Stacy's not here, I wanted to say, Stacy's gone. But I couldn't get my mouth to say the words.

Darla just stood there, looking at me in a way that made me think she'd known that all along. I started to close the door, but stopped when she said, "I have an idea, Mr. Harrison. Do you want to hear my idea?"

As much as I disliked the girl, hearing her talk was like having a link to my daughter, and I found myself nodding.

Fifteen minutes later, I was in the clubhouse with the dogleg. Darla had gone home to get what she needed and had just returned. She looked at me I nodded, and I laid down on the table. Darla smeared cat food on my leg, spit on the cat food, then pressed a leaf against it. I felt nothing until she started singing. The words were nonsensical, something about dancing birds and bears in the trees, and they were set to the same tune that underlay a lot of children's songs, the one for "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and the ABC's. The second she started singing, there was a tingling in my leg, a weird sensation that was not just skin deep, but went down to the bone.

Was this what Stacy had felt?

Darla smiled at me, and lifted the ax.

"Ready?" she asked.

About Bentley Little.

Bentley Little was born in Arizona a month after his mother attended the world premiere of Psycho. He is the author of numerous novels, short stories, articles and essays. He originally came up through small presses.

Bentley Little is notorious for not partic.i.p.ating in anything on the Internet, so he does not have an official website. The Horror Zine communicates with Bentley Little though mail delivered by the U.S. Post Office.

A BAD STRETCH OF ROAD.

by Dean H. Wild.

Max Drummond was in the depths of a heavy driver's daze, the toll of endless miles since sunup and too much to think about, he conceded, but for some reason the sight of the interchange rising out of the distance brought him around. He gave his surroundings a waking-dreamer's blink. He was somewhere in the back-forty of the Midwest surrounded by dust devils and afternoon heat shimmers. Other than that, he was uncertain of his location. Someplace where they didn't bother to post highway signs, he could say that much. Not a single directional sign graced the roadside for as far as he could see. Now that he was looking, he noticed not a single billboard advertis.e.m.e.nt either. Not even a friendly reminder of the local speed limit, only cars racing off the ever-closer interchange ramps at a steady pace, flooding the highway with metal and gla.s.s and chrome. On the one hand, he reminded himself how much he hated busy highways, and on the other hand told himself it didn't matter. All that mattered was he make Milwaukee by sundown, reach Linda by nightfall, and cling to the thinly wrapped hope she would open the door when he came knocking unannounced.

Just ahead, an ancient structure-a kind of bridge or trestle-stretched over the highway. He hadn't noticed it at first, but there it was, acting as a gateway to the weave-work of feeder ramps beyond. It held its ground with ent.i.tlement like a tribal elder. In fact, its rigid profile struck him as possessing a sort of-well-wisdom. The old bridge would be his starting line, he decided. True, his journey began hours ago in St. Louis, but this would be the point where the agonizing fell away, like stages of a rocket, leaving him light and unburdened. He considered it with a sudden pang of hopefulness. Welcomed it, even.

"And we're off," he sighed and punched the Volvo's accelerator as he swept under the trestle.

The sensation was surprising and exquisite. His view of the road gained a harsh, bright-gla.s.s clarity that caused him to squint into the two northbound lanes alive with b.u.mper to b.u.mper trucks and cars. What momentarily drew his attention, however, (and brought a hint of unease) were the interchange ramps. There were more than he'd first realized, and they snaked away one after the other into the distance at ridiculous, drastic angles. They joined with mysterious elevated and unmarked roads, or sometimes fed into other ramps.

The only thing worse than a busy stretch of highway, he decided as he twisted anxiously at the wheel, was a busy stretch whose designer graduated the Dr. Seuss School of Highway Planning.

His cell phone was on the seat next to him. He fingered it and thought about the sound of Linda's voice, how it always had the ability to calm him when things got tense. The old Linda's voice, that was, the one full of sweetness and trust. Certainly not the Linda's voice from this morning which seemed to traverse the distance from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin to St. Louis like a hail of arrows. "How could you?" she had asked him three, maybe four times, demanding an answer, insisting he talk about it. He couldn't. It was all he could do to make the call. To go into any great depths was beyond him.

