Chapter I

She tried to scream, but his hand was covering her mouth as he shoved her back against the cold brick wall. Her thoughts whirled madly out of control, mingling with the crude laughter of her attacker and his two companions in a cacophony of sounds and emotions that only served to add to her growing hysteria. Of course, her terror was warranted as the three men loomed over her, their eyes lustfully foreshadowing their perverted intentions.

"It's all good, babe," the leader of the trio sarcastically cooed, his hand still tightly wrapped around her mouth as he nudged closer to her. "If you do everything we tell you, you might even enjoy it. 'Course, you could always struggle and try to scream, but that'd just get me turned on."

The woman tried to escape, shifting immediately to her and trying to muscle through with her shoulder, only to find one of the other two men blocking her way. He grabbed her roughly by her blouse and threw her to the ground, ripping the garment open. The woman instinctively covered her breasts and tried to escape again, but they were on top of her again, with their leader straddling her body whiles his accomplices held her arms down.

"Now what'd I tell you?" he said laughing as he hands began to explore her chest. "You went and got me all excited. Guess I'm gonna have to do something 'bout that, huh?"

The woman screamed and writhed as her assailant undid his pants. The alleyway began to spin about wildly amid their insidious laughter and her attackers prying hands. Yet in the midst of the terrifying ordeal, the woman became keenly aware that there was another person in the shadows of the alleyway.

"Leave her be."

The voice was humanlike, almost certainly male, but there was something else about it that seemed to strip away any humanity or feeling. It had an almost inward-echo, a reverberation of two voices intertwined and yet somehow separate. However the voice's owner achieved the effect or wherever he was within the passage, he had succeeded in startling the woman's attackers. The leader immediately brought himself to a standing position and began to look wildly about the alley for signs of the voice.

"Alright jackass," he said angrily as he zipped his pants back, "Show yourself 'fore my boys and I come and kick the sh-"

"You will do no such thing," the voice snapped. "You will let the girl leave and you will leave. If you do not, then you will die."

The three men looked at each other for a moment before their leader suddenly barked back into the darkness, "Screw you, asswipe!" He immediately pulled a handgun from his belt and fired into the darkened end of the alley, the bullet echoing and clanging on the cold wet brick surface of the passage walls.

The woman, who for her part had been in a state of near-unconsciousness while under the weight of her attacker, suddenly found herself with the ability to move, though this was severely hampered by the presence of her three assailants. Turning over quickly to face the darkened end of the alley, she peered into the blackness in an effort to find her mysterious protector. There was an uneasy silence that permeated the murky backstreet alley- a silence that loomed as heavy as the company of the three men who had tried to force their will upon her only moments ago.

Then, as if the shadows themselves were alive, something within the darkness began to move. It was subtle to be sure, but it was movement. One of the three men, a scruffy boy with a badly shaven mohawk looked, turned back toward his leader warily. Suddenly there was another movement along the wall nearest to the three men, this time much faster. And as quickly as the movement had happened, all settled again into the tense silence.

"Yo Tony," the mohawked man said, his voice wavering, "let's get out of here. I ain't gonna mess with some nutso pullin' that ninja crap. Let's just go."

"Quiet Miguel," the leader barked back angrily, his gun still pointed into the darkness. "I ain't got time for you to wimp out on me now."

Miguel turned back around, nervously reaching into his belt to pull out a butterfly knife, but his hand never made it to the knife. Suddenly from somewhere above him, a white cord spiraled down on top of him and yanked his screaming body high into the air. Tony instinctively began to fire wildly into the air while his compatriot backed against the wall panting. The sounds of Miguel's screams echoed for a moment before they were blotted out totally.

Tony turned to his remaining henchmen, who returned his glance with glazed stare filled with sheer terror. The man gulped and began to back away from the woman, who was now sitting completely up and desperately holding her torn blouse together as her attackers slowly began to retreat. Unfortunately, it was too late. Just as before, the strange white cord sprang out, this time from the darkness at the end of the alleyway. Latching onto the remaining henchman by his shoulder, forcibly pulling him out of the dim light into the unlit portions of the street, his screams echoing as he disappeared.

