scary stories and legends

breach

there are no more happy endings.

the forest across the canal loomed towards him.  the worst ice storm detroit had seen in a century had done it works well, transforming the entirety of the park into frozen sculptures.  the trees seemed to grasp at the air as they swayed in the howling wind.  many of their branches had already broken under the weight, falling heavily onto the ice stream below.

he eyed the forest, standing on the other side of the worn stone bridge, hands buried in his pockets.  he'd seen the bridge before in pictures and its utter mundaneness came as something of a surprise.  the stones embedded in the concrete were ancient, stripped of the snow that had recently covered them by the wind.  whatever handrails had once guarded the edges of the bridge were gone, long since rusted away.  except for the thick, slushy trail of blood that ran up the center of it, there was absolutely no indication of what he knew was waiting for him on the other side.

he had an idea who the blood on the bridge belonged to.  lucille gale had been the last of the seven young adults who to have disappeared in a month.  the first six had been found already, their bodies discovered in various locations along the bank of the detroit river.

the first of them had his skin completely removed, expertly flayed off.  the second was so badly ripped apart that it had taken a week to identify her.  the third was found lying in an alleyway with lungs full of water and seaweed, a full hundred meters away from the river.

it wasn't until a fourth teenager was found with her skeleton missing that his organization took interest.  they'd swooped down onto the case overnight, so desperate to get him onto the scene that they'd sent him there via translocation.  from the moment he emerged from the detroit alleyway, shaking off the horror of what he always saw when he translocated, it had been nothing but investigation with the local police and terrified locals.

the fbi got involved when two more children turned up dead (exsanguinated and strangled with their own intestines, respectively)  federal agents were always the most difficult to deal with.  they were suspicious of his badge, despite it being completely authentic.  they were suspicious of how massive he was, towering over most of them, easily broader than any.  they were suspicious of how much he already knew about the case, despite having arrived only a few days before they.

what made them more suspicious than anything was how quickly their bosses told them to shut up and get out of his way.  the men who ran the bureau from their offices in d.c. had no idea who he was, and none of them were interested in finding out.  they had all heard the legends from those that had led the bureau before them.  they knew what happened when men like him showed up on the scene of a crime too terrible for words.  the problem stopped, and it was better to not ask questions how.  any federal involvement was quickly terminated, and the assigned agents reassigned somewhere else.

they'd remember this case for the rest of their lives.  they might one day have colleagues who had similar encounters with men like him, and endlessly discuss what organization he might have represented.  theories ranged from an obscure homeland security cell to the cia special operations group.  they would jokingly refer to the men like him as 'the others,' 'those we don't speak of,' 'the activity,' or even as 'the men in black' if they were feeling sarcastic.

his organization knew all of this.  there wasn't much they didn't.