14

The library loomed out of the hazy grayness, a somewhat modern one story building of yellow brick, located across from the high school. The parking lot was deserted but for one car, a red compact, fuel-efficient model that no doubt belong to Mrs. Cressfield, who had been the head librarian for as long as anyone could remember.

As they turned off the road, and into the parking lot, Radcliff was gratified to see the power here was still on-- light pouring up into the gloom through the two glass front doors of the building. Rich guided the pick-up truck into a space close to the doors, but they would probably still get drenched before they made it inside, the rain pouring so hard and steady. Rich cut the engine, and the two made a run for the doors.

Inside was warm and bright and smelled that familiar odor of must and dust and old paper and vaguely of crayons. It was an odor that evoked memories of childhood, and promised the safety of those days, also.

From behind the front desk, Mrs. Cressfield regarded them stoically as they walked in, outwear dripping on the maroon rubber runners on the gray tiled floor. She didn’t appeared the least bit surprised that someone should venture out in this type of weather to seek the wisdom harbored within this building. She had always struck residents as being a true believer when it came to the quest for knowledge, and throughout the years served faithfully even when someone came in search of the most esoteric of documents. Looking like anyone’s grandmother-- with cotton-white hair and glasses whose rims were rhinestone inlaid-- she caught their eye, and graced them with a vague nod of approval.

Both Rich and Radcliff looked around, as if trying to orient themselves-- Rich really looking rather lost; it had been years since his last visit to the library, many things had changed since then. He glanced at Radcliff, who shrugged and suggested, “Reference?”

“Lead the way,” he said.

They went to the reference section, and took off their dripping rainwear at the table at the center of the section, draping them over two of the chairs.

As Rich watched, Radcliff went to the machine that had on microfilm all the books available in the library. She turned the machine on, and the front screen lighted to show the listings. She pressed the buttons at the side of the machine to scan up and down, and it didn’t take very long for her to realize that she didn’t have the vaguest notion where to look for the information they wanted. She paused and glanced in dismay over at Rich, who could only shrug his helplessness.

Having noticed their apparent plight, Mrs. Cressfield approached the table, on which she set a large index card and a pencil. “Just write it down, Radcliff, and bring it up to the desk. That’s what I’m here for-- though I may be swamped at the moment, I believe I can squeeze you in,” she added with a good-natured chuckle. Before returning to her perch at the front desk, she paused to eye Rich. “It’s been a long time, Richard-- have you forgotten how to read?” she added snidely.

The way Rich dropped his eyes to the floor then, it was obviously he was feeling again like a little kid, when he’d had spent entire afternoons in the library, endlessly in search of adventure books. That had been during a time when adventure and excitement appealed to him. After having served three tours of duty in Viet Nam, a quest for excitement was not really high on his to-do list. When he noticed Radcliff looking at him questioningly, he shrugged his shoulders and feigned ignorance.

She sat at the table, and jotted a few things down on the card, pausing now and then with the eraser poised thoughtfully on her lower lip. When she was convinced she was finished, she ran the card back to the front desk. She returned and sat at the table across from Rich, and they both waited in the stodgy hush of the library that was broken only by an occasional roll of thunder outside.

After a while, Rich got a gleam in his eye that Radcliff had never before seen. He raised his hand to his mouth, and cupping his palm round the corner of his mouth, puffed out his cheeks, and made loud noise that sounded exactly like someone farting after having eaten an especially spicy meal.

Radcliff looked horrified.

From some dusty corner of the library, Mrs. Cressfield called, “I heard that, Richard, and don’t think I ever forgot. I forget nothing,” she added in a sinister way.

Radcliff was now blushing.

“What are you doing?” she whispered vehemently. “I still have to come here, you know?”

He started to raise his hand to his mouth again, and she tried to grab it but couldn’t. Just as he was about to release another gross sound, Mrs. Cressfield called out chidingly, “Richard, behave yourself. You’re embarrassing your daughter.”

Rich couldn’t contain himself. He burst out laughing, to his daughter’s dismay.

A moment later, they heard the heels of Mrs. Cressfield’s shoes clacking on the tiled floor, as she neared the reference section. She was carrying a pile of books, some thick, some thin, all very old-looking. She set the pile on the table, between them, and looked down at Rich, her lips purse in disapproval.

“Richard,” she asked, wagging her head sadly, “whatever happened to you?”

“I couldn’t say.”

Much to Radcliff’s shock, Mrs. Cressfield pulled out a chair and actually sat at the table with them. She turned to Radcliff then, and asked, “Did you know that at one time your father spent more time in this building than I did? By god,” she exclaimed, “after eight or nine years of it, I thought he’d run out of books to read. If he didn’t have parents already, I would have got ready to adopt him. You know, it’s not much of an exaggeration, Richard. One of the proudest moments of my life was getting the new issue of the Atlantic Monthly and finding they’d published one of your stories. But why did you quit?-- I never understood that.”

“I don’t know,” Rich said. “I guess you could say real life caught up with me.”

“Such a waste,” she said. “There are really so few gifted writers working today. Most of the books coming out now are just plain junk, if you ask me. You?--what you had was special. You know, it’s never too late to pick it up,” she added, standing up. She gave him one last rueful look before walking back to the desk.

“You were published in the Atlantic Monthly?” Radcliff asked him, dumbfounded.

“It was a long time ago, Rad,” he said in such a way it was clear he didn’t want to discuss the matter.

They turned their attention to the pile of old books. They separated the books, and with their heads bowed as if in prayer, they silently scanned the yellowing pages. Every once in a while, Radcliff looked up to steal a gaze at her father, wondering what other secrets he held.

15

They began to wander into the station. First came Michaels and Edwards. They were the two night deputies, which placed them on the same level as glorified night watchmen; as little as usually occurred in Winsome Lake during the day, even less took place at night. Their most exciting night was usually every Halloween, when local teens invaded the cemetery and dressed as various ghouls teepeed all the monuments. One year Edwards, the younger and more impulsive of the two officers, nearly shot one of the teens because the kid’s costume looked too realistic. Well, he could have been a real one-- how could you tell for sure? was Edwards’ defense of the near tragedy. On the other hand, Michaels was older and layback-- almost too layback-- but then again that was a good thing because his placidness tended to rub off on the Edwards, who often needed to calm down. Michaels had been a construction worker until his mid-thirties, when a bad fall from a partially constructed wall caused sufficient injuries to insure he would never lay another brick. Slightly balding and growing pudgier as each year passed, Michaels probably wasn’t even physically fit enough to serve as deputy-- what with the effects of his old injuries, plus the onset of arthritis in his knees-- but he had four children to feed, and Sheriff Bill had been unable to turn him down for the job, figuring there was little chance of him having to physically exert himself on the graveyard shift. Really, how much work is it to write out a speeding ticket?

The two night deputies now shook themselves off as that walked back to the squad room and the hot coffee, whose aroma filled the entire station.

Next Jimmy Ellison arrived, putting his vacation on hold. Jimmy was the other daytime deputy, who usually worked with Matt and Bill. Jimmy had the bearing of a big city cop-- the snide attitude, the snotty way of speaking to somebody he was writing a ticket. On his face was etched a continual expression of disapproval, as though he’d always been destined to become the disciplinary counselor at the local high school. Still he was never too grave about anything, even tended to be the department practical joker. When Matt confided to him that he’d never in his life tasted peanut butter, it was Jimmy who was largely responsible for the dissemination of the secret throughout the community until Matt could not walk down the street for a while without one or another resident calling out to him, “Hey, Skippy!” Jimmy even broke into Matt locker on night, to put a huge bottle of Jiffy peanut butter on which he taped a noted that said in big bold letters: EAT ME. Another time he broken into the locker, and left a large jar of grape jelly on which he left a note that said: I AM SO LONELY. Jimmy was the only one in the department who could make Manny laugh: Hey, Manny, how were you conceived? Did your mother fuck a statue or something?

Jimmy paused at the desk, looked at Alma briefly, grunted, and then headed for the squad room.

Little by little, then, the auxiliary officers appeared, all staggering through the front door with a gust of wind, the spray of rain, and with highly disoriented looks of their faces. It was clear that when most of them volunteered they never thought that their duties would involve dragging their sorry asses through sheets of cold rain and slogging through mud that was getting deeper by the second. They all looked like they wanted nothing more than to stay home in bed until it was all over. There was Jim Nash, the assistant manager of the used car lot; there were Al Crosby, Fred Landers, and Ross Zimmerman, from the VFW post; there was Pete Benton, who had a small auto body shop-- he finally found his uniform, which was a size too small, and drove in with a panel truck filled with wooden horses; there was Pat O’Shea, the local undertaker-- who had nothing better to do anyway--and his son Brian, an aspiring rock star-- also with nothing better to do; there was Tim Corrin, a teller at the bank; and finally there was old man Hazlett, who every one forgot was part of the auxiliary, and if Alma had realized just how old he was, would never have called him.

When Bill walked into the squad room, everyone-- with the exception of Matt, who was still cleaning himself up-- was standing around, sipping hot coffee and crabbing about the storm.

Bill took his place behind the podium, which he hardly ever had a chance to use, at the front of the room.

Every one in the room quieted down, and waited for him to speak.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “thank you all for being here on this-- lovely day. From the outset, I’d like to go on record to say that the national weather service can kiss my fat cheese-head ass.”

Everyone roared laughter.

“First,” he continued, scanning the room, “Is Pete here?”

Pete held up his hand.

“Pete, did you bring the horses?”

“They’re in my truck outside,” Pete assured him.

“Great. I’ve already talked with Chief Halsey, and we split up the road closings. Pete, I have a list here of places to set the barricades, sections of roadway that have a history of washing out, plus at the ends of the downtown strip. Why don’t you take Jim Nash and Tim Curran to help you set those up.” He stepped out from behind the podium to hand Pete the list.

Just as Bill was ready to continue, Matt walked into the room. He looked much fresher dressed in a clean uniform.

Jimmy Ellison began to hum at the first sight of Matt. His humming turned to singing: “Daniel Boone was a man/ Was a biiiiiig man--”

Matt just stood leaning against the wall, shaking his head and blushing, as every one in the squad room applauded and guffawed.

“All right… all right,” Bill said over the hubbub, though he himself couldn’t help laughing. “All right, I can see news travels fast. It’s true. Our young Matt, here, having been trapped in the deluge on the north shore, did indeed-- in an act of self-defense, of course-- shoot Gentle Ben dead as a doornail…. Now, can we settle down, and get back to business?” The room quieted enough for him to continue. “Let me ask this, how many of you guys with the auxiliary have brought your own weapons?” Except for old man Hazlett, every one of the auxiliary held up a hand. “All right. Normally, I’d say toss them in your trunks, you won’t need them. But given that fact that Matt has reported some unusual animal activity involving bears and coyote, I think it will be prudent for you to keep them at hand-- so long as you exercise common sense. So let’s play it safe on that point, all right? Next order of business, we received an all points bulletin a while ago. The bank in Gorshen was robbed by three armed gunmen. This is just something to keep in mind. There is no vehicle description, and the only description they have on the suspects at this point is that they were all medium height and weight, wearing black ski masks. My guess is that they’re long gone by now, and even if they aren’t the likelihood of catching them is nil-- especially considering what were dealing with weather-wise. Our prime objective is the safety of the people and property in the greater Winsome Lake area. All the businesses, as far as I know, have shutdown, storeowners have returned to the shelter of their homes. In fact, not many people ought to be out; everyone with a lick of common sense is riding out the storm at home now. Any questions so far?”

“What about looters?” asked Brian O’Shea, the undertaker’s son. “Do we get to shoot looters?”

The fact that two or three other auxiliary officer seemed to nod agreement with the question troubled Bill somewhat.

“First off,” Bill began with a sigh, “This isn’t Chicago or Detroit or Los Angeles. I seriously doubt we are going to have a looter problem here. For chrissake, everybody knows everybody else. But if you should see something like that, no, you don’t shoot him. Just make a note of it, who it was, and I’ll talk to them later, after everything settles down. Any other questions?”

Old man Hazlett raised a gnarled hand.

Bill hadn’t even noticed him, the tiny wizened figure, standing at the back of the room.

“Mr. Hazlett? I didn’t realize you were with the auxiliary.”

The old man was obviously insulted. “Since nineteen and forty- two.”

“Really?”

“What do I do? I don’t have a gun.”

Bill thought quickly. “Well, in that case, you’ll be assigned to the station-- to help with coordination, where your experience will come in handy.”

The old man seemed satisfied, if not pleased.

“Now, if any of you guys notice anything usual, just report it in. I doubt that you will, but we had a report come in earlier today that it was raining frogs and snakes.”

The entire squad room erupted in laughter.

“All right, all right, I know it sounds crazy, but, you know, if you see something odd, don’t keep it to yourself.”

“Is Rich Seagrove at it again?” Jimmy Ellison asked, which caused another round of raucous laughter.

“Did I say anything about Rich Seagrove?” Bill said, a bit too defensively. “I’m just saying, if you get any strange reports, don’t keep them to yourself. Okay, frogs and snakes, might sound a little-- unlikely, but, you know, look outside-- the national weather services says we’re not even having a storm. So, under the circumstances, snakes and frogs might not be so crazy after all.”

“No, no,” Matt said adamantly, stepping forward. “Actually, that’s not so crazy, at all.”

Bill looked at him, astonished at first, but then sure he would follow up with some joke.

“Matt…” he growled a warning.

“No, really,” Matt insisted. “There have been documented cases of that sort of thing. There are times a really bad storm goes through a wooded area, and there are microbursts or funnel clouds that nearly touch down, and they suck up all the tree frogs and snakes. Sometimes they are carried for miles before they’re finally released. When they are, it looks as if they’re falling from the sky.”

“Really?” Bill said, amazed. “You’re not making this stuff up?”

“No, I read about it,” Matt assured him.

Jimmy Ellison called from the other side of the room. “Man, the mere fact you know something like that tells me two things. One, you read too much, and two, you need to get laid.”

Guffaws sounded from every side of the room.

“All right, all right,” Bill said, speaking loudly over the ruckus, “Matt’s just a very well-read kid. That’s not a bad thing-- no matter what anyone thinks. Now,” he said finally, “Manny will hand out the rest of the assignments. If you have any questions, I’ll be in my office. Remember I’d rather you ask a dumb question now than make a dumb mistake later. And please, knock before you enter,” he added, before leaving the room.

7

Bill was perplexed at first. He went to his office and stood at the window and gazed toward downtown Winsome Lake. Sure, the sky, with its roiling clouds, looked pretty menacing-- even eerie, the cloud edges tinged with red and gold. But really he couldn’t imagine the kid sitting in his squad not so far away being battered by high winds and sheets of rain. It defied the area’s normal weather patterns, with which he had become very familiar over the years he’d served as sheriff, and before that as just another ordinary citizen. Still he had to give the kid the benefit of the doubt-- he was young, but as a deputy fairly solid, certainly not prone to exaggeration.

He lumbered back into the front office, where Alma sat at the communications desk.

“Were you able radio the ferry?” Bill asked.

“Yeah,” Alma said. “Ed says everything’s under control up there. It’s coming down pretty good now, but it looks like all the boaters made it back to shore all right, except for one rowboat. It sank in about four feet of water. Ed says it looked like a couple college kids. They got out all right, but he’s pretty sure some kind of alcohol was involved, the way they were laughing and carrying on. He’s finishing a run to the south landing now. He says he’ll lock the ferry down and stand by for emergencies. He says he’ll lay up on the booth as long as you need him-- he had a good supply of tuna salad sandwiches, Doctor Pepper, and Lawrence Welk CDs.”

“Good ole Ed. Anything else?”

“The national weather service has updated its forecast. They issued a flash flood warning.”

