The dark clouds parted just enough so that the moon cast its light down through the trees. It was a terrible time for a search, the Lieutenant knew, but he had orders to find the missing person.

The report revealed that she was 12 and had been abducted from outside her home on the edge of an East Texas town. What the report failed to mention was the identity of the abductor, but the Lieutenant didn’t need to ask. He’d investigated dozens of cases of disappearances of people from ages 6-60 and they were almost never found alive, and if they were it was never pretty. He prayed for the girls sake that she had died. After all there are things worse than death, things that had been stalking in the shadows and back woods of East Texas and Louisiana for the last few weeks.

The public had their suspicions of bears, loose zoo animals, even a few cries of big foot had been heard, but no one other than the Lieutenant and his superiors knew the truth. It was something far worse, with more numbers…and more legs.