"Holy shit you can talk! Well not talk, you don't have a mouth - you know what, we'll deal with that later. These mooks might be dead but their buddies will come soon. You're dead meat either way, now move it!"
As an early line, I think this is far too long and irrelevant. At this point you're still getting the reader's attention, and spending time on what is essentially exposition slows the pace down, especially since the perspective rapidly shifts.
"Alright. I have no idea where this is, but you're going to follow me, okay? Take this - yeah, wrap it around your face. I figure we get away from here, find a road, try to hitchhike somewhere. Sound like a plan?"
Likewise, for a guy in a rush they sure have a lot to say. I would cut it down to the actual necessary bits.
After the sign, I feel like there needs to be more vertical separation above and below the horizontal separator.
barely anomalous to be worth chasing
anomalous enough
Help me
Missing punctuation (other places too)
fair share of freaks - or as his handbook
should use an em dash (—), in wikidot do --
make the fact that the teenager in front of him had no mouth any less disquieting.
Too wordy, would be cleaner as something like "but it didn't make the mouthless teenager standing before him any less disquieting."
Couple hours ago, these Men in Black guys showed up and took me into this van. Wouldn’t call me anything but KTE something. Picked up a couple other people, then suddenly the dude next me did something and blew a gaping hole in the side of the van. We all jumped at the chance to escape and made it here but then I got lost… haven't been away from Alabama my whole life, you see…”
I've commented before on how dense this is, but I'd also like to make note: this random guy doesn't know the policy intricacies of various anomalous organizations, so why would he trust the FBI over "Men in Black"?
"This is Assistant Director McKinney, what do you need?"
"We've got a can man in custody, reportedly an escapee of another org. We can't handle a direct confrontation, can you get something diplomatic set up? We're two hours from HQ right now."
I understand that you have a new person on the phone, but I would use a different way to bring them up to speed: saying the same lines twice slows the narrative down
"Which org is this?"
Harrison turned to Frank again.
"Who were the guys that caught you again?"
They called themselves the Global Occult Coalition.
In addition to taking up four lines that I'm not concerned need to be there, I don't think he would know the name of the GOC necessarily. Why can't the UIU agent tell from the fact that they called him "KTE"?
Harrison felt a twinge of nervousness when he heard the name. He hadn't dealt with them much before, but he heard things through the grapevine. A shadowy governmental organization that was part of the UN and had possession of insanely advanced technology was not something Harrison had signed up to deal with when he set out that day.
This is telling rather than showing, and is also not particularly compelling imagery.
but if you do run into one, do not engage. Hand over the can man if you have to, but under no circumstances are you to engage them.
This is repetitive.
Meeting with Global Occult Coalition was never a particularly relaxing affair.
Missing a "the", though I feel like the paragraph wouldn't hurt if you just cut it.
Random note: your quotes are inconsistent, sometimes you use the left/right ones (“ and ”) and other times you use the ASCII one (").
and you are actively protecting an active threat.
Also repetitive.
"Listen carefully, Assistant Director. Is this the first time you have dealt with a different organization within the world of the occult?"
Theodore McKinney hesitated, unprepared for the question.
"Well, we are one of the newer groups - "
The GOC wouldn't know this, and the Assistant Director definitely wouldn't admit it.
Frank is merely one individual who's anomaly
whose
Ok, so having read the interview, it's definitely more engaging and tense the the prior revision, but it still could be tightened up some by impressing the formality and passive-aggressiveness between the two individuals. The line about "you may end up regretting this decision" in particular is a bit too on-the-nose.
… I'm going to tell you now the hard truth - you left any semblance of normal today."
Frank nodded along.
With all due respect sir, I think I left any semblance of normal the day I was born.
This is too much fluff and too little character/emotion-building for my taste. There should be more exploration into the bittersweet moment: he's not going to die, but he's going to live in state custody and have his movements restricted. Take this time to explore what he's going through, what he is thinking.
"It'll be alright, kid. I know that all this is a pretty hard blow, but you're still alive. And that's more than the GOC could ever give you."
Great line.
"We knew they were part of the UN before this, of course, but the strength of the connection to the politics of the mundane world wasn't clear before. When we entered this crapsack world of monsters and inexplicable objects, I didn't expect to be wrangling with politics too. Yet here we are."
This is also telling rather than showing, and doesn't convey the situation well. I think a lot of this Director / McKinney discussion needs to be reworked.
"The Director. You know who I mean."
So, the director of the FBI? I don't really understand what's special about this ending, or what impact I'm supposed to have gotten from this.
