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Prologue - For Those Who Fight
People ain’t the way they used to be
—Shirley Jackson
FUBAR: that was Jed’s name for it Once a Marine, always a Marine He didn’t knohat to call the kids Soht Zo dead, and these kids were the furthest thing Chucky got tossed around, probably started by a fellow vet who just couldn’t keep ’Na true These kids ca
And the Chuckies were nighthter’s face, or a son’s Just like the old movies about that twisted little doll with a maniac’s soul
That day in early October when the world went FUBAR, he ith Grace at the assisted-living facility in Michigan, outside of Waters Cream of Wheat from her lower lip The next, he woke up God kno much later sprawled in a puddle of soupy cereal—blood dribbling fro his brain—and there was Grace, that one, and she said, “Jed, honey, I think I peed my pants”
Technically, she’d pissed her Depends, but who cared? His sweet Grace was back It was a miracle—
And it went bust the instant they staggered into the hall and saw the bodies: nurses and aides and doctors sprawled like picka-sticks
And their granddaughter, Alice, placidly eating her mother’s eyes
That was alo Now, they were into the second week of January and in Wisconsin, not Michigan This early in the ht spilled watery and weak across a powderblue sky The air was still and glassy with that kind of brittle,for a strong fire as he hiked on snowshoes along the cliff trail and down into the dense thicket of evergreens edging the lake Pausing at the sharp dogleg left that led deeper into the woods and toward shore, he did a one-eighty Even without the telltale streaood quarter mile easy, perched on a forested sandstone bluff This tie picture as no er than specks of buckshot
Vietnam had left its mark inside and out, as it had with every vet Jed knew He’d taken a bullet through the left eye, which was bad enough, but then the round’s diagonal trajectory had cored down and out the back of his head In an instant, his left eye was jelly and his right occipital lobe went froht eye still worked, but the brain danize words Color was gone, too His waking world had existed in ashy shades of gray, although his dreams and the flashbacks were always in Technicolor Worse, his brain had conjured eerie shimmers the Navy shrinks said were hallucinations, like visual phantom limbs
Like Grace, thoughthese days, he was different Now he stood, looking up at that distant cabin Oh, he was still blind in that left eye, the eyeball itself long gone and the socket filled with a plastic ietting fitted for an artificial eye,other people uncoht, like a stringy piece of ed for love or et if he couldn’t?
But his good right eye still worked, nowadays better than ever, and that hat he aie ofHe waited, and in a auzy drapery swam into view His vision sharpened on the leather couch and the fitful orange pulse of the fire Further back, deep in the house, he spied Grace, oreHe concentrated, theYeah, Grace had on that fuzzy pink sweater and was spooning coffee into an old pot, probably calculating the nurounds per tablespoon, he bet
Da all hawkeye Grace had been s school class and a hen it caht that if she’d been born fifteen years later, she ht up there with those real-life rocket scientists After Michael, though, she’d never been right So when the Alzhei But then the FUBAR had happened and unlocked some hidden vault where she’d stored every equation and calculation since the dawn of time
She’d saved the boy Thank forty-plus years of nursing and accu that boy mended her, at least as ether She pretended the boy was Michael and the boy let her pretend, and Jed loved him for that with a ferocity that took his breath away
Odd Lake lay southwest of Wisconsin’s Bad River Reservation and deep in the Nicolet His ice-fishing house—a gutted caood half mile fro a left around the kink, though, and there the ice turned, becoood fifty, sixty feet of blueblack water before picking up again The reason was that the lake straddled a stray spur frolas Fault, a rift that unzipped the earth froh the fissure arrees, so in winter that particular stretch never completely froze And that h onto that thin ice and you ood-bye
The boathouse was solid weathered cedar with a north door and west-facing pine slider perched on a sandspit tongue now o, when Michael was sixteen and wanted his own space, they’d worked on the interior together,up drywall and tacking on shelves No pipes or wiring, and nothing fancy All his son wanted was a rack and a little quiet Three years later, Michael joined up and still got his rack, but there was no such thing as quiet for a Marine Seventeen years after that, three somber men in dress blues knocked at their door, and teeks later, Michael returned fro-draped box Michael had plenty of quiet now
Jed’s extreht the instant the north door opened, butall the way to the Upper Peninsula A prancing golden retriever squirted out first A ainst the white of the snow, followed If Jed let his o just a little soft, he could almost make himself believe, the way that Grace did, that this was Michael But then the dog spied him and barked, the boy tipped a wave, and that bittersweet moment passed