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But the fingers are not fingers. They are claws.

And then … they move.

THE CAMRY WAS
gone. Tony was dead, and maybe Casey, too. Rima had scrubbed as much of a pocket out of the snow as she could manage, but she was jammed in tight, headfirst and up to her thighs. Her air was going fast, the snow melting from the warmth of her breath and body heat—and now, just when she thought things couldn’t get any worse, she heard something.

Coming right for me
. A deep trembling seized her. She could feel Taylor’s death-whisper, still clinging to her parka, cringe.
It’s going to get me …
She felt something move and then close around her right ankle.
No!
Her heart bolted up her throat to lodge behind her teeth.
No, no!

“Rima?” Casey, snow-muffled and distant. “Rima, are you okay?”

Oh, thank you, God
. Nearly limp with relief, she wiggled her foot.
Get me out of here
.

“Good.” He sounded relieved. “Okay, hang on. It’ll only take a couple minutes to get you out.”

Actually, it took more like ten, and she felt every single second crawl by as her air pocket got stuffier and her chest started to hurt.
Hurry, Casey, hurry
. Her head ached, the pain like nails behind her eyeballs. Then, all of a sudden, cold licked her hips and waist, and she could move her legs. Pawing through snow, Casey grabbed fistfuls of her parka and yanked. Popping free like a cork from the tight neck of a narrow bottle, she tumbled out, and they collapsed together into the snow.

“Oh!” she gasped. They’d gotten turned around somehow so she was on top. They were nose to nose, her palms flat on his chest, his hands clamped around her biceps. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he said. Deep, bloody scratches scored his forehead and cheeks. The fist-sized bruises on his jaw were purple and puffy. His parka was ripped, the arms nearly in shreds. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Her voice suddenly broke, and she knew she would start to cry if she wasn’t careful. She drew in a shuddery breath. “Thanks for getting me out, for not leaving me, Casey.”

“I wouldn’t do something like that.” Casey gave her arms a squeeze. “Are you
sure
you’re okay?”

She nodded. “What about you? What happened to your face?”

“Landed in a tree across the road. Got blown right out of my fath—” He stopped, licked his lips. “Out of some of my clothes. I guess the wind or something got under and tore my shirt off. My parka was all tangled up, like a noose. Took forever to work the zipper from the inside and then climb
down. That’s why it took me so long to find you. I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s fine.” Her eyes traced the course of a red welt beneath his battered jaw and over the hump of his throat. She thought it was pretty lucky he hadn’t strangled. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Me too.” In the dwindling orange glow of the fire, his expression was unreadable. “I mean, I’m glad you’re okay.”

She was suddenly conscious of the feel of his body beneath hers, how close they were. How she could tolerate his touch. Taylor’s whisper didn’t seem to mind either. This was a very different Casey, not the mean kid from before. Even his voice was different: not rough or sneering, but normal and kind of nice.

Of course
. She pulled in a small, quick breath. His father’s shirt was gone, and with it, all that poison. There was no whisper of Big Earl now, anywhere on—or
in
—Casey. Did he know? Somehow she didn’t think Casey had a clue—and what was it, exactly, that he could do, anyway?

Maybe he’s like me, able to sense death-whispers, but my opposite. I take away the whispers; I free them. But maybe he draws them in, gives them a place to live. Or they take him. Can whispers even
do
that?
She didn’t know. In her experience, death-whispers like Taylor’s were helpless; they needed her to soothe and then free them. But Big Earl was gone, so whatever was going on with Casey was either reversible, or a whisper needed more time to weave itself into Casey’s skin. How long would Casey have to be exposed before that became permanent? All interesting thoughts, and something she’d never considered before. Too much to think about right
now, though. Later, if there was time, they really ought to talk.

“We need to get out of here,” she said. “There might be more of those things.”

“Or something worse.” He slid her to one side and pushed up on his elbows. “We sh—”

When he didn’t go on, she looked over. “Casey?” She searched his face, saw something like amazement quickly shading to alarm—and then she realized:
Wait a second, I can really
see
him
. There was orange light from the dying car fire, but Casey’s face was bathed in a silver-blue glow, the kind of light thrown by a full moon. “What is it?”

“Rima, turn around,” he said, thickly, and lifted his chin. “Look at the sky.”

