The Nimble Man by Christopher Golden, Thomas E. Sniegoski

patient, that she'd be right down, almost as if they were ordinary
callers at her door and that the city was not being besieged by hellish
occurrences fit for the Biblical book of Revelations.
    Once more Eve gripped his arm, but this time her touch was
gentle.
    "You remind me," she said. "But maybe that's
not so terrible. Hard as it is, you also remind me that I'm not alone."
    Clay smiled and then there were footsteps on the stairs
inside and the sound of the chain being slid off the lock, and the door was
pulled open from within. In the woman's hands was a white business card that
had once been crisp and new but had now been bent and had its edges made ragged
by Mrs. Ferrick's anxiety. According to Squire, Doyle had given her the card
years earlier. She had lent him little credence then, but Clay figured recent
events had made her more open-minded.
    "He sent you? Mr. Doyle?" she asked hopefully.
    "Yes. You're Mrs. Ferrick?" Eve asked.
    She nodded. "Can you . . . can you help Daniel?"
    Clay felt for her. This woman's world had started to fall
apart long before the sun had disappeared from the sky. "We can try. But
it might be better if we talked about it inside."
    Mrs. Ferrick glanced upward and then looked around her
neighborhood, the landscape cast in a crimson gloom, and she nodded. "Of
course, I'm sorry." She stepped away from the door. "Please, come in."
     
     
    Danny Ferrick lay on his bed, staring at his ceiling with
headphones on. His MP3 player wasn't working for some reason and so he had to
resort to old CDs. He had a mix on at the moment that he'd burned himself, with
The Misfits, Primus, Taking Back Sunday . . . all kinds of stuff, including
some old school Zeppelin. If he could have gotten away with it with his mother
just down the hall he would have dug through his closet to get the small bag of
weed he'd scored the previous week and lit one up. He wasn't as into weed as a
lot of the guys he knew — he couldn't call any of them friends, really
— but the times he had smoked, it had taken away some of the weight that
he felt pressing on him all the time. Right now, he would have liked to smoke
some weed because he thought it might kill the urge to itch at his skull, just
above his temples. He tried desperately to ignore the feeling, to ignore the
way his sickly yellow skin had reddened around the hard protrusions on his
head.
    Not just reddened. He was just pretending to himself, being
a pussy about it. The redness and swelling around those bumps had been just the
beginning. Now the skin had begun to split.
    His heart beat wildly in his chest and, though he tried to
force himself to pay attention to the music, to listen to something, anything
else, he could not. He was terrified and excited in equal measure. What the
hell did it mean? The sky was turning red. Mosquitoes had eaten the neighbors'
cat. Those kids he'd seen throwing up maggots. And it had rained blood. Blood. He
knew it was because he had tasted it, just thrust out his tongue and let it
drizzle into his mouth.
    He shuddered now, there on his bed, the back of his head
cradled upon his pillow. Why had he done that? It was disgusting. Completely.
    Yet not completely. Not really. His shades were drawn but he
didn't need to be able to see out the windows to know what was happening. He
had seen enough. The world was going to Hell. Or Hell was coming to Earth. It
wasn't really a long stretch for him to begin imagining that what was going on
outside and what was happening with his own body were connected. If that was
Hell out there, then maybe Hell was coming out in him as well.
    Chillax , he told himself. Just derail that thought
train . But he could not.
    How else to explain the way his skin continued to harden to
rough leather, or the way his fingernails had become thick and sharp. Even now
he reached up to idly scratch at the dry, cracking skin around the protuberance
at his right temple. Before he even realized he was doing it he had peeled a
strip of