Too Much Poison: Stories

By William J. Donahue

Praise for Too Much Poison

[William J. Donahue] murders it here, folks, goes deep and scores multiple times poking the underbelly of the human condition. An excellent read.
C.G. Bauer, author of Scars on the Face of God: The Devils Bible

Accept loss forever, as the acclaimed novelist and poet Jack Kerouac once wrote. In this vein, Too Much Poison offers sixteen stories about the influences that touch a human life and, ultimately, fade into the gray. With the turning of each page, we see lovers, friends and spouseseven our own fragile vitalityeither crumble with age or simply succumb to the worlds great and many pressures. Equal parts horror, erotica and pathos, Too Much Poison explores the precious things we all lose in a lifetime but, if given the choice, would rather have held close till the end.

William J. Donahue is an award-winning journalist and magazine editor. He has authored several other published works, including Filthy Beast, which was a finalist for the 2004 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award. He lives near Philadelphia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496957849

William J. Donahue

William J. Donahue is an award-winning journalist and magazine editor. He has authored several other published works, including Filthy Beast, which was a finalist for the 2004 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award. He lives near Philadelphia.

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© 2014 William J. Donahue. All rights reserved.

Cover design by TinHouse Design

Author photograph by Rob Hall Photography

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 12/17/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-5785-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-5784-9 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Too Much Poison

Part I: Cold Fish on Butcher Paper

Bluff

Harlan Reilly’s Cone of Death

Christmas in Iraq

Stealing Second

Last Mile

Joseph Bean’s Experiment

Demons of Chicago

Smitten

Part II: A Pearl of Spit in Death’s Eye

Breaking

Almost, Never

Getting There

The Paris She Never Knew

Torn Apart in Some Coastal Town

The Cold Hand in Mine

Gadabout

Captive

To the Beagles

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the following folks for their time, help and encouragement: Don Swaim, Chris Bauer and the rest of the Bucks County Writers Workshop; the Philadelphia Writers Meetup Group; Donna Schoener Donahue, Brian J. McCarthy and Sharon A. Shaw, for first, second and/or third reads of one or more stories; Mitch Morrison, for making me a better, more inquisitive writer; John Errichetti, for cover design; Rob Hall, for photography; and the friends, family members and other people I’ve collided with over the years who, in some way, informed my decision making as it relates to many of the stories found in this book. Thank you.

Accept loss forever.

—Jack Kerouac

Part I:

Cold Fish on Butcher Paper

Bluff

The extra weight dragged him down and made him feel shorter than he actually was. For too long he had been lugging roughly fifty pounds of backpack, tent and two weeks’ worth of provisions, suffering the burden of each pound every time he lifted a sweat-sodden boot.

The trip had been yet another bad decision, and he had only himself to blame for the disappointing direction in which events had gone. He had lost count of the times he’d wished he had stayed home, warm and comfortable in a chair he’d fought ridiculously hard to keep in the divorce, rather than tramping this devilish footpath that had done its best to trick him into stepping off a cliff or walking into a den of pissed-off rattlesnakes. At the very least it seemed to put him in situations that would break every bone in his overtired body.

Breakaway burs on the pack’s cushioned straps bit into his shoulders. The skin on the left side of his neck, where the strap spent most of its time, had begun to slough off. The chafing had surpassed the point of being a nuisance and was now robbing him of the ability to think. But with any luck, he knew, it would leave a story-worthy scar.

His young journey had produced far more casualties than the would-be scar. Blisters at each swollen heel were about to pop. Once the blisters finally ruptured, his socks would dampen and worsen his discomfort, thereby threatening his pace. He thought it strange that his buttocks had begun to ache. But they were muscles, after all, and they hadn’t endured such torturous exercise … well, probably never before. The terrain and other forces of nature, both seen and unseen, were working against him. He wasn’t twenty-five anymore. While life’s distractions had kept his attention elsewhere, Father Time had cleverly nudged him closer to fifty.

