Peter Nealen's Blog, page 38

“Kill Yuan” Cover Reveal

Kill Yuan has a cover:

Huge thanks to Adam Karpinski, whose fan art of Jeff Stone some of you might remember from a little while back, who is tackling this cover.

Pre-order is coming soon.  Stay tuned.

“Kill Yuan” AO Brief

Since Kill Yuan is set in an AO I haven’t ventured into before, I thought it might be useful to set out a bit of an orientation.

The setting is the South China Sea, recently the scene of extensive maritime territorial disputes between China, the Philippines, and Vietnam.  Other countries have become peripherally involved (including the US), to include Indonesia and Malaysia.  To get a bit of a picture of the overall geography of the disputes, here’s a map:

As part of its program of expanded influence, China has not only been expanding its naval presence in the Spratlys and the Paracels, but it has actually been building artificial islands to further cement its claims.  A good brief of the overall situation by the BBC is here.

Shang Xiao (Captain) Yuan isn’t so foolish as to set up his little pirate kingdom right in the middle of Chinese-claimed waters, however.  The scene of most of the action will be the Anambas Islands, between Borneo and mainland Malaysia.

Real world, the Islands are something of a tourist destination, with plenty of snorkeling, diving, and fishing, though the easternmost islands are primarily bases for Conoco Phillips, Premier Oil, and Star Energy.  It also happens to sit right on the primary sea route between the Straits of Malacca and China, Taiwan, and Japan.  The Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative has a decent map of the major shipping lanes.

Here’s a bit more of a closeup of islands, courtesy of Google Earth:

So, there’s a quick, down-and-dirty orientation of the Kill Yuan Area of Operations.  Should have a cover soon, and hopefully a release date.

Coming In The Spring: “Kill Yuan”

So, I’ve been keeping this project reasonably quiet while waiting for The Walker on the Hills to release.  However, I’ve made some pretty decent progress so far; seven chapters of the first draft are done already.

Some of you may remember I talked some time ago about a project in part inspired by the game Far Cry 3.  As I played that one, I kept thinking, “Sneaking through the jungle slaughtering pirates is fun, but this story is kind of dumb.  It feels like it was written by somebody who’s never actually been outside of a game development studio.  I bet I could do better.”  A later interview with the main writer, where he was going on about how “meta” it was (something that nobody who played it apparently picked up on), only cemented my contempt for the story.  Game’s still fun.  Story’s crap.

So was born Kill Yuan. 

“Dan Tackett is slowly dying inside. A recent widower, he’s struggling to provide for his two children when an intriguing, and lucrative, job offer comes his way—a counter-piracy mission, with a price tag higher than he’s ever seen. He can’t resist. He takes the job.

The training is grueling. The secrecy is strict. And the mission is not what he expected.

A Chinese frigate has deserted. Her captain has set himself up to become a pirate kingpin in the South China Sea, right along the primary trade route feeding into the Strait of Malacca. The contractors that Dan has joined have been hired to eliminate the pirates and liberate the oil company personnel on the islands that Captain Yuan has seized.

It’s not going to be an easy job, which is why the pay is so high. But it’s only going to get harder, because there are other forces at play, including a task force of Chinese Sea Dragon commandos, who have the same mission:

Kill Yuan.”

I don’t have a release date quite yet, but plan on sometime in the spring.  Should have a pre-order available about the time the cover is finalized.

And for those who have subscribed to the newsletter, check your email for exclusive access to a preview of the first three chapters.

The Walker on the Hills is Loose!

At long last, The Walker on the Hills is live, for Kindle, Nook, and iBooks.  Paperback can be ordered, but is taking longer than anticipated; Createspace is being slow, probably due to the proximity of Christmas.

I’m kind of proud of this one; I think it’s the strongest of the series to date.  It’s certainly the longest.  There’s a lot going on, and a few hints of things to come for those who are paying attention.

The Kindle can be found here, with the Nook version here.

Book Review: Her Brother’s Keeper

Family in trouble, ancient mysteries, warlords, and rocket ships that take off and land vertically, as God and Robert Heinlein intended.  These is a short list of some of the awesome stuff to be found in Mike Kupari’s first solo novel, Her Brother’s Keeper.

It is hundreds of years in the future, on the far side of the Great Interregnum, a dark age where human interstellar civilization effectively ceased to be.  Humanity is starting to build a spacefaring civilization again, rediscovering many of the lost artifacts and worlds of the Second Federation, many of which are far beyond their technical knowledge.

Catherine Blackwood, captain of the Polaris-class privateer Aurora, has been called home by her estranged father for a contract: journey to the lawless frontier world of Zanzibar.  Her brother has been taken hostage by a local warlord, and Catherine has to get him back.  Her feuds with her father forgotten, she gets to work recruiting a ground-combat team, and heads out into the black, on the long road to Zanzibar and her imperilled family.

Along the way, the Aurora and her crew encounter ancient derelicts, aliens, cultish colonists, a sort of space North Korea, and the enduring mysteries of Zanzibar.  Also, since this is a Kupari novel, lots of action.

The worldbuilding is phenomenal.  There are centuries of history to be plumbed in the universe and backstory that Mike has created.  He doesn’t answer all of the mysteries presented in Her Brother’s Keeper, either, leaving some of them up in the air for either the reader to ponder, and/or to be dealt with in a later story.  It lends a depth to the storytelling that is very well done.

The science is also gratifyingly hard.  There’s no artificial gravity, spacecraft are described flying like spacecraft, not seagoing naval vessels or WWII warbirds.  The ships are also laid out in a logical manner, where the direction of the decks, i.e., “down,” is toward the engines, so any artificial gravity is generated by thrust, rather than handwavium.  No aircraft carriers in space, here.

At its heart, though, Her Brother’s Keeper is an adventure story, and so the science and worldbuilding, as well thought out as they are, take a back seat to the plot and the action.  Both are well done and fast paced.  You’ll be sorry to see it end, and probably find yourself asking, “When’s the sequel coming out?”

If you want a bit of a taste beforehand, Mike has a short story, set just before the beginning of Her Brother’s Keeper, entitled Ember of the Past, up on Baen.com.  If that doesn’t whet your appetite, I don’t know what to tell you.

Her Brother’s Keeper is out today.  You can order it here.

 

Book Review: The Sovereigns

Imagine Die Hard, if John McClane had been a retired Special Operations soldier instead of an off-duty cop.  That’s pretty much the scenario that Steven Hildreth presents in The Sovereigns, albeit with a bit more going on behind the scenes.

It is an alternate 2005.  An anarchist/sovereign citizen terrorist group calling itself The Liberty Brigade, made up of a few true believers and a few more violent sociopaths who find the idea of revolution fits right in with their particular idea of fun, has seized the Saguaro Towers, a Carlton Hotel, in Tucson.  They have struck fast and hard.  Security is dead, the hotel’s guests are held hostage, and they have the situation under control.  Their demands hit all the high points of the isolationist and conspiracy theorist narrative.  They are also calculated so that the government can never agree to them.

This is because Colonel Rothbard, the leader of the Liberty Brigade, is playing an entirely different game.  Unfortunately for him, Ben Williams, the retired Delta Force SNCO that Hildreth introduced in his first novel, The Last Bayonet, happens to be on-site when the hijacking takes place, and manages to stay free, taking a very similar role to the aforementioned John McClane.

What follows is a tense, fast paced thriller with plenty of action.  Hildreth keeps the clues as to what’s really going on coming at just the right pace to keep you guessing for a while, interspersed with some pretty intense killings as Williams and the sole survivor of the Towers’ security contingent, TJ Eastman, do what they can to fight back against the terrorists and try to get recon reports back to the FBI Hostage Rescue Team outside.

Overall, the story is well plotted and executed.  The action is believable, even if there do seem to be a lot of headshots.  Under the circumstances, the reasoning is solid (the bad guys are all wearing body armor).

Most of the characters are quite well-drawn.  The only nitpick I could find is that some of the bad guys seem a little bit too based on internet Anarcho-Capitalists.  While presumably some of the cannon fodder isn’t going to be the smartest, and might use the usual AnCap buzzwords on a regular basis, at times it did seem a trifle overdone, making the bad guys slightly cartoonish in their evil.

The end opens up a whole new can of worms (won’t go into specifics, but it is very well done), presumably leading into another sequel.  Hildreth is getting better as he goes, and I think we can look forward to more to come.

The Sovereigns can be purchased from Amazon here.

The Walker on the Hills Chapter 5

With the first draft finished, and the pre-order out, here’s the final sample chapter:

Chapter 5

I almost bowled Tall Bear over as I slammed out the door, my .45 already in my hand. I didn’t see any of the crowd carrying guns, but I was almost certain that somebody in there would be packing heat. There were certainly enough pipes, chains, and baseball bats in evidence.

I didn’t stop at the door, either. I kept moving toward the truck; my rifle was in there. Sure, I had the 1911, but a pistol is what you use to fight your way to the long gun that you should have had the whole time. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Tall Bear and Craig, Craig’s quarrel with us apparently momentarily forgotten, rushing to the cruiser, where they must have had shotguns or patrol rifles.

Eryn was right behind me, pulling Chrystal along with her with one hand, Chrystal’s shotgun in the other. I spared the girl a glance as I hauled my Winchester ’86 out of the back seat, and saw why my wife had her shotgun. Chrystal was in no condition to fight. Her eyes were wide, she was still hyperventilating, and she was shaking like a leaf. She looked like she was about to puke.

