The Monsters in Your Neighborhood Read Free Page B

suggestions for improvement that were being ignored.
    Then, very suddenly, the attention of the players was drawn to a place farther away in the park.
    “What was that?” one of the men on the field asked. The camera didn’t pan away from them.
    “What?” the camera operator asked.
    “That sound!” another said as the four of them turned their backs to the camera. “It came from over there.”
    The camera lifted, zoomed in, and then began to shake. “Oh my God!” the camera operator squealed.
    In the distance, across the park, there was a man on the ground. On top of him was a very tall, very bulky . . . thing . He looked like a man, but he was misshapen. One muscular arm was longer than the other and even from the distance his head seemed . . . off somehow.
    Natalie covered her mouth with her hand and stared, unblinking, as the creature reached down and tore the victim’s arm from its socket with a guttural roar that shook the very air around him.
    The soccer players started screaming and running, and the video ended to reveal advertisements of other gruesome footage one could find on YouTube, as well as a handful of cute cat videos.
    Alec shut the laptop case and stared at her.
    Natalie swallowed, trying to find her voice, trying to find any words whatsoever.
    “Well, that explains what happened to the corpse’s arm,” she finally managed to squeak.
    Her boss, the medical examiner Gretchen Grimes, had gone on and on about that during autopsy. About how it wasn’t possible for an arm to be pulled clean off, even though all the evidence pointed to that fact.
    “Gretchen even said to me, ‘What kind of monster would do this to an unarmed homeless man ? ’ ” Natalie whispered. “ ‘What kind of monster?’ ”
    Alec paced the room with a shake of his head. “You know Grimes, she’s always saying things that could be used in television procedurals. I swear that woman thinks she’s on camera at all times.”
    “But we both know that the strength demonstrated on that video is not . . . human,” she said, rubbing her eyes as exhaustion began to make her weak and emotional.
    He hesitated. “Yeah, there is that. So if it was a monster, who was it?”
    She swallowed. “None of ours, I’m pretty sure. The video footage was pretty far away from the event itself, but the body type wasn’t right for anyone in our group.”
    Alec shook his head in frustration. “So if it’s a new monster, how is that possible? I thought we knew all of our kind who live in the city.”
    She shrugged. “Once I sorted through his hoarding and you broke the encryption he used, Blob kept pretty good records. But even he admitted in his notes that it was impossible to keep track of every monster in a city as big as this. People come and go here every day. A monster could pass through one night and be gone the next. And some don’t want to be found. Think about Hyde; he’s been missing for months.”
    Alec flinched. Once Jekyll was killed six months ago, his “brother” Hyde had disappeared off the radar, completely and utterly free to do whatever vile, hedonistic—likely violent—thing he chose.
    “You realize that . . . that . . . the monster on the video . . . well, it looked like a—”
    She clenched her fists. Alec was trying so hard to be gentle about what he wanted to say. It almost made this worse.
    “He looked like a Frankenstein’s monster, a Creature,” she said, filling in the blanks Alec wouldn’t. “I know. It was the crazy arms that did it. And that weird way he moved. But I don’t know how it’s possible. Last I heard, they . . . we were all dead except for me.” She paused and slipped into the one attitude that made her feel better in times like these: snark. “Not that we have a newsletter or something to keep track. Maybe we should have a newsletter. I should write a newsletter. The Creature Feature .”
    Alec stared at her for a minute and then broke into a wide grin.