Fifty, he croaked, letting the word hang in the air, where it would melt into syllables and whirl in his wake like cast-off feathers. The big, hairy Five-Oh would slap him in the face in less than two years. Amazing how quickly time passed without even giving you a goddamn clue, he thought. It didn’t seem fair, just like everything else in life, but it wasn’t worth a complaint. No one would listen anyway, as the saying went.

All the luxuries and comforts he had ever worked for, everything in his life that was supposed to have been fixed and permanent and unspoken, had begun to unravel. He considered this with a deflating sigh. Then he remembered his life’s unraveling had happened months, maybe even years, earlier. The pain was supposedly buried now, left to fester in a hole far behind him … most of it, anyway. Now he merely had things to fix—busywork.

He lurched to the left as his foot skidded off a rock and his ankle turned over in its boot. The treads caught the rock’s outer edge, which kept him from smashing his face into a bed of lichen-bleached shale. It was the fifth or sixth time in an hour he had turned an ankle—the same one each time. Although the rest of him wanted to put more miles behind him than the nine-plus he had already hiked for the day, his legs were tired—nearly spent, to tell it right. His body was failing him, and his brain was making more stupid mistakes than it wanted to admit. All trip long the terrain had been less hospitable than he had expected, than he had been told, than the $12.95 trail guide had suggested. He was already six miles behind schedule, by his best guess, and for that he wanted someone to pay, goddamn it.

In reality, he had no schedule to keep, per se. He now had time on his side, if nothing or no one else. But he didn’t need anything other than the shirt on his back and the boots on his feet and the forty-six pounds of crap weighing down his backpack, give or take a few. At least that’s the story he kept telling himself.

Donald Weaver had been trying to detach and take this trip for years, decades even, but his job, his marriage, his parents’ ailing health, two mortgage payments and other petty annoyances had all conspired to get in the way. Now he could pursue his dream of hiking part of the Appalachian Trail—the AT—without the irritation of eight a.m. conference calls or Sunday lunches with in-laws he had loathed for the better part of a lifetime. His divorce had taken care of the latter, and he was relieved to have the marriage, slimy tentacles and all, finally staked through the heart. He considered it a privilege to have someone in his life named ex or, more respectfully, Ex.

The job was another issue entirely. He hadn’t expected vice president of sales and marketing John Hudler to call him into an all-window office three weeks ago, early on a rainy Monday morning, and tell him the company was bleeding cash and had to make some tough decisions. Donald knew the ax was about to fall. The whole thing with Heather, Hudler had insisted—meaning Miss Heather Churton, the twenty-something tart from the package-design department—wasn’t the reason for Donald’s termination. Not the sole reason anyway. Hudler had used Heather’s name four more times during the nine-minute conversation, as in, "This has nothing to do with your, ah, friendship with Heather, and Heather’s allegations did not factor into our decision." Shit like that.

Heather. Donald cringed whenever her name wormed its way into his thoughts. He didn’t want to see her gremlin-like face ever again, not after all the backbiting she’d done, not after her accusations torpedoed his career and sank it in the harbor. There were plenty of ill-meaning words for people like her. He thought of one in particular, one beginning with a capital C and ending in a lower-case unt. She had nothing to do—well, maybe a little to do—with the dissolution of his rocky twelve-year marriage to Marley, but she certainly hadn’t helped things. His problems with Heather began and ended with how she had handled their co-workers with benefits relationship, as she once termed it.

The ink was barely dry on the divorce papers—Marley, short for Marlene, got the dog and the big house in Ocean City, Maryland, while he got the flood-prone condominium four blocks from the beach in Margate, New Jersey—when he became suddenly jobless. But at least he didn’t have to pay alimony, he realized. And at least he didn’t have to pay child support, there being no children between them to drain the savings. She made more money than he did anyway, she being a lawyer for a D.C. firm, having raked in three hundred twenty-eight thousand the prior year, according to what she told the IRS. He had pulled down a hair over a hundred thousand in the same twelve months, and would have beaten the mark this year in salary and bonuses had he not been relieved of his post as director of sales, alternative retail channels, for a certain unnamed consumer-packaged-goods manufacturer that produced some of the most popular cereal brands and other breakfast foods in the supermarket aisle—a certain CPG manufacturer he hoped would suffer the discomfort of embarrassing and painfully expensive product recalls, unprecedented commodities cost increases and a spate of protracted union strikes in its Northeast-based factories very, very soon.

