Skin to skin, blood and bone, you're all by yourself but you're not alone.
It was early evening, the end of a shift down at the Tláhuac police station. Patrol cars and bikes were in while the police downed cups of tasteless coffee and joked over their paperwork, pulling their sweaty collars away from their necks and rubbing the indentations on the bridges of their noses from where sunglasses had dug too deep for too long. Some were about to head out, shrugging into clean blues and hooking on their radios in the locker room while they yawned into the backs of their hands. It was going to be a long night. There were people sitting in lock-up, being processed and questioned by the detectives, and more would likely end up there by the time dawn began to brighten the eastern windows and the patrol cars rolled back in for the next shift to take over. In one of the greater suburbs of Mexico City, the nights were never as quiet as the nice neighborhood liked to pretend that they were. Maybe no one would get shot, maybe the house calls would all end peacefully. Maybe there would be no drug busts tonight. Maybe homicide would get to stay at their desk, working through their current files and sighing over old cases until they called it a night and headed home.
However the night may have unfolded, the Tláhuac police force was never going to find out.
When he walked in the door, battered leather jacket dusty from the ride down, he was barely given any attention. He flexed his hands and looked around, briefly, his dark eyes coming about to focus on the front desk. Snkt. It was a very different sound from before. Smoother, more metallic, and it rang quietly in the air as the six adamantium blades slid from his knuckles. He moved to the desk with his hands down, and as the tired cop there looked up to face the man approaching, he swept his arm out to catch the cop in the throat. Blood poured onto the desk, onto the directory and his paper cup of coffee, down the front of his uniform while he gurgled, and Logan moved on. Caught the next pair of cops in the back, his claws dragging up through their chests until their organs were shredded, retracting again as they fell. He kicked them aside rather than step across their bodies, put his boot down to crunch the nose of one who weakly tried to reach for his ankle. Reaching up, he took out the fluorescent light above him and kept on walking.
Systematically, he worked his way through the station. It was easy at first -- he was quiet, unobtrusive, fast. Some didn't even look up when their friends were cut down, not until they went to speak and found themselves choking on razor-sharp claws. Soon, however, people were running. Panicking. There were shouts for back-up, reinforcements, and the police took defensive positions around corners, their un-holstered weapons trained on the approaching man as they fired off shot after shot. Nearly impossible to miss at this range, with their target deep in the heart of their own home, only paces away. He kept walking. There was a snarl on his face as the bullets buried into his skin and forced their way out again, his jacket tattering in the sleeves, the chest, the shoulders. He shook off the slugs as the bloody wounds healed and kept walking, the ground beneath him ringing like bells when the projectiles bounced and danced on the linoleum. Every man and woman he encountered was dealt with swiftly and efficiently. His expression never changed. This man wasn't the same brawler who would throw his opponents down on the pool table, swung wildly but with feral aggression at the drunken idiots who tried to hit him in the face with glass bottles. He wasn't the same person who picked up everything he could find and used it as a weapon -- chairs, pool cues, car keys, bottle openers. His training was accurate. He moved like an extension of his claws, like they were not only his swords, but as though he were cutting through the air along with them. Each swing was made with the intention of killing. Logan no longer had to fight just to hold his own ground; it was becoming increasingly clear to the cops desperately trying to hold him back that this was his playing field, and that their lives depended on escape.
Everywhere they turned, however, his claws seemed to be between them and the door. The pools of black-red blood slid into the cracks in the floor and merged until they were tributaries, rivers, and his victim's shoes slipped as they ran from him. Some screamed as they went down. Others, finding themselves cornered, tried to beg with him. Mi familia. I can pay you. Oh God, por favor, leave me alone. What have I done to you? He didn't seem to hear. Or if he listened, his pace never changed, his purpose never once faltered. Each of them met the edge of his claws.
When he walked out, no one inside the Tláhuac police station was left alive. He murdered the criminals in their cells, the prostitutes waiting to be booked, the secretaries at the phone lines, the janitor. No one was alive to tell the tale. Those were his orders. The message, however, would be clear to the people who mattered: when you cross a friend, they send their dog to bite.
Logan shrugged off his jacket as he made his way down the front steps to where his bike was parked. One sleeve was barely attached at the seam, riddled with bullet holes. "Goddamn thing." It'd been with him for a while, but it seemed that this was its last stop. Leaving it in a pile on the concrete, he swung his leg over his bike, turned the key in the ignition, and peeled away into the lamplit streets of the greater Mexico City metropolitan area.