Bad Moon Rising

EPILOGUE

Midnight in Hell

(1)

The SERT Tactical Team came in from the east in a pair of Bell Jet Rangers. They made a full circuit of the town, using nightscopes when they could and standard binoculars where there was too much fire. There were over a hundred buildings burning, cars overturned, corpses everywhere. Lieutenant Simons, the team leader, had spent two tours in Iraq; this looked worse. Before his advance team was even on the ground he called it in as a possible terrorist attack by forces unknown. That rang bells all the way to the governor’s residence in Harrisburg, and he was on the phone to Homeland within two minutes.

The governor declared a state of emergency before the first SERT chopper set down in the high school playground, and by the time Lieutenant Simons had deployed his Tac-Teams, Homeland had issued an elevated Terror Alert.

Each Tac-Team had four men, all of them in woodland camouflage battle dress and tactical body armor; each team leader and his coverman carried the HK MP-5 9mm SMG, the point man had a Glock .40 caliber pistol and a ballistic shield, and the fourth man backed their play with a short-barreled Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun. They were fighting fit and elite, each one of them pumped with adrenaline and ready to take down any armed resistance.

But apart from the fires and the towers of smoke, the streets of Pine Deep were as silent and still as the grave. For the first twenty minutes all they found was death.

The next wave of choppers swept in from Trenton and Philly, their blades scything through the towering columns of smoke that rose from the town, and they skirted the bigger wall of smoke that was an almost featureless gray screen across the forested hills beyond the town. The state forest raged out of control and the fingers of flame seemed eager to reach up and touch the helicopters.

The news choppers got there first, having been scrambled when the live feeds went down. They beat the first of the police units by ten minutes and so were able to tape nearly all of the rescue operation. Even the police were already on their way when Joe Bob Briggs called them from a gas station telephone in Black Marsh. He’d met up with screenwriters Susco and Gunn and the three of them had rowed a fishing boat past the smoking ruins of the bridge and called from the first phone they found.

Residents of Crestville and Black Marsh had reported the blasts to 911 and local news; planes in flight had radioed in descriptions of the widespread fires. Boats of every description pushed off from Crestville and Black Marsh, and an armada of them cruised up the Delaware, disgorging press, cops, EMTs, and lots of rubberneckers.

Police from the neighboring towns and the regular Staties were ordered to hang back well outside the perimeter of the town proper. Orders had come from the governor; the National Guard was being mobilized and Homeland would take over as soon they had a team on the ground.

The SERT teams moved out into the streets, hugging the shadows, sticking close and low to the buildings, each team cross-spotting for the other. As tough and hardened as these men were, what they saw began to wear on them very quickly. Buildings lay in ruins. Bodies littered the streets. Then there was movement off to the left and Simons held up his closed fist and the team froze, weapons shifting to cover the pale-faced figure that moved out of the smoke. It was a woman holding a dead child in her arms. Even from across the street Lieutenant Simons could tell that the baby was dead—nothing that twisted and broken could, please God, still be alive. The woman was white with shock, her eyes hollow, and she walked with a mindless shuffling gait.

Simons detached two men to get her and bring her over and down behind cover. She allowed herself to be nearly carried out of the street; she made no sound, registered no trace of recognition.

And that’s how it started. First her, then a pair of little girls and their dog climbed out through a cellar window of the library. A small family came out of an alley, the father holding a golf club like a weapon until the SERT team members made him put it down. The father looked at the club and then began to cry.

“We have multiple survivors,” Simons called in. “No hostiles visible. We need backup and med teams on the ground right now.”

From then on choppers landed one after another in parking lots and in fields. The sounds of their rotors brought more and more people out of hiding, and they staggered out of their houses, their faces slack with shock and black with soot, their mouths trembling, eyes rimmed with red, minds too numb to even speak. Dozens of people were clearly drugged, but how and by what was not yet known. Some of the tourists and residents rushed up to the rescue teams, heedless of the guns and the warnings, and clung to the police as they wept. By the time the first team reached the hospital parking lot, some of the officers were weeping, too; the rest had faces like stone masks but with eyes that burned as hot as open furnace doors. If there had been any terrorists in Pine Deep, there would have been a second bloodbath.