She did, and her stomach bottomed out.

They lay together on the snow, staring into the black night above and at something new: very dense, milky, and shimmering as if studded with silver glitter—or stars. It boiled out of the darkness in a great pillowing mass, gathering and gobbling the night.

“Oh my God.” She couldn’t seem to get enough air. “Is that … is that a
cloud
?”

“That’s no cloud,” he said.

“WHAT IS THAT?”
Chad peered through the Dodge’s windscreen. “Is that smoke? Like, from the explosions?”

“It wouldn’t be white, unless they were using phosphorus,” Eric said. He was in the backseat but leaned forward now, draping his hands over the front, his walkie-talkie dangling by its wrist strap. “That’s more like fog.”

“Or just real thick clouds,” Bode said. Fog or clouds, he didn’t like the look of all that open sky. Drop him into a tunnel—what he and his fellow rats called a
black echo
—any day. Not that a tunnel was a cakewalk. There was the enemy hunkering down there, waiting for a quiet kill, and booby traps: snakes, wicked-sharp punji stakes smeared with God knows what kind of poison or human shit. But scorpions were the worst. Those suckers nested everywhere: on the walls, the ceiling. Get stung, and you were gone.

Other guys called him lucky. Maybe he was. If he’d popped out of that tunnel ten seconds earlier, that mortar would’ve taken his head off. Instead, Sergeant Battle took the hit: one
minute there, his hand reaching for Bode’s, and the next—

Which is why you need to think, be careful, watch your step
. The voice in Bode’s mind was more hiss than whisper.
Not like I can take one for you this time around, son
.

Bode’s eyes flicked to the rearview. Battle’s head floated next to Eric, who was back to fiddling with his walkie-talkie. Eric wouldn’t have seen Battle anyway, probably a good thing. Battle’s head was a ruin. Most of the meat on the sergeant’s face had flash-fried, leaving blackened bone and shriveled tendon. Battle’s right eye was a crater, no white at all. His left hung on his cheek, tethered to its socket by a leathery stalk of cooked nerve. A fist-sized chunk of Battle’s skull was gone, leaving behind daylight and a charred curl that had been his left ear. A goopy pink sludge of Battle’s brains slopped over his neck.

“I know that, Sarge,” Bode said, thinking it was lucky no one could hear
him
talking to the ghost of a dead guy no one else could see. “But you know we had to help. I couldn’t send the devil dog off on his own, no backup. Wouldn’t be right.”

Right’s got nothing to do with it
. Battle’s mouth was a tight rictus grin of fat maggots squirming over shattered teeth.
After all, it isn’t like you don’t already got enough problems
.

CHAD HAD NOT
wanted to go.

“Man, this is a really bad idea,” Chad said. They’d retreated to the kitchen to retrieve their weapons: a Remington pump, which was already minus two shells, and a four-shot bolt-action Winchester .270, as well as Chad’s Colt. Bode’s own
service weapon was lying in scrub somewhere way back in Jasper. The desert was good for swallowing all kinds of stuff a guy didn’t want found. Guns. Money. Drugs.

Bodies.

“I mean it.” Chad gnawed at his sore. “Don’t we got enough problems?”

“You’re gonna give yourself a scar, man.” Bode hip-butted a drawer of silverware shut. The cupboards above the sink weren’t exactly bare, but whoever lived here had a thing for Kraft macaroni and cheese; the cupboards next to the fridge were stacked full, top to bottom. Man, they must have a lot of little kids. Who else plowed through that many Blue Boxes? Not that he minded: he’d choked down so many beans and franks in the bush, he hoped he never saw another hot dog.

Bode squatted, opened the cupboard beneath the kitchen sink, and pawed past cleaning supplies, lighter fluid, trash bags. No real weapons, though, not even a butcher knife. He felt under the sink to be sure—maybe something taped there—but there was nothing.

Weird. Farmers were always shooting shit: groundhogs, sick horses, crap like that. He stood, thought about that, staring at the black rectangle of window over the sink. So where would they stash a weapon? The barn? Maybe down cellar?

Framed in the window, Battle peered back.
There aren’t going to be any other weapons here, son. This isn’t any kind of
here
you’ve ever been
.