Bitterness aside, the buyout had certainly helped. Although he would never acknowledge it, the buyout erased any notions of suicide that had begun to creep up in the days following the layoff. It’s not every day someone hands you a check for seventeen thousand dollars and says you don’t have to show up for work tomorrow or any day thereafter. The money cushioned the blow. In all honesty, it hadn’t taken long for him to realize his newfound freedom was more parts blessing than curse. Heather had done him a favor, as long as her allegations didn’t follow him elsewhere. He should send her a thank you note along with this year’s Christmas card, he joked.

He hadn’t loved the job for a long time and, the way he saw it, probably would have jumped ship in two or three more years had he not been shown the door. After he finished hiking the AT in a week or so, he would figure out what to do next. John Hudler, despite being the spineless prick corporate life had shaped him into, had already promised a glowing recommendation. Donald would catch on with another CPG firm, most likely. He might have to move to Minneapolis or Chicago or Battle Creek to do so, but he was ready for a change of scenery. This hike through the AT’s well-traveled Mid-Atlantic stretch would be a fitting adios to the East Coast he’d been living along for the better part of forty-eight mostly harmonious years.

The irony was, now that he had the time to ramble carefree along the AT, he no longer wanted to. The thrill was gone, as the saying went, a fact that became apparent just a few miles into the hike on Day One of his great adventure. The going was difficult, uncomfortable and, overall, a miserable existence befitting only of Boy Scouts, hippies and vagabonds. It took him a total of one dreary night to realize he was too old for this shit, as in, I’m too old for this shit, which he told the trees nearby upon waking in the cold mist of dawn on Day Two. But at least he was challenging himself, not sitting in a bland and windowless office making money he hadn’t really earned. And at least he was following through on something, even if it was only a promise made by a much younger man not yet hardened by life’s silly bullshit. In truth he would have liked nothing more than to be sitting shoeless in a warm chair in his Margate living room, sipping a cold beer and watching Golf Channel highlights in hi-def.

He moved his feet cautiously, watching each boot’s placement till the monotony of it made him dizzy, yet careful not to thrust a foot into the mouth of an ornery timber rattler. The last thing he wanted—the very last thing, considering his phobia—was to have a thick-bodied serpent sink its fangs into his calf and pump him full of poison toxic enough to melt muscle. He raised an eye every thirty or forty yards to spot the blue trail markers, otherwise known as the blue blazes, painted onto the trunks of aging oaks and hemlocks—always at eye level—to make sure he hadn’t veered off course.

Here, somewhere along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, the AT’s central artery spider-webbed in hundreds of directions, and one could easily get turned around. Within a mile of where he now stood lay tracts of earth upon which no civilized man had ever set foot. Just last year a park ranger discovered, a mere sixty yards from the foot of an AT trailhead, the blackened skeleton of a hiker who had disappeared four years earlier. The woods could easily do a man in if he didn’t know what the hell he was doing. This fact wasn’t lost on Donald, who was man enough to admit he didn’t know what the hell he was doing. In addition, he worried of tumbling down the ragged shaft of one of the region’s many long-abandoned coalmines. Lying broken and paralyzed three hundred feet beneath the earth’s crust seemed like a bad way to die.

To compound matters, he couldn’t afford to lose any more time backtracking over already tramped miles. He was supposed to meet his younger brother at a trailhead in northern New Jersey in eight more days, by his count. A wrong turn would surely screw up the plan and give his milk-fed brother, Edward, yet another reason to whine—for being an irresponsible bastard or for pulling more typical Donnie bullshit, as he had said in the past. As it was Donald practically had to beg his brother, who lived less than twenty miles from their proposed rendezvous point, to pick him up and drive him back to the bare-walled condo in Margate.

