And never did again.

Setrakian muffled a gasp with his hand. And the feeding Thing didn’t seem to mind him. It spent time over the various sick and infirm. By night’s end, three corpses were left behind, and the thing looked flushed—its skin suppler but equally dark.

Setrakian saw the Thing fade away into the darkness and leave. Cautiously, he got up and moved next to the bodies. He looked them over in the faint light, and there was no sign of any trauma—other than a thin slit in the neck. A breach so thin as to be nearly imperceptible. If he hadn’t witnessed the horror himself…

Then it dawned on him. This Thing. It would return again—and soon. This camp was a fertile feeding ground, and it would graze on the unnoticed, the forgotten, the inconsequential. It would feed on them. All of them.

Unless someone rose up to stop it.

Someone.

Him.

MOVEMENT

Coach

Flight 753 survivor Ansel Barbour huddled with his wife, Ann-Marie, and his two children, eight-year-old Benjy and five-year-old Haily, on a blue chintz sofa in the back sunroom of their three-bedroom home in Flatbush, New York. Even Pap and Gertie got into the act, the two big Saint Bernards allowed inside the house for this special occasion, so happy to see him home, their man-size paws leaning on his knees and patting gratefully at his chest.

Ansel had been seated in aisle seat 39G, in coach, returning home from an employer-paid database security training session in Potsdam, southwest of Berlin. He was a computer programmer embarking on a four-month contract with a New Jersey–based retailer following the electronic theft of millions of customers’ credit card numbers. He had never been out of the country before, and had missed his family intensely. Downtime and sightseeing tours were built into the four-day conference, but Ansel never ventured outside his hotel, preferring to remain inside his room with his laptop, talking to the kids via Webcam and playing hearts over the Internet with strangers.

His wife, Ann-Marie, was a superstitious, sheltered woman, and Flight 753’s tragic end only confirmed her closely held fears of air travel and new experiences in general. She did not drive a car. She lived in the grip of dozens of borderline obsessive-compulsive routines, including touching and repetitively cleaning every mirror in the house, which reliably warded off bad luck. Her parents had died in an automobile accident when she was four—she’d survived the crash—and she was raised by an unmarried aunt who passed away just one week before Ann-Marie and Ansel’s wedding. The births of her children had only intensified Ann-Marie’s isolation, amplifying her fears, to the point where she would often go days without leaving the safety of her own house, relying exclusively on Ansel for anything involving a transaction with the outside world.

The news of the crippled airplane had brought her to her knees. Ansel’s subsequent survival revived her with the power of an exultation that she could define only in religious terms, a deliverance confirming and consecrating the absolute necessity of her redundant, life-preserving routines.