They stumbled backwards. Jackie’s neck and face were a mess of purple blotches, and she was sweating hard through her clothes. Still she remembered to scoop the King City box back off the floor. Diane took off her rapidly dissolving jacket and tossed it to the ground. The librarian’s limb recoiled, curled back into the massive body, then shot out at them again.

As they ducked and ran down a parallel aisle, Diane saw, through the gaps between the books, the librarian emerge from the shadows. She saw, exactly and in full, what a librarian looked like. Her stomach lurched.

She would not forget the sight, recurring in dreams and panic attacks, until the moment she died, at which point she would forget it. Eventually, on the day she finally died, one of things that ran through her mind was: Well, at least I won’t have to remember that anymore. It made her happy, and she died smiling.

But that was much later.

Jackie did her best to keep up with Diane. She was younger and faster, but the poison was coursing through her. Her gait was unsteady, and she hissed hard through clenched teeth.

They tore through the fiction section, and into biographies. Helen Hunt’s face was completely gone, replaced by a gaping mouth, distended from chin to hairline, a buzz of gray rushing at them from its depths.

Then the shelves ran out and there was only space. Ahead was the wide open reading room. A death trap. The moment they stepped out into that, every librarian would see them, and then it would be over. They turned to look, and that white, ropy limb was hissing toward them, leaving a thick, oily trail on the carpet.

They looked at each other. Jackie leaned on Diane’s arm, struggling a bit now with standing up.

“We can do this,” Jackie said. “Just move before you can think about consequences.”

Diane nodded, and they ran as thoughtlessly as they could manage into the reading area. There was a bellow from all around them, and more of the white limbs seethed out of the floor and the shelves. Bulbous shapes loomed at them from the ceiling. The librarians had all come out to greet them.

The skittering of hundreds of spindly legs. A buzzing. Red eyes, maybe, or red spots or blood squirted into the air. There were primary jaws and secondary jaws and tertiary vestigial jaws, and each of them turned to two women running toward the exit.