In the movies, the light finds you. It drifts down warm and gold and it hovers politely at chest height, and you get a second to look at it and understand that your life is about to change.
The blue thing hit Noah Reyes at about the speed of a car.
It went in under his sternum and it did not come out the other side. He was standing and then he was not standing, and the taquito left his hand and landed somewhere in the grass, and that was the last anybody ever saw of it. He would think about that taquito years later, in a room with no exits, and he would laugh until he cried.
Cold. That was the wrong part. Everybody tells you light is warm. This was the cold you get off the inside wall of a freezer, and it was in his ribs, and it was spreading, and it had edges.
He lay on his mother's grave with his knees pulled up and both hands flat against his chest like he could hold something in, and he made a noise, and above him the sky kept tearing.
Then somebody spoke, very quietly, from somewhere behind his eyes.
*"Oh."*
Noah stopped breathing.
*"Oh, no. You're a kid."*
The voice was tired. That was the part he could never explain to anybody afterward, not to the people who asked and not to the people who made him write it down. It did not boom. It sounded like a man at the end of a double shift who has just been told there is one more thing.
Then words came, and they were not sound. They were just there, hanging in the middle of his vision in a color his eyes had no receptor for.
**[BINDING: 4%]**
**[BINDING: 19%]**
**[BINDING: 61%]**
*"I'm going to be honest with you,"* the voice said. *"I don't know what this is either."*
**[BINDING COMPLETE.]**
**[I'M SORRY.]**
The cold stopped all at once, like a hand lifting off him. Noah rolled onto his side and threw up on a stranger's grave.
*****
He got his phone out on the third try because his hands were doing something new and interesting.
Screen fine. Full bars. He dialed 911 and got a recorded woman, very calm, very professionally sorry, explaining that all circuits were busy and asking him to please try his call again later.
Later.
He looked up at the seam running from one horizon to the other, at the stars sliding along it like water finding a drain, and he thought, *how many people just got that message.*
That was when he heard the fence.
It came over the wrought iron on the east side in three pieces of movement and none of the three made sense in order. Noah had grown up with dogs on the block and deer in the greenbelt behind the Kroger. He had a working idea of how a body with legs was supposed to get over a fence. This poured over, put itself back together on the grass, and stood.
Seven feet, maybe. Something like a deer's ribcage worn on the outside, wet and dark, and inside the cage of it a smaller shape moved on a schedule of its own. Too many joints in the back legs. No face anywhere on it. Just a smooth glossy knot where a head goes, turning slow, the way a satellite dish turns.
It tasted the air.
Then it walked past four graves, close enough that he could smell it, pennies and pond water, and it stopped at the fresh dirt.
And it started to dig.
Every part of Noah's body said the same word at the same time. *Run.* His legs were already halfway through agreeing. The gate was ninety feet. The Corolla was past that. Twenty seconds to the car and forty to Delaney and the thing would still be here doing whatever it was doing and he would be alive.
He looked at the dirt coming up in wet handfuls.
"Hey," said Noah Reyes, to the apocalypse.
It stopped digging.
"Yeah. Hey. Get off her."
*****
It turned its head toward him and Noah understood, instantly and completely, that he had made a mistake.
His body quit on him. That was the first thing. His legs went soft under him and his bladder let go a little and his breath came out in short useless sips that did not reach the bottom of his lungs, and he stood there in his funeral shirt with his mother eight feet away under the dirt, nineteen years old, and could not make his knees work.
He threw the grave marker.
He did not decide to. His arm did it. A piece of white plastic with a printed card in the slot, and it hit the ribcage and bounced off into the grass, and in the half second afterward Noah realized he had just thrown his mother's name at it.
Then it came.
He did not dodge because he did not know how. He fell down, which happened to work, and it went over him, and something in the underside of it opened him up along the left ribs. Four lines through the shirt and into the meat.
He screamed. Not a battle noise. A high, cracked, embarrassing noise, and it kept going after he wanted it to stop, and he heard himself doing it from a long way off.
"Help," he said. He was on his hands and knees in the grass and there was blood running into his waistband and he was saying it to a cemetery at ten o'clock at night. "Help. Somebody. Please. Please, somebody."
Sirens somewhere across the city. Not for him. Nobody was coming for him.
He crawled. He got maybe eight feet toward the gate before it stepped in front of him, and it did not even hurry, and that was the worst thing that had happened to him in a day that had already included burying his mother. It was not fighting him. It did not think there was a fight. It looked at him with the smooth place where a face should be, and then it turned around and went back to the dirt.
He was not a threat. He was not worth killing yet. He was something it would get to.
Noah lay in the wet grass and watched it dig his mother up.
