“Hello, puppy,” she said. “Hi, puppy, hello.”
Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid . . .
It moved closer. The growl shifted in tone, to something more quizzical. She’d confused it.
“Who’s a good boy?” she asked, deciding on the spot that this was a male wolf-monster.
He sniffed her hand, and then licked the tips of her fingers.
“Please don’t be tasting me,” she said, more to herself.
She leaned forward and touched the top of his snout. The nose was wet and cold, and felt entirely doglike. If her imagination was indeed another sense on which she could rely, right now it was telling her that this was a Great Dane.
He moved his head under her outstretched hand and let her scratch behind his ear. It was upright, not floppy. It twitched as she scratched. He grumbled, and whined, but seemed to be enjoying this. That was apparent in both the way he kept nudging her hand with his forehead and the fact that he had not yet tried to eat her.
The head was enormous. She was trying very hard to ignore that.
“My dog’s name was Burton,” she said. “What shall we call you?”
He licked her face, and for a few seconds she actually did forget that this was a feral wolf-beast rather than a dog.
Then the wolf-beast heard something. Her fear was that Robbie had awoken and was about to stumble into the room and get both of them killed. But the noise had come from outside.
The animal shook away from her and ran to the doorway, growling once more—not at her, but at whatever was outside. After a moment, she could hear it too: He was picking up the distant call of his brethren.
He whined. His toenails tapped along the cold stone floor, impatient; the dog that doesn’t want to do something.
“It’s okay, puppy,” she said.
He whined some more, but then a second and third howl sounded and he ran off through the open door.
The moment Carol was most afraid was between the puppy’s exit and the time it took for her to cross the room to the door. There was nothing in that agonizingly long stretch—that in reality was no more than thirty seconds—to prevent the dog that had been in there with her from returning as the wolf she’d imagined it to be . . . or for some other nightmarish megafauna to find its way inside.
But then she had the door closed. She fumbled around near the knob until she found the deadbolt they hadn’t considered checking for previously, and latched it.
She sagged to the floor, exhaled seemingly for the first time in her life, and wondered precisely what had just happened.
Two
Paul
1
Pastor Paul didn’t know anything was wrong until Sunday, when nobody showed up for the service.
Already it had been a pretty unusual week for Paul, as weeks went, beginning with the morning he woke up to a pink sunrise over the mountains. He didn’t know what that meant, but considered working into his sermon a joke about the Lord and breast cancer awareness. He’d chickened out at the last minute, because after fifty-one years on this Earth he’d worked out that he was not gifted with a comic sensibility, and there was nothing worse than telling a joke that didn’t get laughs, especially when he was the only one talking.
That same morning, he found the chapel in some inexplicable disarray. Best he could figure, a storm had ridden through, broken a window, and dropped a bunch of forest dirt and whatnot on the interior. It also busted a side door on its way out, suggesting that this was a manifestly malevolent storm that disliked Paul and his mission specifically.
It was a mess, whatever the explanation.
The small room in the back of the chapel where Paul lived was largely untouched, but that was probably because it was better built. He’d reinforced it after a particularly bad winter so that he didn’t freeze to death if all those climate change warnings he’d been reading about trended toward an even colder winter in his future.
Kids, he thought, when he saw the chapel. Coulda been kids.
That was what his pop used to say whenever property was damaged by means other than the weather or the direct hand of God. When Paul was himself a kid, he used to imagine a roving band of juveniles ravaging the country in the dead of night. These kids—who definitely existed only in his head—became young Paul’s first understanding of the devil.
The devil hadn’t mucked up his church either, but he was an easier sell than kids.
What had happened to Paul’s chickens, on the other hand—that might’ve been the devil, all right.
After he saw the damage, Paul figured the best thing to do—before spending the day cleaning the chapel, which was not on the schedule—was to make himself a proper breakfast. Problem was, the storm had also knocked out all the power in his little corner of the White Mountains. (It was all one big circuit in this section; if he lost power, so did all the neighbors.) Power or no, his refrigerator was near empty as it was. No more meat, aside from some old jerky, and the milk had . . . Well, it was impossible to understand what had happened to the milk. He’d seen milk turn, but this was something else. It had turned, evaporated, gained spirit form, and waited for Paul to open the door so it could be released into the world, maybe to go haunt Jed’s cows down the road.
Likewise, the bread was beyond bad. It was a rock.
But the morning could still be salvaged with a coffee and a couple of eggs. Later, he would add a visit to Jed for more milk, and maybe with some sweet-talking, a loaf of bread or two from Veronica, so he didn’t have to spend the day baking it from scratch himself. Then maybe he’d see about hunting down some meat.
The chickens weren’t going to be providing any eggs on this day, though; they were a combination of dead and missing that was difficult to piece together without involving a crime scene specialist. The side of the coop had been torn open, and there was dried blood on the wall, and a few scattered feathers. It also looked like whatever dropped dirt in his chapel had stopped over in the coop for a spell.
The well still had water, though, and there was still vacuum-sealed coffee in the pantry, and a kettle. The pilot on the stove was out, but he had matches, and the gas tank was still half full; no act of the devil had changed that.
