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  When she finished putting everything away, he decided that their talk could wait for another hour or so. Maybe a day. Not more than a couple of days, though.

  "What's wrong?" asked Mia, sitting down across from him at the table and popping her seventh piece of licorice into her mouth.

  "Nothing's wrong."

  "Ask me if I believe you."

  "Do you believe me?"

  "No. What's wrong?"

  "Let's go for a walk."

  "Oh, shit. This sounds serious." Mia had always been allowed to curse around him, though after one very embarrassing experience in the grocery store when she was seven, he'd had to explain that there were certain words only to be used at home.

  "It's not," Rusty told her. "I mean, it is, but it's not bad."

  "Let's go then."

  They left the cabin. It was a beautiful September day, the kind when even the most hardcore city slicker would be envious of their living situation. There were eight different paths around the cabin, not counting the actual road, and Rusty decided that this conversation called for the long, straight path down to the creek. He took his niece's hand as they walked.

  "What's up?" she asked.

  "It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. You're almost eighteen. The Amish have this thing—I can't remember the name, but there's a name for it—where kids your age go out into the real world for a couple of weeks. They see what else is out there. At the end of that time, they decide if they want to go back to being Amish, or if they want to leave that behind and stay in the real world."

  "Okay," said Mia. It was a rare instance of Rusty not being sure what she was thinking.

  "I don't want you to leave," Rusty told her. "My hope is that you'd come back from this and say that you agree with me that the real world is a bunch of crap. But I don't think it's fair to keep you away from everything without giving you a chance to see it for yourself and decide."

  "I've seen the real world," said Mia.

  Rusty shook his head. "No, you've seen this tiny little town. The world has a lot to offer. I hate it all, but that doesn't mean you will."

  "Are you making me go?"

  "No. I'm strongly suggesting that you go."

  "Will you come with me?"

  "No."

  "I'm not going to just wander a big city by myself."

  "That's not how it would work," said Rusty. "We wouldn't throw you to the wolves. You'd have a guide."

  "It sounds awful," she informed him. "It seems like a good way for me to get stabbed to death."

  "You won't get stabbed."

  "Or hooked on drugs. Or pregnant. I can see myself not being able to resist peer pressure."

  "We wouldn't be sending you out there to make bad choices. You'd still use common sense. I was thinking more that you'd go to see some live theater, eat at a fancy restaurant, go to a museum—that kind of thing. Go to a spa. Maybe, I don't know, go to a club and meet some people who aren't me. Make sure that the life I've chosen for us is the life you want to live."

  "A spa sounds nice," said Mia.

  "It sounds like hell on earth to me. People rubbing on you, putting green gook on your face. But you should try it. I don't want you to be seventy years old and spitting on my tombstone every day because I stole your life from you."

  "You'd better still be alive when I'm seventy."

  "Eighty, then."

  "Eighty works."

  "Again, I swear I'm not trying to get rid of you. I'll be—" Rusty almost said heartbroken but decided to tone it down a bit. "—sad if you leave. But you're almost an adult, and you need to be able to make an informed decision."

  They walked silently for a moment. Mia let go of his hand, wiped some perspiration off on her jeans, then took it again.

  "All right. I'll go. But I'll be back."

  "I hope you will be."

  "When are we going to do this?"

  Rusty shrugged. "We don't have to set an exact date yet. We'll start making plans."

  "Okay. Maybe it'll be fun."

  "It will be. Just not as much fun as hanging out with your Uncle Rusty."

  When she was very young, he'd toyed with the idea of having her call him "Dad," but decided against it. It seemed disrespectful to her deceased father. "Uncle Rusty" was fine.

  They walked without talking for a few minutes until they heard the water. It was a fairly large creek, not as good for fishing as the pond, but it was a shorter walk and Rusty loved the sound. Two poles and a tackle box were always out here; nobody was going to steal them.

  Mia let go of his hand again. "What's that?"

