A few years after serving in the Iraq War together, Kat's confidant, Ray, has stopped responding to her letters. Intent on finding him, she treks out into rural Vermont on a bus to the last place she knew he had been. Coming across a small, practically deserted town, Kat encounters a man named Bonner who shows her no hospitality and urges her to get out of the town as soon as possible. Kat refuses to leave before seeing Ray, so when Bonner tries to physically lead her out of the town, she retaliates with her combat training, leaving him on the floor in pain. When Ray finally appears, he asks her to stop and leave. The townspeople have begun watching the ordeal and have prepared themselves with a weighted net and a rifle. Turning back to Bonner, Kat sees him unearth several black, needle-sharp teeth, unhinge his jaw, and dribble pink spittle onto the floor. Bonner lunges at her, and despite her training, it takes a shot with the rifle to subdue him and the net to capture him. Disturbed at what she's witnessed, Kat begins hyperventilating, and needle-sharp teeth erupt from her mouth as well. Kat is subdued and jailed, waking up in a cell back to her normal self. Ray explains that in Iraq, there were stories about people who went through the 'bad hour', where intense emotions cause this otherworldly transformation. What's worse, he explains, is that this disease is contagious, and that is why he stopped reaching out to her. Kat begs to be let out on account of her four-year-old daughter, finally revealing that it is Ray's child as well. The problem is that when her daughter started losing teeth last year, the new ones were abnormal: too long, black, and sharp.