Unlikely Suspect

He wakes slowly; vision blurred and head pounding, disoriented as he blinks stupidly in the dim light. He tries to move his hands, and finds them bound at the wrist behind his back. He sobers immediately, struggling against his restraints as his senses sharpen; he’s in a small, dimly lit room, stripped down to his birthday suit, and bound to a metal folding chair in the center of the small space.

A soft click of the door knob as it slowly turns, his head and attention immediately snapping in the direction of the small noise, and in walks a child, no more than ten years old. The door closes, the child smiles at the man, approaching calmly. As the man begins asking the child for help out of his restraints, only for those pleas to fall on deaf ears, he notices that the child has a knife in their hand, and he begins cursing and screaming as the child makes small cuts along the bound legs of the man, starting from the ankle and slowly moving upwards until ten horizontal cuts line the restrained man’s calf. When the child begins making the same cuts to the man’s other leg, another stranger enters the small room. She looks only a few years older than the child whom entered the room before her, though, the two look nothing alike.

She gives the child a sweet after they hand her the knife. After she dismisses the child, she turns to the man with cold eyes and an even colder smile. She doesn’t know his language, doesn’t care that he’s cursing her as she approaches him and continues to smile, and as she smiles at him, he can feel something happening to him. Something wriggles beneath his skin, subtle, at first, but then he can feel the writhing motions of thing under his flesh, and then those things begin to bite. He howls in rage and pain as the parasites beneath his skin begin to eat his muscle and bones, tearing through tissue at an alarming rate, and as they eat, they begin to generate heat.

Before he can even process what’s happening to him, cauterized scars begin appearing like the termite trails in rotted wood across his skin as the parasites travel. He doesn’t know how the woman before him is doing this, but he knows with certainty that she’s causing him this agony. It isn’t long before the parasites begin targeting his organs, tunneling through lungs, liver, kidneys, stomach, eye, brain, tongue- nothing is safe from the hordes of hungry mouths devouring him from the inside out.

When nothing but the stench of burnt hair and death remain, a blood stain and burnt organic material, are all that remains of the tortured man. The woman smiles to herself, self satisfied and pleased, as she pulls the small pull cord of the single dim bulb in the room, opens the door, and vanishes without a trace. She begins to hum to herself as she blends in with the bustling people around her, contemplating where to go and whom to bring justice to next. One down, many, many more to follow.

______(In the news, the following day)

‘Foreign Leader Vanished Without Trace: No Current Leads.’

When (redacted) was last seen, he had been at a social event to promote his campaign and to quell scandalous rumors. Witnesses claim that he was there for the duration of the event, and some claimed to have seen him talking to a beautiful woman with sandy blonde hair dressed in a pretty red dress that looked almost out dated. He had left the event with the beautiful woman, and has not been seen since. No one knows his current whereabouts, and after speaking with law enforcement, there were no changes to his bank account(s), or anything of the sort, before he disappeared.

Law enforcement has asked that the press reach out to you at home for any tips that anyone may have, and to call them in to your local law enforcement office immediatel.’