  She hurried up ahead. Rusty picked up his pace, but at fifty he was perfectly content to let Mia be the first to make the discovery.

  It was a dead deer, lying half in and half out of the creek.

  That is, the bottom half of the deer was in the creek, while the top half was scattered around about a fifteen-foot area.

  Finding dead animals out here was rare. Nature cleaned itself up pretty quickly. That said, finding a dead deer would have elicited no more than an "Oh, that's interesting," except for the sheer carnage on display. This wasn't how animals died in the wild. Wolves would tear a poor creature apart, but this...this was like a thrill kill.

  "What do you think happened?" asked Mia, walking right up to the scene of the crime. Despite his love of the primitive life, Rusty preferred to buy most of his meat from the grocery store. Still, they did some hunting, and Mia had dressed more deer carcasses than the average seventeen-year-old girl, so seeing this was unusual but not stomach churning.

  "No idea." Rusty didn't even see the deer's head at first, then noticed it lying upside-down next to a tree.

  "Maybe a bear got it?"

  "A bear wouldn't fling the pieces around like this."

  "Humans?" Mia asked.

  "Nah. There aren't any clean cuts. This was teeth and claws, not knives."

  Mia grinned. "I hope we don't have a feral children problem."

  "The only thing I can think of is that some wolves took it down, and then some other wolves came along and tried to claim the kill. During the fight, the deer got ripped up all over the place."

  "Wouldn't one group of wolves have won, though?"

  "Yeah, probably."

  "If it was such a big fight that the deer got strewn around like this, we'd see some evidence, right? Maybe not a whole dead wolf, but there'd be fur. I don't see anything." Mia walked over to the edge of the creek. "There aren't any bites taken out of the lower half."

  "See, how do you know I'm not keeping you from a career as a crime scene investigator?"

  Mia went around the area, carefully looking at each of the many, many pieces of deer. Rusty wasn't sure what he was supposed to be looking for, so he just watched her.

  "I can't say for sure," said Mia, finally, "but I don't think any of this deer was eaten."

  "Really?"

  "Maybe they took a bite here and there, but it kind of seems like the whole deer is accounted for. It's just spread all over. It's like the deer was murdered. I know that sounds dumb—let me try to think of how to say it..."

  "You're saying that it wasn't killed for food."

  "Right."

  "Which is the only reason a wild animal would kill another wild animal."

  "Right."

  "Yeah, that's weird," said Rusty. "Maybe we do have feral children running around."

  "At least the parts aren't arranged into some freaky pattern, like it was a cult ritual."

  "That's a definite upside."

  "By the way, if you send me away, there's a very good chance I'll join a cult. Just throwing that out there."

  "Noted." Even without a cultish, demon-summoning, Satan-worshipping element, Rusty had to admit that this was creeping him out a little. Also, if fresh deer meat was lying out like this and hadn't been taken away by scavengers, this massacre was still very recent. Which meant that whatever had done it might still be nearby. "We should head
back," he said.

  "Yeah."

  They returned to the cabin, not running but certainly not strolling at the same leisurely pace as before. Giving Mia the opportunity to test out the world beyond their off-the-grid existence was the right choice, but Rusty had to admit right now that it was nice to not be alone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Rusty and Mia continued to brainstorm possibilities for what might have happened. Some of their theories were moderately credible, while others were purposely absurd. They laughed a lot, and Rusty got the impression that Mia was much more comfortable talking about the gruesome fate of the deer than her (hopefully) temporary vacation from the cabin.

  He was pretty sure that she was just afraid, which meant that it was his responsibility to push her out of her comfort zone to do this. There were thousands of good reasons to stay out here forever, but fear was not one of them. He'd wait for her to bring up the subject again, but if she didn't in, say, a week or so, he'd have to do it.

  "What if the deer did it to itself?" Mia asked.

  "What?"

  "Hear me out. Let's say you're a deer with low self-esteem. Sure, you could drown yourself or jump off a cliff, but if you wanted to really go out in style, you'd tear yourself apart."

