The Backwoods.

Lee, Edward.

IT CAN'T BE REAL.

The coroner nodded curtly. "It's just kind of odd, and it's difficult to explain in any way that makes sense. But every now and then any medical examiner's office will get a cause of death that simply can never be determined."

Patricia frowned at the sheet. This was much less than she'd hoped for. "How was his head cut off, is what I want to be able to tell the family. Was it cut off, shot off? Was it knocked off in some sort of freak accident?"

Another curt look from the pretty coroner. "It was...none of those things, and that's about the only thing we do know. No blade striations, no evidence of severe impact to the body, no evidence of firearm discharge."

"But the head was never recovered-that's what I heard from the locals, anyway. Is that true?"

"Quite true, ma'am."

This was frustrating. "I'm sorry, but I just don't get it."

"Look on the next page, Mrs. White."

Patricia followed the instruction and immediately fell silent.

What she looked at now was the most macabre photograph she had ever seen in her life....

This book is for Pam Herbster.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

I'm grateful to have so many people to thank for their friendship, inspiration, and support: Tim McGinnis, Dave Barnett, Rich Chizmar, Doug and Matt, Don D'Auria, Jack Ketchum, Tom Pic, Michael Slade. Cooper, Keene, Mike R., and all the Horror-finders. The proofing committee: Pam (whose blood on the print-out exponentially increased its value!), Bob Strauss, and Ben Ricciardi. Special thanks to David Graham and Lord Gore, and, next, to outstanding friends: Christy and Bill, Darren, R.J. Myers, Kathy, Sarah S., Karyn Valentine & Patti Beller, and Jeff Walton, and of course Charlie Meitz and Tim Shannon-for international crustaceans, particularly Portunus halsatus.

Prologue.

The moon smeared in his eyes. He'd been staring as he waited, staring across the gulf of night to the other side of the river. He smiled. Soon . . .

The moonlight revealed sleeping bulldozers, stacks of foundation molds, and telltale trailers erected as construction offices. It's progress, his benefactor had said not too long ago. Progress equates to more jobs, more satisfaction, and more money. In your pocket and mine. It's exponential.

Dwayne's command of the English language excluded that particular adjective-but he got the idea. He was going to help speed progress along, and that was a good thing, wasn't it?

The voice grated out of the dark: "Do a good job."

"I always do, don't I?" Dwayne Parker said. Huffy redneck that he was, he felt mildly insulted by the other man's comment.

"You do, yes. I'm not denying that."

"Ain't none been found, right?" Dwayne challenged.

Right.

Workboots came forward, crunching softly. In the moonlight Dwayne could see leaves and moss stuck to the tops of the boots, but no mud like Dwayne's. Here was what Dwayne guessed was the real difference between white collar and blue collar, the brains and the brawn. Big f.u.c.kin' deal, he thought. Bet I get laid twice as much as he does. . . . It seemed a fair recompense for brawn.

"Sounds like you don't trust me to get the job done," Dwayne finally got out. "The tone of your voice 'n' all. Like maybe just 'cos I ain't no big college graduate like your cronies."

"Don't be insecure." Now there was something else to the tone. Dwayne didn't like it, yet he didn't push it. The boots crunched forward another few steps, twigs crackling. Moonlight flowed through the trees, bars of shadows from branches splayed across the other man's face. "I have the utmost confidence in you," he told Dwayne, and pa.s.sed him an envelope.

That's better. . . .

The envelope contained five crisp hundred-dollar bills.

The other man's voice seemed to resonate, a dark flutter from the face barely visible. "You won't have to do this too many more times before they all leave."

"What happens then?" Dwayne asked.

"Your wife sells the land to me. She'll be rich and so will you."

Dwayne pocketed the money. Yeah, that's right. And until then, I'm gonna have a lot of fun.

The cicadas were thrumming, a nearly electric drone that issued out from the woods in all directions. If a sound could be cloying, this was it. It pressed down on him like the sickly sweet humidity of the marsh.

"Here's fine," Dwayne said.

The girl seemed surprised. "Here?" she questioned. "Don't'cha wanna go back to my shack?"

Dwayne frowned. He'd seen where the Squatters lived: mostly sheet-metal huts on the bayside of the Point. He hesitated, "Well, uh-"

"Oh, it's nice," the girl promised. "Not like lots of 'em. My brothers built it for me, and I got it all to myself now that I'm eighteen."

