I awoke with a start, my eyes shooting open, but I immediately squeezed them shut against the harsh, stabbing intrusion of sunlight.

  Am I dead? The question fluttered through my mind, a detached, academic curiosity. This doesn’t feel like heaven. And it’s way too bright for the other place.

  I took stock of my body. I was lying down, my head propped on something soft and warm that moved with the steady rhythm of a slow heartbeat. I clenched my fist, feeling the hard grit of asphalt beneath my hand. I no longer felt the cuffs around my wrists, which gave me pause but the asphalt was too warm, too real. So, I survived. I love it when I do that.

  As the memory of the last moments crashed back in, the pain in my side, the world fading to black, I felt something wet drip onto my face. Cautiously, I opened my eyes a fraction, my hand held over them to block the sun. Dried blood, red and black, caked my skin and startled me for a moment. That’s a lot of blood. How did I survive?

  I looked up, and another wet drop fell on my face.

  As my vision adjusted to the light, I was met with a heart-wrenching sight. Kira was sitting beside me, my head cradled in her lap. Tears fell silently from her closed eyes, tracing clean paths down her dust touched cheeks.

  I reached up, my fingers trembling slightly as I wiped away a tear from her cheek. The skin was soft, warm. Real.

  At my touch, Kira gasped. Her eyes flew open, wide with a disbelief so profound it was almost painful. “Elias?” she whispered, her voice a raw, trembling thing.

  “Hey, partner,” I replied, a weak smile breaking through the haze of confusion.

  In an instant, she pulled me into her chest, enveloping me in a warm, desperate hug as she sobbed into my shoulder. “I thought…” she choked out, her words tangled in tears and ragged breaths. “I thought you were gone.”

  “Careful, my woun—” I started to warn, instinctively reaching for the wound in my side, the memory of the claws tearing through me still fresh.

  To my astonishment, where I expected to find a gaping, bloody gash, my fingers met only the tattered cloth of my uniform and the smooth, unbroken skin beneath it. I felt along my side in disbelief, finding nothing. There was no sign of the deep, jagged wounds the lizard had inflicted. Just my skin, unmarred and unblemished beneath the dried blood.

  What the actual… The level up. It… it healed me.

  “Kira,” I mumbled into the fabric of her shirt, the realization a slow, dawning light. “I think I’m okay.”

  Slowly, she loosened her grip, allowing me to prop myself up on my elbows. She rubbed the remnants of her tears from her eyes, a fragile, watery smile breaking across her face. With a mix of curiosity and disbelief, I lifted my shredded shirt, wiping away the dried blood that had crusted my skin. Smooth, pale flesh greeted my touch, free from the pain that had been a screaming inferno moments ago.

  Kira mirrored my movements, her own hand tracing the spot where the claws had ravaged my side, her fingers lingering for a half second. Her touch sent a spark of electricity through my skin. I found myself lost in her eyes, captivated by the depth of emotion swirling within them.

  The moment was shattered by a sharp, stinging slap across my face.

  Yup. Definitely alive. I rubbed my cheek instinctively.

  “Don’t you ever do that to me again!” she exclaimed, her voice cracking with a furious, terrified energy as she furiously wiped the last traces of her tears from her cheeks.

  Before I could muster an apology, a sharp CRACK echoed from the ambulance, a single gunshot cutting through the air like a knife.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Instinct took over. In a heartbeat, we were both on our feet, our exhaustion forgotten, our hands dropping to holsters that held our newly materialized sidearms. We ran, our boots pounding on the asphalt.

  What now…

  We rounded the ambulance, its back doors hanging open like a silent scream. And there was the epilogue to this particular shitshow.

  Jonathan Kent, the grieving farmer, stood holding my Glock. He was pointing it at the fresh hole in Monica’s head. She was still cuffed, slumped against the tire like a discarded marionette whose strings had been cut. My earlier shoulder shot was a neat, tidy little hole. This was a gory mess. Brain matter and skull fragments had redecorated the ambulance’s pristine white paint in a spray pattern that I knew I would be seeing in my sleep for weeks.

