He felt betrayed and alone.
Sometimes Rich just wanted to die. He imagined it was a lot like sleep. No cares. No worries. No pain. Just sweet, welcome oblivion, forever and ever—and if there was nothing after this, no Heaven or afterlife, he wouldn’t care anyway because he’d be dead.
Of course, if that happened, the family name would die with him. He had no siblings, no uncles with sons. Rich was the last male Henry from his father’s line. When Tyler had died two years ago in Iraq, a big part of Rich had died with him. The military had never revealed the whole story; just that Tyler had been riding in a convoy across the desert when a roadside bomb—an IED, the government man had called it—shredded his Humvee. One of Tyler’s friends, a kid from Mississippi, had died right away. Not Tyler. He’d lingered for almost fifteen minutes. At the memorial service, an American flag was draped over his closed casket. His high school graduation picture sat on top of it in a nice frame from the Hallmark store. In the picture, Tyler was smiling and whole. In the coffin, he wasn’t. The preacher talked about God and country and sacrifice. Then Tyler was buried.
The rest of the world moved on.
Rich did not.
Carol left him soon after. She said she’d been planning it for years, and had just wanted to wait until Tyler was grown and out of the house. She’d delayed her plans when he joined the army and went to Iraq. But now…
She never finished the last statement. She didn’t need to. Sometimes, things unsaid spoke louder than words.
Carol had left him everything—the car, the house, the dirty dishes in the sink, their empty bed, and a mountain of debt. The credit cards were at their maximum, and they still had five years’ worth of payments left on the house. Whether she’d done it out of pity or guilt or just an eagerness to be done with him, the end result was the same: she’d fucked him one last time before moving in with her dentist boyfriend. Here he was, one year later, unemployed, almost homeless, poaching deer out of season. All so he wouldn’t have to spend his meager unemployment check on groceries, and could instead hold off the bill collectors for another few weeks.
No wonder he fucking drank. “Out of control,” his boss said? Not yet. Maybe soon, though, if things didn’t get better—and if he had enough bullets…
Yeah, he could get out of control. Go postal. It would be so fucking easy.
Rich glanced back through the forest. There were no paths or trails. No wide spaces or clearings. This part of the woods had been unscathed by the big forest fire of 2006. Here the trees grew close together, and the rocky soil was covered with dead leaves and twigs. As dense as it was, he was surprised to see thick clusters of late-season undergrowth thrusting up from the ground: fragile ferns, poison ivy, Queen Anne’s lace, milkweed, blackberries and raspberries, snake grass, pine and oak seedlings dotted the landscape. All of it would be dead in another week or so. Already, the leaves were turning brown. He couldn’t see more than fifteen feet into the foliage, but that sense of being watched remained. It gave him the creeps.
Probably a deer, he thought. Come on out here and let me put some punkinballs in you, sucker.
That would be nice. Bag a good-sized buck, field dress it, and haul the carcass back to the truck. Then hide it beneath the tarp and head home. Move it from the truck bed and into the garage without any of the neighbors seeing (Trey Barker, who lived next door, would call the game warden if he knew Rich was poaching). With luck, he could have it strung up, butchered and in the freezer before dark, and he would then have the entire evening to drink a few beers and watch whatever was on the tube. Maybe he wouldn’t even cry tonight when he went to bed. That would be an excellent change of pace from his normal routine.
He’d parked on the side of one of the old dirt logging roads. Rich wasn’t worried about someone spotting his truck. He was way off the beaten path, hunting along the border of the state game lands. If a game warden or someone else happened to drive by, they’d just as easily assume the truck belonged to a hiker or a fisherman or somebody digging up ginseng roots as they would a poacher. They might even think it was broken down or abandoned. As long as he was careful when he dragged the deer’s carcass out, he’d be fine.
Of course, first he had to shoot one. Hell, shoot anything, something.
But there was nothing.
It was late October—almost Halloween. Small-game season had just ended and deer season was still a month away. The only thing he could legally shoot right now were coyotes and crows, but eating a coyote was like eating a dog and crows didn’t have enough meat on them—and what little meat they did have tasted like shit.
But even the crows were absent today.
Rich wondered if he’d have had better luck coming in from the Shrewsbury side of the woods. Maybe so. He hadn’t come in that way because the volunteers from the fire department and other civic groups were busy working on their Ghost Walk—a haunted attraction that would open Halloween eve and run until the first weekend in November. Even though it was the first one, the organizers had said they expected thousands of people over the next month, ferried back and forth on hay wagons, walking the trail through the forest while people in masks jumped out and scared them. It only took up a small section of the woods, but there were a lot of people working there currently, and he couldn’t risk anyone spotting him poaching.
He spat tobacco juice again and listened to the silence. Then he walked on. As he wound his way through the trees, he reconsidered his skepticism. He could understand why people told ghost stories about this area. This far in, the woods had atmosphere. The stillness was unsettling. He wondered what it meant. Did the wildlife know there was a predator in their midst? He’d been quiet, had walked lightly, dipped instead of smoked, made sure not to wear any deodorant. He’d even worn dirty clothes rather than clean ones that would smell like detergent. But nothing was out there.
Well, almost. Something was out there. He just didn’t know what it was.
He felt those invisible eyes boring into him again, right between his shoulder blades. When Rich wheeled around, there was nothing there but trees and foliage.
“Come on,” he whispered. “Give me a rabbit. A pheasant or squirrel—anything, goddamn it.”
He was smack-dab in the middle of over thirty square miles of protected Pennsylvanian woodland, zoned to prevent farmers and realtors from cutting it all down and planting crops or building housing developments and strip malls. The pulpwood company and paper mill in nearby Spring Grove had logged a great swath of the forest in years past, but lawmakers, the raging forest fire, and the rising availability of cheaper paper from China had put a stop to that. The old logging roads still existed, however. They were rutted and washed out in some places, but even so, they still provided access to the deeper parts of the forest. The adjoining land on the outskirts of the woods that hadn’t been ravaged by the fire was zoned agricultural and filled with corn, strawberry, and soybean fields. Other outlying areas housed hunting cabins. Beyond the farms and hunting cabins were the small towns of Shrewsbury, Seven Valleys, Jefferson, New Freedom, Spring Grove, Glen Rock, and New Salem. York County’s heartland.