Bad Moon Rising Read Online Free PDF Page B

murdering monster was too much to bear. Rage kept spiking up and Crow was sure his blood pressure could blow half-inch bolts out of plate steel. Thank God Val had been carrying her father’s old .45 Colt Commander ever since Ruger invaded the farm at the end of September. It was too heavy a gun for a woman, even a tall, strong farm woman like Val, but heavy or not she must have been pumping adrenaline by the quart. She held her ground and used that heavy pistol to blow the living hell out of Boyd.
    The thing was—more gooseflesh rippled along Crow’s arms—Boyd didn’t go down like he should have. That .45 should have punched him down and dead on the first shot. Maybe the second, if Boyd was totally whacked out…but Val shot him over and over again until finally a shot to the head snapped off his switch.
    While they were waiting for the ambulance last night, Val told him, “That’s when I knew.”
    “Knew what, baby?”
    “That he wasn’t human. That he was…dead.”
    Crow understood. Who better to understand such things? The dread of just that sort of stuff had been haunting him since he was a kid, and it was almost funny because in Pine it was okay to believe in ghosts. Hauntings brought in the tourists. Problem was, Boyd was no ghost—he’d killed Mark for his blood. He tore grown men apart. He’d taken bullet after bullet and kept coming. Boyd was something else entirely.
    Crow knew that, of anyone in town, he was the only one who was predisposed to accept that kind of thing as possible…even likely. During the Massacre when he and Val were kids, he alone had seen the face of the killer and had understood that the terrible menace in Pine Deep was not just a serial killer. Crow had looked into the face of local farmer Ubel Griswold and had seen that face begin to change from human…to wolf. Only the sudden arrival of Oren Morse, the guy all the kids called the Bone Man, had saved Crow. Griswold hadn’t completely transformed and, before he could complete the murder, the scuffle with the Bone Man had roused all the neighbors. Griswold had vanished into the darkness; no one else had seen what he was.
    The truth was that no one else even suspected Griswold of the crimes. The man had immigrated to the States from Germany and had purchased a large tract of land in the borough’s most remote spot—way down past Dark Hollow. There he’d set up a cattle farm and stayed to himself, paying his taxes and maintaining only a few friends. But Griswold never sold any of the cattle he raised. Crow suspected that Griswold used them to satisfy his peculiar hungers ; that he hunted them the way a wolf would, and that those killings kept his appetites in check. It was only after a season of blight and disease had wiped out all of the town’s livestock, Griswold’s included, that bloodlust forced Griswold to hunt beyond his own lands. Still no one suspected because Griswold was sly and careful.
    It was only chance that the migrant worker and blues singer Oren Morse discovered Griswold’s true nature. Morse was hunting the killer that night years ago and had arrived in the nick of time to save Crow’s life; but no one was ready to believe the word of a homeless day laborer—especially a black one in mid-1970s rural Pennsylvania. Not that Crow was believed, either; he told his father about Griswold and was rewarded by a savage beating. The elder Crow was one of a select group of young men who were completely devoted to Griswold. The beating left the young Crow too afraid to tell the truth; and shortly after that Oren Morse tracked Griswold down and killed him, or so Crow believed. Crow’s father and a handful of other men—Vic Wingate, Jim Polk, Gus Bernhardt, and a few others—captured Morse, beat him to death, and hung him on a scarecrow post out in the corn. From that point on everyone believed that Morse had been the killer all along. The truth had never come out.
    The town recovered from the disaster and changed,