And so, there was coffee to be had, and that made most everything a little bit better.
He spent the rest of that morning chewing on the jerky and cleaning the church. Then he unlocked the shed and fetched one of the rifles and set out to hunt.
That ended up being the easiest part of the day, by far. He usually had to climb halfway down the mountain to score a buck, but this time he found one no more than a hundred yards from his back door. The deer let him get close, too, like it didn’t know better. In his fifty-one years, he couldn’t quite recall a deer being so accommodating.
By nightfall, he’d built up the fire pit, skinned the deer, and set about cooking the meat. He’d have to seal and refrigerate most of it, and he had no power for refrigeration, but usually outages lasted only a couple of days.
There was time.
2
The power still wasn’t back the next day. He decided then to place a call to Stewie, who ought to know what was up. But, like the electricity, the line was dead.
He’d lost power before, and he’d lost his landline before, but only a couple of times had he lost both. Those were occasioned by severe winter storms. That was not the case here, unless the storm that mucked his church counted. Hardly seemed likely, if Paul slept through it all.
Still, he didn’t worry. He had food, water, and shelter. Stewie, meanwhile, had citizens in real peril to attend to; he didn’t need the crazy hillside preacher in his business if it wasn’t an emergency. The call could wait.
Then came Sunday.
Nobody showing up was the second thing he thought was pretty strange on that day, and was ultimately the linchpin to his realizing just how much had gone wrong.
But the first thing was still downright alarming.
<
br /> He’d cleaned out the church through the busted side door, not even bothering to go around front until Sunday, when it came time to greet the congregation as they drove up. That was when he noticed the wreath.
It’d been nailed to the door. Just about all that was left was a ring of old aluminum wire, tangled up with dead roots and withered pine branches. There were some climbing vines in there too, which had somehow taken root in the last week and spread across to the other door. The effect was something like a rudimentary mandala, or an eyeball.
He found it deeply unsettling, and tore it down immediately. The vines had taken some of the finish from his doors, but he could repaint. Better that than have the eye of the devil looking out at his congregants.
Not that it ended up mattering at all, since nobody showed.
Paul was a man who lived a life of ritual, so on finding himself without a congregation, the first thing he did was conduct a mental review of his week. Monday through Wednesday was community outreach, when applicable, and repairs on the church, where needed. Thursdays and Fridays were for reading the Bible and choosing his gospel. Saturdays were for polishing the sermon. Except for the power loss and the need to hunt for food, the week had gone more or less exactly as planned.
It was definitely Sunday. It had to be. This wasn’t about him; the town hadn’t suddenly decided he was a pariah.
Something was very wrong.
3
Coming down off the mountain took up the rest of Paul’s Sunday, beginning as soon as he checked on his pickup.
Somehow, just sitting in the garage and minding its own business, the truck had lost pressure in all four tires. He examined them for signs kids had slashed his tires, but they looked fine. Just didn’t have enough air in them anymore.
He couldn’t even begin to come up with an explanation, so instead he just pumped them up, and then tried turning over the engine.
There were three things about which Pastor Paul could be considered a genuine expert, at least regionally. They were, in no particular order: guns, cars, and the Bible. (Old Henry used to say Paul was the only man in New Hampshire who could shoot you down, pray for your soul, and then give the ambulance an oil change while they were working to save your life. It was a joke that sounded better with alcohol.) So when the pickup wouldn’t turn over, Paul knew what he was about.
He popped the hood, and then wondered who’d switched his truck with this old junker.
Everything had to be changed: the battery, the starter, the hoses, the spark plugs . . . just about all but the engine itself. Probably that needed a replacement too, but he didn’t have a spare, or a block and tackle, so it would have to hold out at least until he made it to town.
He had a spare for all the other parts, both for himself and for the occasional good neighbor repair work. It was all in his shed, the only thing he owned that was better reinforced than his living quarters. Winter came, folks on the mountain were isolated a lot, and had to rely on each other, so: He was good if you needed a gun, or needed your car or soul fixed. Jed was good for milk, bread, and news. Old Henry had a still, tobacco, and—Paul had been told—some decent marijuana. And so on.
Paul spent the rest of the morning swapping out all he could under the hood and still couldn’t get the truck to start. The problem was the spare battery, which was just as dead as the one he took out of the truck, even though it was bought new only a few months earlier.
I could just walk it, he thought. It wasn’t far to town. But the problem, as he saw it, was that this wasn’t going to be a quick trip down to figure out if his entire congregation had the flu. It was time to consider whether a more serious thing was going on. It was, in other words, time for the slightly paranoid survivalist version of Pastor Paul to take up some space in his head.
He couldn’t just head down on foot with no supplies. He needed the truck, even if he couldn’t figure out just yet how to get power to it.
One thing at a time.
He packed the flatbed with all the unspoiled food he had—the vacuum-sealed coffee, the rest of the deer, and the jerky—five jugs of water (he only owned five jugs) and an irrationally large number of guns.
