He was backed into the freezer, which had gone mostly defrosted since the power loss. In the indirect light from Dawson’s flashlight and the one in Rutherford’s hand, the walk-in freezer’s interior seemed slimy, silvery, slick. Sides of raw, half-frozen meat hung from hooks behind and to either side of Dawson; thawing, the meat dripped red; the gutted, skinned, headless carcasses of horses and cattle and a pig or two: the marbled, striated meat glistened with moisture; beads of pink water trembled where it marked rows of ribs. June could smell the raw meat beginning to decompose.

  Dawson’s face was in shadow. For no sane reason, he wore his sunglasses. Sometimes when he moved, they caught a little light and glinted, shades in shadow, alone. His pistol, emptied of rounds, lay on the floor near his booted feet, a puddle of bloody water around it dripping from the slightly swaying side of beef—or was it horse?—that hung above.

  Hanging on a peg, on the slicked, icy wall to one side, was a steel hook extruding from a wooden handle: a hand-held hook used for gripping meat. Water ran down the curve of its hook and dripped with tick-tock regularity from its sharp point.

  “What you ought to think about,” Dawson was saying, “is that you guys could be wrong about me. Just think about the possibility. Because if you are—”

  “I climbed the tree,” Sunwalker said. “I looked through the broken window. I saw what you were doing to the girl’s body. You can’t tell me someone else left it there. I saw you do it. In that hole in her breast.”

  “Didn’t you ever wanta fuck a titty?” the sheriff asked, chuckling.

  “Let me kill him,” Sunwalker said.

  June said, “Wait.”

  A fist-sized piece of thawing ice broke off the back wall and fell with a crash to the floor. Everyone but Dawson turned to look that way. Dawson moved behind a pendulous hunk of bleeding meat and grabbed at something.

  “He’s got the—” June began.

  Sunwalker was stepping to one side, bringing the shotgun to bear—Dawson leaped out of the shadows with the meat hook in his hand. It came arcing down, singing with its passage through the air as it sliced into Sunwalker’s shirt, ripped down his chest.

  The shotgun going off in that closed place made a painfully loud, deep-voiced smashing sound that rang from the walls as Dawson bent double around the wound and screamed, falling to writhe around the post hole battered straight through him, flinders of bone showing at the gushing exit wound in his back.

  His blood ran to pool with cattle blood, horse blood, ice water.

  Joey said, “Oh God, oh shit.”

  A buzzing …

  June shouted, “Close the goddamn door!”

  Stetson jumped through the doorway and closed it part way from the outside, not enough to lock it. Joey grabbed the interior handle.

  Face taut, Sunwalker pulled the meat hook from where it had caught on his belt. A streak of blood traced the gash on his chest. “How badly are you hurt?” June asked him. “You could get a variety of infections from that hook, you know.”

  “It’s shallow. I’ll get penicillin later. Forget it.” He was staring at Dawson.

  Dawson’s body went rigid, snapped over onto its back. His eye bulged. He convulsed—and the thing unfolded from his brain, shot upward, stuck itself to a red-streaked shoulder of meat that swayed from Dawson’s lunge. It fanned itself and glared at them in the flashlight glow, with its miniature joke of Dawson’s face.

  The background darkness seemed to thicken, June thought. Was it her imagination?

  Sunwalker raised the shotgun. June slapped it down.

  “Uh-uh,” she said. “No way. I’m going to talk to it. Perry said they spoke to him, in that form. They can talk.”

  “Let me kill that thing,” Sunwalker said. “It shouldn’t ever be alive, something like that. Just being there, it insults us.”

  “We shouldn’t be making deals with it, June, for God’s sake,” Rutherford said, staring at the pilot.

  It buzzed. They felt a vibration ripple through the room, and more ice crashed down from the walls. The pilot looked at the door.

  “Forget it,” June told it. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  She felt something unseen slap her cheek, stinging hard. She staggered. Joey yelled and his gun went clattering. Sunwalker was already pumping his shotgun and firing. A hunk of meat exploded from the side of beef the pilot had perched on; the stripped carcass swung violently on its hook, as if in pain, while the Gray Pilot buzzed furiously around the ceiling, tugging at the shotgun.

