“Well,” said the woman, “I don’t know this little cutie but I’d like to. Mind if we join the party?”

Before Kyle could ask what she meant by “we,” he found out as three other strangers came out of the woods. They were all dressed in leather; they all had grisly necklaces. They all had knives or axes or hatchets in their hands.

Rachael stared at them and felt her heart sink. For one tiny second she thought that the universe was going to cut her a sliver of luck. That hope faded as she looked into the faces of the newcomers. They were hard, brutal, amused. The townsfolk spread out, drawing their own weapons. Only one of them had a gun, but it was a shotgun and not even a pump-action. The strangers were spread far apart and none of them looked particularly frightened of the weapon.

The woman took a couple of steps into the clearing. “Which one of you pencil dicks is running this cluster-fuck?”

“I am,” said the cigarette guy, who tossed the smoldering butt away. “Who the hell are you?”

“Me?” said the woman, contriving to look surprised at the question. Then an oily smile broke on her thin-lipped mouth. “My name’s Glory and I’m the goddamn angel of death.”

The man with the shotgun tucked it into his shoulder and pointed the barrel at her.

“Yeah? Well I’ve got a load of buck shot that says you ain’t shit.”

Glory turned to him—not her whole body, just an insectoid pivot of her head. She raised her hand, kissed her fingers and blew him a kiss. “Buh-bye,” she said sweetly.

Rachael saw a fragment of the forest shadows shift and break off and she began to cry out in warning, but the sound caught in her throat. Who would she warn? And why? She had no friends at all in this place, of that she was absolutely certain.

The shadow moved with blinding speed and suddenly the man with the shotgun grunted, stiffened, seemed to rise to his toes. His eyes bugged wide and his mouth opened to let loose a scream, but all that came from his throat was about a pint of dark red blood. Then the shadow rose up behind him and became something else. A man. Young and tall, with a handsome face twisted into a brutal mask. The shotgun sagged down and with a spasmodic jerk of dying fingers blasted the buckshot impotently into the dirt. The dying man fell to his knees and then the killer braced a knee against his back and tugged, jerking free a thick-bladed butcher knife. The shotgun man fell limply onto his face, twitched twice, and then lay still.

The townsfolk all cried out in shock and then flinched backward as a fifth leather-clad stranger stepped out of the woods, a big nickel-plated revolver in his massive fist.

“Jesus Christ,” gasped Kyle.