It took Simons almost forty minutes to find someone who was lucid enough to tell the story of what happened, but the story turned out to be impossible, just a psychotic delusion. Monsters, vampires, and zombies. The witness was a big man, a blues singer who identified himself as Mem Shannon, who was in town for a Festival gig, and though the man didn’t appear to be as dazed or stoned as some of the survivors, his story was ridiculous. By the time Shannon described how he beat a vampire’s head in with his electric guitar, Simons had already tuned him out and was looking for a more credible witness. But everyone who could talk told the same story, or some version of it.

Two SERT Tac-Teams entered the hospital as if they were entering a combat hot zone, which was not far from the truth, although by dawn there was no heat left. Inside the hospital everything was cold: the building, the bodies, the blood splashed high on the walls. The team made their way in through the ER entrance, past a wrecked car that had been driven right into the building. They saw spent shotgun shells and 9mm casings; they saw bullet-riddled bodies. They followed the trail of bloody footprints that led away from each successive battle site, down the hall, into a stairwell choked with the dead, up the stairs and unerringly to where they found a room filled with patients and injured staff members.

Until that point Jonatha had been in control of her emotions, but when she saw the first SERT officer appear in the doorway to the examination room, she lost it. She laid her head down on Newton’s lap and wept like a child. Newton, his eyes dreamy with the morphine one of the surviving nurses had given him, feebly stroked her hair.

The SERT team swept the hospital and found fifty-six living people and three times that many dead; many more were unaccountably missing. Some of the survivors had barricaded themselves in storage rooms or utility closets in remote corners of the hospital; ten were in the chapel, clutched together behind the altar; and the rest were the survivors of Jonatha’s group. The stories they told were frantic, chaotic, and often contradictory except for those people who had been with Jonatha. Everyone in her group talked about terrorists.

Jonatha had conjured the story and coached them all in the specifics, clearly explaining what the consequences would be for their lives and credibility if they even breathed the word vampire. After everything that had happened, the people were more than willing to buy her fiction and by the fifth or sixth retelling, most of them actually believed it. It was easier to believe.

Newton was evacuated along with a handful of others who were seriously wounded. A Medivac chopper flew him to Doylestown Hospital and he was in surgery fifteen minutes after touchdown. The doctors had to sew up and reinflate his left lung, reset four ribs, more or less rebuild his sternum, and treat him for countless abrasions, contusions, and a dangerous dose of shock. When they asked him what had happened, he muttered dazedly about vampires taking over the world, and the staff all smiled to each other about that.

Jonatha stayed in town and tried to explain how important it was to send a team immediately out to Dark Hollow. She was ignored at first, but then she found the right spur and dug it deeply into their collective flanks. She told them that Dark Hollow was the base camp of the terrorists, and that the leader of the group might still be there. She told them that a local policeman had gone out there with a detective from Philadelphia, and that a second Philly cop had been murdered out there the day before. They had uncovered the terrorist plot, but by the time they knew what they were up against, the lines of communication had been cut.

It was a good story, something to react to, something to get behind. The SERT teams saddled up, eager for the chance to actually find some of the sick bastards who had committed the atrocities, to rescue some fellow officers, and maybe even to get a little payback.

Seventy minutes after the first choppers had landed in town, three helicopters lifted off—the two SERT Bell Rangers and a heavier medevac bird—and flew southeast at top speed. Fire planes were already ordered from every field in three counties, but the Tac-Teams had to go in while the forest was still ablaze. The closer they got to the fires the more the rescue team began to lose hope of finding anyone alive. They found a big field by a dilapidated old house and set down there. The front porch was charred and as they moved past they saw the remains of a corpse on the porch, and Lieutenant Simons knew that, from Jonatha’s description, they had just seen the body of Detective Sergeant Frank Ferro.

The Tac-Teams were trained to move fast and they passed down the forest trail at great speed but with almost no sound. Night-vision glasses painted the landscape a lurid green, but as they neared the burning swamp area they switched back to standard eyesight—the fires provided more than enough light.

