I Live on a Farm in Texas, and There’s Something Strange in the Wind
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The house creaked, and a sound like a child screaming rose, and then faded as the wind swept around the roof. I'd been living with that sound for years, and it no longer fazed me. It was just another facet of living on the windswept West Texas plains. But today, the wind was worse than it had been in nearly a year. The news said to expect 50 mile an hour gusts, and I had no reason to doubt them. Not that I was giving much thought to the wind,

I wasn't giving much thought to anything but fantasies of murder. I sat in my home office, where I did all the accounting for the firm that had been in my family for generations. Today, the computer remained dark. The invoices and receipts and scrawled notes remained untouched. The light was off and the lack of illumination in the room perfectly suited my mood. And although nightfall was still an hour or more away,

All the dust kicked up by the wind blocked much of the sunlight, making it seem like dusk outside. I'd been staring at a pair of scissors and a small forest of pens on my desk, but now I switched my gaze and my murderous daydream from the scissors to the .30-06 hunting rifle propped against the wall next to my office door. I pictured bursting into a motel room with the rifle in my hands, finding them in bed together.

I pictured them pleading for mercy, gripping each other's naked, sweaty bodies. I raised the rifle, pointing it at his head first. I wanted her to see him die before she left the world forever. But that was where my fantasy stopped. Even in my imagination, I couldn't conjure up the courage to pull the trigger. It had been the same with the scissors.

When it came time to plunge them into sweaty, sex-smelling flesh, some sort of mental block stopped me. It only increased my anger and frustration. It was as if my subconscious was daring me to do the real thing, daring me to take the rifle and go find them and really kill them, just to work through my frustrations and the limitations of my imagination. But what if I couldn't do the real thing when it came time? What if I was too chickenshit to kill them?

I'd probably go to jail for attempted murder or something. Then again, if I killed them, I would surely go to prison for the rest of my life. Then what would my kids do? A shout from outside caught my attention. A real shout, not the wind around the house. It sounded like my father. I got up and moved out of the office, down the hall toward the front of the house. The shout came again as I parted the curtains and looked out a front window.

My father stood outside. His sweatpants and ragged flannel shirt flapped wildly in the wind. He had his back toward me, facing the oncoming wind, leaning forward to counter the considerable force exerted by Mother Nature. He shouted again, raising his fists toward the brown streaked sky. His words were indecipherable. I rushed to the front door, yanking it open. A wave of grit and dust immediately pelted me.

Dad?

My elderly father paid no attention to me, his gaze fixed on the distant horizon. His lips moved and I leaned in closer to hear what he was saying. "And there will be fearful sights and great signs from heaven." The emotion in his voice struck me and I turned to look at the horizon. I could barely see through the dust, the line of massive white wind turbines that stood on a stretch of our farmland some quarter mile distant. The blades didn't turn.

The wind was far too strong to have the turbines operating. Otherwise, I saw nothing other than flat Texas farmland in every direction, broken by the occasional barbed wire fence. "Let's go inside, Dad," I said. Had my father been in his prime, I wouldn't have been able to get him to budge. But he was an ailing old man, and I was able to drag him inside with relative ease, helped in no small part by the wind.

He continued reciting scripture as I sat him down on the couch in the living room. "What's mom doing?" I asked. My mother generally kept an eye on him, since he had recently developed the habit of wandering off at odd times. Dad didn't answer. He looked toward the front window, lips moving as he whispered about end times. I stalked to the back of the house and looked out the kitchen window. My mother and father lived in a trailer behind the farmhouse.

but I saw no sign of my mother. I figured she was napping and hadn't realized dad had gone wandering about. Thinking about those red spots on his face, I turned and went to the hall bathroom to get some saline and gauze. I flipped on the light, pausing as I glimpsed my face in the mirror. I had small red spots all over my face as well. Most of them were on the left side because I had angled my face that way to protect my eyes.

Leaning toward the mirror, I inspected the tiny wounds, wondering just how hard the wind had to blow in order to cause them. I knew what windburn looked like, and this wasn't it. This was something else, something I'd never experienced before. Hearing the front door open, I grumbled into the mirror, thinking it was my dad heading back outside. After quickly grabbing some gauze and a bottle of wound cleanser from under the sink, I headed back out.

finding the front door closed and my son kneeling in front of my father. "What happened to his face?" my son, Stuart, asked. He had turned on the light so he could see his grandfather's face clearly. "Must have been the wind blowing grit into his face," I said as I approached. Stuart stood up and looked at me. "You got it too," he said. "Do I?" I studied my 17-year-old son's face and nodded. "Looks like it. Did you fix that sprinkler?"

