Toxic Shadows

1

Already the city was quiet.

Already the smell of death twisted inexorably in the chill air.

Tom Haynes could smell it, feel it. It was in him now, too, a black infection spreading cell by cell.

In his blood.

His bones.

His brain.

It felt cold. There was no other way to describe it—a frigid numbness that was sliding through him with pernicious fingers. This morning it had been different. There had been pain, convulsions, and that awful burning in his belly at the very spot where the dog had sunk its fangs. But thankfully, that was all gone.

Now there was only the saliva that ran down his chin.

The stomach cramps.

His fingers hooked into claws.

And in his head, that odd sense of unreality which told him all was not as he thought it to be. That he could not trust what he saw, what his brain was thinking.

Drooling and delusional, he shambled through the streets.

Trees were down, power lines dangling. Half the city was without power, telephones still out. The storm had been a biggie—eighty-mile-an-hour winds, lashing rains, lightning that split trees—yet it was little more than a minor inconvenience compared to the truly dark thing that had the town in its savage grip. But the storm had done its job, all right, severing the town from civilization long enough for it to go bad.

Haynes looked at the sky but the sun was so bright it seemed to burn his eyes. It made his face feel tight and hot. Nearly sundown. He could trust his instincts on that.

The shadows were long and the air had a nip to it. Night wasn’t far off.

And when the sun went down, he knew, they would be in the streets.

Men, women, and children.

He stumbled along the sidewalks and fell against a parked El Dorado. It was a nice older one with jutting fins in the back. The upholstery was shit. The fender walls were more Bondo than steel, but still not too bad. In another life he had worked at an auto body shop. He could still vaguely picture that life in his mind. It was all gray and convoluted, peopled by shadows and a routine that was alien and somehow exotic now. But it was there.

How long ago had that been?

He told himself months or years, but as he concentrated, collapsed on the hood of the El Dorado, he knew it had only been two days ago.

Two days.

That meant it was only last night he was bitten.

He wanted to be startled by this, shocked even. The tenuous strands of humanity in him demanded it, but he did not have the strength. For a split second there was a surge of panic, but then it, too, was lost in the chill gray fog.

An agonizing wave of muscular spasms swept through him. He writhed and contorted and finally slid off the car into the street. His lips were bearded with bloody foam, his eyes glazed and yellowish.

Am I the last one?

Are there no others left?

Is that even possible?

Yes, he knew it was.

In two days, the town had been swept into the dustbin. It probably started a few days before that, he supposed, being that’s when he first heard about it. That rain—dark, bloody, bizarre. By the time anyone realized how bad it had gotten, it was too late to do anything about it. Flu bug. That’s what everyone said.

Ha, ha. Flu bug, all right.

Then when the storm passed, Cut River was a graveyard.

Haynes made a choking, gargling sound in his throat that was supposed to be a laugh. But it was laughter like a scream is a whisper.

His body grew very cold as his core temperature plummeted.

Weakness moved through him in sluggish waves.

His eyes focused one last time and he saw the Last Call Tavern. Northland A & P. The Drill Sergeant Army/Navy store. Cut River Cinema, formerly just the Rialto. It was good to see those things. He remembered them from when he was a kid. And memories, sentimental memories, were good to go to sleep on. They made him feel like maybe he was still a man, still a human being.

As he slipped into a coma, he prayed he would hurt no one. Prayed that someone, somewhere would shoot him down like the animal he would soon be.

These were Tom Haynes’ last rational thoughts.

2

Lou Frawley rounded the bluff just outside Cut River and saw the little town lying in the hollow below, pretty as a postcard and about as exciting as ten feet of fence. He piloted his Grand Am down the winding stretch of blacktop that fed into town. He slowed, passed over a bridge spanning a rushing, restless river. It must have been the Cut. The moon had just come up and its ghostly reflection rode the waters, rippling, shimmering, but never disappearing entirely.

He slid a cigarette in his mouth and sped over the bridge.

On the other side, in the yawning fields, he caught a momentary glimpse of… what? He wasn’t quite sure. Almost looked like scarecrows strung up on crossbars, dozens of them. And then he was past it.

Some crazy rural custom, he thought without much interest.

He exhaled a stream of smoke, stretched his back.

He drove up a main thoroughfare which was probably called Main or Elm or something equally as bucolic and quaint. When you pushed plumbing supplies in several hundred small Midwestern towns on a yearly basis, you got to know all their secrets. He had once kept count. On his yearly travels through Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota etc. he jotted down in a travel book how many streets were named Main and how many named Elm. Elm beat out Main six to one.

The main drag.

About what he expected.

Stores were squeezed together on either side—sporting goods, drug stores, video stores, clothes shops, party stores. All the essentials. He saw the spires of churches climbing in the distance, old homes, a sprawling park along the riverbank, and, separated by a stand of gnarled, leafless trees, a cemetery hugging a series of shadowy hills. He saw old hotels, coffee shops, sheet metal Quonset huts that housed garages, auto body joints. There was a huge building in the distance, lots of pillars and stone work, a big clock set in its face.

A lot of the town was dark. There were trees down all over the place and telephone poles, too. Maybe not as bad as out on the highway, but bad enough.

Lou was looking for the local Ace hardware, Shinneman’s Hardware.

He’d tried to call them from Green Bay that morning, but the operator told him that service hadn’t been restored yet to Cut River and probably wouldn’t be for a few days. Even the cell towers were down. Entire place was cut off.

Oh, well. Come bright and early tomorrow morning, he’d be hawking PVC pipe and flushing kits to some bored local zombie.

Right now, however, he’d have been glad to see anyone.

Because, thing was, he hadn’t seen a soul since arriving.

Not a car, a truck, nothing.

He thought: These places, Jesus, they sure roll up the sidewalks at seven sharp.

It wasn’t a bad-looking little town, he decided. Much better than some. One thing he liked right off the bat was all the saloons. Every block seemed to have a few, PABST and BUDWEISER signs competing for attention. He pulled to a stop across from a place called the Town Tap. Just to be different they had a neon OLD STYLE sign glowing in the window. There were a few pick-up trucks and a couple cars crowded in front. Looked like the place to be.

Lou got out, tossed his cigarette.

The air was chill and damp, screaming late September at him. Waterlogged leaves were plastered in the gutters. His stomach wasn’t feeling too good about then; he’d had a couple burritos at a Taco Bell on the highway a few hours before in Wisconsin and now they were beginning their obligatory march to the sea. He decided he’d feel more at home in Cut River after a good, healthy shit.

The door, an old weathered oak affair, gave a groan when he pulled it open.

He was expecting muted laughter, Hank Williams Jr. on the juke, the Monday Night Football game on the tube, the overpowering, reassuring stink of stale beer and cigarette smoke.

But what he got was absolutely nothing.

The place was empty.

He stood there in the doorway, feeling oddly like a stranger at the borderland of some ghost town.

He stepped in.

A bar ran along one side, booths along the other, a scattering of tables in-between. The light was on behind the bar—he could see all those bottles of liquor lined up like soldiers, like hookers offering him a hard, fast time—but everything else was dark.

He licked his lips, went to the bar.

He could smell a faint trace memory of old booze, old smoke, but vague, a ghost of what was, was no longer.

“Hello?” he said, his voice echoing emptily like a whisper in a tomb.

Nothing. Nobody.

He turned, made his way out of there quickly, gooseflesh prickling his arms and the nape of his neck. He wasn’t an imaginative sort, but damn if there wasn’t something eerie about the silent vacancy. The breeze was slight, chill, peppered by tiny drops of rain. It felt good, cementing him back in reality.

Don’t make sense, he thought. Door wide open… but the joint’s closed. Everybody head for the hills when the storm hit?

He saw the lights on in a café a few doors down.

He walked over there, noticing with an almost palpable sense of alarm how incredibly quiet the town was. No cars passing, close or in the distance. No far-off barks of dogs, shouts of children.

Nothing.

Just a heavy, almost brooding desolation… a sense of creeping expectancy, like something was about to happen any minute.

A surprise party, is what he was thinking.

The town, its residents, were holding their breath, waiting, just waiting to jump out, to throw open doors and start screaming.

The image of that made his flesh crawl.

He shook it off, lit another cigarette, moved up the sidewalk consciously making as much noise as he possibly could. At least, he wanted to, but in reality he moved very soundlessly, afraid, maybe, that someone would hear.

Oh, for chrissake! he told his runaway imagination. Quit being so fucking ridiculous here. It’s a small town. Excitement here on a Monday night consists of doing the wash, trimming your toe nails, and getting a piece off the old lady while the kids are plugged into the tube.

He started when he saw a shadowy form slip behind a parked truck.

He kept staring, blinking his eyes, not sure if he’d seen anything at all.

His hand on the door to the Chestnut Street Café (there was one for his notebook, a Midwestern anomaly for his memoirs—a Chestnut Street), he could see the graveyard in the distance, a covetous expanse of heavy trees and marble.

The Chestnut Street Café was just a little counter joint. Places like this, Lou knew, always had the best burgers, the best breakfasts. Nobody knew this better than he did… or the expanding sack of his belly. The café was all lit up… but empty.

His heart started pounding then slowed when he saw a man in the corner, back to him, just standing by a huge coffee urn.

“Hello, there,” Lou said, flicking his ash into a tray on the green Formica counter.

There was a blackboard above the malt machine and deep fryers. In fluorescent chalk the specials were scrawled: FRESH PERCH FRY $3.99, HAM AND SCALLOP BLUE PLATE $4.99, HOT BEEF $4.50. Yeah, it all sounded good. Beat the living shit out of Taco Hell.

The guy still hadn’t turned around.

Lou was about to sit down on one of the red vinyl stools, but he didn’t. He stood there, cigarette smoldering in the corner of his drawn lips, a numb, empty feeling spreading out in his belly.

“Excuse me…” he said, lacking the breath to finish whatever might have come next.

The guy turned around.

He wore a red plaid hunting shirt. It was open to the waist. His bare chest and face were the color of graveyard marble. One eye was missing from its socket, a crusty trail of blood smeared down his cheek. The other eye was wide, unblinking, and yellow as a cat’s pupil.

Then the guy made his move.

All Lou knew was that there was some crazy, one-eyed shit coming at him with a meat cleaver. He looked frantically around for a weapon, saw a broom leaning up against a booth. It was either make a stand with the broom handle or he was going to get sliced up like a Christmas ham.

He went for the broom, knowing that a run for the door would have been suicidal at that point.

The guy kept coming, his face tight and bloodless. He was making a low gurgling sound in his throat. A tangle of foamy drool hung from his lips, swayed back and forth as he shambled forward.

Lou got his hand around the broom handle just as a small pale hand grabbed him by the ankle from under the booth. He yanked his foot and the hand pulled back.

He saw a girl hiding under there, no more than seven or eight, stark naked, her eyes yellow and faintly luminous.

She made a low growling sound and dove out at him, scampering on all fours like a mad dog, snapping at his legs. He kicked her in the head and she yelped, rolling away.

At that precise moment, the one-eyed man lunged, swinging the cleaver wildly. It slashed within two, three inches of Lou’s face. It came again and he stepped under it. The blade slit open the booth, stuffing spilling out like the guts from a road killed hound.

The girl scampered forward again and Lou cracked her on top of the head with the broom handle. There was a hollow pop and she went still.

The one-eyed man threw his cleaver and it spun end over end, just missing the crown of Lou’s skull and shattering a tower of water glasses behind the counter.

“Listen, man,” Lou found himself saying. “I don’t know what the fuck this is about here. But you need help. You and the kid. I didn’t want to hurt her, but—”

The one-eyed man, hands hooked into claws, made a sharp barking noise and threw himself at Lou. Lou got around him, cracked him on the side of the face with the broom handle. His head snapped back and came around again.

Lou hit him two, three more times.

He did not got down.

Lou slammed the tip into his belly and the one-eyed man doubled over, crying out. Lou turned and bolted out the door.

His keys were in his hand and he couldn’t remember digging them out of his coat. His shoes made slapping sounds on the wet pavement. The Grand Am was open. He fell in behind the wheel, trembling fingers fumbling the keys, trying to get them in the ignition. Click. There. They slid in.

As he made to turn the car over, he suddenly realized he wasn’t alone.

Oh, God, the backseat, the backseat…

In the grainy darkness, he heard a high, muted giggling and felt cold fingers at the nape of his neck, hot and feverish breath that stunk of sick wards at his ear. Sweat running down his forehead, he ducked forward, brought his elbow back and felt it connect with a solid thud.

He threw open the door and launched himself into the street, an obscene growling rising up from the back seat. He saw huge yellow eyes, glistening teeth—both set in the narrow, hungry face of a young woman.

He found his feet and dashed up the street.

He made it maybe a block before his wind started to give out.

He slipped behind a van and went to his hands and knees, his lungs aching, gasping for breath, more out of sheer panic than exertion. Cautiously, he peered around the bumper.

The street was empty and wet. Bits of streetlight reflected from puddles.

But he was definitely alone.

Why hadn’t they come after him? What in the name of Christ was this all about? What had happened to these people? This town?

The reels of his brain were spinning crazily, but found no answers. A guy with one eye. A naked kid. A woman. All demented, savage. Not human anymore. Animals, monsters. All they wanted to do was kill.

And those eyes, Lou thought in terror, Jesus Christ, those eyes, not right, not right at all.

Down the street, he could see his Grand Am.

It looked harmless, door wide open.

He didn’t see anyone around it. But it was hard to know, the town washed in clutching shadows.

He crouched there, unable to move. Afraid to do anything and afraid not to. His throat was full of cotton, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He needed a plan. Something. He kept trying to tell himself that those three… people were isolated cases, but if that was true, how come he hadn’t seen anyone else? Not a soul. Nothing.

Think! Goddammit, think!

All right, all right. Maybe the town had gone bad, maybe some weird pathogen or something had ravaged it. Okay. He would proceed with the assumption that they were all crazy. So, what he needed was a weapon, some way to defend himself.

And then a phone.

He would call the cops…

Oh, Jesus the fucking lines are down. This place is cut off.Even cells are useless here.

All right. No panicking. All he had to do was use his head.

He thought he’d been to Cut River maybe four, five years before. But that had been in broad daylight. Not at night and not with mental cases roaming the streets. Still, a town this size had to have some cops. What did the sign say back on the road? CUT RIVER, Pop. 2400. Yeah, there had to be a police force here, sheriff’s department, something. Somebody had to get his ass out of here. If all else failed, he’d steal a car or a truck.

But, dammit, he was getting out.

Steeling himself, he rose from his hiding place, wondering if any of those predatory, lupine eyes were even now tracking him, stalking him, waiting to get him somewhere where he could be easily brought down.

But he wouldn’t let himself think that.

He moved off in the waiting, sullen darkness.

He got up on the sidewalk, tried to press himself into the brick facade of shop fronts. He sought shadows, but none that were large enough to conceal any surprises. He decided the thing to do was to make for the end of the road, the end of Chestnut. That big, gothic-looking building at the end, squatting darkly on the hill. It had to be the town hall, probably the police station and fire hall as well. Maybe the courthouse, too. If there was any law in this town it would be there.

The shadows were everywhere, clawing and conspiring.

Lou had a nasty feeling this was his last night on earth.

3

The night was dark and wet.

Lisa Tabano climbed from her car, greeted the chill air with a shiver. She opened her purse, made sure her stash was still there and breathed a sigh of relief.

Yeah, okay. It was cool. Everything was in order.

