I remember him, he had many different names. He was very thin, pale white skin, with pitch black eyes. They swam with phosphorous green, it played over dark rooms like a children's toy at night. He never told me anything about himself, like how old he was, or where he was from. I remember he came back from some late night venture one time, he had dark stains like blood all over his clothes. I asked if it was his, he said some of it was. But when he took off his shirt, there were no marks on his body of any kind. I guess, maybe he lied to me. But about what? What did he do at night? What was he looking for? Maybe a night job. It'd be impossible to get regular work with eyes like that. I don't know...
Maybe he's the villain.
I'd been tracking this one for years. He would commit some horrible atrocity, make every headline for a week, and then vanish. Every time, eyewitness accounts would prove useless. People would either see nothing at all, or some ghastly bogeyman from the depths of their nightmares. The only connection between crimes was the crime scenes themselves. Bodies pasted to walls, ceilings, impaled on light fixtures, occasionally scattered to a fine mist over a thirty foot radius. It was horror on an utterly baffling level.
One woman lucky enough to survive an attack staged two years ago was now locked up in an asylum. She did nothing but write on the walls, repeatedly chronicling her trauma in a shaky, childish script.
She had been a bank teller, a lifetime ago. The attack had commenced without any warning, any sign of danger. He walked in during the busiest hour of the week, on a Friday afternoon, and began his grim work. No requests for money or valuables were made. He took no hostages, and had only allowed her to survive as a witness, to tell others what she had saw.
She couldn't communicate with anyone anymore, screaming until her throat went hoarse every time she had a visitor to her cell. The walls were covered with crayon and felt marker, smudged and dirty and crude. Her hands and face were that of a terrified child's caught scribbling on the kitchen floor.
I had visited her once, months after the attack. The attendants had to sedate her in order for me to gain entrance to the room. Without her cooperation, I'd been forced to piece the story together from the walls. The look of horror frozen on her face, even while comatose from the drugs, had convinced me never to go back. She was the only living witness to his crimes.
After every attack, he disappeared. In the beginning, he had only surfaced to strike once every six to eight months. A few people at an empty restaurant, two men at a convenience store, little strikes into the civilized world. The murders always committed in the same mysterious fashion, like he had forced them apart from the inside. Sometimes the trauma came from sudden contact with walls or ceilings at high speeds, but it was always in a completely impossible fashion.
Then, a year ago, the attacks began to grow more frequent, with locations more and more public being hit almost once a month. I was beginning to lose hope of ever seeing him, when I finally got a tip. An old man running a curiosity shop in the southeast quarter.
"You are looking for someone, correct?" He piped up, moments after I had wandered in. I had heard in a bar down the street that this place had answers to unusual questions. I paused, an old stone statue of a demon still in both hands.
"that's right. How'd you guess?" I put the statue down, my interest piqued. He picked up a long wooden pipe and lit it, inhaling deeply.
"You have that look in your eyes. Are you sure you want to find this man?" He looked up from the pipe, smoke trailing from his mouth and nose.
"Very sure."
His eyes narrowed. "Success in this case is almost certainly going to mean death. You understand that, don't you?"
I walked closer to the counter, opening my coat enough to show off the long-barreled .45 at my hip. The ivory grip was barely visible in the shop's low light.
"I know what I'm getting into, old man."
He laughed then, long and loud, slapping the counter with one hand.
"Good! Good, young man! You hold fire within to liven the loneliest hearth!" He leaned a little closer, his voice dropping almost to a whisper, charged and serious. "If you're certain of your path, you are definitely going to need a little help." He turned around, walking slowly to a shelf on the back wall. He arrived at a small metal box, dull, gray with age. Lifting it with both hands, he walked back to the counter.
"This is a weapon my friends and I built, a lifetime ago. It glows from within, whenever his kind are near." He opened the box, turning it towards me. It was the hilt and the handle of a sword. Simple and economic in design, about the length of my palm, and wrapped in red leather.
"Will you accept it?" He pushed it towards me slightly.
I paused, my hand hovering over the box's open lid.
"His kind?"
He cleared his throat. "deadwalkers. More common occurrence than you might believe. My colleagues have been hunting them for generations." He pulled a pendant out from his shirt. It was the same dull metal as the sword hilt, a simple sphere with one line dividing it neatly in two.
"We act not as the last, but the only line of defense against the beasts, the wolves at our gates." He placed the pendant back in his shirt, his movements calm and slow. "They are cursed to use their latent abilities, to draw from this world and stave off descent into the next, or die."
