Best New Zombie Tales: Vol. 1 Part 25

I didn't have to. He nodded toward a corner. "First booth. What about my tip?"

"Don't charge so much for drinks." I went over to where Chavis was sitting and stood by the booth until he looked up at me.

"Detective John Scott." I showed the badge. "Frank Chavis?"

"I used to be." He waved me to the opposite seat. "Chavis was my warm name. I'm Frank Thanos now. How can I help you, Officer?"

"I'm investigating the murder of Terry Foreman. I believe you knew his wife."

He filled a gla.s.s from a bottle of the hard stuff, then offered to cut my ginger ale. I declined. He took a drink, filling his mouth then pausing to swallow.

"Debbie," he said, putting his gla.s.s down. Whatever he thought of her was lost in the flatness of his voice. "They say you always remember your first. Debbie was my last. Not everything rises from the dead. I'm a stiff in everyway but the one that matters." He looked down at the bottle. "The only vice I have left, and it has to be at least 180 proof before I feel any kick." He looked back up at me. "You think I killed Foreman?"

"Did you?" I asked. I had a feeling he'd tell me if he did. It wasn't like I could do anything about it. The courts had ruled that crimes committed before a person's death were not punishable if he returned.

Thanos gave me a slow shake of his head. "No, Debbie was a nice piece, but not worth killing over. When she told me it was over, it was over. Plenty more out there. Of course, after Foreman died I did comfort her for a while. That ended about a week before I did."

"Debbie ever talk about it, say who might have wanted him dead?"

"Just that sc.u.m of a partner of his. Other than that, old Terry wasn't the type to have enemies. From what Debbie said afterwards, he was an all around nice guy, a church-going Christian sort. He'd have to be some kind of saint to take back a woman who did him wrong like she did."

"For the record, where were you when Foreman was killed?"

Thanos made the effort to shrug. "Nowhere near Debbie's place. Other than that, you find out, then we'll both know. There's parts of my warm life that just haven't come back yet. Anything else?"

I pointed to the bottle. "Just one, who's paying for that? You got a job?"

"Government handout, it's not much but all us cold ones get something to keep us out of trouble. Plus I got a few friends left."

"One of those friends named Debbie?"

He didn't answer, just stared straight ahead. When I got up he was still staring. I left him to his liquor and memories of warmer days.

Despite his denials, Thanos still could be the killer. He did wind up with Debbie. And she wound up with a nice insurance settlement, some of which she could be sharing to keep him quiet. Or she could have killed Foreman herself, with Thanos knowing and not saying. I'd see about getting a court order to look into her financial records. Right after I got back from seeing Morrison on Tuesday.

"Everything I did was legal," Ronald Morrison told me once I finally got into see him. He'd been tied up in a meeting, he said, explaining the hour he kept me waiting. That hour gave me time to review what I'd learned about Morrison & a.s.sociates.

The business grew from the remains of Foreman & Morrison. The two partners had run an advertising firm, not the biggest, but it had its share of regional and local accounts. Morrison was the idea man, the outgoing glad-hander who met and woed the clients. Foreman worked behind the scenes, running the business end of things. It came apart when Morrison emptied the corporate account and filed to dissolve the partners.h.i.+p. He planned to start his own firm, taking most of F&M's clients with him, leaving Foreman broke and looking for a job.

"I wasn't my fault Terry made the mistake of trusting me. We each had equal access to the money. He could have cleaned me out first if he had thought of it."

"From what I heard, Foreman wasn't that kind of man."

Morrison let out a hearty laugh, the kind that comes from enjoying a good joke. "No, he wasn't. He was a good and decent fellow, the poor fool. Honest to a fault, considerate to the employees, fair with the clients. Definitely not meant for the business world."

"You used him," I said, my tone accusing him of a crime akin to murder, "to build the business, to get everything running smooth, then you screwed him over. The night he was killed he was coming to see you, to give you a chance to do the right thing."

