My heart beating so hard I was lightheaded, I stepped over the corpses and opened the utility room door. The creature my boyfriend had become was curled up in the corner by the washer, asleep in a nest of soiled clothes and pages torn from old books. The sight of it should have made me want to run screaming, but that demanded energy I just didn’t have. Its hairless skin was a dark yellow, and its body was practically skeletal. I remembered that birds have hollow bones so they can fly. His spindly arms hadn’t quite transformed into batlike wings yet. There was a little of Jack left in the thing’s distorted face, enough to make me sure it was him, but not enough to make me pause before I blew its head off.
The recoil from the shotgun knocked me flat on my blistered ass. After I got myself u
