I found Jill Hampton’s face three blocks from her body. The glint in her eye caught mine. The street lamp painted her grisly portrait. High contrast but no relief. Her face looked like a vase someone dropped off a rooftop. Shards were scattered across the sidewalk and into the street. A grim jigsaw puzzle, waiting to be pieced back together. If only I had the time.

I flicked over a chunk of cheek or chin with my penknife. The edges of the flesh were brittle and papery, but its back was still damp. Jack Huston couldn’t have gotten far. At least not on foot.

SNAKESKIN

By C.T.Kincaid

We’d tracked Huston to a town two hours west of Opal City. His trail of faceless corpses and discarded expressions led us to a Lord Lodge, the kind of hotel that lost all its grandeur as soon as you passed the marquee. Huston was an opportunistic hunter, not a careful one. The door to Hampton’s room was left open, and she was slumped in a vinyl armchair. Her purse was open on the desk beside her. Her wallet and keys were still inside. Her car was in the lot. If Huston called for a taxi or ordered a KordLess car, he hadn’t used Hamilton’s phone. It was still charging on the nightstand. The print of a cold finger unlocked it. No recent calls. No texts sent or received since mid-afternoon.

Nick Kovak, my fellow agent in the field, took our D.E.O.-issued cruiser and crawled toward the highway, high beams glaring at anyone and anything out at 23:47 EST. I headed the opposite direction, toward high density housing. I couldn’t tell you if they were condos or apartments. I didn’t stop to read the sign. The neighborhood pool looked inviting, but no one was readying for a midnight swim. I was about to cross a random patch of yard and start knocking on doors when I glimpsed Jill Hamilton’s glinting eye.

No sooner had I pocketed my knife than I heard the shriek. A horrible, guttural squeal. Before I could complete a thought, my legs hurdled a hedge, and I rounded the corner of a brick facade. Beside a fenced-in dumpster, Jack Huston was pressed cheek-to-cheek with a terrified teenager. I couldn’t make out the kid’s name tag, but he was wearing the uniform of a Big Belly Burger assistant manager: mustard yellow button-down, lettuce green tie, chargrilled brown pants, and grease spatter acne. The poor kid was probably walking home after an evening shift when he got grabbed.

“Get off!” The corner of the assistant manager’s mouth stretched onto Huston’s otherwise empty face as the teenager tried to shove himself free.

I tapped my earpiece and whispered, “On me,” before stepping forward. “Let him go, Jack. This doesn’t have to get any uglier.”

“Who?!” The killer uttered through shared lips. He twisted toward me, tethered by cascading skin.

“Easy.” I raised my hands, placating. “You don’t need the kid, Jack. Take me instead.”

Huston’s stolen glances darted from my palms to my mouth to my torso to my knees to my shoes and back up again. “No. No! I recognize that suit! You’re one of them — a Bleedwalker!”

“Jack, I can assure you I am not one of those.” I didn’t move, didn’t want to startle either of them. “I don’t even know what that is.”

“Lies!” A borrowed brow registered as anger on Huston’s face and fear on the teenager’s. “Your feet! Let me see your feet!”

“Okay, okay.” Slowly stooping, I tilted my head to look at the assistant manager. “What’s your name?”

The kid had enough control to maintain eye contact, albeit only with his left eye, which was sliding toward his attacker. “Cuh-Curtis.”

“Curtis.” I offered a gentle smile. “Get ready to run, okay?”

He tried to nod, but Huston lurched at me, drawing their connected flesh taut. “What are you do-“

Reaching for my shoelaces, I exhaled a sharp breath and tried not to flinch. My spine felt like it split open, sending needles down my arms. A wave of numbness followed. Freezing hot, scorching cold. My hands shot out. My chin dropped. My head drooped. My stomach flipped. My eyelids fluttered, then fell. The world was a distant memory.

Until something slammed into my shoulder as it rushed past. Reality snapped back into place. I sputtered, spun back on my heels, and saw Curtis, gripping his face — his own face, his whole face — as he turned the corner and ran into the night. Disbelief and relief made his gait awkward but relaxed his shoulders.

I dusted off my knees, planted my palms on my thighs, and pushed off to stand upright again. My last two meals were splashed between my feet and up the sides of my shoes. My breath was rancid with bile.

Jack Huston didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy touching his nose, his mouth, his cheekbones. “How…?”

“It’ll only last about twenty minutes.” I tried to scrape one shoe clean against the corner of the dumpster but only succeeded in spreading the mess. My sock was wet.

