It had been pouring, clearly. There were puddles all over the place. The one mercy of this doomed morning was that there was only the slightest drizzle now. At least she didn’t have to run through the rain. She got out her phone to send a message to let them know she was close. The phone emitted a tiny halo that encircled her hand, giving it a saintly glow. It was hard to text and walk at the same time, not if she didn’t want to fall off the pavement or walk into a post. Am running lake . . .

Claire had tried to type the word late three times, but it kept coming up as lake. She wasn’t running lake, she was running late. She refused to stop walking and fix it. There was no time to waste. The message would stand.

. . . Be there in 5 . . .

And then she tripped. The cell phone took flight, a little glowing ball of light, free at last before it clattered to the sidewalk and went out.

“Bugger!” she said. “No, no, no . . . don’t be broken . . .”

In her concern over the fate of her phone, Claire first didn’t take notice of the thing she had tripped over, aside from faintly registering that it was somewhat large and weighty and it gave a little when her foot struck it. In the dark, it appeared to be a strangely shaped mound of garbage. Something else put in her way this morning to impede her progress.

She knelt down and felt along the ground for the phone, sinking her knee directly into a puddle.

“Wonderful,” she said to herself as she scrabbled around. The phone was quickly recovered. It appeared to be dark and lifeless. She tried the power button, not expecting any result. To her delight, the phone blinked on, casting its little light around her hand once again.

This was when she first noticed that there was something sticky on her hand. The consistency was extremely familiar, as was the faint metallic smell.

Blood. Her hand was covered in blood. A lot of blood, with a faintly jelly-like consistency that suggested congealing. Congealing blood meant blood that had been here for several minutes, so it couldn’t be her own. Claire shifted around, holding up her phone for light. She could see now that she had tripped over a person. She crawled closer and felt a hand, a hand that was cool, but not cold.

“Hello?” she said. “Can you hear me? Can you speak?”

She got up alongside the figure, a smallish person dressed entirely in motorcycle leathers, wearing a helmet. She reached up to the neck to feel for a pulse.

Where the neck was supposed to be, there was a space.