After-shock

beep

click

Dark.

hiss

beep

beep

click

Cold.

hiss

beep

nothing

beep

nothing

beep

nothing

nothing

nothing at all

In Tatsumi-Shi, something unprecedented achieves critical mass, and then explodes.

Centering from somewhere in Tatsumi-shi, a tremor of roiling blackness shunts itself rapidly throughout Sumaru City like an omnidirectional tidal wave. The shockwave reaps no physical destruction save for the way power throughout the entire city shorts out like the dying light under the imperious demands of the night sky. But within the blackout, even the mundane can feel it in its short duration: powerful malaise, seeping throughout Sumaru like a disease. And to even the most dense of the supernaturally attuned, the sharp cry of anguish that accompanies that dark, thick shockwave is all too audible to the psychic senses.

Jagged fragments of darkness burst from a knotted core of doubt and failure: shrapnel, splinters from rotting souls, that scythe the air before dissipating upward with a desperate wheeze, underpinned by muted screaming, pleas for release. For four blocks in every direction, the natural shadows of the city billow and creep with the force of the detonation, arching outward along its leading edge and straining at the anchors of reality before snapping back into place, thinner than before.

beep (click)

In a small apartment one block from the epicenter, a depressed student reconsiders putting his suicide off until after the new year. Six blocks away, a couple is having the fight that will finally dissolve a marriage of haste.

beep (hiss)

In the adjacent northeasterly ward of Sumaru, in Yumezaki Municipal Hospital, six patients in critical care, already barely clinging to life, begin to code. Nurses scramble from floor stations. Doctors roll from uneasy sleep in cots, fumbling glasses onto their faces.

beep--beep--(click)--beep--(hiss)-

The shadows in one darkened room swell and bulge, straining –

-beep--beep--beep-beep-beep-beep-

(a cot within a nest of life-support machines rattles with increasing violence, dancing several inches across the floor, unheard over the din in the hallway, DEFIB IN ROOMS EIGHT, SEVEN, THREE)

--beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep

--and then they burst with a wet, ripping sound. Something massive and glistening, thick with ropy muscle and knotted scar tissue, spews from the moonlit hospital bed and hits the linoleum tile floor with a vomitous splatter of mucous and chunks of indecipherable matter.

beep

The knot of creased and ravaged flesh stirs, slops wetly as it arranges itself into some architecture of sense. Salival strands of ooze stretch and snap from gathered limbs as the hulking figure of a man rises from the floor unsteadily, arms outflung, as though the world were moving beneath his feet. Clots of rank material – interdimensional effluvium; afterbirth -- drip from every hard and twisted contour.

He draws a breath

(click)

thick with the filth of his decanting, and exhales it in a rasping laugh.

(hiss)

"Oh, shit."

Slipping in the mess on the floor, he carefully closes the distance to the cot, gripping the railings with jellied fingers, to look down at the wasted figure still lying there. They are not dissimilar in height, though the interloper possesses all of the raw physical power of that the prone sleeper lacks...and where the sleeper's body is a canvas of tattoos, the newborn is a welter of grotesque scars, every last inch of ink excised by appalling means.

"Oh shit, brother. Oh, shit. You really can't catch a break."

Izo – some piece of Izo, torn in cesarian from his wounded psyche – laughs. In the shadows that love this fragment of who he is, his smile shines like a bare knife, giddy with threat. "But who are we fuckin' kidding, right? It's not like you want to come back, so what the hell? It sort of works out for both of us this way." Leaning, Izo's shadow pats him on the cheek, leaving behind a slug's trail of amniotic fluid. "You were always into win-wins."

He finds this incredibly funny.

It is a full three minutes before he regains his composure enough to dress in the clothes that Izo was admitted in, and let himself out of the window, three stories from the ground.

beep

beep

click

beep

hiss

No one notices the mess until morning. The smell of the slime is at its worst in the sun, as it rapidly evaporates into nothing.

A priest is brought in.

It won't do any good.