Eat the dark, yes, that was all he could do. Anything could be hiding wherever it pleased, anything with enough patience and appetite, clutching itself in darkness and waiting.

Mike raised the flashlight and froze in his tracks with a grunt of surprise.

The linen cart with the bodies of the dead cops was now lying on its side. Three of the corpses were sprawled across the corridor, the radio next to them.

Except there should be four.

He played the flashlight over the bodies to the greasy smear of blood leading away from the upended cart and around the next corner.

There had been four of them. He knew it. So where was the fourth?

Only problem is, Mike, I come here tonight on the devil’s true business.

All at once he heard the sound, not as far off as the crash he’d heard before. This one came from just around the corner, some bastard hybrid of a gurgle and a sob. He was still looking at the corner when the thing lunged around it at him.

He jerked the bat up but it was too late. The thing—the man—grabbed him by the shoulders, knocking him back, shaking the flashlight from his hands. In the darkness Mike could feel the other man’s breath in his face. It smelled like hot salt and minerals, tinged with the odors of sweat and parts of the body never meant to be exposed to air.

“Did you see him?” the man demanded. “Where is he?”

Mike’s throat opened but nothing came out. The speechlessness lasted long enough that he thought he’d been rendered permanently mute, the language center of his brain literally snuffed out by fright.

“You’re one of the cops,” he managed at last. “You were still alive in there?”

Somewhere off to his left, the flashlight came back up and the cop’s face appeared in front of him. Not Repko or Oz, but one of the others. He realized the cop was holding a flashlight of his own, a better one. For a moment Mike thought he might be looking into a mirror reflecting his own terrorized face. Through the caked-on blood, the cop’s wide-eyed expression slowly became one of comprehension, even relief.

“You’re the MRI guy.”

“You scared the shit out of me,” Mike said.

The cop was staring at the bodies in blue uniforms, spilled across the floor. “That son of a bitch. We never saw him coming.”

Mike nodded. “What happened?”

“I blacked out up on Six. Woke up facedown in that cart with my partners’ bodies jammed against me so tight I could feel them getting stiff. Fuck.” He rubbed both hands over his face, pulling his eyes down until all Mike saw was pink.

Mike hesitated, not wanting to ask the question. He did anyway. “Snow didn’t…give you guys a choice?”

The cop blinked. “A choice? What are you…wait. Holy shit. He told us on the way over that if we just dropped him off at the hospital and left, he’d let us live. Of course, we just laughed our asses off. Jesus, this is bad. We gotta roll. Now.”