I’ve been a cop in the Pacific Northwest for nineteen years. I thought I’d seen it all, thought these deep, damp woods couldn’t hide any more secrets from me. I was wrong. Dead wrong.

It was late November, a Tuesday night. The kind of freezing rain that doesn’t just fall—it attacks. The wind was howling off the highway, rattling the old window frames while the fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. I was working the graveyard shift with my partner, Miller. The roads were completely washed out and the scanner had been dead quiet for three hours. No one in their right mind was out in a storm like this. I was just sitting at my desk, nursing my third cup of terrible coffee, staring at the clock and waiting for 6:00 AM.

Then, the front door rattled.

It wasn’t a hard push, just a weak, pathetic scratching sound against the heavy glass. Miller and I exchanged a look. I sighed, figuring it was one of the local drunks locked out of their trailer, looking for a warm place to sober up. I stood up, my duty belt heavy on my waist, walked over, and pulled the reinforced lobby door open, bracing for the wind.

Nobody was there. I looked left, then right—nothing but an empty, flooded parking lot under the flickering orange glow of a single streetlamp.

I was about to shut the door when something brushed against my boots. I looked down.

It was a dog. A medium-sized mutt, maybe part terrier, soaked to the bone and trembling so violently its ribs shook under its matted, muddy fur. It looked half-starved, favoring one of its back legs like it was injured. But that wasn’t what made my heart drop into my stomach.

It was what the dog was holding in its mouth.

The dog looked up at me with huge, desperate brown eyes. It let out a soft, high-pitched whimper, opened its jaws, and dropped something onto the wet linoleum floor.

A glove. A tiny, bright pink, fleece-lined winter glove. The kind that belongs to a toddler.

I just stood there, completely frozen. The bright pink was a stark, horrifying contrast against the dirty, gray floor of the station. My mouth went dry, and all the exhaustion vanished in a single, terrifying second. I knelt down and picked it up. It was soaked through with freezing rainwater, but it was also smeared with dark, thick mud. And underneath the mud, on the palm of the tiny glove… were three distinct drops of fresh, dark crimson blood.

“Miller,” I said. My voice was a raspy, tight whisper.

Miller walked out from behind the dispatch desk, wiping his mouth. “What is it? A stray?” He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw what I was holding. “Is that…” Miller stammered, his eyes widening.

“Yeah,” I breathed.

I looked back down at the dog. The animal wasn’t shaking just from the cold. It was pacing back and forth in front of the open door, staring out into the pitch-black, roaring storm, and then looking back at me. It let out another urgent, agonizing bark, took two steps out into the freezing rain, stopped, and looked back over its shoulder.

Follow me. That’s what it was saying. I swear to God, I could read it in the animal’s eyes.

“Hey, buddy, come here,” Miller said gently, stepping forward and reaching his hand out. “Let’s get you inside. Get you a towel.”

But the dog didn’t want the warmth. It snapped its jaws in the air as a warning before turning and taking a few more steps out into the flooded parking lot. It barked again, louder this time. It was waiting for us.

“Call dispatch,” I snapped, grabbing my heavy rain jacket. “Check if any 911 calls dropped. Check if anyone has reported a missing child in the last twenty-four hours.”

“In this storm?” Miller asked, his face pale as he scrambled back to the radio. “Nobody could survive out there for more than an hour, man. It’s thirty-two degrees and dropping.”

“I know,” I said, zipping my jacket up to my chin and checking my flashlight battery. “Check the logs anyway. Call the state troopers. Tell them we might have a situation on Route 9.”

I walked back to the doorway. The dog was standing at the very edge of the parking lot, where the concrete met the dense, impenetrable line of pine trees. It barked once more, its voice nearly drowned out by the thunder, and I stepped out into the rain.

The cold hit me like a physical punch to the chest. Within seconds, my uniform was soaked. Miller ran out behind me, throwing his rain slicker over his shoulders.

“Dispatch says nothing! No missing kids, no dropped calls. The whole county is asleep.”

“Someone isn’t,” I yelled back over the wind, holding the tiny pink glove tightly in my left hand. I clicked on my heavy Maglite. The thick, bright beam of white light cut through the sheet of rain, illuminating the dog.

As soon as the beam hit the dog, it turned and bolted straight into the dark, terrifying expanse of the Blackwood Forest.

“We’re going in!” I shouted to Miller.

“Are you crazy?!” Miller yelled, grabbing my arm. “We don’t have backup! We don’t even know what we’re looking for! We can’t go off-trail in a flash flood warning!”

I yanked my arm away and shoved the pink, blood-stained glove right against Miller’s chest. “You tell me we can wait!” I roared over the thunder. “You look at this, and you tell me that whoever was wearing it can wait until morning!”

Miller looked down at the glove. He swallowed hard. He reached to his belt, unclipped his flashlight, and clicked it on.

“Lead the way,” he muttered.

We plunged into the treeline. The woods instantly swallowed us whole. The canopy of massive pine trees blocked out whatever little ambient light was coming from the highway. It was like walking into a pitch-black closet. The mud was thick, sucking at our boots with every single step. The branches whipped violently in the wind, lashing against our faces and tearing at our clothes.

We followed the dog. It was incredibly fast, darting through the thick underbrush, but it never let us out of its sight. Every time we fell behind, stumbling over slippery, moss-covered tree roots or wading through knee-deep puddles of freezing water, the dog would stop. It would wait for our flashlights to find it, bark once, and keep running.

