people just bring out the worst in me.

The front door opened, and an older man carrying a pump-action shotgun stepped outside. “Hello, Chuck. Who are your friends?”

Chuck sauntered up the concrete walkway to the front door. “They have valuable information, so I brought ‘em in for questioning.”

Anne made a choking sound. I shushed her under my breath and then called out, “My name is Abe and this is Anne. I understand from Chuck that we might have some things in common, so he graciously brought us here so that we could compare notes. May we come in?”

The man nodded in a friendly way, but he didn’t lower his shotgun. “That sounds good to me, as soon as we check you out real quick. Chuck, would you mind getting the light?” Chuck ducked inside. We waited with our hands up in full view of the surrounding houses in the middle of the night, trying not to think about the rooftop sniper looking at us through the crossed wires in her scope.

Chuck came back out with a handheld spotlight, one of those huge jobs that campers and hunters use. “Put your hand out.”

I did so, and he put the light underneath and turned it on. The powerful light turned the skin of my hand translucent red around and between my fingers. He watched carefully, and then repeated the test on Anne. Then he took a penlight out of his pocket and looked into our eyes, leaving bright red blobs floating across my vision after he was done. “No wigglers. They’re clean.”

The man on the porch lowered his shotgun and smiled. “In that case, come on in.”

The inside of the house was homey, if a little shabby. Stacks of books, magazines, and DVD cases were arranged as neatly as possible, which wasn’t very, considering their number, on every surface and on the floor next to the couch and easy chair. Pictures of the man with the shotgun and a pretty brunette hung on the walls, mostly holidays and vacations, with no kids in them.

Our host led us through the living room and into the kitchen, which was cramped, but less cluttered than the living room. “Have a seat. Can I get you something? Coffee?”

I pulled out a flimsy chair with tubular metal legs and a padded vinyl seat. “Love some, thanks.” Anne pulled out another chair and declined the offer. She was young; eventually she’d learn that when somebody points a firearm at you, at the very least they owe you some goddamn coffee.

The man leaned his shotgun against the wall and poured me a cup from a cheap coffee-maker’s glass pot. The bottom was stained brown from sitting on the warmer for hours on end. He was an older man, late fifties maybe, with a short but full salt-and-pepper beard, round glasses and a tiny ponytail sticking out of the back of his head. He handed me the cup. “I’m Greg. You already know Chuck here.”

The front door slammed and a young woman about Chuck’s age stalked briskly into the room and leaned her rifle against the wall next to Greg’s shotgun. Getting a good look at it made me shudder. A 30-.06 round is a pretty good way to keep bad guys off your lawn.

“And this is Mazie.” She had short, jet-black hair and a pretty face that seemed more sorority than sniper.

Anne stiffened beside me and squeezed my hand. She leaned in close and whispered in my ear. “That’s her. That’s the waitress from my dream.”

I kept my reaction to myself. “Nice to meet you, Greg. And thanks for not blowing my teeth out through the back of my head, Mazie.”

“I don’t shoot people.”

“Glad to hear it. I’m Abe, and this is Anne.” I took a sip of coffee. It was terrible.

Anne pulled her eyes away from Mazie and pointed at the spotlight. “That work?”

Greg shrugged. “The big test is whether or not they’ll let you try it. The fact that you didn’t go berserk when you thought it could reveal you was a pretty good indicator that you were safe. The idea of looking for the small worms in the hands and eyes is a good one, however. I think.”

“You’ve never tested it on a real one?”

“Oh, no. Thank God. But there are plenty of the coerced around town, we know the signs.”

“Coerced? I guess that’s one way to describe them. Abe calls them baitbags because of the worms inside of them.”

Mazie made a face and looked away. “That’s disgusting. And demeaning. Those poor people are victims, and they deserve more respect than that.”

I had to chuckle. “I don’t know that a high-powered hunting rifle equals respect, ma’am.”

Chuck clapped me on the shoulder. “Get ready for a speech on monster rights, dude. I’ve already heard it a million times, so I’m going to bed.”

“Hey, fuck you, Chuck!” Mazie yelled at his back as he slipped out of the kitchen. Then she turned to me and said, “They aren’t in their right minds, so you shouldn’t judge them, but at the same time you can’t let them hurt other people, either. They won’t want the murder of another human being on their consciences when they’re cured.”

Anne and I exchanged glances across the table. “Someone you know?”

“My dad.” Her expression became carefully neutral as she talked. “He went to work one morning and didn’t come back for two days. My mom and I were frantic. The police were no help, of course, being coerced themselves, so we just worried and put up posters and all that stuff. Then he just came home, right out of nowhere. I was so happy, you know? Like the nightmare was finally over and all that.

“At first me and my mom didn’t talk about what was different, like it would ruin everything or whatever, but we both knew something was wrong. For one thing, after he came home, he never left the house again, except to check up on us if we were gone more than an hour or so. It was so creepy, you’d be at the store or something, and he’d just be there, staring at you. Then you’d, like, wave or something, and he’d smile and wave back, like a dad mask snapped into place all of a sudden.”

“How long before he stopped snapping back into dad mode?” I asked it as gently as I could.

“A week? I don’t know. It wasn’t even like he just stopped being my dad, it’s like his personality was getting all stretched out of shape. Does that make sense? Like, he would get angrier than anybody you ever saw, or he would laugh at something and just become manic with it, until he was screaming and laughing all at the same time.” Her expression didn’t change, but she wrapped her arms around herself as she spoke.

“He wouldn’t tell us what was going on, and we learned pretty quick to stop asking. He’d hit you before you knew what was happening. He never used to hit us.”

Anne reached out to touch Mazie’s arm, but she moved just slightly away. “That must have been awful.”

“At first he let us leave if he went with us. He’d drive me to work at the diner where I was watched until my shift was over, and then he’d show up and bring me home. That lasted all of a month. After that he kept us in the house. Sometimes a guy would show up with groceries and toilet paper and stuff, and then drive off. He didn’t even take any money or say anything. Just ring the bell and drive away.

“We lived like that for weeks. It’s all mashed together now, like a blur. Then one night Greg and Rob came to my bedroom window in the middle of the night. I was so out-of-my-mind scared in the house that even burglars or rapists or something seemed like a welcome change at that point. They told me that lots of people were turning up like my dad, and that they could get me out of the house and hide me.

“I didn’t go right away, I told them to come back, so I could get my mom out, too. But I had to wait until the next day, because he slept in the same room with her. God, I can’t even imagine what that must have been like.”

She rubbed at her eyes, even though they appeared to be dry. “Anyway, she wouldn’t go, wouldn’t leave him, so the next night when they came back, I went with them.”

I looked at Greg. “Rob?”

He shook his head, and Mazie spoke up. “My dad killed him. I don’t know how he knew, maybe my mom even told him or something, but when they came to the window, my dad broke my door and ran in. He grabbed Rob and started stabbing him, and it was like he couldn’t make himself stop, even after Rob was dead, so Greg and I escaped.” She sniffed at looked at the ceiling for a second. “Excuse me.” She fled the kitchen at a fast walk, angrily swiping at her eyes.

That left Anne and I alone with Greg, who sat down heavily at the table. “She’s really brave, that one.

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