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By Root 536 0

the blood trails. There were two hundred and fifty-six blood trails, one for each grave, and they led away from the cemetery in all directions. Occasionally, five or ten or fifteen blood trails would merge into one, until there were only forty or fifty blood trails in total, all of them leading away in different directions. Eventually all of these trails faded into the grass and dirt, and became only a stray drop of blood, a strip of shed skin, or small chip of bone, then a series of footprints or single hoofprint before they disappeared altogether. Edgar had no idea what humans, animals, or things had left these blood trails, but they were gone now, traveling in a pattern that suggested they were either randomly fleeing from the murder scene or beginning a carefully planned hunt.

Early the next morning, in Billings, Montana, Junior Estes sat on the front counter of the Town Pump convenience store, where he’d worked graveyard shift for two years. He worked alone that night because his usual partner, Harry Quakenbrush, had called in sick at the last moment.

“Jesus,” Junior had cursed. “You know I can’t get nobody to work graveyard at the last sec. Come on, Harry, if you ain’t got cancer of the balls, then you better get your ass in here.”

“It is cancer of the nuts, and you should feel sorry for bringing it up,” Harry had said as he’d hung up the phone and crawled back into bed with his new girlfriend.

So Junior was all by himself in the middle of the night, and knew he couldn’t cashier, stock the coolers, and disinfect the place all at the same time, so he decided to do nothing. He might get fired when the boss man showed up at 6 A.M., but he knew Harry would get fired, too, and that would be all right enough. Most nights, twenty or thirty insomniacs, other night shift workers, and the just plain crazy would wander into the store, but only two hookers had been in that night and had pointedly ignored Junior. Poor Junior wasn’t ugly, but he was lonely, and that made him stink.

At 3:17 A.M., according to the time stamped on the surveillance tape, Junior noticed a man staggering in slow circles around the gas pump. Junior grabbed a baseball bat from beneath the counter and dashed outside. The external cameras were too blurry and dark to pick up much detail as he confronted the drunken man. A few years earlier, up north in Poplar, a drunk Indian had set a gas pump on fire and burned down half a city block, so Junior must have remembered that as he pushed the man away from the store. Then, at the very edge of the video frame, the drunken man grabbed Junior by the head and bit out his throat. As the video rolled, the drunken man fell on Junior and ate him. Later examination of the videotape revealed that the drunken man was horribly scarred and that he was wearing a Seventh Cavalry uniform, circa 1876.

Edgar and another agent were on the scene twenty minutes after Junior was killed. In the parking lot, as Edgar kneeled over Junior’s mutilated body, he felt like he was falling; then he did fall. In a seizure, with lightning arcing from one part of his brain to another, Edgar saw a series of mental images, as clear as photographs, as vivid as film. He saw death.

On Sheep Mountain, near the Montana-Wyoming border, six members of the Aryan Way Militia were pulled out of an SUV and dismembered.

Edgar saw this and somehow knew that Richard Usher, the leader of the Aryan Way, was the great-grandson of a black coal miner named Jefferson Usher.

On an isolated farm near Jordan, Montana, a widowed farmer and his three adult sons fought an epic battle against unknown intruders. Local police would gather five hundred and twelve spent bullet shells, five shotguns with barrels twisted from overheating, two illegal automatic rifles with jammed firing mechanisms, and six pistols scattered around the farm and grounds. The bodies of the farmer and his sons were missing.

But Edgar saw their stripped skeletons buried in a shallow grave atop the much deeper grave of a one-thousand-year-old buffalo jump near the Canadian border. Edgar saw this