The Town

1

The wind began blowing, sand scraping loudly against the windows and the sides of the house. Visibility was worse than in fog, and through the small attic window Gregory could see only blackness: no moon, no stars, no lights.

He thought to himself, It’s time.

He stood up slowly. He’d been sitting here for hours, in the same position, revolver loaded, waiting, and the muscles in his legs were sore. His father had stopped talking to him some time ago, but he’d stopped listening long before that. He didn’t really need his father to tell him what needed to be done.

He knew.

Oh, he definitely knew.

Gregory opened the trapdoor, carefully lowered the ladder, and climbed out of the attic as quietly as possible. The hallway was dark, but he didn’t need light to see. Something had happened to him after all those hours in the attic. His eyes had not merely adjusted to the dark, his vision had been enhanced. It was like a cat’s, and though the world was in black and white, it was clear, clearer than it had ever been before. He saw the empty corridor before him, saw the metal ladder that someone had brought in from outside and that for some reason had been laid along the side wall.

He started walking.

He understood how Bill Megan had felt, why he had had to do what he did. It was the only possible response, the only way to make sure that mistakes were paid for and that they would not happen again. It was just, it was justice, and there was something both invigorating and fulfilling about knowing that he was about to put things right.

The gun felt good in his grip, like a part of him. He walked slowly, silently, careful not to put too much of his weight on the creaky boards. Outside, the wind increased in volume, the susurrous sand growing in intensity. It sounded to him like music.

Sasha’s door was the first one he came to, and he pushed it open, gun extended. He walked into his daughter’s room. She’d pulled her blanket up, bunching it around her midsection, and the bottom of her body was exposed to the open air. She was lying on her side, and her legs were scissored so that he could see her crotch. Her panties were pulled tight, and he saw the slight bulge of her pubic mound, the crease of her vulva. There was what looked like dried blood on the material, but he ignored that, saw only the outline beneath the stained underpants.

She stirred in her sleep, her legs spreading wider, and he understood what was going on here.

The slut wanted him to fuck her.

The anger began building within him, the rage he’d been conserving all day blossoming into a white-hot, righteous wrath. Here she was, beaten and bruised, and all she could think about was getting that little hole filled up again as quickly as possible. She was just like her mother, hungry for dick, any dick, wanting only to be filled up with man meat, and he was sickened thinking that she wanted to have intercourse with him, her own father.

The beating she’d received from whatever guy had banged her had obviously not been enough to teach her a lesson, and now it was up to him to point out the error of her ways, to make sure she never did anything like this again.

He walked over. She was only pretending to be asleep, and he kicked the bed hard, forcing her to give up the ruse. She sat up, acting as though she was startled, her eyes opening wide with what could have been terror but was obviously lust.

She saw the gun in his hand, looked into his eyes, knew what he intended to do.

“No!” Sasha screamed.

He shot her in the crotch, giggled as a wash of blood spread over her nightgown. “You’re not going to be able to put anything else in there, bitch.”

She was thrashing around, making a funny gurgling sound, and he could not help laughing. The blood was everywhere, and an intoxicating charge surged through him as he looked at what he’d done. He thought of the Molokans’ wimpy little prohibitions against violence, their stupid outmoded adherence to the letter of the Bible, and he knew he was more alive in this moment than they would ever be.

Why hadn’t he done this before?

Sasha was still jerking spasmodically, arms outstretched, back arched, and he lifted the revolver, pointed it at her midsection and fired again.

More spasms, more blood. Then she finally stopped moving, and he smiled to himself as he opened the door, walked out into the hall.

“Next,” he said.

2

Adam heard everything through the walls between their rooms, and even as the agonizing emptiness of loss ripped through his guts, even as that was replaced by terror and fear, he was thinking, moving, and he looked quickly around his bedroom for, first, someplace to hide, and, second, a weapon.

There was no place to hide, and if he jumped out the window from this high up he’d probably break his leg and be caught, so he concentrated on finding something to fight with, but for a brief, panicked second it looked as though he was going to be screwed. There was nothing here he could use.

Then he remembered, and he grabbed the flashlight from underneath his bed. It was a big one, an old one made out of metal, and he and Roberto had often made contingency plans to use it as a weapon should anyone attempt to break into their tent while they were camping in the backyard. It was no match for a gun, but he had no choice. It would have to do.

