I could imagine only that somehow I was running in two Roselands at once: the estate to which I’d come with Annamaria a couple of days before, and another that existed in some alternate reality parallel to ours.
The fork I’d taken at the black tree festooned with white bones proved to be a short path. The hills crowded close, closer, and grew steeper as the way narrowed. I soon came to a dead end at a junction of three formidable slopes, weeds and thorny brambles to the left and right, a slide of raw earth and jumbled rocks ahead.
The brambles would snare and perhaps eventually tangle me to a halt. I clambered up the rocks, some of which shifted underfoot, and soon I was forced to holster my pistol and proceed at a sort of inclined crawl, desperately grabbing for handholds to prevent myself from crashing backward when stone that seemed firm abruptly proved treacherous and tumbled out from under my feet.
Gasping for breath, heart thundering, I could hear the freaks behind me — but I couldn’t smell them. Although they sounded close, a fluke of landscape must have made their voices seem nearer than they really were, because their foul stench should have announced them as they bore down on me.
Halfway up the slope, they caught me. One of them snared the left leg of my jeans. Holding to my perch with my hands, I kicked frantically, connecting with something, maybe its head. But it would not let go, and in fact the beast pulled hard to dislodge me.
A rock came loose from the slide debris in which it was seated, slipped out from under my right hand, and rattled down the hillside. Still clinging to the slope with my left hand, I twisted onto my side and reached cross-body with my right hand to snatch the Beretta from my holster.
A freak loomed over me, and a second freak to my left, and a third to my right, all of them about to fall atop me. The whites of their eyes were pinked with blood, their irises as yellow as the strange sky that I had glimpsed earlier.
Their slash mouths, their bristling teeth, their long pink tongues spotted with black were not made for words of mercy but for the vicious rending and efficient consumption of prey that, as it fed them, might be still alive and screaming.
Three axes were raised, two with blades toward me, one with the hammer brandished. As I drew my pistol, I knew that I could at most kill one before the other two cracked my head and pried it open like a clamshell. I was ready for death if only because nothing on the Other Side could possibly smell as bad as these swine things did.
Before I could bring the Beretta to bear, the creature over me bore down with its disgusting body, pale skin slick and stubbled with irregular patches of prickly hair — but then reared away from me just as a hole appeared between its eyes. The back of its skull exploded. It fell out of sight, disappearing as suddenly as if a trapdoor had opened under it.
Although I didn’t hear the initial shot, the second and third were loud and clear and close. The remaining pair of freaks appeared to fling themselves away from me. One axe clattered to the rocks beside my head and the other twirled out of sight, like a baton thrown too enthusiastically by the ugliest drum majorette in the history of parades.
The rock slide wanted to shift under me. I was determined not to ride a cascade of earth and stone onto the bodies of the freaks, which sprawled on the floor of the dead-end passage below.
Gasping, spitting because I had the notion that a drop of the freak’s sweat had fallen into my open mouth, I turned onto my stomach again and sought firm purchase.
A pair of red-and-black, carved-leather cowboy boots appeared beside me. Beyond the big hand that reached down to assist me was a massive forearm and Herculean biceps crawling with screaming hyenas.
Thirty-four
I took hold of his hand, which seemed twice the size of mine, and the tattooed giant helped me to my feet. We staggered to the summit of the eroded slope.
In the west, the sun-dappled sea glittered like a pirate’s chest of jewels. My last sight on Earth had almost been the teeth of the monstrous swine as they spread wide to bite.
My rescuer’s facial scars were as livid as before, his teeth no less crooked and yellow, but now the cold sore on his upper lip glistened with protective ointment.
“Odd Thomas,” he said. “You remember me?”
“Kenneth Randolph Fitzgerald Mountbatten.”
He beamed, delighted that I remembered his name, as if he were so plain that people usually forgot him the moment he was out of sight.
Overhead, having wandered farther than usual from the ocean, a lone gull soared high and swooped down, making symphonic gestures as if conducting music only it could hear. Having so recently faced pig death, I felt some of the bird’s joy in being alive.
“Thank you for saving my life.”
Kenny shrugged and looked embarrassed. “I didn’t really.”
“No, sir, you really did.”
Slinging the strap of the assault rifle over his shoulder and surveying the surrounding hills, Kenny said, “Well, I have a way with guns and fighting, that’s all. Kill or be killed — there’s only one option there, far as I’m concerned. Each of us has some gift. What’s your gift, Odd Thomas?”
Holstering my pistol to prove that I wanted to believe in the idea of the concept of the possibility of the hope that we might be lasting friends, I said, “Fry cookery. I’m a wizard at the griddle.”
His neck was nearly as thick as his head. Even his ears looked muscular, as if he did one-lobe push-ups every morning.
“Fry cook. That’s a good gift,” he said. “People need food more than anything.”
“Well, maybe almost as much as anything but not more.”
The air smelled fresh, with a trace of ozone that repeatedly almost faded away but always returned, though it was never strong enough to be unpleasant.
Kenny sounded apologetic when he said, “I checked the guesthouse tower. No one’s been staying there.”
“Am I already back to being a candy-ass punk boy who shouldn’t have been let through the gates?”
He rolled his eyes and shook his head. “I didn’t mean anything by that. It’s just my way. It’s kind of how I say hello.”
“I usually say, ‘Pleased to meet you.’ ”
“Anyway,” he said, “I figured it out. You’re an invited guest here, not there, which is none of my business, being as how my job is there, not here, and being as how I’m hardly ever here and don’t know why I am even when I am.”
I said, “I guess all of you must have gone to the same school.”
“What school?”
“To learn how to talk that way.”
“What way?”
“The way of confusion.”
Kenny shrugged. “I was just saying.”
“Sir, I need to find the mini truck.”
“The electric sonofabitch you were driving around in, looking for trouble?”
“That’s the one.”
“I saw you and said, ‘That crazy little sonofabitch is going to run into a bunch of sonofabitch porkers,’ and you sure enough did.”
“I thought they were called freaks.”
“Maybe here they’re freaks, but there we call ’em porkers, though I call ’em porkers here, there, it doesn’t matter to me.”
“Consistency is a good quality in a man.”
“I don’t know about that,” Kenny said. “But I found the truck just as those three sonsofbitches were running
