“Sure, Einar, I understand. Did you get the number here?”

“No. Give it to me again.”

Smith gave it to him again.

“All right, I’ve got it,” Einar said. “Do you think you might come in this afternoon? Will you be in tomorrow?”

“I don’t know, Einar. Really, I just don’t know. I’ve been throwing up all night, and I’m not sure I’m over it.”

“Uh-huh. All right, Ed, but remember, I warned you.”

He hung up.

Smith grimaced, and hung up as well.

“I think I’m about to lose my job,” he told Khalil.

“Seriously?” Khalil asked.

Smith shrugged. “I don’t know. Hey, don’t worry about it; it wasn’t that great a job to begin with. I’ve got some money, I’ll be okay for a couple of months if I’m careful. Besides, if we don’t kill those things off, I think I’m going to want to get the heck out of this part of the country.”

Khalil nodded agreement.

“If they double their numbers every month, however,” he pointed out, “Soon no place will be safe.”

Smith shrugged. “That’s if. And if that happens, my job isn’t going to matter a whole hell of a lot, is it?”

“No,” Khalil admitted. “I am sure they will try to kill us.”

Smith blinked. “Do you think that’s what the fake Sandy was supposed to do?”

“He said so, didn’t he? That he was to send us out alone, where the others could get us?”

Smith nodded.

They sat silently for a moment.

Annie was in the living room, fussing with the ruined couch again. They could hear her bustling about.

“Maybe we should have asked that thing more questions before we killed it,” Smith said. “Like where they’ll be going next, after Diamond Park.”

Khalil shrugged. “You did not think of it.”

Smith nodded agreement. “There’s a lot I didn’t think of,” he said.

3.

“If we can’t kill them all,” Smith said, “Is there some way we can stop them from breeding?”

Nobody answered. Khalil shrugged, and Annie just looked down at her knitting, her fingers working busily.

“What if we just cut their hearts out, but didn’t eat them?” Smith suggested.

Annie dropped a stitch and frowned. Khalil tapped his fingers quietly.

“And how exactly do they breed? That one we questioned said that the larva goes down someone’s throat – how does it get there?”

“Perhaps a bite, the way it happens when one takes a new skin, but it sends only the larva down, instead of eating its own way in,” Khalil suggested.

Smith nodded. “It’s probably something like that,” he agreed. “But if that’s how it works, I don’t see how they can do it. People aren’t going to just let it happen, let strangers walk up and stick their heads in their mouths.”

“Wouldn’t be strangers,” Annie said, looping yarn around the needle. “All those folks over there have friends and family, don’t they?”

“I guess so, but I still don’t see…” Smith began.

“And,” Annie said, “It’s not too much to ask for a little kiss now and then, is it?”

“A kiss?” Khalil’s fingers stopped tapping the table. Smith blinked and looked over at Annie.

“That would do it, wouldn’t it?” Smith said. “At least, it would let ’em get their mouths up against the mouths of their victims.”

Annie nodded, not looking up from her work.

“I expect the one that’s pretending to be Katie may turn up and try to convince me it’s all a misunderstanding, and we should kiss and make up,” she said. “Won’t do it, though, not unless it forces me.”

Khalil and Smith stared at each other.

“I wonder,” Smith said. “Once the larva’s in there, do you think there’s any way to stop it?”

“The doctors have things that pump out stomachs, yes?”

Smith nodded. “Yeah, a stomach pump might work,” he said, “I don’t know. These aren’t normal parasites, after all; they’re supernatural.”

“There are none anywhere yet,” Khalil pointed out. “Should we not try to stop any from getting anywhere?”

“Yes,” Smith agreed, “We should. And I know which one, too – the one that got Sandy said that the one that got Elias’s father was the one that had originally been after me. I think it’s time we finished off that whole fake family over there.”

Khalil nodded.

“Will the two of us be enough, do you think?” he asked.

“We’re all we’ve got,” Smith said. “We’d better be. We’ll be catching it off-guard, I hope, and during the daylight, and there will be two of us to the one of it – we managed okay with the fake Sandy.”

Khalil nodded again. “We go now, then?”

“Yes,” Smith said, “We go now.” He stood up.

Khalil rose as well.

“Oh, one thing,” Smith said, pausing. “This time, Khalil, you eat it.”

4.

Breaking into a locked house in broad daylight was a new experience for Smith, but with his crowbar it wasn’t particularly difficult. The back door of the Samaan house gave way easily.

He just hoped none of the neighbors had noticed anything.

Most of them were probably at work, he figured, or otherwise out for the day – it was late morning, almost eleven. And the others would probably be sitting inside, watching TV. The weather was beautiful, sunny and pleasantly cool – but who noticed that on a weekday morning?

And in August, people might not want to be out when it was this cool.

Despite the temperature, forcing the door had been enough to work up a little sweat. Smith stepped inside, with Khalil at his heels.

They were in the living room, where they had fled after burning the skin off the false Hanna Samaan, and it appeared that no one had bothered to move a thing since then. A few spatters of dried blood, Sandy’s blood, still spotted the carpet in an uneven line from the foyer to the deck; black flakes of ash were scattered everywhere, and the room stank of lighter fluid and smoke.

It felt deserted.

Smith tried to ignore that feeling; after all, the nightmare people weren’t human. They wouldn’t necessarily be tidy housekeepers. They were kin to vampires, which had traditionally dwelt in ruins and decay.

Even so, the air in this house felt undisturbed and empty. It wasn’t just the ash or the blood or the smell, but something subtle and undefineable.

Khalil carefully slid the door closed, and then drew the heavy carving knife from his belt. Smith equally carefully placed the crowbar on the floor and drew his own blade.

They stepped forward, watching all sides. Staying together, they crossed to the foyer.

The ash was thicker here, and scorched remnants of Hanna Samaan’s housedress lay on the tile floor. One blue terrycloth slipper leaned against a wall; there was no sign of its mate.

Smith backed up into the living room, then led the way into the kitchen.

It was as deserted as the living room. Likewise the dining room and the den and the powder room.

Then it was Khalil’s turn to lead, up the stairs and through all the three bedrooms and the two bathrooms, and into the long, narrow walk-in closet over the garage.

One room was clearly Elias’s, equipped with a cheap component stereo and racks of unsorted tapes and records. A Pauli Girl beer poster adorned the closet door; a shelf over the bed held a dozen paperbacks by Stephen King and Robert Heinlein, and a larger volume entitled The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, by Michael Weldon. The bed itself was unmade, and a line of cookie crumbs had collected along a crease in the bottom sheet. An old roll-top desk was awash in papers, notebooks, and junk, with a Batman comic book on top. Three pairs of jeans were on the floor.

Also on the floor was a blackened, stinking bundle that upon investigation was discovered to be the clothes the false Elias had been wearing when Smith, Sandy, and Khalil had cut it open and eaten its heart. The skin itself was gone.