Dream’s eyes brimmed with tears again.
She wrenched her gaze away from him. “You asshole. …”
Chad grunted. Dream didn’t need to see the smirk on his face to know it was there. “Yeah, I’m an asshole. And you’re the most selfish-“
Dream didn’t know what she was doing until she had done it. Her clenched fist struck Chad’s midsection with a force that surprised both of them. It was the first time in her life she’d hit anyone in anger. Chad clutched his stomach, bent over, and gasped for air. His glasses slid from his face and tumbled to the asphalt, where they landed with a crack.
There was a long period of relative silence during which the only sound was that of Chad’s attempts to regain his breath. Dream knew right away her friends were shaken by the sight of her assaulting another human being. Sure, Chad probably deserved some form of punishment, maybe even a good thrashing, but no one would have expected Dream to administer it. Dream was kindhearted. Dream was a hippy-dippy pacifist who listened to Phish and fawned over every puppy she met. Dream wore tie-dyed T-shirts and always had a flower in her hair in the springtime. She was a kind of benevolent earth goddess. She was, well, a flake.
This wasn’t that Dream, the one they all knew and loved.
This was a tigress.
“Damn you for making me do that, Chad.” She sniffled again. “Damn you.”
Alicia touched her elbow. “Easy, Dream.”
Dream flinched from the touch. She wasn’t ready to be consoled. She wasn’t done addressing Chad, either. “It breaks my heart to say this, but you better know I mean it.
I don’t ever want to see you again after this. You can officially absolve yourself of any guilt, real or imagined, I may have caused you.”
Chad held his stomach a moment longer. He examined his broken glasses and cast them aside. He wore them for nearsightedness, but he could see okay without them. He got shakily to his feet. “Okay.” There was a note of sad resignation in his voice. “I guess that’s the way it has to be.”
“Thank God,” Alicia said. “This is eons overdue, if you ask me.”
“Amen “Karen said.
Chad sneered. “Hypocrite.”
Alicia shot a warning glance at Chad, then addressed Dream. “Sweetie, do you have an Atlas in your car? A Mobil guide?”
Chad shook his head. “What do you want, a four-star hotel? Let’s just find the nearest Rathole Inn and call it a night.”
Alicia smirked. “Appropriate, since you are a rat.”
Dream looked at Alicia. “I don’t have an Atlas or anything like that. There was one in Dan’s car, but… well…” She turned her hands up helplessly. “But I saw one of those road signs with symbols on it before I pulled off the interstate. I’m pretty sure there was one of those lodging icons on it.”
Alicia nodded. “Okay, so if we drive a little bit down this road, we ought to come to one of those clusters of motels and convenience stores soon enough.”
Dream said, “I think so.”
The discussion about what to do next continued as Karen Hidecki drifted away from them. She reached the guardrail and stood there as she studied the stand of trees. Shane was out there somewhere. She strained to detect any evidence of his presence, but there was nothing-just darkness and the occasional flicker of shadow as the breeze stirred tree limbs. Something about the inscrutable blackness disturbed her, made her hug herself even though the night was warm. It occurred to her that Shane had been out there a long time.
Almost as if on cue, a scream emanated from somewhere in the woods.
A scream of pain, judging from the shrillness of the cry.
Karen’s heart lurched.
Shane!
She vaulted the guardrail, scrambled up the slight rise, and plunged into the woods. She didn’t realize what an impediment her alcohol-slowed reflexes would be until she ran into a low-hanging tree limb a second after seeing it. The limb smacked her forehead and sent her tumbling to the forest floor, where the back of her head struck something hard and unyielding. She never lost consciousness, but everything went gray for a moment, and she only caught a fuzzy glimpse of the creature that emerged from the shadows to stand over her. She sensed only that it was something very large and entirely outside her experience. It seemed to contemplate her for a moment, the way a patron of a restaurant would study a slab of meat prior to impaling it with knife and fork, then its head jerked up at the sound of her approaching friends.
They were calling her name, getting closer by the moment.
Then it was gone.
Karen blinked her eyes in surprise. There hadn’t even been enough time to be properly scared, but now a tsunami-sized wave of terror was sweeping in, oh, yes.
“What the fuck was that?” she panted.
She heard a crackling of branches somewhere in front of her, then a brutal burst of knowledge arrived in her head fully formed.
Shane had already encountered that… thing.
Which meant…
“SHANE!”
She started to get up, but then a hand fell on her shoulder and held her down. She screamed.
Eddie proceeded the only way imaginable under the circumstances-with the most extreme degree of caution he could muster. He was in the kitchen of The Master’s home. It looked much the same as he remembered from his prior experience. Here was the same large, wellstocked pantry. In the middle of the room was a large island with cupboards and a sink. Beyond it was a table, the same one at which he’d partaken of his last normal meal prior to his imprisonment Below.
He’d arrived here some six months earlier, a lost and weary traveler in search of a telephone. He had been returning from a business trip to North Carolina, where he’d assisted in setting up a new distribution center for the company that employed him, when his car-a year-old Lexus-began to sputter and cough. He’d pulled off the highway in desperation, figuring he would call Triple A from his cell phone. Only his cell phone, a brand-new, company- provided Motorola, had also decided to stop working.
Eddie was a low-key guy, laid-back and not given to fits of temper; he chalked up the mechanical failures to a quirk of fate, the kind of thing he could turn into a funny story at the next corporate meeting. So he got out of his car and started walking, certain he would soon reach a place to crash for the night. In the morning he would call Triple A from a phone provided by the hotel. They would tow his car and soon he would be on his way in a Hertz rental.
Things didn’t work out quite that way.
He walked and walked for what seemed like forever. He was good at judging distance by foot from his days on the high school track team. A mile went by. Two. Three. He began to tire. Huffing and puffing, he stopped to try his cell phone one more time. Nothing. So he trudged on. Five miles and no sign of civilization. Okay, there was a winding asphalt road, bordered on each side by guardrails. Clearly man-made stuff. But he hadn’t encountered even one road sign, not one billboard, nothing at all to indicate he was in a populated area. Which was just absurd. He knew where he was. He’d passed through Knoxville not long before the Lexus started misbehaving. So there should be something. Some tiny telltale indication of a human presence.
But there was nothing.
He was beginning to despair when his eyes detected the faint pinpoint of a distant car’s headlights winding along a curve in the road. He listened to it draw nearer, suddenly all too aware of how rarely he himself stopped for hitchhikers, which was approximately never. As the car entered a straightaway that led to where Eddie was standing, he stepped into the center of the road and began waving his arms up and down.
He remembered thinking, I look like a crazy man.
The car, a sleek black Bentley slowed down as it approached him, but instead of going around him it drew to a stop beside him and the driver’s-side window whirred down. He walked over and peered down into the face of a stern-faced woman, whose hair was pulled back into a tight black bun. Her face was implacable and ghost-pale as
