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  “It’s stopped his bleeding,” Loraine said. She sat back and crossed her arms. “Childe looked under it when we found him and there was a pretty decent gash. That normal web stuff is making it better.”

  “Well, that’s good luck,” said Will. “Spider web is a natural coagulant. The hill folks all up and down the Appalachians have been using it for centuries on cuts and things like that. Something to do with the proteins. There’re some mosses that are good, too.”

  Loraine just stared at him.

  “I’m not going to convince you, am I?” Will asked.

  “Doesn’t look that way,” Loraine said.

  Will put his hands on his knees. “Okay, I’ll trek on back there first thing tomorrow and see if I can’t find what you saw. You said you marked the trail up to that point from the back of your house with this orange lipstick, right? I should be able to follow it well enough. I’ll take my camera and we’ll put paid to this once and for all. Deal?”

  “That sounds fine,” Loraine said.

  “Constable, Will?” Childe asked.

  “Yeah, Kiddo?”

  “Take your gun, okay?”

  * * *

  From the edge of the parking lot, the RV looked like the coziest of mountain cabins. The voices from within blurred and muffled by the time they reached the boy standing at the border between woods and asphalt. Curly blonde head tipped to one side, he seemed to be listening or daydreaming. Gore and bits of brown fur ringed his mouth. His eyes were inhuman black saucers. He inhaled long and deep through his nose, scenting the humans and the brave dog. He smiled. Darwin would be fine.

  Chapter 5

  The flies buzzed, describing lazy helixes and figure eights over a pile of week-old bodies. The flesh-drunk cloud of shifting emerald and black droned over a faint crackling, the second generation mining paths to the light. Ricky Dunbar—Tricky Ricky to those who knew him as a crystal hustler in the Castro—gave birth from a split in the bloated flesh of his left cheek. He’d been fine featured, his whole face suggestive of full lips turned up sly. After a week on the floor of this farmhouse outside of Ricochet, Montana, Tricky Ricky had become beautiful in an altogether different way. The rest of the gang—two men and one woman—had joined him in his new aesthetic.

  Across the room, through an almost visible stench, squatted an old couch. Long arms spread along the back, naked and bone white, shot through with cerulean veins. Black-leathered legs crossed at the knee, the lambskin creaking once a minute or so as the wearer respired. Were it not for the telltale expansion of accordion ribs, one might assume him to be a fresher member of the gang. Behind great round sunglasses his face was etched marble, thin mouth pressed closed. He hadn’t desired a growth of beard since taking this seat seven days ago, so a shadow had not broken his cheeks, as the maggots had broken Ricky’s. His hair, long and black as his leather shanks, painted his shoulders and along the length of his arms.

  A questing botfly corkscrewed away from the mound and landed on a black-lacquered fingernail. All cellular activity ceased and it fell into the pile of flies drifted in a rough outline around the figure on the couch. He, or it, for beneath the leather pants he was smooth as a mannequin, sighed. Another one bites the dust.

  “I am the dust,” he muttered.

  A thousand flies pattered down in a short, grey downpour. The couch sitter enjoyed the silence for a moment, letting it crash against the shores of his skull. He slapped his knees once and lurched to his feet.

  He would have been tall, over six feet, but his spine curved at the top, humping his torso over in a question mark. His arms and hair hung forward and swung as he loped across the room past the gang. His boot nudged a protruding elbow, or something—it was already getting hard to tell—and the mound released a rude breath from some secret orifice. His pencil thin eyebrow rose. The machinations of the human body never ceased to amuse.

  He rounded a corner into the bathroom and found himself in the mirror over the sink. The bathroom was spotless. Even the grout beneath the toes of the claw-foot tub was bleached white. The bad air from the living room had penetrated the entire house on a molecular level, but he could still smell the tang of mildew cleaner in here. Twyla, the female section of the mound, had been a cleaner when she was high on crank. Since that had pretty much been her constant state, Ricky had banished her to the bathroom lest she get too underfoot. Some of the chemicals used to clean and those used to cook do not mix well.

