The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

But the worst of it was in the west of the county, where the coal once was. The underground mines had been tapped out when we were children, and while that’s when I’d first heard the term strip-mining, I hadn’t known what it meant, either as a process or its consequences.

It was plain enough now, though, all the near-surface coal gone too, and silent wastelands left in its wake, horizon-wide lacerations of barren land pocked with mounds of topsoil, the ground still so acidic that nothing wanted to grow there.

No matter how urgently the Woodwalker might remind the seeds what to do.

It was the wrong frame of mind to have gotten in before circling back to the store. I left my sunglasses on inside, the same way I’d wear them on cloudy days while watching the inmates in the yard, and for the same reasons, too: as armor, something to protect us both, because there was no good to come from locking eyes, from letting some people see what you think of their choices and what they’d thrown away.

The place was crowded with Saturday morning shoppers, and there was no missing the sickness here. Those meth people that’ve made such a dump of the place, I hear they don’t mess around, Mrs. Tepovich had said, and for that matter, neither did the meth. I knew the look — some of the inmates still had it when they transferred from local lockups to hard time — and while it wasn’t on every face in the market, it was on more than enough to make me fear it was only going to get worse here. A body half-covered with leprosy doesn’t have a lot of hope for the rest of it.

The worst of them had been using for years, obviously, their faces scabbed and their bones filed sharp. With teeth like crumbling gravel, they looked like they’d been sipping tonics of sulfuric acid, and it was eating through from the inside. The rest of them, as jumpy and watchful as rats, would get there. All they needed to know about tomorrow was written in the skins of their neighbors.

It had an unexpected leveling effect.

From what I remembered of when we visited as children, the men nearly always died first here, often by a wide margin. They might go along fine for decades, as tough as buzzards in a desert, but then something caught up with them and they fell hard. They’d gone into the mines and come out with black spots on their lungs, or they’d broken their backs slowly, one sunrise-to-sunset day at a time, or had stubbornly ignored some small symptom for ten years too many. The women, though, cured like leather and carried on without them. It was something you could count on.

No longer.

The race to the grave looked like anybody’s to win.

When I got back to the house, I discovered we had a visitor, a surprise since there was no car in the drive. As I came in through the kitchen, Gina, over his shoulder, gave me a where-were-you-all-this-time look that she could’ve stolen from my ex. They were sitting at the kitchen table with empty coffee mugs, and Gina looked like the statute of limitations on her patience had expired twenty minutes earlier.

I couldn’t place him, but whoever he was, he probably hadn’t had the same fierce black beard, lantern jaw, and giant belly when we were kids.

“You remember Ray Sinclair,” she said, then jabbed her finger at the door, and it came back in a rush: Mrs. Tepovich’s great-nephew. He used to come over and play with us on those rare days that weren’t already taken up with chores, and he’d been a good guide through the woods — knew where to find all the wild berries, at their peak of ripeness, and the best secluded swimming holes where the creeks widened. We shook hands, and it was like trying to grip a baseball glove.

“I was dropping some venison off at Aunt Pol’s. She told me you two were over here,” he said. “My condolences on Evvie. Aunt Pol thought the world of her.”

I put away the milk and bacon and the rest, while Gina excused herself and slipped past, keeping an overdue appointment with some room or closet as Ray and I cleared the obligatory small talk.

“What have you got your eye on?” he asked then. “For a keepsake, I mean.”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Maybe my granddad’s shotgun, if it turns up.”

“You do much hunting?”

“Not since he used to take me out. And after I got back from the army … let’s just say I wasn’t any too eager to aim at something alive and pull a trigger again.” I’d done fine with my qualifications for the job, although that was just targets, nothing that screamed and bled and tried to belly-crawl away. “But I’m thinking if I had an old gun that I had some history with, maybe…” I shrugged. “I guess I could’ve asked for it after Granddad died, but it wouldn’t have seemed right. Not that Grandma went hunting, but left alone out here, she needed it more than I did.”

He nodded. “Especially after your sister.”