On Scene

“Was he... eaten?”

“I don’t know, detective, I just secured the scene and called it in.”

“Huh.” He scratched his head, pushing his stupid-looking fedora back on his stupid-looking head. “Okay, run me through it one more time.”

“All right.” The uniformed officer took a deep breath. “I got a call about somebody hanging around down here...” He looked around the inside of the warehouse; it was a huge space, set behind and under a bunch of shops and light-industrial and an on-ramp so that the inside was vastly larger than it looked from the outside. Skylights in the roof were beginning to let the dawn illuminate the space, showing an open field of concrete floor that had probably once been polished to be easy on forklift wheels.

“I parked the cruiser out front, and checked out the front with my flashlight. The door was...” He gestured up to the top of the open stairs, where the double front doors were off their hinges. “Anyway, I radioed for backup, and Simms showed up with the dog.”

Both men glanced over at Simms, who was sitting on a bench with his head in his hands; paramedics were on the scene, and one of them kept trying to put an oxygen mask on Simms’ face, but he wasn’t having it.

“So, the place smelled like... well, you can still smell it, a little bit. Funky, like... I don’t know, bad meat and heavy cologne. Simms and the dog went in, and I went in behind. We hadn’t drawn our weapons, but we announced ourselves, said we had a dog, requested that whoever was in here identify themselves. 

“But as soon as we got down the stairs, the dog freaked out, started indicating. So Simms takes the leash off, and the dog is just gone, into the shadows. I mean, you can see how big this place is...”

“Sure.”

“Simms is calling out, trying to get the dog to come back, and there’s something... moving, back in there. I don’t even know, it wasn’t even like a sound, it was just... something big, moving around in the back of the warehouse, you know?”

“Yeah.” Detective Morales looked up at the back of the warehouse, where piles of bricks had peeled off the wall, exposing a huge, round hole in the stone behind the old warehouse. It was big enough to drive one of the new armored humvees they’d gotten from the army down into it.

The thought of going down that hole, even with armor and machine guns, didn’t sit well with Morales. The lingering smell was... funky, like Carlson had described, but... something about it made all Morales’ copious body hair stand on end.

“There was this sound, like... I don’t know, like a really big slurp, you follow? And the dog... you know how in the movies, you hear this yelp from in the shadows and then silence? It wasn’t like that, the dog didn’t make a sound, you could sort of... like you had been hearing the dog moving, and then there was this slurp, and then the dog wasn’t there anymore.”

“A slurp.”

“Yeah, like...” Carlson did a thing with his tongue, sticking it out and sucking it back in, like eating Pho. “But bigger,” said Carlson. “And then there was this huge sound like something big moving fast, and then...”

Carlson looked up and met Morales’ eyes for a second, then looked away.

“And then?”

“It had scales.” Carlson said it quietly, but almost defiantly.

“Scales.”

“Yeah. So, Simms was still shouting for the damn dog, even though it was pretty obvious to me that the dog wasn’t coming back. And we’re both shining flashlights back into the shadows, and we can’t really see anything, because...” He shrugged.

Morales nodded. Big space like this, the darkness just sort of ate the flashlight beam.

“Right, so I realize something’s still moving, and just as I realize it, I see it, just for a second: Like I thought I was seeing the back wall, but it was moving, and it wasn’t brick, ‘cause it glittered, like. And it had...”

“Scales, right,” said Morales. He looked up at the hole again. The edges of it were ragged, like it’d been dug out of the rock with claws. A long time ago.

“Anyway, I was backing up, back toward the stairs, and I’m shouting for Simms to come, and... And he’s not, right? He’s just after the damn dog. So I turned around to look back up the stairs, and I see the panel...”

Carlson waved vaguely at the electrical panel, a row of switches all in the ‘up’ position. “I just figured, we might as well see what the fuck is going on, so I ran over and hit the lights.”

“And they came on.” A place like this, it seemed like less than an even bet.

“Yeah, like, big thunk, you know? Heavy industrial setup. Lights all come on, and whatever it was was just gone, down that fucking hole. I just saw the... the...”

He looked away again. 

“Saw what?” Morales put just a little edge in his voice.

“The tail, Detective. I just saw the tail.”

“The tail.”

“It was pointy and long and it was on the rear end of the thing, so I’m going to go with tail, yeah.”

“Okay. So the thing was gone.”

“And the next thing we saw was... him.”

Both men looked down at the middle of the warehouse floor. A white sheet covered what looked like about half of a human form.

“Like one of those knights in armor from a movie, right? Like Lord of the Rings shit. Except that the front of it was busted open, and blood everywhere, like...” 

Carlson gulped, paused a second to get hold of himself. Morales let him.

“You ever seen a hobo eat a can of beans, Detective? Like, when they ain’t got an opener or a fork or anything? Used to be this guy, lived in a camp down behind the old Fifteenth Street overpass, would go in through the side, use a rock or whatever was handy to just bash a hole in the side of the can, then pull it open and scoop it out with his fingers...”

Morales put his hand on Carlson’s shoulder, gave him an ineffectual little pat.

“Thank you, Officer Carlson,” he said. “Go get some sleep, write it up when you get in.”

“Thanks, Detective.” Carlson looked up. “What are you going to do about...” He waved in the direction of the hole.

“Well,” said Morales, thoughtfully, “I know a little guy out in Parkside, has this ring...” He grinned down at Carlson, who grinned back. 

Morales wasn’t worried about what to do about the hole; he knew for sure that his Captain had called the Feds, and that any minute now someone would be here to take this off his hands.

Morales was wondering what it would say, in block yellow letters, on the backs of their windbreakers.