Ke-style law enforcement officers

Chapter 348 is an old friend

About half an hour after venturing deep into the jungle, Milo found a body in a mountain stream where the sheepdog was barking wildly.

To be precise, it was a ground littered with pieces of corpses.

The ground was covered with a large area of ​​dried bloodstains, and many indescribable tissue fragments were scattered around.

The body was already torn to pieces.

But the sheepdog recognized the scent of the corpse. It stopped about four or five meters away from the pieces of debris, growling softly.

Milo rolled up his sleeves and squatted down in front of the puddle of mud-like substance:

"It's the corpse of that vicious dog."

"It looks like... it exploded."

The bloodstains on the ground formed a pattern like a blooming flower, and the surrounding vegetation and trees were covered with gruesome fragments of tissue and broken bones.

Rick quickly put on gloves, opened his small case, and began using tweezers to collect and preserve the body parts on the ground.

He adjusted his glasses and analyzed intently:
"Judging from the dried blood and the degree of decomposition of the body parts, at least a week, or three to five days, had passed since the time of death. After all, you also said that the dog's limbs were already in a state of decay when it was alive."

He picked up a foul-smelling intestine covered with ants using tweezers and calmly said:
"Moreover, this kind of decay must have already penetrated deep into the internal organs, otherwise the coyotes in the nearby mountains would have eaten it all on the night of its death, and these ants wouldn't have had a chance to share it. So the actual time should be even shorter, maybe just yesterday."

"I've never seen such a way of dying."

Milo handed over the task of examining the body parts to Rick, while he himself circled the area littered with dismembered remains.

"There were no signs of fighting here, nor any trace of other people or creatures. Broken grass and trees were gathered around the corpse, seemingly torn apart by the flying bone fragments."

“How could this be…” Rick stared at the countless filth on the ground and muttered to himself.

“This mutated creature exploded on its own, but that doesn’t make sense. If something inside its body caused this, it should have struggled painfully for a while before it died, but judging from the marks on the ground, it doesn’t seem to have.” Milo shook his head.

However, Rick said, "No, that's not what I meant."

He stood up, picked up a blood-stained, grayish-white fragment from the tweezers, and, presumably to feel the texture of its delicate structure, simply pinched it with his hand, gently pried it a couple of times, then shook his head, looking puzzled, and said:

"If, as you say, this is a canine creature, then there shouldn't be this kind of thing in its carcass pile."

"What is that?" Milo's brow furrowed.

“A human fingernail.” Rick wiped some of the blood off the small fragment and held it up to Milo. “This is a human thumbnail.”

"How did you determine it was human?" Milo asked.

“There are signs of trimming on it,” Rick said with certainty.

"Could it be the old man's? We all know his body wasn't intact when it was sent to the law enforcement station. It's not surprising that some of his body parts were swallowed by the vicious dogs." Milo narrowed his eyes.

“But I wrote the autopsy report for the old man, and I remember it very clearly. All his fingers and toes were perfectly preserved.” Rick placed the fragment of the human fingernail in his palm and gave Milo a questioning look:
"Could there be other victims we don't know about? After all, it has been wandering around this area for almost a month, so it's not impossible that it swallowed some unlucky guy."

"Keep searching inside the body for any other clues. If necessary, we might have to conduct a census in Glenn town."

Milo nodded.

Rick continued to bury himself in his work.

Milo's attention, however, began to be drawn to the surrounding jungle.

He pressed two fingers against the artery in his neck to check his pulse. It turned out that the power of the sense of crisis did not give any signal, but Milo had already sensed that something was following him and Rick from the shadows of the surrounding bushes.

……

About fifteen minutes later.

"I found it." Rick had made another new discovery.

He approached Milo carrying a broken animal paw and repeated the question he had asked earlier: "Are you really sure this thing was a canine in its previous life?"

“Although he’s quite ugly, he really is.” Milo nodded.

"Then this thing is very difficult to explain clearly."

Rick held up a dark, blood-stained object in front of Milo.

This is a broken animal claw.

The skin and fur on it had all fallen off, and it was much thicker than the paws of an ordinary dog. The newly grown paws, connected to the bones, were still sharp and were a good five or six centimeters long.

