Folks, real folks, shook their heads. "Good catch, Earl," they said.

Cap Hainey looked. "d.a.m.n, Earl!" he said. "That's them practicing in their s.p.a.ce suits there, out on the desert. See, it says them astronauts practicing for when they're on the moon, for crineoutloud. Sure that's the moon in the picture, that's where they're heading, Earl. Christ, it says right there."

Earl shook his head and saved the d.a.m.n picture. If ther on the moon how can the moon be in ther sky? he wrote under it. Still made him laugh. Cap Hainey!

The end of the world started with the folks from "Filthydelphia," west of the Barrens. The family stopped on the day, Fourth of July itself, canoe strapped to their roof and dead lost. They bought a couple, five gallons of gas from his dipping barrel and he'd pointed their way to Papoose Crick.

Earl's old hunter dog ignored them. When their car had come crunching up the sand trail off the county road, the old b.a.s.t.a.r.d raised his head and sang a squeaky ba.s.s ruff. When the car stopped, he growled. When he saw their d.a.m.n dumb faces, he farted and fell asleep.

The young dog was off on the causeways, in the wood. He didn't bother homing to see what the h.e.l.l was with these folk.

"Help us with a little gas, there, can you?" the driver called. "Service station's closed over." The man turned to the little woman.

"'Chatsworth' was it?" The woman bent to the map crinkled in her lap.

"Yeah, Chatsworth. Buster Leek. Too G.o.dd.a.m.n rich to work hollydays," Earl said. He squinted at the car folk. "Us Pineys gotta take our fun, too, you know?"

Two ton of plastic camping s.h.i.t but forgot good sense. These folks were good and lost. The daddy's sausage hands were sweat-tight on the wheel. Pretty fingernails. Shiny.

"We're looking for, is it, the Wading River?"

"Yeah, the Wadin'."

"And the, what's it? Papoose Creek," Daddy said it like he didn't want to say it. "You heard of a 'Papoose Creek'?" He gave Earl a little nervous chuckle like he for sure didn't want to say it a second time.

The woman leaned over Daddy to look up at Earl, a white strip of sun grease war paint ran down her nose. She yelled slow, like talking to a d.a.m.n Mexican. "We hear about Jersey's Pine Barrens in Philadelphia. So much history here." She shook her head like she couldn't believe it. "We want, you know, want the kids to see it, before, you know? To see the Pines before..."

"'Fore Cap Hainey cuts 'em down and rolls out them little prefabulous houses to sell?" Earl said.

The lady smiled. In the back seat, the kids did nothing, looked nowhere.

Earl started in. He gave them a little s.h.i.t, spun tales, and charged a pretty penny for the gas. Penny? h.e.l.l, Earl charged what they call "an arm and leg" for a short five gallons of dewy low-test because Buster was closed for Independence. Son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h was good for something.

After dipping and s.h.i.tting, Earl pointed them to the Crick. "That papoose-bottom water is good for what ails you." He winked at the man. "Make you strong. You know what I mean?" He looked at the woman. She snapped a picture of Earl with her little yellow camera box from the store. They paid and were gone. Like that.

Earl was going to tell them, "Watch out for that Jersey Devil." He was going to say, "What's the Jersey Devil? Why, doesn't he carry off folk in the night, his hundred teeth like needles clicking!" He'd written down that story years before.

He could've warned them to watch their d.a.m.n campfires. Could have said, "Might look swampy wet there, but it ain't! Been dry for Christ knows how long. I don't want my shack and me burned through careless ways. Built this myself, aw Christ, back when Cap Hainey was a little s.h.i.t. Back in the d.a.m.n Depression, I been here that long, Cap getting richer, me getting older." He would have told them about Cap, his d.a.m.n bogs, the n.i.g.g.e.r day-labors he jobs in for 'berry seasons.

But the d.a.m.n people drove off, left all that unsaid. The car kicked a rooster tail of sand, slewed onto the trail and into the pines. Like that.

The old dog slept.

Earl laughed.

Then he kept watch through his back window. From sundown-on, Earl leaned against the gla.s.s, looking, looking toward the Crick, watching for sparks and tale-tell red-glowing the sky.

Night snuck from under the trees, across the sand between him and the woods. Tree shadow touched his wall and the dark crawled over him and into the shack, over Hainey's bogs, then was everywhere. The air stayed day-hot and the sky was pale and watery. That could have been his d.a.m.n eyes, still, all he saw of earth and heaven that last night of the world was the forest and a few stars wiggling in the heat. Them and the Thing.