Eryn set her shotgun on the hood and pulled Chrystal down next to the front tire. I kept my eye on the approaching crowd. They looked mad, and more than a little crazy, like they were all hopped up on something. Which they might have been, except I’ve never known even a meth town to all get psychotically high at once and go try to smash somebody. I searched for the tall figure I thought I’d seen in the background, but there was no sign of it. Maybe I’d imagined it.

Of course, in our line of work, it was never a good idea to dismiss anything with, “Oh, I must have imagined it.”

I could hear Eryn talking to Chrystal. “Chrystal, I need you to listen to me, and do exactly what I say. Then you’ll be safe. Do you understand me?” There was no reply, but she must have nodded, because Eryn continued. “I need you to stay right here next to this tire until Jed, or I, or one of the deputies comes and gets you, all right? The tire will protect you if things start to go bad. Don’t move away from it until one of us comes and gets you. You hear me?” Another pause. “It’s going to be all right. We’ll keep you safe.” I saw movement and heard her pick the shotgun up off the hood and check the chamber. Then she racked it. Chrystal had been carrying a shotgun without a round in the chamber. Eryn was too good with guns to pull some Hollywood stunt like racking a loaded shotgun to show she meant business.

Looking out at the crowd, I couldn’t help but wonder if my wife’s assessment of the situation wasn’t a little overly optimistic. I’d faced bad odds before, but we had nothing to fall back to except the trailer, and I was under no illusions that it was going to keep out a psycho mob for very long.

For some reason, they weren’t advancing on us very quickly, and I suddenly thought of an old zombie movie, with the zombies slowly shambling toward their prey. But these weren’t zombies, these were very real, armed people, and they were angry.

I leveled my rifle over the hood. Even at a distance, that looks like a big bore when you’re staring down it. I was hoping it would have some deterrent effect, but none of them even missed a step. They kept drifting closer, the same angry muttering never quite becoming intelligible. Now that I could see them, it looked like they were talking to themselves. They weren’t yelling at us, or speaking to each other. They were just speaking, the tones low and angry.

The two deputies now had rifles out and aimed as well, and before I could say anything, Craig spoke up. “All right, that’s far enough!” he yelled, with the same bellow he’d used in the motel. “Break it up and go back to your homes! We have everything under control here!”

Boy, that last part was a lie if ever I heard one.

The crowd didn’t stop. They didn’t slow down. On the plus side, they didn’t speed up, either. They just kind of kept sauntering closer, various blunt instruments dangling from their hands. As I got a better look, it looked like most of their eyes were kind of vacant, just staring into space. Something was manipulating them, somehow. I looked again for the tall thing I’d almost seen.

“Last chance!” Craig yelled. This was getting ridiculous. These people weren’t going to stop. They no longer had the capability.

But I didn’t want to shoot them. I’ve fought people before. I’ve dropped the hammer on a few as a Witch Hunter, too. A lot of the things I’ve fought are malicious, predatory, downright evil. A few of the people I’ve had to kill have been the same. But I know, all too well, the consequences of that trigger break. As soon as that bullet goes home, that’s it. That person has no more chances. No more chances for repentance, no more option for redemption. It’s no small thing.

But sometimes you don’t have a choice. And as an ululating wail went up from the back of the crowd, wordless, eerie, and simply mind-bendingly weird, the front rank lifted their clubs and chains and started to run forward. They didn’t yell, they didn’t scream, they just kept up that angry, unintelligible muttering.

Then there was no more time to hesitate. I put the gold bead on the closest man’s chest and squeezed the trigger.

It briefly occurred to me, just as the trigger broke, that if the deputies decided I’d jumped the gun, I could find myself in trouble when this was all over. But instead of my shot ringing out on its own, it was part of a ragged volley, as all four of us decided we were out of time at once. The other two rifles and the shotgun were almost drowned out by the .45-70’s report. The big slug knocked the man flat on his back with a splash of blood, tangling up several of the people running behind him. Eryn’s blast of buckshot took out the woman a few paces to his right, while the lighter barks of the two deputies ARs tore into a few people off to the left.

I was shooting as fast as I could crank the lever and switch targets, which was pretty fast. A skinny guy with scabs all over his face, dressed in baggy jeans and a filthy white wife-beater ran at us a little faster than the rest, a tire iron held high, and I shot him through the chest. He fell on his face and was trampled by the others coming after him.

I’ve seen mobs before. There had been an Iraqi mob we‘d had to face down in Anbar once, after a kid got run over by a Hummer. They have an ant-like quality, but generally can be reasoned with, or at least enough of the people in the mob can be reasoned with to break it up.

This mob wasn’t like that. It was as if they had no remaining sense of self-preservation at all, no thought in their heads except getting to us and tearing us apart. I was pretty sure that whatever had made that wail was probably controlling them, by some means that I didn’t understand, but I was pretty sure it was nothing good. Anything that takes away free will like that sure doesn’t come from anywhere wholesome. I was praying for mercy with each shot. Whether for the souls of the people I was gunning down or for my own, well…it was a bit of both.

The Winchester ’86 only carries eight rounds in the tube, and while they pack a good punch, those eight rounds went pretty quick. Eryn and I went dry at the same time. I dropped the Winchester on the hood and transitioned to my 1911, while Eryn hastily started shoving shells into her 870’s loading port. The .45 ACP rounds didn’t pack the punch that the bigger .45-70 rifle rounds did, but they still did plenty of damage, and whether they’d lost their sense of self-preservation or not, these were still living people, not zombies. Shoot ’em in the chest, particularly with a .45 hollow point, and they crumple.

But there were just too many of them. Eryn was back up, blasting a rough-looking young woman in a crop-top who was holding a meat cleaver over her head in the face. I quickly swapped magazines in my pistol, shoved it back in the holster, and slammed eight rounds back into the rifle’s loading port as fast as I could make my fingers work. I’ve had a lot of practice, so it didn’t take long, but by the time I was back up, the mob had almost reached the vehicles.

Now, we hadn’t set the truck and the cruiser up to form a defensive line. And even if we had, I wasn’t sure it would have taken them long to clamber over it and beat or hack us to death. As it was, they just had to run around the flanks and we were done.

The trailer still wasn’t an option; it wouldn’t last long. So I yelled at Craig and Tall Bear, in between thunderous rifle shots and shotgun blasts, “Get over here and get in the truck! If we stay here, we’re dead!”

Craig hesitated. I don’t know if it was worry about getting in a civilian truck and abandoning his cruiser, or if for some unknown reason he still had some kind of grudge building up related to Chrystal, but before he could say anything, Tall Bear had a fistful of his shirt and was hauling him across the gap to the truck.

I kept shooting, the tooth-rattling booms of the rifle echoing across the campground and drowning out the weird muttering that hadn’t changed a bit as the mob had charged. Now I wasn’t sure they were even making the sound, or just mouthing along with it. “Get in!” I yelled at Eryn. “You’re driving!” I didn’t want to let up on the covering fire until the rest of them were in the cab.

Eryn tossed her shotgun in the cab, grabbed Chrystal off the ground, shoved her in the back of the cab, sort of on top of a couple of the go bags we kept back there, then jumped in the front, scooting along the seat to the driver’s side, starting the engine with a roar before she had even stopped moving. It put her closer to the mob, but at least I could sort of whittle it down as it approached. Suppressing it wasn’t happening.

Tall Bear shoved Craig in the back after Chrystal, and the two of them got kind of tangled up even as the big deputy squashed them against the door as he squeezed his own bulk inside, yelling at me, “Last man!”

I took one last shot, laying out a fat man in a mechanic’s coverall, and piled in the passenger seat, yanking the door shut even as Eryn threw the truck in gear and mashed the accelerator, cranking the wheel over. My truck didn’t have the shortest turning radius, but she was able to make the turn without hitting a tree or the cruiser, and got us pointed at the mob. Without pausing to give any of the ones close enough a chance to swing a weapon at either hood or windows, she gunned the engine again, and sent us surging into the crowd.

Now, we didn’t exactly have much momentum, and the mob was pretty closely packed, leading me to wonder how some of them waving around various edged weapons hadn’t managed to slice each other to ribbons yet, but that F250 was a big truck, with plenty of power. I don’t care how closely packed the mob is; it’s still flesh and bone against three tons of steel being pushed by two hundred fifty horsepower. The truck is going to win. It won’t be pretty, but it will win.

The truck shuddered as it plowed through the human barrier, bouncing over bodies that went down under the tires and batting others aside as Eryn held down the accelerator. Bones were crushed and bodies pulped, but in moments we were clear and accelerating down the road toward the town.

I watched out the window, looking for any sign of the tall, slightly hunched figure I’d thought I’d seen before, but it had vanished. Trees sped past as Eryn spun up the big diesel with a roar.

Of course, it couldn’t be that easy. While it looked like most of the town had come out to try to tear us apart, we could see smoke ahead even as we got clear of the campground. It boiled toward the morning sky, thick, black, and ugly. And, just from looking at where it was rising into the air, I was sure it was actually on the road we were presently hurtling down.

I was right. There were two cars and a van mashed up on the road and burning, belching the thick smoke into the air above an angry orange blaze. The woods on either side came right up to the road, and there simply wasn’t room for the truck. Eryn slowed as we approached, and finally brought us to a stop as it became evident that there was no way around or through the flaming barrier.

“Well, crap,” I said. I twisted around to look past the two deputies. The mob was already starting to follow us; the first figures were jogging around the curve that had hidden the fires from us to begin with.

If I lost this truck to a mob, I was going to get mad. I’d lost its predecessor to some kind of conjured toad-demon thing in Silverton. But the truck was stationary, it wasn’t going off-road in those woods, and we couldn’t afford to sit still. “Everybody out!” I yelled. “Into the woods!” I glanced at Tall Bear as I suited words to actions and piled out the door, dragging my rifle and my bandolier with me. “I sure hope you guys called for backup.”