We hiked for what felt like an eternity. My lungs were burning. My legs felt like lead. The rain was blinding, stinging my eyes and plastering my hair to my forehead.

“How far is it taking us?!” Miller gasped, slipping and falling hard to his knees in the mud.

“Get up!” I grabbed the back of his jacket and hauled him to his feet. “Keep moving!”

We were miles away from the precinct now, deep in the unincorporated territory of the county. There were no roads out here. No cabins. No hiking trails. There was nothing but wilderness.

And then, the dog stopped.

We burst through a thick patch of thorny bushes, our flashlights sweeping wildly in the dark. The dog was standing at the edge of a massive, sudden drop-off. A sheer cliff face that plummeted down into a deep, jagged ravine. The sound of rushing water echoed up from the bottom. A flash flood had turned the dry creek bed below into a raging, violent river.

The dog wasn’t moving anymore. It was sitting at the edge of the mud, staring down into the black abyss. It threw its head back and let out a long, haunting, miserable howl that chilled me faster than the freezing rain.

I rushed forward, my heart hammering against my ribs so hard I thought it was going to crack my sternum. I stopped right at the edge of the ravine, my boots slipping dangerously in the wet mud. I aimed my heavy flashlight down into the dark. The beam of light pierced through the sheets of rain, sweeping over jagged rocks, broken tree branches, and the churning, white-capped water of the flooded creek.

I moved the light to the left. Nothing. I moved it to the right.

And then, my breath caught in my throat.

Miller came up beside me, his own flashlight joining mine.

“Oh my god,” Miller whispered, his voice trembling in a way I had never heard in the fifteen years I had known him.

Down at the bottom of the ravine, about sixty feet below us, something was pinned against a massive, fallen oak tree, half-submerged in the raging floodwater.

It wasn’t a child.

It was a car. A silver minivan, completely crushed, flipped upside down in the roaring creek. The front end was totally caved in.

But that wasn’t what made my blood run cold.

The driver’s side door was ripped wide open. And there, tied securely to the exposed, rusty frame of the car seat with a piece of heavy jumper cable, was a small, plastic booster seat.

It was empty.

But dangling from the strap of the car seat, glowing under the beam of our flashlights, was the other pink glove.

And sitting on top of the crushed, overturned vehicle, completely unaffected by the freezing rain, was a man.

He was wearing a perfectly clean, dry, yellow raincoat. His back was turned to us.

He was holding something small and wrapped in a blanket in his arms.

And he was singing.

Even over the roaring thunder and the crashing floodwaters, the wind carried the sickeningly sweet, slow melody of a lullaby straight up the cliff face.

Miller slowly unholstered his weapon. His hands were shaking uncontrollably.

The dog beside us began to violently growl.

The man in the yellow raincoat stopped singing.

Very, very slowly, he began to turn his head toward us.

CHAPTER 2

The freezing rain was blinding, but my eyes were locked on the figure sitting on top of the crushed, overturned minivan.

Time seemed to entirely stop. The roar of the flash flood below us, the violent whipping of the pine branches, the heavy panting of the muddy dog beside me—it all faded into a dull, terrifying static.

The man in the pristine yellow raincoat was turning his head.

He moved with an agonizing, unnatural slowness. It wasn’t the rigid, jerky movement of someone who was freezing to death. It was smooth. It was deliberate. It was the movement of someone who was completely, utterly in control of the nightmare we had just walked into.

Miller’s hands were shaking so hard that his heavy police flashlight was doing a strobe-light dance across the jagged rocks of the ravine. His service weapon was drawn, but I knew he couldn’t take a shot. The wind was too strong, the rain was too heavy, and the distance was too great.

“Police!” Miller screamed, his voice cracking, tearing through the storm. “Show me your hands! Drop the blanket and show me your hands right now!”

The man didn’t flinch. He didn’t drop the bundle he was cradling against his chest.

Instead, he finally turned his face fully into the beam of our flashlights.

I felt a cold wave of pure nausea hit the pit of my stomach.

I expected a monster. I expected a hardened criminal, a meth head from the backwoods, someone scarred and deranged.

But the face staring back up at us was horrifyingly normal.

He looked like a college kid. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-two. He had neatly trimmed brown hair that was plastered to his forehead by the rain, and he was wearing wire-rimmed glasses covered in water droplets.

And he was smiling.

It wasn’t a panicked smile. It wasn’t a manic, crazy grin. It was a soft, polite, customer-service smile. The kind of smile a neighbor gives you when they hold the door open for you at the grocery store.

He sat there, perched on the rusted, twisted metal of a vehicle that had clearly plummeted sixty feet into a raging river, smiling up at two armed police officers while singing a lullaby to a bundle of blankets.

“Hey there, officers,” his voice floated up to us.

It shouldn’t have been possible. The wind was howling at forty miles an hour. The water was crashing against the rocks. But his voice carried up the ravine clear as a bell, cutting through the chaos like a razor blade.

“Beautiful night for a walk, isn’t it?” the young man called out, his tone cheerful and completely conversational.

“I said drop what’s in your hands!” Miller roared again, stepping dangerously close to the muddy, collapsing edge of the cliff.

“Miller, step back!” I grabbed the collar of his rain jacket and yanked him backward just as a huge chunk of the muddy embankment gave way, plunging down into the dark water below.

The young man chuckled. A soft, amused little laugh.

