“Your bones are made of wood!” the old woman cackled, and Johnny recoiled.

Your face is made of wood, he thought. Dark and hard and wrinkled like a walnut. She sure was upset about something. He didn’t know what, but had some ideas. He wasn’t exactly helping little old ladies across 125th.

Were her words an insult, or a curse?

Anyway, it was time to go.

His friend’s apartment would be a good place to hide out. Not a friend exactly, but they were away for the week and wouldn’t mind. He let himself in, got a beer from the fridge, and washed down a couple of his own pills that would help him get to sleep. He stripped down to his boxers and flopped on top of the king-size bed. No one knew he was here. It would be a restful night.

The dream was strange: being chased by not one big goon, but a swarm of tiny little goons. Odd.

He awoke a few hours later in extreme pain.

Alarm bells were going off everywhere: arms, legs, ribs, even his skull. He screamed, but something wrong with his jaw made that sound so horrifically mangled that he could only hyperventilate after that. He tried to raise his arms, to slap what he felt was eating, crawling, digging into him, but something snapped, gave way, and his arms flopped to his sides. What was in those pills? he wondered, even though they’d been his own stash he’d dipped into for days now.

Underneath all the pain was a constant itching, a burrowing, the sensation of things moving inside him. And he couldn’t even move. His jaw felt broken. He turned his head and that was a huge mistake, some cranial tectonic movement bringing fresh agony as microfaults gave way and slipped and sheared. They were crawling over his face. Something was in his bones now, eating, and his last thought was of that woman, that walnut-faced woman…

—

The cops didn’t know what to make of it. Little bite marks everywhere, but really deep, enough to stick a swab in. Every time they tried to move the body, there was another crackle, like rice krispies, and it lost even more shape. What was wrong with this guy’s bones? How were they going to be able to move him?

The rookie noticed a crushed insect under the guy’s hand. He’d thought it was a mosquito since it had made a meal of blood. There was plenty of that to go around. To the captain, who’d had to deal with such things at his house last summer, it looked a lot more like a termite.

Just the thought of those things, chewing away at the frame of his house… He shuddered.