Just one pellet can be fatal.
She remembers the store manager explaining once: Those little sons of bitches like to eat just one tiny bite of unknown food, then head home for the day. If they feel the slightest bit sick, they’ll know it’s poison and never touch it again.
The solution? A nicotine grin, clear in her memory.
Kill ’em with that one tiny bite.
Meanwhile, Laika just tried to inhale the whole goddamn thing like cotton candy. Emma knows the author must be close. H. G. Kane would want to watch and listen, to experience every detail so he can recount it all in his next shitty book. Just like Prelaw and Psych. He’s toying with her as he did them, salting his kill with fear.
She hugs Laika. She loves this big innocent creature. Those black eyes regard her with confusion. I love you, too, Mom.
But why’d you take my food?
She kisses the top of Laika’s head and hopes to God, to whoever’s out there, that no poison pellets have made it into her stomach. She’ll need to induce vomiting to be certain.
First, she has to escape.
Right now.
She hurls the laced meat out toward the ocean. Gripping Laika’s collar, she races back to the driveway where her Corolla is parked. She scans all sides on her way past the garage. Every unknown space she passes, she braces for a waiting figure to lunge out with gloved fingers to her throat, and in the final few steps her heart clenches into a leaden ball inside her chest. But he never appears. She’s alone. All tension. No release.
She reaches her car. East-facing floodlights kick on and spotlight her. Before unlocking the doors, she checks the Corolla’s shadowed back seats for a crouched killer waiting to slice her throat from behind—she’s seen enough movies to know that trick.
Empty.
She opens the door. Laika crashes inside with her usual enthusiasm (I love car rides, Mom!) as Emma leaps into the driver’s seat and jams her key into the ignition.
He’d already disabled her Toyota.
Last night he’d silently popped the hood and snipped both battery cables.
He wasn’t a car guy. In daily life, he never even dared to change the oil of his own Honda CR-V. But this is the dirty little secret of the modern fiction author: you’re only a Google search away from knowing anything. You needn’t be a mechanic to write a scene involving vehicular sabotage or a physicist to write an escape from a supernova. All of that research is out there, ready to be cherry-picked, the hard work already done by someone else. Authors are chameleons. Pretenders. Poseurs.
The frightening result: a villain who can do anything.
That night, Emma’s killer wouldn’t be limited by his background or his skill set. With a little prep time, he could be whatever he wished to be. He was a dangerous unknown, a Swiss Army Knife, a shapeshifter, the sum of the internet’s deepest, darkest knowledge.
How to pick a lock?
How to tie a clove hitch?
How to slice a carotid artery?
How to pass a police polygraph test?
This was his greatest power. As username HGKaneOfficial always liked to say in his online writing group: In a story, the author is God.
“Oh, come on.”
She twists the key again and again. Her heartbeat thuds in her eardrums. Laika watches from the back seat.
Mom. What’s wrong?
She punches the steering wheel. Rain falls in sheets now, clattering against the Toyota’s metal roof, blurring the house lights through glass.
Why are you afraid?
She knows she’s wasting valuable time. She tells herself to stay calm, to work the problems. An unseen psychopath. A dog that may or may not have ingested poison. No car, no Wi-Fi, no cell signal. The killer’s prep work is immaculate.
But . . .
She remembers the landline phone inside Jules’s house. The author may be God, in his own words, but there’s no way he can possibly know about this phone because Emma unplugged it herself more than a month ago. Long before she reviewed Murder Mountain.
It’s still there. In the pantry.
She eyes the front porch through rain-streaked glass. Taking shelter inside is her only option anyway. There’s nothing but acres of grass, open beach, and locked cabins in both directions. Still, she considers ditching the dead car and running for help. Deek’s house is a quarter mile away. Can she make it?
Her blood chills with déjà vu. She’s read this scene before. Exactly this, somehow.
It’s how Psych died. After the ranger’s truck failed to start, the young woman gave up on the sputtering engine, slid out the door, and fled back for the cabin. She made it halfway before a high-caliber bullet paralyzed her from the waist down.
She remembers how H. G. Kane described Psych’s fall—as if her spinal cord were snipped by invisible scissors—and the ghoulish fascination as he marinated in the small horrors of her malfunctioning body. The bone fragments on her jacket. The spreading pool of urine. The way she kept dragging her limp lower body on shredded elbows with tears sparkling in her eyes, still begging him to let her go, not yet grasping the permanence of her injury.
She can hear the author’s breathy whisper, like he’s inside the car with her. Her skin tingles and she checks the back seat again—only Laika’s white face.
It’s just her and her dog.
She reminds herself to stay calm.
Fleeing on foot isn’t an option. He’s almost certainly guarding the grassy open space with a firearm. In Murder Mountain, the unnamed killer carried a Savage AXIS .30-06 bolt-action with an infrared night scope, lethal to half a mile. Twice the distance to Deek’s house. If she tries to escape his perimeter, he’ll kill her. No question.
A quarter mile is a death sentence.
But . . . hopefully twenty feet isn’t.
“We’re running to the house,” she whispers. “Get ready.”
To Laika. To herself.
Mostly to herself.
She releases the door’s lock. She pushes it open with her fingertips and steps outside into the rain. It’s a downpour now, rock-hard, loud enough to drown out approaching footsteps. She twists open the back door to let Laika out. No time to be afraid.
She races for the front porch, her palms slicing the air, icy droplets exploding off her shoulders. Laika pounds beside her, panting.