He ran over to the door, stood next to it, flashlight held high. He hadn’t even known that his dad had a gun, and the revelation shocked him to the core. Even after all that had happened, even after they’d tried to trap his dad in the attic, he hadn’t really believed that his father would snap like this, would go this far. He might get angry, yeah. Might threaten them and throw things around. But murder them? Kill his own children? That he never would have believed.

But he’d heard it.

He knew it was true.

And he knew he was next.

His hands were sweaty, his heart pounding. It was hard to breathe, but though the wind outside seemed deafening, he did not allow himself to suck in the air he needed. He was afraid it would be too loud, his dad would hear. He rationed his air, forcing himself to keep his mouth closed, to breathe through his nose and take short, shallow breaths.

In the hall, his father’s footsteps drew closer.

The flashlight slipped out of his hands.

It fell to the floor, banging loudly against the hardwood, the clattering noise of its landing distinct even above the sound of the sandstorm. He crouched down, scrambled to pick it up.

He heard his father’s careful footstep on the hall floor.

“Son?”

He was so scared that he wanted to cry, felt like he was going to wet his pants, but he remained in place against the wall, next to the door, the hard plastic nub of the light switch digging into his back. He would only get one chance, he knew, one shot—if that—and he’d better make it good. Most likely, he would be killed instantly. His father would probably be expecting something: he’d heard the flashlight fall, and he would no doubt come in like a cop, swinging his gun around in a semicircle, ready to shoot at the slightest sign of movement.

Adam held his breath.

His father walked through the door.

He swung hard, hitting his dad in the head. He swung with all his might, with a ferocity he had never been able to manage playing baseball during PE, and the blow connected, the shock wave passing through the metal into his hand and almost causing him to drop the flashlight.

His father fell to the floor.

“Thank God,” his mother cried. “Thank God!”

He picked up the flashlight, turned it on, shone it toward her. She stood in the hallway, knife raised, both arms shaking, her knees practically buckling. She’d obviously heard the shots from downstairs and had come up here to save him, and though she hadn’t had to attack his father, the fact that she was willing to do so filled Adam with gratitude, relief, and a childish sort of happiness. It was a brave, selfless love that had brought her up here, into the mouth of danger, and at that moment he felt closer to her than he ever had before.

His father was on the ground, bleeding, lying perfectly still, and Adam rushed over his unmoving body to give his mother a quick, hard hug. She squeezed back, but she was already moving away, bending down, checking to see if his dad was… what? Unconscious?

Dead?

He’d automatically assumed that he’d just knocked his father out. But what if he was dead? What if he’d killed him?

The gun had fallen out of his father’s hand, and his mother picked it up gingerly. In movies, people always knocked out the bad guy, then forgot to pick up the gun, leading to another inevitable showdown, but his mom was no dummy, and there was no way that was going to happen here.

She stood up, and he still didn’t know if his dad was alive or dead, but Adam assumed he was alive because his mother said, “We’d better get out of here.”

The flashlight in his hand was bloody, but it was still working, and he wiped the bloody end on his jeans and waited while his mom quickly ran to Sasha’s room, went inside, then hurried back, her face white, blanched. She bent down again, dug through his dad’s pockets, looking for something, and finally withdrew a key ring. She stood, grabbed his hand. “Let’s go!”

They practically flew down the stairs, and he tried to concentrate on the task immediately at hand—escape—but his mind kept going back to Sasha.

There were tears streaming out of his eyes, down his cheeks, but he was not really crying, and he was able to speak clearly. “Where’s Teo? Where’s Babunya?”

“Teo’s in her room.”

Teo was in her room, crying, but she’d been smart enough to lock the door, and she did not immediately open it. Even when they pounded and yelled for her to open up, she did not do so right away. It was only after Adam said, “He’s just knocked out! We have to get out of here before he wakes up!” that she finally unlocked her door and came out.

Adam grabbed his sister by the arm and the three of them rushed out of the house into the sandstorm. Dirt and grit sprayed into his face, needling his skin, little jabs of pain like pinpricks, causing him to turn away, squinting. The wind was tremendous, cold and powerful, strong enough to practically blow him off his feet, and he held tight to Teo’s hand.

The van was parked in the drive, in front of the carport, but as he started toward it, his mom pulled him away, in the opposite direction.

Where were they going?

“The banya!” his mother yelled over the wind, as if reading his mind. “Babunya’s there!”

He pulled ahead of her, in the lead, running down the path toward the bathhouse, dragging Teo with him, his feet moving from memory. The last thing he wanted to do right now was go out to the banya, but Babunya was probably out there praying or something, and they couldn’t just leave her. He thought fast. If they got her, brought her back, they could probably be in the van and gone before his father came to.