  Most of the rest of the house looked like it had played host to a troop of transients, camping out instead of really moving in. Soiled sleeping bags like cast off larval carapaces snugged against the corners of the bedrooms. Used condoms crystallized at the bottom of empty Jack Daniels bottles. Cigarette butts were as numerous as dead flies, foaming out of beer can ashtrays. Under the smell of corruption was the chemical knife of the meth lab they’d set up in the kitchen. And the bathroom, the squeaky clean bathroom with its Windex-clear mirror.

  The man-thing curled his long fingers around the sides of the sink and leaned into his reflection. He reached up and removed the saucer sunglasses. His eyes were huge, nearly as large as the sunglasses and darker, all pupil. The light in the small room seemed to dim as they sucked at it, the scoured tiles greying as if a shadow passed over the sun. He blinked lashless sockets. His lips skinned back over a bushel of cannibal teeth. His voice rose out of his throat, deep and dry, buzzing.

  “I am so bored.”

  He blinked again, longer this time and when he opened his eyes they were normal sized and yellow brown. He squinted and a few days’ crop of stubble shaded his jaw. He took another grain from the million-year hourglass of his existence and checked his reflection; he would pass. It was time to go back to his beginning on this plane. Time to go back to the mother-cut. Back to Shard.

  Chapter 6

  Erica slammed into consciousness, breath in short bursts, heart thrumming. Early morning sun electrified the perimeter of the window shade, a neon square in the dark. A green LED flickered on the smoke detector on the ceiling. Old, moist cigarette smoke, engraved into every surface, wrinkled her nose. She was in that shitbag chain motel outside of the county seat about forty miles north of Shard. The only sound was her breath. Something had yanked her out of her Ambien-induced yuppie-coma. Erica listened, an animal in the dark sensing danger.

  The digital clock flicked through a couple of minutes to 6:14AM. Hell with this. She’d had a bad dream or something. It was just another hotel room in another town, another assignment, another step. It wasn’t a half-suite at The W, that was for damn sure, but there wasn’t anything to freak out about; a normal room—shitty, small, redolent of bulk-purchased cleaning products and short-term human habitation.

  Erica lay back in the dark and stared at the blinking smoke detector. She started thinking about her day. She’d gotten in too late the previous evening (ass-fucked by MapQuest yet again) to get any work done at the courthouse. With no cell signal to speak of, she had finally surrendered and pulled off the single-lane blacktop at the first habitation she’d seen in thirty miles of aimless wandering. The doublewide trailer had sloped so deeply in the middle that it looked like it could fall in any day. A short woman, roughly as wide as she was tall, had answered the door and looked everywhere but at Erica. (Not her fault, really, the poor thing had the worse case of walleye Erica had ever seen.) She got proper directions, thanked the back-woods cliché who gave them, and got back into the rented Subaru Outback. The Motel 8 loomed out of the darkness several turns and dark, tree-walled roads later. Had it not been for the walleyed woman, Erica might have driven around in circles all night on that labyrinth of back roads. The thought frosted her skin more than the car’s air conditioning.

  The young woman at the front desk assured her that the courthouse wouldn’t be open until tomorrow at 10 A.M. and didn’t she just have the most beautiful hair! How’d she get it all wavy an’ streaky like that? Where was she from? New York! Manhattan! Really? What was it like
? Were there just, like, a billion people there? Was she afraid of terrorists? There was this one time? When she and her sister, Olivia-Jean? Had been up to the Wal-Mart in Lewiston? And they’d seen these Arabic guys in turbans? It had really freaked them out. Did Erica want a wake up call? She was in room 124.

  Erica needed records, deeds, avenues of infiltration and opportunity. She wanted at least three plausible legal strategies for relocating every last pathetic holdover in Shard. The lower the cost to Blackstone Mineral the better. The simplest, of course, would be to just buy everyone out. There couldn’t be more than a hundred people still living in that smoke hole, if that, and their homes were virtually worthless. They should thank Blackstone for buying them out at a dollar per square foot, but you didn’t make partner for following the most obvious course of action. Erica wanted a way to get the people of Shard off their land for nothing. Hell, maybe she’d find a way to make all those rednecks pay Blackstone for discounted relocation assistance.