“Careful up there,” the man called out, gently rocking the bundle in his arms. “The ground is awfully soft tonight. The earth is just… swallowing things up. Things like cars. Things like people.”

He looked down at the bundle he was holding, entirely unbothered by the fact that we were aiming our weapons at him.

“Isn’t that right, sweetie?” he cooed to the blankets.

My heart was hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. I holstered my weapon. A gun wasn’t going to help us from sixty feet up in the pitch black.

I reached around to the back of my tactical belt and unclipped the heavy-duty emergency climbing rope we carried for mountain rescues.

“What are you doing?” Miller yelled over the storm, his eyes wide with panic.

“I’m going down there!” I shouted back, wrapping the thick rope around the trunk of a massive, ancient pine tree that grew near the edge. I tied a secure, double-figure-eight knot, testing its strength with my full body weight. “Cover me from up here!”

“Are you insane?!” Miller grabbed my shoulder. “You don’t know what’s down there! You don’t know if he has a weapon! Wait for the tactical team!”

“There is no tactical team, Miller!” I screamed, the rain stinging my face. “The roads are washed out! By the time anyone gets out here, that creek is going to rise another five feet and wash that van, that guy, and whatever is in that blanket straight into the gorge!”

I looked at the dog. The muddy terrier was pacing frantically at the edge of the cliff, whining and scratching at the dirt. It looked at me with those desperate, pleading eyes.

I clicked my heavy flashlight onto my tactical vest, illuminating the steep, muddy drop.

“Keep your light on him,” I ordered Miller. “If he makes a sudden move toward the water, you do what you have to do.”

I grabbed the thick, wet rope with both hands, turned my back to the drop, and leaned backward into the abyss.

The descent was pure agony.

The mud was as slick as black ice. My heavy police boots couldn’t find any purchase on the cliff face. Every time I tried to plant my feet, the earth gave way, sending showers of rocks and debris tumbling down into the raging river below.

I slipped.

My boots gave out completely, and I slammed hard against the jagged rocks. The breath was violently knocked out of my lungs. I slid down ten feet in a split second, the rough, wet rope burning through my tactical gloves, taking layers of skin with it.

I managed to lock my legs around a thick, protruding tree root, stopping my fall just twenty feet above the water.

I hung there in the freezing darkness, gasping for air, the rain pounding against the back of my neck.

“I’m okay!” I yelled up toward Miller’s blinding flashlight beam.

I looked down. I was close enough now to see the horrifying details of the crash.

The silver minivan was utterly destroyed. The roof had caved in entirely, crushing the steering wheel against the driver’s seat. The windows were all blown out, and the freezing, muddy water of the creek was rushing violently right through the open doors.

And the young man in the yellow raincoat was still sitting on top of the rear axle, completely unbothered by my descent.

“You’re making a lot of noise, Officer,” the young man said. His voice was no longer shouting over the wind. We were close enough that he was speaking in a normal, conversational volume.

He didn’t even look up at me. He was staring lovingly down at the bundle in his arms.

“You’re going to wake her up,” he whispered.

I unclipped from the rope and dropped the final six feet, landing in waist-deep, freezing floodwater.

The cold was absolutely paralyzing. It felt like a million tiny needles driving straight into my bones. The current was incredibly strong, immediately threatening to sweep my legs out from under me.

I waded forward, fighting the raging water, keeping my hand hovering right over my holstered weapon.

“Police! Do not move!” I ordered, my voice shaking from the freezing temperature.

I reached the overturned minivan. I grabbed the twisted metal of the rear bumper to steady myself against the violent current.

I was standing less than five feet away from him.

Up close, the young man looked even more terrifyingly ordinary. His raincoat was a bright, clean, cheerful yellow, without a single speck of mud on it. It defied all logic. We had just hiked for two hours through knee-deep mud, and he looked like he had just stepped out of a catalog.

“Hand me the child,” I demanded, holding my left hand out.

The young man slowly tilted his head. The water droplets on his glasses caught the beam of my chest-mounted flashlight.

He smiled that awful, polite smile.

“The child?” he repeated, his voice gentle and confused. “Oh, Officer. You’re very confused.”

He slowly, deliberately pulled back the edge of the thick, woolen blanket he had been cradling.

My breath completely stopped. My blood ran colder than the water rushing past my waist.

There was no baby.

There was no toddler.

Inside the blanket, wrapped carefully and lovingly, was a heavy, rusted iron pipe wrench. And duct-taped to the handle of the wrench was a cheap, plastic tape recorder.

It was still playing. The tinny, distorted, recorded sound of a woman humming a lullaby was looping endlessly over the cheap speaker.

“What… what is this?” I stammered, taking a step back in the water, my mind completely short-circuiting. “Where is the child?!”

The young man let out a long, heavy sigh, as if he were a disappointed teacher dealing with a slow student.

“I didn’t bring you out here for her,” he said quietly, his eyes suddenly going dead and cold.

The polite smile vanished.

“I brought you out here for him.”

He raised his hand and pointed a long, pale finger straight down into the crushed, submerged front cab of the minivan.

I immediately lunged forward, grabbing the mangled frame of the driver’s side door. I shoved my heavy flashlight straight down into the rushing, muddy water flooding the interior.

The beam cut through the murky water.

There was a man trapped in the driver’s seat.

He was pinned beneath the crushed steering column. His head was slumped forward, and the water was rushing violently over his chest, right up to his chin. He was unconscious, his face pale and bruised, but I could see the faint, shallow rise and fall of his breathing.