"It's over with me and her," he had told Linda, and it seemed to be the only defense he could conjure, followed by, "I want to forget it ever happened."

Finally, Linda hung up.

And it really was over with the other woman. Over because he'd chosen to end it. That had to count for something, he thought as he s.n.a.t.c.hed up the phone and dialed Linda's number with a new conviction. There was no backing down on this side of the starting line, after all. No blocking the forward momentum. He was going to tell her that he was coming home so things could go back to the way they were, that was it. No surprises. No need for discussion.

"Yeah," he let out a shaking breath as he depressed the final key on the phone pad, "this ought to go well."

The phone let out a short, piercing squeal and fell silent. He recoiled from it and gave it an irritated wince. The screen was backlit but featureless, only a blank and dim rectangle and he studied it with more than a little puzzlement. Feedback? But from what? As if in response, the landscape outside his window changed to beige blankness as steep concrete embankments flanked the road. They towered over the roofs of the traffic, blocking his view of the complementing southerly lanes and all but the nearest on- and off-ramps. Phone's out and I just went down the gullet of the Hooberbloob Highway. Could I hate this any more?

He dropped the phone into the pa.s.senger seat with an uneasy laugh. Uneasy because when he tried to recall this odd stretch of highway from his trip down to Missouri, (and he was certain he was following the same route back) he couldn't. And the Hooberbloob with its arterial pa.s.sages and Kali arms was something not easily forgotten. Perhaps he had taken a wrong turn while in the grips of his driver's daze. If only he could find one signpost, one bit of direction. If only he were in the right-hand lane so he could exit- A small white hatchback cut in behind him with a screech of tires. The car directly to his right pulled ahead of him and blatantly rammed the b.u.mper of the sedan riding in front of it. He tensed and evaluated this new situation: tailgater behind, unreasonable driver at two o'clock and there was nowhere for him to go. He was sandwiched in, part of a solid ma.s.s of speeding cars, and all he could do for the moment was keep pace with them. He flexed his hands on the steering wheel and found them greasy with sweat.

A grinding crunch shook the Volvo.

"What?" he barked and glanced around.

The white hatchback had rammed him, for Christ's sake. He watched it swerve out and move up on his right, gobbling up any available s.p.a.ce. The driver was a young woman with long hair tied back in a ponytail. She seemed totally unaware that she had hit him, did not even turn her head, but cruised along until she was the better part of a car-length ahead of him. Her rear license plate read SAMI. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up his phone, his teeth gritted, sweat popping out on his forehead. Well, SAMI, you might not think there's a problem, but let's see what the local cops have to say about your driving habits. He coaxed the Volvo to the left, toward the narrow shoulder that buffered the concrete wall from the edge of the highway. He wanted to pull off and inspect the damage to his b.u.mper prior to making his call. A horn blared, high and shrill like a flat chord from a church organ. A rusty blue four-door squeezed by him on the left, kicking up gravel and road debris like buckshot. He could feel the vibration of its humming machinery through the Volvo's window. Its door panel picked off his side mirror with a crunch. Reflective fragments flew.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it," he roared and veered back into his own lane.

A glance in his rearview mirror confirmed that the left shoulder corridor had become an impromptu lane of its own, stacked full of racing vehicles. They whooshed past him in rapid succession.

He tossed the phone aside to clamp both hands back on the wheel. Ahead of him, in the right-hand lane, a yellow Volkswagen raced up to SAMI's back b.u.mper and unceremoniously rammed it. Bits of tail light lenses scattered like flung rubies.

"What is wrong with you people? We're not on the b.u.mper cars at the G.o.dd.a.m.n county fair," Max called out and then blinked uncertainly at the hatchback. "What the h.e.l.l?"

