Chapter 1

It was unfortunate that it was on their honeymoon that their corpses were found strewn on the floor, so decapitated and truncated that it was hard to know where their face ended and their neck started.

It was on Christmas day that the grizzly murder had taken place. Olivia and Mark were out in the Stellar Garden when a sudden movement in the bushes caught their eye. While investigating the source of the noise, a machete poked out from the dense flora, dealing a fatal strike to Mark's face, rendering him useless. Olivia tried to run but the thing that was attacking them was quicker and slashed her chest. Although they were practically dead, it continued to attack then suddenly it bent down and stuck it's face into the guillotined carcass and began to feed ravenously.

Two police officers on guard duty unwarily approached the patch of garden that the young couple had been brutally assassinated. Horror-stricken, the older officer reached for their shared walkie-talkie when a katana forced it's way across his back, through his ribs and out through his chest, a bloody heart impaled on the end.

With that, the thing left, leaving it's agonised victims to be seen.

Chapter 2

News outlets the following morning screamed variations of the same headline:

"Crimson Hunter: Maneater leaves one victim alive, slaughters three."

The police officer who was left standing had his face plastered across the front pages of every tabloid and broadcasted on every morning show on TV, his naive grin stretching across his face. That stupid smile will never be seen again, the man thought to himself bitterly as he crumpled the paper and deposited it in the nearest bin, hiding his shaking hands deep in his coat pockets. He ducked his head and hurried his pace as he shuffled past a well known news anchor on the street, who's quick eyes zeroed in on him instantaneously. She turned away from her conversation to jog after him with a grim kind of determination set in her face. "Excuse me! Mr. Thompson! A word for the public, if you'd mind?"

He shook his head, his lank strands of dark hair around his brows shifting with the motion. Thompson forced himself to ignore the jeers of the news anchor as she gave up and watched him leave. Why couldn't these damned people just leave him to think? To reflect on what he had to witness? Christ, it had only been one day and they were onto him like flies on faeces. Anything to add to the highlights on those trashy papers everyone in this self-absorbed town soaked up like the Man Upstairs wrote it himself. One that Thompson felt his faith in was slipping after last night's incident.

The reporter mumbled to herself in frustration on her way home that night, imagining the credit she would've received on obtaining a statement from the only surviving victim of the Crimson Hunter; or rather, its better well known name amongst town, the Ravager of Flesh. She hunched over her phone and tapped out a message, her fingers pressing harshly into the screen accompanied by loud clicks from the keyboard.

She didn't notice the stalker that had become her shadow, so adept as it was when mimicking her steps.
She didn't notice the glint of the machete as they passed beneath a streetlight.
She didn't notice her shadow creeping closer, closer, closer.

At least, not until her shadow gripped fistfuls of her shiny blonde hair from the back and slammed her face forward into the blade swiftly moved into place. The machete gouged through her eye socket and into her skull with a sickening crack that echoed in the empty street. The creature dropped her to ground, her screams cut short as it ripped into her throat and silenced her forever.

The cold night air hugged her body in the cooling embrace of lifelessness, draining the lasting warmth from it until she was a stiff corpse. And that was how she was discovered by a street cleaner at dawn the next day.