“Then… Then, I will take you instead.” The last beads of his secreted adhesive drizzled off his jawline.

“Sorry.” I worked something out of my molars, slid open the side of the metal trash receptacle, and spit. “Offer expired.”

“Just a slice,” he pleaded. “A small graft. A tiny piece. Every twenty minutes.”

I thumbed vomit from my bottom lip. “Look up.”

He did. Jack Huston’s features disappeared again, this time in shadow. Nick dove right into him.

“Kovak the Night Stalker.” I fished a tin out of my suit jacket’s inner pocket and cracked the lid.

“You rang?” He already had the killer in cuffs.

I popped two icy blue tabs between my teeth and turned the case to my partner. “Mint?”

We rendezvoused with the containment crew near a cornfield half an hour later. Huston studied his reflection in the backseat window the whole ride there. As his features started to slip, he tilted his head back, further and further, trying to keep his face in place. But nothing could stop its descent. When his mouth slid onto his neck, the top of his forehead peeled free and fell forward. Jack Huston’s face sloughed off in one long piece, shed like snakeskin. It landed in his lap, a mask of his former self.

If the agent on comms hadn’t dropped a pin in our chat, we would’ve driven past the containment crew’s armored ambulance without ever noticing. Our cruiser’s headlights barely illuminated their vehicle’s matte black finish and tinted windows. The gunmetal cross on its flank flashed as my partner pulled off the road. Before Nick could shift into park, the containment crew — a quintet in hazmat suits the same black and grey as their ride — spilled out of the cabin and back of the ambulance. Watching them disembark was like watching an onyx ice cube melt.

Before I could blink, the lead agent rapped on my window. He recited our agreed upon greeting: “Night work is light work.”

“In darkness, we shine,” I replied as scripted.

The crew leader keyed a sequence of buttons on the strap that sealed his glove to his sleeve. A beam projected the credentials of Arak Bright Sky, Senior Hazardous Materials [Airborne/Earthbound/Sentient] Specialist of the Department of Extranormal Operations.

I nodded at Nick, who unlocked the cruiser’s rear doors.

Bright Sky chopped the air with two fingers, spurring his team to act. Two of the crew pulled a gurney out of the ambulance and readied its restraints. Two others popped open the rear doors of our cruiser. The crew member on the driver’s side, behind Nick, peeled an anesthetic patch free from a pouch and slapped it on Huston’s neck. The killer’s head bobbed, bounced off the headrest, and lulled toward his lap. The crew member on the passenger side, behind me, slid across the backseat, unbuckling and catching the Huston’s limp torso. Hefting limbs like water-logged blankets, the hazmat specialists spun Huston supine and fed him onto the gurney. His face fell somewhere in the darkness, already forgotten.

The rear doors clicked closed, and Bright Sky tapped our roof twice. As Nick merged onto the road, I watched black and grey containment suits melt back into the ambulance.

After every field op came a mandatory medical exam. Without that clearance, a D.E.O. agent couldn’t step foot in the office, much less head home. Technically, Nick and I could’ve gotten checked out at a clinic on the way back, if we could find a physician who was in network, had the proper cert, and was willing to do non-emergency, walk-in physicals after midnight.

The agency’s benefits package was generous, but the out-of-network coverage was laughably bad: an individual deductible of $5,500; a family deductible of $10,250; and a 51%/49% coinsurance split, with an annual OOP maximum of $57,000.

Through its partnership with The Helix Commission, the D.E.O. was one of only four organizations worldwide — and the only one in the U.S. — to offer the courses necessary to prep for the Ultra Hazardous Occupational Health and Extreme Environmental Medicine exam. Britain was home to another, but enrollment was limited to applicants who’d held U.K. citizenship for more than a decade. The other two organizations were universities in Bialya and Markovia. Given the current political climate, the likelihood of their graduates getting hired to provide medical treatment to American agents could’ve only been slimmer with a couple gulps of Gingold.

So the only place to see a certified, in-network provider to get the okay to go back to work or clock out was the D.E.O.’s med bay, conveniently located in the second sub-basement of headquarters. Access was less convenient. Intentionally so. Nick maneuvered our black-on-black cruiser through H.Q.’s parking deck to the far end of the third floor, where a set of what looked like elevator doors waited. I stepped out of the car, closing the door behind me, and arrived at the elevator entrance in two sick-slick strides.

A scanner embedded in the brick to the right of the doors blinked for my attention. I fished out my badge and tapped it against the reader. A set of three lights flashed red, yellow, green above the entrance, and a bell chimed its confirmation. The cruiser’s engine revved behind me, and I heard its hum fade as Nick drove further into the deck.

