But just outside the town limits, the woman hit her brakes and cranked the heavy truck due east onto a private right-of-way with signs that read: POWER CORRIDOR—AUTHORIZED VEHICLES ONLY.

Fanta followed onto narrow gravel, casting the Tercel’s shadow ahead. As the truck hammered beneath high-voltage wires and their towering supports, the leveling rays of early evening shone hard upon its dusty rear window and the corroded oil drum in its box. Its side mirrors glinted. But he was staying well enough back, Fanta hoped. He took his time, losing her in a thick deciduous blur, following her dust cloud more than her truck itself. He stole glances at the letter.

It’s the deer prions. The bacillus knocked the door down for the Chronic Wasters to go horizontal. Not much time left for me.

Trailing the white truck through the hot, buzzing forest, thick with mosquitoes and ticks, hung with mummy shrouds of the moth worm, Fanta realized that FROM HELL HOLLOW was referring to “horizontal transfer.” He was talking about animal infections going sideways, infecting humans. A vet gets kennel cough. An equestrian gets equine encephalitis. That kind of thing. Exceedingly rare and fundamentally terrifying. Not rats carrying a human disease. Not at all. Humans getting a rat disease, the body undefended.

He shuddered. Lyme disease and a pig valve were all the horizontal action he could handle.

He had to watch the “road” through the power corridor. Primitive at best, it made for rough going, sharply up and down over washboards and deep ruts, around fallen trees and rocks, but somehow the rusty-jointed old Tercel successfully crossed three coulees in the transcendent style of the heavy wires overhead and emerged backlit, dusty-windowed, and leaking strains of symphonic rock onto a county road and then into the bygone hamlet of Mastodon.

Burn slowly the candle of life…

So went the lyric now, the next track.

My flaming out will light the world…

This was what FROM HELL HOLLOW had promised.

The white truck coasted into the lot of Mastodon’s ancient American Legion post and stopped.

Fanta, having nervous fun now, ducked the Tercel into the driveway of one of Mastodon’s three remaining houses, a dumpy little prefab with its curtains shut. He snugged up beside a long-haul rig parked on the yard along with epic quantities of dog shit and one of Rickreiner’s BARRY HER signs, plus two new ones: FREE FRANK and VICTIM’S MATTER. Good God. These referred to county board member Frank Truss, Town of Sumac, a bona fide wife-beater who deserved his night in jail and much more—and of course there should be no apostrophe on the wholly illegitimate word victim.