How it Started

It had all started with a little story she had been tasked with writing up.

Some middle-aged lady in the suburbs had gone missing, been out walking one night and just vanished. It might have been a bigger story if she hadn’t been too old, too poor and too not white. Instead, it became a box out in the local paper and not much more beyond that.

Sammy had forgotten about it just as fast as the rest of the world. She had other stories to write and she had done enough missing person stories that the cases all sort of blurred into one wall of confusion and fear.

That was until she was out jogging and dripped over what she, and plenty others who had passed by that day, to be just a log in the woods. She thought that right up until tried to step on and over it and her foot went through and was engulfed in a mass of maggots and near liquid human remains.

It had been a few days before she could bring herself to go out again and when she did she became obsessed with the case. Hounding it every step of the way through the justice system. She had got a bit of work off of it after the bite marks and missing flesh had come to light. The fickle eye of the national news had rolled over the town for a few days then and she had made some contacts and money.

Yet no leads appeared.

So as fast as they had come the national news slipped off to gawk at another carrion pit and Sammy to keep going.

She had got the coroner drunk, a easy task in her experience with them, and he had told her all about the bite wounds. Too big for a dog but not like any wound a gator would give. The details had only fed her and she had dug deeper and deeper, finding more and more missing women across the state and more grizzly corpses.

As she had tumbled down the rabbit hole a visit to a truck stop bathroom had given her a new hint. A scratched in message on the wall of the stall.

Little blk shep get eAtn up in th Swamp

It was poorly spelt, hell it was barely spelt, but something about it caught in her mind and a thought flourished with a single word at its core.

Cults.