Bad Moon Rising

death.

And then Vince LaMastra tore the gun from his hands and belted Crow across the face. “Crow!” LaMastra shouted, “STOP IT!”

Instantly Crow sagged to his knees, panting like a dog, mouth working to form words but unable to make any come.

“Crow!” said LaMastra again, this time with less force. “It’s over. Crow, man…it’s over.”

Slowly, very slowly, Crow came back from that black place to which his mind had fled, back to the shadows of the cellar and to the musty carpet on which he lay, and back to himself. He looked around…and everywhere there was death. White bodies lay sprawled in improbable heaps, mouths thrown wide, eyes open or closed, hands splayed, flesh torn but bloodless. Dead. All of them. Dead.

Jimmy Castle. Dead. Nels Cowan. Dead. By the boiler, that was Carl Jacobsen, who owned a small farm down by the reservoir. Carl, with five kids at home. Dead. Over by the stairs, wasn’t that Mitzie Grant who had just graduated from nursing school? Dead. The others were strangers. Dead. All dead.

Upstairs Frank Ferro was probably dead, too; and down here in the center of it all—Malcolm Crow and Vince LaMastra. Alive. By some miracle, by a chance. Maybe by skill and luck, too. But alive amid all that death. They looked at each other, shaking their heads, unable to speak because how could human speech make any kind of sense of this? They should have been dead, but they had survived. They were alive.

Alive, but still trapped in Ubel Griswold’s house.

Chapter 36

(1)

Vic’s Ford pickup bounced along the back road, through the tall stands of oaks and pines, his wheels crushing October leaves into fragments. He had a sulfur-tipped kitchen match between his teeth and he was grinning. On the radio Gretchen Wilson was telling him that she needed to get laid. Sunset was hours away, but that didn’t matter. Not to him, not to the Plan, and not to the Man.

Despite his earlier blues Vic felt pretty sporty and he couldn’t prevent nasty little smiles from popping onto his lips every few minutes as rolled through the forest toward the Man’s house.

At one point in the trip he stopped on the crest of the last large hill before the road dropped down into the valley beyond which was Dark Hollow. Vic took a sheet of onionskin from his shirt pocket, unfolded and smoothed it out, and then used a drop of spit to stick it to the dashboard. He consulted the row of numbers and checked them against the screen display on the laptop that lay on the front seat next to him. Most of his stuff was on timer, but the timers were inactive until he sent a master signal, which he did now by typing in a password and hitting Enter. The computer whirred for a moment and then returned a message: Completed. A clock appeared in a pop-up window and began counting down.

Vic took his cell phone from his shirt pocket and made the last call he would ever make on that phone. Even though the cellular relay tower would be the last to go because some of Ruger’s team needed their phones to coordinate troop movements, Vic had no one else to call. Lois was with them now. Vic didn’t have any friends left among the living.

It rang three times and then Ruger answered.

“You ready, Sport?” Vic asked.

“Yeah, as soon as your wife’s done blowing me.” Vic heard Lois burst out laughing in the background.

“Yeah, that joke never gets old, asshole,” Vic said. “The clock’s ticking.”

“Don’t worry,” Vic said, still chuckling, “we’re ready.”

Vic clicked off the phone, his good mood suddenly soured. His fist closed so tightly around the cell phone that his knuckles popped and the case cracked. “Yeah, well, enjoy it while you can, asshole,” he muttered, “’cause this town ain’t the only thing that’s going to die today.”

He cranked down the window and threw the phone into the weeds, then threw the truck back in gear and ground down the road toward the Man’s house.

(2)

Sarah Wolfe did not know her husband was awake though he’d been conscious for almost ten minutes now.

It had taken most of that time for him to realize where he was and what had happened. At first he had been frightened by the strangeness of it all: the intrusion of plastic tubing into his nostrils, the feeling of confinement around his limbs, the restraint of suspension straps, the pounding ache in his head, the small, alien beeps of machines. Then it came to him. He was in a hospital. He was hurt and he was in a hospital.

That realization began the process of looking inside to try and understand why he was in a hospital. Was it a car accident? A heart attack? Then…all at once the memories came to him like a computer coming online. Images flashed onto a movie screen in his head: the face he saw in the mirror, the face that had changed each day, become more horrific, more alien each day. The voice of his little sister, first on the phone, then beside him. In the elevator at the hospital. On the street, in the shadows of his office. In his own home. Mandy’s little bloodstained face, so sad, so frightened, but also so hard and angry. Her words, her desperate pleas for him to kill himself. Then Sarah’s face and Sarah’s pleas that he see a doctor, a psychiatrist. Sarah again, staring at him with pity as he stood amid the broken fragments of mirror in their bathroom. Sarah recoiling in horror as he began to change from man to animal.

He felt the horror surge up in him as he remembered that awful moment when the thing in the mirror had taken control of his own flesh, his very soul. He remembered feeling with the thing’s senses, thinking with its instincts, aching with its lusts, hungering with its passions. For those brief moments he had seen Sarah—his beloved Sarah—as prey. As meat.

There was the memory of how he had torn control back from the thing, back to himself, and the utter horror of knowing that this control was a weak and fragile thing; holding it was like holding an oiled snake. Then there was the memory of the bedroom window, of glass and cold morning air and the pavement leaping up at him. After that it was just darkness and darker dreams.

He lay there in the bed, feeling his body, trying to understand why he was still alive. Why hadn’t the fall killed him? More important, why did he not feel like he had even taken that fall? His head hurt, sure, but nothing else did. He searched his nerve endings, trying to feel for muscles and shattered bones under the two forearm casts, but his limbs felt strong and whole. His skin itched in some places, and felt tight in others, but nothing hurt besides his head. How had he not been hurt? How had he not been killed, not have been at least crippled?

Terry slowly opened his eyes. The room was bright with fluorescent light, though the daylight from outside seemed weak. Sarah sat in an armchair reading a copy of the Pine Deep Evening Standard and Times. It was the early edition. Terry was amazed that he could read the print on the paper from what seemed to be at least twelve feet away. He stared at the blocks of black print and realized that he could read every single word as if the newspaper were only inches away. He could not see Sarah’s face behind the paper, but he could smell her perfume. It seemed strong, far too strong, as if she’d bathed in it. Her sweat seemed strong, too. Terry frowned.

Outside in the hallway someone chewed noisily on the plastic cap of a pen. The sound was crashingly loud