RUNNING BENEATH
THE SKIN

The bullet tore a thin strip of flesh from his cheekbone, drove into the brick wall behind him.

He turned a corner, cut swaths through steaming sewer grates—smoky ghosts wrapping around his skinny legs. Dissipating.

Gone.

More bullets flew past his ears as he ducked around another corner, legs pumping hard, breath coming in thick rasps from his lungs. He didn’t know this section of town, so it was just a matter of time.

Always just a matter of time.

Voices. Loud, harsh. Guttural bursts exploding from thin lips, wide mouths: Find him, fuck him up. The words didn’t matter; their speakers did. The men who spoke these words could run hard and for a very long time. The man they were chasing could not match their endurance.

Gas lamps swam by on his left, shining, flickering, watching the man run. Lighting his way. Chasing away the shadows he wanted to hide in.

The man heard more shots behind him, wished for a dumpster, a garbage can, another brick wall, anything to hide behind. Make the game more challenging. Then one of the bullets slammed into the back of his right knee. He gritted his teeth, but continued running.

Another bullet caught him in the left shoulder. He plunged ahead, driven forward by the momentum, lilting to one side, nearly losing his balance. But his left knee held him, and he kept running.

More shouting. Now coming from two directions.

He turned another corner, saw four of the men that were chasing him standing there, weapons raised, aimed in his direction. He stopped, stumbled backward, teeth clenched tight against the pain in his leg and shoulder. Three more men stood the way he had just come, grinning, their mouths black holes in their faces.

The shouting stopped.

Nowhere to go.

Seven distinct cocking sounds, as bullets entered chambers.

The man took one deep breath, held it. Closed his eyes.

The night burst open with sound and muzzled fire. The man crumpled. Red seeped out from under him, glistening in dim gaslight.

Hospital green.

Walls rippled when he opened his eyes. Fluorescent ceiling lights swam. He looked to his right. The woman in the bed beside him wavered, floated on crisp white sheets.

The man rubbed his eyes, heard a door open, whisper closed. Heard a voice, looked up, saw a young woman at the foot of the bed. A nurse. Her mouth moved, but the man heard no words. She held a clipboard, her eyes sweeping it, her mouth moving again. Her brow crinkled, frustrated she was getting no answers to her questions.

The nurse was beautiful and the man would have answered her questions, had he heard them, had he been capable of hearing anything but his own blood pumping in his ears.

She turned the clipboard around to face the man; she pointed to it, held it closer to his face. Her arm stretching toward him undulated, the clipboard bobbing slowly in her hand. The man blinked twice, rubbed his eyes again and tried to focus. He was tired, and wanted only for more rest, but he also wanted to help the nurse, wanted to help this lovely woman with whatever information she needed.

Seeing the man squint, obviously making an effort, the nurse moved around to his right to give him a better look at the chart. The place where her finger pointed showed a scrawled name—the product of some rushed doctor’s nearly illegible scribbling. He blinked a couple more times and was finally able to make out the name: Henry Kyllo.

Far away sounds filtered into the man’s ears. Mumblings in a tin can. He shook his head, clearing the cobwebs. The sounds swirled around in his head, formed words to match the nurse’s red, red lips. She was asking if he was Henry Kyllo, was this his name on the chart.

The man put a hand to his head, glanced at the woman in the bed next to him. She had almost stopped floating on her sheets, was now staring at him hard, frowning. The man looked up at the nurse, smiled as best he could, and said, his voice a jumble of cracked rocks, “Yes, that’s me.”

The nurse mouthed more words to him, lost again to the pounding in his ears. Henry shook his head to let her know he couldn’t hear her. She smiled in understanding, reached down and patted his hand. She was warm. Very warm. Henry wanted to move his other hand on top of hers, to feel the smooth skin there. He tried, but nothing happened. He looked down and saw the sling they’d put his arm in. His leg, too, was bandaged.

He wanted to tell the nurse that they’d made a mistake: He didn’t need to be here. The sling and bandages were unnecessary. Some kind pedestrian had probably brought him in, or at least called an ambulance to take him away. But they were wasting good hospital supplies on him when they could be used for people who really needed them—perhaps like the woman next to him.

Henry looked again at this woman, and her frown had softened. The lines in her forehead smoothed out to show that she approved of the nurse’s job, approved of compassion shown to another human being.

