Shadowfires

far end of the clearing, several with empty boat trailers behind
them. A big recreational pickup-black with red and gray stripes,
bedecked with gobs of sun-heated chrome-was backed up near the water's edge, and three men were launching a twenty-four-foot twin-engine Water King from their trailer. Several people were eating lunch at picnic tables near the shore, and an Irish setter was sniffing under a table in search of scraps, and two young boys were tossing a football back and forth, and eight or ten fishermen were tending their poles along the bank.
    They all looked as if they were enjoying themselves. If any of
them realized the world beyond this pleasant haven was turning dark
and going mad, he was keeping it to himself.
    Benny drove to the parking area but tucked the Ford in by the edge
of the forest, as far from the other vehicles as he could get. He
switched off the engine and rolled down his window. He put his seat
back as far as it would go in order to give himself room to work,
took the shotgun box on his lap, opened it, withdrew the gun, and
threw the empty box into the back seat.
    “Keep a watch out,” he told Rachael. “You see anybody coming, let
me know. I'll get out and meet him. Don't want anybody to see the
shotgun and be spooked. It's sure as hell not hunting season.”
    “Benny, what're we going to do?”
    “Just what we planned to do,” he said, using one of the car keys
to slit the shrink-wrapped plastic in which the shotgun was encased.
“Follow the directions Sarah Kiel gave you, find
Eric's cabin, and see if he's there.”
    “But the warrants for our arrest… people wanting to kill us… doesn't that change everything?”
    “Not much.” He discarded the shredded plastic and looked the gun
over. It came fully assembled, a nice piece of work, and it felt good
and reliable in his hands. “Originally we wanted to get to Eric and
finish him before he healed entirely and came looking to finish you. Now maybe what we'll have to do is capture him instead of kill him-”
    “Take him alive?” Rachael said, alarmed by that suggestion.
    “Well, he's not exactly alive, is he? But I think we're going to
have to take him in whatever condition he's in, tie him up, drive him someplace like… well, someplace like the offices of the Los Angeles Times. Then we can hold a real shocker of a press conference.”
    “Oh, Benny, no, no, we
can't.” She shook her head adamantly. “That's crazy.
He's going to be violent, extremely violent. I told you about the mice. You saw the blood in the trunk of the car, for God's
sake. The destruction everywhere
he's been, the knives in the wall of the Palm Springs house, the beating he gave Sarah. We can't
risk getting close to him. He won't respect the gun, if that's what
you're thinking. He won't have any fear of it at all. You get close
enough to try to capture him, and
he'll take your head off in spite of the gun. He might even have a gun of his own. No, no, if we see him, we've
got to finish him right away, shoot him without any hesitation, shoot
him again and again, do so much damage to him that he won't be able to come back again.”
    A panicky note had entered her voice, and she had spoken faster
and faster as she strove to convince Ben. Her skin was powder-white,
and her lips had acquired a bluish tint. She was shivering.
    Even considering their precarious situation and the admittedly
hideous nature of their quarry, her fear seemed too great to Ben, and
he wondered how much her reaction to Eric's resurrection was heightened by the ultrareligious childhood that had formed her. Without fully understanding her own feelings, perhaps she was afraid of Eric not merely because she knew his potential for violence, and not merely because he was a walking dead man, but because he had dared to seize the power of God by defeating death and thereby had become not simply a zombie but some hellborn creature returned from the realm of the damned.
    Forgetting the shotgun for a moment, taking both her hands in his,
he said, “Rachael, honey, I can handle him; I've handled worse than him, much worse-”
    “Don't be so confident! That's what'll get you killed.”
    “I'm trained for war, well trained to take care of myself-”
    “ Please!”
    “And
I've kept in top shape all these years because Nam taught me that the world can turn dark and mean overnight and that you can't
count on anything but yourself and your closest friends. That was a
nasty lesson about the