Facilis Descensus Averno [REWRITING]

14. Jeff the Killer

A pale hand reached around the doorframe and she pulled the trigger.

Something collided against the open door, slamming it hard against the wall behind it, almost as loud as the echo of the gunshot. As soon as she turned the barrel at it, a dark blur moved in between them and slammed itself against the wall in the hall outside, before moving back into the darkened room again and crashing against the wall right beside the door, almost two steps away from where the detective stood, stunned.

Jack took a step back to separate himself from the blur, now standing in the dim light flooding in from the hallway into the enclosed room. She could hear the low growl reverberating from his throat as he stared down at something crouching against the wall—something almost brilliantly white that stuck out like a sore thumb in the darkness of the room.

She barely registered Jack calling for her to stand back when the white figure launched itself off the wall and towards the latter, dissolving the two back into another incoherent blur. The next thing she knew, a flash of white hurtled across the table and crashed hard against the chair on the other side, collapsing once again into an unmoving chalk-white lump half-entangled with the bent metal chair.

"Get out, detective!" His voice was rasping in between his heaving breaths, and a shiver crawled down her spine. "Now!"

She saw a brief glimpse of something moving in front of her and snapped her head back just in time to see the white figure flung itself straight for her; she felt the slight recoil from her gun when she pulled the trigger before her knees collapsed, and the next thing she knew, air rushed past above her skull, and something struck the wall behind her, missing her by only a mere quarter of an inch as little chipped flakes of concrete started falling onto her hair.

Within the same breath, a dark blur rushed over and slammed the white figure to the wall beside them, then threw it over back to the chair and across to the other side of the room. Jack's hand reached up and snatched something above her head before appearing over the intruder in the blink of an eye, and she caught the glint of a silver blade too late before he drove the weapon straight into the shoulder of their pinned-down assailant.

She clamped her hand around the grip of her gun and raised it, pointing the end of barrel straight at the cannibal.

A slow, rasping cackle echoed from across the room.

"Oh, I've missed you, too, old friend. It really has been too long."

She could barely hear the grating speech over the pounding of her own heart against her ears, but a cold shiver ran down her spine the moment it spoke. Keeping her gun aimed in their direction, the detective slowly got back up to her feet, and with shaking legs, limped her way halfway across the room. Her eyes caught a glimpse of the pinhole-pupiled eyes and the wide, red-lipped grin stretching painfully across a bleached face staring up at the eyeless cannibal towering over him, and her grip started to shake.

She almost jumped when whiteness suddenly blinded her vision, for at least two seconds before she forced herself to blink and the glare dimmed gradually into a comfortable amount of brightness illuminating the room they were in. The back-up generator shouldn't have taken this long, she thought.

A low snarl rose from the cannibal's chest as he glowered down at the intruder, pressing a single boot down on the latter's chest. "You shouldn't have come here," he breathed out through seething teeth.

A rasping growl appeared from the doorway and the detective spun back around to face it. A dog was her initial thought—a Siberian husky with dark grey fur covering most of its body, and large white patches over its entire face, ears and abdominal area, except she could've sworn it was tinted with a light shade of pink even in the dim lighting. It wasn't any ordinary dog, though; she was sure no ordinary dog would have the wide, toothed, almost human-like sinister grin stretched underneath the muzzle, like the dog standing in the open doorway, staring at her now.