Her heart rate slowed, her hands stopped trembling—or as much as they ever did these days—and something unknotted in her belly. And all this over the remote possibility that she was out. It was getting bad, she knew, but she wasn’t going to think about that. She needed a hot bath, a long sleep. Then tomorrow—

Then tomorrow, a voice told her, you’ll get up and start right away. Because, girl, you don’t have a choice any more. It’s not just social now, it’s chemical. You need it.

She went to the trunk, tried to get the key in the lock and scratched the shit out of the paint job when a wild, almost convulsive shudder passed through her. She got the trunk open, staring blankly at her suitcases, travel bags, and her guitar case.

The idea of lugging all that into a house she might not be welcome in anymore was fatiguing. It made her slump over.

God, she was tired.

I’ll compromise, she decided, I’ll take the guitar.

Like her head, she didn’t go anywhere without it.

She had other guitars—twelve other guitars as a matter of fact, everything from customized Strats to Flying-Vs—but it was this one she would not part from. An ultra-rare ’59 Gibson Les Paul Flametop. Mint condition. A beauty, a collector’s dream, worth mega-thousands.

It did not get out of her sight.

She left just about everything else at her apartment in LA—her custom leathers, her other guitars—but never the Flametop. She wouldn’t even let the roadies touch it. Sometimes, she even brought it in the can with her, slept with it nearby. Obsessed? Yes, she was and would happily admit it.

Taking the guitar in its hardshell case by the handle, she moved up the walk to the porch.

Surely they’d heard her pull up.

Surely they’d seen the lights.

She knew damn well they didn’t sleep that soundly; when she was sixteen coming home from some drunken binge, they’d always heard her.

But not now?

At the door, she hesitated, figuring this was probably a real colossal mistake. But what was she to do? She’d tried to call, but that goddamn storm knocked everything out. She’d lived in Cut River most of her life (before you went big-time, she reminded herself) and if that experience taught her nothing else it was this: Cut River would be one of the last places to get their juice and phones back. It had no true factories anymore, no mills, no real industry to speak of. Places like that weren’t a priority.

The storm had really trashed the countryside.

They were saying on the radio that even a few twisters had touched down.

It didn’t look too bad.

When Lisa came into town, she drove by her old haunts—the school, Chestnut Street, the football field—and found nothing damaged very badly. Somehow, this was what she needed: to find her hometown unchanged. After the frenetic pace of the past three years, she needed that sense of sameness, of roots.

She was about to knock—knock for chrissake at her own door, except it wasn’t her door anymore and she knew it—but decided, on a whim, to try the doorknob.

It was unlocked.

She opened it, went in.

God, it smelled like home. Mom’s incense, dad’s cigars… but overpowering these was a strange, almost forbidden odor. Metallic, savage.

Smelling it, Lisa instantly tensed.

She stood there, just inside the door, feeling somehow naked and vulnerable, at risk. She tried the lights. They came on. She set her keys on the hallway table, but couldn’t bring herself to set down the guitar, her purse.

The house looked the same.

Dad’s chair, his pile of newspapers and magazines alongside it, his ashtray, TV Guide, remote controls. And over there, mom’s chair, a stack of paperback romances on the end table, a few cooking magazines, a bag of cashews.

Very normal, very ordinary.

Memories flooded her head. Above the fireplace mantel was what really caught her eye. There was a framed reproduction of the band’s first CD cover. It showed a blighted, saffron-colored field of stunted grasses and gnarled bushes. In the background were the crumbling ruins of a medieval castle. In the foreground, a svelte raven-haired woman, arms outstretched. She was flaking away into tatters, flames climbing up her black dress. ELECTRIC WITCH, it said in red Gothic print, and at the bottom, BURNING TIMES.

It brought a lump into Lisa’s throat.

Her father had raged at the idea of her being a musician, a guitarist in what he called an “acid-rock” band (though progressive Goth metal would have been more accurate). When Lisa had left home, journeyed to Chicago and formed up the band months later, he’d refused to speak to her. Even when Electric Witch landed a recording contract, a top ten single and video, he still looked on her in shame. It was only in the past few months that he began talking to her again on the phone, offering her a sort of begrudging respect.

But this… the CD album cover on the wall.

That was something.

It proved that he was proud of her.

Dad was old-fashioned; he ruled the roost like something from the 1950’s. Mom, though staunchly independent in her own way, was very submissive when it came to him. The dutiful little wifey of lore.

But one thing was for sure: if dad hadn’t wanted the album cover on the wall, it would not be there. The fact that it was displayed so prominently spoke volumes.

Proud of me, Lisa thought, close to tears, he is proud of me.

For reasons she didn’t completely understand this was very important.

As much as she denied or dismissed parental acceptance, she very much needed it. But the smile on her face suddenly began to dissipate. She wondered what dad would think of her habit, what it would do to him if they found her OD’d backstage or in some shitty motel room.

Not now, she told herself.

There were always rehab centers, methadone clinics. They worked… if you could stand the agony of going cold off junk. It took real balls to kick it, to willingly throw yourself into the arms of a nightmare.

“Mom?” she called out. “Dad?”

It was so silent she could hear herself breathing, hear the wind rattling the eaves outside. She swallowed down hard, chewed her lower lip. Maybe they were sleeping. But for some reason she didn’t think so… she only knew that she was definitely not alone.

Footsteps.

She heard them coming up the hall, slow and stalking.

Not the way her mother or father walked at all.

Not unless they were trying to sneak up on her.

She turned quickly, the hairs at the back of her neck rising up, something thick and heavy stirring in her belly.

From the darkness of the hallway she could make out a vague shape moving stealthily in her direction, see eyes shining in the gloom like strobes. As it got closer she could see it was a woman. Lisa could hear her breathing, raspy and hollow like wind through bellows.

“Who…” Lisa started to say right before her throat seized up.

No, not her mother.

A stranger.

Some strange woman dressed in a business suit of all things, barefoot, her hands held out before her, the fingers trembling and slicked red with blood.

Lisa, a wave of raw fear washing through her, set down her guitar case, dropped her purse. She backed up slowly as the woman advanced, her face twisted up in an insane grimace that was more like the death rictus of a corpse than an actual smile.

Lisa kept backing up.

She reached down and took a poker from the brass sheath of fireplace tools.

“Listen,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, “I don’t know who you are or what you want, but you can’t be here.”

The woman’s lips pulled away from her teeth. Foamy drool slid from the corners of her flaking lips. “What I want,” she hissed in awful congested voice like a backed-up drainpipe, “is you, is you, is youuuuu…”

Long before Lisa even had a chance to be locked-up with horror, before her nerve endings had a chance to seize-up with raw fear, the woman came at her. She didn’t move like a human being, but with a perverse see-sawing motion.

A predator sneaking up on its prey.

Lisa stood her ground and swung the poker.

It caught the crazy woman in the head, snapped her skull around and took her body with it. She landed bonelessly in Lisa’s mother’s chair. She struck the arm and tipped over with it. But her face came up immediately, eyes still burning, her forehead gashed open just below the hairline, blood running over her pale face in rivulets.

The fact that she could be knocked down, could be made to bleed, heartened Lisa.

She advanced on her and as she came up again, growling, Lisa brought the poker down.

But the woman was ready.

As the hook of the poker sunk into her shoulder—if she felt any pain there was no indication of it—she took hold of Lisa’s wrists, flung her sideways with a near-psychotic strength.

Lisa hit the hardwood floor and conked her head.

But she still had the poker.

As the madwoman came on again, Lisa rose to meet her, jabbing the pointed end of the poker into her belly. The woman howled with a bestial roar, stumbled back. The poker was stuck in her belly. She gripped it and pulled it out, about three inches of tempered steel that was glistening red and dripping. She flung it away.

But by then Lisa was on her feet.

She dove past the crazy woman to the fireplace, grabbed a two-foot birch log and when the woman rushed her yet again, she brought it down on her head with everything she had, screaming as she did so.

The woman shuddered, her eyes rolled shut, and she collapsed like she was made of Popsicle sticks. She lay on the floor, bleeding, but not dead. Unconscious and twitching, vile foam dribbling from her askew mouth. A pencil-thin line of it oozed from her left nostril.

Lisa stood there with the log in her hand.

Her body felt heavy, slack, and useless. She had a sudden need to vomit, to cry, to start shouting. But she did nothing but stand there. After a time, she dragged herself into the kitchen.

She didn’t find her parents there, either.

But she did find a lot of blood.

4

“What would really speed things along here,” Nancy Eklind said to her husband, “would be for you to just admit I’m right.”

Ben had a nasty urge to wrap his hands around her throat. Not that he was going to, mind you, he just had a nasty urge to. So he compromised: he said nothing. He kept his hands on the steering wheel and studied the dark road ahead, the minivan’s headlights splashing across it. Safer that way.

“What?” Nancy said.

He kept staring forward. “You say something?”

“I believe I said what,” she told him. “I said what in reference to my comment about you admitting I was right.”

He nodded, wouldn’t go there.

He looked in the rearview.

He could see Nancy’s brother Sam sitting in the back, looking everywhere but at what was going on in the front seat. Poor guy. Sixty days courtesy of the county and his first night out he gets a belly full of this. Dinner and a little gambling at the Chippewa casino, they’d told him. A few drinks. Help you relax.

Ben decided he looked anything but relaxed.

She’s your sister, buddy, he thought acidly, at least I’m only related to her by marriage.

Nancy snorted. “You know, Ben, maybe you’re not involved in this conversation. Maybe I’m having it all by myself. Would you like me to bring you up to speed on what we’re discussing?”

“No, Nancy.”

“All right, then. Feel free to jump in anytime.”

He mumbled something.

“Sorry? Couldn’t quite make that out. Jump in a little louder.”

He wanted to jump with both feet in her fucking face. “I said, no.” He scratched his beard.

“See?” Nancy turned and looked at her brother cowering in the backseat. “See what it’s like, Sam? It’s like this all the time. He can’t discuss anything. Doesn’t matter what it is, if it’s the least bit sensitive, just forget about it.”

Ben sighed, slowed the van, made a left onto a country road. “Let’s change the subject, okay? I think you’ve beaten this to death for one night.”

“Oh really?” Nancy folded her arms across her sizeable bosom, cocked her head, considered it. “No, I don’t think we’re done here. Nope, don’t think so.”

“Hasn’t it gone far enough? Change the record already.”

“You know what, Ben? If you would just discuss things with me, spit out what’s on your mind, we wouldn’t have these problems. But, no, talking with you is like pulling teeth.”

Ben sighed again, thinking that for the past five years since he’d slid that noose… er, that ring on his finger, he’d been doing a lot of sighing. “We’ll discuss this later, okay? We’re making Sam uncomfortable.”

Nancy turned around again. “Are we making you uncomfortable, Sam?”

He kept staring out the window. “Listen, I just wanna go home. I’m tired. I want to hit the sack. A real bed, not a county mat. Jesus.”

Nancy snorted at him, too. “All I’m saying to you, Ben, is that for a man your age, you’re not very responsible. Being eighteen is great, when you’re eighteen. But you’re thirty-five, dear, time to put away the fantasies and what-ifs, live life like a great big man.”

“I think you’re being really impatient,” he told her, trying to sound calm, in control, very rational, so Sam would think she was the crazy, belligerent one and not him. “Every business loses money the first year or so. Ask anyone.”

She kept nodding her head. “Well that’s fine. Problem being it’s my money you’re losing. These past five years, Ben, it’s been one crazy scheme after another. First the trapping business. Lots of money in beaver and raccoon fur, you said. So I put up the money like an idiot. That fell apart. I should’ve known better—people don’t wear real fur anymore. Then the extermination business. Okay, that sounded reasonable. So I put up the money for your licensing, your equipment. What happened? Big fat nothing. All that stuff is out in the garage collecting dust. Then the house painting scheme. Never mind that there were more painters in town than hairs on a dog’s ass. That fell through.” She slapped her knee, laughed without humor. “And now, ah yes, your latest business, striping parking lots. Parking lots have to have those yellow lines, honey, and somebody’s gotta put ’em down. There went my entire tax refund, right down the old drain. And why? Because all those jobs are contracted out, but you didn’t look into that. Oh well.”

Ben was gripping the steering wheel for dear life now, wondering what was keeping him from punching her head right through the windshield. She was right, in essence. All his schemes, as she’d called them, had fallen through. But not for lack of trying. She was pissed off because their income tax refunds, savings etc. were always dumped into his business ventures.

But, goddammit, at least he tried.

Tapping her hands on her knees, Nancy said, “Listen, baby, all I’m saying is you tried and you failed. Okay. Turn the page. The mill is hiring. You have an uncle there, he’ll get you in. Good pay, good benefits. What’s so bad about that?”

“The minute I walk through those doors, I’ll be there all my life.”

“So fucking what, Ben? I’ve been at the credit union for ten years and I always will be. I’ve accepted that. Each week I bring home a paycheck. And that’s the bottom line. Christ, if not for me, then for the kids.”

That was low. Nancy, a widower, had four kids from her first marriage and Ben loved them like his own. Using them against him… that was bullshit.

“Yeah, well, I’ll think about it,” he said, beaten now.

“Damn right you will.”

White-lipped, teeth gnashing, Ben kept driving, luxuriating in the sudden silence. He could hear the engine humming along, feel the tires bumping along the road. God, what kind of life was it when you took great pleasure in such things?

But the quiet lasted no more than five minutes. “Just where the hell are we?” Nancy demanded to know.

“Short cut.”

She rolled her eyes. “Not another short cut.”

“We’re just going to slip through Cut River, it’ll take twenty minutes off the drive.”

Nancy studied the black farmland, heavy woods encroaching from all sides. “Oh, I’ll just bet.”

“He’s right,” Sam said from the back. “It’s the shortest way.”

Nancy said nothing to that.

“Cut River’s up around the bend,” Ben said.

Nancy giggled deep in her throat. “Sure. Probably be Milwaukee or Altoona, PA knowing you and your short cuts.”

As they rounded the bend in the darkness, thumping over railroad tracks in the process, Ben saw the lights of Cut River. But for one moment, one glaring awful moment, he took his eyes off the road. “You know what, Nancy? I’ve had it right up to here with you and your goddamn mouth. Just keeping running it and see where it gets you. You want me to apply at the mill? Fine, I will. If that’s what it takes to shut you up, God knows I’ll be there with bells on my freaking toes. But right now, how’s about shutting the hell up and letting me drive?”

In the backseat, Sam made a strange stuttering sound. “Hey, hey, hey, you guys—”

“If you could drive worth a damn I’d gladly shut up, Ben. But you have a nasty little habit of getting us lost,” she said, ignoring her brother. “And further more… Jesus Christ, Ben, look out, look out—”

Ben brought his eyes back onto the road long enough to see, not five feet in front of the van, a man standing in the road.

Just standing there.

Shirtless despite the weather, his arms were spread out and, just as Ben saw him, he could’ve sworn this guy was smiling. Ben let out a cry and spun the wheel, hitting the brakes, but it was just too damn late.

He heard the sickening, fleshy thump as the minivan slammed into the guy, tossing him sideways. And then, the wheel spinning crazily in Ben’s hands, the minivan careened off to the left, leaped the culvert and slammed into a tree stump.

And there it died.

Everyone was belted in. Ben always made sure of that.

When he found his voice, was able to drag it up his throat, he said: “Everyone okay?”

“Yeah,” Sam said, his voice shallow. “I think… yeah… Jesus, Ben we hit him.”

