CLEANERS

Chapter 2: Aftermath & Shock

The police arrived at the morning, their white patrol car cutting through humid air as it pulled into what remained of the Santos family compound. Officer Martinez stepped out first, his weathered face already grim from the preliminary report. The scene was worse than expected not just the violence, but the strangeness of it all.

Denmar and Marden sat on plastic chairs someone had brought, still wearing blood stained clothes from the night before. Dark stains had dried into stiff patches that cracked when they moved. Neither boy seemed fully present, eyes staring at nothing while bodies trembled with exhaustion.

"Tell me what happened," Martinez said gently, crouching in front of them.

"Monsters," Denmar whispered, voice barely audible. "They weren't human."

Martinez nodded patiently, making notes. Rural trauma often manifested in supernatural explanations drugs, shock could make people see impossible things.

"Can you describe them?"

"Too tall," Marden said, voice cracking. "Arms too long. Eyes like animals. We killed one."

Without a pause, Denmar said, “It was an Aswang. A monster. After we got home we saw them and It killed one of them" voice cracked… 'it ate them. He’s chewing my sister’s arm.”

The officer blinked. “You’re sure it wasn’t a man? Some burglar? Someone with a weapon? I know this kind of murder is brutal, but Aswang… that’s something I can’t imagine.”

“No!” Marden’s voice rose, cracking with fear and anger. “It wasn’t a man! It was… it was something else! Eyes glowing, claws tearing… it’s not human! It’s an Aswang!”

The officer frowned, glancing at his partner. “Son, I know you’re scared. But there’s no such thing as an Aswang. It has to be some psychopath who did this and played the victim's body,”

Denmar’s fists clenched at his sides. “We saw it! We killed it! It was real!”

Denmar noticed that the police kept dodging the subject, as if they didn’t want to get involved, so he stopped arguing.

The officer continued taking notes, internally translating: tall suspects, possible costumes or prosthetics, drug psychosis common in isolated areas.

The forensics examination revealed disturbing inconsistencies. Claw marks in the wooden doorframe too deep for human hands. Blood spatter patterns from impossible heights. Bite marks on the victims that didn't match any known animal or human structure.

"Where's the body of the attacker you killed?" Martinez asked.

Both twins pointed to a patch of disturbed earth. Nothing there but dark stains and signs of struggle.

"Bodies don't disappear," Martinez muttered.

"That one did," Denmar said flatly.

By afternoon, the official machinery was in motion. Bodies removed for autopsy. House sealed as a crime scene. The twins processed through emergency social services and placed with their cousin Lito in the neighboring village.

"I'm sorry," Lito said as he drove them to his small house. He was nineteen, barely making ends meet himself. "You can stay as long as needed."

His house was a single room with basic amenities. Two sleeping mats on the floor would accommodate the twins.

"The police think you're traumatized," Lito said carefully. "Maybe don't mention the monster thing to other people."

Neither twin responded. What was the point when no one would believe them?

That first night, they lay awake listening to every sound. When wind rattled windows, both boys tensed. When a cat knocked over garbage outside, they were on their feet instantly, clutching kitchen knives they'd quietly taken from Lito's drawer.

Sleep became impossible. Food tasted like ash. Simple conversations felt like navigating minefields every question about "what happened" required them to either lie or face disbelief.

The days blurred together. Police interviews that went nowhere. Social worker visits focused on "processing grief." Medical examinations that documented their injuries but couldn't explain the chemical burns from the creatures' blood.

"The case will remain open," Martinez told them during his final visit. "But without witnesses or evidence..."

Without evidence. As if their parents' mutilated bodies weren't evidence. As if the claw marks and impossible bite patterns meant nothing. As if their sister's disappearance was just another rural crime statistic.

Denmar finds himself crying at unexpected moments while brushing teeth, while watching television, while lying in darkness listening to Marden's restless breathing. The tears came without warning, accompanied by flashes of memory: his mother's hand reaching toward the doorway, his father's shattered glasses, Althea's terrified screams fading into the forest.

