Prelude

The door at the base of the concrete staircase burst open revealing four men dressed in tactical black. Their weapons positioned at the low ready, flashlights strobing over the fluorescent flicker before them.

The door closed quietly behind the echo of boots moving tactically over the square staircase as they wound upward.

The unreliable light resting next to the steel door marked ‘4th Floor’ buzzed audibly on revealing the masked men soundlessly rounding the bend in the concrete steps. They moved in perfect unison, as if operating from a single mind. 

Beneath the dark visors and body armor, men quaked in their skin, eyes still full of the images they’d witnessed. As far as each was concerned they were about to open the devil’s door. The front man locked his eyes to the looming mark. The steel barricade standing bravely between they and their target. Not one seemed to taste the fear rising bitterly from their stomachs, there was no room for the irrationality it brought.

Their lives depended on precision at this point.

The carnage left so publically in the monsters wake was too calculated, too perfect to make sense… It wasn’t a crime of passion. It was a proclamation, an ego trip, a message, no doubt it must have been a he they guessed, whispers of a lone wolf slithered over the air waves the team of lethal assassins had left in their wake. The outside world was dead to them until they’d freed themselves of another mission.

Family members held their breath from home. Clinging to one another, the moment the phone had rung they’d known, their fathers stood from the dinner tables, to assemble. To gear up.

They reached the top of the fourth floor staircase.

Monsters leave breadcrumbs.They want to be found, they are often the little voices no one heard. Whatever happened next they were bound to find something to make some sense of what they’d all witnessed.

Reality had exploded and crumbled in around the city leaving insanity screaming in her wake. Her streets were on fire with fear, rage, patriotism, and casting fingers pointing and wagging. Wagering what might have motivated such mindless violence, unlike anything they’d ever seen…

And so publically.

The reaper had dealt a hand that would never be forgotten, now they needed answers to appease crowds and calm the chaos, before the piper laid his claim too.

The officers stopped at the top of the stairwell briefly, listening at the solid door before the front man motioned for the others to follow on his count. The door swung inward silently exposing a deep blue carpeted floor leading through a row of paper thin wooden frames labeled in black numbers.

The team swiftly followed the wall until they reached the door labeled 463. Without hesitation the team lead inspected the doorway before signalling the man in the rear to move forward with the battering ram. In one foul swoop the door gave way, splintering at the knob and shooting little spines and splinters into the air around it.

The team filtered into the dark entryway, flashing their mounted lights at the low ready as they prepared for the worst. They had been to the scene of the crime, they’d seen the aftermath created by the contents of this apartment. The barely bobbing beams highlighted a scene straight from horror.

Flashlights slowed over walls pasted in pictures tied together ominously in red yarn and thumbtacks. Collages of newspaper articles, tabloids baring familiar faces and stories of indiscretion, secrets, fabrications.

This one’s left a web. The thought shot into the front man’s head, joining in with the rest of the horror implanted since the event. So many dead...

In light of what they now knew the constellation map spelt destruction, quietly the officers each reflected on the fact that many of those faces would never be seen again breathing. It all started to make a morbid kind of sense, though no one wished to admit they could see it.

The front man quickly drifted into the living room, doing his best not to fall victim to the smell of rot and stale air. The blacked out windows amplified the effect of the black light on the white newspapers messily bundled on the coffee table. His black steel-toed boots swam through wrappers of all kinds, accidentally kicking into a glass bottle, it clanked noisily into the invisible frame of a cluttered end table.

Resetting his stride he pointed his flashlight at the couch and chairs, there were gouges across the surface where stuffing exploded forth like little clusters of cumulus cloud. Two more lights bobbed forward to join his as each member took a moment to gather in the details defining complete depravity. In the glow offered by their lowered weapons the leader looked around at his team, awful horror shining from eaches eyes to confirm not one of them was prepared to meet the situations maker.

He raised his radio from its place at his chest.

“All Clear.”