He exhaled slowly three times. Cleared his mind. Then he raised the pistol-gripped Starlight scope and peered through the trees that concealed him. His view of the culvert was unfettered.

The night vision system captured the moonlight and magnified it to a field of green, robbing the shadows of their substance, nullifying them. He sought his visual marker and found it. The hand still hung from the mouth of the culvert, blooming from the darkness like a pale and rigored lily, its petals curled and frozen. He watched it for several minutes, waiting for it to move and dreading it, but praying for it as well. It did not.

The eyes of any other would have seen the hand and merely from its shape expected motion, but not Stiles. At dusk he’d returned with his van and, after reconnoitering the area, had pried the bodies from the concrete tube. He didn’t actually expect to find their killer hiding in there among them, but it had been worth a try and it did give him a chance to examine the bodies. Seeing Larry Hovi’s deflated beach ball of a corpse up close, with sagging, sallow flesh the texture of butcher paper and a broadly laughing throat, was enough to strike from Stiles’s mind any residue of lingering humanity. This was no longer a body, an arm, a hand. It was a cold thing, inanimate and unfeeling, and a sane man would no more expect movement from it than he would a T-bone in the Kroger meat display. That’s what made the wait all the more unnerving—waiting for something to happen that shouldn’t be happening at all.

He sat back with a sigh of exasperation and caught himself trying to light a pretzel stick with the dashboard lighter. The tremors were slight but there nonetheless. So that’s it. Damn smokes’ve got a better grip on you than you thought. He kept his hands up and concentrated until the withdrawals subsided and the trembling eased. That’s it, once and for all. You stop this time and you don’t start again.

He smiled to himself and took a long deep drag on a pretzel stick. Yeah, that’s what you always say.

He sat there for what seemed an hour instead of the fifteen minutes it actually was and tried to make some sense of what had happened. In less than twenty-four hours a fairly routine search-and-destroy had become a total fucking nightmare. The result? Dead civilians. What went wrong? What the fuck went wrong?

The little voice in the back of his head answered. You did, asshole. You went wrong. You made the one fatal mistake that any cherry recruit worth his juice would’ve avoided. You underestimated the enemy.