“Flash flood warning! How can they issue a flash flood warning if they haven’t even admitted it’s raining?” Bill said, disgusted, and then added, “Whatever those boys are smoking over there, I’d like to get my hands on some-- I’m going to need it.” There were a fair amount of locations, including the police state and the quarter mile strip of small businesses that comprised downtown, situated on flood planes. Oh, not to mention most of the new riverside constructions north of the lake-- beautiful buildings, yes, but very vulnerable to flooding. He wagged his head. “Looks likes it’s going to turn into a long day. Better call everybody in,” he said. “Call up everybody on the auxiliary, too, and put them on alert. Oh, and find out who has the goddamned horses. We probably have to do some road closures.”

“All right,” Alma said. “Manny already called; he’s on his way in.”

“Good.”

“Should I call Jimmy?-- he’s still on vacation.”

“Yeah, call him. He can finish his vacation later. He’s not doing anything anyway-- just sitting round the house watching TV. I have to get some normal deputies. I got one guy won’t eat anything normal, and another one gets his vacation and spends two weeks roaming his house in his boxer shorts. I don’t get it.”

When he returned to his office, sheets of rain were hammering his window. Jesus, the kid wasn’t kidding; that moved in awfully fast.

8

Matt was growing anxious. The downpour was relentless. He’d already turned off the radio, to save the squad’s battery. Maybe it was for the best; only two stations were coming through clearly. One was playing a Percy Faith marathon, and the other was airing an endless sermon by the Rev. J. J. Hopeful, which was coming live-- Matt couldn’t see how-- from Midland, Texas. He couldn’t decide which was worse, given the weather, listening to the perky tone of Percy Faith and his orchestra or listening to J. J. Hopeful screaming, almost maniacally, “Ye-es, ye-es, and what will you say as you stand before the Lord come judgment day? I am a sinner, Almighty God, please forgive me? I’ll tell you right now, that is not the right time to ask for redemption, because if you do-- if you do-- God is gonna be handing you a one-way ticket to fiery recesses of the infernal regions-- that’s hell to you and me, neighbors. Ye-es. I’ll promise you right now, God has a sense of humor, but He doesn’t have that much a sense of humor. Nosiree, He doesn’t….” The only thing Matt decided in the end was that from now on he ought to carry around a CD player in case a similar situation ever arose.

He started to worry that when it finally did let up, the squad might be stuck in the mud puddle that the roadside was fast becoming; he could swear the squad had sunk slightly already. He grabbed the long flashlight from under his seat, swung the door opened, and ventured outside. He was not prepared for the coldness of the rain, and for a scary moment his body was so shocked, his lungs refused to work. By the time he reached the trunk and opened it to find his rain gear, his uniform was completely soaked and his whole body was a-shiver. He pulled the bright orange poncho over his uniform, and slipped its hood over his head. That was a little better-- not much, but at least the falling rain was now being repelled and he was beginning to feel a little warmer. He slammed the truck shut, and looked down the road. A claw of lightening glimmered across the firmament, and he saw in the distance the hulking outline of the old Henderson place. He had passed it without even noticing. It had been abandoned years ago, and was seriously dilapidated; however, it did have a paved driveway leading to its decrepit garage. He climbed back into the squad, started the engine, and with dome lights blazing, slowly backed the squad down the road until he reached the driveway. He pulled the squad onto the security of the cement, and parked it next to the old house. At least now he wouldn’t have to worry about getting stuck in the mud; that would have been adding insult to injury. He pulled the hood of the poncho down, reached under the front seat and found his binoculars, which he hung around his neck, letting them hang inside the poncho, where they would be dry. His grabbed his cell phone and the portable Motorola, both clipped to the sunscreen. He lifted the poncho, and clipped the Motorola to his belt. The cell phone he shoved into his pocket. He wasn’t sure whether either one of them would do him much good. He snatched up the flashigh and pulled the hood back over his head. He went back out into the rain again, slammed the squad door shut, and ran for the front porch of the old house. As he ran up the front stairs, one of the boards gave way, snapping like bones of an old man taking a bad fall, and he nearly went down. He recovered his balance nimbly, and ended up on the front porch. It was a large wrap-around porch, and even though the building appeared to be on the verge of collapsing, the overhang offered a large pocket of shelter from the rain. He shook himself off, the floorboards of the porch creaking as if nobody had stood on them in years. He realized, then, that he had to take a piss very badly. What the hell, how often do you get to piss on somebody’s front door? Nobody would ever know. Under the poncho he unzipped his pants, and lifting the end of the poncho, he relieved himself on the ancient rubber welcome mat. When he was done, he found breathing easier. He let his hood down, reached into the poncho, and yanked out the binoculars. He tried using them to scan up and down the road, but they were of little use. Why couldn’t this cheap-ass department get night vision binoculars? he wondered with an impracticality that it bourn only of youth. Lightening brightened the sky, and a loud roll of thunder immediately followed, sending vibrations through the old structure. For a second, when the sky was bright, he swore he saw something moving up the road. He kept the binoculars glued to his eyes, and waited for the next flare of illumination. He didn’t have to wait long, and what glimpsed mystified him: about three hundred feet up the road, where the woods began, he spotted several figures running across the road; at first he thought they were dogs, but they had to be coyote, and right along with the coyote, three or four deer galloped across the road, and all the animals vanished into the woods there. Bizarre-- that was the only word for it. Coyote and deer running nearly side-by-side, each not paying the least bit of attention to the other; it defied animal nature, he believed. He continued to watch, and when lightening flashed again, he saw more forms, like gray animal wraiths: a couple more deer and coyote, this time accompanied by the unmistakable lumbering form of a bear. Incredible! He lowered the binoculars and stared out into the rain, his mouth agape. He paced the porch in wonder, then, wagging his head, completely at a loss to explain what his eyes had seen. He soon became aware that vibrations were running through the floorboards beneath his feet, even though there was no thunder. He thought for a second that maybe the old house had finally had it; battered by the wind and rain, and after years of slow decay, maybe the whole structure was about ready to cave in upon itself. He heard a distance scratching sound that seemed to be coming from inside the house. He walked over to the large front window, and cupping a hand around his eyes, tried to spy into the house. But the windowpane was layered with many years of dirt, and it was hardly possible for him to see anything clearly. He had his nose pressed up to the glass, and when lightening flashed behind him, the only things he saw behind the glass were two yellow eyes gazing back at him. Seized by panic, he jumped back and stumbled away from the window. Under his poncho, his hand frantically tried to free his .357 magnum from its holster. He got it loose just as the bear crashed through the window. His back hit the porch railing and the old boards splintered and gave way and he started to fall backward off the porch. Even as he was falling, he raised the gun and pulled the trigger twice. One shot missed, and the other hit the bear in the neck. Still the hulking animal seemed far from daunted. Matt hit the muddy ground, and looked up to watch the bear stand on its hind legs on the porch. All he could see clearly were yellow eyes and white fangs, as the bear roared in the wind. From flat on his back, he took aim and pulled the trigger again. The magnum barked twice in the continuous howl of the storm. Bullets ripped into the bear’s chest. It lurched to the side, and started to go down. It seemed to be falling in slow motion, its body already as limp as a rag doll. When it crashed against the floorboards of the porch, several of the boards snapped and dust wafted up around the crumpled furry form. Matt still lay on his back on the muddy ground, arms extended, gun pointed upward. He stayed like that a moment, frozen except for the tremors that ran through his hands and made the gun barrel shake. Finally, when he was certain the bear wasn’t getting up, he lowered the weapon, and slipping and sliding got to his feet. He picked up the flaslight, which lay at his feet, and slowly approached the motionless animal. He aimed the flashlight at it, and a beam of light stabbed through the rain and the gloom of the storm to illuminate the bear’s lifeless eyes. Its tongue lolled to the side of its mouth. The pool of blood, which was slowly spreading across the porch floor, looked black as ink and wisps of steam were curling up from it. Jesus H. Christ, was all Matt could think, his sphincter muscle still trembling. He believed he might have pissed his pants, but couldn’t be sure because he was totally drenched anyway. His mind finally calmed enough for him to wonder what if there another bear around here? They traveled in pairs, didn’t they? He wished now that the Discovery Channel didn’t have a tendency to put him to sleep. He aimed the beam of the flashlight at the shattered picture window, and into the shadowy hollows of the house, but could make out nothing. Still he was out of here. He holstered his gun, and slowly walked to the squad, the pouring rain washing the mud off his poncho. After he climbed back into the squad, which he promised himself he would not leave again for the rest of the day, he was struck by paranoia; he pulled out the 357 magnum, removed the four spend shells, and replaced them with fresh shells from his gun belt. He started the engine then, turned the heat on high, and blasted the fan. With the adrenaline rush abating, he now felt as though he were freezing. He put the squad in reverse and slowly backed down the driveway, careful not to stray from the cement, lest a tire slip into the mud, into which he was sure it would sink about a foot now-- the ground being so saturated with water. He turned on his dome lights and high beam headlights, and when he back onto the road, he turned the squad to face southward, and slowly started back to the station. He simply had to escape; the storm, which had rushed in so fast, seemed to be lingering over this area, and he wasn’t staying put a moment longer. It was dangerous driving, sure, but less dangerous than standing around in the dark in the rain and waiting for other bears or whatever to try to bite off his face. He found he could see the road only about three, four feet in front of the squad, but that was good enough; he would inch his way back to the station if he had to. He wasn’t concerned about hitting another vehicle-- who else in their right mind would be on the road up here now?-- but rather just keeping the squad on the road and not driving it into a ditch. He wouldn’t be able to take the ferry-- knew Ed Jones, by now, had the ferry secured at the south landing-- but had to take the long way, round the lake along the meandering roads. If he took a left at Campground Road and headed east, he might be able to break out of this really heavy rain, maybe it would lighten up a little at least. Hell, the last thing he was going to do for now was radio Bill, whose orders had been distinctly not to shoot the bear. He wasn’t about to have to explain that to him over a crackly radio.

9

Oh, no, Radcliff thought, not again, not now.

As if reading her mind, Rich Seagrove said, “It’s not that Raddy, honest. This is for real. Check yourself. They’re frogs.”

She got off the sofa, and went to the front door. When she swung it open, she was struck by a gust of wind and cold mist. She squinted out into the darkness and the gray rain angling to the ground. She could make out several lumps lying on the front walkway, and other dark lumps falling to the ground with the rain. Some of the lumps landed on the lawn, and after landing seemed to stir. My God, she realized, they were frogs-- small brownish frogs. Many of them appeared to be dead, but here and there in the wet grass, she could see some of them moving as if hurt or disoriented. Not only that; there were a couple longer forms-- vaguely green, one slipping off a tree branch to plop down onto the sodden grass below--that looked like snakes. She was stunned at the vision, even her young, imaginative mind not allowing her to accept was she was seeing as real. For a horrifying second she believed she had inherited whatever her father had that made him drift toward delusions. She slowly shut the door, and returned to the living room.

“You saw them, right?” Rich asked anxiously. “Please say you saw them, and it’s just not me.”

“There are frogs falling from the sky,” she said, knowing that to a third party she’d sound just as loony as her father. “And snakes, too.”

“Snakes, too?”

“Yeah,” she said dully.

He studied her suspiciously, as though thinking she had seen nothing at all and was just humoring him.

When she noticed the way he was watching her, she assured him, “You can relax. They’re real enough.”

“I thought so,” he said. “I can’t ever be sure, you know-- especially if I see something strange.”

“Oh, it’s strange, all right,” she said, rolling her eyes, listening to a couple more thuds as either frogs or snakes struck the roof.

Radcliff sat on the sofa again, and stared up at him. She didn’t know what more to say, could not fathom an explanation for such a bizarre thing. This was like something you read about in the Bible. She seemed to recall, though not a huge Bible reader, that one of the plagues visited upon Egypt was frogs, but even in the Bible, those frogs didn’t fall from the sky as if God Himself were spitting them at the Pharaoh. And this was not Egypt, but Winsome Lake, Wisconsin.

“What do you think?” she asked him.

“I’m relieved,” he said. “You can’t know what it’s like.”

“I think I just got an idea of what it must be like.“ she sighed. “But we actually have frogs falling on our house….” She shrugged. “Shouldn’t we be doing something?”

“Like what?”

“Shouldn’t we, like, tell somebody?”

“Who’d believe it?-- especially coming from me.”

She conceded the point.

“Beside that, what would anybody do about it? It’s weird, but there’s nothing you can do.”

She started to feel something for her father she’d never before felt: empathy. To have an inkling of what it must be like for him when he had his spells, when he reacted to all kinds of things his mind was telling him were real, but were not real. She was beginning to understand what it must be like for him, and with this new insight, she felt shamed for all the times she’d avoided him, because it was clear to her now that no matter how much she had to endure due to his episodes, it would be he who always suffered most of all. She imagined herself attempting to tell the sheriff about the frogs and snakes, and the slow steady response the sheriff would give her to calm her down, to assure her that it wasn’t possible. She imagined people talking about her behind her back, and even while talking to her face to face, people just a half step farther away than a normal conversational distance, just in case she should suddenly snap and become dangerous. And then she remembered all the times she’d rushed off to her room, locked herself away, and boo-hoo-ed over how it wasn’t fair to her what she had to bear, while he wandered through the house alone at a time when he needed her most, when he needed her support. She was appalled at her own selfishness.

Now she sprang up impulsively, and threw her arms around his neck and hugged him hard.

“Whoa,” he cried, taken aback. “What’s that for?”

He tried to push her away, to look in her face, but she held on tight, not wanting him to see the tears bead up in the corners of her eyes. She whispered in his ear, “I’m sorry, Daddy, I’m sorry.” She didn’t realize she was standing on his feet, the way she had when she was little and learning how to walk.

“It’s all right,” he assured her, although not certain why she was apologizing. It didn’t matter anyway; he would always forgive her anything. As she began to release him, he said, “You know what? Maybe we ought to tell somebody, after all. It might be important. They’ll think we’re nuts, probably, but then there’s proof on the front lawn, isn’t there?” He stepped away from her, and went to the front window. He pulled back the curtains, and gazed out into the storm. There was something wrong here, he was sure, could feel it in his bones. It wasn’t just the chill that the storm brought-- that was normal-- but something else, something that made his skin tingle, something that sharpened his senses, something that made his breathing shallow with anticipation. He’d felt the same way in Viet Nam, on ambushes, hidden at night in the shadows of a jungle, waiting, knowing not that there was the possibly of the enemy nearby but feeling the presence of danger all around him in the darkness. It was exactly like that now, and he was certain-- despite common reasoning crying that this was just an ordinary storm-- that there was something evil out there.

“We need to call the sheriff,” he said.

“But the cordless phone won’t work with the power out,” Radcliff pointed out.

“Take my flashlight. You’ll find an old AT&T rotary phone in that mess in the front closet.”

“He’s going to think you’re having an episode,” she said, certain.

“I don’t care what he thinks,” he said. “ He needs to know about this. I have a feeling that in a short while he’s going to have bigger problems.”

10

Carl Canfield relished his place in the universe, a giant of genius in a town filled with dumb-ass dwarfs.

He had them all fooled, every one of them--especially that dumb fat-ass sheriff. And what a hick he was! Slouching around with the shirt of his uniform rumbled and not completely tucked in, belly hanging over his belt like he drank a vat of beer each day-- some public servant; just the kind this town deserved. But, oh, he was a nice guy, and, sure, that actually meant something in this town. Everybody liked him. He had that-- probably thought it was important, valuable; something you could take to the bank, yeah, and tuck away in a safety deposit box. But he didn’t have his dream house, did he? You know who had that? And when you take away somebody’s dreams, it’s worse than taking everything they have: it’s taking away everything they hope to have; it’s stealing their reason to continue living. Well, Sheriff Bill, fuck you and die, because you ain’t ever going to get that house, are you? So what’s the point of going on? You have a gun. Find a quiet place, and do the right thing-- the only thing. Better yet, make sure you do it somewhere else, so you don’t burden this nice community of dumb-ass hicks by leaving your fat-ass flatulent carcass for them to cry over-- just do it someplace isolated where nobody will find you for a hundred years, and all that is left is a skeleton and your gun minus one bullet-- and nobody will know that once you were a nice guy loved by his community; you will just be an oddity, discovered in some cave or something, along with some ancient pottery and arrowheads. And scientists will number all your bones, and they will test the density of your bones, and which bones were stressed more, and they will study all the test results and scratch their heads, thinking this must be wrong, surely, because if it is right this man’s ass must have weighed two hundred pounds, one hundred pounds each cheek, and how could he have possibly walked? You will be a scientific mystery, like Bushman; you’ll be Bigass man, discovered in Wisconsin. They’ll put you in some museum. Children will point at you and laugh. Women will look at you and gag. And everybody will know that while you were alive, surely you were so revolting, you could never have possibly had friends….

