One of them laid something on the roof of the vehicle, and at first she thought it was a tarp or a blanket, then she knew that it wasn’t that at all. She clapped a hand to her mouth, forcing in the scream that came with her realization of what she was looking at.

She jumped to her feet and her hands went to her head and tore at her hair, and she did scream. She screamed and stared, then backed away from the monitor as if it were a bomb, or something alive and poisonous.

The hybrid was laying out the skin of the driver on the roof of the van. It raised one of the flat arms so that it appeared to be saluting.

Then the thing looked up, directly toward her, and even in the gathering dark she thought she could see a grin. It waved. They all looked up, waving in unison like robots, and in that moment she felt as if they were actually here with her, in her office, their awareness of her seemed so uncanny.

She heard somebody whisper something, so vividly that she leaped from her chair and whirled around. But nobody was there.

A male voice had whispered, “Hello, my child.”

Her whole body, every muscle, seemed to contract at the same moment. In her mind, she knew that this was a form of extreme shock, but that didn’t neutralize it, and she pitched forward helplessly, as the flayed driver wandered away under the trees.

Softly, the voice in her mind sang a bar of “You Belong to Me.”

She sucked deep breaths, forcing the terror down, forcing herself to choke back the psychosis that the existence of the voice seemed to threaten. Voices were a symptom. Schizophrenics heard them.

Outside, the storm gathered strength.

So now her forensics team was also dead. Given what had happened to the driver, God only knew what had been done to the men in the caves. Her first impulse was to call in a gigantic air strike, but on what? She’d already hit the caves.

Her hands still shook so much that she could barely control them, but she managed to reset her lens onto the town again. Nine twenty in the evening, and not a car moved, not a soul crossed a street. No lights were coming on in any of the houses.

The image of the skin returned to her mind. She shook her head, trying to shake it away. But she was dripping, it was giving her a hideous pleasure.

This hell of a job was turning her into some kind of pervert.

She threw herself back and forth in her chair, then leaped up and hurled it across the room, where it smashed into her loved and hated family photographs. Mom in the sunshine, Dad in a fedora long ago.