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         The sound of silence is what awakened Hilary Logan.  Quiet was not unusual in the sleepy suburb, but there was always some noise.  Some indication that the world was still rotating.  Dogs barking, sirens, crickets, the occasional car alarm.  But now, as her glow-in-the-dark Big Ben showed six a.m., when things were generally beginning to stir, there was nothing but silence.  She couldn't have said distinctly what it was about the silence that unnerved her, only that it did.
         Uneasy, Hilary rose from bed.  Walking down the hall, she was conscious of every sound she made.  Her footfalls on the hardwood floor echoed through her ears with an unnatural volume.  She came to a door emblazoned with a giant, yellow Do Not Disturb sign punctuated with skull and crossbones.  Opening the door to her eldest son's bedroom, she entered to find Gavin sleeping in his normal fashion, half on the bed, half off, with headphones on.  Satisfied that all was as it should be there, she closed the door and moved down the hall.
         When she went into Zach and Hunter's room, she was still feeling a little on edge.  The eight-year-old Zach was sleeping soundly in Spider-Man pajamas, thumb firmly tucked into his mouth and the family cat, Wordsworth curled at the foot of his bed.  She briefly wondered if it would do any good to remove his thumb from his mouth.  Probably not, she decided.  He would just put it back later.
         On the other side of the room, Hunter was curled up with his teddy bear, bottom sticking up in the air.  His bed lay beneath the window, and as the weather was still chilly yet, Hilary moved to replace the blankets he'd kicked off during the night. 
                As she straightened from tucking him in, she heard a noise break the silence outside.  It was a shuffling sound, like something being dragged.  Hilary moved soundlessly to the side of the window to peek out the side of the closed blinds.  Her heart was beating an anxious staccato inside her chest and for a moment she had the ridiculous fear that her heartbeat might be heard in the silence.  Outside in the darkness, she could see nothing amiss.  In fact, she could see little of anything.  No light shone at all.  Not from the street lamps, not from porch lights, not even lights in the houses of early risers.  Dawn was less than an hour away, yet the entire street seemed swallowed in the dark.
As Hilary prepared to turn away from the window, she caught a movement on the sidewalk.  From the size of the shadow, she knew it was a man, though not a shape that she particularly recognized as belonging to one of her neighbors.  A stranger.  Something about the stranger, the way he moved, frightened her.  She released the blinds and let them fall almost soundlessly back against the window.  Moving quickly, she went back to her room to call the police.  The whole situation was likely innocent, an early morning jogger or the like, but Hilary wasn't going to risk a home invasion and her children's safety.
            She walked with the phone back down the hall.  The sound of the ON button on the cordless phone was like a bullet firing in the stillness.  And the sound of static coming through the line was the hiss of an electric snake. 
Panic was creeping into the pit of her stomach, cold and liquid as she hurried back to the younger boys' room, the phone still clutched in her hand.  Moving back to the window and peeping out the side again, she was greeted by a face looking back at her.  Frozen, Hilary could do nothing but stare at the person looking through the window.  It was a person, but at the same time, it wasn't.  The face was ...disfigured.  The eyes were cloudy, but sharp and focused.  The man's cheeks were ragged and torn, tendrils of skin hanging and sagging.  Lips were gone and several teeth were missing, exposing raw gums and a thick, black tongue.  There were open wounds everywhere skin was exposed.  The man was wearing a shredded Miami Dolphins tee-shirt and matching boxers.  Who burglarized people in their boxer shorts? she thought.  She looked down and saw her hand trembling on the blinds.
              The movement of the blinds had drawn the attention of the man outside.  When Hilary looked back, he was staring right at her.  Alerted to her presence, he put a dirty, torn hand to the glass.  Two fingers of his left hand were missing, and there were shards of broken glass littering his palm.  As he moved his hand over the window, the sound of glass scraping glass made her hair stand on end.  There was a trail of dirt and blood in its wake.  Hilary couldn't make her feet move, couldn't take her eyes away from the man at the window.  Then his face twitched, and she knew he smiled at her.  And he was gone.
              She stood prone for a moment, trying to find her breath.  Fear was a live thing for her now, a beast with jagged claws and gnashing teeth.  She clutched the phone to her chest and cocked her head, listening.  The absurd thought came to her that this would be a time when Paul would have come in handy.  But he was probably off on some island paradise screwing her gynecologist right about now.  The panicked laugh that threatened to rise was quickly squelched when she heard that same scraping noise coming from her bedroom window down the hall.  She moved leaden feet past the prone figures of her sleeping children down the hall to her own bedroom. 
            Standing in the doorway she could make out the same silhouette that had appeared to her only moments ago.  The hand was pressed against the window feeling all around.  Before she could scarce take a breath, the hand reared back and tore through the double-paned window, taking with it on its return journey the closed blinds and leaving in return a calling card of ragged gray flesh and clotted blood.
            The hand had returned a second time, now with a mate before Hilary could find the voice inside her to scream.  The figure had crawled halfway through the window before she realized that her scream was little more than a guttural croak.  The phone against her breast still sang its lifeless, electric tune as she clutched it with a white-knuckled grip.  The phone had suddenly become a talisman for Hilary Logan.  Something tangible to connect her to a world that had stopped turning and was fast becoming engulfed by something dark and terrible.
              Before the man-creature had completed his sojourn through the window and into Hilary's world, another appeared.  Then two more.  The fifth and sixth creatures she recognized as the couple down the street, the ones with the yappy Pomeranian that always chased Wordsworth.  In life they had been pleasant people, if a bit cordial.  In not-death, they were gruesome parodies of suburban comfort.  The woman's surgically applied permanent eyeliner was still in place, but the eyelid was torn almost off and listed heavily to the left.  The jaw hung limp like a rusty hinge.  Clotted blood caked the expensive salon lowlights.  The woman-creature still wore her house shoes.  Hilary recognized them as J. Crew. 
            As the first creature made its way through the jagged window, the two not-neighbors struggled through.  The first looked around as though it were confused as to the purpose for the trip.  But upon spotting Hilary standing in the doorway, it regained its motivation quickly.  The thing let out a broken sobbing moan that froze the blood in her veins.  With a speed that belied its not-dead appearance, it pounced on her.  Shock and disbelief had nullified any fight-or-flight instinct she might have had.  There were only raw, animal sounds as the not-man began gnawing and tearing at her delicate, living flesh. And as silence surrounded Hilary Logan, she stretched a hand down the hallway toward the door that was opening to reveal tiny bare feet and a low-swinging teddy bear.