Oh, they were out there, somewhere, but he could not see them. He could feel them, though, gathered thickly in the spreading shadows like locusts in a farmer’s field. Just as destructive, just as lethal, just as patient. He thought he could even smell them—their sweaty bodies and sour breath and ...
he managed. “Just fine.” He excused himself and went upstairs. He went into the bathroom and his breath was coming in short, sharp gasps by that point. He looked in the mirror above the sink and did not care for his reflection. The way his eyes kept blinking or did not bli...
It slid from a satiny, wind-blown grave. It came up over the mountains like some huge, luminous eye staring down from the misty sky above. Its pallid light sought and touched serrated horns of exposed rock, winked off drifts of snow, and imbued spruce and pine with a ghostly ambience. The wind bl...
Lisa had spent the previous day visiting the house and now it was time for her all-night vigil. If Eddy had seen her message, then she was sure he would come. He wouldn’t be able to help himself. There were police everywhere nearby and all it would take was one word from her and they’d come runni...
It was an ungainly craft they had roped together, the lifeboat on one side and the oblong raft on the other. But with two men on either side pulling with the oars, they were indeed moving. Marx and Gosling took their break together, as the other four pulled. &n...
The Geiger was clicking so fast now it sounded like one steady clicking roll. “One-fifty and climbing, man…shit.” Sweat running down my face, I looked out the window and there they were. The kids. The fucking Children. Just standing out there on the sidewalk like they were...
Big, bloated, obscene. Its pallid light filters down on the craggy, shadow-pocketed landscape of the northern Wyoming Territory. Black surreal clouds roll in the sky. A cool wind howls and shrieks, the dark pines bend and sway. A lone, crooked oak claws at the sky, its stripped limbs creak and mo...
Surely, not the hacks and precious few prisoners. But JoJo Aquintez was one of them. The state had dropped him for eight years on an armed robbery conviction. He was a tough boy and his little vacation at Shaddock was the second time the state had sent him away to college. But for all that and fo...
They danced and shuddered with idiot splendor, their dead-white faces split by mortuary grins and welded into grisly rictuses. They tore at themselves with knotted fingers, their blood steaming into the snow in mindless sacrificial offerings to the sepulchral gods of boneyards. Their voices scree...
She had a rolling pin in her hand, of all things, and it was raised to strike like some incensed housewife in an old movie, preparing to brain her husband.The floor was flooded in the black mud. There was only maybe an inch or two at most where he was standing, but over near the appliances and pa...
He paid little attention to them. He was looking out across the grounds, watching leaves falling from the trees. Cool night last night and the cool nights brought autumn that much faster this far north. Second of September and already it was beginning. Stray leaves fell from the big oaks and mapl...
A lot was riding on what he did in the new few minutes. The decisions he made now—or didn’t make—could haunt him for years. “We’re going to do this right, understand?” he said to Weston. “This operation is not going to become another Waco or Ruby Ridge. I’m not about to be...