And, oh, how they all had bought the Yahoo story! To this day, when he was alone at home, he would chuckle to think how easily everyone believed the story. What was it Hilter said: The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it. Oh, how true. When he’d let slip the news, they’d all eaten it up, without question. He knew they wanted to believe it, because they all hated him, and by believing he’d been so lucky as to strike it rich in the stock market-- one of life’s dark ironies-- they felt comfortable to continue hating him through the years. All he had to do was reinforce the lie: flash cash, own new cars, wear expensive clothes, tip big, and they would always believe. That was human nature. And you can always count on human nature to make fools of most human beings.

By now Carl was convinced no one would ever find out what he’d been doing over the years, the virtual criminal empire he’d built and had been running from Winsome Lake. He never did anything himself, never dirtied his hands, but had crews of young punks doing everything for him: stealing containers of electronics, committing armed robbery and burglary, whatever-- anything to make money. He had warehouse space-- rented in other people’s names, of course-- in Illinois and Wisconsin to hide stolen goods until they could be liquidated. And everybody he worked with never realized they were actually working for him, but believed they worked for somebody else, somebody big--whose named could never be uttered--somebody so scary that if anyone every got caught they would never dare do anything but take the rap themselves. And Carl, he was just the middleman, under the protection of this big somebody that never existed, in a position to be a nice guy, even. It was a system of criminal activity that was flawlessly conceived to fill Carl’s pockets with money while eliminating all risk of prosecution. And because he always shared the money generously, nobody griped or grumbled or thought to go off on their own.

When the storm started, Carl was pissed because there had been no warning-- fucking weathermen-- and he had the perfect place for a couple of his boys to take down. The storm would provide ideal cover for the boys, and the timing was right: they could walk away with a cool half million in cash-- maybe more if he was lucky. He just barely got hold of the three boys he wanted to use, White Nicky, Astro, and Rizzo, all out of Milwaukee. On the payphone at the gas station down the street from his house, Carl filled White Nicky in on the details, told him where and when to hit the place and which route to take when leaving-- he’d cased the place himself several times over the past year, determining even then that during a significant storm would be the best time for the place to be hit. He told White Nicky where to meet him afterward, so that could split up the cash and call it a day-- it was that easy.

And later he planned to lounge around the house he’d stolen from fat-ass Sheriff Bill, watch a ball game on his new big-screen television, down a couple beers, and delight in the piles of new cash on his coffee table. And nobody would be the wiser.

11

Bill was talking with Alma at the front counter when Manny D’Agastino walked through the door-- blasted through the front door was more like it. He paused briefly inside the door to shake the rain from his poncho and his mountie hat. His appearance and bearing perfectly complimented the weather outside. He was tall and thin, with a long gaunt face. His dark thick eyebrows angled downward toward the bridge of his hawkish nose, creating a perpetual scowl. Bill could recall only two or three times in the eight years that Manny served as deputy when Manny had actually smiled-- so glum was his nature, and without reason, as Manny had a beautiful wife ten years younger than he, two wonderfully behaved children (a boy and a girl, ages seven and five respectively), and plenty of money-- inherited from his old man, who’d been a sly real estate broker-- so much money, in fact, he didn’t need the meager salary he received serving as deputy. Every time Bill saw Manny, Bill would start thinking either of Abraham Lincoln or a old-fashioned undertaker-- like from the 1850’s-- standing next to a black ornate horse-drawn hearse. Bill thought it funny that the couple times he had witnessed Manny smile, it seemed like the warmest, friendliest smile he’d ever seen on a human being.

Manny strode up to the counter, saying, “Goddamnit,” which told Bill he was actually mad about something. That was the only way you could tell, by how he spoke, otherwise he always appeared mad about something.

“Manny, what is it?” Bill asked.

“Driving in this god-awful downpour-- that’s bad enough,” he muttered. “Then, on top of that, I get drive-bombed by a freakin black bird-- can you believe that? Hit the windshield so hard it shattered and nearly caved in. I got rain running all over the dashboard, and bird brains all over the place.”

“Well,” Bill said, like a man with a million problems, to which he could now add another, “just switch the keys with squad fifteen. It’s parked out back-- the mechanic just finished with her yesterday.”

Manny simply grunted.

“Who ordered this shit, anyhow?” he asked.

“Not me,” Alma said.

“It was a rhetorical question,” Manny sneered.

“Oh? Well, it still wasn’t me,” Alma added dumbly.

“Bill, what do you need me to do now, answer phones?” Manny asked.

“Uh, no. No, let Alma take the phones. Why don’t you ride the radio for now? We have Matt stuck someplace on the north shore. We haven’t heard anything from him for a while, now. And everyone else is on his way in, I guess. Is that right, Alma?”

“Everyone but Pete Benton.”

“What’s wrong with him,” Bill asked.

“He can’t find his uniform.”

“The hell with his uniform. Call him up and tell him to wear his pajamas if he has to. I’m going to need bodies down here-- not uniforms. Besides, doesn’t he have some of the horses?”

“Stored in his barn, yeah-- from the last department picnic.”

“Tell him just get his ass down here,” Bill growled, and then retreated to his office.

Once he was settled behind his desk, he glared out his window at the rain, as though with contempt for the storm that was ruining the usual tranquility of his job.

He then turned and pressed the intercom button on his phone.

“Alma,” he said, “send the boys back to the squad room as they come in. When everyone’s here, I’ll hand out assignments.”

“All right Bill. And Bill… I just got a call from the Medical Center in Cloverton. They say their basement is flooding fast, their power is out, and they’re on emergency power. They’re requesting any traumas be diverted over to Stoppard, if at all possible.”

“Got it,” Bill said. “Better get hold of Halsey at the fire department. Make sure he knows. Find out what, if anything, he’s doing about road closings-- or what he plans on doing. Some of these roads are going to start washing out pretty soon, if they haven’t started already-- and, Christ, that bridge up on Hansen Road. Anything else?”

“There was a call in from the Seagroves,” Alma said, reluctantly.

“Now what?” Bill sounded dismal.

“Apparently it raining frogs and snakes by them-- they thought you should know.”

“It’s raining what?”

“Frogs and snakes.”

“Frogs and snakes?” He considered the notion for a moment. “Is he alone up there? Where is Radcliff?”

“I spoke with Radcliff, too. She said it’s true.”

“She did?” Bill said, perplexed; either Radcliff is losing it too, or it actually is raining frogs and snakes. “Well, if you get a chance, call them back and tell them not to worry about it.” He considered something a moment, and then added, “Tell them to say away from the snakes-- just in case.”

“You serious?” Alma asked.

“Sure.”

“You believe them?”

“Whether I believe them or not, it’s still good general advice.”

“All right,” she said, doubtful.

“Look.” Bill seemed hard-pressed to explain himself. “What if there are snakes? What kind of snakes this state have?-- trees snakes, but also rattlers. Better safe than sorry. It would be a heck of a time to get bit by a rattler, if you have to go all the way to Stoppard for medical attention. I doubt that anybody could actually die, but they sure as hell will be sick for a good long time. Besides this is Radcliffe saying this, too-- not Rich on his own-- I know this kid; she doesn’t lie, let along imagine things that aren’t there.”

“So there really are frogs and snakes raining from the sky?” Alma said.

“I guess,” Bill said.

“Only by their house?”

“How do you know that?” he asked.

“Well, nobody else called in about it. Wouldn’t we get a whole lot of people calling something like that in?”

“I don’t know,” he said, his frustration growing. “Something like that has never happened before-- at least as long as I’ve been here.” He took a moment to calm himself. “All right, enough about snakes-- just call them and tell them what I said. Now, I’m forgetting something…. Oh, try getting in touch with all of the shop owners along the main strip. Put them on alert that they may have to shut down because of flash flooding. Don’t imagine they’re doing much business anyway. And I don’t want a repeat of 1981, when nobody listened to me, and I had to go in there myself with a boat and row their dumb asses out. And call down the street to Tony’s-- see if he has a very brave delivery guy willing to bring me two of the chilidog specials. The last thing I need right now is a hypoglycemic attack,” he added.

“Gotchya, Bill,” Alma said.

He took his finger off the intercom button, lay back and tried to relax. Later, he was certain, there would be absolutely no time at all to relax. He put his hands behind his head, and shut his eyes. He started thinking of snakes and frogs falling from the sky. Christ, what next?

12

Radcliff sat crossed-legged on the sofa, and watched Rich as he gazed out the window into the storm. He’d been standing there like a statue, cold and quiet, for so long now she started to get nervous, afraid what the next thing out of his mouth might be. She wondered if he was having some internal struggle-- the rational side of his mind fighting it out with the irrational side-- or was he just mesmerized by the rain. She recalled the many time he’d mentioned how he loved the rain and storms, which she thought was a little weird. He swore, though, he always found a great deal of peace in a raging thunderstorm. Maybe he was just enjoying the weather, especially now since the frogs and snakes had stopped pummeling the house.

“Dad,” she said finally, not able to stand the silence. “What are you thinking?”

He turned away from the window, stepped over to the sofa, and sat next to her. The light of the candles flickered over the placid expression on his face.

“I was just trying to put my finger on something,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“A memory, I think-- I don’t know-- it’s funny.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“This thing with the frogs, with the snakes-- it’s weird, sure, but…well, after I got over the weirdness of it, I started to have the impression that it seemed familiar somehow, that I’d heard some story about something like this happening before…. I just can’t tell if it’s my imagination or what. I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

“You mean like déjà vu?” Radcliff asked.

“Not exactly. It seems a little like déjà vu, but that’s not it.”

Radcliff thought about it for a moment, trying to decide whether or not to tell him what she had seen-- or believed she had seen-- earlier. Finally she hazarded, “It didn’t have anything to do with crows, too, did it?”

“Crows?” Rich frowned.

Radcliff explained to him what she thought she saw in the old oak tree earlier, when the storm first began.

Rich mulled it over, and at last decided, “It wasn’t about frogs and snakes and crows.” He looked at her now with brown eyes that reflected certainty. “It was all the animals. It was a story about a storm and how all the animals went crazy, but that was only part of it. It’s starting to come back to me now. When I was very young, maybe three, fours years old, my grandfather used to tell me stories. Some of them were totally made up, like fairy tales. But he told me other stories, too, that were based on things that really happened, supposedly. Some of it was folklore; some of it was stories from the Indians. How much truth there was in any of it, who knows? But there was a story about a storm and about how the storm made all the animals go mad-- you know, crazy-- and also there was something about a logging camp. Yeah, I’m sure now. I’m not imagining it. Something that happening at a logging camp, and all the people died, and nobody ever found out exactly what happened-- something like that.”

Radcliff was intrigued now, because suddenly the story was familiar to her, too. When she’d been in eighth grade there had been another kid, Billy Whiteman, who was part Indian, on his mother’s side, and he’d written a paper for English that was read before the class. She racked her brain now, trying to recall the title of the story, but she just couldn’t remember. But she was sure that there was a poem that went with the story-- something like “During the wind/ And during the rain/ beasts of the forest/ will all go insane/the whole of the world/ will then take a great pause/ and after that you will hear their claws/ invisibly scraping upon everyone’s soul/ until they come to kill all living things/ and every occurrence that happiness brings….” It was something like that, she was pretty sure.

Impulsively, she asked her father, “Do you think the power is off at the library?”

“The library?” He was clearly puzzled. “I don’t know, why?”

Radcliff sat there mutely, staring at him. Rich was unnerved by this; it was an old habit his wife had had, to stare at him silently when she wanted something but was afraid to ask Rich for it. He wondered how Radcliff had picked it up; she’d been so young when her mother had died.

“Go to the library now?” Rich asked, clearly believing the idea to be ridiculous.

“Well, it beats sitting around in the dark,” Radcliff said. “The pick-up has four wheel drive, too.”

Rich really didn’t like the idea of venturing by out into the storm, especially since he’d sensed evil in it. But by now curiosity was getting the better of him, and what Radcliff said about sitting in the dark was true.

“Better get your raincoat,” Rich advised, and he had to smile at the way she trilled as she jumped to her feet and ran to the front closet to dig out her raincoat.

Rich lingered in the living room, to blow out each of the three candles. The darkness smelled like burnt tallow, as unseen wisps of smoke rose off the extinguished candles. Well, here goes the rest of the crazy Seagrove family, he thought, off in the storm on a great adventure, daughter following in the old man’s crooked footsteps.

13

Manny swung open the office door and barged into the room, and Bill nearly jumped to his feet and reached for his gun.

“Manny, Jesus Christ, you can give a guy a heart attack, you know,” Bill complained. “Didn’t you ever hear of knocking.”

“Sorry,” Manny said glumly, “but it’s pretty important.”

“All right, what you got?”

“All points just went out. Seems three guys hit the bank in Gorshen.”

“In Gorshen? You’re crapping me?” Bill said, stunned. “How much did they get?”

“They’re not saying exactly yet,” Manny droned, “but it might be a lot.”

“Shit, what’s a lot for Gorshen?-- two, three hundred dollars?” Bill said jokingly, knowing that these small-town banks didn’t carry much of a cash supply.

“They’re saying minimum half million.”

“What! A half million. What are they doing with so much cash on hand?”

“Last year the bank started making deals with some of these big companies in the area-- you know to provide no-fee checking accounts to all the employees, free payroll check cashing, lines of credit, et cetera. So they have to up their cash supply on paydays, because they have tons of people coming in now to cash their pay checks.”

“Wonderful,” Bill said, plainly disgusted. “Well, did they send out any descriptions on the suspects?”

“Not much-- it’s doesn’t sound like that have much. No vehicle description. The three suspects were wearing ski masks, all medium height and weight, probably all white. They just walked in, grabbed the money, and then faded away into the storm.”

“What about the dye packs?” Bill asked.

“What about them? If there were dye packs in the money, apparently they didn’t go off the way they should-- after the alarm is triggered and if the packs are outside the building. So either these guys found away to disable the security system or nobody bothered to make sure the packs were in place. They don’t seem to be saying much about it, really.”

“Maybe an inside job,” Bill speculated.

Manny glowered. “Maybe just stupidity.”

“So we might have a half million in untainted stolen cash floating around, and we’re supposed to be looking for what?-- three white guys of average height and weight that could be driving any type of vehicle?” Bill scoffed. “Jesus Christ, that’s about ninety percent of the population of the state, and we’re supposed to be doing this the middle of a raging storm? Well, all I have to say is I hope the bank has good insurance, because prospects of recovery seem a little bleak.”

Manny just looked down at Bill with his long lugubrious face.

“Anything else come through?” Bill said. “Anything I can actually do something about?”

“That was about it?”

“Well, have Alma call them up there-- see if they any more details about that robbery.”

“All right,” Manny said, and then lurched from the office.

Alma came through the intercom then. “Bill, I got Frank Handleman from the national weather service in Manley on line two.”

“Finally,” Bill sighed. He’d had a call in, insisting on talking to an actual living human being. He punched the button on the phone, and picked up the receiver. “Frank,” he began in an affable way, as if he’d known the guy since childhood, though he really didn’t know the guy from Adam. “Sheriff Bill Miller here, and how are you today?”

“A bit busy, actually, Bill, ” Frank said, his voice strained but still he was trying to be friendly.

“Listen, thanks for calling back,” Bill said. “I was afraid the telephone lines would go down before I had a chance to talk to you, and then I’d have to row out there to pay you a visit.”

