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this late at night. That and most people get out of the way of a big white bouncer moving at speed. Especially when he's wearing a "get out of my way" expression.
    A couple walking arm in arm split to either side of Mike as he went through. To reveal an older woman bent over something on the sidewalk. Strangling a curse, Mike skidded to a stop, just short of bowling her over.
    "I think that man is very ill," she told the world at large. Her voice quavered but Mike could see a glint of something undefinable in her bright eyes. She pointed at her feet, drawing Mike's gaze downward.
    A wadded white handkerchief lay crumpled on the sidewalk. The cloth huddled forlorn in a shiny mess of viscous fluid. Some of which was the inky, oily black Mike expected to see once he recognized Timmons's rag. Some of the fluid was a milky pearlescent. For all it was one pool of yuck, the two colors didn't mix.
    Mike looked into the old woman's curious gaze.
    "Which way?" he asked.
    They stood at the entrance to a shadowed alley. Mike couldn't tell how far it went, or even what it contained. The woman pointed down it with one crooked finger.
    "I hope that girl can help him," the old woman said as Mike walked into the dark alley.
    A feeling of strangeness - of some menacing other - drifted on the night air. As he stalked down the alleyway, Mike questioned his purpose. A weird - and creepy, and maybe dangerous - cop ran off. A weird - and scary, and very dangerous - homeless guy chased after him. Then Yasmin took off after them both. And she was a paramedic: young, female and not scary at all that he was aware of. And he still hadn't asked her out.
    Mike took some heart from that as he crept through the dark. The other two could go hang, as far as Mike was concerned. Especially Sergeant Timmons, NYPD, he of the persistently accusatory questions.
    The buildings around him walled out the noises of the city, weirdly distorting the sounds that meant normal to Mike. A siren in the distance became the cry of some great hunting beast. The rumble of vehicles, above and below the street both, morphed into the shuddering function of some monstrous digestion. And the ever-present chatter of humanity took on the ominous, skittering tones of the distant voices he'd tried not to hear earlier in the evening, while unconscious on the bar floor.
    Mike shivered.
    The bite of a fall night in the city crawled inside his jacket and raised goosebumps on his bare scalp, slick now with sweat. He rubbed his free hand over it and made a note to shave sometime soon. Assuming "soon" ever came.
    Mike heard the quiet sounds of a struggle from somewhere ahead of him. A grunt, the scuff of feet, a muffled clang, and sounds he couldn't identify drifted to his ears. Mike picked up his pace, and saw dim light in front of him. Despite the risk, he broke into a run when he heard an anguished cry cut off by the dull thud of flesh hitting cement.
    Mike came into an open loading area, dimly lit by a dull and faded security bulb. What he saw froze his marrow and locked his muscles tight. Mike skidded to a stop and went down on one knee very nearly right next to Timmons. Who barely looked human anymore.
    Mike's stomach rebelled, but his throat was clamped too tightly shut to vomit – though he so desperately wanted to.
    Timmons squatted on bandy legs, arms hanging limp at his sides. His head was thrown back, and the light of the dim bulb shone on his glasses. His shirt hung in tatters from his shoulders. Rising out of the ruin of his suit, clawing and writhing and grasping at the air rose the same sanity-shredding mass of tentacles and spines Mike had seen in his nightmares.
    Infinitely worse than that, however, was the bulbous protuberance that forced the cop's jaws wide. An arm-thick column of muscle studded with spine-like hairs writhed more than two feet out of Timmons throat. Shiny with slime, the abomination culminated in an orifice that could only be called a maw. Fangs the