The Room That Rewrote the Scene

"Sometimes you don’t walk into a crime scene. Sometimes you fall through a hole in the story—and land in something far worse."

Without thinking—because thought would have paralysed me, would have kept me frozen in the car whilst Karl potentially died—I threw open the car door with force that made it swing wide on its hinges. My movements were driven by instinct and adrenaline rather than conscious decision, my body taking over where my mind had failed.

I stumbled out, my legs numb from sitting and weak from exhaustion, my knees slamming painfully into the gravel with a crunch that sent spikes of agony up my thighs. My fall was graceless, a physical manifestation of the turmoil inside me, my body expressing what my mind couldn't articulate.

The pain was sharp, immediate, grounding in its clarity. Blood seeped warm through my trousers where my knees had met the unforgiving gravel, the fabric tearing, skin splitting, but I paid no mind to the pain or the damage. All that mattered was getting to the house, to Karl, to the source of that gunshot before it was too late, before another person I'd failed to protect was lost forever.

My heart was a relentless drumbeat in my chest, each thud echoing the urgency and fear that propelled me forward, each beat threatening to be the last before my overtaxed system simply shut down from the sustained assault of adrenaline and cortisol and pure terror.

As I sprinted toward Luke's house, my legs finding strength from sources I didn't know existed, the pulsing pain in my knees became a distant sensation, overshadowed by the adrenaline coursing through my veins like rocket fuel, like liquid desperation, like the last reserves of someone who had nothing left to lose because they'd already lost everything that mattered.

The night was fractured by the flashing red and blue lights, casting an eerie, chaotic glow over everything, transforming the suburban street into something from a nightmare, from a fever dream, from the kind of scene that haunts you years later when you close your eyes and try to sleep.

The scene was surreal, like a snapshot of chaos frozen in time, every detail hyperreal in the way that trauma makes things.

An unmarked police car was parked haphazardly across the street, its front door hanging open in a silent scream, interior light spilling out onto the road. The sight sent a jolt of alarm through me that added to the cocktail of chemicals already flooding my system.

Was it Karl's car? My mind raced, piecing together the fragments of the scene even as I continued my headlong dash towards the house, my detective brain still functioning despite everything, still observing, still cataloguing details that might matter later.

The licence plate—I should check the licence plate, should confirm whether it was Karl's vehicle, should gather evidence. But there was no time, no space in my consciousness for methodical investigation. I was running on pure instinct now, pure need, pure terror.

The night air was filled with the chatter of neighbours who had spilled out onto the street, drawn by the commotion like moths to flame, like spectators at an execution. Their faces and voices blurred into the background of my consciousness, insignificant in the face of my singular focus. They were NPCs in the video game of my crisis, background characters whose presence registered but didn't matter, didn't impact my narrative, didn't change the trajectory of my sprint toward potential catastrophe.

I prayed fervently, a silent plea to whatever gods might be listening—though I'd stopped believing in benevolent deities somewhere between my parents' death and the realisation that the world was fundamentally unjust—that I wouldn't find Karl hurt, or worse. The prayer was incoherent, wordless, just a desperate psychic scream into the void: please, please, please don't let it be him, don't let me be too late, don't let this be the end.

As I neared the front door of the house, my body collided with an officer moving in the opposite direction, down the driveway. The impact was brief, barely a brush in the grand scheme of things, but in my heightened state, it felt like a jarring disruption, like a full-body tackle that threatened to derail my momentum.

I barely registered his face—young, probably a recent graduate from the academy, eyes wide with shock at whatever he'd seen inside—my eyes and mind fixated on the open doorway ahead that pulsed with light and shadow and the promise of terrible revelations.

Information, at that moment, seemed secondary to the imperative of finding Karl. I had to see for myself, to know he was safe. The urgency was all-consuming, drowning out everything else in a tide of fear and determination that was probably the only thing keeping me upright, keeping me moving, keeping me from collapsing entirely under the weight of accumulated trauma.

Taking the front steps in a single, desperate leap—my legs somehow finding the strength for one more burst of speed, one more surge of adrenaline—my determination to find Karl eclipsed all sense of protocol or caution. The officer at the door tried to block my way, his arm extending to bar my entry, his voice saying something about authorised personnel only, about crime scene integrity, about procedure.