If there had been no folk in the woods, Earl would have sat his porch and taken the breeze off Hainey's bogs. He would have rocked, listened to the crick-crack and buzz of bug and the wing moan of the swallows as they fed; he could have sat and drew pinewood scent through his own and the dogs' familiar stinks mixed with the nearby whiff of frog, carp, and decaying water-life bubbling from the bogs and the far-away mossy sphagnum breath of cedar swamp steeping in the deep wood.

He could have had a good night, July the Fourth, gone to bed and died stupid like the world was going to.

Instead, he was watching out that d.a.m.n bunch in the woods. Because he was, he saw the Thing-saw it come. Almost burned his eyes white. Like sunlight screaming, it set black shadows climbing the inside of his shack. He heard the coming Thing fry the air, felt it whomp the ground. For seconds, the shack shivered on its stone posts. Then the wind sucked out of him and deep thunder boxed his ears. The d.a.m.n air punched his chest a second later and rolled across him, wiggled the flab of his face.

The old hunter dog jumped sudden and wild, looking, singing.

"Best write that down, what do you say?" Earl said. He wrote: Stars shoot back! He wrote, July Forth the stars shoot back. A come. A big come!

He figured the Philly folk were gone. Found later he was wrong. Figured the Thing had whomped down by Ong's Hat Cross where the Ford Sisters had their shack. That was that for them, he figured. Too bad. He liked those Ford girls.

Earl ran outside to look for fire sign.

Nothing but a glowing wake across the sky where the Thing had pa.s.sed. He listened for the fire trucks to come shouting out of Chatsworth. Nothing.

Too much Independence fun, he figured. All your money, Cap Hainey, and you don't even care about, about... Took him a half-minute. "Don't even care about them poor people," he figured out loud.

In a few minutes the star trail was a blue smear down the sky. After a good half-hour, there were still no trucks nor men.

"Up to me," he told the old dog and humped toward the woods. Naught to it normally but tonight that hundred-foot walk was an uphill mile. Each step sank him to his ankles. Each step shoved backward in giving earth, like wading a running tide.

The black wall of the forest rose ahead of him. The dark place where the trees stood open above him whispered. "What's that?" he asked. "What say?" Little s.h.i.t and grown man, Earl had never been afraid, not ever, of man, critter, woods, nor night. Pine-born he was and fearless was he.

Now the forest was a stranger; it whispered in a tongue he'd never heard. What was different? Something changed, but what the h.e.l.l, he didn't know. He'd write it down when he did.

Twenty steps into the forest and the trees folded shut behind. The world-shack, bogs, and Chatsworth-was gone. Now it was him and the sand. The trees stood black and silent. Above, the pine boughs were black fingers against the blue ghost of the star trail. Even that soft light was spreading into the big night. He stood like a dumb-s.h.i.t, like them folks from the city. Ignorant, new, lost.

Out of the forest came a ripple. Something breathed across him and the world rumbled. Earl's toes tried to grip the sand through his boots. Night's breath was cold, bad; a smell wrapped him. From down the trail a scream squeaked his spine. Wasn't man or woman; no animal he'd ever heard made that noise. Something, though, something clamped in pain was down ahead dying.

He tried to grab hold of it, remember the noise, the stink, for writing down later.

When a branch he should have known bit his ankle, when creepers he should have felt d.a.m.n near snared his legs, when a heaved up root he'd stepped over for seventy years nearly tumbled him into the bog-feed, he stopped dead. Chill sweat covered him. Too much new. He'd walked the path to Papoose Crick since the Great Depression. It was become something else. Night's heat was gone (and Christ, I should have brought th' lamp).

He heard it, then. This time he could not forget.

He hadn't run since he was a boy. Men didn't run.

He ran.

It followed him.

Back to the shack. His hair stood wet with damp and chills climbed his bones.

He grabbed his crayon and scribbled, Black sky. He added, Black forever everware. Everware suthins diffrent. That was something he felt true but didn't know why.

Then he did. The diffrence is it is diffrent! he wrote. Before: everthin was all the same, the same forever. Trees, paths, places, all ways the same. Now not. Now alls different.

From his rear window, he watched the dark hole in black forest, the white sand path that led there. Everywhere difference, everywhere he listened-and he listened again to the night-even silence had a stranger's voice, and from the pines came the noise where the silence ate.

He woke when something thumped the shack's a.s.s-end where his head lay. Fog had come while he slept and the shack was wrapped in a gray glow.

Another something whomped the wall. He laid his hand against cool gla.s.s. The fog on the pane shoved back. His hand tremored. "Can't see s.h.i.t," he told the old dog. The hand pressed to the gla.s.s was veined, red and blue, thick skinned, crossed with scars and stories. The same, that at least. Nails, yellow, thick, chipped, dirty, after seventy years of night writing, his right thumb and first two fingers were black with crayon wax, the pinky edge of his hand was gray with news ink. Like always, those hands were truthful. And now they shook, d.a.m.n b.a.s.t.a.r.ds.