Dwayne repressed a grin. Eighteen? s.h.i.t, this girl looks fourteen, if that. She was a twig of a thing, ninety pounds maybe, but then all the Squatters seemed small-Stanherd's clan. The tallest males stood five-seven if they were lucky, and the girls? They were all like this one: four-eleven, five feet tops. Must be something hereditary, in the ancestral blood. Stanherd's Squatters were small people.

But what had she been saying? Don't want to turn her trick in the woods, he remembered. Wants me to go back to her shack-well, f.u.c.k that. Someone might see him.

"Naw, here's fine," he repeated. "All I got time for is a quick one."

The girl was the sleekest shadow in the dark. "Oh, right," she said. "It's gettin' late, and I guess yer wife'd wanna know where you been."

"Just you let me worry about my wife," Dwayne said, annoyed. "I don't answer to her."

"Don't she ever get suspicious of ya?" The girl had asked the question calmly and, unabashed, kicked off her flip-flops and took off her shorts. "We all love her so much, generous as she is to us."

Minimum wage to pick f.u.c.kin' crabs, Dwayne thought with another hidden smile. And these pinheads think that's a lot of money. s.h.i.t. Of course, Dwayne had done the same thing quite a bit in his life, or any other menial job where employers weren't discriminating. Dumpster cleaning, refuse removal, oil-change jockey, and the like-any job his parole officer could land him. Dwayne was almost forty now, and he'd done three jolts with the Russell County Department of Corrections, totaling seven years in stir. After the last one (two years, a.s.sault with a baseball bat), he'd landed here for a job picking crabmeat at the Agan's Point Sh.e.l.lfish Company. Not the best job he'd ever had. After a while he'd begun to smell like crab guts; no matter how many showers he took, the dank fishy stink emanated from him. But then he'd met Judy and his life had truly changed. She owned the company, which her sister up in D.C. had helped her revamp, a small-time operation that turned secretly lucrative. When Dwayne had pulled enough wool over Judy's eyes, she'd practically been begging him to marry her. And now?

Made in the shade, he thought.

Dwayne wasn't picking the crabs anymore; he was the supervisor of the Squatters and other lowlifes who did.

But there was never enough, was there?

The five hundred dollars in his pocket reminded him of that.

When the girl turned in the wedge of moonlight, Dwayne saw that she was fully naked now. b.i.t.c.h don't waste time, he mused. He also saw something else: evidence that she was indeed at least eighteen. Full, fresh b.r.e.a.s.t.s, dark nippled; very feminine lines from shoulders to waist to hips; a plush outgrowth of untrimmed pubic hair. Not that Dwayne would've been worried about statutory rape . . . No. Not with this one, he thought. Or those six others.

"Still can't believe you wanna just do it here instead'a my shack," she was saying. In the dark she was bending over, a gesture like someone putting on stockings. But why would she do that? In the woods?

"And like I was saying," she went on, "what with your wife bein' so kind to us, givin us good work." She looked up, looked right at him with dark sparkles for eyes. "I don't feel too good 'bout doing this, you bein' Miss Judy's husband and all."

Dwayne cut a frown. "Hey, a buck's a buck, right? You don't want to do me because of my wife? Then one of your other little friends will. In a heartbeat."

"I know. . . ."

"Besides, the twenty bucks I'm payin' you for five minutes of your time, you'd have to work three hours pickin' crabs."

"I know," she repeated.

That said it all. The Squatters were poor, and they weren't even on the books as citizens. Invisible, like illegal aliens. They worked hard for their low wages, and the better-looking gals-like this one-utilized other resources for increased income. The way of the world since humans came out of the caves.

Dwayne squinted in the dark. What's she doing? She bent over again, which replayed his notion that she was putting on stockings or garters or something. Yes. She'd slipped something up high on her bare thighs.

"What's that you're puttin' on yourself?" he finally asked her.

"Wheat bands," she said. "Has to be a special kinda wheat, though, and they're hard to make. Hard to get the kernels to stay together when you sew 'em on the band."

The h.e.l.l? he thought. But suddenly he felt distracted by a number of things. For one, the endless chorus of cicadas, these being the three-year variety. This part of Virginia, Agan's Point got them all-the three-year, the seven-year, the thirteen-year, and the seventeen-year. As a kid, Dwayne had always found these waves and waves of insect sounds to be mysterious and captivating. But now-as an ex-con pushing forty-he found them annoying. The girl's voice distracted him too, the accent. All the Squatters had it, at least those from Everd Stanherd's clan. No one could ever quite place it. Part backwoods hillbilly drawl mixed with something that didn't even sound American. There was something rich and swoony about the way they talked. When they spoke, their lips didn't seem to move enough.

And then this new distraction. What the f.u.c.k? Dwayne thought. Wheat bands, she said?

