I could tell I was wasting my time demanding he tell me more, so I just said okay. He was about to get off the phone when he added, “Look at your bodycam footage too. See if there’s anything strange on there. Anything that you don’t remember.”

****

The bodycam videos have to be played through a proprietary software that is only barely functional at the best of times. On the rare occasion we wanted to review something, we normally did it at the main office. The older computer in the clubhouse, while decent enough for logs and streaming the security footage, groaned and chugged when it tried to play videos through the bodycam software. It took nearly an hour of me messing with it to get the video to play, and even then, it was choppy.

Still, I saw enough to be terrified.

****

The video showed me entering the house. It wasn’t angled right to record whatever motion caught my eye as I opened the door, but it showed the figure I told to turn around with their hands up. As they did so, I saw that they were wearing what looked like some kind of shiny fur coat or cape. I hadn’t noticed that in the moment I was in the house, or if I had, I didn’t remember it. They had finished turning now, and it was the woman. Her face was still contorted in a wide, fierce grin, but I was beginning to think it was expressing agony more than any kind of manic joy. Her eyes, still gleaming and black, were streaming with what might have been blood or some other dark liquid as she stumbled forward, lifting her arms in some terrible and silent plea.

As she did so, dozens of glistening, furry bodies fell from her arms and shoulders, her breasts and thighs. Rats. Hundreds of rats had been crawling on her, gnawing at her, burrowing into her flesh through dozens of ragged, bloody wounds. And now they were coming for me.

I heard myself scream on the video, but then the camera was jumping this way and that as I struggled to get them off of me. There was another scream from me as I fell, this one growing wilder and more panicked before cutting off suddenly. Everything was still for several seconds, and then I heard a small voice out of the camera’s view.

“What are we going to do with him?”

Then another. “We are going to wait. He needs to be cured.”

The first voice again, this time with more irritation. “But what are we going to do with him for now?”

“We’re going to set him free. Let him find the video he’s recording on his clever little device just there. And then we’re going to make him understand that there’s nothing he can do to stop what is coming.”

Part Two