  She smiled and stretched her legs; her silk harem pants a luxuriant armor against the course hotel sheets. Probably had a thread count of about, oh, one. She should think about getting up and taking a run and shower before heading to the courthou—

  A loud buzz, like a cicada caught under a paper cup, broke the silence. Erica sat up. Jesus, what the fuck? It came again and this time she noticed the movement behind the window shade. That’s what had woken her up, some kind of pissed-off insect. It buzzed again, thrashing against the window and the shade. Erica wasn’t afraid to swat a bee or whatever (flying bugs she could deal with, it was spiders that wigged her out), but this thing sounded huge.

  She had to do something. If she just sat there in the dark the little monster could get out and start flying around the room. Jesus, it probably had been while she’d been sleeping. Erica reached over and fumbled for the lamp by the bedside table. She found the neck and moved her fingers up the cheap brass to the switch. Her hand closed over a spikey lump that jumped to life like a joy buzzer. She flinched and pain stabbed through the webbing of her thumb and index finger.

  “Owoohshit!” she screamed and rolled away off the other side of the bed to the floor. She pulled her hand between her breasts, fighting panic. There was a bee in here and it had stung her. That was all, she was okay. She wasn’t allergic or anything. How the fuck had it gotten from behind the shade to the lamp so fast? Slowly, she reached up and found the lamp on that side of the bed. With iron will she forced herself to feel up the neck for the switch. It was statistically impossible that she would find another bee in the same place as the last one, but her hindbrain was screeching at her not to do it. She jerked away when her fingers touched the protruding switch but controlled herself and clicked on the light.

  Erica shrank down on her haunches. “Dios mothah¬fuck,” she whispered. The ceiling writhed with the biggest wasps she had ever seen. No, hornets, these could only be thought of as hornets. They were each about the size of her thumb and blue-black. There had to be near a hundred of them sprayed across the water-stained plaster not six feet above her head. The light seemed to wake them up a bit. A few detached and began to float around the room, cruising black helicopters.

  Erica’s will descended like a lead-lined curtain. Her skin cooled and breathing slowed. She had to get out, but if she bolted for the door it might goose the hornets into attacking her. God, they were huge, huge! No, no, she was cool. She was okay. They were just a bunch of fucking backwater bugs that had a nest in the motel she would soon own through the lawsuit she would file as soon as she got the fuck back to New York. She exhaled and began to crawl across the carpet toward the door. Details in the carpet seared her eyes—the acne scars of cigarette burns, the Rorschach patterns of ancient stains. Oh, look, that one looked like a woman being stung to death.

  Sensing her motion, the rest of the hornets took wing and filled the upper two feet of the room like a flashover in a house fire. The hum was loud and harmonized. It invaded Erica’s mind and pulled at her eyelids. The door seemed so far away. Everything hummed. Maybe she could just lie down on the carpet. It smelled dusty and a little bit like asphalt. She could just press her humming head onto the humming carpet and hum for a while.

  A motion caught her eye at the corner. She watched a large grey-brown house-spider stride out from under the bed a few inches from her hand. As spiders went, she’d seen bigger, but it was enough. She yanked her hand away and exploded toward the door, hammering her knees and the heels of her hands across the floor. The humming smoke turned into a growling storm cloud. She yanked at the door, but it wouldn’t open more than a couple of inches. Fragrant summer morning wafted through the gap. Tires sighed on the road. She had to get out! Erica yanked and jerked, but the door wouldn’t move. Cool it, chica, she thought. It’s just the chain. Erica reached up and unlatched it, then whipped around the door, closing it behind her.

  Quiet poured over her.

  The buzzing from those hornets had been infernal. She wrapped her arms around herself and hugged. Erica closed her eyes and counted to ten; she dug her fingernails into her arms with each count. She opened her eyes and looked out on the little parking lot. Dew quicksilvered the windshield of her Subaru. A songbird perched on a power line across the road like a comma on an otherwise empty line of notebook paper. She took a breath, another, another. The air smelled of deep green and high summer. Okay. Okay.