Nancy hadn’t said a word.

She just sat there holding her face in her hands as if it would fall off without support. Ben kept calling her name, but she ignored him. Finally she looked up, saw the damage to the van in the glow of the headlights, and looked to her husband. “You ran him down,” she said. “You ran him down… you goddamn moron… oh my God.” She slumped down in her seat, went the color of cheese, and looked like she was going to pass clean out. Ben put a concerned hand on her arm; she batted it away like a pesky fly. “Oh, Ben, oh dear God in Heaven…”

He sat there, staring, thinking, incapable of unbuckling his belt. “This didn’t just happen,” he said. “This couldn’t have just happened.”

All that got him was an evil look from his wife.

Sam popped his belt, slid the side door open. The night came in, cool and damp. “Van’s trashed. We’ll need a wrecker. The… that… the other thing… shit, we better go look…”

Ben nodded, licking his lips with a heavy tongue. All he could smell was the wet foliage. It had a dark, earthy smell of loam and soil and decay.

“You pegged your first one,” Nancy told him, showing no mercy. “Had to happen, right? Way you drive.” She popped her belt and opened her door, stepped out.

Ben smiled grimly. He didn’t even have the energy to tell her to go fuck herself.

He saw her climb out, step into the grass, lean for a time against the van. He could see she was shaking. Every bit of her was shuddering, trembling. After a time she moved on, jumped the culvert and joined her brother out in the road.

The darkness out there was heavy, absolute.

Ben flicked the emergency flashers on.

He got out himself. The headlights illuminated the woods, the flashers turning the road into some crazy, dancing shadow show of yellow strobing lights. He felt dizzy, disoriented until he realized that he’d been timing his breaths with the rapid flashes of the emergency lights.

He took a deep breath and walked around the front of the van.

It was mashed-in but good. The radiator ruptured, the stink of coolant raw in the air. He could hear other things hissing and dripping in there. The stump they’d hit was all that was left of a huge elm bigger around than a tractor tire. Like some modern version of a druid sacrificial tree, he bet it had claimed a lot of Detroit steel, a lot of flesh and blood. Probably why it was cut down. Good idea, except the fools that did it left about three feet of stump jutting up.

They’d have to walk into town.

He was looking into the woods, thinking how dark and thick they were, impenetrable, like maybe you could wander into them and never find your way out again, just listening to the breeze filtering through the boughs with a sound like someone sighing.

Losing himself in there didn’t seem bad all of a sudden, especially since he had manslaughter on his mind.

Vehicular manslaughter.

But he’d only had two beers at the casino. That was good. Guy just jumped out, was all. It wasn’t his fault. Maybe he hadn’t been watching the road like he should have been what with the old wenchbag pissing at him, but that guy… shit, he’d jumped out at them.

Ben knew he’d skate the charges.

That made him feel better, at least a little.

“Where is he?” he said to his wife and brother-in-law, both of whom were wandering the road in circles like somebody had dropped a contact.

Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t see him. No blood, no nothing.” His pleasant face was drawn with worry. “Couldn’t have walked off.”

“Maybe… maybe I didn’t really hit him,” Ben suggested.

“Oh, no,” Nancy said, “you hit him, bright boy. You ran him down like a dog. Yup, Ben, that was a good idea of yours, this short cut. Good thinking.”

Ben, recovered somewhat now, was about to kick her ass into the culvert, but Sam came between them. “Now’s not the time, Nancy,” he said. “It was an accident and we all know that, so please quit with the recriminations here. I’m not in the mood for it.”

Nancy looked like she’d been slapped. “Well, excuse me all to hell.”

They looked up and down the road, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. If he was out there, then he was surely dead. But it was so damn dark. The only lights were coming from Cut River, less than a mile below in the little valley. But out here… Jesus, nothing but the glow of the headlights, the surreal staccato of the emergency flashers.

“A car should be along pretty soon,” Nancy said. “A truck or something.”

That got Ben to thinking that he hadn’t actually seen a car in some time now.

The old highway swept by Cut River to within maybe three, four miles, the new one farther away yet. So there wouldn’t be a lot of traffic out here and especially not on a Monday night. Yet… there should’ve been something.

A logging truck.

A semi.

Kids out joyriding.

Something.

He tried to remember the last time he’d seen a car and knew it had been before the short cut.

What did that mean exactly?

“Over here,” Sam said. “He’s over here.”

Ben joined him, Nancy dragging at his heels.

The guy had been thrown into the ditch. His head was in the culvert, half under water. He was sprawled in an unnatural position, legs splayed out, arms folded under him.

“We better get him out of there,” Ben said.

As Sam and he got down there, Nancy said, “You’re not supposed to touch an injured man, you idiots. You know that. Never move an injured man.” She shook her head. “Hello.”

They ignored her.

She was right, of course, but leaving him in the cold water wasn’t going to do him any good either. His flesh was clammy, frigid even, as they lifted him up to the shoulder and set him there. Now with the intermittent illumination from the flashers, they could see that the crown of his skull was split open, blood caked in his hair. The water had cleaned the wound thoroughly. Bloodless, they could see his brain in there like some fleshy sponge. His entire left side from armpit to asshole was one huge, livid bruise.

“Oh my God,” Nancy said, turning away.

She began walking in tight little circles, laughing and crying, shaking and gasping. She was hysterical, out of her head now with terror, shock. This was bad for her. But compared to the man with his head split open like a ruptured tire, she was doing all right.

Ben pushed past her, went back to the van.

He popped the hatch, dug a blanket out. It was kept in there for roadside emergencies. This little scenario seemed to fit the bill. He brought the blanket back, spread it over the man.

Nancy was on her hands and knees, vomiting out her dinner into the grass.

“Dead,” Sam said, a statement.

Ben nodded. “We’re gonna have to walk into Cut River, get some help.”

“Nobody on the road tonight.”

“Yeah. Monday night, you know—”

Nancy, finished now, screamed.

“What?”

“He moved,” she said, her voice cracking with panic. “I… I saw him… the blanket moved. He’s alive in there.”

“He’s not alive,” Sam told her.

Ben went to her, put an arm around her shoulders. “He’s dead, honey. You don’t live with a head wound like that. Trust me. When you feel up to it we’re gonna walk into town, get some help.”

Nancy kept shaking her head. She wiped bile from her chin and said, “I’m not freaking out here, Ben. I saw it.”

“Jesus Christ, Nancy,” Sam finally said, sick of this night, sick of his sister, sick of all the bullshit and just wanting it to end. “He’s dead. He’s fucking dead, all right?” He stooped over, clutched the blanket, pulled it back. “See? He’s dead. He can’t move.”

And he did look pretty dead with that nasty gash in his head, the bruising. His face looked pale, discolored… or was that just the flashers bathing him in yellow light? Didn’t matter. Sam started to pull the blanket back over him… and hesitated. There was something about him, something that had changed. He wasn’t sure what.

Then the guy’s eyes snapped open.

They were shining, the eyes of a stag transfixed by headlights.

Nancy made a choking, screaming sound.

“Easy,” Sam said. “Just take it easy. We’ll get you some help.”

But the guy didn’t care.

Run down, head sheared open, he still sat up, one cold hand grabbing Sam by the hair, pulling him forward. Before Sam could do much more than protest, the guy’s mouth was at his throat, teeth digging in through skin, finding the carotid and severing it.

Sam let go with a scream—high, despairing, and hopeless.

There was suddenly blood everywhere, pooling, fountaining, and spraying. Nancy was screaming and maybe Ben was, too. Sam, however, wasn’t doing anything now but bleeding to death.

Ben moved quickly, coming up fast and giving the guy’s head a punt to get him off Sam. He rolled to the side, making gurgling sounds, his face black with fresh blood. Incredible. Impossible. It just couldn’t be, none of it could be.

Sam was curled up on the pavement, his body wracked with awful spasms. Ben went to him, pulled him up, but his brother-in-law was either dead or close to it. He was limp in his arms.

The guy was on his feet now, going for Nancy.

“BEN!” she cried. “JESUS H. CHRIST, BEN! GET HIM OFF ME!”

She was backing away as the crazy bastard came on, grinning and gnashing his teeth, his hands clutching wildly at the air before him. Nancy kicked at him, ducked by him, kept screaming and shouting for Ben to come to her aid.

Ben let Sam slide from his arms, his brain full of alarm bells.

His wife was being attacked, but he was suddenly powerless. Tapped. That man… Jesus… dead, but walking… no, maybe not dead, but surely not alive in the traditional sense. His gait was jerky, more of a shambling than anything else. Like seeing a scarecrow pull itself from its bracket, limbs spindly, face lifeless, straw and rags imbued with ghastly life.

That’s what this was like.

Not a man, but an effigy almost. Jaws snapping open, inhuman gibbers and glottals coming from his throat as slimy, bloody foam bubbled from his lips.

Ben got to his feet, got his hands on the guy’s shoulders, pulled him back.

The guy spat something cold and gelatinous into his face, took hold of Ben by the arm and flung him away. Ben tumbled across the pavement. Nancy helped him up and they began running towards Cut River.

The dead/living man did not follow.

He watched their retreat and turned to Sam’s body. Still making those horrible sounds, he dragged Sam off into the woods and the night went deathly silent again.

5

Some streets were lit, Lou Frawley saw, while others were completely dark.

Parts of Cut River still had no power. He kept away from these areas. He wanted some shadows, enough to conceal himself in, but not enough to drown him in a sea of clutching white hands.

The farther he went down Chestnut Street, the more he realized how total all this was, how the entire town must have been infected with… with whatever the hell this was.

And it was oh-so-perfect, wasn’t it?

The storm.

The power outage.

Then this.

Almost like it was planned or something.

He saw people from time to time, alone or in groups, but he did not approach them; he didn’t like the way they moved, the aura of menace coming off them.

Wait.

He paused there on the sidewalk. Yes, he could hear them. They were coming.

He dashed into the black mouth of an alley. So dark in there. Maybe they were drawing him in. But he didn’t have a choice—he could see the crazy ones coming now, five or six of them, their eyes shining with evil influence.

He ducked into the alley, crouched behind a dumpster.

He sat there, trembling, his heart doing a drum solo, his face wet with mist.

Closer.

He practically sank his teeth through his lower lip as they passed the alley… paused, then moved on.

God, he’d wanted to scream.

Looked to be four men, two women. They were in a various states of dress and undress. One of the men was naked. One of the women shrouded in a ratty mink coat. Another of the men carried an axe. Still another had a butcher knife. A fetid odor blew off them.

What chilled Lou the most was not the insanity on an individual level like he’d experienced back in the diner or in the back of his car, but this mass… dementia, this organized savagery where these groups of… psychos, for lack of a better word, formed themselves into gangs and patrolled the streets. The ones that had just passed, for instance. They were grouped with almost military efficiency—two in front, two in the middle, two in the back, equally spaced.

Like a fucking platoon, he thought with a shudder.

And what did that mean? What did that say about all this?

When they stopped at the entrance to the alley, they stopped en masse, as a bunch. Without a word, they all just stopped there. They did not look around. They kept their heads pointed directly ahead, and then, without reason, they moved off at the same time. Like maybe they were plugged into the same brain, some mass consciousness.

It was scary.

No words, no nothing, just wet slithering sounds.

Lou wondered if they were looking for him.

The idea made his flesh go cold, made his brain race with wild thoughts.

Sure, he thought, they’re out hunting. They’re seeking the normal ones, the human ones. Like a cancer they’re searching out the healthy, uninfected cells so they can kill or contaminate them, bring them into the fold, make them like themselves, one huge body of pestilence.

Normal human beings were the abnormal ones now… the ones to be persecuted, exterminated, and maybe infected in this pernicious witch hunt.

But how did they know?

How did they know which ones were infected and which weren’t?

Lou figured it wasn’t by sight or smell, but something more basic, more primal. Maybe a biochemical thing. A chemical signature they gave off. Same way one spider knew another spider and didn’t end up mating with a housefly.

Yeah, okay. All and fine.

Pure speculation and plenty of it.

But it didn’t get him out of this cemetery, now did it?

Crouched behind the dumpster, he lit a cigarette, very badly needing it. He’d wanted to smoke before this, but he hadn’t dared. Now… well, he just had to before he faced the streets again.

When he’d first made his run he found his fogged, reeling brain thinking all kinds of crazy things. Like the fact that maybe this epidemic, this plague was not biological, but supernatural in origin. It was nuts, but what if? Vampires. Zombies. Something like that. These psychos definitely would fit the bill… but the idea of that was nonsense, of course. The guy in the diner had bled, he’d felt pain. Neither of which had stopped him, but it proved he was living flesh and blood. And in this nightmare, God knew, the knowledge of that was something.

And Lou knew, also, that they could die.

A block back he’d found one of them on the sidewalk, a middle-aged woman in a bathrobe curled up like a dead snake. He knew she was one of them because there was foam all over her lips. Her skin was a mottled gray, but he figured that had little to do with her death. Her head was nearly cleaved from her neck, as if she’d been worked on with a crosscut saw.

But it proved they could die.

Maybe he didn’t know what this disease was. But he knew that much.

He butted his cigarette.

He wasn’t going to get anywhere like this.

Steeling himself, he got to his feet, his back and legs protesting with a series of tiny popping sounds. It had been years, too many years, since he’d gotten any real exercise other than walking. And the smoking, drinking, and fatty foods had not helped. Yet, his body was responding just fine when you considered he was on the bad side of forty.

He made to leave the alley.

And that’s when he realized he wasn’t alone.

6

After all these years, the war finally came home.

It finally rose up from the violent collective blackness that is America’s love of combat, of war, of death, and bit Uncle Sam right in his fat, lazy ass. God knew, it had been a long time coming.

Johnny Davis positioned himself high above the town.

He sat in the belfry above St. Thomas Catholic Church.

It seemed like a good place from which to watch the town go to shit. Safe, defensible. He was invisible in his roost. He didn’t think the rabids would find him up here. Most had emerged from the fog as little more than animals, savage evil beasts who knew only knew two things: fucking and killing. But the others? Yes, some of them—quite a few, in fact—were capable of organization, of tactics, of subterfuge.

These were the dangerous ones.

The ones that could and possibly would lead the others.

But if they came for him up here, if it’s a fight they wanted, then it would be a fight he’d give them. Maybe they’d get him in the end, but he wouldn’t make it easy for them.

Johnny was wearing Vietnam-issue tiger stripe camouflage (pants and shirt), waterproof nylon jungle boots, and a black bandanna. It was the way he’d dressed in the war. And when this happened—like he knew it would eventually—he suited up and got ready.

Funny thing was, everyone in Cut River thought he was out of his head, some stoned-out, brain dead, shell-shocked Vietnam vet who lived in a tarpaper shack outside town at the edge of the marshes. Maybe they were right, he often thought. But the real funny thing, the ironic thing, was that he was the only one who knew what was happening here.

Wasn’t that poetic justice?

After the war, he returned home in ’73, worked a variety of jobs—factories, mills, auto garages, even yard work and construction—but found, like a lot of vets, that he couldn’t hold them. The war was too fresh, the atrocities too close for him to simply shift gears from a world of bloody survival and attrition to one of small-town monotony, hypocritical morals and value judgments. There’d been bar fights, petty crime, then the real thing when he’d hooked up with a local motorcycle gang, now defunct. It had all led to jail, the V.A. hospital, and the psycho ward at the state hospital. Nowhere good.

In the end, Johnny was only glad that he had no family to witness the self-destructive wreck he indeed became.

