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Punished GN
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Tiamat's (very late) Halloween Special! Rated R for violence!
A house in northern Carver
03:30
The SWAT van screeched to a halt in front of a house that, for all intents and purposes, looked entirely normal. Naia however, who sat between Darya and Dragon, shivered uncontrollably as she looked through the window and nodded.
"That's the place," the tiny blonde girl murmured. At her words, the entire SWAT team and the three guests piled out of the van, and the chaser truck with two FBI agents and Doc Holliday emptied as well, almost before it had completely stopped. Hand signals went up, and three officers and an agent swept past the main group, heading for the back entrance with guns drawn.
Darya was reminded of several different horror movie tropes as she looked up at the innocent seeming two story home. It sat, idle, with a front room light on, looking for all the world like the family was just waking up for the morning. But even without Naia's senses, now that she was out of the van she could feel the subtle sickness in the air, almost like looking at certain areas of Albuquerque where too much bad had happened and it seemed to even poison the air around it. But this didn't just make her feel sad, this twisted her guts into a teetering feeling of nausea.
It happened almost without warning. One minute, the upper floor window she was looking at was normal, and then, with a wave of that same nausea, suddenly the inside of the window was tinted red, unevenly, with some still clear and some with liquid looking concentrations. And, most disturbingly, a single red hand print, smeared vertically for a few inches before fading away suddenly.
Naia stood next to her. "Sorry," her companion said, her voice thick with what felt like the same feeling Darya had. "I figured it would be better to remove the illusion and see what we were dealing with but...ugh."
Several mutters echoed behind her, and Dragon moved up next to them. "So, what's the plan?" he asked, shouldering his odd rifle. "Guns blazing or quiet?"
"¡Madre de Dios!” shouted one of the officers behind her. They all turned to look at him, then back to what he was pointing at. It took Darya's eyes a second to realise what she was seeing. In place of the light in the front window she had sen as a lamp before, now they could see clearly that the lampshade had been removed. Somehow, someones head had been put on top of the lamp, and the light was shining out through her open mouth and empty eye sockets.
Darya growled. She could feel the stream behind the house, and a sudden steady flow came up over the yard and into the street to pool around her. “Fucking get it, Dragon.”
The front unit, composed of six officers, Dragon, and Tiamat, poured through the door behind a wave of water which reduced it to splinters. At the same time, they could hear the back door getting kicked in. As the officers spread out to clear the area, Dragon went up the stairs, followed by the second FBI agent. Naia and Holliday came in behind the rest, checking for life signs in the bodies they found, though it was doubtful even on first sight.
In the kitchen hung two horrifically small bodies, suspended from the ceiling by what looked like intestines tied to their ankles, though they themselves hadn't been gutted. They had however, been skinned. The parents' corpses had been arranged in some gruesome mockery of dinner with two unidentified adults, all of them missing various pieces, which had been arranged on the table into a full mock human itself, complete with a serving platter underneath the pile and a full, brightly polished and clean set of china for the four "diners". Several officers had to step outside to vomit.
Dragon cursed as a booming shot echoed through the lower floor. Darya spun around, to see him dragging the screaming FBI agent back down the steps and out of the front door, Doc following. The man's leg looked like it had been nearly cut in half vertically, but messily. As Dragon left him in the care of the healer meta outside, he addressed the rest of the group.
"Whatever this is, it's left booby-traps. Proceed with extreme caution."
Careful re-examination by the remaining FBI agent and two of the SWAT officers trained for it revealed a set of homemade explosives under the dining table, rigged to go off if any of the bodies was disturbed. The shotgun shell that had injured the agent had been rigged underneath a loose stair, and two more were spaced unevenly along the staircase. A tripwire at the top swung a fire axe back from an open bedroom door to drive someone back down the steps and into them. Inside that room, which was the windowed room Darya had seen earlier, they found the remains of a teenager, the owner of the severed head downstairs, haphazardly scattered about the room. Several pieces looked to have been gnawed on by a large animal.
The upper hallway had another tripwire, set to drop the attic trapdoor down on the unwary. A careful peek revealed that it would also drop, with the ladder, enough bleach and ammonia to cause severe problems for those underneath. The other bedrooms showed signs of struggle, but no more traps. Downstairs, the children's bodies were found to be set to drop on the high tension wires they were on if touched, letting the tightly bound steel wires lash out at anyone standing next to them, say if they were getting them down.
It took an exhaustingly long time to make sure everything was safe. The strike team assembled in what was left of the living room. Beyond the gore, most of the furniture had been torn to shreds and scattered about as if bombs had gone off inside them. Naia confirmed the marks of claws on most of it. During all of this, Darya kept the swirling water on her own body or nearby, feeling useless as more capable people disarmed all the various horrors of the charnel house.
Looking around, Darya felt something off. Almost at the same time, one of the officers said, "Where's Girard? And Olliver?" Immediately after the headcount confirmed they were missing, guns swung up and Naia flashed her hand up in some sort of sign. Everyone was suddenly shimmering a pale jade color of light, just barely visible. Naia pointed upstairs, and the whole group moved as a unit to the back bedrooms again.
Olliver lay on the floor of the last bedroom, green glow fading at the same time as the light in his eyes. Blood pumped freely from the gaping wound in his throat. Naia bent down desperately fast, but shook her head as she looked back at the group, one hand shutting the dead officer's eyes.
Dragon spat another curse and asked, "Girard?"
Naia looked around, her eyes that same shade of light but brighter. "Basement. There's something alive down there."
They opened the door cautiously, MP5 flashlights all illuminating the rickety stairs as they descended into the darkness below them. It took them painstakingly long to make sure nothing was rigged like above, with Darya anxiously watching the mystic, but Naia never said another word, only pursed her small lips in concentration.
As they hit the bottom of the steps, several curses went up from the group. They were almost sloshing through blood, several inches of it having pooled down here, as if all the bodies above them had been drained down here. Which seemed likely, Darya thought. Another muttered curse and someone rushing back up the stairs caused Darya to look at the source of the horror.
Broadway had been nailed to the wall inexpertly, probably with a nail gun. Her normally cheery face was gaunt with terror and death, and a gaping hole led to the cavity where her heart had been. Facing her directly across a bare few feet of an alcove that had once held tools hung Sarah Reeves. She glowed faintly in the dark. Ropes had bound her by her wrists to the studs on either side of her, and another beneath her breasts held her aloft by way of the rafters above. Her eyes were glazed with terror, head unable to turn away from Broadway's corpse. The pinky and ring finger from her left hand were missing at the lowest joint, the wounds cauterized, and she was completely nude and bleeding from a multitude of claw marks, none deep enough to threaten her life.
Sound dropped away from Darya's ears, only hearing Dragons shouts for Holliday and a knife in a distant voice. She raced across the gap, heedless of the pool of blood, and caught Reeves' face in her hands.
"Agent Reeves? Sarah? You're going to be okay! Sarah, can you hear me?"
Sarah Reeves mouthed the only words she could think of into the first friendly face she had seen in more than an hour of horror and torture. "I couldn't kill it."
As the ropes released her, Darya caught her up and knelt down, and the FBI agent in her arms suddenly curled up and sobbed like a tiny girl.
