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accompanied it, threatened to smother him. Surely thoughts of her own family would make Dana feel the same way.
    The front door of his house was hanging open. Looking into the deepening gloom consuming the living room, he could see no traces of the bugs whatsoever. It seemed that they had disintegrated into nothingness. Is that what had happened to his wife and children? Had they died then withered away, kept dissolving into smaller and smaller particles until there was no trace of them whatsoever? He shook the idea from his head. In his present state of mind it was not a theory he wished to contemplate. Figuring it was better to be safe than sorry, he took a deep breath and held it before stepping through the doorway.
    In the kitchen he found his flashlight standing on the countertop. After a quick search of the house’s lower level—which yielded no signs of bugs or Dana or Gerald—he wrapped himself in a crumpled blanket lying on the couch and went upstairs to the master bedroom. Once there he allowed himself to take a shallow breath through a section of blanket which he held over the lower half of his face. Wan lighting came in through the shattered window and with the aid of the flashlight Thomas could see that there were no bugs here either. And no Dana. The clothes he’d been wearing when the hallucination began lay scattered about the bedroom floor. None of Dana’s clothes were there. He wasn’t sure what that meant. Had he imagined the whole thing after all? Or had she come out of the hallucination before him, taken her clothes and hurried away?
    His pistol still rested atop the dresser. An anxious feeling overcame him. What had happened to Gerald? The last time Thomas could remember seeing him was in the closet. So he went there and with his heart starting to pound in his chest—he wasn’t sure why but on some small level he thought he knew—he looked inside. And there he was, a dark, huddled form, lying on the floor, not moving. With a feeling of dread welling up inside of him, Thomas knelt down next to the old guy and gave him a gentle shake. His body felt light, too light, as if it wasn’t all there.
    “Gerald?”
    Still the man did not move. Thomas shook him harder, all the while saying his name. He took the man’s wrist in his hand, felt for a pulse. Nothing. No trace of breath from his mouth or nose. And his face. The bruising there. Something odd about the angle of his neck.
    For a moment Thomas wasn’t there, wasn’t in the bedroom at all, he was back in Hell, drowning in fire, when a demon snatched him up out of the lava and impaled him through the midsection with its spear. Thomas punched and kicked at the creature with everything he had, with all the will and ferocity of the damned, and all the while the demon laughed, oh, how it had laughed. But there was something behind the laughter. A sound like screaming rising above all the anguished howls of the tortured souls beneath him. Also, there was something about that brutish face, something oddly recognizable. Eventually the demon growled and released its grip and Thomas plunged once again into the burning river…
    He came out of the flashback and he knew. He knew . He’d done this. At some point during the frenzy of the hallucination he’d found Gerald here, sitting huddled in the closet. And he’d done what, exactly. Kicked him? Punched him? Pummeled him until he stopped moving?
    “No,” said Thomas. It was too much. All of it. His family. The blood. The torture. Now this… What was going on? Good God, what was happening here?
    He stood and turned away from the closet and walked over to the dresser. With shaking hands he pulled out clean clothes—underwear, socks, jeans, and a long-sleeved shirt—and put them on. When he was fully dressed he made his way back downstairs, all the while wondering where Dana was. What had he done to Dana? Then he grabbed his keys, his gun—which he tucked into the front of his jeans—and his