Three days had passed since the first grisly murder had occurred, since the Conner family had been found slaughtered and used as macabre materials for a twisted being’s message. Three days had passed with relative peace, three days without another murder of that caliber. Lost Haven was not a small city and even something as horrible as the butchering of the family quickly became yesterday’s news. For the city was fickle. It didn’t help that the feds hadn’t turned up any leads, or if they had they weren’t talking and STRIKE’s searches turned up nothing as they almost always did and so it seemed that perhaps the man that had done this had moved on, at least to the people of Lost Haven. 

But some few knew better, STRIKE knew the pattern, the way the man who called himself Nightmare always behaved. And on this third night after the Conners were butchered a monster was on the hunt again. 
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Reggie Anderson surveyed the street from behind the tinted windows of the fortified limo. The sound of booming music and the small party that was taking place inside the vehicle was only background noise to him. He was paid for it to only be background noise, as after all it was his job to be a guard. Really though he didn’t see what the point was, it was well after midnight and the neighborhood wasn’t one that the other gangs dared to show their faces in. 

But he wasn’t paid to do the thinking, he was paid to be a wall between his boss and the people who would like to see his boss dead and so the thoughts of how stupid it was to be on alert in the middle of night in the center of their territory was shoved to the side as he continued to look out the window. 

But while he had been distracted something had changed, he could no longer see the streetlights out the right window. In fact he couldn’t see anything out that side but a think inky darkness. He began to lower the window, to see what was going on, had some kids thrown paint on the side in the moment he had been distracted? He couldn’t really think of any reasons for the sudden darkness. Before the window had lowered more than an inch or two something struck the limo with force sufficient to send it flipping over.

A chorus of screams sounded from the shocked people who had been drinking and doing other things before the impact as the large car rolled over twice before coming to rest on the sidewalk. Reggie could see holes in the side of the vehicle, long and deep in a pattern that looked almost as if they had been made by claws that cut straight through the metal. He reached for a gun even as the others continued to have hysterics before everything went black. 

Blinking did nothing to banish the darkness and he heard the cracked windows shatter as something slammed against them, seemingly from every direction at once. He raised the gun and shot out the window in an attempt to hit whatever it was but aside from the harsh roaring of the gun there seemed to be no effect. 

He heard several of the screams cut off with gurgling noises even as he felt what must have been a hand, but a hand with far too many fingers, and far too many joints in each finger close around his gun arm at the wrist and casually ripped it off of his body. It was then that he screamed himself, and he heard laughter, a terrible laughter that he couldn’t imagine had come from a human throat. 

Still blind he could do nothing as claws slashed across his throat, severing his head from his body in a single neat motion and the world faded with that alien laughter echoing in his ears. 
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After the limo had been struck the street had been blanketed in darkness so thick that none of the few people brave enough to look at their windows at the sound of conflict and gunfire could see anything. But over time as the laughing and screaming replaced the barking of a gun a few of the people did eventually call the police, though it did take some time. 

By the time the first police cars arrived the bodies had been dismembered and arranged. There were ten dead in all, their limbs removed and then cut apart at the knees and elbows before being arranged to spell out a message across the center of the road. Bloody letters that seemed to be written in the blood of the victims finished when the body parts of the slaughtered ran out.

[b]HELLO LOST HAVEN
2 OF 20
SO SWEET
A BUFFET OF SCREAMS
STILL RECRUITING
NIGHTMARE[/b]

Set at the end of the message was a pile of heads belonging to the men and women who had been in the limo and lhe limo itself was in poor condition and covered in blood spatter, as was much of the area surrounding it. The right side was badly dented and what seemed to be 13 deep gouges that looked like deep claw marks that cut through the car’s side were in the center of the long dent. 

Many of the responding officers lost their last meal as they saw what was waiting for them when they arrived. Frantic calls went back and forth over the radio lines and atop a rooftop one woman flickered into existence video camera in hand.