He was alive. Barely.

But it was what he was wearing that made my entire world stop spinning.

It wasn’t civilian clothes.

He was wearing a dark navy blue uniform.

A silver badge caught the light of my flashlight, gleaming through the muddy water.

It was a police uniform.

“Miller!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, turning back toward the cliff face. “Miller, get on the radio! Officer down! I repeat, officer down!”

I grabbed the heavy metal door, planting my boots on the rocks underwater, and pulled with every single ounce of strength in my body. The metal shrieked and groaned, but the water pressure was too great. The door wouldn’t budge an inch.

“Help me!” I yelled at the young man in the yellow raincoat. “Get off the car and help me pull him out!”

But when I looked up, the roof of the minivan was completely empty.

The young man was gone.

There was no splash. There were no footprints. There was no trace of him anywhere in the dark ravine. The bright yellow raincoat had vanished into thin air, leaving behind nothing but the heavy iron wrench and the tape recorder, which was now sitting on the metal chassis, still playing that haunting lullaby.

“Hey! Where are you?!” I roared, sweeping my flashlight violently across the dense trees lining the banks of the river.

Nothing. Just the endless, driving rain.

I cursed loudly, abandoning the search for the phantom man. I had a brother in blue drowning in a crushed van. That was my only priority.

I reached into my tactical vest and pulled out my heavy rescue knife. I took a deep breath, plunged my head underwater, and forced my upper body through the shattered driver’s side window.

The water was freezing, blinding me completely. I felt around blindly in the dark, my thick gloves brushing against broken glass and torn upholstery.

I found the officer’s neck. I felt a faint, thready pulse.

I moved my hands down to the steering column, trying to find where he was pinned. His legs were trapped beneath the crushed dashboard.

I surfaced, gasping violently for air, the cold water burning my lungs.

I wiped the muddy water from my eyes and aimed my flashlight directly at the unconscious officer’s face.

I needed to see his face. I needed to know who was working a shift out here without backup. I knew every cop in Blackwood County.

I wiped the mud and blood away from his cheek.

I stared at his face.

And then, I stopped breathing entirely.

The flashlight slipped from my trembling fingers, splashing into the deep water and sinking to the bottom, casting an eerie, glowing halo from beneath the surface.

I stumbled backward, the river current violently slamming me against the jagged rocks. I didn’t care. I couldn’t feel the pain. I couldn’t feel the cold.

I could only feel absolute, mind-shattering horror.

I knew the man trapped in the driver’s seat.

I knew every line of his face. I knew the exact shape of his jaw. I knew the tiny scar above his left eyebrow.

The unconscious, dying police officer pinned inside the crushed minivan…

…was me.

CHAPTER 3

My brain completely flatlined.

I was staring down at a dead man’s face, illuminated by the eerie, underwater glow of my dropped flashlight, and my mind simply refused to process the image.

It was impossible. It was a sick, twisted impossibility.

I reached out with a trembling, numb hand. My thick tactical gloves were soaked and freezing, but I had to know. I had to touch it.

I pressed my fingers against the unconscious officer’s cheek.

It wasn’t a latex mask. It wasn’t some elaborate, Hollywood-style prosthetic. It was human flesh. It was cold, clammy, and bruised, but it was entirely real.

I dragged my thumb across his jawline. I felt the rough scrape of two-day stubble. It was the exact same pattern of hair as mine. It had the exact same patches of gray creeping in near the sideburns.

My eyes darted frantically across his face, searching for a flaw. Searching for any tiny detail that would prove this was just a stranger with a coincidental resemblance.

But there was the tiny, faded white scar above his left eyebrow. The one I got when I was twelve years old, falling off my bike on Gravel Ridge Road.

There was the slightly crooked bridge of his nose. The result of a bar fight I broke up in my rookie year.

I was looking into a mirror. A dark, watery, nightmare mirror.

“Hey!” Miller’s voice echoed down from the top of the ravine, faint and distorted by the howling wind. “Talk to me! Who’s in the vehicle?! Do you need the med-kit?!”

I opened my mouth to shout back, but nothing came out. My throat was completely paralyzed.

I couldn’t tell him. If I yelled up that I had just found my own body pinned in a crushed minivan, Miller would think I had lost my mind. He’d think the cold had sent me into shock.

“I… I can’t get the door open!” I finally screamed back, my voice cracking violently. “He’s trapped! I need the Jaws of Life!”

“The roads are completely gone!” Miller shouted back. “I can’t even get dispatch on the radio through this storm! You have to pull him out!”

I looked back down at the driver.

The water was rising fast. The flash flood was peaking. The freezing river was already up to his lower lip. If I didn’t get him out in the next sixty seconds, he was going to drown.

I was going to drown.

I reached blindly into the rushing water, feeling across his chest. My hand brushed against his heavy, soaked uniform shirt.

I found his silver badge.

I pulled it up slightly above the water level, tilting it so the faint ambient light caught the engraved numbers.

My breath hitched in my chest.

Seven-one-four-four.

That was my badge number. The exact same piece of metal that was currently pinned to the left side of my own chest.

I looked down at his left hand, resting limply against the crushed steering wheel.

A silver wedding band. It had a tiny, almost unnoticeable dent on the bottom rim. I got that dent five years ago when I slammed my hand in a patrol car door during a high-speed pursuit.

It was my ring.

Panic, hot and blinding, finally exploded in my chest.

