It was a corkscrew.

  He bent over the girl.

  Then he turned toward the dark corner again. (Joanie wanted to run. She was rooted. She felt a trickle of warmth at her crotch. Her bladder was letting go. It did that when she was panicked sometimes. She was near … )

  Rofocale asking the dark corner, “Maybe if we use some—” He cut off, as if someone had interrupted him. But no one had spoken. “Okay.” Resignation. He bent over the girl and she couldn’t see what he did with the corkscrew, but the girl screamed and the scream was like a glass needle that went right into Joanie’s bladder. She felt the piss run down her leg.

  “Don’t!” Joanie heard herself yell. “You’re so … it’s not … Don’t, hey, let her …”

  She broke off as they turned to look at her. The corkscrew in Rofocale’s hand had a red cork of torn flesh stuck onto it, dripping. (A buzzing noise somewhere … )

  Lola looked disgusted. Charlie, big, broad, green-eyed, shaggy-headed, bearded Charlie, took a step toward her. (There was a buzzing like a thousand flies, growing, furious, shivering her eardrum.)

  And then the girl on the bed convulsed, the spasm going through her like a whiplash, starting in her feet, rippling her body till it got to her head, her head snapping up and back and—her left eye splashed out of her head and stuck to the green net, pasted there, and the thing that had pushed it out from inside was fluttering in the net, pushing the net outward, deforming it angrily, like a tennis ball pushing into a tennis net and then not giving up, the ball coming alive and fighting the net … but it was a gray, blood-spattered thing, a blur of wings.

  Joanie was gagging, almost vomiting; Rofocale was yelling about the camera and for Charlie to get the net. “We need to control this one!” Lola shrieked as the camera jumped from her hands, threw itself against the wall. The windows rattled; the buzzing grew. The lamp flew from its table.

  They’d forgotten about Joanie, and when her legs realized that, they turned her, flew with her down the hall. In seconds she was running under the stars, feeling the wind dry tears on her cheeks.

  Running into the trees, into the wilderness. Running blindly into the part of the world where savagery declared itself openly.

  11

  “No, uh-uh,” Aunt June said, looking coldly at Sandra. “No hallucinogenic gas, no drugs in our coffee. We saw what we saw. The Stiggins boy is dead, and dead the way Tetty died. Whatever killed him killed Tetty.”

  They were in the kitchen, sitting around the table. Sandra, Lois, Perry, Aunt June. Outside, the night rustled to itself; small dark chitinous things, like little organic computers, called out to one another, operating on instinct the way computers operate on programming, Perry thought. Crickets, and other insects, singing out.

  Were they louder than they had been the night before? Perry wondered. Was that his imagination? Were the insect things, the things that erupted from skulls, were they in some way in league with the insects outside the house and within the walls of the house? Would Perry wake one night to find a rustling blanket of chitinous black and brown covering him? Did they bore into the brain somehow? Maybe they were insects that deposited eggs into the skin; perhaps the larvae worked their way into the veins, drifted to the brain, and hatched.

  Maybe the Horescu/Rofocale scenario was all wrong. Maybe they weren’t a side effect of the human instinct for self-preservation, a forgotten X-factor of human evolution guided by some demonic spirit. Perhaps, instead, they were simply mutated insects of some kind.

  But they had spoken to him.

  He hadn’t fantasized that. They had spoken to him, and tainted him spiritually in that contact, and he’d had a glimpse into them.

  They were human. Horribly human. All the worst of what was human. Disfigured, demented, perversely redesigned to mock insects. But quintessentially human.

  “I saw something else too,” Perry said. “I couldn’t really think about it till now.”

  “Something when?” Sandra snapped impatiently. She poured gin from a pint bottle into a coffee cup and knocked back enough to make Perry falling down drunk. She didn’t even shudder.

  “In the sheriff’s office?” Lois asked. She sat next to Perry, her hand dry and pliant in his under the table. She wore an old army-surplus shirt, four sizes too big, as a dress, with a black leather belt and black tights.

  Perry shook his head. “Before that. When I saw one of them—when it came at me on the back porch.”