Edward had good reason to be distrustful. The Weaver brothers had drifted since childhood, due mainly to Donald’s purposeful distancing of himself from the family, which obviously included the mousy Eddie. But the brothers were all that remained of the Weavers, with both parents and every aunt and uncle having died more than a decade ago, and Donald had since become a different sort of person. He was a better man, the kind of man he had always envisioned himself being—not perfect by any stretch, but not a complete fuckup either: capable, confident, likable, easygoing.

And single, he whispered. He forced a smile.

For now at least, he wanted only to be alone and to put some space between him and the rest of humanity. Extended contact with other humans had soured him, so having to socialize out here in the wild would be an affront of the worst kind. This yearning for solitude was the primary reason for hiking the trail now, in mid-April, weeks before spring’s official arrival, no matter what the calendar suggested. The trees had begun to pop after a brief but harsh winter, their branches bursting with tightly robed buds. In two more weeks, he knew, every tree would flower with the fluorescence of wind-rustled greenery. He was taking a chance by hiking the trail this early, especially this far north, but he gladly accepted the risk. Freak snow squalls surprised parts of the Mid-Atlantic into May some years, though Donald couldn’t remember when such a thing had happened last. But the fact that it could happen was the point, and the possibility posed enough uncertainty to make him feel he was accomplishing something by simply being out here, by surviving among the animals, in the wild. Even if the flakes didn’t fall, the temperature routinely dipped into the thirties, the twenties some nights. The elements would challenge him. They would test his will. They already had, he could admit.

A life gone unexamined is not worth having, he said, evoking an idea from the fertile mind of Socrates but unknowingly butchering the actual quote.

Scores of AT thru-hikers had started their two-thousand-mile treks weeks earlier, according to the $12.95 guidebook, though most of them were smart enough to start in Georgia or North Carolina and wend their way north. But Donald had his reasons for starting when and where he had chosen. He didn’t want to run into anyone, for starters—not a goddamn soul. To truly test himself, he would have to make the journey alone, as in completely unsupported. He couldn’t stomach the obligation of making conversation with homeward-bound backpackers or crunchy tramps, forced to trade stories, share food and generally act as if he could tolerate their company. And, more to the point, he didn’t want to risk having his throat slit while he slept, courtesy of some sick fucker who wandered the trails solely to satisfy a cock-rubbing murder fetish. Anyone with a brain knew that serial killers test-drove their bloodletting techniques on the nation’s forested trails, where the possibility of being caught in the act diminished exponentially. It happened in Europe all the time, he knew, so who was to say it couldn’t happen on American soil? The psychopaths—the truly sick fuckers—would lurk near the main drag to have a better shot at finding a weakling, preferably with a tagalong female from whom he could steal toes, teeth and other souvenirs. In the six nights he had spent in the woods to date, he slept far from the posted campsites.

His thirst for solitude, however, far exceeded where he chose to bed down. He took offshoots to places he thought would be abandoned, or at least free of chatty thru-hikers. As queer as he knew it sounded, he would take this time to get to know the man Donald G. Weaver had become and, more importantly, to determine whether or not this person still deserved to exist in the world. He had a lot of figuring out to do once he returned to civilization, so clearing his head in advance of the battles waiting for him at home seemed the most fitting antidote—preventive medicine at its best.

A small passenger plane buzzed overhead, reminding him he had not yet wandered far enough from the world that had destroyed him. He hurried his steps.

It took only fifteen minutes for his aching right ankle to turn over again, thereby convincing him to take a breather. He wrestled a water bottle from the webbing of his backpack and sucked on the pop-top: a plastic, factory-made nipple. Water dribbled down his chin and formed blotches on his shirt’s quick-drying fiber. By the time he finished suckling he found he had swallowed half the bottle. He couldn’t imagine hiking this trail in the heat of summer, especially in the hot and sticky Southern states.

