He never ran to the bathroom stalls faster. In his wake, the lights were flickering again.
“Hey! Don’t leave us here in the dark! Hey! Come back!” the elder brother screamed after Randal to no avail.
“Just my luck getting the room next to the noisy icebox.” Hendricks wisecracked, not letting go of his substandard motel analogy even when his audience had been reduced only to two young men losing their minds.
Randal was panting hard as though he’d just run a marathon. His physique was closer to the archetypal donuts and coffee build expected in his line of work than most of his coworkers, and it showed during times like this when sprinting was part of the job. Sweat was pouring down his face in thick streamers that smelled sour. He hadn’t put it together yet that it wasn’t just the exercise breaking sweat over his brow. Knots of dread began to coil themselves tight within his belly, like a constrictor snake squeezing the life out of his intestines. His considerable bulk was leaning into the locked door to the stalls, and his hand gripped the sharply cold metal handle fruitlessly. His rattling at it accomplished nothing, nor did the handle itself budge an inch. Like most rooms in this building, the bathroom stalls, like you’d see in any other outlet or shopping mall, had a locking mechanism. Yet, in the daylight hours at least, they were never to be locked, and Randal nor any other officer thought it very likely that they’d ever have to hole up in the stalls to wait out a riot or the apocalypse. It wouldn’t have been an issue if Randal could be bothered to remember to keep a spare key on him, and this thought reared its ugly head to chastise him as he patted down his empty pockets.
Deprived of a means of entry into the washrooms, and with the immediacy of the situation taking massive precedence over his outward image of composure, Randal took to merely banging on the door and screaming for the Chief to hurry the fuck up and get out of the crapper, we have some crazies pitching a fit, goddammit.
“Chief, you slug, get out here! Kid’s gonna give himself fuckin’ brain damage!”
Randal hadn’t thought to take the cell key he should have had access to and manually subdue the hysterical man. This drastic oversight could have been mere panicked incompetence, but part of Randal bubbling up from his subconscious realized that it was keeping that idea from the rest of him, not only because he feared what would happen if he met a maddened man with force, but also because the jailed boys’ delusions had found a foothold in Randal’s mind. He was afraid.
His banging accomplished nothing, and a sharp metallic smell struck his nose as he felt his shoes squelch into something wet, something rapidly pooling under the stall door. Randal froze, grimly certain what he would see when he looked down, and so reluctant to do so and make it come true. Eventually of course, he did look down, and when he did he saw exactly what he was afraid he would.
Blood. A dark, thick spreading puddle of blood seeping heavily out from under the door. In the darkened lighting, it looked almost black.
Randal choked back vomit and shrank away from the sight, words freezing in his narrowed throat. His eyes were wider than he thought they could get, and he felt his hands automatically clamp to his mouth. Back when he’d been an emergency medical technician in his younger, fitter days, he’d learned very quickly that he wasn’t cut out for the work. He always got faint around the sight of blood and gore, ever since he’d been a kid. He hated scraping his knees falling down or crashing his bike, and getting his shots had always been a nightmare. As a young man, he’d stifled his disgust reflexes as best he could and tried to bear with the job and do some good.
That ended when they were called in to clean up the aftermath of an accident involving a big rig semi truck that’d plowed right into a line of traffic-jammed cars. The driver had been going on three hours of sleep, energy drinks, and, as toxicology reports would later confirm, a nip of methamphetamine. He had rounds to make and a schedule to keep, and sleep was secondary. But, his body didn’t care about deadlines, and sleep won over eventually. It won forever, as the driver hit hard enough to be ejected out through the windshield, and he never woke up again.
When Randal had heard that detail, before he showed up on the scene, the first thing his mind had gone to was that, if the big truck had a big enough impact to send its driver flying, what did the luckless line of cars and their passengers look like? They never stood a chance. When Randal arrived on the scene, the oily smell of diesel smoke and burning debris was thick and cloying in the air, and what were once cars were now shredded yard sale displays of scrap metal and shattered window glass.
