deal longer, but his companions were fashioned of less durable alloys. Mark Spitz pegged Jerry to be the first to crack. Mark Spitz was from Long Island and maintained the suburban boy’s suspicion of the pastoral, and here was a man who hunted, gutted, and dressed big game. Mark Spitz cast Jerry as the cowboy right-winger who was going to show this vermin who was boss, blast one of the front windows into splinters and start sending these cretins to their God. Firing into the agitated horde until one of the monsters got ahold of his gun barrel, wrestled it away, and the rest started picking at all the boards. It always happened quick. One part of the barricade failed, and then it was as if the refuge sighed and everything disintegrated at once. The spell of protection sputtered, all out of eldritch juice, and the mighty stronghold was made of straw again. All it took was one flaw in the system, a bug roosting deep in the code, to initiate the cascade of failure.
Tad, when he snapped, was the type to unlatch the front door and run screaming into the mess of them. Suicide by skel. There was a limit to what the human mind, born into that sweet and safe and lost world, could endure. He hadn’t suspected Margie, whom he had decided to save if possible. Bring her with him out the second-floor window, then on the top of the porch, jump and roll and keep moving. In retrospect, the fact that she wore her motocross gear for the final forty-eight hours might have been a hint.
Yes, Margie beat him to the porch roof. In the parlor, Mark Spitz read a spy thriller on the orange shag rug by the fireplace and the other two men were deep in quiet rounds of rummy. They didn’t hear her ease the boards from her bedroom window, but they could not overlook the explosion of glass outside. Margie screamed, “This is our island! Get your filthy hands off of me!” Tad and Mark Spitz broke for the spy holes, but Jerry understood and sprinted upstairs, yelling her name. In the middle of the yard three skels twisted in the blaze of the Molotov cocktail, the dry barnyard grass and sow thistle crackling into sparks and sheaves of flame. The burning security guard, whom Mark Spitz had watched for a whole hour the previous afternoon in a fit of impregnable boredom, staggered and fell on his face as the other dead twisted toward the house, half their ghoulish faces upturned to the commotion on the second story, and the rest to the bottom floor and its suddenly intriguing fortifications. They moved on the house, the mob of them constricting with purpose. Finally the things knew why they had gathered there, as if there had ever been any other reason.
Margie screamed again and the next bomb detonated among the creatures. The bottle was one of those that had held the concoctions of French seltzer and fruit juice, with the elegant label describing the manufacturer’s legend, the commitment to quality, and the ancestral springs. It was a direct hit on the ballerina. The thing collided with another skel, one of the local hippie varietals, and that one went up in flames. The nights had been so dark, moonless and dead, and now the fires livened it all to exuberant performance, embers pirouetting in the air. The wrestling upstairs continued. Glass shattered, and he saw flaming liquid pour over the lip of the porch’s roof and onto the front steps. Not long now.
His mechanism clicked and stuttered. Once again in a stranger’s house, the next residence in the endless neighborhood that snared him his first night on the run. Their different layouts and constructions did not fool him; chimney or no chimney, English basement or cinder-block sump-pumped storeroom, he moved through a single infernal subdivision without outlet, serried cul-de-sacs and dead-ends overlooking broken land. He invited himself in to spend the night and the houses were empty or filled with the dead. It was as simple as that. He couldn’t save these strangers any more than they could save him. His hosts were as alien to him as the soiled rabble mustered outside, now clawing at the windows and doors, ravenous for access. The creatures would find it. The house sighed around him, submitting to the business of dying.
Mark Spitz went for his gun and pack. Tad paused at the landing. He translated the