As they enter the clearing, Simons stopped, his troops fanning out to either side of him.

“Oh my God,” he whispered. His shock was reflected on the faces of each officer and medic. This was like nothing any of them had ever seen.

The fires in the clearing had died down from lack of fuel, the bushes having burned down to the mud and sizzled out. Wisps of smoke drifted up from charred corpses and mingled with the predawn mist to create a surreal landscape. There were thousands of corpses. Thousands.

And in the middle of it all, there were four living people.

Val was the only one conscious. She sat in a huddle, clutching a broken and bloated arm close to her body. Crow had passed out and his hands were icy and slick with sweat. Sarah Wolfe looked like she was sleeping, but as soon as the medics touched her she began to scream—her eyes were still closed, but she screamed and screamed for nearly three minutes. Mike was in worse shape. His body was crisscrossed with many deep cuts, each of which was caked with blood and dirt; some of the cuts were already red and hot with infection. His eyes were strangely discolored—blue, flecked with red, ringed with gold—and the pupils were fixed and dilated, his breathing shallow and rapid. One of the boy’s hands was badly broken, and there was evidence of bleeding from his ears.

The medics worked like heroes and two-man teams hustled everyone out on stretchers, running through the woods as fast as safety would allow toward the waiting choppers.

“Will he be all right?” Val begged one of the medics.

“I’m sure he will,” the medic lied.

They found the body of Philadelphia police detective Vince LaMastra lying in a bloody pool, his dead hand clutched tightly around the ankle of another corpse. Simons stared down at the big detective’s body and tried to understand how such a huge hole could have been torn through the man’s muscular stomach. The wound did not look like any kind of gunshot wound, but it was too rough for a knife. Val was standing beside him and she surprised Simons by kneeling and bending forward to kiss LaMastra on the forehead. She did it gently, as if she were saying good night to a sleeping child. The act touched Simons and his eyes burned with tears.

The man whose ankle was caught in LaMastra’s grip had obviously been killed by some kind of weapon, and Simons was startled to find a broken Japanese sword hilt near the body. His surprise doubled and then tripled when he took a closer look at the face of the dead man. As impossible as it seemed, he looked exactly like Karl Ruger, the man who had been the focus of the manhunt the month before, but whose body was stolen from the Pine Deep morgue. Simons had to force himself to shelve his wonderment so he could continue with the search.

When it was clear that there were no additional survivors to discover or identify, Simons ordered a stretcher for Val.

“I’m pregnant,” she said as they secured her to the board. They promised to be careful.

While they worked, Simons squatted down next to her, pulling off his Kevlar helmet. “What in God’s name happened here?” asked the corporal in an awed whisper.

Val looked at him for a moment. She opened her mouth to speak, but then shook her head.

“I don’t know,” she said.

(2)

It took two days to put out all the fires, though water was pumped onto the buildings for much longer. Nearly a week passed before all of the survivors were found and counted. Some of them had been hiding in root cellars under their farmhouses; others in any shelter they could find. A dozen farmers and their families had crowded into a big shed that was piled with huge sacks of garlic bulbs. The entire congregation of a synagogue had boarded themselves up in the sanctuary. Over a hundred people, mostly teenagers, had been herded into the barn at the Haunted Hayride by a couple of actresses and a stuntman. A Bucks County blues band, Kindred Spirit, and their entire audience hid in the pool house at the country club and for some reason no one was even injured. A group of moviegoers had barricaded themselves in a drive-in projection room, and on the college campus a bunch of students from the theater department had survived by covering themselves in fake wounds and hiding among the dead. Those were the kinds of stories that emerged as the days went on.

But not all of these stories ended well. Four stock boys, three checkers, and half a dozen customers had tried hiding in the walk-in refrigerator of a ShopSmart, and though they survived the night, they were trapped in the cold darkness and found two days too late. Several people had apparently fled into the woods but were killed by smoke inhalation. Three teenage girls were found locked in an old 1950s bomb shelter that was sealed by a combination lock they apparently couldn’t open, and they never turned on the air filtration system.

