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A great round shape, wrapped with a glowing penu over the sun

An eclipse

As the sirens went off, he tore down the row Everyone else was running, too, yelling, Eclipse! Eclipse! The hardboxes, get to the hardboxes! He burst froht into Cruk and Dee

"Where are the girls?"

Dee was frantic "I can’t find the like ink Soon the whole field would be enveloped

"Cruk, get these people in the boxes Dee, go with him"

"I can’t! Where are they?"

"I’ll find theet her out of here!"

Vorhees raced back into the field

Tifty, his heart pounding with adrenaline, eeping the field fron yet, but it was only a matter of tie of the windbreak He tried to get Cruk on the walkie but couldn’t raise him In all the chaos, probably the ainst his shoulder Where would they co had been swept by Dillon’s team Which didn’t mean the virals weren’t there, only that he couldn’t see them

Then: at the periphery of his vision, a faint , near one of the flags at the edge of the field He swung the scope in close and pressed his eye to the lens The hatch of the hardbox stood open

It was the one place they hadn’t looked They’d never checked the hardboxes

Everyone was running, grabbing their children, dashing into the field toward the flags Tifty eed from the base of the tower at a dead sprint

"No!"

Cruk was carrying two children, Presh Martinez and Reese Cuo beside hi little Louis to her chest, Ali with Merry and Satch

"The hardboxes!" Cruk was yelling "Get to the hardboxes!"

"They’re in the hardboxes!"

A burst of gunfire exploded in the field Dee saw Tifty drop to a knee and fire off three quick rounds She turned as the first of the virals burst froht on top of Ali Dodd

Dee felt an urge to vomit Suddenly she couldn’t make her feetits jaws in Cece’s neck The wo like an overturned insect’s The iht; all she could do atch in helpless horror

Cruk stepped forward, shoved the barrel of his rifle against the side of the creature’s head, and fired

Where was Satch? The boy was suddenly nowhere Merry was standing in the dust, screaan to run

The virals were everywhere now In blind panic, people were dashing for the tent, a pointless gesture; it could offer no safety at all The virals swar with screa "Head for the tower!" But it was too late; nobody was listening Dee thought of her daughters, saying goodbye How stark everything became, at the end, all the wishes for one’s children distilled by the world’s swift cruelty into the desperate hope that death would take them fast She prayed they would not suffer Or, worse, be taken up That was the worst thing: to be taken up

An immense force careened into her fro from her arms Face-down in the dirt, she lifted her eyes to see her brother, twenty feet away, pointing his rifle at her Shoot ht Whatever’s about to happen, I don’t want it A prayer of childhood found her lips and she closed her eyes and muttered it quickly, into the dust

A shot Behind her, sorunt Before herher to her feet, hiswords she couldn’t quite ail Why would amust have happened to her head, she realized, because here she orrying over Cruk’s gun, when everyone was dying Other thoughts cas Hoould feel to be ripped in two, like Ali Dodd Her daughters, in the field, and as happening to theer than one’s own babies In a world of terrible things, surely that was theher toward the door He was doing what he thought she wanted, but she didn’t, not at all-she couldn’t die fast enough, in fact-and with a burst of strength Dee tore away fro to her children

Vorhees could hear his daughters, laughing in the corn They were, he knew, too young to be afraid They had snuck away to do exactly what they’d been told not to, and it was all a kind of gaht Vorhees raced down the rows, shouting their na to home in on their voices The sound was behind hi from everywhere, even inside his head

"Nit! Siri! Where are you?"

Then there was a wo in the middle of the row She was draped in a dark cloak, like a woman in a fairy tale, some dweller of the forest; her head was covered by a hood, her eyes by dark glasses that concealed the upper half of her face So total was Vorhees’s surprise that for aher

"Are they your daughters?"

Who was she, this woman of the corn? "Where are they?" he panted "Do you knohere they are?"

With a languid gesture she re a face sensuously slinted in their sockets like diae of nausea

"You’re tired," she said

Suddenly, he was Curtis Vorhees had never been so tired in his life His head felt like an anvil; it weighed a thousand pounds It took every ounce of will for hihter Such a beautiful daughter"

Behind hiunfire The field and sky had sunk into an unearthly darkness He felt the urge to weep, but even this seemed beyond his command He had dropped to his knees; soon he would fall