I didn’t care about the logic anymore. I didn’t care about the laws of reality. I just knew I couldn’t watch this man—this version of me—die in this freezing water.

I turned around and grabbed the heavy, rusted iron pipe wrench that the smiling kid in the yellow raincoat had left wrapped in the blanket.

I gripped the heavy iron handle with both hands. I wedged the thick, metallic head of the wrench right between the crushed dashboard and the steering column pinning his legs.

I braced my boots against the doorframe, submerged up to my waist in the violent current, and I pulled back with every single ounce of strength I had left in my body.

My shoulder muscles screamed. The tendons in my neck felt like they were going to snap.

“Come on!” I roared into the storm.

The rusted metal of the minivan groaned. It was a horrible, high-pitched shrieking sound that cut right through the thunder.

I pulled harder. I tasted copper in my mouth.

With a loud, violent crack, the steering column finally gave way. The dashboard shifted just enough to release the pressure on the driver’s legs.

I immediately dropped the wrench into the water and lunged forward.

I grabbed him by the collar of his uniform, wrapping my arms tightly under his armpits, and hauled him backward with everything I had.

His body slid free from the wreckage.

We both tumbled backward into the raging, waist-deep river. The current instantly tried to rip us away, but I slammed my back against the side of the overturned van, holding him tightly against my chest.

I dragged him up out of the water, resting his upper body on the exposed, rusted undercarriage of the vehicle.

He wasn’t breathing.

His lips were completely blue.

“Hey! Hey, stay with me!” I yelled, slapping his cold, wet cheek.

It was the most surreal, deeply sickening feeling in the world, hitting my own face.

I tilted his head back, preparing to start CPR right there on the slippery metal.

But suddenly, he convulsed.

His chest heaved violently. He coughed, a terrible, wet, rattling sound, and a stream of muddy river water spilled from his mouth.

He sucked in a massive, ragged, desperate breath of air.

His eyes shot open.

They were my eyes. Hazel, bloodshot, completely blown wide with sheer terror.

He looked around wildly for a fraction of a second before his gaze locked dead onto mine.

I expected him to scream. I expected him to be just as horrified as I was to see his exact duplicate staring back at him.

But he didn’t look surprised.

He looked right through me with a profound, soul-crushing sadness.

His hand suddenly shot out. His freezing, trembling fingers grabbed the front of my tactical vest with a grip so tight it felt like a vise.

“You…” he rasped. His voice was a broken, wet gargle. It sounded like my voice on a tape recorder that had been left out in the sun. “You shouldn’t have come down here.”

“Who did this to you?!” I screamed over the roar of the water, leaning in close so he could hear me. “Who was the kid in the raincoat?! Where is the little girl?!”

He squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head weakly.

“There is no girl,” he whispered. Every single word seemed to cost him an immense amount of pain. “The glove… it was just bait. He needed you out of the precinct. He needed the building empty.”

“Who?!” I demanded, shaking his shoulders. “Make sense! Tell me what is happening!”

He opened his eyes again. They were starting to lose their focus. The life was rapidly draining out of him, washing away into the heavy rain.

He weakly raised a trembling hand and pointed a finger straight up toward the top of the dark cliff.

“He isn’t… a kid…” the dying man choked out. “He’s something else. He takes the faces. He wears them. Just like… just like a raincoat.”

A chill that had absolutely nothing to do with the freezing weather shot straight down my spine.

“I don’t understand,” I begged him. “Stay awake! Look at me!”

“Miller…” he gasped, his grip on my vest suddenly weakening.

“Miller is up there!” I yelled. “He’s covering us! We’re going to get you out of here!”

The dying version of me let out a hollow, wet laugh. It was a sound of pure despair.

“That’s not Miller,” he whispered, his voice fading to a barely audible breath. “Look at his boots. Check the trunk of the patrol car. That’s… not… Miller.”

His eyes widened one last time, staring past my shoulder into the dark, roaring woods.

“Don’t let him back inside,” he breathed.

And then, his grip released.

His hand fell completely limp against the rusted metal of the van. The terrible tension in his body vanished. His eyes locked in a permanent, unblinking stare into the freezing rain.

He was gone.

I sat there in the raging water, holding my own dead body in my arms.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. The world had shattered into a million unrecognizable pieces, and I was drowning in the fragments.

But the river wasn’t going to let me grieve.

A massive, deafening crack echoed through the ravine.

I looked up just in time to see a massive, ancient pine tree uprooted by the mudslide upstream. It was barreling down the flooded creek bed like a battering ram, riding a sudden, ten-foot surge of white water.

“No!” I screamed.

I tried to grab the dead body, to pull him toward the bank, but the water was too fast.

The massive tree trunk slammed directly into the side of the overturned minivan with the force of a freight train.

The impact violently ripped the crushed vehicle entirely free from the rocks.

I was instantly thrown backward into the black, churning rapids.

The freezing water swallowed me whole. I was tossed like a ragdoll, completely at the mercy of the flood. I smashed against unseen rocks, the air driven completely from my lungs. I was spun upside down, fighting frantically in the pitch black, unable to tell which way was the surface.

My lungs burned like fire. I was inhaling mud and ice water.

Just as my vision started to fade into a dark, tunnel-like blackness, my flailing hands hit something solid.

Thick, thorny roots protruding from the muddy bank.

I clamped my fingers around them with a desperate, primal strength. The current fought me, tearing at my heavy clothes, trying to pull me back down into the abyss.

