Full Dark, No Stars

been trying to be helpful, but Tess didn’t know the name of the dummocks who had dropped his nail-studded shit on the road and then gone gaily on his way, so Ramona had to do.

“Would you like me to recalculate your route, Tess?” Tom asked, making her jump.

She turned the GPS off, then kil ed the engine, as wel . She wasn’t going anywhere for awhile. It was very quiet out here. She heard birdsong, a metal ic ticking sound like an old wind-up clock, and

nothing else. The good news was that the Expedition seemed to be leaning to the left front instead of just leaning. Perhaps it was only the one tire. She wouldn’t need a tow, if that was the case; just a little help from Triple-A.

When she got out and looked at the left front tire, she saw a splintered piece of wood impaled on it by a large, rusty spike. Tess uttered a one-syl able expletive that had never crossed the lips of a

Knitting Society member, and got her cel phone out of the little storage compartment between the bucket seats. She would now be lucky to get home before dark, and Fritzy would have to be content with

his bowl of dry food in the pantry. So much for Ramona Norvil e’s shortcut… although to be fair, Tess supposed the same thing could have happened to her on the interstate; certainly she had avoided her share of potential y car-crippling crap on many thruways, not just I-84.

The conventions of horror tales and mysteries—even mysteries of the bloodless, one-corpse variety enjoyed by her fans—were surprisingly similar, and as she flipped open her phone she thought, In

a story, it wouldn’t work. This was a case of life imitating art, because when she powered up her Nokia, the words NO SERVICE appeared in the window. Of course. Being able to use her phone would be too simple.

She heard an indifferently muffled engine approaching, turned, and saw an old white van come around the curve that had done her in. On the side was a cartoon skeleton pounding a drum kit that

appeared to be made out of cupcakes. Written in drippy horror-movie script above this apparition ( much more peculiar than a fan foto of Richard Widmark on a librarian’s office wal ) were the words ZOMBIE BAKERS. For a moment Tess was too bemused to wave, and when she did, the driver of the Zombie Bakers truck was busy trying to avoid the mess on the road and didn’t notice her.

He was quicker to the shoulder than Tess had been, but the van had a higher center of gravity than the Expedition, and for a moment she was sure it was going to rol and land on its side in the ditch. It stayed up—barely—and regained the road beyond the spil ed chunks of wood. The van disappeared around the next curve, leaving behind a blue cloud of exhaust and a smel of hot oil.

“Damn you, Zombie Bakers!” Tess yel ed, then began to laugh. Sometimes it was al you could do.

She clipped her phone to the waistband of her dress slacks, went out to the road, and began picking up the mess herself. She did it slowly and careful y, because up close it became obvious that al

the pieces of wood (which were painted white and looked as if they had been stripped away by someone in the throes of a home renovation project) had nails in them. Big ugly ones. She worked slowly

because she didn’t want to cut herself, but she also hoped to be out here, observably doing A Good Work of Christian Charity, when the next car came along. But by the time she’d finished picking up

everything but a few harmless splinters and casting the big pieces into the ditch below the shoulder of the road, no other cars had come along. Perhaps, she thought, the Zombie Bakers had eaten

everyone in this immediate vicinity and were now hurrying back to their kitchen to put the leftovers into the always-popular People Pies.

She walked back to the defunct store’s weedy parking lot and looked moodily at her leaning car. Thirty thousand dol ars’ worth of rol ing iron, four-wheel drive, independent disc brakes, Tom the

Talking Tomtom… and al it took to leave you stranded was a piece of wood with a nail in it.

But of course they all had nails, she thought. In a mystery—or a horror movie—that wouldn’t constitute carelessness; that would constitute a plan. A trap, in fact.

“Too much imagination, Tessa Jean,” she said, quoting her mother… and that was ironic, of course, since it was her imagination that had ended up providing her with her daily bread. Not to mention

the Daytona Beach home where her mother had spent the last six years of her life.

In the big silence she again became aware of that tinny ticking sound. The abandoned store was of a kind you didn’t see much in the twenty-first century: it had a porch. The lefthand corner had