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he was in range, one swift boot into the rib cage flipped the man over, causing him to cry out anew. Miguel raised his knee and stamped down viciously with the heel of his boot on the man’s face, muffling his scream of protest and agony. Again he stomped down, shattering a mouthful of teeth and shredding lips and cheeks.
    Stomp.
    Stomp.
    Stomp.
    By the time he was finished, by the time the demon that had arisen inside his head and apparently taken over his body was finished, Miguel’s leg ached. His boots and jeans were soaked with blood and smeared with gobs of brain and bone chips. The road agent’s head was no more than a gruesome pancake. A cold wind seemed to pass through him, and he collapsed to the earth, shivering.

Chapter 3
    Wiltshire, England
    Caitlin awoke to the crying of her baby. The child would be hungry and in need of changing, and today was Bret’s morning off, which sounded a lot more indulgent than it really was. He might get to hide under the covers for a few minutes more while she tended to little Monique and brought the coal-fired stove back to life for coffee. It was a good idea to keep the fuel banked up overnight and never to let the stove go out completely. Not unless you felt like flapping around before dawn with a cold draft blowing up your nightdress as you got down on all fours to jam rolled-up paper and fresh coal into a dead hearth. Caitlin tried to rub another night of broken sleep from her eyes and squinted at the glowing dial of her watch. Looked like about oh-four-hundred-twenty hours. “Omigod-thirty,” as Bret referred to anytime before the sun rose. She swung her long, finely muscled legs over the side of the lumpy mattress and dropped in bare feet to the flagstone floor. A fair drop, too. The antique wrought-iron bed was huge.
    “Want me to get her?” Bret mumbled without much enthusiasm from under the duck feather duvet. Summer was not far off, but the weather had been chilly since the Disappearance, and although it did seem to be returning to normal, they still often slept under a couple of layers of woolen blankets and one oversized quilt.
    “Not unless you can grow a pair of working udders in the next three minutes,” Caitlin croaked, aware of just how swollen and heavy with milk her breasts were again. Monique was a good sleeper mostly, for which they were profoundly grateful, but that meant that Caitlin woke up most mornings needing to get her on for a long feed. Bret’s half snort, half snore told her just how sincere the offer had been.
    She wearily worked her feet into a pair of slippers and padded through into the baby’s room, ducking under the low wooden lintel. At least he’d offered, and if she had genuinely been too tired to deal this morning, he would have dragged himself into the nursery to change the diaper before sliding Monique into bed beside Caitlin for a feed and a cuddle. They had all fallen asleep like that more than once.
    The baby’s cries, which had been short, disjointed, and scratchy when she first awoke, were growing longer and more insistent as she realized she was both hungry and trapped inside a large, wet, and very unpleasant square of not-so-white toweling cloth. Disposable diapers were almost impossible to get now, and as Caitlin gently wrestled with her daughter in the semidark, she tried to tell herself she was doing the right thing for Mother Earth. She quickly scraped Monique’s poop into a chamber pot, wrinkling her nose in distaste. They routinely saved the malodorous contents for recycling in the farm’s composting pits, but doing so was a hell of a hard sell at omigod-thirty with a thrashing baby kicking her heels in a puddle of what looked like undercooked chicken curry.
    “Goddamn, sometimes I think I’d rather be back in Noisy-le-Sec,” Caitlin muttered without conviction as she wiped the baby’s bottom the way the midwife up at Swindon had shown her.
    “Midwitches, more like it,” she whispered to Monique as the