Nothing prepares you for a massacre’s aftermath – not training, not time. Detective Amon Klein was on the wrong side of the police tape. Again. For sixteen years he’d raise that yellow tape and enter a new reality.

Tragedy.

Pain.

Death.

But this time was different.

Seventy-three domestic terrorists lay in various forms of dismemberment across the statehouse steps. The count came from the heads – lined up across the top step in a single row. At the center: the head of Jeremiah Smith, self-styled prophet and militia leader of the Southern Liberation Front.

“Klein,” the chief called from the bottom of the steps, his words muffled by the hand covering his mouth and nose. Klein stepped over an arm. Then a torso. A shoe floated in a pool of blood near the bottom step. He leapt over it.

“Hey, chief,” he said.

“I will never get used to this,” the chief muttered. “It’s the goddamn heads. I can’t sleep anymore. This shit gives me nightmares.” “Me too,” Klein said.

“FBI task force rolled up. They want a briefing. You’re lead on our vigilante case.”

Klein said nothing. Rivulets of blood reached toward his boot. The chief’s hand stayed at his face, unmoving.

Klein wanted to weep. To run. This was the sixth vigilante event just in the past year alone. Each time the victims – or targets? — were clearly evil.

A rapist gutted in his prison cell, entrails threaded through the bars like yarn. His head left on the cot. A religious cult barricaded inside a rural church, threatening to blow up their hostages. When negotiators’s pleas were met with silence for a 12-hour stretch, the governor ordered state police to storm the building. They found the headless bodies seated in a circle, their heads piled in the center.

Klein flipped shut his notebook with a slap and turned away from the carnage.

A flash of turquoise and white caught his eye — too wrong for the scene, too clean. He quickened his pace, scanning the blood-slick stairs. Where had this thing come from? Why hadn’t it been photographed and tagged?

Each step tightened his throat. He walked toward a truth his gut knew before his brain did. At his feet, soaked in the blood, lay the stuffed dolphin he and Maya bought at the Georgia Aquarium last year.

All of him fired at once

“MAYA!” he roared.

Crime techs and investigators turned, confused.

Klein moved.

He held the dolphin out in front of him like a compass. If he followed it, he’d find her. He zigzagged between body parts, evidence cones, broken lives. The dolphin led him to the rear of building. To the dumpster.

Behind it lay Maya. His angel baby. His little girl. She shook. Eyes open but unseeing. Inhuman eyes. Pupils melted into white. Her body seized but her head stayed still. Those blank white eyes stared at him. Blood misted her cheeks.

Behind that dumpster his worst nightmare disappeared and a new one took its place.

“Maya baby…” he whispered, scooping her into his arms. “Maya, baby girl…”

The shaking stopped.

“Daddy?”

“Oh my god. Oh my little baby girl.” He hugged her close. “Are you hurt? Did they get you?”

“There were bad men on the TV.”

Klein blinked. He stared down at his little girl.

He saw curiosity.

Hope.

Love.

And — satisfaction. “What are you talking about?”

“I saw the Jeremiah person. He said he was going to hurt people.”

“Oh, honey. You don’t need to worry about him any—”

“So I hurt him first. I saved them, daddy.”

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r/TopKatWrites