Virgil called in sick again. His supervisor wasn’t happy with him over it, and Virgil let him rant for ten minutes before patiently explaining the situation in his neighborhood. He made sure to go into graphic detail in describing the bodies he’d found before concluding “I’m afraid I’m just too upset to work after seeing so much blood.”

Which was not actually true. He was ready to work the moment he woke up, but his job working as a manager in a fitness center had taken a back seat to the tasks facing him over the next few hours.

He set the phone down and returned to the table to drink his coffee and try to prioritize his day. “Honey, did you know the name of Roy’s wife?”

Lucy glanced over her shoulder for a moment before returning her attention to the sink full of dishes. After a moment of silence she gave a tiny nod. “I think her name was Mary.”

“What’s their last name?” Virgil asked.

“Jackson, but why do you need to know?”

“I’m going to call the hospitals and pretend to be her uncle so I can find her,” Virgil said. “I need to figure out why she survived.”

“Virgil, if what you told your boss is true, maybe we should be leaving like Alberto did.”

“No, I think moving around isn’t going to matter soon.”

Lucy stared at him anxiously for a long time before she could speak. “What do you mean?”

“I told you already. This isn’t the only neighborhood that’s been hit. We can expect that  whatever is killing people here will move on to other areas.” Virgil stopped himself from going on. He knew the screecher would only move on after every last family in the area was dead. “Maybe Alberto might keep himself and his family safe, and maybe he’s just delaying the inevitable.”

He spent the better part of the afternoon calling hospitals before finding Mary. His description of her wounds brought an immediate response that he should come down to the hospital, because he was the only next of kin who had called for Mary. Only then did it occur to him that he was committing a crime, and to get any information from the doctors, he would have to make his crime worse by impersonating Mary’s uncle for a trip to the hospital.

He conceded that he had trapped himself in the role already, and he got dressed and drove across town to the hospital. He was directed through many corridors before being seated in a waiting room, and for nearly an hour, no one else spoke to him.

“Sir?” a man’s voice called behind him. Virgil rose from his seat and turned to look at the doctor who stood in the door of the small waiting area. “I’m doctor Lopez. You’re Mary’s uncle?”

“Yes, by marriage,” Virgil said, and extended his hand as he stepped up to the doctor. “Is she going to live?” -Please God, let the answer be no,- he added silently.

The doctor’s face twisted with several conflicting emotions before he spoke. “Honestly sir, we’re not sure how it is that she’s alive now. She’s brain dead, but all of her involuntary functions are still working normally.”

“Okay, pretend I’m an idiot for a second here, please,” Virgil said.

“She’s breathing, and her heart is beating, but there’s no one home,” the doctor said and waited until Virgil nodded. “She lost a lot of blood, and frankly, it should have been a lethal amount.”

“So do you think she would die if you pulled her off of life support?”

“No, sir, you really don’t understand.” The doctor sounded highly agitated. “She isn’t hooked up to anything but monitoring equipment and an IV. She doesn’t need a machine to assist her breathing.”

“Come again? No, look, you said that she was brain dead.”

“I know what I said,” the doctor agreed. “Come with me and you can see her for yourself. She is brain dead to the point that she shouldn’t be breathing, and yet she is. She should have been dead well before we brought her in for blood loss. I don’t know what to tell you… er-”

“Virgil.”

“Well Virgil, I’m stumped. Medically the woman should be dead,” doctor Lopez said. He led Virgil to a room and opened the door, letting him walk in first. The doctor laid a hand on his shoulder when he froze halfway into the room. “This may be hard on you, but you must understand that she is feeling nothing at this point.”

Virgil nodded. “Th-that’s good.” He choked genuinely on the words, though his emotion was caused by the memory of what Mary’s body looked like under the layers of bandages.

He turned at the sound of the door closing. The doctor had apparently left with the belief that Virgil needed time alone to grieve. He had hoped to have some time alone with Mary, but once he was in the same room with her, his mind had gone blank. He had no idea of what he was looking for, and the doctor had pretty much confirmed his suspicions without providing any answers.

He’d known that there should be no logical reason for her to survive with such terrible wounds, but he doubted that he could discover why she’d survived. The fact that she was technically dead provided him some comfort, because he had trouble trying to imagine what it would be like to live on in such a horrifying condition.

In spite of his doubts, he walked closer to the bed to look at Mary’s heavily bandaged body. He reminded himself that he would have to ask more questions about what the doctors planned to do in order to complete his act. While he tried to think up a few questions, he noticed that while her chest was rising and falling with only the shallowest of movements, her stomach was pulsing as though she were taking deep breaths.