"And I was waiting for him," Morrison said calmly. "Was surprised when he didn't show. Terry never, ever missed an appointment. Didn't hear about his death until the next day."

"Unless you arranged it."

Morrison took the accusation of murder lightly. "Detective Scott," he smiled, "I'll admit that over the last year of our partners.h.i.+p I slowly drained the corporate account. Terry kept the books and he wasn't a hard man to fool. However, according to my attorney I had a legal right to do so. Terry's attorneys would no doubt see things differently and he was free to sue me. He might even have won, if he had any money left to hire attorneys. So you see, I had no motive to want him dead. In fact, he had a better reason to kill me."

Morrison was so gleefully venal and proud of the way that he'd cheated Foreman that I doubted he'd killed the man. He'd want his victim alive. He would have gloated over the remains of Foreman's shattered career then thrown the man a bone, offering him a job with the new firm. If he had no other prospects, Foreman may have swallowed his pride taken it. I got the feeling that when the Lord called the next batch of us up, Morrison wasn't going to make the cut.

A week went by. In between doing the work the Department paid me to do I managed to get Debbie Lochlear's bank statements. She showed a regular pattern of deposits from her job and withdrawals from both savings and checking. She could have been giving money to Thanos, but there was no way to be sure except to follow her. I also checked on the bullet that had been dug out of Foreman's head. It had yet to be matched to a gun, nor had the Firearms Unit's computer paired it to bullets recovered from other crime scenes.

There comes a time with some investigations when you look at what you've got and realize that you're not going to get anymore. That's when you know it's time to close the case folder for good. I was at that point with the Foreman murder. I suspected that Debbie, Thanos or both knew more than they were telling, but suspicions aren't proof. Maybe it was time to admit defeat and call the real homicide detectives. I'd give them what I had and maybe they could close things out. For me, there were just too many questions I couldn't answer.

I was going over these questions yet again, looking for answers, not really wanting someone else to break this case when I thought of the big question, the one n.o.body had asked. I signed out a car and drove to Perry Hall.

After the last time I didn't think Debbie would let me in, so I sat in my car and waited for someone else to enter and went in behind them.

I knocked on her apartment door. When Debbie answered and saw who it was she tried to slam it shut. I was a bit faster and had my foot and shoulder past the door before she could close it. "Get out," she told me, "I don't have to talk to you."

"Just one question," I said quietly, not wanting to rouse any helpful neighbors who might call the county police. "What did you do with the gun?"

"I didn't..." she started to deny it, then looked at my face. "You know, don't you?" I nodded and she let me in.

She gave it all upwhat she did, what happened to the gun, all of it. "What happens now?" she asked when she was through.

"I honestly don't know," I told her before leaving.

Foreman lived with his sister in a housing development on 33rd St, near where Memorial Stadium used to be before Baltimore's sports teams moved downtown. On the way there from the station I stopped at Lake Montibello. How, I thought, looking at the placid waters of the lake, did she get the gun past the police? They would have searched her, the cars, the house. Where did she hide it? No matter, every house has a dozen hiding places known only to its occupants. It didn't matter either that the gun was now resting somewhere at the bottom of the lake. Let it lay there. No one needed it.

Foreman was waiting for me. "You have news?" he asked, as excited as his kind can get.

"I know who killed you," I told him. We sat down. I took out a sealed envelope. "Before I give you this, what are you going to do after you open it?"

He thought a moment. "I, I don't know."

"No 'Revenge of the Zombie' plans?"

"No. I think that I just want to know."

"Good, because there's nothing the Department can do."

"Statute of Limitations?" he asked.

"Something like that. Listen, Mr. Foreman, before you open that envelope, ask yourself how badly you need to know the name, and how willing you are to forgive the person who killed you." I stood up, offered my hand. "Good luck to you," I said, meaning every word.