Now she stood more directly in the moonlight, her fresh young body nearly luminous, b.r.e.a.s.t.s jutting, her belly b.u.t.ton a perfect black shadow. She'd pulled a band up on each thigh, like corroded garters.

"Those bands are made of wheat?"

"Um-hmm. It's middling wheat, and it ain't from around here. The clan mother makes em, and every girl gets a pair soon as she gits her period. The magic goes back a long way."

"Magic," Dwayne said.

"Yeah. It's for when you're gettin' with a fella. If ya wanna baby boy, ya put it on the left thigh, and if ya wanna girl, ya put it on the right." She adjusted the strange bands daintily with her finger. "And if ya don't want nothin', ya put 'em on both."

Dwayne shook his head. Squatters. Jesus. He knew there was a lot of weird superst.i.tion with them, but this was one he'd never heard before. Deep down he laughed to himself. Stupid cracker. The last thing she needs to be worryin' about is gettin' knocked up.

It was getting late. "Time to get down to business," he said next, and walked right over to her. He dropped a twenty-dollar bill down on her clothes, then turned her brusquely around, her bare back to him, and reached around to slide his calloused hands over the soft skin of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and abdomen. He rubbed his groin against her b.u.t.tocks, feeling that forbidden charge. Her skin seemed to rise in temperature as he maintained his rough caresses, and she began to breathe harder. Dwayne thought with an inner chuckle, Look at that, I'm turnin' the b.i.t.c.h on, gettin' a wh.o.r.e all hot 'n' bothered. Guess them dirty little clan boys don't do the job for her. Dwayne to the rescue . . .

He figured it was the least he could do, considering. . . .

He sucked her neck, playing intently with her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The nipples felt pebble-firm now, and when he gave them a hard squeeze with his fingers, she squealed delightedly, rising on her tiptoes.

"I always had a big thing fer you," came her strange accented whisper. "Just somethin' about you . . ."

The evidence of that was plain when he delved his fingers through her thatch into her s.e.x. Dwayne felt electrified below the belt. "I've had my eye on you, too, for a while."

"Ya have not!" she playfully challenged.

"Sure, I have. You're about the prettiest of all the clan girls-"

"I am?"

"-and I've seen you on the line a lot. One of the hardest workers at the picking den. That's what I told my wife."

"Bet'cher just sayin' that," she toyed. "Why, I bet ya don't even know my name, even though you do the pay envelopes every week."

"Of course I remember your name," Dwayne insisted, still cossetting her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, but then he thought, f.u.c.k? What's this hosebag's name? "Uh . . ." He paused. "Sunny, right?"

"Close," she told him, seeming at least pleased by that. "It's Cindy. Least, that's what I'm called mostly."

Dwayne didn't really give a flying s.h.i.t what her name was . . . yet the comment nagged him. "What'cha mean, mostly? It's either your name or it ain't."

"It ain't my clan name. It's awful."

He worked her b.r.e.a.s.t.s harder, with more focus. "What's your clan name, then?"

"I ain't tellin'!" She seemed ashamed. "You'd laugh!"

"No, I wouldn't."

"Everd says when we're 'round local folks, we use our other names; we only use our clan names around ourselves. Everd says it's easier for us to fit in. We all know we don't fit in with ya all."

Dwayne was only worried about one thing fitting in, and it had nothing to do with names. But the man she referred to-Everd Stanherd-was a strange coot indeed. He was the clan's elder, the wise man, so to speak, for all the Squatters. The f.u.c.ker claimed to be sixty but he looked eighty . . . except for his hair. Not a gray hair on his head anywhere, just jet-black. All the clan had weird shiny jet-black hair, even the older women. Dwayne couldn't see folks like this using hair dye.

"You feel really good . . . Cindy," he guttered. As his own arousal steepened, the dense chorus of cicadas seemed nearly deafening. Now his hands roamed all over-she felt tiny in them, the lithe frame, the reed-thin physique almost disproportionate to b.r.e.a.s.t.s firm and full as the popovers Judy made on holidays-and just as warm.

Playtime was over; Dwayne was more than ready behind the zipper. He urged her through trees hanging with mops of Spanish moss, sort of pushing her along with his groin, and his fingers slid back up to her nipples. She was panting when he got her to the clearing.

"Yeah, right here," he said. He turned her around, placing her hands on his belt, telegraphing that it was time for her to take off his pants.

Now her words sounded parched from desire. "You sure you don't wanna go back to my shack?" she almost pleaded.

His jeans fell down. Naw.

"It'd be lots more comfortable. What's so special about this place?"