Without allowing herself another thought, she stepped off the branch and hurled herself down on Sharon Russell. She caught the blonde around the shoulders with her arms, tipping her backward in the saddle. The rifle went off with a crack.

Startled, the horse bolted sideways, ducking out from under Mari and slamming Sharon’s right leg into the trunk of a tree. She howled her rage and twisted around in the saddle, swinging the gun in Mari’s direction. Mari scrambled to stand and fling herself ahead at the same time, grabbing wildly for the rifle barrel. She caught hold of the fore end of the stock and shoved it aside just as Sharon pulled the trigger.

The rifle cracked again, spitting its load into the soft loam of the hillside. Mari hung on tight to the gun as the horse leapt forward, eyes rolling, hooves scrambling for purchase. Sharon had the choice of giving up her ride or her rifle. She came out of the saddle screaming in fury.

Her momentum drove Mari backward on the steep hillside, and she stumbled and went down, letting go of the gun to try to save herself from rolling down a hundred feet of mountainside. She skidded backward on the rain-slick slope, grabbing for anything she could and catching hold of a broken branch that was three feet long and thicker than a baseball bat. Her fingers gripped it hard as she struggled to get her feet under her, her eyes on Bryce’s cousin the whole time.

Sharon came at her with madness flaming in her eyes and terrible alien cries tearing from her throat. She brought the rifle up against her shoulder. Mari surged upward, swinging the branch, once again knocking the gun to the side. Without wasting a second, she lunged closer and swung again with all her might, catching the woman hard enough in the upper arm to make her lose her grip on the rifle.

The gun dropped and bounced down the hillside, twisting and flipping. Both women scrambled after it, pushing and shoving at each other until they went down in a tangle of arms and legs.

Samantha watched from up the trail, thinking she should do something, but she couldn’t think what. Her brain felt numb. The rain pouring down gave the scene a weird, dreamlike quality and separated her from the other women like a wall, like a window she could see through but not move through. She could actually feel her consciousness retreat inside her mind. She wanted to shut down, to black out, to fall into oblivion where she couldn’t be hurt and she didn’t have to exist in this nightmare. But a small, strident voice inside her shouted for her to hang on, to get up, to do something.

She struggled to her feet and started down the hill. Then the dogs turned and looked right at her with their eyes bright and their teeth showing.

Mari fought to get free of Sharon. They had come to rest on a shelf of treeless ground that jutted out from the hillside. The rifle lay half a yard away, nearer the edge. Mari lunged for it, her fingertips just grazing the butt of the stock as Sharon fell on her. The rifle slipped beyond her grasp. She twisted onto her back and tried to throw her attacker off, but Sharon’s hands closed on her throat and squeezed. Those hands were large and strong, as masculine as her face, which was now twisted with madness and rage, distorted into a grotesque mask. The features blurred and melted together as the blackness of unconsciousness crept around the edges of Mari’s vision.

She struggled beneath the weight of the larger woman, clawing at Sharon’s sinewy forearms to no avail. Flinging her hands out to the side, she scrabbled for anything she could use as a weapon and closed her fingers on a jagged shank of wood. With all the strength she could muster, she swung her arm up and jabbed the shard into Sharon’s biceps.

Sharon screamed, twisting to grab the makeshift knife, throwing herself off balance. Mari heaved her hips upward and to the left, and her assailant fell off her, allowing her to scramble to her feet. She jumped up, dizzy, her legs heavy and slow beneath her. Sharon lunged sideways, making another grab for the rifle and catching hold of the sling. She pulled the gun toward her as she slid another five feet toward the edge of the ground. Desperate, Mari flung herself on Bryce’s cousin, knocking the gun from her hands and sending it over the edge and down the side of the mountain.

The two of them wrestled and kicked and clawed, sending a hail of loose rock careening down the slope. Mari felt her strength ebb as the initial burst of adrenaline faded. She had been running for miles. Sharon was fresh. Sharon was in shape. Sharon was insane. And as they came to their feet, she discovered one other very important thing about Sharon Russell-she had a knife.

At the sound of the rifle shots, Will kicked his horse into a gallop without regard for the terrain or the animal or his own life.

J.D. was right behind him, his thoughts on Mary Lee. He leaned back hard in the saddle as his gelding skidded down the trail, slipping on the mud and dead vegetation. They crashed through the brush and over fallen logs, dodging trees and boulders, stumbling over roots. The rain came down through the trees as loud as nails on a tin roof. It sluiced over the brims of their hats and obscured vision. They rode on, oblivious of it.

Del held his position, watching the goings-on through a 36x Unertl scope. The scope nearly ran the length of an all-black Heckler and Koch.308 assault rifle. His meanest, ugliest, ass-kicking gun. He had it tricked out to take a sixty-shot banana clip. It was the siege gun. The gun he would use to protect his family and his land from all comers.

The time had come to use it. He could feel it. His nerves were jumping like live wires beneath his skin. He felt as though he had a swarm of bees inside his head, that if he could uncork the knot of flesh on top of his head, bees would fly out by the hundreds. He wished he could do that to clear his mind. He wished a lot of things. He wished the little blonde-the talker-had not come to his place. She said she had seen the tigers too, but he still wasn’t sure she wasn’t trying to trick him. The blondes were like that. The one had lured J.D., the dead one, the same one that lured Del during the long nights. They couldn’t be trusted.

He had followed the talker a ways out from his place. Not too far, because he didn’t feel good about leaving the cabin now that its sanctity had been breached. And then he had picked himself a spider hole and waited. There was something in the air, something akin to the storm that gathered angrily overhead. He lay prone in his spider hole and waited as the anticipation built into a ball of energy at the base of his skull.

He had expected the dog-boys and the hunters. What he saw through the scope were the blondes. Two of them locked in combat. They were perhaps five hundred yards out and sharply down the mountain from him on a lip of ground that had always been called Bald Knob. The lack of trees on Bald Knob afforded him a decent view, but his vision was obscured by the rain and the light was nearly gone. The blondes moved together, like dancers, like sexual mates, writhing and twisting, their bodies melding into a grotesque mutation of the human form.

Del’s fingers moved restlessly on the rifle, stretching, limbering. The tip of his trigger finger hummed with energy as it caressed the arc of steel. His heart was running like a generator in his chest. He couldn’t seem to slow it. His lungs felt overinflated. Panic filled his throat. He could smell his nerves like smoldering wiring. His stillness had deserted him. Thunder boomed overhead, and he thought of mortar fire and listened to the remembered crackle of radio static as it skated along between the plate and his brain.

He didn’t know what to do. Had they come to take the ranch? To taunt him? To drive him mad? To kill one another? He didn’t understand. He couldn’t calm himself enough to think. Time seemed to be moving at hyperspeed and there was nothing he could do to still even one moment.