in the aftermath of it all

Who: Brett and Danny
Where: the park
When: well after dark

The sun had set on the carnage before they had arrived and now the park was only lit by the semicircle of headlights, beams cutting through the darkness to cast intermittent and inadequate light over the field. Standing back, at the edge, Brett half wished they couldn't even see that much, though the moans, the occasional screams, the sobbing - nothing would hide the fact that something terrible had occurred here today. It was simply something that was beyond their immediate comprehension, especially since the emergency call had done nothing to really prepare them for this.

They had been working for most of the day on that morning's single murder, putting together and chasing down leads, putting forward theories for consideration and generally working the case. Plans for the event in the park had passed them by - until the moment that the telephone had rung. 'An incident at the park - all available units' had been the detail, and that was all. Clearly, seeing this now, whoever had rung it in hadn't been able to properly express what had happened. Looking at it now, Brett couldn't blame them for that. Outside of the arena of all out war, he couldn't imagine such a thing.

“For fuck’s sake,” Danny murmured from where he stood, near Brett, not even sure where to start. There was no way to even figure out what the hell this was or what had happened. Stakes, it looked like fucking stakes coming up out of the ground. Part of him wondered if he was seeing things, if he was just imaging what was going on in the odd lighting, a result of not spending too long staring at gruesome old case files. “Where the hell are we supposed to even start?”

The question started Brett out of his funk, the shock at seeing what lay before him. He'd seen some horrors in his time, but nothing along the lines of this. For the first time since he'd been a rookie seeing his first three week old corpse, he wanted to go find a bush to throw up behind. Not that he did. "We start by sending every uniform we've got available to the hospital to start interviewing the injured," he said, noting that ambulances and hospital cars were still here. They couldn't even tell how many people were dead - 'far too many' by the looks of it, and in the darkness...

That was something Danny could do and though he'd never admit it, it was good to have something to latch on to. Letting out a low, sharp whistle he motioned for two uniforms to come over. They complied because they knew him and knew it hadn't been that long since he was one of them. In a low voice he explained what he needed. That they had free reign to bring in others. Call people in on their day off. With a body count like this was he had no doubt they'd come. Once they were sent away he motioned for Brett to determine just which set of corpses they started with. Already the smell of death and dying was in his nostrils. It wouldn't go away for days as if it just seeped into his pores from just being in the same vicinity.

"There's going to be a limit on what we can do tonight," Brett said, as they headed out more into the darkness. The ground was damp underfoot and he tried not to think too hard on whether that was blood or just the natural setting in of nighttime dew. "With the wounded here, and the coroners will want to do their thing..." He took a deep breath, then wished he hadn't as the metallic stench of blood hit his nostrils. "Fuck - what even happened here?" he asked, stopping and looking around, his tone one of disbelief. Brett was, in fact, human - for all he tended to act towards most people like he was made of stone.

Danny had been staring at a body, one with a metal pole through his chest. He was dead, probably dead before he could scream, but his eyes were wide open, staring up at the black night sky. Not caring that Brett was there he reached for his flask in his coat pocket, tipping back a hefty swig. This was the sort of thing that drove people to drink. The disbelief in Brett’s tone had Danny looking back up, turning his eyes away from the carnage and looking at the other man in the low lights. That brief instance of humanity, ease the slightest edge of Danny’s ire for the man. Not enough for Danny to like him, but it was like Brett made one small step in the right direction in his eyes. “You’ve got me. I’ve seen a lot, but I can’t tell you anything that fucking stakes people like this. What were all of them doing out here anyway?”

'Stakes'. There was that word again, one he'd been hearing all damn day. Brett stopped a passing uniform and took a flashlight off him, then turned the beam onto the metal rod sticking out of the ground. "These are different to the one from this morning, but... Under the circumstances, no way we can rule out that them being connected somehow," he said, keeping his voice low enough for the comment to stay between them. No way did they need something like that being leaked to the press. That would be the makings of a city-wide panic, if this event alone wasn't enough to set that off already. As for what had happened, Brett turned the beam around, looking for someone who would be able to answer that question.

