All at once, the forest went silent. He’d thought it was silent before, but this sudden quiet made him painfully aware how much it hadn’t been. This was a suffocating silence, like someone sucking all the air from the room. He froze midstep and pressed his palm to the nearest tree trunk for balance, then carefully lowered his raised foot so it made little more than a whisper in the dead leaves. He glanced up—made sure he was positioned under the densest part of the tree’s canopy. Waited for the drone of airplanes overhead.

Nothing came. No cars, no humans, nothing to disturb the abject silence that felt dense as lead.

Phillip breathed shallowly, getting dizzy as he waited. He gave the forest one more scan, but he needed to move on—

Then, a crack—like peanut brittle. Like his arm when he’d jumped from the playground swing.

Phillip flinched. Al said the thing about sniper bullets was that at first, you might not even feel the pain. It hadn’t sounded like rifle fire, but then, he only had basic training for reference. Well, if it was, at least they were a bad shot—

The crack sounded again, chased by a staticky hiss.

Oh, Jesus. A few hundred yards up ahead, what looked like a lightning fork tore between the trees. But unlike lightning, it lingered, crackling, wavering in the air: a thin scar of bright energy. The scar stretched taller, until a thick soup of darkness spilled from its heart.

Phillip thanked the US Army for issuing him rubber-soled boots and stayed rooted to the spot.

The darkness kept pouring out, tendrils of black smoke stretching—like arms clawing out of a womb. The limbs reached down toward the ground. Scrabbling. Dead leaves raked between its talons. A third tendril swelled and unfurled like an elegant, headless neck. The thick scent of decay filled the air. The first two limbs buckled—jointed now—and bent to yank free a torso with a knobby spine.

Phillip didn’t believe in devils or ghouls or angels or anything he couldn’t draw with a circuitry schematic, test with his oscilloscope. But he acknowledged there were limits to the known world, that the universe was infinite, and the observed portion of it was very small. So whatever the thing was slithering out of the tear in the air before him—he was all right with leaving it unobserved. Unobserved, and at a very great distance.

Phillip sprinted—wide to the right, then ahead, zigzagging through the trees. His footfalls were punishingly loud, but he couldn’t stop to check if the creature was following him. He could only charge on.

And finally he saw it, the whitewashed farmhouse at the far edge of the field, glowing like a beacon in the twilight.