The big question in this case hadn't been who killed Terry Foreman. It wasn't whether or not Debbie was paying for Thanos to keep his dead mouth shut. And it wasn't why she hadn't told the police about Morrison cheating her husband. No, it was more basic than that. This is a world where the sky is falling, where the truly good have been taken away and the dead walk among us. So why in this world did Terry Foreman, a man everyone agrees was a good man, return after death? Was it because he had some secret sin, some vice no one knew about? Or was it because in a moment of weakness and despair, having lost his wife, job and future, he got a gun, put it to his head and pulled the trigger?

Debbie told me she had heard the shot and ran out to find Foreman slumped over in the front seat, gun near his hand. Even in her shock and grief, she realized that suicide cancelled Foreman's insurance. So she took the gun, hid it well and waited for the police to ring her doorbell. Later she dropped it in the lake. When the police decided it was probably a robbery gone bad, she let them think it, rather than tell the truth or trying to place the blame on Morrison.

I closed the case out as a suicide. One day someone might read the file and contact the insurance company. If so, Debbie might be in some trouble, but it's not likely.

I never saw Terry Foreman again so I don't know if he ever opened the envelope. If he did, I hope he found the strength to forgive himself, to take the second chance we've all been given to make up for the weakness that had denied us Paradise.

On the Usefulness of old Books.

KIM PAFFENROTH.

He scanned the binoculars along and counted them again. On the length of fence they were responsible for watching this morning, there were only twenty-seven. Four years after the initial outbreak, their clothes were faded and shredded, and the owners weren't in much better shapedigits and ears and eyes missing, toothless mouths hanging open, barely able to moan anymore. In the summers there would be hundreds outside, and they'd have to go up to the fence and shove spears through, stabbing the dead in the foreheads and eyes in order to thin them out, lest they break through the fence with their sheer weight. But now it was autumn, and the nighttime cold was slowing the dead down, so that fewer and fewer new ones showed up at the fence each day. Soon it would be cold during the day as well, and the dead would stop arriving at the fence entirely, so the living could venture outside their compound again to gather supplies. They would also take the killing past the fence and catch the dead out anywhere they could find them. He couldn't say he exactly enjoyed it, for it was hard and dirty work, but he did smile at the prospect of going outside the fence. His smile had the slight downturn of a sneer at the irony that the living were now most active during the night and the winter, times when people used to huddle inside and hear tales of the undead and other monsters.

"What are they, dad?" The man looked over at his son, eleven years old, who had again asked this rather obvious and wholly unnecessary question. The man's smile softened to the quizzical and bemused one he usually turned on his son at times of such pointless questioning. The boy looked exactly like himsame hair and eye color, same nose and chin, same gaunt build. But the boy would always have his mother's mind, a mind insatiable for questions, especially ones that seemed to have an obvious answer, but which both of them would always push further and further, never ceasing to look for what they were so certain was therethe hidden, truer meaning under the obvious, surface answer. As much as he had loved both of them, it was maddening at times, for he had long since learned that some questions were better left unasked, and many more were better left unanswered. He'd learned that long before the dead rose, and that particular phenomenon had only driven the point home in the most vivid way imaginable to him.

His remembrance of the boy's mother wiped the smile from his face, but he kept his reaction just to that, as he almost always kept his emotions under control in front of the child. At the beginning of the outbreak they had fled north, as far as they could go. Given what they heard on the radio, it hadn't been the worst choice of action. It had prolonged their lives past the initial, universal, and unimaginable carnage of cities being overrun by the living dead. But "not worst" and "good" were two totally different things, and that first winter had nearly killed all three of them anyway. The boy's mother had died in March, even as things were beginning to thaw and melt; she had been so painfully, so maddeningly close to surviving. He'd tried to cut their rations to the point where they'd last until the spring, but it had left them all too weak and susceptible to disease and she had died. He had been pretty sure at that pointand was now completely convincedthat there was no h.e.l.l worse than the one they were in now. Nonetheless, he was equally sure that there were still some things that one simply never did, no matter whatif not for fear of h.e.l.lfire, then just out of some sense of primal, ineradicable pollution. He therefore had decided that he would feed the boy only the remaining, regular rations, while he would take upon himself the internal torment and sickness of eating the other sustenance that had become available with her death. The two of them had survived that way, but he had known there was no way they'd make it through another winter like that on their own, so in the spring they had started moving southwards until they arrived at this community of survivors.

