3:59

FORTY-THREE

9:05 P.M.

“WHO ARE YOU?” JOSIE REMEMBERED THE SHADOWS she’d seen in the darkened corners of the warehouse ever since Nick had first brought her there. A trick of the eye, an overactive imagination. Not so much. But where had the man come from? Materialized out of thin air? Magically risen out of the ground?

“Quiet!” he barked.

Josie shook herself from her daze. She reached out and felt his shoulder, tall and strong in front of her. He held Nick cradled in his arms.

“This way.”

Not that she had a choice. Stay in the warehouse and be eaten alive by monsters that live in the darkness or follow the mysterious stranger down the rabbit hole.

Mysterious stranger it was.

He led her across the warehouse to what must have been the far corner beyond the parking area. He moved slowly, unhurried, which seemed odd considering the swarm of creatures that continued to circle just above their heads. It took Josie a few moments before she realized they weren’t being attacked. It took her even longer to realize that while Nick had been viciously overcome within seconds of the Nox bursting into the warehouse, she didn’t have so much as a scratch on her.

The Nox left her alone.

What was going on?

The stranger paused, and Josie felt him bend down. Or so she thought. He continued to move forward and as Josie followed, she realized he was going down a set of stairs.

The steps were rickety wood, judging by the way in which each step sagged ever so slightly under her weight. Only a dozen or so, and Josie landed on a firm dirt floor.

“Wait here,” the stranger said. He squeezed past her in the passageway. He was tall—Nick’s height, at least—but broader and heavier. Josie’s eyes strained against the blackness of the space, trying to get a glimpse of the stranger, but other than an outline of a body disappearing up the stairs—even blacker than the blackness around her—she couldn’t make out anything.

She heard a distant thump, and the shrieks of the Nox were instantly muffled. A trapdoor. He really had come through the floor.

“Who are you?” Josie asked again, now that she could actually hear her own voice. Above in the warehouse, the shrieking intensified, punctuated by thumps on the floor.

“They can hear you,” the stranger said, ignoring her question. She could hear him breathing in the darkness. “They get angry when deprived of prey. We should keep moving.”

Josie took a step back. Her foot nudged something on the ground. Nick’s leg where his body lay motionless. “We’re not going anywhere with you,” she said. Her voice sounded small in the darkness.

“You,” he said firmly, “don’t have to go anywhere. But he’s coming with me. He needs medical attention.”

“Is . . . is he . . .” Josie felt the weight of Nick’s motionless body behind her on the ground. She pressed against his lifeless form, afraid to ask the question on the tip of her tongue.

“He’ll be fine. I think.”

She felt a figure move past her in the darkness. She stepped aside as the stranger grunted against the weight of Nick’s body. “This way.”

Josie placed a hand on either side of the narrow passageway and slowly followed the sound of the stranger’s shuffling footsteps. She stooped, worried she’d clock her head against a low beam, and picked her way cautiously across the uneven ground. The floor was soft dirt, dry and powdery; their footsteps kicked up small clouds of the stuff that tickled Josie’s nose and made her eyes water. It was significantly warmer in the passage than the late spring evening above, and the heat accentuated the stench of mold and damp cardboard that permeated the space.

They hadn’t gone far before a creak from in front of her stopped Josie in her tracks.

“Watch your step,” the stranger said. “They’re rotting away on this end.”

Great. Josie felt with her foot for the first step, then tentatively tested her weight. It was bouncy, but sound, and clearly the stranger had gone ahead of her carrying Nick. Without a second thought, Josie climbed the stairs.

Like the passageway through which they’d just come, the room Josie stepped into was almost completely dark. Almost. Unlike the metal walls of the warehouse, this room had been constructed with wooden beams, and slivers of grayish-blue moonlight filtered in through the weathered slats. A hint of light in the utter blackness, but it was enough to show the dimensions of the space—no more than ten feet in any direction, windowless with a low roof and a thin outline of a door on the opposite wall. She wrinkled her nose as an acrid, chemical smell wafted toward her, mixed with the stale stench of unwashed bodies.

There was only one place they could be.

“We’re in the storage shed,” Josie said out loud. “Next to the warehouse.”

“Yes.”

Dust billowed up in amorphous clouds as the stranger shuffled across the dirt-layered floor. He grunted, then the metallic creak of ancient mattress coils signaled that he had deposited Nick on a bed of some kind. More shuffling, then a single flame burst to life, strong and unwavering, from a table in the middle of the room. Not the feeble flickering of a candle—this was the powerful, gas-fueled light of a Bunsen burner, which illuminated a bedlam of beakers and cylinders, test tubes and flasks cluttered around a low-grade laser rig on a large metal table. The orange light of the burner barely permeated the darkness, but Josie could see a shadow moving around on the far side of the table. The shadow of a man.

He walked quickly, purposefully back and forth from the table to a cot. Josie tentatively stepped around the table toward the body that lay unconscious on the bare mattress. Nick was motionless, and his thick, wavy hair looked matted and sticky with blood. She stared at him, desperate to catch a glimpse of movement from his body. A shudder, a slight expansion of the chest to prove he was still breathing. Anything.

The stranger remained cloaked in shadow even as Josie drew closer to him. She could see his outline, a dark silhouette that seemed to absorb the feeble moonlight streaming in through the tiny fissures in the wall. He sat on the edge of the cot and rolled Nick onto his side, then dabbed at the back of his head and neck. The stranger was utterly consumed with his task, seemingly unaware that Josie stood within arm’s length.

“This wound is deeper than I thought,” he mumbled to himself. “Going to have to stitch it.”

“Shouldn’t we take him to a hospital?” Josie said.

The stranger jumped as if he’d completely forgotten her presence. He turned to her, stared her straight in the face as the light from the burner illuminated his features, and suddenly all the life seemed to drain out of Josie.

There was no face.

The man had no face. At all.

From where she stood, Josie should have seen the articulated facial features of a human being: the sunken eye sockets, protruding nose, lips, chin.

Instead she saw nothing but a flat, featureless sea of black.