He moved closer still, noticing how her stomach was beginning to expand. The effect was small at first, but it became impossible not to notice after only a few minutes. He backed away towards the door to look for the doctor. Instead, he found a nurse down the hall, and he stepped out of the room to wave at her.

“Is something wrong, sir?”

Virgil nodded. “Come and have a look at this. Her- my niece’s stomach looks like it’s starting to bulge.”

“What?” the nurse asked and walked around him quickly. “Oh my.”

Virgil gasped when he walked back through the door. In the short time that it had taken him to summon the nurse, Mary’s stomach had doubled in size. -She looks pregnant,- he thought as he moved closer to the bed.

The nurse was moving around to the other side of the bed to check the monitors when the slow rhythmic beep of Mary’s pulse monitor became a steady flat tone. “Damn. Hey, hit that button!” the nurse shouted at him.

Virgil looked to where she was pointing and slapped the bright red emergency button. Even as he was reaching for it, he noticed the lights in the room were getting dim. The tone of the monitor failed and when he turned to look at it, he saw that the machine was off. “What’s happening?”

The nurse seemed no less mystified than him, and she raised her head to look up at the  fluorescent lights. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Virgil looked down at Mary’s body, and his eyes grew wide as he saw what looked like a pool of blood which flowed out of her stomach through the bandages.

Before he could open his mouth to speak, the tiny pool sprang out and flowed around the nurse’s arm. She started to scream as the fluid continued to rise, pulling her up and off of her feet.

The lights died, and Virgil heard the nurse screaming in a shrill voice. Under her cries, he could hear something else, a wet squishing sound which turned his stomach. He tried to back away from the bed and stumbled over a chair.

Before he could recover, his whole body froze when the screeching began. He knew that he was in the room with whatever had killed two families in his neighborhood, and the knowledge got him moving backward slowly across the floor.

The door slammed open and light spilled into the room. Virgil yelled in fear at a black figure which hovered just inches from his face. As soon as the light hit the creature, the pitch of the screech grew as the volume swelled. He saw two red eyes open to glare at him just before the creature began to evaporate. Its body dispersed like black smoke, but what he thought were eyes were instead two globes of blood which fell and splattered over on his pants.

Virgil panted as he looked up at the lights in the room bursting back to their full brightness. He felt a hand on his shoulder and stared at doctor Lopez blankly, who had to repeat himself three times before Virgil could understand him. “What happened?”

Virgil shook his head and stood up on shaky legs. “I don’t know. I called the nurse-” He lost his voice as his gaze fell on the nurse’s body. She had been peeled completely, and even from where he stood, he knew that she was dead.

“What in hell was that?” doctor Lopez asked.

Virgil slowly tore his eyes away from the nurse’s body to stare at the doctor’s pale face. “I don’t know what it was, but I think it may have been from Hell.”

He wanted to leave right away, but the nurses arriving into the room noticed the blood on his pants, and suddenly he was beset upon and dragged into the bathroom to be decontaminated. He pulled on a pair of blue scrub pants and made an excuse of needing to look for a phone to get away.

He got into his car and shut the door, taking a long slow breath as his mind replayed the scene over again. Somehow, the creature had been able to draw the electrical power away from the lights and machines, and when it had been exposed to light, it had dissipated like smoke. But before the lights had failed completely, he felt sure that it had looked more like an oily fluid.

His memory returned to the two blood filled eyes staring at him, and he shuddered and looked around the parking garage before he started the engine. He backed the car out of the parking slot and looked up at his rearview mirror. At the other end of the garage, the lights began to flicker.

He didn’t bother waiting to see if they would fail. The car surged forward and he took every turn at a speed fast enough to risk a crash. He wanted to slow down, but each time he checked his mirrors, he found another light behind the car winking out. The lights beyond the flickering light had died out, sealing more and more of the area in a pitch black shadow.

As he drove through the second floor, he passed a doctor, and he slammed on his brake pedal, looking back anxiously as he debated with himself. The lights above the doctor flickered then died. Before Virgil had turned back around in his seat, the screeching began, and a second later, the doctor screamed in agony. He stepped down on the accelerator and didn’t bother looking back until he was out of the garage.

While he drove home, his mind picked at two details over and over. Mary had been pregnant with the monster. She hadn’t survived the attack at all. The monster inside her had kept her vital organs running during its short gestation period, and then it had broken free. 

But perhaps worse was the knowledge that there would potentially be two of the creatures stalking his neighborhood. A few moments later, he realized that if any of the other women attacked in the city had been ovulating, they too could become carriers for a new monster.

He parked the car and looked around as he got out. The sky was already getting dark, and he didn’t know if the creatures had any weaknesses. He had only a few hours left to sort out a plan before at least one of the creatures came to visit the neighborhood. If a second creature arrived, it would come looking for him.

