Dean Koontz - Winter Moon

Very reliable. You can fire hundreds of rounds, until it's almost too hot to touch, and it still won't jam. I think you should have one, Heather… You should be ready."

Heather felt as if she had followed the white rabbit down a burrow into a strange, dark world. "Ready for what?"

Alma's gentle face hardened, and her voice was tight with anger.

"Luther saw it coming years ago. Said politicians were tearing down a thousand years of civilization brick by brick but weren't building anything to replace it."

"True enough, but-"

"Said cops would be expected to hold it all together when it started to collapse, but by then cops would've been blamed for so much and been painted as the villains so often, no one would respect them enough to let them hold it together."

Rage was Alma Bryson's refuge from grief. She was able to hold off tears only with fury.

Although Heather worried that her friend's method of coping wasn't healthy, he could think of nothing to offer in its place. Sympathy was inadequate.

Alma and Luther had been married sixteen years and had been devoted to each other. Because they'd been unable to have children, they were especially close. Heather could only imagine the depth of Alma's pain.

It was a hard world. Real love, true and deep, wasn't easy to find even once.

Nearly impossible to find it twice. Alma must feel the best times of her life were past, though she was only thirty-eight. She needed more than kind words, more than just a shoulder to cry on. She needed someone or something at which to be furious-politicians, the system.

Perhaps her anger wasn't unhealthy, after all. Maybe if a lot more people had gotten angry enough decades ago, the country wouldn't have reached such perilous straits.

"You have guns?" Alma asked.

"One."

"What is it?"

"A pistol."

"You know how to use it?"

"Yes."

"You need more than just a pistol."."I feel uncomfortable with guns, Alma."

"It's on the TV now, going to be all over the papers tomorrow-what happened at Arkadian's station. People are going to know you and Toby are alone, people who don't like cops or cops' wives. Some jackass reporter will probably even print your address. You've got to be ready for anything these days, anything."

Alma's paranoia, which came as such a surprise and which seemed so out of character, chilled Heather. Even as she shivered at the icy glint in her friend's eyes, however, a part of her wondered if Alma's assessment of the situation was more rational than it sounded. That she could seriously consider such a paranoid view was enough to make her shiver again, harder than before.

"You've got to prepare for the worst," Alma Bryson said, picking up the shotgun, turning it over in her hands. "It's not just your life on the line.

You've got Toby to think about too."

She stood there, a slender and pretty black woman, an aficionado of jazz and opera, a lover of museums, educated and refined, as warm and loving a person as anyone Heather had ever known, capable of a smile that would charm wild beasts and a musical laugh that angels might have envied, holding a shotgun that looked absurdly large and evil in the hands of someone so lovely and delicate, who had embraced rage because the only alternative to rage was suicidal despair. Alma was like a figure on a poster urging revolution, not a real person but a wildly romanticized symbol. Heather had the disquieting feeling that she was not looking at merely one troubled woman struggling to elude the grasp of bitter grief and disabling hopelessness but at the grim future of their entire troubled society, a harbinger of an all-obliterating storm.

"Tearing it down brick by brick," Alma said solemnly, "but building nothing to replace it."

For twenty-nine uneventful nights, the Montana stillness was disturbed only by periodic fits of winter wind, the hoot of a hunting owl, and the distant forlorn howling of timber wolves. Gradually Eduardo Fernandez regained his usual confidence and ceased to regard each oncoming dusk with quiet dread.

He might have recovered his equilibrium more quickly if he'd had more work to occupy him. Inclement weather prevented him from performing routine maintenance around the ranch, with electric heat and plenty of cord wood for the fireplaces, he had little to do during the winter months except hunker down and wait for spring.

It had never been a working ranch since he had managed it. Thirty-four years ago, he and Margaret had: been hired by Stanley Quartermass, a wealthy film producer, who had fallen in love with Montana and wanted a second home there. No animals or crops were raised for profit, the ranch was strictly a secluded hideaway… Quartermass loved horses, so he built a comfortable, heated stable with ten stalls a hundred yards south of the house. He spent about two months per year at the ranch, in one- and two-week visits, and it was Eduardo's duty, in the producer's absence, to ensure that the horses received first-rate care and plenty of exercise. Tending to the animals and keeping the property in good repair had constituted the largest part of his job, and Margaret had been the housekeeper.

Until eight years ago, Eduardo and Margaret had lived in the cozy, two-bedroom, single-story caretaker's house. That fieldstone structure stood eighty or ninety yards behind-and due west of-the main house, cloistered among pines at the edge of the higher woods. Tommy, their only child, had been raised there until city life exerted its fatal attraction when he was eighteen.

When Stanley Quartermass died in a private-plane crash, Eduardo and Margaret had been surprised to learn that the ranch had been left to them, along with sufficient funds to allow immediate retirement. The producer had taken care of his four ex-wives while he was alive and had fathered no children from any of his marriages, so he used the greater part of his estate to provide generously for key employees.

They had sold the horses, closed up the caretaker's house, and moved into the Victorian-style main house, with its gables, decorative shutters, scalloped eaves, and wide porches. It felt strange to be a person of property, but the security was welcome even-or perhaps especially-when it came late in life.

Now Eduardo was a widowed retiree with plenty of security but with too little work to occupy him. And with too many strange thoughts preying on his mind Luminous trees

On three occasions during March, he drove his Jeep Cherokee into Eagle's Roost, the nearest town. He ate at Jasper's Diner because he liked their Salisbury steak, home fries, and pepper slaw. He bought magazines and a few paperback books at the High Plains Pharmacy, and he shopped for groceries at the only supermarket. His ranch was just sixteen miles from Eagle's Roost, so he could have gone daily if he'd wished, but three times a month was usually enough. The town was small, three to four thousand souls, however, even in its isolation, it was too much a part of the modern world to appeal to a man as accustomed to rural peace as he was.

Each time he'd gone shopping, he'd considered stopping at the county sheriff's substation to report the peculiar noise and strange lights in the woods. But he was sure the deputy would figure him for an old fool and do nothing but file the report in a folder labeled CRACKPOTS.

In the third week of March, spring officially arrived-and the following day a storm put down eight inches of new snow. Winter was not quick to relinquish its grasp there on the eastern slopes of the Rockies.

He took daily walks, as had been his habit all his life, but he stayed on the long driveway, which he plowed himself after each snow, or he crossed the open fields south of the house and stables. He avoided the.lower woods, which lay east and downhill from the house, but he also stayed away from those to the north and even the higher forests to the west.