When I finished watching that video, I immediately tried to download it from the card to the computer’s hard drive. My old cop training had kicked in immediately, pushing through my confusion and horror, demanding that first and foremost, I preserve the evidence of what had occurred.

That’s when the computer froze up.

At first I thought it was just the aches and pains of the old desktop, and I had a moment of panic that the hard drive might have died, but when I rebooted it, the computer came back just fine. I went back to the memory card and it was empty. I fired up the proprietary video player and tried opening it from that, but no luck. After thirty minutes of trying different things and researching possible ways of at least seeing if the data from the bodycam was still on either the card or the computer itself, I gave up. Maybe some forensic computer expert could find the video, but as far as I could tell, it was just gone.

I spent the little time I had left on my shift sitting in a chair with my back against the wall. I had my cell phone in one hand and my extended baton in the other, and my eyes were constantly roving, looking for some lurking shadow coming down one of the halls or a swarm of small, furry bodies rolling toward me like some kind of biting, clawing wave. I wanted to call Oscar again, but decided to wait. I wanted to talk to him in person, and I’d see him in twelve hours. That would have to be soon enough.

A few minutes before shift change, I saw Spires pulling up outside the clubhouse on the external camera. I’d never been so happy to see him in my life. I wanted him to come on in, to either keep me company or relieve me early, but he sat alone in his car until one minute before his shift was supposed to start. When he did come in, I tried to hide my irritation and anxiety by asking him how he’d been doing since I’d seen him a week and a half earlier.

He raised an eyebrow and frowned slightly, almost as though he thought he was the target of some practical joke. “It’s been…fine. How’ve you been? I heard you were sick with a stomach bug.”

I smiled widely and then wondered if I looked like a crazy person. I was trying to restrain my manic glee at being around another person after such a strange and terrible night, but it was hard, and when I spoke, I could hear the frantic edge to the rush of words that spilled out.