He opened his front door and glanced around at the group of neighbors gathered in his living room. Tony waved at him to come closer. “We’re trying to decide if it makes sense to leave now or not.”

“Why would you need to put it to a vote? If you want to leave, follow Alberto’s example and get out of town,” Virgil said.

“Yeah, that’s why we needed to vote,” Tony said and turned to push the play button on Virgil’s VCR. He’d recorded the evening news, and after he fast forwarded through the intro music, Virgil saw the reporter’s expression bordering on genuine alarm.

“Police are baffled over a series of grisly murders which are happening all over the country.”

Virgil’s legs wobbled, and he sat down heavily on the floor.  -The  whole country?-

“Here in San Antonio, no less than twenty eight bodies have been discovered by police. Most of the bodies were discovered being completely peeled out of their skins. An additional three women have been found alive, but in critical condition. Police have no leads, but they are advising everyone to be cautious.”

“Ha!” Virgil shouted.

“Just wait,” Tony said.

“Though police have no answers, a local man claiming to be a mage has suggested that these killings are the work of demons.” The scene changed to an old man talking into a microphone, but his voice could not be heard yet. Instead the reporter’s voice spoke over the video feed. “Mandrake Constantine the fourteenth claims to be a true mage who has witnessed several of these attacks.”

“Yeh, those wraiths are nasty little buggers,” Mandrake’s voice cut in. “They aren’t easy t’kill either. You have to find their center and burn it out with fire.”

The microphone vanished out of the camera view, and a male reporter’s voice spoke. “Sir, you don’t really believe in mythical creatures, do you?”

“I believe in much more than that, lad. You modern people don’t believe in the old ways anymore, but there was a time when everyone knew the cry of the wraith. In other lands they called it the wail of the banshee, but it’s the same kin, really.”

The screen shifted back to the reporter who looked mildly amused. “Mandrake recommends lighting many candles and placing them around a room to prevent an attack by a monster. This reporter can’t help but wonder why it wouldn’t be easier to just use a night light.”

“Because they-” Virgil began.

“Wait,” Tony said.

“In a related story, a family of five was found ripped to pieces inside their car on the outskirts of the city. The bodies of Alberto and Nina Sanchez and their three children were found on the shoulder of IH-ten West, where police believe the car crashed some time last night. None of the victims were peeled, but few other details have been given. However, they have said that certain markings on the bodies have given them cause to believe that the cases are related. In other news-”

Tony stopped the tape and turned to look at him. “Right, you were saying?”

Virgil stood up. “I don’t know if the mage is peddling crap or not, but something happened tonight at the hospital. I went to see Roy’s wife Mary, and…” He took a long breath before telling his neighbors about the creature killing a nurse and its attempt to follow him. “Mary gave birth to a new creature, so I think tomorrow’s news will include an update that the survivors all died, along with a few doctors and nurses at the hospitals where they were being cared for.”

“Do you really think they’re banshees?” Tony asked.

“I don’t know. I do understand why certain women seemed to have survived, but now I have to consider something else. No one in Alberto’s car was peeled. Rory was torn in half, but the rest of his family was peeled.” Virgil paused as he realized that several of his neighbors were moaning in fear. “Folks, we’ve got to keep ourselves from panicking. There’s likely to be more than one of these banshees attacking us tonight, so we’ll all need to load up on candles.”

“This is stupid!”

“Derrick-” Tony said.

Derrick Smith shook his head. “No, I’m not taking advice from some idiot on TV who thinks he can talk to crystals and see auras. Why can’t we just turn on all the lights in our house and leave them on?”

“I told you. These creatures can and will dim the lights before they attack. They move damned fast, and they can peel you and suck you dry in a few seconds,” Virgil said.

“How do we know that you aren’t making this stuff up?” Derrick accused.

“Excuse me?”

“Hey, nobody but Tony and you have seen these bodies, and only you have somehow seen a creature and survived. Maybe you’re making some of this up to be the center of attention. I mean, I can’t help but notice that you’ve acted like a prima donna ever since Roy’s family died.”

Virgil opened his mouth and closed it before he smiled. “Hey, you know what? Head on home and turn on all the lights. I’ll come by tomorrow morning to see how that worked out for you.” He looked around at his neighbors. “You can all do whatever you like, but you have to know that leaving doesn’t mean you’re going to be safe. This is nationwide, and I can’t make up that, can I?”

Derrick stormed out followed by his wife, and Virgil watched him leave without a word. He glanced at Tony’s hand on his shoulder. “We should make a run to the store for candles.”

Virgil nodded. “Right, I’m chipping in a certain amount for the candle fund. I’ll start at twenty and see who matches. Maybe we can get a stock to last us for a few days.”

Every family had matched him before he got ready to leave.