“You think they will?”
“They’d be fools to when it’s light like this. We’d mow them down. But then Sheriff Fulton’s always been a fool.”
“I’ll use the binoculars.”
“Don’t drop them this time.”
“Mom, that was an accident.”
“They’re your father’s good pair.”
“When are you going to learn to trust me?”
She walked to the kitchen and out the back door.
All the dead things in the forest—animals that had starved—were rotting in this heat, and the whole county smelled like roadkill up close. She trotted over to the fence, painfully aware that any of Fulton’s men could be taking a bead on her from up in the hills, and used the cover of the dead cedar hedge to make her way to the back.
She paused next to Leigh’s shed and looked into the woods. With the light coming down in this eerie way, and the shadows gathering in the lifeless trunks, it didn’t even look like Earth anymore, but like some weird and suffocated version of Earth.
She ventured more deeply into the woods. She came to stash one. She dug—and she dug and she dug until she had uncovered stash one. As she was hauling it out of the warm, dead earth, she heard the bump and rattle of Buzz Fulton’s truck coming along the highway, but only for a moment before it died at the top of the hill, to the east of the house. Her heart jumped as if with booster cables and her shortness of breath worsened, and she listened and listened, and tried to hear the truck, but the silence, after the usual signature cacophony of his vehicle, was like a death writ. He wasn’t passing by this time. He was stopping. Up at the top of the hill. And it couldn’t be good, oh, no, it had to be bad, because if he was stopping at the top of the hill, it meant he had plans.
She shoved the stash into its hole.
She ran out of the woods into the yard, conscious of the thump of her sneakers against the dead grass.
She entered through the back door, and locked it manually because the console didn’t have power anymore.
The front door was open and, getting closer, she saw Jake standing on the slab of concrete they called
the porch. He held the binoculars to his eyes and stared up the hill.
She stepped out onto the stoop beside him.
He took the binoculars away. “I think they’re here, Mom. I think this might be the night.”
“Did you make a head count?”
“Three for sure. But there could have been four.”
“So you remember what I said?”
“That the old rules don’t apply, and it’s okay to kill if I have to.”
“Just pretend it’s one of your Handheld Sport games.”
“Mom, it’s a little scarier than that.”
“I know… I know. Take up your position in the back. Don’t come forward unless I give you the signal.”
“I feel a little sick.”
“Are you going to throw up?”
“I’m just really scared.”
“Let’s get ready.”
They went into the house. Glenda walked to Hanna’s room.
Hanna had now put her book aside and was looking out the window. “Is it them?”
“Buzz stopped up the hill. I think you and Jake should go to the woods, like we planned.”
“I never liked Buzz. He was such an asshole at Marblehill. He actually came on to me.”
“He did?”
“I never told you.”
“But you were only twelve.”
“Like I said, he’s an asshole.”
They left Hanna’s room.
Jake and Hanna went to hide in the woods out back.
Glenda stayed alone in the house, on her knees at the front window, her rifle ready, scanning the highway, hoping Jake would give her a whistle if Maynard and his crew came from the back. She waited and waited, and slowly the hole in the sky got darker until finally it shone with the eternal blue of
nighttime, a shade a hundred times darker than indigo, a ragged continent shiny with stars in the pitch-black of the shroud.
She crawled back to the coffee table and groped for her high-powered flashlight, glad Leigh had stashed away so many extra batteries. She struggled back to the window and looked out at the front lawn. It was now a shade brighter than it had been a moment before—and looking at that hole in the shroud, she saw that its edges were growing brighter as well.
After another fifteen minutes, a pale fingernail of Moon peeped out at her from behind the shroud, and she couldn’t help thinking of Gerry.
When Sheriff Fulton finally came, he didn’t show his face, but megaphoned from somewhere out in the dark.
“Glenda?” He waited for a response. “Glenda, we know you’re in there. And we know you have food.
Why don’t you do the sensible thing and give it all up?”
She left the living room, went into the den, placed the flashlight on the high window ledge, turned it on, and shone it out at the front lawn. She left it there, beaming out into the dark, then retraced her steps through the dining room, then the kitchen, grabbed her second flashlight, moved quickly through the dining and living rooms to the other side of the house, and went into Jake’s room.
She put the second flashlight on the window ledge and shone it out at the front lawn as well. Its beam intersected with the one coming from the den. She paused to measure the effect. A pale glow now lit the yard. Fulton would be a fool to come in from the front. Which meant he was going to come from the back. At least she didn’t have to fight this war on two fronts. Not unless they shot out the flashlights, and she didn’t think any of them were good enough marksmen for that.
She left Jake’s room, feeling her way through the dark house until she got to the kitchen, carrying her rifle loosely in her right hand. She grabbed her extra purse from the top of the refrigerator, the one she kept all her rounds in now. She slung it over her shoulder and exited by the back door.
In the light of the Moon, she saw a ground-clinging mist creep over the lawn. She scanned the backyard.
Her eyes strayed to the woods, and as the Moon clawed its way further out from behind the shroud, the poor dead things that used to be trees glowed as if from nuclear waste; not silver, not orange, but somewhere in between.
She leaned her rifle against the house. She heard Fulton’s megaphoned voice from out front, like a nasal and electronic ghost moaning out of the darkness, his words now unintelligible because the house blocked the way. How long before he gave up trying to convince her?
She hurried to the fence that ran between her lot and Leigh’s.
She got a ladder from the fence and carried it quietly to the back of the house. Made of Duratex, the ladder was light and easy to carry. She placed it against the mudroom, climbed to the top, put her rifle on the mud-room roof, dragged the ladder up, then leaned it against the side of the house so that it reached the top. Making sure the feet of the ladder straddled the mudroom peak securely, she climbed to the main roof.
She maneuvered around the low-pitched slopes with relative ease. She took up a position behind the satellite dish, and scanned the backyard. She had great lines of fire.
She got to her feet and moved to the front of the house.
The Moon was brighter now and she saw Buzz Fulton’s truck parked at the top of the east hill, and two police cruisers further down.
She waited.
After several minutes she saw men crossing the highway to the east and disappearing into the yard of the house beyond Leigh’s. Fear momentarily weakened her because up until now she had been hoping that they might