Lot of vets had seen bad things, had experienced mind-numbing horrors that their Main Street, USA upbringings had definitely not prepared them for, but he had seen things far worse.

The war had been history for roughly thirty years now.

He had seen his fiftieth birthday come and go.

And what had he learned in all that time?

Not a thing, not really. Nothing he didn’t know at twenty in the Delta. Sure, he’d mellowed after they let him out of the hospital, he’d gotten a grip on reality again via intensive therapy with other vets. He’d even managed to hold jobs. But what never changed in all that time was that the war still left a bad taste in his mouth.

And, more so, the government that waged it, its citizens who allowed it.

He sat there, cheek packed with chew, thinking, wondering why he hadn’t just gotten the hell out when he’d seen this coming, because he had. Maybe it was that all these years he’d been looking for some action, looking for a good fight, a reason to do some serious damage and now he had found it.

The belfry had been screened-in to keep out birds and bats, but Johnny had cut the screens out with his K-bar. So, up there in the tower he had himself a four-sided gun port. With his Winchester and its telescopic nightsight, he could pick the rabids off a block away. Not that they’d stay down unless you got them just right, but he could still drop them.

He studied the town.

He had a .357 Smith in a holster at his belt, along with a Browning 9mm semi-auto and .38 in his shoulder sack. Plenty of ammo for all three. Then there was the K-bar, a machete, and a sawed-off twelve-gauge pump with a pistol grip.

Loaded for bear?

Damn right he was.

Bears were nothing compared to what he was facing.

What would have been nice would have been some grenades, some Claymores for perimeter defense. Maybe a sixty or an over-and-under CAR-15. Yeah, sure, and while he was at it maybe an RPG and a Stoner machine gun like he’d carried in the war.

He watched the streets and hated what was happening, while knowing something like this was inevitable. He hated the innocents getting caught up in it, especially the children. They always suffered. He didn’t like the government (never voted, thought they were all corrupt, self-serving facists owned by rich special-interest groups) and hated authority in any form. He knew he was a dinosaur with his revolutionary, anti-establishment attitudes that stunk of sixties’ radicalism.

But he didn’t care.

He was getting old and he was going to die this time, probably. And the thought of that didn’t scare him, it energized him. He decided he was just going to watch this get out of hand, wait for those in power to send in the troops to clean this up, to stop it (if they could), and when they came, he was going to start killing them. Until then he would—

Jesus H. Christ, what was that?

He saw it, but didn’t believe it.

Down there, walking up the sidewalk was a woman. She looked confused, dazed, lost. At least, that’s what her stumbling gait told him. Crazy thing was that she carried what looked like a guitar case.

Was that possible?

“Going to a jam session with those animals, dear?”

He took up his Winchester, sighted her with the night scope. He watched her in the field of green, brought the crosshairs to bear right between her shoulder blades. It was the best way to grease someone. A slug in the spine would explode the vertebrae like shrapnel.

Killshot.

He kept watching her, wondering what her deal was.

She didn’t move like one of them.

He didn’t like the idea of shooting, of announcing his presence to the rabids. But this woman, she had to be fucked-up to be wandering around like that. Had to be. Besides, it was only a matter of time before they got her and he needed a target to sight his rifle in with.

He’d save her from them.

Winchester balanced on the lip of the belfry, eye pressed to the sight’s eyehole, he breathed in and out slowly, bringing himself down, willing a total calm to descend over him. Killing in war was a business and had to be handled in a business-like matter.

Nothing personal, bitch.

He applied pressure to the trigger.

7

The voice was clotted, full of dirt: “You got a smoke for me, mister?”

Lou Frawley almost fell right over, knowing he was not only in imminent danger but that he had been since he’d hid out in the alley. The voice belonged to a woman… no, not a woman, a young girl. A teenager, he guessed.

He made his way out of the alley into the streetlights.

He saw no one around. Heard nothing.

He stood there, his throat tight, his heart pounding, wondering if maybe he’d imagined it all. He waited a moment, two, three. Nothing.

What if that girl was still human?

What if she needed help?

Then he smelled something.

An odd odor. Sharp, pungent. A chemical smell. That and a vague stink of decay, like what you might smell at the bottom of a pile of wet leaves. Not revolting, really, simply earthy, unsettling.

He cleared his throat. “Come out where I can see you.”

First, he heard a slithering sound.

It turned his guts to jelly, made him take a few steps back. Nothing sane made a sound like that. It was low and wet-sounding. He expected to see a nest of snakes come slinking out of the darkness, all knotted-up together like when they hibernated, a great tangle of reptilian motion.

He heard a wet dragging sound, heard it getting closer.

It was time to run, but he couldn’t.

Like the aftermath of a head-on collision, he just had to look.

She came out of the alley on her belly, eyes lit yellow like Christmas bulbs. She was grinning, a wild and deranged smile, all teeth and gums, a froth of foam coming from her nose, her mouth. She slithered along on her belly in a hideous, side-to-side serpentine motion. Her hands were out before her, clawing at the pavement as she came on, the fingertips scraped to bloody nubs.

And Lou, who’d grown up in the mean streets of Milwaukee and had witnessed the aftermath of a gangland execution before his twelfth birthday, fell back, but did not go down.

His head grew dizzy, his lungs seized up and ached from the lack of air.

Then it came, from down deep, somewhere distant and primal, a ragged manic scream that made his bones rattle.

It snapped him out of it.

Like a snake, an emotionless voice told him, she moves like a python, a crawling, legless thing.

And the crazy part was, she moved very quickly.

When she was within a few feet—about the time he screamed—her head and torso rose up like a cobra preparing to strike. He could see that her abdomen had been rubbed raw, her breasts worn to bleeding sacs that hung like skinless polyps.

He also saw why she moved like a snake-woman.

She had no feet.

There was nothing beneath her ankles, just crusted, ragged stumps.

Her bleeding hands reached out for him. “Can you help me, mister? Can you? I’m sick, mister… help me…” she asked, her voice black and soulless. Her tongue came out, seemingly five or six inches of it, white and swollen, tasting the air and looking for life to steal. “Please, mister, I’m so cold… help me…”

But he couldn’t help her.

He couldn’t even help himself.

For one crazy moment while his mind teetered on the edge of some yawning black pit, he almost went to her, pulled her into his arms. He could almost feel the chill of her damp flesh against his own, smell her acrid chemical stink, feel her teeth sinking into his throat.

He ran.

His brain a hive of turbulent thoughts, he kept going, not caring if he ran into a pack of the psychos as long as they would make it quick. That girl… she was inhuman, a thing from the slime of evolution, an obscenity. All he could see was her grotesque form in his brain, inching forward like a slug.

He had a pretty good idea he was going crazy. But there was nothing to stop it now. He just went with the flow, a twig caught in a stream heading out to the dire, churning sea of eternity.

Then he tripped over something and went sprawling face-first into the street.

He split his lip, tasted the blood, and felt the pain. His eyes welled with tears at the hopelessness of it all.

He couldn’t accept this shit.

He couldn’t accept that some lunatic prick of a god had tossed his ass into this… this bedlam. So he lay there, waiting for the end. He had run blind from the snake-woman, didn’t even know where the hell he was anymore. At least before he’d been eyeing up cars, looking for one with a set of keys in it. Now… now he was just lost.

He pulled himself up, saw what he’d tripped over.

Another body.

This one was crushed, splattered.

A man, or what was left of him. It looked like he had taken a swan dive off the roof of the building behind him—three stories up—rather than become like the others.

Or maybe he’d been thrown off.

Lou went to him, not shocked by his slaughtered remains. A corpse was a corpse. Much better than those things that pretended to be people. He had something in one undamaged hand. Lou reached down to see. The dead man’s stiffened fingers were locked death-hard around it. Lou snapped them free.

A gun.

Sweet Jesus, it was a gun.

A revolver. A little .38 police special.

Lou broke it open. Not a shot had been fired. Looking around like maybe someone might take it from him, tell him it wasn’t allowed in the game, he clutched it tightly in his hands.

He saw the big building in the distance, the place he thought was maybe city hall or the municipal building, an island in the storm. Armed, he would go there now.

They haven’t beaten me yet.

This part of town, though partially lit up, showed the abuse of the storm. Trees were split open and tumbled across sidewalks. Cars wrecked. Plate glass windows shattered, storefronts ravaged, doors kicked in. And there were more bodies, of course. Four of five of them sprawled on the walks, another (headless) lying in the street.

It made him wonder how much was the storm and how much was the psychos out venting themselves.

It was about then that he heard the sound.

First he thought it was running feet in the distance. But as he listened, he understood all too well. Clomp, clomp, clomp. The sound of paws on concrete. The rattle of collar chains.

Dogs.

They came around the corner just ahead, three mongrels trotting side by side. Two bigger ones—shepherd and setter mixes—and a smaller beagle mix. They came forward, tongues flopping from side to side, moving with an ordered, businesslike efficiency that belied a set destination.

Then they stopped dead.

They saw Lou, raised their hackles, began growling.

Lou brought up the gun, made ready.

His heart skipped a beat when he saw the fierce yellow of their eyes, the foam dropping in clots from their tongues. The small dog launched itself first.

Lou put a bullet in its head.

The slug punched through its left eye and scrambled its brains. It flopped over, squealing. The other two approached it, more interested in their fallen comrade now than Lou. They sniffed its twitching corpse. Then, without hesitation, they began to devour it.

But were they devouring it?

They seemed to be ripping it open, yanking out lengths of viscera, chewing them, tearing them and vomiting them back out again. Their only purpose here seemed to be mutilation.

Quietly, very quietly, Lou backed away, one silent step at a time.

Then he slipped around a corner and ran like hell.

8

Lisa Tabano left her mother’s house in something of a daze.

Had she been able to think clearly, to process and sort the details of her little fugue, she would have known she was in shock. But that blood, all that goddamn blood, splattered, pooled. Like a slaughterhouse.

That crazy woman there… had she murdered her parents?

Maybe killed them in the kitchen, dragged them outside? Maybe that’s what she’d been doing when Lisa arrived. Feeding on them, maybe, mutilating their bodies at the very least. Just finishing up when Lisa arrived, taking out the scraps.

Yes, Lisa saw it all in vivid, shocking Technicolor and, seeing it, her traumatized mind simply closed-up shop, pulled in on itself. The reality of it was simply too much, so it was filed away in some dark shadowy closet where the worst nightmares were stored.

Then Lisa, bewildered and confused, her dazed brain running on auto, wandered off in an outraged stupor. Guitar case in hand she toured the city. She made it quite a few blocks before she was seen.

Two young punks, is what she thought.

Then she really saw them as they stepped into the glow of the streetlight. They wore leather motorcycle jackets that were crusted with filth, no shirts beneath. Their flesh was the color of tombstones, their ribs jutting like ladders of bone as they breathed. Their eyes were huge, empty, devoid of anything remotely human. Wide, staring pools of electric neon yellow rimmed in red.

Maybe this is what brought her out of it.

Like a slap in the face with a wet towel or a boot to the crotch.

She blinked, blinked again, felt a scream clawing its way to her lips. It brought her back to the real world, to reality, the reality of survival in her hometown which was now a barbarous netherworld. It showed her that Lisa Tabano was about to become a victim. And there she was, head full of dreams and dust, guitar case in one hand, purse thrown over her shoulder (gotta protect the stuff inside, God yes).

Then she did scream.

The two punks grinned, snarled really, lips pulling away from teeth, tangles of terrible translucent foam running from their mouths. Their chests were crusted with it.

“Oh, Christ,” she managed, knowing she was mostly fucked here.

The two punks separated, moved to either side of her, coming in slow and stealthy, breath rattling from their lungs with the sibilance of wind through pipes.

Lisa tried to go back, tried to duck forward, tried all the easy moves but they kept pace with her all too effortlessly.

The punk to her left got within three, four feet when there was a thunderous, distant crack and his head literally exploded, shattering like a crystal vase in an eruption of blood and bone. His head neatly split open, his face actually dangling by threads of meat, he took two, three drunken steps forward and went down in a heap. He should have been motionless, divorced of life, but his body trembled, his fingers clawing madly at the wet sidewalk with shrill scraping sounds.

Lisa let out some kind of cry, went down on her ass, confused as ever now.

The second punk studied his fallen comrade with amusement, turned back to her.

He bent his knees, made to leap like a cat on a sparrow. His hands clutched to either side, he actually moved maybe a foot before his face caved-in. One minute he was coming at her, whispering hungry death, and the next there was another loud report… and his face imploded, actually blew out the back of his head.

She saw it spray in the air, white crown-shaped things tinkling over the walk.

She realized they were teeth.

He slumped over, went face-down. Did not move.

She pulled herself to her feet, jogging away. Bile kicked up into her mouth, her stomach trying to push its way into her throat. She stumbled off, not even looking where she was going until she slammed into a wrought-iron fence. Then she cried and coughed, her head echoing with dark noise like a scream in an empty room.

She looked up and saw the church.

Yes, St. Thomas’. She knew it very well, having made communion there. She took catechism in the school out back. It loomed up before her gigantic and black and gothic. She pushed her way through the gate, fell on the stone steps.

I’ll be safe in there.

They can’t get me in there.

They can’t come in here, not their kind.

In her brain was everything she ever was or wanted to be. Her life, her goals, her aspirations. She thought of the next CD Electric Witch was working on. The songs were better than the first. Her playing was so much better, so much more professional, not rough and raw. She could hear her own voice telling her that, yes, yes, girl, you’re gonna be a rock star, you’re gonna be big, band’s gonna be big… and then all that faded away into grayness as she saw how easily this town had stripped it all away from her.

She opened her eyes, looked up.

There was a man standing above her.

He was not a big man, but hard-looking, powerful, wizened.

“I guess you think you’re going to live, eh?” he said.

And then he descended on her.

9

The town was dead.

Cut River was a graveyard.

Ben Eklind and his wife Nancy cut through darkened yards, up shadowy streets, across lonesome boulevards. The chill night wind was at their backs, dead leaves skittered up walks, and everywhere, everything was sullen, empty, abandoned. The houses were dusty tombs, the buildings mausoleums. There was no one, nothing, just that awful creeping, electric stillness that buzzed in the air.

They’d run into town, breathless and bewildered, needing only to be free from the scene of the accident. From the dead guy who was anything but dead, maybe not truly alive in the human sense of the word, but definitely not dead. Caught in some twilight limbo in-between perhaps.

So they ran… into this.

“Sam…” Nancy kept saying under her breath. “Sam. Sam. He’s—”

“Yes,” Ben told her, holding her tight against him. “He is, darling. But we can’t think about that right now. We’ve gotta think about us.”

And that made sense to her.

They knocked at the door of the first house they found.

Nothing. No one answered.

Same at the one after that and the one after that. All the houses were dark, uninhabited. Phones were dead. Cars were in driveways. Yards were neat. Hedges trimmed. Everything looked normal… yet, there was something wrong here. They both knew it. It wasn’t just that psycho on the road, either. That was minor compared to this. Nobody anywhere. Not that you could see, anyway. But, down deep, down where the aboriginal being lived, Ben knew they were still here.

Somewhere.

Hiding.

Playing some wicked game of cat-and-mouse.

More than once, he’d been sure there was someone in the dark, someone just watching them.

“Maybe the world ended,” Nancy said, “and somebody forgot to tell us.”

Ben shook his head. “No, this is localized.”

“And how do you know that?”

“I just… I don’t know, just a feeling.”