That other unpleasant remembrance he wiped from his mind as quickly and cleanly as he had the smile from his face, and he finally replied, "Son, I keep telling you: they're just dead people."

The boy's eyes were defiant, and he knew that, although exactly like his own, they would always sparkle with a fierce intellect that he had never had. Like any parent would, he often wondered what the boy would've become, if things hadn't changed, and he had tried out all the usual answers that proud parents would've given in that other worlddoctor, scientist, president, Academy Award-winning director. But today a different answer came to him, and with an unnerving, breathless clarity that few other than religious mystics ever experience: the man knewnot wondered or hoped, but knewthat the boy would've been a prophet, though the man barely knew what that meant in any world other than a made up one of G.o.ds and priests. But he knew, somehow that the boy would've railed against injustice, and ignorance, and hate: the fire in the boy's eyes and the vehemence with which he now spat out his words left no doubt.

"I know that, Dad, but why do they walk around? Why do they try to kill us? Why do we have to go out and kill them? The books we have, that we read in cla.s.s, they don't talk about that. I remember when Grandpa died, when I was really little, and he didn't become one of... them. When someone dies, they lie down and they stop moving. It isn't right."

The man drew his breath in slowly and deeply through his nose and felt the cold tingle, while the boy was practically panting in frustration and rage. He thought to himself how the boy would, in just a few more years, have spent more time in the world of the undead than he had in the previous one. It would be his "normal," his "regular," in a way that it could never be for his father or any of the older people. As sad as it seemedto grow up and live in such a worldthe man was almost happy for that, because he thought it might make it easier for the boy.

"I don't know, son. It just started happening one day. No one knows why. But they're still just dead people."

The boy drew himself up and back, and calmed a little. His eyes narrowed. "Mr. Grosvenor says it's because G.o.d is angry with us. He says the people out there are d.a.m.ned, and we will be too if we don't believe in G.o.d and do what He says."

Now it was the man's turn to spit out words. "What G.o.d says, or what Grosvenor says?" Yes, the boy was just like his mother, all right. He knew just how to push his b.u.t.tons. Get your Dad to admit he doesn't know the answer to something, then tell him that someone else does. Oh, and the someone else who does know the answerhe's someone you know your Dad doesn't like. Hates, is more like it. The kid was a real b.u.t.ton pusher. "Grosvenor is a sanctimonious a.s.shole," the man growled as he shook his head.

Now it was the boy's turn to sneer. "A sanctified... a what kind of a.s.shole?"

There was a certain amount of reconciliation and satisfaction that could now be gained by father and son laughing together, and the man was glad for that. "It means he doesn't know what he's talking about, and he judges other people too much."

"So, does that mean that G.o.d isn't angry?"

The man kept looking at him. "No, I guess I'd say that He is. What do you think?"

They started walking back towards the edge of the roof, away from the enclosure they had been ina kind of blind made out of cubicle part.i.tions that had been built on the roof of one of the perimeter buildings of their compound. The area had been an industrial park, so the buildings were st.u.r.dy and defensiblemany without windowsand surrounded by a cyclone fence. The man had been told how, before they had gotten there, the battles with the dead had been fierce. But now they lived a fairly stable existence, with the outer fence secure and covered over with paper or fabric, so that the dead couldn't see them moving around within the compound. The roofs of some of the buildings had these little blinds, so they could observe the dead outside the fence and monitor their numbers and activity.

"Yeah," his son agreed, "I think He probably is." He looked sideways at his father and smiled a little more. "But I still think you're right about Mr. Grosvenor."

