My voice was stern and abrupt, the one I used when shit was one-hundred percent fucked. And things were royally fucked. The radio clicked off, the silence rushing back in thick and heavy.

  Behind me, Jonathan sat hunched in his armchair, rocking back and forth, a broken metronome of grief. "I didn't mean to... I didn't mean to..." he mumbled into his hands, the words a prayer to a god who wasn't listening.

  His wife, Martha, hovered near him, her own hands fluttering uselessly in the air between them, wanting to comfort but not knowing how. The smell of her fear-sweat was sharp in the stale air of the living room, mixing with the medicinal tang of whatever tranquilizer was shutting down their son's respiratory system.

  The heavy thud of boots on the porch steps made Martha flinch, her entire body going rigid. The screen door banged open and two paramedics swept in, their presence a whirlwind of clipped questions and focused energy that transformed the room from a tomb into a triage center.

  One dropped a heavy-looking bag that landed with a muffled thump, already unclipping it and grabbing various tools of his trade with practiced precision. The other was already kneeling beside Michael, his movements economical and sure as his fingers found the young man's throat, checking for a pulse. They didn't so much enter the living room as occupy it, turning a space of chaotic grief into a makeshift trauma bay.

  Kira was already briefing them, her voice a low, urgent staccato of facts. "Adult male, early twenties, tranquilizer dart to the chest, shallow respiration, unresponsive to verbal stimuli..."

  I stepped over to Jonathan, giving the medical team room to work. He was vibrating, a low hum of terror that made the armchair creak beneath him. His eyes were wide but unfocused, staring at his son on the floor but not really seeing him. Probably replaying the moment, imagining all the things he could have done differently.

  I knew that loop. I'd been stuck in it myself more times than I could count. It wasn't healthy, and it would just lead someone further into despair. The fear in the air was so thick it felt like I was breathing in static.

  "What kind of tranquilizer is this?" I asked, keeping my voice soft. Gentle, Elias. He's in shock. Slow and steady.

  Jonathan didn't respond, just kept rocking, his chanting changing to a quiet, broken "what have I done, what have I done."

  I put a hand on his shoulder, firm but not aggressive. The gesture an attempt to ground him back to the moment, to pull him out of the spiral. "Jonathan. I need to know what you used. It's important."

  He finally looked up, his eyes bloodshot and swimming with tears that carved clean paths through the dust on his face. "It's... it's horse tranquilizer," he choked out, his body slumping as a ragged sob finally broke free from somewhere deep in his chest.

  Horse tranquilizer. Right. We'd be in real trouble if the man owned a zoo. I couldn't stop the cynicism. It was my coping mechanism. It reminded me that things could always be worse.

  "We... we use it when one of the horses gets tangled in barbed wire," he sobbed, his voice breaking on every other word. "It calms them down enough so we can... so we can help them without getting kicked."

  A cold knot of dread twisted in my gut. Horses weighed a thousand pounds. Michael couldn't weigh more than one-eighty soaking wet. The math on the dosage was not in his favor.

  "Perfect," I said, the word tasting like rust and failure on my tongue. "Do you still have the box it came in? The paramedics need to see exactly what we're dealing with."

  He nodded numbly, his gaze already drifting back to his son, and directed Martha to a stand by the front door with a weak gesture. She returned a moment later, clutching a small cardboard box in trembling hands like it was a live grenade.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  "Give it to them," I said, pointing toward the paramedics who were now working with a grim, silent efficiency that spoke volumes about how bad things were.

  One of them grabbed the box and immediately began reading the label, his eyes scanning the fine print with practiced speed. I could tell by the way his jaw tightened, by the sharp look he exchanged with his partner, that the situation was bad. He looked up at me, his face a professional mask that couldn't quite hide the concern underneath.

  "We're transporting him immediately," he said, his tone leaving no room for discussion. "Whatever this is, it's not good. We need to get him to a hospital five minutes ago. Clear a path for the stretcher."

