Shadowfires

the very fortune on which she'd claimed to have no designs. Yes, of course, why not? And now there she was with her lover, with the man she had been fucking behind his back, and she had clearly come to finish the job that the garbage truck had started.
    They pulled back beyond the bend, but a few seconds later he saw
movement in the brush, to the left of the road, and he caught a
glimpse of them moving off into the trees. They were going to make a
cautious indirect approach.
    Eric dropped the binoculars and shoved up from the armchair, stood
swaying, in the grip of a rage so great that he almost felt crushed
by it. Steel bands tightened across his chest, and for a moment he
could not draw his breath. Then the bands snapped, and he sucked in
great lungsful of air. He said, “Oh, Rachael, Rachael,” in a voice
that sounded as if it were echoing up from hell. He liked the sound
of it, so he said her name again: “Rachael, Rachael…”
    From the floor beside the chair, he plucked up the ax.
    He realized that he could not handle the ax and both knives, so he
chose the butcher's knife and left the other blade behind.
    He would go out the back way. Circle around. Slip up on them
through the woods. He had the cunning to do it. He felt as if he had
been born to stalk and kill.
    Hurrying across the living room toward the kitchen, Eric saw an
image of himself in his mind's eye: He was ramming the knife deep into her guts, then ripping it upward, tearing open her flat young belly. He made a shrill sound of eagerness and almost fell over the empty soup and stew cans in his haste to reach the back door. He would cut her cut her cut. And when she dropped to the ground with the knife in her belly, he would go at her with the ax, use the blunt edge of it first, smashing her bones to splinters, breaking her arms and legs, and then he would turn the wondrous shiny instrument over in his hands-his strange and powerful new hands!-and use the sharp edge.
    By the time he reached the rear door and yanked it open and went
out of the house, he was in the grip of that reptilian fury that he
had feared only a short while ago, a cold and calculating fury,
called forth out of genetic memories of inhuman ancestors. Having at
last surrendered to that primeval rage, he was surprised to discover
that it felt good.

----
22 WAITING
FOR THE STONE
    Jerry Peake should have been asleep on his
feet, for he had been up all night. But seeing Anson Sharp humiliated
had revitalized him better than eight hours in the sheets could have.
He felt marvelous.
    He stood with Sharp in the corridor outside Sarah
Kiel's hospital room, waiting for Felsen Kiel to come and tell them what they needed to know. Peake required considerable restraint to keep from laughing at his boss's
vindictive grousing about the farmer from Kansas.
    “If he wasn't a know-nothing shit-kicker, I'd come down so hard on
him that his teeth would still be vibrating next Christmas,” Sharp
said. “But what's the point, huh? He's just a thick-headed Kansas
plowboy who doesn't know any better. No point talking to a brick wall, Peake. No point getting angry with a brick wall.”
    “Right,” Peake said.
    Pacing back and forth in front of
Sarah's closed door, glowering at the nurses who passed in the corridor, Sharp said, “You know, those farm families way out there on the plains, they get strange 'cause
they breed too much among themselves, cousin to cousin, that sort of
thing, which makes them more stupid generation by generation. But not
only stupid, Peake. That inbreeding makes them stubborn as mules.”
    “Mr. Kiel sure does seem stubborn,” Peake said.
    “Just a dim-witted shit-kicker, so
what's the point of wasting energy breaking his butt? He wouldn't
learn his lesson anyway.”
    Peake could not risk an answer. He required almost superhuman
determination to keep a grin off his face.
    Six or eight times during the next half hour, Sharp said,
“Besides,
it's faster to let him get the information out of the girl. She's
a dim bulb herself, a drugged-up little whore
who's probably had syphilis and clap so often her brain's like
oatmeal. I figured
it'd take us hours to get anything out of her. But when that shit-kicker came into the room, and I heard the girl say 'Daddy' in that happy-shaky little voice, I knew he'd
get out of her what we needed a lot faster than we could get it. Let
him do our job for us, I thought.”
    Jerry Peake marveled at the deputy