The man grinned and playfully punched the boy's shoulder. They climbed down the aluminum ladder to the ground. "You looking forward to going outside?" When things froze hard in a few weeks, the boy would go outside the compound with him for the first time.

"Not really. I don't know. I guess. I want some more books."

More questions needed more books, that raised more questions, that needed more books; it seemed as though it would never end. On the whole, however, he deemed it a worthier goal than booze, candles, and matches, which were what he'd be looking for.

Spiking Day arrived early that year. It was the only holiday on their rather circ.u.mscribed and grim yearly cycle, and it had no set date. It was simply declared after a week had pa.s.sed in which no new zombies showed up at the fence that surrounded their little compound. Then the people of this little outpost could go outside and kill all the dead who were pressed up against the fence. The celebration of the holiday was exactly as its name implied: they would walk up to the more or less helpless dead, who could still flail about clumsily but defenselessly, and drive a spike through each of their heads. They couldn't afford to waste bullets. Any dead who were still slightly more active could be spiked at a safer distance using spears, as were any who blocked the gates. They would then drag the bodies some distance away, dump them in a pitwhich was now the same one, used over and over at the beginning of each winterand set them ablaze. Any who looked like they might have more fat would go on top, so the grease would drip down and help the fire: again, no waste was possible, and fuel was as important as ammunition. Not since the days of human sacrifice on Incan step-pyramids and Celtic moors, thousands of years past, had there been among humans a more horrible and dichotomous celebration, as the people celebrated the beginning of the season in which they would be relatively safe from attack and would be able to gather food and eat with much greater abundance than they could during the lean months of summer and autumn. It was the equivalent, in their world, of what Easter or Pa.s.sover or any springtime celebration had once been in saner times. But their celebratory acts were not hiding eggs or dancing around a maypole. Instead, they built the unholy, obscene edifice of an enormous pile of burning human bodies, a hideous inferno that went on for hours, accompanied by the sickening sizzle of fat, the pop of eyeb.a.l.l.s and various vesicles, and the oppressive stench of the smoke that roiled over them, hanging low like a shroud to hide their shame and joy from a G.o.d who could neither understand or lessen their pain.

Even in their world, however, there was some sense of decency, and the smallest children were s.h.i.+elded from the details or the full and personal experience of Spiking Day. This winter, that would change for his son. The man didn't really think that it'd be that big of a deal: the boy had seen the fire from a distance and had smelled the awful smoke. There were certain details, however, that he still dreaded explaining to the boy, all because he knew his rapacious intellect and the unanswerable and never-ending barrage of questions that would ensue. But as they prepared to go outside, he looked at his son in profile, and the boy's resolute featureslooking today in the bright autumn sun much more like his dead mother's than they usually didtogether with his calm, piercing, hazel eyes, somewhat rea.s.sured the man that it would be all right.

Some of the men speared enough of the dead to allow the gates to be opened and everyone tumbled out to begin the horrible work of their joyous celebration. The first round of spiking was done with care and speed, without a sound on either sideneither a shout of triumph from the living, nor the usual moan from the dead, as though the dead were as willing and content to die as the living were eager and resigned to kill. As the bodies piled up and the writhing and tottering dead were driven further back, some people began dragging the bodies to the pit. The man and his son began this work, and he watched the boy carefully, as he knew this was actually the more horrible and unnerving part, because this was usually when one made the more graphic and nauseating observations of ravaged human anatomy. It was bad enough to drive a rusty spike into the head of what looked like a little girl. It was far worse to go to pick her up, as gently and respectfully as one could now, and have her arm tear off in your hands and her head roll away on the ground. That was guaranteed to have a two-fold effect, one bodily, one spiritual. First one would usually vomit uncontrollablyfor this reason, Spiking Day was also the only fast day on their calendar, in a year with little enough eating. And then one slowly, fully, and forever after realized the full weight of how much one had violated and victimized a monster that somehow remained partially and painfully human.