They were like stupid movie people, he realized. They should not only have taken his father’s gun, they should have tied him up before they left so he wouldn’t be able to come after them when he did regain consciousness.

But Adam didn’t know where ropes were or even if they had any, and he thought that maybe they had done the right thing after all. It might have wasted too much time had they stopped to figure out how to restrain him.

Time, he suspected, was the one thing they didn’t have.

They reached the boulders, ran past them. He could not see the banya, but he knew it was ahead and he led them straight to it, stopping in front of the open doorway, and shining his flashlight inside.

Babunya was in there.

She was standing in the center of the bathhouse with a whole bunch of old Molokans who looked like they were dressed for church. It was creepy to see them all inside the bathhouse, dressed in white, in the dark, while outside the wind and sand blew wildly, but… but somehow the banya didn’t seem quite as spooky as it had before. It was as if whatever had been in here, whatever had possessed this place, had fled, leaving behind only the eerieness of an ordinary abandoned building. Behind them, he noticed, the shadow on the wall had disappeared.

He felt a small shove on his right side, and then Teo was pushing past him, running inside, throwing her arms around her grandmother.

“He killed Sasha!” Teo cried. “And he tried to kill Adam!”

His mother’s hand was on his shoulder, and then all of them were moving into the banya.

“It’s Dad,” he explained. “I hit him in the head with this flashlight”—he held it up—“but I think it only knocked him out.” He cast a quick look out the door. “He’s after all of us. He’s crazy.”

Babunya nodded. “I know.”

They started talking in Russian, the Molokans, and he had no idea what they were saying, but the tone was easy enough to read: they were scared. He heard high, fast syllables filled with far too many consonants. He looked over at his mom and she was listening intently, but he had the feeling that even she was having a difficult time keeping up.

Teo glanced around, frowning. “What happened?” she asked. “Is the banya dead?”

She’d been here too, Adam realized, and the thought of that made his blood run cold.

Babunya smiled at her, hugged her. “Yes,” she said in English. “We kill it.” She walked over to his mom and said something to her in Russian.

His mother nodded.

“Come on,” Babunya said. “Work here done. We have to go.” She moved forward, gently took the gun from his mother’s hand. “Others are waiting.”

Like his mom, Babunya held the weapon as though it was a hand grenade about to go off. He realized that the gun was what his father had used to kill Sasha. It was what had murdered his sister.

Murdered his sister.

It still didn’t seem real to him. In some ways it seemed too real—the horrific specifics of it were imprinted on his mind and would be there forever—but at the same time, the knowledge was too large to grasp any way but intellectually. He knew Sasha was dead, but he hadn’t really felt it yet, not the full force of it, and he was afraid of what would happen when he did.

“Oh, shit!” his mother said. “Oh, shit!” She started beating her rear end, hitting her pockets in the front. She looked at the ground around her, turning in a circle, then glanced up at Babunya. “The keys! I lost the keys!”

Adam’s heart lurched in his chest. “The van keys?”

“Oh, shit!”

“There are cars,” Babunya said, nodding toward the other Molokans. “We go with them.”

His mom sounded as though she was about to cry. “But—”

Babunya put a hand on her shoulder. “We go with them.”

3

When Gregory came to, his face was stuck to the floor. His head had stopped bleeding, but the congealed pool of blood had cemented his hair and cheek and left temple to the hardwood of the upstairs hallway, and it felt like his face was being ripped away as he pulled himself free and stood up.

He did not scream, though. He did not cry out from the pain.

He welcomed it.

He thought of his family, smiled to himself. They were stupid. They should have killed him when they had the chance. Now they would have to pay for that mistake. And from somewhere down the hall he heard the voice of his father, agreeing with him. “Kill them all,” his father said. “They don’t deserve to live.”

No, they didn’t, Gregory agreed. He put a hand up to the side of his face, it came back wet and red. His wound had been newly reopened, and it hurt like a motherfucker. Adam would pay for that. He’d been planning to dispatch the boy like he had his sister—quickly—but his plans had changed. Now the little shit was going to die a slow, horrible, painful death.

He hobbled down the hallway, using his hand to guide himself along the wall because of his closed eye and the subsequent loss of depth perception.

He used the handrail on his way down the stairs.

“Kill them all,” his father whispered again.

He did not even bother to answer. His father had become irrelevant, and Gregory was acting now on his own reasons, for his own purposes.