SAMI had a rider. He hadn't noticed one earlier, but now a small, hairless silhouette was visible in the pa.s.senger seat. A child, standing and bracing itself against the dashboard. This road's a h.e.l.l of a place for a kid, he thought, and wondered why the blow from behind a minute ago hadn't knocked the little rug rat off the seat and right out of its Pampers.

Another feeder ramp allowed more vehicles to crowd onto the main highway ahead. He watched them merge, transfixed by their dumb voracity. He'd seen brewery bottles bustle onto a conveyor belt like that once. It was during a beer-making tour he insisted they go to in downtown Milwaukee. Linda followed along politely that day, absorbing facts and details with her usual quiet interest, and after the tour she suggested they go to the art museum. Out of fairness, he respected her wishes only to realize later he'd enjoyed both portions of the day equally. He never admitted this, but he was pretty sure she knew. Smart girl, his Linda. And intuitive. That's why he loved her, he guessed.

The flow of traffic changed again, just enough to allow him to pull up alongside SAMI. At that moment he saw her pa.s.senger reach out to embrace her with long arms. Overlong gray arms. Max blinked, all his attention suddenly drawn to the interior of SAMI's car. The rider tipped its oddly large head toward him as if it sensed his stare. A mask, he thought, the child in the seat wore a disguise that turned its forehead into something high and creased with perpetual rage. The nose was an insignificant hump vented by two slits and the mouth was a lipless gash, all of it the color of ashes. Added to that was a pair of novelty shop goggles. The type where huge painted eyeb.a.l.l.s (a solid deep orange in this case) might pop out on springs and waggle partway down the cheeks of the wearer. He regarded it with a tenuous brand of amus.e.m.e.nt, knowing he should watch the road, but unable to look away. The face of SAMI's rider caught the sun in that second and he felt his breath leave him. The rider's mouth moved liquidly to show sharp nubs of teeth. It was almost a smile, but not quite. Its large eyes, not goggles at all and not equipped with springs of any kind, glimmered and pulsed at him with embryonic heat like steam engine coals. And they blinked, wet and alive.

He shook his head, still unable to look away. SAMI's pa.s.senger clamped its hands around her throat. The hatchback swerved and Max jerked his wheel to the left to avoid a collision, but he was allowed little play. A tan sedan piloted by a portly man in a short-sleeved shirt and necktie now cruised the shoulder to his left. The sedan held its ground and Max compensated again. He had enough time to notice another small hairless figure, similar to SAMI's rider, in the portly man's back seat. It tapped its gray fingers on the headrest, impatient, its mouth rolling up into a mocking smile.

"This can't be," he said and glanced back to SAMI.

SAMI's pa.s.senger climbed onto her while she drove. No, climbed wasn't right. It mounted her, facing her. Its arms slipped around her neck and it pressed itself against her. The hatchback remained on a steady course, steering itself perhaps, even as the young woman's hands began to claw wildly at the air.

"Get it off of you," he cried out to her.

She tried to twist her head, her saw her make the attempt, but her face became buried in the flat underbelly.

The gray flesh of the rider began to ripple and reform, becoming loose and dangling strands. In unison those strands, ropy and wet, stretched through the air and slipped over SAMI's face, her neck, her thrashing arms. Max realized he was watching a drowning woman, one who pulled not dark and swampy water into her lungs, but invading cables of gray matter. He felt the air in his own lungs grow thin and hot as he fought to keep the Volvo on track. SAMI's rider lost all shape, becoming a woven membrane which sealed itself in a shroud-like pod around the blonde behind the wheel. Her throes were momentarily visible as twitches and overlong bulges, then the gray sac clenched and a small spray of crimson bloomed on the underside of the skin. All movement stopped inside. After an eternal pause, the pod began to shrink, rapidly reclaiming shape as Max stared on-a head, a narrow body, long arms. Seconds later it was the gray rider once again, now facing front, its horn-like claws c.l.i.ttering on the wheel. The only thing reminiscent of the previous driver was a short nub of matter, somewhat like her ponytail, which waggled from the back of its head. Max turned away, a new kind of daze calling him away from the act of driving-this one charged not with fatigue but with disbelief. The hatchback broke away, squeezed between two vehicles which traveled the right-hand breakdown lane, and zipped up one of the twisted exit ramps. He barely noticed.