Why in the hell would I want to do that? he asked himself. I’d die out here in August. Better men than I …

He laughed at the conversation. He had never given credence to the idea that he might be insane, at least not before this trip. But three days earlier, when he started talking to no one in particular, out loud, and getting surprising responses, he rendered a new self-diagnosis. In doing so he found, to his delight, that he was pleasant company. He was damned interesting, in fact. He also proved he could carry a conversation and be a good listener, no matter what Heather Churton or the Ex said. A man who could have an honest conversation with himself would never be lonely or bored, he knew. He wondered if the talky-talk habit would stay with him once he emerged from the forest and eased back into the world of BMWs, BlackBerrys and rum-and-Coke lunch meetings.

His stomach had begun to rumble an hour earlier, and he figured he still had another hour or two of rough hiking before he could make camp and conjure up something resembling a decent dinner. Tonight’s menu, he had determined, would be lasagna and wasabi peas—or Spicy Beef Lasagna with Wasabi Peas, according to the bag of premium dehydrated nutrition, $8.99 retail. With his stomach full he could return to his seemingly endless bout of soul searching. So far the gift of introspection, and the hours needed to put it to use, had served him well.

Mistakes had taught him too many lessons in a short amount of time, lessons he could have used to make sense of a younger man’s messes. Out here, he could dissect those missteps, especially the biggest among them: Heather. He suddenly became aware of the foulness of his own bad breath and found the coincidence amusing. Even as he had been stepping into the trap Heather had set, he knew only a fool would have gotten close enough to learn the source of her distinctive scent, to know her faults, to find out who she was beyond the veneer she showed everyone else at the office: young, pretty, successful, sharply dressed, talented, et cetera. Only now, after the murk had cleared, did he realize she was nothing more than a revenge-seeking temptress, the owner of two perfectly unblemished breasts she brandished as weapons and, to her credit, a gifted cocksucker.

He had a tough time forgiving himself for the mistake—or mistakes, plural, as in multiple infractions—even though he had stopped the affair well before it got out of hand. Despite his restraint, nothing at that point could have kept the proverbial house of cards from tumbling down around him. The crying started soon after he brought the relationship to an abrupt end, followed by the finger pointing and the screaming and the figurative kick to the nuts. (You flabby old asshole, she’d hissed.) Soon after that joyful little moment, she had paid an unprovoked visit to good ol’ Johnny Hudler, as in Donald’s boss, bearing gifts of harassment allegations. What a fun conversation that had been, with Hudler, when Donald had to explain how he had let Heather lead him into a stairwell during work hours, how she removed her top and had him slide his tongue over her dark nipples, how she massaged his balls through his trousers till the world went fuzzy and he came in his underwear.

I don’t need the details, Don, Hudler had said, though he had stopped pressing Donald only after absorbing all the details. That’s not how she remembers it.

…

Out here, in the middle of nowhere, away from everyone and everything that mattered to a modern-day American male, all the mistakes Donald had made meant nothing. Out here, the past didn’t matter. Out here, the past never even happened. He imagined those horrible months from nearly a year ago as part of some long and terrible dream, nothing more. And now he was awake, and alive enough to notice.

He inhaled deeply and sang, All the kids, love pigs in pieces!

He shouted these nonsensical words to the tune of a classic rock song whose name he couldn’t quite remember. He’d been singing them, out loud or in his head, for the past three hours. He didn’t know where his brain had gotten the idea. The brain did funny things—funny as in screwy, even scary sometimes—whether its owner wanted it to or not, he realized. The brain, he always liked to joke, had a mind of its own.

The blue blazes etched into a towering oak led him to a proposed fork in the trail. To the left went the AT’s worn and weathered path. To the right curled a narrow, overgrown ghost of a footpath hemmed in by bur-spiked brambles and young trees strangled by furry brown sumac vines. A redheaded woodpecker twittered on a thick branch to his right and thrust its beak into the wood in search of grubs, termites or whatever else redheaded woodpeckers eat. As the bird hopped to the other side of the tree, it showed plumage patterned after a black-and-white chessboard.

He took the trail to his right, choosing the offshoot.