The house was silent and the sound of the wind and sand outside was maddening. His head was aching, a sharp pain that seemed to run down the entire left side of his body, but the pain was good and he was grateful for it. It spurred him on, enabled him to remain focused on what he had to do.

Hunt down his family and kill them.

Bill Megan had been lucky. He’d been able to take out his family easily, with no difficulties or complications. Gregory wondered if he’d had a silencer on his gun. Maybe that had been the problem, not having a silencer, and he cursed his Molokan upbringing for not allowing him to be more familiar with firearms.

His mother would pay for that.

He staggered through the living room, reached the front door, pulled it open. The wind and sand stung his face, blowing into his wound and amplifying the agony tenfold. He looked down, steeling himself against the onslaught—

And something caught his eyes.

A key ring.

He bent down. Smiled. The stupid bitch had tried to steal his keys, but she’d dropped them on the porch, right on the welcome mat, like a present for him. He laughed, the laughter spiraling upward, out of control, until he finally forced himself to cut it off.

He walked through the stinging sand out to the van, got in.

He could see out of only one eye, but there was not much to be seen in the sandstorm anyway, and he drove by instinct, drove from memory, heading up the drive, down the road, through the dirty black night toward the center of town.

He drove directly to the gun store, and as he’d hoped, its doors were wide open. The place had obviously been looted, but there were still plenty of weapons available, and he chose a revolver exactly like the one he’d had. He was familiar with it, knew how it worked, and he wouldn’t have to waste any time adjusting to a new weapon. He walked behind the counter, grabbed a box of ammunition from the cupboard beneath the display case, loaded the gun, and put the rest of the ammo in his pockets.

Outside, through the blowing dust, he saw what looked like Paul’s car parked in front of the café, and he smiled. He should’ve known that little pussy would be living in there now. He was probably crying himself to sleep. Or trying to hump the chalk outline the pigs had drawn around Deanna’s dead body.

Or both.

He was glad Deanna was dead. He’d never liked that bitch, and it served her right that she’d met her end in her husband’s café. He wondered what her last thoughts had been. He hoped they were desperate and despairing.

He walked against the wind, keeping his head down, until he reached the café. The door was closed and locked, but he raised his revolver and held it against the door handle, pulling the trigger.

There was a loud report that was swallowed instantly by the wind, and the door swung open, its lock and handle shattered.

His night vision was still intact, and, out of the sand, he could see clearly, though there were no lights on in the café and no illumination filtered in from outside. He didn’t see any sign of Paul, but the café owner was a lazy fuck, and Gregory knew there was no way in hell that Paul would walk home and leave his car. Especially not in this kind of weather.

Revolver extended, he walked along the side of the counter to the short hallway that led to Paul’s office. He kicked open the office door.

Paul looked up groggily, squinting into the darkness. “Who’s there?”

“Hello, Paul.”

“Gregory?”

“Who else?” He remembered what it had been like to see his friend’s hand shoved all the way down his wife’s open pants, fingers working on her, and he was filled afresh with rage and hate. “Didn’t expect to see me here again, did you?”

“N-no.” Paul could obviously tell that something was not right, and Gregory smiled at the wary expression on his face, enjoying the slight hesitation in his voice.

He thought of the last time they’d fought, the words that had been said. He advanced slowly. “ ‘Milk drinker’?” he said softly. “ ‘Faggot’?”

His head hurt like a motherfucker, but the pain cleared his brain, sharpened his thoughts, and he was able to remember in vivid detail the particulars of the fight, the unfair way he had been kept from complete and total victory. Paul was going to get what was coming to him this time. There was no Wynona to save his ass now, no teenage bim who was going to arrive at the last minute and rescue him.

Paul could still not see him, but the café owner stood, facing the direction of his voice. He walked out from behind the desk, and it was obvious that not only had he been sleeping—he was drunk.

Good.

“You called me a homo,” he told Paul.

“Did I?”

“You’re the homo.”

Paul grinned into the darkness. “Then why’d your wife want to fuck me?”

Gregory shot him in the knee.

Paul went down screaming, a bloody spray of bone and cartilage flying out every which way, splattering against the wall and the desk, soaking the carpet. Gregory was surprised the shot had been so true. He could see perfectly in the pitch-black room, but it was out of only one eye and his depth perception was completely gone.

God must be looking out for him.

No, he thought soberly, not God.

Paul was screaming nonstop, a piercing, agonizing cry that sounded more animal than human. It was an irritating sound, an excruciatingly grating sound, and he stared at the writhing figure on the floor, willing it to stop.