“A scar.” Chad let out a giddy bray. “Like that’s the worst thing I got to worry about.”

“You don’t have to worry about anything,” Bode said,
flatly. To Battle: “What do you mean, this isn’t a
here?
I’m standing here.”

Yes
. Battle’s ruined face glimmered from the window’s murky well.
But
where
are you?

“I’m in a kitchen, Sarge.”

And where is this kitchen?

“Look, Sarge, you got something to say, say it.”

Think, son. Use your head. Does this house look like any farmhouse you’ve ever seen? Does it
feel
right?

“Sure,” Bode said. “I mean, you know, it’s a house.”

It’s got the right shape. It’s got furniture and there are rooms. There’s food and light. But there are no pictures on the walls, no photographs. Who
lives
here?

“I don’t know. I haven’t really looked, Sarge, but there have to be bills or something lying around. There’s probably a name on the mailbox.”

Are there? Was there?

“I didn’t notice. It was, you know,
snowing
.”

“Man, we got to get out of here.” Chad hugged himself. “This place just don’t feel right.”

“You need to calm down,” Bode said. Chad was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Good on patrol; definitely watched your back, and the guy could de-ass a chopper like greased lightning. But he wasn’t any kind of rocket scientist. On the other hand, Chad wasn’t as crazy as Bode, who
knew
he was nuts. Given Bode’s day job, though, crazy is as crazy does. Battle’s ghost hitching a ride in his head was just so much icing on that proverbial cake. “Let’s just focus on one thing at a time, okay? First light tomorrow, we figure a way out of the valley.”

“A way out?” Chad said. “We don’t even know how we
made our way in. Do
you
remember how we got down here? I sure don’t.”

Bode didn’t either. On the other hand, he’d gotten into some serious smack, so maybe that was understandable. The high had tailed off, though, and while Bode knew from experience that his memory never quite recovered a hundred percent, he really didn’t recall more than jagged fragments and sensations: the stink of piss from the men’s room, a thick sweat-fog hanging over the dance floor.

The moment he squeezed the trigger.

“Bode, I’m telling you, man: the cops catch us, they turn us over to the MPs and it’s Leavenworth. They give you the firing squad for stuff like this.” Chad hugged himself a little tighter. “I told you to let it roll, but no. You had to go and follow the LT out of the bar.”

Bode was tempted to point out that the military’s preferred method for execution these days was hanging, but no use making Chad more anxious than he was already. “Relax. No one saw us.”

“Bode, anyone finds your gun, the cops or the MPs’ll trace it right back to you.”

“Yeah, but we ship out in a week. No way they’ll pull us out of that.”

“How you figure?”

“Man, they’re hurting for guys to fight. No one’ll come looking. Come morning, we get our bearings and drive on out of here. Until then, don’t sweat it. Everything’ll be copacetic.”

“What if the owners here show up?”

Battle:
They won’t
.

“They won’t,” Bode echoed. “Not tonight anyway.”

“Man, I hope not.” Chad shivered. “House gives me the creeps. Know what bothers me? The food.”

Bode laughed. “Macaroni and cheese makes you nervous?”

Don’t laugh
, Battle said.
He’s right
.

“Bode, that food was ready and waiting,” said Chad. “That’s just wrong. No one goes off during a blizzard and leaves his oven on.”

It was a good point. “If there was an emergency, they might,” Bode said, but he couldn’t convince even himself.

“If there was an emergency,” Chad said, “then it was a long time ago. There were no tracks and the road wasn’t plowed. That casserole ought’ve burnt. But it didn’t. I’m telling you: that’s not right.”

“Well, we’re not going to solve that little mystery now.” Turning away from the window and Battle, Bode scooped up the Winchester and the Remington pump. “Come on.”

Chad’s mouth set in an unhappy line, but he followed because that’s what Chad did best. Yet he—or maybe Battle—had planted a seed, because Bode realized something as they drove away and the house and barn dwindled to bright islands.

There was light. The house had electricity. But there were no power lines. This far out in the country, there would have to be.

So where was the light—the power—coming from?

“MAYBE IT’S LIKE
gas,” Chad said now. He dug at his sore with a dirty thumbnail. “You know, like some kind of nerve gas or that Agent Orange.”