Stuart reached up and felt his skin. "I didn't feel anything." "Neither did I," I said. "Did you fix the sprinkler?" "Yeah, I did," he said, looking back down at his grandpa, who was still staring at the window, mumbling scripture. "You'll be alright," I said. "He's just having one of his episodes." Stuart didn't look convinced, but he returned his gaze to me. "What about you? Have you talked to mom?"

I stepped over toward the couch, forcing Stuart to move out of the way. "Can you get dinner started?" I asked. "Dad, you can't do this forever." I crouched in front of my father. "Do as I say, get dinner started. There's thawed hamburger meat in the sink. Get your sister to help if she's done with her homework." "Is it true you said you'd shoot Mom if she came home?" Stuart asked, his voice a strange mixture of the child he'd once been and the man he was fast becoming.

The adult edge to his voice, the edge as hard as a tiller's blade, made me turn and look at him in a new light.

The anger seemed to come out of nowhere, filling my chest like a lung full of expanding poison gas. I shot to my feet, dropping the gauze and saline to the floor before grabbing my son's shirt and yanking his wiry frame toward me. "Your mother broke her vows," I growled. "She betrayed all of us by lying with another man. Don't you understand that? Don't you understand what kind of backstabber that makes her? She turned her back on all of us when she let that man inside her.

Stuart's face twisted in disgust, but it was impossible for me to tell if the disgust was with me or his mother. He tried to push away, but I held firm to his shirt. "You're not without blame in this thing, Dad," he said. "I've overheard your conversations with Aunt Lizzie. I've heard what kind of husband you are." I brought my other hand up and grabbed Stuart's chin, digging my fingers into his cheeks, barely holding back the rage still ballooning inside me.

A speedy gust of wind brought the childlike screaming sound, which only served to tense me more. A goddamn sound! The fifth angel sounded his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from the sky to the earth. The star was given the key to the shaft of the abyss. My father was yelling now, yelling over the screaming wind.

Still clutching my son, I looked over my shoulder to see my father standing in front of the couch, gesticulating toward the window as he yelled, "When he opened the abyss, smoke rose from it like the smoke from a gigantic furnace. The sun and sky were darkened by the smoke from the abyss." He stopped, arms still raised and mouth moving, but no coherent words came out. It was as if he'd forgotten what came next.

When he spoke again, he had skipped ahead in the scripture, but the delivery of the words gave me chills. He turned to look into my eyes as he said, "During those days, people will seek death but not find it. They will long to die, but death will elude them." I released Stuart, shutting my eyes as if against a deluge of frightful visions, Old Testament visions of demons and torment and apocalypse.

"What's happening?" Stuart asked, sounding bewildered. "Dad, it's okay," I said. "It's just a dust storm. It's okay." My father shook his head, lips quivering as he continued staring into my eyes. "For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ." "Sit down, Dad," I said. "Please."

I grabbed my father's arm to guide him to the couch, but he yanked it out of my grasp and moved around the couch. He hardly took his eyes off me as he worked his way toward the kitchen. "Where are you going?" I asked. "Let me clean those wounds." Dad shook his head and pointed an arthritic finger at me. Then he pointed it at Stuart as he backed into the kitchen. Stuart and I just watched him as he backed away, and then turned and hustled out the back door.

I strode to the door and watched him walk through the fierce wind to the trailer. Once he was inside the trailer, I allowed myself to relax a little. I wasn't in the mood to deal with one of his episodes, and this one seemed particularly bad. But before I could allow my shoulders to soften, I saw a number of cows out in the field beyond my parents' trailer. They weren't my cows. They belonged to my neighbor, but I let them graze on certain fields at certain times of the year.

Right now, they were grazing on old corn stalks, eating whatever was left over from the fall's harvest. Barely able to see them through all the dirt in the air, I leaned toward the window to peer at them. There were several near the fence, acting odd. They kicked their heads up, and when the wind was just right, I could hear several of them releasing long, mournful moos. Something's wrong, Stuart said from behind me.

"He's just having an episode," I said, still studying the cows. "No, I mean something's wrong with me. I don't feel good. Don't you feel that? Please, for the love of Christ," I said, turning to face him. "Just make dinner. Get your sister to help if you're really feeling bad." He stared down at the palms of his hands. A look of fear spread across his face. "Hey," I said, slapping his hands down.

"Snap out of it. You get up in that turbine and smoke some weed again or something?" Stuart looked at me as though waking from a deep slumber. His throat clicked as he swallowed. "No, no, I... I don't know. Are you going to make dinner? Can you do that for me?" "Yeah," Stuart said, staring past me at the trailer outside. "Thank you," I said. "Now, I need to go see what the hell is up with Isaac's cows."

I pulled on a jacket and found a pair of goggles before heading out the back door. I skirted my parents' trailer and approached the fence with the wind at my back, lurching here and there from the gusts. There was a hill near the fence, which I climbed to get a better view of the cattle. As I came close to the fence, I slowed, fear settling on my back and whispering in my ear. The dirt-filled air seemed to shimmer and my head buzzed unpleasantly.