  "Even in the context of you trying to be as ridiculous as possible, that doesn't make sense," Rusty informed her.

  "Aliens, then."

  "It was wolves that got scared away by something. If we went back down there, we'd probably find them finishing up their dinner."

  "Have fun. I won't wait up."

  "I didn't say I was going."

  "Oh, sorry. My mistake. I thought you were in a wolf-fightin' mood."

  It was Rusty's turn to make dinner, so he boiled a pot of water on their gas stove for spaghetti. His commitment to living away from society did not include insanity like trying to make his own pasta. He was perfectly content to buy pre-packaged spaghetti, and the hamburger had also been purchased from the store. In many ways he was a hypocrite, but he was okay with that—it wasn't as if he went on angry rants or tried to convince others that his was the only way to live.

  The spaghetti was a little undercooked, but Mia assured him that she didn't mind; she'd simply underwash the dishes to balance it out. After everything was cleaned up, they settled in for an evening of reading: Rusty reading an action-packed adventure novel, and Mia reading Lord of the Flies as homework. (Her previous reading assignment had been Wuthering Heights, which Rusty absolutely hated. He was glad they were past that shit.)

  After a couple of hours and several literary machine gun battles, Rusty gave Mia a kiss on the forehead and retired to his bedroom. He climbed into bed, turned off the kerosene lamp, and closed his eyes.

  A few minutes later, he was still awake.

  This was unusual for him. Rusty was the kind of guy who could fall asleep like flipping off a light switch. If he was stressed out over something, he might lose his appetite, but he'd been blessed with a mind that was happy to put everything on hold until the next morning. Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, simply wasn't normal behavior for him.

  He considered saying, "Screw it," and getting up to read some more, but he didn't want Mia to think anything weird was going on. He'd give it a few more minutes, at least.

  It was probably just the double dose of accepting that Mia might not be with him forever and the weird-ass deer massacre. One or the other wouldn't disrupt his sleep, but both of them at once forced his mind to obsess a little bit. He certainly wasn't worried that whatever killed the deer would get into the cabin. There were plenty of bears in the woods, but unless you did something stupid like leaving food out or getting between a mother and her cubs, they weren't going to bother you.

  He and Mia were perfectly safe.

  Rusty lay there for a few more minutes, wide-awake.

  Damn.

  He rarely noticed the noises of the forest anymore. After he first moved out here, twenty-five years ago, when he turned out the lights and sat in the darkness it sounded like he was completely surrounded by danger. It was easy to imagine that if he stepped outside of the cabin, glowing-eyed hellhounds with oversized incisors were waiting to pounce. But it was actually an exhilarating kind of fear. Now, he didn't even hear the animals that he knew were out there.

  Tonight, he did. Things rustling in the trees. A bird cawing. A distant howling.

  Nothing that could get at them, though. It was stupid to think otherwise.

  He did hear a scratching that didn't sound all that far away. He ignored the other noises and tried to focus on it. It wasn't a spooky scratching, like a vampire very slowly scraping its fingernails across a window, but a rapid scratching.

  Rusty had no idea what it was. Probably nothing. Definitely nothing. If he paid attention, he was sure he'd be able to hear something like that on any given night.

  He decided to try silently counting to clear his mind and let him fall asleep. At six hundred and forty-six, he finally did.

  * * *

  When he woke up, it was still dark and he had to pee.

  Of the many downsides to getting older, this was the most annoying. He used to be able to sleep through the night. He'd only be woken with the need to urinate if he'd had a big slice of watermelon right before bed. Now, even if he purposely had nothing to drink for several hours before falling asleep, his body would find some hidden reserve. There were no exceptions.

  But at least he woke up instead of wetting the bed, which he assumed was the next exciting phase of the aging process.

  He got out of bed and slid his feet into the bright green fuzzy slippers Mia had gotten him for his birthday a couple of years ago. It had been a joke, but damn were they comfortable. He'd definitely get another pair when these wore out.

