Blood of Gato

At the site of the old gas station, chaos reigned. Police officers moved in wary clusters among the charred ruins, murmuring to each other, scribbling hurried notes, the stink of smoke clinging to skin and fabric alike. The air was still thick, damp with soot, acrid enough to sting the throat — so dense it felt like it could be cut with a knife.

Sam and Carl pulled up, and the mood hit them immediately: this was not going to be a good morning. The case with the so‑called "maniacs" was already slipping out of control; superiors breathing down their necks, reporters circling like vultures. And now — a fire. Another collapsed building. Another mess when they were already out of strength and patience.

"One damn thing after another," Sam muttered, shoving his hands deeper into his pockets, grimacing at the wasteland of twisted metal and ash.

Carl didn't answer. He just stood there, staring blankly at the ruin, as if he were looking not at debris but at some invisible wall only he could see.

"Hey." Sam frowned, nudging him with an elbow. "You're frozen. Didn't sleep?"

Carl turned his head slowly. For a moment, his eyes were empty, unfocused. Then he blinked, and life seemed to drain reluctantly back into him.

"Yeah… not for days." He dragged a hand down his face like he could peel the exhaustion off. "Sleep doesn't come easy anymore."

He didn't add the rest. That every night a creature of fire and blood crawled into his dreams — a vile, eyeless thing that fixed its burning stare on him and refused to look away. That it had begun after that cursed afternoon at Cain's construction site, when they'd collected the samples. That he felt there was something he'd forgotten, some small but vital piece of the puzzle. And whenever he closed his eyes, that missing shard tormented him.

"You need coffee and a real bed," Sam grumbled, his voice softening despite himself. "Hell, you look worse than a junkie who quit cold."

"Sure," Carl murmured. Then, brisker: "Alright. Let's get to it."

They crossed to the cluster of forensics techs. The investigators had drawn tight around a dented metal dumpster — one of the only things left standing after the blaze. Inside, when fire crews pried it open, they'd found something they hadn't expected: a body.

Sam and Carl had braced themselves for a scorched lump of charred flesh, the usual grotesque after a fire like this. But what they saw instead chilled them deeper than any ruin. The corpse inside was intact. Untouched. No soot, no burns, no sign of exposure to the inferno raging just feet away. It looked like someone had carefully laid the body there before the flames.

"Detectives!" A bright voice cut through the haze. Lea trotted over, her white coverall streaked with soot, her expression far too cheerful for a crime scene. She practically beamed at them. "Finally, some good news! We've got a proper corpse this time."

Sam snorted. "Glad someone's thrilled."

Lea crouched beside the body, gesturing eagerly.

"Classic homicide: strangulation. Bruising on the throat rings true. And see here?" She gently lifted one hand of the dead man. "Skin under the nails. Blood. He fought back — managed to scratch his attacker."

Sam's lips curved into a bitter smile. "Nice. A dead body that wasn't carved up by our resident lunatics. Just a regular murder. With fingerprints, DNA, hard evidence — the whole happy set. Sounds too easy, doesn't it?"

Carl leaned in, his eyes pulling toward the face of the deceased. Something hollow opened in his chest — it looked eerily familiar. For a heartbeat, recognition threatened him. He tore his gaze away at once, swallowing hard, refusing to follow that thread.

"And here's the twist," Lea added, no less delighted. "We've got perfect prints too. Clear striations, pressure pattern intact — right on the throat. I'll bet my Michael Jackson tape they belong to the killer."

Sam gave her a cold, tired look. "Lea, if that tape's 'Thriller,' you might have just gambled the most valuable asset in this department."

Lea smiled and waved them off.

"Relax, detectives. For once we've actually got something solid to work with. Isn't that cause for a little optimism?"

Sam opened his mouth with a dry retort on the tip of his tongue, but Carl cut him off — his voice harsher than either of them expected.

"Enough small talk. Show us everything you've got on this body. Prints, samples, every scrap of evidence."

He dragged a hand down his face again, like a man trying to hide behind his own fingers, the motion almost compulsive.

Sam raised an eyebrow, surprised by the edge in Carl's tone. His partner usually drifted through cases half-asleep — never like this.

Lea launched into her list of collected evidence, but Carl barely heard her. Her voice, and even Sam's, flattened into a distant hum, muffled as though by thick glass. He watched their lips move but the meaning slipped away, the present dissolving around him. Something was pulling at him — dragging him backwards, back toward Cain's construction site.

And then the images started. Raw, stuttering flashes across his vision: floodlights bleaching scaffolding; long shadows snaking over concrete; sparks bursting from a welder's torch. And in the afterglow of those sparks — the thing.

It stood before him again, as it had in his nightmares: a figure of heat and clotting blood, its mask of a face crumbling and reforming in endless cycles. Eyes smoldered in its skull like two coals buried deep, burning from the inside out.

Then the voices struck.

Three at once — overlapping, jarring, breaking through him like broken frequencies on a detuned radio.

Two low, male, guttural. One higher, female, tinged with a rasping accent he couldn't place. Strange, repulsive — but comprehensible, like the words were burrowing straight into his understanding.

We see you, Carl. We're watching. You remember. Don't you? You saw everything.

