Chapter 1
Detective Marcus Kane hadn’t slept in five days. He didn’t dare close his eyes—not when the city would burn the second he blinked. He doesn’t want that. The last time he blinked, thirteen people died while he rested his sore eyes. He kept them open now until they stung, until the edges of the room jittered like heat. Kane stepped onto the first landing, the metal grate of the stairwell groaning beneath his weight. The air was thick with the scent of damp concrete and a faint tang of something acrid, like burnt oil lingering from the building’s old heating system. Each flight of stairs zig-zagged upward, the narrow shaft catching snippets of echo—footfalls from somewhere above, a distant cough, the hum of energy-efficient lights overhead.
The walls of the stairwell were lined with rows of windows, each a frozen frame of the outside world: trees stiff in the wind, cars crawling along streets, and clouds that didn’t move. The glass was sealed tight, a perfect, untouchable membrane. Kane’s reflection stared back at him from each pane, layered infinitely as he ascended. It was like climbing through a series of ghostly mirrors, the city trapped behind them and unreachable.
He reached the fourth floor, the low buzz of electricity and distant voices from the street filtering through. The corridor stretched ahead, dimly lit by flickering sconces. Doors lined both sides like watchful sentinels, their wood pitted and scuffed, names and numbers etched into the metal plaques beside each.
Kane paused in front of one particular door. It was plain, unremarkable, yet it carried a weight—something about the way the light from the hallway haloed its edges, the faint scuff of repeated footsteps, the subtle shift in air pressure as if the space behind it held its breath. He rested the landlord’s key on the cold keyhole, feeling the tremor of anticipation run through his fingers, and for a moment, the silent city outside the windows seemed to hold its own, waiting with him.
He had bribed the landlord claiming he was in an infidelity case. He looked over at the nearest window to see a shattered window and thought, “just another crack in a crumbling facade.” His job isn’t about saving people; it was about holding back the tide of rot.
He entered the apartment as silently as he could. He heard a humming coming from ahead.
The reek of burnt ozone, wet concrete, and human grief. Under it, a copper-sweet thread he’d learned to taste before he saw blood. It clung to the air like a sickness. He stepped over the shattered glass, the sickly sweet stench of chemicals hanging in the air. His tongue recoiled against the sharp tang—metallic, bitter. Pennies. Every time.
A warning. He wiped sweat from his brow, but the taste lingered, clinging to his teeth, in his throat. Too close. Too late.
He pulled his mask tighter, scanning the empty apartment. Nothing moved. Nothing alive. And still, the pennies coated his mouth, whispering that the killer had been here. Or maybe… that he still was.
There were moments where he missed the cohesion and trust working in a team. Unfortunately, his time with the Defense Intelligence Agency and active military career ended with the insertion of politics. Now, as Detective Lieutenant, his entire squad of detectives had been incapacitated.
Inside the kitchen, the humming had stopped. It was quiet now, a stillness that was somehow louder than the screaming had been. A boy no older than ten stood over his father. The boy’s knife tapped the tile, a slow drip keeping time. His pupils were glassy and wide, tracking a rhythm Kane couldn’t hear.
The mother, hunched in a corner humming two notes on a loop, was gently rocking a swaddled nothing in her arms, her song replaced by a low, guttural whimpering.
He lowered the black gas mask and thumbed the seal on his mask. The room air hit like battery acid. Too late to help, early enough to smell what did this, his jaw tightened in response. He caught sight of a television with a broken screen. It was powered on and he heard a woman’s monologue about the city’s inherent sickness. Kane switched the button on the rear to off.
He noticed on the stovetop a cryptid symbol that was out of place.
Failure followed him like uniform lint. Dunwich Heights wasn’t a city; it was an infection. He was just the surgeon with a rusty blade, and every slice left a new scar. Kane was a grim warning issued by the very men he worked for. Not a protector, but a scavenger of the pieces left behind.
Two months into the ’Accelerated Compliance Order, obsessed with their “Law and Order” crusade, had turned Dunwich Heights into a petri dish of social decay and violent catharsis. Checkpoint vans filmed every doorway. The mayor’s office called it a data audit. They wanted results, not justice. Kane was the result.
He limped down an alley, dragging a man in shackles. The man was whimpering, a broken sound that meant nothing to Kane. The city’s sirens wailed in the distance, a new sound, a different symphony of violence. His radio crackled to life, the static a familiar whisper of bad news.
“Another one,” the voice on the other end said. “Holloway’s crew. He’s loose.”
The words were a bitter pill, one of many. Kane had been doing this for five days now, ever since Venn staged the riots, gutting the city’s correctional facilities and unleashing the worst of Dunwich Heights back into its streets. Kane was running on blood, pills, and the white-hot rage that had replaced his humanity.
He dropped the shackled man like trash. The escapee’s head thudded against the concrete, and a thin trail of blood marked the pavement. Kane didn’t flinch. He just popped the top on a small bottle of pills, swallowed them dry. The burn of the chemicals in his throat was a reminder that he was still alive. He pushed himself forward, back into the night, the sirens growing louder, calling to him like a chorus of damned souls.
He knelt, thumbed the tag on the man’s shackle—Blackwood property—then unlocked it. ‘Run west.’ He didn’t watch if the man obeyed.
But the sirens were wrong. They were off-key. A frantic, new rhythm began to bleed through the airwaves, a panicked symphony of a city being torn apart. One by one, the city’s backbone was being ripped out.