“We did,” he said, as he followed, “but it’s going to be another half hour before it gets here.” He leveled his M4 at the approaching mob and ripped off about five rounds. They weren’t particularly aimed, but he was just trying to suppress them, a habit that I was afraid wasn’t going to do anything but waste ammo in this situation. And in fact, I was right, as the lead runner, a machete in his hand, didn’t even break stride. I aimed and dropped him with a single shot, shoving another round into the loading port as the rest ran off the side of the road behind me. Eryn wasn’t shooting, as she had a hand on Chrystal’s arm, steering her through the trees, but the two deputies were putting up some decent fire.

Of course, they really weren’t accomplishing much. While a few of our attackers were going down, the deputies were still trying to suppress people who were no longer capable of being suppressed. I took careful, aimed shots, for the twin reasons of knowing that there was no way to scare them into leaving us alone, and with only eight rounds in the tube and a loading port instead of a magazine well, I had to make every shot count. I didn’t have the firepower to spray it indiscriminately.

For some reason, our pursuers weren’t speeding up as we booked it away into the woods. They kept to the same easygoing jog, although it looks a lot less easygoing when the person in question is staring vacantly at you and wielding something that would hurt a whole lot if they hit you with it. It made me suspect that whatever was controlling them either had some pretty narrow capabilities, or didn’t have a lot of imagination.

It meant that now that we weren’t sitting there with our backs to the wall waiting for them, we could keep some useful distance between us and them. Unfortunately, we were going to tire eventually, and I had a feeling that they’d be forced by whatever was compelling them to this psychotic behavior to keep after us long after they were physically ready to drop from exhaustion.

Another burly guy with a shaved head and tattoos crawling up his neck started closing the distance, so I turned, took a moment to steady my aim, and blasted him, working the lever as the big rifle came down from recoil. He was down flat and not moving. I turned and ran after the rest, shoving another round into the loading port as I went.

The woods followed the river, which skirted the south side of Coldwell, between the town and the freeway. The trees were mostly aspens and birches, and there was a fair amount of undergrowth, but nothing so thick that it would particularly slow us down. A few deadfalls loomed up in front of us, and we had to divert around them, but most of the bushes were easily pushed through. The biggest obstacle before we got to the road was a big blowdown that went clear into the water. There must have been fifteen trees that had gotten caught up in the tangle of trunks and branches. We weren’t far from the road at that point; I could see the bridge up ahead, past the gray tangle of branches. I stopped and turned as Eryn led the way to find a path around the blowdown. The mob was still after us. I could see too many glimpses of them through the trees and the brush. The deadfalls and the bushes weren’t slowing them down. I brought my rifle to my shoulder, searching for the clearest target.

Craig was ripping through another mag next to me, but Tall Bear had slowed down his shots, apparently having come to the same conclusions about our pursuers that I had. He was waiting for a good shot before taking it. When Craig reloaded before either of us had fired, with a shout of, “Last mag!” the wisdom of that course of action became apparent. I still had over two thirds of my bandolier left.

Tall Bear and I fired at almost the same instant, and I think we both shot the same guy. The concentration-camp skinny meth head flopped over backwards as he was hit.

“Come on!” Eryn yelled. She had found a way past the blowdown, and was standing there with her shotgun in her shoulder. I started toward her, pushing Craig along. He didn’t appreciate it, but this was no place for a last stand. Tall Bear just took another shot and followed right behind me. I could hear his pounding footsteps at my back.

It took me a second, between the noise we were making thrashing through the brush, the angry muttering of the crowd that was still reaching us even through the trees, the breath rasping in my own throat, and of course the occasional gunshot, but I realized I could hear something else—sirens. The cavalry was on the way.

The road was well banked up, as it approached the river and the rest of the ground dropped down toward the rocky channel. It was a scramble up through bushes and fallen leaves, but in moments we were up on the road. The sirens were getting louder, but the cruisers sounding them weren’t visible yet.

From the road, Tall Bear and I turned and looked back. We’d managed to open up almost a hundred yards between us and the mob. “How are you on ammo?” I asked the big deputy.

He didn’t even look. “Two mags left,” he replied. He was in better shape than Craig, who was down in the prone on the other side of the road. It still wasn’t going to be enough.

I shook my head. “Killing these people isn’t accomplishing anything,” I said. “We’ve got to find what triggered this and deal with it.”

He squeezed off another pair of shots. “If you’ve got some idea of how to do that, I’m open to suggestions,” he said.

I couldn’t be sure, but it looked a little like our pursuers had actually started to pick up the pace a little. Or maybe that was because we were now stationary at the road. A lanky teenager with shaggy brown hair, a thick-waisted blond woman, and another emaciated, wild-eyed meth-head came charging out of the trees. I dropped the meth-head first, worked the lever, and turned to the teenager. Tall Bear was pumping round after round into the ax-wielding woman, but she staggered another ten yards before she dropped.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t go after whatever was driving the mob without disengaging from the mob in the first place, and that wasn’t looking too likely. We’d killed or disabled a lot of them, but there still had to be close to a hundred coming after us. It was as if the whole town had emptied out to try to tear us apart.

The terrain was deceptive; while it looked like it would take a long time for the sheriff’s cars to get to us, they came screaming around the bend not even five hundred yards away, and roared toward us, blue lights flashing. They came to a screeching halt right next to us, having apparently noticed the two deputies and two civilians shooting into the trees and figuring that this must have something to do with the call.

I, admittedly, didn’t see much beyond the lights coming up on us. I was a little focused on the horde of druggies and semi-normal people trying to tear us to pieces. Under any other circumstances, I’d have expected to be knocked down on the ground with my arms wrenched behind my back and be facing some serious charges. But the newcomers, seeing the deputies shooting alongside us instead of at us, made the leap and came charging out of their vehicles, rifles, pistols, and at least one shotgun leveled. The knot of weapon-wielding, vacant-eyed madmen who came out of the trees next was met with a thunderous volley of fire that knocked ten of them flat in a second.

And just like that, it was over. There were still people in the trees, but they’d stopped their strange, tireless jog and collapsed where they were, aside from a few who caught themselves against tree trunks and stood there, clinging to the bark, gasping. A couple of them fell to their knees and vomited.

I’ve got to hand it to the deputies; their fire discipline was excellent. As soon as the people stopped charging forward, they stopped shooting. I was momentarily glad it was over, for no other reason than the fact that I was down to about twenty rounds left, all told. I almost immediately felt a little guilty about the sentiment; there were a lot of people dead, who probably hadn’t had any idea of what they had been doing.

In fact, even as I lowered my gently smoking muzzle, several of the nearest, who had collapsed to their hands and knees in exhaustion, started to look around them, almost as if waking up from a dream. The hatchet-faced, skinny brown-haired woman, wearing shorts and an oversize t-shirt, suddenly realized she was clutching a butcher knife in her hand. Dropping it, confused, she looked around, and began to see the carnage around her. She just stared for a moment, then started to shake. Then she put her hands to her head, her hair bunching beneath her palms, and started to scream. She wasn’t the only one. Even the rougher-looking customers weren’t doing too hot. One dude who looked like the very image of a Hell’s Angel, complete with studded black leather vest and forked goatee, was soon howling himself hoarse with horror at what had just happened.

“What in the hell happened here?” a loud voice demanded. I looked back to see a tall, barrel-chested man with white hair and slightly squinted eyes above a square jaw. While his uniform was exactly the same as Craig’s and Tall Bear’s, I picked him out as the Sheriff himself. He stood on the edge of the road, an AR held in large, meaty hands, and surveyed the scene with a mix of horror and weariness on his face.

“It looks like Coldwell finally went ax-murderer crazy, Sheriff,” Tall Bear said grimly, as he reloaded.

The big man shook his head. “I always expected something bad to happen, but I sure didn’t figure the whole town would go psycho.” He looked at me, as if seeing the tall, spare man in civilian clothing with a rifle for the first time. “Who are you? Did you have something to do with this?”

“In a manner of speaking, I guess you could say they did,” Tall Bear put in before I could say anything. I’d started to respond, but subsided when the big deputy started talking. He knew his boss, and after what had just happened, I was generally inclined to trust the man. “The town turned out as a bloodthirsty mob specifically to kill these two, and possibly Miss Meek, as well.” The Sheriff looked around to see who the other person was he was talking about, and saw Eryn, her red hair slightly disheveled, a shotgun under one arm and supporting Chrystal with the other, coming across the road toward us. He frowned.

“What did you do to make the whole town come out for your heads?” he asked. “That just doesn’t happen, even in someplace as screwed up as Coldwell.”

“They didn’t do anything but ask a few questions about a friend of theirs, that out-of-towner who came through asking a bunch of questions of his own about a week ago,” Tall Bear said. “We were here for most of it. Apparently, the questions they asked weren’t the right ones for Coldwell.”

The massive Sheriff was squinting at me. “Well, mister?” he asked. “You got a voice, or is Deputy Tall Bear going to do all your talking for you? I’ve got what looks like a truckload of dead people and now a report of some mighty strange behavior. You got any explanation?”

“Not yet,” I answered honestly. When I didn’t elaborate, he frowned harder.

“I don’t think you quite get it, son,” he rumbled. “This isn’t just idle curiosity. I’ve got to have answers for what just happened here. I will have answers. So if you know something, you’d best spit it out. Now.”