There were other stories of survival and disaster, and with each day the tallies of both living and dead rose. When the official counts were finally checked and rechecked a dozen times, the survivors numbered 6,532. The death toll stood at a staggering 11,641, making it one of the worst disasters in U.S. history. Nearly two-thirds of all the people in town for the festival had died—a mix of residents, tourists, entertainers, and reporters.

Somewhere, no one ever discovered where, there were eighty-four people missing, among them Lois Wingate, the mother of the boy rescued in the forest. No trace of them was ever found by the authorities; no remains were ever discovered.

Over time the hundreds of forensics investigators from dozens of local, state, federal, and military agencies put together a clear picture of what happened. Blood tests showed that a large number of the survivors had ingested dangerously high doses of LSD, haloperidol, PCP, and other hallucinogens. Bags of tainted candy corn and other treats were found in the pockets of many of these people. They found even larger quantities of these drugs in the town’s water supply, in beer kegs, even in locally bottled well water. Autopsies revealed that a number of the victims died from massive overdoses of these drugs, particularly among the children; another group had lapsed into comas. It didn’t help matters much that haloperidol was known for disrupting memories, so some survivors had no recall of anything happening.

They found weapons caches, and background checks allowed the authorities to tie the weapons to over a dozen militant groups ranging from the Aryan Brotherhood to Al Qaeda. They found anti-Semitic literature that espoused a violent call to arms to stop the ‘Jewish takeover of America.’ They even found Internet downloads of schematics for making a low-yield dirty bomb—this in the garage of a Syrian doctor who was killed at the hospital. In short they found absolute proof of a hotbed of terrorism right there in Small Town, America. Homeland jumped on this and released it to the press in an attempt to counter the wild stories of vampires and monsters. It was a far more reasonable explanation for the witness reports, and for the most part it worked.

Vic Wingate would have been pleased. Setting up that smokescreen had taken years to plan and implement.

Depending on who was looking at the evidence, and how much of the evidence he was looking at, it either made perfect sense or no sense at all. That, too, would have been fine with Vic. He had left good leads to follow and some that were obvious red herrings. He wanted misdirection and that’s exactly what he got. Except in transcripts of eyewitness reports—which were always privately discredited by physicians and psychologists—the word “vampire” never made it into any official report. If it did, it was on an eyes-only level, and at that level no one was particularly chatty.

Even so, Homeland’s press blackout did little good, so eventually the story got out. Reporters descended on Pine Deep like an invading army, and once entrenched they could not be budged for weeks. Nightline began nightly reports from Pine Deep that went on for forty-six days. Every detail of information released by the authorities was minutely picked over and endlessly debated by experts in fields ranging from pharmacology to international politics. Every person in town was interviewed over and over again. Every avenue of investigation was explored with unflagging enthusiasm.

No army of terrorists was ever discovered, though some of the less credible terrorist organizations tried to take credit for the catastrophe. That at least gave the current administration someone to shoot at.

When the press found out that the body of Ruger, the infamous Cape May Killer, was discovered at the scene of the Dark Hollow slaughter, that hyped things up again. Just what his involvement had been was never determined, and the coroner’s report was sealed by order of Homeland Security.

The official story, given to a prime-time audience by the president, was that a small domestic terrorist cell had been formed by Vic Wingate, Karl Ruger, and Kenneth Boyd. Drug money financed the cell and it received support of various kinds from other terrorist organizations around the world. Wingate and Ruger had known ties to white supremacist organizations, so overall this was seen as “terrorism from within,” a sound-bite-friendly phrase that got great coverage. The president saw this as a clear sign that America “must increase its vigilance within our own borders” and “never back down even in the face of great personal harm” and “that every citizen must join with him in responding appropriately.” It was not the worst lie of that administration, but it was close. When another U.S. carrier battle group was dispatched to the Middle East as part of the appropriate response, even the president’s usual critics applauded the action. At the time.

The government breathed a sigh of relief that the Official Story had been successfully swallowed because of the collective gullibility of the people. But the investigators in the government were still deeply afraid because they knew they were lying; they really had no idea what had happened in Pine Deep and they were terrified that it would happen again.