“What can do for you?” Frank was all business now.

“Frank, the trouble is, we’re taking a beating down here, and the television weathermen are still saying--what was it?-- partly cloudy with a chance of drizzle tonight?”

“Yes,” Frank said, guarded, “and where are you again, Bill?”

“Winsome Lake.”

“Winsome Lake,” Frank said, in a slightly distracted manner, as though referring to a map. “Oh, yes, uh, we’re showing some cloud cover down your way.”

“Some cloud cover?” Bill was appalled. “Is that what you call this? Frank, I’m looking out my window, and the only thing I can see clearly is this enormous boat and some old guy with a beard is leading two of each animal onto the boat, and he’s doing it pretty fast because the boat seems to be starting to float away.”

“What?” Frank sounded befuddled clearly. “You saying it raining?”

“Raining doesn’t quite cover it, Frank,” Bill said.

“That doesn’t seem very likely.”

“Frank, I’m telling you, for the past hour, it’s been raining cats and dogs and frogs and snakes-- everything. I’m waiting for a cow to come crashing into my office.”

“Bill, we’re not showing anything like that down your way.”

“What? But what about the flash flood warning?”

“Yeah, you’re under a flash flooding warning, sure,” Frank conceded, “but that’s because of these large clouds bursts up river from you. In Cloverton and areas further up river. And boy, we missed that coming. It all came out of nowhere. But down by you should still be dry as a bone, although your river levels ought to be rising by now.”

“There has to be some mistake here,” Bill protested.

“Look, Bill, we have real time radar and everything-- very hi-tech stuff. We don’t just have a wind sock or a bunch of guys standing outside wetting their thumbs and holding them up in the air.”

Bill rose from behind his desk, and walked to the window, the cord from the phone straining behind him.

“Frank, I want you to listen to something for a few seconds,” he said, and he pushed open his window with one hand, while thrusting the receiver outside with his other hand. He held the receiver out there for ten seconds or so, long enough to catch two loud rolls off thunder over the steady pounding of rain and whistling of high wind. At last he pulled in the receiver, shook off the rain, and shut the window. “Frank, did you hear that? Does that sound like cloud cover?”

“Shit,” Frank murmured, at a loss to say anything else. “I’m going to have to get back to you,” he added, and Bill could tell the man was thoroughly confused.

Bill took his handkerchief from his back pocket and used it to dry off the receiver before putting it back on the phone base.

No sooner did he sit down and resettled his bulk in his well broken-in leather chair that his door swung open and Matt entered the office.

“Well, it’s about ti--” Bill started, but then abruptly stopped when he notice the deplorable condition in which Matt appeared; his poncho was streaked with drying mud, his shoes where caked with mud, and his face, usually rosy from a good diet and lots of exercise, was pale, slightly gray, and there were a few small cuts on his forehead where he’d been nicked by shards of flying glass when the bear had crashed through the picture window. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what in the hell happened to you?” Bill gasped.

Matt’s nerves were obviously frayed from his experience with the bear, followed by the long, slow tortuous ride back to the station.

“Dang, Bill,” was all Matt could manage to say at first. Then he went on to tell Bill what happened with the bear, and how strangely the animals were acting-- the way the coyote and deer didn’t even acknowledge each other. “It was just like all the animals were acting like they were all afraid of something, so afraid that they wanted to get away, and didn’t have time to react to their normal instincts,” he explained.

Bill listened intently frowning, and when Matt was finished, he said, “Well, Junior, you think that’s weird: I got a guy from the national weather service in Manley swears up and down were not having a storm.”

“What?”

“It’s true. This little blow were having is only showing up as a little cloud cover on the radar.”

“Well, then something is wrong with his darned radar-- that’s for sure. My God, I passed by the campgrounds and it’s half washed out and deserted, which might not be a bad thing considering the way the animals are acting. What the heck is going on here, Bill?”

“I don’t know. Whatever it is, we have to deal with it.”

“Well,” Matt said warily, “I’m going to the locker room, and grab a shower and throw on a fresh uniform.”

“All right,” Bill said. “Grab of cup of coffee, too, will you? You look like you need it.”

“I just might,” Matt said, and slunk from the office.

Her old man went loony, again.

If she had lived in a big city, like New York or Chicago, she would have come home to find the house surrounded by a SWAT team, clad in black, wearing bullet-proof vests, poised to shoot canisters of tear gas through the front windows. But this was just Winsome Lake, Wisconsin. The person in question was just Rich Seagrove. So it was just a sheriff’s car with its dome light flashing, a portable spot light--clipped to the open door of the squad car-- casting a lonely beam of light at the front of the weather-beaten house that had been in the Seagrove family for three generations, and Sheriff Bill Miller, without any backup at all, leisurely resting his paunchy form on the squeaky porch swing, while trying to talk sense to Rich through the front window.

Why Rich went occasionally batty was the subject of much town gossip. Some say it was because of the three tours of duty he’d served in Viet Nam. Others say it was that the Seagrove family, whose roots in Winsome Lake ran deep, was cursed by hereditary madness, with family members being affected every other generation. Others still-- including Rich while he suffered these bouts-- claim that he’d been abducted by aliens once, when he was at a young and at a critical stage of development, and had been the victim of a physical exam gone terribly wrong.

To Radcliff, it didn’t matter why it happened. It was just a source of enormous embarrassment whenever it did happen.

This time it was on a beautiful early summer evening. School was out. The crickets chirruped happily. Fireflies flashed across the open field next to her house. As she walked home from her summer job at the Winsome Kwik-mart, the air she breathed smelled of freedom and serenity. It should have been a perfect night. Then, as she neared home, she saw the flashing dome light of the squad. She saw the spotlight splashed across on the house, which was badly in need of a paint job, and through the ancient oak tree out front, making sinister silhouettes of its crooked limbs.

“Not again,” she murmured to herself. She felt that awful sick sensation in the pit of her stomach, like the feeling you get when you go home to discover an unwanted relative, a drunken uncle or a lazy cousin, was lounging around your living room watching his favorite program on your television, and would be staying over until he got back on his feet, which may take weeks or months or maybe never. Wasn’t it bad enough a name like Radcliff had been hung around her neck since birth? How much can a sixteen-year-old endure? She wondered what she had done to deserve it all.

As she approached the front porch, she could hear Sheriff Miller. “Come on, Rich, you know you don’t have anything in there,” he was saying.

Inside her old man called back something she couldn’t hear.

“You’re always saying that, Rich, but you never mean it,” Sheriff Miller answered. When he noticed Radcliff standing there, at the foot of the porch stairs, he said to her, “Hey, Rad, he’s at it again.” He said it in a casual way, as though they’d run into one another on the street, and he was commenting on the weather.

All she could do was roll her eyes, and shrug in an apologetic way.

Her old man called out something. His words were muffled, and reminded her of words of some old person in a nursing home, confined to a bed, lost in swirls of white covers, calling out to a relative to complain about the food or the way the nurse took blood every day or demanding to know why they just couldn’t go home.

“Rich, you do not,” Sheriff Miller said, certain. “You never owned a gun in your life.” When no response came from within the house, he turned Radcliffe and asked, sounding less than certain, “He doesn’t, does he?”

She shook her head weakly, biting her lower lip.

She took a couple meek steps up the front stairs, as though she were visiting the house of some stranger. “How’re you enjoying your summer vacation so far?” Sheriff Miller asked her, letting Rich Seagrove mull something over inside the house. He spoke to her like someone stopping by for a neighborly visit-- a cup of coffee and a slice of homemade cake.

“All right,” Radcliff said.

Again the old man was yelling something.

“I’m telling you, Rich,” Sheriff Miller called back through the front window, which was opened a crack, “It was just old man Hazlett’s dogs got loose.”

Radcliff gave the sheriff a puzzled look.

“Old man Hazlett’s dogs got loose,” he explained to her. “They dug a few holes in the garden, and now he has it in his head that somebody laid in a mine field around the house.”

That was typical. It always started that way. There would be some commonplace thing-- like holes in the garden-- and the old man’s mind got all twisted up. The next thing you knew he believed people were after him; aliens were landing, or some such nonsense.

“Yes, I’m sure.” Sheriff Miller was now saying toward the window. “Rich, I’ve walked around your annuals about ten times already. If there were land mines, my fat butt would have been blown to kingdom come. Now, listen, Rich: Radcliff is out here. You need to stop acting like this. You think you can calm down. You think you can do it for her, if for no other reason?”

Hearing her name mentioned, Radcliff thought, Oh, no, don’t drag me into this-- please! The sick feeling in her stomach suddenly dropped deeper, and assumed a grinding quality that threatened to churn up her last meal-- whatever that had been. She wished she could cry out, Hey, just leave me out of the this, but she couldn’t, because that was her father in the house and whatever he did was eternally linked to her. That was the whole problem with her life, or so she thought; if she just had a normal, sane, father, everything would be perfect.

Her old man said something then. He must have been standing right next to the front window, in the living room. It didn’t sound as though he was yelling now, just talking normally.

“All right,” Sheriff Miller said. “Well, you think you can un-barricade yourself and come out so that I can see you’re okay. Otherwise I can’t leave. You know, it’s getting late already. My wife will be looking for me. I’m already way late for dinner.”

A long moment passed, and then you could hear the deadbolts slide inside the front door, which slowly opened. Rich Seagrove hedged as he stepped onto the front porch. It didn’t look as though he shaved in a couple days, and you could see where gray whiskers were invading his beard. He was wearing a t-shirt whose arms had been cut off. He had a faded tattoo on his right arm: a heart with a knife running through it. His feet were bare below his baggy jeans. He glanced at Radcliff, and then his eyes dropped shamefully to the ground.

Sheriff Miller labored to rise from the swing. He waddled up to Rich then.

“You going to be okay, guy?” he asked, placing a large, comforting hand on his shoulder.

Rich just nodded his head abjectly.

“All right, then,” Sheriff Miller said; it was almost a whisper, although no curious neighbors lingered nearby and the closest house was a good two hundred feet away. “Don’t worry about it. This is between us, as always. We’re all family here. Nobody else needs to know about it.”

Though the sheriff spoke sincerely, Radcliff didn’t believe it was true. Within a day or two, she was sure, the whole town would know her old man had had another episode. And when people came up from Chicago and Milwaukee to go fishing during the summer they would return home with stories of the loony bird who lived on Jeffery Road and who ran the bait shop. It was supposed to be the sleepy little town’s secret, but she was sure half the Midwest already knew by now. She knew for a fact when she finally went away to the University of Michigan, people there would just wander away from her when they learned her name.

She walked up onto the porch, squeezed round the old man, and went inside. She ran up to her room, and locked the door. She’d lie down in bed, then, and put on her stereo headphone and play music, any music, just so it was loud and she didn’t have to hear through the open window as the sheriff and her old man finished talking outside. Finally the spot light went out, and her room was pitched in darkness. She removed her headphones in time to hear the sheriff’s car as it went down the unpaved drive, the loud crunching of gravel dissolving into nothingness. Then the entire house was silent, except for occasional enigmatic creak from a wall. She lay there in the dark for a long, long time, wondering why her mother had to die, why she had to have no brothers or sisters, why she had to endure everything alone.

She knew her old man was downstairs, skulking through the house. He was probably feeling pretty bad about now. He always did after one of these episodes.

She had to remind herself that he couldn’t help it. It was not his fault. It was just something that happened to him, like catching a cold or the flu. He was just sick, and for some sicknesses there is no medicine that works-- God knew, the doctors had tried. She would try to hate him for it, recalling every odd look somebody gave her, every snicker heard behind her back. There were time she believed she actually achieved a fitting level of hatred for him, but it never lasted long and was always replaced by a spell of self-loathing. She was despondent, but also relieved, that she could never really hate him, the way some people hate others. That would require a level of selfishness she could never reach. Whenever she tried to hate him, she couldn’t stop thinking what a good father he had always been for the most part. She’d remember when he’d taught her to ride a bicycle. She’d remember the times he’d bought her things she knew she didn’t deserve. She’d remember how he’d cried after her mother had died, and how lonely he’d seemed for months afterward. She’d remember how he’d visit her grave every week for the longest time. He’d place flowers perfectly on her head stone, and then spend hours talking to her, as though she were still alive, telling her everything that had happened that week. He’d tell her how everything was going at the bait shop, how Radcliff was doing in school, how the Buford’s old dog, Boone, had finally had to be put to sleep, and could she kept an eye out for him?

How could she ever hate someone who could do things like that? She’d end up wondering. The music would pound in her ears. She tried to hold back the tears, but usually couldn’t.



It had been her mother that insisted on naming her Radcliff. Her mother had had visions of greatness for her newborn daughter, and could never have imagined the endless teasing the child would suffer over the years because of the name.

Her mother never lived long enough to learn her daughter would probably never live up to her expectations. Radcliff was far from dumb. She was a better than average student, but no super brain. She had friends, but was in no way the most popular girl in school. For the most part she was too shy and moody and withdrawn to be very sociable. She was turning out to be quite attractive, her mother would have been pleased to know, with shoulder length chestnut hair, high cheekbones, and soft brown eyes that might too often reflect sad or lost looks.

Each morning when she awoke, she was filled with renewed enthusiasm, which usually waned during the day. Some little incident or other that occurred during the day would dampen her spirits. It was rarely that she made it to an evening with optimism and good humor intact. The morning after her father’s latest departure from reality, she lingered in her room. It was always hardest to face him after his episodes, incredibly awkward--he downcast and feeling foolish, and she not knowing what to say or do. She just wished that the last episode would indeed be the last episode, so that she never again had to deal with another. So she wanted nothing more than to deal just with the normal problems teenaged girls her age have to endure: troublesome boys, horrifying zits, petty peer jealousies. Sometimes, when the absurdity of it all was too much, she’d laugh to herself, thinking, Please, oh, please, chip my teeth or give me hammer toes, gave me something I can deal with, because I can’t take Dadiness any more-- ‘dadiness’ was the word she’d invented years before to describe her father’s odd moments.

Now, having donned a t-shirt and overalls, she crept out onto the landing outside her bedroom door. She stood like a statue, listening down into the living room. Her father should have left to open the bait shop hours ago, but she wanted to make sure he was gone. After a moment she determined all was clear, and bounded down the stairs and through the living room to the kitchen.

Before she had the chance to make herself something to eat, she spotted the letter on the small kitchen table. She was instantly filled with dread. A letter-- what a terrible thing for him to have left her! For she was now forced to read it. If she didn’t, and if he later referred to something in the letter and she had no clue as to what he was talking about, it would all be very awkward. Since she’d turned fourteen she had striven to avoid awkward moments, and it seemed no matter how much she tried even the small things became complicated enough to end up in awkward moments. She wondered whether this was true of only her, or if other kids had the same problem. She wished she could ask friends about it, but was always afraid that they might not understand and look at her as if she were losing her mind or something, just like her father. That was the last thing she needed.

She now unfolded the heavy bond paper that was filled with her old man’s scrawl.

Dear Rad,

I just wanted to express to you how very [unreadable] am I about last night.

I know that I cause you a great deal shame at times. I wish it could be otherwise. I have tried to control myself, but it seems that there is really nothing to control-- not as I go along. It is only after the fact that it becomes clear that I have been acting irrationally and it’s like they say closing the barn door after the horse has run away. I wish I could avoid whatever causes this to happen to me. I wish I could put a scarecrow in front of the house to keep it away, but it‘s not that simple. It is a sad thing to have to go through life this way, and sadder

still that you have to endure it as well. I know that you are ashamed of what I have become. I wish only that you could remember when I was younger. I was much different then, and I think you would have even been proud of me. It is too bad you have not the peace of mind of knowing that I was once a father you deserve to have now. I think if you could remember me then, at least you wouldn’t hate me as much as do now.

Dad

She crumpled up the letter. It didn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know. It just dampened her morning spirit. She liked his idea about the scarecrow, though, and thought she could use a few of those herself, planted outside on the front lawn, or at her school or around the Kwik-mart, frightening off any ghost, real or imagined, that seemed intent on haunting her.