Fourteen months. Fourteen months of the pill schedule and the sheets and the pump that sounded like the fridge, and the sponges, and the little cup, and holding her hand at 4:12 in the morning while a nurse said the word. He had done all of it. He had done every part of it and he had gotten one day off work for it, and here was the world, six hours after they closed the ground over her, taking her back out of it.
"Please," he said. He did not know who to. "Please, please, please."
He got up.
He got the folding chair off the stack because it was there and it was metal. He was crying so hard he could barely see the thing he was swinging at, and he hit it across the ribcage and the noise it made was enormous, a church bell noise, and he hit it again and again and he was saying something the whole time that was not words in any language, just sound coming out of him.
The chair bent. The thing took it out of his hands and threw it over the fence.
Shovel. It was standing up in the dirt pile and he grabbed it and swung it like a baseball bat because a baseball bat was the only swing he had ever learned, and he missed, and the blade hit a headstone. The shock came up the handle into both wrists and his hands opened on their own and the shovel was gone in the grass and the thing was on him.
He got thrown. His face hit granite and skidded and he ended up pressed against somebody else's stone with the letters printing into his cheek, EUGENE, and something wet and heavy standing on his back pushing the air out of him.
"Sorry," he was saying, into the granite, over and over. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
He was not talking to Eugene.
"Mom," he said.
It came out of him small. He was nineteen years old and he was lying face down in a graveyard calling for his mother, and she was forty feet away, and she could not come.
Something in his chest went cold again, the way it had when the light hit him.
*"Kid."* The tired voice. Very close. *"Get up."*
"I can't."
*"I know. Get up anyway."*
The weight came off his back. It had gone back to the hole. It kept going back to the hole.
Noah pushed himself onto his elbows and looked at what was around him, because that was the one thing fourteen months had actually taught him. When the thing in front of you cannot be fixed, you stop trying to fix it and you look at what is in the room.
What was in the room was a lowering frame with two nylon straps still threaded through it, sitting where the crew left it because they were coming back Wednesday. Straps rated for six hundred pounds, because that is what they hold.
He crawled to it. He pulled a strap free with his teeth and one hand that worked, and he was shaking so badly he lost the loop twice, and he wrapped it around the base of Eugene's headstone and cinched it and he lay flat in the grass with the other end wound around his fist.
Then he had to make it come at him.
That was the part he never told anybody about either. Not the fighting. The three seconds where he lay in the dark with his heart going like a bird in a box and had to open his mouth on purpose.
"Hey," he said.
It did not hear him.
"HEY!"
It came.
It came so fast that his whole body tried to let go of the strap, and he held on out of pure stupid animal panic, and the nylon came up out of the wet grass into its back legs at a full sprint. Six hundred pounds of rated strap against a thing that had never once considered the ground. It went down hard and it went down wrong. One of those extra joints came apart with a wet branch sound and it screamed, and the scream was not an animal. It was a room full of people all saying one syllable at once.
Noah got the shovel.
He hit it eleven times. He counted later, off the marks. He hit it long after it stopped moving, standing over it in one shoe with blood in his waistband and his face open, and the only thing he could hear himself saying, over and over, was:
"Get off her. Get off her. Get off her."
Then his arms would not lift anymore and he sat down in the dirt next to it and threw up. There was nothing left. He did it anyway.
*****
**[+40 XP]**
**[LEVEL 2]**
**[+3 UNSPENT POINTS]**
Noah stared at the letters floating in the dark over the body.
"What," he said.
*"Yeah,"* said the tired voice. *"I saw it too."*
"What is that."
*"Man, I don't know."* A pause. *"I want to be clear I'm not being coy. I genuinely don't know. I was walking, and then I was falling, and now I'm in a nineteen year old and there's a number."*
"There's a *number.*"
*"There's a number,"* the voice agreed. *"I think it's yours."*
Noah looked at his hands. Shaking. Split across three knuckles. Under the blood and the grave dirt something was moving in the skin, a faint blue running up the veins of his wrists, going out slow like a coal.
The four lines in his side had already stopped bleeding.
He crawled the six feet back to the fresh dirt and pushed the loose handfuls into place and patted them flat, both palms, over and over, longer than he needed to. He set the marker upright. He wiped the card clean with his thumb until the name was readable.
"Sorry," he said. "Busy night."
Then he stood up, because there were sirens now from every direction at once, layered, and out past the fence the city was doing something it had never done. The lights on the west side went out a block at a time. Something enormous was standing on the interstate. Above all of it the seam had stopped being a seam and had become an opening, and things were coming through it in numbers, silhouetted and patient, like birds settling on a wire.
*"Kid,"* said the voice, and it had gone very quiet.
"Yeah."
*"That thing you just killed."* Ellery paused, and Noah would learn, over the years, that this particular pause always meant the same thing. *"That was the smallest thing that's coming."*