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He stood in the rain and slowly looked around, trying to remember what world this was. Fifty feet away the yellow bulk of Big Bird stood like an anchor that held him to the world.
He gasped and spat out the awful tastes in his mouth, and wiped his face with the back of one big hand.
His first clear and cogent thought was that this was not an isolated event. It couldn’t be. The girls had been hurt—Killed? Was that the word?—somewhere else and had walked onto the construction site. That meant whatever this was didn’t start here. This wasn’t some old Indian burial ground or any of that horror movie stuff. This was something else, and whatever it was, it was happening out there.
Out … where, exactly?
The second thing he thought was that they knew about it.
They.
The government, or at least the National Guard. Those were soldiers who shot Burl and the others. Soldiers.
That meant that this thing was really damn big.
“Oh, shit,” he said.
He listened to his voice. There should be panic there, that desperate whine, but it wasn’t there. He sounded like himself. The way he should.
It was the second thing that anchored Jake DeGroot.
It helped him take a real breath.
“Think it through,” he told himself, liking the sound of his voice.
He didn’t have much family in the area. Only a niece, Jenny, who lived in Bordentown.
He could go there.
But no. Jenny was a single woman and a teacher.
With the storm, the single teachers volunteered to work at the region’s emergency shelter. The Stebbins Little School. The kids would have all been picked up, but the cops would have moved the old folks to the school. And some families from the flooded areas. The school had cots and food and a generator.
That’s where Jenny would be.
And suddenly he was very afraid. Not for himself this time. Jake thought about Jenny. She was a tiny little thing. It took everything Jake had to stop that one guy.
Jenny?
She could never …
Before Jake even realized he was doing it he began running for his car, slapping his pockets for his car keys.
And not finding them.
They’d been in his jeans pocket.
He looked back at the pit under Big Bird.
They must have fallen out. Down in the water. Down in the mud.
Jake swallowed a lump the size of a fist.
“No fucking way.”
Even if he could work up the nerve to crawl down there where the dead man was, what were the chances he would find those keys in all that mud and water. After all that fighting and thrashing. His car was useless to him. Even if he knew how to hotwire it, there was no time and no tools.
His heart started to sink, but then he raised his eyes. Just a few feet.
