The Second Layer

Chapter 2: Ryan

Chapter 2: Ryan

Detective Ryan Lydon was driving at high speed towards his fiancee's house. About five minutes ago he'd been watching TV in his apartment when he'd gotten a call. The instant he'd answered he'd been paralyzed by the sound of her voice. He'd never heard her that afraid. "Ryan! You have to help me. Someone's here. I-" that was all she'd said, then there'd been what sounded like a crash and the line had gone dead. In the next moment his coat was on, his gun was tucked into the back of his pants, and he was out the door.

He tried calling her on his cell phone even as he started up his car and pulled out of the driveway. There'd been no answer. The next thing he'd done was contact dispatch, who'd sent a couple of patrol cars over to her house to make sure everything was alright. He'd tried calling her house again another three times since, but there was still no answer.

Ryan's stomach was in knots. It felt like his veins were pumping pure fear rather than blood. If anything happened to her... He loved her more than he'd ever loved anything in his life. They'd been planning on moving in together in just a few weeks. She had to be alright. She had to be.

Nearly six minutes and as many more unanswered phone calls later he pulled up to the curb just a little down the street from her house. He couldn't park in front of her house, that spot was taken up by the two patrol cars who'd already arrived. The sight of them comforted him only a little though. The cars were empty, and the front door of her house was lying wide open. A second after he parked he was out of the car and racing for the house.

He burst through the open front door into an empty entryway. It was dark, and only a little moonlight was filtering in through the windows, so it took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust. He could make out a table that had been overturned, the lamp that had rested on it seemed to have shattered on hitting the ground. He was about to reach for a light switch, when he heard a crash from a couple rooms over, and immediately he was in motion. Through a door to his right, down the hall only a little and through another door to the living room where he thought the sound had come from. The sight that met him as he crossed the threshold froze him in his tracks.

The moonlight was stronger in this room, so he had a clear view of the three bodies on the ground. For a second his heart leapt into his throat and the only thought racing through his head over and over was that one of them might be his fiancee, but as his eyes scanned quickly back and forth between them he realized that none of them were her. They were all cops, and all three seemed dead. The crash he'd heard had been one of them landing hard on a coffee table.

And then he saw the figure. They'd been standing in a patch of shadows at the corner of the room, so they'd been hard to see at first, but as they stepped forward the moonlight suddenly fell over them, and Ryan could make out their face. A man's face, stark, pale, and almost animalistic in its expression. The man was watching him with a savage grin. Slowly, deliberately, the man took a step towards him.

Immediately Ryan reached back and pulled his gun free. In the next instant he had it pointed straight at the man. "Don't move!" he barked the words even as he moved his finger over the trigger.

The man paused for about two seconds, then he threw back his head and laughed. Ryan felt chills run through his body. It wasn't because the man was laughing, but because of the way it sounded. The man's laugh didn't seem quite... Sane. There was something off about it that unnerved him in a way he couldn't describe. Then suddenly the laughter cut off and the man looked back at Ryan with the strangest smile on his face. And once more he began to advance.

The man didn't seem armed, but Ryan had given warning and there were three cops on the ground, that was all the reason he needed, he opened fire. Six shots to the chest later, and at a range of only about fifteen feet Ryan was sure he didn't miss, yet still the man was standing. The man's head had bowed slightly with the impact of the first shot, but the moment Ryan stopped firing his head snapped up and Ryan felt his breath catch as he caught sight of the man's eyes. There was literally a faint bluish glow about them, but... That was impossible. Yet staring at them he felt sure that it wasn't some trick of the light, they really were glowing. Not only that but in the moonlight, through the holes in the man's shirt where the bullets had penetrated, Ryan could catch glimpses here and there of smooth unbroken skin. He wasn't wearing kevlar, and the very bullet holes in his shirt proved that they'd hit him, but there were no wounds.

Again the man laughed as he began to move forward, and this time the sound filled Ryan with a deep sense of dread. Taking an involuntary step back, he once more opened fire. Yet even as the first shot fired, the man seemed to disappear. Ryan had just started to turn his head to look around and try to pinpoint the man when another hand suddenly grabbed the gun and ripped it out of his grasp. Just as his head finished turning he spotted the man, standing beside him, Ryan's gun held in one hand. Somehow he'd managed to move there in the span of a fraction of a second. But Ryan wasn't given a chance to think about it.

In the next second he found the man's hand on his throat. He hadn't even seen the man's arm move. Before he could try and struggle the man suddenly whispered the word "Goodnight", and then the next thing Ryan knew he was flying across the room. He felt a hard impact, and then everything went dark.