DESTINY'S DAMNED: Serial Killer: Murder #1

From the third story of a house less then a hundred feet up the hill and to the right, a hazy, fog blurring light coming from a single group of windows was indistinguishable from the light of so many other houses nearby. Deep in concentration, his shades drawn, Eric Caldwell did not hear the cable car’s bell, nor did he know it had rained that day or there was fog outside. He worked at a modern, metal-framed, wood-top desk, finishing his latest article. A dedicated, investigative reporter with the mental discipline to close out almost everything, he heard nothing. Not even the footsteps on the stairway up to his room.
As he looked through small, light gray, titanium glasses studying the screen of the laptop, he had taken to every corner of the world with him, he absentmindedly swept back his long, dark-brown bangs. Small lesions on his face, from years of overexposure to the sun, were meaningless. The dysentery that followed him, everywhere, mere nuisance compared to a story.
To his right, always visible from the corner of his eye, always with him, no matter where he went, was a picture of a little girl and her mother, smiling and beautiful, taken eight years ago. He had wanted to be a good husband and father, to be the man his wife and daughter forever looked to for love and protection, but as Rebecca got older and his need to expose the wrongs of the world came to obsess and absorb him, he somehow lost them.
Taking a sip of coffee, long gone cold, he began to reread the article he wrote that day, making editorial changes along the way, he did not hear the lock being picked nor the door opening behind him. Seemingly mesmerized by a certain phrase, he put down the coffee, propped his square chin on his left palm, and mentally picked the phrase apart.
Stunned, as if shot by a rock with a sling shot, he gasped. Abruptly straightening, his body rigid, time stood still, as an object, hard and deadly, breached his flesh and bore into his heart.
Instantly limp, unable to stop, he collapsed and fell forward, his face smashing into the laptop. God! he thought, his arms slumping to his sides. I’m having a heart attack. His cell phone only inches away, he panicked as he tried to lift a hand and reach it.
Pain, like that of slowly cracking bones was emanating from his heart, filling his chest, and radiating down his left arm. He trembled. Desperate for help, yet not able to call, he heard the familiar squeak of his apartment’s softwood floor.
Help me. He opened his mouth but found no breath to say the words.
Within a couple of fleeting seconds, he was aware that someone was leaning over him. A deep, heavy breathing drowned out the sound of his own feeble breath. Eric tried again to speak but heard only a groan rattling inside him. Able to roll his head by letting its own weight topple it, he felt the right side of his face clear the key board and mouthed, “Help.” Glasses askew, trapped beneath his left cheek, with blurred vision he searched the room.
Only inches away, he saw a hand gloved in purple nitrile laying a .22 caliber revolver with silencer on the desk top in front of him, he suddenly realized the hot, sweaty body above him was, most probably, his murderer.
Why? Who are you? he asked in terror, without being heard.
Frantically struggling, yet unable to force himself to move, Eric felt the steel like, purple hand slide down his flaccid, dangling arm and grab his right wrist, pulling, then extending the arm across the desk, pinning his hand, palm down, fingers outstretched, to the top.
His strength and interest in what was happening about him waning, he was little aware that something rubbery and vice-like was holding in place his right index finger. Sensations numbing, the pain of the bullet wound mercifully lessening, he felt only a sting, heard but a thud, as a six-inch knife severed his finger tip. His heart struggling to beat, his mind and sight blurring, strangling from lack of oxygen, an irresistible, overwhelming horror overtook him, and he closed his eyes.
His life’s liquid pooling on the high gloss, oak tabletop, he fought to open his eyes in response to the angry voice, muffled and unclear, reverberating in rhythm to the pounding of his head. “Her...sc...ant...sions...and...votion...more!” A piece of paper with printed words was set before him, a corner coming to rest in the leaching pool of red liquid.
“Sign!” the voice ordered. Roughly lifting what was left of Eric’s finger, pinching as it wrote, his hand scrawled with blood oozing from the stump something unintelligible at the bottom of the page.
Like a sheet in the wind, the bloodstained paper flew by him, and the voice shouted,“Her...!”
He heard a shuffling, a zipper being opened and closed, something metal being placed on the floor and something very heavy beside it. And then, his attacker came back.
Digging crooked, clawed fingers into Eric’s shoulders, his attacker threw him against the back of his chair then casually propped him there, positioning his drooping head to the left. Eric saw, but could do nothing, as the purple hand retracted, lingered in the air an instant, and struck, fist doubled, into Eric’s face, knocking him to the side.
As his chair moved, as his attacker then flung him to the floor, there was a rolling motion, a tumbling. Unforgiving wood from the floor rose up against him, and he screamed. Fighting with the last moments of his life to understand what was happening to him, half hallucinating as he was sprawled on the floor, he caught a glimpse of a headless man dressed in black, his hands waving something in front of Eric’s eyes. A bumpy plate of some kind was placed against the center of his forehead, and as he watched, numb from his ordeal, a blurry, round stone dropped.
Prickles of pain were suddenly radiating across his head. Streams of blood were flowed into his eyes, blinding him. His skull was cracking under the pressure of the plate being hammered into his forehead, the agony that followed but a brief discomfort as Eric quickly expired.

Excerpt from DESTINY'S DAMNED - BOOK 1 OF THE DESTINYS'S DAMNED TRILOGY
© Shawna Ryan
author: DESTINY'S DAMNED & SATAN'S SCAT

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