Only a handful of people knew the full and complete story, and one of them wrote it down and waited for just the right moment to spring it on the world.

(3)

One year later, on the anniversary of the Pine Deep Massacre, Willard Fowler Newton published his first book. It was called Hellnight: The Truth behind the Destruction of Pine Deep; and it told the true story of what had happened in the town from an insider’s point of view. He wisely changed many of the names. Crow and Val were downplayed in the story and their later actions ascribed to townsfolk who had died—a literary license that created new heroes for the public. Mike Sweeney was not mentioned at all, and his role in the story was given to Brandon Strauss, who would forever be remembered as the dhampyr in the Pine Deep catastrophe, and who was one of the eighty-four people still unaccounted for.

The book was not a sensationalized piece of writing, not like the dozen or so terrorist-themed books punched out by tabloid writers for the hungry paperback crowd. If anything, Hellnight was understated, the prose a little dry. The book didn’t just chronicle the events of that one night, but instead presented a backstory that jumped decades and even centuries into the past. Newton’s book did not focus on white supremacists, psychedelic hallucenations, or mass hysteria.

Newton told a monster story.

The immediate result was a media outcry and a universal panning of the book by every critic in the country. Within a day of the first reviews Newton was fired from the Black Marsh Sentinel.

Newton took the backlash stoically. He no longer cared what his editor thought, and he didn’t give a damn what the critics wrote or said. In the first two weeks Hellnight sold out its modest first printing. The small publishing house that had bought the book—the forty-third Newton had approached—hammered out a second printing, this time putting one hundred thousand copies on the shelves, and in a little over ten days those shelves had been swept clean. By Christmas of that year, Hellnight was into its fifth printing and it showed no signs of slowing down. It leapt to the top of the nonfiction best-seller list and nothing seemed to be able to shift it until well into the spring. During this time some of the townspeople began coming out in support of the book—a few at first, and then more and more as the book’s fame and topic rekindled a whole new interest in the town. Suddenly everyone was talking about vampires. The Sci-Fi Channel was the first to do a special on the town and its haunted history, and soon every basic cable station with a van and a steadycam was producing their own. Reporters who had previously mocked Hellnight were rushing their own books to print.

The government very vocally denied that any of the events in Newton’s book happened and saying so publicly was tantamount to issuing a mandate for conspiracy theorists to shout “cover-up!” This was further fueled when fragments of video footage from the first few moments of the massacre began appearing on the Internet; officials again denied their authenticity, but the story persisted.

There were some odd cultural side effects of this new notoriety. The word dhampyr came into popular usage and even, in one of those pop-culture quirks, became the word to describe an up-and-coming executive who was likely to replace a well-seated CEO. A band called Missing 84 had a modest hit with a song called “Haunt Me” that was later covered by the blond gal from American Idol and it hit the number three spot on Billboard.

Did the public actually believe the story? Did they truly believe in vampires? Psychologists and sociologists went head to head over that for months. The consensus was that people believed what they wanted to believe, and vampires, it seemed, were what they wanted to believe. It was like the UFO craze of the eighties and nineties. Still, the sales of garlic rose steadily all through that year and well into the next, and in some rural areas, never quite dropped back to normal.

Newton and his fiancée, Dr. Jonatha Corbiel, a noted folklorist from the University of Pennsylvania, were regulars on Oprah and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno; Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert got a lot of mileage out of the story. Newton’s scarred and grimly smiling face appeared on every magazine cover from Fortean Times to Newsweek. Fifteen movie companies courted him for the movie rights to the book. Newton hired a particularly predatory agent who negotiated an excruciating contract that left Newton with extraordinary artistic control over the project, and gave him a check that was so astounding that Newton had it copied and framed for his office. When the book finally went into paperback release, thickened by a new chapter on the reconstruction of the town, it started out as a bestseller and just simply stayed there. His second book, Ghost Road Blues, was a biography of the now legendary Bone Man. The film rights to that became the subject of a bidding war eventually won by Don Cheadle, who planned to direct and star in the picture.

