“Hey,” Janet Harper said as she entered the Pair-A-Dice. This early, the kitchen wasn’t up, and except for the coffeepot on the end of the bar, there were no beverages available. Most of the tables were empty as well, with the chairs still stacked upside down from Friday night, and Janet made her way to the little stage in the corner.
Mandalay and her boyfriend, Luke Somerville, sat side by side on the edge of the stage. They were four years younger than Janet, an eon by teenage standards, but Janet had not hesitated when Mandalay asked her to come jam with them. You didn’t turn down the leader of the Tufa, no matter how old she appeared to be.
Besides, Mandalay was one of the few Tufa musicians who could really keep up with, and sometimes challenge, Janet. It wasn’t bragging to say that Janet Harper was the best musician alive in Cloud County; despite her heavily diluted Tufa blood, thinned by marriages to humans over the past few generations, something in her was true beyond belief. She could play any instrument, learn any song almost at once, and jam with anyone. Some folks could best her on their specialties, like Page Paine on the fiddle, but none approached her versatility.
She put her guitar case down on the stage and said, “Good morning.”
“Hey,” Mandalay said. “How are you?”
“A little preoccupied,” Janet said as she took out her guitar. “I can’t get my brain going. Like there’s something weird in the air, you know?”
“I know,” Mandalay agreed. She turned to Luke. “See? It ain’t just me.”
He shrugged, unable to look at her. “I guess not.”
Janet dragged a chair away from a table and sat down facing them. She picked along with the song Mandalay strummed, even though she didn’t quite catch the melody at first. At last she asked, “Hey, what exactly are we playing?”
“You don’t know?” Luke said.
“Nope. Sounds familiar, but I can’t quite place it.”
“But … you’re playing it.”
“I’m just following along.”
“It’s ‘Poor Ellen Smith,’” Mandalay said. “It’s been in my head all day.”
“Ah-ha!” Janet said. “Now I recognize it. The Neko Case version?”
Mandalay shook her head. “Nope. Mine.” When the verse came back around, she sang:
Poor Ellen Smith how she was found
Shot through the heart lying cold on the ground
Her clothes were all scattered and thrown on the ground
And blood marks the spot where poor Ellen was found.
Luke strummed rhythm, simply trying to keep up. Mandalay played broad, open lead, which Janet filled with soft picking like the sound of tears hitting the concrete floor. Janet nodded to Mandalay, and she sang:
They picked up their rifles and hunted me down
And found me a-loafing in Mount Airy town
They picked up the body and carried it away
And now she is sleeping in some lonesome old grave.
Mandalay slowly stopped playing and stared off into the distance, as if receiving some message that only she could hear. Janet picked a harmony rhythm with Luke, waiting, but eventually even the two of them stopped. They sat in silence, waiting for Mandalay to speak.
Finally Luke said, “You all right?”
Mandalay blinked, then gave him a luminous smile. His genuine concern for her always made her feel warm and special. “Yeah, I’m all right. It’s just…”
“Something in the air,” Janet said.
“Yeah, exactly.”
“Think it has anything to do with Kera Rogers’s getting killed?”
Mandalay chewed her lip. “Maybe.”
“I’m covering it for the school paper. Care to give me a comment?”
Mandalay grinned. “No, ma’am, I would not.”
“You believe she was killed by a wild hog?”
“I believe it until somebody proves different.”
“And you think that’s why you’re all twitchy today?”
Mandalay thought that over. “No. That’s something that already happened. This feels … impending.”
“Should we tell somebody?” Luke asked.
“It’s all too vague,” Mandalay said. “I wouldn’t know who to tell.” She began to strum again, going back into the song. Luke kept watching her, concerned, while Janet immediately picked back up where they’d left off.
Then, with no warning, Mandalay set her guitar aside and said, “Sorry. I have to go.” And she did.
* * *
Two things happened at once, and even after the panic had burned off, Duncan couldn’t quite believe it.
He raised his gun and put the bead at the end of the barrel right over Adam’s face. He deliberately filled his mind with the selfie from the phone, of the two of them snuggled together in Adam’s bed. He let the rage come, the stinking jealousy that enveloped him so strongly, he really could smell it. He waited for Adam to look his way; he wanted the smug bastard to know who’d blown his head off. As the rage increased his heart rate, the end of the barrel trembled, and he gritted his teeth as he fought to hold it steady.
But then he realized he really did smell something vile and rank. He had a moment to puzzle over it.