One also noticed little details that were normally overlooked when fighting and killing themthe fine features still recognizable on a woman or girl, the remnants of pretty jewelry or clothes, bespeaking happier times. Finally motionless and without the horrible spasming of their minds and muscles that drove them on to fight and struggle like rabid animals possessed by every demon from h.e.l.l, even their flesh seemed to look more natural, less decayed, and even, perhaps, as though it might once have been beautiful. But, of course, the irony was that when they stopped moving and they looked the most human and vulnerable and potentially beautiful, then it was time to throw them on to the fire like pieces of rotten trash. The man stifled a grim smile at this thought, out of some residual respect for the dead and not just concern for the boy, who couldn't see most of his face under the kerchief he was wearing over his nose and mouth, like everyone else that day.

It was not quite time for their immolation, however. There was one last rite to be performed, one last indignity to be committed. The dead were to be searched and anything of value still on them was thrown in a cart, to be sorted and distributed later. Four years of wandering around outdoors had left the dead at this point with very little that could be of use to the living, but even now there were enough useful surprises that the tradition stood. There was still the occasional tool, knife, pair of eyegla.s.ses, or even handgun to be found, so that they couldn't risk throwing it all to the fire. There was little room for sentimentality or reverence in their lives in general, and Spiking Day could be no different. He watched his son go through a dead man's pockets, producing a small screwdriver and pocket-knife and tossing them into the cart.

"Good boy," the man said. Then he and the boy grabbed the corpse's wrists and ankles, dragged it over to the pit, and tossed it into the flames below.

As they walked back to do the same to another, they went past the cart full of found objects. "That's why they call it Canada, huh?" the boy asked matter-of-factly.

"What?" At first, the man could make no connection with what the boy was saying. The boy was standing next to the cart, and he looked back and forth between the objects and the flames a few yards away. The man followed his gaze and understood what the boy had realized. Before he was allowed to come out on Spiking Day, the boy would've done his part inside the compound, sorting the things that came there in the carts, and putting the objects into the storage area they called "Canada." Some wag had named it that, and the man was more grateful for the kerchief, as it concealed his crimson blush at his son's discovery of this cruel and insensitive joke. But what could they do? Black humor was the only kind they had.

"You were reading a history book?" he said, very quietly.

"Yes," the boy hissed, barely audible over the roar of the fire, as his gaze turned defiant. The man had noticed this was his more frequent reaction to such horrors; he suspected it was better, in the long run, than sorrow or confusion. The boy must have read that "Canada" was the nickname of the area in Auschwitz where they gathered all the goods confiscated from the millions of people murdered there. "Mr. Grosvenor says the Jews deserved to die, that's why the Germans did it." Mr. Grosvenor taught the kids history and social studies, since he had been a schoolteacher before the dead rose. The man tightened his fists when he thought how they had now perpetuated Grosvenor's evil foolishness far beyond the death of the old world. He hoped that their punishment for such lack of wisdom and foresight did not go beyond inconvenient conversations like the one he was now forced to have.

The boy was baiting him, daring him to come up with a better, saner explanation. The man's eyes narrowed. "Oh, they did? So, did these people deserve to die and be thrown in a fire, too?"

"Mr. Grosvenor says so. He says the zombies are Satan's army and they killed all the Jews and Muslims and atheists first, and if they ever break in here, it'll be to kill all the bad Christians we have in here, and anyone who tries to protect them." The boy had a disconcerting ability not to blink at times.

"Satan's army" was vintage, Grosvenor foolishness, as if this poor band of rotting imbeciles qualified as such a thing. The rest of the a.n.a.lysis also sounded like the kind of idiotic, insane thing he would come up with. Of all the people not to get killed and eaten, he'd never understand why Grosvenor should be one of them. But that wasn't his choice, and even to contemplate the justice or injustice of Grosvenor's life and these people's undeath was a recipe for frustrated, impotent madness. The man also knew he couldn't just put Grosvenor down, or demand that the boy disregard his inanities. The boy had to choose. With his great intellect came great powerbut far more importantly, great responsibility.

