He opened the door and slammed it, then looked around.

In the back seat Smith was struggling with the false Irene Corbett. Her head was in his lap, face up and smeared with bright red blood, and his right arm was around her throat, while his left arm reached across, the point of the open switchblade pressed between her breasts.

“Hold still,” Smith hissed, “Or I’ll cut your heart out and eat it.”

She blinked up at him, horror suddenly plain on her face, and held still.

Smith relaxed slightly, but the knife didn’t move.

The hand that had been round her throat reached up and pulled at the loose skin on her nose.

It peeled away, like a rubber mask, revealing ridged flesh the color of wet modelling clay, a black-lipped mouth filled with gleaming needle-sharp teeth that looked more like stainless steel than bone. From the bridge of her nose – its nose – up, it still looked human; from there down, it was monstrous.

“Believe us now?” Smith asked.

Buckley swallowed.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I believe you.”

Smith smiled, and sank his knife gently into the thing’s chest.

Chapter Eleven:

Wednesday, August 16th

1.

In the days that followed Smith’s little demonstration Lieutenant Buckley and some of his men provided unofficial help in reducing the number of nightmare people in the vicinity, as he had promised they would.

Officially, nothing was out of the ordinary at the Bedford Mills Apartments, nor elsewhere in Diamond Park, or any other part of Montgomery County. No bulletins were issued regarding Bedford Mills or its inhabitants, and no arrests or incidents were reported. Nothing more appeared in the newspapers about the disappearance or its aftermath.

Unofficially, however, the nightmare people were being systematically hunted and destroyed. Half a dozen of the few who still bothered to show up for work at their victims’ jobs received unexpected calls from the police while at their places of business, calls informing them of various emergencies, and when they left to attend to matters they were never seen again. A dozen or so who stayed “home” were phoned there and summoned for questioning, and likewise never seen again.

The brief spell of cool weather gave way to normal August heat, muggy and uncomfortable, but that made no difference to either the hunters or the hunted. None of them paid much attention to the weather, or the news from Lebanon, or the upcoming twentieth anniversary of Woodstock. The silent struggle for survival took precedence.

During that period, several Montgomery County police officers reported in sick with stomach problems – cramps, nausea, and so forth. Officers who had not been included in the secret campaign wondered about food poisoning, and memos were circulated, but nothing came of it. No official cause was ever found, and in the end the whole matter was dismissed as an outbreak of an unknown and not particularly serious virus.

By Sunday the thirteenth the nightmare people had no doubt at all of what was happening, but there was little they could do about it. Appealing to higher authorities, hiring lawyers, all the lines of recourse that humans would have were too risky, too likely to expose what was really going on.

Besides, it was already too late to help the ones who had been destroyed.

Phones at Bedford Mills began to go unanswered, however. Traffic in and out of the apartment complex dwindled away to nothing. Police cruisers prowled the parking lot regularly, and went unmolested, but the officers involved generally stayed in their cars, making no attempt to enter any of the four buildings.

After all, in there they would be outnumbered. A raid in force would be noticed, would draw questions that couldn’t be answered very well.

A few small expeditions into now-empty apartments were staged, but without significant results. And there were still ways of luring an incautious creature to its doom.

The menace was contained, but not destroyed.

Meanwhile, at 706 Topaz Court, life settled into a routine. Smith and Khalil slept from early morning until mid-afternoon, while Annie and sometimes Maggie stood guard, ready to scream if anyone got into the house. In the evenings, Smith and Khalil joined Buckley and his men in trapping and killing nightmare people, and searching through the homes of destroyed creatures in hopes of learning more about them. At night, while Annie slept, the two of them rested, planned, and stood guard over Annie and each other. No one was permitted to enter the house without showing a drop or two of flowing blood; Annie’s sewing basket and a bottle of S.T. 37 antiseptic had been moved to an endtable in the living room so as to provide a supply of sterile needles for that purpose. The three full-time inhabitants all had wounds on their fingers that had been opened and re-opened repeatedly.

Khalil had enough vacation time and sick leave accumulated that his job as a garage mechanic was safe until the 21st, and Smith’s job was already lost. They were both able to devote themselves entirely to the fight.

Even so, by Wednesday, August sixteenth, the night of the full moon, Smith knew there were still a hundred and four nightmare people out there.

What was worse, some of them were unaccounted for. Buckley’s men reported only ninety-three still in the Bedford Mills complex. The other eleven were lost.

“Probably scattered across half the country,” Smith said, during a conversation at the breakfast table. It was late afternoon, and he had just gotten up.

“And there’s nothing we can do about them,” Smith continued.

Khalil and Buckley didn’t argue.

“And there’ll probably be twenty-two of them, rather than eleven, two weeks from now,” Buckley added.

“At least,” Smith agreed.

“Do you really think we can stop the others, here, from breeding tonight?” Khalil asked.

Smith shrugged.

“We can try,” he said.

2.

“Just what is it you’re planning, anyway?” Buckley asked from the door of his cruiser as he prepared to depart. The sun was down, the sky grey and darkening; somewhere in the east the moon was rising, but hidden by the haze.

“A distraction,” Smith said. “Something to keep everybody busy.”

Buckley wiped sweat from his forehead, and glared at Smith. “That’s no answer,” he snapped.

Smith ignored that and remarked casually, “There’s a lunar eclipse tonight, did you know that? It should start in just a few minutes. First one in seven years that can be seen around here – except I don’t think we’ll be able to see it. All the same, I figure the eclipse might have something to do with how those things breed. Even if it doesn’t, if I understand how lunar eclipses work, that’s got to be when the moon is fullest. And since it’s just now getting dark, I figure this has got to be when they’ll be able to breed, so that’s when I set my distraction for.”

“What kind of a distraction?” Buckley demanded.

“Believe me,” Smith said, “It’s better if you don’t know. You’re still a cop, after all.”

“Yeah, I am,” Buckley said, “And I don’t like the sound of that. Maybe I’d better go along with you two, make sure things don’t get out of hand.”

Smith smiled, and leaned on the roof of the patrol car. “I thought you might feel like that,” he said. “That’s why I set the main charge up to be completely automatic. I put it together last night and set it up this morning, right before I came back here to sleep. It’ll go off in about five minutes, whether I’m there or not – I rigged a second-hand computer and printer. See, I put sandpaper in the printer and taped matches and a fuse to the print-head, and then programmed the computer to run a full printer test at 8:23 tonight – that’s when the guy on the news said that the eclipse starts. It’s kind of an expensive way to rig a timer, but I’m not that good with mechanical stuff – I figured I should use what I…”