I kicked wildly, dragging my upper body out of the water and hauling myself up onto the slick, muddy embankment.

I collapsed onto my stomach in the thick mud, violently coughing up river water, gasping for air that tasted like dirt and pine needles.

My whole body was shaking uncontrollably. My radio was gone. My flashlight was at the bottom of the river. The minivan, and the body inside it, had been completely washed away into the gorge.

I was entirely alone in the pitch black.

It took me five agonizing minutes to gather the strength just to push myself up onto my hands and knees.

I looked up.

I was about a hundred yards downstream from where I had initially descended.

Through the dense, whipping branches and the heavy sheets of rain, I could just barely see the top of the cliff face where I had left my partner.

There was a beam of light up there. Miller’s flashlight.

It was pointing down into the dark, sweeping slowly back and forth across the rushing water.

“Miller!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. My throat was raw and bleeding. “Miller, I’m down here! I washed downstream!”

The flashlight beam suddenly stopped.

It slowly moved along the muddy bank, creeping through the trees, until the blinding white circle of light hit my face.

I threw my arm up to shield my eyes from the glare.

“Throw down the rope!” I shouted, waving my arms frantically. “The van washed away! I’m trapped down here!”

The person holding the flashlight didn’t say a single word.

They didn’t yell out to ask if I was okay. They didn’t move to secure a line.

They just stood there, a dark, silent silhouette against the storm, aiming the blinding beam directly into my eyes.

And then, something small and heavy plummeted from the top of the cliff.

It hit the mud a few feet away from me with a wet, heavy thud.

I crawled over to it in the dark, my hands shaking violently.

It was the bright yellow, heavy-duty emergency climbing rope I had tied to the tree.

I grabbed it, feeling a momentary surge of relief. I thought Miller had thrown it down for me to climb up.

But as I pulled the rope toward me, it felt far too light. There was no tension on the other end.

I ran my wet, numb fingers along the thick, braided nylon fibers until I reached the top end of the rope.

My heart stopped completely.

The rope hadn’t snapped under tension. It hadn’t come untied from the tree trunk.

The end of the heavy nylon rope was perfectly flat.

It had been cleanly, deliberately sliced through with a tactical knife.

I slowly looked back up at the top of the cliff.

The flashlight beam clicked off.

Plunging me into absolute, terrifying darkness.

CHAPTER 4

The absolute darkness was heavier than the freezing rain.

I lay there in the thick, sucking mud of the riverbank, staring up into the pitch-black void where my partner had just tried to murder me.

My mind was a fractured, skipping record. I couldn’t process it. Miller. Jim Miller. The man who had been my partner for five years. The man who had come to my daughter’s eighth birthday party. The man who had stood beside me at my father’s funeral.

He had stood at the top of that cliff, pointed a flashlight directly into my eyes, and methodically sliced my only lifeline in half.

But then, the dead man’s final, gurgling words slammed into my brain like a physical blow.

That’s not Miller. Look at his boots. Check the trunk of the patrol car.

I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees. My joints screamed in protest. Every inch of my body was bruised, battered, and freezing. The early stages of hypothermia were setting in. My teeth were chattering so violently I thought they were going to crack.

If I stayed down here in the mud for another twenty minutes, I was going to die of exposure.

I grabbed the heavy, severed end of the yellow climbing rope. I had maybe thirty feet of it left. The rest was gone with the river.

I crawled to the base of the sheer, muddy cliff face. The rain was washing rivers of loose dirt and rocks down the incline. It looked completely impassable.

But I didn’t have a choice. I was running entirely on pure, primal adrenaline and blind terror.

I tied a thick, bulky knot at the end of the severed rope. I wrapped the other end around my waist, pulling it brutally tight. I used the knot as an anchor, jamming it deep into a narrow crevice between two massive, exposed tree roots protruding from the mud.

I tested the tension. It held.

I started to climb.

It was pure agony. My heavy, soaked boots found zero traction on the slick mud. I had to use my bare hands, digging my fingers into the frozen dirt like animal claws. My tactical gloves were completely shredded. My fingernails tore, bleeding sluggishly into the freezing rain.

Every time I pulled myself up a few feet, the earth would give way. I would slide back down, tearing the skin off my knuckles against jagged rocks hidden in the soil.

I don’t know how long it took. It could have been twenty minutes. It could have been an hour. Time didn’t exist anymore. There was only the mud, the cold, and the burning fire in my lungs.

Finally, my bleeding hand crested the edge of the ravine and clamped onto thick, solid, wet grass.

I hauled my upper body over the edge, completely collapsing onto my back in the flooded brush.

I lay there in the pouring rain, gasping for air, staring blindly up at the black canopy of the pine trees.

I had survived the drop. But I was miles deep in the Blackwood Forest, completely unarmed, freezing to death, and being hunted by something that wore human faces.

I forced myself to roll over. I staggered to my feet, leaning heavily against a thick pine trunk to keep from falling.

I needed to find the patrol car.

I stumbled through the dense brush, following the trampled path Miller and I had created on our way in. My legs felt like lead weights. The wind was howling, completely drowning out any sound. I kept expecting a flashlight beam to cut through the dark. I kept expecting a bullet to tear through my chest from the shadows.

But there was nothing. Just the endless, driving storm.

After what felt like miles of agonizing, blind stumbling, I finally saw it.

The faint, reflective glow of the police cruiser’s taillights through the trees.