“Oh really?” she said, as they moved up a nameless street. “I hope it’s not the same sort of feeling that told you to take the shortcut or we’re seriously screwed here, I think.”

He ignored that.

Something was wrong… but what?

He’d been through it all in his mind, the usual things. Nuclear war. Plague. Foreign attack, terrorists, alien invasion. Some natural catastrophe. Everything he’d sucked in from a lifetime of watching old movies on the late show. But none of it fit. None of it seemed to wash in his way of thinking.

Something had happened.

Something pretty bad.

He kept thinking chemical spill. Maybe some tanker truck had overturned, spilling a load of some toxic substance. The town had been evacuated. And maybe… yeah, maybe that guy on the road had been contaminated or something. He liked that scenario, it covered all the bases. He liked it until he stopped to consider that they, Nancy and he, might get tainted by the stuff, too.

But he kept thinking about it.

It was something rational to hold onto.

“Look,” Nancy said as they crossed an avenue. “Over there.”

Ben saw it. In the middle of the block, a small ranch house with its lights on. They’d been in Cut River for some time now and this was the first sign of life they’d come across.

Up ahead, he could see, there were more lit up houses.

Even streetlights shining like beacons in the murk. He sighed with relief. It meant they were still on planet Earth, anyway. Crazy as it sounded, he was starting to think they’d stepped off into some alternate universe.

The first three houses were dark, festooned with creeping shadows, wound up in webs of blackness. Scary, sure. It was all scary. But why was it that this ranch house, lights glowing in its windows, seemed more… threatening? There were other houses lit-up on the next block and street lamps, too, but this one, all alone in the tenebrous sea, really got under Ben’s skin.

He could feel a formless dread rolling in his belly.

It didn’t bother Nancy, though.

When they reached the house, he hung back. It wasn’t a conscious decision. Something atavistic, maybe, wouldn’t let him get any closer.

Nancy, however, went up the walk, totally at ease.

Ben looked around—a bird feeder, thick cedar bushes, a fence in need of paint, a newer pick-up in the drive, a few newspapers on the porch, rolled-up and unread—there was nothing wrong with it.

Yet, he knew there was.

Something.

“A cup of coffee,” Nancy was saying. “That’s what I need. Or maybe a drink. You don’t know us, but here we come.”

“Maybe we should just make for the main drag like we said,” Ben said.

She looked at him over her shoulder, annoyed. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” he said, realizing he couldn’t put it into words. “Why not?”

“Why not? Because this town is giving me the fucking creeps, Ben, that’s why not. We’re going here. Maybe their phone works.”

He followed her up onto the porch. “I doubt it. Lines are down.”

“Well, maybe they’ve got a computer. Maybe they’re on-line.”

“Not if the phone lines are down.”

She shook her head. “A lot of people use cable now, bright boy, or haven’t you heard?”

“It’s probably down, too.”

“Oh, quit being such a moron. I don’t need it, Ben. You hear me? My brother’s dead and I don’t need your bullshit right now.”

Yeah, Sam was dead. But Ben knew they weren’t that close, never had been. Right now, he knew, she was worried about her own ass despite what she said. It was funny how her insults didn’t bother him now. Any other time he would have been thinking about putting her down on her big butt, but right now her caustic tongue was almost reassuring.

She was knocking at the door.

She kept at it, on and off, for maybe three, four minutes. Then she opened the screen door, the inside door. Ben’s protests went unheard. She walked right in. He had no choice but to follow.

First thing that struck him was the smell.

It wasn’t the usual household bouquet of lingering food odors, tobacco, pets, room deodorizers. This was heavy, pungent. A strange, heady chemical brew almost like ammonia.

He caught a good whiff of it and then it was gone.

He had to wonder if it was ever there.

“Hello?” Nancy called out.

Her voice echoed and died.

Ben felt the flesh on his arms begin to crawl; he didn’t like this in the least.

“Hello?” Nancy called out again. “Is anyone here?”

The heavy echo of her voice told them the place was empty.

Funny, Ben was thinking, but the very quality of an echo can tell you so much. It can tell you that a house is empty. It can tell you that something is wrong, that something nasty is about to happen.

They walked from room to room to room. Bedrooms were empty. Living room ditto. The TV was on, but there was nothing but static on the screen. Nancy picked up the remote, clicked a few channels. She found the Weather Channel.

“See?” she said. “Cable’s working.” She tossed the remote on the couch. “Where the hell is everyone?”

There was a blanket on the floor at the foot of a rocking chair. Next to it was a side table, an ashtray sitting on it. A cigarette had burned down to ash long ago. A pack of Marlboros and a lighter were next to it.

Nancy shrugged, put one in her mouth, lit it. “It’s cold in here, Ben. It’s so cold in here,” she said in a low voice.

Ben was going to remind her that she’d quit smoking six months before, but he didn’t; he had an urge to light up, too, and hadn’t smoked in eight years. Right now, he needed something.

In the kitchen, the back door was open to the night, frigid air funneling in. Ben closed it, the texture of the darkness outside somehow unsettling. There was a ham sandwich on a plate, a pile of chips at its side. A bottle of Coke, opened, sat on the table, untouched.

It was eerie.

Like the fucking Mary Celeste, he thought.

Except this place wasn’t out in the middle of some gray, empty ocean. It was just an average house in an average town in the upper Midwest in the very average state of Michigan. Yet, hehad a pretty good idea now—if he hadn’t before—that something extremely un-average had swallowed this place whole and spat something back in its place, something sinister, something malevolent.

“Lets go,” he said, barely able now to contain the horror he felt.

But Nancy, stalwart and self-deluding, maintained her sense of normality. She tried the phone, shook her head. Then she started leafing through bills by the phone. “Gerald and Shiela Bricker,” she said. “I wonder where they’ve gotten to?”

“I’m leaving,” Ben announced.

“Oh no you’re not,” Nancy informed him. “There’s a truck outside. Help me find the keys. Then we’ll drive out of this mess.”

“We can’t steal their truck.”

Nancy raised an eyebrow, looked him dead in the eye. “Oh yeah? And why the hell can’t we?”

But he couldn’t seem to come up with an objection. He’d never stolen anything in his life. It wasn’t in his make-up to do so, but right now grand theft auto sounded perfectly fine. He started rooting through drawers, but quietly, as if someone might hear.

And maybe that’s what he was afraid of.

He found a cell phone on the floor. Looked like somebody had purposely smashed it. He picked it up, but it was useless.

Nancy searched around in the living room, checked the hall closet. The Bricker’s bills in hand, she went to the back bedrooms. The last one was not a bedroom at all, but a computer room. She sat down at the desk. The screen was black, but she clicked the mouse and it came up. Somebody had been chatting.

“Ben, come here,” she called, afraid now, too.

He came in, his usual windburned, hearty complexion wan and sickly.

“Look,” his wife said. “Shiela8. That must be Shiela Bricker.”

Shiela had been at the keyboard trying desperately to reach the outside world apparently. She’d last logged-on some two hours before.

6:28 P.M. Shiela8: help me

6:31 P.M. Shiela8: help me

6:39 P.M. Shiela8: help me please is there anyone

6:42 P.M. Shiela8: is anyone out there

6:55 P.M. Shiela8: alone am alone am alone help me out there

7:02 P.M. Shiela8: last one am i the last one am i the last i

7:07 P.M. Shiela8: nobody nobody help me help me godhelpus

7:11 P.M. Shiela8: youareout areyou out help meeeecan you

7:14 P.M. Shiela8: happeningnowhelpmememe helpmeee

7:15 P.M. Shiela8: help usssss

Ben cleared his throat. “What the fuck happened here?”

“Look,” Nancy said then. “Somebody answered her.”

8:35 P.M. XXX: where are you

8:37 P.M. XXX: tell me and i’ll come for you yes

8:40 P.M. XXX: i’ll help you tell me

“I wonder who the hell that was?”

Nancy shook her head. “You never get out and chat, Ben. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“Sure I do,” he said, crossing his arms. “Chat rooms are full of dipshits with too much time on their hands.”

“Sometimes.” She shrugged. “Maybe this XXX person was trying to help.”

“Probably thought it was all a joke.”

“Let’s find out.”

“No.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Let’s find those keys and get out of here.”

“Ben. This might be our only contact with the outside world.”

He looked angry. “I said no. Let’s find the keys, get in that truck and get the hell outta Dodge.”

“And if we can’t find them? Then what? We go house to house looking for a car to steal?” She fixed him with those dark eyes of hers, that don’t-be-so-fucking-stupid stare. “Let me try this, get a message out there. Then we’ll go.”

He didn’t like it, but he submitted. “All right. Whatever.”

Nancy typed a message.

9:31 P.M. Shiela8: Hey, is anyone out there? This isn’t a joke. I need help.

The minutes ticked by. Ben stood there, feeling superior but not enjoying it at all. They were wasting time. For some reason, he felt time was very precious. They had to get out of this mess now. They couldn’t afford to wait.

9:34 P.M. Shiela8: Please we need help. We’re in Cut River Michigan. Something’s happened here. We’re trapped. We need assistance immediately.

9:35 P.M. XXX: cut river yes where are you

9:35 P.M. XXX: where are you

“Don’t answer that,” Ben suddenly said. “There’s something wrong about this.”

“Oh, quit it for godsake,” Nancy said and typed.

9:36 P.M. Shiela8: We’re at 809 Kerrigan Street. The Bricker’s residence

9:37 P.M. XXX: yes i’m coming yessss

9:37 P.M. XXX: coming through the rye yessss

Nancy kept staring at the screen, slowly shaking her head. “It’s a big joke to them.”

Ben grabbed her by the arm, pulled her roughly to her feet. “It’s more than a joke, you dumbass,” he snapped at her. “Whoever XXX is, they’re in this town. Don’t you see? They’re here and now they know where we are.”

Nancy began to argue, but Ben didn’t give her the chance to do more than cuss. He dragged her straight through the house and out the front door. He pulled her down the porch, nearly tossing her into the yard. She fought with him, made to slap him, kick him. It did her no good. He clamped a hand over her mouth and put a wristlock on her he’d learned in high school wrestling. It wasn’t until they were hidden behind a row of cedars that he let her loose.

“You stupid sonofabitch!” she railed, but not too loudly. “Who the fuck you think you are? You don’t lay a hand on me, you don’t—”

He clamped his hand over her mouth again. “Shut your hole,” he said sternly, his voice hard, trembling with authority. “Someone’s coming.”

Nancy listened, turning her head this way and that. She heard nothing but the wind in the trees overhead. But then… yes, something. In the distance.

Click, click, click.

She narrowed her eyes.

What the hell was that?

It was getting louder, from the direction they’d come from, from the blacked-out section of Cut River… one of them, anyway. She licked her lips, suddenly aware of the cool mist on her skin, the thunder of her heart. She drew in quick, shallow breaths, trying to do this quietly. Quiet mattered now. Mattered more than anything.

Click, click, click.

Very close now.

Nancy was gripping Ben’s arm with everything she had. He was doing the same. Any other time it would have hurt, now it was just a solid, firm pressure that she needed more than anything. She could smell the damp air, cold and gray, smell the thick green odor of the cedars they hid behind. These were physical things. They grounded her.

Click, click, click.

A woman came up the sidewalk, her stride casual, yet… odd.

Just a woman, Nancy knew, that was all… but that shape coming from the darkness… it filled her with a nameless dread, made her flesh crawl in waves… a woman, yes, but not really. More like something ebon and malignant pretending to be a woman.

She kept coming, tall, thin, hair swinging at her shoulders.

She paused at the walk and they both got a good look at her. She was wearing high heels, a purse on her arm. She carried a high, noisome stink of violated crypts about her.

And she was stark naked.

They could hear her breathing. It was a horrible wet sound like water sucked through a hose. Her white, grinning face said all there was to say about the black depths of human madness, of incarnate evil. Her eyes were yellow, gleaming.

Nancy was shaking, willing herself not to scream.

The woman carried a big knife in one hand.

She walked right up onto the porch, went through the open door.

“Helloooo,” she said, “anybody home?”

Dear God, Nancy thought, that voice.

Raw, rasping, and bestial. The snarl of a mad dog contained more humanity. She kept calling out in the house. Sometimes her voice was remotely human, other times more of a barking, growling noise, an enraged wolf attempting speech.

About the time Ben and Nancy were thinking of making a run for it, she reappeared at the door, electric yellow eyes glistening like wet chrome. She scanned the yard, drool foaming from her lips and dropping in clots to her taut, jutting breasts.

“Hide and seek?” she hissed into the night air. “Is that our game… yesss… come out come out wherever you are. I can smell you out there…”

Nancy wasn’t sure what was holding her together by that point.

Maybe it was Ben. Maybe she was just locked-down hard with superstitious, unreasoning fear. She watched the woman step out into the yard. She started in their direction and then abruptly turned, making towards the truck parked in the driveway. She pressed her face up to the windows, leaving a sticky smear when she pulled away. Then she went to the garage, threw open the door and disappeared inside.

“Now,” Ben said under his breath. “Quietly.”

Still holding onto each other, they rose and darted out from behind the cedar bushes. They scampered across the neighboring lawns, staying on the grass to avoid any noise. Three houses down the block, they paused behind another parked pick-up. In the distance, the Bricker’s house looked peaceful. They waited maybe five minutes, but didn’t see the woman again.

It took some time for Nancy to find her voice. For too long she was concerned only with staying alive, living long enough to draw another breath. “Oh my God, Ben, oh Jesus…” her voice trailed off into sobs. “What are we… what can we do?”

“We have to get out of here. This whole town is bad.”

Nancy nodded silently.

They moved off again through dappled shadows.

There were other lit-up houses ahead and they made for them. They didn’t really expect to find people now, but maybe keys to vehicles, weapons to protect themselves with. Something. Anything that could give them an edge of security in this nightmare.

Whether it was safe or not, they kept away from the road and sidewalks, sticking close to the houses, the shrubs, the bushes. Ben knew very well that at any moment white hands might reach out for them, drag them into the forever night, but there was no choice.

They came around the corner of a neat two-story cracker box, saw something dangling from the porch overhang. They both saw it, there was no way not to. No breath left in his lungs to scream, Ben teetered there on rubbery legs, wondered what could possibly top this.

“My God,” Nancy whimpered. “My God…”

The body of a boy was swinging from a rope.

A frayed noose encircled his throat, cutting into the flesh. He couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven, if that. He dangled in the breeze, turning back and forth slowly, his hands knotted into fists.

This was the epitaph of Cut River, the ghastly monument reared in its passing. A young boy hung by the neck.

It couldn’t get worse than this.

That was, until his bloodless face hitched into a sneer, lips hooked into a smile, a chattering death grin.

His body began to dance.

Just a shudder at first, then a more fluid motion, arms and legs flopping limply in some macabre imitation of human locomotion. He was like some gruesome puppet, some marionette dangling by the neck, his limbs flowing as if he were walking on air.

Ben stood there, mesmerized by this latest statement of sheer lunacy.

His brain was filled with a thundering black sound like the flap of huge wings, like birds taking flight in his skull. It was maddening. And all he could think of was that old music video by Herbie Hancock, the one with all the motorized mannequins and automatons mimicking human beings—walking, kicking, turning, gyrating. And that’s what this boy was, some cold, whirring machine mocking a little boy, jaws snapping open and shut, head bobbing, limbs thrashing, a garbled dry croaking erupting from his throat.

Nancy began to shake all over.

