Laws of Nature -2 Christopher Golden (ebook reader web .txt) 📖

Kenny Oberst as background noise. Most mornings, Aaron griped about Kenny's incessant talk; the man had an opinion about everything.

That morning, however, when Kenny had not appeared by eight o'clock, Aaron grew concerned. The two old men had been knocking about together since the second grade. Kenny never showed up at the drugstore unless he was expected, and he never failed to show up when he was. Not without calling to let Aaron know.

Not ever.

Aaron phoned Kenny three times that morning, before, during, and after his racking of the periodicals. There was no answer at the Oberst residence. As ten o'clock came and went, he waited on a handful of customers, and in between he read the new National Enquirer cover to cover. He scratched at his scalp, where his white hair was thinnest, and cleared his throat. The sound echoed hauntingly in the empty store.

About ten-thirty, Aaron walked back to the magazine rack, convinced he had arranged the new shipment incorrectly. He favored his right leg, unwilling to rest too much weight on the left knee he had popped playing basketball in 1964. It only bothered him when he was trying to pretend nothing else was on his mind.

When he found himself reading the covers of women's magazines, he knew he had put it off long enough. Maybe too long. Anxiety simmering in the back of his mind, he swallowed hard and pulled the keys out of his pocket. They jangled as he went to the front, turned the sign around to CLOSED. He locked the door behind him and headed for the antique Dodge Dart he still drove.

Only minutes later he rolled the Dart slowly to a stop in front of Kenny's faded house. There wasn't any yard to speak of, but it still sorely needed attention.

Aaron studied the yard in order to avoid consciously thinking about the house itself, and how quiet it all seemed.

Something itched inside his ear, and he stuck a finger into it and twisted it around. His knee ached the way it did before a heavy rain, though the weather report had said nothing about precipitation. After a moment's pause Aaron swallowed, his throat dry, then walked up to the front door.

It was open just a crack.

He rapped on the wood. "Kenny? You down with the flu or something?"

The words sounded downright foolish coming out of his mouth. He knew full well Kenny was not down with the flu. The old man could still answer the phone, couldn't he?

Aaron pushed the door open.

For a moment he only stared with wide eyes at what he saw within. Books were strewn all over the house, pages torn out, piled in stacks that reeked of urine.

Furniture was shattered into kindling, the television had a hole the size of a basketball in it, the walls were spattered with blood. On the floor, near a pile of old videotapes, Aaron saw what he thought was a ruined eyeball, still trailing a piece of optic nerve behind it.

In the midst of the wreckage lay what remained of Kenny Oberst, who had been his best friend since before either of them could read.

During the time he'd served in the Korean War, Aaron Travis had seen a mother and child blown apart by a land mine; he'd seen soldiers cut each other down; he'd had to gut a man with a knife to save his own life outside a bar in Seoul. But he had never seen anything as savage and horrible as what had been done to Kenny.

"Oh, dear Jesus," Aaron whispered.

He put a hand up to cover his eyes and turned to walk out of the house, tears flowing freely down his cheeks. He limped to his Dart and climbed in, shuddering with the effort. Gravity dragged more heavily upon him now.

For the first time in his life, Aaron Travis felt truly old.

Molly sat exhausted on the floor of the forest, leaning against a tree, and closed her eyes. They had spent most of the previous day trekking along old hiking trails with bottles of water, chocolate-chip cookies, and a compass as the sum total of their supplies.

If she didn't count the guns.

At first, Molly had been sure they would get lost. Soon, though, she came to realize that as long as she was with Jack, she could never be lost for long. Not when he was constantly conversing with the lost souls who wandered the forests around Buckton. Many of those spirits who still lingered in the area had been victims of the Prowlers, and as the day had worn on, their sheer number had cast a pall over both Molly and Jack, a grim yet silent acknowledgement of the grisly murders that had occurred in the vicinity over the years.

Given what they had learned by Jack's contact with the dead, the pack had been hunting these mountains and the surrounding towns for decades. And yet, given that time frame, the unsettling numbers began to seem less outrageous, even modest. It chilled Molly to think in those terms, but the pack had been hunting here so long that it was amazing the death toll was not higher and that - as far as they knew - the Prowlers had never killed within Buckton until recently. They had clearly curtailed their activities in order to attract as little attention as possible.

Until now.

Molly figured that once they worked out why those patterns had been broken, it would not be too difficult to figure out who the Prowlers were. They had spent six hours the previous day putting together what she had come to think of as the ghost-map. After another dinner at the Jukebox Restaurant, they had both slept soundly, dreamlessly. This morning, after a quick breakfast, they had set out just after seven o'clock.

Now it was going on ten, and she needed a rest. Boston was a walking city, and she'd spent most of her life discovering it, but she now realized there was a significant difference