She made herself a sandwich then, a B.L.T., and wolfed it down. She found it impossible to enjoy, like everything else in her life these days.

2.

Sheriff Bill Miller began his day stopping by Butchers Café. He’d been doing this for twenty-three years, and thought by now that he should have built up some shares of ownership in the café, which occupied a corner lot on the main thoroughfare that ran threw Winsome Lake. It was not much to look at, but served decent food-- at least he thought so, he with the wife who had a hard time mixing three or four ingredients without the end product tasting somewhat like a chemistry experiment gone awry. The business that originally occupied the small freestanding building was said to be one of the first in Winsome Lake. Naturally it had been a butcher shop, hence the name of the café. It seemed to Bill nearly all the small towns in Wisconsin had such businesses, named after the original business-- small town pride in history running rampant-- and he could recall places like Orchard gas station, Miller’s Tavern, Farmer’s Mall, and, his favorite, the Cattle Crossing Inn. He wondered why he never saw places like the Slaughterhouse Hotel or Taxidermists Used Books. He supposed that good taste prevailed over historical pride.

He parked his cruiser in front of the café, and tugging up his belt, opened the front door and waddled into the welcoming light.

The morning waitress, Stella, always had his coffee waiting for him, the cup set on the counter before his stool, which was notable because its cushion was flatter than the cushions on the other stools. He was so used to the stool, in fact, that ten years back, when the restaurant owners replaced the worn old stools with new ones with extra form padding, he, unknowing, tried to take his seat only to jump up suddenly as though goosed. After he complained about the new stools-- I don’t care if the darned foam is the same that they use on the space shuttle; I’m not drinking my morning coffee on the space shuttle, am I?-- he came in next day to find his old stool had been rescued from the garbage and reinstalled at the end of the counter nearest the bathrooms, right where it belonged and right where he now sat, took his first sip of coffee, wondering-- for about the thousandth time-- how Stella always knew exactly when to set the cup on the counter so that it was there waiting for him when he came in. Did she spy him through the café’s front windows? Did she have E.S.P.? Or was he just that darned predictable? Whatever the case, his coffee, still steaming, was always waiting for him there, next to the neatly folded newspaper at which he’d hardly ever glance because he preferred to receive bad news later in the day.

“Hey, Bill,” Stella called at him as she came out of the kitchen.

“Hey, Stella.”

“Coffee nice and hot?”

“Yeah,” he said. “How do you do that, anyway?”

“I don’t do that, silly,” she said, completely missing the point. “The coffee-maker does it.”

“I mean--” he stopped, deciding he really didn’t want to know after all. “Never mind.”

Stella gave him an amused look as she grabbed a clothe from under the counter. She then started to move swiftly around the restaurant, wiping down all the tabletops whether or not they needed it.

The only other customer in the café was Carl Canfield, sitting there, down the counter from him. Bill glanced his way and gave him a customary sneer. Carl had always been Winsome Lake’s least liked resident. When he was younger, Carl was a major troublemaker, often picked up by the former sheriff for usually minor violations of the law. If rumors had been right, Carl had got away with plenty of more serious crimes during his youth. It appeared that he had finally straightened up then, found gainful employment, though almost everyone in Winsome Lake would always remain wary of this transformation, and still harbored suspicions of Carl. Those who had been actual victims of his crimes, usually theft and criminal damage to property, still loathed him.

All this was not the reason why Bill now regarded Carl with contempt between sips of coffee. Some years ago, an apparently reformed Carl, opted to invest in the stock market. He took all his money and stupidly put it all in a single stock, rather than wisely putting into several different stocks. He also stupidly chose a stock of a new company, a mere thirty-eight cents a share; a very high risk investment, as the stock would most likely drop out of existence, and he would lose all his money. The stock he invested in was Yahoo, and the reason he picked it reflected his financial skills: he simply liked the name of the company. After the stock rose, and split so many times, Carl was a millionaire. But even this was not reason enough for Bill to resent Carl; the reason involved no petty jealousy, but was more personal. Bill had placed a bid on a piece of property he and his wife had had an eye on for years, hoping it would still be available as they gathered money for a down payment. It was a rundown old mansion on the edge of town, but in their eyes it was a dream home. They planned on renovating the house, clearing the surrounding ten acres, planting an apple orchard…. The day he finally had the money together, and put a contract in on the property, was the happiest day of their lives. Soon afterward they learned that another offer had been made on the property, and they had to raise their offer. For a while they entered a bidding war, which they eventually lost to a faceless nemesis, who later turned out to be Carl. And it was Carl who remodeled the old mansion, but didn’t have the vision to do anything with the surrounding acreage, instead leaving it to grow wildly. It went to show what a wonderful country we all live in, Bill would often think thereafter: any moron can become a millionaire, and any criminal can steal from a man of the law.

Now Bill watched as Carl finished off his soup, slid the bowl away from him, and pretended to notice Bill’s presence just now.

“Hey, Bill,” Carl called, and every pour of the man oozed oiliness.

“Hey, Carl,” Bill said, sounding weary as though he had just ended a double shift.

“I was just finishing my soup,” as though even the most mundane of his activities were of great interest. He might drive an expensive car, wear trendy clothes bought in Chicago, live in the best house in town, but all Bill saw whenever he looked at Carl was the same greasy gangling guy who had used to terrorize the town in his youth.

“Well, I hope you enjoyed it,” Bill said, obviously insincere.

“Heard Rich Seagrove had another fit last night.”

“I wouldn’t call it a fit, Carl.”

“What would you call it?” He was now standing, smoothing out a wrinkle in pants with the palm of his hand.

“Not a fit.”

Carl made a big show of taking a wad of money from his pocket and counting some out on the counter for his bill. He left a hefty tip for Stella.

“Well, whatever.”

“It was a terrible thing Rich went through,” Bill said, remembering the long-ago night, how the top of the Seagrove car had almost been completely sheared off as their car slid under the trailer of the semi whose driver blew the red light. The sight Jane Seagrove’s headless body in the front seat still cropped up in an occasional nightmare. He’d found Rich wandering through the nearby woods, cradling in his arms his wife’s head as if it were an infant, though later Rich said he couldn’t even remember being in the woods. Bill could never understand how Rich had survived the accident, survived without a bruise or scratch or anything. It was miraculous, and that made the death of his wife seem all the more tragic. “An awful thing, that,” Bill added, saying it as though to himself.

Carl stepped up to him. “Everybody’s got their breaking point, I guess,” he said blandly, passing behind Bill as he headed for the front door.

After Carl had walked out, Stella slinked along behind the counter, picked up the large tip that Carl had left her, and took it to the end of the counter, where, next to the cash register, there was a plastic container whose label requested contributions for the local food pantry. She slid the money into the slot, and then asked Bill if he wanted to order now.

“Your timing is always impeccable,” he told her, and ordered a Denver omelet with hash browns.

He ate his breakfast in peace, and then headed for the station.

In his office, he found one of his deputies, Matt Slinger, sitting behind his desk, and, with feet propped up on the desktop, silently dozing. Bill couldn’t be mad at him. He knew Matt was doing some moonlighting-- body and fender work-- trying to get together tuition money. He had aspirations of becoming a lawyer some day, though Bill wondered whether the kid was bright enough; he seemed to possess such an ordinary, unimaginative mind. He was a likeable kid, though, and did his job fairly well. The thing Bill liked most about him was that he never started taking himself too seriously after he began to hang a badge from his chest. Those deputies, the ones who harbored delusions that they could actually change the world were the most annoying; they believed that by being a deputy they were serving some higher purpose in life than other people, and always, but always, complicated the simplest of chores: even a parking ticket somehow ended up turning into a federal case.

When Bill cleared his throat, Matt jumped to his feet, startled. He looked like he was from marine recruiting poster: tall, athletic, crew-cut fair hair.

“Sorry, Bill,” he said, rubbing a fist into one of his sleepy eyes like a little boy.

“You have to learn how to drink coffee,” Bill advised, but knew Matt would never touch the stuff. The kid had been raised on a bizarrely strict diet, even claimed at times never to have eaten--never even tasted-- things like peanut butter, pizza, or hot dogs-- any of the things kids normally ate as they grew up. Bill often tried to coax the kid into trying a chilidog, but to not avail. “Anything up?” Bill now asked him.

“Well, no, not really,” Matt said.

“Sounds like it might be something,” Bill said. “You know even the least little thing around here gets attention.”

“We got a call this morning from the emergency room up in Cloverton. Nurse up there reported they treated three dog bites today so far-- thought it was strange.”

“Dog bites? Bad?--like attacks?”

“No, just minor injuries. All separate incidences.”

“That’s odd,” Bill agreed, squeezing around his desk to sit down. “How many do they usually get?--one, two a month?”

“If that.”

“Not exactly a crime spree, though, is it? Anything else?”

“From last night,” Matt said. “While you were out at the Seagroves, I took a criminal damage to property report out on Buckingham road. Couple over there came home last night, found the windows of the sliding glass door off their deck shattered. No apparent entry into the house; nothing missing.”

“Probably just kids,” Bill sighed, wagging his head. “Happens just after school lets out for the summer. That’s it?”

“Yeah, that’s all. Everything all right at the Seagroves?”

“Just the usual.”

“Sad thing,“ Matt commented. “Especially for the girl.”

“Not the easiest way to grow up,” Bill said.

“I’d see her sometimes, walking home from school. She always seems so lugubrious.”

“So what?” Bill asked, raising his eyebrows. “Trying to sneak in one of your twenty-dollar, college-boy words on me?”

“I mean she seems so mournful.”

“Well, there’s a lot to mourn in that family,” Bill said, apparently becoming uncomfortable with the topic. “Anyway, for today, I want you to go out on Main coming into town. Seems that some of our less that observant motorists don’t know exactly when to drop from forty-five to thirty. Oh, and if you get a chance, swing by the woods up over on Angler’s Road, just north of the old Henderson place. See if you notice anything unusual out there.”

Matt was puzzled. “The woods?”

“Yeah, I was filling up this morning at the Citgo, and a couple guys were saying they thought they spotted a bear up there.”

“A bear? This far south?”

“Happens from time to time,” Bill assured him. “About ten years back, Mrs. Kilpatrick-- you remember her?”

“Yeah, past away a few years now.”

“Yeah, well, about ten years ago, she woke up to find a moose in her back yard.”

“A moose? That’s impossible.”

“Yeah, that’s what I told her at the time. And then she told me she’d be much obliged if I could come up to her place and tell the moose how impossible it is, because the poor dumb creature didn’t seem to understand.” He chuckled wistfully. “That Mrs. Kilpatrick-- what a pistol she was. Well, maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising; people get lost all the time-- why not animals?”

“All right,” Matt said, and shrugged. “I guess I’m off looking for bear.”

“Oh, and if there is a bear, you know what to do, right? You radio me and I’ll get hold of the state. They’ll send somebody down to tranquilize it, and relocated it where it belongs. I don’t want to come into my office tomorrow and find a bearskin rug on the floor.”

“Gotcha,” Matt said, and summed up his duties for the day: “Hand out tickets. Don’t shoot the bear.”

3

Rich Seagrove was contemplating his existence, which at the moment consisted of selling worms and leeches, packing them in little folding white containers, exactly like the containers the Chinese restaurant down the road used for the beef fried rice he ordered occasionally. Once after he’d had a rush of customers-- which seldom happened-- he sat down to finish his lunch, and pulled out a tangle of night crawlers out of the container with his chop sticks. He’d never learned who accidentally received his beef fried rice; no one had come back to complain, and he wondered now and again, to this day, whether somebody actually baited their hook and caught something with the stuff. He always heard stories about people using all kinds of crazy things to bait their hooks-- canned vegetables: green beans, carrots, and kernel corn. He’d heard more than one person say that carp loved kernel corn, that they’d bait a three-pronged hook with it-- it never failed.

Was this a real job? he now wondered. He was hard-pressed to answer the question. It seemed all right-- certainly no weirder than that of an undertaker, and somewhat less creepy. Still he couldn’t say for sure; most of the time, he found himself drifting through life these days uncertain about the simplest of things. He would have to ask Radcliff later whether she believed he had a stupid job. In the wintertime he would plow snow, usually parking lots for some of the local businesses, and he felt pretty sure that was all right, but this bait thing seemed-- unbecoming.

He was still feeling plenty bad about last night. He wanted Radcliff to have the best life possible, and realized his flaws, his weaknesses, were causing her distress, affecting her, maybe even scarring her for life little by little. But what could he do? It was like standing on the roadside and watching a bad accident, helpless to stop it. His departures from reality came and went, sometimes as quickly as a summer storm. He certainly had no control over them. If somebody else had control, he would have gone to them and begged that the episodes stop-- maybe he deserved such punishment, but his daughter did not.

He walked outside the front door to get some air, past the window with the neon sign that said BAIT in flashing blue and red letters, past the coin-operated bait machine, and into the small empty parking.

The bait shop was located right on the lake, on a thick finger of water that reached deeper inland, forming a cozy little cove. In the parking lot, to the left side of the bait shop, a few cement stairs led to a paved area off of which was built a small pier that ran parallel to the shoreline. Rich walked out on the pier. On the opposite side of the cove the shoreline was overgrown with trees, some of them very old, their thick gnarled roots clearly visible about the water line. Erosion over the years had cause one of the trees tip at a dramatic angle; one day, it was sure to fall over. To his left it looked as though woods swallowed up the innermost edge of the cove, which to his right the cove broadened and opened up on the main expense of the lake. The sky was graying, and a few of the people who had boats out on the lake were already heading toward shore. Others, either bold or stupid, would keep their boats out on the lake until it started to rain heavily or until huge claw of lightening flashed across the sky. Rich lit a cigarette, and stared at the water surrounding the pier. The water was murky with algae, dark green particles hovering just below the surface, breaking through in some places to form scummy patches. The soft breeze made gentle ripples on the surface of the water, seemed to be tugging the water toward the shore, creating the illusion that the pier was in motion. Rich jerk suddenly, reflexively, trying to regain his balance, but his balance was never really lost. It was just the optical illusion of wind, water, and algae particles. Feeling foolish, he looked around to see whether anyone had seen him. Then he decided to look out to his right, further away, across the broad expanse of water, which appeared green around the shorelines, but turned a grayish-blue further out where the depth of the lake increased. He could see no boats now, just the gray-blue face of the lake. He finished his cigarette and flicked the butt over the railing of the pier as he felt the first raindrops. He thought he saw a motion on the lake, then, about two hundred feet out. It had to be his imagination or another illusion. It appeared to be a two-foot swell that was there and gone-- the lake just didn’t move that way, he knew from experience. But then it occurred again, a rise of water level across thirty or forty feet of the lake surface-- there, then suddenly gone. He continued to watch as the phenomenon repeated itself every five to ten seconds. He shut his eyes tight for a moment, and looked again; but it was no use, the water in that small area of lake continued its rhythmic motion. A bolt of panic went through his body when he realized it looked exactly as though something really large just below the surface of the lake were breathing. Good God, Richy boy, get a grip, he told himself, as he lighted another cigarette with trembling hands. Think of Radcliff-- do something. You’re wondering how to make things better, and now you’re seeing the fucking Loch Ness monster in fucking Wisconsin.

A cold rain was falling steadily when he retreated back into the bait shop.

4

Radcliff lay on her side in bed, her head propped up with one arm while she wrote in her notebook. She had finished all her daily chores, and didn’t have much else to do for the day. Even if she had made plans for the day, they would have been threatened by the darkening sky, which had forced her to turn on her bedroom light. She never made plans anymore, anyway. People cancelled out too often, and even when they didn’t, whatever was planned was usually pretty lame. There wasn’t much to do in Winsome Lake within walking distance, unless you liked fishing or looking at water. She often thought to be a real human being you needed a car, at least around here.