"All the kids! Love pigs! In pieces! he shouted again. He wouldn’t have admitted it, not even to himself, but he intended his racket to scare off any black bears scouring the trails for something edible with which to fill their bellies. As far as the bears were concerned, that something edible" might as well include him, Donald G. Weaver, an unemployed Capricorn. His singing loudly, though jarring and ugly, put him at ease. He tapped the canister of bear spray snug at his hip to make sure it hadn’t gone anywhere. He did so twice more in the next few minutes. Bears were the least of his concerns out here, he knew, but they were a concern nonetheless.

He followed the narrow path for two miles, he guessed, his steps slowed by the tangles of withering overgrowth. The going got so choppy he considered turning back to follow the AT’s central artery—twice considering it, twice choosing to press ahead. A much lesser chance of running into a machete-wielding nut job on this route, he figured. A stiff wind brushed his face and cooled the inside of his mouth. He coughed at the unexpected chill.

I’ll get back to Edmonton someday, he told himself. The cold air on his tongue made him think not of the sickeningly heavy snowfall of a western Canada winter but rather of a tasty Slurpee-type drink—blue raspberry, he remembered—he’d bought at a gas station in Winnipeg two Februarys ago. He was weird like that, associating most of the places he’d visited—and, thanks to his former job, he’d visited an atlas’ worth—with the foods and libations consumed along the way. There was the foie gras in Paris, the barbecued pork in Kansas City, the spit-carved beef filet by the bonfire on a cattle ranch in Brazil, the boardwalk fries at the Jersey Shore, the almond-crusted salmon in Seattle, the deep-fried bitterballen in an Amsterdam café, the overcooked red beans and rice at the New Orleans airport during a hurricane-forced layover. He lived for food—good, bad and ugly.

That’s when he heard it: the dull, constant rumbling of rushing water. As he moved closer, the sound evolved into a soothing roar. He hurried his steps, stamping over dormant thorn bushes, till the path led him to a rocky outcropping free of overgrowth.

The view was magnificent.

Atop the overlook he saw only open blue sky and the occasional cumulus cloud—nature’s idea of contrast, he guessed. The valley floor lay more than a hundred feet below. A small river, likely a burbling stream swollen with winter melt, carved a route through the gulch and eddied to the left. He sat on the edge of the cliff, ragged and wild and swept clean by the wind. The valley went on for ten miles, he guessed, and then kept going. Thousands, perhaps millions, of mature trees poked from the soil, their branches brushed with flecks of green. Broken shards of red rock corralled the river on both sides. People called it Pennsylvania red rock—shale—but Donald thought it looked purple. Turkey vultures soared in the updraft.

"Hmm hm hmm, hm hm hm hm-hm," he hummed.

Hardened globs of gray, green and white bleached the ledge to his right. Bird feces, he knew, most likely from those same buzzards looping graceful death spirals out there in the open sky. He dropped his backpack and let it settle on the ledge. It felt good to be rid of it. The muscles in his lower back throbbed, clearly not used to hauling so much weight for so many miles over the course of so many days. He felt shorter now, or if not shorter then at least in some way small. He rolled the cuffs of his pants to a line above the knee and let his bare legs dangle over the edge, a hundred feet above the next strata of flat, solid earth. He studied his legs—sculpted thigh muscles meeting the bony caps of his knees, shins slick with oil, dark hairs tickling calves that poured into thick llama-wool socks, which, in turn, reached into the cushioned mouths of heavy-duty Merrell boots. He then felt around in his pack and retrieved an unopened bag of trail mix. Dried cherries, peanuts, banana chips and M&M’s trickled into his open palm. A green M&M skipped from the bag’s mouth, rolled down his pant leg and sailed into the nothingness. He leaned to watch the tiny green sphere turn end over end till it disappeared. He imagined the M&M meeting a pane of shale on the valley floor, its neon candy shell exploding into slivers so small they would be little more than sugar vapor.

"All the kids, love pigs in pieces," he sang, quieter now.

The tattered edges of an AT map poked from his pack, so he removed it to study where the trail had taken him. He unfolded the little squares and zeroed in on an area along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border. His finger traced the outline of the trail, branching down the offshoots and back again, till he found one that led to what appeared to be a small stream. The words Shear Overlook were printed in red italics.

