“Please don’t hurt me,” she begged as tears welled from her eyes. Her heart hammered to get out of her chest. “Please.”

“Well, well, it is nice to hear you say please.” He licked his lips again and his hand never stopped touching her. He sought out her nipples and pinched them and laughed as she yelped and flinched. Jonatha wanted to throw up. She wanted to run, but she felt as if all the power had been sucked out of her muscles by his invading touch. “Say it again. C’mon, girlie-girl, say it again.”

“P . . . please . . .”

“Again.”

“Please!”

“Again.”

“Please, for God’s sake! Please!”

“Well, since you ask so nice . . .” and he grabbed the collar of her sweatshirt and gave it a vicious and powerful jerk.

Cloth ripped and his fingernails scraped painfully across her sternum. The gun barrel pressed harder as he ripped and tore at the cloth, shredded it, exposing her upper breasts and the white bra, and all the time he muttered a kind of chant that sent cold chills racing up and down her spine. “Here it comes. Oh boy, here it comes. Here it comes now . . .”

She saw the specter of death looming above Vic’s shoulder, she saw it grinning through his melted face and burning in his eyes. She saw the future in those fiery eyes. She saw rape and pain and humiliation, and at the end of it all, she saw her agonizing and pointless death. In all her nightmares of vampires and werewolves, in all her research into demons and beasts, in all of her studies into the nature of evil, she had never conjured an image more terrifying than this madman with the scorched face. She could understand monsters that killed because it was their supernatural nature, she could understand beasts that were trapped within the dictates of an ancient curse, or driven by primal instincts that were completely beyond control, but this was an ordinary man. A human being capable of making his own choices, capable of understanding right from wrong and good from evil. This was a chosen, deliberate evil, and Jonatha suddenly understood that this was the worst kind of evil. In this man she saw all the evil of the human kind seething with life and power, glaring at her with lust and hunger, ready to rip her life away.

“Here it comes, girlie-girl. Oh boy, here it comes . . .” His strong fingers hooked inside the edge of one bra cup and began to pull. Jonatha screamed.

And then she hit him.

Before she was even aware that she was going to do it, one hand smashed the pistol aside and the other slammed into Vic’s burned face with her rigid palm and hooked fingernails. It exploded the blisters and drove spikes of red-hot pain into his head—and he screamed even louder than Jonatha had. His finger jerked on the trigger and the gun fired, but the bullet tore into a cabinet.

“Get away from me!” Jonatha shoved him with both hands and Vic stumbled and stumbled back, but instead of taking the chance to run, she chased him and hit him again and again, pounding on the gory ruin of his face, screeching so shrilly that it hurt Vic’s ears almost as much as the blows that kept raining down. Vic’s blood splashed abstract patterns across her torn shirt, across her screaming face; it sparkled like rubies in her short hair; and he swung wildly with the pistol and caught Jonatha on the arm, spinning her halfway around.

Vic was in such immediate pain that he didn’t even try to shoot her—he just wanted to get away; so with blood in his eyes and his head in a bag of thorns he tore free and staggered toward the door and clumsied it open just as he heard a sound that chilled his boiling blood. Jonatha had retrieved her shotgun and jacked a round into the breech.

“Bastard!” She fired a shot that chopped a hole the size of a dinner plate out of the jamb a yard from his head, but Vic was ducking and weaving, and then he plowed into the crowd of patients, bashing and kicking at them, tossing them behind him to block pursuit and give her no chance at a shot.

In the hall, Newton lay on the gurney, nearly as blind with pain as Vic. He was frozen in the act of digging into his pants pocket for a tissue to wipe sweat from his eyes. He didn’t know who this guy was—but like Jonatha he could make a reasonable guess. His pistol tangled in his sheets where he’d dropped it after shooting the vampire and after the shock of that act had buried a knife of pain in his chest.

The gun wasn’t visible to this killer, but reaching for it would draw his fire.

Jonatha stood in the doorway, her shotgun aimed and ready, the barrel moving back and forth like a viper searching for exposed flesh to bite.

Vic grabbed a young girl, a bald chemo patient, and wrapped a thick arm around her throat, laying his pistol arm on her shoulder to steady it as he backed away from Jonatha.

He squeezed off two shots; the girl screamed and the bullets hit the metal door frame and zinged off through the hallway.

Jonatha ducked back inside and everyone else dropped to the ground.

Newton took the only chance he could. If he could distract Vic, draw his attention—even if meant drawing his fire—then it would give Jonatha at least a chance.

