Demon Days

This is an incomplete story, and I would love it more than anything to hear what I should add to it or change. Please tell me what you think! Thank you! :D

INTRODUCTION

           San Francisco

I stare Death in the face. He sees me, yet does not acknowledge my presence. He knows as well as I it’s not my time to go. The gun is pressed into my back by an unseen antagonist. He struggles to breathe properly. Taking a life is harder than he thought. Unfortunately, his time to turn back has long expired. The alley is deserted. Will he seal his own fate, like so many before him?

“Just give me the money!”, he screams so as not to show his true fear to me. I can still hear it in his desperation. Feel it in the movements of the gun.

“Who said I had any money? You made that assumption all on your own. Your life will not be missed.” I smile.

“No more tricks y’hear!!!! I will put a bullet straight through your head if you try anything! J-Just give me your money!”His hand starts to tremble.I pull my wallet out of my pocket, slowly, as to not make his trigger finger twitch.

“Fine. Take it then.” I drop it on the wet concrete. He slowly walks over to pick it up, never taking the gun away for a moment. I can see now that he is a middle aged man, balding, with a worn out coat and an obvious alcohol problem. His breath is foul, and old stains on his coat suggest that I’m not his first victim. Finally, some fresh meat.

    “Your precious money won’t be able to save you, you do know that, right?” His face turns white. Sweat starts to form on his face.  

“What…. what are you talking about?” He shakes his head violently in an attempt to mask the fear already deep inside him.

“You a cop or something’!? What’s with that creepy smile!? I will end you, I swear I will!!!”

“Try me.”

A shot pierces the air, and red saturates the ground in front of me. As always, there’s no pain. I turn back and face my assailant.

“So, what was that you said? Something about,’ending me’? As you can plainly see, I’m still here. Was that it?”. He freezes in absolute horror.

“I shot you!! How are you not dead!?”. I take the gun from his hand, and carefully lift him by his neck.

“Trust me. You haven’t seen anything of me yet. Not even close” he writhes and tries to escape my grip, screaming and kicking at me. In an instant I punch through his chest, widening the immense pool of blood in the alley. Before he can say a word I rip out his heart. It looks….delicious.

“Pity. He didn’t even have a chance. Humans are so very fragile.”

I take my wallet from his coat pocket. Bloody. I wipe it off and walk calmly away into the cold San Francisco streets.

Chapter One: Hard times

      October 21st, 2020, San Francisco, California

I wake up early to start my daily shift. My room looks very lonesome before the sun comes up. To be honest it always looks like that, but somehow the darkness just seems to amplify it. I wonder how things are gonna go today. Gang violence? Domestic disturbance? Maybe the odd streaker or druggie to stir things up? Well, whatever it is, I have to get up. You know, protector of the people and all that jazz. I really need a vacation. I take one last look at the emptiness of my room before getting up. “Hey, who knows? Maybe today will be a slow day. Maybe I’ll actually have time for breakfast for once” I put on my uniform and stare at the mirror. This job really gets to you. Two days without shaving and I already look like a cop. Just as I start to think about starting a cup of coffee to get me going my phone chirps.

Casey! We need you down here. We got a BIG mess on our hands. Get here ASAP!!! We’re at 101 and freedman’s street. Come quick!

“Well. I guess that means no breakfast for me.”, I mutter to myself as I head out the door.

“I wonder why Alex’s text sounded so urgent.”

I pull out of the driveway, reluctant to leave the safety of my home. The streets are very quiet today, even though the traffic is still bad. Something is amiss. Something about the air. Something about the people. Something’s just… off…

I pull onto 101st street, and now I understand why the text was so dire. We’ve got another horror story on our hands now.////EDIT 2

I pull up silently to the scene, trying to pry my eyes from the bloodbath in front of me. Who would do this? Why? I park in front of Alex’s squad car, just in time to be greeted by a very pompous Carlton Lewis, San Francisco's dollar store version of Sherlock Holme’s.

“Lewis, what are you doing here? You should leave this case to the professionals.”

Me and Lewis have had a standing rivalry. From grand larceny to beheadings, Lewis has tailed behind me everywhere, always quick to nitpick and ridicule our investigative team at every opportunity. He hasn’t been so bad though, considering that he actually can be helpful when he’s not too busy being a nuisance. He’s somehow managed to solve many cases without even a sliver of information from us. That kind of deductive skill doesn’t come naturally. Either he’s lucky, has connections to the underground, or is actually a good detective. Please let it be the second one. Please let it be the second one.

“May I remind you that this is my job too? I don’t think you should be taking that tone with me, anyway. From what I’ve heard, your people don’t have a dime on who killed him either.”

“Either? Does that mean Mr. Psychic detective can’t solve this one on the first play?”

“Sadly to say, you are actually correct for once. The killer left no fingerprints, a gun was found, but it’s obviously not the murder weapon. Forensic reports two types of blood, but they’re so mixed that they can’t be separated. A recreation of the crime scene based on the bullet found in the wall shows that there was a struggle, possibly in self-defense, but no lead into the perpetrator. The victim appears to be homeless, and has yet to be identified. The bead body was discovered at 2 A.M. that night, but anyone who could have possibly killed him is long gone.In addition to all that, his veins have gone black, and his body is already beginning to decay. To be honest, our only inferences for what happened to this poor man range everywhere from UFOs to spontaneous combustion. Really, the only thing we know for sure about this case is that it’s not pretty. My good Casey, I doubt even a detective as great as I could solve this labyrinth of a case”  

“Then why don’t you find yourself another rat den to crawl into and stop wasting my time.”

I walk past the now speechless Lewis and make my way to the crime scene. I duck under the yellow tape to join my co-workers. Once I get up close I see the truth to his madness. It really wasn’t pretty.  As he had said, there were some… irregularities… in the corpse. I was informed by the forensic team and on-site paramedics that the blood on the concrete had suggested that the victim and the killer were both alive and well the night before, but the state of decay in the body made it clear that the victim was long dead. When I asked how this was possible, they replied it wasn’t. Why would the blood and body be in two completely different states of decomposition?It just didn’t make sense. But then again, none of this made sense. What Lewis had failed to prepare me for were the injuries. I had seen some gory scenes in my life, but this one beat them all by a mile. His heart had been torn out of his chest. How this had happened, we could only guess, but it left a clean hole, just as if the heart had never been there in the first place. Of course the gun couldn’t be the murder weapon. A child would be able to see that. But in that case,what was? What on this Earth could be capable of punching clean through a man’s chest, as if it were just paper. What could make something rot so fast, as if it were covered in mold for months. What could bleed so much without dying, without even flinching. To be continued. Please tell me what you think of it thus far.

Author's Note

please ignore where it says the///Edit