She didn’t keep a diary, like many girls her age, because she felt it all ended up too much like talking to yourself-- you write something down and then read it back later; nobody else was ever supposed to see it. She felt the whole concept of a diary inspired people to become schizoid. Instead, she would try to write poems, though she would be the first to admit she didn’t know much about poetry in a technical sense. She just tried to blend imagery and ideas in a way that would evoke sadness or joy, or, many times, define the unfairness of life.

The gloom of the day outside inspired her now to write:

The gathering clouds

Above will make

A refuge for evil

Of Winsome lake

The clouds will roil

The lake will breathe

The boats will sink

The water seethe

The morning will

Find a better day

With Winsome Lake

Washed away.

She read the words over a couple times, and decided that it sounded a little too ominous. She tore the sheet out of her notebook, balled it up, and tossed it into the small metal garbage can in the corner-- three points! She tried writing again.

A rush of wind

A creak of wood

A scent of rose

A breath of chill

All will mark

A moment today

With touches

Of those

Passed away--

Just then the light in the room flickered, as though the electric were going out. She stopped writing. She shivered at the coincidence-- writing something creepy, and then something creepy happening. She shut the notebook and tossed it aside. She rolled out of bed and walked to the window, whose panes were speckled outside by raindrops. Lightening flashed silently in the sky, and the gnarled limbs of the old oak tree were eerily lighted. The tree was half dead, and anyone else would have cut it down years ago, but her father felt the tree made the property appear stately. If ‘stately’ meant old and creepy, Radcliff couldn’t have agreed more. She noticed then, as the lightening flashed again, four or five crows had taken refuge among the twisted tree limbs half covered with leaves. When lightening flashed one more, it appeared to be more like twelve to fifteen crows. Weird, her mind murmured. She stepped away from the window, fearing the next time lightening flashed she would see the entire tree filled with crows. What did they call it? A murder of crows.

She started to go down to the living room to watch television, but when she was halfway down the stairs, the power went out. Wonderful. Now what was she supposed to do? Sit around a pitch-dark house? She couldn’t even call a friend and yak on the phone; it was one of those cordless phones, and with the power out, you couldn’t even make a call. She continued down stairs, and after bumping into the coffee table, found the sofa. She sat curled up in the darkness, lightening flashing through the front window now and then, making eerie shadows on the living room walls. She waited for the lights to come back on, starting to suspect that even Nature itself hated her.

5

Matt had had a good morning. He had nailed six speeders; they were all blatant violations, not just two, three miles an hour over the speed limit. He gathered particular joy from writing the last ticket. It was some guy who was looking to reach Cloverton but who jumped off the interstate too soon and ended up to getting himself lost. The guy immediately assumed a combative attitude-- it was clear he resented getting the ticket-- who didn’t? He kept harping to Matt how late he was, he had an important meeting and was late already and on and on, which compelled Matt to write the ticket as slowly as he could, stopping to check his spelling and whether he crossed all his t’s. By the time Matt was done, the guy was seething. Matt reminded him to have a nice day as he handed the guy the ticket. He watched then as the guy drove off, burning rubber, and considered getting back into the squad, chasing the guy down, and giving him another ticket. Finally he relented, decided to let it go; you could push an ordinary person only so far before they turned into a whacko, and the last thing the world needed was more whackos.

When he climbed back into the squad, Bill was on the radio trying to reach him. He grabbed the microphone and answered.

“What’s your twenty?” Bill wanted to know.

“Downtown,” Matt said.

“Why don’t you grab some lunch. Tony’s got a chili dog special today.” That was Bill, always trying to lure him to eat some gutting-wrenching, artery-clogging fast food. He should never have told him about the peanut butter thing.

“I think I’ll take a pass on that,” he said into the mike. “I think I’ll head up to the woods and look for moose or bear or whatever.”

“All right.” Bill sounded disappointed. “Report into the station when you get back.”

“You mean assuming I don’t get eaten by Gentle Ben.”

“It’s probably nothing.”

“Ten four.”

Matt put the squad into drive. He headed for the ferry landing, which was at the end of a quiet dead-end street on the Southern edge of the lake. Matt was originally from Nebraska, and he still marveled that you could actually be driving down a street that apparently ran right into the lake. Boy, he thought, when he’d first saw the setup, if somebody gets lost at night and isn’t watching the road in front of them closely, they’re going for a swim. It was true, too, that once or twice a year, somebody new to area would drive their car straight into the lake. He now pulled the squad up to the lake, and put it into neutral. He gazed across the lake, watching in the distance the ferry crawl across the water toward him. The ferry was nothing more than a flat top surrounded by railings, with a small control booth on one corner. The ferry ran on cables run underwater. All in all it didn’t look like much, but it saved people a lot of time; without the ferry, everyone wishing to go from the south shore of the lake to the north shore would have had to circumnavigate the east or west ends of the lake-- given the existing roads, no less that a forty-five minute drive, whereas the ferry got you there in a twelve minute crawl.

When the ferry abutted the landing, the metal sheet at the end of the ferry slowly lowered into position, becoming ramps. Matt eased the squad onto the ferry, as four or five cars heading southward disembarked. He edged the squad up to the far end of the ferry, where the ferry operator, Ed Jones, stood working the controls in the small booth. Matt turned off the engine, and climbed out of the squad. He paused a moment to stare up at the sky, the dark thunderheads looming out to the west, as lower clouds, growing grayer but the minute, rolled overhead with an unnatural swiftness. He swore that the he could feel by the skin of his bare arms the temperature dropping from second to second. He hopped over the cement divider that separated northbound from southbound traffic, and walked to the booth at the corner of the ferry.

Ed Jones had just finished locking the ramps in the upright position. He hit the level that caused the ferry to lurch slightly and then begin to creep back across lake.

“Ed,” Matt said.

Ed nodded a hello. He was quite a stoic character. He was tall and thin, white-hair and bronze-skinned, and Matt figured he’d been operating the ferry for about a hundred years. It took a person with a certain disposition to be the ferry operator: nothing but years and years of going back and forth, back and forth…. It reminded Matt of the myth of Sisyphus. It was a wonder Ed hadn’t lost his mind somewhere along the line, with a routine so staggeringly predictable. Oh, sure there was the occasional times when a cable broke, and the ferry was set adrift on the lake and boats had to come out and tow it back into position while the cables were repaired. But, really, how often did that happen? Once every two, three years.

“I don’t recall them saying anything about rain,” Matt commented.

“Not a word,” Ed confirmed tersely. “Looks to be a bad one, too.”

Matt knew that if the storm got too bad, Ed would secure the ferry at the south landing. He would then stand by for emergencies, because the ferry was a short cut on the way to Cloverton Medical Center, the closest trauma center. If it meant saving a life, Ed would make a run across the lake no matter how bad a storm became.

When the ferry docked again, Matt disembarked and started driving north. There were fewer residences on this side of the lake, though the houses tended to be larger, more opulent, and had been built on larger parcels of land. To the west, developers, over the past two years, had built some beautiful riverside homes, complete with decks that overlooked the river, and small piers for private boats. A little to the east lay Camp Reckover, a sprawling camp ground which, at the peek of summer, would be filled each weekend with campers, mostly city people coming up from Illinois, believing that sleeping in a tent under the stars was actually a good thing. Matt often wondered whether those people who loved camping out realized how similar it was to eviction and homelessness. Still people came each season, slept on air mattresses laid out on the cold clammy ground, hiked during the day, barbequed at night. A large section of the campgrounds, always unusable because it was on a lower plane and prone to get swampy, had been converted into an area for paintballers. So now there would be people running around in the woods in the mud, shooting each other with brightly colored paint. It was progress of a sort, for Winsome Lake anyway.

As Matt drove northward, lightening flashed above the clouds now and then. It flashed dimly at first, shy as a little boy peeking from round a tree trunk, and then more boldly, showing long bright crooked lines that looked like glowing skeletal arms that were reaching across the sky. The road in the distance ahead looked foggy. Suddenly there was a cloudburst, and the squad was battered by sheet after sheet of rain. A cool wind whistled shrilly through the passenger window, which didn’t close quite all the way. It got so bad he was forced to pull off to the roadside. He couldn’t see anything through the front windshield, just water gushing down over wipers that couldn’t move fast enough to clear the window. The rain pounded the hood and roof of the squad like a thousand tiny hammers trying to reshape the form of the vehicle. Wonderful, now I’ll end up in search of Yogi the Bear in the middle of a typhoon. He grabbed the radio.

“Sixty-eight to desk,” he called. “Sixty-eight to desk.”

“Desk. Go ahead, sixty-eight.” It was Alma, the retired woman who came into the office three days a week to sort files.

“Alma, is Bill around?”

“He was just heading out for lunch.”

“Can you grab him for me.”

“How to you mean that,” Alma asked, mischievous.

“Get him on the radio.”

“Oh, that, sure.”

The radio crackled static for a moment, and then Bill came on.

“What’s you got, Junior?”

“Listen, Bill, I’m pulled off the side of the road up here---” He paused suddenly, and strained his eyes to make out something, some shape outside off the squad-- anything that looked like a landmark. “I’m not exactly sure where, but there is one hellava deluge up here.”

“There is?” He could hear Bill saying something to somebody at the station, something about the national weather service, and then the line became filled with static again. Finally Bill returned. “According to the national weather service, it’s partly cloudy, seventy-two degrees, with 8 m.p.h. westerly wind.”

“Well, Bill, the national weather service can kiss my you-know-what,” Matt said, annoyed. “I’m going to need a pair of water wings in a couple minutes. Did anyone over there bother to look out the front door?”

“Alma-- she said it looked a little overcast….”

“Well, that’s not going to last too long,” Matt said. “I take it there are no small craft advisories in effect.”

“Well, no.”

“I just crossed over in the ferry, and there are some boats still on the lake. My guess is they’re going to be taking a beating in about ten, fifteen minutes. This thing moved in really fast…. Bill?…Bill?”

“Yeah, you started to fade on us there. We caught the part about the boats. I’ll see what I can do. You stay put until it blows over.”

“I can’t see anything to go anywhere anyway. The winds are really started to gust up now. It feels like God Himself is bitch-slapping the squad.”

“Yeah, I can hear it. Just stand put,” Bill told him. “Out.”

Matt leaned back and tried to relax. He turned on the radio, but the only station that was coming through reasonably well was playing hopelessly corny music. Well, the downpour couldn’t go on forever, he assured himself, but as the minutes passed he began to wonder. After a while, out of sheer boredom, he grabbed the microphone and switched from the radio to public address. “Yogi?…Yogi, I know you’re out there, Yogi…. And when this rain stops, I’m coming to find you….”

6

Radcliff started awake on the sofa in the dark. She had dozed off, and the wind began battering the front windows so hard, she nearly jumped out of her skin. She remembered her situation then-- storm outside, electric out-- all right, everything was in order, she thought wryly. The blessing that is my life just keeps getting better and better. She stood up and felt her way to the front windows. When she pulled the curtains back, she saw the rain was now pouring so hard she couldn’t see the street, could just barely make out the large crooked form of the oak tree nearest the window.. She wondered whether the crows were still clinging to the twisted tree limbs. If they picked there for their shelter from the storm, boy were they shit out of luck. Lightening flashed then, and she could have sworn she saw a figure at the end of the front walkway, moving through the mist that clung to the ground. It was impossible to say for sure-- visibility was so bad. It looked maybe like someone wearing all black, the wind billowing up something behind the figure that looked like a cape. When lighting flashed again the figure was gone. Maybe it had just been her imagination. She knew it could not the mailman, Roman; Roman, though a decent public servant, didn’t take all that ‘neither rain nor sleet nor gloom of night’ stuff that literally. She was sure he would be holed up now in somebody’s house, sipping hot tea, waiting for the worst of the storm to pass before finishing his appointed rounds.

She headed back toward the sofa, but stubbed her toe on the end table leg. She hopped around in the dark in agony, until she finally lost her balance and felt to the floor. She was lying on the carpet, hissing a few curses, her pinkie toe throbbing, when she heard the loud pounding coming from the kitchen door. Almost instantly the pain went away, and chill ran through her. Somebody was out there. She was sure it wasn’t just the wind. She wondered why they didn’t have a dog-- a big dog. The pounding at the back door continued. Well, she just wasn’t going to answer it-- uh-uh, no way. After a while the pounding ceased, and she started to creep toward the kitchen to see if she could glimpse anything through the window. The wooden frame of the house was creaking-- it always did in bad storms-- but now she suddenly realized the creaking was somehow different, less random. She heard what sounded like scratching and a shuffling noise, too. Then there was a crash of glass breaking upstairs, followed by a loud thump. Someone was breaking in, she realized, her stomach dropping, her stocking feet frozen to the floor as her mind raced. Baseball bat…front closet, her mind finally screamed at her. She groped her way to the closet, opened the door, and felt around inside for the old bat. Things started falling down on her in the dark as she desperately dug through all the junk. One of her hands finally found the bat, and she pulled it out. Before she could turn round, she heard water dripping on the carpet behind her; a slow drip…drip…drip…drip… and she sensed a presence very close. She could barely breathe. She turned round slowly, and saw the lighted face hovering above her. She let loose a shrill scream.

Rich Seagrove lowered the flashlight from his chin. He pointed it down at her, at all the junk-- a baseball mitt, winter coats nobody ever wore anymore, a big straw hat won a million years ago at a carnival-- from the front closet littering the floor.

“What are you doing?” he asked, as though he ha

The investigation into the events that occurred in Winsome Lake that stormy day began when Sheriff William R. Miller reported to the State Police headquarters in Cloverton that two of his deputies and one auxiliary deputy had gone missing during the storm. He reported that radio communications had been poor during the storm and that he had been unable to reach those deputies. He reported further that he conducted a search that failed to ascertain the whereabouts of the missing personnel. It was at this point that he requested assistance from the State Police, and later that night a state trooper discovered an abandoned BADGER shuttle bus, which led to the discovery of “many dead bodies” on a private parcel of land approximately one quarter mile east of the bus.

Over the following months, yellow crime-scene tape was tacked to the trees round the property, while investigators from the State Police, joined by FBI and ATF personnel, combed through the clearing that, thankfully, couldn’t be seen from the road, which was continuously prowled local and national reporters.

At the outset of the investigation, it was discovered the crime scene was just beyond the county line, not even in Sheriff Miller’s jurisdiction.

Bill breathed a sigh of relief when he learned that. Also, that the property on which the “massacre” occurred was never actually owned by Manny; its owner of records was a ninety-two-year-old nursing home resident who had passed away two days before the tragedy. Her name had been Beatrice (Betsy) Cooper, and she was the unwed great-grand-daughter of George R. Cooper, Jr., who had been fired for drunkness by the foreman of a logging crew that was later discovered murdered, apparently by each other, in 1858. It had been a strange storm that Cooper survived, although losing his horse Aimee in a freak occurance when a full-grown beaver fell from the sky and struck and killed the hapless horse. Cooper attempted to tell his story, was written up in several newspapers, and generally ridiculed. Because he persisted in trying to make everybody believe his story, he could find neither a sympathetic ear nor employment, and lived out the rest of his days as a recluse.

In a similar situation many years later, Bill Miller, wisely, kept his mouth shut. No freakin frogs falling from the sky. No freaking snakes falling from the sky. And, definitely, no freaking zombies!… He bided time until the investigation turned cold, which was not long.

In the end, investigators could establish only so much: eighteen senoir citizens died, along with three law enforcement personnel-- who undoubtedly stumbled into some kind of situation-- three employees of the coroner’s department, three suspected back robbers, one bus driver, Carl Canfield, and one teenaged waitress whose body could not be found anywhere. They established that hundreds of rounds of high-powered ammo had been fired, that an explosion from crudely-made C-4 had leveled the only structure at the crime scene. They recovered most of the rest of the money from the Gorshen bank, excepting those bills that had been destroyed in the explosion. They compiled mounts of reports and forensic test results, and when they reviewed everything they had, they couldn’t connect everything together to form a rational senario.

The investigation went cold, and after he was sure it would stay cold, Sheriff Bill Miller retired.