But she didn’t know Henry. Didn’t know what Henry was. If she did, the frown lines would most certainly reappear.

The doctors usually discharged Henry pretty quickly once they realized what he was, but the doctor who’d scribbled Henry’s name on his chart so illegibly might have been in too big a rush to figure it out, or maybe too new to his job to notice the signs. At any rate, the nurse would figure it out soon enough and then, once he was able to walk again, he’d be released.

Quietly.

The way the hospital staff looked at him—and others like him—was always with disgust. When they removed the casts, the bandages, the IVs, or whatever other point- less machines they had him hooked up to, they’d ask two security guards to walk him down the hall of this hospital—or one of the other three in the city—the automatic doors would slide open, and they’d stand there silent, waiting for him to leave. Just staring. Afraid to touch him. Pushing him out into the cold with their eyes, with their fear.

Henry was used to it, and knew that this time would be no different . . . 

The nurse patted his hand again, then released it, smiled once more, and walked out the door. The woman beside him looked away, focused on the mounted TV across the room, high up on the wall.

Henry tried to move his injured leg, but, as with his arm, no dice. He’d have to wait probably another hour, maybe two before he could walk with any degree of comfort again.

Just once he wanted to walk out of a hospital without being escorted; just once he wanted to leave of his own accord, even if the outside he was walking back to was the same cold place it had always been for him.

With his good hand, Henry touched the bandage on his face where the first bullet had grazed his cheekbone. He knew by now it would be nearly healed. By the time the program currently on TV had ended, the wound in his shoulder would be closed up, scar tissue already evident. Then, maybe another hour or so after that, his knee would operate as it always had—smoothly, and without a hint of pain.

When Henry was finally discharged from the hospital several hours later—amidst the requisite complement of security guards, and exactly the amount of disgust he had anticipated from the attending doctor—he walked straight home to his one-bedroom apartment, where the phone was ringing.

“Hello?”

“Henry. Milo.”

Henry’s old friend Milo figured that the flesh beneath his skin was now about 90% lead, give or take. Milo had been at this game a long, long time. The game was Milo and Henry’s connection. Their only real connection to anyone else.

“Caught another few slugs tonight, brother,” Milo said. “What about you? Examined yourself yet?”

“Not yet, just got home.”

“No way you’ll ever catch up to me, you know that, right?” Milo chuckled.

“I don’t want to catch up to you, Milo.”

“Sure you don’t. So why not just stay home, play it safe?”

Henry stayed quiet.

“That’s what I thought.” Milo chuckled again—this time with less heart.

Another few seconds passed before Milo broke the silence: “How long’s it been?”

“Since I examined myself?” Henry said. “Couple of weeks.”

“What’s the matter—afraid to check?”

Fucking Milo. Always on Henry’s ass about the same goddamn thing.

“Listen, why don’t you lay off me for a while, alright, Milo? Today wasn’t the greatest day I’ve ever had, and I don’t need your shit making it worse. Don’t you have anything better to do? Christ.”

“You know I don’t. Neither of us do.”

Henry sighed, looked out his living room window. Snow had begun to fall—big fat flakes that stuck to the window, melted, vanished. No lights on in his apartment yet, so the lone gas lamp outside his apartment building shone in, illuminating his sparse furnishings with a sickly yellow glow.

As if somehow sensing Henry’s line of thought, Milo said, “You know what you need? You need a woman’s touch over there, my friend. Someone to bring some fucking life to that shitty little hole you call home.”

“I’m hanging up now, Milo.”

“Alright, alright, but check yourself out, chicken shit!” Milo blurted, knowing Henry meant his threat. “And let me know what—”

Henry hung up.

He crossed his living room, touched the base of a lamp. Slightly less sickly yellow light flooded out of it, suffused the room. Henry touched the lamp’s base twice more, until the light was closer to white than yellow.

More than just sparse: Stark. Empty. Hollow. Gutted. A home to match his personality. But that was Milo talking. Henry knew better. Tried to convince himself of better, anyway.

Shower. Maybe some TV, then bed. Fuck the examination.

It could wait.

Henry hung his leather on the coat rack near the front door, made his way to the bathroom. Past piles of mystery novels stacked halfway to the ceiling; past a computer that he never used on a desk at which he never sat; past two loaded Magnums on the computer desk that he rarely took out with him on The Run; past pizza boxes empty but for the crusts of each slice, turned rock-hard, forgotten.