He realized dimly that he and Paul had once been friends, but that seemed so long ago and so far back that it was almost as though it had been in another life, in another world, in an alternate universe.

The screaming did not abate—got worse, if anything—and Gregory took a step forward, reached down, placed the barrel of the gun next to Paul’s Adam’s apple and blew a hole in his throat.

Blood was gushing, spurting everywhere now, and he knew instantly that he’d made a mistake. Paul was thrashing around and was no longer screaming—he no longer had a voice box, no longer had a throat—but he was dying, and Gregory had wanted him to suffer longer, had planned to draw out his death and torture him before finally allowing him to give up the ghost.

He stared down at his dying ex-friend. In a suddenly lucid moment, it occurred to Gregory that something was wrong. He was not the person he used to be, not the person he should be. He knew it, and he wanted it to be different, but his thought processes seemed to be overridden by an outside imperative, a will greater than his own, and the insight vanished as quickly as it had arrived.

Paul died.

And that made him feel good.

He walked back through the café and out onto the street, bracing himself against the coldness of the air and the strength of the sand. He thought for a moment, then started down the cracked sidewalk toward the bar, the bar where his father had been humiliated and where for the past few months that smug prick of a bartender had made it clear that he was doing him a big favor just by allowing him to drink here.

MOLOKAN MURDERERS

Whoever had spray-painted that graffiti gem had been more right than he’d known.

And the bartender was about to find that out for himself.

Gregory clutched the revolver tightly, holding it out in front of him. He didn’t know what time it was, but it couldn’t have been that late because through the sand and darkness he could see the glowing neon of a battery-powered beer sign, colors that he knew to be red and blue but that appeared to him as shades of gray.

The Miner’s Tavern was still open.

He walked inside. Candles were lit on the tables and on the bar, providing the only illumination save for the beer sign. The place was empty except for the bartender, and perhaps that was just as well. He thought of his father, humiliated here, degraded, cowed into being less than a man, and without stopping to confront the bartender or explain what he was doing, Gregory started shooting.

He stopped only when the hammer clicked on an empty magazine, but the bartender was already long dead.

He popped out the empty round, popped in another, then walked out of the bar.

Playtime was over.

It was time to get back to business.

It was time to kill his family.

4

The Molokans’ cars had been parked on the road that ran by the burned house on the other side of the banya. It was closer and quicker this way, and they didn’t have to go anywhere near their own home and risk seeing his father again. Adam was thankful for that.

He rode in a big car with his mom, Teo, and two Molokan men he didn’t know, moving slowly through the sandstorm. Babunya was traveling in one of the other two cars, and all three vehicles pulled up in front of the church together.

The wind was still blowing crazily, but the downtown buildings kept the worst of the dust out, and at least they could see here. The cars pulled into the small parking lot, and they all got out at once.

At the front of the church were the rest of the Molokans, twenty or thirty of them, old men and old women in white Russian clothes.

But it was the people with them who were the surprise.

Indians.

Standing next to the Molokans were several men from the reservation, dressed in what looked like the traditional clothing of their tribe. Dan and his father, the chief, were in the front, and Dan smiled at him, waved. Adam felt hope flare within him. Despite the reassurance he’d gotten from Babunya and her friends, despite the fact that they seemed to know what was happening and what to do about it, the Molokans seemed to him too old to be effective in any kind of fight. He did not think they would be able to stand up against the sort of power and force that could summon ghosts and kill people and haunt houses and possess his father.

But the stoic men of the Indian tribe seemed healthy and fit and reliably steady. He believed in them, he trusted them, and he knew from the clear, hard expressions on their faces that they could handle whatever trouble was thrown their way. They were clutching long spears painted with bands of alternating red and black and blue, fringed at the top with loops of leather cord and white feathers, and the fact that they carried weapons rather than Bibles made him feel a little more confident as well.

Although…

He squinted, looking closer.

They were not spears after all, he saw. They might not even be weapons. They were… painted sticks.

Dan said something to his father, started toward Adam. Adam looked up at his mom, wondering if it was all right for him to talk to his friend again, but he could tell by the expression on her face that their little rock-throwing incident and subsequent arrest was the last thing on her mind, and he hurried across the dirt to meet his pal.

Dan was the only Indian dressed in regular street clothes, and he and his family were the only Molokans similarly attired. Dan grinned at him as he approached. “Came through for you, didn’t I?”