She started sobbing, then tittering, then both it seemed.

Ben wanted nothing more than to go quietly mad, but now wasn’t the time.

With tremendous effort, he got his legs moving. He spun his wife around by the shoulders and her face, bathed in the yellow moonlight, was crazed, pulled into some tight crying/laughing mask. It frightened him. Probably worse than anything he’d seen thus far.

She came alive under his grip, fighting him, hitting out, trying to scratch his face. He slapped her and she slumped into his arms. He half-carried, half-dragged her away, wondering how long it could possibly be until that rope around the kid’s neck snapped and he came looking to bite at something other than empty air.

“Gonna be okay,” Ben heard himself whisper to Nancy as she collapsed completely and he scooped her up, carrying her away and across the avenue onto the block with the lights on.

He found a row of high bushes and set her gently down behind them.

He sat beside her, stroking her hair.

She was awake then, sobbing. “It can’t be happening, Ben, can it?” she asked. “I know it can’t, I know I’m crazy. I gotta be. That boy, he’s dead, but he’s still moving and that woman… oh Jesus, Ben, I’m losing my mind…”

He pulled her tight against him, kissed the top of her head. “You’re not crazy, girl. This town is crazy, but not you.”

After a time she quieted down and he was afraid for her.

Afraid because she was a tough, ballsy woman who didn’t take shit from anyone or anything and now she was weak and beaten, whimpering like a little girl.

This is what scared him.

She was always a rock and now she was wearing down, flaking away before him.

“Sam and all this… I can’t think straight. I don’t know.”

“Sshh. It’s gonna be okay. I’ll get you outta here.”

Then they both heard something coming up the sidewalk.

At first it was muffled and indistinct, but then it became obvious: the slapping of bare feet. Many of them.

Ben and Nancy hugged one another, drawing strength.

The parade of bare feet came and went, their owners making a series of wet, almost reptilian hissings as they passed. Ben had this almost suicidal, crazy urge to peer over the hedges and see what manner of people made such sounds.

But he didn’t.

He just held Nancy and was held, waiting.

Ten minutes later, they were still clutching one another. Waiting for what came next and not having to wait long. It came from across the street, from a bank of dark homes. Ben could feel his breath catch in his throat and hold there. It was merely a sound, but it conjured an almost physical horror in him.

I can’t take anymore of this, oh God in Heaven, I can’t.

Across the street, he could hear a shrill, eerie giggling.

The giggling of a little girl, demented and loathsome.

10

“All I want to do is live,” Lisa Tabano told the bald, mustached man who carried her into the church. “I don’t even want to know about this… I just want to live.”

Johnny Davis nodded in the darkness. “Seems a simple enough thing, doesn’t it?”

“I used to think so,” she said, her voice weary.

“I’ll try to get you out, but I can’t promise anything.”

“Thank you. Then we can get the police, the army, I don’t know. The authorities. Someone in charge. Maybe… maybe my mom and dad… maybe they’re alive somewhere.”

“Maybe they got out,” Johnny said.

She ignored that. “We’ll get out, get the cops, whatever. Let them sort it out.”

Johnny laughed low in his throat. “Oh, you are naïve, aren’t you? You don’t get it, do you? You don’t even know what this is all about.”

Lisa looked at him. “Do you?”

All that got was laughter.

She saw him shaking his head, massaging his jaw (something he seemed to do whenever confronted by something he didn’t like). “No point in getting into any of this,” he said. They were just inside the main door of the church where Johnny had taken her after finding her on the steps out front. He opened it a crack, peered out. “If you want to get out, we might as well start on that.”

“I was kind of thinking that maybe you were coming with me,” Lisa said. “Or am I mistaken on this?”

“Sadly mistaken, dear.” He pulled a pack of RedMan chewing tobacco from inside his survival vest and stuffed his cheek. “I’m staying right here.”

“For godsake, why?”

“You wouldn’t understand. It would take just too long to explain it and we don’t have the time.”

An enigma?

Oh yes, and then some.

Here was a guy who obviously was some sort of survivalist—dressed out in fatigues and survival vest, armed to the teeth. A guy who had positioned himself in the church belfry and, thankfully, picked off those psychos who were about to make hamburger out of her. Hard as a concrete piling, he was built thick and heavy and was definitely no stranger to the business of killing. Not some weekend warrior here. No gun freak wannabe who dreamed of action and jerked off over back issues of Soldier of Fortune, but would piss his pants at the first taste of the real thing.

No, Johnny Davis was the genuine article.

But there was an undercurrent to him Lisa just couldn’t put a finger on, some secret agenda. A mystery.

But right now, despite everything that had thus far happened, neither Johnny Davis or any of the rest of it was a priority for her. She was beginning to feel nauseous and sweaty like maybe she had a good flu bug going.

But it had nothing to do with that.

“We should leave before things get… worse,” he said.

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

He sighed, shook his head. “Goddamn women and their bladders.”

She ignored him and he led her through the church to the rectory in the back. He motioned towards the bathroom and left her alone. She closed the door and clicked on the light. She set her guitar case and purse down. When she was sure he was out of earshot, she relieved herself (though that wasn’t the real reason for this visit).

When she was finished, she splashed some water in her face and looked at herself in the mirror. Good God. She was wasted, drawn, her dark eyes and hair standing out in marked contrast to the pale, sweaty skin of her face. Twenty-three years old and already she had discolored rings under her eyes, worry lines at the corners of her lips. Like Keith Richard’s junkie sister.

God, she felt horrible.

She opened her purse, took out a baggie of brown powder. She didn’t have a spoon, so she scooped up a tad and shoved into her nose, sniffing it up. She repeated this and sat down on the toilet, shivering, her eyes watering, her guts flipping and flopping.

When’s the last time you ate? she asked herself. The last time you actually put some food in your body?

But she couldn’t remember.

A day? Two? Three?

Got so after awhile all you needed was the junk, you didn’t need anything else.

She was pencil-thin, nearly emaciated, sporting a classic hard-living rock and roll look: haggard, gaunt, a big head of hair and a skeleton for a body. All those years as a teenager she’d gone on one crazy, punishing diet after another trying her damnedest to look like her heroes—Johnny Thunders, Joe Perry, Nikki Sixx—and now, at last, a rock star in her own right with a hit album, she’d discovered their secret: heroin. You didn’t need diets or fasting or any of that nonsense, all you needed was H. Food of the gods, yes oh yes oh yes.

Already she could feel it canceling out the bad stuff.

Her personal cloud found her, wrapped her up tight. She’d peak in fifteen minutes or so, but the climb was oh-so delicious. Nose full of junk, she could laugh at the psychos outside.

Euphoric and revitalized, born again, she gathered up her stuff and left the bathroom, had a foolish urge to skip and whistle.

This was more like it.

She had nearly six grams left. Plenty to last.

God, if mom and dad are dead, if—

Don’t think about it. That’s for later,she told herself, when you’re safe.

“Took you fucking long enough, rock star,” Johnny said when she returned.

It was dark and Lisa was glad for it. She didn’t want her savior, Johnny Davis Rambo, seeing the change coming over her. She had a pretty good vibe on the guy now and it told her he was not stupid, that he’d been around.

“You gonna lug that guitar case with?”

She looked at him like he was mad. “Of course. It’s very rare, man, worth a bundle. It’s everything to me.”

He was peering out the door again. “No, you’re wrong there, girly. A guitar ain’t nothing but a guitar, just wood and strings and steel and what have you. Your life is all that counts.”

“I’m not going to argue with you.”

He shrugged. “Whatever. Seen cherries like you in the war. Always fretting over good luck charms and religious objects and prized possessions. Didn’t do ’em no good. You got one life, that’s all you get and all you need. Rest is bullshit. Materialism.”

“Oh, you got me pegged, eh? Material girl.”

“You said it not me.”

“You don’t know shit.” She fished a pack of cigarettes out of her coat pocket, fired one up. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“No, you’re right. I don’t know, don’t wanna know.”

This guy. Jesus. He was ruining a perfectly good buzz with his attitude. “What about you? That must be quite a story. Look at you… what is that getup about?” she asked him, giving him a sneer she usually reserved for the cameras. “Camouflage for chrissake? Didn’t notice any jungle around here, Rambo. Time to leave Da Nang behind, Chuck Fucking Norris.”

He closed the door. “You wanna get out of here, rock star? That what you want? Then you’d best zip up that pisshole you call a mouth.” He turned back to the door, muttered under his breath: “Fucking broads. Cooking and sucking dick are their high points, rest is crap. Can’t trust ’em. Can’t trust anything that bleeds for a week every month but don’t have the good sense to lay down and die.”

“Excuse me?” Lisa said, her blood boiling like hot molasses. “What did you say?”

“You heard me.”

“You arrogant, macho shitbag.” She shook her head. “Yeah, just my luck. I get stuck in this fucking mess and who do I get for company? Sexist goddamn loser. What happened, Rambo? What gave you such a high opinion of women? You get dumped too many times? Small penis? Or don’t you even like girls?”

He smiled thinly. “How bad you want to find out?”

“About as bad as I want my tits stapled to the sidewalk.”

“Good place for you, long as your ass is up in the air.”

Lisa was wondering how he’d look with a guitar case shoved up his back door sideways. “Okay, macho man. Save it. Show me the way out. You can do that can’t you?”

“I can do all sorts of things, woman.”

Though there seemed to be no sexual undercurrent implied, she said, “Spare me, Sarge. You couldn’t get laid in a fucking leper colony.”

He pulled off his watch cap, stroked his bald head, put it back on. “You’d be surprised.”

“No, I’d be disappointed.” Her buzz had peaked now. It would hang around for a time, but already this guy had ruined a good thing. She wasn’t going to let him get away with it.

Johnny took two quick, very quick, steps toward her. She saw his hand come up and was powerless to stop him. She saw her life flash before her eyes like a low-budget movie. His hand stopped inches from her left temple.

His eyes, locked with her own, belonged in the head of wild boar, not a man. Finally, he let out a breath, grinned at her, started giggling. “I like a woman with balls that puts me in my place. You’re okay, rock star. You married?”

“Only to myself.”

“Wanna be? You think you could go for a mutt like me?”

“Doubt it.”

She suddenly felt connected to this guy, antithesis to everything she loved about the male species.

He nodded, shouldered his rifle and pulled a shotgun from its sheath at his back. It was a sleek, nasty-looking piece of hardware with a pistol grip. “Let’s go, rock star.”

Lisa stuck her tongue out behind his back, but followed.

Back out onto the streets. The damp. The cold. The grainy darkness.

Yeah, Rambo here was a real piece of work. It wasn’t so much that he’d insulted her or women in general (she’d been gone over by the best), it was just that she had to wonder what sort of combination of circumstances produced a guy like him. He was rough, sure, about as polished as a rusty nail and liked to give the impression he was an A-number one badass lifetaker. And maybe he was, but she had a pretty good idea he was more than that. Something else entirely. There was warmth under that roughhewn exterior.

Like a coal in a firepot, warm at its center, but covered in ash and dirt.

That was Johnny Davis.

“Follow the leader, rock star.”

Meaning: don’t lag behind.

But she had no intention of doing that. In a situation like this, even a complete asshole like Johnny Davis came in pretty damn handy.

He motioned for her to stop.

He did everything with hand signals like he was humping it up the Ho Chi Minh Trail again. Up ahead, he was studying what lay before them.

He was real careful, real professional.

Good man to have on point, she figured.

Especially when the war came home.

11

Lou Frawley’s world was one of madness and damp and perpetual dark.

It was a compacted microcosm of horror and survival where the worse things not only could happen but did with shocking regularity. His world was Cut River and the madhouse it had become. Pretty little snow-globe town. Shake it up and the snow fell on the quaint little village. Except the quaint little village was haunted by monsters that lived in the skins of men, women, and children.

Quite a change, really.

His was a salesman’s life—town after town, one bad meal piled on another, ulcers, failed relationships, promotions that never materialized, shitty hotel rooms, drunken nights, ass-kissing sales managers, one night stands with painted-up bimbos and the only drama in it being what sort of social disease you might bring home like a sick puppy to care for and feed until it did you in, and the road went on forever.

That was pretty much what it was before Cut River.

All that dark revelation and this in only a few short hours.

Maybe it wasn’t much of a life when you stuck it under the scope like a new microbe, but it was his and he tended it well. Watered it, fed it, and kept it growing.

Now there was only survival.

Stay alive long enough to maybe get out of this godforsaken town or, at the very least, to die knowing the answer to the grim puzzle.

I should’ve stayed in Green Bay, he thought. He almost did. Instead, he drove a couple hundred miles north into this.

Sound thinking, all right.

After his little rendezvous with the Snake Woman (as he now called her), he kept moving, keeping in the shadows, keeping his eyes on the big brick building perched on the hill. It had to serve some official function. He knew that much. But what if it didn’t? What if it was some old condemned rathole waiting for the kiss of the wrecking ball? What then?

That’s what he kept thinking.

He was half a block away from it now and could’ve been there a long time ago if he hadn’t had to hide all the time. No matter, there it was.

He was in the doorway alcove of a little craft shop, pressed up stiffly to the plate glass display window, enclosed in bands of darkness.

Safe?

Yes, about as safe as any other place in this town. And that, of course, wasn’t saying much.

He hadn’t seen any more psychos since the Snake Woman, but that didn’t mean they weren’t out there. He could hear them from time to time—wild shriekings and cries. Sometimes the sounds of shattering glass. Oh yes, they were out there and very active. No doubt about that. But not just them; he could also hear dogs barking and whining… at least he hoped it was dogs. And earlier he could’ve sworn he heard gunfire, but it was too distant to be sure.

He liked to think that it was just that: gunfire.

Sounds of humanity, bugle call of his brothers and sisters in the resistance.

The resistance. That made him smile.

Knowing it was probably a mistake but not giving a ripe shit since he had the gun now, Lou lit up a cigarette. He lit it quickly, then cupped the cherry, waiting to see if it drew any attention.

As badly as he wanted out of this nightmare, he also wanted answers. He needed to know what had happened here. He knew that during the past week or so the area had been nailed by storms and that within the last couple days they’d been severe, bad enough to wipe out telephone poles and their attending lines without mercy.

But what else had happened?

What took possession of this town when the light failed? Was it a plague or a contagion and, if so, what kind? Was it in the soil? The air? The water? And better yet, was he already contaminated?

Jesus, it was all such madness.

He kept watching the big building up ahead.

Very gothic with the moon washing it down in a ghostly ambiance. It sat on a low, sloping hill, surrounded by denuded elms and craggy oaks. Three rambling stories of stone and brick, domed belfries, widow’s walks, drooping eaves, gabled roof dormers, all capped by a jutting expanse of sheer-pitched roofs and rusting weather vanes. It had lots of scrollwork, a marble-cut frieze wrapping around it like a scarf, too many oblong and oval windows that glared out, dead eyes in a stone face. There was a huge clock set in the facade of a rectangular tower, telling him it was nearly half past nine.

Quite a place. About as inviting as mausoleum at midnight.

He thought maybe he saw some lights on in there… but couldn’t be sure with moonlight the color of cornsilk turning the windows to somber reflecting pools. He dragged from his cigarette, knowing that now, this moment, more than ever before in his life, was not the time for impulsive action. Whatever he did had to be plotted out carefully.

He looked around.

Nothing but the town everywhere he looked—buildings and homes and church spires and leaning chimneys painted the color of coal dust, all frosted by the moon. Black, patchy clouds above and cold, mean streets below.