Tony stood silently with mouth agape for several seconds before he finally managed the will to mumble a prayer under his breath, punctuating it with a flurry of curses directed toward the unseen enemy. As he muttered, the woman quickly scrambled to her knees, her mind trying to process what was happening. Suddenly a large object came hurtling out of the darkness and landed on the pavement. Tony nudged forward to better see what the object was, causing the woman to dart toward the closest brick wall and take solace in the shadow of a dumpster. Slowly Tony picked up the object, only to drop it again in disgust as he discovered it to be a disembodied arm.

Quickly backing away from the appendage, Tony quickly looked up as the sounds of footsteps began to resound through the alley. Slowly a form became distinguishable through the darkness- a hulking black mass that moved fluidly through the black of the unlit street. The shape began to move into the light, giving more substance to its form. It was large and rippling with muscles, standing a full head and shoulders above the cowering Tony. Yet despite any resemblance to a man, the creature was as much inhuman as it was human. Though still shrouded in the shadows, its movements were slow and calculated- as though it was an animal stalking its prey.

Tony gulped and raised the gun, his finger trembling on the trigger. From somewhere in the darkness, the creature laughed. It was a low, rumbling laughter that terrified both Tony and the concealed woman to their core.

The creature suddenly moved with dizzying speed, bounding from the pavement onto the side of one of the walls nearest to Tony. The terrified man fired wildly at the creature, but it was in vain, for the creature had already leaped over him onto the opposing wall. Dropping down like a cat, the creature grabbed onto Tony and lifted him high into the air, letting out a loud cry as it suddenly pulled Tony in close. Tony screamed.

And, somewhere else in the darkness, the woman screamed in terror.

Detective Meidrik sipped his coffee and sighed. To say that leaving his wife and daughter to come out to Diamond Heights at 2:00 in the morning, but he was thankful for little graces, like the all-night doughnut shop on his way from his house. The truth of the matter was that he hadn't been asleep that night anyway, nor had he slept much in the past month. He was working a new case- a serial murder with a fetish for disemboweling local riffraff. As he had driven over, he had silently prayed against hope that this was not another murder, but his gut instinct told him to expect the worse.

As usual, his instincts were right.

The alleyway was swarming with uniformed officers, as well as on lookers and clamoring journalists- two breeds of human beings that Meidrik could not stand in the least. The former hovered like vultures who wanted to gawk at the carnage and offer color commentary when it was not asked for. The latter were parasites that would poke and pry at the scene and anyone silly enough to give them the time of day until they got enough to print a story or make the six o'clock news. How either of them managed to arrive at the scene before he had was a fact that evaded Meidrik. He sighed again and took another sip, pushing past the crowd into the alley and into the crime scene.

Unfortunately, calling it a crime scene did not do it justice; it had all of the makings of a scene for a deranged horror movie, from the mangled bodies lying on the ground underneath the lights set up by the officers who had arrived on the scene to the blood that covered the walls. It even had an attractive young woman, who for her part was sitting underneath one of the streetlights on the wall. All it was missing was the maniac with a chainsaw…

"What'd we get tonight, Phil?" he said to the forensic officer hovering over one of the bodies.

Phil looked up and shook his head. "It looks the same guy as Mission Street and Townsend, Jon. This time he got three for the price of one. And boy did he get 'em good."

Phil motioned toward the first body- a mohawked man covered in tattoos with a huge hole where his chest had been. "Miguel Rodriguez, age 19. He lived two blocks over with mom and grandma, who will be getting an 'It's my sad duty…' right about now. Had his lungs yanked right through his rib cage. We're still looking for them, but no luck so far…"

Meidrik whistled in disbelief and turned his attention to the next body. At one time it had been a squat little man with a scruffy beard, but now it was an armless mass of flesh with its abdomen ripped open and its intestines hanging out of the side.

