5/1 20:01

"Thud!"

From the cattle barn behind the farmhouse, near the Meuse River, came a loud crash. Cooper, who'd been watching television, sprang up from the couch at once. He froze for a few seconds, then his shock flashed instantly into fury; he grabbed the shotgun and flashlight off the coffee table beside him and stormed out of the farmhouse.

"I'm gonna blow you filthy lizards to pieces!"

Cooper cut through the farmyard, thick with night shadows cast by the trees, the commotion from the barn ringing steadily in his ears. Cursing under his breath, he chambered a round and stalked toward the barn in a rage.

The barn stood a short way from the river, with an entrance at each end — the front door opened onto pasture where the cattle grazed, the back door let them go down to drink on their own. Once in a while a calf would slip and fall into the water, but that had always been a minor matter. Alligators — back in the great drought of '62, a dozen-odd starving spotted alligators had climbed up to the barn and eaten two heifers; in '96 they'd lost one grown cow. But this time, every loss had been a full-grown animal. Had they developed a taste for it?

At some point the commotion had gone quiet, leaving only the occasional low of a cow. Cooper slowed his steps, puzzled; the sudden silence left him uneasy and confused.

He looked at the barn — the front door was intact, so whatever it was must have come straight in through the back from the riverbank. Cooper eased his steps and circled around to the back door, meaning to cut off the gluttonous intruders' escape route and catch the whole lot of them at once. He reached the rear of the barn; on a moonless night, he could barely make out the scene in the dark by flashlight alone. From the riverbank to the barn, the ground was all soft, slick river mud, one big crooked trail of water and mud running straight into the barn — same as the days before, up to this point. What was different was that the fence he'd just put up that morning, and the back door itself, had already been smashed to pieces.

"Damn it!"

His confusion and unease vanished in an instant, replaced by a head full of pure fury. Gripping the flashlight against the stock with one hand and raising the gun with the other, he walked into the barn.

The cattle lowed and cried in fear, but none of that drew his attention like the sound coming from deeper in the barn — the crunch of bone being chewed, the thud of something striking the ground. Cooper swept the flashlight left and right; the trail of water and mud led deeper in, joined now by streaks of fresh red blood, and the air was thick with the reek of iron. Cooper couldn't go any farther, because there, caught in his flashlight beam, was a broad expanse of smooth, tawny yellow, patched with blotches of blue — and the thing was tearing into one of his own cattle in huge, gulping bites.

"What in the hell is that—"

Before he could finish, something swept across his ankles, slick with some viscous fluid, and Cooper went down hard, his gun and flashlight — held too loosely in his shock — falling from his hands. And the thing turned and lunged straight at him.

The flashlight hit the ground, rolled half a turn, and came to rest shining across the empty stalls, its beam full of drifting dust — and the screams, and everything bloody that followed, echoed on and on through the darkness.