When the Hellnight movie came out the following Halloween, two years after the massacre, it opened nationwide on 3,144 screens and had the twelfth biggest opening weekend in movie history. Newton was delighted that they got Jason Alexander to play him in the film. Jonatha found it absurd that Beyoncé was signed to play her, the actress being nearly a foot shorter. The hunky young soap opera actor who played Brandon—local newspaper delivery boy and eventual slayer of the monster—parlayed his movie role into a three-picture deal that ultimately made him a big screen star. In later years he would generously tell E! that it was his role in Hellnight—The Movie that gave him his first good role. It would have amused Ferro and LaMastra, Newton mused, that their parts were played respectively by Denzel Washington and Owen Wilson who, though they did fine jobs in their roles, were as unlike the two cops as Beyoncé was unlike Jonatha. It made a hell of a movie, though, with a great blues soundtrack by Mem Shannon and Eddie Clearwater—both of who had been in town that terrible night.

As the books and the film became famous, newspapers tried every wheedling trick in their repertoire to try and discover the true of identities of craft store owner “Jessie Hawkins,” and local farmer “Mary Perkins.” None of them ever succeeded. The town hall had burned down, more than half the townsfolk were dead, and none of the residents interviewed after the release of the book seemed to have a clue as to who these people really were, or had been. It was often speculated that they were just ciphers, characters blended from several sources to give the book a point of focus. After a long time, the newspapers gave up and went in search of fresher news.

Malcolm Crow and Val Guthrie were happy with the fiction and wanted no part of the celebrity.

BK and Billy Christmas didn’t spend much time with Crow after that night. They buried a lot of their friends after the massacre and after the funerals they drifted. And on one drunken evening when BK and Billy were together down in Philly, staring into their beers, Billy said, “I’m good if we never talk about that shit again.”

BK nodded. “Works for me.” Nor did they, though it privately haunted each of them because it made the world fit wrong.

The surviving celebrities stopped returning Crow’s calls when he kept trying to apologize. Val figured that Crow had upped everyone’s therapy bills by several hundred percent. Acting in horror films is one thing, living one is a bit different; eventually Crow let it go.

In took four years for the whole Hellnight hullabaloo to settle down. By then rebuilding of the town was well under way. Since the governor had declared the town a disaster area, a decision supported by the White House and FEMA, the surviving residents were able to obtain federal funds with which to rebuild and restart their lives. Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp did a Farm Aid concert there one year and that helped a lot as well. After an event that that seemed certain to destroy the town for good, Pine Deep began coming back. The notoriety of the book and movie helped enormously. Sarah Wolfe was elected mayor a year after her husband’s death and ran unopposed; and working with a team of investors and corporate donors, she rebuilt the town’s economy and partnered with Rachel Weinstock to acquire funding for the Saul Weinstock Memorial Wing of the Pinelands Hospital. Sarah did not, however, reopen the Haunted Hayride. It remains abandoned to this day.

Pine Deep, even in its half-rebuilt state, became the place to visit. Souvenirs such as bricks from the dynamited buildings became hot novelty items; authentic Pine Deep garlic oil was a top seller. The bottom line was that the town itself was coming back bit by bit, brick by brick, life by life.

By then Newton was comfortably wealthy and living in a restored New Orleans antebellum mansion with his wife and their baby girl, whose name was Valerie. The house was set back into the lush countryside in St. Martinville, not too many miles from where Jonatha had grown up. The estate had a wall and a security gate and there was always a guard on patrol. Always.

On a spring morning five years after the burning of Pine Deep, a Lexus with Pennsylvania plates passed through the gates and drove the winding quarter-mile to the house. Newton and Jonatha saw the car coming and were there with smiles and hugs as the passengers got out. Then all had a lazy picnic under the pecan trees.

