They both thought of retrieving the skin, but looking at the stinking mess that lay beneath the trees, neither one could bring himself to touch it. Nor could they afford to wait around for the remains to finish dissolving. Someone, either human or nightmare person, might happen along at any time.

“We’ll get one another time,” Smith said, leading the way to his car.

“Who is Jim, that he thought he was meeting?” Khalil asked, as they headed back toward Topaz Court.

“Nobody,” Smith said, his eyes on the road. “I made him up.”

Startled, Khalil asked, “But how…”

“Their memories aren’t complete,” Smith explained. “It didn’t know whether the real Walt Harris knew someone named Jim who would want to meet him like that.”

“Ah,” Khalil said, nodding.

A moment later he added, “But that will not work with all of them, surely.”

“Surely,” Smith agreed, “But it’s a start.”

Khalil nodded again.

7.

The next ruse was a call from a veterinarian, to come and pick up a cat’s medicine. The false Attalla Sleiman knew that it had a cat in its care, and could not be sure that it was healthy; Smith’s mother had been through a bout of F.U.S. with her cat, years before, so Smith was able to fake the call quite convincingly, and to plead with the creature to come and get the diuretics and antibiotics quickly, because the cat would die without them. Wednesday, he said, was the only day they had evening hours at the clinic.

Sleiman’s replacement believed it; he came to the animal hospital on Longdraft Road, over in Gaithersburg, and Smith and Khalil dragged him behind the unused shed out back.

This time Smith had a Nerf ball for a gag, and used a stick to wedge it in.

It was full dark by then, and the nightmare people were stronger in the dark, so the struggle lasted for some time, but in the end numbers and the initial surprise were enough.

After that, the two of them were too battered and worn to tackle any more. They returned to Annie’s house, where they washed and rested.

They stood guard that night, while Annie slept; they made plans over the kitchen table, listing every resident of the Bedford Mills Apartments that Smith knew by name, writing down every deception they could think of that might draw nightmare people out alone.

“If they start travelling in pairs, we’re in trouble,” Smith remarked.

Khalil just nodded.

“Unless we recruit some more help, anyway,” Smith added a moment later.

Khalil looked up.

“When we started,” Khalil said, “There were four of us, even without Annie and Maggie. Now we are two.”

Smith nodded. “I know,” he said, “And I feel guilty about Elias and Sandy, too. All the same, we can’t do it all ourselves, not when there are a hundred and forty of them left, and they probably all know who we are.”

Reluctantly, Khalil nodded.

8.

Einar Lindqvist fired Smith on Thursday afternoon, but Smith didn’t worry about it. His job didn’t seem particularly important just now.

He had other concerns.

“George,” Smith said into the receiver, “I can’t explain it on the phone, but it’s really important. You’ve got to come out here this afternoon, right after work. I’ll give you the address…”

George came.

The first odd thing George encountered was that the old lady who answered the door wouldn’t let him in until he’d pricked his finger with a needle she gave him, and let her see the drop of blood that oozed out.

Then he was bundled into a car with Smith and another man, and driven over to the apartment house where Smith had lived, where they picked up a girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, saying they’d drive her to Patsy’s house. The girl seemed to know and trust Smith.

Picking her up that way seemed strange, and made George nervous, but it was not particularly terrible.

What came next was terrible. George watched in horror as his friend Ed Smith, who was now obviously insane, stuck a steak knife into the girl’s belly, while the stranger Ed called “Khalil” held her down.

His horror grew when he saw that she didn’t bleed. She didn’t scream, either, but smiled, showing silvery teeth that George tried to convince himself were just peculiar braces.

She started screaming a moment later, though, when Smith pulled a slimy black lump out of her chest and started to eat it, not merely raw but still living, still pulsing faintly and secreting something thin and clear and oily.

George fainted.

He came to in time to see the girl’s corpse dissolve slowly into putrid, oozing slime. The stench was unbelievable.

“The real Jessie Goodwin’s been dead for a week,” Smith told him. “This thing ate her, and crawled inside her skin and wore it like a disguise.”

The combination of the description and the smell was too much; George leaned out the car door and lost his lunch. As he wiped his mouth and looked at the ground he noticed that Smith hadn’t been able to keep the black thing down.

George knew he was going to have nightmares about this one, bad nightmares.

“We need help,” Smith told him. “There are just two of us doing this, now. We’ve got some… I guess you’d call them support people, some other people backing us up who don’t actually go out after the monsters. We started out with four of us, but they got the other two before we learned enough to protect ourselves, and we need more. Khalil and I can’t do it all ourselves. There are more than a hundred of them still in there, in those apartments, and next week, when the moon’s full, they’ll be able to breed, and there could be more of them, more than we could ever get.”

George didn’t say anything; he was still too sick.

“George,” Smith said, “Will you help us?”

George raised his head unhappily. “Help you do what?” he asked.

“Kill these things,” Smith replied.

“Like that?” he said, pointing at the dripping mess on the back seat.

Smith nodded.

George shook his head.

“I can’t do it, Ed,” he said.

They argued for a few minutes, but eventually Smith yielded.

“If you won’t do it, you won’t,” he said. “I can’t make you. If you change your mind, let me know. Or if you can find someone who will help, let me know.”

He drove back to Topaz Court, where George’s car waited.

George drove away slowly, and Smith and Khalil silently watched him go.

They’d had trouble contacting Lieutenant Buckley, who was, after all, a busy man. Smith had finally got hold of him, however, and arranged to meet him later that evening.

They didn’t plan to try a graphic demonstration with him, as they had with George, for fear that as a trained man of action he would stop them and give the monster a chance to escape or retaliate. They didn’t lay it all out, the story of spontaneous generation of evil, the extinction of the vampires, any of that. They didn’t mention that they had killed any of the creatures. They merely told him, as they drove along, that the things in the Bedford Mills apartments weren’t human. They described some of what they knew about the nightmare people.

Smith watched his face carefully, judging how much the cop believed.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t much.

“It’s not my problem,” Buckley told them.

“It’s over a hundred murders,” Smith replied.

“I don’t see any evidence,” Buckley answered.

“What if we brought you one of the skins they wear?” Smith suggested. “That would prove someone had been killed, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Buckley admitted, “But not by a monster.”

“A complete human skin in one piece, except for, say, a hole in the chest, wouldn’t prove something supernatural was happening? I mean, the fingers and toes all there, not cut open?”

“I don’t know,” Buckley said, eyeing Smith uneasily.