The very first body Randal saw at the scene of that awful accident had been a young woman - couldn’t have been older than her early twenties - severed in half at the waist. He found her upper body - the rest from the waist down was still buckled in. The fragility of human life was rammed into his head like a railroad spike as he saw tattered rags of flesh where her torso ended, and thick, ropey things that he realized with mounting horror had been the woman’s intestines. She had almost surely died instantly, or close to it, given the huge spread of blood that had already begun to congeal under her. That’s what Randal’s rational, practiced medical-oriented mind told itself, but the dead woman’s eyes told a different story that would haunt the man for as long as he lived. They were wide open, staring. They had a bewildered look of shock, but not of the dumb sort. In those still orbs, Randal could see that the realization of what had happened to her had dawned on the woman before she bled out. Her last thoughts would have been of how she had lost her lower half from under her. Her arms had been laid at her sides, left in a testament of how she must have been feeling for the legs that were no longer there.
Randal had vomited long and hard then, and then he passed out. One of his own coworkers at the time had to take him to a hospital separately, and less than a week later Randal handed in his notice.
He’d taken his role in the Station Bay police force under the understanding that he’d be a paper pusher for much of his time, and rarely see much action. He didn’t have the stomach for it. And now, here was another scene of grisly carnage laid out before him, all the same.
He turned around, turning his back to the door, and crouched over, knowing without having to look in a mirror that all the color was draining out of his till-then reddened face. He had to go tell the guys, that was his priority right now, had to call for them if they hadn’t heard his shouts to the Chief already, but he knew no noise would come out of his throat. His fingers felt welded to his mouth by hardened saliva, and he knew that their presence was the only thing holding back another session of overwhelmed trauma vomit. He felt for sure that on its heels would be a fainting spell, as had happened to him back then. He couldn’t lose consciousness, not in the vicinity of whatever had done… whatever it did… to the Chief. Whatever it was the boys in the cell were rightly scared senseless of.
He’d just take a few moments to steady himself, then he’d sprint double time for backup.
He heard the door click unlocked behind him, and creak open with a sound like the door to a stereotypical haunted house.
…
Back in the breakroom, Dean looked worried to Forest.
“What’s wrong?” Forest asked.
“It seems too quiet, suddenly. I don’t like it. Randal sent you to get me, right? Who’s with him right now?” Dean asked.
“Nobody. There are only three prisoners spending the night, and they’re all in one corner. Why?” Forest asked.
“I’ve just got a bad feeling. Excuse me.” Dean shuffled out of the room, leaving Forest bewildered in the breakroom.
The latter decided to kick his feet up and at least enjoy his fresh cup of coffee. That pencil-pusher Wilcox couldn’t reprimand him to get off his ass back here, not understaffed for tonight as they were and with the old man having to manage the front desk. Suddenly, Forest found he needed the break for the first really legitimate time he had ever taken it. His nerves were jittering, and there was a slow wave of anxiety flowing over him.
Dean came back. “Wing’s empty.” he said.
“Randal checked out?” Forest asked.
“No, you don’t understand.” Dean spoke dryly. “It’s empty. The cells too.”
Forest shot back up, knocking over his chair and dropping his half-finished mug of coffee to the carpeted white tile. It shattered apart there, and neither of them cared. “You mean they’re open?!”
“No.” Dean shook his head. “Not open. They’re still locked. The prisoners just aren’t there.”
“Well they didn’t just vanish!” Forest smacked the table. “Look, you stay here, I’m going to go find Randal, ok?”
Dean nodded sullenly. “Forest?” he asked as the slightly older officer held at the exit.
“What is it?” Forest asked Dean.
“Be careful.” Dean said.
Forest nodded, a forced smile tugging at the corners of his lips. Then he was sweeping the halls for the missing number among their now shared flock of jailers and the jailed.
