Calamity by Cedric Rose (best ereader for manga .txt) 📖

Amaia had opened the note. "Hello, my dear. I do not know who you are or why you are here. I have no intentions of harming you, but rather would like the opposite. I want to interest you in a game of "Cops and Robbers". You should be able to tell who's who at this point. This was my first target. My next target's location is somewhere inside of the room you found this note in. The victim you find knows exactly where it is, though he no longer lives. If you think about it long enough, you'll see it is the last thing on his mind. Hopefully, I'll see you again, not in the shadow of the moon. Toodles. Signed, Viri." Amaia felt disgusted. He acknowledged her, but he let her live. "Does he really think I'm that pathetic? That I'm just worthy enough to be a pawn in his little games? He'll just use me as bait when the going gets tough. Still, I feel...." she said, tears barely flowing out of her eyes. She reluctantly opened the door and almost fainted from what she saw. Blood. A tattered corpse. A heart.

~

Lansing's eyes broadened after hearing the words Viri had spoken, but they began to droop slowly, for two reasons; one being his acceptance of his death, and two, he seemed to know exactly who he was. Lansing pointed to a painting hanging on the wall. "Thank you, Lansing. I appreciate your help. You have saved the life of your wife, but sadly, your daughter cannot be spared. I attempted to take her as my own but she refused. You want to know what I did to her?" Viri said, disgustingly happily. "While she was sleeping, I tied her to her bed, then I put my blade to her and carved into her 'Semper Amo Te'. I was trying to be romantic. I guess she saw it otherwise, for she tried to fight me off. I had to cut off one of her fingers to calm her down. At that point she was flawed, and when my desire for her grew more. I was as impressed with her as much as I was infatuated. So I cut off the rest of her fingers, then I carved off her breast, for they were the only things blocking me from her heart. I then proceeded to cut three of her ribs out. It was a splendid sight indeed; her heart racing, because of me. Me! I couldn't help myself, I had to have her heart." Viri reached into his pocket slowly. "I had to have it. She loved me ! She couldn't say it but her heart showed it ! That's why I love the human body. It cannot tell lies, no matter how well the facade the puppeteer puts on." He pulled out the heart and tossed it up slightly in the air, as if it was a baseball. Lansing's eyes followed it with the precision of a hawk. "I have to take my leave now, Lansing. I'm sure you are moments from passing on to the next world. I won't burden you with my presence anymore." Viri sat Lansing in an upright position on the wall closest to him. "Rest in peace, 'Black Crow'." Viri threw the heart into the air, but before it hit the ground, he threw the blade through it, penetrating both the heart and Lansing's already heavily damaged midsection. "One more down." Viri said.

He is genuinely unhappy. He is awake but doesn't rise, not from lethagry, but from sadness, as if his depression has manifested into the homonym. He is, once again, thinking about his life, or what little he can remember. He knows he's a killer and that he exists. Usually, that is enough for him to get by, but on this day, his existence seemed meager, as if everything around him was better than him, for their purposes were expressed. He doesn't know who he is. His name, a pseudonym bestowed on him by a man who nurtured him back to health a little over a decade ago, after a failed job in his youth. He suffered from a concussion after being knocked down into the orner of a solid mahogony coffee table, though the anmesia isn't known to have come before or after. The man called him a Socratici viri poking fun at him for how much he pondered, on what he had no idea, but the man knew that Viri was well enough to move around, but stayed bed-ridden. Viri awoken one night and left without saying a word to the man, but he left a thank you note. Viri was a killer, but not crude.

As a child, Viri was wise beyond his years. Delving into books on political theory, the military-industrial complex, even chaos theories on the many contradictions of past govermental figureheads, he learned at a young age that the government could not be trusted, going against the words of his mother who believed the government was the only purity people could rely on. As an adolescent, he became a self proclaimed misanthrope. He hated everyone, though it seems everyone loved him, by way of some mysterious, Newtonian force. The sources of entertainment his raucous companions (if you can call them that) were always enthralled by always seemed to leave him devoid of the same joyous response as the usual adolescent. He loathed the people he was forcibly made to fit in with. He felt like a bathing suit lastly packed in with heavy winter coats lined with fur for a summer trip to Florida. A torrent of emotions start to flood his mind, forcing him to sit up, as if the rapids would recede down his body so he could get some peace. On some level it worked. He felt his pre-migraine start to fade and took this as an opportunity to get out of bed. His room was white, almost as if a winter blizzard had came across his room, minus the temperature drop, and empty enough for it to be psychologically evaluated as a sensory deprived chamber.

He walked into the bathroom, which seemed to have encountered the same aforementioned blizzard, and slpashed his face with lukewarm water. he looked into his emerald green eyes, and counted 12 total lavenderesque shards floating in both irises. "One less than yesterday," he thought. He looked at his cheek and noticed something; a tiny speck of red. His skin was smooth and flawless, to the point where even those horomonal teens you see on "lose acne fast" ads would be jealous, so the red spot stuck out immensely. He looked below the sink for a rag and also grabbed a container of bleach. He dabbed the rag with the off brand bleach and disinfected his face, wiping the same spot with water to do away with any residual corrosive chemicals. He tucks the rag back under the sink, then continues to start his day. He looks in the closet and grabs the only pair of jeans he sees. He reaches up and grabs a light brown button up shirt, sporting the word "Chaps" in front of it. It was his favorite brand, though he never golfed a day in his life. He liked the styles and material used in its production. He put on the Levi's and pulled a cord, as you would for a light switch, except there was no luminescence. He proceeded to the bathroom, and flipped another switch, which also did nothing. Kitchen. Bedroom. Four switches flipped, all as effective as the last, and hurried out, looking at the clock. 7:58:19, with a rapid progression of 3 digits that could be thrown into the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. As he was walking out, he passed by a stray cat, the same color as an inkwell in the night with eyes as green as a reviving field. "Come along, now, little one, I don't want you getting hurt. Bel, make sure the door is locked." The cat meowed, as if questioning who he was talking to. Viri threw the key into an open sewer drain, then proceeded to his bike, an 18 speed Huffy. "Bel, since you were the last one out, you have to walk. I'll meet you at the diner."

Amaia looks for covers to hide Lansing's corpse, tears filtering her vision, her stomach feeling like she has just experienced 7G's of gravity, then declined to the normal force of gravity. She finds a couple in the unnnervingly large bathroom, bigger than any room Amaia has ever lived in. "Hopefully, the sheets are a dark color so the blood wouldn't look that bad.." Forgetting the situation, Amaia focuses on trying to find something to shelter the body, as if the veil will act as a protective barrier into another dimesion. "Just a towel... Anything will do...." She starts to lose it. She can feel herself breaking down, tears come through as if the levy holding them back has reached its limit. "I can't..." She feels like all her strength has been transformed into liquid, manifesting onto the bottom of her eye, flowing out in the same manner an over-filled cup would. A disembodied yell snaps her back though. Mrs. Lansing. The widow was still here. She would have been with Lansing, and, if anything, spared as Amaia was. At least, that's how it worked in her mind. She dropped the now crumbled letter a miniscule distance from Mr. Lansing's lifeless body, with the intention of picking it up again at some time in this lifetime as far a thought as any. She searched around the room for anything that even fleetingly seemed like an escape route, even knocking on the walls hoping to hear the cry of a false wall. To her surprise, she could actually hear a difference in one section