Not everybody in the TNI is a freakshow. Some people even started out normal…

Morning is always the worst. Waking up remains a daily brutality. There’s always a brief moment when I don’t remember where I am, who I am, what I’ve become. Or even better what I’ve done. It’s a blessed bit of amnesia, forgetting the horrors I’ve seen. But it never lasts.

I open my eyes and see the yellow raincoat hanging on the door, or the fog clears and I’m reminded of the last god-awful trailer park white trash messiah wanna-be, or of the things in the darkness that steal men’s sanity and eat the eyes of virgins, or of the endless parade of fucked up freakshow monstrosities that my life’s become.

My name is Elliot Arthur Kendrick and I’m an Inquisitor.

Some of you may know what that means. And I guess most of you who do know hate me for that. Those of you who don’t know probably got handed Abel’s Foreign Legion deal too. Maybe you hate me as well.

Two years ago I had a normal life. I had everything. I had a beautiful wife, Jenny, two kids with a third on the way, a house in a quiet suburb, nice car, and a good job. The American Dream, my dream, it was mine. I was happy.

And then Mr. Funnybones came into my life.

I came home from work one day and I found a horrid dwarf dancing about the house wrapped in bloody entrails. I remember the detachment of it, the sick unreality I felt as I watched the ghoulish scene, this couldn’t happen. “Things like this don’t happen in real life,” I thought to myself.

And then he smiled at me, those twisted features, misshapen and shriveled, like a burn victim. His teeth were sharp little pins, green with rot and filth. He hissed at me in a voice as twisted as his appearance. “Oh it does happen Kenny my boy. Oh yes. It can and it does happen. Just ask dear, sweet, Miss Jenny.”

Somehow he’d read my mind. Then, slowly, the true horror of what he’d said seeped into my mind. Jenny. He’d… he’d killed her, and now he was dancing in her guts as though they were some strange Mardi Gras party favor.

I remember the scream, the tortured, unending wail that I let slip from my throat when I saw her. Blood pooled around her, turning the white shag rug she’d loved so much into an unbelievably dark crimson. Face frozen in a mask of terror, pain, and ecstasy. Hair spread around her face like a dark halo.

It was too much for me, too much terror, too much horror, just too much.

I went mad… I know that now.

The strain of what I’d seen unhinged something inside of me, some primal fear of the unknown, some animal reaction to the danger that she had written on her pale blood stained skin. It was as though some curtain of blood, some red tide drew from the depths of inside of me and carried me away.

The next thing I remember was standing inside a police station, a dark room, and burly, serious men around me. Grim faced, like blue clad gargoyles they asked me which one.

Hand shaking, I raised it, slowly, afraid my resolve would shatter and I’d go insane from stress and the relived madness of what I’d witnessed, I pointed towards the demented dwarf.

Through the one-way glass, he fixed his eyes on me; smiling that twisted, rotting rictus he said, “Surely it’s not me. Not your old pal, Mr. Funnybones!”

The trial passed in a haze. Lawyers, judges, cops, and always, that twisted obscene smile. I scarcely remember my testimony or much of what was said. Mainly I remember the feeling of revulsion as they slowly, agonizingly described the pain staking way Mr. Funnybones had killed Jenny, and how he’d devoured the flesh of our two young sons while she’d watched.

(It was lies! She’d never have eaten our sons. She loved them. Lies. All Damned LIES!)

And in the end, despite damming evidence, despite my pleas for justice, for vengeance, for anything, somehow, he walked. The jury acquitted him. They let him go.

It was… impossible. Yet it had happened. Despite a mountain of evidence that twisted little freak had walked. He stood on the steps of the court; shouting in his hellish voice “The System works!” and cackling, mad with laughter.

He. Had. Gotten. Away. With. It.

I swore that I would not, could not allow such a thing to happen.

Two days after the trial I bought a gun.

Two weeks after the trial I was on the run from the cops the cops and things far worse than the cops. I’d killed Funnybones in some rundown shitball of a hotel on the outskirts of a Chicago suburb. He’d been merrily butchering a small dog while singing when I kicked in the door.

He didn’t say anything; he just sort of tittered quietly, waiting for the bullet.

I felt righteous when I splattered that freak’s brains across the wall of the Route 66 Joliet Motor Lodge. Fucking vindicated. It was like whatever miscarriage of justice I’d suffered had been washed clean in the miasma of brains, bone, and blood my pistol stained the room with.

But it didn’t matter. I couldn’t go home. Hell I hadn’t even taken the basic precautions. Things that are now second nature, instincts, to me, never crossed my mind. I hadn’t worn gloves. I left brass casings all over the floor. I didn’t even think to drive a different car. I may as well have spray painted my name in neon paint announcing that I’d killed him.

“Fuck it,” I thought. “Who’s going to care about a twisted freak like that getting what he deserves?”

A surprising number it turns out. Mr. Funnybones had a lot of friends, and more than a few of them were walking talking freakshows like him.

Three days after I’d killed Funnybones a man I’d never seen tore off his skin and threw it at me. I barely escaped. Two days after that five enormously fat women all wearing identical faces, clothes, and make up busted down the door to the men’s room in some greasy spoon on the edge of Des Moines, they shot mice, insects and dust at me out of their eyes and mouth.

I was in Phoenix, low on sleep, cash, and a will to live, sleeping in a bus station. I don’t remember what woke me up, but I remember sitting up in time to see an eyeless man walking towards me with outstretched hands. Maybe eyeless is the wrong word; it’s just his eye sockets had been stitched closed.

He wasn’t armed, and that’s what worried me. I scrambled for the gun I’d hidden in my bag, trying to save myself, only to see the Eyeless man’s face explode in a cloud of red mist.

There were two of them; one was a woman, 30 at a guess, the other a tall stone-faced killer. He squatted down to pick up the shell casings, then calmly pulled out a knife and slit the Eyeless man’s stitches.

“Here’s the deal,” she said “You come with us, or Gustov pops two into your brain pan and we call it a fucking day. Understand?”

And that was how I met them. Yellow raincoats, surgical masks, and silenced pistols. The New Inquisition.