"Figure this out," he coached himself between deep breaths, "Think it through."

The driver of the tan sedan on the left shoulder punched his brakes hard enough to make the tires squawk. Max glanced his mirror in time to see a dusky form hop out of the back seat and flop onto the man's chest. A second later a stripe of blood painted the middle of the sedan windshield. A chorus of horns rose up. A heavy crash followed.

"Where are those things coming from?" Max asked through a violent shudder.

Several car lengths ahead of him a man leapt from the seat of his moving convertible as if performing a standing long-jump, arms outstretched, dark shirt and Roman collar stark against the clear sky. His legs pumped enthusiastically as if the G.o.d who had called him into service and gave him his daily bread might now pluck him from the air and set him down tenderly at the roadside so that he may run away from this bad stretch of road. He crashed into the windshield of the yellow Volkswagen, tumbled over its roof and landed in the right-hand lane. A dark colored Cadillac riding behind the Volkswagen bounced over him importantly. The man's abandoned car veered sharply and cut between vehicles in the right lane to crash into the concrete wall. An opening formed between the Caddy and the yellow Volkswagen and Max cut his wheel hard to the right. The Volvo slipped into the s.p.a.ce neatly and Max rapped the steering wheel, calling out with excited accomplishment. "Almost there. The next exit ramp is mine, baby!"

Don't celebrate yet, he thought, not as long as you're on this road- A musky reek flooded the car. It reminded him of old leather and wet weeds, the scent of things flung off into the ditch to rot. He checked his rearview mirror just as the shape in his back seat slipped forward. Its round lantern eyes twitched, calculating, sizing him up. A web-work of black veins pulsed beneath its skin.

"What do you want?" he called out.

The thing made a small, wet grunt and tilted its head the way an old woman might ponder produce in the grocery store, thoughtful and perhaps a little skeptical. Its claws came up and gave his shoulder a tentative, exploring poke.

"No, you don't," he told it and wrenched the steering wheel hard to the right.

His rider toppled to the backseat floor with a surprised squawk. Momentum swept the Volvo to the edge of the breakdown lane and directly into the path of a ma.s.sive recreational vehicle. Its horn sounded and its grille flashed in his rear window like the snarl of a gigantic beast. Max switched back to the travel lane instinctively and his trunk nearly sheared off the nose of the ensuing Cadillac, which had already begun to claim the open s.p.a.ce. The RV rumbled up along his side. Its driver glowered down at him, hunched and gray-skinned, contempt in its eyes. He switched his gaze back to the creature in his backseat. It rose up and clicked its claws anxiously as if readying fine instruments for delicate but necessary work. Its eyes lingered on him with want and determination.

"I said no!" Max jerked the wheel and slammed sidelong into the RV.

The RV's side panels buckled and grated against the Volvo, raising shrill, prolonged screeches. His rider raised its hands in an att.i.tude of fussy distress, and then clamped them over its head. To his amazement, it flopped backward and began thrashing on his back seat, kicking its legs as if throwing a tantrum.

"Don't like that racket, eh?" he asked it, even as the two vehicles parted and the screeching stopped. "Then don't even think about coming over the top of that seat." He gave the steering wheel a slight tug, lurching the car to punctuate his point. "I'll do it again, longer next time if you try. I swear to G.o.d."

The RV drifted to the right and sailed up an exit ramp like a wounded cur in retreat. d.a.m.n it, he hadn't even seen the exit coming up. But there was another, not too far. A mile maybe.

The Cadillac rammed his back b.u.mper anxiously.

"Oh yeah?" he asked as he glanced his rear view mirror, "Oh yeah?"