Dean, with nothing better left to do while his mind was numbed by dread, simply looked over his sketch of the clawed jester, his head hanging almost limply as though all the life had gone out of his body.
A dark shadow rose over the paper in the form of a tall silhouette, one whose head was split into two diverging conical ends. Dean heard the soft jingling of small bells.
“You caught my bad side in this sketch, officer.” a low, poison voice drawled.
Dean’s skin crawled as he felt the cold touch of a long blade on the back of his neck, even as his trained hand drifted to his holster.
In the front desk room, Wilcox and Lester both jumped when they heard a gunshot - loud, crisp, and booming - echo out from the bowels of the police station. Their hearts hammered in their chests as they both looked at each other, then took their firearms from their belts and stood at the ready.
"That came from inside this building, something's wrong." Wilcox grit his teeth. "Lester, take point, I'm right behind you."
Lester nodded, his face pale, making a few razor burn marks amidst his stubble stand out as angry pink spots. As Lester crept down the hall under the archway bearing the premature welcome banner for their new transfer recruit, Wilcox secured the perimeter and engaged the hidden switch to put the precinct under emergency lockdown. The doors automatically locked, and metal shutters unfurled to drape the windows. Only one of the officers could engage the override control with their fingerprints and a special passcode.
No one was getting in or out of the station. Whoever was dumb enough to attack the SBPD on their own soil had balls if nothing else, but it was clear their logic was tanked and their luck had run out. Without having to be told, they all somehow knew that the serial killer they'd been looking for was now among them.
"Saved us the trouble of hunting you down." Wilcox licked the corner of his mouth.
Right now, he very much wished he hadn't already finished his bag of cinnamon hard candies earlier in the day; they had been his substitute vice when he gave up the cigars, and he had rationalized that at his upper middle aged point in his life, a few cavities made little difference when he was well on his way to lose his teeth anyway. Without something on hand to quell his oral fixation, he found his teeth grinding the way he'd expect a man loaded on amphetamines might grind his teeth in one of the cells overnight.
Wilcox caught up to Lester at the hallway junction where one end split to the basement stairway, leading down to the temporary cell block Randal had been guarding. The lights were flickering overhead here in the room before the outer iron gate at the top of the stairs, as though the creeping darkness of the basement had spread and begun infecting the building proper. When Wilcox's boots made a creaking sound in the hallway, Lester jumped and whirled on the elder cop, almost drawing his gun on him.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
"Christ! Watch where you point that thing!" Wilcox shielded his face.
"S-Sorry, Cox." Lester scratched the back of his head in nervous embarrassment, forgetting in their mutual panic that he hadn't taken the safety lock off of his pistol.
They straddled the gate, peering through its bars down into blackness that swallowed the stairs. Wilcox fumbled for the keys and grunted for Lester to cover him. The keys clashed against the heavy iron door, and it swung open with a protracted creak. Right now it felt more like an emergency bulkhead on a ship than anything else, a heavy and oppressive feeling walled off behind it, like canned malice. Ambient dread leaked out of the permeable membrane bridging the hall to the basement even before the door swung open.
With bated breaths, the men descended.
"Dean? Forest? Randal?! If you fucks can hear us, answer!" Lester called down the shortening stairs as their boots echoed off of each cold step.
Then their feet touched floor, and they were walking amongst the rows of cells. Wilcox kept to the rear position of their two-man formation, fetching his standard issue heavy black flashlight from his belt and shining it over Lester's shoulder to light the way for the younger man in the event he needed to aim his gun.
It almost went off in Hendricks face when the small man with a shock of thinning, witch-like white hair crashed into them, shrinking and cowering and raving about the dark. "Hendricks you oaf!" Lester cried as he stumbled backward into Wilcox. "What are you doing out of your cell?!"
The old man clutched at Lester's collar. "Them boys across from me," he squealed in a high-pitched, child-like falsetto. "They took them a little walk, hehehe!"