Or maybe not.

To the right of the big building was an open expanse like a park and beyond that what looked to be a cemetery. Same one he saw earlier, but from a different perspective now. A mutiny of stones and marble vaults… and beyond, nothing but dark woods, empty meadows.

So there it was.

He could either take his chance with the building or he could just do the smart thing and slip out of town. Through the boneyard and into the fields beyond. Easier than promises in the dark. Maybe they were out there, too, but probably very few, he figured, the best hunting being here in Cut River.

Grinding his cigarette beneath his heel, he moved out.

Across the street, past the monolithic building, into the park. He didn’t like it there too much, either: too many dark hiding places, dank little holes where the monsters could spring out at him like trapdoor spiders from their webby lairs. He hid behind a war monument, listened, watched, kept the .38 in his hand. Okay.

Go!

Through a perimeter of stout pines and across a winding dirt drive.

So far, so good.

The cemetery was right before him now. Low stone wall, irregular and mounded, encircling it. He hopped over it, nearly flipping himself into the dirt. Just inside the wall, he crouched down, panned the night, looked for anything that reeked of danger.

Nothing.

The cemetery was laid out over hilly, grassy turf crowded with manicured shrubs and ancient oaks. The tombstones seemed to glow under the eye of the moon. Silent, jutting sepulchers trimmed in dead ivy were cut from charnel shadow. This was worse than he thought, more places to hide than he could’ve imagined—everywhere gravestones, markers, biers, marble shafts, leaning funerary crosses. A maze of stone and foliage and knife-edged shadow.

Lou darted forward, his legs pumped with concrete from all the unaccustomed exertion.

Headstone to headstone to headstone.

Silence, waiting and pregnant with sinister possibility.

He was thinking that he was perfectly safe. Chances were he was wasting his time with these cat-and-mouse evasion tactics. Too many old movies coming home to roost in the rotting rafters of his panicked brain. Yeah, it was cool, it was—

Up ahead, movement.

He stayed put, the gun trembling in his sweaty grip.

Shadows were everywhere out there, throngs and multitudes created by the moon, the trees, and the stones.

But then he saw, yes, they were here, too.

Dim forms threading slowly through the monuments in his direction. His heart skipped a beat, skipped another, kicked with a sharp pain in his chest.

Why here?

Were they waiting for him? Were they part of some group consciousness, knowing and thinking and acting as a single entity, but composed of hundreds of parts? Ridiculous. Again, too many late night movies vomiting drivel into his head. No, not that, but something, something…

He could hear muted thuddings now, muffled clangings.

Terror then, flooding through him like icy creek water, horror. The revelation was grisly. They weren’t out here looking for the living, they were out here after the dead. Rooting through graves and burial vaults and crypts like grave robbers, hungry ghouls.

But maybe they did know he was here.

Some of them were getting closer, moving in his direction with less than casual interest. He could see their eyes now, flat and yellow like the eyes of rabid dogs.

They were spreading out now, six or seven of them. He could hear the wet sounds of their breathing, the chattering of teeth.

Lou’s heart was literally in his throat, flabby and fibrillating uneasily, choking off his air and squirting sour bile onto his tongue. He sprang from his crouch and ran with everything he had out of the cemetery and into the little park and away until he was in the cyclopean shadow of the building.

Behind him, it was quiet.

They hadn’t followed. He fell to his knees in the wet grass.

After a time, his panic lessened. He saw a sign.

CUT RIVER MUNICIPAL COMPLEX

City Hall Offices

Hall of Records

Public Safety Department

Bingo!

And, yes, he saw, studying the recessed windows, that there were lights on in there. Not all of them, but some. He licked his lips, calming himself. He could see a parking lot now in the back with a couple police cruisers and a few city trucks. If there was still law here, why weren’t they doing something?

No time for that, no time for reasoning and analysis. That was the province of civilized men and civilization had now become something of an abstract concept here in the Devil’s backyard.

Wiping a sheen of icy sweat from his brow, Lou got to his feet.

Move!

He was running again, galloping through the courtyard of the municipal building like a fox with a pack of slavering hounds at his tail. Through the wet grass, over glistening pavement, ducking into shadows, becoming shadows. And above, always, that huge and full moon, that hunter’s moon, brushed by dark clouds like scars across a blind eyeball.

Lou’s breath was misting sludge in his aching lungs, his brain raging with storm clouds.

He jogged up the steps to the entrance.

Huge double doors. He turned the knob, pushed, his heart going off like a cluster bomb, and then he was inside. Dark corridors, stairs climbing off to the left, a bank of elevators. A few panels of overhead lights were on, enough to see and navigate by. There were doors studding the hall, windows set in them. CITY TREASURER. CITY MANAGER. COUNTY CLERK. UTILITIES DEPT. There was a directory on the wall. Lou studied it, seeing that what he wanted was on this floor.

So far, so good.

He would’ve liked every light in the place to be burning, but at least it was warm. He hadn’t realized how cold he’d been until the warmth touched his hands, his face.

God, he was numb.

A corridor wound off to his left, very dim, and that was the way he needed to go. He started off, the shadows alive with secret threat.

The police offices were all lit up.

But empty.

There was a bullpen securing a few desks and filing cabinets, stiff plastic chairs for visitors, safety posters on the wall, wanted bulletins tacked to a corkboard. All illuminated by buzzing fluorescent lights overhead.

Lou entered carefully, moved into the bullpen, holding the swinging gate so it wouldn’t make any noise.

And his heart fell.

It looked like a tornado had howled through the place.

The floor was heaped with papers and folders as if someone had cleared the desktops with a broom. Computers were smashed under desks, keyboards jammed into their screens. Drawers were empty, their contents strewn about. Wastepaper cans kicked aside, a coffee maker and its attendant pot smashed in the corner. A letter opener was imbedded nearly two inches into the wall.

Yeah, the crazies had been here, too.

They’d made a thorough job of it by the looks of things. Probably the worse thing was the smell—like old piss. As if the crazies, monsters—whatever in fuck’s name they were—had urinated all over everything to mark their territory.

Lou went to the first phone he found, picked it up.

Dead.

Even the cops didn’t have working phones. There was a radio, but the microphone was missing, wires ripped out of the back.

Don’t you see? a voice said to him. Don’t you see what’s going on here? You’re completely cut off from the real world. It’s what they want. You’re normal and they can’t have that. This is a mousetrap, and you’re the mouse, my friend. No way out. The storm took care of the phones, they did the rest. And moment by moment, the noose is tightening.

Lou slumped against a desk, a crude mockery of a smile etched into his face like somebody had slashed it there with a knife. Okay. All right. Yes, indeedy. This is what it was like to go insane, eh? Worse than he thought. Maybe it would be easier if he just surrendered.

No.

He plugged a cigarette into his mouth, lit it, drew hard off it. The nicotine woke up his brain, parted the mists of bullshit. Like a worn-out TV set that needed to be slapped on the side, it started working again. The picture rolled a bit at first, sure, but it was receiving and processing again.

There was a door off the bullpen, another entrance leading into darkness.

He chose the door, a restroom.

He walked right in there, gun raised. He was feeling like Dirty Harry or the guy in High Plains Drifter, a man with a gun and a past and a serious need to kill some people… or, in Lou’s case, things that looked like people but were people like a rubber glove is a human hand.

Typical bathroom. A few urinals with rust stains against one wall, sinks against the other. Above them a mirror. It was spattered with water stains, flaking in the corners. But none of that caught Lou’s attention. He only saw what was scrawled across it:

GOD HELP US ALL

By this time, it took quite a bit to unnerve him. Two days ago, had he walked into an empty, vandalized police station and saw something like this he would’ve pissed in his shoes. Now, as ominous and menacing as it indeed was, he only studied the message, wondering vaguely what that crusty, dark stuff was.

Blood?

Lipstick?

He turned away, his brain still asking the same shopworn question: What exactly happened here?

He paused before the sink, dragging slowly off his cigarette. A long gray ash dropped away. He let the butt fall with it into the basin. Setting his gun aside, he turned on the faucet. That still worked. His cigarette butt sizzled out, ashes sucked down the drain. He splashed water on his face, wetted his lips. Oh Lord, it felt so good, so—

Jesus H. Christ, you fucking idiot!

He pulled away like it was acid… or he’d been splashing water from a urinal in his face. Only this was much worse. The water. Something happened here. Something had gotten these people and had gotten them bad. Too fast, he figured to be strictly from body contact, had to be airborne, maybe, or in the water. His imagination shifted into high gear. He could almost feel whatever it was coming through his pores, oozing into him like cold syrup, settling into his cells.

Fuck it.

He went to the sink and started gulping water.

Yeah, better. Goddamn right it was better! Ha, ha!

And then he happened to look in the mirror, saw the blunt tips of black shiny shoes under one of the stall doors. He was not alone.

He reached for the gun.

12

Ben and Nancy Eklind were on the move again.

“We’re going to walk right out of this town,” he told his wife. “No stops, no bullshit, no nothing. No stolen cars. We walk out, get our asses somewhere safe.”

It was a plan.

Ben decided then and there, after they were a safe distance away from the hanged boy and the child laughing in darkness, that they weren’t going to bother with anymore of the houses, lit up or not. All of them were potential traps. Better on the streets where you could run, maneuver.

They simply had to get out.

That was all that mattered; leave this clusterfuck to the authorities. But to get out they had to purge their minds of all the horror, wipe the blackboards clean, so to speak, so they could concentrate.

As they approached Chestnut, he pulled Nancy behind a tree.

“Are you okay?” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m just fine, Ben. What could possibly be wrong?”

Good. Sarcasm. Meant she was indeed okay or as okay as she was going to get this night. They crossed Chestnut at a jog, holding hands. They saw no one or nothing and that was perfectly fine. Soon enough the houses ran out and then there were warehouses, a few decrepit factories behind locked fences, a public works garage, a junkyard, and beyond, more dark buildings and a train yard.

“We make that train yard,” Ben said, “and we’re free.”

Nancy had nothing to say to that. She simply nodded.

Ben studied the streets.

God, so many shadows, so many traps waiting to be sprung.

He remembered reading To Kill a Mockingbird in high school. There was a line in it about nothing being as dangerous as a deserted, waiting street. It had stuck in his mind all these years, buried with the attendant trash of daily living, only to emerge now. As if maybe it had been waiting for this, waiting to be applied to this spook show.

Hand in hand, they started walking faster, practically jogging.

He could feel the night air on his exposed hands and face like the breath of something long dead.

Not far now: the weedy fields of the train yards were just ahead. He studied them in the deadly moonlight. A gravel road wound along the edge of Cut River. Beyond it were the silent hulks of the trains themselves, huge and segmented worms clinging to the rails, waiting to be woken.

He could feel Nancy’s hand gripping his own tighter and tighter, feel the breath aching in his lungs. Yes, this was it. So simple and easy, of course, he hadn’t thought of it until survival instinct had pointed the way: the fields, the woods, you dumb shit, make for the open spaces.

They stepped onto the gravel road and seized up like their hearts had stopped.

On the other side of the road there was a ditch, another deep culvert separating them from the train yards and freedom. And out of it loped three or four bulky, panting bodies. Dogs. Mangy things covered with greasy pelts, tongues lolling from their mouths, teeth bared.

They saw Ben and Nancy, froze.

And then in unison, they started to growl, baleful yellow eyes fixed on the intruders.

“Oh no…” Nancy managed.

The dogs watched them.

They came no closer but stood their ground, growling, teeth exposed like white spikes.

Two or three others came out of the ditch, joined their comrades.

The fact that he and Nancy had even made it this far, Ben knew, was a blessing. Her hand in his own was hot, greasy, and crushing. They were close enough to one of the abandoned factories to make a run for it, to climb over the fence. He doubted that dogs, even these dogs, could climb an eight-foot storm fence.

As they slipped away, the dogs started growling simultaneously.

It was a low evil sound that rose up to a cacophonous whine.

The dogs launched themselves forward at the same time.

Nancy let out a scream and Ben thought he might have, too.

They turned and ran, both instinctively going for the fence. They would make it, maybe, mere seconds before those teeth ripped into their ankles like knives into soft, fat bellies.

They heard a rumbling, saw lights wash over them.

A Jeep Cherokee came whipping down the street, bearing down on the dogs, scattering them to the four winds like hornets in a cyclone. The Jeep cruised right up to the curb, the passenger side window slid down.

“What’s happening, people?” a woman said to them. “You walking the dogs or are they walking you?”

Ben and Nancy stood there, staring at this woman, this vehicle. Too good to be true. A taste of civilization.

“Yeah,” Ben told her, wanting to start crying with relief. “Jesus Christ, are we glad to see you.”

“Climb in,” she said.

The driver’s side door opened and a mountain of a man got out. The Jeep seemed to actually rise up a few inches when it was free of his weight. He had wispy, shoulder-length hair and a full ZZ Top beard. He was built like a linebacker, carried a gut on him like a feed sack, but given his size, it seemed to belong.

He nodded to all present. “What the hell’s going on around here?” He went to the back door, opened it with a key. “Lock’s fucked,” he said. “Gotta have a key to open it. Hop in.”

Ben and Nancy did, melting into the soft leather seat, the warmth, the safety.

The big guy slammed their door, walked around the Jeep, scanning the darkness, looking and looking.

“He better get in,” Ben said, “those dogs…”

“Don’t you worry about Joe, hon. Dogs mess with him they gonna be sorry.”

Ben almost believed it.

He was like a recruiting poster for the Hell’s Angels.

He moved quickly for a large man, carrying a certain deadly intensity about him. He stood out in front of the Jeep, daring the dogs to come on. Slowly, they did. They came from all directions, making that awful growling sound again as they joined forces. Joe came around the side and hopped in, slamming his door. The Jeep rocked from his girth.

He hooked an arm the size of a carpet roll over the seat, turned to face his guests. “What in Christ’s name is going on here?” he asked. “Goddamn town’s like a graveyard. What gives?”

Ben broke up into laughter, despite himself. Wasn’t that the $10,000 question? He kept laughing until he started coughing and gagging. Nancy laughed, too, patting him on the back.

“I say something funny?” Joe asked.

“We’ve been through a lot,” she told him and, having found her voice, couldn’t stop talking.

She told them about the hit-and-run on the road outside Cut River. About the dead guy who wasn’t dead at all. About Sam getting killed (that wasn’t easy), about them running. All the craziness they’d seen. All she left out was the bit about the hanging boy because it was just too… insane. Now, in the warmth of the Jeep, she was certain she’d hallucinated that.

“Jesus Christ on a stick,” Joe said. “Nice place. All that and mad dogs, too.”

Nancy nodded. “Not just them, but the people. Rabid. They’re all rabid or something.”

“You don’t say?”

Nancy’s hackles rose. “I’m telling you the truth.”

He held his hand up, palm out. “Easy, lady. I believe you. Something’s majorly fucked here. Even I can see that.”

He told them that when they’d pulled into town about fifteen minutes before, the road coming in was nearly blocked with cars. Smashed cars.

Ben felt the skin at the back of his neck crawling. “Blocked off?”

“Almost,” the woman said. “We just squeezed through, man. It was unreal. Remember, babe? Remember what I said? Heavy weather ahead for sure.”

He nodded. “Yeah, we should have just turned around. Place didn’t feel right, if that makes any sense. After we got past those smashed cars, shit, there were others in the streets—windows broken, bumpers torn off. And bodies. A mess. Looked like a goddamn riot passed through.”

