I saw it through the gap in the skirting.
Upside down, its neck craned over the trailer’s edge at an impossible angle. Gray skin sagged from the skull. One eye socket was torn open, black-crusted and empty. The other eye moved—slow, methodical sweeps across the dark beneath the trailer. It was that unhurried patience, more than anything else, that turned my blood cold.
Its mouth opened.
A wet, sucking sound escaped—air pulling through a throat half-full of fluid, producing a gurgling, drowning noise that went on and on, rhythmic, almost like breathing. Dark liquid dripped from its lower lip, thick and slow, landing on the gravel with soft drips that I could count between my own heartbeats.
It didn’t see me.
Didn’t—
Don’t move. Don’t breathe. Don’t exist.
Seconds passed. Or minutes. I had no way to tell and no capacity to care. Time had collapsed down to a single, trembling point—the width of a heartbeat, the space between one moment and the next, stretched into something that could have been an hour or ten seconds.
Just still.
Just silent.
Just praying to a god I’d stopped believing in weeks ago that the shadows would be enough.
The carrier shifted slightly beside me. A tiny sound. Barely anything. A small movement of weight inside a plastic shell.
My breath had gone completely shallow, just these tiny sips of air that I was terrified I could hear. For one agonizing moment, I stared at the face in the gap, waiting for the eye to lock onto my position, waiting for the mouth to stretch open and call the others.
The eye rolled past. Kept searching. Moved on.
I looked down.
Doc Fluffbutt stared back at me through the carrier’s grate.
His eyes were wide and round, pupils completely black, ears pressed flat against his skull, every hair on his body standing on end. His mouth hung slightly open, panting in quick, shallow, silent breaths—terrified down to his bones, every instinct screaming at him to bolt, to yowl, to claw his way free and run.
But quiet.
Absolutely, miraculously quiet.
“Good,” I whispered—and even whispering overstated it. The word carried no voice at all. “Stay like that.”
The smell arrived before anything else—rot and stagnant water, and beneath both of those, something worse. Sweet and thick and permanent.
My shoulder throbbed as a fresh wave of pain radiated outward, hot and impossible to ignore no matter how hard I tried.
My hands shook against the ground, tremors running through my fingers in rapid little spasms I couldn’t control.
My heart would not slow down, would not stop hammering, would not give me even a moment of calm.
But I breathed—slowly, carefully, through parted lips, filtering the rancid air through my teeth.
Alive.
For now.
And outside—they circled. Feet shuffled through gravel in slow, patient loops. Hands dragged along the trailer’s metal skin.
They knew something had gone under here.
And I knew—I knew it the way I knew my own name, knew it in my gut and my bones and the cold pit at the base of my spine—