His jowls were quivering, and he was shaking like a leaf. He smelled like rank pickle juice. Wilcox knew in an instant that the coot had come unhinged, that they were staring into the eyes of a madman. Those wide saucers were windows into a world of paranoia and terror for which the only escape was into lunacy and irreverent cackling.
He'd seen it plenty times before, in all kinds of different people; people suffering waking nightmares on narcotics that had induced psychosis, battered women who had become all but empty shells under the inescapable caul of oppression, children whose parents had killed each other in front of them and left their blood splatters on their young angelic faces. Back when he'd worked guard duty on Death Row, it was a look he sometimes saw on the condemned inmates, whose foreknowledge of their coming fates had finally made them crack after years of waiting. Some voluntarily waived their appeals just to not delay the inevitable any longer. Death was better than madness for them.
All those times, Wilcox had been prepared and expected to see what he saw. He had been given the summary details of what he was walking into, and knew how to look for the signs. Reports of erratic behavior, or sounds of screaming and crashing dishes, these all carried the warning flags that maddened eyes were a distinct possibility.
Never had Wilcox been blindsided by someone in the grip of madness rushing out of the darkness, just materializing in front of him. In that moment, the fact that Hendricks was an arthritis-riddled relic who a moderately strong child could probably break in half seemed completely unimportant. Wilcox saw the wild animal fear in his bugged-out eyes, and it scared him bad.
"Let him go, Lester." he told the younger officer.
Lester looked at Wilcox incredulously.
"We're under lockdown, he can't go far. We have priorities to attend to." Wilcox said.
Lester nodded and stood aside, letting the terrified Hendricks scramble off and up the stairs. Beyond, they found the two cells divided by Randall's empty watch desk. Both cell doors were closed still, but the one that had housed the two brothers was barren except for long scuff marks in the stone - four slashes, side by side. The beds, chairs, even the built in sink and toilet were just… gone.
"What the hell?" Lester spoke dryly.
"The shot didn't come from down here." Wilcox deduced.
How could the acoustics have been so warped though? The building wasn't so convoluted that even rookie officers wouldn't be able to tell up from down, or where a loud sound had originated. Then again, people couldn't walk through iron bars or make the contents of a cell just disappear out of sight. Wilcox's gaze was transfixed on the gaping hole in the ground where the toilet should have been connected.
Then, a crash came from upstairs. The officers exchanged glances, then sprinted up to the ground floor as quickly as their legs could carry them, with Wilcox finding a reserve of athleticism in him he hadn’t drawn on since high school football. In the corridors above, Forest knocked into the both of them, and all three men went sprawling.
“Jesus! What the hell are you thinking?!” Wilcox grabbed the younger officer by his collar and gave him a rough shake. “That’s been two close calls via failure to abide by safety regulations in an emergency situation, and there will not be a third, is that clear?!”
Forest’s face was slick with sweat, his eyes wide and frightened. His jaw quivered as his mouth and lips tried and failed repeatedly to make words. “T-The bathroom…” he groaned low and gutterally, hands trembling.
“What about it? Was that where the crash came from?” Lester asked.
“No… Randal… th-the chief…” Forest looked behind them, and drew his gun by his side, pale face cast into the darkness beyond the hall.
“Did you fire that shot we heard?” Wilcox asked, dusting himself off as he stood and smoothed out the wrinkles of his pants.
“No, not me.” Forest shook his head.
Though his gun was drawn, Forest would not move forward, and his eyes had taken on a glazed, vacant look. He appeared to be in shock and freezing up, not able to act on the muscle memory the academy had instilled him with. There was a disconnect somewhere in his mind, that much could be gleaned from a look, if you knew the signs to look for.
While Wilcox examined Forest, Lester had gone on ahead. “Aw shit! Cox! Get in here!”