There were seven of them. Newton and Jonatha sat in cane chairs the servants had brought down for them, and little Valerie tottered around behind twins with black hair and blue eyes. The twins, a boy and a girl, were four-and-a-half years old, and their names were Henry and Faith. Their mother sprawled in a lounge chair and she was hugely pregnant. She wore a floral-pattern sundress and her long legs were tanned and pretty. Her husband sat on the deck of the redwood picnic table and kept his eye on the kids, who were throwing pieces of sandwich bread at the ducks. Butterflies flitted placidly among the bougainvillea and ground orchids, and the pecan trees cast them all in cool shade.

Malcolm Crow bit into a piece of boudin and washed it down with lemonade that had cherries and mint leaves in it. He looked older than five years should have made him, but his mouth was still prone to smiling, and he called the extra creases in his face laugh lines. He wore an ancient Phillies cap and a sweatshirt with an R. Crumb picture of Blind Lemon Jefferson on the front.

Without glancing away from the running children, Newton said: “How is he?” Newton never needed to specify who he was.

“About the same,” Crow said after a few moments.

“Has he decided about college yet?”

“Nope.” A yellow jacket landed on Crow’s arm; he blew on it to chase it away.

“Did you tell him that Jonatha and I would pay his way? Anywhere he wanted to go?”

“Uh-huh.” Crow munched a cookie. “He’s just not sure he wants to go.”

“I don’t think he will go,” said Val. “He just isn’t interested.”

Jonatha shook her head. “College would be good for him. He’s smart enough.”

“That has nothing to do with it.”

“But it would give him a chance to meet other people, to get away from that place.”

Val took a sip of her lemonade. “I don’t think he wants to get away.”

“That’s insane, though!” said Jonatha. “After all he’s been through, why would he want to stay?”

Val and Crow exchanged a brief glance, but said nothing.

“Hey,” said Newton, changing the conversational tack, “have you guys given any more thought to moving down here?”

“Uh-huh,” said Val.

“And…?”

“Gets awful hot here during the summers,” Crow said. “Makes it hard for Shamu here to get around.” He winked at his wife, who mouthed the words “You will pay for that.”

“Which means what?” asked Jonatha “You’re not going to come live with us? Why not stay at least until the baby’s born? We do actually have air conditioning, you know.”

Val reached over and took Jonatha’s hand. “Thanks, sweetie, but the time’s not right. He won’t leave, and we won’t leave without him.”

As Newton turned to say something, Crow held up his hand, “Now, now, don’t go off on a lecture tour on us, dude. You guys have been terrific to us, and more than generous. With the insurance money from the store and the cash you guys send us—which you don’t have to do, but which I will keep taking anyway, you filthy rich bourgeois snobs—we have the new house just about finished.”

“The farm’s coming along, too. I made an offer on a couple of hundred acres of what used to be the Carby place. If it goes through next year we’ll become the second largest garlic farmer in the state.”

“You guys are nuts,” Newton observed. He wore shorts and boat shoes and there was an old dime on a string around his ankle. “I wouldn’t live there for all the—”

Val shook her head. “Our life is in Pine Deep.”

“Still?” Jonatha asked, cocking her head to one side. “After everything?”

Val reached over and took Crow’s hand. “Yes,” she said. “Especially after everything. It’s different for you two, it always was. Pine Deep wasn’t your home. It was our home, and it still is. We fought for it, and we won’t walk away now.”

“Or hobble away,” added Crow, tapping the cane that lay beside him. After that hellish night he’d spent eighteen months in a wheelchair, another year on crutches, but was now able to get around with only a cane to help him up stairs and slopes. The doctors said he would always have a bit of a limp. A souvenir, one of them had said, and after the look Crow gave him he hadn’t repeated the joke.

“Has there been any sign of…” Newton gestured vaguely.

“No,” Crow said quietly. “I think the fire, the birds…and Mike…whatever Mike brought to that fight seemed to turn the tide. I’ve, um…even been down there a few times. Now that I know a back way I can drive in. Beats climbing that friggin’ hill.”

Newton paled. “You went back?”

“I had to see. Once I was up and around I had to feel the place, you know? I brought in the heavy equipment and we tore his house down.” He laughed. “I even sowed the ground with salt. The swamp, too. But I don’t think it was necessary. The place felt—I dunno…diminished.”