Maybe something's going around, I thought, chalking it up to a bug. There were eight cows and two calves gathered near the fence, and all of them were acting strange. Their muscles and ears were twitching. They kicked their heads up in mood, as if in pain. Their black eyes rolled maniacally in the fading light. They started moving in a tight circle suddenly, keeping the two calves in the middle. I watched, perplexed, my eyes feeling like they were so wide they were going to pop out,

As the eight cows moved in a circle around the calves, all the adults grew more and more frantic. Some of them reared up, walking two or three steps on their hind legs as they cried out in their mournful way. Then one of them broke formation and reared up toward the center of the circle, coming down hard and kicking a calf in the head. The calf, which couldn't have been more than a month old, screeched and fell to the ground.

The same cow who'd knocked it down stomped its forelegs on the calf before rejoining the circle. Then another cow did something similar, trampling the calf for no apparent reason. The tiny cow bellowed an awful scream before a third adult stomped on it, collapsing its chest down. The other calf, slightly older, managed to work its way into the crowd during this brutal display. Now, it slipped out and trotted away off into the field.

As I fixed my protected eyes back on the dying calf, I jerked, seeing instead my wife's naked and mangled body there amid the still circling cows. The jolt of righteous satisfaction I felt was at once elating and sickening. Still, I reached up and moved the goggles to my forehead with one hand, rubbing my eyes with the other. When I had the goggles back in place, I looked once again at the cattle. The calf in the middle was just that, a calf.

I stumbled down the hill and headed back toward the house, pulling out my phone so I could call Isaac and let him know his cows were acting crazy. I hit the send button as I stepped back into the house. Stuart was in the kitchen, absently stirring ground beef in a skillet on the stove. He didn't look at me as I passed through. He just stared down at the meat. Isaac didn't answer, so I left a quick message, letting him know what had happened and that he should get out and tend to them.

Back in my office, I pulled off my jacket and the goggles. I sat down in my chair, determined to get some bookkeeping work done. I turned my computer on, my eyes unfocusing as they fixed on the booting screen. Dark fantasies took over with little effort on my part. Once again, I found myself indulging in daydreams of cold-blooded murder. This time, they were vivid, lacking that distant and ephemeral quality of imagination. It was more like watching a movie.

No, it was like living a movie. I burst into the motel room, rifle in hand, finding Jessica in bed with Mark. I could smell the potent sour smell of sex. Light from the dim bedside lamp glistened orange off their sweaty skin. But instead of fear, instead of pleading and whining and begging, they both smiled at me. Their eyes turned solid red, and their mouths opened. Sharp teeth seemed to grow longer as they laughed at me.

I fired the gun, blasting Mark's head apart. But instead of brains and blood and bits of skull, tiny black worms erupted from his ruined head. There were millions of them, and they wriggled all around. They squirmed and shifted and crawled toward me. All I wanted to do was finish the job. I wanted to kill Jessica for her betrayal, but terror possessed me, and I turned to run. The motel room door wouldn't budge. I looked down and saw that the tiny black worms had engulfed my feet.

They crawled up my boots and under my pant legs. I pulled my jeans up and tried to beat the creatures away, but they simply attached onto my skin and then, one by one, disappeared into me, invading my body. I felt them inside me, turning my veins hard and my blood to poison. As I stood frozen to the spot, I felt them reach my brain, causing a sensation like it was being drilled from the inside out.

Painful explosions of colors and shapes erupted in my mind, forcing me to wrench my eyes closed. I no longer held a rifle in my hands. The stench of adultery faded away, along with any sense of reality I'd been clinging to. My mouth dropped open, a ragged scream starting low in my throat. I reached my hands up to my head and dug the tips of my fingers into my skull. My skin had grown brittle, and the bone underneath felt as thin as a candy shell.

My fingers crunched through, sinking into my brain as I screamed and wrenched my head from side to side, wanting nothing more than to dig the parasites out of my brain. Any sense of self beyond pain and betrayal was whipped away by the howling winds. My father's words grew loud in my head, each utterance like a blade slicing deep into my cerebral cortex. The fifth angel sounded his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from the sky to the earth.

The star was given the key to the shaft of the abyss. When he opened the abyss, smoke rose from it like the smoke from a gigantic furnace. The sun and sky were darkened by the smoke from the abyss. The words battled for dominance in a cacophonous roar until I thought my eardrums would explode. I dug my fingers deeper into my brain, but they never touched.

They just kept reaching farther and farther in, only bringing more pain. I opened my eyes, gasping for breath. I was sitting in my office chair, hands gripping my head, which pounded with feverish but silent intensity. It was fully dark outside. A gust of wind screamed around the house and then died away, only to be replaced by another scream. A real scream, from my daughter Madison. "Daddy!" she screamed.

