• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Vi had begged him several times to come shoot with her at the range. He never had and knew nothing of how to use a firearm except for what he’d seen in movies and on television.

After searching for a safety that wasn’t there, Max finally aimed through the rear passenger window as the pale-faced man closed in.

He squeezed the trigger and the glass exploded as the .45 bucked in his hand.

The man continued toward him, unscathed.

Max opened the door and scrambled out of the car as the shotgun boomed, glass raining down on him. He crawled to the back of the car, poked his head above the trunk in time to see the shotgun jerk and fire come roaring out the barrel.

Max ducked down, sitting with his back against the tire. Sweat sheeted down his forehead into his eyes but it smelled rusty, and when he wiped it away the back of his hand was bloodsmeared. He touched his head, felt where the pellets of buckshot had scalped three marble-size trenches down to the bone, the steel November afternoon like ice on his skull.

He looked under the car, unable to see the legs of the man who was trying to kill him.

Max peered over the trunk again.

No one there.

He stood.

Glock quivering in his hand.

Three bloodstreaks down his face like warpaint.

Blinked, and there was the barrel of the shotgun, peeking over the other side of the trunk and Max felt the ground beneath him and he was staring through the twisted limbs of those haunted trees at flinders of a fading sky the color of his wife’s name and he tried to say it, tried to call out to her.

A black moon appeared and descended toward him, filling his violet sky with the reek of scorched metal and death.

60

BETH bolted barefoot through the beach grass as the third shotgun report erupted from the thicket of live oaks. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the old man leaning against the rusted pickup truck, hand pressed into his side where she’d cut him with the boning knife.

The adrenaline waned, her own stab wound beginning to throb like the worst cramp she’d ever felt, as though something were trying to burrow out of her stomach.

Another shotgun blast echoed across the water.

She plunged into the thicket north of the house, running like hell, not looking back, tearing through the cooling darkness of the live oaks, the sun at her back, not long for the world.

Beth crossed a patch of sandspurs.

She screamed and fell, dug three organic spikes out of her right foot and ran on, dead leaves clinging to the blood on her left leg.

After two minutes she collapsed, lying in leaves in the swarming cold.

She rolled onto her back, stared up at the fading sky.

She closed her eyes.

Excruciating now to inhale.

She pushed her palm into the wound, felt blood seep between her fingers…

When her eyes opened she could see a solitary planet in the cobalt.

Her breath steamed.

Leaves crunching somewhere in the distance.

She wondered if the man with long black hair would kill her in the woods or take her back to that awful house…

Beth woke colder than she’d ever been, the sky starblown, woods gone quiet, her bleeding stopped. She sat up, staggered to her feet, and limped along through the thicket.

After an hour she broke from the trees into a field of marsh grass, her feet sinking every step in the cold mud. She tramped on, so delirious with exhaustion that she hardly noticed when her eviscerated foot touched the pavement of Highway 12.

Beth stepped bewildered into the middle of the road. To the north it ran into darkness as far as she could see. Southward, it extended toward what could only be the nighttime glow of civilization.

The moon was rising.

Sea shining.

She stumbled along toward the village.

Rufus’s wound was long but shallow. He sat in a chair in the kitchen while, in lieu of stitches, Maxine used a strip of duct tape to close the three-inch slice to the right of his bellybutton.

The left side of her jaw was swollen but the pain was sufferable. There was little she could do about it anyway. They didn’t have much time. People would