Carl jolted, blinking hard. The station ruins rippled and warped like painted scenery scraped away. The cops around him became shadows. Lea and Sam looked distant and indistinct. And then his eyes fell on the corpse.

The world collapsed.

The dead man's eyelids twitched. Then they snapped open. Black pupils widened into voids — not eyes, but pits. Empty rot glistened in the sockets. His jaw sagged open with a stiff creak — and from the darkness inside came a flood of movement.

A buzz, a drone, a sick churn of wings. Suddenly the mouth was spilling over with cockroaches, flies, larvae that plopped onto the floor in a writhing, glistening wave. They skittered and swarmed across the blood‑stained concrete, hundreds of them, scattering for Carl's boots, his legs…

He gasped and stumbled back, his lungs seizing. Blinked hard.

The insects were gone. Just the corpse again, expressionless, mouth closed. Silent.

But Carl's hands shook violently, betraying the truth his eyes tried to deny.

"Check inside his mouth," he rasped, pointing a trembling finger at the corpse.

Lea frowned, caught off guard. "What?"

Carl bent over, palms pressed to his knees, voice suddenly cracking into a sharp bark.

"I said check his damn mouth! Now!"

An uneasy silence stretched. For a second, Sam looked ready to mock him, to shatter the tension with a cynical remark. But something in Carl's eyes stopped him cold.

Lea hesitated, then sighed and did as he asked. She leaned closer, snapping on a new glove. With careful insistence she pried open the dead man's jaw. Sam tilted his head, his skepticism curdling into quiet curiosity.

Carl shut his eyes tight, bracing for the vision — for insects, for rot, for a deluge of horror spilling out again.

But this time, nothing. Stillness. Only the corpse.

"Clean," Lea muttered at first, her tone flat. "Like right out of Silence of the Lambs, if that's actually what you thought you'd find."

She smirked faintly — then stopped dead. Her eyes narrowed.

"Wait… hold on. There's something lodged in the trachea."

Carl's head snapped up, heart hammering like a fist against his ribs.

Working slowly and methodically, Lea slid a pair of long forceps into the throat, fishing with precise little motions. Her expression changed — a flicker of concentration, then grim satisfaction.

She drew something free. Not a bone shard, not burnt debris. A tiny package, the length of a cigarette, slick with saliva and bile, its paper wrapping clotted with half‑dried mucus and the sour sheen of vomit.

Sam grimaced, shaking his head. "Christ… that's vile. Who the hell shoves this down someone's throat?"

Lea rolled the damp cylinder on her palm, nose wrinkling, eyes sharpening with curiosity. "Whatever it is… someone wanted it hidden."

Carl couldn't tear his gaze away. His skin crawled. His gut churned. The voices seemed closer now, whispering in his ears, though no one else reacted.

You saw it. You remember. Open it. Open it and see.

"What is it?" Carl muttered, fighting to steady his voice.

Lea frowned, turning the damp bundle over between her fingers, probing it carefully.

"Hard to say just by looking… but…" She hesitated. "It looks like skin."

Sam's face twisted in disgust.

"Beautiful. A lovely little gift from our thoughtful killer."

Lea took a breath and slowly, methodically peeled the wrapping apart. The folds came loose, stiff with dried fluids. Inside, scorched letters seared into the flesh's surface revealed themselves — clean, precise, deliberate:

I SAW YOU.

Silence closed over them like a lid. Only the faint crackle of cinders underfoot broke it.

But the dread didn't come from the words themselves.

It was Lea's expression. She swallowed hard, color draining from her cheeks, her gloved fingers trembling. She recognized the texture, the curvature, the sickening detail. A small, rounded depression. A navel.

"Oh God…." Her voice cracked into a whisper she barely believed herself. "It's human skin."

Sam straightened slowly, jaw tightening. He forced the revulsion down and it hardened into something else — brittle, controlled. His features settled into stone.

"…Well. That makes this more than just a homicide."

He shot Carl a sidelong glance — his partner looked stricken, sweat crawling down his temples, fingers burrowing at his scalp as if to hold his skull together.

Carl stumbled back a step, clutching at his temples like the words had been carved into his own skin. Cold sweat slid down his neck. His body trembled, but not only from horror. There was recognition there. An unbearable, intimate certainty: he had known this was here, even before it was found. He had felt it.

How?

In his ears, the noise returned — that crawling static of voices layered on top of each other, invasive and insistent.

You saw. You're with us. You were there. Don't you remember?

Carl let out a sharp, shuddering breath, shaking his head as if to physically ward them away.

Sam's eyes narrowed. "Carl?" His voice was low, edged with something between suspicion and concern. "The hell's the matter with you? You look like you're gonna pass out."

Carl forced his teeth together, trying to choke down the rising tide of panic.

"I… I told you to check the mouth," he whispered, his gaze still glued to the piece of skin. "I knew it was there. I could feel it before she even touched him."

Lea snapped her eyes up at that, alarm flashing behind them.

"Carl—how the hell could you know that?"

For a long moment, no one moved.

The ruin around them lay quiet, smoldering. The pale piece of flesh with its scorched confession sat heavy in Lea's hand, obscene and undeniable. And Carl stood there trembling, caught between his partners' stares and the low hiss of the voices, closer now than ever.

We saw you. We still see you. And you cannot hide.