I jumped from my seat, but my head felt ungainly and too heavy. I fell to the floor and had to lurch up to the door, yanking it open and stepping out into a completely dark house. My heart thudded away, feeling like my blood had turned to sludge. Madison screamed again from upstairs. I heard a thump and the crunch of wood, as though someone was trying to break a door down. Stomping unsteadily down the hall, I battled at the hall light switch, but it did not come on.

By the time I made it to the stairs, my head felt slightly better, and I took the steps, two at a time. Emerging into the dark upstairs hallway, I saw a figure outside Madison's door, working some tool to try and break into the room. "Steward!" I shouted at my son. His figure was unmistakable even in the dark.

He looked up from what I now saw was a crowbar, but he said nothing. "Daddy!" Madison screamed from inside the room. "Something's wrong with Stuart!" "What are you doing?" I asked, striding toward my son. He looked down at the partially damaged door, as if waking from a dream. "Dad?" he asked, stepping away from the door and dropping the crowbar to the wood floor. I grabbed Stuart by the back of his neck and pulled him toward me. "What are you doing?" Stuart shook his head.

"I don't know. I thought she was... thought she was what?" I asked. The walls of the hallway seemed to shimmer in my peripheral vision. My head swam. I blinked and willed the oddities away. "I don't know," Stuart said again. His face morphed, making him look like a small child again as he started to cry. "Something's wrong with me, Dad," he said. "I need to go to the hospital. I'm sick."

I pulled him to my chest, my heart still thudding away, showing no signs of slowing down. "Yeah, okay," I said. "You're right." Madison opened her door a crack and peered out. Her thirteen-year-old face was streaked with tears. "What's wrong with him?" she asked, chin quivering. "He chased me up here after the power went out. He was saying terrible things, Daddy. Like he was crazy." "I don't know, honey," I said.

But I think I need to take him to the hospital. You're coming with. Madison nodded and opened the door more, stepping out over the crowbar. The back door downstairs opened, then shut. All of us looked toward the stairs. Dad? I called. No answer. Mom? Still nothing. When did the power go out? I asked Madison. Stuart was still sobbing into my chest. Like two minutes ago. Madison said. Okay. I said. Let's go.

We moved down the stairs as a group. Stuart had stopped crying, but he stayed close. Madison gripped my hand, and I could feel the fear radiating off her. At the bottom of the stairs, I glanced around for any sign of whoever had come in the back door, but I saw no one. I didn't think it had been Mom or Dad leaving, because they would have come running if they'd heard Madison screaming. Actually, with the way Dad had been acting earlier, I wasn't so sure he would have come running.

I grabbed a key fob off the hook next to the door and handed it to Stuart. "Get your sister into the truck," I said. "I'll be right there. I just need to tell your grandma that we're leaving." "No, Daddy," Madison said. "Don't leave me alone with him." I looked through the gloom into my son's eyes, having a hard time getting my head around the fact that he'd been trying to break into his sister's room. I wasn't thinking clearly, that was for damn sure. I hadn't been thinking clearly since I learned of Jessica's cheating.

"Okay," I said. "Stewart, go start the truck. Madison and I will be right out." Stewart nodded, then he looked at his sister. "Mads, I'm sorry. I don't know what got into me. It wasn't me, okay? It wasn't me." Madison just nodded. Sniffling, Stewart opened the front door. The wind whipped it out of his hand, and it crashed back against the doorstop. Dust and dirt flew inside the house as Stewart left.

I watched until he was safely in the truck and then forced the door shut. Madison and I moved to the back of the house. I looked around as we went, calling my parents' names once more, but no one answered, and I didn't see anyone. The trailer's lights were off, which made sense if the wind had caused a power outage to the whole area. Still, I expected to see flashlights or candles making the windows glow orange. Instead, they were completely dark.

I grabbed a flashlight I kept in the miscellaneous drawer in the kitchen near the back door. "Why don't you just stay here?" I asked Madison. "You'll be able to see me the whole time. It won't take but a minute." "Okay," Madison said. There was reluctance in her voice, but she released my hand and stepped back so I could open the door. Out in the whipping wind, I narrowed my eyes and turned the flashlight on. The wind helped me along, pushing at my back as I worked my way across the pavers to the trailer.

Mom? I thought I could hear water running.

but the wind was too loud to be sure. Thinking Mom was in the shower, I headed for the bathroom. At the door, I heard the shower running. Although there was no light coming from under the door, my hand shook as I knocked on the door. "Mom? Dad?" When there wasn't even a murmur, I opened the door. With a click of the light switch, I could see the small bathroom. The cloudy shower curtain obscured a figure lying in the bathtub. A familiar moan came from the bathtub.