The elder man did, leaving Forest there still standing in his paralyzed fugue. The moment Wilcox passed the threshold, he fell back against the wall with a heavy sinking feeling, his nose recoiling at the scent of blood. Lester was biting his lower lip as he looked down at Randal, lying on his back in the pool of spreading blood. It was clear that there had been separate puddles that had leaked into each other and connected at the middle, with an ungodly mess of it splashed all about the bathroom tiles and walls. It could be assumed from Forest’s choked statement that the chief was the other victim.
As for Randal himself, his shirt and the flesh under it was split open in four long gashes, blood welling up from between the ridges of sliced skin like cranberry juice being squeezed out from a barrel of them underfoot. Chunks of his throat had been gouged out, leaving slick gristle and exposed bone behind. Another set of slashes were drawn horizontally across his waist and the lip of his lower belly. His utility belt had been cleanly ripped through in the path of the presumed claws during the attack. Randal’s face was painted red and slicked with a full sheet of blood that matted his hair, and a backwash of it still bubbled in the back of his throat where it had collected.
“Dear God, Randal....” Wilcox wiped his mouth.
He and Lester both nearly had heart attacks when they heard Randal gurgle and begin convulsing, making sick choking noises as he aspirated the drainage of his own slashed jugular vein. Lester was the faster of the two, and reflexively threw himself at Randal’s side, slicking his knees and palms with blood as he knelt beside him and tried to lift the fallen man’s head, trying in some numb way to help him clear out the blood he was choking on. Randal’s pudgy hand gripped Lester’s wrist like an iron vice, hard enough to leave bruises, and his upturned face revealed a single glassy eye peeking through the blood. The other eye, Lester realized, had been plucked out, leaving only an empty hole staring back at him.
Lester heard the desperate whistling air noises of a man trying to speak through a decimated windpipe, even as he began to seize and fade. Lester could read lips, though, and he was able to pick out “hallways” before Randal’s lips fell still.
The wounded cop’s head fell back, his body finally going slack and limp, and he was gone. Murdered in their own precinct.
“He said the hallways.” Lester looked back at Wilcox with haunted eyes, lost like a child’s might be.
Wilcox nodded, checking the hall at their back where he saw Forest now crouched and rubbing his temples with his fingers in little circle motions, his gun forgotten on the ground. “Les, go snap Forest out of it.” Wilcox ordered, carefully stepping past Lester and over the fresh corpse on the ground to shine his flashlight into the bathrooms. Lester was in no condition to survey whatever had become of their Chief, Wilcox understood, and steeled himself to examine the carnage in his stead.
When Wilcox came back out again, he looked to be at his limit. “It’s worse.”
Then the two of them had Forest under the arms and were trying to shake him back to his senses. There was a dangerous fugitive still inside the building, two of their men were dead, and another was missing, they needed everyone operational.
“Randal said something about the hallways in the backrooms of the station before he… before he died…” Lester looked down, letting the reality of his coworker’s sudden and violent death sink in as the words left his lips. “Did you see anything back there?”
Forest rapidly shook his head. “N-No, I went to find Randal, like Dean had said. He was working on the sketch in the break...breakroom.”
“He’s alone back there?!” Wilcox shouted.
Then they were all guns drawn and rushing to the breakroom, single file with Lester taking point, Forest sandwiched in between as though caught in a tide, and Wilcox at his back shoving him to get his ass in gear.
The first thing they all noticed when they barged into the breakroom was the table Dean had been writing on split in two down the middle, broken perfectly in half. An empty clip was lying beside an overturned chair, and a few splotches of blood peppered the carpet.
"They lead to the closet." Wilcox noted.
Lester moved to the standing cabinet with its slotted wood panel front, and stood to the side with his gun drawn and one hand tentatively gripping the handle. Wilcox nodded, and Lester threw the door open wide. Dean, clutching a shoulder wound and a grazed neck, tumbled out of the cabinet onto his knees. Wilcox and Lester caught him under the arms and lent their shoulders to support his weight.
