This was Juan Rivera’s second time in Exmouth, and as he looked down what had once been a quaint village street, he saw it was now more reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno. The SWAT team he was leading had dismounted from their vehicles to approach on foot, their first job to secure the area so paramedics could retrieve the dead and injured. A temporary command station was being set up behind them, radios blaring, sirens going, searchlights blazing. Two MRAPs idled, each with .50-caliber machine guns, ready to move into action if the killer or killers reappeared.
But it looked like the killers were gone. The town was silent—deathly silent. From where he was standing, he could see two bodies in the middle of the street. But even as he squinted into the darkness, he thought he could see at least one other, more distant but equally disquieting shape in the distance. The storm, a swift-moving nor’easter, was starting to pass; the rain squalls were coming less frequently and the wind was dropping. The streetlights were out and the houses dark from a power failure. The scene was lit, instead, by a single house halfway down the street, which was in the last stages of burning, casting a garish glow across the nightmarish scene.
The horror his forward recon team had discovered on Dune Road—the police chief savaged inside his own squad car—had deeply unnerved him. The reports they’d received as they were on their way had been fragmentary: crazy stories of monsters, demons, anarchy, and mass killing. The sergeant—Gavin was his name—was nowhere to be found and hadn’t responded on any police hailing frequencies. Rivera wondered if he, too, was dead.
What the hell had happened here? Rivera swallowed uneasily, collected himself. There would be plenty of time to figure it out; what they had to do now, and do fast, was secure the area, deliver first aid, and evacuate the victims.
He raised his radio and gave the orders, and the SWAT team began moving down the main street in formation, at a trot. As they proceeded, the carnage became more evident. One of the SWAT team started praying under his breath over the frequency, until Rivera shut him up. He could hear other comments, whispered speculation, muttered maledictions. What the hell? he wondered. Terrorists? Meth heads? Gang rampage?
Rivera started to feel a little strange; the scene was utterly unreal. He could see from the hesitant, reluctant way his men were moving that, even if they’d never admit it, they were scared. This wasn’t urban violence; this wasn’t even war. It was something like…well, like a horror movie.
He tried to shake off his own feeling of dread and take firm charge of the situation. In as matter-of-fact a voice as he could muster, he rapped out orders, sending two-man teams left and right to secure the main street and side streets. The first body he came to was horribly mutilated, as if by a wild beast.
His radio began crackling with incoming reports. “Victim outside number eleven Main Street!” “Two victims in the Inn!” The calls were spotty at first, but people were soon talking over one another on the emergency frequency.
As if to push back against the chaos, Rivera watched his team carefully, making sure they were performing by the book: this was a big one, a very big one, and everything they did would be reviewed and re-reviewed. With relative efficiency, given the circumstances, his men established the perimeter, secured the area, and then called in the ambulances. No sirens. Within minutes, paramedics came in and rushed to the many victims, performing triage and, where necessary, first aid.
Not many, Rivera noticed, needed first aid.
Then it came time to clear the houses. There were about twenty of them on the main street. Three had their doors broken in, and in those houses they found more bodies. Even one or two pets had been killed.
In the rest, they found the living: whole families cowering in basements, or hiding in the attic or in various closets, so terrified they could hardly move or speak. And when they did, they spoke of glimpsing a creature: a demon with a tail and a dog’s face. His men duly took down the information, shaking their heads with disbelief. In the storm, the darkness, and the power outage, no one seemed to have gotten a good look at it—at least, no one who survived.
In the thick of battles in Iraq, Rivera had experienced a kind of chaotic, collective terror, in which events were so fast-moving and scrambled that afterward nobody could say what had really happened. That seemed to be the case here. The survivors had nothing to say that was reliable or credible, even though their recollections were remarkably consistent on certain points. If only he could find someone who had gotten a good, long look at the killer…
As if on cue, Rivera heard a shout. Lurching from behind a house staggered the figure of a man, not exactly drunk, but not exactly sober, either: wild-eyed, shouting and waving. He spied Rivera and came rushing over, arms outspread, and before Rivera could react the figure had enveloped him in a panicked hug, like a drowning man clasping his rescuer. “Thank God, thank God!” he screamed. “It’s the end times. The demons have been unleashed from hell!” Despite all that Rivera could do, the man knocked him down in his desperation.
Two members of his team came to Rivera’s assistance and helped wrest the man off him, pinning him to the ground. He continued to thrash and shout.