No Grave Sneak Peek #3: Scene of the Crime
Nicole entered the alley warily, as though a creature might still be there waiting, biding its time in hopes of further prey. She imagined it with slavering jaws, growling lips peeled back to reveal yellowed fangs, and breath like an exhumed corpse—but there was nothing there. It was just a dark, cramped space between two dilapidated buildings. To the west there was the side of an old warehouse that had been torn apart by Sandy. A sign screaming ‘For Lease!’ hung hopelessly from its side. The building’s concrete carcass blocked the setting sun and made the whole alleyway cool and dim. A window in the side of the building facing the alley gaped open, glass teeth jutting from its frame.
Nicole could taste rusted metal. There was a sound in her ear, a distant whistle, and beneath it she heard her friends voices as though she was underwater. She took a step forward, her foot landing next to a mottled red-brown splash of dried blood. She glimpsed down at it and, for a second, it seemed bright red, still wet and fresh. She could hear the crisp, smacking sound of it splattering across the alleyway floor. She blinked, and the blood had crusted over again, long dry. Misshapen droplets of ichor were spread across the next few feet of cement. The wound had been deep, and the man had tried to run away, sending drops of blood cascading to the ground.
“So there’s the initial,” Christina explained, her voice distorted under the whistle in Nicole’s head. She pointed to the splotch of gore by Nicole’s foot. “Bunch’a punctures to the lower calf and Achilles staggered him, but he must have tried to run, anyway, because the pattern spreads out for another few feet…”
“Then he got hit again,” Nicole continued. She stared at another grainy, sanguine patch of crimson splashed against the alley’s east wall. Looking at it, she could almost hear the echo of the man’s scream. The blood stain shivered, calling her forward. There were long rivulets crisscrossing the alley between this second strike and the final one, the thin trails of gore making it appear as though there’d been a vicious struggle between two combatants.
“Yeah. Then there’s a fight, but it ain’t a long one. The vic gets pinned on that spot,” Christina walked past Jimmy and Will to indicate the wide swath of blood just beyond the halfway point of the alleyway, a puddle of dense crust and a damp spot in the middle of it where the blood hadn’t dried, yet. “After that, it’s a wham-bam job. Thing tore him right up, almost tore the arm off, opened up the jugular…”
“In the photograph it looks like something opened up his side,” Will said.
“Yeah, that was post-mortem,” Christina replied.
“Guy was an ex-MMA fighter, owned a gym in the area,” Christina continued.
“Pro?” Angie asked.
“Four years, competed worldwide.”
“Why’d he retire?”
“I dunno. I didn’t know the guy before I met his corpse this morning.”
Angie’s eyes drifted across the alley, pausing over the crusted pool in the center of the lot. “So he might’ve been able to fight it off for a few seconds.”
“With credentials like that, yeah, for a few seconds.” Will said.
Christina puffed a few strands of hair from her face and looked to Jimmy, “So you see why I called you?”
“Yeah,” Jimmy mused, running his hands through his thick black hair and pushing it over his shoulders, “yeah, I do.”
Nicole stared down at the dense crust where the man had died. It had pooled out from the tear in the man’s side where a monster chewed through his flesh. She began to feel something vibrate inside of her, a low hum that rang up through her chest and into her brain, bass to the whistle’s treble. A thought blossomed in her head like a flower made of broken glass. This is a part of something. She didn’t say anything, but she realized the others were staring at her. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
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