Henry flicked a switch on the inside of the bathroom doorway; a fluorescent light above the sink flickered, shot to life.

He pulled his shirt over his head as he walked in, dropped his pants around his ankles, stepped out of them. He took his underwear off, then stood up straight, turned to his left, saw himself in the mirror. Nearly every inch of his torso held scar tissue; his legs more of the same. There seemed to be only small patches of skin left unmarked.

No way I’m even close, Henry thought. Not a chance I’m anywhere near Milo’s percentage.

Fingers trembling, heart thudding in his chest, Henry brought his hands up from his sides, placed them gently on his chest . . . and moved them around there in slow circles. He rubbed around his nipples, pushed in near his armpits, squeezed the flesh around what remained of his ribs, sank his fingers deep into the soft meat of his stomach. Both arms, pressing, concentrating, trying to feel as deeply within his body as possible. It was a crude manner of examination for the information he was trying to obtain, but it was all he and others like him had.

Down to his legs, pushing, kneading, prodding around the knees. To his calves, the tops of his feet. Standing back up, checking his groin, buttocks, up to his neck, his hands roaming over his scalp as if washing his hair in the shower. But feeling gently, listening to the song of his skin.

Steel-jacketed lead.

Not pulsing through his veins, but replacing them, replacing flesh, tissue, organs—everything but bone. And even a good portion of that had been shattered, replaced by rows of bullets or clumps of shot.

Everything but skin. The skin remained, though forever changed.

Scarred.

The bullets in his body pushed flush to one another inside him. When he pressed on his abdomen, he felt them clinking together. They rippled under the skin of his forearms, writhed in his thighs.

Henry had caught up to Milo—had likely surpassed him. He estimated about 95%, maybe more. His head was the least-affected part of him, as most of the bullets were aimed at his body, and because the natural instinct to duck away from higher shots was hard to resist. If he’d been able to control that reaction, he’d probably be near

100%.

And then . . . 

But no one knew what happened then, because no one in living memory had reached 100%. Maybe no one had ever done it.

Henry showered, dressed quickly, flicked on the TV, and stared out the window again at the steadily falling snow. He gathered his thoughts, then dialed Milo’s number.

Milo picked up almost immediately. “Well?”

“Ninety-five,” Henry said, sweat on his brow, his hands slick. His voice was edged with a nervous tremor that Milo caught.

“Ninety-fucking-five,” Milo whispered, and whistled low. “Holy shit, man.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Another good Run, bro, and you might be there. You might just do it . . . And before me, too, you cocksucker.”

Henry grinned.

“So . . . belief?” Milo asked. “Which crackpot theory you subscribe to these days, my man? Spiritual transcendence? Transformation into a god of steel? Eternity in some kind of bullet-time Valhalla? Or maybe you finally show up on God’s radar and he strikes you down for the freak of nature that you are. Any or all of the above?”

Henry thought for a moment, chewed his lip. “I don’t know, Milo. I have no clue.”

The snow blew hard against Henry’s window, whipping up a white storm of flakes that mesmerized him as he stared outside, lost in thought.

“Still there, dipshit?”

“Yeah . . . yeah, still here, Milo. Gotta go. See you at tomorrow’s Run.”

On TV, the news had just started. The weatherman called for four inches of snow tonight, another two tomorrow afternoon. Harsh, blowing winds. Wind chill creating a deep freeze to smash all previous records.

Henry, a frozen metal statue, running. Just for the sake of running.

And Milo running to be noticed.

Running to get on God’s radar.

There were rules, just like in any other game:

You couldn’t just pump shots into yourself—that was seen as suicide. And like many other religions, kept you from the divine. The hunters wouldn’t shoot if you stood there and waited for their shotguns to blossom, their handguns to light the night; you had to run, you had to be sport, or they wouldn’t play the game. And this was the only arena in which the game was played. No time for common murderers; no time for cops: Jail time held you up, kept you from The Run. Kept you from the goal.

As for shooting each other, that was nearly as bad as shooting yourself. This was and always had been about ceremony. Tradition. The hunters hunt; the runners run. The path to enlightenment—to further evolution, some thought—was paved with bullets.

Tonight, shadows moving quickly against a backdrop of random white, like the snow on a TV screen. Same running crew as always. Same hunters, too, save for a few new faces on both sides. Young faces—fathers teaching their sons.