So he took out the one solid object in his pocket and flicked it at the back of Vic’s head. It was small, just an old dime—scraped and faded, with a hole through it so that someone could wear it around their ankle on a piece of twine—

and it pinged off Vic’s skull doing no harm at all, but Vic spun that way, swinging the gun away from the girl and aiming it at Newton. There were two simultaneous blasts—one from Vic’s pistol, and his bullet punched a hole right into the wall an inch from Newton’s head, and the other was the deeper boom of Jonatha’a shotgun. The blast took Vic in the wrist and blew off half his arm.

A few of the birdshot peppered the arm of the chemo patient, and she cried out and fell, but Vic seemed painted into the moment, his body immobile, his face white with shock, his eyes bugging out at the ruin of his arm, which ended in a red tangle just below the elbow.

He opened his mouth to scream, to whimper, to say something . . . but nothing came out. Vic didn’t even seem to be registering the pain. He was frozen into a moment of total, horrified disbelief.

That gave Newton all the time he needed to pick up Weinstock’s heavy gun, steady his arm on the rail of the gurney, and aim.

“You’re Vic Wingate,” he said.

Vic’s eyes flicked to him. Tears burst from his eyes and rolled down his cheek. “I . . . I . . . please!”

“This is for Mike,” Newton said, and shot him four times in the face.

2

The Bone Man felt it happen. He felt Vic die. It sent an electric thrill through him that lifted some of the deadness from his heart. It was similar to what he had felt when Polk ate his gun, and when the vampires killed Gus Bernhardt.

He’d even felt some of it—less of it—when Eddie Oswald died.

Now, every single one of the men who had murdered him thirty years ago was dead. Since he’d come back he’d prayed for something like that, for the twisted release that came from rough justice. It made him feel more free, less tied to the blood and nerves of this goddamned town.

As he drifted down the hill behind Mike Sweeney, Val, Crow, and Vince LaMastra, the Bone Man felt even less substantial than he had since he’d risen.

I could leave now, he thought, I could go and rest. Without knowing how, or where that insight came from, he knew it was correct. His own murder was avenged, even if indi-rectly. He had saved Mike from Tow-Truck Eddie—several times in fact, whether by standing between the boy and the killer, or by whispering in the boy’s head at the right moment, or by drawing on all of his nearly exhausted reserves of energy in order to push Newton into the path of Oswald’s bullet. He’d done that; and as far as he could figure, that’s why he’d been brought back. Not to get justice, but to give justice some kind of fighting chance.

He’d tried to help Henry Guthrie’s family, but he certainly failed at that. On the other hand he’d stood between Crow and the roaches that day and maybe that had saved his life.

Yeah, he mused, I could step out of this ball game and sleep.

With Vic dead, the Bone Man knew that all he had to do was want it bad enough and he’d be gone. Leave the living to fight the dead, even though that fight was probably lost anyway.

I could go . . . but what if I stayed?

The climbers were nearly down to the floor of the Hollow.

The end game was about to start, win or lose. It wasn’t his fight anymore. He’d already saved the town once, and died for it. Been damned for it.

This ain’t my fight no more.

Overhead, invisible against the sky, the crows were circling, circling.

The Bone Man looked at Mike, who was trying hard not to scream, trying hard not to run from this because who on earth would want to go forward and embrace that kind of heritage. And yet he kept going.

He looked at LaMastra, who had already lost a friend and who would probably be haunted by this every day of his life.

It wasn’t even his town, and yet he kept going.

He looked at Val, who had the most to lose of any of them because of that little babe that was just starting to grow in her belly. She should leave, she most of all should just turn around and find some way out of this town. She’d already lost too much, and yet she kept going.

Then he looked at Crow, who had been tortured by this since Griswold had killed his brother and then tried to kill him. Crow had been in and out of the bottle, had wrestled with enough personal demons. Maybe he had the biggest stake in this because he always believed that the evil had never gone away. Even so, he could have left; he should have packed Val and maybe Mike into a car and driven out of town after they discovered who and what Boyd was. He knew that he was on a suicide mission, that there was no foreseeable way that the four of them could stand against all those monsters, let alone against Griswold and what he was about to become. He should leave, and yet he kept going.

They reached the bottom of the pitch and stood facing down the long corridor of twisted trees. The sounds of shrieks and laughter from the Hollow filled the air, even from this distance. The Bone Man, invisible, stood behind them and watched them brace themselves, check their weapons, exchange handshakes or hugs, and then head down the road toward death.