He would remain in Winsome Lake. Each morning he would still go to Butcher’s Café, where, as always, Stella had his coffee ready for him. His stool at the counter would always be the one who cushion was worn and of a different color than the other stools. He would always appreciate the comfort of consistency.

He frequently saw Matt, who remained a deputy for another year, until he quit to go to law school in Chicago, and even then the two exchanged regular letters.

Matt never spoke to anybody of the events of that strange stormy day, but having survived first a bear attack and later the whole “zombie ordeal,” he changed the way he looked at life. No matter how well you eat and take care of yourself, if your time is up, your time is up. You can prevent heart attacks, but what good does that do you if you live in a world in which zombies can come after you at any moment? With his new fatalistic outlook, Matt started to eat peanut butter, chili dogs, and all the artery-clogging foods he had always denied himself.

Rich Seagrove continued to work at the bait shop. Although there would be occasional chuckles and snickers behind his back because of some strange thing he’d said or done, he would never have another odd episode. It seemed that living through the zombie incident, and helping others to live through it, somehow fixed what counseling and medication had failed to cure.

During that first summer, he set about repairing and painting his house, which had gone neglected so long it had the look of a haunted house. When the outside of the Victorian was freshing painted, the old oak tree out front looked out of place. Once Rich had though the half-dead tree stately, but now it struck him as being nothing but creepy. So, to the immense joy of Radcliff, he had the tree cut down and hauled away.

Radcliff never again suffered a moment of shame because of her father. They two would spend time together like many fathers and daughters. They’d play miniature golf, go to the movies, eat together in restaurants. They’d even go fishing, although Radcliff was still squimish when she had to bait her hook with a leech or a night crawler. After hanging out with Rich, she came to realize that her old man was really pretty cool. Sure, he was different from the fathers of the other kids, but then wasn’t everybody different in some way? And isn’t that what makes the world interesting? It didn’t even trouble her that Rich insisted on keeping a cache of weapons in the house. Whenever she spoke to him about, maybe, getting rid of them, he’d tell her he needed them “just in case.” All she could be was roll her eyes, and say, “That’s my Dad.”

After Pat O’Shea’s funeral, nobody saw Brian. His mother closed down the funeral home and sold the building. She took Brian and moved away without a word to lifelong neighbors where they were going, which was Evansville, Indiana, where she’d grown up.

For months Brian surfed the Internet, scanning every news source he could find, searching for clues that Cassie Unger was still out there-- somewhere. Every time he found an article about an unexplained murder, he printed it out and put it in a file that eventually grew fairly thick. There were so many murders in this country, and it was difficult to tell whether Cassie was involved in any of them. Two, though, were suspicious. Both occurred in Milwaukee, and both male victims were killed in an unnaturally brutal manner. The police believed that the murders occurred after the victims had had sex with an unknown female. They believed that some sex cult was to blame. But Brian knew that this was Cassie, still out there, still trying to gain control of herself, but sometimes failing.

He’d have nightmares about her being trapped, a prisoner in her own dead body, which she was forced to share with some evil thing…. But what could he do about it? Nothing-- not now.

When he graduated from high school, he joined the army, became an airborne ranger, did four years, and came out a man.

No long hair, no face jewelry, no punk music and video games. No meaningless life.

He didn’t return to Evansville. The town, he realized, would seem too confining to him. He traveled from city to city, taking jobs, staying only so long, and then moving on, always looking for Cassie or listening to hear some strange story about a young woman who didn’t act quite right. He would search as long as it took. He would finally kept that promise. He would find her, and he would kill her.

Some day.

They ran out of the woods, Matt first followed closely by Rich. Their faces were intent, until they realized they were too late, and then there was a flicker of relief followed by weariness.

They wandered over to where yet another squad car crashed into another tree. But unlike the squad abandoned down the road, this one had a rather large dead guy on its hood.

It didn’t seem like an extraordinary sight. In a world where anything can happen nobody should be much surprised.

Brian climbed out of the car. He watched Rich and Matt approach, but couldn’t help glancing at the dead man warily.

When Rich and Matt reached the totaled car, they didn’t say anything. Neither did Brian, who looked a mess, standing there in wet ragged clothes, long damp hair hanging down, falling across his face, which was spattered with blood from the close-quarter gunshots.

Rich looked at him. Their eyes met briefly, and Rich gave him a nod. It was the first gesture of real respect Brian would ever remember getting from anybody.

Standing next to Rich, Matt murmured a single word: “Goliath.” That seemed to cover it all.

Soon Bill and Radcliff came from the woods, and joined the others.

Bill stared in disbelief at the scene. It was hard to tell whether he was amazed that Brian had finally stopped the towering bus driver turned zombie that he and Radcliff barely escaped or was he just stunned that his own personal squad car had been wrecked. Maybe it was a bit of both. He started to say something, but then stopped and stared in the distance to the west, where the sky had completely cleared and the setting sun was shining brightly.

“I guess it’s over,” he said.

“It’s over,” Rich confirmed.

“What the hell time is it?” Bill asked abruptly. He tugged up his shirt sleeve and gawked at his wristwatch. “This can’t be right. Anybody got the right time?”

Matt was the only other one with a watch, and his said the same thing as Bill’s-- that it was only ten minutes before seven.

“That can’t be right,” Bill complained. “It seems like it should be midnight already.”

“Time wasn’t working right,” Radcliff put in.

“Not working right?” Bill said, and almost scoffed at the notion. But considering everything that had happened today, he might never scoff at anything ever again-- not even at one of Rich’s crazy stories.

“We were stuck in a mobieus zone,” Brian said tiredly.

“A what?” Matt asked.

“A-- mobieus zone?” Brian said carefully, not sure where the words had come from; they’d popped out of his mouth before his brain could register them. And though he didn’t understand them, he sensed there was truth in the words.

“Well, whatever,” Bill said. “It’s over. They’re all dead-- I mean, really dead.”

“All of them?” Brian askedly, suddenly anxious.

“Yeah.”

“You guys got Cassie, too?”

The question was met with uneasy silence. Rich, Matt, and Bill looked at each other.

Then Bill asked Matt, “Did you see her body?”

“Uh-- I don’t think so.”

“Me either,” Rich added, looking suspicious, the way he always did right before one of his episodes. “She went into the woods before the explosion. I don’t recall her coming back out.”

So everybody returned to the clearing to re-check the corpses, even Radcliff, who didn’t seem troubled at what she saw. But Cassie wasn’t among the dead, and oddly there wasn’t a crow in sight now.

Rich, Bill, and Matt searched the woods. They didn’t find anything, and soon they had to quit because it was getting dark, a natural dark.

Brian protested that they absolutely had to

find her.

“She’s just not out there,” Rich told him.

“Yeah,” Bill agreed, “and we need to haul ass out of here.”

“We’re just going to walk away, then?” Matt asked.

“Well, what do you suggest we do, Junior? Make a fucking report? You really want to do that? Write it all up, just like it happened, and then sign your name to it? Fuck that shit.”

And Matt couldn’t disagree.

So with what little light was left, Bill and Matt “sanitized” the area.

When they were finished, Bill went over everything, “Okay, I think we’re covered as well as we can be. We have all the registered guns, except for Pat and Manny and Jimmy’s-- that’s right, right? We wiped down the interior of all the vehicles-- the steering wheels, dashboards, anything any one of us might have touch. We still have to stop by the access road to wipe down the other squad, and, Rich, do you think your truck will ride?”

“Axel might be bent, but not broke,” Rich said. “I should be able to make it home.”

“Okay, good,” Bill said. “Now, we can’t do anything about blood, DNA, and all that shit. I don’t think any of us is in any of the databases, anyway. So that’s covered. Can’t do anything about the shell casings, either-- they’re all over the place; it would take months to pick them up. So, Rich, you need to ditch your weapons-- ditch them somewhere nobody will ever find them…. Okay, then, all we need is our stories. They need to match. We have to be consistent, if anybody asks. So I’ll work on that. For now, you, you, and you,” he said, pointing out Rich, Radcliff, and Brian, “are going to get your asses home. Junior and I will go back to the station. Within the next couple days, I’ll stop by to see each one of you. I’ll have your individual stories figured out by then, and you’re all going to have to stick by them, all right?”

Everybody agreed, because nobody wanted to explain the truth, which, in this case, was one wild story. Nobody would ever believe them, and everybody would think the worse. The others must now understand what it must be like for Rich Seagrove every time he attempted to make people see whatever he saw when he had one of his delusions. And, really, who now could say for certain that they even were delusions?

Probably they were, but, then again, you never really know.

Brian had strayed from the safety of the squad car, to search for Cassie, when the figure emerged from the woods.

At first he thought he was having an hallucination. He blinked his eyes a few times before was convinced what he saw was real.

The man must have been close to seven-feet-tall, and his shoulders looked about four feet wide, beneath a brown uniform shirt with a couple ragged bullet holes right over the heart. His eye sockets were bloody black holes beneath the thick ridge of his brow, and drying blood streaked his checks from were his eyes had been down to his large jutting chin. His long arms were extended before him, his huge hands groping at the air as if searching for something, anything, to crush.

Brian’s knees went weak at the sight of the man, who shambled slowly forward, heading more or less toward him. Shit, Brian thought. The guy looks like a cross between Frankenstein and a killer clown.

And he was coming nearer, tipping his huge head to the side, as though listening for the sounds of his prey, which at the moment seemed to be Brian.

Whether from fear or out of common sense, Brian quelled the impulse to run. He’d got a sense of how fast these creatures could move. One second they could be several yards away, and the next second the were in your face, clawing to rip your heart from your chest.

Brian looked back at the squad car. He’d left the door open, and could see that Sheriff Bill had forgot to take his key from the ignition; a large rabbit’s foot dangled from the chain. Brian sensed that as soon as he moved, as soon as his gym shoes scraped across the rough, rocky roadside, the man would home in on his position, and rush after him. He would never have enough time to get behind the steering wheel. The man would probably grab him and drag him out of the car, and then that would be that-- crushed chest, broken neck, or maybe something even more grisley.

So Brian decided to do the hardest thing; he decided to do nothing, hoping the man would bypass him and, maybe, start wandering down the road, far enough away so that Brian had a better chance to reach the squad car and escape.

He didn’t move an inch. He tried to slow down his breathing, and hoped the man couldn’t hear his heart, which was beating like the wings of a wild bird trapped in a cage.

He watched the man come closer, moving slowing, lurching this way then that, listening hard, his huge hands clawing at the air.

Then the man was heading straight at him, and Brian feared that somehow he’d been detected. He wanted to run; the urge was almost overwhelming. But he willed himself to stand there frozen to the spot.

Then the man veered away, and moved past Brian, who refused to sigh relief.

When the man reached the squad car, his hungry hands felt along the edge of the roof. He moved along the length of the car and was trapped briefly by the open door. He felt his way round the door and made it to the front of the car. He stopped by the hood. He stood there a long time, leaning forward, his hands flat on the hood. His empty eye sockets seemed to be staring through the wind sheild.

Again Brian fought off the impulse to flee. The man was still too close, and it didn’t seem he would move further away. He’s just going to stand there, guarding the car, Brian realized. He’s waiting for somebody to return. Great-- just fucking great!… It was a standoff, and Brian wondered just how long he could stand this way.

He looked over his shoulder. Yeah, the man was too close. If Brian made a move, the man could catch him in a matter of seconds. But the open door and the dangling rabbit’s foot tempted him. Maybe he could get to the car before the man realized what was happening. Surely, the man would not be expecting somebody to run toward him, and not away from him. The man might be confused, confused long enough for Brian to slip into the car and escape. It was possible, Brian decided, but was he willing to bet his life on it?

Then he remembered that Sheriff Bill usually kept a shotgun under the front seat-- all the squad cars did. That was another option. But could he get to it in time. Maybe yes, maybe no. All he knew for sure was that he couldn’t stand there for very much longer; his muscles-- already weakened by his earlier ordeal-- were shaking and begging for a rest. If he didn’t do anything soon, he might be too weak to do something later.

He decided to go for the shotgun. Yeah, blow a hole in the fucker’s chest. That ought to stop him, right?

He checked over his shoulder again. The man still loomed over the hood of the squad car. He was a huge target; hitting him wouldn’t be a problem. But getting back to the car and getting the shotgun out from under the front seat before the man could move round to the passenger side-- that was going to be close.

He pivoted, careful not to make a sound, so that he was at least facing the car.

He could do this. He was certain, as certain as a gambled who knows what the next dealt card will be.

He bent his knees and set himself like a sprinter at a track meet.

When he made his move, three things happened in quick succession. The rocky ground crunched loudly under his feet. The man snapped his head, turning his gruesome face toward Brian. And Brian, taking a powerful first stride, tripped and fell flat on his face.

When he looked up from the ground, Brian saw the man was already away from the car, taking freakingly long steps, heading directly at him.

Bill and Radcliff slowly emerged from the woods. Bill was walking with a limp he tried to hide. Radcliff’s long dark hair was tangled and hid half her face, but she didn’t try to fix it. Both were wide-eyed as though not knowing what to expect next.

The found Rich and Matt in the clearing. They were moving slowly from corpse to corpse, methodically double-checking to make sure that none of the dead would rise again. They’d pause over a broken body, as though to say a prayer, and then move on to another. There were plenty of bodies to appraise.

The clearing looked like a battlefield moments after a massacre took place. Bodies and body parts lay strewn across the soggy earth, along with debris, which, oddly, included money. Bills of all denomination littered the area, some wet and stuck in the mud or pinned against a dead body while others fluttered in the light breeze and tumbled along the ground. The presence of the money, and how it had been cast over the site, made everything seem unreal, as though you had just stepped into the nightmare of a madman-- a dream that had started on a sunny day but then descended into the foggy realms of a warped subconscious.

As Bill and Radcliff approached a dead body, Bill said, “I don’t think you should be seeing this.”

“Seeing what?” Radcliff said hollowly. “I don’t see anything-- not a thing.”

They passed the stop where Carl Canfield’s half-charred head lay on the ground, eyes wide open, staring at a muddy puddle. They made their way toward Rich and Matt.

The four came together a few yard away from the black van that lay on its side. The area reeked of gasoline that had gushed from, and not had not ignited, when Rich shot the gas tank. Mercifully the strong smell of gas masked the aroma of death.

Bill gazed out across the clearing. He looked glassy-eyed. “This is a-- a-- a--” he said in a shaky voice, grasping for the right word but finding nothing close to describing what he now saw. The closest he could come was “clusterfuck,” but even that didn’t seem to cover it-- scads of dead folks, some mangled and in pieces, almost all of them senior citizens… And then a sick thought stole into his mind: I wonder how much will be saved in social security payments….

“Nothing moving,” Rich said.

“For now,” Bill said.

“Forever. None of them are going to get up again.” Rich sounded certain, as though he had been through it all a million times-- and maybe he had, in his mind.

“How are we going to explain all this?” Matt asked.

They all looked at each other, and then out across the clearing, before Bill said, “This isn’t something you explain, Junior. This is something you walk away from, and fast, and you try to forget it all as best you can.”

Radcliff was standing slightly off to the side. She made a feeble effort to shove her hair away from her face, and then she hugged herself against the chill that still lingered in the air.

She looked over at her father as he stood there with Bill and Matt. She viewed him with a sense of awe now.

Her eyes drifted to the nightmare images that surrounded them all. This was hell for real-- not the hell of boredom and embarrassment that had been her life for as long as she could remember. The shame she’d experience just because he father was a little different now seemed like such a petty thing, compared with death.

Then she noticed movement in the tree at the back of the clearing; shadows flitted among the leaves. She could make out the slouching figure of a crow perched stoically on one of the branches. Then she saw that there were other crows, half-hidden in the trees; all seemed to stare down at the clearing with their beady black eyes. The crows were in the all the trees. More dark spots in the clearing sky swooped down to alight in the trees to further infest the woods. Each crows was stationing itself on a branch, where it could wait and watch and assess the four humans loosely grouped together amid the carnage.

Radcliff stepped up to the three men, pointing at the woods, saying in wonder, “Will you look at that!”

