I looked around the street; our car had hit a tree just a block from Ingrid’s house, and the street was full of people and other cars, all on their way home from the town meeting, all of them frozen in shock. I jogged a few steps in the direction the monster had gone, still reeling from the accident, and saw that people in that direction were still screaming and shying away from something I couldn’t see. The monster was still there, it was just … invisible, somehow, to people who were too far away from it. I sprinted after it as fast as I could, desperate to catch up, but the town was small, and I reached the end of it in just a few blocks. The monster was gone. With no people left to see it, I had no way to track it. And I had no idea how to find it because everything I’d thought I knew about it was wrong. Jessica’s death had seemed so different from the others, and I’d been certain that Officer Glassman was lying about the “bigfoot,” and yet here it was. There was no supernatural gas leak, there was an actual monster with actual claws.