Another something whomped his wall and screamed.

Onto the porch went Earl, the old dog trailing.

The shack might have hung miles high in the air for all Earl could see of the earth below his own d.a.m.n steps. He and the dog sniffed. To Earl's thinking, the morning smelled a little like fire-and something else too. Something maybe the dog placed.

What the h.e.l.l, he thought, 90-something and afraid. Christ.

Another whomp to the back of the shack. A flapping scream followed. The dog trembled against Earl's leg.

Earl gave the animal a shove with his knee. "Ought to by Christ take and shoot you, you old b.a.s.t.a.r.d. A 'fraid dog ain't useful."

The dog waddled toward the gray morning. He stretched his neck, took one step down, another. Then his body jerked and he sounded one long howling note. The ba.s.s end of it curdled into a growl as he scratched backward to Earl's legs. Dog-song echoed from the day.

This was a good old dog, lazy on his porch but one to fly, flapping ears and jowls, singing pretty into the trees and off the trail, taking long-leg strides ahead of roaring trucks and charging junkers bouncing after game. He'd run the night, unafraid of men, guns, or the tearing death of wheel, tooth, or claw, this old dog.

Now, the old b.a.s.t.a.r.d tucked and whimpered into the shack.

Another thing hit the back wall, another scream, more flapping from the mist. Echoes. Earl hear the old dog whimper. "What the h.e.l.l?" Earl said.

The world stank a little like outhouse, something of old oil and gas-like them old fish boats by Egg Harbor. Fire scent still soaked the air and something else lay on the bottom of all those stinks.

"The f.u.c.k?" Earl said. Saying, it came to him. The day smelled, d.a.m.n if it didn't, like s.e.x. Once he caught hold, Earl reeled in. d.a.m.n if it wasn't the biggest part of the morning: the thick odor like that place women had. He remembered that d.a.m.n much about it, anyway, haw-haw.

"You old s.h.i.t," he said to the hound, "what good's a dog afraid of a little p.u.s.s.y?" The dog shuffled deeper into the shack.

The flapping from the back sounded like someone shaking a wet sheet to dry. Two, three wet sheets, a dozen. Then another thud and more. Out of the sound came a stream of birds, big and small, running, reaching for the air. With them came fox, c.o.o.n, squirrel, possum, a swarm from around the shack, from under it, the swarm flowed over Earl's roof, his porch and into the fog away from the woods.

Later, he tried to write down the sounds: birds so scared they forgot air had buildings and trees in it. Squirrel frightened enough to run with fox or any critter as would eat them standing still or on the run. He tried to write down cries so terrible as to frighten a chase hound. Some reason, broken flapping birds were worst.

Later, he wrote, Birds will be last to go! A minute after, he calculated fish might be, but didn't bother writing it.

Earl stepped off the d.a.m.n porch. Two paces and the shack was a gray smear in the blank day. "A man could lose hisself a step from his own d.a.m.n shack," he said. Having said it, he realized it was true. Inside, he kicked around stacks of The Sentinel, looked under some of the stinking clothes he figured on washing sometime, he scattered the pieces of his old radio hiding in under yards and yards of plastic tarp. He tossed aside tools, wire, pistons and rods, rooted among boxes, bottles, engine parts. He finally found the rope, good yellow stuff-the plastic kind the electric men used to stay the power poles over by the highway-two hundred feet, coiled neat.

He tied one end to the porch post, the other around his gut, then he stepped down onto the sand again. Still like wading, he thought. "Wading a running tide!" he said.

The shack disappeared, behind. Alone in the mist, he trudged through giving sand and payed out the rope. All around and overhead, the flap of wings, the rustle of paws and claws in sand continued. All invisible in the mist.

What the h.e.l.l he was doing, he didn't know. He just felt the need to go, to look, felt he ought be on the trail. Whatever strangeness was here, it had come from the sky to his patch of wood this foggy morn. His duty, he figured.

He had forty, maybe fifty feet of nylon rope left on the coil when screams, a thousand of them, echoed from the mist. Some near, some distant, the screams held a thousand terrors, all on the move toward him.

A breeze stirred the stink of dirty s.e.x. The air cleared enough to let him see the opening in the forest wall. That darker spot in the gray seemed a mile off. But that was the fog. It was close. Earl squinted. There was movement at the edge of his seeing. Sand, the forest floor rolled, moved toward him. Out of the screaming woods and rustling brush, the sand rippled. In slow-motion, the wave front crested, broke toward him, almost frozen but not.

The wave's breath came on the breeze: rotted meat and s.e.x. The sand it was, that's what screamed the thousand, the million tiny voices. The sand and the things the sand was eating.