  Erica turned around and jumped. “Holy shit.”

  The window was coated with hornets, black and sharp as obsidian chips, but safely on the other side of the glass. She covered her mouth and felt her eyes go wide. Her hand complained and she examined the angry red welt. She could actually see the fucking hole the stinger had made. Oh, she was so going to sue the hell out of this place. Had that little redneck skank who’d checked her in last night known her room was infested? Maybe she’d thought it would be funny to teach the big-time city girl, (the Spic, perhaps) a little lesson?

  Erica shook her head and stared at the writhing mass. The hornets flowed around and over each other, dragging pendulous abdomens, great poison factories, behind them. They cleaned their antenna with garden-shear jaws and sucked at the light with oil drop eyes. Erica took a step toward the window and they froze, becoming a framed poster of hornets. It wasn’t that they slowed, or just a portion of them stopped crawling—they ceased all motion, not a wing tip twitched. She felt as if she were dreaming. Erica reached out and flattened her hand against the glass. The world silenced. Then, very low, Erica heard a ticking like miniature hail blown against a tin roof. She squinted and looked close. Where her hand touched it, the hornets were stinging the glass.

  * * *

  The motel owner stood behind the counter like a pudding with delusions of humanity. “I’m sorry, miss,” he said. “We just couldn’t find no bees in your room.”

  Erica had been standing in what passed for a lobby at this fistula of hell for the past twenty-five minutes, in her pajamas, arguing with a man who smelled like eggs and took her about as seriously as a page ripped out of a porn ‘zine. “That’s probably because the swarm of prehistoric fucking hornets fucking ate them.”

  “I’m sorry?” No light behind those watery peepers, nothing.

  “Not half as sorry as I am,” she sighed, and pinched the bridge of her nose. Her own morning breath pounded up her nose. Lovely. Couldn’t be worse than the way this yokel smelled. “Listen, for the millionth time, maybe they went back to their nest—wherever the hell that was, in the ceiling or whatever—but when I woke up there were at least fifty or sixty enormous black hornets in the room.” There had been more like two hundred but fifty or sixty sounded less hysterical. She held up her throbbing left hand. “See this? I didn’t ram a spear through my own hand, pal.” Pal, that was one her father’s. Whenever he’d slam some punk up against the patrol car, he’d call him “Pal”. Erica wanted to do that, slam this fat bastard’s face straight down on the counter. Instead she held up her palms in surrender.
/>   “Fine,” she said. “Fine. I just want to check out.”

  “Well, okay, but don’t you want to go back to your room and collect your things?” He scanned her body for the fortieth time. “Your, um, clothes and sundries and all?”

  Erica paused. Twenty minutes ago she wouldn’t have set foot back in that room for a partnership at the firm, but now curiosity itched behind her forehead. She reset her face to pleasant mode. “Yes, of course. I’m just a little flustered, I suppose. Listen, sir, could you maybe—while I’m collecting my sundries—call ahead to Shard and book me a room?”

  He leaned a hip against the counter, a wedge of hairy belly flowing over the lip. “Shard, huh. You, uh, got folks there?”

  “No.”

  “Well, they had a motor court but it closed down a long time ago.” He chuckled and a ripple traveled his flesh. “Pretty much everything’s closed in Shard.”

  “Well, where else is there to stay in the general area?”

  “Other than here?”

  “Yeah, other than here.”

  He rubbed his cheek. “Well, miss, I don’t think you’ll have much luck. There’s Mechanicsville about fifty mile up County 31, but other than that…” he opened his hands and trailed off.

  “And there’s nothing in Shard? Nothing at all? A B&B, something?”

  “Well, there is a boarding house down there. The Rhodes family used to run it, but I think there’s only the son there now.”

  Erica brightened. “Do you think he’d rent me a room?”

  “Might do. Might do.”

  “Do you think you could call him while I go get my things?”

  “Nope.”

  She raised her eyebrows and imagined stabbing a railroad spike through the flab of his neck. She could almost feel the hot gush on her wrist. “Nope?”

  “No phone.” He showed her his teeth. Still had most of them.

  * * *