But I was already past him, shouldering through the gap before he could properly react, my badge still on my hip giving me just enough authority to make the breach technically defensible, though we both knew I had no business being here, no jurisdiction over this scene, no right to contaminate an active investigation.

My only focus was to get inside, to find Karl, to see with my own eyes that he was okay, or if he wasn't okay, to be there, to bear witness, to not abandon him at the end the way I'd abandoned every principle I'd ever claimed to hold.

The living room light flickered on just as I entered—someone hitting a switch, flooding the space with harsh illumination—momentarily blinding me after the relative darkness outside. I blinked furiously, trying to force my eyes to adjust to the sudden brightness, my pupils contracting painfully, everything washing out into white and shadow before slowly resolving into shapes, into forms, into the terrible reality of the scene before me.

Officers swarmed around me, attempting to restrain me, their hands grasping at my arms with increasing urgency as they recognised I shouldn't be here, that I was compromising their scene, that I was acting irrationally. Their voices merged into a cacophony of orders and shouts—"Detective Lahey, you need to leave," "This is an active scene," "You're contaminating evidence"—but I tuned them out, my mind singularly focused on finding Karl amidst the chaos.

"Fuck off!" I yelled, adrenaline fuelling my strength as I pushed through them with force that surprised even me, my exhausted body finding reserves I didn't know existed. Their attempts to contain me felt like gentle suggestions, easily dismissed, easily overcome through sheer desperate will.

Their voices continued—warnings, orders, concerns—but they became background noise, white static against which my singular focus on finding Karl played out in sharp relief.

"Karl!" I called out, my voice echoing through the house, bouncing off walls and through doorways, a mixture of fear and desperation that probably revealed more about my state of mind than any psychological evaluation ever could. The reality of what I might find was a weight in my stomach, a dread that tightened its grip with every step I took, every second that passed without response.

But then I stopped dead in my tracks, my forward momentum arrested so completely it was like hitting an invisible wall.

There, in the middle of the living room, lay a middle-aged woman on her back, her life ebbing away into a growing pool of blood that spread across the carpet with horrible organic patterns, seeping in deep, staining everything it touched with the evidence of violence, of mortality, of the fragility of human existence.

The sight was jarring in ways I couldn't immediately process. Her face was unfamiliar to me, and for a moment, confusion clouded my thoughts, disrupting the singular focus on Karl that had driven me here. This wasn't Karl. This wasn't Luke. This was someone else entirely, someone whose presence here raised questions I had no capacity to address.

She was perhaps in her fifties, dressed in what looked like normal casual wear now soaked with blood. Her eyes stared at the ceiling with that particular glassy quality that only comes after life has departed, that transformation from person to object, from someone to something that happens at the moment of death.

"She's gone," someone said solemnly—a paramedic, I thought, from the uniform glimpsed in my peripheral vision—crouching beside the lifeless body. The finality in his voice was a sharp contrast to the chaos around us, a declaration of defeat, of the point at which medical intervention becomes autopsy, at which saving becomes cataloguing.

My head was spinning, the room seeming to tilt and sway as I struggled to piece together the events. The blood. The body. The absence of Karl. The gunshot. None of it formed a coherent narrative, just fragments of horror that refused to connect into meaning.

"Jenkins?" I asked the nearest officer—a woman whose face I vaguely recognised from briefings, whose name I couldn't recall—hoping to find a familiar face in the sea of uniformed personnel, hoping for confirmation that Karl was alive, was safe, was somewhere other than here.

The officer shook her head, her expression sympathetic but unhelpful. "Haven't seen him."

Relief, fleeting and fragile, washed over me like a tide that would inevitably retreat, leaving me stranded again. Karl wasn't here. Karl wasn't the body. Karl was still out there, still alive, still... still what? Still running? Still destroying evidence? Still becoming the thing we'd spent our careers hunting?

With nobody trying to stop me anymore—the officers apparently deciding I was too distraught to be worth the effort of removal, or perhaps recognising that I was still technically law enforcement even if I was clearly compromised—I turned and walked briskly out of the house.