Nik, nik, nikniknik, the sand said a billion times above the hissing flow of coming tide.

From the trees, Earl's dog-the young one who'd been hunting when the Thing came down-the stupid animal now came dragging its a.s.s end. The d.a.m.n animal hauled itself from the pines. Where the wave crested, it collapsed, rolled head over a.s.s, then stopped, stuck, sinking, in the rippling sand and devoted itself to screams.

From the shack, the old dog returned the call.

Whole thing took a minute. At the end, the dog was gone. For a few seconds it struggled, seemed to sink, sink slow, like a boat oozing under. When the hound rolled over, it was dead and no longer screamed. It continued writhing, being argued over by so many tiny mouths. The dog went side-up first, then belly up, ribs like teeth. Earl saw. No legs, no more, no more hind-end and belly. The thing was body cavity and bone, unwinding guts, dissolving flesh and blood seeping into the sand. The sand drank. The sand ate. The dog melted like ice on a grill and was soon gone. A minute, maybe two.

Earl wrote: Sand c.u.m from out of s.p.a.ce. He wrote it but knew that wasn't right. Our sand made alive by... He held the crayon above the page of The Tom's River Sentinel. His hand shook. What to say, what made the sand alive? He wrote: That star f.u.c.ked us shur. Good an answer as any. f.u.c.ked Mother Earth and made it live! He was writing on the picture of the astronauts, the lie, back from that fake moon trip, sitting in their little trailer, talking with the president through the window. Astronauts all smiles and teeth.

The morning had stopped screaming, the mists cleared some. The wave rolled closer to Earl. He backed away, kept a good twenty, thirty feet of still earth between the living rolling sand and his own d.a.m.n self. He could see a little now. Even so, he wound the yellow rope around his arm back to his porch. He hugged the post, the post he'd raised in the Great Depression.

The sand wave stopped a couple, three yards from his steps. It hushed, waiting. A pot set to simmer. He heard more than saw through the thinning fog, but the forest was moving, creaking, cracking. Trees, a few, then more, fell, rolled, tore the brush, the brush crackling in its own dissolving ways. He pictured the pines, falling, upended, rolling, sinking, eaten like his dog. A wind blew and the fog tore to shreds around him.

With the wind, Earl got a little of himself eaten. A grain of sand on the wind, a speck of grit to his eye. Nothing unusual in the Barrens. He blinked, wiped the corner, like always. From deep inside him, the familiar pain grew teeth. White heat grabbed the side of his head, fire flashed a bright hot needle inside his eye... One grain, but it ate fast and hungry; thing ate fuller than he could have thought.

That thought came and was written down, later. In the moment, the pain dropped him to his knees. He fell, hands first, on his porch. By the time he'd wiped the grain away, the eye jelly was gobbled, the lid nibbled through, eaten out. That part of his seeing was gone, gone for good.

Later, the sand wave swept forward, rolling slow like mola.s.ses in January. It surrounded the shack, rolled on by. Later...

Later, he wrapped his head in torn parts of his last clean shirt, took to wearing the goggles he'd kept when he junked the Indian cycle, 1942, wrapped and taped himself inside the plastic tarp. That's when he wrote, h.e.l.l, there's always sumthin gon to kill you... mite as well be this, which was as true as anything ever written down, he figured.

Later, the car came out of the silence, banged and screamed. It seemed a strange and alien thing. It rolled on metal rims, tires eaten, gone. The engine was over-racing, coughing toward a stall. But the spinning rims kicked sand every which way, sprayed tiny teeth into the air.

"Sand eats rubber!" he called to them. "But I guess you knew that," he said to himself.

The car folks stayed put; they screamed, but stayed.

Earl wore his new plastic suit onto the porch. He'd tied bricks to his feet with the yellow plastic rope. He whisked the wind-borne sand mouths off the porch with a flail of frayed tether.

The car's windows were near gone, pitted, holed.

"Gla.s.s turns to sand!" Earl yelled.

Shreds of nylon tent covered the holes where the windows had "gone over." "Guess you found that out, too," Earl said.

The car, the people screamed.

Earl couldn't see who was left. "Where to go? What to do, what, for G.o.d's sake, to do?" They all screamed.

"Give us gas?" someone yelled. "Pour us some gas, we'll take you too!" someone else yelled. Earl thought it was the man but who knew? The yelling was shrill.

"Sure!" Earl yelled. "Gotta charge you, though!" He laughed at that.

"For G.o.d's sake, help us out of here!" a woman maybe, maybe the girl. He couldn't see with his one eye, the fading light, the pitted plastic lens of the goggles.

"Where's 'outta here'?" he called across the sand. "Where're we going when the whole world's going over?"

"Please?" A squeaky voice. The squeak rose to "Pleeeease!"