"Is that what you say?"

The boy stared past the man's left shoulder at the flames. His eyes narrowed to the point where it seemed they were shut. His jaw relaxed slightly as he said clearly, "No."

The man relaxed a little as well. He tilted his head slightly as he eyed the boy and thought how terrible it must be to have such an over-reaching intellect, one capable of grasping and being confounded at every irony and paradoxhow terrible, and at the same time, how wonderful. It would be boy's burden and his gift, all his life. The man drew himself up, equally from pride as from a feeling of being humbled. "Let's finish, son," he said quietly.

They performed the rest of their duties in silence that day, and the man thought it was good that Spiking Day had come early that year.

Less than a week after Spiking Day, people started going out again for supplies and game. The nights were consistently below freezing, and there would only be a few hours in the middle of the day when any of the dead might thaw enough to pose a threat. The man and his son prepared early one morning to go to a town that had not been investigated before. The town was right at the edge of how far they could travel to and back from in one day, so they left while the eastern horizon was just glowing, peddling their bikes down the road between old wrecked cars, their breath trailing off behind them in the damp, freezing air. The man let the boy pull ahead of him and smiled at how they looked. He had always thought whenever pairs left the compound on bikes that they looked like Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses, slowly peddling out into the cruel and uncaring world, eager and optimistic even though hopelessly outnumbered by the unbelievers. Or, as things stood now, by those who literally believed nothing at all, because they could no longer think, or feel, or believe anything ever again. And there would be no conversions on any of their trips now, just a few miserable calories gathered for the living, or a few more spikes in the heads of the unthinking dead. Still, it always struck him as funny looking.

They peddled for hours, silently and steadily. They were both panting and exhausted from their first hard exertion in months when they stopped for water and food late in the morning. They stood next to their bikes on a long stretch of road with pine forest on either side, about fifty feet back from the road surface. The gra.s.s nearer the road was less than knee high, still frosted in some places, though most had thawed in the warm sun this morning. The man ate one of the hard boiled eggs they had brought; the chickens that had been brought to the compound were one of the greatest, most life-giving of their finds. He pulled out a handful of acorns and hickory nuts from his pocket and started breaking them with a pair of pliers and handing the insides to his son. At this point in the season, most had a little white larva in them, and he wasn't quite hungry enough today to eat thosethough he had done so often enough in the last four yearsso he threw those on the ground. This time of year one could afford such extravagances, as they'd be gathering tons of nuts before the snow fell and got too deep.

They both heard the rustling at the same time, for it was distinct and nearby. They crouched and looked toward where it had come from, as the man shoved the pliers and nuts back in his pocket. There was a stand of cattails and other reeds and tall gra.s.ses right at the edge of the forest. A very light breeze was blowing over the road and toward the little marsh, so it must have smelled them. Now they could hear the moan, as the gra.s.ses swayed from side to side, more and more violently. The man pulled the aluminum baseball bat from its holder next to the bicycle's front wheel. "Stay here," he said to his son as he started to walk toward the moving gra.s.s.

The boy grabbed his sleeve. "Let me come," he said, not exactly fearfully, as he would've just the previous year. "I want to see."

The man took a step back, still eyeing the gra.s.s. "You want to see? What? You've seen them killed before. And you don't know what's in the gra.s.s between here and there. Could be one lying down. You know that's happened to people before."

"The gra.s.s isn't that tall. We'll both just keep an eye out. I've got boots on. I'll be careful."

The man hesitated again. After Spiking Day, the boy had seen pretty much every indignity that could be inflicted on the human body, so he didn't see what harm there could be in him witnessing another brutal slaying. It bothered him that the boy actually wanted to see it, but there was no telling with him what exactly was going through his head. "Okay, but stay close, and keep watching the ground and checking behind us."