Right.
Except that they had found countless size 16 footprints—bare—throughout the town, inside the homes that had been invaded, many printed in blood. One killer. Not a crazy mob, not a riot, not a rampaging gang of terrorists. Just one killer seemed to have done all this. As for witness descriptions of that killer, Rivera chalked a fair amount of that up to hysteria and terror. But not all of it. Some crazy, large, and undoubtedly costumed killer had rampaged through town. But who he was, why he had done it, where he had come from, and where he had gone were mysteries yet to be solved.
One killer. Rivera’s nerves spiked again.
There had been a crucial development: one bright-eyed officer had noted a security camera in front of a clothing store that the killer must have passed several times. The camera was recording 24/7, and it was low-light capable. Best of all, it switched to battery backup during a power failure. Rivera’s team had broken into the store and collected the digital footage, and they were now processing it at the mobile command center. The footage was overly dark due to the lack of ambient light, but it was currently being enhanced, and it was supposed to be ready…he checked his watch…now.
Until he could see that footage, Rivera simply refused to speculate on how a single individual, barefoot no less, could have perpetrated all this death and destruction. This was something completely outside his experience, and he needed to reserve judgment…at least until he had seen that footage with his own eyes.
He raised his radio. “Gil?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Is that footage ready?”
“Um, well, sort of, but I gotta tell you—”
“Don’t tell me anything. I want to see it fresh, without any preconceptions.”
“Right, sir.”
Gil didn’t sound his usual cocky self. Rivera hung up the radio and walked toward the command center: a mobile container set atop a tractor-trailer rig. He mounted the steps and entered to find things strangely silent. It didn’t take ESP to sense that the level of tension in the room was through the roof.
“What do you have?” he asked.
A number of edgy glances were exchanged. Gil, the video operator, nodded toward a screen. “This is the feed from the store camera. It was dark, but all the digital information was there, waiting to come out. It covers the area in front of the store, the sidewalk and part of the street. It caught the, the perp both coming and going down the street. Time stamp’s in the lower-right corner. The first segment starts at 21:23, and the next at 22:04.”
“Let’s see the first segment.”
A hesitation. “Okay.”
Rivera folded his arms and watched the monitor. At first there was nothing to see, just a fish-eye view of the empty sidewalk, the edge of the storefront, and the street. The town was in blackout and there were no streetlights, but the camera had recorded a grainy, reddish image that was surprisingly clear. Suddenly, there was a movement and a figure strode across the monitor. It took less than a second—but that was enough.
“What the fuck?” Rivera said.
Silence.
“It’s a guy in a mask and suit,” Rivera said.
No one responded until Gil, in a weak voice, said, “I’ll go through it frame by frame.”
Rivera stared as the feed was rerun and replayed, this time at one frame per second. The perp—if it could be called that—came into view again, walking in a fast shamble down the sidewalk toward town.
“Freeze it!” Rivera barked.
Gil froze the image.
“I don’t believe this. Go one frame back.”
The operator complied.
“I don’t fucking believe it. Can you magnify that face?”
The face was magnified.
Rivera squinted, looking close. “That’s no mask.”
“No,” Gil said.
No one else spoke.
Rivera licked dry lips. “Continue.”
He watched the frame-by-frame in deepening shock and disbelief. It was pretty much as the witnesses had said—a deformed monster with a tail. No, he said to himself, not a monster: this was a human being, a freakishly deformed man. The view was from diagonally and above, which accentuated the doglike, bucktoothed snout. But instead of a dog’s nose it had a human nose, squashed like a prizefighter’s. The man’s face was splattered with blood and gore, slowly being washed away by the rain. Its expression positively glowed with hatred, the eyes like slits, the mouth open, showing a swollen pink tongue from which hung a rope of drool. It strode along with a sense of purpose that chilled Rivera to the bone simply because it was so intentional. There was no insanity here, nothing random: this was a brute with a plan. And there they were—those gigantic, splayed bare feet with the three-inch toenails, the tracks of which they’d found everywhere.