The rain stopped about an hour ago, but the smell of it lingered in the air. Sean had convinced his friends to go urban spelunking at the abandoned meat packing plant just outside of town, but they nearly backed out on count of the weather alone. Not so much for cowardice as much as safety; they’d gone exploring in urban ruins before, and rain historically made things much more dangerous to move around. Going at night wasn’t ideal, but when they attempted to go during the day, it resulted in a stern talking to by a patrolman posted along the main road. Being the angsty 20-somethings they were, still burning with the embers of teenage rebellion, they returned at night, keeping to the dark and parking off the road farther down, waiting until the patrol car left for its end of shift. Sunset had long past and the freshly wet air added to the gloom of the dimly lit area. The street lamps on the main road provided the most light around, and only touched on the outer walls of the plant, the front of which was comprised of the loading docks and the office entrances. The doors and windows all broken and boarded up, they had to turn around to the far side of the building to find one window that was propped open, big enough for someone to climb up and crawl in, likely made by a vagrant looking for shelter from the weather or winter months.

Once inside, Chris turned on his flashlight, prompting Sean and Alex to do the same. These were not the brutally large baton-like flashlights from decades past, but more compact and significantly brighter; good that they can see, but good luck if they need to swing at anything that moves. Luckily for them, that’s never been the case, as any time they encountered someone in these places, they haven’t been hostile, and the ones that were only made the three friends turn away and go elsewhere in the area instead. Besides that, they had only encountered their fair share of monstrously large rats and other kinds of wildlife that scuttle about in such places. The only other significant downside of having such lights is that obstructions tend to make the shadows grow longer and deeper by contrast to anything in the light, which can be bothersome if someone’s eyes haven’t had time to adjust.

Sean took point as usual, making his slow way back towards the front offices. The plant floor was about as decrepit and derelict as expected for a place abandoned nearly ten years ago without any attempt to repair. Nature had reclaimed some corners of the walls where it could sneak through the cracks, and what few bits of machinery existed had long fallen into disrepair, rusting into place along the plant’s main line. As suspected, the three found more than one area littered with food packaging, blankets and other signs of makeshift camps, but for all that they found, no one was here recently or they hadn’t stuck around long enough to leave a trace. There weren’t many obstructions in the way on the plant’s production floor, but they still took their time to safely cross the area back to where the offices were in the building, closed off and isolated from the noises of the machinery.

As they approached the doors to the offices, Alex motioned his flashlight to the wall beside it, a yellow-stained off white color that had been covered with graffiti and other markings. He moved his light steadily across the surface as he read the most recent addition to the wall aloud to the others, or at least as much as was there:

WHEN LIGHT DESCENDS TO DARKNESS
AND THE WORLD SINKS INTO HELL
THAT’S WHEN ALL THE CATTLE START TO RUN
ALONE IN THE COL|

The line of the letter D started but not finished as it faded away from it’s original color of dark, brownish red. Sean chuckled about teenage poetry, while Chris inspected a mop bucket near the lettering. He backed away with a snarl, his nose crunched up from the metallic stench, muttering that he doesn’t think it’s paint on the wall. Alex stiffened at the thought of it, but Sean assured them it was probably more theatrics of kids making their mark in the area. Chris became more observant thereafter, and Alex noticeably took deep steady breaths to calm down.

They regrouped and headed into the offices, the hallway made all the more narrow from the cabinets and debris that had been stacked there. The three filed in, one by one, into the first room, a few desks and office chairs, and the cubicle partitions all stacked against the wall. The boards on the windows blocked out all but the smallest slivers of light from the distant street lights, and the room was long abandoned, not even made a camp for any homeless. The dust on the few furnishings was thickly caked, and made it apparent that this part of the building–despite having the most dense human activity in its previous life–was forbidden to any new travellers. Alex backed out of the room and they followed in reverse order as they peeked into some offices that were crammed with abandoned furniture. Near the end of the hallway, they stepped into another room, spacious, with tile floors and countertops crowded with tabletop appliances. The area was appropriate, so Sean advised a quick break to assess what they’d seen and get their cameras ready for pictures and filming. Sean always had a superstition about documenting on the way out of a location rather than in, because he claimed that found footage films had to be found to be seen, and it always gave him a glimmer of hope that he would would be alive to give things out instead of having his remains robbed at some kind of crime scene.