It was a moan I'd heard many times before. A moan I'd elicited from my wife in the privacy of her own bedroom, and once or twice in the shower. There was movement from beyond the shower curtain. A thrusting movement, and more moaning, and a man grunting. The sheer impossibility of it was lost on me as my head buzzed and my stomach roiled and my muscles tensed. I became sure that Jessica was in there, getting her brains fucked out by Mark.

I was so sure, I found myself stepping back into the bathroom moments later with a kitchen knife in my hand, barely cognizant of the trip I took to the kitchen to get it. But when I ripped the shower curtain open, I didn't find my wife and her lover. I found my dead mother. The sight of her felt like a punch to the throat. I stumbled back, sitting down hard on the toilet and dropping the knife to the floor. Blood still washed away from the stab wounds in her chest, but the water flowing down the drain was barely pink.

Hoping it was another hallucination, I shut my eyes and shook my head, trying to clear it. But when I opened my eyes again, my mother was still there. I reached in and touched her neck. She was cold to the touch. The water was frigid. Then I thought of my father. Could he have done this? The way he was acting. The way we were all acting. Everyone except for Madison. Madison!

I shot up from the toilet and rushed to the front door of the trailer. I let the wind push the door open as I bolted outside, sprinting to the house. "Madison!" I scanned the kitchen frantically for my daughter, seeing no sign of her. Thinking she'd gone out to the truck with her brother, I rushed to the front door, whipping it open and stepping outside, freezing as my feet touched the porch boards. The truck's lights were off, and it was sagging on four deflated tires.

As I moved to the passenger side door, I saw that the tire had been punctured. I opened the door to find the truck empty and the engine off. Looking around at the dark, windswept night yielded nothing but a vast sense of loneliness that opened inside me like a poison flower. I yelled my children's names, but the wind lashed my voice away. Pulling my phone out, I stumbled back to the house, dialing three numbers as I went.

When the 911 operator picked up, he didn't meet me with the cool, calm voice I so desperately needed to hear. He sounded stressed and scared. 911, what is your emergency? My mom has been killed and my kids are missing. I blurted out. Then I gave him my address. I need an ambulance and the police. Sir, I'm going to need you to listen to me very carefully, the man said. We've received an influx of calls from your area tonight.

and all of our available units are currently busy. We'll get someone out to you as soon as we can." The bottom ripped out of my heart. I sank to my knees in my living room, the wind still buffeting me because I hadn't bothered to close the door. "Enhauer?" I cried. "Someone murdered my mother!" "Do you know who it was and where they are now?" "No!" I sobbed. "I don't know!" "I suggest you get somewhere safe and wait until the police arrive." "What about my kids?" I said.

The man was silent for a long moment. "I don't know how to say this, but I wouldn't trust anyone around you right now. Even your kids." "What the hell are you talking about?" "There's something going on, sir. We've received reports of family members turning on each other." My fingers went limp. The phone dropped out of my hand, bouncing off my thigh and then coming to rest on the living room rug. I got to my feet and rushed to my office, thinking only of getting the 30-06 from the wall.

But when I looked at the gun rack, I found that it was empty. My throat thickened as I moved to the closet and grabbed my pistol case from the shelf. It wasn't locked. I'd stopped locking my guns up as soon as I taught my kids how to use them and respect them. But as soon as I lifted the case, I could tell my Remington wasn't inside. I dropped the case without opening it. Then I heard a door slam upstairs. I looked at the ceiling. My eyes seemed to buzz in their sockets.

Getting to the second floor only took moments, but I slowed as I reached the hallway. The crowbar Stuart had been using was still on the floor. I grabbed it and glanced into Madison's bedroom. Without the lights on, it was difficult to see everything clearly, but I was certain no one was in her room. Still, I pulled open the accordion closet doors and looked inside, seeing nothing but clothes and shoes and boxes.

Back in the hall, I saw that Stuart's door was closed, along with my bedroom door. "Stuart?" I asked outside my son's door, leaning close to listen for movement from inside. The 911 operator's words bounced around my skull. "Reports of family members turning on each other, turning on each other, turning..." I pictured my son standing in his room with my rifle in his hands, waiting for me to open the door so he could blow me away.

As soon as that image popped into my head, a strange thing happened. My son, at least the version of him inside my head, was no longer my son. He was little more than a stranger who wanted to kill me. Someone I had to kill if I was to survive.

Whatever history we had together, from his birth to his yet unfinished transformation into adulthood, faded into the background of my thoughts, replaced by a swirling mass of anger, aggression, and hate all encompassed by the sweet promise of violence. After stepping to the side of the door, I reached out, turned the knob, and shoved it open, pulling my hand back out of the way. I listened hard with my back pressed against the wall.

waiting for the sound of movement or even a gunshot. When nothing came, I pivoted around the doorframe and rushed into the room, crowbar held up and ready to go. The room was empty. A twitch traveled up my neck, prompting me to shake my head as I stalked out of the room. Some small part of me was trying hard to figure out why I wanted nothing more than to bash someone's head in. Kaleidoscopic images of violence swirled through my head, each one bringing more sick pleasure to my gut than the last.

