Saturday September 17, 2026 [8/8 +40]
Chicago, United States of America
Matthew McBride couldn’t sleep.
He was lying in bed, his detective fling/source snoring loudly beside him.
4:07 A.M…
Matthew did not have to report to work the next day at The Daily Post and Register; however, he had planned on a full day to investigate the rather disturbing trend that he discovered in the past week.
It all began with the suspicious circumstances surrounding the murder-suicide of Brianne Eagleton and Shaun Warman.
The social media pages of the two dead young kids had erupted in utter disbelief that such a thing could have occurred.
Apparently, both of the kids were absolute paragons. Great grades, great attitudes, great dreams. There was absolutely no hint of a history of violence in either Brianne’s or Shaun’s past. There was a mounting chorus of voices demanding that the investigation seek out others who might have caused this tragedy.
Matthew had interviewed twelve of the couple’s close friends, as well as Brianne’s mother. They all were steadfast in their belief that there was absolutely no way that Shaun Warman had committed this atrocity. All were convinced that this was the act of an outsider, perhaps an intruder into the student apartment that the two kids shared.
The crazy thing was that all authorities considered this an open-and-shut case. It had to be a murder-suicide, everyone reasoned. If an external party forced Shaun to shoot his girlfriend and then himself, then that external party would also have fallen into the Coma Imprisonment.
It was well established that anyone forcing or ordering someone to commit murder would also be struck down by the Coma. It was the reason why Parker Rhodes, the erstwhile President of the United States, was struck down by the Coma Imprisonment. The President’s orders to take out key figures in the Iraqi Insurgency had made him a killer, albeit one with a license to kill as the POTUS. When 8/8 hit, Parker Rhodes, several members of his Cabinet, and several other world leaders fell into the Coma Imprisonment.
So if someone else was responsible for Shaun Warman’s and Brianne Eagleton’s deaths, then that person would have also fallen into the Coma–yet the crime scene had absolutely no evidence of a comatose puppet-master in the bloodied apartment.
This stinked of foul play. That was what was bothering Matthew so much. Yet absolutely no one in law enforcement was doing a damn thing about it.
And another thing was eating away at the edge of Matthew’s brain.
Occam’s Razor states that the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions is most likely correct. Applying this to the case of Brianne Eagleton and Shaun Warman, Matthew McBride had to accept the simplest explanation.
The simplest explanation was that someone else was the cause of the deaths of these two young people.
There was an inescapable corollary to that conclusion: that there was someone out there who was immune to the Coma Imprisonment.
Matthew elbowed the snoring Marcy beside him. She snorted and fell silent.
God. I really need to kick this one out of bed, he thought.