It was parked exactly where we had left it on the dirt shoulder of Route 9. The engine was off. The headlights were dead.

I crept toward it, using the thick trunks of the pine trees for cover. I didn’t have my sidearm. I had lost my radio. I picked up a heavy, jagged rock from the ditch, gripping it so tightly my knuckles turned white.

I approached the driver’s side window.

It was empty.

I moved to the passenger side. Empty.

The keys were gone from the ignition. The heavy, reinforced metal divider between the front and back seats was locked.

The imposter had left it behind. The main bridge leading back to town was washed out. The cruiser was useless to him. He was on foot.

He was heading back to the precinct.

He needed you out of the precinct. He needed the building empty.

The dead version of me had been right about everything so far.

I walked around to the rear of the vehicle. The trunk.

My heart hammered aggressively against my ribs. I dreaded opening it. I dreaded finding out exactly what that thing had done to get Miller’s face.

The trunk was locked. I didn’t have the keys.

But I knew the design of these old Ford interceptors. I walked around to the rear passenger door. It was unlocked. I pulled it open, leaned in over the plastic backseat, and shoved my hand deep into the gap where the seat cushion met the metal frame.

I found the manual emergency trunk release cable. I wrapped my freezing, bleeding fingers around it and yanked hard.

The trunk popped open with a loud metallic click.

I stepped back out into the rain and walked slowly to the rear of the car.

I grabbed the heavy lid of the trunk and pushed it up.

The dim, yellow trunk light flickered to life.

I dropped the heavy rock I was holding. It hit the pavement with a dull thud.

I clamped my hands over my mouth to stop the scream from tearing out of my throat.

It was Miller.

The real Jim Miller.

He was crammed into the small, carpeted space. His body was folded at impossible, broken angles.

But that wasn’t the worst part.

He was completely stripped of his uniform. He was wearing nothing but his white undershirt and boxers.

His face was gone.

I don’t mean it was mutilated. I don’t mean it was injured.

I mean it was cleanly, surgically removed. The skin had been peeled back from his hairline, down past his jaw, in one perfect, horrific piece. The muscle and bone underneath were completely exposed to the yellow light.

I backed away from the car, my stomach violently heaving. I threw up into the flooded ditch, collapsing onto my hands and knees in the dirty water.

The thing walking through the woods right now wasn’t just wearing Miller’s uniform.

It was literally wearing his skin.

It had taken him out before we even left the parking lot. When Miller went back behind the dispatch desk to call the state troopers. That was when it happened. In the blink of an eye.

The imposter had walked out of the precinct right behind me, wearing my partner’s face, speaking in my partner’s voice.

And now, it was heading back to the only warm, lit building in a fifty-mile radius. A building with a fully stocked armory, access to the state database, and a direct radio line to every emergency service in the county.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my trembling, muddy hand.

I forced myself to stand up. I forced myself to walk back over to the open trunk.

I couldn’t look at his head. I focused entirely on his right leg.

Miller was a paranoid cop. He always kept a backup piece strapped to his right ankle. A tiny, matte-black Glock 43. He never told the captain about it. It was completely off the books.

I reached in, my hand shaking so violently I could barely control my fingers, and pulled up his pant leg.

The ankle holster was still there. The imposter hadn’t known about it.

I unclipped the holster and pulled the small handgun free. It was cold and heavy in my palm. It only held six rounds. Six bullets against something that didn’t bleed like a normal man.

I slammed the trunk shut.

I had a five-mile run ahead of me. Down a pitch-black, flooded highway, in freezing rain, with shredded boots and bruised ribs.

I started running.

I ran until my lungs felt like they were filled with broken glass. I ran until I couldn’t feel my legs anymore. I ran through knee-deep washouts, ignoring the freezing water pouring over my thighs. I fell twice, scraping my knees raw on the rough asphalt, but I forced myself back up immediately.

I had to beat it to the precinct. I had to stop it from locking the heavy steel doors and barricading itself inside.

The sky was just starting to turn a bruised, sickly shade of gray when I finally saw the orange glow of the single streetlamp in the precinct parking lot.

I slowed to a stumbling walk, completely exhausted, clutching the small Glock tightly against my chest.

The parking lot was entirely empty. The flooded puddles reflected the flickering fluorescent lights from inside the building.

The heavy reinforced glass front door was standing wide open, swinging slightly in the harsh wind.

I crept up to the brick wall outside the lobby. I pressed my back against the cold stone, trying to control my ragged, heavy breathing.

I peeked around the doorframe.

The lobby was empty.

The muddy paw prints from the stray dog were still smeared across the linoleum, leading right back out the door. The tiny, pink, blood-stained glove was gone.

I gripped the gun with both hands, raised it to my chest, and stepped through the doorway.

The precinct was dead quiet. The only sound was the humming of the old refrigerator in the break room down the hall.

“Miller?” I called out. My voice was a raw, raspy croak.

Nothing.

I cleared the lobby. I moved toward the dispatch desk. The heavy glass sliding window was shattered. Glass covered the desk and the floor.

I stepped over the broken glass and walked down the main hallway toward the holding cells and the evidence room.

The lights in the hallway were off. It was completely dark.

And then, I heard it.

It wasn’t a footstep. It wasn’t a voice.

It was a slow, wet, dragging sound. Like a heavy sack of meat being pulled across the floor tiles.

It was coming from the locker room at the very end of the hall.

I raised the gun. I walked slowly, placing each footstep carefully to avoid making a sound. My heart was pounding so loudly I was terrified it would hear me.