Different parts of town attracted different kinds of runners and hunters. But with one thing in common: All operated below the collective conscience. For most intents and purposes—invisible.

Everyone in this Run thought the gas lamps in this part of town—north of the railway tracks that cut through the town’s middle—made for the best ambience; the electric streetlights to the south side of the tracks were too garish. Too modern. The game was old, had history; it deserved respect.

Henry and Milo sprinted side by side, two swaths of black cut out of the fabric of the storm. Henry had brought his Magnums this time—to present a danger. To keep interest up. Prevent boredom: hunters’ flesh was not nearly as bullet-friendly as runners’.

Ashotgun blast cracked nearby. Three hunters spread out, settled in behind dumpsters in the alleyway Milo and Henry had entered, coming in off a main street. The wind cut to a minimum here. Henry recognized the area—it was the same part of town he’d fallen in last night. He and Milo hunkered down behind some trash bins, caught their breath, listened for movement from the dumpsters.

“Fuckers hemmed me in last night,” Henry whispered, pointing behind them to the corner where he’d gone down in a quick-flash spray of red.

“Tired of the chase?” Milo said.

“Must have been, yeah. Though I like to think I provide a reasonable challenge, you know?”

Another shotgun blast crisped the night, lit up the graffiti-strewn brick walls around them.

“That’s why tonight,” Henry said, cocked his Magnum, “we piss them off a little.” He stood up fully, in plain sight, popped off a round in the direction of the closest dumpster, where one of the hunters’ feet was visible through the blowing snow. Henry’s shot pulped it.

The hunter fell to the side, propped against the wall. Screamed his lungs out. Henry ducked behind the trash bin again, leaned to his right, just enough to see his target’s head through the heavy snow.

Fired.

A clump of bone and gristle slapped against the brick wall, silencing the screams.

Words of anger filtered out from behind the other two dumpsters. It wasn’t often that the runners fought back.

“That did it,” Milo said.

A shotgun exploded from behind one of the dumpsters; machine gun fire opened up from the other. Anguished wails and screams of hate filled the thin spaces of silence between metallic staccato.

Hearing the bullets whistling above his head from where he crouched behind the trash bins, Henry realized his opportunity, took a quick breath, closed his eyes . . . and popped his head up.

Three bullets in quick succession whistled into his cranium. The first two slammed out the back, but the third stuck hard. Two more sliced through his neck, butted up against several others already lodged there. Henry fell backward, exposed to the gunfire, unconscious. One more found its home in his chest as he lay there, then the firing stopped.

Milo, grinning, moved to pick Henry up. The two hunters ignored Milo—he was too easy a target now—and shuffled to the dumpster where their friend had fallen. Low, muffled curses whipped by wind found Milo’s ears.

The hunters picked up their dead friend—each to an arm—and dragged him backward out of the alley, his booted feet leaving trails through the snow.

“Good haul, man,” Milo said, hoisting Henry up and over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. “With any luck, I’ll take a few in the back on the way outta here.”

Milo trudged through the deep snow of the alley, past the three dumpsters where the hunters had been, walking in the grooves left by the dead hunter’s boots. He squinted against the wind, was nearly blinded by the street lamp’s glaring reflection off the crisp, fresh snow. At the mouth of the alleyway, down and to his right, Milo spotted a dark shape, a man, lying on the ground, most of his head pulverized, a misshapen, bleeding lump in the darkness.

Oh fuck, he thought. He looked up from the hunter Henry had shot, saw the man’s two friends coming toward him. Scowls under hoods.

The closest one stopped in front of Milo, blocking his way; the other one stood behind the first, at his shoulder, glaring, stone-faced. The first one spoke: “This ain’t how the game is played, friend.” Then he pointed to Henry, a dead-weight sack slung over Milo’s shoulder, still out cold and leaving a trail of blood in the snow behind them: “He killed my friend; now I’ll kill his.”

“Whoa, now, hang on a minute, fellas,” Milo said. “Henry was just trying to liven things up a little, you know? Keep you interested. I’m sure he didn’t mean to—”

Something metal glinted in the whitewashed gaslight, catching Milo’s eye. He looked down. The hunter had pulled a machete from a sheath.

Milo backed up a step, shook his head once.

The machete swung, slicing through snowflakes, through air, through Milo’s windpipe, his vertebrae.