Marden's grief manifested as rage. He punched walls until knuckles bled. He broke dishes while washing them. He snapped at Lito over trivial things, then felt guilty for taking anger out on the only person who'd offered them shelter.

"I keep seeing their faces," Denmar said one night, staring at the ceiling. "The things that took her. I want to kill them all."

"With what?" Marden asked bitterly. "We don't even know what they were."

"I'll figure it out."

But neither twin had any idea how. They were seventeen with no money, no connections, no understanding of the supernatural world they'd entered. Their research consisted of asking village elders about aswang stories that mostly contradicted each other.

The school tried to resume, but the twins couldn't concentrate. Teachers spoke in sympathetic tones about "taking time to heal," while classmates either avoided them entirely or stared with morbid curiosity. The counselor assigned to help them kept steering conversations away from what they'd actually seen toward more acceptable explanations.

"Sometimes when we're frightened, our minds create explanations that make sense to us," she said during their mandatory session. "It's normal to see things that aren't really there."

"We're not crazy," Denmar said quietly.

"I'm not saying you're crazy. I'm saying you've experienced something terrible, and your minds are trying to protect you by making it seem less random."

"It wasn't senseless," Marden snapped. "Our sister they took her."

The counselor made more notes, expression growing concerned. "It's important that you don't get fixated on details that might not be accurate. Trauma can distort memory."

The twins stopped attending counseling after that.

days passed in bureaucratic processing and mounting frustration. Missing persons reports filed for Althea, though everyone assumed she was dead. Insurance claims that would take months to process. Discussions about permanent placement since Lito couldn't house them indefinitely.

"Maybe you should try to move on," Lito suggested gently one evening. "Accept what happened and focus on building new lives."

The twins stared at him in silence. Move on. Accept. As if their sister being dragged into darkness by monsters was something they could just get over.

"She's still out there," Denmar said.

"You don't know that."

"We know she was alive when they took her. We know they wanted her for something specific."

Lito sighed, recognizing stubborn determination in his cousin's voice. "Even if that's true, what can you do? You're kids with no resources, no way to track down... whatever took her."

It was brutal truth. They were powerless, ignorant, alone in a world that refused to acknowledge what they'd experienced. But powerlessness didn't diminish their certainty or their determination to find their sister.

Late at night, when Lito slept and the village was quiet, the twins would sit by the window watching darkness. Sometimes they whispered about what they remembered details about the creatures' appearance, their movements, their intelligence. Other times they sat in silence, each lost in memories of that night.

"I dream about her," Marden admitted one night. "Every time I close my eyes, I see them dragging her away. She's calling for us to save her."

"I dream about them too," Denmar said. "The things that killed our parents. I wake up wanting to kill them."

"But we don't know how."

It was the admission that hurt most their ignorance about the enemy they faced. They had witnessed the impossible and survived by luck, but luck wouldn't be enough for what came next.

The rage was there, burning constant and cold beneath their grief. The determination to find Althea and destroy everything that had taken her. But without knowledge, without resources, without anyone who believed their story, that rage had nowhere to go except inward.

"Someone has to know," Denmar said finally. "Somewhere, there have to be people who've seen what we've seen. Who knows how to fight these things."

"How do we find them?"

All they knew was that the official world treated their experience as delusion. That they were completely alone with a truth no one would accept.

And that somewhere in darkness, things that had destroyed their family were still hunting.

The twins developed routines around their trauma. They slept in shifts. They never went anywhere alone. They tested every door and window before settling in. Small rituals that gave them the illusion of control in a world that had revealed itself to be unpredictable.

But beneath the surface, something harder was growing. A cold determination that would eventually transform grief into purpose, fear into preparation, and helplessness into focused rage that could reshape two broken teenagers into something their enemies would learn to fear.

They just didn't know it yet.