Adam nodded. “Thanks, dude.” There was so much he wanted to say, so much he needed to explain, that he didn’t know where to start. The next words out of his mouth were totally off the subject.

“You seen Scott?”

Dan shook his head. “I haven’t been allowed to see either of you.”

“Until now.”

The other boy smiled wryly. “I guess they finally figured out that it wasn’t really our fault.”

“It wasn’t?”

Dan laughed. “Well, we’ll let ’em think it wasn’t.” “So what’s the plan? Do you guys… know what’s going on here?”

“Yes.”

“My dad went crazy and killed my sister Sasha. He tried to kill us, but I knocked him out with this flashlight, and then we ran over to the banya, where my grandma and those other Molokans did some sort of exorcism to force out the demons or ghosts or whatever was living in there.” The words tumbled out of him in a rush, and he was grateful to see Dan nodding at everything he said, not surprised, just accepting it.

“I told you,” Dan said, “weird things have always happened here. Like Scott said, it’s a haunted place.”

“But this is different.”

“Yeah.”

“Uninvited guests.”

His friend nodded. “Na-ta-whay.”

“What do you guys think we need to do?”

Dan looked at him evenly. “Find it. Kill it.”

“It?”

“There’s a leader, a ringleader. Kill it and the others will scatter.”

Dan seemed so much more knowledgeable than he himself was, so much more mature than he felt. He wondered if that was an Indian thing or if that was just how Dan was.

The adults were talking now, and Adam listened in.

“They try get Vasili,” an old fat woman said in English even more halting than Babunya’s. “They no come back.”

“Maybe it’s only the sandstorm,” he heard his mother say. “Maybe they just got lost or didn’t want to chance the roads at night in this wind.”

The woman said something in Russian.

His mother turned toward Dan’s dad. “What do you think it is?”

The chief said basically the same thing his son had, about there being a host of evil spirits, about killing the leader, and he used some long, unpronounceable word to describe the creature.

His mother recited the name back to him perfectly, and for the first time, the chief allowed himself a small smile. “Very good.”

“We call him Jedushka Di Muvedushka,” Babunya said.

“So you know what this is, too?”

“Of course.”

“It is a mischievous spirit. It likes to play.”

“Play?” his mother repeated.

Dan’s father nodded grimly. “We are nothing to it. We are toys, meant to be used and discarded. It orders around the other spirits, makes them do its bidding, murders us, hunts us down. All for its entertainment.” He leaned forward. “That’s why it must be killed,” he said fiercely. “I know Molokans are pacifists—”

“Cannot kill what not alive,” Babunya said.

“We can kill it.”

Adam looked from one to the other, following the conversation. Creatures who used people as toys, for entertainment? It sounded like Greek mythology, like all of the gods and creatures they’d learned about in English class who had alleviated their boredom by playing chess with human lives.

Once again, he thought that maybe the legends of all cultures had some common root, and the idea made him shiver.

Because that root was right here in McGuane, the grain of truth at the core of it all located at the overlapping intersection of Russian and Indian myths.

He was struck by the fact that more than half of the Molokans were women but that there were no women among the Indians. It was a strange observation to be making at this time, and though it wasn’t a contest, he thought that his people were more progressive, more modern than Dan’s tribe, and for the first time he felt genuinely proud to be Russian, to be Molokan.

His mother looked from Babunya to the chief to the other Indians to the other Molokans. “So what do we do now?”

The chief looked at her, looked past her at the others. “We have to go back to your house.” His voice lowered. “And kill it.”

5

There were shapes in the sand, outlines. Small, light figures that cavorted behind a curtain of tan; larger, darker, unrecognizable creatures that slouched through the windblown dirt, barely seen. It was as if the dust-storm was a cover, a cover for… for what?

An army of monsters that was invading McGuane.

Scott turned away from the window. That was the thought that came to him, and while he knew it sounded crazy, he believed it. As he’d told Adam, McGuane was a haunted place, and it seemed to be getting worse by the minute.

His parents were fighting again, screaming at each other in the bedroom. Earlier, he’d taken advantage of the situation and tried to call Adam from the phone in his dad’s den, but the line had been busy. He’d tried again just now, but a recorded voice said that line had been disconnected.

He didn’t like that.

And he liked the shapes in the sandstorm even less.

For some reason they reminded him of the bathhouse, of the pictures he’d taken.

