Blue and red swirls of light reflected off of the cold, damp asphalt of the road leading up to an abandoned factory. The air was thick with tension, indistinct shouting, police in full tactical gear hidden behind their cars with scopes pointed at a lone SUV parked a few meters away from the old factory entrance. The concrete building was caving in; an aesthetic metaphor for the decay of industrial society, the inevitable fall of mechanization and its reliance on unsustainable pollution to power it.
Caleb coughed as a light breeze threw a whiff of ancient smoke across his face, shielding his mouth with the sleeve of his navy blazer. Nobody back at the station had bothered to brief him on the situation when they took advantage of a conveniently stationed FBI profiler, so he cluelessly steps through the haze of night into the flashing lights of chaos.
—
There was no situation to diffuse, only wasted time surrounding an empty SUV outside of an abandoned factory. For reasons still unclear, last night’s events were a set-up intended to distract the police; keep public eyes in the wrong place. ‘But why?’ Caleb kept asking himself. No crimes had been reported; nothing unusual at all, in fact, so what was this mystery culprit’s motivation for sending the police toward an empty SUV at the edge of town? To go through the trouble of executing such a plan, putting each piece in its place in order for a fake threat to seem so undeniably imminent… One must be truly mad to craft such a plan just for laughs.
Yet, it remained the most obvious explanation. Perhaps this convenient call to a fake crime scene was more relevant than it seemed; after all, Agent Hendricks hunted madmen. He understood them, got into their heads by reaching depths darker than anyone else in the bureau dared to touch – perhaps the encounter was not coincidence, but in fact a challenge.
Short Stories and Drabbles 