Then a shadow drifted out of the forest behind Adam. Because it came down the slope toward him, it appeared to loom over him, squat and huge, almost elephantine.
Adam froze, aware that something was wrong. His face wrinkled at the odor.
He turned and saw the giant wild hog bearing down on him. He screamed and tried to bring his gun around to fire in time, but in his panic, he pulled the trigger too early, and didn’t have time to jack another shell into the chamber. The hog mowed him down, stood over him, and dug into his belly with its enormous tusks. As it tossed its head, chunks of bloody meat and innards flew through the air.
Duncan froze, looking down the barrel at this scene. He could fire, and maybe hit the animal in the sweet spot behind the shoulder blade, where it would tear through lungs and heart and drop the beast in its tracks. But he didn’t. He just watched. He couldn’t see exactly what was happening, but Adam never made another sound. The only noises were the monster’s grunting and the wet, cracking sound of snapping bones.
Then the others emerged, smaller hogs, even piglets, who tore into Adam. Many were black, some mottled, and two had white Hampshire stripes. At first Duncan wondered if some of the squeals came from Adam, but he realized that by this point, Adam was long past making any noise.
It was like a scene from a horror movie, and even from this distance, Duncan could see the dark red on the animals’ snouts as they rose to catch a breath before diving back in. The gigantic leader moved away, his tusks also stained with red. He had one of Adam’s arms in his mouth, and dragged the dead man’s shredded body after him. The corpse was missing one entire leg and part of the dangling arm; luckily mud covered his friend’s face. Again the monster presented the perfect side shot, and again Duncan didn’t take it.
And then two silent dogs burst into the clearing.
* * *
The WHOMP team clearly heard the pig squealing in unmistakable terror, but there had been no subsequent human scream. Jack led the sprint through the forest toward the sound. The team moved with surprising stealth for all their speed, with Bronwyn Chess making the least amount of noise. They reached the overgrown stone foundations of an ancient cabin, and Jack hopped up on the remains of the chimney, trying to sense the direction.
There were no more gunshots, either, just the sound of porcine panic. But all the birds and insects in the immediate woods around them fell silent, the way they always did when something was afoot that could kill anything that drew its attention.
He jumped down and motioned for them to continue on toward the bayed pig. They burst into a smaller clearing just in time to witness the chaos.
Random and Hobo had been as silent as possible, but the monster had nonetheless fled before they arrived. They fixated on the first hog they saw, a big sow with brown patches. Growling low in their throats, they circled it closer and closer, until they could dash in for quick bites.
Usually when dogs settled on one hog, the others would vanish. But the rest of the herd seemed like hairy pinballs, bouncing off each other and trees in a desperate bid to escape, and thus failing.
“Hobo! Random!” Dolph yelled. “Back! Now!”
The dogs obeyed and backed away from their quarry, whose flanks now bled from dozens of nips.
“Take ’em down,” Jack said, and immediately drew a bead on one. He fired, dropping it where it stood. Max and Dolph did the same. The noise was sudden and the sharp cracks made everyone’s ears ring.
Only Bronwyn worked silently, drawing back her bowstring and letting fly with the aid of a wrist-mounted caliper release. Each arrow struck exactly where it needed to, dropping its target where it stood. And before that arrow even reached its target, she’d drawn another, nocked it and clamped the caliper around the string in the same motion, and taken aim at the next one.
Max, as he fired, caught a tiny snippet of the song Bronwyn softly hummed. He couldn’t believe he heard it correctly:
And another one’s gone, and another one’s gone,
Another one bites the dust.…
Seven pigs lay dead by the time the others had scattered into the woods, including the one bayed by the dogs. But none of them was the monster.
“Go,” Dolph said to the dogs, and they scurried off after the escapees.
Jack looked around. “Everyone all right?”
After the acknowledgments, Bronwyn said, “So who screamed?”
“I don’t know,” Max said, “but look at all the blood.”
The ground was spattered with it, far more than the dead pigs could’ve lost.
“Where did that shot come from?” Max asked.
“From this,” Dolph said, and picked up Adam’s gun. The stock bore marks from hog teeth. “And now I think I know where the blood came from, too.”
“Who was it?” Jack said.
Bronwyn delicately held a ragged, blood-soaked piece of denim. “Whoever wore these.”
“Jesus,” Max said. “Where’s the rest of him?”
“They ate him,” Dolph said.
“No, there wasn’t time,” Jack said. “We got here too fast. The big one must’ve dragged him off.”
“Pigs don’t do that,” Max said. “Besides, there’s no sign the big one was even here.”
