Cryptic

It all started with a cryptic message in a wall, like many horrible events do. Alyssa studied the words, the unfamiliar symbols between them, the calligraphy, the red paint.
Everything lacked sense. The brush must have been thin to draw most of the symbols, and the traces that joined the words, while it must have been wide for most of the lines in the letters. Bold and thin, each word was. The words were perfectly normal in one language or another, but together they made no sense at all. Was it a code? The language of each word was what mattered? The symbols could have been anything from decoration to alien words.
But the greatest mystery was the paint. There was nothing in the nature with such color; there was no known way to produce it by mixing other colors in real life. Even the so called red that was so popular in modern tech screens, the one that was considered a miracle of the light properties, was only almost-red.
Chemists had took samples before the cleaning staff scrubbed the mysterious words away, bumping into the experts in language, anthropology and sci-fi that were trying to take pictures. All of them have left to make their own research, but Alyssa had the number of a couple of the laboratories where the red substance was being analyzed. She called them twice a day, and it would have be more often, but she spend most of her time contemplating the message in the wall with her brother.
Blood, they said. Not some kind of tincture.
It was to be expected, since nothing else was red. And she had expected it. But she didn't understood while people was suddenly becoming suspicious of the person who had leave the message—whoever that might be. She didn't understand why their words were suddenly seen as a bad omen, and constantly related to horrible things. She had no time to watch the news, but her brother was doing so more and more often, and would come to tell her about all those things.
It sounded, sometimes, like he blamed the message too.
Nonsense.
It was absurd. They didn't know anything. She didn't know either, but that's why she needed to look into it. To understand before it was too late. All the scientist had vanished at some point. Her friends had mentioned that they seemed to be fine, giving reports about their progress trying to crack the code, but she knew that was a lie. She would have meet at least one by now, giving how much time she spend right next to the wall. She had seen it so much that by now it seemed to have a different color. But the scientist weren't there.
Her friends were the next to disappear. This was dangerous business, but she was sure that the problem were the haters, not the message in the wall. Ignorant people, or some powerful person or organization that was trying to hide the truth. Both, most likely. It was scary, but she couldn't stop. She and her brother would figure the message out. He wasn't helping much, more focused in silly things like food and sleep. Alyssa would humor him sometimes, but she was worried that he was loosing perspective.
"Lyss?" Her brother muttered, one morning. The was something wrong in his voice, but what?
She hummed back, and he added:
"You know that they cleaned and even painted the wall like a year ago, right? You... this is for focusing, right?"
She didn't understand. Nor the words, neither the dread in his tone. "You are getting as confusing as the message," she said, pointing at the blood letters in the wall.
He didn’t reply and immediately she thought: 'they’ve got him'. Her heart sank; the rage so deep that she didn't really listen at her inner voice's warning: 'They've got him, and now they’re coming for me.'
There was no point in panicking. Better to see the message in the wall one last time before the end.