APOCORONALIPSE

It was a night drowned in rain and secrets.

Neon bled across the puddles, turning the cracked pavement into a crooked mirror.

The city looked almost beautiful that way, if you ignored the sirens, the boarded windows,

and the things that moved where the light didn’t reach.

I’m a Private eye. I’ve seen enough nightmares to know the line between the supernatural

and the mundane is thinner than a razor’s edge.

The bottle waited in my apartment like an old lover who already knew I’d come back eventually.

I used to wear the badge. Homicide division. Good instincts. Bad politics.

Then Internal Affairs found evidence lockers missing narcotics and dead witnesses tied to city officials. Somebody had to carry the coffin. Somebody with enough credibility to make the lie believable.

That somebody was me.

The tape arrived just after midnight, wrapped in brown paper with no return address. An old film, scuffed and yellowed with age, the kind of thing most people had forgotten how to play...