Most of them were of me killing Mark and Jessica, but there were also some of me killing my father, my son, and even Madison. I shook my head again as I approached the master bedroom door. My neck popped with the violence of the motion. Bursting into the room, any notion of self-preservation faded away. I rushed directly toward the figure sitting on the edge of my bed. It was my father. His back was to me as he sat facing the bedroom window.

As I came around the bed, I raised the crowbar, teeth clenched, ready to kill. Then I saw the blood. The front of my father's shirt was soaked in it. A small amount seeped out of the ragged wound across his neck. Something about seeing him like that, slumped and frail and no threat at all, brought me partially back to my senses. I reached a hand out and grabbed his shoulder. The movement made him flop back onto the bed.

The wound opened up to reveal the inside of his throat as he fell back. The floor creaked behind me. Someone was coming out of the bathroom. I spun around, fear prompting me to raise the crowbar, but my attacker was already stabbing his knife at me. The blade scraped along my ribs under my armpit, slicing through cloth, skin, and muscle.

Grunting, I brought the crowbar down sloppily, hitting the man in the shoulder. Something about his huff of pain told me I knew this man, but I couldn't see his face because of the bandana and baseball cap he wore. My feet moved back, tangling with my father's legs, prompting me to fall. I fell back into the bedside table, knocking the lamp off and causing a sharp jolt of pain to join the breathtaking discomfort of the cut across my ribs.

The man advanced on me, shoulders stiff with purpose. I brought the crowbar up to fend off any attack. But before the man could make a move, the bed shifted as if someone had jumped on it and a blur of motion slammed into him. I recognized the clothes. It was Stuart. But my skinny son was no match for this large and thick-limbed man. Using Stuart's momentum against him, the man threw my son at the window. The glass shattered, and Stuart fell out into the night.

I stared at the broken window, no longer sure I was experiencing reality. The buzz in my head grew louder and the walls of the bedroom shimmered. But the man looked at me, moving in, knife still in his hand. "Daddy!" Madison's scream ripped through the bedroom, pulled along by the draft created by the open front door and the shattered window. The man turned his attention from me, looking right at her where she stood in the bedroom door.

I could just see her if I lifted my head to peer over the bed. A half second later, the man bolted away from me and toward Madison. I screamed for her to run, but she was already moving, running for the stairs. I lurched up in time to see the man darting out through the bedroom door. As I got to the door and turned into the hall, I jerked back as the man thrusted his knife at me. He stopped just outside the door to wait for me. He was proficient with a knife, quick and savage.

His blade entered the side of my left knee, and he dragged it across, tearing open my flesh and doing untold damage to the joint. I swiped at him with the crowbar, but he dodged back. My left knee stopped working, and I fell to my right knee. The man pointed his knife at my face. "I'm going to take my time with you, Luther," he said. Then he turned and ran after my daughter. His voice was familiar. It was a voice I knew well.

A voice that had been playing in my head ever since I heard it on my wife's phone one day when she forgot to lock it while going to the bathroom. I had known something was going on. I had suspected she was cheating, but that was the day I found out. Her phone vibrated from the bedside table. I didn't hesitate for long, the suspicion already simmering in my mind. I reached across the bed, picked up the phone, and listened to the voice message.

It was a man, talking about all the things he was going to do to my wife's body the next time he saw her. But the contact information said the message was from someone named Marcy. I scrolled up, my stomach clenching as I read the interactions and listened to the voice messages my wife sent to this man. She came out of the bathroom, her face going ashen when she saw I had her phone in hand. I only learned the man's name after prying it out of Jessica during our fight.

I subsequently kicked her out, threatening to kill her if she ever came back. That was a week ago. I had quickly found out who Mark was and what he looked like. We lived in a town of only 5,000 people. It wasn't hard. He was fairly new to town, having moved into a house just down the road. But none of this explained why he was now in my house, why he had killed my mother and father and maybe even my son.

And it certainly didn't explain the strange things that had been happening. The crazy thoughts I'd been having. It didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was Madison. Growling in pain, I got up onto both legs and made my way down the hall. My left knee wouldn't obey. He'd severed many of the tendons. So I had to use that leg like a crutch, locking the knee despite the tremendous pain it caused to put any weight on it.

I was covered in sweat and feeling sick by the time I reached the bottom of the stairs. Out on the porch, I gazed around. My eyes narrowed against the wind. Out on the road, I saw a dark figure running away. Although it was partially obscured by the darkness and the dirt in the air, it could only be Mark. I moved down the porch steps and started down the driveway. But then I paused, looking at the truck.

