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Fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead, casting their sick yellow light across the processing floor. Cal Reddick stood at the observation window, clipboard forgotten in his hands, watching his workers scatter to dark corners with their lunch pails. Not one of them sat together anymore. Not one of them spoke.
"They're eating it raw now," Dinah Grasscloud said behind him. "Have you noticed?"
He had noticed. Three nights ago, he'd watched Marcus Dent tear into a slab of pork shoulder with his bare teeth, blood running down his chin, eyes fixed on nothing.
"People get strange on night shift." Cal turned from the window. "It's the hours. Throws off your system."
"This isn't that." Dinah's voice stayed level, but her knuckles had gone pale against her own clipboard. "My grandmother called this place hungry ground. Said something bad happened here before the plant. Before the town, even."
Cold air seeped from beneath the door to Cold Storage Three. Cal felt it curling around his ankles, wrong somehow—too sharp, too deliberate.
"The refrigeration units in Three are broken," Dinah continued. "Been broken for a week. But there's frost on the walls. Thick frost."
"I'll call maintenance."
"You won't." She stepped closer, and in the yellow light her face looked drawn, older. "You'll keep running the lines because we're behind quota. You'll keep pretending nothing's wrong because admitting it means admitting you don't know what to do."
Heat flared in his chest. "I've run this plant for eleven years—"
A scream cut through the processing floor. High and ragged, then abruptly choked off.
Both of them ran.
Past the hanging carcasses they sprinted, past the silent workers who had pressed themselves against the walls, past the blood gutters and the bone saws. Through the swinging doors of Cold Storage Three, into air so cold it burned Cal's lungs.
Yancey Holm crouched in the corner, shirtless despite the temperature, his fingernails broken and bleeding where he'd been clawing at frozen beef. Frost clung to his bare skin. His eyes were black and starving and utterly empty.
"Get out," Cal ordered Dinah. "Call the police, call—"
"That won't help." She grabbed his arm, her fingers digging hard. "Cal, listen to me. This is what she warned about. The hunger that never stops. You have to let me—"
"I'll handle it."
Pride. Eleven years of pride. He shook off her grip and walked toward Yancey with his hands raised, voice steady.
"Hey, buddy. Let's get you warmed up, okay? Let's—"
Yancey unfolded. There was no other word for it. His spine cracked and elongated, his jaw stretched wide, and the sound from his throat was not human. Had never been human.
The thing lunged.
Cal hit the floor, cold concrete splitting his lip, and the creature's weight crushed him flat. Its teeth snapped inches from his throat, and the stench of it—rotting meat and winter wind and something older than stone—filled his nose.
"Dinah!" he screamed. "Dinah, help me!"
Her voice rose through the frozen air, words he didn't recognize, sounds pressing back against the cold itself.
The creature hesitated.
"Say it with me," she commanded. "Say it now!"
And Cal, believing at last, opened his mouth and added his voice to hers.
