wanted. He took his flashlight and panned it back and forth across the darkness.
“Cox? Forest? Lester? Hello?!” he called out.
He heard his own voice echo back to him, followed by high-pitched, nasally giggles. He heard creaking and grinding somewhere far off, deeper into the tunnels. He turned a corner and saw the horror-stricken face of the elder brother who had disappeared from the basement cell. His eyes were wide, but lifeless, like the eyes of a suffocated fish.
“You’re one of the prisoners…” Dean spoke slowly. “What happened? How did you get out of your cell?” he asked.
The boy only tilted his head like a confused dog. There was the sound of metal scraping metal beyond them, like claws on a shutter. The boy looked back at the sound, as if beckoned by a parent, and trudged off around the corner to answer the call.
“Wait, don’t go back there!” Dean shouted, and ran off after him. “It’s dangerous!”
He turned the corner and saw only the tail of the boy’s shirt disappearing again, this time around the left corner several dozen feet down the end of another hall. Even as he chased after the escaped, daydreaming prisoner, Dean’s instincts were screaming at him this isn’t right. The tunnels didn’t go back this far. Dean didn’t recognize any of it. His echoing steps became the falling of distant rain, and his head felt thick and clouded as he stumbled into some kind of industrial room. The walls were slate gray, and the floor beneath Dean’s feet had become rusted iron grates, underneath which yawned a bottomless black expanse. The shadow of a whirring industrial fan was visible around another corner, breasting a large heating tank of some kind that had long ago gone cold.
Lester heard Dean’s calls. They sounded like they were coming from behind him somehow.
“Dean?!” he pitched back and forth, shining his flashlight wherever he heard noises. It wasn’t just Dean calling after the escaped prisoner now, that racket was now joined by Randall’s dead moans, and a threading collage of disconcerting white noise; falling metal objects thundering on grate floor, slamming lockers, the bleating of lambs, and insane laughter.
Lester jumped when he spotted a crimson configuration on a wall - a completed game of tic-tac-toe painted in blood. The bloody game was running down in thin streaks. The X had won, diagonally from bottom left to top right.
“What the?” - and then Lester’s flashlight flickered and died.
Lester felt his stomach drop. He hadn’t felt like this since he was a kid cuddling up to his mother, scared out of his wits during the thunderstorms and letting her soothe him off to sleep, gently petting the inside of the rim of his ear with one delicate nail. Those memories had been discarded with the patchwork teddy bear he left behind when they moved, and the onset of adolescence had been a welcome transition into a world where monsters didn’t exist.
Now, it felt like adulthood had been a blissful dream, one that he was suddenly waking up from in a panic, and all his forgotten childhood terrors were suddenly remembered. He dropped the flashlight - it was deadweight now anyway - and heard the thud it made on the floor only distantly. His shaking hands reached for a cigarette again, and fumbled badly enough that he almost dropped it more than once. In his yellow shroud of fear, he had forgotten that his lighter was spent. He flicked desperately at the ignition, needing a small bit of light from that tiny flame more than anything else. It gave nothing but a lazy spark once or twice.
“Come on, come on!” Lester whimpered.
Then there was a flame - but not from Lester.
Lester looked up and saw within that small circle of illumination that a gloved hand was reached out to him, turned upward and a single flame flickering on the fingertip. That hand was attached to a black and white striped sleeve that stretched back into the darkness. Lester heard the jingling of bells, and he numbly realized that the hand was attached to a kind of gauntlet affixed to the back of the jester’s hand. There was a thin slot running between two thin pieces of metal pressed together, cradling the man’s knuckles.
The claws, where were the claws?
Lester heard a click.
“Oh.” Lester said.
The quartet of curved, single-edged blades shot out of the slot in the gauntlet like four giant switchblades merged together. The flame had been close enough to light Lester’s cigarette, had he not dropped it just now. As such, when the claws instantly extended from the gauntlet, they effortlessly punched through Lester’s throat. The middle two blades pierced straight through Lester’s adam’s apple and out the back, while the outer blades on either end of the claw sliced skin and snared Lester’s neck like he had been trapped by a trident. The killer easily lifted Lester off his feet by his impaled neck, and pinned him against the wall. The blades sank into the wall as easily as they did flesh, parting stone like butter.
Lester’s hands flew up to his neck, and he fruitlessly grasped at the swords, trying in some mindless way to pry them out of his throat as though he might survive if he could. He lasted only long enough to hear a satisfied snicker before the killer wrapped things up by punching his other set of claws through Lester’s chest, puncturing his heart.
“Three to go.” Lester heard that soft voice say soothingly, and then he heard nothing else ever again.