I kept a key in a magnetic box attached to the inside of the driver's side wheel well. Even with four flat tires, it would go faster than I could. A glance back toward the road told me the figure was going into the field, which meant that's where Madison was going. I limped over, grabbed the key and got into the truck.

Thankful it was my left knee that was damaged, I fired up the engine, put it in reverse and hit the gas. The truck moved sluggishly, but I got it turned around in the road and then bumped down the other side, into the field of newly planted wheat. I ran down a fence post, catching some barbed wire in the front bumper, but I just kept my foot on the gas.

Soon, one of the massive wind turbines in my fields loomed out of the darkness, its white base faintly illuminated by my truck's headlights. Between me and the wind turbine, Mark chased Madison across the field. I pushed the truck as hard as I could, watching as Madison ran up the small flight of metal steps to the access door in the base of the 345-foot-tall wind turbine.

I'd asked the company in charge of maintaining these things to come out and fix the broken lock on the thing, but apparently they hadn't done so, because Madison slipped right inside. Mark was already at the bottom of the steps by the time I got near. He strode inside, leaving the door open. I grabbed the crowbar and jumped out of the truck, collapsing and shouting in pain before picking myself up again.

The turbine loomed over me, taller than the Statue of Liberty, the massive blades unmoving in the too strong wind. The lights from the still running truck cast a long shadow ahead of me as I lurched to the steps. When I got inside and out of the wind, it took my eyes a moment to adjust. To the right, an electrical control box sat against one wall of the circular tower.

To the left, a ladder led up a good 80 feet to a transition deck, where another ladder on the opposite side would go up to another deck. Madison's sobs bounced off the interior of the turbine tower as she climbed to the transition deck. Mark was about halfway up, but he was moving faster than Madison, even though he was climbing with a knife in one hand. Back before the wind turbines were installed, I had taken a tour of a different turbine on a different farm.

I had wanted to know what exactly was going to be on my property. As a result, I knew where the switch was to light the interior. I reached over and hit the switch, illuminating the inside of the tower with strategically placed LED lights. Mark looked down at me as he climbed. "You touch her, I'll kill you!" I shouted up at him. The edges of his eyes crinkled, and although I couldn't see it, I knew he was smiling under his bandana. He kept climbing.

Madison had disappeared from view on the transition deck, so I shouted for her to keep climbing as I limped to the ladder and started up. I couldn't hold the crowbar and climb at the same time, so I slipped it between my belt and jeans at my back, so it was hooked onto my belt. My left leg was useless for climbing, so I had to haul myself up, using only my arms and my right leg. It was slow going, and I could no longer see either of them.

When I reached the first transition deck, I got onto the metal platform and looked up the next ladder. Seeing Mark already coming to the next transition deck, moving as fast as I could, I climbed up the ladder, wincing as each use of my right arm opened the gash along my ribs. I could feel the blood soaking my shirt, not to mention the hot, wet pain that was my left knee. When I came to the next transition deck, I looked up to see an empty ladder. Both Mark and Madison were up there, at the top of the turbine.

Feeling a sickening dread take hold, I forced myself up. Whatever odd mental virus had infected me came back in a wave of hate as I thought of all the things Mark had done to my family. Taking my wife away from me wasn't enough. He wanted to take everything away from me.

I came to the end of the ladder and to the top of the turbine. I stuck my head through the hole and something hit me in the back of the head. My skull slammed into the ladder rung and I lost my grip, falling down two rungs before I grabbed back on again. I reached back and yanked the crowbar from my belt. Then I twisted on the ladder so I was facing away from the wall. "Your daughter's dead," Mark said, bending over to look down at me through the ladder gap. He pulled his bandana down so I could see his face.

He was smiling. I flung the crowbar at his face. It clanged as it hit him. He cried out and jerked backward as the crowbar fell to the metal platform. Using both arms, I yanked myself up through the hole. The top of the turbine was crammed with machinery and equipment used to turn wind into electricity. I could see that a hatch in the ceiling which led out to the very top of the turbine was open. I wondered if Madison had gone out there because I didn't see her around.

Mark was recovering, but there was a small gash under his right eye. He gripped his knife and stepped toward me, but I picked up the crowbar and swiped at him, hitting his knife hand. He cried out in pain, but managed to hang on to the knife. Still sitting down with my legs hanging through the ladder gap, I swiped at him again, but he dodged away and climbed up onto the equipment toward the ceiling hatch. Wind blew dirt and grit through the open hatch, but this didn't seem to faze Mark. He crawled right through and disappeared onto the roof.

Afraid that Madison was up there trying to hide from Mark, I lurched up and got my head through the hatch. But I'd learned my lesson the last time, so I ducked back down quickly. Mark's knife hand shot down through the hole, aiming right where my neck had been a moment earlier. I was ready for this. I grabbed his wrist with my left hand and then slammed the crowbar into his forearm as hard as I could. I felt the bone break as the metal tool connected.