  Sunwalker fired again; missed. The round sent shotgun pellets ricocheting between floor and ceiling. Rutherford cursed as two of the small pellets caught him in the neck. The pilot buzzed toward the back of the freezer. “No way you’re going to get this gun away from me!” Sunwalker yelled, reloading. “My pockets are full of shells!”

  In the shadows at the back of the freezer, it buzzed once, angrily, but didn’t try to attack them.

  The body on the floor steamed slightly. June moved back from the sticky pool growing around it. Gunsmoke scraped at her lungs, and she coughed. She was almost falling-down exhausted. Rutherford reached out to steady her. She told herself: Calm. Calm. She relaxed, leaning against Rutherford.

  “I’m going back there,” Sunwalker said.

  “I don’t think so,” Rutherford said. “We got it trapped in here. Let’s head out, get some scientists, some health authorities—somebody out here.”

  “No,” June said. “My second idea is better.” She thought about Cornelius, wondered if he’d been lying. Her stomach did a flip-flop as she remembered him, the boy, the distorted, twitching face.

  “It’s not going to cooperate with you, lady,” Bryce said.

  “Just let me talk to it.” She took a step into the freezer and spoke to the pilot: to the shadows.

  “We’re in command here,” she told it. “You can’t get past all of us. We will kill you. You have one chance. Bring the others here. The Lord who set you free will help you bring them. They will be suspicious. But they will come. You understand me?”

  “Yes …” A susurrous voice, almost inaudible, followed by a nearly subsonic buzz she felt in the bones of her skull.

  “Will you bring them?”

  “No.”

  “What do you owe them? If you don’t bring them, we will kill you. If you do bring them, they will outnumber us, attack us. You’ll have a greater chance to escape. And think about this: why should they survive when you don’t?”

  “Truth. Thissss isssss truth.”

  “This is insane” Joey said.

  Bryce’s voice cracked when he said, “Joey’s right.” June thought the boy was near breaking down. He’d seen too much. The man burning to death in front of him, Markowitz with his genitals cut away, the woman hanging from the hook in the other room, her throat cut, her breasts slashed open.

  She put her hand on his arm. “It’s going to be over soon.”

  He shook loose from her. “What’s to keep this thing from tellin’ the others with its mind what we’re doin’ here, huh?” His voice was getting shrill.

  “It knows that if the others surround us, attack us, show that they’re aware of what we had planned, we’ll realize it. And then we’d kill what’s left of Dawson here before they kill us.” She looked toward the back of the freezer, and spoke to Dawson’s pilot. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Yezzzzz.”

  Rutherford said, “You can’t make deals with the fucking devil and come out a winner. I think we ought to kill it now …”

  “No,” the pilot said. “They are coming here now. The Higher are gathering. I have decided to summon them, because I wish to watch them kill you.”

  18

  It was Perry who spotted the Land Rover as they stepped up onto the highway, wondering where to go. “That’s your uncle’s, isn’t it?” he said. He’d never forget seeing Marv and his sons in the vehicle the day he’d met Lois.

  That seemed an age ago. Another life. The world had been redefined since then.

  Lois had the pistol; she held it in her hand like a woman carrying a clutchbag. They walked up behind the Land Rover, looking for Marv and Joey and Bryce. Seeing no one, at first. Looking at the slaughterhouse, Perry’s heart stammered in its beating. A premonition.

  “There’s a light in the slaughterhouse,” Lois said.

  Perry nodded. He’d seen it too. A flicker at the window, like a flashlight beam passing over it.

  They stood by the Rover, looking in, and saw Stetson. He was huddled in the backseat, snoring. Lois said, “It’s Carl.” She reached in through the open window and shook the Indian’s arm.

  He sat up bolt upright, as if startled from a bad dream. He shuddered, and looked at them, blinking. “Whuh? Whusgonon?”

  “You’re crazy to sleep out here tonight, Carl,” Lois said. “Where’s Marv?”

  “Uh …” He passed a hand over his eyes. “In the slaughterhouse.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Lois said, looking toward the building. “I don’t want to have to go in there. I always hated it. And tonight …”

  “No animals in there tonight except in the freezer,” Stetson said, rubbing his eyes vigorously now. “And we took the girl down from the hook. Covered her up.” He lowered his hands and looked at her. “You got a key to this damn thing?”