“Oh, yes, there is,” Jack said, and pointed to the clear track of the monster in the churned-up earth. There was also the smudged line of something heavy that had, in fact, been dragged away. “Let’s go. Fan out and be careful. He can’t be too far ahead.”
* * *
Duncan stood absolutely still and watched the hunting party head off into the woods after the monster. He felt nauseated, and cold, and as if he might both throw up and wet his pants simultaneously. At last his legs gave out, and he sat down hard on the ground, the rifle sliding from his hands.
What had he done?
He began to cry then, hard tears that made his face ache with the effort of producing them.
He didn’t know how long he’d been crying, but when he looked up, he let out a shriek that echoed through the forest.
Bronwyn Chess stood over him, her bow in her hands, an arrow nocked. From his huddled perspective, she looked like some dark-haired primal deity against the treetops and blue sky beyond, a grim Artemis in a baseball cap. Even the gnats and mosquitoes swarming in the cool air stayed away from her, as if intimidated. He expected her to point the arrow at him and declaim a stray line that had stuck with him since school: “Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”
Instead she said, “Duncan? What are you doing here?”
He stared up at her. Despite her slender and feminine appearance, everyone knew she was Mandalay Harris’s enforcer, the woman who meted out justice in the Tufa community. To run afoul of her was to risk being dropped from the sky, as had happened to Dwayne Gitterman when he killed her brother. If she knew what Duncan had just done …
He choked out the word, “Adam.”
“Adam? Adam Procure?”
Duncan nodded. Then he pointed toward the site of the attack.
“Adam Procure was killed by the pig?”
He nodded again.
She grabbed him by the front of the shirt and hauled him to his feet. “What the hell, Duncan? What were you two doing out here?”
“W-we were hunting it,” he choked out. “It killed Kera.”
“The hog? You and Adam were hunting the hog?”
He nodded.
“Are you out of your mind? That thing is a monster. Adam didn’t have a chance.”
“I didn’t—”
“Come on,” she said, picked up his gun, and pressed it into his hands. As she strode away, he realized he had a perfect shot at her back, just as he’d had at the pig. He could put a bullet right through her heart.
He shook off the thought. What was wrong with him? Then he rushed to catch up.
They reached the site of Adam’s death. He stared at the ground, churned and ripped by the herd of pigs, and then he spotted a hiking boot that was stuck ankle-first in the fresh mud. He knew without checking that Adam’s foot was still inside it.
“Just stay here,” she said, and took out a walkie-talkie. “Chess for Cates. I found someone else here. He and a friend were hunting the damn hog. Come back.”
After a second, Jack Cates’s voice came over the radio. “He knows who the victim was?”
“He does.”
“Great,” he almost growled. “Well, the son of a bitch is gone for now. None of us could find the trail, including the dogs. They got spooked and wouldn’t keep going. Stay there, we’re on our way.” Then he summoned the others to meet back at the site of Adam’s death.
Bronwyn said nothing else, and instead retrieved her arrows from the dead hogs while also watching the woods around them for any sign the monster might return. Duncan stood with his gun in his slack hands, mouth open, staying on his feet just because it was easier than falling down.
When the others returned, Jack said to Duncan, “So tell me, in great detail, what the hell you thought you were doing?”
Duncan gulped before he spoke. “That thing killed my girlfriend. I deserve to be the one to kill it back.”
Jack looked at Bronwyn. She shrugged.
“Do you know anything about wild hogs?” he asked Duncan.
He shook his head. He felt like a child before the grade-school principal.
“They are faster than you can imagine, and more ruthless than you’d believe. Your friend didn’t have a chance, even with a gun, once it got up close to him.”
Duncan fought to suppress the image of the pig knocking Adam to the ground, then swinging its big head as its tusks tore into his flesh. “We didn’t—”
“Think?” Jack roared. Startled birds lifted off from the trees overhead.
“Well, if it was coming back, that sure scared it off,” Dolph said dryly.
“We have to call regular law enforcement again,” Jack said. “Someone will have to stay here with the … remains.” He looked down at the boot still stuck in the mud. Flies now congregated around it and the surrounding blood.
“I will,” Dolph said. “My knees could use the rest anyway.”
Bronwyn handed him Duncan’s gun. “Keep this. He’s not up to carrying it, and you might need it.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Dolph said, and touched the brim of his cap in salute.
They left the veteran outdoorsman leaning against a tree, watching the shadowy forest around him with the nervousness of a man wearing steak underwear in a piranha pool.