I hadn’t been disarmed, but I kept my Winchester very carefully aimed at the dirt as I took a deep breath. I glanced at Eryn. She just nodded fractionally, still supporting Chrystal, whose head was hanging down, her shoulders shaking as she wept silently. I looked the Sheriff in the eye. “I’ll be honest with you, Sheriff, I don’t know much of anything. I might have a couple of suspicions, but I can’t confirm them until I go back there in the trees and poke around a little. And even if I find anything, well…you might not believe it.”

He just stared at me stonily for a long moment. “You might be surprised at some of what I might find believable, mister,” he said. I could tell he was trying to decide whether to play along or just throw us in the clink until he figured out what to do. But he waved his hand toward the woods and said, “Lead on. Let’s see if we can find something that might explain this.”

When I looked back at Eryn, she looked at Chrystal and said, “I think I’d better stay here with her for the moment.” I nodded and looked at the Sheriff questioningly. He thought for a second, then grudgingly nodded as well. His deputies would be able to keep an eye on her while I went into the woods with him.

As we started down the embankment, Tall Bear joined us. The Sheriff looked at him, and Tall Bear just shrugged. “I just had to kill a lot of people,” he said. “I’d like to know why.”

We passed the nearest bodies, and started threading our way through the shattered survivors. I was keeping an eye out, but was generally heading for where I thought I’d seen that unnaturally tall figure, just as everything went pear-shaped. It was the only lead we had.

It seemed like a lot longer distance, when we weren’t running for our lives. We came to the burning vehicles that had blocked the road. They were still fully involved, with flames starting to lick through the undergrowth and up several of the trees. I could hear the deeper, harsher note of fire engine sirens in the distance; hopefully they’d get here in time before this little barricade turned into a forest fire. My truck was still sitting there, the doors open, far enough from the flames that the paint wasn’t even going to be scorched as long as the fire got put out soon. A cursory glance showed that it hadn’t been touched. Everything was still where it had been.

I frowned. My theory that the townspeople had been under some sort of compulsion was getting stronger. A riot or a simple mob probably would have trashed it, maybe even set it on fire. I was quietly glad that they hadn’t. I didn’t want to have to try to find another truck. I immediately felt guilty for the thought, given the number of bodies we’d stacked in the woods.

Given the stress we’d been under at the time, I hadn’t really pinpointed where exactly I’d seen the thing, if I’d even seen it at all. I had to look around. I was pretty sure that it had been on the river side of the campground, so I started there. The ground was pretty torn up; footprints were everywhere, and crowding each other into illegibility. I didn’t see anything in particular that looked like a monster footprint, but if the thing was the kind that could get into a few hundred people’s heads and turn them into bloodthirsty pseudo-zombies, it might not be the kind that left discernible footprints, either.

Tall Bear was looking just as intently as I was, and I noticed. “Did you see something?” I asked him.

He frowned, still studying the surrounding trees. “I don’t know. I think I did, but there was a lot going on. I might have imagined it, but I don’t think I did.” He glanced at the Sheriff, who was watching and listening without appearing to, and added quietly, “It was weird, if I did see it.”

I nodded. “Yep. That’s why I told Sheriff…”

“Baker,” Tall Bear supplied helpfully.

“…Sheriff Baker that he might not believe me if I found anything,” I finished. “If I’m right, there is some very weird stuff going on here.”

I still couldn’t find any marks, footprints or otherwise. That alone was starting to make me nervous all over again. Even some of the more powerful denizens of the Otherworld often need to use glyphs or sigils to have the kind of unnatural effect that the people of Coldwell had been under. The fact that whatever this was apparently hadn’t was…disturbing.

There was something, though. As I stepped next to a tree, I got a sudden feeling of dread, like I imagine a mouse feels when a rattler is watching it. I held up my hand and froze. Both the Sheriff and his deputy followed suit. I scanned the trees, but I couldn’t see anything, just the shadows and the growing murk as the smoke from the burning cars filled the woods. The thing could be just hiding behind one of those sooty black clouds, watching. It sure felt like it.

Sheriff Baker had his AR held at the low ready as he looked around, squinting against the growing sting of the smoke. I was looking from tree to tree, but if the thing was moving, it was well disguised by the movement of the smoke. I couldn’t get any sense of direction, like you can sometimes tell that there’s something behind you (a lot of times there really is, you just can’t turn around fast enough to see it—be glad of that fact). There was just this oppressive sense of being watched by something big, powerful, and predatory. “I think we should get out of here,” the Sheriff said carefully. “Right now.”

“You feel it, too?” Tall Bear asked.

“Yeah, I do,” was the clipped reply. “And we are not in an advantageous position right now. Let’s move.” He didn’t take his eyes off the trees and the smoke, but his next words were clearly aimed at me. “I think I’ll be taking your word for it, mister. And we need a lot more manpower. Let’s go.” Suiting actions to words, he started moving back in the direction of my truck and the burning cars. Tall Bear and I weren’t going to argue. The threatening feeling of the campground was only getting worse as the smoke billowed thicker. Two fire trucks were already at the burning barricade, dousing the fire, but that just added steam to the black smoke, making it just as hard to breathe, and leaving more gloom for the thing to get closer. By the time we got up to the road by the fire trucks, I was already imagining all kinds of toothy Otherworldly predators drifting closer like Jaws. But it didn’t show itself.

After another ten yards, the threatening feeling disappeared. I stopped and looked back. That was weird. I glanced at the other two. They were also looking around quizzically. Both had felt it, too. I took a step back the way we’d come, back toward the campground. The feeling didn’t come back. Another step. Still nothing.

“What are you doing?” Baker asked quietly.

“Checking on something,” I replied, as I carefully, slowly made my way back toward the campground.

I got all the way back. The oppressive sense of being watched by something ancient and malevolent did not return. I looked back over my shoulder. Both Baker and Tall Bear had followed me, either similarly curious or determined that the crazy civilian with the lever action rifle didn’t get into any more trouble and/or get eaten. “I think it’s gone,” I said.

“You may be right,” Baker said. “But I’m not taking the chance with only three guns. Come on.”

When we finally got back to the sheriff’s department vehicles, where the deputies had the remaining members of the mob restrained and face-down on the pavement, and were checking the bodies to make sure there wasn’t anyone who still might need medical attention, I had even more questions than I’d had going in there. And I wasn’t the only one.

“Do you have any idea what was back there?” Baker asked me, standing next to his vehicle. I couldn’t help but notice that Tall Bear was the only other deputy within earshot. Craig was still hovering near Eryn and Chrystal, neither of whom were paying him much mind. Eryn was trying to talk to Chrystal, but kept glancing over at the three of us.

I shook my head. “I really don’t,” I replied.

He squinted at me. He looked like he squinted a lot, but this was a little more intense. “I’ll come clean with you, mister. I’ve been a cop in some capacity for twenty-five years. Probably ninety percent of the crazy, messed-up stuff I’ve seen has been due entirely to drugs, violence, or just plain stupidity. But that other ten percent…I’ve seen stuff I can’t ever explain. So has every cop who’s been at it long enough. I was a beat cop in Seattle and had to fight a guy who was no kidding possessed. Took six big cops, two the size of linebackers, to restrain him. Couldn’t hurt him no matter how hard we hit him. I’ve seen other stuff I can’t even begin to describe. So I’ve got a bit of a sense for when things are off-kilter. And this is about as off-kilter as it gets.

“Those people weren’t just a mob; they were after you five. And whatever that thing back in the smoke was, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t human. And I’m getting an idea that you know a little bit of what I’m talking about.”

With a deep breath, I nodded. This part was always awkward, which was why I preferred to get the work done and leave. “I do. This kind of thing is our job.” I waved to indicate Eryn. “But I still don’t know what that was back there.”

“Do you have any idea whatsoever as to what’s going on here?” he asked. “Because I’ve got a whole town gone crazy, lots of dead people, and no explanation. None.”

“We’re as much in the dark as you are, Sheriff,” I admitted. “All we knew, coming here, was that a friend of mine is in trouble. When we couldn’t find him here, we were supposed to find Chrystal Meek. Well, we found her, and then all hell broke loose.”

He eyed me. “Your friend in the same business?”

“Yeah, he is,” I said. No point in denying it. “So yes, the fact that there’s some Otherworldly weirdness going on here isn’t all that surprising. I just have no idea exactly what we’re dealing with.”

Baker nodded toward Chrystal. “Does she know?”

“We haven’t really had time to find out,” Tall Bear put in. “We’d barely gotten to her trailer when the mob showed up.”

“Well, then, let’s go talk to her.” Without another word, Baker stalked over to Eryn and Chrystal. Tall Bear and I followed. “Miss Meek?” Baker asked, crouching down to bring himself face to face with her. “I’m Sheriff Baker. I know you’ve been through a lot, but I’ve got some questions.”

The Walker on The Hills Release Date and Pre-Order

So, figuring out a release date for The Walker on the Hills has been difficult, largely thanks to real life slowing down my productivity, but since I’ve been able to adjust and get back in the swing of things, I can now announce that it will be out on December 15th.  Not only that, but in the last 24 hours, we’ve gotten the cover design nailed down, and so I’ve been able to get the pre-order set up.  You can find the Kindle pre-order here.

And here’s the cover:

The Walker on the Hills Chapter 4

They didn’t lead us to the sheriff’s department, as I’d halfway been expecting. Instead, we headed back toward the interstate, and pulled off in the truck stop at the exit. Craig parked the cruiser back by the semis, then got out and waited. I looked over at Eryn, shrugged, and got out to go join him.

He was leaning against the hood of the cruiser, his arms crossed in front of him. “What do you know about Chrystal Meek?” he asked as I walked up to him.