  “The Rover? No.”

  “Shit.”

  “There a lady with them?” Perry asked. “She’s about—”

  “You’re the kid—Perry. Yeah, she’s in there alive.”

  Lois sighed. “Let’s go.”

  She and Perry turned toward the slaughterhouse, walked down the road. The slaughterhouse loomed up ahead of them. Perry just didn’t want to get any closer. But his feet drew him on. It seemed to him, for a moment, as if he were standing still and the slaughterhouse were moving toward him.

  Just do it, he told himself. Whatever comes, whatever you have to do, just do it. Don’t think, don’t look too hard at the things you see, just do what you have to and get out.

  “Hi!” the old man shouted cheerily, coming around the corner of the building. Perry recognized him as the old man from the museum. He looked like someone’s friendly grandfather, with his suspenders, rolled-up sleeves, smiling eyes. “Hold up there!” He came toward them. “Wanta have a word with ya!”

  He got within ten feet, smiling, making small talk, and reached behind him.

  “Maybe he’s just the caretaker,” Lois said.

  But looking at the old man, Perry knew what he was. He could feel it. He could hear the buzzing, even if Lois couldn’t.

  Perry turned and snatched the .22 from Lois’s hand, turned to the old man, pointed it at his head, and pulled the trigger. The gun barked, leaped in Perry’s hand. The old man’s eyes crossed, as if trying to look at the hole between them, and his legs went rubbery. He fell, facedown.

  “Perry, Jesus!” Lois put her hands over her mouth and took a step back from Perry.

  “Look at his hand. Behind him.”

  There was a big handgun in the waist of the old man’s baggy pants, at the small of his back. His right hand was on the butt of the gun.

  She stared and nodded. “Do you think he’s going to—that one of those things will …”

  “Probably not.” (I shot someone.) “The bullet in the head …” I killed someone. “Probably blew the thing up in there.” (Like it was nothing, I shot him in the head.)

  “Perry, what if you were wrong?”

  He didn’t want to tell her how he knew he wasn’t wrong. That he could feel them. He didn’t want her to know they’d established that much connection with him.

  Why don’t I feel anything? I shot a man! Why don’t I—

  Perry wrenched the thought away. Don’t think about it. Do it. Whatever you have to. He had bent over, pulled back the man’s collar. There was a swelling on the back of his neck. “Yeah. He was stung.”

  “Perry, there’s more of them!” She pointed. There was a crowd coming across the grass from the road. Maybe forty-five people. Thirty, maybe forty more coming from the opposite side. Men, women, children. Carrying deer rifles, axes, knives, hammers. They came about the same time, from the same two directions, but they didn’t look like a single-minded group. The way they moved, glanced at one another; they were each out for themselves.

  In the background, the buzzing. Not the kind you could hear. But you could feel it. And glimpsed in the air, the pilots, buzzing, zipping nervously, diving in and out of the stars, moving in an unruly cloud toward the door of the slaughterhouse.

  Breathlessly, Lois said, “Perry, maybe they’re real people, normal people, hunting the changed ones. Maybe they’re not—”

  One of the women, a stocky Indian woman in jeans, was in the way of an overweight teenage boy wearing a Sum 41 T-shirt. The boy impatiently shoved her aside. She turned, slashing with her kitchen knife, and his throat gushed. He wailed and staggered. Someone else smashed the back of his head with a hammer and he went down. They walked over and past him, indifferent. Coming closer to Perry and Lois. Twenty yards. Perry and Lois stared, frozen with not knowing which way to run. Eighteen yards.

  “Oh fuck!” Lois burst out. She knew, now.

  One of the men popped the deer rifle to his shoulder to sight in on Perry.

  Their paralysis passed: Perry and Lois turned and ran for the front of the building. A crack and chips of brick flew from the corner of the slaughterhouse as they ran past it, across the battered ground that served for a parking lot, up to the open double doorway, like a small barn door with a ramp leading up to it.