The three men gazed at the trees, which seemed alive because of the tiny fluttering or fluffing movements the crows made among the branches. There were hundreds of crows now, as though they had magically multiplied, and yet not a single one ventured to alight on the ground.

“Damn,” Matt whispered. “What are they doing?”

“What now?” Bill asked, dreading yet another weird event.

“It’s nothing,” Rich said. “There just waiting-- that’s all.”

“Waiting for what?”

“For us to leave,” Rich said. “We’re keeping them from their chores. All long as we’re here they won’t come down. Maybe they’re paying us a kind of homage.”

“Yeah,” Matt said, “a creepy kind.”

“What, because we killed so many?” Bill asked.

“No, because we released so many souls from evil.”

“We’re scarecrows,” Radcliff said, as though she was both surprised and comforted at the thought.

Rich looked at her and nodded, before he walked over and put his arm round her shoulder.

“I think it’s time to go,” he said. “I don’t know about you fellas, but I’m sorta tired.”

They all started to walk slowly back to the road.

As he walked, threading his way round dead bodies and body parts, Rich kept his arm round Radcliff’s shoulders. He held her close, but she didn’t seem to mind at all.

“Dad?” she said finally. “I have to ask you something.”

“Yeah?” he said, intent as though expecting some grave question.

“What do you have in your pocket? Because it’s poking me in the side.”

“It’s just a hand grenade, Rad-- that’s all,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Oh,” she said, satisfied.

“You should have seen her, Rich,” Bill said, lagging behind with Matt. “There was this guy-- I swear he was about ten feet tall-- and he was just about to get me, when Rad comes out of nowhere and jumps on his back and… well, you just had to see it to believe it. I never thought she had that in her.”

Radcliff looked back over her should and grinned.

“I’m a Seagrove, you know,” she said proudly. “I can be pretty darned crazy.”

They all laughed at that, and then Bill stopped suddenly, and gasped, “Oh, shit, I almost forgot. That monstrosity is still out there.” He explained to Rich and Matt what had happened.

“How big is this guy?” Matt asked.

“Big.”

“Don’t panic,” Rich said. “If he’s blind, he isn’t much of a threat.” He told Matt to go into the woods and get his backpacks. He still had plenty of full clips for the AK-47s.

Matt started to jog toward the woods, but didn’t get far.

They heard the sound of frantic gunfire coming from the road. The roar of a shotgun reverberated through the woods and across the clearing.

“That goofy kid,” Bill murmured in dismay.

Matt sprinted to get the backpacks, with Rich running not far behind him. It was pretty clear, though, that they would never be able to reload and get to the road in time.

Whatever was happening, the kid was on his own.

Brian had remained in the back of the squad car, looking out the rear window, watching as Bill tried to chase Radcliff into the woods.

And then the explosion that jarred the car. Something flew passed, something large and metal that landed in the middle of the road with a loud clank. It took a bounce and disappeared on the opposite roadside. Brian could have sworn it was the large old cast-iron stove that had been in the shack. Shit, if that thing had hit the squad car, they would have been scooping what was left of him up with a teaspoon off the cushions of the back seat.

When he looked back out the rear window, he saw Bill lying on his back, the blast having knocked him off his flat feet. He struggled to get up. It was pitiful, depressing. Why do old people to it? Insist on surviving way past the point where they are good for anything…. But Bill somehow managed to stand. He looked dazed and wobbly, yet still he staggered into the woods after Radcliff.

“Stupid,” he murmured, thinking, If the little bitch wants to run into that mess, then fuck her-- let her go.

Then he looked away. It didn’t have anything to do with him-- not anymore.

He sat alone in the car. He only heard the gunshots, the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic fire. Just like in one of the video games he liked to play, but this was in real life. Then everything was quiet. It was probably all over. He discovered that he was bummed. He didn’t know why. Should be happy, he thought. He’d escaped a horde of zombies-- real fucking zombies. He should have been joyful. It was all over and he’d survived. He should have been at least relieved. But he wasn’t. His father was dead now, and as much as he’d loathed the man, as many times as he’d wished Pat would just drop dead, he now felt the sting of the loss. The old man had been a hypocrite, sure, but he did try; he’d offered comfort to grieving families-- that counted for something, right? What had he, Brian O’Shea, ever offered anybody? He sat around the day long. He listened to music and played video games. He’d promised not to cut classes, but he did anyway. He’s promised not to get peircings, but he did. He’d made many promises, but he never kept a single one. That fact never troubled him until now. Maybe because Cassie had asked him to promise the hardest thing of all-- swear it, that you’ll make sure I’m dead-- I mean really dead. Even if you have to do it yourself-- and he’d had given her his word, and word that never meant anything before now.

The gunshots started up again. Some nearby and others further away. He wondered if Cassie was already dead-- dead for real, rescued from the evil inside her. Probably. Probably one of the deputies or that crazy old Rich Seagrove had got her. Or maybe she’d been blown to bits by the explosion. He felt cheated; it should have been he who ended her life. She’d asked him. He knew her. It was personal.

He got out of the car, for the first time in his life intent on keeping a promise, intent on doing something decent.

It had stopped raining. The gray had faded from the sky, but Brian barely noticed.

He would find Cassie, and if she wasn’t already dead, he would somehow kept his word-- no matter what the cost.

Brian O’Shea was finally growing up.

break

The four erect old people were almost at the truck when the engine finally started.

Rich quickly shifted into reverse, and backed away. But one of the old men surged forward. His motion was unnatural, not just because of its speed; it appeared as though his slippered feet weren’t even touching the ground. He glided forward, and jumped onto the front bumper, his gnarled hands gripping the wind sheild wipers, his face pressed against the glass, staring at Rich. The old guy had a neat little moustache-- obviously the Errol Flynn of the old folks home-- but the rest of his face was a section of bad road-- a bulbous nose covered with broken capilleries, cheeks like white putty, mouth slack on one side as if he’d suffered a stroke, the whites of his staring eyes shot through with red.

Matt started to pull the 357. Magum from his holster, but Rich stopped him.

“Save the ammo,” he said, and shifted the truck into drive.

The truck lurched forward, and Rich cut the wheel sharply to the right so that he struck one of the other old men still standing.

The geezer on the bumper fell off, and then went under the truck with the other old man. Sickening sounds came from beneath the undercarriage.

The last two old people remaining on their feet, a man and a woman, gawked, as though in disbelief, as the truck passed them, heading for the back of the clearing.

Rich began to drive in circles. It reminded Matt of the time he had caught to drunken teenagers driving around the base path at the baseball field at the high school, driving round and rounds, kicking up plumes of dust. Only now there was no baseball field, and Rich was running over all the crawlers-- pitiful old forms, faces looking up in confusion. I’ve fallen and I can’t get up…. And then-- splat, splat, splat-- they were crushed under the truck. Rich homed in on each other of them, like some driver desperately seeking to hit every single pothole on the street.

Matt thought he would vomit. The truck would jounce every time a tire or tire rim climbed over and crushed an old body. Thin bones snapped like dry twigs. Eyeballs popped out of fragile, bird-like, skulls. Tires slipped on a fat woman’s flab. Chests spilt open. Blood gushed under the weight of the truck.

The last old woman standing vanished under the truck. Her fat round face looked comical, small mouth rounded slightly into a tiny O of dismay, before her body thumped and rattled beneath the truck.

The last old man standing suddenly lunged at the truck. It seemed that he came out of nowhere; one second Matt could see him, and the next second the old guy’s head was thrust thrugh the side window, his thick calloused hands clawing at Matt’s face, neck, and shoulders, as desperately tried to get a grip on something-- anything.

Matt couldn’t slap the guy away. He started to pull out his gun, but Rich stopped him again.

“Save your bullets,” he yelled.

Save my bullets? Matt thought. What am I saving them for? There’s a crazy old zombie motherfucker trying to grab me around the throat-- if I can’t use a couple bullets now, then when?

“Just hold on a second,” Rich said calmly, as though reading Matt’s mind.

Rich swung the truck out into a wide arc, and then cut the wheel back as sharply as he could. The tire rims on the right side of the truck dug deeply into the mud, while the driver side tires lifted off the ground. The truck creaked loudly as slipped over onto its side.

Inside the cab, Rich fell out from behind the wheel and landed on Matt while the entire weight of the truck came to rest on the old man who was halfway through the window.

The old guy stopped clawing at Matt. It looked like his eyes were going to pop out of their sockets, as the truck crushed his body. But he just let out a sound like a bark, and a gob of blood flew from his mouth and splattered across the front of Matt’s uniform.

“There,” Rich said with satisfaction, “you saved your bullets.”

They both climbed out of the truck, Rich first, and then Matt with the AK-47, and jumped to the ground.

Matt was astonished when he noticed that it had stopped raining. The sky was still overcast, but the clouds were a bright milky white.

He followed Rich around the truck, and the two beheld the carnage that lay in the clearing. Bodies were strewn like toy soldiers in a sand box. Old legs and arms were twisted at unnatural angles. Blue-tinted hair stirred in the light cool breeze, but nothing else moved at all. It looked as though the senior citizens of the world had gone to war, and lost.

He wandered along, making sure every one of the corpses was dead for real this time, that they bodies were sufficiently broken so that nothing evil unseeable force could use them.

When they came to Jimmy Ellison, the two paused over the body.

Jimmy lay face down in the mud. His legs were crushed from being run over by Rich, but otherwise his body didn’t appear very damaged. Matt was relieved he didn’t have to see Jimmy’s face.

“Your partner?” Rich asked.

“Yeah,” Matt said solemnly. He really was going to miss Jimmy; the guy was a big mouth, cocky and arrogant, but, shit, he could be a lot of fun.

“Make sure he doesn’t get up again. Rich said.

Matt looked up at Rich, frowning.

Rich motioned to the AK-47 Matt was carrying.

“You want me to shot him?” Matt asked, incredulous.

“He’s your partner, right? You want to take a chance of him getting up in a while and start roaming the countryside?”

The crazy guy was right, Matt realized. She slowly lifted the rifle and emptied the rest of the clip in his friend’s dead body.

In the silence that followed, Rich gazed over the clearing. Nothing moved until a sparrow alighted on one of the corpses and fluffed his wings before starting to peck around for small pieces of clothe to build its nest.

“I think we’re done here,” Rich said, but still wondered; it had stopped raining, true, the sky was bright, a sparrow had dared come out of hiding, but still something didn’t feel right-- something felt-- undone.

Bill tried for a dead center forehead shot, hoping that it would stop the giant in his tracks. But no such luck. The guy was just a bit too fast; the bullet ripped into the guy’s left eye and blew brain matter out the back of his large squarish head.

He was almost in reach of Bill when the bullet struck, and probably would have grabbed him, but veered slightly to the left, as though compensating for the sudden loss of vision on that side. This gave Bill the chance to squeeze off another shot, a scary close-quarter shot. This time, he aimed for the guy’s right eye, quickly reasoning that though it might be hard to stop the guy, he could completely blind him and that might be just as good.

But his second shot missed its mark. The bullet skittered off the right side of the guy’s head, lefting off a large flap of scalp.

He didn’t have the chance to pull the trigger again. As large and awkward at the guy was, he somehow shifted his weight, wheeled round, and cuffed Bill in the back with the side of his freakishly large fist.

Bill saw points of lights in the dimness of the woods. A surprised oomph escaped his mouth along with a gob of phlegm. His gun flew from his hand, and he felt himself falling forward, drifting earthward, in an oddly slow way, as though suddenly the air had the consistency of molasses.

Then next thing he knew, he was pushing himself up off the wet ground. Bits of dead leaves stuck to his face. He gazed up with a stunned expression.

The giant was standing over him, appearing impossibly tall, like the image in a funhouse mirror. It couldn’t be real, and yet it was. The guy wasn’t looking down at him; he was staring off, as though into the distance, with his good eye. The socket of his other eyes was bloody pit, and a small stream of red ran down his rough cheek and dripped off his thick upper lip-- dripping too slowly, as though the blood was unnaturally viscous.

Then the giant lowered his eye to stare down at Bill. At first it appeared there was no comprehension in the wide unblinking eye, then, as though he received a soundless message, intelligence filled the eye. The guy when from a total blank to puzzled to appearing hurt and finally to blistering rage. He let loose a primal cry-- like a wounded animal whose instincts let it realize it’s dying-- that echoed through the woods.

Bill tried to ease away, crab-walking backwards, his bulky ass dragging across the ground. He ran his hands through the leaves and twigs that covered the clamly ground, but couldn’t locate his gun.

Then the guy looked down at him, his good eye filled with wrath.

Just as Bill thought that now he was dead for sure, the guy would lunge at him, tear off an arm or a leg-- just then an astonishing thing happened. It was so strange, so otherworldly, Bill wondered for an instant whether he was conscious and not out like a light and having some bizarre dream.

A slender arm suddenly appeared hooked round the driver’s throat. The guy appeared to forget about his rage and what he had been about to do to Bill. He seemed somewhat dismayed at the new development.

When the guy turned round to see what was going on behind him, Bill was stunned to see that Radcliff was on the guy’s back, her feet swinging free a full foot or so above the ground. Her long dark hair was wild. She snarled and grunt, trying to hold on as the guy tried to shake her loose. Her legs swung wildly to and fro, but she wouldn’t allow herself to be tossed away. The harder she clamped her arm round the guy’s throat, the more frantic the guy became, turning this way and then that, trying to solve an unsolvable problem. It was like some crazy ritualistic dance that was taking place there, just inside the woods, as light filtered through the trees and cast a faint eerie green glow on the scene, making it all seem at the more unreal.

Then, even more unbelievably, Radcliff, with her free right hand, started to punch the guy in the side of the head. Whomp, whomp, whomp. The sickening sound of her knuckles hitting the loose flap of scalp on the side of the guy’s head. Whomp, whomp, whomp. The guy started twisting and turning, now in an absolute panic, tiny squeaking sounds of fright escaping his mouth. Whomp, whomp, whomp.

Bill could barely tear his eyes from what he was seeing. He’d never thought the kid had that in her, she’d always seemed so quiet, so sad and timid. But those eyes, so dark and deep-- maybe they had always been a tip-off.

Finally he took advantage of the distraction. He searched for and found his gun. When he turned to use it, he saw that Radcliff was still hanging, still whomp-whomp-whomping the guy upside the head, only now muttering a word with each whomp. Die…you…bastard…

Bill yelled, “Rad, let him go!”

But she wasn’t listening. How dare you… throw me down… you big ape…

The guy was wheeling around, with his arms stretching out in from of him, like somebody playing a desperate game of pin the tail on the donkey.

Then Bill noticed that Radcliff’s arm had slipped up from the guy’s throat and now lay across his good eye.

Although he hated to waste a bullet, he took a shot at the guy’s knee. The bullet ripped through the pant leg of the uniform. He staggered sideways, and for a dreadful second it appeared that he might fall back and sandwich Radcliff between his hugh body and the ground.

The roar of the gunshot got Radcliff’s attention, though; she looked round with wild eyes, seemed to focus on Bill, who was now sitting on the ground and looking for a clear shot.

“Jump off him,” he shouted to her.

And she did, and in the a few seconds during which the giant needed to gain his bearings, Bill got a clear shot at his good eye. Blood and flesh spattered from the eye socket and now the guy was totally blind, rubbing his large fists into his bloody eye sockets, the way a little girl rubs the sleep out of her eyes in the morning. The guy was staggering around, bumping into tree trucks, until he trip over some deadfall and landed on the sodden ground with a thud. There he remained, squirming and kicking his feet, as though this would somehow restore his vision.

Bill looked over at Radcliff, who was squatting, watching the guy, looking about ready to jump on him again. When he finally got her attention, he motioned her to him, hoping the guy wouldn’t soon discover that though he could no longer see, he could still hear.

The two of them eased deeper into the woods, toward the place where the shack had been. There was no gun fire now, and aside from the rustling of the guy rolling on dead leaves behind them, the woods were filled with an eerie silence.