That last part wasn’t entirely accurate. He had ten guns to choose from. Three of them were hunting rifles, and while he surely didn’t need to bring the Marlin 336, the Remington Sendero, and the old Winchester 70, he liked each of them for a different reason, and so he took all three. Likewise, for the two shotguns: a Winchester double-barreled, and a short-barrel Mossberg. As for the four handguns . . . he had no excuse to take more than two, but once he decided to bring three rifles and two shotguns, he was pretty much all in. He likely had no use for the five-shot Smith & Wesson or the old Heritage .22, not as long as he had the Glock 40 and the Ruger.
That left the BB gun he used to scare off foxes from the coop. The BB stayed, because for some reason, in his mind—both the paranoid and non-paranoid parts—taking it with him was going one step too far.
It was, therefore, an entirely rational number of guns.
He also threw in a couple of changes of clothing, an extra pair of boots, an overcoat, and both of his Bibles. Then he was ready to go.
By the time he finished packing, he’d come up with the basics of a plan, if not to start the truck, then at least to get it moving.
Getting something with wheels off the side of a mountain wasn’t inherently tough. Getting it up would be a challenge, but going down just meant accepting the gift of gravity and all it can bring. He also didn’t need to get all the way down the mountain in one go; just to Jed’s place to start with. He knew for a fact that he could coast there in neutral, because he did it all the time to conserve fuel.
Jed had more power options, so that was a better place to start working out a solution to the larger problem of getting Paul to the town . . . and to figure out what was going on. Better yet: He might not have to go any farther, since Jed’s was a news hub.
Before he left, Paul said a quick blessing over the church he’d built with his hands some fifteen years prior, then shifted the truck into neutral, gave it a little shove, and hopped in.
4
Twenty white-knuckle minutes later—following two stops where the road leveled off more than he remembered, four times when the overgrowth meant he lost sight of the road completely, six near collisions with deer, and three Hail Marys—Paul reached Jed’s farm. It was late afternoon by then.
Jed and Veronica kept a small homestead: just a few dairy cows, pigs, chickens, and so on. They grew enough vegetables to feed them and the folks at the farmers’ market six months out of the year, and made do otherwise by selling homemade butter and cheese. Their biggest crop was pumpkins; every October they cleared enough to cover the finances for the winter.
The pumpkin patch was the first sight to see on crossing the property line, and unless Paul’s calendar was off, his friends were in for a problem this year, because the field looked overgrown in a bad way.
Jed always said the way to grow pumpkins was to let the plants find their own bliss—just spread out and take what they wanted. Maybe rein them in if they got fresh with the other vegetables, prune them now and then, but otherwise leave ’em alone.
Paul didn’t have to stop to get a hard look—and couldn’t, since momentum was his fuel—to know something was up with the patch. Jed would have to go to market soon, but it didn’t look like he had much of anything to bring.
The other fields didn’t look like they were doing any better. He rolled past the vegetable patches with no vegetables, to the edge of the grazing land near the barn, to a stop a hundred feet from the farmhouse.
He shifted the car back into park and stepped out for a better look around.
The place felt abandoned. Paul kept expecting someone to give a shout from the house or one of the fields, or the barn, but nobody did. Jed employed two part-time hands, and his son, Dave, was a fixture most days, as was Jed himself, and Ver
onica. A couple of times a month their daughter, Stacy, and her girls would be up for a weekend, too. There should have been someone there.
“Hello?” he shouted.
Nobody was around to answer.
The barn door was open, the livestock was gone, and Jed’s truck was missing. Possibly, Jed had gone into town with all the animals, except Jed had no reason to do that, and also, the truck wasn’t nearly big enough to carry them all.
Paul headed into the barn to see if there were any better explanations inside.
What was in there was an answer, but not a better explanation. He found the remnants of a carcass: mostly just bones. Judging from the size, it belonged to one of the cows.
It looked as if something large and terrible had torn it apart and then picked the bones clean. There was hardly even any odor; the phantom remains of Paul’s milk smelled worse.
“Kids,” he said out loud. “Running around, slaughtering livestock. What’s this world coming to, I tell you.”
Out the other side of the barn, around near the pig trough, he found what was left of a pig, and the chicken coop looked a lot like his own.
Whatever had struck Paul’s home also hit here.
Aliens, he thought. Not kids, not the devil. Aliens blew through town, ate all the animals, and got out again.
Paul wasn’t a New Hampshire native. He was raised in Iowa, ending up in the Granite State only due to a comedy of circumstances that included an ex-wife, two failed business ventures, and a stay in the county prison. He’d found God somewhere in the middle of all that, almost by accident. God wasn’t why he moved to a shack on the side of the mountain, but He was why Paul decided to build a chapel on the land once he got there.
Iowa farmland was a good area to grow up in if you wanted to meet someone who not only believed in aliens but could tell you about the time he met one. It seemed like every farm town had one or two locals who would swear on their mother’s Bible that they’d been abducted, sometimes more than once. There was also the occasional extraterrestrial cattle mutilation that Paul’s dad of course attributed to kids.
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