  He turned, and the gun came with him, its movement lazy but deliberate. His eyes were not just empty. They were voids, black holes of despair that had swallowed everything else. Out of my periphery, Kira’s shotgun came up, the stock nestling into her shoulder with a familiar, solid sound. Good. One of us was still running on all cylinders.

  I put my hands up slowly, palms open. The universal symbol for ‘don’t shoot me’.

  “Easy, Jonathan,” I said, my voice sounding like gravel in a tin can. “It’s over now. Let’s make sure no one else gets hurt. Just put the gun down.”

  His focus shifted, his gaze looking right through me. He was checking out of this reality, and death was the concierge holding the door. Then that terrifying clarity snapped back into his eyes. No more grief. No more anger. Just a finality that shook me to my core.

  He’s not...

  I opened my mouth to say something, anything, to ease the pain I knew was in his heart. But what do you say to a man who has lost everything in a single, brutal afternoon? As I racked my brain, Jonathan lifted the Glock to his temple. A slight, heartbreaking smile touched his lips as he closed his eyes.

  “Take me to them.”

  The gunshot was brutally loud, an exclamation point at the end of a very, very bad day.

  Jonathan’s body crumpled like a dropped puppet. The sound of his skull hitting the pavement was not loud, just a flat, wet thud that was sickeningly final.

  My own knees gave out a second later, hitting the asphalt with a jolt that shot up my spine. Okay. Scene is… not secure. One GSW, self inflicted. One GSW, homicide. Two perps down. One victim… five victims… My brain tried to run the checklist, to put this horror into a neat little box with a case number, but the processor kept crashing. The rest of my mind was just screaming static.

  The adrenaline vanished. It didn't fade; it was like someone unplugged me. One second, a fire in my veins. The next, a hollow, shaking void. A wave of cold washed over me, and my stomach churned, the coppery taste of blood and burnt coffee rising in my throat.

  A hand landed on my shoulder. Kira. I had not even heard her move. She didn't say anything, just pulled me to my feet. My legs felt like they were made of wet cement, but she steered me toward the cruiser, and I let her. Inside, her arms were around me, pulling me into a hug that was less about comfort and more about holding the pieces together. I just sagged against her, letting her take my weight, the smell of gunpowder and her sweat grounding me for a half second.

  After a moment that could have been an hour, we pulled apart. There was work to do. There was always, always work to do.

  I grabbed Roy’s scrawny ankles. His skin was already cool. I dragged his corpse off the road, his worn out sneakers leaving two parallel lines in the dust. He was surprisingly light for a deadweight scumbag. Monica was next. I put them side by side near the ditch, their vacant eyes staring up at the empty sky. End of the line for the meth fueled Bonnie and Clyde. I didn't hope they found peace. I just hoped they stayed dead.

  Then came the worst part. The ambulance. The air that rolled out as I hauled the door open was a physical thing, a hot, wet blanket of copper and piss. My training screamed at me. Don’t touch anything. Preserve the scene. What scene? The world was the crime scene now, and there was no one left to investigate but us.

  The flashing lights from our cruiser painted the inside in strobing flashes of red and blue, a macabre disco over the dead. I reached out and closed Michael’s eyes with my thumb. A small, pointless courtesy from one world to the next. Martha was a dead weight across her son’s chest. My hands came away sticky as I untangled them, arranging them side by side, giving them some semblance of peace. A family, reunited. The thought was so fucking bleak it was almost funny.

  I added Jonathan and the two paramedics to the collection. A full house. What the fuck is wrong with me?

  I slammed the doors shut, the heavy clang echoing in the unnatural, dead quiet of the roadblock. My stomach, which had been a tight, cold knot, gave a violent lurch. I stumbled away from the ambulance, doubled over, and emptied what little I had onto the dusty asphalt. Wiping my mouth with the back of a bloody hand, I looked back. The red and blue lights kept blinking, their stupid, cheerful rhythm painting the side of the metal box. A rolling tombstone.

  It was not senseless. That was the most fucked up part. In this new, broken world, it made a horrifying kind of sense.