I shook my head. “Bupkis,” I told him. “She’s a name that Blake gave us to find if we couldn’t meet up with him. That’s all we know.”

Craig frowned, looking down at the asphalt as if to gather his thoughts. “Chrystal’s…well, she’s been through a lot. I’d almost say she’s the one decent person in that blight of a town. A lot of people have tried to get her to leave, but she’s always been the type to say that it’s her home, that she can’t leave, you know? She’s stayed for her mom. Lord knows why. Her mom’s an abusive addict, nobody knows who her dad was, and she’s had a string of abusive boyfriends, a couple of whom I’ve had the pleasure of putting in jail.” He spat on the ground. “She kind of latched onto your friend when he came through town; I can kind of see why. He seemed like a decent guy. At least, until he left her here.” He squinted at me. “Now, I’m not sure it’d be a good idea for you to go barging in and telling her that your friends with this dude. Pretty sure it wouldn’t be good for her.”

I grimaced. Great. Drama. As much as I’ve had to deal with hair-raising, sanity-shredding things from beyond human ken, I still really hate a lot of human drama. I’m not a cold-hearted individual, at least not most of the time, but Chrystal was our only link to Blake and whatever was going on that had scared him enough to write a panicky, cryptic note to come out here and see him. And I suspected that whatever it was had to do with the sudden increase in psycho belligerence that the sheriff’s deputies had noted in Coldwell. I couldn’t leave this alone.

“Look,” I said carefully, “I’m pretty sure my friend’s in trouble. Chrystal is the only lead I’ve got. I’m certain that if Blake bounced, he had a good reason, and didn’t do it just to abandon her here. Knowing him, he probably thought it would be safer here than with him. But regardless, we’ve got to talk to her. We can let my wife do the talking; she’s a lot gentler and more diplomatic than I am.” Which she is. Vastly.

He studied me silently for a long moment. “I get the feeling you’re not telling me everything,” he said.

I bit back the sarcastic comment about how it would take several human lifetimes to tell him everything, but I did say, “I really don’t know much. I got a message from Blake, telling me to meet him here, and if that failed, to find Chrystal. I’m assuming because he would have told her where he’s going.”

He chewed his lower lip for a second. “Well, if he did tell you to find her, that might make it a little different,” he allowed. “She hasn’t said anything about it to me…but then, she hasn’t said much the few times I’ve seen her lately. She seems scared of something.”

If she’d gotten a good look at the creepy stuff Blake and I dealt with on a daily basis, I’d be surprised if she wasn’t scared. And some kind of Otherworldly or demonic influence was the best explanation for the weird behavior of the inhabitants of Coldwell I could think of.

I dug around in my pocket for the note, but I figured I’d left it in my pack in the truck. “I can show you the note,” I offered.

After a moment, he nodded. “Let’s see it.” He wasn’t just going to take my word for it. Which was fine. I probably wouldn’t take a complete stranger’s word for it, either. We walked back over to the truck. Eryn watched us coming over, a calculating look in her green eyes. She was gauging the situation from the way we approached. I just gave her what I hoped was a reassuring look, and reached into the back for my pack.

It took some rummaging around to find the crumpled note. It was buried at the bottom of one of the outside pockets, naturally. At least it was in an outside pocket. I smoothed it out as best I could and handed it over. Eryn continued watching from the passenger seat.

Craig took the note and studied it, flipping it over just as I had to see if there was anything else on the other side. “And this is it?” he asked.

I nodded. “It doesn’t make sense that he’d tell us to find her if he was planning on just abandoning her,” I pointed out.

“None of this makes sense,” he said with a frown, still studying the wrinkled paper. He looked up at me. “You have no idea why he was here?”

“None,” I replied, honestly enough. We knew little more than Craig did.

“You said he might be in trouble,” he said thoughtfully. Oh, hell, here we go, I thought. “What kind of trouble? Was he possibly involved in any sort of illegal activity?”

I had to handle this very, very carefully. “I highly doubt it,” I replied. “We’re both private investigators, of a sort. We tend to specialize in missing persons.” Which was true enough; most of our cases as Witch Hunters started with either ritualistic murders or disappearances. They were usually the only indicators to be found in the open when the society as a whole doesn’t believe in such hoodoo as Heaven, Hell, or the Otherworld. “But I don’t know anything about the case he might have been working.”

He frowned. “I don’t know of any missing persons cases around here at the moment,” he said. “Nothing that’s been reported to the sheriff’s department, anyway.”

“Maybe we should ask Chrystal,” I ventured. “If she was hanging around with him, and he left word with her, she might just know what’s going on.” That earned me a sour look. I was getting the impression that Craig had rather…personal reasons for being protective of Chrystal. I didn’t know for sure what they might be; I had no good reason to suspect that they were nefarious, but I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday. I knew full well that these sorts of situations rarely turned out to be what they appeared to be on the surface, even without spooky influences affecting them. I just shrugged. “She’s our only lead. Don’t tell me you’re in the habit of passing up leads because it might be traumatic to the person to tell you what you need to know.”

He really didn’t like that one. If he’d been able to set me on fire with his eyes, I think I would have been cinders on the spot. But he also knew I had him. Still, that wasn’t going to keep him from trying to find a way to avoid admitting it.

“Look,” he said, “all I have is this note, that could have been written by anybody, and your assertion that your friend might be in trouble. That’s not exactly stirring cause to take action.”

Now he was starting to make me mad. All I wanted to do was find Chrystal Meek and ask her where Blake had gone. Why was this deputy so hell-bent on keeping us away from her? I was starting to smell a rat.

The windows were down, and Eryn had been listening to the latest part of the conversation. Apparently she smelled a rat, too. “What is the problem, Deputy?” she asked. Her tone was friendly enough, but there was just enough steel in it to leave no doubt that she expected a good answer, and would know if she got anything else. “Why are you so determined to keep us away from this woman?”

“Like I was telling your husband,” he said, “she’s been through a lot, and…”

Eryn cut him off. “That’s got to be one of the weakest excuses for not speaking to a witness I’ve ever heard,” she said. “Do we really have to report Blake missing before you’ll let us speak to her?”

Craig’s expression went stiff. Anger flared in his eyes. Before he could say anything, though, Tall Bear loomed over both of us. “I think we had better go see her, Eugene,” he rumbled. “Enough’s enough.”

Craig started to protest, but fell silent at Tall Bear’s stony glare. The big man looked at me. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll take you to her.” Without another word, he stalked back to the cruiser, suddenly the man in charge instead of the silent partner. Craig gave me a look of pure venom, then wordlessly followed his partner back to the cruiser.

Frowning, I climbed back into the driver’s seat and pulled the door closed. “What was that all about, I wonder?” Eryn asked, her eyes fixed on the two deputies.

“I don’t know, but I’m starting to suspect somebody has a personal problem,” I replied, as I put the truck in gear to follow the cruiser. “Deputy Craig is invested in the situation, somehow.”

“Do you think it’s got something to do with Blake’s trouble?” she asked. “Maybe he doesn’t want us to talk to Chrystal precisely because she might know where he went?”

I squinted at the cruiser as we headed back in the general direction of Coldwell. “Maybe. But it doesn’t feel like it. I think he’s genuinely being protective; the only question is why and from what?” The cruiser turned off the road a mile short of the town, and I followed. “From Tall Bear’s reaction, it may not be something necessarily all that…wholesome.”

I felt more than saw Eryn’s eyebrow go up. “You think he’s got a thing for her? Maybe a little bit of an unrequited, obsessive ‘thing?’”

“Maybe.” I gave an uncomfortable shrug. “I have a feeling we’re going to find out when we meet her, and I don’t think it’s going to be all that pretty.”

The road wove through the trees for maybe a half a mile, then opened up on a campground down by the river. It was pretty empty, but there were a few trailers parked in camping sites, none of them looking particularly new. There wasn’t anyone outside, but I glimpsed a couple of sets of blinds moving as people peeked out at us as we drove by.

The cruiser led the way to an old, but still serviceable-looking, Airstream trailer parked near the far end of the campground. There were empty spaces all the way around it, and unlike the other trailers, it didn’t look like it had been sitting there for all that long. Or maybe the occupants just didn’t pile all their junk outside until they looked like permanent residents.

The cruiser stopped there, and both deputies got out, starting toward the trailer without even looking back at us. “I guess this is the place,” Eryn said. “Let’s get over there before Deputy Craig throws a monkey wrench in the works.”

Without a word, we both got out and strode over toward the trailer. The double slam of the truck doors was loud, echoing against the trees. It was very quiet in the campground. The gravel crunched under our boots as we walked toward the trailer.

Craig was already at the door, but he didn’t look like he was in a hurry to knock. Tall Bear said something, and Craig shot him a look, then gave me an even more bitter glare than he’d given me before, then knocked, almost timidly, on the door.

At first there was no response. He knocked again, but by then I was close enough to tell it was a half-hearted tap, not a knock. Tall Bear, apparently disgusted by the shenanigans, reached past him and rapped three times on the door.

This time there was some shuffling from inside, and the trailer rocked a little as somebody moved around. Then the door cracked open, just a little bit. “Who is it?” a woman’s voice asked.

“It’s Deputy Tall Bear, ma’am,” the taciturn deputy said before Craig could open his mouth. “We’ve got some people looking to ask you some questions, if it’s not too much trouble.”

The door opened just a little bit more. I could see an eye and disheveled dark hair. “Who are they?” she asked. Tall Bear turned to look at me, and I stepped forward, even as Craig saw fit to stick his oar in, regardless of Tall Bear’s warnings.

