Chapter 4: The Anomaly

Chapter 4: The Anomaly

The rain fell in a steady, cleansing sheet, but it couldn’t wash the grime from the city’s crevices. It slicked the asphalt of the alley to a mirror of distorted neon, reflecting the lurid reds and blues of the district’s signage. For Agent Marcus Thorne, the scene was depressingly familiar: the yellow tape, the uniformed officers trying to look busy, the tired-looking detective waiting for him under a sagging awning. The only thing out of place was the reason he’d been woken up at 3 AM.

“Thorne,” he said by way of introduction, flashing his credentials. The laminated card was stark and simple, bearing his name and the seal of an eagle clutching a bundle of what looked like broken arrows. Anomalous Incidents Bureau. Most cops had never heard of it, and that’s how the Bureau liked it.

The detective, a man named Miller with a cheap suit and the weary eyes of a lifer, grunted. “Glad you could make it. We’ve been holding the scene for you feds for two hours.” There was an edge to his voice, the standard resentment of a local having his case poached by a ghost agency from D.C.

“My flight was delayed,” Thorne lied smoothly, his gaze already sweeping the alley, absorbing details. “What do we have?”

“Jane Doe. One of the working girls from the strip. Found by a dumpster diver an hour ago. No ID, no purse, no witnesses.” Miller pointed with his chin towards a white sheet covering a lump on the ground. “Cause of death looks like bleed-out. But the wound… well, you’d better just see it.”

Thorne knelt, the damp concrete seeping through the knee of his dark trousers. He lifted a corner of the sheet. The victim was young, her face slack, makeup streaked by the rain. His eyes, trained by two decades of analyzing the grotesque and the bizarre, immediately went to her thigh, where the fabric of her red dress had been torn away.

He paused. His breath hitched for a fraction of a second, the only outward sign of his surprise.

It wasn't a stab wound. It wasn't a slash or a bite. A perfect, bloodless-looking rectangle of flesh, roughly the size of a credit card, was simply… gone. The edges of the wound were unnaturally sharp, as if cut by a machine of impossible precision. There were no hesitation marks, no jagged tears from a struggle. It was a void. A geometric absolute carved into human tissue.

“See what I mean?” Miller said, squatting beside him. “Looks like some kind of ritual thing, right? But there’s no symbols, no candles, no… weirdness. Just this. The M.E. on scene was baffled. Said he’d never seen anything like it.”

Thorne didn’t respond. He had seen things close to this. Things that pretended to be ritual killings but were really something else entirely. This, however, was a new texture of strange. The killers he usually hunted, even the most deranged, left traces of their humanity—rage, passion, a sloppy signature of their madness. This was devoid of all that. It was cold. It felt less like a murder and more like a… procedure.

“No signs of a struggle. No defensive wounds on her hands or arms,” Thorne observed, his voice a low monotone. “She was either taken completely by surprise or she was incapacitated.”

“Or she knew her killer,” Miller offered, the textbook response.

Thorne let the sheet fall back into place. “No. This wasn't personal. This was transactional.” He stood up, brushing the damp from his knee. “I need the body moved to the federal morgue. My people will take it from here.”

Miller bristled. “Now, hold on, this is still my case—”

“No, Detective,” Thorne said, turning to face him. His eyes, though tired, were sharp and unyielding. “It’s not. This is an AIB matter now. You’ll have a report on your desk in the morning officially reassigning jurisdiction. For your records, you can list the incident as ‘unexplained animal predation.’ Now please, secure the scene until my transport arrives.”

He walked away before Miller could protest further, leaving the detective sputtering under the awning. Thorne didn’t enjoy pulling rank, but secrecy and containment were paramount. The public, and local law enforcement, weren't equipped to handle the truth of what lurked in the world’s dark corners. That was his job. To stand on the wall and stare into the abyss, so no one else had to.

---

Two hours later, the abyss was laid out on a stainless-steel table under the sterile, unforgiving light of the AIB’s subterranean morgue. The rain-soaked alley felt a world away. Here, there were no shadows, only cold, hard facts.

Dr. Aris, a man who looked more like a librarian than a medical examiner with his wire-rimmed glasses and meticulous nature, peered at the wound through a magnifying lens. Thorne stood opposite him, hands in his pockets, a familiar sense of disquiet settling over him.

“The official cause of death is exsanguination resulting from a severed femoral artery,” Aris stated, his voice clinical. “All the blood in her body drained out through this single wound. And that, Marcus, is the first impossibility.”

“How so?”

“The artery is deep. To sever it like this would require a significant incision, a deep, violent thrust. But look at these edges.” He gestured for Thorne to look closer. “There is no tearing. No bruising to the surrounding tissue. The flesh, fascia, muscle, and artery are all transected on the exact same geometric plane. A knife, no matter how sharp, would leave microscopic striations. A scalpel would leave drag marks. This… this has none of that.”

Thorne leaned in. Aris was right. The walls of the wound were unnervingly smooth. “A laser?”

“No burn residue. No cauterization. The tissue isn’t cooked; it's just… absent. It’s as if this section of her body was defined by a set of coordinates and then simply ceased to exist.” Aris straightened up, rubbing his tired eyes. “Furthermore, toxicology is clean, aside from some trace cocaine and nicotine. No sedatives. And the lack of defensive wounds or stress indicators suggests she was either unconscious or completely compliant when this happened. And it did happen while she was alive, Marcus. The blood spatter patterns in the alley, what was left of them after the rain, confirm it. The arterial spray was significant.”

A pre-mortem wound with post-mortem precision. A contradiction. An anomaly. Thorne’s work was built on cataloging and containing anomalies.

“So, what are we looking at, Aris?”

The medical examiner sighed, a sound of deep, professional frustration. “I can tell you what it’s not. It’s not a human killer using any conventional tool I’m aware of. It’s not an animal attack; the geometry is impossible. It’s precise, it’s efficient, and it’s utterly inexplicable by the known laws of biology and physics.” He took off his glasses and cleaned them with a cloth. “It’s one for you, Marcus. It’s one of the reasons they pay us the big bucks to work in this concrete box and lie to everyone we know.”

Thorne stared at the perfect, empty rectangle on the dead woman’s thigh. He had investigated cases involving spontaneous combustion, localized time loops, and things that fed on human memory. He had seen horrors that would turn a sane man’s hair white. But this felt different. It wasn’t chaotic or overtly monstrous. It was quiet. Deliberate. There was a logic to it, but a logic so alien he couldn’t begin to grasp its syntax.

He thought of the files in the archives, the heavily redacted cold cases that spoke of similar patterns—unexplained exsanguinations, victims found with missing patches of skin. Cases that were always dismissed, buried under layers of bureaucracy.

This wasn't the first time. It was just the first time in a long time.

“Run a deep-tissue scan,” Thorne ordered, his mind already shifting from analysis to action. “Check for any foreign particulates, any radiation, any energy signature, no matter how faint. And cross-reference the wound’s dimensions against any unsolved cases in the archives dating back fifty years. Codename: Shepherd.”

Aris raised an eyebrow. “Shepherd? Any particular reason?”

“A hunch,” Thorne said, turning to leave the cold room. “It feels like someone is gathering a flock.”

As the heavy door hissed shut behind him, Thorne felt the old, familiar weight settle on his shoulders. It was the thrill of the hunt, mingled with the cold dread of what he might find. This wasn’t just a random act of madness. It was the start of something. And it was his job to find out what.