There was one couple, Mike and Liz, who said they were just passing through, trying to get to Georgia from Maine. There was a skinny unemployed waitress who’d lost her home, and a guy who seriously resembled a walrus and said he did drywall. He was the only one without a tent, and had built himself a lean-to from corrugated metal and cardboard. He also reeked of booze and kept giving the waitress hungry looks until she fled back to her tent and zipped it up tight.

Two of the camp residents were kids, lanky teenage boys with loose, stretched-out cuffs on their sleeves and a hollow look in their eyes, making me wonder how many tricks they’d turned today and how recently they’d shot up their earnings. I thought of Nick and wondered if they knew him, if he’d shared a mattress or a needle with them. These boys, these people, were perfect targets for the Mazikin. No one would know or care if they were missing. Hell, they were already missing and no one cared. When they died, people would cluck their tongues and say what a waste it was. They wouldn’t look too hard for a cause, for a killer. And if a Mazikin possessed them, no one would know the difference.

I sent Henry back to the tent and patrolled around the edge of the camp, getting a sense of its layout and where it would be most vulnerable to an attack. It would be difficult to hear the approach of footsteps because of the highway noise, and that was a major disadvantage. The tents nearest the water were likely to get hit first, seeing as the others were against a wall. The easiest escape was along the grass, which extended up into a park area, or back toward the neighborhood we’d just walked through. We’d parked about four blocks away in a neighborhood full of people who didn’t raise their eyes from the sidewalk as they passed, but I knew they were watching us all the same. Not the safest place to leave a vehicle. Our Guard car was a twelve-year-old Taurus, though, and I doubted anyone would want to jack it.

Around midnight, I joined Henry in the tent, keeping the flashlight aimed at his feet and not his face. He was sitting there in the dark, casually fitting iron-tipped bolts to the long, narrow crossbow he’d assembled from a jumble of components he’d carried in his backpack. “I can’t hear anything with this noise,” he complained. “I hate this noise.”

“I know. Me too. I need to go back out there to keep an eye out, but …” I hated to admit it, but I was freezing.