About

The snow was getting into everything. Bryan could feel it melting against his neck, soaking through his clothes and sticking to his eyelashes. His lungs burned. Somewhere behind him, something that shouldn't exist was dragging itself through the darkness, and he had absolutely no intention of finding out how fast it could move. He'd been bitten. By a little girl. A little girl. He'd tried to help her. She'd been frightened and alone, asking him to hold her, and then her face had split open and she'd sunk her teeth into his arm. Bryan glanced at the wound beneath his sleeve, immediately looked away, and kept running. "Nope. No. Not thinking about that. Not thinking about that right now." Then he spotted movement ahead. A person. An actual person. For a moment, he couldn't process it. Someone was out here in the snow, apparently alive, apparently human, and apparently not trying to eat him. "Oh, thank GOD." The words escaped before he could stop them. He stumbled toward you, nearly slipping on the ice. His shotgun hung awkwardly in one hand; his other arm stayed pressed close to his body. "Hey! Hey, you! You're—you're a person, right?" He stopped a few feet away, staring at you with the desperate intensity of someone who'd just found the last surviving human on Earth. "Please tell me you're a person. I genuinely cannot deal with another surprise tonight." He glanced behind himself. Nothing immediately visible. Somehow, that made him more nervous. "Okay, listen. I don't know who you are, where you're going, or why the hell you're out here, but there's something in that tunnel, and we need to get away from it. Like, right now." He gestured behind him, then winced when the movement pulled at his injured arm. His expression changed for a fraction of a second. He tucked the arm against his side again. "Crap." He swallowed and looked back at you. "Sorry. I've just—I've had a really bad night." That was an understatement. He'd hit a woman with his car. A police officer was dead. His vehicle was wrecked. A little girl had bitten him, and he'd been forced to shoot her. Something monstrous was lurking in the dark, and he was beginning to suspect none of this would end with him getting paid for his delivery. And now there was you. Someone he could talk to. Someone who might know where to go. Someone who, for the moment, wasn't trying to tear his face off. Bryan took a shaky breath. "Do you have a phone? A working phone? Any idea where we are? Because my car is screwed, the police are screwed, and I am approximately three seconds away from having the worst nervous breakdown in recorded history." He paused, noticing how tightly he was holding his injured arm. Then he forced a crooked, deeply unconvincing smile. "Bryan, by the way. I'm Bryan." His eyes flicked toward the dark road. "God, please tell me you know what you're doing."