He frowned. “How can you know that?”

“I found a big piece of her skin hanging back there.”

“No!” he gasped. Jack couldn’t see his complexion but was sure it had gone waxy. “You can’t mean it!”

“I wish I was wrong, but I saw her back the other day and the same marks are on that piece of skin. They skinned her, Dad. They fucking skinned her and hung it out to dry.”

Dad placed a trembling hand over his eyes and was silent a moment. Then he lowered the hand and thrust it toward Jack’s sack of grenades. His voice was taut, strained.

“Give me one of those.”

7

Semelee lay tremblin’ on the floor, head down, hands over her ears. It sounded as if war had broken out. Those weren’t just guns firin’ out there. With the explosions and the way the windows was shatterin’, it felt like they was bein’ bombed.

Luke fell through the door, grabbin’ onto a bleedin’ shoulder.

“They got grenades, Semelee! They’re killin’ us out there! Corley’s dead and Bobby’s leg’s bleedin’ real bad! Y’gotta do somethin’!”

“What can I do? Devil’s dead and Dora’s no good on land.”

“The things from the sinkhole, the ones you brought up last night…we need ‘em now. We need ‘em bad!”

“I can’t! I told you before—they won’t come up till after sundown.”

No matter how she’d tried yesterday, she couldn’t get those awful winged monsters to come out of the hole while the sun was up. But as soon as it went down, they were hers—or so she’d thought.

She’d almost lost it when she first saw them. She hadn’t been able to get a good look at them while they was down in the lights, but once they was up in the air, in the twilight, what she saw scared her so much she almost dropped her eye-shells.

The most horrible lookin’ critters she’d ever seen.

They was the size of lobsters—not the crawdad-like things around these parts; no, these was thick and heavy, like the big-clawed ones from up north. These things had shells and claws too, but that’s where the likeness ended. Their bodies was waisted, like a wasp’s, and they had wings, two big transparent ones on each side, sproutin’ from the top of the body like a dragonfly’s.

Chew wasps—that was the name that popped into her head, and it seemed to fit them perfect.