"Dean, fucks' sake, what happened?" Lester said with a concerned tremor in his voice.
Dean was panting hard, his cheeks flushed with effort, and his knees shook a bit as he found his strength to stand again. The young man pointed his free hand to the twisting darkened corridors. "Our perp went that way." he managed.
Wilcox noticed Dean's pistol half-dangling out of a damaged and scuffed holster. He looked again to the empty clip.
"Did you fire off every round? I thought we only heard one shot." Wilcox said.
"You did only hear one shot. Freak took the rest." Dean grunted.
"Forest, get your ass over here and help us!" Wilcox barked at the still subtly hysterical Forest.
"No, get off me, I'm ok." Dean shook off his helpers, and stood. "Any spare rounds?"
"Randal had a full clip on him, I should have thought to take it." Lester looked down.
"No, you did fine, son. Best not to touch the bodies; this is a crime scene now. Here, take my spare." Wilcox supplied fresh ammunition to his junior officer.
"This the culprit?" Lester picked up the composite sketch of the masked, clawed jester; it was splotched with blood now, a corner torn.
"That's him, alright. Halloween came early." Dean cleared his parched throat.
Forest finally came out of his daze, staggering over to the sketch to take it in. His moistened eyes trained themselves on those twenty four inch raking claws.
"I can believe it. If you'd seen that nightmare back in the crappers-" Forest began.
"I trust you. We'll mourn our fallen brothers after we apprehend him. I heard the lockdown protocols engage, he has nowhere to run." Dean said, loading the clip into his gun.
"Don't be too sure." Wilcox said.
"What do you mean?" Dean asked.
"Our boy here's a ghost. As in enigmatic - so far - we'll know soon enough if he's flesh and blood or not." Lester quipped.
Dean looked at Lester with an uncertain expression on his face, then silently eyeballed Wilcox for an explanation.
"Let's just say the harlequin has a few magic tricks up his sleeves. The contents of an entire cell are just gone, the inmates included, and that coot Hendricks is roaming around ranting and raving about it." Wilcox scratched his head. "I'm not sure how he did it, but it'd be safer for us to assume he can freely move through the station. If anyone happened to stumble over some secret passageways I was never made aware of, now's the time to speak up."
The other three men all shook their heads.
"Dean, you said he took your bullets. This guy have a peacekeeper on him?" Lester asked.
"I don't think so. Just snatched them on a whim, or to rub it in, I think." Dean said.
"What do you mean?" Wilcox asked.
"I mean he roughed me up a bit, then tossed me aside and fled the scene with a skip in his step. He's faster than you'd think, redirected my aim with his claws before I could pull the trigger. The shot you heard was the only one I got the chance to fire, for all the good it did me. His other claw clutched the clip out from under me in the same stroke. The way he moved was like he was dancing around me." Dean said.
His face fell, and anger grew in his eyes as it sank in how easily he had been brushed aside.
"He's toying with us, then." Wilcox surmised.
Psychological warfare, from the sound of it, but why put so much effort into convoluted antics when it was surely more practical to go straight for the kill? Wilcox didn't like what these indulgences implied - that the killer was in no rush, and did not consider the police gathered together here a threat. They were like flies corked in a sadistic boy's killing bottle.
"Enough standing around." Wilcox renewed his mettle. "Dean, patch yourself up," he tossed him a med pack from the counter by the sink. "We're giving pursuit, destination is the back rooms."
Idle hands were the devil's playthings.
Forest whipped his head back and forth. “N-No way, we need reinforcements!”
Wilcox flicked the younger man’s forehead playfully. “We are the reinforcements, in case you’ve forgotten. You’ve got a badge, same as us. Start acting like it.”
Sullenly, Forest swallowed his spit and then nodded. Dean pat his back. “Let’s go catch this fucker. Payback time.”