I reached the locker room door. It was slightly ajar.

I kicked the door open and leveled the gun.

The imposter was standing in front of the mirrors, completely ignoring me.

It had taken off Miller’s soaked uniform jacket. It was just wearing his undershirt.

But it wasn’t Miller anymore.

It was facing the mirror, running its pale, long hands through its wet hair.

The face… it was shifting.

It was like watching thick, wet clay being molded by invisible hands. The jawline was softening. The nose was flattening out. The shape of the eyes was changing completely.

Miller’s face was melting away, dissolving into the pale, terrifyingly ordinary features of the young college kid we had seen on top of the minivan.

The kid in the yellow raincoat.

It turned its head slightly, catching my reflection in the mirror.

It smiled. That exact same polite, terrifying customer-service smile.

“You’re very persistent, Officer,” it said. Its voice was no longer Miller’s deep baritone. It was the soft, gentle voice of the young man from the ravine. “Most people don’t climb out of the dark. They just close their eyes and let the water take them.”

“Turn around,” I ordered, my hands shaking so hard the gun sight was jumping up and down. “Put your hands on your head.”

The thing turned around slowly. It didn’t raise its hands. It just looked at me with those dead, empty eyes.

“You don’t understand what this building is, do you?” it asked gently. “It’s a box. Full of files. Full of names. Full of addresses. And now, I have the keys.”

It took a step toward me.

“Stop!” I screamed.

It took another step.

“I won’t tell you again!”

It smiled wider, exposing teeth that were just slightly too long, slightly too sharp.

“You can’t kill me with that,” it whispered. “I’m not wearing a body that dies from bullets.”

It lunged.

It didn’t run. It moved with a sudden, violent blur of speed that completely defied physics. It crossed the ten feet between us in a fraction of a second.

I pulled the trigger.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Three deafening shots echoed off the locker room tiles.

The bullets hit it dead center in the chest. I saw the fabric of the undershirt tear. I saw the dark, thick blood splatter against the gray metal lockers.

The impact stopped its forward momentum. It stumbled backward, looking down at the bullet holes in its chest with an expression of mild annoyance.

“Rude,” it whispered.

It didn’t drop. It didn’t scream. It just looked back up at me, its eyes turning completely pitch black.

I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t try to arrest it.

I turned and bolted down the hallway.

I heard it shriek behind me. It wasn’t a human sound. It was a high-pitched, metallic screech that rattled the fillings in my teeth.

I heard the wet, heavy thud of its bare feet slapping against the tile, sprinting after me.

I reached the front lobby. I scrambled over the dispatch desk, knocking chairs and files out of the way.

I grabbed the heavy, red emergency flare gun we kept mounted on the wall near the fire extinguisher.

I turned around just as the thing burst through the hallway doors.

It was crawling on all fours now. Its limbs were stretched out, elongated, moving like a massive, pale spider across the linoleum. Its jaw was unhinged, revealing rows of jagged teeth.

I leveled the flare gun directly at its chest and pulled the trigger.

A blinding, intense ball of red phosphorus fire shot across the lobby.

It hit the entity dead center, burying itself into the fabric of its shirt and the flesh beneath.

The thing screamed.

It was a sound of pure, unadulterated agony. The phosphorus burned at over two thousand degrees. It couldn’t be put out easily.

The creature thrashed violently on the floor, tearing at its own chest, the bright red fire illuminating the dark lobby with a demonic, strobing light.

The skin on its face—the face of the college kid—started to bubble and peel away, revealing something dark and wet underneath.

It scrambled backward, crashing through the heavy glass front doors of the precinct, shattering them into a million pieces.

It dragged itself out into the flooded parking lot, still screaming, still burning, disappearing into the heavy sheets of freezing rain.

I didn’t follow it.

I dropped the empty flare gun. I slumped back against the wall, sliding down to the cold floor, pulling my knees to my chest.

I sat there in the dark, surrounded by broken glass and the smell of sulfur and burnt meat.

I sat there for three hours, staring at the empty doorway, waiting for it to come back.

It never did.

The state troopers finally arrived just after dawn. The storm had broken. The sun was coming up, casting a pale, gray light over the wrecked parking lot.

They found me sitting in the corner, catatonic.

They found Miller’s body in the trunk of the abandoned cruiser.

They dredged the gorge three days later. They never found the crushed silver minivan. They never found the body of the officer with my face.

The official report stated that Jim Miller had a psychotic break. That he attacked me, locked me out of the car, and then mutilated himself in the trunk before dying of exposure.

They completely ignored the three bullet holes in the locker room. They ignored the melted phosphorus on the lobby floor. They needed a clean narrative. They needed a closed case.

I handed in my badge two weeks later.

I moved three states away. I bought a house in a crowded, noisy suburb, as far away from the woods as I could get.

I have a heavy steel deadbolt on my door. I sleep with a loaded shotgun under my bed.

But I still don’t feel safe.

Because sometimes, late at night, when it rains heavily, I can hear a soft scratching at my front door.

And I know exactly what it wants.

I kept the tiny, pink glove. It sits in a locked lockbox in my closet. A constant, terrifying reminder.

There are things out there in the dark. Things that don’t belong in our world.

And if you ever see a stray dog standing in the freezing rain, holding something that belongs to a child…

Do yourself a favor.

Lock the door. Close the blinds. And do not follow it into the woods.

THE END.