Like most of the people in town, his parents were blaming the Molokans for bringing this curse upon McGuane, and he was glad they hadn’t seen the shapes in the sand. They stupidly thought it was Adam’s influence that had made him throw rocks at cars on the highway and had led to his arrest—that was one of the things he’d wanted to talk to Adam about—and their anger had grown from there. Part of his parents’ current fight had been about his dad going off to “smoke some Russians.” Luckily his mom had refused to let him go, yelling at him, telling him he could pretend all he wanted outside these walls with his friends, but in here, where it counted, in the bedroom, she knew he was not a man.

The argument had branched out from that starting point to cover the usual issues and grievances, and for once he was glad his parents were fighting. It kept them occupied.

Ordinarily, he hit the road when his parents got into it like this, going over to someone else’s house, hanging out at French’s. But tonight he stayed home. Their screaming was the worst he’d ever heard, but he knew it was preferable to what was happening outside, and as he looked through the window at the obscured world out there, he thought that no matter how tense things got in here, right now there was no place else in town he’d rather be.

The cells were full. The sheriff tried once again to radio the Rio Verde sheriff’s station to ask if they had any open cells where prisoners could be transferred, but, as before, he was unable to get through.

He tried Willcox, tried Safford, tried Benson.

No answer.

Roland slammed down the mike on the radio set, frustrated. Tish, holding down the front desk by herself, looked over at him, worried, and he forced himself to smile reassuringly at her.

“Still no answer?”

He shook his head. “I’ll try again in a few minutes.” He started to walk back to his office but noticed something strange when he passed the hallway leading to the holding area.

Silence.

He frowned, listening. The prisoners were awfully quiet all of a sudden, and that didn’t sit well with him. Not with things going the way they were. He made a detour down the hall, knocked on the metal door that led to the holding area. “Tom!” he called.

He expected the door to be opened immediately, but when there was no response, he called his deputy’s name again and quickly pulled out his own keys, a feeling of dread growing within him. “Tom!”

He pulled open the door.

Tom was lying unmoving in the middle of the corridor that ran between the two rows of cells. In the cells themselves, the prisoners were dead. All of them. Pressed against the bars, faces blue-black from lack of oxygen, eyes bulging from their sockets in contrasting white.

A cold fear gripped Roland’s heart and he turned around, wanting to get out of here as quickly as possible, not even bothering to check on Tom’s condition to make sure he was dead.

The metal door slammed shut in his face.

Faron Kent pulled to a stop in front of the temple. He’d been born and raised Mormon, had left the church only when he’d married Claire, but he still considered Mormons his people, and when he saw all of the cars and trucks parked in front of the temple, he knew where he had to go.

He’d just come into town, and he’d almost pulled off to the side of the road to wait out the sandstorm once he’d come through the tunnel and experienced its ferocity. There’d been only a slight wind in the adjoining canyons through which he’d driven, nothing at all on the flat desert plain before. Which mean that this freakishly localized weather could not possibly last the night. It was probably safer to pull onto the shoulder and catch a couple winks than attempt to maneuver these narrow roads with zero visibility.

But…

But he saw shadows in the sandstorm. Figures. Creatures. And he heard things. And he thought it safer to try and navigate the roads than pull off and wait for… what?

As he drove down the sloping highway into town, as the sand and its hidden inhabitants swirled about his car, old buried beliefs from his upbringing suddenly kicked in, and he found himself wondering if this was the end, if these were the last days.

It did not seem that far-fetched, and when he saw all the vehicles parked in front of the dark Mormon temple, he immediately and impulsively pulled in.

Even as he braked, however, the wind was lessening, the sandstorm dying down. There were still no lights on in McGuane, other than what looked like headlights further up the road, but a faint glow of moonlight from above the storm could now be seen filtering onto the scattered buildings.

And the mine.

For that was the only place where he saw movement, the open pit across the highway, and the movement that he saw, that instantly grabbed his attention, scared the living shit out of him.

There were creatures crawling out from the mine, emerging from the pit onto the ground above, creatures of dirt and gravel, monsters made from copper tailings and animated with some hellish spark of life.

The last days.

His first instinct was to run inside the temple for sanctuary, but his experiences during the intervening years proved far stronger than the influence of his upbringing, and he reached for the rack behind him and pulled his shotgun down.

He got out of the pickup, locked and loaded, and strode bravely across the highway. He pointed his shotgun, aimed it at the first sand creature and pulled the trigger.

With a short, high wail, the creature dissolved into dust.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

He targeted the next monster pulling itself up, its mineral fingers still clutching the edge of the pit, and when its head exploded in a shower of dirt, it fell back into the mine.