“Chrystal, you don’t need to talk to anybody,” he started to say. The woman, whom I assumed was Chrystal Meek, opened the door farther and shot him a glance that can only be described as scorching, and looked at me.

“Who are you?” she asked again. She was black-haired and dark-eyed, with very prominent cheekbones. She would have been beautiful, if she hadn’t looked like she’d been awake for a week straight.

“I’m Jed Horn,” I introduced myself. “This is my wife, Eryn. We’re friends of Blake’s.” I studied her for a reaction to the name, but she kept her face carefully impassive. “He sent me a note, telling me to meet him here, and if he wasn’t here, he said to find you. These gentlemen–” I indicated the two deputies, including Craig even though I hardly thought he deserved the term “–tell me that he’s left. So we came to find you.”

She studied us with the same calculating dispassion. “How do you know Blake?” she asked. She was very hard to read; I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

“We’re in the same line of work,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I got him into this line of work after we both got out of the Marine Corps. He was my platoon sergeant, once upon a time.”

She studied me quietly. I could almost see the gears turning. She was tense, almost like a deer that’s trying to decide to bolt or not. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?” she asked suddenly. “Maybe you know Blake, or maybe you’re lying to me.”

“She has a point,” Craig put in, trying to step between me and the door. “All you’ve got is a name and that note.” He’d acquiesced to his partner’s insistence that we come here, but he still didn’t like it, and for some reason he really didn’t want us talking to Chrystal. The paranoid part of my mind was starting to wonder if it had something to do with Chrystal, or if he was somehow involved in the trouble that Blake was in.

I ignored him, and carefully reached into the collar of my shirt, pulling out the little silver crucifix on its leather thong that hung around my neck. It’s nothing terribly fancy, nor is it terribly big, but it’s the symbol of the Order. All of us wore one. “He would have had one of these,” I told her. “Didn’t he?”

She sagged in the doorway, and for the first time the shotgun she’d been holding next to the door became visible. I had a sudden flash of memory, back to when I’d first met Eryn in Silverton. She’d had that big .44 of hers ready if I turned out to be something other than what I claimed. “You’d better come in,” she said, relief plain in her voice.

“Chrystal, I don’t think you should talk to these people,” Craig tried again. “We don’t know who they are…”

“There is no ‘we,’ Eugene,” she said tiredly. “There never has been. You can wait outside if you want to, but I’ll talk to them, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. If it really bothers you that much, you can drive away.” She glanced at Tall Bear, who just stood there, his big arms crossed across his chest, as impassive and silent as he had been up until he’d intervened. “There’s no crime to arrest them for, so you can leave. I’ll be fine.”

He didn’t like it. The look he gave me was pure poison. But I returned his gaze, completely unconcerned. I’d faced a lot worse than a jilted lover, whether he had a gun and a badge or not. Tall Bear had discreetly moved closer behind him, and a glance at the big man suggested that he was ready to grab his partner if he tried to do anything…regrettable. “Fine,” he spat. “We’ll be right here, in case you change your mind.”

The look on Chrystal’s face said what she thought the odds of that were, as she stepped back inside the trailer so that Eryn and I could come in. I didn’t gloat as I brushed past Craig. I didn’t need to, and frankly, I was still a lot more worried about Blake and whatever had turned Coldwell psycho than I was about Craig’s jealousy.

The inside of the trailer was fairly Spartan; it didn’t look like it had been modified at all. It was well taken care of, but none of it was new. Wear showed on just about every surface. The trailer’s suspension creaked as we stepped inside.

Chrystal set the shotgun on the counter as the door swung closed and sat down on a stool, gesturing to a wicker chair and another stool. I took the stool, and let Eryn take the chair. Chrystal didn’t say anything at first, but just sat on the stool and fidgeted, staring at her hands as she wrung them over and over. She seemed terrified, in spite of the relief she’d displayed when I’d shown her the crucifix.

“Chrystal?” Eryn ventured, her voice gentle. “What was Blake doing here?”

“I don’t know for sure,” she replied, her voice quiet. “A lot of what he said, and what’s happened, doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.” She kept looking down at her hands as she started to shake. “He made it seem safe while he was here, and now he’s gone, and I’m scared all the time, so scared…” She started to hyperventilate. This was not going well.

Eryn got up and moved over to her, leaning against the counter and putting her arm around the other woman’s shoulders. “It’s all right,” she said soothingly. “We’ve all been there, believe me. You’re safe now. We’re here, and we’ll protect you.”

No sooner had she said that than there was a rap at the door. A muffled voice that sounded like Tall Bear said, “Folks, I hate to break up the meeting, but it might be time to go. Things are about to start happening out here.”

I quickly moved to one of the windows and lifted the blinds. He wasn’t kidding.

A mob of wild-eyed, skinny people was slowly working its way across the campground towards us. I thought I saw a taller figure in back, but it faded behind a tree—if it had even been there—as the angry murmuring from the crowd started to rise to a roar.

The Walker on the Hills, Chapter 3

It was a long drive to Coldwell, and we didn’t get started until late, so it was getting dark as we drove into town. Perhaps not the most auspicious beginning.

The town itself was set well back from the interstate, a good five miles down a winding county road. It had apparently been on the old highway, before the interstate, and was still hanging on, even though there wasn’t much to keep it alive. There weren’t even many farms in the vicinity, though a sign just as we turned off the interstate, lit up by our headlights, announced the presence of the Bar-13 ranch, about ten miles in the other direction.

Mostly it was five miles of rolling hills, sagebrush, bunchgrass, and the occasional stand of trees in the low ground where there was more water. The trees were already clumps of darkness against the grasslands that were already going gray in the growing twilight.

There weren’t a lot of lights on in Coldwell. There was a gas station on the edge of town. As I got a good look at it, I thought Ray had been rather overly charitable in calling it a “truck stop.” The pumps were ancient and rusty, and the building behind them was dingy, the paint peeling where it wasn’t dirty enough to turn from white to gray. It looked like the windows hadn’t been cleaned in a quarter century at least. At least the lights over the pumps were on, though the building itself was dark.

Only about three streetlights were lit down the main drag. They didn’t help. All they seemed to do was show the decay. Sidewalks were overgrown with weeds, and more were growing out of cracks in the street. Several of the old storefronts were boarded up, and one was visibly sagging toward the street. Another was burned out, black sweeps of soot staining the dingy paint as well as the buildings closest to it.

It wasn’t that late, so there were still a few people out and about, but most towns I’d been in still showed more activity. The place almost looked like a ghost town, with a few scavengers still going through the detritus. But it was still, as far as we knew, a living town, albeit for certain values of “living.”

I almost drove us straight past the motel. It was set back from the road, and was mostly dark, lit only by a single light over the door to the lobby, and a sickly yellow light coming through the dirty windows looking in on the front desk. A few of the windows of the rooms showed some light, but all the curtains were drawn. A few grungy-looking cars and trucks squatted in the gravel parking lot.

“I don’t like the look of this place, Jed,” Eryn said, eyeing the motel.

“Can’t say as I do, either,” I replied, slowing the truck to turn into the parking lot. “This place looks sketchy as all get out. But I don’t see another motel in town.” And I could see most of the town from there; the entire place probably didn’t cover a square mile.

She shook her head. “I don’t just mean the motel,” she said. “I mean this place. All of it. I’m starting to feel what Ray was talking about when he said that there’s something off about this town.” She looked at me, her green eyes glinting a little bit in the splashback of the headlights. “Can’t you feel it?”

I squinted at the motel. I’d been in plenty of run-down pest holes over the years, ranging from borderline ghost towns full of squatters, meth towns, slums, dying railroad towns, and suburbs gone rotten. The predators of the Otherworld like to prey on such places, as do some of the more demonic enemies of mankind. Silverton had turned as warped as it had because the town saw a downturn, the locals got bored, and a few of them tried to summon something best left in the Abyss.

But this was something different. And, just like Ray had said, I couldn’t figure out just what was different. I could feel a sort of quiet unease, but there wasn’t any particular reason I could point to as to why. There was no visible threat. Sure, it was dark, and everything was dirty and falling apart, but I’d been in plenty of dark, dirty, disintegrating places before, without feeling like I should have a gun in my hand, like I was feeling right then.

Motion grabbed my eye. A figure shuffled in front of the headlights. I’d pulled over to the side of the street, but hadn’t pulled into the parking lot, as we sat there and looked at the crumbling roach motel. Now there was a young man making his halting way down the crumbling sidewalk toward us.

Even though it wasn’t a cold night, he was wearing a long, dark-colored parka that looked like it was about two sizes too big, with the hood flipped up over his head. He was gaunt, hollow-cheeked, and wide eyed, and his mouth, sans several teeth, was hanging half open. He had “meth head” written all over him. The stare he was giving us was not a friendly one. He glared at us like a madman. Even from ten yards away, I could see whites all the way around his irises.

He shambled forward, speeding up, and suddenly lunged at us and slammed his hands on the hood. I already had my .45 in my hands, and out of the corner of my eye I could see that Eryn had her Smith & Wesson Model 29 out. We might have to shoot through the windshield, which would be a shame, given how much it would cost to replace, but better that than getting mauled or stabbed by a meth-head.

He yelled something, but it was, frankly, completely unintelligible. When we didn’t respond, he just got more agitated, banging his hands on the hood and yelling wildly. I’d learned a long time ago not to get focused on just one threat, so I started to see movement as more figures started to come out of the shadows onto the street, watching us. None of them were moving toward us, at least, though that could be good or bad. Nobody seemed to be moving to calm down the yelling man, either.