“Maybe one did,” Nancy suggested grimly.

He shrugged. “By the way, I’m Joe,” he told them. “This is Ruby Sue.”

“Nancy Eklind.”

“Ben Eklind.”

“Married, eh? That takes some serious balls,” Ruby Sue said.

She was thirtysomething, Ben figured. Short, thin, her face dominated by huge sleepy eyes. She was friendly, very warm, though maybe a little dizzy like she was hitting the pipe a little too often.

“That guy you hit… he just went crazy, eh?” Joe asked them.

Ben sighed. “Never seen anything like it. I hit him hard. He popped out of nowhere. I turned my eyes from the road for a second or two… and, well, there he was. Bam. We found him in the ditch. We were sure he was dead… head split right open, ribs crushed in on the side, and then he jumped up and started throwing us around. Christ.”

“Like he was possessed,” Nancy added.

“Hit and run. Wow.” Ruby Sue stared at the ceiling, overwhelmed by the concept. “Know what? There was this guy… what was his name, Joe? Oh, Crazy. Remember Crazy? We had this bash, you know? Everybody drunk and naked, booze, chemicals… oh, man. Crazy, though, he snorts half of Peru, been drinking thirty-six hours straight. Tripping, speeding, totally fried, man, wanders off, starts dancing out in the highway. BAM! Big Peterbuilt. Hamburger Helper, you know?”

Joe looked at Nancy. “Your brother,” he said, saying it very gently, compassionately, “Sam was it? You sure—”

Nancy chewed her lower lip like a strip of jerky. “Yes. That psycho ripped his throat open… blood everywhere…” She fell silent.

“I’m only asking because if he’s not, well, shit, we wouldn’t want to leave him out there.”

“Yeah, Joe would help him if he could,” Ruby Sue admitted to Nancy. “He was a medic in the army once. Like that one time, eh, Joe? Those two Banditos at Sturgis? Going at each other with knives? Bad news. Bleeding all over the place. Joe stitched ’em up, took care of ’em. Hey, babe?”

The bearded giant ignored her, folded his massive forearms over his chest. “Barefoot, no shirt, you say? This time of year? Again I ask, what the hell is that all about?”

“That’s what we were wondering,” Sam said.

“Dude must’ve been baked,” Ruby Sue decided. “Some of that shit, man, look out. You just never know. Sometimes you get stuff that’s been treated or sprayed with shit. Been there, done that. You get some herb treated with dust or something, cancel future appointments.” She laughed. “Happened to me. I thought everyone was after me. Major paranoia, for sure. I thought my roommate had a spider for a head and snakes for hands. God, I was dusted for twenty-four hours.”

Again, Joe didn’t pay any attention.

Probably kept his sanity that way, Ben figured.

“We have to get out of here,” he told them. “That’s the bottom line.”

“Agreed,” Joe said.

There was a sudden thudding and the Jeep started rocking. It came again and again. Thud, thud, thud. The dogs were back, throwing themselves at the Jeep. They dove at the windows, enraged and filled with maniacal bloodlust, jaws snapping, eyes bulging, snouts spraying tangles of saliva and foam into the air.

“Jesus Christ!” Joe cried. “They’re attacking my fucking Jeep!”

An immense black lab clawed its way up onto the hood, throwing itself at the windshield, teeth biting, tongue licking, paws clawing. Its eyes were huge, bulging, on fire with that profane yellow shine, raging with blind hatred. Its jaws closed around a windshield wiper, ripped it free, and snapped it in half like a chicken wing. It kept smashing its snout into the glass with a savage ferocity until the windshield was painted with foam and slime and blood.

“Wow,” Ruby Sue said. “Un-fucking-believable.”

Joe threw the Jeep in reverse, swinging around in a perfect arc, tires squealing. The lab tumbled through the air, disappeared. The Jeep popped the curb and Joe already had the transmission in drive. They swung back onto the street, knocking dogs aside like bowling pins. The Jeep gave a sickening lurch as it rolled over more than one of them. And they were away and gone, tooling down the road.

Ruby Sue said, “They’re rabid, man. I seen a show once.”

“It’s worse than that,” Nancy said, pressed up close to Ben now.

Joe was shaking his head as they wheeled around a corner, sliding into the street. “I’ve seen rabid. I’ve seen it more than once,” he told them. “And that ain’t rabid. It’s like rabid to the tenth power.”

Joe had the Jeep wailing up Chestnut, doing an easy seventy miles an hour.

The dogs had sent home the message that Ben and Nancy had been unable to: that there was something seriously wrong here and it was like nothing you could possibly imagine.

Now they know, Ben thought and was satisfied with that.

But he knew that the message wouldn’t truly hit home until they saw the people of this town… or what they had become. The dogs were bad, yes, God knew they were, but the people… savages, monsters, inhuman things.

“Let’s just get out of here,” Joe said. “We’ll sort the rest out later.”

Joe brought them straight up Chestnut until they crossed Magnetic Street, and entered one of the blacked-out sections of Cut River. Houses were dark. Cars parked. Bodies sprawled in the streets. Lifeless, empty. A cemetery. At least that’s how it looked, but Ben knew better. He knew what sort of things populated the darkness, their pale faces and grinning mouths and hooked fingers.

Yes, he knew all about those things.

Joe kept putting her to the metal, squealing around corners, firing through intersections, handling the Jeep with a near-suicidal mastery like he was piloting a fighter-bomber through enemy airspace. And, in some respects, that was true. Only thing lacking here was the heavy firepower.

“Up ahead,” Ruby Sue said. “That’s where those cars were, I think.”

Joe nodded. “Yeah.”

Ben sat silently waiting for something, anything. He didn’t know what, but he knew it was coming. Knew it wouldn’t be this easy.

Nancy was feeling it, too, he knew.

Her breathing was deep and labored, her body tight and rigid like it was held together with wire.

The headlights of the Jeep cut through the night like scalpels, peeling back the blighted darkness and revealing the festering underbelly of Cut River: cars with smashed windshields, flattened tires; garbage cans overturned, litter strewn on the sidewalks; tree limbs down from the storm; a pick-up truck driven right through a garage door. The homes squatting dismally in the gloom didn’t look right either—windows were shattered, furniture spilled out onto lawns. There were other things in the yards, too, shapes nestled in the leave-strewn grass.

Ben thought he saw bodies, but it was hard to be sure.

But he did know he saw what he thought were effigies, scarecrows dangling from second-story windows and porch overhangs.

At least, he hoped they were effigies.

“Check that out,” Ruby Sue said. “Did you see it?” Nobody answered, so she elaborated. “Looked like… I don’t know, man… like symbols and shit painted on that house. This place has gone totally fucking pagan.”

Pagan.

It made all the sense in the world to Ben.

Whatever had gotten this town, whatever pestilence had infected its citizens, it almost seemed to have freed something primal, something atavistic dwelling within them. Like the veneer of civilization had been peeled free, baring the dark, feral underbelly of the human race and the calculated barbarity that went with it. These people, like our ruthless, bloodthirsty ancestors fifty, a hundred millennia before, were predatory monsters, killers who reveled in the art of butchery, of slaughter.

“I thought it was the storm,” Joe said to them or maybe to himself. “But it isn’t; not all of it.”

He had his window open just a crack. No more, no less. The air smelled of smoke like maybe there was a fire nearby. It stunk of other things, too: ripe, raw things. Nameless odors that stirred some shadowy race memory in the occupants of the Jeep. Some distant, dark memory of barbaric times when civilization was an unrealized dream.

Yes, Ben thought, these people have reverted somehow. And wouldn’t it be easy, when you came right down to it, to tear off your clothes and join them? Celebrate death and sex and blood?

“What’s that smell?” Ruby Sue inquired. “That burning? What is that?”

Good question because the wind was carrying a stink far worse than charred wood now.

The Jeep slowed down and everyone saw why.

The street was entirely blocked-off now.

Cars were wedged three deep across the road and right up onto lawns, blocking any possible avenue of escape. There were a few battered, mutilated bodies lying on the pavement before them.

And Ben was thinking: Yes, exactly! They’ve marked the perimeters of their territory and everything within is their domain. And the bodies? Sacrifices, blood offerings to whatever it is they think rules the night. A primitive version of breaking a bottle of champagne against a ship. Because it wasn’t always champagne, not in the dire, forbidding days before history. Good luck, good hunting, fertility…

Maybe he was overwrought (he was) and maybe he was giving them too much goddamn credit, but he didn’t think so. This was not as simple as he’d originally thought. This was not just a bunch of crazies acting impulsively, satisfying their basal desires. Oh no, not at all. The blockade proved that; this was organized. Maybe at some aboriginal, tribal level, but organized it was.

Joe clicked on his hi-beams.

“Look,” he said, “by God, look—”

And they were all looking and all seeing, knowing there was no need for explanation here. At the back of the blockade, at the rear row of vehicles, bodies had been lashed to tree limbs and posts jammed into the ground, set afire. They were blackened and smoldering now, curled and withered by flame. The fires had gone out, but the thick nauseating stench of cremated flesh hung in the air like a poisonous envelope.

No man’s land, Ben thought wildly. Clearly marked. Do not pass go. Do not exit. This is the end of the world, their world.

“Turn ’em off,” Nancy whimpered, “for God’s sake turn those lights off!”

Joe did, speechless, afraid as he’d ever been in a life where his sheer size made terror an impossibility.

He threw the Jeep in reverse, spun it around and headed back the way they came.

“There’s other roads out,” he said in a whisper of a voice. “Other ways.”

He said nothing more and neither did anyone else.

But it was building in Nancy.

Ben could feel her shuddering next to him, not with horror, but with rage. It was only a matter of time.

“Are you—” she sucked in a dry breath “—trying to tell me that fifteen minutes ago when you came through here, you saw none of that?”

Ruby Sue turned in her seat, looked at her, then looked at Joe. “Oh, for chrissake, tell them the truth, babe. What does it matter now?”

He nodded. “We’ve been here for a couple hours.”

Silence.

Nancy licked her lips. “And you lied about it because…”

“Because,” Joe said, “the reason we were here in the first place wasn’t exactly what you’d call legal. Okay? We came to see someone. They weren’t home. So we waited around. They didn’t show, so we took a ride. Then we found you guys.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ben said.

“Hell it doesn’t,” Nancy snapped. “What else are you two lying about?”

Joe sighed. “Listen, lady. Way I see it we’re the only game in town, so why don’t you sit tight and I’ll try to get us out. How’s about that?”

She grumbled under her breath.

Ben didn’t like where any of this was going.

He managed to calm her down, but he knew it wouldn’t last. The silence in the Jeep was thick like honey, dripping with innuendo. They couldn’t afford to piss Joe off. They needed his ride. Like he pointed it out, it was the only game in town.

Through the streets again.

Joe drove slower this time, no theatrics, no NASCAR bullshit. He navigated the roads, taking his time. Maybe he knew now what was at stake here. That if he wiped the Jeep out, the story ended right here.

Nancy was suspicious of the both of them and, dammit, so was Ben now.

What bothered him at first is why they didn’t offer their last names when everyone introduced themselves. It was a small thing, yes, but the smallest of bones could choke a man. And why lie about how long they were in town? They said they were in Cut River for a reason that wasn’t exactly what you’d call legal.

Okay.

Fine.

But how bad could it be?

From the looks of Ruby Sue, Ben was figuring drugs. But from the look of Joe—and it took a while to look at Joe, he was so goddamn big—it could’ve been just about anything.

Ben massaged his temples.

He couldn’t think anymore. He was drained, emptying fast.

Next to him, Nancy was grinding her teeth. It wasn’t a good sign. It could’ve been anxiety or fear or she could’ve been pissed off, simmering like a pot of chili on the back burner.

As they drove, he swept his eyes over what he could see of Cut River.

They were driving through a part of town that had electricity: streetlights were working, shop fronts were lit, squares of light in apartment windows. It all looked so positively normal, so completely average it was frightening.

But six, seven blocks back, in the darkness… Christ, how could things change so quickly?

What bothered him the most was that he knew the psychos were around.

Maybe he didn’t see them, but he definitely felt them. The way a man could feel something hunting him in the black jungle or cold steel about to be pressed to his throat.

Yes, they were out there. Many of them.

The bad part was how they didn’t show themselves.

But then, neither does a tiger until it’s time to sink its fangs into your throat.

Ben licked his lips, his eyes wide and staring now. He had a pretty good idea he knew where Joe was taking them, out to where the country road merged with the town. The very way Nancy and Sam and he had planned coming in. More turns, more little shortcuts, then finally a main road, maybe part of Chestnut (Ben had only been in Cut River once or twice, so he couldn’t be sure).

The electricity had failed here now, lights were patchy, few and far between.

It was going to be bad and he knew it.

He didn’t think they’d be able to get out this way either. Just a feeling, but it persisted like a nasty itch. When Nancy and he had come into town earlier they had taken a footbridge up river that led into a little park. They hadn’t gone over the main bridge. Maybe that was a good thing.

As they sped down the final stretch of road and Cut River fell behind them, dread thick as tar settled into Ben’s belly.

The moon lit up the countryside pretty good.

He could see the bridge up ahead, other things, but he couldn’t be exactly sure what. Joe must’ve seen them, too, because he started slowing down, clicking his brights on.

“Whoa,” Ruby Sue said expectantly, “don’t look good, people.”

And it didn’t.

Ben and Nancy were sitting forward in their seats now, mutually shaking.

The bridge was blocked with more cars.

No real surprise. There were clearings to either side of it, meandering open meadows.

Ben could see shapes out there, indistinct but there, all right.

As Joe backed up and swung the Jeep around, the headlights turned the clearing on the left to day. Ben kept looking, so did Nancy. He felt a serious necessity to scream, but he couldn’t. His lungs were empty. He sat on the edge of his seat, that cold, gnawing feeling in his guts.

Nancy kept shaking her head. “My God,” she whispered, defeated now. “My God.”

The meadow was full of scarecrows mounted up tight and secure on crossbars, except, of course, they weren’t scarecrows at all. They were people, maybe too hideous to even be called that. Corpses, really. Some recent, others decayed and withered into gray husks. And not just a few, but fifteen or twenty within the range of the headlights and many more hunched in the darkness beyond. Some were little more than skeletons dressed in the moldering cerements of the grave. They were not crucified as such, but lashed with wire, with ropes.

Joe idled there maybe two, three minutes, enough for the morbid impact of it to take root in their minds, to find soil and grow to ghastly fruition. When he pulled away, the fleshless skulls and cadaver faces faded, but were still livid and hurtful in their minds.

Nancy started sobbing.

Ruby Sue kept shaking her head as if it was beyond belief.

It was.

“Those people,” she said bleakly, “those people… oh, man, they must’ve dug ’em up or something. You think they dug ’em up?”

“Shut up,” Ben told her.

There was no argument on that and no time for one.

The townspeople were making their appearance.

They walked straight up the road en masse towards the Jeep. Mostly men and women, a few children. There had to be thirty or more, marching in unison, although it was more of an inhuman shambling. They were organized and fixed of purpose. A wall of humanity, a throng of white faces and glaring unblinking eyes.

“I’m going through them,” Joe announced coldly. “I’m fucking plowing through them sonsabitches.”

Ben felt Nancy slump against him as the Jeep picked up speed.

He felt his flesh crawl in undulating waves as reality spun wickedly out of control, as his mind narrowed and squealed with white noise.

When the Jeep started hitting them, his brain fell into darkness.