and smiled. Carby screamed once, a shrill, tearing scream of absolute horror, and ran.
He had no idea when he got up, or how. He had no thought at all. He just ran, the shotgun in his hands as forgotten and useless as the flashlight that now lay in the dirt behind him. A quarter of a mile away the lights of his house beckoned with welcome and safety. In the house there were door locks and a telephone. Inside the house were his son and daughter. Inside his house was his wife, Lily. They were all farm people, they all knew how to handle guns and every gun in the house was loaded. In the house was one big, mean sonovabitching German shepherd. In the yard beside the house there was a car. The walls of the house, even in shadows, looked tall and strong and safe. If he could only get there, get inside. Gaither Carby ran as fast as his thick legs could carry him. He never once looked back; he never paused, never slowed, even when his bladder released and warm piss ran down his legs. He ran until that seized-up heart in his chest began to hammer again and he ran until lights burst in his eyes like fireworks. He ran as if his life depended on it.
But he didn’t run fast enough. A dark something came out of the shadows to his left and smashed into him, knocking him sideways with terrible force, tearing a strangled scream out of him before the weight of the thing slammed him down and drove all of the breath from his lungs. He hit hard and slid a few feet across the sandpaper roughness of the fallow field. He was blind from the shock but he could feel fingers bunching the cloth of his jacket, could feel the heat of breath on his cheek and something bent low over him. It was man-sized but it panted like a hungry dog and its weight was oppressive. Gasping a lungful of air, Carby swung a strong overhand right, aiming blindly, and he felt his knuckles crash into something that crunched like cartilage. A nose? An ear? He shook his vision clear and pounded his fists at the hands that held him down. Around him he could hear the pounding of feet as someone else ran up to join the fight. He heard other sounds, too.
He heard the low snigger of laughter. The figure on top of him was a dark silhouette but Carby knew it was a man, and he hooked punch after punch into the man’s ribs. He heard them go, felt them break under his punches, but the figure just crouched there, holding him down, not even grunting with the pain.
“Let me go, you shit-eating bastard!” he bellowed and swung his biggest punch yet, cracking right across the point of his attacker’s jaw. The blow snapped the man’s head around and he toppled sideways as Carby kicked and scrabbled out from under. He spun around onto all fours as the man that had brought him down rolled away. Carby looked left and right. There were four other people there. Five in all. Ringed around him. One on the ground, crouched like Carby, was on all fours; four were standing. Two of them were close enough for the starlight to cast their faces in cool blue-white light.
One was a man that Carby had never seen, dressed in khakis and what looked like a polo shirt. It was so weirdly incongruous to the situation that Carby just stared. The man was in his midthirties, with a handsome face and a trim little mustache. Carby turned to his left and looked at the other person whose face was starlit. A woman. A woman he knew. Eighty years old, with a dowager’s hump and a tangled mass of gray hair, dressed in her best church clothes. Carby definitely knew her, had known her all his life. Just yesterday he had sat drinking kitchen whiskey with her son, Bailey. Just hours after six men lowered her coffin into the ground at Pineview Cemetery. Andrea Frane.
Carby’s mouth hung open to scream, but there was no sound left in him. Andrea opened her mouth, too. More than once Carby had seen her without her dentures, her toothless mouth caved in on itself, but that mouth was not toothless any longer. Now it had brand-new teeth that gleamed white and wet in the starlight. She opened her mouth to show all of her new teeth to Carby as the others stepped up and took him by the arms and shoulders. The man with the polo shirt grabbed Carby by the hair and wrenched his head to one side, exposing the vulnerable flesh of his neck and throat as Andrea Frane stepped closer and then bent toward him with her gaping, toothsome mouth.
PART TWO
SEASON OF THE WOLF
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.
—Ernest Hemingway,] “On the Blue Water”
Wolf comes hunting, pale moon overhead Big gray wolf comes hunting, blood moon overhead Better lock your doors, better say your prayers ’Cause the wolf’s come hunting…hunting for your child.
—Oren Morse,
Chapter 10
(1)
In his dreams he was usually Iron Mike Sweeney, the Enemy of Evil, a planet-hopping, dimension-crossing super-hero with high-tech weapons and vast powers that made him invulnerable to harm. In one of his favorite dreams Mike was the squad leader of a team of interstellar commandoes and in those dreams he moved with the ruthless efficiency and eyes-on-the-prize clarity of focus of Jack Bauer—if Jack Bauer had been a spaceman. Frequently the villains in his dreams looked like Vic—and even in the deepest of his dreams Mike realized what
Sometimes—rarely over the years and then almost exclusively over the last few months—Mike’s dreams changed into very regular and specific nightmares. In those dreams he would be walking through a dark swampy hollow. The bushes and trees around him were on fire and there were people lying everywhere. Dead people, covered in blood, torn apart. In those dreams Mike always carried a samurai sword, a