With what could only have been an oath, though it was just as garbled as anything else he was saying, he started to come around the side of the truck, on Eryn’s side. She already had the window up and the door locked, but he started smacking his palm on the window, still yelling. Even that close, we still couldn’t understand what he was saying, but it was certainly hostile enough.

Eryn didn’t bat an eye. She just lifted her .44 and pointed it at his nose. That rather changed the dynamics of the encounter.

Faced with his imminent demise, the staring meth-head backed off. He didn’t get any more friendly, though. He continued to glare at us with an unnerving intensity as he backed away. Finally he continued down the street, though he kept looking back, staring at us until he ducked into a house that I could have sworn had to be abandoned at first glance.

The rest of the people on the street didn’t move for a while, and we stayed where we were, watching them back. None of them were standing under a streetlight, and they’d managed to all stand outside the cone of the headlights, so it was impossible to see any of them well. They were just dark silhouettes, their stares more felt than seen.

“Now I don’t want to go inside,” Eryn confessed. “I’m afraid that if we do, we’ll come back out to find the windows broken and the tires slashed.”

I couldn’t say I disagreed. There was a palpable hostility in the air. A few of the more distant figures were filtering back into houses and what looked like the town’s sole operating bar, but the nearest were still just standing there, watching. I grimaced. “We can’t just bug out,” I said. “This is where we’re supposed to meet Blake.” I looked over at her. “I’m just not sure which is going to be more dangerous—going out there to go into the motel to get a room, or staying out here on security.”

“I’d think staying out here would be riskier,” she said.

“Except we don’t know what’s inside,” I replied. This place was already making me paranoid. “Or who.”

“I’ll go in,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’ll have Mabel with me.” She hefted her .44. She’d named her revolver long before I’d known her, and liked to tease me about why I didn’t name any of my guns. I’d just said that I wasn’t in the habit of naming my tools.

She cracked her door, and I rolled down my window, so as to have as clean a shot on anyone coming after us as possible. Nobody still on the street moved, except for a couple more fading back into the dark, briefly silhouetted by an opening door, then vanishing. Eryn got out, closed her door, and started toward the motel office.

The door opened, then closed behind her. I sat behind the wheel, as tense as I’d ever been in a combat situation, watching the watchers out on the street, my ears straining for the sound of gunshots from inside. I was confident that Eryn would put up a hell of a fight if it came to it. I just hoped it wouldn’t come to it, even as I wound up to dive out the door and go in after her.

A couple more of the dark figures melted away when I glanced back at the motel. I still had the truck running and the headlights on; if need be, I’d use the truck itself as a weapon. The rumble of the engine meant I couldn’t hear much of anything outside, but I wasn’t willing to shut it off.

Finally, one of the watching figures, wearing a coat like the meth-head, took a step forward, then another. Here we go, I thought. I lifted my 1911 to the edge of the rolled-down window, ready to punch it out and blast the guy if he came at me.

Whether he sensed my movement or not, I don’t know, but the figure stopped. There wasn’t enough light spilling from the headlights to illuminate his features, but his eyes glinted under his hood. A few others drifted closer, but the standoff continued.

I resisted the urge to check my watch. I was too busy trying to watch three hundred sixty degrees at once. It felt like Eryn had been in that motel office forever. She had to have gotten a room by now. There had to be something wrong. I hadn’t heard a gunshot, but something bad must have happened.

I think it was just the eerie decay of the town, the hostile watchers, and the circumstances that led to the hard, cold knot of fear that was building in my gut. Not fear for myself; I’m perfectly confident in my ability to handle myself in a fight, particularly against people as opposed to monsters and demons. I also hadn’t had any ideas about dying in bed for several years. No, I was terrified that something had happened to Eryn, where I couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, and couldn’t do a damned thing to stop it.

Finally, a wan bit of light spilled out into the parking lot from the motel office door. I only saw it because I’d turned my head to make sure somebody wasn’t trying to come up in my blind spot. Eryn stepped out and hurried to the door, her Smith held openly in her hand.

She pulled open the door and climbed inside. Strangely, as she did, the people watching us started to move away, drifting either into the shadows or into more crumbling, decrepit houses.

Eryn shook her head. “That was painful,” she said.

I didn’t look at her, instead continuing to watch our stalkers disappear into the night. “What happened?”

“I went in, and there was nobody at the desk,” she said. “So I waited, figuring they’d come back sooner or later. They didn’t come back. So I rang the bell on the counter.

“This older lady came bursting out of the back room as soon as the bell rang. She looked really mad, and stared at me like I’d just stabbed her cat or something. ‘Why’d you ring the bell!?’ she yelled at me. As if I’d somehow committed a crime by disturbing her while she was at work. I told her we were looking for a room. That made her really mad. She got red in the face, and didn’t say anything for a moment, then screamed at me that there weren’t any vacancies, and I should go away before she called the sheriff on me.

“I told her there wasn’t any call to be treating customers like that, and she tried to hit me. That was when I pointed my gun at her.” Fear started to creep into my wife’s voice. “Jed, it didn’t even faze her. She just kept yelling and cursing at me.” She stopped and looked back at the motel. “There is something really, really wrong here.”

A handful of the people in the street hadn’t moved, even as their compatriots had faded away. The guy in the coat with only his eyes visible had even taken a step closer. I kept my eye on him as I said, “I’m rather inclined to agree with you.” Shoving the 1911 into the little pocket on the inside of my door, I put the truck in gear and started to pull away from the curb, ready to mash the accelerator and turn the big F250 into a battering ram. “Obviously we can’t stay in the motel tonight.”

“What are we going to do?”

I considered the question as I pulled out in the street. We passed only a few feet from the guy in the coat, who just kept watching as we rolled by. I caught a glimpse of haggard, gaunt features, but his hood still mostly obscured his face.

The truth was, we were already off to a bad start. Whatever Blake had gotten mixed up in here, in this benighted little decaying town, it was already advanced enough to make what looked like the entire town actively hostile. I suspected that if we started digging, we’d find the rot went deeper than a bunch of creepy meth-heads on the street at night. That was, of course, assuming that digging deeper didn’t end in a shallow grave down by the river. I had little doubt that these people would resort to violence if pushed. I only wondered what had managed to corrupt an entire town like this. Even Silverton, with all that had happened there, hadn’t ever gone this bad.

But, bad start or not, this wasn’t something we could just run away from. Blake was here, or, if he wasn’t, then this Chrystal person should be, and should be able to lead us to him. Like it or not, dangerous or not, we had to stay.

That didn’t mean we would be trying to stay under any roof in town. That was obviously a bad idea. “We’ll find a place to bed down for the night, and come back in the morning,” I said. “Someplace well outside of town.”

Spending the night in the bed of the truck wasn’t a problem. I’d spent a lot of nights back there, before Eryn and I had gotten married, and we’d spent not a few since the same way, when we were out away from Ray’s ranch. There was a canopy over the back, and a mattress. It wasn’t roomy, especially with the two of us, but since it was a chilly night, neither of us minded much.

Not that it was terribly relaxing. We’d found a campsite a few miles down the road, but still close enough to see the handful of lights that barely illuminated Coldwell. I found myself tensing up whenever a car or truck passed coming from that direction; there was no reason to think any of the people from the town had followed us, but we’d had a distinctly disquieting introduction to Coldwell, and I wasn’t terribly trusting that they wouldn’t get a tweaked-out posse together to go find the out-of-towners who dared to intrude on whatever weird stuff they had going on in the dark. I kept my Winchester by my side. Though I hadn’t said anything, Eryn had brought her shotgun to bed with her, too.

The mind starts to play tricks in the dark, especially when you’re already keyed up. Of course, a lot of the things a Hunter sees can never be un-seen, and they tend to come back to haunt you in the dark, quiet hours.

Every coyote slinking through the grass outside, every odd breath of wind, every creak of the truck turned into something ominous, a worldly or Otherworldly predator creeping up on the truck while we slept. I kept starting awake, expecting to see staring, glinting eyes in a cadaverously thin face under a deep hood, staring in the back window of the canopy. Or worse. Whatever was going on here, I suspected the tweakers were the least of our worries.

Nothing materialized, though. No monsters came out of the night and tried to tear us out of the truck. No meth-heads tried to stab us in our sleep, fitful as it was.

It was not a restful night.

Coldwell was hardly more inviting in daylight than it had been at night. If anything, the light of day just showed the advanced state of decay that much better. It didn’t look like anyone in the town owned a lawnmower, or if they did, they were either completely ignorant or indifferent as to its use. Weeds grew out of control everywhere, and it didn’t look like there was a single house that didn’t have most of its paint peeling off. Windows were broken and maybe repaired with plastic bags. I’m fairly sure that about fifty percent of the cars in the town were up on blocks or just rusting away on flat tires.

At first, the place looked dead, even compared to the night before. There was no one on the streets at all. No cars were moving, and there weren’t even any faces in the windows looking out to see who was driving down the otherwise deserted main drag. It almost looked as if the disquieting encounters of the night before had only been a dream, and we’d rolled into a ghost town, after all.

I parked almost right where we had pulled over next to the motel the night before. The place looked as deserted as the rest of the town, except for the cars and trucks in the parking lot, which hadn’t moved. Not a single curtain stirred. “This is just eerie,” Eryn commented.

The slam of the truck doors echoed loudly across the street. I looked around carefully, scanning for a reaction to the noise, but was greeted by hollow, dark windows and empty doorways. It really seemed like there actually wasn’t anyone around. Either that, or they were watching without revealing themselves.