  “Good God, what perfect tripe,” Sandra muttered into her cup. It made her voice sound lugubrious. “Bloody adolescent fantasies. Attention-seeking—”

  “Cunt,” Perry said. A hot wet wax-melting feeling in his head as he let it all go. “You fucking cunt. You are so incredibly full of shit.” The words clacking out of his mouth as if on a ticker tape, following some inner mechanism he couldn’t control. The mechanism of anger releasing. He felt his face burning with it.

  Aunt June was looking at him in what he assumed was shock. But when he looked at her, the expression on her face was simple fear. As he watched, she got it under control; it almost vanished under a veneer of adult reproach.

  Perry realized: She thought for a moment that one of the pilots had gotten to me. That I’d been stung and changed.

  “Why you foulmouthed little wanker,” Sandra said, looking at him with her head cocked to one side. But she seemed more bemused than angry.

  Lois had realized Perry’s outburst of obscenity was just anger. She rolled her eyes at him.

  Perry shrugged. “I’m sorry. I’m just—I saw what I saw.”

  “I yam what I yam,” Sandra said, mimicking his voice. “He’s Popeye the Sailor man.”

  Perry wanted to smash the cup into her face. Grind its fragments in …

  Maybe they did get to me, he thought, catching himself. Not with their stingers; not physically. But they tainted me somehow.

  He took a deep breath and said, “There was something more when they spoke to me. Something in the background. Just a feeling that …” Struggling to find a way to explain, he squeezed Lois’s hand. Her touch had gone damp. “A feeling that something else was watching. Calling the shots.”

  He looked at Lois, and she looked down at the table, avoiding his eyes. “In town there’s a lot of talk,” she began. She hesitated, and then went on. “There’s been a lot of weird things happening around town. Reverend Martindale and those people in that fire, that old man cutting off his wife’s head and disappearing. Rumors about rabies turning people crazy. And some people tried to contact the state cops and the state cops said they’d talked to the sheriff and he’d told them not to come, that everything was under control. And the town council went to the sheriff and he said, ‘Forget it! It’s under control!’ They talked to him in the hospital—and then he disappeared.”

  “So what’s the point of all this gibbering?” Sandra asked, arching her eyebrows as she looked at Lois. “Hm, little girl?”

  “You can throw me out,” Perry said. “But if you talk to her like that again I’ll—”

  “Perry!” Aunt June broke in, a hand raised. “Let me, okay?” She turned to Sandra. “Sandra, shut up, or talk civilly to people. You asked me to stay so we could figure out exactly what happened to your daughter. I’m doing that. I won’t stay without Perry, though.”

  Sandra turned away. She began to quiver, and for a moment Perry thought she was shaking with laughter. But as she turned back, tears coursed from the corners of her eyes, and when she spoke, her voice was broken. “I’m sorry.” Her shoulders shook. Her makeup became watercolors. “I’m sorry. But Tetty … and then you tell me this story …”

  Aunt June picked up her chair and moved it close to Sandra’s. She sat beside her, hugging her. There was something in the earnestness of Aunt June’s hug that said she was getting as much comfort as she was giving.

  Perry got up and led Lois into the next room. All the lights were blazing, including a Coleman electric lantern on the floor.

  They sat on the sofa, clasping both hands, and Lois said, “I’m trying to believe what you guys told me. But it’s like something a cult would believe or—”

  “I know. Don’t blame you. But those things are out there.”

  “You knew about it before but you couldn’t talk about it?”

  “Uh-huh. Aunt June had trouble talking about it at first, but she’s less susceptible, I guess, to whatever it is that holds people back. Maybe because she’s a scientist, more, uh, left-brained. I don’t know. She finally was able to …” He shrugged.

  “Who did you talk to about it? I mean—”

  “I know what you mean. She made some calls. She had trouble getting it out, but she did it, and a lot of people hung up on her. We haven’t got any evidence. The one we killed just sort of melted away into slush. Tomorrow we’re going into Portland, talk to the state cops, health department, whoever. I can’t get her to go tonight. She won’t say why. But I think it’s because”—his mouth was dry—” because she doesn’t think it’d be safe out there. On the road.”

  “Maybe we should try to evacuate the town. Talk to the town council, or—”

  “Uh-uh. We just can’t. How many people have been infected by those things? If they go with the ones who’ve evacuated, they could spread it into the big cities.”