Something thumped beneath him. Dumbly, he checked the instrument panel with a twisting fear that the car might not be weathering the unexpected abuse. The last thing he needed was to break down in the middle of this h.e.l.lish, swarming mess. But it was not a thump brought on by failed suspension or a wobbling tire, it was something closer. More intimate. It was...inside. He checked the floor just as a gray arm shot out from under the car seat. Spiny fingers clawed at his ankles. He took another sharp hit in the rear from the Caddy. A second arm unfurled and claws scrabbled at the floor between his feet. With deliberate slowness a gray head began to emerge from under the seat, mashed into an impossible contour as it moved through the narrow s.p.a.ce. Eyes, alight with flat determination, peered up between Max's knees. The caved-in condition of its head made the eyes looked crossed. The obscenity of it made him want to laugh, something harsh and humorless, but he was afraid if he started he would not be able to stop.

It's not coming over the seat, he thought with that same dark, lunatic humor, I'll give it that much.

The rider twisted around and rammed the heels of its hands down on his accelerator foot like a medic doing field compressions. The Volvo shot forward and rammed the rear end of the Volkswagen before he could pull back. Horns blared around him and he gave a helpless sweeping glance to the tight raft of traffic, and the tighter confines of the Volvo cabin. There was no room to put up a fight. His cell phone rested on the seat, however, its blank face still casting drab light onto the upholstery. He s.n.a.t.c.hed it up.

"Please," he said with hoa.r.s.e hopefulness as he pushed the redial b.u.t.ton. "Don't connect. I don't want you to connect."

The screech that pealed out of the phone's earpiece seemed to fill the interior of the car. The creature glared at him with alarm. He thought it might attack him, latch onto his throat and just start tearing, but instead it slipped away from him, scrambled into the foot well on the pa.s.senger side and crouched there like a terrified child, its features limned with distress.

"I'd say the reception sucks around here," he said through a lunatic near-grin as he redialed again. "What do you think?"

The second squeal seemed louder. Max thrust the phone forward in a menacing manner and the creature shrank away. Now if he could only pop the pa.s.senger door open somehow and toss the little creep out on his bony gray a.s.s...

The feedback ended and the phone fell startlingly silent.

The creature vaulted from its place, its face pulled down into an expression of hatred, and it two-handedly sunk its claws into his extended arm and opened him up from elbow to wrist. Pain rocked him like a sickening blow. The phone popped out of his fingers, rapped sharply against the windshield and then tumbled to the floor. Its housing came off in two jagged pieces revealing gleaming components, and a small fragment of internal parts bounced a few inches away on the floor mat. The phone display screen went dark.

The creature leapt onto the pa.s.senger seat. Max balled his free hand into a fist and drew back. Blood squelched in his palm. The creature's eyes widened with a sudden urgency and for a moment he wondered if it had read his intentions so clearly that it nearly felt the imminent blow. Its eyes, however, were no longer fixed on him. They goggled toward the road ahead.

"What? What's up there?" he asked it.

The rider did a frustrated double-take and lunged at him, suddenly wild and thrashing. Desperate. Claws gouged his cheeks, raked his forehead and he did his best to fend off the attacks. One talon pulled a long furrow down the side of his neck. He lost his grip on the wheel, regained it. His front fender nicked somebody and the Volvo's front b.u.mper rang like an ill-tuned chime. The creature's feet tramped on his thighs and then it stood before him, blocking his view, its face hardened by something like triumph, an athlete about to make an eleventh-hour score.

Max brought his fist around and delivered a hard smack to the side of the thing's head. The creature rocked back and for a moment he could once again see the road ahead, the strands of cars that stretched out before him and slipped, row by row, past the last remaining exit of the entangled interchange. But there was one other structure before the ramps were gone and the cement walls gave way to low, flat landscape once more. An ancient trestle, as diligent, monumental and wise as the first.

Dim realization bloomed in his thoughts. The rider pressed itself against him. Its naked chest scrubbed against his cheeks, filling his lungs with the scent of rotted leaves and stagnant runoff. Its pelvis humped up against his throat. Tissue began to slide over him, rubbery cords working furiously to knit up around him, draw him in. He tried to veer off the road, perhaps collide with another vehicle-any type of distraction would do-but the Volvo's wheel was locked and unmovable. So much for forward momentum, he thought.