Welcome to Shear Overlook, he said with some confidence, named so for the cutting winds, he guessed.

Then, as if on cue, a gust rose from the valley floor and teased back his hair, and then gave it a sharp tug. He zipped up the front of his pale-blue North Face fleece. The wind’s tail brought a sour smell to his nose. He eyed the splotches of bird shit and returned his attention to the bag of trail mix. He licked the coarse salt from his fingertips then eyed the bird shit. He did the same thing twice more—trail mix, bird shit, trail mix, bird shit—and began craving the luxuries of running water and antibacterial soap. He imagined how horrible it would be to contract salmonellosis and have to endure the delightful aftereffects, namely diarrhea, that so willingly came with it. Out here, despite the lightweight filtration pump stuffed into one of his pack’s many pockets, he couldn’t waste a drop of potable water on nondrinking purposes. His skill at starting fires, so he could boil water to kill off any malevolent bugs that might want to make a home of his digestive tract, was rudimentary at best. What’s more, he had only a handful of water-purifying iodine tablets, and they were reserved for emergencies only.

He stuffed the bag of trail mix into a side pocket and opened the map in full. The wind fought him for it, grasping at the curled edges. He placed the map beneath his legs, holding down the sides with the backs of his knees, and smoothed its face. It took him two minutes to rediscover his probable location: Shear Overlook. He had a GPS unit buried at the bottom of his overstuffed pack, but he had decided long ago to use it, much like the iodine tablets and a fully charged BlackBerry, only in cases of true emergency. He would wander, a nomad, and trust his survival skills to deliver him to his own sort of Promised Land too many miles north of his current position.

He closed his eyes and let his other senses take over, absorbing what they told him: the sound of wind rustling skeletal branches and the far-off whine of the plane engine, the fragrance of newly flowering trees and the unpleasant stink of processed bird food, the brush of air against his face and the cold hard rock beneath his rear end. With his eyes shut, he lay down and gave his brain some momentary peace.

He awoke, by his best guess, nearly twenty minutes later. Suddenly groggy, he picked up the map to restudy his supposed position and, more importantly, his intended route north. The sun shone through the map’s dense pulp, making it translucent. He’d need to plot a course and devise a formal plan if he truly wanted to reach the rendezvous point with Edward just across the state line early next week. He couldn’t afford to disappoint his younger brother yet again. The wind kept fighting him for control of the map. As he ran a finger northward, along the dotted line representing the AT, he heard another noise, like that of a horse’s hooves clopping on cobblestone. He peered over the edge of the overlook and inspected the valley floor. Through the trees he saw a dark figure striding toward the seam of rushing water.

Donald’s eyes lied to him. Such a creature, he thought, could not possibly exist.

Rock shattered beneath its shiny hooves. The beast walked on two stalk-like legs, its gait like that of a goat, with shaggy black hair lining the back of each hind limb. Its upper body was thick and well muscled, improbably thick for such spindly legs, bearing the same smoky fur. The torso recalled that of a mountain gorilla, with beefy arms and bare pectorals gleaming black in the sun. It had the head of a wolf, though no wolf Donald had ever seen. Its blunt snout gave way to a mouth of jagged eggshell-colored teeth jutting from gums so red they appeared infected. The same charcoal fur blanketed twin dog’s ears that stretched toward the sky. Its eyes glowed yellow, like jewels of amber, against so much black.

The creature hesitated before stepping fully into the open. It looked left to the right, twice, then clopped onto the edge of a broad cut of shale. It then knelt by a kidney-shaped pool and dipped a hand delicately into the water. A thick reptilian tail, lizard-like, jutted from the base of its spine. Hairless and muscular, the tail had no spade at its tip. A good sign, Donald thought. The beast cupped water in its upturned palm and began to drink. Donald could sense it slurping, a very un-doglike trait. As water spilled down its chin and rejoined the pool in thin rivulets, Donald studied the beast’s claws, which shimmered like crescents of hot tar.