"What's the story on chubby here? Don't tell me he tried to Atkin's and failed."

Phil snorted and replied coolly, "Try the 'Eviscerated Diet'." He turned slowly toward the final body, a well-built man whose head had been cracked open and scraped clean of any brain matter. "He's the only one that fits the M.O. of our guy. The beat-cops say he's Tony Delmoro, a.k.a. Big Tony, a local thug with a sheet as long as the Golden Gate Bridge."

Nodding toward the young woman still being crouched underneath the streetlight, Phil added, "Apparently he and his fellow gentlemen tried to enjoy themselves at the young lady's expense when they ran into our boy."

Meidrik shook his head again and turned away from Phil, walking quietly toward the young woman. She was mildly attractive, though Jon wouldn't allow himself to take his thoughts beyond that simple acknowledgement. It was obvious, however, that she had been scared by what she had seen. But that was only part of the reason Meidrik wanted to speak to her. She also had the singular pleasure of being the only person still alive who had seen the culprit. That alone made her valuable to him.

"Hey," he said with a forced smile, catching the girl's eye. "What's your name?"

She sniffed and wiped her eyes, still damp with tears from the screaming state of shock she had been found in. "Rachael. Rachael Murphy."

"My name's Detective Meidrik. I'm with homicide and I'm trying to find out what happened here. I know you already told the officers, but could you please tell me again?"

"I was walking home from work," she started, her eyes becoming glazed. "My car is in the shop, so I had to walk. I work at the bistro five blocks over. Those three guys started following me. They dragged me into this alley. They tried to rape me and…"

Meidrik folded his arms and leaned closer. "Then what?"

"They died. He... I mean, it… I mean, he killed them."

"Who killed them? What did he look like?"

Rachael began to shiver, tears coming down her face again. "He was big- really big. I couldn't see him real well, but he had white eyes and a big white symbol-thing on his chest and back. It looked like a spider or something."

Meidrik bit his lip to avoid cursing. He was hoping for something more, but what she was describing sounded more akin to a hallucination brought on by the events of the night, a monster made by her imagination to explain what she had seen. This was San Francisco, not New York; they didn't have monsters in San Francisco, just nutty people.

"Alright Rachael," he said finally after an uneasy silence, "I'm going to have one of the officers take you home. Give him your phone number and I'll call to check up on you in a day or two. Take the next week off- you need some rest after tonight."

Turning back, he moved quickly toward Phil, who stood with his arms crossed between the bodies. Meidrik shook his head wearily and said crossly, "She's got nothing right now. That girl is so scared, she can't see straight. According to her, our culprit is some kind of spider-monster with white eyes."

Phil cleared his throat and replied, "I don't know, Jon. I've been looking at these victims and at the other ones and I'm beginning to wonder if it's a man we're after or not. I mean, it looks as though these guys weren't sliced open with a knife or anything like that."

"What'd you mean? If he didn't use a knife, what'd he use?"

"It looks more like someone or something used claws to do it."

"Claws?"

"That's not all. I can't be sure yet, but after examining the head wound on Delmoro, it looks like whatever did this used its teeth to get into his skull."

Jon quickly covered his mouth and stood silently for several moments before saying slowly, "What are you tellin' me Phil? Are you saying that we've got some kind of animal running around feeding on punks? Do I need to put out an A.P.B. for Bigfoot or something?"

"I don't know, Jon," Phil said defensively. "I can't be sure without running some more tests. But I can tell you this: even if this thing is a man, it sure as hell ain't human."

Meidrik growled and turned away. Five dead men, all ripped apart, and the only lead he had was that the person or thing doing it was a big thing with claws and teeth. Inside, he couldn't help but wonder if this thing would be content to keep killing the hoodlums of the city or if it would get bored with that and start turning on other people.

As he walked back to his car, Phil's words kept ringing in his ears.

Even if this thing is a man, it sure as hell ain't human.