Out of time

The house was a mess; a lot of the furniture was broken and looted, and there were clear signs of a fight having broken out inside. Blood stains on the floor and on some of the floor tiles.

My heart was beating so fast I felt as if it was about to explode. I felt as if the world was crumbling around me. Every step I made felt significantly heavier as I ventured inside the house. Past the first hallway, I opened the door leading to the kitchen.

The door was halfway open already.

Come on now, what are the chances you're going to find something here?

I said it to myself to convince myself that everything was going alright, but I could smell the putrid smell of rotting corpses in the air. So I steeled my resolve and pushed the door open.

The kitchen was in complete disarray, plates broken on the ground, the fridge was stripped of its doors, most shelves were left open, and the silverware was all stolen. At the center of the kitchen was the table.

Around it were sitting a number of homeless-looking men, all of them slowly rotting away, with their bodies filled with maggots and other insects. As for how they died, they were struck on the back of their necks with something sharp while having their ankles chained to the table.

What the?

The situation suddenly became a lot more confusing. Why were these people inside my house? Were they the looters? Where was the rest of my stuff? Who could've possibly chained these people down, and did the same person kill them later? How many people were involved in this incident?

Just to make sure those were random people, I got closer and gently lifted their heads to check out their faces. I couldn't recognize any of the faces. Thankfully, I let them be and headed out to the dining room.

There were even more people in a similar state; each of them was chained down to a piece of furniture, one of them being crucified against the wall where once stood a TV, the golden paint littering his body slowly spreading out like a branching tree to all corners of the room.

I have a bad feeling about this. What the fuck happened here in the last six years? How could the city change so drastically?

Written in that golden fluid was a haunting phrase, "Death to the infidels." Strange symbols were carved onto their backs, but because of their rapid decomposition, they were now illegible.

A sudden sense of relief came to my head. The more I explored the house, the more strangers I saw. It was still worrying to see such a high number of corpses, but at least I felt confident that I wouldn't be able to find either my wife or my daughter among those corpses.

So, after taking a brief moment of pause, I began to once again explore the rest of the house, this time heading towards the second floor. I was confident, but with each step I made, doubt began to grow in my chest; it felt as if it was slowly strangling and twisting my heart, all the while I was sweating profusely.

It's going to be fine. I'm sure she is now living a new life. It happens, right? I heard it a lot; it's a common scenario after all… Please… Just please, I promise I won't be angry at you, nor would I blame you for this.

I was silently praying as I opened the first guest room on the second floor. The house at the time felt so quiet even the sound of my heavy breathing felt deafening. I could feel my heart palpitating in my chest as I tried to open the door.

Then it stopped; I felt as if the world had suddenly stopped moving. There was something on the other side of the door, something blocking the door. Was it an enemy or just another corpse? I had no way of knowing.

My anxiety was reaching new heights. I picked up my handgun and tried to slowly push the door up until it hit that object again, so I kicked the door to open up a gap big enough for me to squeeze through.

What I saw was a kid, a small male kid, his hands tied behind his back, wounds covering his whole body, crying silent tears. As soon as he locked eyes with me, he tried to squirm away.

"Don't worry, I'm not here to harm you. Here, let me help you." I tried to be as calm as possible in order to calm down the kid, but it wasn't much help; the guest room was too much of a mess for a poor kid to suffer through.

The window was broken, glass shards were all over the floor, and on the guest's bed were a bunch of people being impaled, liquid gold dripping from a large pot hanging from the ceiling, tainting the corpses.

The walls were decorated with the decapitated heads of some of the intruders, their expressions forever trapped in the utter fear they had in their last moments alive.

What kind of man could do something this heinous? Even if these people were intruders, it wouldn't justify this sadistic level of gore…

After realizing the kid had run to the bathroom, crying, he hugged what remained of a woman chained to the bathtub filled with ice cubes. She was dead; her eyes had been gouged out and preserved within a jar filled with a strange liquid.

The walls of the bathroom were decorated with those jars, each containing a different organ of hers.

I was about to puke; I had never once seen something this vile and horrific, never once had I seen something this cruel.

Back in the Fracture, we were beaten within an inch of our lives by cops. Sometimes they tried to persecute us in different ways because we kept agitating the public. They tried to arrest us, but never once did they torture us or treat us like this man treated his victim.

"Kid, do you know who did this?" I asked him, boiling with rage, whatever sick maniac had done this deserved to disappear. I knew I didn't have enough time to make a proper investigation, but at the same time, the thought of letting a guy like this one get away scot-free was unforgivable.

The kid was inconsolable; he wouldn't react to anything I said or did. He simply kept hugging the corpse of that woman while crying desperate tears. He kept losing blood from his many injuries. It was clear that without some urgent care he would've died of blood loss.

If I call, will I even help to save this child? Most likely not; they'll just send someone to retrieve the corpse. Maybe if I call a taxi, he could arrive in time, but that's just a maybe.

The situation was awful; there was no way of slowing down the bleeding because he simply had too many injuries carved all over his body.

"Stay here for now; I'll call some help in the meantime." I said to the kid as I took out my phone.

I first called the police, then I called the emergency hotline, but both hung up the phone the moment I revealed to them the address; even most taxi drivers refused to drive to these parts of town.

Damn it!

I already knew the answer; I didn't even know why I held out that sliver of hope.

I'm sorry, kid.

So I headed out to the master bedroom, I ignored the corpses, and simply kept looking for the culprit. The more I looked, the more I felt like I was going to go crazy. Every single one of those victims had their bodies tortured before they were executed; some had it way worse than others.

Some of the bodies had just recently turned into corpses, but there was no sign of a culprit.

"W-welcome back." A creepy, unsettling, hoarse voice whispered in my ears.

"Where are you? Who are you? Reveal yourself!" I shouted as I turned around multiple times, holding my handgun with both hands.

I was sweating so hard I feared the gun might slip from my hands, and I was gripping it with so much strength my hands were quickly getting tired, but there was still no sign of the culprit.

"I did good, right? I took revenge!" The voice kept whispering in my head.

I could smell the faint presence of a demon; it was all around me. The entire house was trembling. I heard the haunting last scream of the kid as it died in the bathroom I left him in.

"W-why are you doing this?" I asked out loud.

The trembling didn't stop; the entire house was shuffling itself. As I looked at the door behind me, I saw the room shifting place and going down to the base floor, the stairs twisted, and the windows suddenly repaired themselves.

A demon this close to the city? What the hell has happened out here while I was gone?