  He stepped out of his bedroom. He'd done an outstanding job on the cabin floor and the wood didn't creak as he walked toward the front door. Despite the much nicer bathroom inside, Rusty remained committed to the outhouse for his middle of the night pee breaks, weather permitting, and no way in hell was he going to disrupt his routine out of fear of a wild animal.

  He opened the door. Rusty kept the hinges well oiled, so the process was soundless. If he peed inside, the flush would awaken Mia and she'd want to know what was wrong. Rusty didn't vary his routine very often.

  Rusty stepped outside and then hesitated. He could still hear the scratching. In fact, though he couldn't quite pinpoint its location, it seemed to be coming from the outhouse.

  It was an admirable trait to not let fear rule one's life, but it was also admirable to not be a complete dumbass. Though technically he could just pee off the side of the porch, he tried not to be a savage unless he was out for a walk by himself. He would urinate indoors tonight.

  After he finished, he considered not flushing, but Mia had made it clear that in bad weather she'd rather be woken up than be confronted with an unflushed toilet, "even if it's just number one." He flushed and left the bathroom. Mia, who'd been a light sleeper since she was a baby, emerged from her bedroom.

  "Is it raining?" she asked.

  "No." Rusty was a little embarrassed, but then he decided there was no reason for it. Mia sure as hell wouldn't be venturing over to the outhouse if she heard scratching near it. "There's something out there."

  "A wolf?"

  "I don't know." Rusty walked over to the door and opened it. "You hear that?"

  Mia stepped into the doorway. "The scratching?"

  Rusty felt oddly relieved that she heard it, too, even though there'd been no point where he thought it was ghost-scratching. "What do you think it is?"

  "Something that got trapped in the outhouse?"

  Rusty nodded. "That makes sense."

  "Are you going to let it out?"

  "I don't know."

  "It could die in there. Why scoop up a dead animal if you don't have to?"

  "Yeah, yeah, you're right." Rusty picked up the flashlight that they kept on a shelf next to the doo
r. "Back in a second."

  "Let me put on my shoes. I'll come with you."

  "You don't have to."

  "I want to know what it is. If I shine the flashlight and you open the outhouse door, we can see what runs out."

  "All right. Stay on the porch, though."

  Mia frowned. "You really think it's something dangerous?"

  "No, but you saw the deer."

  "Something that got trapped in the outhouse wouldn't be big enough to shred a deer."

  "Still, stay on the porch."

  "The flashlight beam won't reach that far."

  Rusty sighed. "Fine. Get close enough to light up the front of the outhouse, but don't walk right up to it, okay?"

  "Okay."

  Mia put on the bright rainbow-colored fuzzy slippers that Rusty had bought her as revenge for his birthday present, and they left the cabin.

  It was a pretty good flashlight, but the outhouse was about a hundred feet away from the cabin and off to the side. Rusty didn't actually care that much about what was making the scratching sounds as long as it went away, but Mia was right that she couldn't have properly illuminated it without leaving the porch. She was also right that a giant deer-ripping-in-half creature couldn't fit into the outhouse, unless it had been a werewolf who'd now reverted to his human form. It probably wasn't.

  Rusty walked toward the outhouse. The scratching was definitely coming from there. And as he got closer, he could also hear some thrashing, and some squeaks.

  He stepped up to the door and grabbed the handle. He glanced back at Mia to make sure she'd kept her distance, and then threw the door open.

  Nothing came out. The noises continued.

  Rusty backed up a few feet, then walked over so that he could see inside the outhouse. As far as he could tell, there was nothing in there, but he was standing in front of the light, so something could be masked by the shadows. He walked back toward Mia. "Let me have the light."

  She handed it to him. Rusty returned to the outhouse and shone the light all around the inside, while remaining a safe distance away. No signs of anything in there, though the sounds continued. If it was underneath the toilet seat—well, the poor animal would just have to suffocate.