To help Milo see the problem more clearly, Rick carefully pried open the claws on the animal's paw with his hands.

Beneath those horrifying connective tissue claws, connected to the muscle tissue, was a bloody human fingernail.

Moreover, the skeletal structure of this hand can be seen more clearly from this angle.

This is not a broken dog paw...

It's a mutated human hand!
It has the skeletal structure of a human with five separate fingers, but strange muscles have grown between the fingers, connecting them to form a fist-like shape. Combined with the countless rotten pieces of flesh covering its surface, it initially resembles the paw of a canine. ...

Rick took out a scalpel and cut away the overgrown tissue, allowing the claw to fully extend.

And so, a bloody human hand appeared before Milo.

The only difference was that each finger bone had a new claw five or six centimeters long.

……

Rick blinked at Milo: "This looks like a person."

"Um--"

Milo scratched his head, feeling a bit overwhelmed.

It was only then that he realized with a slight sense of dread that the message conveyed by the Church's Eye of Thinking was so precise—the scene it had glimpsed was not complete.

Indeed, the vicious dog that Milo saw from the perspective of the undead was actually a person.
But what he clearly saw was a canine creature emerging from its mouth, without the slightest hint of a human.

But if you think about it carefully...

When that thing appeared, it didn't have a single animal hair on its body; all that was exposed was hideous flesh and blood. Is it possible that it wasn't that the hair and skin had fallen off, but that it simply didn't have any hair at all?

"This is indeed a person."

As more and more bone and tissue fragments were found, Rick discovered a lot of human tissue.

From a rational perspective, the current pair of dismembered bodies should be considered as a mixture of the corpse of a wild beast and a human, but this is not the case. Many of these tissues, which do not belong to the same species, are connected and growing together.

"In your knowledge, is there any species where wild animals transform into humans or humans transform into wild animals?" Rick made a rather bold speculation.

Milo nodded: "Congratulations on breaking free from the conventional notions of ordinary humans."

He was pleased with Rick's reaction.

If this guy starts rambling incoherently after discovering this series of chilling truths, or shows any signs of weakened sanity, Milo will have no choice but to send him back to work in the basement of the law enforcement office.

But it's clear that Rick has an extremely high capacity for understanding, or rather, his sanity level was not affected at all. He was even seriously and diligently analyzing the problems he was facing and making bold speculations.

This made Milo realize for the first time that keeping this half-zombie gourmet was the right decision.

"There are indeed similar creatures, but they are not canines."

Milo recalled the terrible story of the David Derby family, who had been used as bait by Milo to send to a mental hospital and was intercepted and killed by hunters on the way. David, or rather Ephraim, was a creature that could completely transform from human form into something resembling a beast.

However, information provided by investigator C later confirmed that the creature belonged to the descendants of the Dagon sect of deep-diving beings from the coastal area.

It's not quite the same as the dismembered corpses lying on the ground in front of us.

……

"Regardless of whether it was a human turned into a beast or a beast turned into a human, it only killed the old man, right? At least as far as we know, he was the only victim."

Milo felt that familiar feeling well up in his heart once again.

The sense of familiarity was there as early as when Investigator C first mentioned this inference.

Investigator C's clue was that in those 23 cases of animal attacks, the victims were all killed by their own pets or livestock.

"They kill the people they know best."

What if the beasts in all the cases were actually some kind of human being...?

……

Milo rubbed his temples, quickly recalling all the cases he had handled in the past, searching for the source of that familiarity.

But just then, some scattered noises coming from the bushes nearby interrupted Milo's thoughts.

Rick immediately gripped his scalpel warily, keeping a watchful eye on the patch of grass.

But Milo patted him on the shoulder and said:

"It's nothing, he's an old friend."

……

A moment later, a small black cat with a broken bell around its neck stealthily emerged from the woods, sat upright, and bared its teeth at Milo and Rick.

It's Marshall, Rebecca's cat.

Neither Milo nor Rick noticed the little black cat that had been following them all along; even Milo had only recently become aware of its presence.

Marshall leisurely licked his little paws, tilted his head to look at Milo and the other man, then turned to look at the dismembered corpses on the ground behind them, revealing a very human-like, uninterested expression.

(End of this chapter)