That morning at the start was like any other morning, nothing out of the ordinary at first, just people going to work children going to school, the usual stirrings of a day. No one had any idea what was coming, people rarely did after all when it came to the decisions of heaven and hell.

Lawrence was hungry. He knew it when he too woke up that morning. It wasn’t the kind of hunger which could be sated by food from earth, it was a hunger that ran far deeper into the core of his being and it had been ticking over far too long. He needed SIN, and it was impossible to ignore. His response was like a cat hearing the faint stirrings of the evening, rising from where he’d been sitting watching and vanishing out into the city.

As he went he found his wrist itching around the watch he wore, a deep and distracting itch that made him rub at it at first before progressing to scratching as if it was making him allergic. He knew for all his attempts to restrain himself that hunger, left as long as he had left it, would force him to lose whatever it was he’d put in place. He needed people. He needed people and he needed reflections. He didn’t remember but his very core yearned for something and it didn’t need memories.

He found himself in the city center almost before he knew where he was going and what followed was recorded at first with confusion and then with growing horror in the media which had never really been focused on Appleton. After all, the quiet cosy little town had been nothing but pleasant for so long, it wasn’t the kind of place where bad things happened.

And yet, Gardeville, the city nearest to Appleton that afternoon, for no discernable reason had turned into a bloodbath. A large group of people seeming to lose all control, attacking one another in a berserk frenzy and when the skirmish was over, killing themselves. There was no rhyme or reason to it that anyone could tell, there was no bias to age, gender, race or creed. And in the midst of it all there had been people untouched, people who were spared by the crowd, without a scratch. Some were young, many were not. They were left questioning why they had been spared over others. No one understood what had happened and none of it seemed like something the news was used to dealing with. There were scattered reports of marks on the foreheads of the possessed and fractured comments about mirrors and voices in their heads.

To those from heaven and hell, after research it would be ascertained that those killed were marginally more sinful than the others and that despite the “moral” inclination of it all the act had had to be in the name of hell, because after the massacre they received a frankly enormous shipment of SIN.

And when Lawrence came home, he wasn’t hungry, and was nursing a huge bloody and raw welt around the still ticking watch.