As she runs, she braces for a high-caliber bullet to the lower back.
He shot Emma Carpenter in the spine—
It never comes.
She reaches the porch. Key chain in hand, she fumbles for the slippery lock—“Shit!”—and senses a dark form climbing the cedar steps behind her as she jams the key inside and twists, twists with slick fingers and rising dread as his gloved hands reach behind her to clamp onto her throat—but then the door bangs open. She crashes into warmth, into safety. She almost smashes Laika’s tail in the door behind her.
She whirls, locking the latch.
Through the peephole, the front steps are empty. Was he really there?
Where is he?
Doesn’t matter. Getting back inside is a victory. There’s safety in close quarters. The night vision rifle from Murder Mountain will be cumbersome indoors. She flicks on every light on the main floor, revealing every unknown space—no crouched figure in the coat closet, no deadly ambush behind the kitchen island—and with her wet shoes squealing, she races to the pantry and finds Jules’s ancient Trimline telephone sitting on a shelf exactly where she left it weeks ago, still wrapped in its black spiral cord. Untouched.
He’s sabotaged her car.
He’s blocked her cable modem, her cell signal.
But he can’t possibly know about this, Emma’s twentieth-century surprise, as she plugs the cord into the wall and mashes 911 on the spongy keypad.
He cut the phone lines, too.
“Fucking seriously?” She hurls the phone at the wall.
All homes built in the last century are linked with standardized telephone cables, which, courtesy of Google, he understood to be buried twelve to eighteen inches deep alongside the nearest county road (which was obviously Wave Drive, a quarter mile from Emma’s front door). All it took was a small shovel and a wire cutter.
Emma was grasping it now. The convenient horror “tropes” for which she’d one-starred Murder Mountain were now her inarguable reality.
No gun.
No car.
No phone.
There could be no escape for this story’s victim, no lifeline to police or outside help. In Murder Canyon, a remote trailhead inaccessible by vehicle. In Murder Forest, a campsite unpatrolled by park rangers. In Murder Lake, the body of water itself is the barrier.
Tonight was different, though.
Emma had already performed most of Murder Beach’s prep work herself. He didn’t need to wait weeks for her to take a camping trip or drive across the state alone. She had no family, friends, or meaningful human relationships to complicate the hunt. She’d willingly isolated herself on this rainy island, and he took no chances in severing the few remaining strings that linked Emma to the outside world.
She wanted isolation?
She got it.
By this point in an H. G. Kane novel, the victims are often trembling and sobbing. They’re reactive, prey animals without agency. They rarely show grit or determination before they die their lovingly detailed deaths. But Emma Carpenter was different.
In the living room, a flicker of orange light surprised him.
She’d . . . lit a cigarette.
Smoking: the ultimate deal-breaker on the homeowner’s waiver. Not that it mattered now, and Emma damn well knew it. No Dollar Tree fan this time. Puffing with a trembling hand, she approached the windows and stared outside through blurry sheets of rainwater. She cupped her fingers to the glass, squinting out into acres of coastal prairie. Searching for her killer.
She scanned left to right, across the tall grass to the snarling breakers and back, and for just a moment her gaze passed over her concealed killer’s form in the grass—something resembling eye contact. For just a split second, by pure accident, she looked directly at the shrouded form of the person who was here to take her life.
Then her gaze moved on.
She had no idea.
She knows he’s out there.
Somewhere in that sea of waist-high grass, invisible to her.
Staring back at me.
The motion sensors haven’t tripped, and in a way the darkness is comforting. It shows a perimeter of safety. For now. With her cigarette in her gritted teeth, she moves to the whiteboard and uncaps a dry-erase marker. HELP, she writes to Deek. CALL 911.
His faraway house is dark, near invisible on the horizon. Only the faint glow of a bedroom lamp in an upper window. The old man is probably in bed, reading or drinking or both. He’d promised to keep an eye out—but it might be hours before he wanders downstairs to check his telescope. If he even remembers to.
“Shit.” She hurls her marker.
Two spaceships. Alone in the void.
In the meantime, she’s memorized every entry point in the house. She chews on her cigarette and runs down her mental checklist: two locked doors on the main floor, plus two windows that can’t be opened. But he—whoever he really is—has already entered the house freely. He’s the author of tonight’s story and he carries every key. She’s barricaded the front door with a tipped end table, but it doesn’t feel like enough.
She takes a breath.
And lets it out.
She can’t help but wonder—how will H. G. Kane write her story in Murder Beach? Will he use her real name? How will he describe her appearance, her actions, her personality? Being seen makes her skin crawl.
He’s outside. Somewhere.
In her right hand she hefts Jules’s kitchen knife, getting a feel for the balance. She can stab. She can slash. With some luck tonight, she might still ensure Murder Beach is never written at all.
Some serious luck.
For better or worse, Emma knows she possesses two advantages that those poor Appalachian hikers Prelaw and Psych didn’t. First, she knows she’s in H. G. Kane’s book. She understands the motivations of the deranged man outside, at least in some part.
And second?
It hurts to face this, but Emma doesn’t mind if she dies tonight. Not fully. Not quite. She’s invested, yes, but only in the same mild way she hopes a horror-movie heroine survives the house full of malevolent ghosts. For months, her grief has locked her into a death spiral, a stalled plane in a slow, inexorable glide. But tonight, in a grimly upside-down way, that gives her an edge.
An edge he won’t expect.
As she tosses her cigarette in the sink, she thinks: I’m not afraid of you.