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He cah the rain and Val turned and ran on

The sot closer and closer and closer, and just as he was reaching out to close his bone-​white fingers around her naked shoulder…

…Val woke up

She shuddered and shook her head and crawled up until the knobs of her spine were pressed against the wooden headboard Her face and throat and breasts ith sweat and for just a moment the sweat smelled like rainwater

Chapter 6

1

"Boyd!"

The cry clawed its way out of the car and fled away across the tops of the corn A fes stirred and flapped uneasily, casting lifeless black eyes suspiciously around They sat on the crossbar of a scarecrow perch, but there was no scarecrow here, just the faded old wood of the perch The birds waited, listening

There was silence, except for the swaying of the corn

"Oh…Jesus…" A whisper now: pale and bloodless, too weak to even rustle the feathers of the crows

Silence again Longer this tieted

Then a new sound A creak and then a mild protest of metal The birds hopped and turned to look The broken car squatted below them, half buried in toppled stalks of corn The crumpled metal skin of the car looked like cloth thrown over a pile of rocks; there was no ive it a metallic sheen The car simply hunched there on its crippled wheel, abandoned and desolate

The croaited They were hungry crows They knew

With ancient black eyes they watched as the door of the car was pushed slowly, heavily open Its hinges squealed with piglike protest, but the door finally opened

There was ain Nearly ten minutes passed before there were any further movements from within the car The crows rustled their feathers and tried not to think about their empty bellies One crow opened its beak as if to utter a loud cry, but closed it again withouta sound

It was a hand that first appeared Dark with blood, it reached out of the car and hooked treers slipped on the sht in the depression of the rain gutter above the door The hand curled, tensed, tried to be strong Tendons stood taut on the back of the hand and in the wrist, the forearm muscles swelled with effort as the bloody hand tried to haul its body out of the car It was a problem in physics, and it should have be an insoluble one; the arth to pull the body froh blood or life in its veins to carry strength to its h to allow that engineering feat to come to fruition But as the croatched, Tony Macchio pulled himself slowly, carefully, and painfully out of the car

The nearest crow squawked very quietly as if ironically cheering the performance The other croatched with more evident annoyance Death was sometimes too slow, slohen the belly was eet hied into the V fors refused to be part of this mad venture and si cruciforhed once, sharply, and then again more softly His ruined nose ollen and purple Blood dottled his lips and dripped onto his chest, but each drop was lost against the immensity of the stain that drenched hiut leaked sluggishly, the flow di from a simple lack of hydrostatic pressure He was bled white and should by all accounts have been dead, but even though his body was dying it lingered at the point of death and life, sustained by a single thread That thread was the wire of hatred sewn through Tony’s soul

His bloody lips forle word

"Karl!" He said it without sound, but it had all the force of a curse screa the na muscles It wasn’t a lot of power, but it was a cold and deters assu him, and with slow deliberation he pushed hirab the edge of the roof to keep fro face-​forward into the dirt He couldn’t let that happen, he knew If he fell, he would die If he could stand, he could find Ruger If he could find him, then he could kill the evil son of a bitch