I’d seen Iraqi villages that were far more welcoming.

I locked the truck, though that wasn’t going to stop determined vandals, and we stepped toward the motel office that Eryn had been shouted out of the previous night.

The door was unlocked, at least, and it wasn’t broken and hanging off its hinges, like more than one abandoned motel I’d been in. There was even a little bell that chimed when the door opened. The office itself had definitely seen better days; the two couches against the wall were faded, stained, and threadbare, the linoleum was bubbled up and worn out in several places, as was the counter top. There was a small service bell on the counter, but nothing else—no hours, services, brochures, nothing. There also was no receptionist. There was the faint sound of what might have been a TV coming from the back. So, the place wasn’t entirely uninhabited.

I held off ringing the bell for the moment; Eryn had found out how they reacted to that. I didn’t feel like sitting on one of the couches; they looked like you could catch something from them. So I leaned against the worn, slightly tacky counter, and waited. Eryn stayed back, keeping away from the door but putting some distance between herself and the counter. I don’t think she liked the idea of talking to the receptionist again.

We must have waited, hearing the faint noise of the TV, but little else, for almost fifteen minutes. I think both of us were getting a little fidgety by the time the receptionist finally came out of the back. She didn’t look that surprised to see us, but just snapped, in a nasally twang, “What you want?”

She was probably in her early fifties, though living in a place like Coldwell she could have been as young as forty. Her hair was a sort of dirty blond, in a sort of half-hearted puffy hairstyle. Her eyes had deep bags under them, and her skin was, well, saggy would probably be the best word. She wasn’t fat, but she looked like gravity was set on pulling her into the ground anyway. There was a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, in defiance of the “No Smoking” sign on the wall beside her.

A glance at Eryn’s tight-lipped expression confirmed for me that this was the same woman who had screamed at her and threatened her the night before. I briefly considered bringing that up. I’m a lot more intimidating than my wife; I stand about six-foot-two, broad-shouldered and kind of gaunt, with an unruly mop of black hair and equally black stubble on my jaw. Eryn had somewhat prevailed on me to look a little bit less like a dangerous drifter, but I still don’t usually look that friendly, as opposed to Eryn, who is small, red-haired, green-eyed, and probably the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

I refrained, however. This probably wasn’t going to be pleasant as it was; there was no reason to turn it into a fight before we had what we needed. Priorities. I reached into my shirt pocket, pulled out the only photo I had of Blake, and showed it to her. “We’re looking for a friend. He said he might be in trouble, and we haven’t been able to contact him. Thought maybe he’d been here.”

She just stared at me coldly for a moment before she reached down, with an exasperated sigh, and picked up her glasses. She was making me mad already. She peered at the picture for a long moment. Then a strange transformation came over her.

She almost seemed to twitch. She blinked rapidly a few times. Then she looked up at me with pure hate in her eyes. “You gotta lotta nerve, comin’ in here like this!” she yelled. “Get out! Get out now, ‘fore I call the cops!”

I didn’t move. I just glared at her and shook my head. “Go ahead,” I said coldly. “The phone’s right there. Somehow I doubt the sheriff’s department is going to be terribly amused if you call them to arrest somebody just asking questions. Last I checked, that still wasn’t a crime in this country.”

“You’ll see!” she shrieked, snatching the phone off its cradle. Apparently, she was nuts enough to think this was actually going to work. “They’ll throw you in a deep, dark hole with the murderers and the child molesters!”

I could see Eryn frowning. I kept my own expression carefully thunderous, but didn’t move. There was definitely something very, very awry here. I just didn’t know what.

The receptionist was screaming into the phone about harassment, robbers, and terrorists now. She wasn’t terribly coherent. I almost doubted if the sheriff’s department—Coldwell was too small for its own police department—would bother to send anybody, or just put it down to somebody being off their meds again.

She slammed down the phone triumphantly. “You better run!” she yelled at us. “They’ll gun you down, yeah, you’ll die in the mud, you scum-sucking…” Her ranting got steadily louder, more profane, and more abusive. I just folded my arms and glowered at her. I could feel Eryn tensing up next to me, and not without good reason. There was no telling when this psycho would go from loud to violent.

Now, it might seem strange that we were standing there, taking this abuse from someone who was clearly not sane and with no intention of telling us what we needed to know. The truth was, if everyone in this benighted town was as unbalanced as the receptionist, there was no way we were going to find Blake by asking questions. I had some burgeoning hope that the county sheriff might actually be sane, and might be able to point us in the right direction.

Far sooner than I expected, there were red and blue flashing lights outside the motel. I stepped back from the door, turning so I was facing both the receptionist and the door, just in case. Eryn followed, her hand hovering nervously near her hip, ready to draw. It was a habit she hadn’t quite broken yet.

The sheriff’s deputies who came through the door didn’t come charging through with their guns up, or even with their hands on them, which was a little surprising, given the racket the receptionist was still putting up, leaning halfway across the counter to spit her bile at us. Under different circumstances, I might even have been a little impressed at the extent of her vocabulary of foul language, but not at the moment.

Both deputies were in uniform and wearing vests. The first one, a short, skinny black guy, shouted down the screeching receptionist with a deep bull-bellow that would have done a drill instructor proud—of course, for all I knew, the guy had been one before he’d been a cop. Nobody’s perfect.

“All right, all right!” he yelled. “We’re here, we’ve got it under control!” The receptionist had now shifted the target of her screaming to the deputies, telling them to make sure all sorts of vile things happened to us. Eryn had gone white, mostly with fury. If she’d been anyone else, I’m not sure she wouldn’t have drawn and shot the receptionist on general principles. The deputy turned to us. “I’ll need you folks to come with me,” he said, a little too loudly, though seemingly only to make himself heard over the torrent of verbal filth coming from the receptionist.

Since both he and his towering partner, who was as brown as leather and looked about fifty, were trying to be polite and ignore the receptionist’s shrieking, I just nodded. I ushered Eryn out in front of me, mainly to shield her from anything the receptionist might take it into her head to throw as we left. Of course, the deputies were right behind us, but I also wanted myself between her and them, too, just in case.

Their cruiser was parked right behind my truck, the lights still flashing. Somehow, it suddenly struck me as a warning to the townspeople to stay away. When we got to the sidewalk, I turned to the two deputies and asked, “So, are we under arrest?”

The black guy, who I now saw had a black name tag that said “Craig” on his vest, just snorted. “What for? Because Psycho Kim started screaming at you? We’d have a county lockup full of truckers and clueless tourists if that was a crime. The only reason we showed up was because we’ve had a cruiser on standby for the last week to come in and rescue anybody lost enough to stumble into this crap-heap of town.” He squinted at me, while his partner, who had the name tag “Tall Bear,” watched the street. He was looking for trouble. I knew the look. “Speaking of which, what brought you here?”

“Looking for somebody,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows. “Somebody who lives here?”

I shook my head. “This was where he said to meet him.” I held out the photo. “You seen him around?”

Craig took the photo, saying, “He’s got pretty bad taste in meeting places, if he told you to meet him in Coldwell.” He frowned at the picture, then handed it to Deputy Tall Bear. “Doesn’t this guy look kinda familiar, Frank?”

Tall Bear took his eyes off the street to look at the picture. He barely gave it a glance. “Yeah, that was the guy who swung through the office about a week and a half ago, asking if there was anything weird going on, disappearances and such,” he said, turning his attention back to the surrounding buildings. As I followed suit, I was starting to see a bit of movement, though no one showed their faces. There were just a few moved curtains, a slightly opened door, that sort of thing. I could feel the eyes on the back of my neck. “He seemed like a decent guy.”

Craig was nodding. “I remember now.” He handed the picture back. “I’m afraid you either got here too late, or he decided he couldn’t keep the appointment,” he told me. “This gentleman left the county two days ago, in quite a hurry.”

“Do you know why?” I asked patiently. I was sure I saw a face dimly pale in the darkness of a broken window across the street.

He shook his head. “He didn’t say. Like I said, he was in a hurry. He did warn us about things getting worse in Coldwell.” He looked around and grimaced. “Boy, he wasn’t wrong about that.”

I frowned, something else he’d said suddenly standing out. Eryn beat me to it, though. “Why have you had a cruiser on standby here for the last week?” she asked. “Has something happened?”

Tall Bear just snorted quietly. Craig shook his head. “Oh yeah, it has,” he said. “Starting about a week ago, violent incidents here went through the roof. So far they’ve mostly been directed at people from out of town, but lacking that, they’ll tear each other’s guts out, too.” He had to be frustrated as hell to be saying this much to a couple of wayward citizens; he didn’t know us or our background, though the fact we were looking for Blake might have loosened him up toward us some. “This place has been a blight for years, but now…I’d just as soon cordon it off and burn it to the ground, and I don’t think the Sheriff is too far behind me.” As if realizing that he may have stepped a little too far, his demeanor changed, and he suddenly got more formal. “Anyway, I’m sorry, but you had to endure that little fit in there for nothing. Your friend’s not here.”

The sense of being watched was getting more and more intense. I wanted off that street. Fortunately, Blake having moved on wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle. “He said that if he wasn’t here, we should get in touch with a Chrystal Meek,” Eryn said. “Does that name sound familiar to you?”

The two deputies shared a glance, then Craig looked back at us. “Yeah, it does,” he said slowly. He took a look around the street, as if suddenly becoming aware of the same oppressive sense of being watched that I’d been feeling for a while. “Why don’t we go somewhere a little less public? You can follow us.” He headed for the cruiser without another word. I looked at Eryn, shrugged, and we went to get in the truck. Maybe we’d finally get some answers.