“Now burn the incantation!”

“I know what to do, Sam.”

“Burn it!”

I lit the parchment. As it burned, Sam’s head began to levitate as the lines of time and space sparked and smoked. By the time the small paper was ash, Sam and his body were reunited—all five foot four of his cranky ass.

“Man, I gotta piss like nobody’s business!”

“Hold it. We gotta get up to Griffith Park and see what’s happening up there.”

“I ain’t doing anything until I piss and get some food!”

Fine. We stopped at a burger joint on the way to the park. Sam drained himself and ate five hamburgers without taking a breath. After nearly choking to death, he was ready for action.

“Let’s go kill this little bastard,” Sam smiled. Every scar on his messed-up head moved like a thousand tiny grins.

I was about to pull away from the burger dump when suddenly everything went black. And I mean everything, including street lights and the sun. In the blink of an eye, total darkness—like an instant eclipse. Everything came to a halt and for one nanosecond, the world was silent. A beat later, I began hearing screams and car horns in the darkness. It was as black as a starless midnight sky. People were panicking.

A car, practically on two wheels, came smashing through the side of the restaurant wall and landed on top of a table of six with a thunderous, smoking crash. There was blood and smoke and screaming everywhere. I yelled for someone to call an ambulance.

As we moved through the unnatural dark, the entire city was in chaos. There were screams and crashes everywhere. In the sky I heard helicopters, but couldn’t see them. People were running into the streets and getting struck down by cars. It was horrible.

Though we wanted to, we didn’t allow ourselves to stop and help. I looked over at Sam as we drove toward the park. There was a horror in his eyes I’d never seen before. Maybe the ghouls had been right all along. The floodgates had opened. The day of the monsters was upon us, and it was all that little fucker Billy’s fault.

Maybe, if we hurried, we could do something about it. If not, we were in for a long period of darkness, and most likely, the end of life as we knew it.

I drove through the darkness like a madman, from Sherman Oaks to North Hollywood, but just as I prepared to make the turn to the observatory, I saw a nightmare. Just ahead of us, a woman was being dragged from her car by a red, winged creature identical to the one I killed. I slammed on the brakes and came to a sudden stop, catching the woman and the creature in my headlights.

As I ran toward the action, the creature stopped, and tried to take flight. I lowered my .45 and aimed.