Three crumpled heaps now, lying still in the dark.

Bleeding.

Three hours later, when the sun tinged the sky dark red, a passerby noticed the three bodies in the street. Only one was still breathing. The passerby called 911; an ambulance picked Henry up, took him to the closest hospital. Upon examination, the paramedics quickly figured out what he was, had seen a few of his kind during the course of their job, but since there was no clear directive about how to handle them, they just treated them like they were normal people in need of assistance. Let someone else worry about them once they got to the hospital.

Henry started waking up a little during the bumpy ride. And even though he was barely conscious, he still felt the paramedics’ stares, their hatred, their fear, flowing from them in waves.

He wondered briefly what his percentage was like now—was it enough? He guessed not, because if it had been, shouldn’t . . . something have already happened? He wondered, too, if maybe Milo had been taken in another ambulance. Maybe Henry would see him at the hospital.

Henry closed his eyes, wished he were outside again, feeling the night’s fat snowflakes falling gently on his lips.

Again—hospital green.

And again, the same nurse. Only this time warmer, due to familiarity.

“You here again?” she said, smiled a little, leaning over Henry, fluffing his pillow.

Henry’s mouth felt stuffed with cotton; his head, packed with burnt chestnuts. “Sure looks that way. Not for long, though, I suspect, once the doctors get wind of it. I’ll be trotted out again, just like last time, security guards and all.”

The nurse said nothing, just kept smiling.

Looking up at her pretty face, Henry suddenly remembered something Milo had said on the phone last night: You need a woman’s touch over there, my friend. Someone to bring some fucking life to that shitty little hole you call home.

And he decided to give it a shot . . . before his head cleared some more and he was capable of talking himself out of it.

“What’s your name?” Henry said, blushing, feeling like a complete fool. “Mine’s Henry.”

“I know what your name is,” the nurse said. “The chart, remember?”

“Oh . . . oh yeah. Forgot,” Henry said, shuffled his hands and feet uncomfortably under his sheets.

A few seconds passed, then Henry asked where Milo was; he couldn’t stand the unanswered question hanging in the air—like it always did whenever he actually worked up the nerve to talk to a woman.

“Who?” The nurse’s brow furrowing.

“Milo. There wasn’t another guy with me when I was found on the street? Tall guy. Skinny as fuck. Long black hair.”

“No one else came in. I can double-check, but as far as I know, they just found you out there—the two others they found near you were . . . dead.”

The nurse waited a beat, swallowed, averted her eyes from Henry’s. “I’m sorry, Henry.”

Inside Henry, metal shifted. Bullets and shot moved slowly, piecing themselves together. Like a puzzle.

“I, uh . . . I have to go now,” he said. Some base instinct taking over. A need to be home. To be warm.

Henry swung the sheets back from his legs, got to his feet. Staggered, nearly fell. The nurse caught him, steadied him.

“Henry, your head. Jesus. You can’t just walk out of here with—”

“Goddamnit, you know I’ll be fine!” he shouted in the nurse’s face. “You know what I am, that I’ll heal in a handful of hours, and be back out on the street, running through back alleys, eating bullets, chewing shot, lucky if they take off my head and end it for good, hoping that it all actually fucking means something!”

Henry took a breath, put a hand to his head—the walls swam and rippled. “Only now I’ll be running alone,” he said quietly, pushed the nurse away from him.

Walked out the door.

The nurse followed him, trying to convince him to go back to bed, stay and talk for a while. Just until he calmed down. But he kept walking. Wouldn’t even look at her.

She gave up at the front door, where it was clear she wasn’t going to stop him, no matter what she said. She watched Henry from the hospital’s window. Watched him stumble slowly out into the blowing snow. Trip. Fall. Collapse on his side.

She cursed under her breath, threw her coat on, ran through the double doors, across the parking lot. She knelt down, tried pulling him to his feet, but he was too heavy.

“What’s your address, Henry?” she shouted over the noise of the wind. “Come on, Henry! What’s your home address?”

He mumbled it between ragged breaths.

The nurse stood up, left him lying in the snow, ran out to the sidewalk, flagged down a cab. The cabby pulled over; she approached the driver’s side and explained the situation. The cabby put on his hazard lights, jumped out of the car, moved to help the nurse.

