Chapter One

Judd Perkins was a level-headed man. Literally. Well, flat-headed anyway. Maybe it was because his mama left him lying on his back for too long when he was a baby. That’s what folks said caused a kid to have a head that was flat in the back. Judd’s was and maybe that was why. It suited him, though, built solid as an anvil like he was — thick and broad, with arms like sides of beef. His late wife sometimes had to work a seamstress’s magic to get shirts to fit around his broad shoulders. If he’d been a tall man, he’d have been a giant. At five feet ten inches, he just looked like — what was it Julie Ann called him? — a refrigerator with legs.

And level-headed people didn’t get all upset over nothing. Which was what Judd was afraid he was doing, getting all bent out of shape over something didn’t mean a hill of beans.

But what if it did?

Judd had lost his pickup truck on J-Day, had been on his way to load up two rolls of baling wire from a fella in Drayton County, crossed the county line and boom! Wound up in the Middle of Nowhere sicker than he had ever been in his life. So sick he was heaving and praying to die at the same time, with a needle buried so deep in his skull that he still found himself walking around careful so he wouldn’t dislodge it, and that’d been almost two weeks ago. He had an old farm truck, a 1961 International Harvester that wouldn’t go into fourth or fifth gears because the transmission was shot, but it had a full tank of gas and would get him from Point A to Point B when the need arose. So he could take Buster in to see E.J. — Dr. E.J. Hamilton, the veterinarian — if he had to. He just didn’t know yet if he had to.

He took off his John Deere cap and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, squinting up into the woods where the dog had run off to. Just run off. That wasn’t like Buster. Taken all by itself it wasn’t no thang. But with everything else.

Squinting, he thought he could see the white fur of the big dog in the shadows of the trees on the edge of the woods, but he couldn’t be sure. He opened his mouth to call out, “C’mere, Buster!” but he didn’t. Maybe he’d ought to talk to E.J. first.

“Either crap or get off the pot,” he said aloud, would have said it to Buster, who’d have wagged his tail and cocked his head to the side like he understood every word. “Either call the vet or no, ain’t no sense in stewing over it all day.”

He had a lot to get done today, and he found it hard to concentrate, his mind wandering off to that thing wrapped around the county that you couldn’t cross, in or out.

It’d been there for two weeks now. And even the likes of Judd Perkins was … scared. He knew he wasn’t the only one’d started thinking ahead, wondering how … if it didn’t go away soon, how … everything? He’d never stopped before to consider how systems worked, how loaves of bread got on the shelves and what you could buy with a dollar, and where them big tanker trucks that showed up at the filling stations got the gasoline they pumped into them underground tanks.

He didn’t know how any of that stuff worked, but figured it was all gonna stop working pretty soon and where did that leave him and his family? Wasn’t nobody but his daughter, Doreen, and her girls Julie and Michelle here in the county.

The nine-year-old was taking the Jabberwock thing harder than her older sister. Michelle’d been taking piano lessons and turned out she was real good, and was on some kind of team, soccer or something. At twelve, Julie was preoccupied with rock music and the group of neighborhood girls she ran with, who, the best Judd could tell, would have snared gold medals on the Olympic giggling team.

But Michelle … the scariness of it. ‘Course everybody was taking it hard, but the kids was the ones with the wildest imaginations. He’d heard some of the stories they’d cooked up — about extraterrestrials like E.T. except with acid for blood and two sets of teeth. Or zombies. In the beginning, the first few days, Judd just wanted it to hurry up and get over with so folks could go on with life. That wacky storm had blown something in here — somehow. He’d been sure eggheads would spend years trying to figure out what it had been. Whatever it was, there would come along another storm to blow it back out in a day or two.

Only that didn’t happen. Day after day, that didn’t happen. Now, whenever Judd let himself think about it too long, that big vein on his temple would commence to throbbing and he imagined he could feel again that needle inside his skull.

His Mildred had been gone for going on eighteen months now, so it was just him and Buster. Doreen’s lowlife ex-husband was out there in the wide world somewhere. Doing something. Doreen was doing nothing, sitting home because she couldn’t go to work in Carlisle at the bank where she was a loan officer. So how was she gonna get paid? And what good did “paid” do?

He was gonna talk to her about moving back into the old house with him instead of staying in their little house on Coal Run Road in Pine Bluff Hollow. Wasn’t no sense in that. Whatever was coming, he wanted them close so he could look after them. He could hunt. Woods was full of game and wasn’t a better shot in the whole county than Judd Perkins. He had a garden. They wouldn’t starve. But the rest of it. He just flat out didn’t know.

Buster’d been acting weird for the past few days and Judd’d had too much on his mind to pay it any attention. But this morning the dog had killed a chicken. Just killed it. The chicken was out pecking at whatever it was chickens pecked at in the yard, and the next thing you know, Buster’s leapt up and killed it, snapped its neck and slung his head back and forth with the chicken’s body in his mouth, feathers going every which way. He’d dropped it then and walked away from the body lying there in the dirt. He was walking funny, too.

If there was something wrong with Buster … Judd didn’t know how to think about that. He loved Buster like he was a kid, had hugged that dog to his chest and cried into his fur when Mildred passed and wasn’t no human he woulda done that with.

Buster’d been a beautiful dog when Mildred was alive to care for that long coat of his, brushed it two or three times a week. She had taught that dog all kinds of things, got a book about training a guard dog and talked to E.J. about how you was supposed to use commands in German so couldn’t nobody else control your dog. White as a polar bear, the dog was. A Great Pyrenees, he probably weighed 170 pounds, with a big, square head and eyes that followed Judd’s every movement, wide, intelligent eyes that you could look into and … sometimes Judd thought that dog could read his mind.

Buster wouldn’t look at him this morning, though. He’d put the dog’s food out, set the bowl on the floor and Buster wasn’t interested. Judd cast a glance up into the woods at the white spot lying in the shade of that sycamore tree … what was the dog doing up there?

Then he turned on his heel and marched into the house to the phone.

E.J.'s receptionist, Raylynn Bennett, answered, “Healthy Pets Animal Clinic, may I help you?”

Judd swallowed. “I need to talk to E.J. Something’s wrong with Buster.”