Alive or dead, she must be found. Alive or dead you’re going to take her home.

Let her live let her live let her live, that’s the song in my heart, what keeps me running when my burning lungs beg me to stop.

No stopping. I won’t stop until we get home, both of us. Alive or dead, both of us.

The mad mud ghost yanks back the tarp, exposing his cache of weapons. First thing he loads up is the famous Breda machine gun, draping a full belt of ammunition over his shoulders. A thousand rounds. The weight of that alone is enough to make an ordinary man’s legs buckle, but Ricky Lang was no ordinary man even before full-blown psychosis doubled then tripled his strength.

Next, the fully loaded AA-12 automatic shotgun with the custom sixty-four-round drum magazine ready to fire, and a spare drum hooked to his belt. Thirty pounds of lethal firepower and he holds it in one hand.

Ricky slings the three remaining RPG launchers over his left shoulder, a crushing load he doesn’t even notice. He thinks about carrying a pistol for close work, decides his KA-BAR killing knife will do. The KA-BAR can be held in his hand or in his mouth, whichever gives him the most dexterity when firing the automatic weapons.

A panting dog watches from the charred ruins of the house he burned down six months ago.

“Get away!” he shouts, placing a shot at the dog’s feet, watching it scamper away with a startled whimper. Calling back over his shoulder, he says, “Tyler, you leave that puppy alone! Girls, keep hold of that boy! Grab him by the ankles if you have to! Daddy’ll be back soon!”

He follows a path familiar only to him.

Half a mile later, draped with bullets and lugging enough explosives to bring down a fleet of 747s, Ricky Lang strides into center of the Nakosha village. The native-style elevated huts that are really perfectly constructed homes with every modern convenience. The two-room schoolhouse open to the air, so the children do not fester and mold. The clinic where white medicines are dispensed, and herbal remedies, too. The hospice where Tito Lang, once a hero to his son, wasted away. All of it bought and paid for with the wealth Ricky brought to his people, laid at their feet like a gift.

Love me, the gift said. Love me and we shall all of us prosper, we shall all of us live forever, one people, forever and ever amen.

Ricky stands in the middle of the village, ammo gleaming in the sunshine. If the devil designed a perfect killing machine it would need to resemble Ricky Lang, part flesh, part steel, all muscle, and fueled by the urge for death.

“Joe Lang!” he bellows. “Show yourself!”

Not a sound from the village. They’re all hiding, he tells himself. Under the beds, in the closets, hiding and ashamed.

“Joe Lang!” he screams. “You’re the big man now! Be brave!”

A shadow moves on the porch of the biggest hut. Joe Lang must be hiding. Too scared to face him.

Ricky hefts the grenade launcher, drops to one knee, bracing himself. He fires. The blowback scorches the side of his head, but all he cares about is the red streak followed by the satisfying WOMP! of the fuel-air warhead detonating inside the chickee hut, vaporizing it in a ball of howling flame.

Ignoring the blowback, he fires the two remaining RPGs, exploding the schoolhouse and the clinic. His right ear sizzles and his black hair melts against the side of his skull, but he feels no pain.

Ricky Lang smiles with the unburned part of his mouth as he goes from door to door, blowing through the thin walls of the huts with the twelve-gauge. Finger locked on full-auto, barely any recoil, launching Frag-12 explosive shells at a rate of three hundred per minute, ka-wump-ka-wump, steady as a driving piston.

Having emptied the spare drum magazine, he drops the auto shotgun, shrugs his big shoulders and continues with the Breda M37 machine gun.

Raking the huts, the wreckage of school, with eight-millimeter slugs.

In his head the machine gun is stuttering die-die-die-die-die-die-die.

The M37, a real classic, is normally fired with both hands from a tripod, not freehand. Wicked, bone-jolting recoil, and it heats up after less than a hundred rounds, but Ricky is having fun, he’s getting into it, and when the machine gun finally jams with a few hundred rounds still to go, he peels the glowing metal stock from his boiling hands and drops it to the ground.

Where did he put the KA-BAR? Right, between his teeth.

Ricky figures most of his people died in the initial explosions or the lethal gunfire that followed, but there may be a few survivors and he doesn’t want them to suffer.

This isn’t about inflicting pain, it’s about getting things right.

Knife at the ready, he ducks into the smoking remains of one of the chickee huts. With bare feet he kicks though the wreckage, looking for bodies or parts of bodies. Looking for familiar faces, frozen with regret for the great sin of banishing their leader.

Screaming wordlessly, he runs to the next hut. And the next.

Nobody. Nobody. The village is empty.

21. The End Of The World As She Knows It

When I stagger into the clearing Randall Shane is already there, staring at the blackened remains of what must have once been a house. He looks utterly defeated, and gazes at me with an expression of such intense sorrow that I immediately burst into tears.

In the distance another rifle shot, one of hundreds popping off in the last few minutes. Another muffled explosion, then a terrible, lingering silence.

“I’m so sorry,” he says.

“Where is she?” I blubber. “Where’s Kelly?”

“Not here,” he says. “I was so sure she’d be here, at the place it all began. I was wrong.”

He does not flinch when I beat my fists on his chest. It feels like I’m the rain and he’s a rock, and the world is ending, and nothing will matter ever again. Then I start running in circles, splashing through the ash of the ruined house, screaming her name.

“Kelly! Kelly! Kelly!”

Shane watches, doesn’t try to stop me. He looks like he wants to die, and at the moment I don’t care if he does.

“Kelly! Kelly! Kelly!”

There is no echo in this place. The landscape is too wide open, nothing to throw back my voice as I scream my daughter’s name, again and again, as if saying it will bring her back.

Something stops me in my tracks. A small sound, one I’d recognize anywhere.

“Mom!”

Very faint. As faint as a memory.

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Shane asks.

It comes again, smaller still. He can’t hear it, but I can.

“Over there, by the water.”

Shane glides to the shore, to a place where the ground slopes gradually away.

“Oh my God,” he says.

He’s staring at the water’s edge and my blurry eyes finally focus on what he’s seeing. A ragged pile of palm fronds scattered along the shore, as if by the wind. Extending out from under the green fronds, a long dark thing that seems to be pointing toward the water. A tree trunk—no, it’s not.

The thing twitches.

A tail.

I dive at the fronds, ripping them away, and find myself staring into the anthracite eyes of an immense alligator. It’s so close the pink wrinkles on its ugly, pebbled snout are clearly visible. So close I can smell its rancid, reptile breath.

Startled, it roars. A bellow to shake the earth, ancient and menacing. Its breath moist on my face. This time I really do wet my pants a little. The beast shakes its great nobbed head from side to side and then backs slowly into the water and sinks, vanishing from sight.

Frantically I rip away the rest of the fronds and there they are, spread-eagled and staked to the ground.

My daughter. Edwin Manning. Seth.

Manning is breathing, barely, but Seth looks dead.