  “Oh Lord. You’re right. Jesus fucking Christ. Perry, I’m scared. I hereby freely admit it.”

  He smiled wearily. “So you believe us.”

  “Well, something weird is spreading through town. Oh, shit, the Indian rights rally is tonight. My uncle’s there. If any of this stuff is true, if some of those people are there, Perry—” She shook her head. “I just picture myself trying to tell him to call it off and explaining why.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Tomorrow we’ll talk him into going with us. It’s only one night. What could happen in one night?”

  Deputy Sheriff Albright had just come back from vacation and found everything changed.

  He’d only been gone two weeks. Two weeks fishing in Canada with Alma. They’d hardly argued at all. Once or twice, at first. But then as the sweet green days relaxed them and the pure cold mountain air brought them together in bed, they hadn’t felt the need to talk, let alone argue. Happy and quiet as clams.

  Still he’d almost been looking forward to coming back to his job. He liked being deputy sheriff in Jasper. Dawson was a grouchy old bigot, sometimes, but he was a good guy, and a good cop. Anyway, that’s what Albright had been thinking, driving home, the day before.

  But now … Now, Dawson and Lancer were acting like a couple of prime assholes. Kind of like a couple of yokel James Bonds, scheming and sneaking around and talking about using explosives.

  Albright thought, Did I hear him right? Is he really talking about blowing the phone lines?

  They were in Dawson’s cruiser, all three of them, Albright riding shotgun, Lancer prattling in the back, driving down Salt Springs Road, almost in sight of the lake. It was dark out, and it was a gravel fire road; they were the only car in sight, a little moving island of sleek metal design and electric light in the rolling landscape of trees and clumps of thorn-bound rock. Sometimes the land flattened enough he could make out the horizon as they swept by; trees etched jet black against an indigo sky.

  The car was moving at almost sixty, fast for a road like this; it fishtailed slightly when Dawson took a curve. Nervously, Albright tightened his seat belt. It was a little loose. That was one good thing anyway. He’d lost some of that paunch, on the trip.

  Albright was a broad-shouldered man, six-one and two hundred pounds but used to feeling trim, athletic. Former high school quarterback, former Army Ranger. Still kept himself clean shaven and he’d hept his blond crewcut, though it was twelve years since that eight-year stint in the army.

  Dawson wasn’t wearing his seat belt, Albright noticed. Not usual for him.

  “What we do here is,” Dawson was saying, his eyes fixed on the road, “we find that seventy-eight line. We set a charge under those poles.”

  Albright turned to stare at the sheriff. It was dark in the car; the blunt lines of the sheriff’s profile were picked out by the sickly green light of the dashboard. “You’re serious,” Albright said. “For a while I figured you guys were putting me on. Maybe you are.” He turned in his seat to look at Lancer. Wondering again why Lancer was here anyway. He’d been his replacement while he was out of town, but he was supposed to be laid off now. Was Dawson going to replace him with Lancer? It seemed hard to believe. Lancer had always annoyed Dawson. He as just a glorified security guard.

  “No joke,” Lancer said, chuckling.

  “Then what’re you laughing for?” Albright asked.

  “Why should we be jokin’?” Dawson asked suddenly.

  He hadn’t taken his eyes off the road for a second, which was good, because he was driving too damn fast for Albright’s liking. That was unusual for Dawson too. Normally Dawson would let a perpetrator get away rather than take wild chances on driving.

  They screeched around a curve, and Dawson went on: “It’s very simple. The fucking red niggers are having their fucking war dance tonight. We’re going to see it doesn’t happen again. But we got to see to it there’s no interference from the other kind of red element, if you know what I mean.”

  Lancer snickered.

  “Red bastards crawling like cockroaches over the whole fucking state,” Lancer said. Echoing somehing Dawson had said earlier.

  “That’ll take out the phones for all of Jasper,” Albright pointed out. Thinking, More important, it’ll get us all busted and tossed in the state pen. But for reasons he couldn’t put his finger on, he was scared to say it aloud.

  “Will it do that?” Dawson said, making a gag of pretending he hadn’t known. “No shit?”