Mark screamed and let go of the knife, which clattered down among the equipment. He pulled his arm away and I let it go, but I wasted no time in getting up onto the top of the turbine. As I stood up, putting most of my weight on my right leg, a gust of wind threatened to throw me over the side. It was a long drop. I crouched and looked around for Madison, but I saw only Mark. He gripped his injured left arm, staring at me sullenly from near the unmoving blades at the front of the turbine.

We glared at each other in the dark, about ten feet apart. "Where is she?" I shouted over the wind. "At some motel," Mark said. At first, I was confused. Then I realized he was talking about my wife. "She said it was a mistake," he continued. "She said she was going to do whatever it took to get you to forgive her." "That's why you came here?" I shouted. Mark shook his head. "I don't know. I think something's wrong with me. Where's Madison?"

He shook his head again. "I don't know. I couldn't find her. I think she came out here and fell off." I looked around, but I didn't dare peer over the edge. I wouldn't be able to see her body even if I did. Looking back at Mark, I suddenly felt that he was a pathetic excuse for a man. I thought about all the fantasizing I'd done about killing him, and how it wasn't even close to the same when it came time to do it in person.

The potent and otherworldly rage that had been infecting me in waves since not long after I'd first discovered those strange red dots on my face seemed to dissipate. My shoulders slumped, and I dropped the crowbar. Let's get off of here! I shouted, gesturing toward the hatch. Mark looked at me distrustfully. Really? Something happened to us tonight! I said. Something bad. I think it's still happening. We've been poisoned or infected! Mark nodded vehemently.

"That's what I'm saying! I never would have done this! I swear, I never would have!" "I believe you," I said. "Come on, let's go back down!" He seemed to consider it before finally nodding and stepping toward the hatch. "Why don't you go first?" he asked when he was still several feet away. "I'm not letting you get behind me," I said. "But here's what I'll do." I kicked the crowbar over to the edge, which was about five feet away.

It fell off the side and down into the darkness. It was enough for Mark. He moved forward to the hatch. "I swear I wouldn't have done this," he said again. "Not if I was in my right mind. I know." As soon as he was close enough, I whipped my right hand up in a fist. His teeth clacked together as I hit him under the chin. He stumbled back, dropped onto his ass, and his momentum took him over the edge. He fell, disappearing into the darkness below. I never heard him hit the ground.

"But you slept with my wife," I said as I eased myself down to the hatch. When I got back into the turbine, I called out for Madison. "It's okay. He's gone now. You can come out." "Okay," Madison said. She had hidden herself in a narrow gap between a piece of machinery. She approached, and I pulled her into a hug and kissed her head. "I'm so glad you're okay," I whispered. Madison said something I couldn't understand as she started to sob.

The newscaster's report filtered through the drug-induced haze that clouded my head as I lay in the hospital bed. Apparently, in an oil field two miles from my house, there had been a blowout. Oil had spewed up into the air as the pressure control systems failed. And as far as the authorities could tell, there was some unknown organism in the oil. Hundreds of thousands of specimens had been blown all over the countryside by the wind.

and had apparently worked their way into humans and animals alike, causing strange and violent behavior. Dozens of people had been killed by their friends or loved ones. The media had dubbed the as yet unnamed organisms, the murder bugs. I tried to focus on the television but found it difficult. Soon, I gave up and looked to my right, squinting against the sunlight coming through the window. I was expecting to see Madison sleeping in the chair by my bed.

just where she'd been when I came out of surgery sometime earlier. But it wasn't just Madison there. Jessica sat in a chair next to our daughter, holding Madison's hand. My wife's lips twitched in a smile that seemed to say, I'm sorry. Can you ever forgive me? Or maybe that was just what I wanted it to say. Stuart? I said through dry, cracked lips. He's okay. She whispered. He's out of surgery and stable. I was just there. He's asleep.

I recalled Madison and I pulling up in front of the house in the struggling truck the previous night. Stuart had limped out onto the front porch, cut and bleeding, and with one arm in an unnatural position, but he was alive. As he came toward the truck, I breathed a sigh of relief to see him up and moving. Then the sound of a siren came to my ears, blaring in the heavy wind. I looked over my shoulder to see a flashing ambulance turning into our driveway. After that, things were kind of a blur. Now,

I studied my daughter's sleeping face. She looked so much like her mother. I shifted my eyes to Jessica, feeling the betrayal still there, still deep and hurting and stubborn. Jessica leaned forward and reached out. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it, looking into my eyes. I swallowed and looked back at my daughter, wrestling with my emotions, searching deep inside for something I hoped would be there.

When I looked back into Jessica's face, I saw that she was worried. But when I squeezed her hand, a grateful smile came onto her beautiful face.