Dream

I step into the building; it's eerie how normal it looks on the ground floor. Big wall of mailboxes, according to a plaque on the wall this place is called "Lander," named after some wealthy donator. The ground floor is empty, from the brief I got on the way over the victims this far down experienced a form of hysteria; the police rounded them up a while ago. The elevators are offline, I head for the stairs.

When I open the door a kid inside, I'd guess 20 year old Asian male, is sitting on the first flight of stairs, hunched over his head in his hands. When the door opens he looks up at me, his eyes are locked in a stare of absolute horror, but a creepy insane grin begins to spread over his face. He doesn’t move or say anything, just sits there like something out of a funhouse gone horribly wrong. He follows me with those terrified eyes as I climb the stairs. I pass two more people, both unmoving. I'd guess comatose by quick observation, but I wouldn't rule out dead. This case has thrown all the rules out the window.

The Second floor. I step out. There's another kid on the ground across from the doorway. He's curled up in the fetal position, shivering, and saying "so clear, but... so clear" to himself over and over again. He doesn’t respond to questioning. He doesn’t respond to me nudging him in the side of the ribs either. I move on. I turn right out of force of habit; a row of rooms is off to my right, and a larger door in on my left. I head through the larger door.

It looks like it was a lounge, or public room or something. Whatever it is that shell shocked the people behind me hit these harder. I can count... 5 total. All dead. Suicides, they don't look planned either. One in particular is frozen in rigger mortis, his hands on his head, after snapping his own neck. The ceiling in this room is singed in a few places. It looks like I'm one floor off from the main event.

I head up the stairs again; I pass another self inflicted fatality on the way, and one that may have been a combination of hysteria and a flight of cement stairs. It's a lot more then I want to deal with right now, I'll let the coroner decide what happened.

The third floor is even worse. There's a weird smell in the air, a mix of ozone and something burning. I head for the public room on this floor. I pass something really weird. Have you ever seen pictures of a human shadow burned into the concrete in Hiroshima? It looks almost like that, but something that strong should have destroyed the building. And it's just one, someone who was leaning against the wall on the hallway side of the public room door. This makes less and less sense. I hesitate to look any further, but it's far too late to turn back now.

I was wrong. There's a lot more then one. There's dozens in this room, the floors and walls are singed but there are clearly human shaped shadows in the burns. It looks like they were standing in a ring around the center of the blast. There aren't any remains of any of the shadow casters, but there is one body in this room.

Caucasian male, I'd say six and half-ish feet tall, big frame, heavy set. At first I think he was singed, but he doesn’t have a mark on him, he's just wearing all black. He's dead in a way that doesn’t make any sense. No sign of any injury, no toxin, and no heart attack. He hasn't undergone rigger mortis, and his skin hasn't paled much. He's got something in his hand. It's a little recorder, a digital one. I flip to the last recording in its memory and hit play. After a brief period of scratchy silence a voice comes through the recorder's crappy mono speaker.

"The following is the audio log of Maximilian Willson, the current date is... April nineteenth, two thousand six. It's all so clear now..."