  Albright looked at Dawson and thought, The man’s had a stroke or something. On drugs. Something. “I still think you fellas are kidding me ’cause you know how I feel about that stuff.” That stuff meaning racism.

  “You’re what they call the Aryan type,” Lancer pointed out. “Time you came home to your people.”

  “That’s a moving speech, Lancer,” Albright said sarcastically. “You should go into politics. You can run on the Klan ticket.” Lancer was rumored to be a Klansman.

  “Politics, that’s what we’re doin’,” Dawson said. “You know I always wanted to do something about the red niggers throwin’ their weight around. Fucking aborigines. Drunks. Rapists.”

  “Only one of them raped a girl—how many white men raped—” Albright began.

  Dawson steamrolled on. “Rapist drunk whinin’ red niggers. But every time I wanted to do something, Ol’ Marv Nigger Lover and his liberal pals put the pressure on the town council.” He paused, grunting as the car jumped in a rut, giving them all a brutal rattling. “Organizing the Indian vote. You think they’re going to reelect ol’ Sheriff Dawson, all them drunk Indians? This fucking rally is to see to it I don’t get re-elected, that’s what it’s about. See to it the radicals take over.”

  “The rally, what I heard, is about land rights. They don’t want to be moved to another reservation or something,” Albright objected.

  “It’s me they’re after,” Sheriff Dawson said. “But we’ll see who gets who first.”

  Albright didn’t say anything for a while. He sat there, feeling funny, and after a while he realized it was something he hadn’t felt since the Gulf War. It was bone-deep scared.

  Her name was Betty Prakesh. And lately she’d been waking up scared.

  Tonight she sat bolt upright on the couch, her blouse stuck to her back with perspiration, her hands cold, her scalp contracting, skin crawling, and what made it worse was the way Hassan was looking at her. “That what happens,” he said, his Iranian accent rolling like syrup through the syllables, “when you sleep in the middle of the day, Betty.” He said her name like Bitty. “You have bad dreams. That what happens.”

  He was sitting there in his La-Z-Boy recliner, the Persian slippers his mother had sent him from Tehran on his feet, his eyes large and dark as the petroleum seepage at the LaBrea Tar Pits. She always thought of that because they’d met in the park by the tar pits, in Los Angeles, both of them out on their lunch hour. She’d stood by the railing, looking at the statue of the mammoth half sunk in the tar pits—the mammoth straining upward against the sucking swamp, the glue of the tar, perpetually desperate. It was an ugly sight, and the tar pits were ugly, but it had matched her mood that day. She was thinking, the mammoth’s weight is pulling it down. And me, my weight is dragging me under too.

  Eight diets in eight months, every one a failure.

  And then Hassan had leaned up against the rail next to her and said, “It stinks, this water, eh?” Not exactly a romantic first line. But five minutes later he’d asked her to have a drink after work. Her mother hadn’t liked him, her friends hadn’t liked him, and he was a lapsed Muslim, a foreigner with a thick accent and a smell of funny spiced foods and gallons of cheap after-shave on him. But he had dark good looks, and he petted her as if she was a cat, and she was afraid of dying without a husband, so …

  “I didn’t sleep during the day,” she pointed out, now. “It wasn’t day, it was evening and I took a little nap. I was tired from being on my feet all day. Waitress work wears you out.”

  “You are have a bad dream, eh?” He was still looking at her like that. Hardly even blinking.

  She swallowed. The bad taste of the dream was still in her mouth. Blood in her mouth. She must have bitten her tongue. She did that when she got scared. She felt cold, remembering the dream.

  “You don’t like being waitress, okay. Seven-Eleven, that’s not so easy either.” Restrained anger in his tone.

  What was he mad about?

  She didn’t think, anyway, that operating the 7-Eleven was as hard as waitressing. The 7-Eleven was why they’d moved to Jasper, so he could quit his cashier job and go into partnership with his uncle Beyrooz on the 7-Eleven franchise outside the tract housing spread by the lake. But there was no explaining to Hassan that her life might be as hard as his. She was a woman. Persians regarded women as second-class citizens. She’d learned that only a few hours after they were married. And just the day before Uncle Beyrooz had come over for dinner and they’d spent the whole time talking in Farsi, leaving her out completely, rude as you can be.