Behind him, a few of the braver men were walking out onto the steps from inside the temple to see what was going on. The wind had died down enough now that the sound of the shotgun blasts had carried.

“Grab some weapons!” he yelled as loud as he could. “I need some help here!”

There was a second’s hesitation, then two men sprinted down the steps and out to their pickups. A moment later, three others ran out of the temple to help.

He smiled, feeling good, feeling strong, and blew the next monster into a cloud of dust that dissipated in the wind.

6

They were starting toward the cars when Agafia saw Gregory staggering up to the church through the blowing sand.

Even with the flashlights pointed at him, he remained only a silhouette, but she would have recognized her son’s shape anywhere, and she drew in her breath sharply. He was lurching to the left, and it was obvious that there was something seriously wrong. Her first instinct was maternal, and she wanted to run to him and hug him and pray over him and make him feel better. But pragmatism took over instantly, and she ordered the others back into the shot-up and now hairless church, warning them to stay down. Julia shoved the kids through the door, and Adam’s little friend went with them. The older Molokans obeyed as well, but some merely doused their flashlights and moved off to the right or to the left, waiting to see what was going to happen. The Indians, following some plan of their own, broke up and began moving into the dust storm, into the night, attempting, she assumed, to sneak up behind Gregory.

He came closer.

She kept her flashlight trained on his indistinct form.

The sight of him with a gun in his hand was not only shocking but repulsive, and her first thought was that she was glad his father was not alive to see this.

She still had in her own hand the gun she’d taken from Julia—the gun he’d used to kill Sasha

—and though she had no intention of using it, did not even know how to use it, she grasped it as she’d seen in movies and on television and pointed it at Gregory, illogically hoping that it would scare him away.

He shot at her.

Agafia jumped back, almost fell, and did drop the flashlight, though she managed to hold on to the revolver. She chanced a quick look behind her, but did not see anybody dead or injured, and she prayed that he had not hit anyone.

Gregory ran forward as fast as he could.

It was totally unexpected behavior, and in this place and under these circumstances, it appeared to be the move of a madman.

Screaming crazily, shooting at the church, causing everyone to scatter, he ran toward her, past her, up the steps—

And pointed his gun at Julia.

Agafia knew she had to act fast. He was not playing around, not trying to gain leverage or make demands. He wanted only to kill his wife, and Agafia stepped up, shoving her gun hard against the side of his head, the side with all the blood. He winced but did not drop his weapon, did not waiver from his intent.

“Forgive me,” Agafia said softly in Russian, not knowing if it was Gregory to whom she was speaking or God.

She pulled the trigger.

Gregory dropped.

Julia screamed. It was a cry of sheer pain unlike any she had ever heard, and Agafia felt a twin of that pain within herself, a cry that wanted to escape and be let out but that she kept bottled up inside for fear if allowed free rein it would never end.

They were staring at her with horror, all of the other Russians. Aside from Gregory, she was the only Molokan she had ever known who had willingly and intentionally taken a human life, and that sin weighed on her like a mountain on a peasant’s back. Awareness that the life she had taken was also the life she had created, her son’s, made her crime that much more heinous, made Agafia feel empty inside. She almost expected God to strike her dead right here and now, but as the others started moving forward, as the Indians emerged from the storm, she understood that that was not going to happen. She would not be taken, she would not be granted an easy way out. She would have to live with what she’d done, with what she was.

Evil.

She thought of Russiantown.

But she could have done nothing else. It was either her son or her daughter-in-law, and she had chosen. If she’d done nothing, Gregory would have killed her next, and the kids, and then however many others he could have before someone stopped him, so she’d made the decision to do it herself. It was something she would not have been able to carry out had she had time to think about it, but running on instinct, she’d made the split-second decision to kill him.

It would be God who judged her finally, and she was prepared to accept His verdict no matter what it was.

Julia was next to her, next to him, on the ground, touching Gregory’s face, but she was already pulling herself together, obviously attempting to be strong for the children, and Agafia admired that. Julia was tough. She was a survivor and, no matter what, could always be counted on to do what had to be done. Agafia was proud of the choice her son had made.

Her son.

She had no son any more.

She had murdered him.

Again, the scream was within her, threatening to escape, but she pressed it back, would not let it out. She looked down at Gregory’s bloody body, then turned away, looked over at the others watching her, staring at her.

She took Julia’s arm, pulled her up. “It not over,” she said in English. “Indians are right. We go back to house. Finish it.”