Creature from the Black Lagoon! (Part One)

A twenty-five year victim of a gangland war. Two and a half decades in urban hell, cut down years past his prime.

Coffee splashes down my throat like a river of fire. I wipe the crust from my eyes. Two days later and they’re still dredging the swamp just outside city limits. The suddenness of the chief’s statement was unnerving. Standing around the rotting rank naked torso in six inches of water, looking through the fog at the deep grooves in the mud caused by clutching fingers, the phantom of the scream echoing in our minds, he said what we were all thinking.

“I don’t know what it was, but something came out of those waters.”