Damn! He started to toss it back to the floor, then decided not to. Maybe he should find out what it was before he threw it away.

He rose and grabbed a paper towel from the roll suspended from the underside of a cabinet. He rolled the needle within and used it to blot the drop of blood oozing from his fingertip.

He turned to his father and Carl, still standing in the doorway.

“What the hell happened here?”

Dad could give him only a stunned look, but Carl held up his plastic shopping bag.

“It’s all here!”

“What’s all there?”

“What happened. The camera caught it all. Or at least most of it.”

2

“When I picked up the camera this morning,” Carl said, “I was in a hurry so it just sat in the bag till after I got home. Long after I got home.”

They’d all hurried back to Dad’s place to set up the camera for playback.

“You didn’t check it right away?”

“Nuh-uh. I figured, what for? I mean, I ain’t never seen nothin’ before and figured this wouldn’t be no different. So I just left it be until I was watchin’ the Dolphins game. That’s when I checked it and found the battery didn’t have no charge left. That ain’t happened before. So I recharged it and took a look to see if somethin’d set it off.”

“What’s this camera about?” Dad said.

Jack ran through a quick explanation of Dr. Dengrove’s attempts to catch Anya watering her yard.

“Dengrove,” Dad said. “Cheats at golf but God forbid anyone sneaks a little water onto their lawn. What an ass.”

Jack had the two-inch LCD screen flipped open. He hit PLAY and started to watch. Dad hung over his shoulder, Carl crouched farther back. The screen lit with green and black blobs that quickly stretched and coalesced into recognizable shapes—the side of Anya’s house, her plantings, the doo-dads, the lawn furniture in her front yard. And then a set of legs went by. Then more.

“Doesn’t this thing have any sound?” Dad said.

“If you hook it up to your TV you can get sound. Want me—?”

“We can do that later if we need to,” Jack said. He had a sick cold feeling in his gut that they’d be listening to the high-pitched barking he’d ignored last night. “First let’s see what’s to see.”

Carl jabbed a finger toward the little screen. “There they are! See?”

Jack saw. A crowd was gathering in an irregular semicircle around the edge of Anya’s lawn. Light from the front windows lit their faces. His intestines began to writhe as he recognized Luke and Corley and a couple of the others. Looked like the whole gang had shown up.

“The clan,” he said.

“All cept Semelee. I didn’t see her nowheres when I watched.”