The One That Stays With You

6

It wouldn't end with the three murdered kids in the setting of a nightmare circus. Not when the bomb went off and killed an 81-year-old war veteran in a horrific design of a birthday celebration. It wouldn't end on a prayer. It wouldn't end until this man. This killer. This...clown was brought down. Alive or dead, and most hoped for the latter.

What followed seemed to many as very much a part of this animal's design. There was a phone call. No sooner had Willis Merl been scavenged across two blocks. It was recorded. The breakdown after had it layered between the killer's voice and music in the background identified without the use of fucking experts as calliope music. The kind you associate with the goddamn circus.

The voice was creepy as it tried to sound both friendly and hateful at the same time. It giggled and laughed until it gagged back. "Come play with me!" it said. The destination was to a mile marker to the north of town surrounded by dense state woodlands, and they would know it was the right one when they got there. The giveaway was a cluster of balloons tied to the post.—all colors, with an arrow pointing beyond the safety of road, further in even more. And further still, even more. They brought in bomb experts to look out for landmines that weren't there.

It was insanity and only getting worse.

What they found a mile from the road where they first saw the balloons was a large field. They would find two men, three women, two children, and half a dozen rodents in said field. All of which were killed in various ways, but nothing really as creative as before. All hung along the trees painted colorfully with flair hanging from them to look like morbid pinatas and a sign reading Welcome to the Party KIDS. They brought in the bomb squad again to find nothing. Then they started to go over the scene.

When it was over and the bodies were back at the county coroner, they weren't all that surprised to find that the victims had been mutilated post mortem and stuffed with what you would guess: candy. To make matters worse. One state police officer had gone home early that day and, overloaded by what he had been forced to witness, killed himself in his basement.

The first of many casualties in this newly broken world of theirs.