John Langan is the author of the novel House of Windows and several stories, including "Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers," which appeared in my anthology Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, and "How the Day Runs Down," which appeared in The Living Dead. Both of those stories also appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, as has most of his other fiction. A collection of most of Langan's work to date, Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters, appeared in late 2008 and was named a finalist for this year's Stoker Award.
This story, which is original to this anthology, is the tale of a quartet of Iraq war veterans who were the only survivors of an encounter with a monstrous, blood-drinking creature during the 2004 Battle of Fallujah. "The story began with its title," Langan said. "A couple of months later, I was watching an interview with an Iraq war veteran who was discussing having been in a Hummer that had been struck by an IED. He described being pinned by the Hummer's flipping over so that he was lying on his back, staring up at the sky. That told me what the story was going to be."