The scanner blinked again before displaying an oval, pinched to a point at either end. I leaned forward, allowing it to review my retina. The same light sequence flashed, followed by another chime. The image on the scanner shifted into a droplet. The embedded pad popped out of the wall, turning into a reservoir. I spat inside. It retracted. Red, yellow, green, ding. Finally, the doors opened.

I walked into an unassuming hallway. The entrance sealed behind me. I heard a gentle whirring. Then, the entire corridor turned bright white. As I pressed forward, which was actually downward along a gradual slope, a line appeared on the floor before me. I followed it, and it split in two, creating a path the width of my shoulders. Fainter lines bloomed underfoot, forming a golden brick pattern between the path’s borders. As I walked, the pattern shifted into octagons, and the gold brightened to orange, the orange to red. A voice from somewhere or nowhere or everywhere told me to stop.

The whirring intensified. I held my breath instinctively. There was a click, then silence. The red-lit lines faded to black. The octagons morphed into chevrons, directional arrows guiding me forward/downward again. The voice announced, “Proceed.”

I followed the prompts for another fourteen or forty minutes, starting and stopping at least seven more times, before the path’s borders jetted outward to form a six-foot circle around me. A blue ‘x’ blinked below my feet. I sensed myself spin, more disconcerted than dizzy. The black circle and white-on-white surroundings offered no points of reference. Finally, a prick of light burned to life in front of me. It spread up, right, down. A laser etching an outline. A rectangle. A doorway. I pushed through.

—

Twenty minutes and a scalding shower later, I sat in an ergonomic recliner in a privacy pod. The tray table on my right held an empty two-pack of Milano cookies, three Toast Chee crackers in crinkled cellophane, and a thirty-two ounce bottle of Power Booster Gold Label, Original Citron Flavor, with a couple sips left. A IV catheter, embedded in my forearm, connected to a digital pump that regulated drips from a banana bag hanging from a pole behind my chair.

An automatic blood pressure cuff gripped my left bicep and threatened to snap my arm in half every fifteen minutes. The tray table on that side was down to allow room for a hovering platform. Dr. Ruth Smallwood, standing atop it, peered into my ear with an otoscope. The surgical mask she wore softened the edges of her voice. “Full facial transference? Not merely derma-kinesis? Orbital, rhinal, mandibular, even buccal structural shift? Fascinating.”

“He also had a hangup about feet.” Mine, incidentally, were unremarkable: blistered from breaking in too many pairs of work shoes and currently submerged in a basin teeming with robo-rafa, artificial fish that scoured my skin for evidence and contaminants. The bots were so thorough that they’d break down any fabric that skimmed the water’s surface. To avoid unwanted hemming, my suit separates had been sealed in bags and sent to the forensic lab for analysis. I was stuck in a pair of “one size fits most” shorts that I hiked up over my hips like mom jeans. Even with the drawstring pulled tight and double-knotted, they threatened to slip off every time I shifted in my seat. Thankfully, I could remain fairly still as a patient. I must’ve grown accustomed to fake fish nibbling at my feet because I no longer jerked involuntarily when they touched my arches.

“Less of a John Woo fan than a Tarantino fan, then.” Dr. Smallwood keyed a sequence into the hover platform’s control pad, maneuvering it to be parallel to the top of my shins, above the fishbowl. A quirk in my examiner’s genetics halted her growth as a pre-schooler. She could’ve been mistaken for a kid playing dress-up, if it weren’t for her naturally graying hair, the crow’s feet barely hiding behind her thick glasses, and her apparent knowledge of ‘90s cinematic auteurs.

“Look past might left ear.” As one hand gestured toward that side of the doctor’s head, the other flashed the otoscope across my eyes. I blinked away a bright white corona.

“And my right ear.” Another gesture. Another flash. More brightness. More blinking.

“Look up.” The tip of the scope nudge up one nostril, then the other.

“Open your mouth and say, ’ahhh’.” Between the mints and snacks, my breath should’ve been bile-free. I hoped.

“Look down.” My gaze started to drop, only to stop abruptly. A sliver of silver caught my attention. I tilted my head to look at my right hand, resting on the arm of the recliner. Half a dozen needles jutted from my fingers. One was embedded in the nail bed of my index finger at a forty-five degree angle.

I flexed my hand, spinning it, studying it. I pressed the back of my hand against the chair’s upholstery and sunk the needles in further.

I couldn’t feel a thing.