Danny eyed the rod in the flashlight beam, judging its height with one nearby. “Nothing I know of shoots metal rods,” he pointed out, voice just as low. “And nothing I know of shoots stakes either.” Which to Danny was more of the connection between the two. Someone with homemade weapons. Very well homemade. As the light turned away from the stake, Danny drifted a step away from Brett, trying to get a rough body count with what he could see.

Brett could agree with Danny on that - he'd never known anything like that. He let the other guy wander off a little as Brett himself stopped a man whose blood-splattered white attire betrayed him as being part of the ambulance service. "You know why all these people were even here?" he asked the man as he flashed his badge. He couldn't imagine that this many people would turn up without reason. Or that some psychopath had managed to get them to just stand there like lambs to the slaughter either, not without some other reason.

"Sure Detective - you not hear the news?" The guy said, though he looked keen to move on - there were still wounded out there. "Church organised some kind of outdoor mass thing for this town overseas - load of them there got burned to death. Massacre, they're calling it. And now we've got one here as well. You ask me, whoever did this's got one sick sense of humour. Now, I gotta get busy, y'know?" he said, then disappeared off into the night.

Danny had drifted farther, noting another body that seemed familiar, though little of her face was left. Kneeling he squinted trying to make some resemblance in the night, but the light wasn’t hitting her right. Still something the woman looked familiar. Like he’d seen her face somewhere before. Opening his mouth to ask Brett, he spotted the guy talking to medic of some sort, but between the din of what was going on around he couldn’t quite hear what they were saying. Just a few words drifted through. Frowning, he waited, assuming Brett would fill him in when they were done.

Brett let the guy go, then headed over to Danny, shining the light from the flashlight more over the corpse and wincing at the sight. "Apparently it was a church gathering," he said, his voice quieter. had she still been alive, his aunt would have been here. Of course, she wasn't - she'd died getting on for eighteen years ago, but he still remembered how it had been - every Sunday, come rain or shine. Her religion had been important to her.

“Does she look familiar to you or am I’m just losing my mind?” Danny asked Brett before whatever Brett said actually filtered through. When it did though Danny’s entire demeanor changed. “A church gathering?” His voice had changed, no longer gruff, but replaced with something that sounded closer to panic. A church gathering meant Janey...where was Janey tonight? Did she tell him she was going to something? Frantically he started looking around, grabbing Brett’s flashlight and trying to shine it over every body in the vicinity, looking for a familiar shock of of red hair.

Brett had been about to answer, when the flashllight was ripped from him. Oh, fuck. It didn't take a genius to realise what the change meant. It meant that Danny knew someone who was likely here. "Who is it?" he asked, following after the guy, but already looking around for someone who could support him - he was going to need it, if the worst actually came to pass. Nobody needed to see a cop lose it at a crime scene, and he couldn't just leave the guy to it with no support in any event.

In his head Danny was praying. He never did that but right now he was demanding that God did not let his wife die or else Danny was coming up there and taking down the man himself. What sights he’d been able to stomach earlier, a steel feeling of being a cop for too damn long were too much to stomach now, and all the blood had his stomach churning, bile rising to the back of the throat. Please don’t let any of it be hers. Brett’s words seemed to come through a cloud that was taking over his head, and Danny had to swallow back the contents of his stomach before he could answer. “My wife,” he said tersely, through gritted teeth, trying not to show too much emotion, trying not to show the fear.

Brett turned and hollered for a uniform, the loud tone cutting through everything and bringing someone running pretty quickly. "New job for you - stay with McKinnon here. His wife's out there - find her," he said, sharply. With all hell loose, they couldn't afford to lose both of them, but Brett wasn't going to question the need for Danny to find his wife. Brett knew that, in the same position, he'd be one track as well. He turned back to Danny. "I'll cover things here - just let me know," he said, not adding in anything about wat that outcome might be. Given everything that had gone down here tonight, it felt right now that there was little hope of a good outcome.

Danny knew what was going on, where his focus should be but this was his wife. He couldn’t deal with these other people now, not when she might be out there. Turning to Brett he didn’t speak, not trusting his voice to give everything away. Instead he just nodded. He knew what could happen, what the possible outcomes could and would be.Damnit God, don’t let her be dead.

"I said I'll cover it - go," Brett repeated, since Danny didn't seem to be moving.

Danny didn’t need to be told a third time. Grabbing the uniform’s shirt he pulled him with him, starting off, deeper into the massacre.