For the runners were all the size of children. She could see that even from here. Only they weren’t children. Something about the build of their bodies, the way they moved, indicated to her that they were older than that.

Much older.

They reached the high grass and leaped into it, and then she could see only the movement of the grass stalks, what looked like a narrow band of wind whipping through the center of the meadow.

What were they? Leprechauns? Elves? Something supernatural. Not dwarves or midgets or children. Even from this far away, their strangeness, their otherness, was apparent. They were not human.

She watched the grass whip back and forth, the narrow stream of movement heading straight toward the ranch. She stood her ground, not moving, and she realized that she was not as afraid as she should have been.

But that changed.

The grass in front of the pasture began to thrash wildly and then they emerged into the open, clutching weapons made of baseball bats and animal skulls, horseshoes and bones. They were made up like clowns: red noses, white faces, colored lips, and rainbow hair.

Only she wasn’t sure it was makeup.

They kept streaming into the pasture from the tall grass. Five of them. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. Nothing slowed them down, and their stubby legs pumped for all they were worth, carrying them around the clump of boulders in the center of the pasture, jumping over the small fence Hube had built for the cows. They were accompanied by what looked like a swarm of insects. Bees, maybe. Or beetles.

Patty closed the front door, locked it. But she knew, even as she did so, that she would not be safe in the house. Her only hope was to run, to get out before they overran her home and hope that it slowed them down enough to let her escape. She had no idea what they were or what they wanted, but she knew it was not good, and she could not believe she’d been so stupid as to just stand there and watch them approach when she could have been fleeing.

This was what the crow’s appearance had foretold, she knew. The crow had been an omen, a warning, and she probably would have known that if she’d paid a little more attention to her mother growing up and a little less attention to boys.

A judgmental review of her entire life passed through her mind as she ran through the house and out the back door, locking it behind her. A critique of her faults and shortcomings, an analysis in hindsight of her mistakes and misjudgments. The thrust of it all seemed to be that she could have avoided finding herself in this predicament if she’d done things differently, but she did not really believe that to be the case.