  I nodded and began moving furniture out of the narrow hallway—an end table, a coat rack, anything that might slow them down. His partner returned with a spinal board, and with painstaking care that felt agonizingly slow but was probably as fast as humanly possible, we maneuvered Michael onto it.

  Michael wasn't very big, but if you've ever moved an unconscious body, you'd understand that dead weight was different. It was awkward and clumsy no matter how mechanical you tried to be, how careful. The human body wasn't designed to be a rigid object. Finally, Michael was secured to the spinal board, the straps cinched tight across his chest and legs.

  As we carried him through the front door toward the waiting stretcher on the porch, Michael's eyes snapped open.

  They weren't the eyes of a man. They were blown wide with a terror that wasn't from this world, a panic so absolute and primal it seemed to suck the air from the yard. His pupils were pinpricks in a sea of white, darting frantically like a cornered animal searching for the predator it could smell but couldn't see.

  "MONSTERS!" he screamed, the sound tearing from his throat raw and ragged, stripped down to its most animalistic components.

  He began to thrash violently against the straps holding him to the board, a wild, impossible strength surging through his body that should not have been possible for someone who'd been unconscious seconds ago. Foam frothed at the corners of his mouth, speckling his chin. His back arched against the restraints hard enough that I heard the board creak.

  "RUN! GET AWAY! THEY'RE COMING!"

  The hairs on my arms and neck immediately stood on edge, a wave of goosebumps racing across my skin like I'd just walked through a spiderweb in the dark. What the fuck did this kid see?

  His scream wasn't just loud. It was primal, resonant, the sound of prey that had locked eyes with the predator and knew, with absolute certainty, that it was about to die. It was the kind of scream that bypassed your brain entirely and spoke directly to the oldest, most terrified part of your nervous system. The part that still remembered being hunted.

  My hand was already on my pistol before I even registered the thought, my body responding to a threat my conscious mind hadn't even identified yet.

  A sound ripped through the afternoon. Not a gunshot. Not a bomb. It was the sound of reality being torn open, a deafening, violent CRASH that came from the direction of the fields, shattering the air like an explosion of splintering wood and screaming metal. The entire house shuddered behind us, dust raining from the eaves. Every eye—mine, Kira's, the paramedics', even the Kents'—snapped toward the source.

  What the fuck was—

  The thought died as my brain tried to process the impossible.

  Hurtling through the air, tumbling end over end like a gruesome, discarded toy, was the carcass of a bull. Not a calf. A full-grown, two-thousand-pound Angus bull. It sailed in a lazy, dreamlike arc across the cloudless blue sky, its body rotating slowly enough that I could see the gaping wound in its belly, the gray-pink coils of intestines trailing behind it like grotesque streamers.

  My brain tried to file it under "normal" and came up completely empty.

  That's a bull. Bulls don't fly. Physics doesn't work like that. This isn't—

  It landed a hundred and fifty meters away with a wet, heavy thud that I felt through the soles of my boots, a vibration that traveled up my legs and settled in my chest. The carcass hit the grass and didn't bounce—just settled, a broken heap of meat and bone that had been savaged by something impossibly large.

  The smell hit us a second later. Copper and shit and the hot, meaty stench of an abattoir on a summer day.

  From the direction of the now-obliterated chicken coop, I could see the splintered wood, the cloud of dust and feathers still settling, a roar erupted.

  It wasn't the roar of any animal I knew. It wasn't a lion, wasn't a bear, wasn't anything in the catalog of sounds my brain had labeled as "dangerous predator." It was deeper, more resonant—a guttural, bone-rattling sound that seemed to tear at the very fabric of reality, to reach inside my chest cavity and squeeze my heart in a fist made of pure, prehistoric rage.

  The sound traveled through the ground, a subsonic frequency that made my molars ache and turned my intestines into a cold, liquid fear.

  Every cell in my body, every ancient instinct hardwired into my DNA from a million years of being prey on the African savanna, was screaming the same thing:

  Run. Run now. Run or die.