He slammed on his brakes.

The Cadillac rear-ended him with a grinding force. The jolt snapped his head backward. The creature was flung into the back seat in a tangle of gray limbs and a spiteful flash of orange eyes. Max hit the gas and nosed the Volvo blindly into the breakdown lane. A speeding van clipped his right fender, sending another shockwave through the car. The creature made an incensed bleating sound. Max steadied the Volvo and set his sights on the trestle ahead, on the broad shadow traced like an ashen thumbprint across the highway. Finish line, he thought with grim a.s.surance. He glimpsed the mirror one final time. The creature lunged at him from the back seat, its hands locked in a vicious claws-out rigor.

Max closed his eyes and braced for the blow. The Volvo pa.s.sed beneath the trestle. Shadows clenched at him, but their hold was ardent one moment, insubstantial the next. No claws slashed him, but there was a slight pa.s.s of air at the back of his neck and then nothing but the rumble of his tires on the craggy breakdown lane.

He opened his eyes to the realization he was once again alone in the car, and that he needed to steer if he wished to stay on the road. He clamped the wheel tightly. Pain sizzled inside each cut on his arms, his face, his scalp, burning deep down like cruel betrayals and things unsaid.

He took the next off ramp (a green sign properly designated it as an "Exit" and informed him that Dubuque, the next city of notoriety, was 42 miles away) and the road ahead expanded to three lanes. He chose the center lane because it seemed the least congested.

The first gas station he came to had a phone booth just inside the plate gla.s.s entrance and he pulled in. Blood ran from his cheeks and onto his chin like oily tears as he dialed Linda's number, the well-worn handset pressed to his ear. When she answered, his first utterance was a broken sigh of relief. But she knew it was him. She asked, with real concern, what was wrong. Where was he? Was he coming home? So smart, his Linda. So intuitive.

Outside, traffic glittered and pa.s.sed benignly in the afternoon sunshine.

About Dean H. Wild Dean H. Wild has been writing for over twenty years, and most of his work is in the horror and dark fantasy genre. Some of Dean's work in print include: "The Laughing Place," published in Brian Hopkins' Extremes 5: Fantasy and Horror from the Ends of the Earth, and "The Kid," included in William Simmons' Vivisections. He is the a.s.sistant Editor of The Horror Zine. http://www.deanwild.com

THE HOUSE AT THE END OF SMITH STREET.

by Stephen M. Dare.

The two men stared at the small, partially burned house at the end of Smith Street. It was bordered on one side by the high trees of the Park Woods, and on the other by a vacant lot full of tall gra.s.s, weed-trees, and the junked hulls of appliances and cars. They stared, amazed that so much of the house was still standing; so much was still intact, somehow surviving the fire. The worst of the fire looked to have scorched the house's right side where some blackened bricks of the foundation had been kicked over, probably by kids in the neighborhood-kids in rags and bruises on their unwashed bodies, most without shoes, but all with rings in their ears and noses.

Kids, the men thought, not much younger and not much different than their sister Rachel's boy, Eddie. Head-shaven Eddie, with the new stainless steel gauge in his earlobe, a bit less expensive than the diamond Rachel had studded into him when he was six months old. Eddie was eleven now, bearing their father's eyebrows and cheekbones and their mother's pouty mouth.

Eddie hadn't been to school in three days. The school had finally called his Uncle Shane, one of the men who was now staring at the house. Shane had called his own brother Al, the other man. Al worked the second shift, so he was home now; two brothers staring at their sister's home across the street, and wondering where Rachel was right now. The last they knew, she had wound up in some friend's trailer, after the fire had broken out, though now in a meth-haze.

A few days ago, the brothers had gone to the trailer to try to reason with her. Rachel wailed that she "didn't know nothing" about Eddie until Al shoved her head against the wall. That was when she finally cried out, "The house has him! The house has my Eddie, and it won't let him go!"

