“I think when he don’t get what he’s askin for—and he ain’t gonna—then I got a feelin there may be some shootin. So I figure we’ll shoot first.”

“What if you’re wrong?” Semelee said. “What if that really is a buncha deputies out there?”

“Ain’t wrong. It’s him, I tell you.”

“All right. Say it is. What if he ain’t alone?”

Luke’s smile turned real ugly. “I hope he ain’t. I hope he brought Daddy along.” He lifted his cap and ran a hand over his scabbed-up head. “I got me a score or two to even with that old coot.”

Semelee stepped back to the window. Why did he come? This storm’s tearin up the place and yet here he comes, loaded for bear, lookin for an old lady he only met a couple days ago. What sort of man does that?

She ducked away from the window as the gunfire started outside.

Whatever sort of man Jack is, she thought with a sting of sadness, he’s gonna be a dead one pretty soon.

6

Jack had taken cover behind an old fallen trunk at the first sight of a rifle on theBull-ship ’s deck. Good thing too, because they’d opened up without warning. Dad and Carl had responded immediately. The element of surprise allowed them to take down a couple of the clan before the rest of them dropped to the deck to take cover behind the gunwales. TheHorse-ship crew had their guns out now and the air was filled with wind and water and lightning and bullets and shot.

Most of the fire from theBull-ship seemed concentrated on Jack’s position. Semelee’s idea, probably…or Luke’s…or both. He’d definitely put himself on the wrong side of those two. When Jack dared raise his head, he fired back with the Ruger. He wanted Luke. If he could take him out, the rest of the clan would lose their steam. But Jack couldn’t identify him through the dim light and the rain. And even if he did, he’d be hard to hit. Jack wished he were a better marksman, but knew if by some chance he did hit Luke he’d be a goner. He was firing Cor-Bon .454 Casulls, hard-cast, flat-point, 335-grain rounds that jerked the barrel high every time he pulled the trigger. Which was okay in a way. If he missed, he wanted to miss high. He didn’t want one of those big rounds to plow through the hull and hit Anya.

The fire on Jack’s position became so intense he didn’t dare raise his head to return it. These guys were good shots. When a lull came, he belly-crawled back to the old huts and took a position behind a post. Maybe from back here he’d be able to take the time to aim and make his shots count. He glanced back at that towel flapping in the rain, thinking it ought to be one damn clean piece of cloth by the time this storm is done.

Lightning flashed as he turned back to the boat, revealing a design on the fabric that caught the corner of his eye. Something familiar about that pattern of lines and dots…

Whatever it was caused a ripple of nausea, and a chill, as if something has crawled under his hood and whispered across his neck on spider legs.

Jack fixed his gaze on the cloth, waiting for the next flash, and when it came he saw the pattern again and knew where he’d seen it before.

On Anya’s back.

With his blood sludging in his veins, Jack rose and stepped over to the cloth, ignoring the lead whistling around him, because it had to be a cloth, a cloth someone had drawn on, copying the pattern they’d seen cut and burnt and punctured into Anya’s back. He reached out and touched it, and when his fingers flashed the message that this was too thick and entirely the wrong texture for cloth, he slumped to his knees in the mud. Somehow he managed to hold on to the Ruger.

A sob burst from his lips, but the grief that spawned it lasted only a few heartbeats before a black frenzy boiled out of the vault where he stored it and took over. Repressing a howl of rage, he rolled back to the post and found his plastic bag of grenades. Breath hissing through bared teeth, he snatched one from within, pulled the pin, popped the safety clip, and waited, counting…

One thousand and one…

The note Abe had included with the grenades said the M-67 fuse gave a four-to-five-second delay between release of the clip and detonation.

…one thousand and two…

It also said each grenade had a kill radius of fifteen feet and a casualty radius of about fifty. Dad and Carl weren’t much beyond that but he was only peripherally aware of the risk. His focus was tunneled in on theBull-ship and nothing was going to pull it away.

…one thousand and three!

As soon as he hit three, he lobbed the grenade up and out, then ducked behind the pole. If it hit the deck and exploded, great; if it exploded above the deck, even better.

But he didn’t wait for it to hit before pulling another from the bag. He was popping the clip when the first went off. He poked his head up as he started counting. His throw had been short by maybe half a dozen feet, but not a complete loss. It had exploded at deck level and the screams of the wounded and frightened shouts of the rest were music.

…three!

This one sailed towardHorse-ship —no need for them to feel left out—and it too fell short, but not without doing some damage to hull and human alike.

It looked so much easier in movies.

Jack was ready to pop the clip on a third when he heard someone thrashing through the underbrush to his right. The fact that whoever it was made no attempt at stealth left him pretty sure it was his father, but he raised the Ruger anyway. Sure enough, seconds later, Dad burst from a stand of ferns in a crouch and dropped down beside him.

“What the hell are you doing, Jack?” His eyes were wide; rain ran down his face in rivulets. “Anya’s in one of those boats!”

“No, she’s not, Dad,” he said through a constricting throat. “She’s dead.”

He frowned. “How can you know that?”

“I found a big piece of her skin hanging back there.”

“No!” he gasped. Jack couldn’t see his complexion but was sure it had gone waxy. “You can’t mean it!”

“I wish I was wrong, but I saw her back the other day and the same marks are on that piece of skin. They skinned her, Dad. They fucking skinned her and hung it out to dry.”

Dad placed a trembling hand over his eyes and was silent a moment. Then he lowered the hand and thrust it toward Jack’s sack of grenades. His voice was taut, strained.

“Give me one of those.”

7

Semelee lay tremblin on the floor, head down, hands over her ears. It sounded as if war had broken out. Those weren’t just guns firin out there. With the explosions and the way the windows was shatterin, it felt like they was bein bombed.

Luke fell through the door, grabbin onto a bleedin shoulder.

“They got grenades, Semelee! They’re killin us out there! Corley’s dead and Bobby’s leg’s bleedin real bad! Y’gotta do somethin!”

“What can I do? Devil’s dead and Dora’s no good on land.”

“The things from the sinkhole, the ones you brought up last night…we need em now. We need em bad!”

“I can’t! I told you before—they won’t come up till after sundown.”

No matter how she’d tried yesterday, she couldn’t get those awful winged monsters to come out of the hole while the sun was up. But as soon as it went down, they were hers—or so she’d thought.

She’d almost lost it when she first saw them. She hadn’t been able to get a good look at them while they was down in the lights, but once they was up in the air, in the twilight, what she saw scared her so much she almost dropped her eye-shells.

The most horrible lookin critters she’d ever seen.

They was the size of lobsters—not the crawdadlike things around these parts; no, these was thick and heavy, like the big-clawed ones from up north. These things had shells and claws too, but that’s where the likeness ended. Their bodies was waisted, like a wasp’s, and they had wings, two big transparent ones on each side, sproutin from the top of the body like a dragonfly’s.