As Alex and Sean prepared their devices, there was a loud clatter from down the hallway, coming from the plant floor, and loud enough to get their attention. Reflexively, Chris leaned out the door and aimed his flashlight to see anything, only to find nothing of note among the debris, not even so much as a scuttling rat. In that briefest of moments that he turned to tell them it was nothing, the figure emerged from the darkness, his heavy stomping footfalls a stampede of sound as they rushed forth, and grabbed Chris by the throat with his dirty and stained hand, nearly strangling him in the hold. Carrying Chris by the neck, the man rushed and pinned him to a wall at the near end of the hallway, lifting him off the ground by over a foot. Sean and Alex hurried out of the office, but stopped just outside of the doorway, their flashlights pointed at this man holding their friend pinned to the wall. He was roughly their height, covered in dirty, stained denim, reclaimed from previous owners, and he wore a knitted cap, bloody red and soaking wet. However, what caused them to stop in their tracks was the blade he carried in his other hand: a billhook machete sharpened to a razor’s edge. What felt to them as an eternity took a fraction of a second, as the man raised the blade high, and plunged the hook into their friend’s chest and yanked hard downward with a wet, cracking squelch. Chris’s muffled pleas–his throat still locked in the clamp of the man’s hand–fell quiet, the panic in his face slacking into a death grimace of shock and horror. The air pulled out of the room as Alex and Sean could barely breathe at what they’d just witnessed, their eyes widened and unbelieving as they stood paralyzed at the sight. The man, still holding Chris against the wall by the neck, rested the hook over his shoulder and used his now free hand to pry open his victim’s chest and plunge his face inside. Alex audibly gasped, nearly choking on the bubbling reflux coming from his stomach, and the man withdrew his face with a snap, turning to see the other two watching in horror. Whatever his complexion, the man’s face, clothing, and hair was covered in the fresh blood of his victim, but that image was all the more sickening as he looked at Sean and Alex with wild eyes and a grin from ear to ear with gnarly, stained, and sharpened teeth.

The killer dropped Chris’s body from the wall, leaving it in a pile on the floor as he turned his full body towards the others, taking the blade off his shoulder into his hand, his eyes unblinking as his gravely voice began a soft melody. “Hunting piglets in the darkness, make it fun and try to hide, hehehe” he giggled, as he took the first steps towards them. The blood on his face and hair began to bead up into droplets that ran up towards his red knitted cap, leaving only the faintest stains behind on his dirty hair and skin. Sean and Alex both immediately turned and ran down the hallway, squeezing single file through the bottle neck of the doorway at the end, and the man shouted the resolution in his gravely cackling voice, “I’ll rip apart your insides! Bleed you out until you die!”

Sean and Alex were onto the plant floor, their lights shaking heavy from the run, barely focusing on the obstructions in the room, to keep them from getting tripped up. The rush of heavy stomping boots grew louder as the man caught up, tackling Alex like a lion pouncing on its prey. His panicked scream was immediately cut short with another audible wet squelching impact, as Sean, tears in his eyes, abandoned his friend. The propped open window they’d come through was shut and barricaded, so he turned a corner, quickly slipping through a broken crack in the wall to the back rooms and climbed into a metal cabinet at the far end. Turning off his flashlight, Sean gripped it tight, wishing it was decades older one, heavy and worthy of its brutal reputation. In that moment of thought, the loud stomps of his attacker approached and whatever door in the room was kicked in with a loud crack and clatter as it flew to the floor. The man had no subtleties about his search, his heavy feet stomping across the room as he flung open cabinet doors and threw chairs aside as he sniffed about, his gravely voice humming another murder ballad as he hunted for the last survivor. Sean tried to steady his breathing and held it tight as he heard the man approaching quickly, knowing that it was just a matter of time before he was found. That fear was well founded, but cut short just the same as he heard a grunt of effort before something heavy crashed against door of the cabinet, pinning him against the back and trapping him inside.

He felt something warm and wet spilled from his lips, but something blocked his hand to reach up to feel it; a metal pipe had pierced the door, puncturing his chest just off center enough to miss his heart, and put a hole through his lungs instead. The stomping feet of the man faded as he walked off, angrily throwing things about in failure to find his quarry, and the blood loss set in on Sean’s final moments. As he expired and the blood spilled down his body, the action camera he had harnessed on his chest was slowly covered by the drip, drip, dripping of it, the casing already clipped from the pipe beside it. The cracked backlit display popped a freeze frame of the man attacking Chris, and a window asking “Delete?”