Chapter 1: The demon with the leather face

The sky was black above Vrenford, a small town just outside London. But the boy’s hair seemed even darker.

He walked at an unhurried pace, his hands buried in the pockets of an old dark coat that felt oddly out of place on someone his age.

Beneath the heavy scarf, a faint smear of red still stained one corner of his lips.

Every now and then, something caught his attention.

An electric bus.

A huge advertising screen mounted on the side of a building.

Three tipsy girls laughing at the top of their lungs as they tried to take a selfie.

One of the girls noticed him watching them and gave him a puzzled look.

The young man looked away and continued on his way, turning into a side street.

He had walked a few steps down the alley when the light from the streetlamp at the entrance suddenly vanished for an instant, only to reappear a moment later.

But the lamp hadn’t gone out.

It was as if something massive had passed in front of it, blocking the light for a moment and casting a broad shadow over the young man.

He spun around but saw nothing.

He stood still for a few seconds, staring at the entrance to the alley, then started walking again.

That was when a hulking figure slowly emerged from the fog.

It entered the same alley and began following him.

The young man’s footsteps slapped against the wet pavement, and those of the figure behind him matched them in perfect sync.

After a few yards, he suddenly stopped. He felt a raindrop and looked up at the cloudy sky.

Yet he could still hear footsteps on the wet pavement. But they weren’t his.

He spun around, and this time he saw him.

The silhouette of a huge, masked, human-like being stood just a few steps away.

He had to be well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and thick arms, his massive frame partially hidden beneath a long butcher’s apron stained with blood.

The mask he wore looked as though it had been made from several pieces of pale, leather-like material crudely stitched together.

More importantly, he was holding a chainsaw.

The brute said nothing. He simply stood there, staring at him.

And then...

VRRRAAAAM!

...the chainsaw roared once, twice, three times.

VRRRAAM! VRRRAAAAAAM!

The young man took a step back, then another, and another.

But no farther. He couldn’t.

His back hit something hard. It felt like brick.

He glanced over his shoulder and finally saw what the fog and darkness had hidden from him until now.

A wall.

He’d walked straight into a dead end.

The huge creature revved the chainsaw again, then charged straight at him.

A grin spread across the young man’s face.

"Come on, I only woke up three days ago. Give me a break."

The colossus’s roaring chainsaw came crashing down on him, fast and heavy, slicing effortlessly into his skull.

Too effortlessly.

It was as if flesh and bone offered no resistance to being torn apart.

That was because the young man’s body was no longer made of flesh and bone.

It had turned into mist.

A thick grayish mist swirled around the chainsaw, blending into the fog that already filled the alley.

A moment later, the young man was already standing behind the brute.

Then came a metallic thud.

The still-running chainsaw had fallen to the ground and kept rattling against the pavement.

The masked being slowly lowered his gaze.

An arm protruded from his chest, a pale hand clutching his massive, still-beating heart between slender fingers.

The brute barely had time to look at it before collapsing face-first onto the pavement.

The young man pulled his arm back and let the heart drop onto the pavement.

He stared at it for a moment, then crushed it beneath the heel of one of his elegant brown loafers, so old-fashioned that they looked as though they’d come straight out of the previous century.

Without sparing the corpse another glance, he slipped his hands back into his pockets and headed toward the mouth of the alley.

Behind him, something began to move in the shadows.

First came a squeak. Then another.

Rats began pouring out of garbage bins, sewer grates, and cracks in the walls.

Thousands of them, if not more.

They moved in a tight, orderly mass, as if someone had commanded them to.

They all converged on the massive corpse, flowing around the young man like a river around a rock.

When the young man reached the mouth of the alley, he looked up at the night sky and let out a long sigh.

This era is shaping up to be quite interesting.