Together, they lifted Henry to his feet, shuffled him through the snow and ice to the back door of the cab. The nurse ran inside the hospital, fished around for some bills in her purse, came back out, paid the cabby, told him Henry’s address.

The car pulled away from the curb, soon lost in a white sheet of snow.

It snowed for another three days straight, then cleared up suddenly to usher in sunny, blue skies. But colder now. Much colder.

Henry shivered in his apartment. Not only had the temperature dropped, but his bedroom radiator had given up, shut down. He was too tired to move out into the marginally warmer living room, so he wound the blankets around him as tightly as he could to keep in the heat. But no matter how many blankets he curled around himself, or how snugly he wrapped them around his frame, the cold still got in.

The cold of ice on steel.

His teeth chattered. He swam in and out of consciousness. Several times he had hallucinated the nurse from the hospital coming to see him, stroking his brow, telling him it would be alright. He just needed to rest to get through this. Just needed to sleep a while longer.

Sometimes in the night, he dreamed of Milo: Milo standing at the foot of his bed, smiling. Just smiling. Snow in his hair. Then he’d walk out of the room, disappear, and Henry would wake up. Cold and alone. With pieces of the metal puzzle inside him still shifting around. Faster than at the hospital, steadily picking up speed.

In the chill of dawn, when the apartment seemed at its coldest, Henry felt he knew what the pieces of the puzzle were doing. They were moving within him to touch each other, form something. But what—and for what purpose—he had no clue.

He believed in nothing. Expected nothing. God was something that Milo had been after, not Henry.

The only thing Henry wanted now was to close his curtains. Since the storm had subsided, the sun streamed through his bedroom window. Too bright for Henry’s eyes, which now glinted in the light. He didn’t know it, couldn’t see it, but they’d turned from deep brown to metallic silver.

The day after the storm had passed, Henry felt the puzzle inside him slowing, calming.

Milo came to visit him one last time, late that night. He stood at the foot of the bed, as he always did. Only this time, before he left, he walked over to Henry’s bedroom window and closed the curtains.

The nurse knocked on the door.

No answer.

She knocked harder. Still nothing.

She fretted about whether or not to keep trying, questioned why she was even there at all. Decided to forget about knocking again and just try the knob.

It turned, clicked. The door swung open gently.

The apartment air was frigid. The nurse shivered and pulled the gray scarf around her neck tighter.

She walked in slowly, called out, “Henry? Henry, you home?”

Silence.

“I knocked, but—” she poked her head around a corner, looked in the kitchen which branched off from the living room. Nothing. “—there was no answer, and the door was unlocked, so I came in. Hope that’s okay . . . ”

The bathroom light shone bright in the relative gloom of the apartment.

“Henry?”

No one in the bathroom. Only one more room in the place.

The bedroom door stood slightly ajar. The nurse pushed on it softly, peeking inside. The curtains were closed. It was hard to make out anything but shadows layered on shadows. The nurse whispered Henry’s name once more as she walked through the door, but her stomach had already begun to sink. It was so quiet. No hiss from the radiator. The sound of the refrigerator running didn’t make it to this side of the apartment.

No breathing sounds came from the bed.

“Oh, God,” the nurse said, putting a hand to her mouth. “Henry . . . ”

He lay still on the bed. Bundled in blankets. Only his head uncovered. His medium-length dark hair, threaded with gray, hung in strings to the sides of his face. Unwashed for days.

For a brief moment, the nurse thought maybe he wasn’t dead. His cheeks seemed rosy in the dim light. She moved forward, tentatively put a hand on his forehead. He was warm. Not only warm—burning up. But somehow there was no life in him. No breath. Just this wall of heat, emanating from his body.

The nurse’s heart sank.

And that’s when she noticed his eyes: Steel gray. Wide open, staring at the ceiling. His face expressionless.

A tear slipped from one of her eyes. Dropped to Henry’s bed, sank into the fabric.

She stood like that for a long while, looking down at him, feeling the warmth still coming from his body in waves, as if something inside were generating it. Gears spinning. Clockwork winding itself up.

Then she told him her name, and quietly left his apartment.

The following morning, a dark, heavy shape, unlike anything this world has seen before, rose from Henry’s bed, moved around the room as if waking from a deep sleep.

Outside Henry’s bedroom window, a single snowflake drifted down, stuck against the pane, melted.

Vanished.

The first of a new storm.