by Kylie Fox

Created on: October 02, 2009

PARANOIA

It could have been any other suburban house; brick veneer, pretty garden, wagon parked in the driveway. It could have been, and once was, but not anymore. Now it was a slaughterhouse.

The detectives gagged as they walked through the front door, both certain that an abattoir would contain less blood than this otherwise ordinary lounge room.

It was splattered and sprayed up the walls, across the once peach coloured carpet and over furniture. Strips of skin and flesh were strewn across every surface. A pair of eyes, their sight long gone, made a macabre ornament to the glass-topped coffee table that lay slightly to the left of the room.

In the centre of all of this carnage, were two women. One lay on the floor, a pile of butchered meat, no longer recognisable as even human, much less the woman she had been only hours before. The other, straddled her body, bolt cutters at the ready, snapping open the dead woman's ribs. The presence of the two detectives didn't deter her from her work, if anything, she worked faster, determined to finish what she had started.

"Move away from the body." Said one of the detectives, mustering a voice of authority from his tight throat.

"Nooooo!" she screamed. "Not yet. I know who you are. You're THEM. Five more minutes. Please. I'm so close."

"Put your hands up where I can see them and move away." Roared the older detective. His eyes took in the collection of "tools", most matted in gore, which lay beside her. Hacksaw, scalpel, butcher's knife, pliers and several items that he'd only seen before in his wife's kitchen gadgets drawer.

The blood-soaked girl looked up at the detectives with frenzied eyes. Desperate to tell her story, she started babbling, her words coming out in gasps.

The younger of the two detectives moved to restrain her, to stifle her words.

"Ah, what the hell. Let her go. Get it off her chest if she needs to. Makes no difference to us does it?" The more senior of the two said, stopping the younger's advance. He grimaced, but dared not defy the authority of his superior. Still, though, it made a difference to him. The less time he had to spend surrounded by this barbarity, the better his chances of keeping his lunch.

"Why couldn't she just tell me where it was?" she began, "All the pain, all the blood, all this," she swept her arms around her indicating the obvious, "would have been unnecessary.

"I've got to hand it to THEM though; they certainly train you operatives or spies or whatever you

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