“Still doesn’t feel right, though,” Val said. “I’ve been there, too. Once, to lay flowers in memory of Terry, Vince, and Frank. I won’t go back again. But to answer your earlier question…yes, we’ll stay there. We earned that right.”

Crow reached over and took her hand, then gently kissed the hard ridge of her knuckles.

Jonatha lapsed into silence, but Newton said, “And you’ll keep Mike with you?”

“For as long as he wants to stay,” Crow said.

“Is there any sign of skeletal degeneration? Anything like that?”

Crow and Val shared a look. She said, “He doesn’t like to go for his tests. So far he looks strong…really strong, but I know that sometimes he’s in pain.”

“What kind of pain?” Jonatha asked.

“He doesn’t talk about it,” Crow said. “Whatever it is, he just eats it, just deals.”

Val looked at the sunlight through the leaves. “After the adoption went through we talked about moving away—we thought he’d want to—but he wants to stay even more than we do. He has a good job with Pinelands Reconstruction. He likes building; he likes making things whole again. He’s helping to rebuild the town. It’ll take years, you know, but you’d be amazed how many people want to move in and raise families there. It’s weird, but the place has really come alive. Property is selling for ridiculous amounts of money.”

“It’ll be a different town, though,” said Crow. “New faces, new families.”

“But it’s always going to be the ‘Most Haunted Town in America,’” reflected Newton.

A shadow passed over Crow’s face and he looked away at the geese and ducks and the bright sunlight glinting off the gently rippling water. It was only after he heard his children laughing as they chased a butterfly that the shadow gradually passed and for a moment he thought he heard the faintest echo of sweet, sad blues drifting on the breeze.

“Yeah,” he said very softly. “It’ll always be that.”

(4)

It was just breaking dawn when he emerged from the forest near the farmhouse. He trudged along, his feet heavy with exhaustion, his face haggard. There was a small cut above his left eye that still bled sluggishly and the shoulder of his black pullover was torn.

He crossed the fields where Val would soon be planting corn, turned onto the winding road, and plodded slowly toward the house. He was tired, but he wasn’t in a hurry. There was no more need for haste, the sun was already up, the night’s work was done.

On the back porch he stamped clumps of dried mud from his boots and slowly climbed the steps that led to his own back entrance to the house. Val and Crow understood his need for privacy, for a private entrance. At the door he stopped and leaned forward to sniff the strand of garlic bulbs. They were stale, the aroma faint. He tossed them over the railing into the yard. He’d replace them this afternoon. There was always enough garlic around; Val saw to that.

Inside he unbuckled his army-surplus web belt and tossed it and the holstered Beretta onto the bed. He shrugged out of the shoulder sling that held his sword, a three-year-old Paul Chen original. The blade would have to be cleaned, but that could wait, too. Right now he was just too tired. He stripped off all his clothes, stuffed them into a hamper, and then stretched his aching muscles, ignoring the popping sounds from his joints. Mike was a big man, tall and muscular. The growth spurt that had started when he was sixteen had rocketed him up to six-three, and he suspected he might make it to six-four. Long hours with weights and punching bags, with Nordic-Trak and bicycles, had sculpted his physique into lean hardness. The last five years’ worth of boxing, wrestling, and jujutsu had given him quickness and balance and an economy of movement that made some people wonder if he was a dancer.

He padded into the bathroom and removed his contact lenses. They were tinted to make his eyes look blue—an ordinary blue. Without the lenses he avoided looking into the mirror whenever possible. He drank four glasses of tap water, turned on the shower, adjusted the temperature mix, and came back into his bedroom. He put an old Robert Johnson CD on the changer and turned the volume all the way up.

He opened a small cupboard. On the inside of one door was a chalkboard, the slate cluttered with numbers that had been chalked in and wiped out. The number 84, long since erased, could be seen faintly, just a ghost of a mark. The clearest number, the latest number, was 41. Mike used the side of his balled-up fist to wipe out that number, and with a piece of chalk he wrote 39. He set the chalk down, rubbed his weary and unsmiling face, and went back into the bathroom to scrub away the dirt and the blood and the memories of the night before.