Gretchen McNeil - 3:59

She heard a distant thump, and the shrieks of the Nox were instantly muffled. A trapdoor. He really had come through the floor.

“Who are you?” Josie asked again, now that she could actually hear her own voice. Above in the warehouse, the shrieking intensified, punctuated by thumps on the floor.

“They can hear you,” the stranger said, ignoring her question. She could hear him breathing in the darkness. “They get angry when deprived of prey. We should keep moving.”

Josie took a step back. Her foot nudged something on the ground. Nick’s leg where his body lay motionless. “We’re not going anywhere with you,” she said. Her voice sounded small in the darkness.

“You,” he said firmly, “don’t have to go anywhere. But he’s coming with me. He needs medical attention.”

“Is . . . is he . . .” Josie felt the weight of Nick’s motionless body behind her on the ground. She pressed against his lifeless form, afraid to ask the question on the tip of her tongue.

“He’ll be fine. I think.”

She felt a figure move past her in the darkness. She stepped aside as the stranger grunted against the weight of Nick’s body. “This way.”

Josie placed a hand on either side of the narrow passageway and slowly followed the sound of the stranger’s shuffling footsteps. She stooped, worried she’d clock her head against a low beam, and picked her way cautiously across the uneven ground. The floor was soft dirt, dry and powdery; their footsteps kicked up small clouds of the stuff that tickled Josie’s nose and made her eyes water. It was significantly warmer in the passage than the late spring evening above, and the heat accentuated the stench of mold and damp cardboard that permeated the space.

They hadn’t gone far before a creak from in front of her stopped Josie in her tracks.

“Watch your step,” the stranger said. “They’re rotting away on this end.”

Great. Josie felt with her foot for the first step, then tentatively tested her weight. It was bouncy, but sound, and clearly the stranger had gone ahead of her carrying Nick. Without a second thought, Josie climbed the stairs.

Like the passageway through which they’d just come, the room Josie stepped into was almost completely dark. Almost. Unlike the metal walls of the warehouse, this room had been constructed with wooden beams, and slivers of grayish-blue moonlight filtered in through the weathered slats. A hint of light in the utter blackness, but it was enough to show the dimensions of the space—no more than ten feet in any direction, windowless with a low roof and a thin outline of a door on the opposite wall. She wrinkled her nose as an acrid, chemical smell wafted toward her, mixed with the stale stench of unwashed bodies.

There was only one place they could be.

“We’re in the storage shed,” Josie said out loud. “Next to the warehouse.”

“Yes.”

Dust billowed up in amorphous clouds as the stranger shuffled across the dirt-layered floor. He grunted, then the metallic creak of ancient mattress coils signaled that he had deposited Nick on a bed of some kind. More shuffling, then a single flame burst to life, strong and unwavering, from a table in the middle of the room. Not the feeble flickering of a candle—this was the powerful, gas-fueled light of a Bunsen burner, which illuminated a bedlam of beakers and cylinders, test tubes and flasks cluttered around a low-grade laser rig on a large metal table. The orange light of the burner barely permeated the darkness, but Josie could see a shadow moving around on the far side of the table. The shadow of a man.

He walked quickly, purposefully back and forth from the table to a cot. Josie tentatively stepped around the table toward the body that lay unconscious on the bare mattress. Nick was motionless, and his thick, wavy hair looked matted and sticky with blood. She stared at him, desperate to catch a glimpse of movement from his body. A shudder, a slight expansion of the chest to prove he was still breathing. Anything.

The stranger remained cloaked in shadow even as Josie drew closer to him. She could see his outline, a dark silhouette that seemed to absorb the feeble moonlight streaming in through the tiny fissures in the wall. He sat on the edge of the cot and rolled Nick onto his side, then dabbed at the back of his head and neck. The stranger was utterly consumed with his task, seemingly unaware that Josie stood within arm’s length.

“This wound is deeper than I thought,” he mumbled to himself. “Going to have to stitch it.”

“Shouldn’t we take him to a hospital?” Josie said.

The stranger jumped as if he’d completely forgotten her presence. He turned to her, stared her straight in the face as the light from the burner illuminated his features, and suddenly all the life seemed to drain out of Josie.

There was no face.

The man had no face. At all.

From where she stood, Josie should have seen the articulated facial features of a human being: the sunken eye sockets, protruding nose, lips, chin.

Instead she saw nothing but a flat, featureless sea of black.

9:21 P.M.

JOSIE BEGAN TO TREMBLE. SHE WANTED TO FLEE and yet this man, this thing, had saved her life—twice—and currently held Nick’s life literally in his hands.

“We can’t take him to the hospital,” he said calmly. “The people who sent the Nox to attack you will know you’re still alive.”

“Someone sent them?”

“It was a coordinated attack. Contrary to popular belief, the Nox can communicate with one another. And with humans.”

“Those things can talk to us?”

The shadow man stared at her for a moment—or at least she assumed he did—then without answering her question, he slowly turned back to Nick. “He’s going to require stitches to close this kill wound,” he said. “I’ll need your help.”

The shadow man stood up and walked across the room to the table, and Josie heard rattling and scraping as he dug around in his clutter of science equipment. Help stitching up Nick’s head? Was she really going to let this thing near Nick with a needle and thread?

He returned to the cot, but Josie stepped in front of him. “Who are you?” she asked again, feeling the futility of her repetition. Then added, “ What are you?”

A breathy, humorless laugh came from the shadow. “I might ask you the same question.”

Josie straightened up, squared her shoulders, and held her head as high and mightily as she could, in her best Jo-like pose. “I’m Jo Byrne.”

This time, the laugh was genuine. It burst from the shadow in a violent explosion, as if his body was unused to the expression. “Sure you are,” he said at last. “Just like the woman locked up in Old St. Mary’s is Dr. Byrne.”

“It is my mom,” Josie said truthfully. This shadow knew way too much about her.

He sobered up immediately. “I didn’t say it wasn’t your mom.” He stepped right up to her, the movement a blurred shade in the dimly lit shed. Josie backed up instinctively until her legs were pressed against the edge of the cot. There was something terrifying about the flatness of the shadow man, like a thinking, living black hole that might suck her past the event horizon of his emptiness if she got too close.

He sensed her fear and backed away. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. His raspy voice ached with indignation.

“I know.” Much to her surprise, Josie actually meant it.

“Then can you step aside and let me save him?”

Josie gazed into the void that should have been his face. The darkness was impenetrable. If she shined a light directly onto his face, she doubted it would illuminate anything. It would be sucked into the darkness, where even the individual photons of light couldn’t escape its pull. She was afraid, and yet she needed to trust this thing who had saved her twice from a gruesome death. She stepped aside. “What can I do to help?”