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Sodden with blood, a girl pushes herself up off of the wet morning ground and staggers off into the black of the night. Her clothes are clinging to her so badly that it made her feel like she was trying to move through mud. Spots swam in her vision as she willed herself to keep going. She was desperate to get as far away from the house as possible and get back to civilization.

She’s confident that she can do it, too. She has to be.

That confidence died when the silence of the night broke with an odd mechanical humming. What was that? A plane? She quickly regretted it when she looked at the sky and her vision blurred so much that she nearly fell. The greyish spots turned completely white as the hum got louder.

She figured out it was a car. She hears the car coming but does not see it, and then he has her…

Ellie closed the book she was reading so hard that several pages ended up getting bent. She tossed it across the room thinking, ‘Oh please, this book is such a load of crap.’

...*

...

Jack Laurie had a talent for accidentally walking in on incredibly heinous crime scenes. It started when he was four years old and walked into the bathroom at the movie theater and found a dead body. His luck didn’t improve at all since then, it was mostly just a downward spiral. He decided to put his luck to use and joined the FBI, becoming an undercover agent. ‘This is part of the problem with you, Jack.’ His mother’s voice rang in his head. ‘You make so many bad decisions.’

‘Too fucking right, mother.’ It wasn’t something Jack expected to think but as he stared down at the crime scene in front of him, he started reconsidering his life choices.

“We need you to get rid of the body,”

“Are those teeth marks?” Jack had learned never to ask a criminal questions about the crime they committed, as bad things always seemed to happen afterwards. But this one was particularly gruesome and he could not take his mind off of it. A body so mangled that there was almost no identifying markers left on it. The bitter smell of baking death in Florida heat filled the air and made him feel like he was going to throw up.

“Yeah, one of my boys needed a problem gotten rid of so I fed the sorry sucker to my gators.”

‘Animal smugglers,’ Jack resisted the urge to make a face, ‘they’re all fucking crazy.’ He didn’t say anything else. He buried the body in a place where the other agents could pick it up and went on with his life. Luckily, it was only four more months before he was taken out and the smuggler was arrested.

Jack had thought that he would get a break after that.

Nope.

Not even close.

It was three twenty-eight am on a Thursday when he got a call that started with, “We’ve got a problem.”

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