Prologue

Doctor Raymond Lems awoke with a gasp and sat up. Pain riddled his body. It forced him to drop back upon the collapsible stretcher where he found himself laying. His torso felt like someone stabbed him with burning pokers. Raymond touched his hand to his chest and looked at it with groggy eyes. Blood.

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With great effort he lifted his head enough to glimpse his chest. Raymond cried out as he peeled away the blood-soaked gauze. Bullet holes—and why can’t I hear anything? He could only feel an empty rattle in his throat as he screamed—tinnitus drowned out all sounds. Shock rang in his ears, drowning out everything else.

Where in the Hell am I? What happened—this is all General Braff’s fault. I’m certain of it!

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Raymond didn’t recognize the room, though it looked familiar… these were the same color schemes company designers painted at his research lab; supposedly they calmed people. He growled. Raymond had quit the lab after finding they had begun secret experiments on children and the disabled.

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Wiping away a hot tear, he tried to piece everything together, but he couldn’t remember anything that had happened since meeting up with Agent Scofield at that crappy diner. “Why can’t I remember?” he barely heard his voice as the ringing in his ears lessened.

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He knew why he couldn’t remember, but he refused to entertain such a notion. If he had become a carrier—if those things had controlled his body—then all hope was lost.

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Even though Raymond wasn’t a medical physician, he was still a doctor, and as such he recognized many of the haphazardly strewn medical supplies upon on the table next to him. A bag of blood hung on a rack; it fed into his IV and kept him from bleeding out. Why did they leave me here? Where are the doctors and nurses?

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A second bag of fluid hung nearby—this one contained a mix with morphine in it, but it hadn’t been injected yet. Shakily, Raymond pinched the catheter and rammed it into a vein. It only took a few tries. After a few seconds, the pain relaxed enough that his ears began operating again; his body fought back against the trauma and shock.

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He looked over his body again, assessing the swelling and purple bruises. Some kind of noise blurped in the hallway as he looked over the bullet wound.

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Who in the Hell shot me? Raymond wondered as he scanned his surroundings with fresh eyes. And who puts a gunshot victim in a supply room? He groaned and crawled off the bed before staggering across the linoleum. He knew the answer: someone with no intention of coming back.

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The research scientist yanked the intravenous lines from his arms and pushed open the door where the swelling sounds of chaos greeted him. Yellow lights flashed everywhere in the hall, bathing everything with pulsating amber. Warning sirens shrieked in time with klaxon lights. Inhuman screams echoed from a nearby stairwell sounding like some kind of portal to the underworld he’d often joked that his and Swaggart’s madcap research would open.

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Raymond stumbled across the hall and found a door with a familiar nameplate. He scowled, but opened the entrance to General Roderick Braff’s office and locked it behind him.

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“Where are you, Swaggart?” Raymond limped across the hallway and towards the broken window at the far side of the room wondering where his friend had gone. Blood leaked from his oversaturated bandages and he felt light headed.

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Shards of glass crunched underfoot as he meandered past the general’s ornate, wooden desk. A bittersweet odor tugged at his nose. The doctor grabbed clumsily at the smoldering cigar that lay on the desktop.

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With shaky fingers, Raymond barely succeeded in placing the smoking husk between his lips by the time he got to the busted window pane. He peeked out at the commotion. A herd of bodies sprinted across the far slope, heading up the hillside in a herd panic. Dread filled the researcher’s gut with hot regret. It all made sense: the blackout, the gunshots, the sirens. The entities have broken free from their containment units in the basement.

He looked at the ground and noticed an empty shoe abandoned upon the tangle of broken, bloody glass.

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Raymond couldn’t be certain, but he thought it could be Braff’s brand. It made him happy to think that someone had finally thrown that bastard through a second story window. He just wished it could have been there to see it.

Raymond looked back towards the mountainside. The peaks stood in stark contrast to the eerie light glowing behind them. Then, something brilliant flashed and all the light on Earth went out.