Disgusted with her drug-induced psychosis, the two brothers had left in Shane's Mustang to find out for themselves if Eddie was trying to live inside the burned house. Once there, they talked in front of the house, watching its burned silence behind a single strand of yellow police tape over the front door. Shane lit a cigarette, and Al kept nodding at what he was saying until Shane pointed with his cigarette across the lot at another house just like Rachel's. This one was surrounded by a ragged wire fence, yard stomped to dust by dogs and kids. One of the kids-a child certainly no older than three, diaper sagging yellow around its middle-stood at the fence staring at them. The child stared and stared and stared so long that both Al and Shane soon believed the child could not blink.

Across the street and in the tall gra.s.s of the other lot waited an older child dressed only in cut-off jeans so baggy that the boxer shorts underneath were in full display. The boy was smoking a gray joint. He watched them as if waiting for something before finally sitting on the crumbling curb. A dog barked with menace down the pitted road somewhere.

Shane pulled his palm across his forehead. The heat had stilted the air to a smother. Maybe there would be rain later, but this early, the sky was white with August fatigue.

Al said, "No crickets here."

"No crickets anywhere," Shane said back. Then he finished his cigarette and tossed it into a pothole in the street, and they went together to the path scrawled through the weeds up to the house.

Rachel's satellite dish had been moved since they were last here. Rachel and her G.o.dd.a.m.n daytime TV and her Xbox, and all the while Eddie ran wild over G.o.d knew the h.e.l.l where. The brothers had long known that Rachel lived only for Rachel. Plasma TV Rachel, iPhone Rachel, Wi-Fi computer Rachel; probably all stolen. And the latest was that BioFab one of her old boyfriends had installed; that penthouse-designer carpet you never had to vacuum. That was their sister. Gotta have every new and trendy thing because she was tweaking all the time and always needed a distraction, and go screw the rest of you.

Approaching the front stoop, the brothers saw that a rotting board was set on cinderblocks as a step before the battered screen door. Al broke the single strand of yellow tape, pulled the screen door open, and tried the k.n.o.b on the weather-warped storm-door behind it. Shane would have gone instead to one of the windows along the side of the house, but each window had been barred, probably so that Rachel's stolen items wouldn't get re-stolen when she had lived there. With all those bars, it was amazing that anyone had gotten out that night when the house had caught fire.

Al pushed the big front door open and they both stepped in. Though it was mid-morning, it was dark inside, the air smelling of old fire. It was close and stale, but with something in it that made them both pause. Al didn't like it and said so. Shane grunted. It was like wetness, he said. Wetness from the firemen's hoses, hauled in like heavy snakes through the front door. Wetness and rot. Like a pile of vegetable sc.r.a.ps and meat left to rot in the sun. But Al thought of something more: it made him think of rank digestion.

They shut the door against the outside and waited in the dark for their eyes to adjust. They couldn't turn on any lights since Rachel hadn't paid her bill before she left. No electricity for almost a week before the fire. Maybe she couldn't stand the lack of TV and Xbox and that was why she left. It sure wasn't the smell of the burned roof; Rachel had lived like this for years. She might have continued living here, even with the fire damage and its rank smell. Except neither of the brothers could remember when the smell had been this bad.

Al called for Eddie several times, his voice filling the empty house. Nothing. You could tell when someone was hiding out in a house. An empty house felt empty, vacant and hollow. The feel of it here said that Eddie was sure as s.h.i.t gone. Probably living with someone, some girl maybe.

In the dimness, as they waited and talked in near-whispers, Al thought he heard something move across the designer carpet to their right. A mouse, maybe. They were all over these places, rats too. But it didn't sound like a mouse. It sounded like something pushing its way over the floor, jabbing in one long, darting movement through the paper and trash. Not scurrying like a mouse, but something more like a snake.

"Snakes're all over out here," Shane said when Al spoke about it, "'specially under these houses. Foundations're crawling with the f.u.c.kin' things. Fire could have drove them out though."