Prologue
Chicago, Ill, 1950
Several squad cars, racing against time. There had been an Incursion…
At the McCoy place.
All of the officers racing to the house, owed their careers to John J. McCoy Sr.
Officer Joe Kelly, in particular, owed everything he was to Officer McCoy. The man had been Senior Partner to Kelly when he was a green Rookie Cop.
Now, McCoy's house was invaded, his life, and the lives of his family, at risk.
These…Incursions…had started after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after the A-Bombs had ended WWII…
Now, the entire world was paying the price…
The experts had said that something had weakened the fabric of reality, weakened the boundaries between Reality, and…
Other realities, other dimensions…
Every once in a while, Reality's fabric would tear, and…things…would slip through.
Those moments were called Incursions, and what slipped through during these incursions was always terrifying.
Men spoke of bodies…appendages…eyes in the wrong places, everything twisted out of true.
Worst of all, those…things came with a ravenous hunger.
And teeth.
The only good thing that could be said to come out of this was that national differences had been put aside in the face of this world-wide threat; the Soviet Union, and Red China too, were both plagued by these selfsame Incursions.
There was no room left anywhere for making war on other nations. All resources were going into combatting these…extra planar threats…
So…
An Incursion, at the house of Officer John J. McCoy Senior wasn't something to laugh about.
His wife…his kids…
Kelly, Adams, Leroux, and Stephens, the first four on the scene, were confronted by a horrifying sight.
The light flaring through the windows of the house were like no light the officers had ever seen.
Black…
The light was…black, somehow, even though it lit up the inside of the house just fine.
Kelly swallowed nervously, then kicked the front door in.
Dead bodies everywhere…
Rose McCoy, still wearing her apron, lying there, eyes staring sightlessly, two of her children-eight year old Erin, and three year old Donny-dead by her side.
A child's scream caught Kelly's attention.
"The living room!" he ran, the other three following…
Horror greeted them there.
The rent in space was there, and coming through that tear…
Tentacles, like that of a monstrous octopus, but covered in what looked like fine quills.
One tentacle had John Senior. He was struggling, fighting to get free; his eyes on the other tentacle.
That one had a child.
Little Jack…
Kelly stood there a second, assessing the situation.
Both tentacles were close to the hole in space.
We can save one or the other. But not both.
Shit…
John Senior apparently knew…
"Save my boy!" he cried. "Save Jack!"
Kelly nodded; looked for something to use as a bludgeoning or stabbing weapon.
Firing a gun around children was not something he wanted to do.
He saw the kitchen knife-the big one used for carving roasts-on the floor, snatched it up; just in time to see the tentacle pull John into the hole; and John McCoy Senior was gone, into the void…
Won't let that happen to Jack…
All four officers jumped on the remaining tentacle, Kelly stabbing repeatedly with that kitchen knife, the others making do with batons.
Up close, Kelly realized the quills studding the tentacles weren't quills at all. They were stalks, some with disturbingly human-looking eyes at the ends; others with hungry-looking mouths studded with fangs, dripping with blood.
He stabbed again and again, black, noxious-smelling blood flying; then, just before everything went tipping off into the blacker-than-black void, the thing let go of the boy, and everyone staggered backwards.
One minute later, the hole closed up, and everything was normal again.
Normal…
Joe Kelly looked down at the boy he held in his arms.
Jack McCoy, almost ten years old, and the sole survivor of an Incursion.
Everyone else was dead.
Or drawn into that other reality…
He sighed.
Death might be a kinder fate than that.
He checked Jack carefully. The teeth he had seen had been bloody. Someone had been bitten…
The bite marks were all over the boy, arms legs, neck, hands…
Washington will probably have him put under quarantine. Just in case he gets infected…
He had heard stories about people who got infected, how they changed, become other than human.
Those were quickly killed.
The word the experts used was, euthanasia…
The thought of that being done to Little Jack was almost too much to bear…
Please…Officer Kelly prayed. Don't let that happen to Jack…