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could be traversed, the kinetic force translated into the violent snap of her neck. Her raised arm dropped, propelled downward by forces greater than gravity as the discharge of energy exploded through her head to her hand. Instantly the pain in the optic nerve vanished, replaced by a brief burning sensation in one finger, and then nothing. Her head dropped onto one shoulder, a quizzical expression on her face. The second impact buckled her knees and Madelyn’s body flooded to the floor like a boneless sack of flesh.

CHAPTER TWO
    I had an uncle named Evo. he was a big man, nearly six-foot-four, and though he carried a paunch above his belt and a spare tire over each hip, I never thought of him as fat. From my recollection he filled the frame of every doorway he passed through, from top to bottom and both sides, shoulders like a stevedore and an angular head like a bronze bust, bald and shiny as polished stone. The only hair you would have noticed were the unkempt bushes over his brows and several days’ layer of stubble on his face. For most of my life, as a child and later, my uncle in physical appearance was the spitting image of Luca Brasi, the notorious assassin of
Godfather
fame.
    Evo’s enduring expression was a kind of passive, simpering smile, what you might take for the face of a wiseass until he opened his mouth to talk, which he seldom did. Then you would have noticed the missing teeth up front like broken pickets in a fence and the childish thoughts and worries that spilled from his mind.
    Caught up in events, just a few years out of high school, I was told that Evo had always been a happy kid, full of life, smiles, and laughter. But as Christmas 1950 approached he found himself perched behind the sights of an M1 Garand on a snow-covered slope, peering out at what must have looked like the edge of the earth. His Army unit had pushed out into the mountains north of the Marine battalion encamped along the western side of a reservoir, an ominous place of ice-covered rivers and barren mountains.
    The North Korean forces had evaporated under the massive air assault and pounding from UN artillery. U.S. forces, Army units, and Marines, along with their allies, had driven the North Koreans up the peninsula to within a few miles of the Chinese border. MacArthur had broken their backs at Inchon. Victory was at hand. By Christmas the troops would be home. It was late November and temperatures at night dipped to sixty below, driven by icy winds off the steppes of Manchuria, temperatures so cold that at times it froze the actions on machine guns so that they would often fire only a single shot and had to be cycled by hand. Having outflanked the North Koreans by landing far behind enemy lines, the UN forces had moved north so fast that most units had been issued little or no winter weather gear.
    Though he didn’t know it at the time, from all accounts Evo’s unit and those on the line with him had gone as far north as any UN forces would ever get. As Thanksgiving approached, these troops were just a few ridgelines south of the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and the People’s Republic of China.
    Much of what I know of these events I have garnered over the years from books and articles and from conversations with my father, who was Evo’s older brother. My uncle seldom talked of his experiences in the war. In fact, in the decades after his return to civilian life, I can recall him having only a few conversations, and most of those with my father.
    Even with all of this, what drew my attention to him as a child were the gravitational black holes where my uncle’s eyes should have been. I often wondered what was going on beyond the vacant depths of those twin dark pits. According to the shrinks at the VA hospital, it was most likely visions of hell.
    It is possible that these childhood memories of my uncle have softened my brain and impaired my judgment sufficiently that last week I returned a phone call from a