Was this the devil, he wondered, or perhaps a lesser demon of sorts? Such an idea didn’t seem plausible. But it couldn’t have been anything else.

A rush of wind snaked up from the valley floor and snapped the map from Donald’s right hand. The map fluttered like a flag till Donald corralled it and crushed it into a ball in his lap. Fuck, he thought. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. He clamped his eyes shut and opened them, slowly, peering down, scanning the valley floor, where the beast had been sipping its water. The beast was frozen in place and looking up, right at him—directly into him, those amber eyes boring holes through his skull. Its lips curled back to expose those fierce yellow canines and apple-red gums. It growled, deep and bass-y, and reared back on its horse-like legs. Hooves cracked the heavy pane of shale.

Donald squinted twice to make sure he wasn’t crazy, to make sure his eyes and brain weren’t scheming to deceive him.

The beast stretched its arms wide, the biceps flexing and the claws at its fingertips stabbing the air. It unleashed a horrid roar and then leapt across the chocolaty stream in three even strides, the water yielding to its perfect hooves. Its gait was graceful, the beast a paragon of chimeric agility. It disappeared briefly behind a small outcropping before slithering up the spine of a fallen log. Like a wet dog, the beast shook the water from its coat and turned to face the towering wall of red rock. To Donald’s horror, it began climbing, claw over claw, digging the tips of its hooves into cracks in the sheer red face. Cleaved rocks slid down the wall and shattered against the shale base below.

It was coming for him.

The beast alternately checked its handhold and stared at Donald, making sure he hadn’t gone anywhere. It huffed and hooted as it climbed, the odd vocalizations sounding particularly ape-like. A smile seemed to spread across its face. Wands of saliva dripped from its mouth and beaded the thick fur on its stomach.

It scaled the bluff with frightening ease, halfway up the hundred-foot wall before it even occurred to Donald that he should run like hell.

He let the wind have the map. The crinkled-up ball spilled over the cliff’s edge as if it were tumbleweed. He found his feet and dragged his forty-something-pound backpack along the overgrown trail. After a few steps he hoisted the pack onto his shoulders and broke into a full run. Petrified thorns clawed at the fiber of his pants and ripped into the soft flesh beneath, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs in the form of blood speckles.

As he ran he recalled the beast’s hideous smile: those yellow teeth, those infected gums, those possessed amber eyes. He ran harder despite his lungs’ protests. He was nearly a mile away, he guessed, by the time he decided to stop and rest and consider his next move. His lungs ached, and he coughed to clear the sludge pooling in the hollow of his chest. He spat on the ground. It looked creamy.

Maybe it fell, he huffed. It must have fallen.

He didn’t dare sing it, but his brain belted out a frantic refrain: All the kids! Love pigs! In pieces!

There was no sound but whispers of wind.

Then a branch cracking.

Then another.

Two gray birds fled a tangle of brush to his left. They cooed as they flew. Doves.

Then, sixty feet down the trail, a shock of black appeared to defy the drabness.

The beast had hunted him down.

Even from a distance Donald could tell the beast towered above him. He estimated the creature’s height at eleven feet, maybe twelve, from hoof to ear. Its chest heaved. Its eyes burned with an alien glow. The reptilian tail waved behind it, one of many weapons at the ready. Spittle flowed from the gaps between its teeth, then slinked down its naked pectorals and settled in the thick patch of fur masking the true nature of its sex. Donald had assumed it was a male. Monsters, he thought, were always male. The wet fur shone purple with a hint of iridescence.

Donald’s heart seemed intent on bursting through his chest, or merely exploding inside him and leaving the pieces to disintegrate in his bloodstream. He could hear its thrum, which now seemed so strained and irregular. So this is how heart attacks happen, he thought. This is how it ends.

The creature clopped nervously on packed dirt, its oil-slicked tail glistening in the sun. Arms outstretched, it bent at the waist and unleashed a guttural roar. The beast’s claws moved to its face and pressed bony talons into the flesh of its cheeks. It then gave another vocalization, which sounded to