  They ran around the body of another boy with long curly black hair, his gut ripped open from sternum to groin, dead face staring up at the stars as if in awe. They ran up the ramp. Where they led the animals to be slaughtered, Perry thought.

  Inside, four kerosene lanterns June had found in a storeroom hung in the four corners of the main room, from meat hooks on the ceiling. They cast a mucous-yellow light around the room, but the shadows were thick, and restless.

  It was a wide room with a wooden floor, splintery in spots, worn smooth in others, and sagging. An age-grayed wooden railing ran into the room from both sides of the door, intended for shunting animals to the right, into a pen. Another “chute” ran from the holding pen to a rusty iron harness that hung on chains from the ceiling. On a framework below the ceiling were parallel rows of rusty iron rails studded with work-shiny hooks on wheels. At the back was the big metal door to the freezer. Closed. They looked closer, and the nervous shadows solidified, and they saw pilots on the ceiling, crawling along the rusty rafters.

  On the far left, in a mesh of shadow, was a stainless steel thirty-inch meat-cutting saw.

  Beside the freezer door was another door, standing open, and Aunt June leaned in it, hugging herself, talking to Rutherford and a tall Indian with a ripped shirt. “Perry!” she yelled, catching sight of them.

  She started to cross the room, but the Indian reached out and held her back. “He might be one of them, now. He’s got a gun.”

  The Indian stepped in front of her and pointed the shotgun at Perry.

  “It’s okay,” Perry said, raising his hands. “You can check us over for stings.”

  “Those people outside,” Lois began. “Sunwalker, they’re—”

  “Lois!” Rutherford stepped up beside Sunwalker, pushed the gun aside. “It’s all right. I can see my girl is all right. They’re okay. You get a sense for ’em.”

  “Come on,” June said. “Before they come in. Out this way—everyone. Come on!”

  Hassan stood in the center of the room, looking at the door to the corridor, beside the freezer. They were in that corridor, Dawson was telling him. The rest of the Higher, coming in behind him, heard it too.

  They’re in the corridor, Dawson said.

  And the Lord, the One Who Always Hungers, said it too: They’re locked in there. They cannot be reached from behind. The door is weakest on this side.

  We guard the back, Dawson said. Break into the corridor from this side.

  They are the ones who know about you, the Lord said.

  Where was Dawson speaking from? Hassan wondered. From behind the building, he said. But the feel of it was more: from the freezer …

  The others, herded by their own urgent need to kill those who know about them, poured into the room, looking for the door to the slaughterhouse’s back corridor, the corridor where the boy Strandman and Rutherford and the old woman were said to be the ones who knew.

  The Higher saw the door and rushed to it. It was locked. A group of them began to batter it. A thick pig-eyed man, battering the door, misjudged his rush, and struck another of the Higher at the door in the small of his back so that he broke his nose on the door. The smaller man with the shattered nose turned and shoved a pistol in the bigger man’s gut and pulled the trigger three times. The pig-eyed man went down clutching at the other’s eyes, while more of the Higher pushed closer to the door. “Break it down! They know us; they’re in there!”

  Hassan felt some of them holding back, urging the others. From somewhere outside the building. Not commanding: the Higher won’t stand for that. But influencing. And a sort of vacuum, sucking them in here: the Lord of Dark Corners wanted to feed. And another fight broke out. The seductive energy of rage crackled the air. It coursed around them like a warm fountain. Building, building, charging on itself, reaching for critical mass.

  Hassan turned to run back the way they’d come, but someone swung the doors shut from the outside, and Hassan heard the click as they bolted them.

  “There are two or three of them out there,” Perry said, looking through the back door, out into the night. He heard a crack and ducked back into the corridor as a rifle bullet creased the door frame a few inches over his head. “Fuck!”

  “You can die quick or slow!” someone shouted from the brush behind the slaughterhouse. “If you make us come in for you, you gonna wish you gave yourself up!”

  Heart pounding, he pressed himself against the inner wall of the back corridor. Lois stood beside him, chewing a knuckle, her eyes glistening in the reflected glow of Rutherford’s flashlight. Aunt June was hunkered down, hugging her knees, her eyes shut, looking exhausted. “I can’t do any more,” she said, her voice lifeless.