Bad Men

A high-pitched wailing tone, a kind of electronic scream, almost shredded her eardrum and she thrust the phone away. When it had receded, she brought the receiver back to her ear.

“Richie?” She was crying now, and felt the certainty of his loss like a great darkness that covered her, wrapping itself around her body and head, suffocating her in its depths. Then the darkness became real as the lights went out and the TV died and the buzz of the refrigerator stopped, like the life of an insect suddenly cut short.

And in the midst of her sorrow and pain, she heard a sound like a sudden exhalation of breath, as though a great many souls had found at last the release that they had sought for so long.

Marianne was barely on the road when the engine of her car failed.

“No!” she cried. “Not now.”

She tried to start it again, but the car was dead. She could go back to Bonnie and ask to borrow her Plymouth, but by now Bonnie would have called the police and she would argue with her again, or insist that she needed to find Richie first, and there would be more delays, and Joe would come, and then there would be no way out.

She opened her door, then Danny’s, and began pulling him from his car seat.

“No, Mommy, I’m tired.”

“I’m sorry, Danny, really I am.”

She held him in her arms and started to run.

It was Shepherd who went astray first. He was bringing up the rear, the bulk of Dexter like a great black bear before him. The shapes in the forest had unnerved him. Scarfe might have been right: it could have been smoke from the fire, or even shadows cast by it from the topmost trees. He had glimpsed them only briefly, but it had seemed to him that they were moving against the wind, walking parallel to their own group. He tried to tell Dexter as they walked, but Dexter was only mildly concerned.

“Could be locals on their way to help at the fire,” he said. “We can take care of them at the house, or avoid them. Doesn’t matter.”

Shepherd didn’t think it would be that simple. They looked almost like men, but Shepherd could have sworn that they were wearing furs, and even out here people had probably given up on furs a long time ago.

As they continued along the trail, Shepherd spent more and more time looking behind him, or to either side, and less time trying to keep Dexter in sight. The snow grew thicker and the bear shape ahead grew fainter, distinguishable only from the trunks of the trees by its movement. Shepherd stumbled on a hidden stone and landed on his hands and knees in the snow. When he stood up, there was no one in front of him, and the trail was gone.

“Shit,” he said. He put his hands to his mouth and whistled, then waited. There was no response. He whistled again, then tried calling. He didn’t care about the barely glimpsed figures now. He had a gun and anybody who was out here with them would have to be crazier than-

Than Moloch, he heard himself finish. Because Moloch was crazy. They all knew it, even if none of them had the guts to say it out loud. This obsession with the woman had led them into alien territory during just about the worst snowstorm that Shepherd had ever encountered. What they had here was a full-on blizzard, with Shepherd now stuck on his lonesome in the heart of it, and he was one hundred percent pissed at this turn of events. He had come for the promise of easy money, the lure of $100,000 for a couple of days’ work. That money could buy him a lot: a small house somewhere cheap and quiet, maybe a share in a business. Like Dexter and Braun, Shepherd was tired. He’d done time, and as you got older, jail time aged you faster. Even as the years inside passed slowly, infinitesimally slowly, the aging process seemed to accelerate. Dexter had seen young men come out old from a nickel stretch, and older men come out dying after a dime. Shepherd wasn’t sure that he could survive another spell inside. This was to have been his final gamble, Dexter’s and Braun’s too, he guessed, except that Dexter had changed since they’d last met. Now he spent his spare time staring into space or watching those damn DVDs in which everybody went down in a blaze of glory at the end. Dexter had given up hope, and now Shepherd wasn’t sure that he was any saner than Moloch. His was just a better organized form of insanity.

Shepherd looked at the compass on his watch. If he headed northeast, back the way they had come, he could find the road and then follow it to the boat. The way things were going, that boat was going to be a regular hot spot for lost men. He made one last effort to summon the others, then turned around and headed back toward the sea.

Dexter noticed Shepherd’s absence first, but the wind had found renewed force and was now howling into their faces. When he opened his mouth to speak, snowflakes began to colonize it like bugs on a summer’s day.

“Hey!” he shouted. Moloch and Scarfe paused.

“Shepherd ain’t back there.”

Moloch, buffeted by the wind, the snow thick around his boots, joined Dexter.” How long?”